HUNTER (The Corbin Brothers Book 1) (92 page)

My condition was pregnant. Gran’s was just age, and she drew herself up in a high temper.

“We came in a cab,” she said proudly, frowning at him.

“Well, please think of it as the first of our contributions to your well being,” Mrs. Paxton said. “No need to spend your precious income on taxi rides. Miles?”

The butler materialized, holding the car keys. “Right this way, ladies, if you please.”

I looked longingly at Ben, but it was clear he wasn’t going to stand up to his parents. I could start to understand why it was never a possibility of him issuing an ultimatum that he was going to play basketball after high school. Mr. and Mrs. Paxton had plans and motivations that no one was going to upset.

For all the time I was there, Ben never looked at me once. As overbearing as his parents were, the fact still angered me. I needed him, but he was absent.

Gran didn’t say anything in the car ride home except to thank Miles for his kindness. We rode the creaky elevator up to our floor, and entered our apartment in silence. I tolerated it for as long as I could.

“Gran,” I said as she sat passively in her chair. “Say something.”

She shook her head. “What more is there to say, child?” she asked. “This is our new reality. This is what you’re now going to have to deal with.”

“But you don’t really think I should give my baby up, do you?” I asked. “I don’t want to. I want to be a good mother to it, like my mother never was to me.”

Gran set her mouth in a thin line. “Maybe I should’ve forced your mother to be around you when you were younger,” she said. “And then you would’ve seen what a fool the woman was. Maybe there would’ve been a lesson in that, and maybe it would’ve scared you straight and you’d never find yourself in this situation. But I always thought that if I was kind but strict, you could grow up to be a good girl and still believe that somehow your mother was a perfect person. Babies shouldn’t think bad of their mothers.”

              I watched Gran, silent, sure that she was talking about more than my mother and me. Perhaps Gran was talking about my mother and herself. I’d never paused to think what it probably cost Gran to tell me so many times over that my own mother was a loser. Did Gran think she failed as a mother because of it?

“I’m scared, Gran,” I admitted quietly. “I want to be a good mother, but I feel like I don’t know how.”

She exhaled heavily and looked up at me. “Every mother is scared, at the beginning,” she said. “That’s the way you know you’re going to do your best. You should be scared. Being scared makes you cautious and caring. You don’t want anything bad to happen for your baby. And you need to start planning ahead.”

“What should I be doing?”

“Focus on school, for one,” Gran said. “Your baby needs its mother with an education so you can provide for it.”

“I need a job,” I remarked.

Gran nodded. “You know my pension checks don’t get any bigger,” she said. “And that baby’s gonna need things. If you think you can handle a job and school, then that’s the best thing you can do.”

Think I could handle it? I had no idea. All I knew was that I was going to have to handle it because there wasn’t another option. I needed to help provide for this household, especially if I was adding to it.

I got two jobs to start with, while I was still feeling strong, and to save up as much money as possible.

In the morning before school, I got a job as a cook at a breakfast restaurant. I made home fries and ham and egg biscuits for a few hours, then went off and threw myself into my studies. After school let out, I caught a bus to the mall, where I worked at a clothing store. I got a pretty wicked discount and sometimes salivated over the new shipments we got in, but I never bought a scrap of clothing. Surviving was just too important right now. Everything that was extra had to wait.

With my dual paychecks, we started buying things for the baby—a crib, first, then little onesies and rattles and pacifiers. Every time we went grocery shopping, we bought another package of diapers.

“You’ll see,” Gran said after I asked her why we needed ten packages of them. “If we budget it in now, we’ll get used to the expense. It won’t surprise us so much when we’re going through them four or five a day.”

I worked and my belly grew, carefully monitored by the battery of doctors the Paxton’s sent me to. Before each appointment, I had to sign an agreement that stated the doctors would be letting Ben’s parents know about the progress of the baby growing inside of me. It was their only stipulation of me seeing the doctors they were paying for and transporting me to. Gran figured it was fair enough.

              The baby started kicking right on schedule, according to the obstetrician. I wanted Ben to be there for it, to feel the power of our child that we created inside my body, but he hadn’t been back to school since the ill-fated meeting with his parents. I heard rumors that he was being home-schooled for the rest of the year, or that his parents had pulled strings to have him transferred to an exclusive private school—the school they’d wanted him to go to from the beginning, anyways.

It was hard to know what to believe, hard to ignore the ache in my heart or the kicks that made my stomach flutter. But I kept going to school to give myself a future, or at least that’s what Gran told me to get me out the door each morning.

When I walked across the stage for graduation, the gown did a poor job of hiding my pregnant belly. By that time, I’d been forced to quit my job, the strain too much on me despite us needing the money. We started baking and selling cookies and cakes, Gran and I, both of us taking turns with selling packages of sweets to passers-by.

              I missed Ben, though, even if we hadn’t seen each other since that terrible day with his parents and Gran. And despite my enormous belly, which I could only cover with a cavernous muumuu, I craved his touch. I thought about his perfect cock inside my body, finding every pleasure point I possessed, pumping, driving, thrusting. I touched myself, trying to replicate what I’d felt with him, but my self-made orgasms always seemed to pale in comparison to what we’d had together that sweet afternoon in his bed.

More often than not, my tears would start up the moment my weak pleasure would fade. Gran explained seesawing hormones and all that, and the doctor filled in the rest of the blanks, but I was still heartsick for Ben. I wondered if he was pining away for me, too.

The one good thing that had come out of all of this was that I had the finest medical care. The Paxton’s saw to that, once they realized I was carrying their grandchild. When they sent the car to collect me for my appointments, Gran admired the gesture in spite of all the bad blood from our little “family meeting.”

