Billionaire Boss's Secret Love Child: A Second Chance Romance

by Sophia Lynn

  “I have an apartment here,” he said. “I still have the condo in Chicago, and given everything that we're doing, I was thinking a house in Schaumburg or Naperville may be in the cards sooner rather than later. Eddy, what's wrong?”

  “And when were you going to bring this up with us? With me?” she asked, her voice tight, and Travis realized he had made a mistake even as he sat up.

  “Chicago has amazing schools and amazing resources,” he said defensively. “We both want the best for Sofia...”

  “The schools here have excellent ratings,” she said. “We have an amazing education college in the— Why are you acting as if you're the one who has the power here?”

  “It's not power,” Travis said impatiently. “I'm doing what is obviously and clearly right for our daughter and for us. She deserves better than—”

  He cut himself off because even in his own ears that sounded like it was going to be unforgivable, but Eddy stared at him as if he had slapped her.

  “You're kidding me,” she whispered. “You really haven't changed, have you?”

  “Eddy.”

  “She deserves better than me and our hometown, that's what you're saying.”

  Travis wanted to argue, but it was true, even if he could see how cruel and insulting it was now.

  “Eddy, I'm sorry, I didn't mean—”

  “Yeah, you did,” she said, shaking her head. “Get out.”

  “Eddy...”

  “I can't deal with you right now,” she said, her voice clipped and furious. “We can talk later, but right now, you need to leave.”

  Travis was ready to fight, ready to battle this out immediately, but then there was a little knock on the door. Eddy looked stricken, and then she opened the door.

  Sofia, her hair rumpled and her expression confused, peered up at them.

  “I heard yelling,” she said, her tone fretful. “What's happening? Are you mad, Mama?”

  “No, no, sweetheart,” she said hurriedly. “Daddy and I were just talking a little too loudly. It's okay. Everything's fine. Let's get you back to bed.”

  She shot a worried look over her shoulder at Travis, and Travis realized that she wanted to make sure he didn't escalate matters further in front of Sofia. It stung, and he started to pull his clothes back on.

  “I got her back to bed with some water,” Eddy said. “I think she— Travis, what are you doing?”

  He buckled his belt and shrugged his jacket on.

  “I think we both need to cool off before we say things we're going to regret,” he said coolly, and a flash of hurt went across Eddy's expression before she lifted her chin. God, but she was proud, and he liked it even as it made him want to scream.

  “That may be for the best,” she said, and she sounded like a stranger.

  “We're not done with this,” he said, and her eyes flashed fire.

  “We're absolutely not done with this,” she said, and with a stiff nod, Travis made his way back to his car.

  Behind the driver's seat, he didn't start it right away, instead sitting in the dark drive with his hands loosely on the wheel. The house was dark except for Eddy's window, and he watched it for what felt like a very long time. Then it went out, and reluctantly, feeling as if he had made a terrible mistake, he started the car.

  Travis slept a handful of hours at his own place, and when dawn peeked through his blinds, he gave up on sleep and went into the office. He wanted more than anything to go back to Eddy and Sofia, because, well, they were both right. They both had things to say to each other, and it was just the beginning. He could see now where he had messed up, making assumptions about what was going to happen and what they wanted. He knew they needed to hammer out a shape for what their lives should look like, and then they would be fine.

  It would be all right.

  Then there was a meeting he had forgotten about, and a call with some investors that had to go through a translator, and of course that always took forever. It was ten in the morning by the time he got free, and after considering his phone, he decided to go to the store instead.

  Some things are best handled in person, he thought. If I explain it to Eddy clearly, she'll see why a move to Chicago could be an amazing thing, for Sofia and for us as well. She probably hasn't even really given it a chance. That's what I should have done, taken her to Chicago, shown them a good time...

  Travis was so lost in thought that when the door refused to open under his tug, he was totally confused as to what might have happened. He tugged harder, and then when it didn't budge at all, he looked up to see the sign turned over to "closed."

  "What the hell?" Travis muttered, peering into the dark windows. Despite the cluttered nature of the store, it had always looked homey and welcoming, like a place where you could just walk in and explore. Right now though, there was something oddly foreboding about the furniture and loaded cabinets, something abandoned, and Travis shivered.

  He picked up his phone, thumbing Eddy's contact, and with every ring that went by, he grew tenser and tenser.

  "Hi, you've reached Eddy Baker, owner and operator of the Recollection in Springwell. Leave a message, and I'll get back to you as soon as I can."

  Eddy's voice in her recorded message was light and bouncy, and Travis's heart squeezed painfully. At the beep, he cleared his throat.

  "Hey Eddy, it's me. Look, we had a misunderstanding last night. Call me back."

  He ended the call, and then he had to shove the phone in his pocket before he immediately called again. This was making him crazy.

  "Eddy, come on," he growled, and something dark and painful washed over him, making him realize how truly alone he was.

  Chapter Eight

  Eddy

  Eddy was rational and sensible all throughout breakfast. She thought she deserved some credit for that.

