Perfect Summer (27 page)

She rolled her eyes for effect, and everyone laughed it off except for Clint. He must think she was a big liar. She squeezed his hand and shot him a look that said they would talk about it later.

“My sources say that you’re worth close to forty million.” Jade thrust a microphone at Summer.

The money in question wasn’t Summer’s but her mother’s.

“I wish your sources would talk to my bank because the roof on my palace needs replacing.” She pointed to her house. “And I could use a new diamond tiara. My old one broke.”

Everyone laughed, including Jade.

"What did I miss?" Stan, bless his heart, had perfect timing. He looked from Summer to Jade, and his face lit up. "You're Jade Harold."

He stepped in front of her, effectively blocking Summer. "I love you. The WNBA lost its brightest star when your knee gave out."

How could Jade resist so much admiration?

“Thank you.” She nodded as a princess would to a peasant.

“You are so dignified on TV. I DVR your show every day.” Stan touched her arm. “Would it be too big of an imposition to introduce you to my other half? Chuck is a
huge
fan.”

Stan led her toward his house, her camera crew following like chicks after the mama hen.

“Heiress?” Clint whispered as he kissed her cheek.

“Later,” Summer whispered back. She hadn’t lied, just omitted the truth. Hell, she hadn’t even done that. She lived paycheck to paycheck, like everyone else.

For the next hour, they smiled and served food, but Clint never left her side. As the last media van pulled away from the curb, Clint put his arm around her.

“You were fantastic. No one noticed that we didn’t give an interview.” He bent down and picked up a stray coffee cup. When he straightened, he checked his watch, and the oddest look came over his face. All the confidence was gone, and worry lines creased his forehead.

“Are you okay?” Summer looked around. Had Clint seen another reporter?

“Fine.” He took a deep breath.

“Is this about the heiress thing?” Summer massaged the tense muscle at the back of her neck. “I don’t have any money. My mother does. Yes, it’s in my name, but she’s the executor. I don’t inherit until I turn thirty-five or possibly never, depending on my mother’s mood.”

“You don’t seem too eager.” He analyzed her face like he was looking for something. Untruth?

“Money never made anyone in my family particularly happy.” She shrugged. “I like earning my own way. At school, I’m Summer Ames, teacher, not Franklin Ames’s daughter. No one judges me on anything but me.”

While, on occasion, the money would be nice, it wasn’t worth it.

Clint’s eyebrows bounced off his hairline. “I know a little something about family comparisons.”

Summer smiled. “Your father. On paper he looks like a real winner, but I have a feeling he was a real ass in person.”

“Your ability to see people’s true nature is astounding.”

It felt good to please him. “I have my moments.”

“Speaking of moments, do you trust me?” Clint opened the front door.

That was very mysterious. “Yes.” Summer didn’t mean to draw the word out as if she didn’t trust him. “Why?”

“I want to give you a gift, and I need for you to accept it without knowing the details.” He wouldn’t meet her eye.

“Okay.” She shrugged. “I love presents. Give me three hints.”

“It should be here any minute.” He wiped the sweat from his upper lip.

“Is it bigger than a bread box?” She patted his arm, trying to put him at ease. He didn’t owe her anything, but clearly he was nervous about giving her this gift.

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen a bread box.”

“Can I drive it, and if so, are the wheels made of chocolate?” She grinned.

“Aren’t those two things mutually exclusive?”

Summer shook her head. “Not in my world.”

Clint closed the door and took both of her hands in his. “It’s important to me that you take full advantage of my gift.”

“Sure thing.” She said.

Clint took gift giving very seriously. Excitement shimmied down her spine. This was the first gift a man had freely given her. Didn’t Clint know that whatever he gave her she would cherish?

There was a knock on her front door. Clint opened the door wide, letting in a man wearing a purple velvet coat and two women in white tee shirts and black jeans. “Summer, I would like for you to meet Bono.”

“The stylist, not the singer.” Bono pulled himself up to his full Napoleonic height of five-foot-four and attempted to look down his very important nose at Summer.

Clint was giving her a pretentious weird guy with an entourage? What, exactly, was she supposed to do with them?

“I don’t understand.”

Clint slid an arm around her. “Welcome to your makeover. Today is the first day of the new Summer.”

