Having Jay's Baby (Having His Baby #2) (3 page)

“We’ve only been married for eight months, Elizabeth.” I wasn’t in the mood for going through this tired little routine again. It was with practised efficiency that I allowed the words to glance off me without a dent.

“Plus a two year engagement,” she said, still in the throes of the argument.

“You know perfectly well we were never engaged,” I said. “It was your father who spread that rumour.”

Elizabeth ignored my logic, and cried, “I should never have said yes! I don’t know what I was thinking!”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. She’d been thinking then what she was thinking about now—money and connections. Slipping the phone into my pocket and making for the door, I paused for only a moment to say, “I’ll drop you at the club,” before leaving the office.

Her outraged howl reverberated down the corridor.

#

I called for one of the town cars so I could continue reading the stock reports on the way to the meeting, but after we were on the road, it was hard to concentrate. I stared at the report but my mind kept churning over the recent spat, the tension exacerbated by Elizabeth’s silent and passive aggression next to me in the back seat.
Damaged goods
… what the hell did that mean? And who was Jinny Adams, anyway? I had no memory whatsoever of her. I rubbed my eyes, my fingers absently loosening the tension in my jaw. Fuck this Jinny Adams and her cohorts, and fuck Elizabeth if she thought I was damaged. The Bensons, my parents—they were the damaged ones. They were so beyond hope that they were pathologically incapable of happiness.

I stared down at the stock reports again, forcing myself to concentrate. What I was seeing was alarming. Fitzsimmons & Jones’ share price had dropped two points overnight. My father had obviously leaked his plans to take a more ‘disruptive’ role in the company. Part of me had wondered, given the intervening months of silence since the scene in my office, if he’d been making idle threats. How could I have doubted him, knowing the man as I did?

Glaring out of the tinted car window, I ran through the various scenarios in my head. Exactly what kind of evil plan was the old bastard hatching? And even if I could find out, could I stop it?

I sighed and got a lungful of flowery musk. Elizabeth was staring mournfully out of the other window, her presence having been momentarily shelved by my busy mind. A stone dropped into the pool of my conscience, guilt rippling out. Though in her early-thirties her profile was still somewhat childish; the tall, convex forehead and arched nose were precocious to say the least. She looked like she was drowning.

She’d always needed—or wanted—me or someone else to take care of her. She’d never shown any desire to be independent, neither financially nor emotionally. She was dragging this divorce into its second month of mediation now, bickering over every line in the prenuptial agreement, and as much as I detested the process, I sensed that for her it was a form of assimilation—of adjustment. My patience with Elizabeth was, though, like gasoline: exhaustible and highly flammable in the process. I could feel it threatening to ignite in my chest as I considered the additional complication caused by the drama over the weekend in the Hamptons.

I rubbed my eyes. I’d help her; of course I’d help her. I had married her after all. But, given the circumstances, I was damned if I’d spend any more time on it than I had to. For a start, this was sure to be picked up by the press and I didn’t need to be involved in anything controversial while Fitzsimmons & Jones was in such a precarious position.

Thinking of the press was enough for my brain to latch on to Stella. As I had every time since our meeting in the hotel, I felt an abrupt surge of inappropriate humour at her reaction to my accusation about her kid. In retrospect, I regretted acting on that note; it had turned out to be a random, isolated oddity. Then there had been her astonished expression in the foyer outside my office when she’d gotten an eyeful of Abel
in flagrante
. What the hell had I been thinking, trying to seduce her after all that? I swear to God she oozed some kind of chemical that made my brain short.

“Darling?”

I started, realising Elizabeth was watching me. She was smiling. I stared back at her in confusion for a moment until I realised that I must have been smiling, too.

I covered the gaff by checking my watch. “Am I dropping you at the club or at the apartment?” I asked with a return to impatience.

The pause was loaded with static. She turned away from me again. “Neither,” she said distinctly. “The Ritz-Carlton.”

“I thought you were going to the club.”

“I’m going back to my suite,” she said. “I need a drink. I’m not facing those women when I don’t have your support.”

“You have my support,” I told her, my patience as thin as her lips. I turned to look out of the window, and then paused. “Did you just say you have a suite at the Ritz-Carlton?”

Her gaze slithered like a snake.

