by Abby Gaines
“Are you going to report me to the cops? Because my mom is really sick, and if she hears about this she might—”
“We want to help you,” Bethany said again. An inquiry at the nurses’ station gave them access to an empty room. Kylie sat on the bed, Bethany beside her.
“Tell us about Ben,” Tyler said.
“I called him Jordan,” Kylie said. “I didn’t want to put his name in the note because there were people who would’ve known he was mine. But Ben’s nice too.”
“When was he born?” Bethany asked.
“October twelfth. At a clinic in Houston.”
“Was anyone with you?”
“One of the nuns I’d been staying with—they have a home for single mothers.” Kylie gave a mighty sniff. “My boyfriend, Marcus, left me right before that.”
“How did you end up in Houston?” Tyler asked.
“Mom was really mad when I got pregnant. She did the same thing—that’s how she ended up with me—and she wanted me to be different. I was sixteen and Marcus was nineteen. Mom complained to the police about statutory rape and got social services involved. I loved Marcus, so we ran away.”
Bethany gripped her hand, squeezed it. The girl must have been terrified, giving birth with no one she loved at hand.
“When did you come back to Atlanta?” Tyler said. “And why did you give Ben away?”
Her lip quivered. “I called home, I was so lonely. The kids told me Mom was sick and there was no one to look after them. I wanted to come back, but I knew I couldn’t look after Ben as well as the kids and Mom. I saw your picture in the newspaper, you looked nice and kind.”
He made a stifled sound.
“I told Mom I’d had a late miscarriage.” She hung her head. “How is Jordan—Ben?”
“He slept through the night for the first time last night,” Bethany said. “Maybe he knew we were about to find his mommy.”
Tears sprang to Kylie’s eyes again. “I miss him so much. But I can’t look after him. I can’t work, not with Mom to visit and the other kids to look after, and there’s no money and no time.”
“We can fix that,” Tyler said.
SOON THEY WOULD KNOW for sure if Kylie was Ben’s mother—she’d taken a DNA test. But Tyler’s instinct told him she was the real deal. His lawyer, Malcolm Farthing, came to the office for a meeting two days after they’d found Kylie.
“You know, Tyler, if you want to keep this baby, you could contest the mother.”Keep Ben? Tyler half rose from his chair, then gripped the arms, forced himself to sit down again, to say without excitement, “He’s Kylie’s child.”
“Whom she abandoned,” Malcolm said smoothly, “with a request that you adopt the boy. She didn’t come forward, you and Dr. Hart tracked her down. It appears she’s in no position to raise the child herself, she doesn’t have any extended family who can support her…” He shuffled his papers. “Fact is, if we’re thinking about what’s best for the baby, there’s every chance Ben will be better off with you. You can afford the best child care, he’ll never want for anything—”
“And I love him,” Tyler said sharply.
Malcolm pursed his lips. “That, too.”
Tyler pictured a scenario where he kept Ben and they had their own little family. Him and Ben and—not Bethany, but eventually, maybe someday, a woman he wanted to marry. A woman who was selfless, but not too selfless. He had trouble conjuring that, so he pushed the thought aside.
But Kylie…she was Ben’s mother. She was desperate. Brave. Was it right to take a child from his mother?
Caring wasn’t about money…Bethany and Ben had shown him that. Yet the lawyer was right, Tyler’s wealth would ensure Ben had security. And Tyler didn’t want to lose Ben.
He thought about it so long without speaking that Malcolm glanced at his watch and cleared his throat.
“You’re right,” Tyler said. “Money talks.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
IT TOOK an appallingly short time—almost no time at all—for the arrangements to be made.
By ten o’clock Thursday morning, the removal guys had packaged up most of the nursery’s contents and started on the trip across town to Kylie’s home.Tyler, holding Ben, sat down in the armchair that was one of the few furnishings that remained in the room. He was due to deliver Ben to Kylie in an hour. He couldn’t imagine how empty the house would feel. Bethany would move out, too, of course. Yesterday she’d attended a job interview at Piedmont Hospital for a full-time resident position.
