“Yeah, and I thought Dad would be around when I was a kid. But he wasn’t.” Nick caught Darius’s gaze. “You were the golden boy. The company, the baby, the troubles are all yours.”
He left the room with Cade right behind him.
Darius fell to the sofa. Over the years he’d cursed his dad for being a philanderer who had created three very different sons … four now. Today he looked up at the ceiling, finally understanding what had troubled his father for the last ten years of his life. The Andreas brothers truly weren’t family. Having three different moms and hailing from three different parts of the United States, they were as divided as they were different. They might share dark hair, dark eyes and a shrewd business sense, but there was no love lost between them.
The silence of the lawyer’s office rattled around him. Both of his parents were dead now. He had no cousins or aunts and uncles. He had two adult half-brothers, but they wanted nothing to do with him.
He thought back a few weeks to Christmas. He’d gone to parties galore, but on Christmas morning he’d been alone. His footsteps had echoed in his cold, empty apartment. Unless he did a better job of raising Gino than his father had done with him, Nick and Cade, this would be the sound of his life. Silence.
In a weird way, he was glad he’d gotten custody of Gino. Gino was his family now.
Well, his and Whitney Ross’s.
A sliver of excitement slithered through him when he remembered the feeling of attraction that had arced between him and Whitney. Oh, she was tempting. A challenge. A buttoned-down present, begging to be unwrapped. But that would be nothing but trouble. He had to raise a child with her.
He understood why Missy Harrington had recognized that Gino would need a mother figure. Anybody who spent two minutes in the company of any of the Andreas brothers knew they weren’t the settling-down kind. So if Missy wanted a mother for Gino, she’d probably known she’d have to pick her. But he didn’t have a clue how “shared custody” would work in the real world. Would sharing a child be like being married? Or maybe being divorced? Would they have to draw up a custody agreement that set forth who got the baby and when? Or would they pass the poor kid back and forth like a tennis ball or Frisbee?
He ran his hands down his face. He had absolutely no idea how this would go. Worse, he had no idea how to care for a baby. Hell, he just plain had no idea how to be a dad, since his own father hadn’t come around until he was nearly an adult.
Which gave Whitney a second, maybe more important, role in this child-custody venture. Because Darius didn’t know how a father was supposed to behave, Whitney was going to have to teach him.
AS WHITNEY AND HER DAD left his office, Cyn caught his arm. “They need you in the conference room right now.”
“But I’m still working with the Andreas brothers—”
“The exact words Roger said were, ‘The Mahoney case is going to hell in a ham sandwich. The very second Gerry is out of his meeting we need him in here.’”
Whitney’s dad faced her. “Will you be okay?”
She forced a smile. “Yes. You go on. When the Andreas brothers are through with their little powwow, I’ll have you paged if we need you.”
“Thanks.” He kissed her cheek, slid the duffel and diaper bag onto her shoulder, turned and raced away from her.
Walking to her office, Whitney looked down at Gino. Sucking a green-and-brown camouflage-print pacifier, he peered up at her. Luminous dark eyes met hers. Her heart stumbled in her chest. Layla’s pale-blue eyes had been a combination of her father’s sky blue eyes and Whitney’s gray blue. Her hair had been yellow. Baby-fine. Wispy. Whitney had never been able to get a clip to hold and she’d become one of those moms who used multicolored cloth hair bands to decorate her baby’s head.
Her chest tightened. She’d give everything she had, everything she owned, every day of the rest of her life, for even one more chance to touch that wispy hair.
Gino spat out his pacifier and began to cry. Whitney set the baby carrier on the small floral-print sofa in the right-hand corner of her office.
“Don’t cry, sweetie,” she said automatically and her throat closed. Her chest tightened. Caring for a baby was something like riding a bike. Unfortunately, all the remembered skills also brought back memories of the baby she’d lost—
The nights she’d walked the floor when Layla was colicky. Her first birthday party when the abundance of guests had scared her. Bathing her, cuddling her, loving her.
Being her mom.
Don’t cry, sweetie.
She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to pull herself together, but Gino cried all the harder.
She sat on the sofa, lifted him from the carrier and cuddled him against her chest. Sobbing in earnest now, the little boy buried his face in her neck.
He smelled like baby lotion and felt as soft as feathers from an angel’s wings. She closed her eyes again, weakened by longings for her own baby. Remembering treasured events. The plans they’d had for Layla’s future. The mom she’d wanted to be.
Shaking with sorrow, she pushed at those memories, trying to get them out of her head. But they wouldn’t budge. Instead, they arched in her brain like a rainbow of photos, a cacophony of happy sounds. Baby giggles. Toddler laughs. First words. Mama. Da Da. Nanna. Pap Pap. Kitty.
She knew it was the sweet baby scents that caused her total recall. So she grabbed a blanket from the diaper bag and laid it on the sofa, then placed Gino on top, putting three feet of distance between them.
She swallowed. The memories receded. Her shaking subsided. The thumping of her heart slowed.
The little boy blinked at her.
“I know you’re probably scared,” she said, talking to him as if he were an adult because she couldn’t risk the baby talk that she knew would soothe him. “I know my mom was very good to you the past few days, but I’ll bet you miss your own mama …” She swallowed. Miss didn’t even halfway describe the feelings of loss this baby must feel. Even though he probably didn’t understand that his parents were dead, her heart broke because she did understand. She knew exactly what it felt like to lose the two people closest to her. He was alone. Scared. And wanted his mom. Or someone to make him feel safe again.
In three long years, she hadn’t felt safe. Everything she believed had been tossed in the air and come down in pieces the day her husband had committed suicide and killed their baby with him.
As she checked Gino’s diaper to see if that was why he was crying, a rush of memories of Layla flooded her brain again. Except this time they weren’t happy. This time, she heard her baby crying, calling for her, and suddenly she was face to face with her worst fear. The fear that morphed into guilt. The guilt her therapist had told her was pointless.
No one knew if Burn had deliberately put Layla into the car with him when he’d decided to kill himself by sitting in the vehicle while the garage filled with carbon monoxide. Speculation was that he’d put Layla into her car seat to go somewhere, but when he’d gotten behind the wheel he just couldn’t force himself out into the world. He’d sat in their garage long enough for the fumes to begin to get to him and was soon mentally too far gone to remember he had the baby with him.
That explanation had soothed everyone but Whitney. If everyone accepted that Burn’s depression and mounting mental illness were reason enough to forget he had their child in his car, then shouldn’t she have realized he was too sick to care for her baby?
Layla.
Why hadn’t