The Rich Man's Baby

She pointed a trembling finger at her brother. “Willie, you saw how he looked at Nat. He’s going to want him.” Her lip trembling uncontrollably, she looked between the two of them. “Don’t you care that he’s my baby? My world? Don’t you care about either one of us?”

“Mom cares enough to give you a roof over your heads and food in your bellies so you don’t have to go to work or school or anything,” Willie shot back.

“So I don’t have to work? Who do you think tends that store out there? When was the last time you stood behind the counter?”

“Hey, I’m scheduled to start on the green chain at Dover Creek,” Willie protested.

Juliet ignored him. “And as far as going to school, you know I can’t afford to go anywhere yet.”

“How do you know, when you’ve never even applied to any schools or tried to get financial aid?” He found an old wound of hers and poked it.

Juliet clamped her teeth together and fought the tears blinding her and the raging swell of helplessness that threatened to strangle her.

“You don’t know a thing about me,” she choked out, then left the kitchen.

The frustration exploded within her, and she started running—through the living room, through the empty store, and out into the dusk-shadowed gravel parking lot. She mentally winced when the busted screen door hit the wall after she blasted through the door. She prayed the bang didn’t wake her baby. But she didn’t stop running. She knew if Nat cried out her mother or Willie would go to him. At least she could count on them for that.

With barely a glance in either direction at the lights of oncoming traffic, Juliet darted across the two-lane highway and plunged down the embankment. She followed the well-worn trail until it ended at the stone-strewn edge of the McKenzie River.

Taking her usual seat on a smooth boulder, she tried to focus on the dark water slipping by, to let the steadiness of the river seep into her soul and smooth the rough edges of her pain like it had smoothed the rocks around her, but her tears made it impossible. Juliet buried her face in her hands and let loose the body-racking sobs she’d been doing such a lousy job of containing.

She was being pitiful and feeling sorry for herself, but she didn’t care. At this precise moment she didn’t have the strength to care. She’d think of a way to keep her baby out of everyone’s clutches later. Right now she just wanted to cry and curse the day she’d fallen for Harrison Rivers and taken the one and only chance of her miserable life.

Chapter Three

A blur of sun-blond hair and bare limbs dashed through Harrison’s headlights. He shoved his foot down hard on the brake pedal and swore.

Thank heavens he’d already been slowing to turn off into the gravel parking lot of the little store. If he’d been going full speed, he wasn’t sure he could have stopped in time. Twilight was a dangerous time to drive as it was, without crazed females bolting out in front of him.

He didn’t have to look twice to know the woman who’d nearly become his hood ornament had been Juliet, but he did look to see where she entered the underbrush and disappeared over the edge of the road.

Finishing his turn into the parking lot, Harrison brought his Porsche to a stop alongside the rusted gas pump. After leaving his father and grandmother at home, he had jumped in his car and headed back up the river. He’d told himself he was coming to see his child, his boy—but after seeing Juliet blaze across the street without so much as a look-see, he acknowledged he’d come to see her. He needed to make sure she didn’t hold some power over him beyond the comfort she’d unwittingly given him during his time of grief two years ago.

Getting out of his car, Harrison spared a glance at the storefront. While the white-and-red plastic sign read Open, the interior of the building stood dark except for a glow coming from the rear. Somebody better be in there, because his little boy certainly hadn’t been in his momma’s arms when she’d darted in front of Harrison’s car.

But as he started across the parking lot toward the road, the image of Juliet tucking their baby’s head under her chin flitted through his mind again. Somehow he doubted she’d leave Nathan unattended. Obviously she loved the child.

His child.

The knot that had formed in his stomach earlier today tightened. He hoped talking to Juliet about what had happened would loosen it a bit. Though her reaction to his declaration of paternity made him certain this talk wouldn’t be congenial, he had to make her see he wouldn’t settle for less than what was best for their son. And he firmly believed disappearing back down the highway for good wasn’t in Nathan’s best interest.

