Legal Heirs - Box Set Edition: Books 5-8 (Surrendering Charlotte Chronicles) (26 page)

Charlotte was bringing Atticus to him today, to his house, that was his tiny glimmer of hope that things would change, that she loved him and she would come to her senses eventually. It had been more than a year since he and Charlotte had been together in New York, and after that Charlotte had abandoned him for Finn. In that span of time he’d grown to love Atti with a love as fierce, and huge, and unchangeable as his love for Charlotte. He picked Atticus up at the Country Day school two or three afternoons a week and spent as many weekends and holidays with him as Finn and Charlotte allowed. They were more than fair, he had to give them that, they had only said no once or twice when Bly had asked to spend time with his son, and always with good reason. Bly went along with Charlotte and Finn’s rules and schedule because of Atticus. The boy was remarkable as far as Bly was concerned, he had just turned eight, and he was brilliant and determined with a big heart that loved truly and deeply. Atticus loved Finn without reservation and Bly had come to accept that. His son had room in his heart for two fathers, and although he insisted on calling Bly Alex rather than Dad, it was obvious that Atticus loved and needed him as a father.

Atticus came bounding through the house as soon as Charlotte parked her car out front. He had his own room facing the ocean and the household staff adored his sweet nature and indulged his every whim.  Bly’s life and his household revolved around Atticus, and the boy had become accustomed to the gargantuan house and the privileged lifestyle. The catch being that he could return home to his mom and dad and sister at the end of the day or the weekend or whatever period time he spent with Bly. That would change, Bly knew, with time and patience. Atticus had welcomed Bly as his ‘other’ dad, and he had already bonded with Holden, the two boys had been inseparable over the summer. Mia was an entirely different matter, at seven years old she didn’t really like the idea of sharing her father with Holden, much less with a boy she considered an outsider.

“Atticus isn’t our brother, his hair is too black, and he’s wild, and looks like one of the lost boys in Peter Pan. Why doesn’t he leave us alone, doesn’t he have a family of his own?” she asked one night at the dinner table, which made Atticus turn red and leave the room quickly.

“Mia, that was rude, you’re going to apologize Atticus immediately. He
is
your brother, your older brother, and I don’t ever want to hear you calling him or anyone else names, do you understand?” Bly said. He loved his little girl mightily, but she seemed to have gotten all of Maddie’s bad qualities and none of the sweetness that had drawn him to Maddie in the beginning. Bly tried his best to be patient with Mia, her life consisted of an entirely patchwork family, after all. Maddie had come begging to see her children the year before, and Bly had allowed it, thinking that a mother could only be a good thing for the twins. Maddie was bi-polar as hell, it turned out, and she was alternately kind and indifferent to Holden and Mia. Holden had refused to spend time with his mother after only a few visits, but Mia liked to go with her, and oddly, she had also developed a close relationship with her half-brother, Milo, who was only a year younger.

“Hey,” Charlotte said, she had settled into the deep sofa in the sunroom and was fanning herself with a magazine she’d picked up off the coffee table.

“Hello, Charlotte, you look beautiful and hot and… pregnant?”

“Yes, it’s really beginning to show, isn’t it? We’re calling it our Christmas baby, I’m due September twenty-fourth; my doctor says that means I conceived on Christmas Eve. Merry Christmas nine months later, right!” Charlotte laughed and her hands covered the small bump as she stretched her long legs in front of her and kicked off her sandals. “Sorry to just make myself at home, can you believe it’s this hot in June? Anyway, the heat is really getting to me.”

“No problem, I’ll get you some tea or lemonade, you always did look beautiful pregnant. I’m just surprised, I suppose, I thought you were done with babies.”

A maid handed Charlotte a tall glass of lemonade and she held it against her burning face. She had avoided Bly after their affair in New York, and that had been more than a year before. Finn had taken on the role of go-between, meeting Bly or Billy Kipling when Atticus was picked up or dropped off.

“I always wanted three, this one was something of an after-thought, for sure,” she said rubbing a hand lovingly over the bump. “I don’t know how I’ll make it another three months with this relentless heat, but it’ll be worth it.”

“It only delays things a bit, Charlotte, your being pregnant, I mean. Our son loves me now, I can assure you that you and I
will
be together. I imagine Finn’s hoping for a boy, a son of his own…” Bly said, and he suddenly pulled Charlotte up and against him and covered her mouth with his. She didn’t fight him but she didn’t kiss him back, he rested his forehead against hers and he could tell she wasn’t completely beyond his reach. “Charlotte, this baby doesn’t change anything, I know with absolute certainty that you and I belong together. You still love me, I can see it in your eyes and your body’s willing, even if your will fights against me. The ring I bought for you in New York, is meant to symbolize our love, a love like no other, and it will be used for exactly that purpose. I believe that with all my heart.”

Charlotte was indeed disturbed by Alexander Bly, she wasn’t in love with him, and surely it was just her raging pregnancy hormones that caused a flurry of desire to well up inside her. She pushed him away and he smiled down at her, he’d felt her body respond to him, she had melted into him and her lips parted against his for just a brief moment.

“I was wondering if Atticus could stay with you this weekend, we’re taking a quick trip to Cabo,” she said, her voice was unsteady and her hands nervously busied themselves in her hair. She pulled the thick mass away from her face and wove it into a long braid that hung down her slender back. She wore short loose shorts and a white cotton tank top that outlined her tiny waist and stretched across her perfectly round baby bump.

She was thin, as were her mile long legs, and her skin had that miraculous pregnancy glow. From the back it was impossible to tell that she was expecting, at five-foot-ten her body was beautifully proportioned even at seven months pregnant.  

“Absolutely, you know I love to have him with me as much as possible. We have a great time together, Charlotte, he’s come to love me, I hope you know that,” Bly said, he turned away from her and stared out across the wide expanse of lawn to the Pacific churning in the distance.

