Anne Peters - My Baby, Your Son

Gripping the window frame, he stared out into the night

“With which Conan agrees,” Maeve stated rather than asked. She put aside her knitting and caught her son’s free hand. “Jared.” Gently, she uncurled the fist he had formed. “Would it be so bad?”

“Yes.” Vehement, Jared bent and gripped his mother’s shoulders. His eyes bored into hers. “Mom, you were there.”

“Yes, I was.”

“He was tiny.”

“Not much more than a handful,” Maeve quietly agreed. She returned Jared’s burning gaze with one that was loving and true.

Because his eyes threatened to fill, Jared closed them. He hung his head. His hands spasmodically squeezed his mother’s shoulders. “He was only hours old when they gave him to you, remember? Completely helpless. Needy. Damn it, Mom—” With a strangled sound of anguish, Jar- ed straightened and turned away. His fingers speared into his hair and stayed there as he tilted his head toward the ceiling.

“How could she do it?” he asked raggedly. “Tyler needed her. He could have died. How could she just…give away her own child?”

“She says she didn’t,” Colleen hesitantly put in. “When I challenged her on it today, she told me she didn’t do it willingly.”

She winced when Jared rounded on her with a snarl. “So unwillingly makes it all right?”

“Well, it certainly puts a different light on things.”

“ If it’s true.” Jared leveled a finger at his sister. “And since when are you back to being her champion?”

“I’m not That is…” Averting her eyes from Jared’s accusing ones, Colleen sought support from their mother. “I guess I want to believe her, Mom. She seemed so gen- uinely…broken up. I felt—”

“Sorry for her?” Jared smacked his palm against the windowsill with a snort of disgust. “You always were a bleeding heart, sis, where April Bingham was concerned.”

“And you weren’t?” It was Maeve who asked that ques- tion, shocking Jared into swinging around to stare at her.

Erect and still formidable, Maeve stared back. “All those years when that poor little girl would come to us seeking refuge from that harridan of a mother, who was it went out of his way to comfort and amuse her when Colleen was not around?”

Maeve leveled a finger at his chest “You, Jared. You always had time for her, always understood her. Shielded her. Coddled her. There was nothing, you said, you wouldn’t do for her. And she for you.”

“Mother—”

“No, Jared,” Maeve cut short her son’s attempt to in- terrupt. “You’re my son and I love you. I stood by you and so did your father, God rest him, throughout that whole mess. But that doesn’t change the fact that you were not blameless in all that transpired. You were twenty years old. You knew what an innocent April was, for all she was seventeen. You also knew she worshiped the ground you walked on and would give you anything you asked, in- cluding…”

Too straitlaced to speak of sex, even to her grown chil- dren, Maeve faltered. With a wave of the hand, she settled for, “Well, you know what I mean. She loved you, Jared.”

“I loved her, too,” Jared flared. “And kindly remember I’m not the villain in this piece.”

“But you’re sure that April is?” Maeve had come to stand beside him at the window.

Behind them, Colleen noisily blew her nose. “You should have told her you’d marry her.”

“Oh, sure.” Jared’s short laugh was bitter. “I tried that, remember? And got tossed out on my ear.”

“You should have told her right away. And you’ll recall it wasn’t April who sent you packing.”

“Oh, no.” It was galling to realize the memory still hurt. “As always, she let her mother handle that little unpleas- antness.”

“Jared.” Taking Jared’s callused hand in her own work- toughened one, Maeve gazed down at her son with sorrow- ing reproof. “You know as well as I do that no one lets Grace Rhinegold do anything, least of all April. Grace just does, and let nobody dare try and stop her.”

She waited for Jared to meet her eyes. “It was Grace who handed me the baby, son, in that posh and private London clinic. I never told you this because you never wanted to hear the details, and anyway I thought, What was the point?”

“So why are you telling me now, Ma?” Jared didn’t like the direction this conversation was taking. After all these years of blaming April, despising April, was he now ex- pected to forgive and forget?

Angry, suddenly, he shook off his mother’s hands, rounding on her and Colleen. “Why are the two of you all of a sudden working so hard to convince me that she is the victim here instead of me?”

“We’re not,” Colleen exclaimed defensively. She wiped at her cheeks. “It’s just that—”

“It’s just that there’s more to consider here than your hurt feelings or April’s,” Maeve interrupted with some im- patience. “As far as I’m concerned, Tyler’s well-being is the only thing that matters.”

“Which is exactly my point!” Jared leveled a rigid fin- ger at his mother. “What do you think it’s going to do to Tyler when after a month, two months, or three, the famous Ms. Bingham gets tired of languishing in our backwater town and bored with playing Mom, and hightails it back to the bright lights? Huh?”

He grimly forestalled the defense he saw Maeve draw breath to offer. “Which she will.”

“And if she doesn’t?”

“She will.” Convinced of it, Jared stared hard at his mother in an effort to convince her, too. He noted with a pang that his father’s death had scarred his mother’s face, just as the simultaneous death of Regina had irrevocably scarred his own soul. Though not for the same reason.

