An Act of Persuasion

by Stephanie Doyle

  She still hadn’t said anything. He could see the dust he was pushing around with his shoe. The place needed to be cleaned.

  She stepped toward him. “I didn’t buy a house because it had to be perfect. I was waiting for everything to be perfect. Although I’m not sure what that perfect is anymore. Or maybe what I was really waiting for wasn’t just walls and a ceiling…but a home. A real one, with more than me in it. I think what you saw in my face when I talked about having a house was more about having a family. Someone to come home to. Someone who was mine.”

  “You have a family now, Anna. Forget what you do or don’t see with me in the future. That little bit in your belly with the beating heart will always be your family. From now on.”

  Her shoulders dropped then and great sobbing cries echoed throughout the empty rooms.

  Oh, shit, he thought. More crying.

  He reached out as if to pat her on the back but she leaped into his arms and held on to him as if she would never let him go. This, he thought, this is what he wanted when he’d brought her here. There was probably something ethically wrong with buying a home just to get a woman to hug and sob all over him, but he didn’t care.

  “I saw you, Anna. Every damn day. I swear it. But I didn’t know what the hell to do about it. If I’m being honest, I still don’t.”

  She looked at him and smiled, her face was a hot mess and tears still streamed down her cheeks.

  “I was such a bitch earlier.”

  “I noticed. The Bachelor? Seriously?”

  She half sobbed, half laughed. “I’m scared. I’m really freaking scared.”

  “I know.” He wiped her face with his thumb. “I don’t know of what, though.”

  She shook her head and when he looked into her eyes he saw the fear, but also maybe something else. Maybe something like hope. Hope he could work with.

  “I’m going to kiss you now.”

  “I thought you said no pouncing.”

  “Kissing isn’t pouncing. A kiss is just a kiss.”

  She frowned. “Isn’t that from an old song?”

  “Anna?”

  “Yes, Ben?”

  “Shut up.”

  It was, he decided, their first kiss. That night didn’t count because it was all too blurry and rushed and had happened before either of them knew it was happening. Then that time in her kitchen he hadn’t given her any choice. It was something he needed without thinking about what she needed.

  This, he thought, was two people dating who got to kiss for the first time. Something they both wanted. He could taste the salt on her lips and feel the soft plumpness of them. Everything about Anna was soft. He ran his hands into her hair to hold her head at the exact right angle so when he pushed his tongue into her mouth it was deep and they were connected.

  It felt more right to him than anything he ever remembered. Better than that night, better than the last time in her kitchen. And he wondered if every time hereafter it would get better still. It seemed impossible.

  Her tongue played with his, her hands on his back, her breath mingled with his breath. He could feel his body stretching forward toward her, wanting her, needing to feel all of her against him. What should have been just a kiss was about to become actual pouncing if he didn’t back off.

  As he pulled his head away and could still feel the little pants of her breath on his mouth he struggled for control. In his life he couldn’t remember a struggle as intense. But she said she wasn’t ready for more and he wasn’t going to do anything to jeopardize the fragile headway he’d made tonight.

  “I should take you back.”

  She nodded and he could see the flush of red in her cheeks, the glassy, unfocused look in her eyes. She wanted him, too. She wanted him the way he wanted her and for a second he wasn’t sure why he thought it was so important that he stop.

  But the reality of the empty house intruded and the last place he intended to have a pregnant woman was on a hardwood floor.

  Unless, of course, she was on top the way she had been that night, riding him, taking him deep—

  “Ben?”

  He jerked out of his thoughts and finally brought himself ruthlessly under control. Anna was still walking around the room, the sound of her flip-flops echoing off the empty walls.

  “This is really my house?”

  “Yes. When we get to my place I’ll give you the paperwork. You can move in whenever you want. With the mortgage paid, and your salary—assuming Sharpe isn’t a cheap bastard—you will more than be able to cover the utilities and taxes.”

  “Move in to my house. Where I’m going to raise my baby.”

  Our baby. He didn’t voice the correction because he didn’t want to upset her. Tonight was about her, not about the baby. While he was glad she loved his gift, and satisfied she knew that he had done this before there was even an idea of a baby, it didn’t change his strategy for their future together.

  Yes, he’d given her this house. And he couldn’t wait to see her turn it into a home. Then he planned to attack it like a medieval knight, bringing down the barricades and storming the walls until he, too, was safely inside it alongside of her and their child.

  “Since learning about the pregnancy I checked into the local school system,” he said. “It’s got an excellent reputation and there are also a number of well-reputed day cares not fifteen minutes in either direction.”

  She held up her hand to stop him. “Yes, yes. I’m sure you’ve got a list of the best grocery stores with the highest quality produce and the best dry cleaner and hairdresser and all the rest, too. I just…I just want to take it in for a few minutes.”

  “Do you want me to leave?”

  “No. I want you to stay.”

  Anna left the room and made her way back to the foyer and the wide staircase that led to the second floor. Four bedrooms, he told her continuing his commentary on the house. There was a smaller one next to the master bedroom that could easily be used as a nursery.

