My Baby, Your Son

There is so much I didn’t know, she thought wearily. And such a lot that Jared knew nothing of. Why couldn’t he have been reasonable? Why couldn’t he at least have given her a chance?

She closed her eyes and tried to gather strength. The confrontation had drained her, left her raw. It was exactly the kind of thing she had been told by her doctor to avoid.

Rest, rest, and still more rest was what he had prescribed after her collapse on the concert stage in the middle of her most recent tour. Exhaustion had been cited as the cause. April had been ordered to take a minimum of three months off.

It had caused a rescheduling nightmare, this breakdown of hers. Her mother had had to pull strings, call in all sorts of favors, to arrange for this inconvenient—Grace’s word— hiatus.

“We’ll lose a fortune in ticket sales,” she had fumed, pacing the floor of the Paris hotel suite. Though April was sitting right there on the brocaded settee, it was Dr. Shi- mons and Marcus Bingham she was addressing. “Not to mention the damage to April’s reputation should it get out that she’s a temperamental diva, an unreliable performer. Really, April, are you sure?”

“Positive,” the doctor had said in April’s stead.

To which Marcus, who had rushed to Paris from Beijing when he’d heard of his sister’s collapse, had added, “If you’d stop being April’s manager long enough to be her mother, Mother, maybe you’d have recognized the state of her exhaustion and this so-called calamity could have been avoided. Though personally I think it’s the best thing that could’ve happened to her.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning she’s a human being, Mother, not a robot. When was the last time you allowed her more than a one- week break?”

“When she asked for it,” Grace had snapped. “Which she is too much of a professional to do very often. April knows she is getting on—”

“Oh, yeah—she’s in her dotage.”

“And that younger talent is constantly nipping at her heels. She can’t afford to rest on her laurels.”

“Not that you’d let her….”

Even now, thousands of miles away and standing in front of a hardware store, April shivered at the harshness of the exchange between mother and son. Mark was one of the few people whom Grace couldn’t intimidate, bully or de- feat, but their arguments always made April cringe. Espe- cially when, as was often the case, she was the cause or subject of it.

Mark was her twin; but he was also her best, her only, friend. Grace—which she insisted Mark and April call her—was her mother, her manager, but more than that, her taskmaster. Relentless, unceasing, she had always de- manded everything April had it in her to give. And then just a little bit more.

Only Mark ever dared to try to interfere with Grace’s ruthless ambition. Only Mark seemed to recognize the price for it April had paid all her life. But even he had never been able to slow Grace down. Though not for lack of trying.

Dear, grouchy Marcus. Older than she by several minutes, he took his role as older brother very seriously. During her summers at Cliff House, where he had lived with their Aunt Marjorie all year round, Mark had always defended her against the teasing and taunts of some of the rougher kids in town. Kids who called the shy, bookish girl from New York who didn’t even know how to swim or play catch, dumb. Or stuck-up.

But never when Mark was around. Or Jared. Or even….

“Colleen?” Startled because it seemed as though her thoughts had conjured her up, April stared into the face of the woman stepping out of the store.

“Hello, April.” Hostility laced the voice and turned the otherwise unchanged face of her girlhood friend into that of a stranger. “I saw you out here with my brother. Haven’t you done enough?”

“W-what?” April stammered, shocked by the unex- pected attack.

“You heard me.” Obviously distraught, Colleen pressed a hand to her throat. A diamond-studded wedding band winked in the sun. “Why have you come back? What do you want?”

For a moment April couldn’t speak. Even you, she thought, and somehow the pain of Colleen’s rejection sliced even deeper than Jared’s had done. Perhaps because in the olden days, in Colleen’s eyes at least, April had been able to do no wrong.

“Do you have children, Colleen?” It hurt to speak.

And the non sequitur obviously took the other woman aback. “Why…yes, I…” She gestured distractedly toward the door behind her. “Ralph and I have a daughter.”

“Ah.” April nodded, her gaze briefly shifting to the sign above the door. Simpson Hardware. Of course. April re- membered then—Ralph Simpson. He and Colleen had dated that last summer, that same fateful summer when she and Jared…

“How old is she?”

“Five.”

