Temptations: A Limited Edition Contemporary Romance Collection

by Blue Saffire

  “But I want to hear how he did it, Mom,” Noah pipes up behind me. From the corner of my eye, I can see his dark head peek around my shoulder. His face aimed straight at Tobias.

  At his father.

  “I want to know how to dodge bullets too.”

  36

  Tobias

  As soon as I found her note, I called Angus and had him ready my plane. Drove myself home and changed because when I saw her again, I wanted to be me.

  Not Tobias Bright, the billionaire.

  I wanted to be me.

  Tobias.

  The man who fell in love with her.

  I was so focused on Silver, that when I walked in, all I could see was her. Explaining everything to her was all I could think about. Making her understand. Forgive me, was all that mattered.

  Now that I see him I can’t look away.

  “I want to know how to dodge bullets too,” the boy says, his wide, luminous gray eyes staring up at me from behind Silver. The same eyes that have haunted me for five years, set in a face I know as well as my own.

  He looks exactly like my mother.

  When I don’t answer him, when all I can do is stare, the kid leans even closer. “Mom?” he says, his brow slightly furrowed, bouncing a look between me and his mother.

  Silver clears her throat and shifts herself in her seat again, giving me a better view of the boy behind her. “Noah,” she says carefully, slipping her arm around his shoulder. “This is… my friend, Tobias. Tobias, this is my son Noah.”

  My son.

  As soon as she says it, my ears start to ring—a high-pitched howling that makes it hard to concentrate. See straight. Think clearly.

  My son.

  Not your son.

  Not even our son.

  My son.

  “Nice to meet you, Tobias,” the kid holds his hand out for me to shake.

  “Hi, Noah.” I breathe it out while I take his hand, letting my fingers wrap around his. “It’s nice to meet you too.” I must be smiling because the kid suddenly beams up at me, giving me a grin that nearly splits me in two. “How old are you, Noah?” I don’t know why I ask. Maybe because I need confirmation, despite what my eyes and my heart are telling me. Maybe because I can feel Silver’s father staring at me from across the table and I want him to know that I didn’t know. That if I had known…

  “I’m four,” he says. “But I’m almost five.” He nods sagely, like being almost five holds some sort of magical property. “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-two,” I tell him, somehow managing to sound normal. Not at all like I’m holding a conversation with a part of myself I never even knew existed. “I’m almost thirty-three.”

  “Are you my mom’s boyfriend?” he asks me, his face scrunched up while reclaiming his hand. “Because Papa and I were hoping that Patrick could be her boyfriend because Papa likes him and he lets me push all the buttons in the elevator but Patrick says—”

  “Noah James—” Silver says in the kind of warning tone all mothers seem to come equipped with. As soon as she says it, she goes pale, her mouth clamping shut before the rest of it can escape.

  “Fiorella.” I finish for her.

  She didn’t even give him my last name.

  “Tobias,” she whispers, finally managing to tear my attention away from the boy behind her.

  “Don’t.” I say it softly because her father is still staring at me and so is the boy and I can’t say what I want to say. Not without all hell breaking loose. Not without saying things that might hurt or confuse Noah.

  My son.

  “I’ll let you get back to your dinner,” I say, forcing myself to look at her before refocusing on Noah. “It was nice to meet you.”

  I turn to retrace my steps. Through the swinging door. Down the service corridor. Past the dining room. Out the heavy glass door, my gaze focused on the Maybach Angus kept curbside at my request.

  “Will you at least let me try to explain?”

  I knew she was behind me. Heard her calling my name as she hurried to catch up to me. I had no intention of answering her. Of stopping. I have to get out of there. Away from her.

  “Tobias, please.”

  Against every instinct I have, telling me to leave. To go back to New York and forget I ever met her, I turn around and look at her.

  “What do you want?” I say, turning around to pin her with a glare that seems to freeze her in place. After she stares at me for a few seconds she starts to shake her head, her face pale and stricken.

  “Nothing,” she says, arms wrapped around her middle. “I don’t want anything from you.”

  “Good.” I jerk open my door before Angus has a chance to get out of the car and do it for me. “Then that’s exactly what you’ll get.”

  37

  Silver

  “What do you want?”

  As soon he says it, I feel like someone’s knocked the air out of my lungs. I feel loose inside. Like my guts are going to spill out so I wrap my arms around my middle to hold myself in.

  “Nothing.” I shake my head, trying to breathe my way around the pain. This is exactly what I expected. Exactly what I knew would happen. He’d find out about Noah and think I want his money. “I don’t want anything from you.”

  He glares at me for a moment, like maybe he’s trying to figure out what my angle is. Like maybe he doesn’t believe me. “Good,” he snarls at me, yanking his own car door open before Angus can even get out of the driver’s seat. “Then that’s exactly what you’ll get.”

  He shuts the door in my face. A few seconds later, the car pulls away from the curb and I stand there, willing myself not to fall apart.

  * * *

  The rest of the evening passes by in a fog. As soon as I came in from chasing Tobias out into the street, my father pounced on me, demanding to know what was going on. If Tobias Bright was Noah’s father.

