“Grace,” he interrupted. “Now that the crisis is over and we aren’t going to freeze to death, we need to talk about all...” He glanced down at Jules. “This.”
“I agree.”
“Good. Then let’s do the right thing and get married.”
Grace’s mouth fell open, then she slammed it shut. This wasn’t what she’d call “talking.” This was Mica making his declaration—again. For some reason he thought that the decisions should all be made by him.
“You can’t be this arrogant,” she hissed, glancing over at Mrs. Beabots. “We should go to the other room to have this argument.”
“Fine. But the problem is that we don’t need to argue.”
“Sure we do,” she retorted. “There is no way I’m going to enter into a loveless marriage like your mother did. I’m not going to spend my life wasting my years and my—my choices, chances, on...” Her brain had gone black again. She hated when it did that. She was so overwhelmed with emotions, she couldn’t think. She saw black. Felt black. “On...you,” she sputtered. It was all she could manage. And the second it came out, she wished she could stuff it back in.
Grace’s heart cried out in pain. Her anger was simply protecting her from hurt. She wanted Mica as her husband. She wanted to spend the rest of her life with him, but above all she wanted him to love her. Just last night, even this morning, she’d felt flickers of that love. She wanted to believe it was there. Last autumn there had been long nights and golden afternoons when she’d convinced herself that deep down, Mica loved her. But they had vanished that day when he’d said goodbye with a cold wave at the Indian Lake train station.
He shot to his feet and pointed at Jules.
“He’s my son,” he growled. “He’ll inherit my family’s farm one day, and I mean to make that happen. I’m not about to let you spoil that for him.”
Carefully, she put Jules on top of the blanket she’d used to cover herself that night. As she stood, she could swear she saw Mrs. Beabots pop one eye open and then close it. The octogenarian had been playing possum this whole time.
“Oh, so now I’m the bad guy?” She picked up her mug and the French press.
She walked past Mica, who was standing like a pillar of indignation in the middle of the floor. “Well? Are you coming?”
“What?”
“To the kitchen, where we can talk.” She marched out of the room.
Mica followed her and closed the kitchen door.
“Look, Grace...”
“No, you look, Mica Barzonni. I’m not going to marry you. Got that? Women have babies every day of the week and raise them without fathers all the time. This is a new century. Times are changing.”
“Not for me, they’re not. A child needs both parents, Grace. Both. The statistics show that kids are better adjusted with both parents in the house.”
“Since when have you boned up on parenting?”
He leaned his right hand on the island and stuck his face close to hers. His eyes were glacier blue and hot with anger. Fire and ice. Grace realized there was nothing she could say to convince him.
“Since you finally got around to telling me about the existence of my own son!”
It took every ounce of her willpower not to cry. She did feel guilty, ashamed and embarrassed that she had kept the truth from him. He had her on that front. He was punishing her. She deserved it. But she wasn’t about to go on being punished forever.
“I told you that I’m sorry. I made a mistake. I should have told you. And I have told you now. That’s in the past and we can’t do anything about that. So, can we be adults about this?”
“Sure.” He clenched his jaw. “So, will you tell me the truth now?”
“What truth?”
“About what’s going on? Why you won’t marry me. You know it’s the best for Jules. And yet you refuse. So there has to be a real reason, and I think I know what it is.”
Confusion pinged around Grace’s brain. “What are you talking about?”
“This is all about that guy, isn’t it?”
Stumped, she asked, “What guy?”
“Rene? You’re refusing to marry me because he’s waiting for you back there in Paris. I saw him during your conference. I heard him, too. You both—you’re a lot more than just coworkers. That guy’s in love with you.”
“Rene?”
“Yeah.”
How could Mica tell if Rene was in love with her? If she thought about it, she had to admit she’d seen some signs of love, from time to time, but they’d both worked so closely and were both so driven, they’d never seen if it could go anywhere. Plus, she’d chalked a lot of their closeness up to the intimacy and intensity of their working relationship.
Still, Grace had not seen this coming. How could Mica see romance between her and Rene when he’d obviously missed the fact that Grace was deeply, irrevocably in love with him? But telling Mica that wouldn’t do either of them any good. He would probably use her feelings as leverage in his marriage campaign, even as he remained adamant that he didn’t love her back. Grace would hope Mica wasn’t that cruel, but she could see how much he loved Jules. How much he would do for that little boy. And that scared her.
Mica raked his hair. “So tell me, Grace. Did you and this guy cook this whole thing up about bringing Jules here to dump him on me so you can go back to him? Did you ever intend to come back for your son?”
Grace pulled back her hand to slap him but stopped just as her hand was about to make impact. She whirled away from him and went to the other side of the island. She needed distance. “That is the most insulting thing I’ve ever been accused of in my life. You can’t possibly think that, Mica. And I want you to take it back. Right. Now.”
He exhaled deeply. “Okay, fine. But if that’s not true, then what? You want to leave Jules here with me for a couple months, just long enough for us to bond—which we’ve done already, in case you haven’t noticed—then take him back to Paris? Boot me out of the picture for good?”
