An Heir At Any Price: The Billionaire's Obsession - Contemporary Romance (19 page)

Aiden stood up. It was like he could
hardly bear to look at me any longer. He took out his phone and
said, “1120 Wyndcliff Rd.” I tried not to look perturbed that he’d
had me investigated. I should have known that he would, especially
once he found out that I was pregnant. I suppose that I may have
done the same thing. It was ironic that we were both fighting so
hard for the same child, yet working against each other instead of
together.

“Yes, that’s it,” I finally told him.
He gave me another look of smoldering disgust and then glanced down
at my belly once more. It was incredible to watch the change in his
face from one look to the next.

Chapter
Seventeen

~

I made a simple dinner of spaghetti,
salad and bread. I didn’t think I’d be able to eat, my stomach was
so full of butterflies there wasn’t room for anything else in
there. I asked my mother if she could go to a meeting or to one of
her new “sober” friend’s homes for a couple of hours. I didn’t want
her to have to witness what I was sure would be another fight. I
was not afraid of Aiden, not physically anyways. But no matter how
hard I tried not to let him intimidate me, he just had that way
about him when he was angry.

I had just finished setting the table
when Aiden rang the bell. When I opened the door he was standing
there with the same look he’d had on his face earlier. I took a
deep breath and invited him inside. I hoped that this wasn’t going
to be just another mud-slinging fest. I would do whatever I could
to fight for my baby, but he was right, I didn’t have the resources
to do it in court. I was really hoping that we could do it this
way.

“I made spaghetti,” I said.

“I’m not hungry. Holly, this isn’t a
social call.”

“I realize that, Aiden,” I said,
trying to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. “I’m just trying to
establish some kind of civility between us.”

“Civility? Civil people don’t make
promises they don’t intend to keep, and they don’t lie to each
other.”

“Are we going to really talk, Aiden?
I’m wondering if you’re too angry to do that.”

“I don’t know what you expect, Holly.
Of course I’m angry. If you couldn’t do this or you had no
intentions of doing this, or were just trying to trap a rich man
into marriage…”

“Are you kidding me? Do you think that
I didn’t have multiple opportunities while I was working at the
café if all I wanted was to snag a rich man? And of course I had
the intentions of doing this. My mistake was in not getting to know
you better before I agreed to do it.”

“Because I’m such an emotionally
damaged monster?”

“Oh Aiden, none of this is getting us
anywhere.”

“Then let’s get down to it,” he said.
I offered him a seat and he took it but stayed perched on the edge
looking as if he might run at any minute. I noticed that his eyes
kept moving from my face to my stomach and back again. The look he
gave when he looked at my belly was one of longing and
sadness.

I sat down across from him and trying
a softer approach I said, “I never intended to hurt you,
Aiden.”

He raised an eyebrow, “Really, Holly?
You thought that running away with my child wouldn’t hurt me? Or
did you just think I’d never find out? What did you plan on telling
him when he got old enough to ask?”

“I hadn’t thought that far ahead,
Aiden. I will concede that I was wrong to run away. This talk we’re
having now should have happened a long time ago. But it didn’t, and
we’re here now, so are you willing to hear me out, or
not?”

“I will hear you out,” he said. “But
be assured that I will be willing to take this as far as legal
action if it’s necessary.”

“Okay, Aiden,” I said, tired of the
threats but trying to understand why he felt the need to make them.
“I hear you. I know that you think having the law on your side is
the most important thing here. I’m hoping that I can convince you
otherwise. Are you ready to listen?”

“Go ahead,” he said. “But don’t count
on convincing me otherwise.”

Taking a deep breath for patience I
said, “First of all, when I signed that contract, I want you to
know that I honestly believed I could do this. I thought I could
put my emotions on a shelf and ignore them for a while. I was
stupid to think that, plain and simple. I’ve never been one to be
able to ignore my own feelings about things. I wear them on my
sleeve and I usually get hurt because of it. My feelings for you
were over the top and I could see it happening from the first kiss.
I should have put a stop to it all right then and there, but I
wanted a second kiss, and a third. I wanted to believe that it was
more, or would be more, even though I knew you were just making a
baby.” The look on his face clearly showed what he was thinking so
I said, “You never led me to believe otherwise. I know that. You
kept your end of the contract to the letter. I tried to do the
same, but my emotions got in the way. I even began to resent that
you were so hung up on the contract, that it was so important to
you. Every time I fell asleep in your arms and woke up alone, I
hurt in my heart a little bit more. I know that you can’t help how
you feel and neither could I. The more I tried to not want you, the
more I read little things in to what you said or what you did. I
told myself as I was doing it that it was wrong and I was setting
myself up for heartache, but short of walking away, I didn’t know
what to do about it.”

“So you just walked away?”

“I thought you were going to hear me
out?” I said, frustrated with his sarcasm.

“I’m sorry, go ahead.”

“Thank you,” I said. I swallowed hard
trying to force down the lump in my throat and I sucked in a deep
breath and continued, “As much as I was falling for you, I was also
finding things out about you that worried me. You took this
clinical, business-like approach to this whole thing. You talked
about our child like he was the end result of a big contract you’d
scored. Family is supposed to be so much more important than that.”
I touched my belly absently; protectively…I did it now without even
thinking about it. “This is a human being we’re talking about. He’s
a human being that we created and we have a responsibility to him.
Not as two business partners who coldly decide who he’ll live with
and how he’ll be raised, but as two warm, loving parents who are
mature and responsible enough to put their differences aside and
take his best interest to heart.”