Anger lit me. “What do you need that for?” I didn’t even want to consider what a woman—a woman with a perfectly ostentatious apartment in the city—used a hotel suite for. “We’re going through a divorce, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “Can’t you just lie low for a few months until it’s done?

“I’m not staying at the apartment myself,” she responded. “I told you that.”

“No, you said you had no intention of moving out, which is why I rented a room at the Four Seasons while I’m here. What the fuck am I doing in the Four Seasons when the apartment is empty?”

“Don’t swear at me!”

I swore at the window instead. “This is not happening, Elizabeth. It’s the suite or the apartment. Choose one,” I said, my voice grating over my shoulder.

“I will not,” she said, the colour rising in her cheeks.

“Choose one.”

“No,” she said. “I won’t. The apartment is already paid for and we can afford the suite at the Ritz. I won’t have you bullying me—”

“Then take the suite,” I said, ignoring the other words streaming out from her mouth. “I’m moving back into the apartment.”

She uttered another squeal of frustration. “You’re in Washington, D.C.,” she said, rummaging violently in her bag, “so why do you need the apartment?”

“Why do you need it, if you’re staying in a hotel?”

“That’s not the point! We already agreed on this!”

My phone vibrated in my pocket. Switching my attention gratefully, I took it out and frowned at the screen. I used this phone for calls and emails, but I rarely got text messages on it. I opened the message, registered the unfamiliar number, and began to read.

“
She put the wrong name on the birth certificate
,” it said.

My chest constricted. The phone tumbled through my legs, bouncing onto the car’s carpeted flooring. The words slashed through my mind like a blade as I grappled for it, lifting the screen to my face again.

She put the wrong name on the birth certificate.

Get the kid tested. 

CHAPTER TWO

Stella

It was so quiet. I was wearing sneakers, but I could hear each step from the empty hallway into the great room. Under normal circumstances the evening sunshine mingled warmly with whatever scene was taking place through in the kitchen—it was my favourite time of day in the house—but tonight the low rays hung in the air, dusty, desolate, lost. My house was no longer a home. It was an empty space waiting for a family to fill it.

“Come on, Stella,” Monica said, touching my back as she approached through the open front door. Her voice echoed off the bare walls. “You’ll get the money back.”

Maybe, but not in time to get my house back.

“There are other houses.”

I don’t want another house.

This was my first house. I’d bought it as soon as I’d found out I was pregnant. I’d spent my entire pregnancy—or at least, the six months of it after Aaron had left—in a blissful state of nesting, knocking plaster off walls and sanding and painting, and bleeding from a variety of cuts from hammers and wrenches and saws. The house and I had healed together. I’d made it a home. My first real home—somewhere safe where I could bring my daughter back from the hospital.

I’d always imagined we’d live out our lives here together. I’d imagined her first school day; reluctant homework at the kitchen table; Nina’s and her friends planting tomatoes in the kitchen-garden when they were old enough; boyfriends and break-ups and finally, my daughter heading off to college knowing I’d be here for her when she needed me in our house on 45th Street.

Emotion threatened to swamp me, but there was no time for it and I shoved it away somewhere for later. It wavered on my lips. “Yes, there are other houses,” I said. “You’re right.”

“Aaron won’t get away with this.”

“No, he won’t,” I agreed, but it was a token effort. Picking up a discarded plastic bag, I stuffed it into the waistband of my yoga pants. “Is that us?”

Monica, my best friend, was as hesitant as a deer. Tall and doe-eyed, she oozed sympathy. Wrestling with watery eyes under her careful scrutiny, I looked blindly towards the back garden.

“Let’s go,” she said. “We’ll get pizza on the way home; the kids are waiting up for us. We can watch a movie.”

Bright spots of pink distracted me. “Look,” I said, focusing on the trellis at the back window. “The sweet peas are—” I meant to say ‘flowering’ but the words never made it past the sudden blockage in my throat.

I clasped at Monica’s hand when she approached. The emotion, as fierce as it was, burned out quickly. “Fucking things … I’ve been waiting for them to flower,” I managed. Thoughts of Nina, who was waiting for me in the car, were enough to keep an unsteady lid on my emotions. They spat and bubbled and rattled beneath it.

Clasping my hooded top with a fist, I wiped away the useless tears with it. “Maybe I should take them with me,” I said. “I could dig them up—keep them in your greenhouse until we find a new place.”