“Do you love her?”

“Well, of course. What a question. But…look. April—” Clearly agitated, Colleen came a step closer. “Don’t do this.”

“Do what?” Anger was a welcome change from the hurt. “What am I doing, Colleen, that you yourself—as a mother—wouldn’t do in my shoes?”

“Well, for one thing…” Colleen’s eyes, so much like her brother’s in their brilliant indigo blue color, sparked now with indignation and resentment. “I would never have given up my child in the first place.”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t.” Defeated, suddenly, and un- bearably weary, April thought, What’s the use? Still, before turning to go, she added quietly, “ But then, knowingly, I wouldn’t have, either.”

“Confound it, Conan, that’s not what I called you to hear.”

Raking a hand through his hair and letting it rest on the back of his neck, Jared paced the narrow confines of his father’s den like one of the restless cats in his boarding kennel.

From the other end of the line, the eldest O’Neal off- spring was sounding equally incensed. “Then get yourself another lawyer and bankrupt yourself,” he shouted. “Not to mention devastate your son. My advice stands.” Click.

Jared winced as Conan abruptly broke the connection. Perching on the edge of the desk, he let out a sigh of ex- asperation. Damned hothead! Cradling the cordless phone in his hands, he scowled down at it.

“What?” his mother prompted. Knitting, she sat by the open window through which a desultory breeze was trying valiantly to cool the room. The day had been uncommonly hot.

Jared didn’t look up from his dark contemplation of the phone. “He hung up on me.”

“That’s not what Mom’s asking.” Colleen, carrying a tray of glasses in one hand and a frosted pitcher of lem- onade in the other, walked into the room. “We want to know what he said you should do about April and that letter from New York.”

“Why? So you can gossip about it with all of your friends?”

“What?” Colleen exchanged a bewildered glance with her mother and demanded, “What are you talking about?”

“Nothing.” Jared gestured impatiently with his hand as he belatedly realized this was hardly the time to vent his ire about the conversation between the two woman that Tyler had overheard. It would only make this miserable day more hellish still. “I’m just mad, that’s all.”

“So tell us why. What did Conan say that’s got you so bent out of shape?”

“He says, ‘Go along with it.’ Says, ‘Don’t try to fight it.’ Or her!”

Frustrated, Jared waved away the glass of lemonade Col- leen held out. Too restless to sit, he once again paced. “Can you beat that? After giving away her kid, after nine years of nothing, the woman waltzes back into our lives with the intention of staking a claim and, according to some fancy New York lawyer, it would behoove me to let her get away with it if I don’t want to find myself hauled into court.”

Gripping the window frame, he stared out into the night

“With which Conan agrees,” Maeve stated rather than asked. She put aside her knitting and caught her son’s free hand. “Jared.” Gently, she uncurled the fist he had formed. “Would it be so bad?”

“Yes.” Vehement, Jared bent and gripped his mother’s shoulders. His eyes bored into hers. “Mom, you were there.”

“Yes, I was.”

“He was tiny.”

“Not much more than a handful,” Maeve quietly agreed. She returned Jared’s burning gaze with one that was loving and true.

Because his eyes threatened to fill, Jared closed them. He hung his head. His hands spasmodically squeezed his mother’s shoulders. “He was only hours old when they gave him to you, remember? Completely helpless. Needy. Damn it, Mom—” With a strangled sound of anguish, Jar- ed straightened and turned away. His fingers speared into his hair and stayed there as he tilted his head toward the ceiling.

“How could she do it?” he asked raggedly. “Tyler needed her. He could have died. How could she just…give away her own child?”

“She says she didn’t,” Colleen hesitantly put in. “When I challenged her on it today, she told me she didn’t do it willingly.”

She winced when Jared rounded on her with a snarl. “So unwillingly makes it all right?”

“Well, it certainly puts a different light on things.”

“If it’s true.” Jared leveled a finger at his sister. “And since when are you back to being her champion?”

“I’m not That is…” Averting her eyes from Jared’s accusing ones, Colleen sought support from their mother. “I guess I want to believe her, Mom. She seemed so gen- uinely…broken up. I felt—”

“Sorry for her?” Jared smacked his palm against the windowsill with a snort of disgust. “You always were a bleeding heart, sis, where April Bingham was concerned.”

