Anne Peters - My Baby, Your Son

“No!”

“Damn straight, no!” Jerking his face back toward her, Jared spoke through clenched teeth. “As in no way. No way do I believe you, and no way are you getting your hands on my son. He is not a thing you can keep or reject like the ring you tossed back in my face.”

“The ring?” April stared at him, bewildered. He could only mean his fraternity ring. She’d been on cloud nine the day he had given it to her as a token of his love. And she had sunk into the depths of despair the day it had disap- peared.

Which had been the same day she had confessed to her mother that she was pregnant. Her last day at Cliff House. Because the very next morning, her mother had put her on a plane to London. Marjorie had written in her journal that day.

I think Grace is overreacting. And my little April is so distressed that I telephoned Joshua in London and pleaded with him to intervene on his daughter’s behalf. I am heartbroken but not really surprised that, as usual, my brother shirked his responsibilities and refused…

Reading it all these years later, April had cried. Her fa- ther was dead and could answer no questions, but she had often wondered why he’d been so seemingly content to give her mother free reign.

Perhaps if he’d taken a stand, she would not now be in this untenable situation with Jared O’Neal.

“What are you talking about?” Biting her lip, April blinked back the moisture that had risen into her eyes. In his present frame of mind, Jared would probably see her tears as a sign of weakness and guilt. “I never tossed that ring—”

“Of course you didn’t. That would have taken courage.” Jared’s jaw flexed, remembering. “No, you had your mother do it for you.”

“You’re wrong.” April felt as though she were in a quagmire of misunderstandings and trickery, and sinking fast. What was he talking about? When would her mother have done this? Why? Grace had sworn to her that she hadn’t seen the ring.

And she had also sworn, as she’d hustled the heartbroken and hysterical April to the airport, that she hadn’t seen Jar- ed. More lies?

Oh, Mother. April’s shoulders sagged beneath the weight of so much treachery, so much manipulation. “Jared…”

“Spare me.” Jared didn’t want to hear her excuses, her lies. “I don’t give a damn, about you or the ring. Though just for the record, it’s in my desk drawer. Come by and check it out. Or, better still, I’ll mail it to you since I can’t stand the sight of it.”

Or of you. Though he didn’t say it, it was there in his face for April to see. She shivered. “Then why do you keep it?”

“To remind myself never to get into a situation like that again.”

“Did it work?” April was surprised to hear herself ask. She fully expected Jared to snarl some scathing reply.

But he didn’t. He contemplated her in brooding silence for several long seconds during which April could hear every one of her heartbeats as loud as a drum. Such a ter- rible pain clouded his eyes that April couldn’t help but be touched by it. She reached out to him with her hand, un- formulated words of regret, perhaps even apology, on her lips.

But before she could either touch him or speak, Jared pivoted and walked away.

It struck her anew then, the enormity of all she had lost. And she ached. She grieved. She mourned the loss of in- nocence—her own as well as Jared’s—that inevitably was the legacy of betrayal.

“Oh, Jared,” she murmured, and her throat burned like acid from her unshed tears. To hide her emotions, she turned to stare without focus at the window display in front of which she found herself. It consisted of tools of some sort. Nothing April would have recognized even had she tried. Or cared.

There is so much I didn’t know, she thought wearily. And such a lot that Jared knew nothing of. Why couldn’t he have been reasonable? Why couldn’t he at least have given her a chance?

She closed her eyes and tried to gather strength. The confrontation had drained her, left her raw. It was exactly the kind of thing she had been told by her doctor to avoid.

Rest, rest, and still more rest was what he had prescribed after her collapse on the concert stage in the middle of her most recent tour. Exhaustion had been cited as the cause. April had been ordered to take a minimum of three months off.

It had caused a rescheduling nightmare, this breakdown of hers. Her mother had had to pull strings, call in all sorts of favors, to arrange for this inconvenient —Grace’s word— hiatus.

“We’ll lose a fortune in ticket sales,” she had fumed, pacing the floor of the Paris hotel suite. Though April was sitting right there on the brocaded settee, it was Dr. Shi- mons and Marcus Bingham she was addressing. “Not to mention the damage to April’s reputation should it get out that she’s a temperamental diva, an unreliable performer. Really, April, are you sure?”

“Positive,” the doctor had said in April’s stead.

To which Marcus, who had rushed to Paris from Beijing when he’d heard of his sister’s collapse, had added, “If you’d stop being April’s manager long enough to be her mother, Mother, maybe you’d have recognized the state of her exhaustion and this so-called calamity could have been avoided. Though personally I think it’s the best thing that could’ve happened to her.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning she’s a human being, Mother, not a robot. When was the last time you allowed her more than a one- week break?”

“When she asked for it,” Grace had snapped. “Which she is too much of a professional to do very often. April knows she is getting on—”

“Oh, yeah—she’s in her dotage.”

“And that younger talent is constantly nipping at her heels. She can’t afford to rest on her laurels.”

