He tried to sound philosophical. “I imagine by now I’d have to hire a stadium to properly celebrate Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in order to accommodate all the stepmothers and stepfathers I’ve acquired.” His mouth curved cynically. “Not that any of them would come if invited.”
They had shut him out, she thought. Sherry raised herself up again and looked down at him. “Oh, Sin-Jin, I’m so sorry.”
He shrugged the sentiment away. “Don’t be. Being a distant fifth wheel made me strong. It made me determined to be my own person, to never rely on anyone else for my happiness.”
Was he putting her on notice? Telling her that this was nice, but don’t get used to it? Now wasn’t the time to think of her own feelings, she warned herself. He was sharing something, something hurtful from a past he’d kept locked away. This was about him, not her.
“That shouldn’t have been a decision made by a young boy.” She truly ached for him. Sherry caressed his face, wishing she could have made things different for him. No wonder he felt the way he did. “Every child should have a warm, loving family.”
He blew out a dismissive breath. “Yes, well, there seems to be a slight shortage of those. At least where I was. I decided that that kind of thing was highly overrated.”
She knew that was the act of a child attempting to protect himself. And the child was the father of the man. Right at this moment she hated the emotionally crippled couple that had given birth to him.
“Money being the only stable factor in my life, I decided to make some of my own. So as soon as I was able,” he told her, “I took the money that my grandfather had left me in his will, left the place that was supposedly my home and went to college.” He didn’t bother saying which one, but that was a matter of record. He closed his eyes, remembering how hard it had been for him. “Along the way I shed my name and my family. I don’t think either one of the two principal players even noticed. They were too busy with their own lives.”
He opened his eyes, staring straight ahead. He couldn’t remember what his parents looked like anymore. If he passed them on the street, would he know? Or would he just keep walking?
“They always had been. Which was all right,” he said a second later, “because I was busy forging mine. Making connections and reinventing myself.”
When Sherry reached for him, he pushed her hand aside, stiffening. He shouldn’t have said anything. What had gotten into him? “I don’t want your pity.”
He was shutting her out. Just like his parents had shut him out. Putting her own pain aside, she looked at him incredulously.
“Why would I pity a man who went on to become a force to be reckoned with? Who didn’t wallow in self-pity but made something of himself? If anything, what I’m feeling right now is sympathy for the small boy who shouldn’t have had to grow up in a house with no love. Who left home and felt that no one cared.”
When he turned his face away, she physically forced his face back to make him look at her.
“Sympathy,” she emphasized, “not pity. Pity is for the person who lets life knock him down and refuses to get up again. There is nothing pitiful about you, Sin-Jin. There never has been.”
But there was, he thought. It was pitiful to him that he felt so lost without her, that his body was spent and all he could think of was making love with her again. Not because he had any physical needs. That would have been easier to accept. Men had needs. But he couldn’t lie to himself. He wanted to make love with her because he needed and wanted this woman.
Needed and wanted Sherry.
And to need was to be vulnerable. And to be vulnerable was to be pitied.
His mouth curved slightly. “You do know how to stroke a man’s ego.”
“That wasn’t stroking, that was the truth.” And then she smiled up into his eyes. “But if you want to see stroking,” she told him mischievously, slipping her hand down beneath the tangled sheet, finding him. “I can show you stroking.”
Her fingertips lightly closed over him, her thumb passing over the tip of his shaft. Her hand just barely made contact as she moved her palm tantalizingly up and then down, over and over again. She felt him grow from wanting her. Her smile deepened.
“You know just how to get to me, don’t you?” he breathed. Within a moment he had shifted so that he was over her again.
“Do I?” she wanted to know. Her smile faded as desire took root again. Want me, Sin-Jin. Love me. “Do I really?”
He pretended to breathe a sigh of relief. “Thank God, the questions are back.” He laughed, and his breath tingled the skin along her throat, making the very core of her tighten in anticipation. “I was becoming worried. You didn’t ask me any questions while I was telling you about my parents.”
Guilt chewed at the fabric of the illusion she was trying to maintain for just a little while longer. Just for tonight. Tomorrow she would tell him the truth, that she already knew everything that he’d told her. Tomorrow, not tonight.
For tonight she sought refuge in half truths, praying she’d be forgiven. “You were telling me what you wanted me to know.”
“Was I?” He kissed each of her breasts in turn, fascinated at the way her breathing became more labored. “Or were you just pulling it out of me like the sorceress that you are?”
“Is that what you think I am, a sorceress?” She rather liked the description. One of her favorite characters in literature was Morgana Le Fey, King Arthur’s half sister. Seen as evil by some, she was still a fascinating character.
“Come to your own conclusion.” He paused, knitting a wreath of openmouthed kisses over her quivering abdomen. “You certainly cast a spell over me. I’ve just said things to you, told you things I haven’t said to anyone else.” She moaned as he licked her belly. A recklessness came over him. He slid his body along hers until he was looking into her eyes. “Did you know that my name is really John Fletcher?”
