But still, just some pictures. He might not even cooperate.
Or like her.
So, fine. If he didn’t like her, that was fine. He didn’t have to like her.
He just had to pick some damned pictures so she could be sure he was fine.
She gagged again. But didn’t have any stomach contents to lose.
This was ridiculous.
With a good long look at herself in the mirror, Talia bent, rinsed her mouth, pulled a stick of gum out of her mouth and opened the door.
Maybe he’d like her if she gave him a stick of her gum?
THE FIRST TIME he’d seen Brooke, Sherman had been walking across campus, mentally rehearsing the debate he was about to win. She’d been in the middle of the lush green quad, in shorts and a tank top, lying on a blanket reading a book.
He’d stumbled. And damned near missed the competition that had ultimately, four years and many debates later, won him a scholarship to graduate school.
A lot had happened between then and now. Running into her at a concert on campus. Being inseparable for the remainder of their four years of undergraduate studies. Convincing her to put her marketing skills to work in his field and joining him as he signed on with one of the nation’s top campaign management firms.
Years of miscarriages. Thousands of dollars spent on failed in vitro attempts.
Seeing Kent for the first time, less than an hour after his birth. They’d decided, long before he was born, to wait until his tenth birthday to tell him he was adopted. They’d wanted him to have grown to take their loving him for granted, to feel a part of them and to make the telling part of the celebration. They were going to tell him about his birth. And about how long they’d waited for him to come into their lives.
If he were the boy’s biological father, would he know what to do with him? How to reach him? Help him? Was there some “fatherly” instinct that he was missing?
He and Brooke had talked it over a lot before his birth. The whole time they’d been preparing his nursery. Their ability to instinctively know what was right for their child even though they didn’t birth him. Like knowing that he shouldn’t know he was adopted. They’d made considered choices, based on weighing all sides of the situation.
Until he was ten, they’d decided not to tell anyone he was adopted. There were a few who knew, of course. People they worked with. But anyone who hadn’t seen them in a while, anyone new to them, just assumed that they’d had him biologically. Kent was all theirs. That was all that mattered. Sherman had no family close enough to know that Brooke hadn’t been pregnant. No one who would care one way or the other about his son’s biological parentage.
Brooke was really the driving force behind the decision. She’d been adopted. To a couple who’d had a biological child a couple of years later. They made such a big deal of finally having a biological daughter. They told everyone about their miracle. By the time she was a teenager she’d been consumed with the need to find her own biological connection—filled with a need to be someone’s miracle.
Her adopted parents had seemed almost relieved to have her do so, as though they were all right with being done with her. Or so it had seemed to the teenage Brooke. They’d continued to support her, both financially and otherwise, after her birth mother had refused to meet her.
Sherman had met them a few times, but with them in New York and him and Brooke in California, the visits had been infrequent. They’d appeared to him to love their daughters equally. But after she’d died, he’d never heard from them again.
Regardless of the fact that Brooke had never told them that Kent wasn’t her biological child. Bottom line to them, he supposed, was that he wasn’t theirs.
With Brooke gone, with Kent being so emotionally vulnerable all of a sudden, he hadn’t known what to do regarding his adoptive status. Logic told him the boy would have to know at some point. You just didn’t keep something like that from a person for their whole life. Shortly before Kent’s tenth birthday he’d talked to Kent’s therapist, Neil Jordon, about telling the boy the truth about his parentage, and had been quite relieved when Dr. Jordon had adamantly advised against breaking the news to him anytime in the near future. Kent was in no state to have his security, his foundation, further rocked.
Of course the fact that Dr. Jordon thought it would have been far easier on all of them to make the adoption a part of their family story from the beginning hadn’t been as welcome a pronouncement.
It was lunchtime on Monday. Or rather, sixty minutes past the lunch hour, but the time that he and Brooke had set aside as sacred. Even if one or the other could only spare fifteen minutes, or five, out of a busy day, assuming they were both in the office, they used to meet at 1:30 p.m. every single day. If neither of them had had a lunch appointment, they’d share whatever they’d brought from home to eat. Sometimes, they’d just fill each other in on the fact that they’d catch up at home that night. More than once they’d locked his office door and made love.
Occasionally, they’d fought.
That last day, the fatal day, they’d fought. She’d made plans to have dinner in north LA with a nationally known reporter, Alan Klasky, from a not-so-reputable online news source—part of a plan the marketing team had come up with for damage control for a candidate who’d been caught on film at a strip club. The plan was to promise the rag exclusives from their office for the remainder of the campaign.
Brooke hadn’t been fond of the plan. Sherman had hated it, preferring to handle the blow they’d been dealt by the man’s penchant for lap dances by flooding the press with the candidate’s good deeds, of which there were hundreds. By getting good family press for him. From reputable sources.
Marketing had preferred to get in bed with a group that wasn’t going to go away. They gave in to the blackmail.
Brooke was the bait. Chosen by their CEO because of her professionalism, her intelligence, her ability to create on a dime and because she was female.
She’d been honored by the recognition. Felt herself up to the task.
Sherman watched the fifteen minutes tick by that he still set aside, every single day that he was in the office, to close his office door and give his heart, mind and soul over to the woman he’d vowed to love forever.
Even though he’d stopped making love to her more than a year before her death.
It was a fine line between honor, decency, integrity—and justification. A line upon which he had to balance every single day of his life.
* * *
“HI.”
In the end, that was all there was. One word. No grand introduction. Nothing at all remarkable.
The little boy looked up at her, and Talia’s throat closed as she recognized not only the blue-gray eyes studying her, but their intensity even more. He was a few years older than Tatum had been when Talia had left home, but that look was very similar.
“Hi,” he said, turning back to the workbook in front of him, the neat rows of pencil-written numbers in the three-digit multiplication problems he’d been solving.
“I’m Ms. Malone.”
The words won her another of those glances. He nodded.
Looking around for a chair, Talia prayed that she wouldn’t throw up again.
Snagging a chair and pulling it close enough to reach his desk, she sat down. Kent pulled back, his eyebrows drawing together and up.
“I’m going to be working with you all week,” she said, wishing she’d taken Mrs. Barbour’s