Time to Pretend (37 page)

Alan surprised him by bobbing his head in agreement. “She said that children want to be with their parents no matter what. I’m too old
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for this. Alaina’s mother has had some health issues, and that’s all I can handle right now.”

Daniel hadn’t heard a word about health issues. He had yet to meet Alaina’s mother, but it wasn’t for lack of trying on her part. He dismissed the words as an excuse. Having a kid, especially one as young as Zach, was work. From what he’d heard about her life, Alaina had pretty much raised herself. Zach wasn’t as independent.

He didn’t do his homework unless someone made him do it. He wanted and needed involved parents.

“If you’re worried that she will refuse, stop. She’ll take him in a heartbeat.”

Sliding the chair back with his knees, Alan lumbered to his feet.

“That’s what we’ll do, then. I’ll meet with lawyers tomorrow. Please don’t say anything to Zach or Alaina. Their mother and I want to explain things to them.”

Keeping something this big from Alaina didn’t sit well with him.

He recognized and dismissed his own secrets. There was no way he could tell her now. She had too much on her plate already. Once she acclimated to being Zach’s legal mother, he and Evan could divulge their secret.

Daniel folded his arms across his chest. “You have one week. I’m going to tell her everything next Monday evening if you don’t.” Alan nodded stiffly and left.

When Daniel returned to the main room, he found Zach in the exact same place staring at the floor. The tears had dried. He sat down on the chair next to Zach and put his arm around the boy’s shoulders.

“Well, Zach, it looks like you’re coming home with me tonight.

That movie starts in a half hour. Let me grab a quick shower upstairs, and we can go.”

Zach didn’t say anything, but he nodded. Daniel was at a complete loss. He knew there was nothing he could say to make him feel better.

The best he could hope for was to help him forget for a while.

He texted Lainie and Evan to let them know where they’d be.

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Chapter 19

The red brick house where she grew up wasn’t her favorite place to visit. The fights she had with her father had mellowed in the months since she’d begun seeing Evan and Daniel, but the painful memories of her childhood were still fresh.

Evan and Daniel took having Zach in their lives in stride. Alaina could easily see how the three of them could successfully raise a family together. Though neither of her men showed signs they were pretending to enjoy the parental roles they had both assumed, Alaina didn’t want to be selfish. As much as they all wanted Zach, he wasn’t theirs.

And now he was depressed. He had been dealing with not seeing his parents very much, but when they declined to join them for Thanksgiving, he had broken down and cried all night. Later, after Zach finally fell asleep in the predawn hours, Daniel had growled threats toward her father.

Alaina had refrained from commenting on Daniel’s changed attitude toward her father. She had always known it was only a matter of time before Daniel stopped trying to find reasons to defend her father’s selfish behavior.

That morning, as soon as Evan and Daniel left to see Michigan play Ohio State, she bundled Zach off to Camilla’s to spend the day with Mario, and she headed to her parents’ house to figure out what the hell was going on.

Naked grape vines climbed a trellis that surrounded the front door.

Tiny roots had embedded themselves in the brick, just as she had
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warned her father would happen ten years before when he put it up.

She inhaled courage and pressed the doorbell.

Nobody answered. Given that both of her parents’ cars were in the driveway, and her father’s car had been recently cleared of the light dusting of snow Mother Nature delivered that morning, she knew they were home.

She rang again. When still nobody came to the door, she pounded on it. She wasn’t going to go away, not with Zach’s happiness at stake. If they wanted to cut themselves off from her, that was fine.

She loved her parents, but she had never been close to them. If Zach hadn’t been born eight years prior, she could have cut back contact to the necessary holidays and not thought twice about it.

Finally, the door flew open. Red-faced with fury, her father glared at her. “What do you want?”

