I had no one. Sure, there were hundreds of names in my contacts list, many of them wealthy and sexy and influential. Before these last twenty-four hours, looking at my list of contacts always gave me a surge of pride. How many other twenty-four-year-old young women could brag that they had the personal numbers of two senators, half a dozen billionaires, and the private phone number for a certain young, hard-partying member of the British Royal Family on their speed-dial?
But none of these people could help me. Hell, after they found out what had happened to me, most of them probably wouldn't even take my calls. They were interested in my sex appeal, in having me hanging off their arm at parties. When I could no longer fulfill that purpose, I didn't have any use to them.
Scrolling down, I paused on one number, a single word entered for the name. "Mom." I hadn't deleted that contact? It wasn't like she'd pick up a call from me, anyway. I could be dying, and she'd probably still send my calls to voicemail, ignore any messages I left, delete them without reading.
After what I'd done to her, I wouldn't be surprised if she grinned in delight each time she declined one of my calls. What would make her feel better than to have her ditzy, delinquent, drop-out daughter crawling back and begging for forgiveness?
I put the phone aside, let out another muffled scream into my pillow. I couldn't be too loud, or Mr. Bennison, downstairs, would start pounding on the ceiling with his broom. After I'd emptied my lungs, I looked around my shabby little apartment, trying to picture a future here.
A future with a child. I barely had anything in my checking account, but I'd probably be able to save some money if I stopped going out and sold all my clothes. Maybe I could find a used crib somewhere. Could I get child support from Seb? Did that need a lawyer?
So many questions. I didn't have answers to any of them, and each additional one made my mood sink even lower.
Finally, I managed to haul myself up from the couch. Heading into the kitchen, I opened the fridge, dug past some of the frozen meals until I found my target. I chiseled it out from where it had been half-frozen in place, dropped it onto the counter.
I didn't remember the last time I'd felt so low that I had to dig out this quart of Rocky Road, but the ice crystals on both the inside and outside of the carton told me that it had been a while. The stuff was probably bad, if ice cream ever went bad.
I didn't care. I grabbed a soup spoon and dug in, shoving the sugary dessert into my mouth.
I finished the carton of ice cream, and then staggered off to climb into bed. It had barely passed three in the afternoon, but I couldn't face this day any longer.
I just wanted to curl up, pass away, and pretend that the last day of my life hadn't happened.
Happy birthday to me.
Chapter Seven
SEBASTIAN
*
"Hey, Sebastian, what are you doing conscious before midafternoon?"
I looked up, jostled from my thoughts. A new face had entered the main sitting room of the Stone mansion, grinning at me from the small space between wild brown hair and a similarly out-of-control beard.
"Not now, Tanner," I said shortly, looking back down.
He didn't leave, of course. Tanner failed at many things, including taking a subtle – or not so subtle – hint. The man was, even by his own admittance, a complete screw-up.
Normally, I didn't mind him, despite his many freely acknowledged inadequacies. My older brother, Teddy, had first found Tanner somewhere, but it had been Callie Vere who hired him to watch the Stone mansion while Richard and Linda took their honeymoon.
Originally, Tanner's time living at the mansion was only supposed to span the two weeks while my oldest brother and his new wife were away, banging each other's clinically repressed brains out on some tropical beach somewhere. But even after they returned, tanned and permanently semi-stoned on love's deadly endorphin cocktail, Tanner kept on living at the mansion.
I knew why, of course. So far, neither Teddy, Richard, nor their wives had the heartlessness to ask him to leave. And as long as no one explicitly told him to get out of the house, that his job was over, Tanner was happy to stay.
I felt vaguely like I should be bothered by his freeloading, but it truly didn't annoy me that much. Before he'd shown up, this huge, moldering pile of stone and brick only got a good cleaning once a month when the hired maid service stopped by. Now that Tanner lived here, he cleaned it almost daily. He wasn't efficient about it, of course, since the vacuum pushing was more for appearances than out of any real hatred of dust and dirt, but it was still better than nothing.