Summer’s smile froze into place as her eyes dropped to her jeans and baggy tee. He’d given her a makeover. Clint didn’t like the way she looked. How could he? She was fat and tall and awkward. He was fixing her, but she hadn’t realized that he thought of her as broken. This sucker punch knocked down her ego and went straight to her soul. As his girlfriend, he expected her to look a certain way.

“Great.” She hoped her voice rang with the right measure of gratitude. After all this time, she’d thought she’d finally found someone who liked her for her, but clearly she’d been wrong. She needed a moment alone. “Would you excuse me for a minute?”

Summer fled to the bathroom and closed the door. After flipping on the light, she studied herself in the mirror. Shaggy, tangled ponytail, blue eyes that were too big for her face, boobs that were too big for anyone under ten feet, and a body shaped like a huge pear. Everyone wanted to make her over into someone else. Why wasn’t she good enough?

Davis’s plan to win Lilly wasn’t exactly going gangbusters. She hadn’t called to beg for forgiveness or dropped by to grovel. It had been a week and nothing…not a damn thing.

He squirted Simple Green on the exam table to sterilize it. Usually his vet tech did this, but the poor guy was analyzing a canine fecal sample, and Davis needed to keep busy.

Losing Lilly felt like someone had scooped out his heart, leaving him broken and hollow to watch the rest of the world laugh and love and carry on with their happy lives.

This morning, he’d found himself doodling a picture of her while he was on the phone with a goat’s owner. After he’d finished the conversation on hoof rot, he’d hung up, only the reflex to dial her was so strong that he’d been four digits in before he’d hung up…again. Every day was a lesson in torture. No longer did he get to talk to her when he wanted or see her every weekend. She was gone because he’d broken up with her. What an idiot.

“Penny for your thoughts.”

He glanced up. Lilly stood in the doorway. She was here.

He blinked a couple of times, making sure that his mind wasn’t playing tricks on him. Yes, she was really here.

His heart rate shot up, and love grabbed him by the throat and squeezed.

“You’re here.” Davis took a step toward her and then stopped. Let her come to him. That had been the deal he’d made with himself. “You look different.”

She was thrown together and well…sloppy. It was nice. She looked more approachable.

He leaned closer, which technically wasn’t movement in her direction. “You’ve been crying.”

“I’m pregnant.”

Her words bounced off his eardrums, but the message didn’t quite make it to his brain. “I beg your pardon.”

“I’m pregnant…. We’re having a baby.” Lilly grinned. He’d never seen her grin—smile coolly, yes, but not grin. “Now, we
have
to get married.”

Those words
he heard just fine. She was pregnant, and they
had
to get married. Nothing about love or wanting to spend her life with him. She was knocked up and needed to get hitched. Another loveless marriage, like his parents’, like her first marriage. He needed more, and damn it, he wanted more for her.

In his chess game to win her heart, he hadn’t seen this move coming. Now his king was in check, possibly checkmate.

“Say something.” Lilly tucked her hair behind her ears.

He noticed that her fingernails were chewed down to the quick. “When did you find out?”

Her grin was fast becoming one of those plastic smiles she favored. “This morning. I just came from the doctor.”

His world turned perfect, and he let out the breath he’d been holding. Those fingernails weren’t freshly bitten off. He’d rattled her. She really did love him, and he’d get her to admit it one way or another.

“I thought you wanted to get married. Now we can.” Lilly took a step toward him.

It was a start, but not nearly enough. They had a give-and-take relationship, and it was time for her to stop taking and start giving. His eyes went to her chewed-down fingernails; those tokens of her distress gave him courage. Offense was the best defense, and he had a mind to move his king out of check and advance on the queen.

He took a deep breath.

“The offer is withdrawn. When I marry, it will be for love, and I don’t mean the one-sided kind. You have my love. I want the same from you.” His tone was more pathetic than he would have liked, but he’d gotten the words out and stuck to his guns.

The remains of her grin melted away, and her eyes turned cold. “I love you. There, I said it. Satisfied?”

“No. I want you to show it. For the last year, I’ve been your dirty little secret.” He sighed. “If you want my well-groomed hand in marriage, I need to be romanced…courted.”

It was a ballsy move. He was rather proud of himself.