“She will,” he repeated, but quietly this time. Loving his mother for all she was and all she had done for him— and for Tyler—Jared bent and kissed her cheek. “I’m sorry, Ma, but I’d stake my life on that.”

“But, son,” Maeve’s hand kept him from straightening. “Don’t you see? If you fight her, it’s not your life that you’re putting at stake. It’s Tyler’s.”

They looked at each for a long time, mother and son, as the truth of Maeve’s words wrestled with the bitterness in Jared’s soul. And when, with an oath, Jared finally straight- ened and turned away, Maeve gestured to Colleen and qui- etly led the way out of the room.

April was lying down with an ice pack on her head when the phone rang. Even though she had set the volume control at the lowest setting, the whirring sound reverberated through her head with all the force of one of Mozart’s cres- cendos. Not since the collapse that led up to this prescribed rest period had she suffered a migraine of this magnitude. She had felt it coming on in the aftermath of her encounter with Jared O’Neal and Colleen Simpson. The stress, her overwrought state, all were like poison to her constitution. Only the hope that the call might be about Tyler motivated her to pick up the phone. Indeed, it was the only reason she had not unplugged it.

Gagging back nausea, she kept her head as still as pos- sible as she groped for the handset on the low table next to her with her eyes closed. “‘Lo?”

“Hello, er…April?”

Jared. April tensed. Pain lacerated her skull. It seared both of her eyes like a hot poker and drove an involuntary groan from her lips.

“What’s the matter?” Something like alarm sharpened Jared’s tone. It assaulted April’s ears and head like a ham- mer blow. “April?”

“Please,” she croaked. “Not so loud.”

“Are you sick?” Jared asked in a more moderate tone that—incongruously to April—held an unmistakable note of concern.

“M-migraine,” April whispered hoarsely. “But never mind that T-Tyler?”

“Yes.” Jared cleared his throat. “He’s, uh…. Well, he’s the reason I’m calling. But look, it can wait until—”

“No…” Heedless of her head, dizzy with pain, April rose up on one elbow as though that would lend force to her whispered plea. “Please. Is it all right? Are you going to let me see him? Talk to him? When?”

“Well, it can’t be right away.”

Not right away? Gasping, her disappointment an even more devastating pain than the one in her head, April col- lapsed back against the pillows.

“You see, he’s gone camping with my sister Leslie’s family for a couple of days.” There was a pause that gave April time to realize—and appreciate—the fact that Jared was trying to establish some sort of rapport. His next words bore that out.

“You remember Leslie,” he said with a strained, self- conscious little chuckle. “She’s the one who was always practicing the clarinet in the hayloft and spooking the cows.”

“Yes…” April also recalled that Leslie was two years older than Jared, the second oldest, after Conan, of the six O’Neal offspring.

“They’ll be back Wednesday or Thursday.”

Two more days, maybe three. It seemed like such a long time. Though she knew it was foolish—she had waited this long, what did a couple more days matter?—April felt tears of disappointment sting the backs of her eyes.

She refused to let them fall, even when Jared added to the devastating letdown by saying, “And I’ll also need some time to talk to him. I need to prepare him. I mean, he knows you exist, but we can’t just spring your imminent entrance into his life on him out of the blue.”

“I understand.” The suppressed tears constricted her voice. “You’ll, um…you’ll let me know?”

“Right.”

“Thank you,” April whispered, but Jared had already severed the connection.

With a tremulous sigh, April let the phone slip out of her hand. She lay perfectly still, letting the fact that Jared had decided not to fight her soothe her like a balm.

Not till a pool of water had collected in each of her ears did she realize that holding back the tears hadn’t worked.

At his end, Jared, too, was distraught. It had been a dif- ficult phone call to make on all levels. He put down the phone and, with his elbows propped on his father’s desk, cradled his head in his hands, thinking, I don’t think I can do this. I don’t want to do this.

He didn’t want to trust April. Didn’t want to risk Tyler getting hurt. But most of all he didn’t want to get sucked in once again by April Bingham and her problems. He didn’t want to care.

“Damn.” Pinching the narrow spot between his eyes, he bowed his head and sucked in a number of ragged breaths.

So she still got those headaches. Was he to blame for this one?

Jared dug his nails into his scalp, remembering the first time he had seen her with one. He had been looking for her to ask her to go swimming. Her aunt had come to the door.

“I don’t know, Jared,” Marje had said in that elegant British way of hers. “April is terribly upset.”

“What happened?”

“Her mother rang. From England. She announced her imminent arrival—she’ll be here two days from now—and I’m afraid April isn’t taking it well. She was so enjoying her holiday, poor lamb.”

And now it’ll be back to the salt mines, Jared had thought. “Where is she?”

“April? She fled upstairs to her room, white as a sheet.”

“Can I see her? Please?”

Marje had considered this for a moment before tossing up her hand. “Sure. Why not. If anyone can cheer her, it’ll be you.”

As Jared bounded up the stairs, she had called after him, “Mind, you leave the bedroom door open!”