The Inconvenient Laws of Attraction

by Trish Wylie

  ‘How many times did you move when you were a kid?’

  ‘I stopped counting. At first, you think it’s how everyone lives. By the time you’re old enough to know better, you don’t know anything else.’ He breathed deep, feeling a hint of remembered acceptance. ‘When the reporter lost our trail, he headed straight for Charlie to break the news to him he had a kid. Charlie hired a PI to track us down. Gotta give it to him, he had one hell of a stand-up row with my mom when he found us.’

  ‘You’d have done the same thing.’

  He would, but he’d never understood how Charlie might have felt until that moment. In the darkness, he could feel the curve of Liv’s stomach pressed against his waist and for a moment—before he’d realised what he was doing—he pictured what it would be like to have a full, rounded belly pressed against him and a baby—their baby—moving inside her. Stepping into Charlie’s shoes and replacing his mom with Liv, he understood how angry his father had been at his mother for keeping his child from him. Liv was right, he’d have yelled, too. He’d have yelled his damn head off.

  But the mental image he’d created didn’t stop there.

  The heated weight in his groin at the thought of what was involved when it came to putting a baby in Liv was hardly a surprise, but what stunned him was how completely okay he was with the idea of her being pregnant with his child, of a new life that would bind them together. He’d never thought about having kids, about a family of his own.

  That suddenly he thought—

  ‘Keep going,’ she coaxed in the same soft, totally- unaware-of-his-thoughts voice.

  ‘Where was I?’ It took a lot to keep his voice even, and Blake didn’t know how she couldn’t hear his heart racing, his body already kicking into full-on baby-making mode. What the hell was that about?

  ‘Charlie found you. He had a fight with your mom.’

  Lifting the hand from her back, he swiped it over his face in an attempt to pull himself together. ‘When they’d calmed down and talked about it, I think Charlie got it. He’d hit a few reporters in his time and he knew how insecure my mom was. He loved her. Guess he must have, since he never married. So they made a deal. She’d send him pictures and keep him updated—he’d send money and keep the secret till I was old enough to decide what I wanted.’

  ‘He didn’t visit?’

  ‘When he could—wasn’t always easy for him to keep a low profile. Don’t think he found it easy to keep track of us at times, either. My mom could be hit-and-miss with the whole stay in touch part of the deal. Every time he visited she was borderline manic for days after he left. Everyone was looking at us, everyone was talking about us; someone had to have recognised Charlie. It was easier when he didn’t visit.’ Blake had known that at twelve. He’d resented the man who made life more difficult for him than it already was. ‘Not like a handful of days a few times a year was gonna make for much of a father/son bond, anyway. Once I hit my teens, he didn’t stand a chance. I wasn’t interested in why he wasn’t there. Bottom line, he wasn’t and I had my mom to deal with on my own.’

  ‘Did she ever get help?’

  ‘Talk to someone who might rat us out? Hell, no.’ And by the time he’d worked out that his mom might have benefited from talking things through with someone it had been too late. ‘If she’d visited a doctor more often they might have found the tumours sooner.’

  He’d felt guilty about that. He should have made her go sooner, should have known there was something wrong.

  ‘Is that when you came here?’

  ‘When she collapsed and the hospital emergency room said it was cancer, I made her contact Charlie to pull some strings and get her the treatment she needed.’ His pride might have been dented but it had been her only hope. ‘After a couple of semesters at high school in New York, they decided I’d spend the summer here. I wasn’t given a choice. It didn’t go the way I think Charlie hoped it would. By seventeen I had attitude, was getting into trouble, resented the hell out of being here and was stuck with a guy I barely knew. Not like we could toss a football around. He was a lot older than my mom, to begin with.’

  Blake ran his palm along her spine before starting to make circles with his fingertips again. ‘Looking back, I think it took that summer and the couple of years my mom was sick before she died to straighten me out. If things had been different, there might have been more than one member of the Warren family wearing an orange jumpsuit.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Liv said with a certainty he far from deserved.

  She hadn’t known him.

  ‘When was the last time you saw him?’

  ‘Her funeral.’

  ‘He didn’t try to get in touch again?’

  Blake immediately thought of the envelope he’d been carrying around. ‘Not till it was too late.’

  ‘He should have tried.’

  ‘I can be pig-headed when I set my mind to it.’

  ‘You?’ She pressed a kiss to the skin directly over his heart and rubbed her cheek against his chest. ‘Never.’

  He smiled into the darkness.

  They stayed silent for a long while after that, a clock chiming the hour somewhere in the distance while Blake tried to make sense of his thoughts. What the hell was he doing thinking about having a child when he had no idea what family meant? Families were something other people had. Granted, it might explain some of the emptiness he carried around, but what if having a family of his own didn’t fill it or, worse still, he handed whatever defect it was inside him onto his kids? They didn’t deserve that. Neither did their mother. His arms tightened instinctively around Liv. He wouldn’t do that to her.

  The void within him expanding, he vowed he would let her go before he came close to hurting her. He could do the honourable thing. What he couldn’t do was be selfish, give her half a man or one who might some day succumb to the emptiness and leave her living with a shell. A wave of anger crashed over him. It wasn’t enough, damn it.

