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Deidre stepped forward, her expression contrite. “I’m sorry if I made you feel bad. You know what you’re doing. Let’s go out tonight. You can borrow my new Michelle Mason dress. We’ll celebrate the end of the school year and three months of freedom.”
“Thanks,” Bella said, grateful to have what she’d always wanted.
Freedom to do whatever she wanted with her time. Freedom to live where she was most content. Freedom to spend money on a fabulous vacation without guilt.
So, with all that freedom to revel in, why did she feel as if something was missing?
*
In the quiet Upper East Side apartment, Blake thanked his doorman and hung up the phone, his spirits lightening. Once he put Drew to bed, his mood always dipped. In the days before his son’s arrival, he’d discovered just how much he hated being alone. Most nights Vicky had been at the theater preparing for her off-Broadway debut. The part had been small, but she’d been thrilled. Blake had indulged her, knowing his wife needed a diversion. Waiting to become parents had been hard on both of them.
Or so he’d thought.
It was his nature to be focused and driven. Setting goals and achieving them had made him wildly successful in his business. He’d applied the same principles to his personal life: first finding the perfect woman to marry, and then starting a family with her.
He’d taken Vicky at her word when she told him she wanted children someday. Two months after their divorce was final, he wasn’t sure if she’d really wanted to be a mother before being an actress came along and got in the way, or if she’d told him what he wanted to hear so that he’d marry her.
Either way, the results were the same. He and Drew were alone—the same way Blake and his father had been in the ten years following his mother’s return to Paris—and Blake had no intention of letting his son grow up without a mother who loved him.
The doorbell chimed, startling Blake out of his reverie. He glanced at his watch as he headed for the front door. Ten-thirty was late for his sister to be out. But when he opened the door, he saw it wasn’t Jeanne.
Rocking her weight from one black stiletto sandal to another, Bella looked like a kid caught midprank. But she wasn’t a kid. Nor was she the guileless Iowa farm girl she’d been last summer. In the nine months since he’d last seen her, New York City had transformed her into a sophisticated woman who looked at ease in a one-shoulder black minidress that showed off miles of toned leg and bared slender arms adorned with eight inches’ worth of jangling bracelets.
Her inability to meet his gaze gave him hope that the woman he’d befriended wasn’t gone, only hiding beneath her expensive wardrobe. She’d done something with brown eye shadow to make her large, pale blue eyes dominate her face. Not even the bright red she’d applied to her lips could eclipse their haunting beauty. But the stark color did emphasize her mouth’s downward cant. The urge to smear her perfect lipstick with hot, demanding kisses demonstrated that his reaction to her this afternoon hadn’t been a fluke.
Damn this sudden attraction.
He didn’t want to be distracted from his important mission by a fleeting, if forceful, craving to take her to bed. He had to keep the focus on Bella and Drew’s relationship. She needed to become so attached to Drew that she couldn’t imagine not being a part of his life. That would be jeopardized if Blake got physically involved with her.
He stepped back. The move wasn’t an invitation for her to enter, but a retreat from the way she affected him.
“Come in,” he offered, covering his lapse of control.
“I can’t stay long. I’m meeting friends.” She glanced around as she took three steps into the foyer and stopped.
Blake shut the door, trapping them together in the foyer’s dimness. Intimacy crowded them as the silence lengthened.
A year ago they’d been friends. He’d thought her one of the kindest, warmest people he’d ever met. She was everything he imagined the perfect mother to be. Gentle, but resolute. A natural caretaker with a loving heart. Dedicated to her family.
His heartbeat quickened as images of her in the apartment rushed through his mind. The evening she came over for dinner to celebrate her agreeing to act as their surrogate. The afternoon she’d perched on the edge of a chair in the living room while they awaited the results of her pregnancy test. Her, cranky and uncomfortable the morning before she gave birth, four days past her due date and annoyed with him for being so positive despite the extended wait.
Thinking about that day made his heart clench. Twenty-four hours later, she’d exited his son’s life without a backward glance. “What brings you by?”