Taking considerably more care crossing the two-lane highway than Juliet had, Harrison jogged across the street, then started down what seemed to be a trail through the blackberry bushes and other underbrush growing on the embankment. His leather-soled loafers proved slick on the gravel-strewn dirt path, and the waning light made it difficult to pick his way down the trail, so he was forced to catch himself with his hand several times to keep from sliding down the incline on his rear.

The soft murmur of the river confirmed his suspicion of the trail’s destination, right before he emerged from the bank’s growth onto the rocks at the river’s edge. The paleness of the stones reflected what light still hovered in the air, so Harrison had no trouble spotting Juliet. Her slender back to him, she sat huddled atop a thigh-high boulder, her arms folded on her drawn-up knees and her head resting on her forearms.

What he had initially thought was another sound of the river turned out to be Juliet crying. Her soft, soul-wrenching sobs touched him so deeply he clenched his jaw against the sensation. She was crying because of him. He knew it.

Seized with the urge to comfort her, just as he had been compelled to be a part of her two years ago so she could comfort him, Harrison made his way toward her. One of his loafers slipped off a poorly chosen rock and his foot plunged into a small, stagnant pool of orphaned river. The splash sounded like a shotgun blast.

Juliet’s head jerked up and she swiveled on the rock toward him. She stared at him, her posture like a mouse caught in a hawk’s sights. A full minute passed, and he was about to identify himself when she finally spoke.

“You.” That one word held a wealth of recrimination and mistrust. “What do you want?”

Feeling like an invader of sanctuary, Harrison raised a hand, palm up, toward her. “We need to talk.”

With stiff, jerky movements, she turned to face the river again and pulled her knees up tighter to her chest. “We have absolutely nothing to talk about.”

Harrison drew in a fortifying breath of river-moistened air and started toward her once again, only to realize he still had one foot ankle-deep in water. Releasing the breath with a sigh, he extracted his sodden foot from the puddle and gave it a shake. Nothing about this was going to be easy. Absolutely nothing. But he had to make her listen. Not only for Nathan’s sake, but for their sake, too. They had to put to rest what had happened between them so they could move forward as rational adults.

Not caring anymore where he stepped, Harrison moved to her side. This close, he could easily make out the features of her profile. As before, he was struck by her loveliness. Little wonder he’d never completely forgotten her. Seeing her, free from the earlier distractions, Harrison confirmed again that he’d had very good reasons for never contacting her. She was more than a threat to his vow to never care about a woman enough that he lost control of his emotions; she was an all-out assault.

Not even the hardness of her expression diminished her effect on him. Once again he found himself wanting to get lost in her, to forget about the burdens he carried, the frustrations he bore. He wanted to meld with her and not have to manage or dictate or supervise, but just be.

Damn it.

Thank God he wasn’t the same irresponsible man he’d been over two years ago. He couldn’t allow himself to give in to the out-of-control desire he apparently still harbored. He was stronger now. He could risk having her in his life. As the mother of his child. Nothing more.

“Juliet,” he whispered. Her knees dropped away from her chest an inch or two, as if the sound of her name on his lips weakened her defenses. “Juliet, please. It’s just you and me here. You don’t have to pretend. We need to talk about our son.”

She finally looked at him, but in the failing light he couldn’t identify the emotion in her tear-swollen eyes. “He’s my son. Not ours. Not anybody’s but mine.”

He heard what he hadn’t been able to see. The tortured strain of her voice told him what she was feeling, why she’d been crying. He wasn’t surprised when she pulled her knees up tight against her again. She was feeling besieged.

“Look, Juliet, I know how you feel. I know you’re afraid. Of what, I’m not exactly sure, but—”

“Oh, so you know how I feel? How is that? Considering you don’t even know me.”

His empathy beginning to give way to frustration, he leaned in close. “You and I both know how well I know you.”

She jerked away from him like she’d been slapped. Harrison pulled back and let out a noisy breath. He was doing this all wrong. She would never let him help her if she stayed mad at him. He needed to make up for the damage he’d done before he found out about Nathan.

“I’m sorry, Juliet. Today has been a little trying for me, too. It’s not every day a man walks into a store to buy gum and walks out a father. So forgive me if I’m not as patient or as understanding as I should be.”

