Читать книгу The Family They Chose / Private Partners: The Family They Chose / Private Partners - GINA WILKINS - Страница 15

Jamison used the flight to Boston’s Logan Airport and the subsequent ride home to mentally prepare himself for seeing Olivia.

He’d had the days since seeing the photos to weigh all the options, to look at the situation from all angles and to think about what he would do when he saw her.

It had opened up childhood wounds he’d thought had healed over the years, brought back memories of his distraught mother crying over the telephone, desperately trying to track down her husband. In those days of no cell phones or pagers, when a person wanted to get lost, it was a lot easier than it was today.

Judson Mallory would sometimes get lost for days. His staff would cover for him, inventing meetings that Helen had no way of confirming or disproving.

Of course, Jamison had been too young to know what was really going on when his father would disappear. All he knew is that there would be long stretches of absence during which the household staff would care for him and his brothers because his mother “had taken ill.”

As Jamison got older, it didn’t take long to realize his mother wasn’t really sick at all. She was either too drunk to function or too hung over from the benders brought on by her husband’s going MIA.

It wasn’t until years later, long after his father had died, that once-faithful friends and confidants crawled out of the woodwork offering tell-all books detailing that all wasn’t as rosy as it seemed behind the manicured Mallory hedges.

Piece by painful piece, Jamison learned about a much darker side of the man he and an adoring public had idolized. The havoc that his father’s womanizing had wreaked on their family and the subsequent betrayal by friends was enough to convince Jamison that he would never live his personal life the way his father had—fathering six boys he’d never wanted and leaving all responsibility for them to a mother who was unable to cope.

Jamison did want a family … someday. But he didn’t want to repeat his father’s mistakes. He wanted to wait until he was ready. Obviously with the way he was waffling back and forth—one minute ready to do it because it would make his wife happy, but the next minute feeling so unsure about his marriage, which in turn made him feel uncertain about having kids—meant that he wasn’t.

In the same way that he’d committed to marriage once he’d pledged his life to Olivia, he felt that strongly about waiting until his marriage was on firmer ground before having children. Especially now that there was the possibility that his wife had strayed.

On the car ride home from the airport, he thought about the photos and what might have driven Olivia into another man’s arms. He knew he’d been a little selfish over the past couple of years, a little insensitive to her needs. The purely rational side of him that could separate facts and emotion—the attorney in him—had leveled the verdict that maybe this had driven her to another man. But that was about as far as the rational side went. The thought of her in another man’s arms nearly drove him over the edge. So he clung to the last shred of hope he had. That even though the photos showed Olivia in Demetrios’s arms—in an embrace that looked intimate—there wasn’t a single shot of them kissing … or worse.

The fact that there was no kiss left a huge gray area open to interpretation. That’s when common sense dictated that he had to give Olivia the benefit of the doubt. And he still needed to see her face—her eyes—when he presented the photos. That would be key.

He knew her, and he’d be able to recognize if she was lying about something. But at least he’d had time to figure out that he was willing to fight for his marriage if Olivia was willing to meet him halfway.

Of course, they’d be back at awkward square one. Another thought that remained constant in his mind as he sorted out everything was that he was glad there were no children involved.

So, despite his earlier, impulsive change of heart, essentially they were back at the starting line. He’d have to insist that they mend their marriage before they brought a child into their world. He’d grown up in a broken home and, above all else, he’d vowed to never put a child of his own through that hell.

His father had strayed and his mother had put him out. Had Olivia been talking about having his child one minute and then turning to another man the next?

No!

He wouldn’t jump to conclusions. He wouldn’t trip down that slippery path, he reminded himself.