  “Yes.” That’s all I said, because that’s the only thing there is to say. Tobias is Noah’s father. There’s nothing else to explain. How can I explain what happened when I don’t even know. Can’t even wrap my head around it.

  When Jane showed up after work, she took one look at me and knew. She didn’t say anything. Didn’t pepper me with questions. Didn’t say I told you so. She just wrapped her arms around me and said what I needed to hear.

  “I’ll be waiting with a bottle of wine and box of tissue when you get home,” she says, smiling at me before scooping Noah up and taking him home for me like she does every night.

  Have I mentioned how lost I would be without her?

  I spent the rest of the night on auto-pilot. Putting out fires and dodging my father until the last diner was out the door and the night’s totals were tallied and locked in the safe in my office.

  I called an Uber and slipped out the front while my father was still in the kitchen.

  When I finally got home it was well past midnight. Usually, Jane is asleep on the couch when I come in and I wake her up and send her down the hall to her own apartment. Tonight, she’s wide awake, promised wine open and half gone on the coffee table, a buffet of junk food laid around it.

  She even managed to wrangle Delilah.

  “Where’s Noah?” I say, peeling off my coat.

  “Asleep, in his own bed,” Jane says, pressing a glass of wine into my hand as soon as I sit next to her on the couch. “I figured you might need a good cry.”

  She’s right again. It’s impossible to get a good cry on when you have a curious four-year-old asking why you’re crying every ten seconds.

  “Thanks,” I say, taking the wine while offering her a weak smile. “I’m sure I’m going to need it.”

  “Well,” Delilah says, curled up in the armchair, her bare feet tucked underneath her. She’s wearing a leather mini-skirt and enough eyeliner to make Ozzy Osborne jealous. Despite her obvious club attire, she looks mostly sober. “You want to tell us what happened?”

  I don’t.

  I don’t want to tell an
yone what happened.

  I just want to take a shower, try to scrub the last few hours off my skin and crawl between my sheets to sleep and cry for a week straight.

  Maybe longer.

  But I tell them anyway because they deserve to know and maybe if I say it all out loud, I can figure out where I went wrong.

  How I can make it right.

  “I just didn’t want him to look at me and see those other women,” I say, finally landing on the reason I kept Noah to myself, even after I knew who Tobias was. “I didn’t want him to think I got pregnant on purpose or that I was after his money.” I shrug. “I don’t know. I was afraid—”

  “That’s not why you didn’t tell him about Noah,” Delilah pipes up at of nowhere from her chair where she’s steadily plowing her way through a box of Dingdongs, the growing pile of foil wrappers in her lap making me wonder just how sober she really is.

  “Excuse me?” hearing her say it, I’m instantly defensive.

  “I mean—” She shrugs, turning the chocolate covered cake over in her hand so she can dig crème filling out of its belly with a long, glittery fingernail. “I’m sure you feel that way,” she says, scooping white fluff and bits of chocolate into her mouth. “But that’s not why you didn’t tell him. You didn’t tell him about Noah because you were afraid.” The last of it is delivered around a mouthful of Dingdong.

  “That’s what I just said,” I say, struggling to keep my temper in check. Scratch my earlier assessment. My sister is as high as a kite. “I was afraid he’d think—”

  “You were afraid he wouldn’t love Noah,” she says, glancing up from her snack cake to nail me with a look that makes it suddenly hard to breathe, her sky blue eyes going slick and shiny with tears. “That he wouldn’t want him. Ignore him the way our mothers ignored us.” Delilah looks down at the pile of white goo and waxy chocolate in her lap. “You know better than anyone that all you need is one parent who loves you. Noah has you. He doesn’t need anyone else.”

  It’s not what she says.

  It’s what she doesn’t say that squeezes and tears at my throat.

  Of my ten brothers and sisters, I am the only one who isn’t monumentally screwed up in some way and the reason is because our father loved me best.

  Raised me.

  Wanted me.

  What she doesn’t know is that I’ve always worried that that love was conditional. That I’m living in a minefield. One wrong move, one wrong step would destroy everything. Leave me alone.

  Just like her.

  “Lilah, I—“

  Before I can say anything else, there’s a knock at the door, soft but insistent.

  The three of us sit there, staring at each other, not knowing what to do until Jane finally sets her wine down and stands. “I’ll get it,” she says, skirting around the coffee table to make her way to the front door.

  I know who it is. I don’t have to watch her open the door but I do anyway and my heart does as strange double-tap in my chest when I see Tobias standing on the other side of it.

  “We need to talk.”

  38

  Tobias

  I have a son.

  I have a son.

  I have a son.

  Those same four words have been on repeat in my brain since I saw him.

  I have a son.

  And Silver kept him from me.

  I don’t remember telling Angus to take me to Logan’s place but I must’ve because here I am, banging on his front door like I have a search warrant, yelling at him to open the damn door. Finally, after what feels like hours, he yanks the door open.

  “What the fuck, Tob?” he yells, soaking wet, towel clutched around his hips. He still has soap in his hair, running down his arms. Water puddling on the floor at his feet. “Are you out of your goddamned mind?”

  Am I out of my mind?