She turned to look at him again. “Is that the only reason you stopped? For gum?”

Harrison squinted hard at her, trying to cut through the gloom to see what emotion swam in her dark eyes. He wanted to be sure that he had been right earlier, that she had been waiting for him to come back for her. The possibility revived the wildness he’d felt then. He did his damnedest to clamp a lid on it.

Planting his hands on his hips, he shifted his weight to his squishy, wet shoe. “Well, since I’m trying to get you to be honest, I suppose I have to tell you the truth, too.” He shifted his weight back and softened the truth considerably. “No. I didn’t stop to get gum. I came up here because a stupid, silly part of me was hoping to see again the beautiful, barefoot woman I’d never been able to forget.”

He could just make out the narrowing of her eyes. “A stupid, silly part of you?”

So she suffered from a touch of vanity. Good. He was powerless against her stubbornness and strength of will, but vanity he could work with. Despite the fact he would be testing his control to the max, he’d have her agreeing to let him be a part of Nathan’s life yet.

He leaned toward her, ignoring how her fresh, clean smell filled his head and opened the door to all sorts of physical needs. “The stupid, silly part of me who still scans the sky for eight tiny reindeer on Christmas Eve and makes a wish when I blow out my birthday candles.”

Her lips parted slightly, then she tightened them and frowned. “But what about when you said you wished I had left for college and gotten married?”

“I panicked,” he lied. He couldn’t very well tell her he’d meant to squash the hope shining in her eyes. “You were so beautiful standing there, more beautiful than I’d remembered, and I felt like a bastard for not coming back.”

Her hold on her legs went slack and her knees dropped away from her chest again. This time nearly a foot.

He let the silence build for a while before he broke it. “Why didn’t you let me know I’d made you pregnant, Juliet? Why didn’t you tell me I had a child?”

“How could I? I didn’t know who you were,” she whispered, then pulled her knees back up.

Rife with regret, he ran a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry. I am so sorry.” He had to make her understand that he hadn’t used her, that what had happened between them hadn’t been about sex. It had been about trying to focus on life instead of death, about being free of the sorrows and pressures of his existence for a moment or two.

He reached out and laid a hand on her shoulder, the material of her white T-shirt doing a poor job of keeping at bay the memory of the texture of her skin. “I’ve thought about you, and our time together, a lot. It’s not that I didn’t want to come back…but…” He fumbled for an explanation that wasn’t as insulting as the bald truth. “But my responsibilities made it impossible for me to come see you again.”

“Because I’m from—” she made quotation marks in the air with her fingers “—the wrong side of the tracks.” Her words virtually dripped with disgust. “I’m sort of curious. Why did you come anywhere near me in the first place?”

“It mostly had to do with my mother.” He surprised himself with his truthful answer. He’d never talked about how his mother’s death had affected him with anyone. His family knew, but they never spoke of that time. There was something about Juliet that made him step beyond the boundaries he set for himself. Something he’d avoid if he were smart.

She gave him a sarcastically doleful look. “Your mother.”

Compelled to defend himself after making such a ridiculous-sounding statement, he explained, “About the time I returned home from school to start at Two Rivers, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had the most radical surgery available and came through the chemo okay, so we figured she’d be fine.”

He ran a hand over his eyes and fought to push down the swell of pain. The pain was precisely why he never spoke of those terrible days. “After a couple of years, the cancer came back, though, and it spread everywhere…”

An image came to mind of his mom, pale and shaking with pain. “She used to refuse the morphine so she would be lucid enough to talk to me about how work was going when I returned home in the evening. I did my damnedest to always have good news for her.

“She was so angry with me when I refused to go to the office near the end. She wanted me to be an even bigger success running the family business than my father, but there was no way I wasn’t going to be with her, to help her fight for her life.”

He shook his head sadly at his inability to help her. The cancer proved stronger than his bright, vibrant mother, and she’d slipped away. “Everyone except my dad was there with her when she died. He couldn’t handle seeing it happen. I couldn’t handle it afterward, so I took off on my motorcycle for a week and ended up here.”

