Читать книгу Child by Chance - Tara Quinn Taylor - Страница 12

CHAPTER FOUR

THE FIRST TIME he’d seen Brooke, Sherman had been walking across campus, mentally rehearsing the debate he was about to win. She’d been in the middle of the lush green quad, in shorts and a tank top, lying on a blanket reading a book.

He’d stumbled. And damned near missed the competition that had ultimately, four years and many debates later, won him a scholarship to graduate school.

A lot had happened between then and now. Running into her at a concert on campus. Being inseparable for the remainder of their four years of undergraduate studies. Convincing her to put her marketing skills to work in his field and joining him as he signed on with one of the nation’s top campaign management firms.

Years of miscarriages. Thousands of dollars spent on failed in vitro attempts.

Seeing Kent for the first time, less than an hour after his birth. They’d decided, long before he was born, to wait until his tenth birthday to tell him he was adopted. They’d wanted him to have grown to take their loving him for granted, to feel a part of them and to make the telling part of the celebration. They were going to tell him about his birth. And about how long they’d waited for him to come into their lives.

If he were the boy’s biological father, would he know what to do with him? How to reach him? Help him? Was there some “fatherly” instinct that he was missing?

He and Brooke had talked it over a lot before his birth. The whole time they’d been preparing his nursery. Their ability to instinctively know what was right for their child even though they didn’t birth him. Like knowing that he shouldn’t know he was adopted. They’d made considered choices, based on weighing all sides of the situation.

Until he was ten, they’d decided not to tell anyone he was adopted. There were a few who knew, of course. People they worked with. But anyone who hadn’t seen them in a while, anyone new to them, just assumed that they’d had him biologically. Kent was all theirs. That was all that mattered. Sherman had no family close enough to know that Brooke hadn’t been pregnant. No one who would care one way or the other about his son’s biological parentage.

Brooke was really the driving force behind the decision. She’d been adopted. To a couple who’d had a biological child a couple of years later. They made such a big deal of finally having a biological daughter. They told everyone about their miracle. By the time she was a teenager she’d been consumed with the need to find her own biological connection—filled with a need to be someone’s miracle.

Her adopted parents had seemed almost relieved to have her do so, as though they were all right with being done with her. Or so it had seemed to the teenage Brooke. They’d continued to support her, both financially and otherwise, after her birth mother had refused to meet her.

Sherman had met them a few times, but with them in New York and him and Brooke in California, the visits had been infrequent. They’d appeared to him to love their daughters equally. But after she’d died, he’d never heard from them again.

Regardless of the fact that Brooke had never told them that Kent wasn’t her biological child. Bottom line to them, he supposed, was that he wasn’t theirs.

With Brooke gone, with Kent being so emotionally vulnerable all of a sudden, he hadn’t known what to do regarding his adoptive status. Logic told him the boy would have to know at some point. You just didn’t keep something like that from a person for their whole life. Shortly before Kent’s tenth birthday he’d talked to Kent’s therapist, Neil Jordon, about telling the boy the truth about his parentage, and had been quite relieved when Dr. Jordon had adamantly advised against breaking the news to him anytime in the near future. Kent was in no state to have his security, his foundation, further rocked.

Of course the fact that Dr. Jordon thought it would have been far easier on all of them to make the adoption a part of their family story from the beginning hadn’t been as welcome a pronouncement.

It was lunchtime on Monday. Or rather, sixty minutes past the lunch hour, but the time that he and Brooke had set aside as sacred. Even if one or the other could only spare fifteen minutes, or five, out of a busy day, assuming they were both in the office, they used to meet at 1:30 p.m. every single day. If neither of them had had a lunch appointment, they’d share whatever they’d brought from home to eat. Sometimes, they’d just fill each other in on the fact that they’d catch up at home that night. More than once they’d locked his office door and made love.

Occasionally, they’d fought.

That last day, the fatal day, they’d fought. She’d made plans to have dinner in north LA with a nationally known reporter, Alan Klasky, from a not-so-reputable online news source—part of a plan the marketing team had come up with for damage control for a candidate who’d been caught on film at a strip club. The plan was to promise the rag exclusives from their office for the remainder of the campaign.

