AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The fact that he’d asked her to come with him still hadn’t fully registered. Because she didn’t know what it meant.
“Thanks.” Gage’s eyelids closed and he swallowed. “I had to do it even though I feel like I’m standing on quicksand. All the time. I needed something to hold on to.”
He accompanied the frank admission by tightening his grip on her hand. He meant her. She was the one holding him up and it settled quietly in her soul. In his time of need, he’d reached out to her. She wished she could say why that meant so much to her. Or why the fact that he was meeting this challenge head-on had softened her in ways she hadn’t anticipated. Ways that couldn’t be good in the long run.
But what if there was the slightest possibility that they might both put down their agendas now that something so life altering had happened? That hadn’t felt conceivable in Dallas, but here...well, she was keeping her eyes open.
He rang the doorbell and a frazzled woman answered the door with a baby on her hip.
“Right on time,” the woman said inanely, and she cleared her throat.
Gage’s gaze cut to the baby magnetically and his hazel eyes shone as he drank in the chubby little darling clad in one of those suits that seemed to be the universal baby uniform.
“I’m Lauren,” she said to Cass. “We haven’t met.”
“Cassandra Claremont.” Since she wasn’t clear what her role here was, she left it at that. She and Lauren didn’t shake hands as there wasn’t any sort of protocol for this situation, and besides, they were both focused on Gage. Who was still focused on the baby.
“Is this him?” he whispered. “Robbie?”
“None other.” Lauren stepped back to let Gage and Cass into the house, apologizing for the state of it as she led them to the living room.
A square playpen sat off to one side of the old couch surrounded by other baby paraphernalia that Cass couldn’t have identified at gunpoint. All of it was tiny, pastel and utterly frightening.
That was when Cass realized she knew nothing about babies. She’d always known they existed and murmured appropriately over them when other women who had them entered Cass’s orbit. But this was a baby’s home, where the process of living and eating and growing up happened.
Gage had told her in the car on the way over that the baby’s aunt was seeking to adopt Robbie. Really Cass was floored Gage hadn’t signed the papers to give up his rights on the spot. Why hadn’t he? The solution was tailor-made for a billionaire CEO who thought commitment was the name of a town in Massachusetts. Give up your kid and go on living life as though it was one big basket of fun with nothing to hold you back.
Sounded like Gage’s idea of heaven to her.
The fact that he was here meeting his son instead...well, she wouldn’t have missed it for anything in the world.
Crossing to the mat on the floor, Lauren set the baby upright in the center of one bright square and motioned Gage over. “Come sit with him. I can’t honestly say he doesn’t bite, but when he does, it doesn’t really hurt.” She laughed without much humor. “Sorry, that was a lame joke.”
Then Gage knelt on the mat and held out a hand to his son. The baby glanced at the stranger quizzically but then reached out and grasped his father’s finger with a small baby sound.
Cass forgot to breathe as a wave of tenderness and awe and a million other emotions she couldn’t begin to name broke over Gage’s expression, transforming it into something that tugged at her soul. She almost couldn’t watch as the moment bled through her, blasting away the last of her barriers against a man whom she could never call heartless again. It would be a lie.
His heart was all over his face, in his touch as he ruffled his son’s fuzzy head. In the telltale drop of moisture in the corner of his eye.
She couldn’t watch and she couldn’t look away as her own heart cried along with Gage. That’s what love looked like on him and she wanted more of it.
Thirty minutes passed in a blur as Gage held his son in his strong arms and laughed as the baby pulled at his father’s too-long hair. He pumped Lauren for information, demanding details like what Robbie ate, whether he’d taken his first step, what he did when he rolled over. Robbie’s aunt answered the questions to the best of her ability but it soon became clear she hadn’t spent every waking minute with the boy like his own mother had.
A somber cloud spread over the four of them with its dark reminder that this wasn’t strictly a happy occasion of father meeting son. Gage had a decision to make and he needed to make it soon so Robbie could get settled in the home where he’d live for the next eighteen years with his permanent parent.
