Читать книгу The Beaumont Children: His Son, Her Secret - Sarah M. Anderson - Страница 14

Eight

Leona fumbled with the keys in the lock of her apartment door. She didn’t know why she was more nervous bringing Byron home with her this time, but she was. Even now, he stood too close to her, watching her. Waiting, no doubt, for an answer to his question.

If only she knew what she wanted.

“May?” She called out when she finally got the door open. “We’re home.”

Percy made a shrill noise. “Hi, baby,” Leona said, walking into the living room and picking him up. “Did you miss me?”

May stood and said, “The doctor prescribed more drops. They’re on the changing table.”

“Thanks,” Leona said.

There was an awkward pause as May glared at Byron without actually looking at him. “Right. I’ll be back late.”

“Have fun,” Leona called after her as May grabbed her jacket and her purse.

That only got her a dirty look. Then May was gone.

Byron sighed. “I actually asked the Realtor if she could find us a place with a nice one-bedroom close by. I get the feeling May might not want to look at me every day.”

“I’m not sure if she’s going to move or not,” Leona told him. If she didn’t, Leona would have to keep paying rent on the apartment. Which might not be a bad plan—if it didn’t work out with Byron, she could come back. “Here, hold Percy. I’ve got to change.”

Byron sat down on the couch again and took the baby. Today, he looked slightly more confident. Or, at the very least, he looked less panicked. “How’s my boy today?”

Percy made a face at him.

Leona hurried back to her room and changed into one of her prettier casual tops and a pair of jeans. She was not dressing for Byron’s approval, not really. She was just being...comfortable.

Yeah, right.

When she got back to the living room, she found Byron and Percy stretched out on the floor together, both on their tummies. Byron was smiling at Percy, encouraging him. Leona wanted to stand there and watch them. This was what she’d dreamed of before Byron left her—having him all to herself, with no Beaumonts and no Harpers around to complicate things. They were going to have a family one day—they’d talked about it.

And then he’d gone and proved himself to be a Beaumont just like all the rest. He’d left her, like her father had always warned her Beaumonts did. And now he was back, issuing orders and expecting them to be followed to the letter.

She couldn’t trust him. All this stuff he was doing—the ring, the apartment, talking about being a family—all of it was because he thought he wanted it. It had nothing to do with what she wanted. And the moment he changed his mind, it could all be taken away from her again.

She wanted to tie herself to a man she could count on, a man who would not treat her as if she were a ball and chain around his neck like her father treated her mother, and yet would also not treat her as if she were disposable and forgettable like all Beaumonts treated women.

She wanted stability and happiness and safety for herself, her son and her sister.

There’d been a time when she’d thought Byron was all of that and more.

She could not make that mistake a second time.

She focused on the safety and happiness of her son because right now, that was the thing that drove every other action. She would sacrifice her own heart to save his. “Having fun?”

“I was curious to see if he’d roll over,” Byron replied, propping himself up on his elbow.

“He hasn’t gotten that far yet.” She sat down on the floor on the other side of Percy. “How are your ears, baby?”

Percy made a grunting noise as he tried to push himself up. “I know,” she told the baby. “It’s so hard to look around when you’re on your tummy.”

She rubbed his back and looked at Byron. He was staring at her as if he’d never seen her before. “What?”

“You haven’t answered my questions—any of them.”

“Ask me again,” she told him, steeling herself to making it official.

“Will you move in with me?”

Letting Percy have this—a loving relationship with his father? Even if it meant torturing herself with her greatest love and her greatest mistake every single day for the rest of her life?

It was no contest.

“Yes.”

“Will you come with me tomorrow to look at places? You can bring Percy, too, since he’s going to be living there. He might have an opinion.”

She couldn’t help but grin. It was a thoughtful thing to say. If only everything he said and did was that thoughtful. “Yes.”

He stared at her for a moment longer. There was something in his eyes, something deep and serious. “Will you marry me?”