“And you weren’t?” It was Maeve who asked that ques- tion, shocking Jared into swinging around to stare at her.

Erect and still formidable, Maeve stared back. “All those years when that poor little girl would come to us seeking refuge from that harridan of a mother, who was it went out of his way to comfort and amuse her when Colleen was not around?”

Maeve leveled a finger at his chest “You, Jared. You always had time for her, always understood her. Shielded her. Coddled her. There was nothing, you said, you wouldn’t do for her. And she for you.”

“Mother—”

“No, Jared,” Maeve cut short her son’s attempt to in- terrupt. “You’re my son and I love you. I stood by you and so did your father, God rest him, throughout that whole mess. But that doesn’t change the fact that you were not blameless in all that transpired. You were twenty years old. You knew what an innocent April was, for all she was seventeen. You also knew she worshiped the ground you walked on and would give you anything you asked, in- cluding…”

Too straitlaced to speak of sex, even to her grown chil- dren, Maeve faltered. With a wave of the hand, she settled for, “Well, you know what I mean. She loved you, Jared.”

“I loved her, too,” Jared flared. “And kindly remember I’m not the villain in this piece.”

“But you’re sure that April is?” Maeve had come to stand beside him at the window.

Behind them, Colleen noisily blew her nose. “You should have told her you’d marry her.”

“Oh, sure.” Jared’s short laugh was bitter. “I tried that, remember? And got tossed out on my ear.”

“You should have told her right away. And you’ll recall it wasn’t April who sent you packing.”

“Oh, no.” It was galling to realize the memory still hurt. “As always, she let her mother handle that little unpleas- antness.”

“Jared.” Taking Jared’s callused hand in her own work- toughened one, Maeve gazed down at her son with sorrow- ing reproof. “You know as well as I do that no one lets Grace Rhinegold do anything, least of all April. Grace just does, and let nobody dare try and stop her.”

She waited for Jared to meet her eyes. “It was Grace who handed me the baby, son, in that posh and private London clinic. I never told you this because you never wanted to hear the details, and anyway I thought, What was the point?”

“So why are you telling me now, Ma?” Jared didn’t like the direction this conversation was taking. After all these years of blaming April, despising April, was he now ex- pected to forgive and forget?

Angry, suddenly, he shook off his mother’s hands, rounding on her and Colleen. “Why are the two of you all of a sudden working so hard to convince me that she is the victim here instead of me?”

“We’re not,” Colleen exclaimed defensively. She wiped at her cheeks. “It’s just that—”

“It’s just that there’s more to consider here than your hurt feelings or April’s,” Maeve interrupted with some im- patience. “As far as I’m concerned, Tyler’s well-being is the only thing that matters.”

“Which is exactly my point!” Jared leveled a rigid fin- ger at his mother. “What do you think it’s going to do to Tyler when after a month, two months, or three, the famous Ms. Bingham gets tired of languishing in our backwater town and bored with playing Mom, and hightails it back to the bright lights? Huh?”

He grimly forestalled the defense he saw Maeve draw breath to offer. “Which she will.”

“And if she doesn’t?”

“She will.” Convinced of it, Jared stared hard at his mother in an effort to convince her, too. He noted with a pang that his father’s death had scarred his mother’s face, just as the simultaneous death of Regina had irrevocably scarred his own soul. Though not for the same reason.

“She will,” he repeated, but quietly this time. Loving his mother for all she was and all she had done for him— and for Tyler—Jared bent and kissed her cheek. “I’m sorry, Ma, but I’d stake my life on that.”

“But, son,” Maeve’s hand kept him from straightening. “Don’t you see? If you fight her, it’s not your life that you’re putting at stake. It’s Tyler’s.”

They looked at each for a long time, mother and son, as the truth of Maeve’s words wrestled with the bitterness in Jared’s soul. And when, with an oath, Jared finally straight- ened and turned away, Maeve gestured to Colleen and qui- etly led the way out of the room.

