Ace kept his eyes closed, kept on sucking, his little hand waving in the air. Damn, she loved this baby. He was the one good thing that had come out of all the difficulties. And for him, everything else was worth it.
There was a slight knock on the door, and Henry opened it slowly. “Ma’am?”
She pulled a receiving blanket over Ace’s head and her exposed breast. “Yes. Come in.”
“There is a gentleman here to see you.”
Another man stepped around Henry, wearing some kind of uniform, though she wasn’t certain what. “Are you Diane Talbot?”
This was strange. And worrisome. A deep hollowness made her stomach ache, and she wanted to get up and run. Or to deny who she was, although she was certain he wouldn’t believe her.
“I am.”
He handed her a folded stack of papers. “You are being served,” he said. With that, he left, escorted to the front door by Henry.
Diane stared at the papers, afraid to open them. It was probably divorce papers from Jason, the final severing of their relationship. How could he do that to her, let her be served by some strange man, rather than come to her himself? What was wrong with him that he couldn’t even face her for this? What a coward. What a miserable, no-good coward.
Ace had stopped sucking. She lifted the blanket away from his head. He was asleep, mouth still ajar, her nipple slipping free as his head lolled back. How would it be to have so few worries? He had this family willing to take care of him and meet his needs… all except for his need for a father. But she would remedy that as well. After the divorce, she would find a man who was good and strong, and who loved children in a way Jason obviously did not. She would get a father for this sweet little boy if it was the last thing she ever managed.
And she would sue the hell out of Jason, demand the alimony from hell, as well as massive child support. He was going to regret leaving her.
Ace now cradled in her lap, she opened the document and scanned the first page. Her heart stopped.
This wasn’t a legal action begun by Jason. This was coming from Carl.
And it wasn’t a divorce. Carl was suing for custody of Ace.
CHAPTER 25
Jason took the thick paper from the officer, then closed the door. Maybe it was time to take one of those anxiety meds, before he opened it and read it.
There was a chance it was something unrelated to his relationship with Diane. Maybe some tenant was suing on something trumped up, thinking the owner was a wealthy man able to pay out on frivolous liability claims. Or it could be someone from his past, with a crazy accusation or two. It could be anything. Or maybe it was one of Diane’s neighbors accusing him of robbery after someone else broke into their house. After all, he had been casing the place, right?
Still, it was most likely Diane.
“Well,” he said to no one in particular, “I guess it’s time to face the music.” He opened the document, scanned it, then dropped it on the floor.
Good heavens. And Diane had gotten one just like this. She was probably panicking.
He had to get a lawyer, and fast.
No, first thing he had to do was call Diane.
He punched in her contact info, and the phone rang. Just once.
“Jason?” Her voice broke. Yup, she’d already been served.
“Diane, I’m so sorry.”
“I need your help. I don’t know what to do.”
“I’ll be right over.” He hung up, then made another phone call to the lawyer he had on retainer. This suit wasn’t his main area of expertise, but he could advise on another barrister, and even help him get an emergency appointment. Sometimes, having a lot of money gave you the clout you needed.
Once that was arranged, Jason rushed out the door. It took nearly a half hour to get to the house, and all the while he ran scenarios through his mind, tried to figure out what kinds of awful tricks his father could come up with to sway a judge into granting him custody.
When he got to the house, Diane greeted him at the door, her eyes red from crying, her cheeks still wet. “Thank you for coming,” she said, her tone gracious, yet more distant than a wife’s voice should be. That clearly let him know where he stood with her. He was going to have to tread carefully.
“Where’s Ace?” He sucked in a breath after he’d asked the question, remembering that he didn’t know if she’d changed the baby’s name.
“Sleeping.”
He explained about the lawyer, and they arranged to leave the baby with his nanny.
“You want to drive in that?” Diane said, pointing to his run-down car parked at the curb.
“No. Is the chauffer still around?”
“We let him go yesterday,” she said.
Damn. A lot was going on that he needed to be brought up to date on.
“And I got myself a smaller car,” she continued. “We’ll take it.” She grabbed her purse and headed toward the back door, out to the garage.
He followed her. “What happened to the limo?”
“I wanted to sell it, but the title’s in your name. We haven’t driven it, though. Gas mileage issues.”
“Right.”
He got into the passenger side of the car, then gave her directions to the lawyer’s office.
They waited in the lawyer’s reception area, while the man finished working with another client, then he invited them into his office.
“Paul Gerhardt,” he said, shaking their hands.
Jason introduced himself and Diane, then handed Gerhardt his copy of the summons. Gerhardt scanned the document, then shook his head. “There’s not a judge in the state of Texas who’s going to take a child away from his mother without some serious reasons.”
Jason nodded. “That doesn’t surprise me. But you can bet my dad is concocting plenty of lies to get his way. And with as much money as he has… he may do even shadier things.”