He paused, struggling to put the pain back in the dark pit where it belonged. “It’s never good to love someone so much that you lose control like that.”

He felt the warmth of her fingers, then her palm as she slipped her hand over his forearm, her touch more comforting than anything he’d ever felt. He slowly swayed toward her, wanting to wrap himself around her and absorb her like a balm for his hurt. But she broke the contact and forced him back to the difficult reality of the situation.

He shoved his hands in his pockets and cleared his throat. “The reason I didn’t come back was that I had to devote all my time and energy to running my family’s paper producing company. Now that I know about Nathan, I promise, from here on out I’ll do whatever I can to make everything right. I intend to be a father to Nathan. I will live up to my responsibilities and provide for him in every way. I—”

“Whoa, whoa. Hold on.” She slid her feet off the boulder and stood. “What do you mean, be a father to Nat? Live up to your responsibilities? Provide for him?” Her voice gained in volume. “If you think you can just show up here with your sad stories,” her voice cracked, but she continued, “after deciding my baby looks like you, and take him away, you’ve got another thing com—”

“Now you whoa. I never said anything about taking Nathan away from you.”

“Maybe not now, but later…”

“No.” He said the words with the echo of this afternoon’s conversation with his father and grandmother still in his head.

“That’s right. Because you’re not Nathan’s father!” she shouted and turned toward the trail.

He caught hold of her arm, instinctively pulling her tight against him. He couldn’t seem to touch her without wanting to touch all of her. She trembled against him, and he instantly lightened his grip to a caress. “Please, not that again. Can’t you—”

“Nat and I were doing fine until you showed up.” She stepped away and yanked her arm from his hand. “We don’t need a thing from you.”

“He needs a father.”

“Well, you’re not him,” she stated, and headed for the path to the road.

He watched until she disappeared in the underbrush and then he buried both hands in his hair. That hadn’t gone the way it should have. Not one damn bit.

He should have focused more on what he could do for Nathan, on how easily he could improve their child’s life by moving them to the estate. Surely she’d want what was best for Nathan. He knew he sure as hell did, and he’d only had Nathan in his life for a day.

Unfortunately, after having Juliet back in his life for a day, he feared what was best for Nathan would not be best for Nathan’s parents.

“WE GOTTA LEAVE. We gotta leave,” Juliet chanted to herself in a panting whisper as she mounted the stairs to her room. Her heart slammed around in her chest, and her breath did a rotten job clearing her throat.

Forcing her mind to concentrate on what she needed to do wasn’t easy with Harrison’s words reverberating in her ears. He needs a father, he’d said. A father who didn’t want the mother. He would decide she wasn’t good enough, then take her baby away.

She wouldn’t let him. She would pack their things, bundle Nat up in his quilt, and go. Problem solved, she thought as she quietly opened the door and slipped into the room crowded by Nathan’s crib, her narrow bed and a single dresser.

But he only said he’d wished you’d left and gone to college because he felt bad about not coming back. You might still have a chance with him.

She shook her head at such nonsense and forced the tiny voice that had kept her hopes alive back into the bruised corner of her heart where it belonged.

Quietly moving to the crib, she checked on Nat. Seeing her baby—curled in a little ball around the quilt she’d made for him, his breath coming in tiny, even huffs—eased the tightness in her throat and allowed her to breathe again. But while the tightness eased at the sight of Nat’s sweet back, in its place was something as debilitating—the pain of a mother’s love. She loved her child with an intensity that invaded every pore and threatened to twist her guts till they were of no use to her anymore. She couldn’t lose him.

Keeping an eye on her sleeping toddler, Juliet tiptoed to the side of her bed and got down on her hands and knees. After groping about beneath the old bed, she retrieved her lone duffel bag and put it on top of her faded yellow comforter. The duffel wasn’t very big, but she and Nathan didn’t have much. They had each other, and that was enough.

She yanked open the top drawer of the dresser. Scooping up an armful of Nathan’s little undershirts, footed pajamas and socks, Juliet shoved the clothes unceremoniously into the duffel.