Chapter Three

April was lying down with an ice pack on her head when the phone rang. Even though she had set the volume control at the lowest setting, the whirring sound reverberated through her head with all the force of one of Mozart’s cres- cendos. Not since the collapse that led up to this prescribed rest period had she suffered a migraine of this magnitude. She had felt it coming on in the aftermath of her encounter with Jared O’Neal and Colleen Simpson. The stress, her overwrought state, all were like poison to her constitution. Only the hope that the call might be about Tyler motivated her to pick up the phone. Indeed, it was the only reason she had not unplugged it.

Gagging back nausea, she kept her head as still as pos- sible as she groped for the handset on the low table next to her with her eyes closed. “‘Lo?”

“Hello, er…April?”

Jared. April tensed. Pain lacerated her skull. It seared both of her eyes like a hot poker and drove an involuntary groan from her lips.

“What’s the matter?” Something like alarm sharpened Jared’s tone. It assaulted April’s ears and head like a ham- mer blow. “April?”

“Please,” she croaked. “Not so loud.”

“Are you sick?” Jared asked in a more moderate tone that—incongruously to April—held an unmistakable note of concern.

“M-migraine,” April whispered hoarsely. “But never mind that T-Tyler?”

“Yes.” Jared cleared his throat. “He’s, uh…. Well, he’s the reason I’m calling. But look, it can wait until—”

“No…” Heedless of her head, dizzy with pain, April rose up on one elbow as though that would lend force to her whispered plea. “Please. Is it all right? Are you going to let me see him? Talk to him? When?”

“Well, it can’t be right away.”

Not right away? Gasping, her disappointment an even more devastating pain than the one in her head, April col- lapsed back against the pillows.

“You see, he’s gone camping with my sister Leslie’s family for a couple of days.” There was a pause that gave April time to realize—and appreciate—the fact that Jared was trying to establish some sort of rapport. His next words bore that out.

“You remember Leslie,” he said with a strained, self- conscious little chuckle. “She’s the one who was always practicing the clarinet in the hayloft and spooking the cows.”

“Yes…” April also recalled that Leslie was two years older than Jared, the second oldest, after Conan, of the six O’Neal offspring.

“They’ll be back Wednesday or Thursday.”

Two more days, maybe three. It seemed like such a long time. Though she knew it was foolish—she had waited this long, what did a couple more days matter?—April felt tears of disappointment sting the backs of her eyes.

She refused to let them fall, even when Jared added to the devastating letdown by saying, “And I’ll also need some time to talk to him. I need to prepare him. I mean, he knows you exist, but we can’t just spring your imminent entrance into his life on him out of the blue.”

“I understand.” The suppressed tears constricted her voice. “You’ll, um…you’ll let me know?”

“Right.”

“Thank you,” April whispered, but Jared had already severed the connection.

With a tremulous sigh, April let the phone slip out of her hand. She lay perfectly still, letting the fact that Jared had decided not to fight her soothe her like a balm.

Not till a pool of water had collected in each of her ears did she realize that holding back the tears hadn’t worked.

At his end, Jared, too, was distraught. It had been a dif- ficult phone call to make on all levels. He put down the phone and, with his elbows propped on his father’s desk, cradled his head in his hands, thinking, I don’t think I can do this. I don’t want to do this.

He didn’t want to trust April. Didn’t want to risk Tyler getting hurt. But most of all he didn’t want to get sucked in once again by April Bingham and her problems. He didn’t want to care.

“Damn.” Pinching the narrow spot between his eyes, he bowed his head and sucked in a number of ragged breaths.

So she still got those headaches. Was he to blame for this one?

Jared dug his nails into his scalp, remembering the first time he had seen her with one. He had been looking for her to ask her to go swimming. Her aunt had come to the door.

“I don’t know, Jared,” Marje had said in that elegant British way of hers. “April is terribly upset.”

“What happened?”

“Her mother rang. From England. She announced her imminent arrival—she’ll be here two days from now—and I’m afraid April isn’t taking it well. She was so enjoying her holiday, poor lamb.”

And now it’ll be back to the salt mines, Jared had thought. “Where is she?”

“April? She fled upstairs to her room, white as a sheet.”

“Can I see her? Please?”