The butler, Miles, was always kind to us, holding open the door and offering us his hand whenever we got in or out of the car.

Still, no amount of doctor appointments or unsolicited advice from Gran or absence from Ben prepared me for the first life changing, wrenching cramp of my first contraction, in the dead of night. I knew exactly what was happening even if I’d never felt it before.

I was going into labor. I was going to have this baby.

As soon as I entered my eighth month of pregnancy, Miles had been on call to drop whatever he was doing as soon as he got a call from a cell phone the Paxton’s had given us specifically so that we could contact them. I called Miles before I even told Gran what was happening.

“Yes, Miss Shimmy?” he answered.

“I’m in labor,” I said breathlessly.

“I’ll be right there,” he said briskly.

“Miles?”

“Yes, Miss Shimmy?”

“Will you please let Ben know what’s going on?” I asked, halfway hoping that Ben would be in the car when Miles rolled up in front of our building.

There was a moment’s hesitation. “I’ll tell him,” Miles said. “Be ready.”

              “Thanks,” I said, ending the call and grabbing a plastic bag. I shoved a change of clothes for both Gran and me then made sure I had all my forms of identification in my purse.

“Gran?” I called. “Gran? Baby’s coming.”

She was in bed, fast asleep, and I was almost sorry to wake her up. She looked so tired, but I found that I needed her. I was too scared to do this alone.

“All right, Shonda,” Gran said sleepily, climbing from bed and slipping a dress on over her slip. “Everything’s gonna be all right.”

I grimaced and sat heavily on the bed, riding out another contraction, squeezing the plastic bag of our clothing until it passed.

“Miles is on his way,” I said. “Let’s go on outside.”

The car was waiting for us at the curb, Miles at the ready to help us both into the backseat. I was disappointed, though not surprised, when Ben was nowhere to be seen.

“Did you tell Ben?” I asked, panting as another contraction tore through my body.

“I told him,” Miles said, pulling into the street and stepping on the gas pedal. The car raced forward, the engine purring. “I think he and his parents are riding to the hospital together. They’ll meet us there.”

“Oh,” I said, wondering if the clenching of my heart had anything to do with my contractions. I wished that Ben had gone with me instead. Him going with his parents was like picking sides. Had Ben given up on the idea of us?

We were admitted with lightning speed once we arrived at the hospital, which probably had something to do with how much the Paxton’s were paying the doctors.

But when I was snugly in bed, hooked up to all manners of wires and devices and in a hospital gown, it still didn’t feel real.

“Is this really happening?” I asked Gran, reaching for her hand. She gave me a squeeze.

“We’re here aren’t we?” she asked.

“What’s it going to be like?” I wondered, gritting my teeth through another contraction.

“It’s different for everyone,” Gran said. “You’re just going to have to be brave.”

I could’ve been, maybe, if Ben was by my side. But it was just Gran and me. I was going to have to try hard to keep it together. Ben probably wasn’t an option anymore. He was out of the picture, pushed out by his parents.

One of the many doctors and nurses around me added something to my IV, and my reality shifted a little bit. I could still feel the contractions, but it was almost as if they were happening to someone else. I was glad they weren’t happening to me, because it sounded like they hurt. Gran was there, but she was even farther away, urging on someone I couldn’t see.

Finally, there was an enormous effort, a thin cry, and with a rush, I was back inside myself, a new mother.

They put my wailing son in my arms, and even with the bits of sticky grime and gore on his face, he was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. He slit his eyes open and looked at me and knew me—knew that he was mine and I was his. It was a magical moment, especially when he locked onto me for the first time and drank what my body had made for him. I was a mother, and I’d never let anything bad happen to my baby. My little treasure. No diamond or pearl was more precious than the baby I held in my arms.

“What are you going to call him?” Gran asked, crying and smiling all at the same time.

“I was thinking about Trevor,” I said, tired but buoyed by elation. I was a mother. This was my baby.

“That’s a good name, child,” Gran said. “A good name, Shonda.”

There was a light commotion at the door before Mr. and Mrs. Paxton came in.

“Congratulations are in order, I see,” Mr. Paxton said, the cheer in his voice nowhere near genuine. It made me shudder.

“It’s a boy,” Gran said, beaming. “His name is Trevor.”

Ben’s parents looked at each other.

“That’s not what we had in mind,” Mrs. Paxton said.

“Well, that’s what this child’s mother did,” Gran said, putting her hands on her hips stubbornly. “You’re just going to have to deal with that.”

“Where’s Ben?” I asked, clutching Trevor to my breast. “Where’s this child’s father?”

“He’s away right now,” Mr. Paxton said. “We thought it’d be best if he not worry about this thing right now.”

“You sent him off when his baby was getting ready to be born?” I asked incredulously. “What kind of monsters are you?”

Mrs. Paxton’s mouth twisted and I realized exactly what kind of monsters they were when there was no one to keep her from saying exactly what she wanted to.

“We’re simply protecting our son from a low-class little slut using a baby to claw her way into wealth,” she said.

              Gran gaped for all of five seconds before slapping Mrs. Paxton right in her poisonous face. It was all I could do to watch, aghast.

“You will use respect when you talk about my granddaughter,” Gran said. “Your son saw fit to be with her. She is a good girl.”

Mr. Paxton grabbed his wife before she could retaliate against Gran, which was good. If that woman tried anything with Gran, I’d be up and out of this bed, baby in my arms or not.

“Can we see our grandson?” Mr. Paxton asked. “Please.”

“You can see him just fine from where you are,” I said coldly. “Now, please leave. I’m going to raise this baby the right way and better than you folks ever could.”