Baby of His Revenge

by Jennie Lucas

  She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t have to.

  You don’t love me.

  Pushing his arm away, she left the bedroom. He followed her to the kitchen, where her grandmother was stirring a big pot on the stove.

  Kassius took an appreciative sniff. “That smells fantastic.”

  “Oh, are you still here?” her grandmother replied, not bothering to look in his direction. Lifting her eyebrows, she glanced down at her son.

  “I’ve decided to give the man a chance,” Clark said gruffly.

  “Really.” She sounded skeptical. “Even after the way you were calling him a no-good—”

  Clark coughed. “Laney said she has news.”

  Her grandmother paused in stirring the pot. “News? What news?”

  Kassius looked at Laney. Now she was on the spot, her cheeks were pink. Clearing her throat, she said in an overly cheerful voice, “Kassius and I got a wedding present a few days early. We found out we’re going to have a baby!”

  Her grandmother’s spoon dropped. “A baby!”

  Clark turned toward Kassius with a blind scowl. “Baby?”

  Kassius came behind Laney, putting his arms around her. He felt her trembling, though she gave her family a big smile. “Yes, a baby. And we couldn’t be more delighted.”

  “A great-grandchild!” Yvonne breathed with delight. Then a shadow crossed her face. “But we’ll never see the baby. You’ll be living so far from us. We’ll never see any of you.”

  “Just another member of the family he’s taking from us,” said Clark sourly.

  Standing on the worn linoleum of the tiny, dimly lit, spotlessly clean kitchen, Kassius heard himself say, “Laney and I would be happy to have you stay with us. My jets are at your disposal. We have plenty of extra rooms. Please come and stay as often as you like.”

  Laney’s jaw dropped.

  Yvonne gasped, turning towards Clark, who had a stunned expression.

  “I take it back.” The elderly woman sniffed joyfully, wiping her eyes with her brightly colored apron. Coming up to Kassius, she stood on her tiptoes and enveloped both him and Laney in a hug. “Every bad thing I ever said. Because you’re not just good people, Kassius—you’re family!”

  * * *

  Later that night, Laney crept out of her childhood bedroom, with its pink ruffled comforter on her twin bed, foreign maps on the walls and overflowing bookshelves. Fresh from the shower, she was dressed in an old T-shirt and pajama pants as she sneaked down the hallway.

  Engaged or not, pregnant or not, there were some rules that had to be followed in the Henry household, one of which was that an unmarried couple would never, ever be permitted to sleep in the same room. Even on the night before their wedding.

  Too nervous to sleep, Laney had waited until her grandmother and father had gone to bed. Silently, she tiptoed down the long, dark hallway to the front room, where Kassius had been assigned to sleep on the sagging sofa.

  Earlier that night, when her grandmother had handed him the pillow and blanket, Laney had half expected him to refuse and announce that he was off to a hotel. Instead, he’d just meekly said, “Thank you very much, ma’am.”

  Laney bit her lip. It wasn’t the first time he’d surprised her today. She hadn’t expected him to treat her family so well. As if he respected them. As if he really cared about their opinion. She was grateful but bewildered. Where was the arrogant man who claimed to have no feelings?

  The front room was dark and empty, the pillow and blanket left in a pile on the sofa. Hearing a creak on the porch, she pushed open the peeling screen door.

  Kassius was sitting on the old porch swing, his handsome face distant as he looked out into the dark night.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  He blinked, as if coming back to himself, and she wondered what he’d been thinking about. For answer, he just moved over, giving her a spot on the wooden swing.

  She took a deep breath of the fragrant, cooling night air. She could hear the wind against the trees, the distant hum of city traffic. She could smell his expensive, woodsy cologne, the scent of cypress trees and musk.

  “Not able to sleep, either?” she said.

  “No.”

  She didn’t want to ask if he was having wedding jitters like she was. “Is it the sofa?”

  Kassius gave a wry smile. “It does have a hard spot right in the middle.”

  “I used to jump on it as a kid,” she said apologetically. She bit her lip. “I feel guilty having a bed...”