She didn’t want to lie, but telling him the truth now would ruin everything. Would steal him away from her. She knew it.
So instead of answering, she threaded her arms around his neck and brought him down to her abruptly, seizing his lips and kissing him as hard as she could. Praying that the question would slip his mind.
The question he’d just uttered vanished in a haze of desire. He’d already talked too much. It was time to stop talking and to make love with her.
Sin-Jin gathered her into his arms and gave himself up to the demands of his body and hers.
The soft, crying sound coming from the monitor on the nightstand had her opening her eyes immediately.
The baby was hungry, she thought, sitting up groggily. She looked at the clock beside the monitor. Almost four. Just like clockwork, she thought, smiling to herself. It gave Johnny something in common with his godfather.
Last night and the wee hours of this morning came back to her in brilliant hues. They’d made love three times, each time more frantic than the last. It was as if Sin-Jin couldn’t get enough of her. That made it mutual.
As her feet touched the floor, she turned to see if the baby had woken Sin-Jin.
Her heart froze.
His side of the bed was empty.
She stretched her hand out to touch where he’d slept. The sheet was cold.
And his clothes were gone.
Chapter Sixteen
Maybe Johnny had cried earlier and she just hadn’t heard him. Maybe Sin-Jin had gotten up to look in on the boy and hadn’t wanted to wake her up.
Mentally crossing her fingers, Sherry hurried into her son’s room.
Sin-Jin wasn’t in the nursery.
Johnny was awake, fussing in his crib, trying to shove his fist into his mouth. Cooing softly to soothe him, she picked the infant up.
Slipping her hand beneath his bottom at least told her what part of the problem was. “You’re wet, huh? Well, we can fix that. Just hang on a second longer, okay?”
Sin-Jin had to be in the house; he couldn’t have just left without saying a
word.
Could he?
With the baby tucked into the crook of her arm, Sherry went out into the hall again and crossed to the head of the stairs, hoping that perhaps he’d gone to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee.
Sin-Jin was just opening the front door, on his way out.
“Wait.”
He stopped dead and looked up toward the top of the stairs. It was evident by the look on his face that he’d hoped to be out of the house by the time she woke up.
Damn it, why?
It wasn’t a time for banter, but it was the only way for her to hide the suddenly panicky feeling that was clawing its way up within her. She would have come down the stairs if she could have, but her knees felt frozen in place.
He was leaving. Permanently. Think. Say something to keep him from going.
“You don’t have to sneak out, you know.” Sherry forced a smile to her lips. “I won’t make you change his diaper.”
He was behaving like a coward and he hated it. But he’d wanted to be gone before she woke up. Before she looked at him with those eyes of hers, those eyes that made him forget everything else except her.
Before he wanted to make love with her again.
It was too late for that. He could feel the stirrings beginning already. He slammed them down. The consequences of following his impulses were too costly. They were already costing him. Dearly. He’d seen that last night. Time to get out before he couldn’t.
Damn, why couldn’t she have slept just a little longer?
Uncomfortable, he cleared his throat. “Look, this was a mistake.”
Stunned, feeling like a single-engine plane caught in a tailspin, Sherry could only stare at him. She’d never felt more isolated in her life. There were suddenly a million miles between them.
Maybe she hadn’t heard right. Maybe she was stuck in some kind of time warp.
“What?” she whispered hoarsely.
“This went a little too far,” he told her. A helplessness was drenching him. The frustration he felt angered Sin-Jin. “It was nice, but—”
She held her baby against her. Her eyes widened as she continued staring at him incredulously. “Nice? You call these last weeks ‘nice’?”
It was a bland word, meant to be applied to a cut of clothing, not to what was happening between them.
But maybe nothing was happening between them, maybe it was all in her head, all one-sided. Could she be that blind not to realize?
No, it wasn’t possible.
Was it?
“Yes, nice,” he repeated with emphasis, wanting to be anywhere but here, anyone but him. “But I think it’s over. I said some things last night…”
He stopped, not knowing how to end the sentence, knowing only that he felt threatened. And he hated to feel threatened. What the hell had he been thinking of, saying those things to her? Baring his soul to a woman he knew was a reporter? For all he knew, she might have been playing him all along.
His eyes darkened. “If I see a word of what I told you in print, your paper’ll face a lawsuit the magnitude of which you can’t even begin to imagine. By the time my lawyers are finished with the Bedford World News, it will be completely bankrupt.” The words were coming out of his mouth, but it felt as if someone else was saying them. Still, he couldn’t stop them. “I won’t have my privacy invaded.”
Numb, she felt as if someone had just ripped out her heart and left a gaping hole in its place. “Your privacy?” she echoed. “This is about your privacy?”
She wanted to scream at Sin-Jin, to beat on him with both fists until he took it back, until he came to his senses. But there was a baby in her arms and he came first, before her own feelings. Johnny was growing progressively fussier, as if he was reacting to the agitation going on inside of her. She couldn’t even raise her voice. But her eyes said it all.
“Well, the hell with your privacy, John Fletcher, or St. John Adair, or whatever you want to call yourself. And the hell with you.”