He shifted in the seat. Maybe it was the transition from upright to half lying down, but Ben started to whimper. Tyler felt like doing the same.
“Hush, baby.” He ran a finger down Ben’s cheek.
He’d seen Bethany do that with calming effect, but now Ben’s whine turned into something nearer a wail. Tyler jiggled the baby on his shoulder, but Ben squalled louder.
It was about now that Bethany would start to sing. Tyler managed a “la-la-la” under his breath. Ben’s cries approached a shriek.
Bethany had said he was teething, and his cheeks had two bright red patches, so Tyler assumed the poor kid was in pain. He didn’t want Ben’s last memory of his time with Tyler to be full of pain. He knew Ben didn’t have that kind of memory, but still…He sighed. How could he ever have thought it would be easy to give Ben back?
Reluctantly, rustily, he began to sing.
“Twinkle, twinkle, little star…”
Ben’s eyes unscrunched.
“How I wonder what you are.”
Was it his imagination, or was Ben quieting?
“Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky…”
At least this rhyme bore some resemblance to reality, Tyler told himself. Not like some of Bethany’s ditties about cows jumping over the moon, or farmers’ wives cutting off mice’s tails.
“Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.”
Ben’s distress had wound down to a quiet sobbing. By the time Tyler sang the song through once again, the baby had stuck his thumb in his mouth and was watching Tyler with big eyes.
Tyler studied the little boy in his arms until he couldn’t see for the haze in front of his eyes. “You’re my little star, kid.” He blinked, but somehow a drop of moisture escaped and landed on Ben’s arm. Tyler brushed it away with his thumb.
“Tyler?” Bethany’s voice from the doorway made him jump a mile high.
“What do you want?” he said roughly, not looking at her.
“I, uh, thought I heard singing.” She came into the room, pretty in that copper-colored dress Sabrina had helped her buy.
He cleared his throat. “I don’t think so. Ben sure wasn’t singing.”
She looked at him, at his possessive hold on Ben, at his face, which was no doubt red and possibly even damp. She put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed sympathetically. “Bonded, huh?”
What was the point of denying, to himself or to her, the overwhelming love he felt for Ben? He looked up at Bethany, met her eyes for what felt like the first moment of honesty between them in a long while. “Superglue.”
WITH THE ATMOSPHERE still so strained between her and Tyler in the lead-up to Ben’s departure, Bethany had asked Susan for the details of Tyler’s arrangements for Kylie and Ben.
Susan had told her that Tyler had paid for Kylie’s mom, Nancy, to move into a private room in the hospital, where she could have her family around her. The doctors had started another round of chemotherapy—Nancy wanted to try every last option—but they were predicting she’d need hospice care in another couple of months. Tyler had promised Kylie he’d pay for that, too.He’d paid off the mortgage on the family’s home—Susan assured Bethany it was a laughably small amount for him—and with the help of a guidance counselor worked with Kylie to devise a plan for her to finish high school at a school that catered to single moms by providing on-site child care. Tyler would fund an after-school sitter for the other kids so Kylie and Ben could visit Nancy each day. He’d
met with social services to make sure Kylie wasn’t in any trouble, and that they would keep an eye on the family. It wouldn’t be easy for Kylie, but the girl seemed determined to succeed.
For a guy who didn’t like to do more than sign checks, it was an impressive effort.
With Ben gone, there was nothing to keep Bethany at Tyler’s house. After he left to take Ben to his new home, she started packing. She hadn’t finished by the time he got back.
He showed up in the doorway of her room, took in the sight of her suitcase, the pile of clothes on the bed. “You’re going back to your apartment?”
She nodded. “I need to visit my parents for a couple of days, too. I still haven’t told them I didn’t get the foundation’s money, and I owe them some kind of explanation as to why I haven’t bothered to find an alternative source of funds.”
“They owe you,” he said. “They owe you years of love.”