  “Don’t,” he cut her off. “I want you to have it. You need to be comfortable. How are you feeling?”

  “Better. No nausea.” She gave him a shy smile. “It might be because I’m home. Eating my grandma’s cooking. I feel good. I feel...grateful.” She looked at him in the shadowy night. A breeze blew the branches of trees across the nearest streetlight, moving light and shadow across his handsome, angular face. “Thank you for what you did today.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “You made my family love you.”

  He gave a low, cynical laugh. “By offering to give them use of my private jet? Or by not telling them the truth about my loveless heart?”

  “You opened up your home to them. Home means family.”

  Kassius looked at her. In the dark, lowering sky, the crescent moon was haunted by a swirl of frosted cloud.

  “How do you do it, Laney?” His voice was low and intense. “After everything that happened to you, how do you keep your heart open?”

  “What do you mean?” she said with an awkward laugh. “Is there any other way?”

  “Your mother abandoned you.” His dark eyes seemed to burn through her. “She left your injured father and you and ran away with some boyfriend. It was monstrous...”

  Laney sucked in her breath. “Don’t say that! She made some mistakes, yes, bad ones, but—”

  “Mistakes?” he said incredulously. “Abandoning a sick partner and a young, innocent child? It’s beyond selfish. It was evil.” His hands had tightened into fists, and his jaw seemed tight enough to snap. “She deserved to be punished...”

  “She was punished,” Laney said quietly. “She died. Of an overdose. Alone on a California beach, without my father or me around to help her and protect her from herself when she needed us most.”

  Kassius stared at her, then blinked, as if recollecting himself. He took a deep breath.

  “How do you do it?” he repeated. He gestured toward the house. “All of you. After everything you’ve gone through, how can you still have such hope, such belief in love? Your father has clearly never gotten over her. He still has her pictures on his wall, pictures he can no longer see. He still wears his wedding ring!”

  “You can’t turn love on and off like a light when it’s convenient,” she said quietly. She stared down at the peeling finish on the wood porch. “I wish you could.”

  “You mean, you wish you could,” Kassius said flatly. “Because you think you’re in love with me.”

  Laney looked at him, astonished.

  “But you’re wrong.” He shook his head. “You’re not in love with me. You don’t even know me.”

  For a moment, she didn’t—couldn’t—answer. Then something about being here, in her own home in her own city, made her brave.

  “There’s a lot I don’t know about you yet, that’s true,” she said quietly. “I don’t know where you were born. I don’t know your first language. I don’t know why you gave Mimi those diamonds in secret, or why, for a man who worked so hard to create his fortune, you’re willing to toss so much of it away on bad loans to her boss.”

  Folding his arms, Kassius set his jaw, looking away.

  “But there are some things I do know.” Laney tilted her head, looking at his silhouette in the moonlight. “I know you’ll always be honest with me, even if that means saying things I don’t want to hear. You’re willing to commit your life to me, if not your heart. You have somehow already
made my family love you. You’re going to marry me tomorrow, and I know you will keep your vows to honor and cherish me. And I know above all that you will love our baby.”

  His eyes widened, and he turned toward her. For a long moment, they stared at each other in the moonlit Louisiana night, the only sound the creak of the chains on the porch swing and the soft whisper of the night breeze through the cypress and palm trees.

  “Let me in, Kassius.” Reaching out, she took his hand in her own. “Tell me your secret.”

  He stared at her for a long moment. Then, pulling back his hand, he abruptly rose to his feet.

  “It’s a busy day tomorrow. Get some rest.”

  And he left her on the dark porch.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  STANDING AT THE altar of the two-hundred-year-old Gothic church, lit by candlelight on a dark February night in the heart of New Orleans, Kassius looked at Laney, radiant in her white dress.

  “I now pronounce you man and wife,” the minister intoned.

  She looked like an angel, he thought. Her brown eyes glowed as she looked up at him. Her lips were full and pink, her dark hair pulled back beneath the long white veil. The wedding dress was vintage, with white lace sleeves and sweeping skirts.

  The minister grinned. “You may now kiss the bride.”