See, look at me. Such a generous billionaire, letting this guy live at my mansion for free. Shouldn't that have earned me some karma in the universe's ledger, helped me avoid this awful, gut-wrenching turn of events?
"I can see that there's something on your mind, man," Tanner went on after another moment, stepping around to the front of the white sofa on which I'd sprawled out. Of course, instead of leaving me alone, he kept on nosing in. "Why don't you share?"
"No." I turned away from him, hoping that he'd take the hint.
He didn't, of course. Figures – that's classic Tanner obliviousness. He reached out and grabbed a white leather ottoman from in front of a nearby armchair, pulling it up so he could sit beside my couch. "Come on, talk to me. It always helps me feel better if I can share my problems with someone else."
I knew that. More than once, he'd tried sharing his problems with me, and he always seemed to manage to pick the least opportune times to do so. Once, he even followed me upstairs after I returned home from a party with a girl hanging off each arm, trying to shout through my closed bedroom door about some kind of stupid plot issue that he had with his never-finished novel!
Trust me, nothing kills an erection faster than hearing about how somebody's main character needs to amputate his own gangrenous leg, complete with detailed descriptions of the progressing disease. I nearly puked on one of the best pairs of tits I've ever seen.
In the end, I now realized, it would probably be faster for me to just tell him, instead of continuing to stonewall. That was how Tanner McCallister seemed to work. He just kept up his politely insensitive badgering until everyone else gave in and let him get away with whatever he wanted.
"Fine," I gave in. "Richard and Teddy and their stupid life partners know, so I might as well tell you, too."
He didn't say anything, but his face lit up, probably because he'd just scored another point by making me give in to him again. He leaned in, practically bouncing up and down on the stupid ottoman.
"Tori's pregnant." There. I could say the words without throwing up, at least. It still didn't feel real to me, like I was telling a lie, but I could give them a voice.
His eyes widened. "Tori, your girlfriend?"
"She's not my girlfriend." Definitely not. Tori herself would probably smack me if she heard that label. And I didn't believe in labels, anyway.
"Oh. I guess I always thought that the two of you were..." Tanner lapsed off.
I narrowed my eyes at him. "Were what?"
"You know." He made some gesture with his hands that I couldn't even begin to understand. "Together. Haven't you brought her back here before?"
"That doesn't mean that we're dating."
"But it does mean that you're having a baby together! Congrats!" Again, in a spectacularly tone-deaf gesture, he leaned forward and attempted to slap me on the back in congratulations.
I waved his attempt off. "It's not a good thing, Tanner! I'd undo the whole damn thing, if I could."
"Oh. Sorry, man, I didn't realize." Tanner lapsed into silence, although I knew it would only last a few seconds before his next question popped into that otherwise empty, wild-haired head. I counted the seconds down under my breath.
Nine, ten, eleven- "So are you going to help her with the next steps and stuff?"
That stopped me for a moment. "What next steps?"
"You know, things that she's going to
need." Tanner made another gesture with his hands, as if this could take the place of words. For a man who claimed to be a writer, he sure had a hard time finding the words to communicate his ideas. "Where's she going to stay, after she has the baby? Are you going to buy her diapers and stuff? Nipples?"
"Nipples?" I repeated blankly.
"Yeah, you know. They go on top of bottles so that babies can suck on them."
"Oh. Rubber nipples." Those were a thing, weren't they? Gah, this was awful. I felt like a blind man, and Tanner wasn't much better. Neither of us knew the first thing about babies, it seemed.
Still, he did raise a couple good points. Now that I'd gotten Tori pregnant, didn't I owe her child support? Did I need to go talk to our family's attorney, an ancient and dusty old man who seemed to crack whenever he moved a muscle?
I thought about her run-down little apartment. A part of me still couldn't believe that she lived there. I looked around at the high ceiling of the Stone mansion's living room, the ornately carved white trim boards that ran around its perimeter. We'd inherited the huge house from our father. On paper, the house belonged to Richard, but I'd never really moved out. Tanner had also moved in, and I didn't even know what floor held his bedroom. With a dozen bedrooms, there was more than enough room for all of us, as well as the girls I sometimes brought home.