Gerhardt nodded. “Have you read the whole summons?”
Jason shook his head, and Diane did the same.
“All right. Let’s get a copy that you can leave with me.” He called in his assistant to duplicate the document. “Now, I want you to tell me everything that led up to this, so I know what we’re dealing with.”
Jason looked at Diane. “I think we’re going to have to tag-team on this one.”
She nodded. “Okay. We’ll start at the beginning and work our way from there.” Gerhardt took out a pen and a pad of paper and made handwritten notes.
Once they had finished their account, Gerhardt put his pen down, nodding grimly. “Okay. I’m going to contact his lawyer, and our first effort will be to see if we can settle this thing out of court, in your favor, of course. But if that fails, we need to be prepared to go to court. Here’s what I need you to do.”
✽✽✽
They were on the way home, Diane still feeling nervous, but pretty certain the lawyer Jason had hired would be a good one. He would do everything that was possible to keep Carl from getting his way.
But her gut still churned, the possibility of Carl winning still a terrifying vision in her mind.
“Are you hungry?” Jason said. “We could stop somewhere to eat.”
“I have to get back to Ace,” she said. “I’m about ready to start leaking.”
“Leaking?”
She explained that when a woman breast feeds, her milk builds up, and if the baby doesn’t suck it out soon enough, some will drip out, creating embarrassing wet spots on her blouse.
And leaking wasn’t the only problem. Her breasts were distended, full, starting to hurt, like how you feel after gorging on a Thanksgiving meal, just in another part of the body. If she didn’t get home soon, she would be in a lot of pain. And then, her system would start to cut milk production. She didn’t want that.
Jason seemed surprised, but also accepting.
“Having a child changes a lot of things in your life,” she said. “At least if you plan to spend time with him. And I plan to do that.”
/> “Of course,” Jason said.
“In fact, I’m thinking of waiting for a few years before I finish my master’s degree, so I can spend lots of quality time with him. I don’t want him to have to go through anything like you experienced.”
“I’m glad you feel that way.”
Her head cocked to the left. “Are you feeling up to seeing him?
Jason rubbed his hands over the tops of his thighs, like he was trying to dry them off. “Still scares the hell out of me.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head, a distressed look on his face. “I’m a basket case, I guess.”
“So, does that mean you’re not coming home?”
“After all this?”
That wasn’t the question. What she needed to know was if he wanted her. And did he care about his son? Was his love for them enough to overcome his crazy fears, or at least try to work with them?
“If you don’t come home, a lot of things need to change,” she said.
“Like what?”
“You need to sell the house. And we’re gradually letting all the staff go.”
He stared at her. She only glanced at him once, but even while she was watching the road, out of the corner of her eye she could see him turn toward her, jaw slightly agape. “Why?” he finally said.
“Your dad cut me off. I can’t afford to make payroll anymore.”
“He what? Son of a…”
“Without you, I wouldn’t have the money to hire a good lawyer. I think he was counting on that.”
“I don’t understand this. He’s still sending me money.”
A soft chuckle rocked her belly. “He’s doing that so you have enough to pay alimony.”
She turned the car onto their street, then pulled up to the curb behind Jason’s rusty old car. Jason sat still, staring at the trunk of the old beater, like he was seeing it for the first time.
“What now?” she said.
His eyes filled with terror again. Then tears. “I don’t know what to do.”
It was so disappointing. He knew she loved him. She’d told him that in a recent voicemail. But he wasn’t reciprocating. All those times he had told her before he loved her must have been lies. Now, she had the proof.
“Do you want a divorce?” she said.
He jerked on the door handle, shoving it open with his shoulder, then rushing to his car. In a moment, he was gone.
She sat there for another moment, stunned, circles of wetness forming on her blouse. This was the end, then. She would get a lawyer and begin the process of divorce.
CHAPTER 26
He couldn’t drive. After he got around the corner, where Diane couldn’t see him anymore, he had to pull over and wait until his eyes were dry. That had been a close one. You could never let a woman see your tender side. That’s what his dad had told him.
His dad. What a bastard, putting Diane through all of this.
Time to take action. Time to make certain Diane had everything she needed.
As soon as he got home, he took out his computer, then did a number of calculations. He had to figure things both ways, both for if he kept getting money from his dad, and for if Dad decided to withdraw that support, leaving him with little for paying Diane child support or alimony. It took several hours, and a lot of guestimates on various factors that still weren’t clear. And of course, there were always contingencies he couldn’t plan for. But he’d done the best he could.
Most important, he had decided she needed the funds to maintain her household, just as it had been when he lived there. She needed the help so she could have the resources to spend quality time with his son, to make certain the little guy grew up happy and well adjusted. Nothing was more important than that.
