AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The space that had been organized for Ana was immaculate.
Plain white walls and a double bed had been replaced with an ornate, dark wood crib with pink bedding and a mobile hanging over it. There was a rocking chair, a matching dresser and a closet filled with pink clothes.
“Oh.” Behind him Paige made a little noise. Then she brushed past him and into the room. “Ana, look. It’s your very own room.”
His chest seized up tight, his breath locking in his lungs. The light in Paige’s eyes as she presented Ana with a space that belonged to her was…he had never seen anything like it. All of Paige’s unruly enthusiasm was, in this moment, focused on her daughter.
How anyone could doubt that she would be a good mother was beyond him. It was hard for him to remember his birth mother, hard because thinking about her always dredged up other memories that he wanted to keep firmly locked behind a closed door in his mind.
Mary Colson, his adoptive mother, had been a firm and constant presence. Both she and Don had invested in him, into his education, into guiding him, putting him on a path that would lead to success. He was grateful to them, and their distant, tough sort of parenting had been ideal for him.
But for a moment, he wondered if anyone had ever looked at him the way Paige was looking at Ana.
It didn’t matter. He closed the door on the yawning, empty well inside of him. He wasn’t a child. He didn’t need obvious displays of emotion. Far from it, he avoided them if at all possible. And being around Paige didn’t seem to allow for that. She was constant bubbling energy, and emotion. And glitter.
“Thank you,” she said, her blue eyes bright.
“Don’t thank me,” he said, trying to find some way to loosen the knot in his chest. “You’re here under false pretenses, due to a situation of your own making. And it’s hardly permanent, so don’t get too attached.”
She blinked, a flash of genuine pain visible on her face. So open. So real. Did the woman have no sense? Had she no defenses at all? “Okay, I…I mean I know that, but this is beautiful and I just got really excited and I didn’t mean anything by it.” All of her words ran together, coming faster as she rambled, the tension she was feeling palpable. She projected her feelings. So strongly he felt like he was being hit with a wall.
“Relax, Paige,” he said. “Take a breath.”
She snapped her mouth closed, her eyes still pooling with confused emotion.
“I’m sorry,” he said, the word foreign on his tongue.
Almost instantly, the tension left her, her face brightening. “It’s awkward. For everyone. I know. I’m not picking out china patterns or anything, I’m just…making the best of things. Making the best of living in a mansion by the sea, which, I admit, is not so hard.”
“You may not be so optimistic when you hear what I have to say next,” he said.
“You’re putting me on a hide-a-bed. No, my window has an ocean view, but the beach is a nude beach. Or maybe…”
“You’re going to have to at least appear to be sharing a room with me.”
“Say what?”
“Come now, Paige, are you so naive? If we’ve moved in together, we’ll obviously be sharing a room. A bed.”
Paige bit her bottom lip. “I don’t know about that. What about good, traditional values?”
“Does anyone have them these days?”
“My social worker, it seems. Since she was so concerned about Ana having a mom and dad.”
“Which means she needs to be confident that that is indeed what Ana is getting. And my staff needs to believe it, as well. The last thing I need is for someone to slip up and make a comment that winds up in the paper. I’m not being dragged into a public farce. A private farce, it seems, is unavoidable, but I will not be humiliated in a public forum.”
“That’s not my intent,” she said. “But hey, as long as I don’t actually have to sleep with you, I’m okay with having to dig through your closet to find my clothes.”
He wasn’t. He’d never lived with a woman before, had never had feminine things mingling in with his suits. His space was highly prized and this element of their arrangement didn’t sit well with him.