“Not that you’d let her….”

Even now, thousands of miles away and standing in front of a hardware store, April shivered at the harshness of the exchange between mother and son. Mark was one of the few people whom Grace couldn’t intimidate, bully or de- feat, but their arguments always made April cringe. Espe- cially when, as was often the case, she was the cause or subject of it.

Mark was her twin; but he was also her best, her only, friend. Grace—which she insisted Mark and April call her—was her mother, her manager, but more than that, her taskmaster. Relentless, unceasing, she had always de- manded everything April had it in her to give. And then just a little bit more.

Only Mark ever dared to try to interfere with Grace’s ruthless ambition. Only Mark seemed to recognize the price for it April had paid all her life. But even he had never been able to slow Grace down. Though not for lack of trying.

Dear, grouchy Marcus. Older than she by several minutes, he took his role as older brother very seriously. During her summers at Cliff House, where he had lived with their Aunt Marjorie all year round, Mark had always defended her against the teasing and taunts of some of the rougher kids in town. Kids who called the shy, bookish girl from New York who didn’t even know how to swim or play catch, dumb. Or stuck-up.

But never when Mark was around. Or Jared. Or even….

“Colleen?” Startled because it seemed as though her thoughts had conjured her up, April stared into the face of the woman stepping out of the store.

“Hello, April.” Hostility laced the voice and turned the otherwise unchanged face of her girlhood friend into that of a stranger. “I saw you out here with my brother. Haven’t you done enough?”

“W-what?” April stammered, shocked by the unex- pected attack.

“You heard me.” Obviously distraught, Colleen pressed a hand to her throat. A diamond-studded wedding band winked in the sun. “Why have you come back? What do you want?”

For a moment April couldn’t speak. Even you, she thought, and somehow the pain of Colleen’s rejection sliced even deeper than Jared’s had done. Perhaps because in the olden days, in Colleen’s eyes at least, April had been able to do no wrong.

“Do you have children, Colleen?” It hurt to speak.

And the non sequitur obviously took the other woman aback. “Why…yes, I…” She gestured distractedly toward the door behind her. “Ralph and I have a daughter.”

“Ah.” April nodded, her gaze briefly shifting to the sign above the door. Simpson Hardware. Of course. April re- membered then—Ralph Simpson. He and Colleen had dated that last summer, that same fateful summer when she and Jared…

“How old is she?”

“Five.”

“Do you love her?”

“Well, of course. What a question. But…look. April—” Clearly agitated, Colleen came a step closer. “Don’t do this.”

“Do what?” Anger was a welcome change from the hurt. “What am I doing, Colleen, that you yourself—as a mother—wouldn’t do in my shoes?”

“Well, for one thing…” Colleen’s eyes, so much like her brother’s in their brilliant indigo blue color, sparked now with indignation and resentment. “ I would never have given up my child in the first place.”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t.” Defeated, suddenly, and un- bearably weary, April thought, What’s the use? Still, before turning to go, she added quietly, “ But then, knowingly, I wouldn’t have, either.”

“Confound it, Conan, that’s not what I called you to hear.”

Raking a hand through his hair and letting it rest on the back of his neck, Jared paced the narrow confines of his father’s den like one of the restless cats in his boarding kennel.

From the other end of the line, the eldest O’Neal off- spring was sounding equally incensed. “Then get yourself another lawyer and bankrupt yourself,” he shouted. “Not to mention devastate your son. My advice stands.” Click.

Jared winced as Conan abruptly broke the connection. Perching on the edge of the desk, he let out a sigh of ex- asperation. Damned hothead! Cradling the cordless phone in his hands, he scowled down at it.

“What?” his mother prompted. Knitting, she sat by the open window through which a desultory breeze was trying valiantly to cool the room. The day had been uncommonly hot.

Jared didn’t look up from his dark contemplation of the phone. “He hung up on me.”

“That’s not what Mom’s asking.” Colleen, carrying a tray of glasses in one hand and a frosted pitcher of lem- onade in the other, walked into the room. “We want to know what he said you should do about April and that letter from New York.”

“Why? So you can gossip about it with all of your friends?”

“What?” Colleen exchanged a bewildered glance with her mother and demanded, “What are you talking about?”

“Nothing.” Jared gestured impatiently with his hand as he belatedly realized this was hardly the time to vent his ire about the conversation between the two woman that Tyler had overheard. It would only make this miserable day more hellish still. “I’m just mad, that’s all.”

“So tell us why. What did Conan say that’s got you so bent out of shape?”

“He says, ‘Go along with it.’ Says, ‘Don’t try to fight it.’ Or her!”

Frustrated, Jared waved away the glass of lemonade Col- leen held out. Too restless to sit, he once again paced. “Can you beat that? After giving away her kid, after nine years of nothing, the woman waltzes back into our lives with the intention of staking a claim and, according to some fancy New York lawyer, it would behoove me to let her get away with it if I don’t want to find myself hauled into court.”