Shocked into momentary silence, Alaina gasped. She had expected mild, polite curiosity. She had expected him to pretend nothing out of the ordinary was happening. That would have been par for the course. When he sent her prom date packing and grounded her until graduation, his demeanor hadn’t been different from the way he would order pizza over the phone. He had responded to her tears by telling her to grow up, and then he had sent her to her room. Neither he nor her mother had seen fit to tell her that her father objected to the low neckline of her dress, a dress she had purchased while shopping with her mother, until nearly ten years later when Alaina threw that episode in her father’s face during another argument.

Anger, which wasn’t difficult to find, bolstered her courage.

Beneath her anger at them for abandoning Zach was fury that her mother had yet to meet the two men she wanted to marry. “I want to know why the hell you haven’t seen Zach for more than ten days in the past three months. I want to know why you refused to spend Thanksgiving with your son, and I want to know what the hell—”

“Why don’t you come in?”

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The weak, thin voice floated through the growling and hissing of Alaina’s demands. She wasn’t the kind of woman who yelled in public, and her father hadn’t yet invited her inside the house.

With a long-suffering sigh, Alan Miles stepped aside to let Alaina in. She slipped past him and stopped cold at the transformation of the room before her.

The house opened to a long room that doubled as a living and dining room. This was supposed to be the hub of the house, the place where everyone gathered. Alaina had avoided it for most of her childhood because it was where she could usually find her parents.

Zach had never avoided it, though. Many of his toys were stored in a box on the far side of the room.

However, the chairs and loveseat were gone. The sofa had been shoved under the window where Zach’s toy box used to be. Replacing all that furniture was a hospital bed, the kind of bed in which Alaina’s most reluctant new patients could usually be found. Those were the addicts who had survived an accident or a suicide attempt.

An IV dripped fluids into the swollen woman on the bed. Though reality narrowed to include nothing except the bed and the woman on it, Alaina managed to navigate herself closer.

Her mother’s body was misshapen. The soft curls and catlike eyes Alaina had inherited reflected dull, sad tones. Blankets covered the lower half of Barb Miles’s body, and Alaina had no desire to lift them to see what kind of damage hid there.

Though Alaina had always fought with both of her parents, most of the battles were centered around her father’s actions. The woman on the bed was an alien life-form, someone Alaina had always known but someone she’d never understood. And yet her heart pulsed painfully, pushing all the love she’d denied to the surface.

The clinical parts of her mind filed facts. The swelling meant her mother’s kidneys weren’t working. The IV pumped her full of fluid that had no place to go. A quick glance at the urine bag confirmed Alaina’s assumption. Gasps and wheezes issued from between her
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mother’s parched lips. A cup with a straw sat on the TV stand next to the bed. It was full of water.

She touched her mom’s face. Her mother’s eyes closed, and a tear escaped. Alaina knew a twin tracked down her own cheek. “What the hell is going on?”

“Lung cancer.” Her father’s voice, sounding weak and old, drifted from the other side of the bed. He adjusted her mother’s pillow.

“Stage four. It came on quickly.”

“How long?” She had to force the words out. She didn’t know if she was asking how long they had kept this secret or how long her mother had left to live. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer to either question.

Nobody answered, but Alaina knew enough to guess the answers to both.

“It’s wrong to keep this from Zach. He thinks you don’t want him anymore.”

“I call him every day.” Indignation stained Alan’s words.

Alaina glanced up at him. “Then you must have lost track of days, Dad. You haven’t talked to him in four days.”

“Maybe,” he admitted. “I’m always surprised to see the hospice nurse.”

A pile of blankets covered the sofa, and discarded takeout littered the dining room table. Her father didn’t often leave this room.

Alaina’s heart broke a little more, but she didn’t cry. There would be time for that later. Right now, her parents needed her. She sniffed and squared her shoulders.

“I’m going to bring Zach by tonight. Right now, we need to get this place cleaned up.” Alaina made a move to step away from the bed, to get away from the specter of death keeping company with her mother, but her mother stopped her with a weak hand on her arm.

“Alaina.”

She stopped moving and lifted her gaze to meet her mother’s dull, glassy stare.

