His Pretend Baby

by Theodora Taylor

  Calm down, Josie, she thought, reminding herself that Beau and she were adults now.

  Sure, she had flashed back to their high school years with a terrible inward cringe more times than she cared to admit, considering she was now a grown woman and not a love-struck seventeen-year old. But Beau’s life in Los Angeles was so beyond their relatively mundane shared past. He probably didn’t even remember what had happened between them back in high school.

  Plus, he’d been badly injured. She still wasn’t clear on all the details, since the Suns had yet to release a statement, other than Beau was suffering from the side effects of a game-related concussion and would be out for the rest of the season. But she guessed he’d most likely be more concerned with recovering from his concussion than reliving his high school memories. Their new servant-employer relationship would be based on the grown-up versions of themselves, she assured herself, and at the very least, civil.

  So then why did her heart start beating at what felt like one hundred miles per hour when the limo came to a stop right in front of her? And why did her breath actually catch when Beau Prescott stepped out, without waiting for the driver to come around to open his door?

  From the way Mrs. Prescott had made it sound, she’d thought Beau would be a frail and sickly version of the football god she’d last seen at her mother’s funeral, more than a year ago. But no, that wasn’t the case at all. Sure he was dressed in slouchy jeans, Topsiders, and a dark green hoodie, instead of the sharp suits he usually wore when he was off the field. But somehow his leisure outfit still looked like it cost more than her best dress. And even though his thick black hair hung down messy and uncombed almost to his chin, and he was sporting a beard that didn’t look like it had ever seen a pair of trimming scissors, it still wasn’t enough to hide the classic good looks lurking underneath all that unchecked hair.

  To Josie’s disappointment Beau still exuded almost hyper-masculinity, he still looked like a football god, and he was still completely mesmerizing. Worst of all, he still put her in mind of a superhero straight out of the comic books she used to read when she was kid, back when she was still silly enough to nurse a secret crush on him.

  If anything, he was even more ruggedly, ridiculously handsome—almost too handsome. And the only thing indicating there might be something wrong with him were the designer sunglasses covering his eyes, even though it was overcast outside.

  “Why am I still standing here?” Beau asked, his voice cut across the blustery day like a bullhorn. “I thought my mother hired somebody to make sure I wasn’t left standing in the goddamn driveway.”

  These words snapped Josie right out of her staring spell. She rushed toward him, getting there just as the driver, a slightly older man with a thick grey mustache, did.

  “That’s all right, I’ve got this,” Josie said, taking Beau’s arm before the driver could.

  The words were barely out of her mouth before Beau was turning toward her voice, and at the same time, yanking his arm away like he’d just been touched by someone with a contagious disease.

  She must have startled him, she realized, kicking herself inwardly. She’d been reading up on tending to the newly blind and more than one source had warned against not announcing yourself before touching a blind person.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Prescott,” she said. “I should have told you I was going to touch you before I did. I didn’t mean to come at you out of the blue like that.”

  But he continued to stand there, breathing hard and rough, like a bear who’d been surprised in his cave.

  Maybe, Josie thought with another mental kick, he didn’t recognize her voice. It had been years since they’d last seen each other, and they’d only exchanged a few terse words at her mother’s funeral. “It’s all right, Mr. Prescott,” she assured him. “It’s me, Josie Witherspoon.”

  “I know who you are,” he answered, like she was nothing less than an idiot for reintroducing herself. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Josie’s eyes widened. “Your mama didn’t tell you?”

  “Tell me what?” he asked, between gritted teeth.

  He looked so furious Josie actually took a step back before saying, “She hired me to take care of you.”

  “She did what?” he yelled.

  “She hired me to take care of you…?” Josie repeated slowly. She’d thought the nervous energy from before was bad, but now her heart was beating with the thunder of a million horses in her chest.

  This was not good. She hadn’t expected Beau to be this angry about her being here. And now he was yelling at her, which made her as skittish as a foal in fog.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, trying not to let her mind go to Wayne. “I thought she told you.”

  “No, she didn’t fucking tell me.” His jaw set and his left hand clenched and unclenched, a move she recognized from his high school days, a sign he was holding his anger in check while figuring out what to do next. “Where’s the guy who drove me here?”

  “Right here, sir.” The limo driver stepped up. “My name is Miguel, and I’m at your service,” he said as if it were a first time introduction, and even though he’d probably already told Beau his name when he picked him up at the airport. “What can I do for you?”

  “Take me in the house,” Beau bit out.

  The driver, who had probably been given instructions to hand Beau over at the front door, looked askance at Josie.

  “Okay, I can just lead the way. No problem,” Josie said, scrambling to reconcile this situation with the research she’d done to prepare for her new job as Beau’s caretaker.

  “Okay, Mr. Prescott, we’re at the steps now,” she said, as the driver guided Beau toward the front door. “There’s four of them, I’ll count them out for you.”

  Beau didn’t answer, so she counted the steps as he and Miguel took them one at a time.

  “Now we’re in the foyer,” she said when they got inside. “You want to sit down for a spell? I could bring you something to drink, or some food if you’re hungry.”