Bethany dropped her chin to her chest, didn’t want to engage in talk of love with him, when he didn’t love her. She rummaged in her pocket. “I found Ben gumming this a couple of days ago.”
She held it out to him. His silver pen. His bemused frown as he turned the object over between his fingers suggested he’d forgotten its existence.
“So Ben had it all along, huh?”
“I haven’t seen it before…He may have just found it tucked in a fold of his stroller.”
Tyler clicked the nib down, then up again. “Was he enjoying it? I could give it back to him—you said he needs hard things to gum while he’s teething.”
“A twelve-hundred-dollar pen would be overkill.” When he looked as if he was about to argue, she added, “The pen isn’t child safe, it’s sharp and it might have small parts he could choke on.”
Tyler shoved it into his pocket as if he never wanted to see it again. Did he remember how horrified he’d been when she’d lost it?
She stacked a pile of clothes in the suitcase. Then took most of them out again, dropped them on the floor.
“Why did you do that?”
“You’re right, I do have awful clothes. I’m going to get rid of them. All of them.”
“Peaches, I’m a hundred percent in favor of you going without clothes, but I’m not sure Atlanta is ready for it.”
The Peaches made her eyes sting, but it was so nice to have him talk to her in that light, teasing, Tyler voice that she let herself laugh. “I have the things I bought with Sabrina, and she said she has a couple more to pass on to me. Anything of hers will be so tasteful, even I can’t go wrong.”
He nodded, but it seemed he wasn’t really listening. “What happened about the job at Piedmont?”
“It’s mine if I want it.”
“That’s great.”
“I’m not sure I do. I still want to get back into research, and there’s always a possibility of—” she concentrated on zipping up her half-empty case “—Toronto.”
“You don’t mean that,” he said dangerously.
“What’s it to you if I go to Toronto?” she challenged him. Tyler’s eyes shot daggers, but he didn’t reply.
She hefted the case off the bed. “Okay, I’m done.”
They both knew it was more than her packing that was done. I’m done living with you. I’m done laughing with you, crying over you. I’m done waiting for you to love me back.
We’re done.
He carried her case downstairs. The cab she’d ordered was waiting. Bethany halted beside it, gave him one last chance to ask her to stay.
“Thanks,” he said, “for all you did for Ben.”
Dammit, that was all he planned to say. How could he be so dense?
“It hurt you horribly to give Ben back,” she said. Susan had told her Tyler’s lawyer had suggested he keep the baby—Bethany knew how tempted he must have been. She could hardly bear to think of not seeing Ben again herself, was deliberately not thinking about it. It would be just as bad for Tyler.
He shook his head impatiently.
“You gave up something infinitely precious because it was the right thing, the unselfish thing, to do,” she persisted.
“That wasn’t it at all,” he growled.
Beneath his words, Bethany saw the truth. Tyler had made a huge sacrifice. But it had hurt too much. He didn’t want to risk that hurt again.
She had no answer to that.
As if he saw her concession of defeat, he opened the taxi door, waited for her to get in. Then he shut it firmly, finally.
She was out of Tyler Warrington’s life as surely as if she’d never been in it.
TYLER HAD EXPECTED to miss Ben horribly, and he did. What he hadn’t expected was that nothing would feel right without Bethany. Not even aspects of his life where she’d barely been involved—work and social events. And lunch with Mom on Sunday had been so flat, the whole family had noticed.
A part of him had wanted to ask Bethany to stay. But for what? She’d been the mother of “his” child the last couple of months—of course he felt some attachment to her. But now Ben was gone, there was nothing between them.Apart from an all-consuming desire to take her to bed. I’ll get over that.
Talking to her was a lot of fun, too. He couldn’t think of a single conversation that wasn’t better for having it with Bethany. And, of course, she was pretty sharp when it came to interpreting his family.
And what about when he went to visit Ben, which Kylie had promised he could do? If Bethany came, they could talk about what Ben was up to, share their memories of his time with them.