  So we had a fight, she told herself, making up some eggs and bacon for her and Sofia. We had a fight. It doesn't mean things are over.

  That sort of helped her hold things together until that other little voice popped up, the one that she could never quite figure out if it was harsh reality or just her worst fears getting the better of her.

  Maybe that would be true if it were just a fight about laundry or where you wanted to eat, the voice said. This is a little more important than that, isn't it? This isn't a snack or some chores, this is the rest of your lives. This is where you want to live, how you want to live, and you know how Travis feels about that, don't you?

  "Mama?"

  She looked up to encounter Sofia's concerned face over the table. A part of her cringed at how worried her tiny daughter looked. Christ. She wasn't even in school yet, and she was worried about her mother? What kind of parent did that make her?

  "What is it, honey?" she asked, and Sofia played with her fork for a moment.

  "Mama, where's Daddy?"

  Chicago, that nasty little voice informed her. He's in Chicago. He never wanted to be back in this town, he never wanted to be tied down by all the things that we love about it. He's probably packing up to go right now, and we'll never see him again, and—

  "Oh, he's probably at work right now," Eddy said.

  "Oh." Sofia mused over this for a moment, nibbling at her strip of bacon. "Did you fight last night? Like I fought with Billy?"

  Eddy choked a little, because when it came to her and Travis, biting was a sign that things were going very right.

  "Honey, no. We were having a talk about something that we both feel very strongly about. Just because people care about each other doesn't mean that they don't disagree sometimes, and a disagreement isn't always a fight, okay?"

  Sofia nodded, but the dubious look on her face suggested that Eddy probably needed to simplify things a bit.

  "It's all right," she said. "You never need to worry about that kind of stuff for adults, okay?"

  Sofia was silent, but Eddy thought that her clever little mind was still turning things over, still figuring out what she thought and what h
ad happened.

  Eddy sighed, because sometimes that was the best you could do, and they didn't have forever to talk it over anyway because Sofia was due at daycare, and she was due at the shop.

  Suddenly, Eddy didn't want either of those things. She didn't want to be separated from Sofia today, and she definitely didn't want to go to the shop and plunge back into the endless inventorying.

  "Hey, Sofia, how do you feel about a trip?"

  "A trip!" cried Sofia, perking up at once. "Where are we going? Are we going to the water park? Are we going to visit Uncle Sheridan?"

  Eddy grinned, increasingly certain that she was making the right call. That's what they both needed, a little bit of time away to think, to figure out what was going on. What they really wanted.

  I love this town, but could Travis be right? Eddy found herself wondering. There are opportunities in Chicago that you can't find here, and what would be best for Sofia? What would be best for all of us? Are we an ‘us’?

  They sure felt like an ‘us’, and the idea that they were only two right now hit her with a hard pang.

  "Let's go up to the cabin," Eddy said, already taking their plates to wash. "It'll be fun. We can go wade in the creek, maybe walk down to the lake, what do you think?"

  Sofia cheered with the utterly complete joy of someone who was still new to the world, and then she hesitated.

  "What about Daddy?"

  "Well, this one will be just for us for now, okay?" Eddy said. Travis had been to the cabin a lot when they were teenagers, she remembered. He and Sheridan had used it for parties more than once, ones that she was explicitly not invited to, and she snorted at the memory.

  "But... can we ask Daddy along?" asked Sofia, a little fretfully. "Miss Lopez was saying that we should invite the people we care about with us when we're doing fun things."

  "We can," Eddy said, feeling a little like a fraud. "He's at work right now, but maybe we can give him a call tonight, okay?"

  "Okay, and then I can show him the creek and where I find my favorite frogs!"

  To Eddy's relief, Sofia ran off to pack her little backpack, and she was alone in the kitchen.

  For a moment, what she was doing felt an awful lot like running away, and Eddy had never been very good at that. She knew that the mature adult thing to do would be to stay right where they were, to send Sofia to daycare and to go into the shop. She could work off some of this heartache with the dull and monotonous inventorying, and then around lunchtime, she could call Travis. They needed to talk, no matter what it turned into. Maybe they could patch things up and find a way past this. Maybe they couldn't.

  It was the lack of surety that made her throw a few things into her backpack in preparation for spending the night away. She couldn't deal with it. She had never in the years since Sofia was born thought that she would have Travis back in her life. The fact that it was now a possibility, something that tempting and tantalizing and beautiful, took her breath away. The idea of having that chance irrevocably taken away was like a punch to the gut.

  Sofia came back, her teeth brushed and her little pack slung over her back. She was so bright and lovely that Eddy could have cried, but instead she put on a bright smile.

  "All right, missy, let me take a look at that bag and make sure you haven't forgotten anything, and then we're off."

  The cabin was located just an hour out of town, and Eddy had no idea how long it had belonged to her family. At some point, someone had thankfully put in indoor plumbing and insulated it against the worst of the northern Illinois winter, but it was still a one-room affair with two futons that folded down into beds, a galley kitchen, a mini fridge, and a few lamps from the seventies.