  Maybe I am. Maybe I totally misread the situation. Maybe I can’t do simple addition and subtraction for shit. Maybe that kid looks nothing like me. Maybe I made it all up in my head like last time because I was about to tell Silver I love her and that scared the hell out of me.

  Maybe.

  “I have a son.”

  As soon as I say it out loud, I know I didn’t misread anything. I didn’t make it up. I can add and subtract just fine.

  I have a son.

  Logan’s posture instantly changes. His shoulders sag and his face softens as he angles himself out of the doorway to let me in. As soon as he shuts the door, he turns to look at me for a second, like he’s not sure what he’s supposed to do with me. “Let me get dressed and call Patrick to tell him I’m going to be late for my shift.” He wipes soap off his face. “Wait here.” He glances at the conference table where his bank of computers seem to be working overtime, their screens flashing and scrolling faster than I can track. “and don’t touch anything.”

  He comes back a few minutes later, hair still wet, wearing a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt with a picture of a kitten, playing with a ball of yarn on it. “Thanks, Patrick,” he says into his cell, nodding his head. “I appreciate it.” He hangs up and jams his cell into the back pocket of his jeans.

  “What did you tell him?” I practically snarl the question because all I can think about is how Noah wants Patrick to be his mother’s boyfriend.

  “That my rash flared up,” he says—his way of telling me to mind my own business. “Now explain.”

  I tell him everything. About meeting Silver on her twenty-first birthday. Taking her home. What I thought the morning after. How I treated her.

  That one earns me a dirty look. Logan’s got a thing about men who mistreat women—more than most. I’m sure it has something to do with his mother but I never asked. I could’ve and he would’ve told me but I never have because that would mean I’d have to reciprocate.

  Talk about my own mother.

  What it was like to watch her die.

  Why I had to do it alone.

  I shove the thought aside, focusing on the now. I finish telling Logan about Silver. How I walked into that meeting with his friend/boss and there she was. That I strong-armed her into dinner and basically kidnapped her (earning myself another dirty look) to New York. That I ended up taking her to the Hawthorne. That she took off on me and I chased her back to Boston and ended up face-to-face with my own son.

  “You took the mother of your child to your sex pad?” He looks at me like he thinks I might need a CAT scan.

  “I didn’t know she was the mother of anything,” I gripe back. “And I took her there because she asked me to.”

  He glowers at me like he’s mentally docking me humanity points for not being able to predict the future. “Gotta be honest,” he says, shaking his head at me. “I was sure it’d be Jase I’d be having this conversation with someday.”

  Yeah. Me too.

  “Okay,” he says like he gives up. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want to see his birth certificate.” That’s what I want. Even though I know I’m not listed as his father. Even though I know she didn’t give him my last name. I want to see it for myself and I know he can do that for me. I know it’ll take him about five minutes to hack his way into the Department of Vital Records. It’s what Logan does. He finds things.

  People.

  Information.

  “Why?”

  For a second my mind goes blank. My chest goes tight and hot like someone packed it full of hot coals. “What do you mean why?” I say, my voice raised, louder than necessary. “Because he’s my kid and I have a right to see it.”

  He shrugs his shoulders. “Not really,” he says, his own tone calm and reasonable. “Not if you’re not prepared to do the right thing. Not if you just want to see it to fuel your own bullshit fantasy about how this woman did you dirty.”

  “She had my kid and kept him from me—that’s the fucking definition of dirty.” Even as I say it, I know it’s wrong. I know I’m wrong but I can’t seem to stop the river of bullshit spewing f
rom my mouth. “She—”

  “Woke up to an empty apartment and a stack of cash on the nightstand,” he interjects, his tone sharpening just enough to cut through my tirade. “Take it from someone who’s been bought by Tobias Bright—it feels like shit.”

  It’s like he punched me in the mouth. That’s how much it hurt. How fast it shut me up.

  “I never bought you,” I say even though, if I look at it objectively, that’s what I did. What I always do. When something in my life starts making noise, I throw money at it to shut it up. “All I’ve ever done is try to help you. You’re my brother. It’s my job to protect you. Take care of you.”

  “The fact that you actually believe that is the only reason I’m still standing here.” Logan shakes his head like I’m a poor dumb bastard and he feels sorry for me. “Look, man,” he says, running a hand over his face. “I’ll do it. I’ll dig up the kid’s birth certificate for you but you’ve got to promise me that you’re gonna leave him and her alone. That you’re not going to chase this thing unless you’re prepared to do the right thing.”

  The right thing.

  “I promise,” I say, even though I’m pretty sure I have no idea what the right thing is anymore.

  Not that I ever did.

  39

  Silver

  I wasn’t surprised when Tobias showed up at the restaurant this afternoon but I’m surprised now. Once he found out about Noah, I never expected to see him again. I expected lawyers and judges and gag orders but I never expected to see him on my doorstep.

  I stand up, staring at him over the back of the chair Delilah’s still sitting in. “What are you doing here?”

  He looks at me like I just asked the dumbest question he ever heard. “We need to talk.” He repeats himself, enunciating each word like he thinks I might have brain damage before shooting Jane a quick look. “Alone.”