Lilly walked right up to him, slid her hands around his neck, pulled his head down, and kissed him. Her tongue charged into his mouth, assaulting rather than pleasuring. It was heaven. Abruptly, her hands dropped, her mouth left his, and she kicked him in the shin.

“Ouch.” He grabbed his leg. “That hurt.”

She slapped a glossy square of paper on the exam table next to him. “In case you’re interested, we’re having a boy. Have a nice life.”

She turned on her heel and marched out of his office.

He should have quit while he was ahead…only he’d never really been ahead.

He picked up the thin piece of paper. It was an ultrasound photo. The image was the size of a baby bird and just as delicate. The head was no bigger than his thumb, and the arms and legs were Q-Tips sticking out of a robin’s egg of a body.

His son. He stared at the grainy image until it went out of focus. He was having a boy. The reality settled in. He traced the outline of his baby and gently tucked the picture in his breast pocket, near his heart. His boy.

He and Lilly were having a baby, a beautiful, perfect little baby. He was going to be a father. They would be a family.

Davis froze. No, they wouldn’t.

Lilly had just kissed him good-bye. She wasn’t coming back.

He sprinted from the room, vaulted over a Springer Spaniel—his two o’clock—and out the front door. Lilly’s BMW’s red taillights were all he saw of her. She was gone, and other than her cell number, which he was pretty sure she wouldn’t answer, he had no idea how to contact her.

Davis had taken a risk and wound up in checkmate. He’d lost the only woman he’d ever loved.

Game over.

***

Lilly gunned the engine and tore out onto the highway. At the Lambert Dairy Queen, she pulled into the drive-thru and ordered a large M&M Blizzard. Five minutes later, she was back on the highway, spooning the frosty soft-serve into her mouth.

Davis was psycho. One minute he wanted to get married, and the next he didn’t.

She scooped up another spoonful from the cup resting in the cup holder. Multicolored M&M chunks dripped down her shirt, dotting the white with a confetti of stains. Lilly couldn't have cared less.

Not since her father had she told a man that she loved him, and Davis had thrown it back in her face. He didn’t love her. She shoveled in an extra-large bite. She hadn’t exactly given him many reasons to love her, of course. Being a bitch was her trademark, but it seemed like a lot of work now. He'd known what she was when they’d started seeing each other, so that couldn’t be it.

Was it the baby?

In her stomach, the Blizzard turned to molten acid and inched up her esophagus. He didn’t want their child. A wave of nausea hit so hard that she pulled off the highway and onto the shoulder. She took several deep breaths, trying to calm her stomach, but Baby Boy had other plans. Just in the nick of time, she threw the door open and heaved chunky Blizzard globs and macerated gummy bears onto the asphalt. After the nausea passed, she rinsed her mouth out with the remains of her bottled water and pulled back onto the road.

Davis didn’t want their child. Her mind couldn’t wrap itself around the concept. How could he not want their son? She put a hand on the bump below her navel.

“It’s okay, little one. I’m here.” Love made her voice strong. “We may want him around, but we don’t need him. We have each other…always.”

It was a promise.

She wiped her cheeks with the Dairy Queen napkin. “How about I name you after my father, Henry?”

Her son sent up a craving for a gummy bear. She took that as a yes.

“Henry Ames, it is.” She popped in a pineapple-flavored gummy. Sadness, deep and dark, put her in a bear hug. She'd lost Davis forever.

"How about I tell you about your namesake?"

Anything to take her mind off her broken heart.

Baby Henry shot up another gummy craving. It felt like he wanted to hear about his grandsire. "Your grandparents, my parents, were full of love and life and weirdness. My dad had red-gold hair and kind, blue eyes just like your sister, Summer. I'll tell you about her later. My mother had long, pale, blonde hair down to her hips, like a fairy princess. They didn't have much, but they loved each other and me with every molecule in their bodies."

Regret stabbed her in the chest. Daddy had always been so much fun. Every birthday, her parents would take her camping at the state park of her choice. After setting up the tent, they’d build a huge bonfire, make s’mores, and tell silly, made-up ghost stories. For her birthday, her father always gave her a homemade gift, something he’d written, a story or poem or song. At the time, she’d have liked a tangible present, but her parents had always given her experiences…happy memories…things that mattered, not the latest shoes or the hottest jeans. Life was about making good memories, not material possessions. Somewhere along the way, she’d forgotten that.