“No!” she barked. “None of that is true.”
“I’m sorry.” He put his shaking hand on the island and looked down. Then he lifted his face to hers. “I just don’t understand you.”
“We’re even, then,” she snapped. “You know, Mica, I think something about me really ticks you off. Not always, but you can be the biggest jerk to me. Why is that?”
Silence.
“I really want to know,” she said. “Is it because I was a teen queen and you still harbor some resentment about that? You’re right that I handled my pregnancy all wrong, but Mica, all I wanted from you was some help. That’s all. I’m not ‘dumping’ Jules on you. I love Jules with all my heart. I would never, ever give him up. And I hadn’t thought far enough ahead, but I don’t plan to keep him from you. That wouldn’t be fair. I’m not an evil person, Mica.”
Her throat thickened and cut off the rest of her words. It was just as well. Words were useless now. They’d come to the end of their road.
And it was a dead end. No fork. No road less traveled. No turning back.
Grace felt utterly alone at the moment she needed to feel wanted and loved. She, of all people, knew life didn’t work out the way she wanted.
“No,” he said softly. “You’re not a bad person. Neither am I.” His face softened and he stood back from the island. “I hope.”
“I never said you were. Mica, I can tell you that Rene is not my boyfriend or anything like that. We haven’t been plotting against you. I admit that he loves Jules. And he does have feelings for me...”
Mica pointed at her. “See? I knew it!”
“But I’m not going to marry him.”
Mica’s intake of breath was audible. “You aren’t?”
“Definitely not. In the first place, we’ve never even d
ated. In the second, he hasn’t asked me.”
“Yet,” Mica added. “You haven’t dated and he hasn’t asked you yet.”
“That’s accurate. Yes,” she admitted. Who was she to predict the future? Once she was back to Paris and after she got her company up and rolling, there was always the possibility that she could get over Mica. Move on. Have a life. A half life.
“Grace, we have to come to some kind of agreement. If marriage is out of the question, then could we work out a custody agreement?” he asked.
“Sure. I have no objection to that.”
“You don’t?”
“No,” she replied sincerely. “I want you to be in Jules’s life. I want you to know all the joys like I have with him.” Even as Grace spoke, she felt her heart break again. She was hopelessly in love with him. If Mica would only tell her that he loved her, she would marry him and never look back on this pain.
“Then I think I have a solution for us.”
Grace felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle as if bad tidings had swept over her. “Oh?”
“I have an attorney friend here in town. He can draw up a custody agreement for us. We can have his name legally changed as well. A few papers—” he snapped his fingers “—and then it’s done.” He smiled winningly.
And Grace felt her heart sink.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ONCE RAFE HAD hooked the snowplow onto the front of Mica’s truck, Mica was able to plow the long drive, the path from the house to the barn and the path to the horse barn. After the four-day power outage years ago, they’d equipped the villa with a backup generator, so Gina, Sam, Rafe and Olivia had been warm and safe all night.
Mica remembered his childhood years when the family had been snowed in and without power. He and his brothers had been ecstatic about the time off school. But it had been no vacation for his parents. Gina had done everything she could to save the food that was spoiling in the freezer. She kept five backup tanks of propane gas to run two gas grills. He remembered his father cooking at the grill with snow swirling around him.
Mica hung up his jacket and took off his wet boots in the laundry room. Though the lights had gone out, the situation between him and Grace had been illuminated. They’d come to a decision. A conclusion that should have made him happy. But he felt hollow inside, which he didn’t understand.
He was on emotional overload. In less than a week, he’d been hit with his mother’s engagement and marriage, learned about Jules and wrestled conflicting feelings about Grace.
He needed a distraction to quiet his mind.
Withdrawal and retreat into his design work had always been his salvation when emotions vied for center stage.
The power outage made him wonder what kind of problems and solutions other people in town had faced.
Electric wheelchairs and scooters could only run on their batteries for so long before needing to be recharged in an electrical wall socket. Backup batteries or generators would help them, but not for long periods of time. He thought of the many people who used oxygen tanks at home. Unless they had a fully charged battery to run the apparatus, they wouldn’t have oxygen. He could only guess at the numbers who had suffered. Then there were people like Mrs. Beabots, who were relatively healthy but still vulnerable, and perhaps not physically able to build and maintain fires to keep warm.
He sat at the computer at his father’s old desk and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. Energy sources were the province of physicists, though as an electrical engineer, Mica had always been fascinated with energy sources and their applications.
Mica had set up his PC with a thirty-two-inch screen and had hooked up two laptops beside it to handle his engineering software. In addition to his 2-D drawing program, he had MATLAB, which gave him high-level linguistic and numeric computation. A third program turned his drawings and calculations into 3-D models, and a fourth cut down his design time.
With three screens in front of him, he sat back in his chair feeling just a bit like a space-shuttle captain, exploring new galaxies.
“And I am.”
While the computer booted up, Mica took stock of the office.
