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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 ke
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 co
“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 i
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.”