Brooke hadn’t been fond of the plan. Sherman had hated it, preferring to handle the blow they’d been dealt by the man’s penchant for lap dances by flooding the press with the candidate’s good deeds, of which there were hundreds. By getting good family press for him. From reputable sources.

Marketing had preferred to get in bed with a group that wasn’t going to go away. They gave in to the blackmail.

Brooke was the bait. Chosen by their CEO because of her professionalism, her intelligence, her ability to create on a dime and because she was female.

She’d been honored by the recognition. Felt herself up to the task.

Sherman watched the fifteen minutes tick by that he still set aside, every single day that he was in the office, to close his office door and give his heart, mind and soul over to the woman he’d vowed to love forever.

Even though he’d stopped making love to her more than a year before her death.

It was a fine line between honor, decency, integrity—and justification. A line upon which he had to balance every single day of his life.

* * *

“HI.”

In the end, that was all there was. One word. No grand introduction. Nothing at all remarkable.

The little boy looked up at her, and Talia’s throat closed as she recognized not only the blue-gray eyes studying her, but their intensity even more. He was a few years older than Tatum had been when Talia had left home, but that look was very similar.

“Hi,” he said, turning back to the workbook in front of him, the neat rows of pencil-written numbers in the three-digit multiplication problems he’d been solving.

“I’m Ms. Malone.”

The words won her another of those glances. He nodded.

Looking around for a chair, Talia prayed that she wouldn’t throw up again.

Snagging a chair and pulling it close enough to reach his desk, she sat down. Kent pulled back, his eyebrows drawing together and up.

“I’m going to be working with you all week,” she said, wishing she’d taken Mrs. Barbour’s offer to introduce them, after all. The principal had been busy. And she’d wanted the moment to herself.

“What, you’re, like, my monitor or something?” Belligerence, or derision, entered his tone as he gave a half scoff. As though he was too cool for words.

Or too old to need a babysitter.

“No.” I’m your mother. The words flew, unwelcome and without permission into her brain. “I’m working with the sixth-grade art classes and have an hour break each day, and since everyone else here already has jobs to do, I’ll be spending my break time with you.”

“Got stuck with me, you mean.”

“That’s funny, and here I was thinking you were going to figure you were being stuck with me.”

That gave him pause. And then, “So, what, you’re just going to sit there and watch me do my math?”

He eyed the thick satchel she’d set on the floor by her feet. And sounded as if he kind of hoped she had more in store for him.

He was bored. She figured that out quickly enough.

“Nope. I’m here to work, not babysit,” she said, wondering where the words were coming from. Surprised by the ease with which they slid off her tongue. The battered women hadn’t been such a leap for her, but she was still a bit stiff with the kids. Until she pretended they were all little Tatums. Or until they got going on their collages and then she got so engrossed in reading their picture messages, in helping them compose those messages, express themselves, that she forgot to worry about anything else.

But this was...a ten-year-old boy who just happened to have shared her belly for nine months.

Oh, God. She was going to throw up again.

“What, you brought papers to grade?” he asked, his nose scrunched as he glanced at her bag again and then frowned at her.

He wasn’t rejecting her presence beside him. Didn’t seem to dislike her being there.

“No,” she said, reaching down to her bag, thinking about putting her head between her knees while she was at it.

There was a trash can not far off. There if she needed it.

She wasn’t going to need it.

“We’re going to do an art project,” she said instead, and pulled out the stack of magazines. A motorcycle and car one. Travel. Surfing. Boating. Sports—but not the famous one with pictures of girls. Home and Garden. Tatum had laughed at that one, but Talia would bet a week’s groceries that Kent would use it. Maybe he’d home in on some brownies on a plate or a basketball hoop in a backyard display...

“What about my math and sentences for English?” There was no sign of the tough guy as Kent glanced down into her open satchel to see colored papers, markers, glue and a couple of plastic containers of assorted embellishments. She had his attention.

“What you don’t finish at school today you have to do as homework,” she told him.

“Cool.” Closing his book, he turned to her with eagerness in his smile. And Talia had the strangest urge to give him a hug.

* * *

MONDAY’S DINNER PRETTY much summed up Sherman’s day.