His father had never particularly cared for this room, he remembered. Angelo was a man of the earth, wanting always to be outside, riding a tractor or, better still, one of his Thoroughbreds. Gina did all her work in the den: accounting, bookkeeping, the taxes, correspondence and ordering supplies.
None of Mica’s brothers had spent much time in here, either. When Gabe was in middle school, Angelo had introduced him to the corporate buyers. It was obvious that both Gina and Angelo had expected Gabe to take over the family business one day. But Gabe had seen his life differently. From the time he went to college in California, his dream had been to become a vintner. Angelo hadn’t accepted this at first, but Gina had encouraged him. Rafe had spent every spare moment with his horse, Rowan. Nate ran away from home before the ink was dry on his high-school diploma.
No, this walnut-paneled room, with its Persian rug, overstuffed leather chairs, brass lamps and shelves filled with every novel and biography Gina had ever read, had fallen to Mica. Now it was his domain.
Once his father had died and Mica’s arm had bailed on him, he’d acquired another computer and then another. Between his father’s death and the accident, he’d worked on his designs sporadically, stealing a few hours on the weekends and in the evening. After the accident, he’d been too depressed to focus on his work, though he’d had the time.
What he’d needed was motivation.
Jules had given him that and plenty of it.
He hadn’t realized until this moment just how far along he’d come with his designs. He was one of those helter-skelter kinds of engineers who invented all the parts, but didn’t put them together until the very end. Partly in fear that the dang thing would never work. Partly because then the design and the challenge would be over. He was much like the novelist who wrote the ending, then the beginning, then some scenes in the middle. And prayed for the transitions that would glue everything together.
Mica knew now that his design would work, and he also knew he’d taken it as far as he could. From this point, he needed a manufacturer who saw the potential and would provide a coding expert to create the software Mica envisioned.
Mica had drawn up a list of his top six contenders for a partner. His favorite was Peerless Farm Manufacturing, which was located in Florida. He’d taken a virtual tour of their facility and liked what he saw. It was a small firm, run by two men who had gone to college together and were former farmers. Their vision and mission statements were similar to Mica’s goal.
Yes, today was the day. He would make the greatest leap he’d taken in years. Possibly ever.
He opened his inbox and hit Compose.
He uploaded his resume, a description of his project and two 3-D models of the unit.
His hand didn’t even shake when he hit Send.
Everything was just as it should be, he thought.
“Good morning, Mica,” Gina said, coming through the door with two cups of coffee. She handed a steaming mug to him. He took a sip. It was rich and black and he instantly recognized his mother’s favorite Italian blend. She only brought it out for special occasions. But then, only two days ago had been New Year’s Eve and her wedding.
Her wedding. She was a bride again. A newlywed.
A thick wave of nostalgia washed over Mica, and he saw his father’s face, tanned from working in the sun all summer. His dad was wearing overalls and a white T-shirt, his biceps flexed as he pulled a tree stump out of the ground. Mica had been driving the tractor. Gabe and Rafe worked the chains.
The tree had been struck by lightning and had fallen across a soybean field. Recent rains had made the work muddy and difficult. Though not even in their teens yet, all three boys di
d man’s work. Angelo demanded it.
He barked orders and shouted at them. He whirled his arm over his head as a signal to Mica to keep pulling the tree off to the side of the field.
Mica did as he was instructed, driving carefully so as not to disturb even the first soybean plant. And he didn’t.
Angelo had often said that of all the boys, Mica’s driving was like a second sight. Rafe could rein a horse as if he’d been born in the saddle, but Mica and machines were like one brain.
It was the only compliment Mica had ever received from his father.
Mica inhaled the aromatic steam. “This is from your private stash,” he told Gina.
“Sam loves it. He says I make the best coffee he’s ever tasted.”
“Don’t tell that to Maddie,” Mica joked, looking at his mother. Only this time he really looked.
She was incandescent. She appeared twenty years younger this morning, with her dark hair clipped messily to her head, tendrils cascading down her neck. She wore a white turtleneck, jeans and a pair of leopard moccasins he didn’t remember seeing before. But then, Mica hadn’t been all that observant lately. Possibly ever.
And that was a real fault.
He’d been missing out on a lot. He cocked his head. “You’re happy.”
Lifting her chin, she let out a laugh. “Impossibly happy.” Then her face grew more serious. “I hope that doesn’t upset you.”
Her comment took him back. Back to the other life, where she lived with his father and the four sons she raised. He was seeing her not as just his mother, but as a woman. Mica hadn’t liked to think of himself as narrow-minded. He was educated, on his way to becoming a great designer, but when it came to living...he was failing.
And he didn’t like it anymore.
“I have a confession,” he began.
“Oh?”
“That afternoon when I found you in the kitchen—when Sam proposed—I was angry. I admit it. I guess I thought you should go on mourning Dad forever. Stupidly, I thought that we—well, Rafe and I and the farm—would be enough for you.”
His Baby Dilemma Page 17