“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.