Monica’s expression crumpled with sympathy. She hugged me. “You can buy more for the next place. Leave them for the new people.”

The new people
… I still couldn’t believe someone else would be living in my house before the year was out. Still, Mon was right; and it might help the house to sell more quickly, and—boy—with foreclosure looming like a dark cloud, I needed this house to sell quickly. “God.” I uttered the word in a faint blast of hysteria. Then I cleared my throat and shook my head, struggling for composure. I was aware I was probably veering in and out of emotions like a crazy woman.

“It is only a house.”

“I know. I’ll find another one.” I said the words like a mantra.

“Of course, you will.”

I blew out a breath, twice, and then once more for good measure. “Let’s just go.” Desperate to put an end to this, I swiped at my bag on the floor. I took one last look around the clean, newly-painted walls; the varnished wood floors stretching to the quaint, rustic kitchen, and finally to the cheerful doormat with a big yellow ‘Hello’ woven into the tufts. Then I left my home for the last time.

My lawyer was pragmatic about the situation. “It’s more common than you think for one party to empty the joint accounts when a relationships ends, especially if it’s acrimonious. You should have put a restraining order on the account as soon as you two decided to split.”

Two days later, my attention fractured between bouncing Nina on my knee and grinning at Monica’s eldest daughter, Julia, who was showing me her latest dance routine in the small kitchen. I resisted the urge to sigh heavily. “Isn’t there anything I can do? The money wasn’t his. I can prove it.”

“Technically, in the eyes of the law, it was as much his as it was yours,” she corrected, “presuming the account was in both your names.”

“But I was paying at least four times as much into it every month to cover the house payments,” I said. “At least that, and the house is—was—in my name.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” she said. “You should have had your wages paid into a separate account—kept your savings, anything tied up with the property separated—and transferred a smaller amount into the joint account every month.”

The words barely dented my consciousness—there wouldn’t be a next time to use that advice.

The lawyer sighed. “What did he do with the money—do you know?”

I glowered, but only for a second. Julia finished up the routine and I clapped Nina’s hands together in silent applause. “I hear he’s set up a surf school in Hawaii,” I said.

“A surf school?”

“He’s a surf coach,” I said, as if this made it any more justifiable.

“He’s aware you and his daughter are now homeless, I presume?” she asked, and the ensuing silence on the line was either appalled at Aaron for his callousness, or me for my stupidity.

I, personally, veered violently between the two reactions, and had been for several months now.

“I don’t know if I can help you with the money he’s already spent,” the lawyer said, “but I can certainly sue him for child support. He’s listed on the birth certificate, right?”

“Right,” I said.

I paused. Monica came into the kitchen, lifted her brows at the scene and then grinned. Her three children were wrapping me, and Nina, in streamers from a recent birthday party, effectively tying us to a chair.

“Honestly, I don’t know if I have a copy of the final version,” I said finally, “but I sent it to him, in Hawaii, to be signed.”

We ended the call by agreeing that I’d go down to City Hall the following morning to get a copy of the final version of the certificate. This would allow us to petition Aaron. Since most of my belongings were currently in storage, it seemed like the quickest solution to finding the document.

“You should keep that kind of thing somewhere safe,” Monica chided as she headed for the island in the centre of the kitchen.

After extracting us from the chair, I hitched Nina on my hip, watching as Monica’s kids ran out of the room hooting like Indians.

“You need a proper filing system,” she said. “You have to be more organised when you have kids.”

“I challenge anyone to think about paperwork in the first three months after giving birth. I barely remembered to eat some days.”

Grabbing a sack of potatoes from under the sink, she dumped them in the sink and began peeling. “So, what did the lawyer say?”

I explained the gist of the conversation. “I don’t think I’m going to get the money back,” I concluded.

She shook her head, the peeling momentarily forgotten. “What did you ever see in that guy? Why on earth did you take him back?”

The question—or accusation—resounded in me like a guilty gong. Aaron had arrived on my doorstep, charming and apologetic, two days after Jay Fitzsimmons had left for London. “I was at a loose end,” was what I told Monica. “It’s not like I planned to get pregnant.” Inside, I remembered the feeling of utter hopelessness than had descended around that time. “I missed Jay.”

She pursed her lips. “Speaking of the fabulous Mr. Fitzsimmons, did you hear from him again, about that note?”A wicked smile lit her face when I shook my head. She went back to peeling. “That’s so weird!” The frown returned and the peeling stopped again. “It is weird, right? There’s no chance…?”