With that, she turned her back on him and walked back to the nursery.
He wanted to rush up after her, to sweep her into his arms and apologize. But it was better this way. Better for her, better for him.
Sin-Jin slammed the door as he left.
As she laid Johnny in his crib, the sound vibrated within her chest. Sherry caught her lower lip between her teeth to keep from crying.
He waited for the story to appear in the paper. For ten days he waited. Each day that it didn’t, he grew progressively more restless, progressively more uncertain of his actions. Had he been wrong to end it?
No.
Yes.
He didn’t know.
Sin-Jin threw himself into work, arriving early, staying late. His temper shortened, his disposition deteriorated, and his fuse became nonexistent. He caught himself snapping at everyone and regretting it, but lacking the ability to right the situation.
He was a man in hell.
And then, after what seemed like the umpteenth sleepless night, he came to terms with his demons and began setting his house in order. The first order of business was to call Sherry and humbly apologize.
She wasn’t home.
He kept calling, getting her answering machine and growing progressively more and more irritable.
Ten calls later he was sitting at his desk at work, debating whether or not he should go over to her house in person and set siege to her door. He’d taken over entire corporations with less difficulty than he was having trying to find this woman.
Another futile attempt had him slamming down his phone receiver. Where the hell was she?
He heard the slight tap on his door and knew better than to hope that Sherry would be standing on the other side. He did, anyway.
“Come in.”
Mrs. Farley walked quietly in and placed a single printed sheet on his desk, then took a step back.
Disappointed, Sin-Jin frowned at the paper without picking it up. He didn’t recall asking for anything. “What’s this?”
Mrs. Farley laced her hands together primly. “I believe if you read it, you’ll see that it’s a letter of resignation.”
He felt as if a bomb had just been detonated beneath his feet. “Yours?”
She inclined her head. “Mine. Although,” she said, “it will probably be the first of many.”
Picking it up, he scanned the sheet without really seeing it. This had to be some kind of mistake. Mrs. Farley was the most steadfast part of his life. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do we, John.” If the letter hadn’t gotten his full attention, her addressing him by his real first name would have. Mrs. Farley rarely ever called him that. When she did, it was because she was deadly serious and meant business. “Ever since last Monday, you’ve become this surly, unapproachable man whose only order of business seems to be biting people’s heads off.”
He’d been like a man who could not find a place for himself within his own skin. It had taken him almost two weeks of grappling with his soul, with the past that he’d wanted to keep buried, to come to the conclusion that he had allowed ghosts to rob him of his only happiness. The specter of his parents’ failed liaisons had egged him on to sabotage his one true chance at happiness.
He realized that what he had failed to take into the equation, on that morning he’d run for his life, were the personalities of his parents and of the people they chose to have their relationships with. Not a one of them was equal to Sherry.
And he was not his parents. For as long as he could remember, they had been comfortable coasting through life, never contributing, never attempting to leave a mark or make the world even a minutely better place than they had found it. That wasn’t him. The contributions he made to various charities attested to that. Since he couldn’t care for one person, he’d cared for many.
But now it was time to take the training wheels off. To care for the one. Because she had finally come into his life.
Looking at the letter of resignatio
n, he knew he’d already made up his mind to go to Sherry and get on his knees if he had to, to get her to forgive him his temporary foray into the land of the insane.
But first there was a fire to put out. He raised his eyes to the thin, regal-looking woman standing by his desk. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Farley.”
She sighed delicately. “And so am I. You’re a good man, John.” Her eyes narrowed behind her glasses. “Whatever’s wrong in your life, fix it.”
That was exactly what he intended to do. Sin-Jin smiled at her as he crumpled up the letter of resignation. “Absolutely.” He held up the ball of paper. “May I throw this out?”
She paused. Married at twenty-three, childless and widowed at thirty, she had always regarded the man at the desk as the son she would have loved to have had.
“If you promise to stop this nonsense and go back to being the man I’ve always been proud of, yes, you may throw it out.”
“It’s a deal.” He pitched the wadded-up resignation into his wastepaper basket. As he reached for the telephone to try one last time to get through to Sherry before he went to her physically, it rang beneath his hand.
Ever the guardian, Mrs. Farley moved his hand aside and picked up the receiver. “Adair Industries, Mr. Adair’s office.” She paused, listening, then placed the call on hold. “Are you in for a Rusty Thomas? He says he’s a friend of Ms. Campbell’s and that this is urgent.”
Something suddenly tightened in his gut, stealing his breath away. Sin-Jin extended his hand for the receiver. “Give it to me. I’ll take it.”
He barely had time to say hello before the man on the other end began talking.
“Look, Mr. Adair, I’m a friend of Sherry’s,” Rusty told him. “She’d kill me if she knew I was calling, but her son’s in the hospital.”
Sin-Jin was on his feet instantly. “What hospital, where? Why?”
For once in his life, Rusty had very little information and it confounded him. “Blair Memorial. There’s something wrong with his heart and—”
A Billionaire and a Baby Page 18