  She sat on the stairs and he sat next to her feeling slightly awkward. In a way it was like when they had tried to sleep together. Both of them unsure and stiff together, compared to how easy it had been when they were working alongside each other.

  Ben still wasn’t sure he understood when the situation between them had changed. He didn’t think it had only been them having sex, or even Anna leaving him. Something else had shifted and made them out of sync. Nearly discordant, and he felt helpless to put it back the way it was. To make them the way they had been before.

  But for now, they were together and she had cried because he gave her a house. They had kissed again and it was nice. And she didn’t want him to leave.

  It was enough. For now.

  *

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN I can’t paint?”

  Mark walked into his office the next day to find his exasperated assistant talking into her cell phone like she was dealing with a slow child. Or more likely a very stubborn man.

  “I’m on Google right now and it says nothing—” She stopped and Mark couldn’t help but look over her shoulder at her computer monitor. The first page contained all kinds of warnings about exposure to paint fumes while pregnant.

  “Okay, fine. I can’t paint. Yes, yes, I’ll let you hire painters. But I’m picking the colors.”

  Mark chuckled and made his way to his office. She’d left the mail there and the folders of a few cases that he’d recently agreed to take on. One was the death of a teenage girl many believed was a suicide. An anonymous tip, however, indicated differently.

  “Hey.”

  Mark lifted his head. “So how did date number two go?”

  “He bought me a house.”

  These two were definitely not on the traditional courting path. A proposal first, then dating, now home buying. Huh. “A little over the top for my taste—I’m more of a flowers guy. But what are you going to do with a guy like Ben.”

  Anna smiled and sat in his guest chair, her hands instantly moving t
oward her belly, which was still barely there but growing every day.

  “Can I talk to you?”

  “Isn’t that what we’re doing?”

  “I mean as a friend. I don’t have many and Maddy is in Detroit right now being fabulously in love with her fiancé. I don’t think I can talk to someone so happy with love right now.”

  “Then you’ve come to the right place. I’m nowhere near happy with love right now.”

  “What’s your beef?”

  “Well, there was this charming redhead I met who I would have liked to get to know better. Sadly, she was already committed…and pregnant.”

  She batted a hand at him, dismissing his heartbreak, but he had to admit it wasn’t all harmless flirtation. Leave it to Ben to snatch her up first. Leave it to Mark to be always a step behind.

  A house, he thought. Ben obviously wasn’t taking any chances. Could there be a more perfect gift for a woman who had grown up in the foster-care system? Mark only hoped the gesture had been made out of sincerity and not strategy.

  “I’m serious, I don’t know what to do.”

  “About the house? Worried it’s a bribe?”

  Anna shook her head. “That’s the problem. It’s not a bribe. He bought it for me months ago. When he was sick.”

  Not strategy then. Just sentimental feelings. Ben Tyler with sentimental feelings. The very idea seemed completely unsupportable, but the truth was glaringly obvious. “He really thought he was going to die, didn’t he?”

  Anna nodded. “You’ve never seen a man look so betrayed. When we got the news after the first round of chemo that the cancer was still there, it was like he’d personally failed at a mission. He was devastated. Not because he was still sick, but because he hadn’t successfully destroyed it. I should have known then that he would have done anything to beat it. That he would be willing to take any risk…just to win.”

  That sounded a lot like Ben. “So let’s recap. You have a man who you say you love. This same man who bought you a house when he thought he was dying so you had somewhere to go after his death. This man who is also the father of your unborn child—”

  Anna winced. “Yeah, I get it. I’m being stubborn and ridiculous. I should just marry him and make a home with him and raise the kid. Easy answer.”

  “Anna, I wasn’t trying to talk you into anything. You said you’re being stubborn and ridiculous. Isn’t the question why? He’s been back in your life for a couple of weeks now. First, you were afraid he didn’t love you. Then you were afraid he only wanted you for the baby.”

  “That still could be true.”

  “No, it can’t. And you know it. Because he didn’t buy that house when you were pregnant. Isn’t that what’s scaring you most of all?”

  She looked at him then and he could see an anguish that belied her normally easy nature. This woman had been hurt in ways Mark didn’t remotely understand.

  “What if, in the end…he doesn’t love me?”

  “I don’t see how that’s possible.”

  She gulped and he could see she didn’t entirely believe him. Whether it was her fear of not being loved, or her fear of being abandoned after she committed herself, it had a remarkably strong hold on her. Why shouldn’t it?

  Her parents had left her. A foster mother she cared about got sick and so she was taken away from her. Ben got sick and he was almost lost to her. Mark wondered if Ben knew how scared she was. If he understood the real reason she’d left him when he got sick wasn’t because he didn’t include her in his decision, but because she needed to leave him before he left her?

  Anna was a woman who was lacing up her sneakers and getting ready to flee. Mark could see it. He wondered if Ben did.

  “I don’t know what’s gotten into me. I’ve taken up enough of your time. This is my job and I’m sitting here talking about my love life.”