Marje had considered this for a moment before tossing up her hand. “Sure. Why not. If anyone can cheer her, it’ll be you.”

As Jared bounded up the stairs, she had called after him, “Mind, you leave the bedroom door open!”

Jared knocked on the door, then right away pushed it open and stuck in his head. “April?”

No answer. A quick scan of the room revealed that it was empty. Puzzled—maybe she’d gone to the bath- room?—he’d hovered in the doorway, and that’s when he heard it. A keening sort of whimper. And it came from the direction of the closet.

Two strides took him there. He wrenched open the door. There was April. Curled into a tight little ball with her arms wrapped around her head, rocking, moaning.

“April. Honey…” Dropping to his knees, Jared reached for her.

“No…” She shrank away, curling more tightly into her- self. “The d-door…the light…oh, please….”

Jared had crawled into the closet with her, closed the door, and held her. Held her….

But who was holding her now? Who had held her all the times in between until the pain went away?

Damn you, April Bingham. Jared leapt to his feet and charged out of his father’s den as though pursued by a stampede of cattle. I don’t want this, you hear me? Not again. Never again.

He ran to the stable and, hands shaking, saddled his horse. Only one thing could get his emotions and priorities back where they belonged—a long, hard ride through the surf.

But it didn’t help this time. April Bingham stayed with him as though he were holding her in the saddle in front of him the way he had so often done in the past.

And when, hours later, he cantered past the stairs that led from the beach up to Cliff House and saw April stand- ing up on the cliff, silhouetted against the purpling sky, he knew his emotional troubles had only begun.

“He is cooperating,” April said to her attorney who had called to follow up on the letter to Jared he had copied her on. “Or, at least, that’s more or less what he indicated to me two days ago.”

“More or less?” Greg Hoskins queried. “What does that mean?”

“Well…” April quickly related details of her phone con- versation with Jared, ending with, “I haven’t seen or talked to him since.”

“Any chance he’s intending to renege?”

“No.”

“You sound pretty sure for a woman who’s been be- trayed the way you have.”

“Oh, I am sure,” April said. “And anyway, I’ve since found out that Jared wasn’t…I mean, he apparently didn’t know. Well, I’m just sure,” she said again when it occurred to her that Jared’s ignorance of the fact that she had not been responsible for Tyler’s release for adoption was irrel- evant with regard to her attorney.

“Does this newfound confidence in Dr. O’Neal mean you no longer deem it necessary to investigate him?”

“Well, no…. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to make sure we’ve covered all the bases.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that, Ms. Bingham. Wouldn’t want any unpleasant surprises at some future date, would we?”

“No.” Disturbed, April gnawed on her thumbnail. “Jar- ed would not be pleased if he found out we were doing this.”

“Perhaps not,” the attorney allowed. “However, there’s no reason to think that he would. Find out, I mean. These things are handled with discretion and confidentiality, if that’s what’s worrying you.”

“Hmm.” April bit down on her nail too hard and, vexed with herself, jerked her hand away. She had half a mind to cancel the investigation after all. She had still been reeling from all she’d found out and girding herself for battle, so to speak, when she had authorized it initially. Discover the opponent’s weaknesses and capitalize on them, had been the rationale. The way things stood now, however…

She sighed. “Well, if you’re sure it won’t cause prob- lems?”

“Positive.”

The word went around and around in April’s head like a circling vulture for quite some time that afternoon. Maybe she should have called the thing off.

Still fretting about it as she left the post office later that afternoon—a substitute had been in for Jean Ivers, thank God—and feeling another headache coming on, she finally told herself—Enough.

If Jared had nothing to hide, he would never know she’d had him checked out. And in the unlikely event something objectionable should turn up, then, well—

Childish shouts and laughter abruptly snagged April’s attention.

“Hey, Charlie, watch this!”

“Heck, that’s nothin’, man!”

Turning her head toward the sound, she realized she was at the school yard where the Gulls played baseball. Sure enough, several uniformed youngsters were already on the field, tossing balls, swinging bats, warming up for a game or practice.

A leap of excitement quickened April’s pulse. Eagerly, wondering if Tyler would by chance be one of the kids, she looked around more closely. And there—her heart skipped a beat—there he was.

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