My stomach clenched, as it did every time that I’d thought about Jay. “Not really,” I said. I shifted in the seat, my hand tingling sore under the cold tap. “I mean—okay, I guess there’s a chance in a million. There’s always a chance in a million if you’re having sex with someone. No method of contraception is fool proof, and the timing isn’t totally off.”

“So, why are you so sure it’s Aaron?” She stared at Nina.

“I told you—the condom split.” I glanced furtively around to make sure there were no reasoning children within earshot. “I should’ve gone to the clinic the next day.” I shook my head. “God, I wish I’d gone to the clinic the next day.”

Nina tapped her chubby hand across my mouth. Filled with sudden anxiety, and pounding fear, I pulled her close and pressed a firm kiss across her cheek. “I can’t believe I just said … I don’t mean that. I just—wish that Aaron wasn’t a part of our lives. How am I going to explain all of this to her when she’s older?”

I swallowed, kissing my daughter’s soft head distractedly. I knew from experience that there was only one thing worse than having no father, and that was having a bad father. Even if Nina grew up well-adjusted—and I hoped to God she did—there was still a chance she’d bear the weight of having been abandoned by Aaron somewhere deep in her psyche. I never wanted her to feel she wasn’t good enough—wasn’t deserving, somehow, of his love.

We worked in silence for a while, Monica preparing the vegetables while I washed and chopped things one-handed. “Are you going to see Jay again?” she asked finally.

It was my turn to purse my lips, unable to resist a smile. Inside I was warring with ambivalence. “Probably not,” I said eventually.

“Why not?”

“He only called me because of the message about Nina.”

“Yeah, and he kissed you, didn’t he?”

I ran hot and cold at the memory.

“You’re the one who said the sex was good.”

Covering Nina’s ears, I feigned shock.

“What?” Monica laughed, though she lowered her voice with a glance at the open doorway. “What are you waiting for? The doctor gave you the all-clear. You’re not with Aaron anymore; you haven’t been for a long time.”

“I’ve just had a baby, Mon,” I said, placing said baby in the seat by the island. I put a dummy in her mouth. “I’m not ready. Not—mentally.”

I certainly wasn’t.

That kiss … my brain hadn’t been ready—at all—for the jolt of arousal, or the overwhelming urge to simply climb on top of Jay in that luxurious car in the middle of 45th Street and fuck him senseless. Like a fuse had blown low down, it had burned up my body and shorted in my brain. I wanted to laugh, nervously, every time I remembered how I’d had to grab him just to—well, to protect him.

Then I’d run. And I didn’t regret it.

Well, okay … maybe I regretted it a little, from time to time, in the middle of the night when my body was aching for—something. Passion? Comfort? Connection?

My time with Jay had been characterised by utter abandonment; we’d lost ourselves in desire—nothing more, and nothing less. It hadn’t been a relationship mired in shared values or common interests. We’d laughed a lot, but only because we didn’t have to care about anything when we were together. I had gone off the deep end a little after he’d gone to London, but I knew, logically, that I wouldn’t get any of the things I yearned for from a casual hook-up with Jay, no matter how satisfying it might be on a physical level.

With everything in such a mess right now, I had to keep my head on more practical matters than physical satisfaction. Today, at any rate. Maybe some distant day in the future I’d be ready to throw caution to the wind again, and hopefully Jay would be around when I did, but not today.

In the meantime, I’d just have to imagine.

#

“Nina Pearl Winters,” I said to the clerk again, raising my voice to shrill levels so that he could hear me through the partition and over the general din. “I called yesterday afternoon and they said I could purchase an extract of the certificate here.”

He took his time as he sat down and angled his screen towards him. He frowned at the computer screen. “How do you spell it?”

I paused. “Nina?” I spelled my daughter’s name.

There was another long pause. “And what was the rest again?” he asked.

“Nina Pearl Winters.”

“How do you spell that?” he asked.

So it went on. After a couple of pauses while he searched the database, unsuccessfully, I stood back and eyed the crowds for something to do. We’d had a change in the temperature this morning, April sun giving way to April showers, and it was freezing again. People were running into the vestibule like they were exiting a ride at a fairground. Inside, the air was damp with stale bureaucracy.