She needed to say yes. For Percy. But... “I need to know what this marriage will actually be before I agree to it.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Like what?”

“Will you see other women?”

“No.” He didn’t hesitate at all, which was good, she guessed. There was a pause. “You?”

“No. I have too much on my plate to even think about dating.”

That got her a nice smile. “So we’re agreed. No seeing other people. What else?”

Just the small matter of the facts. And the fact was that Beaumonts always cheated. Hardwick Beaumont always took the kids. Beaumonts were not to be trusted, no matter what.

“If it doesn’t work out,” she asked in a quiet voice as she picked up Percy and held him to her chest, “you won’t take him away from me, will you?”

Byron sat up, as well. He leaned forward and kissed the top of Percy’s head and said, “I am not my father, Leona.”

She didn’t reply. The silence seemed to stretch, pushing him away from her.

“And what about you?” His voice had turned colder. “If it doesn’t work out, you won’t take him and disappear? I will not stand for another lie, Leona. Because if you betray me again...” The words trailed off, but there was no give in his voice.

A cold chill ran up her spine. The threat was implicit. If she did something he didn’t like, he would make her suffer for it.

“I never lied.” It sounded weak to her own ears. “I told you my last name.”

“Is that what you tell yourself? It wasn’t a bald-faced lie, therefore you’re completely innocent? How touching.” He held out his arms for Percy.

She held her baby so tightly that he started to fuss. Byron sighed, the only acknowledgment of her feelings. “I want things to be different, you know. I don’t want to be my parents.” He came and sat beside her. Percy squirmed in her arms and she had no choice but to hand him over to Byron. “I know exactly what my father did to my mother,” he went on in a quiet voice. “I would never, ever do that to you or to Percy.”

She shouldn’t believe him, shouldn’t trust him. But he said it with such conviction that she couldn’t help it. She looked down at her son, who was happily trying to suck on all his fingers at once. “I need help with him. If May doesn’t move down with us, we’ll have to find a day care for him and that’s not cheap. The drops for his ears aren’t cheap, and I didn’t know how I was going to pay for Percy’s surgery to get tubes, either. For the ear infections.”

“I’ll take care of it. All of it.” He said it in an almost dismissive way, as if he’d never had to worry about money.

Well, maybe he hadn’t. After all, she hadn’t, either—not until she’d walked away from her father and his fortune. There’d been a very real price for her independence, but it’d been one she was willing to pay to keep Percy happy and safe.

Would she really give up that hard-fought independence and let Byron call the shots just because it was best for her son—even if it wasn’t anywhere close to what was best for her?

No, she would not panic. She forced herself to breath and keep her head on her shoulders. “What about your family?”

“What about them?”

She gave him a hard look. “You saw how Frances reacted to me. If we get married, are they going to be...difficult about it?”

He grimaced. “Things have changed. It’s almost like we all finally figured out that Hardwick is really and truly dead and we don’t have to be what he thought we were anymore. Even Chadwick is different now. He smiles and everything.”

“I wish my father realized that, too,” she said wistfully. If only they could all just go on with their lives without a decades-old feud to haunt them.

Percy made the high whining noise that signaled he was getting hungry. “Oh, I should be making dinner.”

She started to get up, but Byron was quicker. “Let me. What else does he eat?”

“He liked the applesauce,” she called after him as he headed for the kitchen. “And yogurt and cereal. But it’s still mostly baby food at this point.”

Byron ducked his head around the kitchen door, a jar of what looked like green beans and mashed potatoes in his hand. “This stuff?” He made a face.

“Yes, that stuff,” she replied, trying not to be defensive about it. “That’s a good brand—all organic, no added anything.”

After giving her a dismissive look, Byron disappeared back into the kitchen. Leona stood and checked Percy’s diaper. “I have a feeling,” she told the baby as she carried him back to the changing table, “that he’s going to start from scratch.”

