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"Your college roommate Wes?"
"Yeah, you remember him."
"Don't bother. Surely you have some cereal."
"Frosted Sugar Os and Captain Crunch."
"He'll have toast with butter."
"Educational TV and healthy food. Larissa, does our boy get to have any fun?"
"Of course, he does. Just not bad influences."
"Is that why you never called me?" he asked.
"What?"
"Am I a bad influence for our son?"
"No. Never."
She closed the distance between them, reaching up to touch him and then dropped her hands. "The reasons are complicated. Let's get Peter settled, then we can talk."
He nodded. He'd wanted her to touch him. Needed her to in a way that made him feel vulnerable, reminding him that he was just a man and had more weaknesses than he wanted to acknowledge.
The toast was buttered and eaten in short order. Jake grabbed a soccer ball from the closet, and now that the morning sun was shining brightly, they took it outside. Peter kicked the ball, chasing it from one end of the yard to the other.
He gestured for Larissa to sit down on the chaise and dragged over one of the Adirondack chairs he'd made last summer.
He watched his son running after the ball on pudgy legs. Larissa had taken something from him that he could never get back. Though deep inside he allowed he probably wouldn't have been ready for fatherhood three years ago, he still felt betrayed.
Jake suddenly thought of his father. God, the old man was going to be extremely disappointed when Jake told him he had a three-year-old son. Just one more screw-up from a son who never measured up.
Larissa sat there looking much the same as she had in their college days. A sweet innocent who didn't really fit in at Georgia Tech. He'd befriended her because she'd reminded him of his younger sisters and he would've wanted Victoria and Imogene to have found a guy who'd do the same.
But all of that faded when he glanced at their little boy. "I'm so angry I want to shake you."
Two
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Larissa had been hoping that Jake would just jump on the problem with the reporter, but she should've known better. He was a detail man who liked to get all his facts in order before making a decision. Many times during their college days, he'd used her as a sounding board for his theories and ideas before drawing a conclusion. She leaned back in the lounge chair and took a sip of her coffee.
"Stalling is not going to make me less angry," he said.
"I know." She watched her small son chasing the ball across the yard and tried to find the words to tell Jake that she'd kept Peter a secret for herself and for him. She hadn't wanted Peter to grow up in a household similar to the one she had.
Her parents had married because her mother had been pregnant. From her earliest memories Larissa was aware that if she hadn't been born, her parents wouldn't have been married. Theirs was an unhappy house. So she sought refuge in a world of books, creating her dreams from the stories she cherished. Tales of epic love and vanquishing heroes.
But the real world wasn't full of those epic love stories she'd dreamed of for her life. And instead of being a fair lady waiting in her tower to be rescued, Larissa's fate had become her mother's.
"I'm waiting," Jake said, his voice quiet and deep with suppressed emotion. Her heart ached because she knew how hard it had always been for Jake to express his emotions. To the outside world he presented his devil-may-care bachelor image but Larissa knew that Jake's emotions ran deep. He was anything but carefree.
She studied Jake's face. He was so familiar to her, not just because of his resemblance to their son. But because she saw his face every night in her dreams. Even before Peter was born, Jake had been the one man she'd never been able to forget.
Perhaps it was because of their friendship. She'd survived her college years at Georgia Tech because of him. Unlike the other guys who'd looked right through her, Jake had seen her.
He'd been her first male friend. The first man she'd trusted. The only man she'd ever really been comfortable with.
She couldn't tell him that she'd kept their son a secret because she'd been afraid that one day he'd leave her for a more glamorous woman and perhaps take their son with him.
"Everything about Peter is complicated."
Jake sat on the edge of her lounge chair and touched her face carefully. She knew in that instant that however Jake saw her, it wasn't the way other men did. "It doesn't have to be. Just level with me."
When he touched her she couldn't think. Shivers of awareness spread throughout her body and she'd never been more aware of Jake's maleness.
The fact that he was filled with rage at the secret she'd kept for too long didn't make it any easier to stop her skin from tingling, her nipples from tightening, or the warmth from pooling between her legs. She closed her eyes. But that only intensified his touch. It brought the entire focus of her world down to the two of them and the warmth of his fingers on her face.