Harrison Rivers couldn’t waltz in and lay claim to her child. Especially not for whatever price her own family naively decided on. Nor did he have any right to come back into her life and make her want things she now knew she could never have with him. He was worth millions, and she was worth, well, at the moment, not much.

Whatever had led him to deal with his grief by slipping his hand into hers that early summer day more than two years ago had apparently faded or he got over it or he came to his senses, or something.

The nasty little voice that camped out in her brain whispered, The only thing that made him touch you back then was your willing smile.

She stubbornly shook her head again as she packed the duffel. It hadn’t been like that. They’d talked; they’d connected in a very profound way. They just hadn’t talked much about things like names or jobs or inheritances.

Or futures.

She had foolishly allowed herself to live in the moment, to take a chance. To dream.

Now that dream of one day being with him again was being taken away from her by the realities of their lives. She didn’t belong in his world, but she didn’t belong in hers, either. She’d never had the guts to face that fact before. She’d never had the guts to face a lot of things.

Struggling to ward off a fresh torrent of tears, Juliet went back to the dresser. She and Nathan didn’t need to stay here in her world. Not when her family couldn’t see past their greed. With a hip to the bottom edge of the drawer to keep the broken front from falling to the floor, she pulled the second drawer open and emptied it of Nathan’s overalls and sweats. She used the same hip to push the drawer closed.

Her reflection in the mirror above the dresser caught her attention. Nathan’s bunny lamp gave off enough light that she could see a dirty handprint on her shoulder. Harrison was still leaving his mark on her.

She didn’t want a man who popped into her life and made her believe in things that didn’t exist. Like soul mates and knights in shining armor. She curled her lip at the thought. The guy just said he never wanted to love someone so much it cost him his control.

She and Nat would simply leave. She stuffed her armload into the bag. The two of them would go so far away no one would ever find them, no matter how rich he might be.

The thought of riches made Juliet pause before going back to the dresser to collect her few belongings. Instead, she knelt and pulled a large, dented, Dutch shortbread cookie tin from beneath the bed. Popping the lid open, she released a quiet sob and sat on her heels to stare at the white envelope resting on top of a battered, leather-bound volume of Shakespeare’s works.

A faded Polaroid of her and her grandpa marked the page he’d been reading to her right before he died. Her grief hadn’t allowed her to open the book since. Missing a loved one was probably the only thing besides Nathan she and Harrison had in common.

Looking at the envelope, she didn’t need to pick it up and count how much money was inside. She knew exactly how much it held, exactly how much she’d managed to squirrel away since she’d convinced her mom to pay her minimum wage out of any profits the store made. Unfortunately, lately there rarely were any.

At one point she’d had close to five thousand dollars saved in that envelope. Five thousand dollars saved for college, for the school she’d been trying to screw up the courage to apply to.

Then she’d had Nat and had started dipping into the envelope to pay for things. Important things like the hospital, trips to the doctor, his crib and car seat. And that cute, fuzzy, blue snowsuit with bear ears that she’d bought when it had been so cold last winter. Juliet’s gaze rose to the open duffel. And those overalls embroidered all over with little trains he loved so much. Important things like that.

Now her envelope contained exactly $249. They wouldn’t get far on so little. Not far at all. Nat might even end up in danger. She’d rather die.

She slid her hand beneath the envelope to satisfy her ritual of tracing the tired lines of her grandfather’s face peeking out above the book. Fresh tears streamed down her cheeks. Quietly she replaced the lid of the old cookie tin with a hollow snap.

Grandpa would have told her to fight for what was hers. He wouldn’t have stood for this running-away nonsense, either. Grandpa would have gone toe-to-toe with anyone who’d tried to mess with his family. Shoot, he’d done as much when the state had made noises about taking her away from her own mother back when Mom couldn’t declare which of her boyfriends had fathered Juliet. At least that’s how he’d told the story.

No, Grandpa wouldn’t want his granddaughter sitting on the floor crying because she didn’t have enough money to run away. He’d want her to fight.