  “No,” he answered, his voice sharp and hard. “I want to go to my room. Now.”

  “All right. That’s totally fine,” she said, throwing Miguel an apologetic look. The poor man had definitely not signed up for this. “If you could just lead him to the big staircase over there.” Then to Beau: “Mr. Prescott, we’re at the big staircase now. Lots of steps, I’ll count them as we go up.”

  “No.” His voice was colder than a decade of Northern winters. “No more telling me where I am, no more counting.”

  Josie’s face fell. “But the counting is so you can get used to moving around the house on your own,” she said. “Counting the stairs out might seem silly now, but it will help you memorize the numbers when I’m not around.”

  “Why’s my mom paying you if you’re not going to be around?” he asked. Then, before she could answer, he waved Miguel forward. “Take me upstairs.”

  She thanked Miguel profusely after they’d arrived in Beau’s old room. Another thing her mother had taught her was to be twice as kind to the other help as she was to the Prescotts. “Let me just go get a tip out of the mad money…”

  But Miguel shook his head, “No, ma’am, that’s already taken care of,” he answered.

  “Oh no, I couldn’t let you leave here without something.”

  “Really, it’s all right, ma’am. I was paid a tip in advance.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “He said it was taken care of, Josie,” Beau said. “Let him go already.”

  She pursed her lips, about ready to tell Beau what he could do with his edicts and commands, but then she remembered how much she needed this job and her room with it’s little amenities—like heat and electricity.

  “Well, then I hope you know how grateful we are for your assistance,” she said to Miguel, pasting a tight-lipped smile on her face. She then decided to wait for the driver to get all the way out the house before she attempted to reason with Beau
again.

  While she did so, she looked around the room, realizing if Beau could see, this probably would have been the first time he set eyes on his old bedroom since college. Before Wayne had moved Loretta into her own apartment in Birmingham, she had told Josie that Beau never came home after he went pro, preferring to occasionally fly his parents out to visit him in L.A. rather than come back to Alabama.

  “Guess he too good for this place now,” her mother had said.

  But Josie hadn’t been able to judge him. She’d started staying away from Alabama herself by then, too, mostly at Wayne’s behest. He’d claimed he couldn’t do without her but also that he couldn’t get away from work to go home with her.

  At first she’d been flattered by his desire to keep her by his side, but eventually, she’d come to see Wayne’s supposed devotion for what it really was: his way of keeping her separated from the people she loved, the people who might have helped her.

  Maybe it was a good thing Beau couldn’t see this place now, she thought to herself now. She’d suspected Mrs. Prescott wouldn’t be the kind of woman who would leave a room as a shrine to her son, even one who had been as good at football as Beau had been from the start, and she’d been right. His former bedroom now looked like it belonged in an upscale bed and breakfast with its large four-poster bed, an expensive looking Persian rug on the floor, wallpaper covered in a delicate fleur de lys pattern, a crystal chandelier, and lace curtains adorning the huge bay window that looked out onto the back lawn and the woods that lie beyond it.

  It was definitely fussier and decidedly more feminine than what Beau was probably used to. She’d once run across a feature on him in one of Wayne’s sports magazines. It had a photo of Beau in an ultra-modern and very masculine penthouse surrounded by lots of windows, sleek black and red furniture, and ample white space. A far cry from his current surroundings, that was for sure.

  She finally heard the front door close behind Miguel and said, “Just so you know, your room no longer looks like it used to. If you don’t mind taking my arm, I can give you a quick tour.”

  She stood to the side of him and held out her arm, but he didn’t make any move to step closer. Instead, he said, “Is the intercom still to the right of the door?”

  She looked over her shoulder to the little white box that would allow him to call her, no matter where she was in the house. “It sure is.”

  “I’ll use it if I need it. Now leave.”

  “But—”

  “Get out,” he said.

  She hesitated. Yes, he was being an ass, an even bigger one than he’d been in high school (and that was saying something). But after all the reading she’d done, she felt bad abandoning him in the middle of an unfamiliar room without even a cane to help him find his way around.

  “Are you sure there’s nothing else I can get you?” she persisted.

  “What part of ‘get out’ don’t you understand?” he asked before turning his head away from her voice, as if to dismiss her with both words and body.

  After a few uncomfortable ticks, she decided to do as he’d commanded. He was newly blind, she reminded herself, and needed her sympathy and understanding.

  “Oh, and Josie?” he said behind her.

  She turned back around. “Yes? Is there something I can bring you?”

  “I was just wondering if you were alive.”

  “You’re wondering if I’m alive?” she asked, frowning. Could he be having even more side effects from the concussion? “Of course I’m alive.”

  He smirked and a bit of the old Alabama drawl laced his words as he asked, “You’re not a ghost? Or maybe one of them zombies?”

  “No,” she answered, truly alarmed now and wondering if a visit to the hospital might be in order. “Can I ask why you’re asking me these questions?”

  “Because you’re working for me now,” he answered. Then he smiled in her direction, his voice flat and hard. “And it sounds to me like you’re still breathing.”

  And with that, Josie knew the amicable working relationship she’d been hoping for was nothing more than a pipe dream.