  At last. Cupping Laney’s cheek, Kassius lowered his head. He forgot about the hundred people watching from the pews and just kissed her. He felt her small body tremble. But her lips did not. She barely touched him before she pulled away. She was distant. Unreachable. Nothing like he’d expected from the warm, emotional woman he’d just married.

  As Kassius drew back, suddenly he was the one who was trembling.

  Around them, people were applauding and cheering from the pews, and a few threw rose petals as Kassius took Laney’s hand and led her back down the aisle, past her openly weeping grandmother in the fancy hat, and her father, who was still blinking back tears from the experience of escorting his daughter down the aisle.

  The nave of the tiny, Gothic-style church was lavishly decorated with expensive flowers and candles. But the real heart of the ceremony had been the joy of the wedding guests, mostly Laney’s family and friends. He’d only invited one real friend, his best man, Spanish billionaire Ángel Velazquez. But that was the difference between them, wasn’t it? Kassius had acquaintances, people he met for business dinners or a hedonistic week of skiing in Gstaad. He had business allies and rivals, suck-ups and hangers-on, all of whom he hadn’t bothered to tell the wedding planner to invite.

  While Laney had family. She had friends.

  Newly wed, the two of them walked out of the stone church, and the wedding guests followed them out into the warm, dark, moist Louisiana night, a noisy, happy crowd, chattering, laughing, even bursting into song as they walked the short distance to the reception, being held at an antebellum mansion in the Garden District. The wedding planner, an accomplished woman, followed them with her headset, making sure everything was ready for their arrival.

  When Kassius saw the location of their reception, he sucked in his breath. It was like seeing a ghost.

  The mansion, set back from the street, looked exactly like his mother’s childhood home. It had the same type of old Spanish architecture, with covered wrought-iron balconies. His mother’s house had been built a hundred years later, two miles farther west, on St. Charles Avenue. He’d only seen it in photographs, before he’d had it destroyed.

  A cold sweat broke out on his forehead, and his skin felt clammy beneath his tuxedo. He didn’t know why this mansion, and the thought of a different house, was affecting him. The Cash house was in the past. Dead and gone. He’d never even gone to see the empty lot—that was how little it meant to him. So why did he suddenly feel dizzy?

  He felt his bride’s cool gaze on him as they walked past the wrought-iron gate, over a pretty path created by white rose petals and lit by white Chinese lanterns. He looked at her, and she instantly turned away to talk to a friend who’d come up beside her to squeal over her wedding dress, the beautiful ceremony, their future happiness.

  And once they got inside the mansion, that was how the reception went, too. All night long, Laney offered bright smiles—fake! So fake!—to all of the people who loved her. For him alone—the one person on earth, it seemed, who did not love her—she offered coldness and a consistently averted gaze. As if she couldn’t even bear to look at him.

  And the ink was barely dry on their wedding certificate. Not a good sign.

  To Kassius, the evening stretched on like torture, with an elegant sit-down dinner in the colorful high-ceilinged ballroom shimmering with lights. Gritting his teeth, he ate his dinner, barely tasting the blackened catfish or jambalaya. A tearfully happy wedding toast was offered by Laney’s maid of honor, a childhood friend called Danielle Berly, now a married kindergarten teacher with two children. A much shorter, far less emotional toast was offered by his own best man, Ángel Velazquez.

  He’d just held up his champagne flute and cried with a flourish, “Buena suerte!” Good luck. Which he obviously thought his old friend would need.

  Kassius gritted his teeth and got through it. He smiled at all the right places and acted pleased when he and Laney cut the gorgeous six-tier wedding cake with its raspberry filling and white buttercream frosting with sugared flowers. He smiled for the photographer, leaning in toward his bride when she was refusing to touch him or look in his direction. When he took her out on the dance floor for their first dance together as a married couple, beneath the beaming smiles and oohs and aahs of her family and friends, he tried not to notice how she’d flinched when he’d touched her.

  It didn’t promise a very good honeymoon.

  All he could think about was how different this night was from the New Year’s Eve ball, when they’d first kissed and hadn’t been able to keep their hands off each other. This wedding night should have been beautiful, and it had been, but coldly so, like a distant star. But why? What had changed?