Would that need to stop? Now that I had a baby on the way, it somehow seemed disrespectful for me to go out and party. Did I need to declare to other women that I had fathered a child, as if I was confessing to an STD?
With a groan, I put my head down in my hands. Tanner, although almost definitely unable to guess what might be going on in my head, moved in closer and patted me on the shoulder.
"Come on, it's not that bad," he pointed out in a vain attempt to cheer me up.
I lifted my head just enough to fix him with one eye. "Yeah? How's that?"
He blinked, opened and closed his mouth for a moment. "Well, you'll get to be a dad! Have someone to pass on your fortune to?"
"Yeah, because that was my biggest problem," I retorted, my voice dripping with sarcasm.
"Well, how about watching as a kid grows up? Teaching him stuff?"
"Like what?" I threw my hands up. "Come on, Tanner, you know me! I'm good at partying, making immature jokes, and hooking up with women. This is totally outside anything that I know! I'm going to be an awful father."
For a minute, Tanner was silent. Glancing at him out of the corner of one eye, I saw him shifting his jaw back and forth, as if chewing on something invisible. He frowned for a second, shook his head back and forth.
"You're not having a mental breakdown, are you?" I asked. "Because if I can't handle a kid, I can't handle a man who's going crazy, either."
For some reason, he didn't laugh. "Sebastian, can I tell you something?" he asked.
I shrugged. "Yeah, sure."
"I..." He paused, taking a deep breath. "I didn't have the best childhood, growing up."
I turned a little to look at him. "Tanner, if you're trying to make me feel better about myself, I'm grateful, but it's not really what I need right now-"
"Shut up for a minute, will you?" he snapped, and my jaw clicked shut. That wasn't like Tanner. I couldn't remember him ever actually yelling at me, being anything but cheerful and happy as he bungled his daily duties. It was like getting attacked by a squirrel.
He paused for a second, apparently pulling himself back under control. "I grew up basically with just a single parent. My mom was really the only one who raised me. My dad was almost never around, and when he was, that was almost worse than when he wasn't there at all. He'd show up, take advantage of my mom for a week or two, break my stuff, and then he'd be gone, off to go blow whatever money he could scrounge together on the casinos, or some hair-brained scheme that he always insisted would make him rich. Not make us rich. Make him rich. All he cared about was himself."
Tanner shuddered, and this time, I was the one to reach out and pat him on the arm. "I'm sorry," I said, feeling a bit like an idiot for not being able to say anything more.
He shook his head. "Nah, don't be sorry. It's not your fault, and you didn't know anything about my past."
Because I never asked, I thought with another pang of guilt, but I kept my mouth shut. Some friend I was.
"But here's my point with this," Tanner continued after another second. "I had a shitty, shitty father. He wasn't around for most of my life, and he only cared about himself when he was there."
"So?"
There were tears welling up in the corners of his eyes, I saw, but he still managed to put on a watery smile as he turned towards me. His index finger poked me lightly in the chest. "So," he said, "I'm pretty sure that, no matter how bad of a dad you think that you'll be, you won't sink quite to the level of my father."
"I hope not!" The words came out without thinking, and I wished a second later that I could grab them back. "Sorry, Tanner, I didn't mean..."
"I understand," he assured me. "But just keep it in mind. Tori being pregnant is a shitty situation, but what matters now is what you do about it. You might feel lost, but as long as you don't act as badly as my father did, your kid will thank you for it."
The message was imperfectly delivered and badly phrased, but Tanner's confession did help me feel better. "You're right," I said. "Thanks, man."
He reached up and brushed a dirty sleeve against his eyes. "Yeah, no problem. Now, in exchange, just forget that you saw me getting all weepy."
"Not a chance." I dug out my phone, pretended to snap a picture of him. He laughed even as he batted it away.