He’d had errands to run—a case of flyers to drop off at a candidate’s office, shirts and pants to pick up from the cleaners, and they were out of toothpaste—after picking Kent up from school and was still in his creased gray pants, white button-down and gray-and-white silk tie as his son dropped into his seat at the kitchen table and announced that he was starving.

“You never did tell me how school went today,” Sherman said as he dumped salad from a bag, tossed it with the chicken nuggets he’d just pulled from the oven, added some dressing and put it on plates for him and Kent.

“You never asked.”

The boy had dropped his book bag by the door and sat in his pants, button-down shirt and sweater vest, his hand supporting his head, looking grumpy.

“Yes, I did. When you got in the car.” And his phone had rung. He’d taken the call and...

“Fine. School was fine. Okay?”

His son’s first day of in-school suspension and all he had to say was fine?

“What did you do?”

“Sat.”

“Did you go to the cafeteria to eat your lunch?” Sherman, as he’d been instructed, had packed sandwiches. He’d added celery sticks and a couple of Kent’s favorite cookies, too.

“No.”

He frowned. “What about your juice?”

“Someone got it for me.”

He nodded. Okay. So maybe this was good. Kent was seeing that if he misbehaved, he’d be taken out of society. Such as it was.

Brooke wouldn’t be happy with their son missing lunch with his friends. Hell, he wasn’t happy about it. Kent had been alienated enough from the regular kids, as he called them now, when his mother was killed.

Before the accident, Kent had been such a great kid. That person was still there inside him. Sherman knew it. And the counselor Kent was seeing seemed to think so, too. Somehow they just had to get through the anger stage of the grief process.

“Did Mrs. Barbour have anything special for you to do?” He put a plate of salad in front of his son.

“Nope.”

“Did your teachers come in and give you assignments?” Retrieving foil-wrapped bread from the oven, he dropped it on the table along with some peanut butter and a knife.

“Nope.”

He sat. Opened his napkin on his lap. Picked up his fork. “You just sat there all day and did nothing?”

Not at all what he’d envisioned when he’d asked for his son to spend the week in the principal’s office.

“No.” Kent was attacking his salad as if it was a banana split.

“You did schoolwork, then?”

“Duh, Dad, it’s school.”

The disrespect hurt as much as it irritated. He let it slide. Took a bite of salad. Missing the days when Brooke used to make it with fresh lettuce, cutting up cucumber and onion and celery and broccoli while he grilled fresh chicken for the top.

“So how’d you know what to do?” he asked, chewing.

Kent pushed salad onto his fork with his thumb. “Mrs. Barbour gave me a list.”

Sherman picked up a piece of bread he didn’t want, touching his son’s wrist and motioning with the bread, then used it to push food onto his fork. “You just said she didn’t have anything for you to do,” he said.

“I said she didn’t have anything special for me to do. It’s all just regular stuff that we always do.” The boy picked up a piece of lettuce with his fingers and popped it into his mouth.

Biting back the retort that sprang to his tongue, Sherman took a bite of salad and hoped he didn’t get indigestion.

“Did you get it all done?” he asked a moment or two later. Were they at least going to get to skip homework that night and go straight for the basketball game he wanted to watch? Kent loved basketball—or, really, any sport—and so far, they still bonded over their teams.

“No.”

He stopped chewing. “No?”

“No.”

Picking up a piece of bread, Kent used it to shove a huge bite of salad onto his fork the way Sherman always urged him to.

And now Sherman was worried. Why would the boy purposely do something to please him? Why start following the rules at that exact moment?

“Why not?” he asked. If Kent thought he was going to stop doing his schoolwork altogether, things were going to get a hell of a lot harder on him. While the boy had been acting out a lot, so far he’d maintained excellent grades. And so Sherman had been more willing to go along with the counselor’s recommendation and give Kent some slack on some of the rest of it.

Because Dr. Jordon had recommended a less severe course of action, and because Sherman understood Kent’s anger and had a hard time finding it within himself to be hard on the boy. He’d rather die for him than hurt him.

Kent shrugged. “I got extra to do,” he said. And dunked his bread into his chocolate milk, dripping chocolate on the table as he slurped the mess between his lips.