  With a sick feeling in his gut, he knew exactly why. Because she’d reached out to him last night, and he’d pushed her away.

  He was tired of being alone. And weary, so weary, of having no one completely on his side.

  Finally, at midnight, he’d had enough. She’d been visibly reluctant to depart, but he’d insisted. He’d finally taken her hand and led her out of the elegant old mansion to the circular driveway where a vintage Cadillac now waited, bedecked with sashes and white flowers.

  Laney’s footsteps slowed. “Where’s the limo?”

  “I decided it was too much.”

  “Really?” she drawled as the driver held open the back door. “Too much?”

  Then she turned with a bright smile to wave at her family and friends who’d poured out of the mansion to bid them farewell. Kassius looked for Velazquez, but his friend was nowhere to be seen. He’d been such a hermit lately, Kassius was almost surprised the Spaniard had been willing to leave his half-million-acre Texas ranch to be his best man. Kassius certainly wasn’t going to give him a hard time about ducking out early, but it meant only his bride’s friends and family shouted and cheered after them as they departed, throwing white streamers at their car as they drove away.

  Sitting beside his bride in the backseat, Kassius almost jumped when he heard loud bangs behind the car. Looking back, he saw rusty metal cans attached to the glossy bumper. He gave an incredulous snort. “I can’t believe Ms. Dumaine—”

  “The wedding planner didn’t do those,” Laney informed him. “I heard Gran giggling about it with the ladies of her bridge club.”

  The drive to the elegant hotel in the French Quarter where they were to have their honeymoon wasn’t supposed to take long. Normally it would take fifteen minutes, the wedding planner had told him. But with the huge influx of tourists celebrating the weekend before Mardi Gras, traffic was heavy. The drive took forever.

  Or maybe it just felt that way to Kassius, with the awkward silence in t
he backseat, the two of them not touching. Laney still wouldn’t look at him and seemed more likely to strike up a conversation with the driver than the man she’d just pledged to honor and cherish.

  Suddenly, he could stand it no longer. He leaned forward and spoke quietly to the driver, who nodded and changed the car’s route.

  “Why are we turning around?” Laney asked in confusion. The first words she’d spoken to him in ten minutes.

  “You’ll see,” he said grimly.

  The car turned back onto the wide, well-tended avenue, divided by tracks, for the historic St. Charles streetcar line. On both sides of the avenue were oak trees and gracious mansions, many at least a hundred years old.

  “Here,” he told the driver, and the man parked. Kassius abruptly got out.

  It was past midnight now, and the street was quiet. This was a residential area, with a variety of architectural styles, from old Spanish to Greek Revival, Italianate to Colonial. Each mansion was evenly spaced with a large garden.

  Except one house was missing, like a gap between teeth. He stood in front of the empty lot, stuffing his hands in his jacket pockets. Looking at a house he’d never seen.

  Laney came up behind him. He heard the soft whisper of her skirts. “What are we doing here, Kassius?”

  “You wanted to see the place I’m from?”

  “So?”

  Wordlessly, he pointed at the barren plot of land, lit up by a pale trickle of moonlight, ghostly and empty between the other elegant homes.

  She stood beside him, looking at the lonely plot of land, nothing but overgrown grass and a single cypress tree. “You were born here?”

  He shook his head. “My mother was.” He looked at the empty lot. “This was her childhood home. She was the only child of the wealthy Cash family and ran off at nineteen to see the world rather than stay and marry the man they’d chosen for her.”

  A car drove past them on the quiet road, its lights illuminating Laney’s big dark eyes.

  “She fell in love with a Russian she met in Istanbul. She thought my father would marry her, but all he gave her was excuses. He floated in and out of our lives, promising he’d marry her soon, bringing us money and gifts. Until I turned eleven, and he disappeared completely.” His jaw set as he looked out at the sad cypress in the moonlight, hearing the plaintive cry of night birds soaring invisibly above. “Later that year, my mother got sick. If we’d had money for proper medical care, she might have survived. As it was...it took her five years to die. Alone.”