  He wasn’t enough for her.

  As if sensing he needed to get lost in her again, she shifted and stretched her body along the length of his, her hands smoothing up his arms and across his shoulders as she whispered, ‘Thank you. For telling me…’

  It felt like the least he could do. His inability to give her something more when nothing ever felt like enough forced him to fight his most basic instincts and remain passive while she took what she wanted. But as her soft lips moved across his mouth he felt himself drawn to her warmth, the need to move closer to the fire making him roll them over so he could set the pace before he was engulfed by the flames she ignited inside him.

  He couldn’t get enough of her. Maybe he never would.

  Olivia found the letter by accident as she picked up a pair of his jeans. When it dropped to the floor, she bent down to lift it without thinking, unfolding it to see if she could toss it away. Reading several familiar scored out addresses, she froze, turning it over and checking the sender’s address above the unbroken seal. How long had he been carrying it around? She checked the date on the postmarks, her brows lifting in surprise.

  ‘How many damn bottles of stuff did you bring with you?’ Blake called from the bathroom.

  ‘You think I look this good without any effort?’ she called back while frowning at the envelope.

  ‘That’s one of those questions there’s no right answer to, right?’

  Turning towards the bed where their weekend bags were laid out, she debated telling him she’d found it. She loved that he’d shared so much with her but the closer she felt to him, the more there was to lose. The story of his past told in the deep, rough rumble of his voice while he’d held her in the dark had had even more of an effect on her than the fact they’d made love in what had felt like the truest sense of the word.

  But why hadn’t he opened it? Why carry it around? Why hadn’t he told her—?

  Lifting her chin, she frowned harder. Just because her heart longed to pour everything she had to give—without r
estraint—on someone who might need her a fraction as much as she needed him, didn’t mean she could throw caution to the wind and go looking for something with Blake that wasn’t there. How many times did she need to remember what they had would end before it sank in? Folding the envelope between her thumb and forefinger, she pushed it back into the pocket of his jeans, packing them into his bag as he appeared beside her and dumped an armful of assorted toiletries into hers.

  ‘Is there anything left in Macy’s?’

  ‘Remind me never to show you my shoe closet.’

  ‘I’m allowed to give you shoes, am I?’

  ‘I think you’ll find that’s enabling an addict.’ When he shook his head and leaned down to kiss her, she turned her cheek. ‘Helicopter’s here. We should go.’

  It wasn’t a lie—she could hear the rhythmical beat of the rotors close by—but the fact she’d taken a step away from him—no matter how small or practical the rejection might have seemed—made Blake frown.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Apart from the fact I seem to be packing for you?’

  ‘The house will still be here a week from now,’ he said in the rough voice she loved so much. ‘We’ll come back at the weekend.’

  Olivia tucked a strand of hair behind her ear before pulling the zips on the bags. ‘I can’t next weekend. It’s Jo’s birthday.’

  ‘We’ll be back, Liv.’

  ‘You never know.’ She tossed her best imitation of a smile at him as she began filling in the cracks in the wall around her heart. ‘Might be another place we like better.’

  ‘Not fooling anyone in this room, sweetheart.’ Picking up their bags, he pressed a kiss into her hair. ‘I refuse to feel jealous of a house.’

  The helicopter was swinging in to land by the time they got to the front door, Blake jogging down the steps with their bags and walking across the gravel with long, confident strides as Olivia reached out a hand to the wooden railing and looked up.

  ‘’Bye, house.’ She swallowed to loosen the sudden knot in her throat. ‘Take care of him for me.’

  Knowing he’d never had a place to call home made him a perfect fit for a house calling out to be loved. It might be a part-time relationship, but while he was there she knew he would lavish attention on it in a way that could last more than a lifetime.

  Turning, she forced reluctant legs to carry her away. Now they were leaving The Hamptons and fantasy land, it was time for a reality check. Holding her head up, she walked towards the helicopter without looking back.

  She’d never considered she would be the one to end it. She wondered why. Was she so desperate to hang on to every last moment until the day he walked away? How much of a masochist did that make her?

  Enough was enough. It was time for damage control. She had to give herself a fighting chance of getting over him—something she doubted would be easy, especially if she fell in love with more than his house.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘I ALWAYS figured if someone handed me a few million bucks I’d look happier than you do right now.’ Marty dropped onto the stool next to him and ordered a beer.

  ‘Not all it’s cracked up to be,’ Blake replied.

  It earned him a grin, ‘Aw, you’re just saying that to make me feel better.’

  No, he wasn’t. He’d been right about making decisions he hadn’t planned on making putting him in a perpetually foul mood. The fact Liv was being weird with him wasn’t helping any either. Why hadn’t she kicked him to the kerb for his attitude of late? It wasn’t like her.

  ‘Punishment for being economical with the truth, if you ask me,’ Marty said.

  Blake tilted his bottle to his mouth. ‘You knew my old man had money and I wanted nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Left out the Charles Warren part, didn’t we, Anders?’

  ‘Could we knock it off with the Anders some time soon?’