  “You can always talk to me. We’re friends, Anna.”

  She smiled halfheartedly and returned to her computer and whatever tasks she had lined up for the day.

  Mark thought about calling Ben to tell him he needed to be even more cautious with her. Then Mark considered Ben’s reaction the last time he’d tried to talk to him about Anna. No, Mark was done interfering. Ben was on his own when it came to love.

  But as much as Mark liked to consider Ben a rival, he was, in his own way, kind of rooting for the guy. Obviously Ben had powerful feelings for her. But if he pushed her too hard and went too fast—the home buying a case in point—he wouldn’t give her enough time to accept that what he was offering was real and permanent.

  Anna wasn’t much better than a rabbit right now. And while Ben was holding up a really big carrot, and she was desperately hungry for it, one false step and she might decide she was better off without it. Safer, anyway.

  Yes, she was pretty messed up. Because her earliest memory started with an epic betrayal.

  Was this how Sophie felt? Had she felt that one of her parents had abandoned her at an early age because he wanted to be a spy instead of a dad? And now the one parent she counted on the most had done the most unforgivable thing and died, leaving her practically an orphan.

  Of course, Sophie had her grandparents so she wasn’t living at the whim of the foster-care system. But what if something happened to them?

  Wasn’t that exactly what Dom was afraid of and why he’d taken Mark’s phone call in the first place? He and Marie were too old to escort Sophie all over the country. Between his arthritis and Marie’s emphysema things were getting harder for the two of them, not easier.

  Mark needed to fix this. Now. Or at some point in the future Sophie would be the one lacing up her running sneakers getting ready to bolt any time a man tried to get close. What if she never gave herself a chance at real happiness? Mark would always know that it was partly his fault.

  Maybe he couldn’t save Anna, maybe he couldn’t help Ben. But Mark sure as hell could fix things between him and his daughter.

  He picked up the phone and dialed the number he had committed to memory. Dom’s voice was instantly recognizable.

  “I’m done playing around, Dom. I don’t care what she wants. I’m coming for Sophie.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  MARK PULLED ALL his courage together as he approached the house. Dom and Marie had been living in the same home in the upper-middle-class suburb of Philadelphia known as Bryn Mawr for as long as Mark had known Helen. He’d had no trouble remembering how to get here. As he parked the car in the driveway he noted that his hands were as sweaty as they’d been the first time he’d met Helen’s parents.

  Sweatier even than the time they had come to tell her parents she was pregnant and they were getting married. Funny, because he didn’t remember her being nervous then. It was almost like they were an afterthought to Helen.

  His parents hadn’t been thrilled with the announcement, knowing what it would do to his plans to apply for the CIA. His father was a former military man who thought serving the country was a man’s duty, not a choice. While he’d originally imagined Mark following in his footsteps as a career soldier, he’d at least accepted the CIA as the next best thing. Certainly better than, say, the Coast Guard.

  Of course, his parents had been even less thrilled when he told them the wedding was off. His mother seemed to know that, while biologically she was a grandmother, she wouldn’t be one in reality. That had certainly borne out. Sophie had disappeared into Helen’s family and his parents had gotten to see her only once as a baby.

  He would change that. His father had passed away two years ago, but his mother deserved the chance to know her grandchild. Thankfully his older sister had given her two others to keep her occupied or she might have been more insistent about seeing Sophie and that might have created conflict between the two families.

  But now, come to think of it, he wished she had been more insistent. Maybe if his mother had forged some bonds on the Sharpe side of the family, this meeting wouldn’t be quite so nerve-racking. It w
as too late now. What was done was done.

  He got out of the car and started up the trail of steps that led to the front door with the flowers clutched in his hands like a sword he might need to defend himself. He rang the bell and waited.

  A few moments later a solemn-faced Dom opened the door and let him inside.

  “You’re early,” Dom noted.

  “I’m anxious.”

  “They’re waiting for you in the living room.”

  Mark followed the older man, purposefully slowing his gait to match Dom’s arthritic steps. He thought of the many steps outside without any kind of railing and wondered how Dom still managed them. There was also the size of the house. It felt like it went on forever, sprawling over several thousand square feet. It must take the man an hour to get from the foyer door to the kitchen.

  After what seemed like an eternity later, they finally rounded a hallway that had an archway opening to a much larger room than Mark remembered.

  Or maybe it was that he felt smaller.

  It wasn’t until he saw her, wearing a green dress with her hair in a heavy braid down her back that he let out his breath. She was beautiful in person. So much like her mother. He’d forgotten how pretty Helen had been.

  She looked at him, her face expressionless. Marie made a coughing noise behind her hand that sounded feigned and Sophie immediately rose and walked over to him. She held out her hand and met his gaze head-on.

  “Father.”

  Father? He took her hand and watched her dip into a small curtsy.

  “Did you just curtsy?”

  Marie shuffled over to them quickly. “Sophie often has to greet dignitaries and sometimes foreign heads of state when she’s traveling. A curtsy is always appropriate.”