"Come on, man, I'm showing myself as vulnerable, here. Don't be a dick."
"It's like you don't know me at all," I said, but I lowered the phone. Instead, I unlocked it and opened it up to the notes app. "So what, specifically, would have made your childhood a little less shitty? What sort of steps, if your dad had done them, would have made you actually turn out to be successful, instead of a failure who's taking advantage of our good natures and living rent-free at our house?"
"Ass," Tanner said, but he at least said it with a smile. "Okay, think about Tori. What's she going to need, as she spends her time on this kid? What's he, or she, going to need in the future?"
I took notes, ideas starting to slowly come to me. I still felt like I'd been tossed into the deep end of the pool before receiving a single swimming lesson, but I didn't need to just give up and drown. I could try and at least keep my head above water.
Chapter Eight
TORI
*
"So, what are we doing out here?" Ellen asked from the passenger seat of my car, peering suspiciously out the window at the houses on both sides of the road.
I shrugged from the driver's seat. I didn't have an answer for her. Seb had called me up this morning, sounding strangely excited about something. He'd given me this address and then hung up before I could ask him if he was in danger of lethally overdosing on caffeine. Normally, Seb wasn't even conscious before eleven in the morning, much less able to sound excited about, well, anything.
Still, I felt like I'd gotten the address wrong. My GPS guided us out of the city and into the absolute middle of boring, pedestrian suburbia. Large, similar-looking houses lined both sides of the street, with perfectly manicured green lawns, conservatively trimmed hedges and bushes, and painted in a variety of vague, mostly indescribable pastel colors.
Ellen didn't look optimistic about us finding anything out here, and I heard Seb's voice speaking in the back of my head. The voice of my perception of Seb, the guy who always had a laughing, sarcastic comment about everything, the guy who delighted in his quick wit.
Welcome to the home base of the Stepford Wives, commented my mental version of Seb. Better carry the car battery around with you, in case you need to short-circuit one of them! And put on a cute little sundress, so that you can blend in with them...
My phone beeped at me, and I pushed my mental construction of
Seb back down in my head. "This is the place, I guess," I said, turning the wheel and pulling into the driveway of one of the houses.
"Are you sure?" Ellen leaned forward to peer up at the house through the windshield. Her blonde hair fell forward, and she reached up to try and sweep it back. "This place just looks exactly like all the others."
She had a point, I admitted, as I climbed out of my car. I had to hold my hand up in front of my eyes, squinting in the bright morning sunlight. Even that seemed brighter out here, away from the comforting shadows of skyscrapers in downtown. The house looked identical to its neighbors on either side-
-except for the large sign standing in the middle of the otherwise perfectly trimmed front lawn. The smiling, almost waxy face of the real estate agent flapped back and forth in the slight breeze, his soulless eyes seeming to follow me.
"Oh no," I whispered, suddenly guessing why Seb invited me out here.
Ellen had also climbed out from the passenger side of the car, and even as my stomach dropped in my abdomen, I had to lift my hand and cover a little giggle at her appearance. She'd dressed in what I thought of as her usual outfit, which consisted of a tiny little black mini-dress, three-inch heels, and close to a dozen bracelets and bangles on each slender wrist. A pair of Gucci sunglasses completed the assemble, and she would have fit in perfectly at any nightclub in Ibiza or Miami.
In the middle of suburbia, however, she looked hilariously out of place. She took a step away from the car – and the stiletto heel of one shoe immediately sank deeply into the lawn. With a squawk that surely caught the ears of half the neighborhood, she toppled backwards. She just barely managed to wrench her foot out of the shoe before it sent her crashing down onto the lawn.
"Oh, perfect!" she cursed, bending down to pick up the lost shoe. Across the street, I saw a rather paunchy middle-aged man standing at the foot of his driveway, frozen halfway through the act of rolling his garbage bin down to the curb. His eyes were now locked on Ellen's ass, covered only by a thong as her mini-dress rode up high on her hips.
For Love of Freedom (Stone Brothers Book 3) Page 5