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“I don’t have much time left. I’m in a lot of pain, and the morphine isn’t working. I want you to take care of Zach. I love your father, but he’s not a good dad.”

Alaina wanted to admonish her mom to not talk like that, but she knew it was a selfish sentiment. She shook her head. “Mom, you have to let Zach see you. You have to let him talk to you.” Barb mustered her tiny reserves of energy, and determination stained her cheeks red, the only color on her face. “No. I don’t want him to remember me like this. I know I look bad, and I don’t want him to see this. I didn’t want you to see me like this, but you’re too damn stubborn for your own good. Just like your father.” Her eyes shuddered closed, her lashes casting short shadows on her cheeks. Alaina waited for them to open again, but they didn’t.

“It takes a lot for her to talk,” her father said. He scratched the back of his hand. His nails needed trimming. “Let’s let her rest now.” But Alaina knew what her father refused to acknowledge. She felt her mother’s wrist for a pulse. She leaned over the bed and rested her ear over her mother’s heart. All was silent.

Alaina didn’t say a word to her father. She didn’t tell him anything. She grabbed her coat and purse and left the house. In a daze, she drove to Daniel’s loft, but his truck wasn’t there. Of course, he and Evan were at the game. They wouldn’t be home for several hours.

She drove aimlessly. When Camilla called to ask if Zach could sleep over, she gave automatic permission. When sunset streaked the sky, she headed to Evan’s condo. Daniel’s truck was parked next to Evan’s in the carport. She parked in a visitor’s slot and used her key to let herself into the darkened house.

Voices came from upstairs, so she followed them without thinking. The tableau that greeted her when she pushed open the bedroom door would have titillated her another time.

Daniel held Evan in his arms. The passion of the kiss filled the entire room. It lingered, hungry and expressive of something he held
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back every time the three of them made love together. Danny cupped the sides of Evan’s face in his large hands, his strong fingers tapering to hidden points under strands of Evan’s soft brown hair.

Evan ran his hands up and down Danny’s back, holding him in a close caress just like he frequently did with Alaina. The kiss went on and on. When Daniel finally broke it, he moved to explore Evan’s neck. Evan hadn’t shaved that morning. A day’s worth of stubble would be chafing Daniel’s lips, but he savored every inch of Evan’s skin. Masculine moans filled the air with a quality wholly different from the sounds that happened when the three of them were together.

By some unspoken signal, both men shed their shirts at the same time. Alaina’s breath caught, and her moist pussy ruined her panties.

She scented her own arousal, wondering that the sight of them could affect her so much after the day she had endured.

Daniel’s hands loosened Evan’s belt and pushed his jeans from his hips, revealing the paler, smoother skin there. Daniel sank to his knees, kissing his way across Evan’s bare chest. Evan’s hands tangled in Danny’s hair, and his eyes closed to focus on the sensations.

Danny stroked Evan with his hand, pausing to spend more time on the underside of Evan’s hard cock, where he was more sensitive.

Those strong, lush lips parted, and he took Evan deep into his mouth.

Evan breathed deeply, and a soft moan escaped.

Alaina was struck by the similarities in the dreamy expression Evan wore now and the one he wore when Alaina went down on him like that. Love for her two men welled in her heart, but it competed with the pain of knowing they kept this from her. It was a quick, momentary feeling. Then the numbness of her mother’s death chased away all feeling.

I shouldn’t be here.

She must have voiced her thought. Evan’s eyes flew open, and his expression changed from ecstasy to shock.

“Alaina.” He whispered her name, jolting her from her reverie.

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She clapped a hand over her mouth, but it was too late. Daniel broke away suddenly, his shocked gaze closing in on her with unerring accuracy. He held the base of Evan’s cock with one hand while his other arm froze, wrapped around Evan’s ass to hold him closer.

“I’m sorry.” She muttered the words, but she didn’t know if it was loud enough for them to hear. Turning, she walked away. If she were less upset, she could have run down the stairs and out of the house, making it to her car faster than Daniel or Evan could gather their wits enough to come after her.