“You don’t think that I would put my
child’s best interests first?”

“Not if you continue to think of him
as another belonging, Aiden. You may think that his best interest
is having a large staff to take him places and look after him, but
that’s not what a child needs. A child needs love and special
attention from his parents, not strangers who are paid to watch
him. You’re very fond of saying “my” and “mine.” It’s like a
contest. It took us both to make him and I don’t understand why we
can’t both raise him. We don’t have to do it together I’m not
asking you to live with me. Lots of parents co-parent their
children from different homes. Wouldn’t that be putting our child’s
interests before our own?”

He didn’t answer that so I went on,
“The day I heard you on the phone arranging for a “back up plan”
that was the final straw. You were so cold and so clinical about
it. There was no emotion in your voice at all, not a thought to how
any of that would make me feel…”

“We had a deal and at that point, it
hadn’t gone anywhere. I was well within my rights to start looking
at other solutions if this one didn’t pan out.”

I smiled to keep from crying from
sheer aggravation, “That attitude, Aiden is exactly what I’m
talking about. That sounded just like something you might say about
a business deal. This is a child, damn it!”

He looked shocked at my anger. So far
he’d seen a lot of emotion from me, but not the anger I was feeling
right now.

“Okay, fair enough,” he said. “I can
see a lot of your points. Now, is it my turn?”

I smiled again. That still sounded
like something he would say in a business meeting.

“No, one more thing,” I said. “My
reaction to you being drunk needs to be addressed as well. I
probably should have told you this before, but my mother is an
alcoholic.” I actually knew that he had to already know that. He’d
turned up at her rehab looking for me, after all. I wondered then
how he had found out and I was about to ask him but he beat me to
it.

“I know. I had you checked out Holly
before I moved forward with the contract. I think you’ll understand
that was something I had to do. I was, after all, inviting you to
live in my home and be privy to matters I couldn’t trust just
anyone to.”

“So, that whole time I worried that if
you found out you wouldn’t want me to be the mother of your child,
and you already knew? How did you find out where she was in
rehab?”

“I have some of the best investigators
in the world on my payroll, Holly,” he said in a matter of fact
tone, like it was something everyone had, or at the very least
something I shouldn’t be surprised about. I tucked that away to
think about later. I didn’t really need anything to fuel my anger
right now. It wasn’t really the most important issue we had to
address here tonight. I refocused my thoughts and moved
on.

“Anyways, she’s always been an
alcoholic, but I didn’t realize it until I got into my early teens
I guess. My father covered for her a lot. He was the buffer, my
safe haven. I was embarrassed of her and I didn’t want any of my
friends to know. I could never have friends over and my father
wouldn’t ever let her drive us anywhere. I learned how to
pretend…all the time. My imagination and my dreams saved me, until
my father died. I was fourteen when he died and my life suddenly
became all about taking care of my mother. I cleaned her up, I fed
her, I took her to the doctor and sometimes the hospital and I
bailed her out of jail. I had a 4.0 GPA and I got offers from four
colleges. I had to turn them all down. I couldn’t leave her alone.
I couldn’t play sports or go on dates…when I saw you like that, and
I thought about you handling your problems that way…I was so afraid
that this child would have to grow up like I did. I at least had my
father for a big part of that time; he was only going to have you.
I couldn’t just walk away Aiden and let that happen.”

“I’m sorry you had to grow up that
way, Holly,” he said, sounding very genuine. “I’m not an alcoholic.
I was depressed and angry and I drank too much. It happens, but
with me, not often. I can’t even recall the last time I was drunk
before that. I like to be in control, as you well know. I don’t
like giving myself over to alcohol, that was a fluke. Had you stuck
around, when I sobered up I would have told you that. I can
understand however that with your upbringing how that would have
bothered you. As you know, my childhood was tough after the loss of
my parents. My mother was amazing and I loved her more than life
itself. When she died, I was so angry. I didn’t know who to be
angry with, or where to put it all. I kept getting into fights and
getting expelled from school. That went on for years until one time
I got into a fight with this boy who unbeknownst to me had a
seizure disorder. I punched him and he fell to the ground and began
flopping all around. I thought he was dying…It was horrible. I
found out later that he’d been having a seizure, but that feeling
stayed with me. I can still call it up now. I never wanted to feel
that again. So I did something that had a lot to do with shaping my
personality.”

“I’m sorry, Aiden, that is
terrible.”

He nodded and said, “I decided then
and there that my emotions were just that, mine. I was the one who
could control them, the only one. So I learned how to keep
everything in tight little boxes in my head. I think it’s called
compartmentalizing. I didn’t fight any longer, but I rarely allowed
myself to actually feel an emotion at all, I’d just tuck it away
because when I did let myself feel things, it always ended badly;
it always ended with me getting hurt.” He paused and said, “Can I
have some water?”

“Of course,” I said starting to get
up.

“No, you don’t have to wait on me,
Holly. I can get it.” He motioned me back down and went to get his
water. While he was gone I thought about him as a little boy,
broken hearted because he missed his parents so badly and trying to
channel it into beating someone up. I felt another tug at my
already vulnerable heart. I guess that’s what love does; it makes
you want to forgive things you wouldn’t otherwise.

He came back and when I saw his face,
I didn’t even have to guess what was in his hand.