  The baseball game playing on a large screen behind the bar took up their attention while some of the lunchtime crowd filtered in, Marty eventually taking a short breath before stepping into touchy territory again.

  ‘So how was your first day at the office?’

  ‘I’m just looking around.’

  ‘Well, while you were—’ he made speech marks with his fingers ‘— “looking around”, the rest of the class took a field trip to that warehouse down by the river.’

  Blake turned towards him. ‘And?’

  ‘Doable.’ Marty nodded. ‘You’ll need to clear those changes you want made with the architect and building control, but yeah—should keep us busy for a while.’

  ‘Good. Bring in as many new guys as you need.’

  ‘Yes, Boss.’

  Blake shook his head. ‘Don’t do that.’

  They watched the game for a while, Marty glancing sideways when Blake kept checking the screen of his cellphone. ‘Waiting on an important call?’

  ‘No.’ He set the phone down and lifted his beer.

  ‘So what’s the problem?’

  ‘Apart from the fact I might need a new lawyer?’

  If firing her was what it took to make it feel as if they could hold a conversation that didn’t involve work, then so be it. Seemed to Blake they’d talked about little else since they got back to Manhattan. But as sexy as he found her, he didn’t want to spend time with the lawyer—he wanted to spend it with the woman he’d been with in The Hamptons. Where the hell had she gone? He missed her.

  ‘Thought there was something going on with you two.’

  Blake frowned as he swallowed.

  ‘Ah,’ Marty said.

  They sat in silence for as long as Blake could stand it. ‘You got something to say, spit it out.’

  ‘It’s none of my business.’

  ‘Never stopped you before…’

  ‘Never looked like it mattered before…’

  There were loud groans and shouts of complaint in reaction to what was happening on-screen while Blake focused his gaze on the bottle he was turning in circles with his hands. ‘It matters.’

  There was a long pause, then Marty dived in with, ‘Know what I think?’

  ‘I will when you get round to spitting it out.’

  ‘I think you stepped out of the dugout too soon.’ He nodded. ‘Didn’t help any that they sent a curve ball your way with the lady lawyer.’

  Blake glanced at him from the corner of his eye. ‘Could we do this without the baseball analogies?’

  Leaning an elbow on the bar as the game went to commercial, Marty turned towards him. ‘Knee-jerk reaction has always been your problem. We’ve both known that since high school. First day you turned up, you came out swinging and asked questions later. That’s what you’ve done this time. You ask me, you didn’t spend enough time prepping for the game. One look at her and you were stepping up to the plate. Understandable—you got eyes—but now you’re asking questions and I’m willing to bet some of them you should have asked yourself earlier.’

  As the game resumed on the screen, he turned away, leaving Blake to absorb what he’d said. ‘Didn’t occur to you to say any of this sooner?’

  ‘Ain’t nobody getting in your way when you come out swinging.’

  ‘Didn’t stop you that first day in high school…’

  Marty shrugged again. ‘You were taking on half the football team. Someone had to stop you getting killed.’

  ‘I didn’t know she was dating the quarterback.’

  ‘Yeah—’ he snorted sarcastically into the rim of his beer bottle ‘—’cos cheerleaders didn’t date football players in any of the two hundred other schools you went to. That pretty much never happens.’

  Breathing deep, Blake looked up at the screen. Marty was right, he was asking questions. Some he’d thought he knew the answers to. Some he’d never asked before. Some it stunned him he even had to ask. As to the part about Liv being the reason he’d stepped up to the plate before he was ready? That was probably true, too. He’d wanted her from the moment he laid eyes
on her. Still did. Except now he wanted more at a time when he was pretty certain she was backing off. But since he’d never stuck around long enough for a woman to back off before he did, how would he know?

  ‘Had to happen some time,’ Marty commented.

  ‘What did?’

  ‘Something to make you think about staying put.’

  They sat in silence through two sets of commercials, occasionally lifting their bottles and tilting them to their mouths while Blake tore the corner off the label and rolled it between his fingertips.

  ‘What’s it like?’ he asked, tossing the paper ball onto the bar and watching it roll away.

  ‘What’s what like?’

  ‘Staying put.’

  ‘Depends what you want.’ Marty reached across for a handful of mini pretzels. ‘And who you want it with.’

  That helped.

  ‘You see your life without her in it?’

  Blake frowned at the question and got a nod in reply.

  ‘Don’t suppose you counted up how long you’d been here before all this happened.’ Marty shook his head. ‘No. Give it a minute. Use fingers and toes.’

  ‘We’d been busy.’

  ‘We had plenty of work the last two times you came home and it didn’t stop you getting itchy feet after six months.’ He tossed another pretzel in his mouth and chewed while talking. ‘Happens to the best of us—just comes a time when we’re ready to put down roots and settle.’

  ‘You got married at nineteen.’

  ‘Some of us get lucky earlier than others.’ He glanced sideways. ‘No one said anything about you getting married, did they?’

  Blake clenched his teeth together hard enough to make his jaw ache.

  ‘Mmm.’ Marty quirked his brows as he looked up at the screen. ‘Might want to figure out how serious you are about her before that reporter comes sniffing around again. He seemed as interested in her as he was in you.’

  ‘What reporter?’