  Beau hadn’t forgotten what happened when she crossed him all those years ago. In fact, he seemed to remember every single bit of it down to the fine details. He had no intention of letting bygones be bygones. And he finally had her where she had vowed to never be.

  Right under his thumb.

  3

  I shouldn’t have come back here, Beau thought to himself while sitting in the bay window of his old bedroom.

  He couldn’t see what lay beyond the glass, but he’d spent so much time at the window as a boy, he knew the scene by heart: an immaculate lawn, a gazebo, and a large shed that doubled as a hiding place if you wanted to get away from your life as the only child of Beau Prescott Sr., the last in a long line of Prescott steel magnates that stretched all the way back to the mid-nineteenth century.

  When Beau had lived here for real, looking at the never-changing scene had been enough to calm him down after yet another fight with his father about how he should have gotten an A+ as opposed to an A-, about how football was beneath a Prescott, about how he needed to start doing more to live up to the Prescott name.

  But he couldn’t take much comfort in the familiar scene now, since he couldn’t see it. He took off his sunglasses and rubbed a hand over his face. This damn blindness was turning his life into a nightmare.

  And it had made living in Los Angeles unbearable. Suddenly everything he’d enjoyed about his life was gone. The football, the partying—even the never-ending stream of girls had come to a standstill. After getting cleared for sex by his doctors, he’d tried to get it on with two groupies, only to find out a certain part of him hadn’t been down to party.

  Not for those two girls. Not for the one his agent had sent him in lieu of a get-well card, or the one he had hired from a discreet escort service in a fit of desperation.

  He’d asked his mother to arrange his return home partly out of frustration and partly because he couldn’t stand living in L.A. as a shadow of his former self. The last thing he’d expected upon his return home was to find Josie Witherspoon waiting for him on the goddamn front steps.

  He hadn’t even needed her to tell him who she was. Her smell, her voice, her undeniable presence—he recognized it all in an instant. And despite his worries about whether he could still get it up after the concussion, he immediately knew it was all bullshit, because his dick had gone hard as a rock as soon as she touched his arm.

  He mentally cursed his mother. It was one thing not to show up to see to him like any decent mother would have. He had long ago stopped expecting even a minimum of maternal behavior from her. But to hire Josie Witherspoon of all people…

  His cock throbbed with almost painful need just knowing she was here, in the same house. It was even worse than when they had been teenagers and Josie had decided to go and sprout some serious curves the summer before she started at Forest Brook Senior High. The summer she turned seventeen.

  He’d tried not to look, reminded himself Josie and he had practically been raised together, like brother and sister. But he definitely didn’t feel like her brother that hot afternoon when he watched her plump, heart-shaped butt swaying back and forth underneath her jean shorts as she walked out to the shed with a green apple and a stack of sci-fi books.

  The airy shed held special meaning for her, too. It had been her favorite place to read since she was eight, and often when he saw her walking out there, he’d join her with one of the “great men of industry” biographies his father was always haranguing him to read. But that afternoon, instead of grabbing a book and joining her, he’d stood frozen on the back porch, hypnotized by her beautiful backside, to the point that he didn’t hear his father come up behind him.

  “She isn’t for you, Son.”

  He turned, startled, to find his father staring at him. Hard. “I was just…” Then he trailed off, not wanting to lie, but not knowing how else to explain why
he’d been ogling Loretta’s daughter.

  “I know exactly what you were doing, Junior, and I’m telling you, she isn’t for you.”

  Beau Sr. was a few inches shorter than his son, but that didn’t make him any less intimidating when he stepped out onto the porch. “That Mindy LaSalle girl, she’s fine. A good girl from a good family. But you’re a Prescott and Prescott men don’t need to be associating with the help. Do you understand?”

  “She’s not the help,” Beau answered. “I mean, I wasn’t planning on getting with her or anything, but she’s not the help. She’s Loretta’s daughter.”

  His father leveled him with a censorious look. “You know what I mean. And if you don’t want to listen to me on this, think about Loretta, the woman you claim to love like a second mother.” He nodded toward the shed. “Loretta’s put just about near everything she’s earned in a college fund for that little gal. And she wouldn’t want you sniffing around her daughter.”

  Beau looked away and felt his face grow hot. He would never want to jeopardize her future, nor did he want to disappoint Loretta. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his father give him a grave shake of his silver head, “She isn’t for you, Junior. Leave her alone.”

  And though Beau managed to stand up to his father about all sorts of things, including playing football, that short conversation had left him feeling guilty and uneasy. Not just because he got caught checking out Josie, but because of the how his father had made it sound like him having any kind of feelings for Josie would somehow ruin her. Plus, he already had a girlfriend, Mindy, the cute cheerleader who was a shoe-in for homecoming queen that year.

  As a result, shunning Josie had felt less like a dick move and more like something he had to do when she came bouncing up to him on the first day of the school year to ask if she could catch a ride home after football practice. He was standing with his teammates, and Josie, it seemed, still hadn’t figure out that her new curves made not only him, but also other guys look at her as more than the knobby and bespectacled kid who liked to tag along with him from time to time.