  "Me and your Uncle Sheridan used to come up here all the time with your grandparents," she said to Sofia as they got out of the car. "This was one of our favorite parts of summer vacation. Daddy came up here too, sometimes."

  She went to get the generator working, stashed their groceries in the humming mini fridge, and then they walked down to the creek, where Eddy sat on one of her favorite rocks from when she was a teen and where Sofia danced through the shallows, exclaiming at the tiny fish that swarmed around her ankles.

  She can't have this if we're living in the suburbs, Eddy thought. We can't just pick up and decide that we want to spend a night in the woods. This place won't be a part of her the way it was for me and for Sheridan. It'll just be this thing she goes to visit. She won't belong to it.

  She was beginning to think that going to the cabin was a bad idea. Her head was clearing, and she realized more and more why she didn't want to take Sofia to Chicago. At the same time, she could also see why Travis did, and there was no clear solution to this. That meant they needed to put their heads together and to come up with something.

  Can we? Is there a compromise we can make?

  They would have to, she realized, but then she realized that Travis knew it too.

  He's not here just for things being easy, she thought, staring hard at the summery sunny gleam on the water. He's not just here for getting his way. He wants to be a part of this. He wants to be Sofia's dad. He's going to be here to figure this out.

  It was like the moment when she was putting together jigsaw puzzles. Eddy had never really liked puzzles much, though her parents were sort of crazy for them. She hated sorting the edge pieces from the others, she disliked carefully staring at each piece to see where it might connect with another. However, there was this place where there were large chunks of the puzzle completed, where you could see what the image was getting at and how it might all come together. Then, through finding the right series of pieces, or sometimes just through looking at the large chunks themselves, they would come together, and... and you could start to see it.

  She could start to see how she and Travis and Sofia would fit together.

  She let Sofia play in the water until the sun was almost directly overhead, and then she called her back to the cabin.

  "I love it here," Sofia said happily as they ate their hot dogs. "I want Daddy to come and see it too."

  "We can make that happen sometime," Eddy said with a slight smile. She was still feeling a little raw, but yes. She would call Travis that night. They would get back to town in the morning, and then they could sit down and have a talk about what this was going to be. Maybe they would find that they couldn't really be together, and God, that would be terrible, but they would figure out something for Sofia, so she could have two adults in her life who cared about her so very much.

  After lunch, Sofia wanted to go out and play some more, and Eddy nodded.

  "Just in the yard, okay, sweetie? Where I can see you. Remember, it's important to buddy up if you're going to go into the woods."

  Sofia agreed happily, and Eddy settled on the porch. She was just getting comfortable when her phone rang. She noted a few missed calls from Travis, which she wasn't ready to handle yet, and then she was talking to Sheridan, the distance between the United States and the Galapagos turning his voice staticky and tinny.

  "Hello, favorite sister," he said, "how's it been going?"

  "Oh my God, Sheridan..."

  She told him all of it, what she could manage over bad connection, she reminded him that she needed to lay into him for the father reveal to Sofia, and then before she was quite ready to let her wayward brother go, his time was up.

  "Please take care of yourself," he said at the end. "Travis, he's a good guy, and while I want you to do what you want, just listen to what he has to say and make sure he listens to you too, okay? I'm convinced you two would have been married years ago if you could have done that."

  "I'll take your advice when you have a long-lasting relationship with something that isn't a unique tropical biome," she snorted. "I love you."

  "Love you too, sis. I'll see you when I'm home in six weeks."

  She hung up, sighing. It would be good to have Sheridan home, but what in the world was it going to look like when he was? Would she and Tr
avis still be together? Would they still be talking?

  She looked up automatically to see what Sofia was up to, and she froze.

  True to her word, Sofia was still in the yard, but she was at the very edge of it where there the grass gave way to trees and brush. She was crouched down, looking at something intently, and Travis stood just a few yards away from her.

  "What's he..."

  Then she looked closer, and her blood ran cold in her veins.

  Travis looked terrified.

  Chapter Nine

  Travis

  They weren't at home, they weren't at the shop, and one of the nice things about a town the size of Springwell was that there were only a few places they could be.

  Even as he drove up to the cabin, Travis wondered if he should be doing this, and then he quickly decided that he didn't care.

  He'd back off if Eddy told him to, but she wouldn't even pick up her phone. He had managed to avoid leaving messages that would make him ashamed if he heard them again, but he knew he was getting short towards the end, worry turning into frustration.

  No, it's better I find them. Hell, maybe her telling me to get lost face to face will help us both clear the air.

  And then what?

  He didn't know.

  When they were kids, he had loved the Bakers' cabin. Sheridan always downplayed it, and Eddy called it a wreck, but it had been a place where they could be on their own, doing things without the adults watching, learning how to be themselves.

  I wonder if that's what I was trying to capture when I bought that place in the Catskills, he thought suddenly. If I was trying to be a teenager again.

  The moment he thought it, he dismissed it. It had been less about the time than the people, and he resolved that if they worked this out, he would take all of them – Eddy, Sofia, Sheridan if they could pry him from his turtles – to the Catskills to test the theory.