She wasn’t wrong about that. By the time she got Percy changed, Byron had peeled potatoes boiling and a can of green beans heating. “I don’t like using the canned stuff,” he told her in his chef voice. “I’ll pick up some fresh or frozen ones for him.”

“You don’t have to...” He cut her off with a look. She sighed in resignation. “Fine. Go ahead.”

In forty minutes, they sat down to mashed potatoes and green beans—Percy’s being slightly more mashed together than theirs—and pan-fried chicken in a parmesan crust. “This is delicious,” she said in between spooning Percy’s dinner into his mouth and taking bites of her own. Percy agreed by thumping the top of his high-chair tray with both hands and opening his mouth for more.

“Good,” Byron said, watching Percy swallow another mouthful. “I used to cook for the new kids, you know. When my dad would remarry and his new wife had babies. Dad expected us all to like the same things he did, but it was hard for a four-year-old to really get into steak au poivre, you know? George always had something else for us, but we had to eat it in the kitchen so neither of our parents would catch us.” He looked at his plate. “That was a long time ago.”

“That sounds a lot like dinners in my house growing up.”

Byron looked at her. “We never really did discuss your past. You always changed the subject.” He stabbed at his chicken viciously. “And I never caught on.”

She couldn’t tell who he was madder at—her or himself. “I knew who you were—it was hard to miss that last name. But I...” She sighed. “I wanted something different than Harpers versus Beaumonts. I wanted to see if you were really what my father claimed you were. I wanted to know if you liked me for me, not because I was heiress to a fortune.”

She’d never gotten the chance to say those words out loud to him. Everything had happened so fast that night... “I just wanted to be something more than Leon Harper’s daughter.”

Byron set down his fork. “You were.” He stood, picked up his plate and headed back to the kitchen. “You were...”

Leona leaned forward to catch the end of that sentence because it seemed important. But when she didn’t hear the ending, she got up and followed Byron into the kitchen. “What?”

“Nothing,” he said gruffly, scraping his plate into the trash and running hot water into the sink.

“Byron.” She stood next to him and put her hand on his shoulder in an attempt to turn him toward her. He didn’t budge. “What?”

“You should have told me,” he replied, grabbing his plate and scrubbing it furiously. “It wouldn’t have mattered if you’d told me yourself. Instead I had to learn it from your father.”

Guilt, which had been creeping around the edges of their conversation for the past few minutes, burst out into the open. “I wanted to. But I didn’t want to risk ruining the best thing that had ever happened to me.”

For a second, she thought he was going to give her that smile, the one that always melted her. But then his face hardened. “You didn’t trust me.”

She stared at him as a new emotion pushed back at the guilt—anger. “First off,” she snapped, “I’m not the one who bailed. I was right here, dealing with the fallout of you abandoning me. I went on with my life when all I wanted to do was run and hide, too. I did not have that luxury, Byron.”

Byron opened his mouth to protest, but she cut him off. “Secondly, this is exactly why I haven’t said yes to your marriage proposal. At least this time it wasn’t an order, but I simply do not know when you’re going to switch from doting father to angry ex-lover.”

Percy began to fuss, no doubt unhappy about being left behind while everyone else was in the kitchen. However, for the first time in her life, Leona didn’t rush off to pick him up.

“And finally, you didn’t trust me, either. Four days, Byron. That’s how long it took to get away from my father—and you were gone. Gone. You couldn’t even stick around for a damn week to wait for me.” Unexpectedly, her throat closed up, but she would not crack. “So you’ll forgive me if I want a little more reassurance that you’re not going to up and disappear again, that you’re not going to marry me only to dump me and take my son.”

“You need me,” he said in a quiet voice.

Percy let out a wail of impatience. Leona heard a spoon clatter to the ground.

“I need child support,” she corrected him. “I need a job. You have yet to prove to me that I need you.”

And with that, she turned and walked out of the kitchen.