The results of his work mocked him. He had only one good option.
Only one option that would keep her in the style she had grown accustomed to, the style he wanted his son to be raised in.
Only one option that would cut his father’s efforts off at the knees. Only one option that would demonstrate to all that Ace’s mother could provide for him just as well, if not better, than his grandfather.
So it was settled. He would draw up documents to put all the properties he had purchased into her name, and all the income would go to her and little Ace. That would leave him with nothing, but he figured he could get along. He had made it this far on his own.
And maybe she would even help him out, here and there. Maybe she would allow him to live in their house, in a separate bedroom, of course. But that way…
No, that wouldn’t work.
He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. Damn it. He needed to get over this stupid fear.
✽✽✽
Jason was coming over again, and Diane had to come up with several answers before he arrived. The visit wasn’t actually to “visit,” but part of the preparation for her defense against Carl. But first, they had to come up with a mountain of information, based on the questions Carl had demanded answers to in the “discovery” document. Jason was the only one who had most of those answers, so they would need to work together, and they had decided that working over email could fill in the gaps, but they were going to have to meet face to face at least a couple of times.
But before he arrived, she needed to figure out what to do with the baby, so that Jason wouldn’t freak out or something. A little overtime for the nanny was probably in order.
Once that was taken care of, she rearranged the papers on the large table in the library. A moment later and Jason was in the room with her.
Awkward.
Her hands grabbed each other, and she gave him a smile so self-conscious it probably looked like a wince. “Hi.” Damn, her voice was too breathy. He might get the wrong idea.
“Diane,” he said, voice even, gaze steady.
“Everything’s set up. Here’s the information I was able to get.”
He sat on the other side of the table, then scanned the small pile of documents. Then he handed her a thumb drive. “Here’s what I’ve gathered.”
“Thank you.” There was a strange quirk in his smile as he handed the gadget to her. But she quickly dismissed it. She knew she couldn’t read him. No point trying to guess what that thought had been.
“That should cover all the questions. Of course, the lawyer asked if we wanted to do our own discovery.”
Her lips trembled. He was being so cold, so matter of fact, so business like. It was like he had never been to bed with her, never claimed to care about her. God, she was going to cry.
“We should definitely share the misery,” she said.
Jason shook his head with a rueful laugh. “It won’t bother Dad. He’ll just have his assistants put the whole thing together.”
“Oh.”
“But we should do it anyway. We need to verify his level of resources, on the slight chance that he isn’t as well off as I think he is.”
“How could that possibly be?”
His shrug looked like the old Jason, the one who had said his father was loving. Damn, she wanted to go back in time, correct the mistakes she had made, tell him then that she loved him, before he became so jaded that he didn’t want her anymore.
“He may have laid out his finances so that it is almost all gone by the time he dies. Just to spite me.”
She gave him a nod and an expression she hoped said she understood. She wouldn’t put it past that rotten old man to do something just like that. If she could just see Carl again, she would strangle him.
“Or, he might leave everything in his will to Ace, with someone else to be his guardian.”
Diane shook her head. “Even if he tells us now what’s in his will, there’s nothing to stop him from changing it after the hearing is over.”
“True.”
“Can you have a court order dictating what a person can put in their will?”
“I have no idea.”
She buried her face in her hands, whe
re the moisture from her tears piled up in her palms. “Jason, I don’t know how much more of this I can deal with.”
“We’ll get you through it,” he said. “We’ll win.”
He sounded so confident. But she didn’t feel that way. Even the distant possibility that her son could be taken from her filled her with terror.
“Okay, let’s talk about what else we need to know from Dad,” Jason said.
“Yeah.” Diane grabbed a tissue and wiped her eyes. “Sorry.”
“No apology required.”
After that, they spent several minutes discussing what they would need to know from Carl, with an eye toward showing that he didn’t have the resources to properly take care of a child. Then there was a discussion of who they could call for witnesses. Diane had already gathered a long list of her own character witnesses, and Jason seemed to think that would be adequate. To that, he added a long list of his old nannies – those who were still alive, at least. In most cases, he hadn’t had any contact with them for a long time. Some could have already passed on without his even knowing about it.
“Were you ever close to any of your nannies?”
Jason stared at the papers on the table for a long time. “No,” he finally said. “They were strict, and I think Dad told them to be mean to me.”
“Probably not in those exact words.”
“Yeah.” His eyes seemed to have lost their focus, his expression haunted. “You know, it’s funny. I had everything I needed. But I felt abandoned.”
She caught herself before she reached out to put her hand on his. “You were.”
“I felt like a street urchin, lost and alone.”
Her eyes filled with tears, and something sharp wedged itself in her throat. “I’m so sorry.”
His eyes met hers, also moist. “I think I’d better go now.”
For Better or For Worse (Wedding Vows) Page 14