Five
Make love.
Was there even room for making love when you were at war?
The nervousness welling inside her made her breathless as they drove to the engagement party.
Landon sat behind the wheel of his sporty blue-and-tan Maserati, tearing through the highway while Beth replayed the phone call she’d just made in her head.
She hadn’t expected David to answer; he was too young and was observed too closely for that. But to the nanny who’d picked up in his stead, Beth had explained about her engagement party and how much she’d love for David to be there. Beth prayed that the kindnesses she had shown this young woman in the past would be repaid now.
Say you’re taking him out, she’d thought as she’d given her the hotel address, take him out for a walk, and let me see my son tonight.
She considered the possibility of Anna mentioning her call to Hector and shuddered. No. The next time she hoped to see her ex-husband was in court.
Facing her and Landon.
Landon studied her in the dark interior of the car. She shuddered again, this time, in pure feminine awareness. She’d never known she could respond to a man like this.
He wasn’t even doing anything, for the most part kept his eyes on the highway, but she was somehow inhumanly aware of his presence and his occasional straying gaze—her own gaze felt magnetized to it. His darkened eyes said more than they should as he quietly watched her.
In his eyes, she saw vengeance, justice and something just as dark, just as dangerous she dare not put a name to.
“Relax, Beth,” he said, his voice, although mild, powerful and commanding as it cut through the silence. “Trust me a little. By the time he loses his pride, his word, his company and his child, Hector Halifax will have no idea what hit him.”
But it was Beth who felt struck an hour later, while their petite celebration was underway in the sprawling gardens of the prestigious La Cantera Golf Resort. And Beth knew exactly what hit her.
The sight of the looming figure blocking her entry to the hotel lobby.
She’d thought it proper to rush inside a moment and check her makeup and hair before the press took their pictures. She had to look sharp, smart—respectable. Show the world that no, she wasn’t a slut, and she wasn’t the clouds-for-brain careless mother Hector had painted her for, either.
She’d been eager to discover if David had come.
But she didn’t see her boy. She didn’t even make it to the ladies room.
Instead, she found Hector.
Correction: Hector found her.
Her blood froze. She felt his presence at five feet like an open assault on her person, there was such antipathy in the air.
He just stood there, blond and blue-eyed in the cool, calm moonlight. People always used to think he was her brother. But no. He was a monster. A polite, cold-hearted monster.
He’d taken things from her he shouldn’t have taken, abused her in mental and emotional ways she should never have allowed, trampled her innocence, her self-respect. Do you know how to do anything except stand there looking pretty, Beth? Are you goddamned stupid?
Bethany had sucked it up, because that is what her mother had taught her to do. “Beth, if your father didn’t like the eggs, I’d suck it up and make him new ones. Suck it up, baby, I didn’t raise whiners in this house.”
Except with Hector it wasn’t the eggs. It was how Beth ran the house with a free hand, how she put their child in danger if he licked his hands and ate germs from the supermarket cart. It was everything about Beth.
Her father had been strict and her mother had sucked it up. But her mother had received love and praise from her husband, too, while Beth had received nothing. Months after a lavish wedding and a hopeful “I take thee,” Beth had found herself a shell of a person, glancing at women out in the street and envying how carefree they looked, how independent.
Beth had forgotten how to laugh for her kid.
By the day she packed her and David’s bags and left Hector, she’d spent months building up her self-esteem, gathering the remains of what had once been a person and trying to become someone again. A mother.
Even that he’d taken away from her.
Now they faced each other, and she wasn’t sure who appeared more stunned. They’d spotted each other in the same instant. His mouth parted. She expected something would come out of it, but for a moment nothing did.
He took in her appearance—the dress Landon had provided at the last minute. Elegant and midnight blue, it made her skin seem smooth as porcelain and her eyes more electric.
Her heart beat one, two, three times.
Hector’s doctorly face—the one he used to persuade his patients to do whatever he told them to because he, in fact, was a god—failed him. His mouth clamped shut and color rushed up to his face, as though the sight of her—alive and looking well—infuriated him. He took a step.
“You’re marrying Gage.” The sneer lashed at her like a whip crack, and she hated that she instinctively flinched, panicked into immobility.
“You’re marrying Gage and you expect me to let you see our son? Why did you call him? You’re forbidden to talk to him. You’re forbidden to see him, or have you forgotten?”
Confrontation. God, she hated this.
Not here, not here.
Beth glanced around the patio, and when she saw nothing but shadows, her chest constricted with foreboding.
No one was within hearing range, unless she screamed.
But with reporters here?
She didn’t want to. She hadn’t screamed the time she’d found a hairy tarantula in her kitchen, and she wouldn’t scream now.
Oh, God, taking in the sight of his boyish, pretty face, she couldn’t believe she could be disgusted by any living being so much. Not even cockroaches.
In the space of six years, this man had managed to turn a healthy human being into a puddle of fear, a nobody, a robot, and even now as she stared at him, she felt that fear, that anger, that despair that he had her son with him and she didn’t.
He had everything.
But she had Landon.
Struggling to tame her emotions at that thought, she eased back a step, but that only made him move forward. Hector seethed with palpable anger, while fury and hurt churned inside her belly. He took my little boy from me. Her voice sharpened. “David is as much my son as he is yours.” How dare Anna tell him she’d called? How dare he take David away from her? How dare they?