Dammit, the new appreciation of life he’d experienced recently came from sharing everything with Bethany. Garnering her disapproval, teasing her, making her laugh against her will. Being driven crazy with desire for her.
He remembered the day they’d disgraced themselves, both too cowardly to tell Sabrina she had cereal in her hair. Those midnight rendezvous in the nursery with Ben. The night he’d nearly made love to her.
She’d been gone five days and his home had gone back to being just a house.
He reminded himself he hadn’t liked having her constantly judging him. With his next breath, he admitted it had been strangely comforting to know she saw his faults and…liked him anyway.
He loved that she wasn’t Little Miss Perfect, either. Not just her truly awful clothes, which he acknowledged with a twinge of regret might be a thing of the past, but the way she assumed the worst of him, even as she manipulated him to her own ends. She made him laugh, some of the outrageous accusations she leveled at him.
She made him laugh, full stop.
Right now, he didn’t feel like laughing at all.
“I DIDN’T GET the funding.” Bethany was beyond sugarcoating the news for her parents.
Her mother’s face crumpled. “Oh, Bethany.” Not sympathy. Accusation.“I’m still trying other organizations.” Okay, maybe she wasn’t beyond sugarcoating.
Her father let out a whistling breath between his teeth, his eyes on his wife. He shook his head but didn’t say anything.
Bethany saw how worried he was for her mom.
Suddenly, she was sick of bearing the brunt of the responsibility for making something out of Melanie’s death.
“It wasn’t my fault,” she said.
“I’m sure you did your best,” her father said heavily. “I suppose that foundation has a lot of people asking for money.”
“I mean,” Bethany said, “it wasn’t my fault Melanie died.”
Her mother flinched, and her dad’s gaze turned reproachful.
“No one’s ever blamed you,” he said.
“Not out loud,” Bethany admitted. “But you’ve said it in the way you don’t love me, the way you don’t love Ryan, because neither of us could save Melanie.”
Her mom’s fists clenched in her lap. “That’s not true, we do love you.”
“Then you loved Melanie the best, and I guess someone has to be loved the best, so that’s all right.” The words poured out of Bethany in a torrent. “But i
t’s not fair to take it out on us. It’s not fair to duck out of life because the one you loved most has gone. Give us a chance, Mom, Dad. Get some help to get better, and give me and Ryan a chance to be part of a real family—or say goodbye to us both.”
ADMITTING HE WAS WRONG didn’t come easily to Tyler. But if he was going to be a better person, that was what he’d have to do. He couldn’t afford to screw things up with Bethany, so he decided to practice on his brother.
He found Max with Jake, poring over architectural plans for a new condo development.Max looked pleased to see him, and Tyler realized he felt the same. “Can we talk?” he asked.
Max waved him to a seat. “Go ahead.”
“It’s kind of private.” Tyler looked at Jake, who got to his feet.
“Sit down,” Max told their cousin lazily. “Tyler probably just wants to show off about his new job.”
Jake sank down again.
“Mom told you,” Tyler said.
Max nodded. After a moment, he said, “Congratulations.” He stood, offered Tyler his hand. “Getting this think-tank job—it’s a big deal. You’ve done well, Tyler.”
“Not bad for a guy who couldn’t hold down a job in his own family’s business,” Tyler agreed. So much for admitting he was wrong—it was harder than he’d thought. “I didn’t mean that,” he said. “I’m here to say you did the right thing firing me.”
Max protested, but not too hard. Tyler grinned. “I could have done the marketing job well, but I didn’t. I was coasting, and you knew it.”
Max lifted one shoulder. “I could have given you another chance. I pushed you out as fast as I could.”
“I was pretty mad,” Tyler said. “And hurt that Mom took your side, like she always does when it comes to the business.”
“She takes your side with everything else,” Max said gruffly.
Tyler nodded. “That’s the other thing I’m here to say. Mom loves you just as much as she loves me.”
Jake groaned. “Do I have to listen to this?”