“I know he does, Bly, we’ve talked about it and he’s said so. He thinks you’re pretty amazing. Finn and I have assured him that it’s good and right for him to love his biological father. He
likes
you, too, and that says a lot. You’re doing a good job with him, Bly, and your relationship with him is far more important than anything that ever existed between us.”

“He exists because of what happened between us, Charlotte. You might as well accept that it will never be over.”

*

It was a short flight from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas, on the Baja Peninsula of Southern California. A car from Las Ventanas El Paraiso picked Finn and Charlotte up at the airport and delivered them directly to the ocean-front resort. Charlotte stood on the rooftop terrace of their room while Finn tipped the bellman, then he stood behind her and wrapped his wife in his arms.

“The only thing more beautiful than this view is you, my love,” he said. Finn had cut his hair but let his beard grow in a bit, and the short stubble on his chin grazed her neck as his lips moved over her skin. Her hands reached up and tugged at his hair so that he was held firmly against her. She leaned back, her high, firm bottom nestling against him. His arms closed around her and his hands slipped under her shirt and enclosed her rounded belly, he sighed contentedly as the baby kicked. “I think he’s a wild one already, like his mum, it seems.”

“He’s like the two of us, everything about us together is free and wild. Your love makes me wild and I’m wildly in love with you,” she said, turning her face up to his, pulling his lips down slowly to meet hers, always there was the thrill of his hot, sensual mouth. Sometimes she found herself studying Finn’s mouth, the absolute erotic perfection of it, and she would blush at his slow, crooked smile when he caught her. She couldn’t help it, she didn’t just love him; she needed him as much as she needed the air she breathed. When she thought back on the years that she had known him, she could pinpoint the exact moment she had fallen in love with him. It always surprised her, the simplicity of that first moment when the thought ‘
in love
’ took shape in her mind. She had never felt anything even close to it with Jorgen, and the ferocity of it had shocked her then as it still did when she let herself contemplate the depth of it.

It had hit her like a sledgehammer one night in law school when she and JP and Finn were studying in her dorm room. There had already been moments when Finn had either purposely or inadvertently touched her, and his touch had sent sparks careening through her body. But one night the three of them had studied until nearly dawn, and JP had gotten up to go to the restroom. Finn was sitting on the floor, leaning back against her bed, and he closed his eyes and stretched his long limbs with his head thrown back. She lay on her side on the thin mattress and looked down at him, while his eyes were closed and those lush, sculpted lips were slightly parted. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from his indecently riveting mouth, or his face, for that matter. He was handsome, almost beautiful, really, with his strong, square jaw, high cheek bones, and wide, smooth forehead. His eyes were rimmed with thick dark lashes, and she could see tattooed letters just past his collar bone down the V-neck of his t-shirt.

His lids lifted and his intense blue-grey eyes met the pure sapphire-blue of hers. It was as if she heard the turning of the world speed up and then slow to a comfortable crawl, as if the planet had only just found its singularly perfect orbit, an orbit that she and Finn were the center of. She knew that he felt it too, and that if either of them moved or spoke, JP would return to find them wrapped up in each other with no hope or desire of ever being parted.

His kiss had that effect on her, now that she had let go of the notion that she loved two men equally. Bly was Bly, handsome, powerful, and beguiling, but Finn was all those things, and so much more. He was both safe and dangerous at the same time, intensely loyal and devoted to the ones he loved, and relentlessly driven to destroy those who chose the darkest corners of nefarious wrong-doing. He had explained to Charlotte his powerful need to eradicate the drug cartels that were flooding America with deadly poisons. Teenagers easily purchased the illegal drugs on the streets and even in schoolyards. Younger children, as well, smoked marijuana daily and snorted, swallowed, and shot-up street drugs. They were easy targets for drug dealers, ‘
start them young and you’ll have a customer for life until death
’; that was the motto of the cartels. The truth of that, the chilling reality that children barely older than Atticus and Hadley were already addicted to drugs, made Finn want to wipe cartels, and especially the master-minds behind them, off the face of the earth.

“I could stand here kissing you all day, it’s amazing how the baby kicks when your blood races, my love,” Finn said, finally breaking free of the passionate kiss. “I’ve made plans, they’ve closed the spa just for our private pleasure today.”

Charlotte wondered if he could see how much she needed him, how the taste and feel of his mouth, and the clean, masculine smell of his skin had ignited a scorching flame within her. He smiled down at her, his wonderful crooked smile, it had just begun to crinkle the corners of his eyes now that they were no longer twenty year olds. They were both thirty-five, nearly thirty six, and because of their age the baby had been tested for chromosomal abnormalities. Not that it mattered, they would’ve had their baby no matter what, but it was perfectly fine, and it was a boy.

“The entire spa to ourselves, huh? Well, that’s good, I wouldn’t want to scandalize the massage therapists with the things I intend to let you do to me,” Charlotte said, smiling a wicked smile.

*

Charlotte smiled even before she opened her eyes the next morning, remembering the things she and Finn had done at the spa. The gracious young Latino men and women who worked there had laughed quietly and hurried out of the room when things took an erotic turn. Finn had arranged everything ahead of time, and it was a full and highly pleasurable day.

It began innocently enough, Finn and Charlotte walked along a cobbled path with the ocean on one side and the sprawling, elegant, white stucco resort on the other. They were welcomed into the meticulously elegant spa by the host, Antonella, and the tall doors were locked behind them. They shed their clothes with the help of the quietly efficient estheticians, and they were led, naked, into a warm, bubbling pool of salt water.

“Welcome to the Spa at Las Ventanas, are you ready to have an out of body experience?” Antonella asked as she held out large, plush towels for the both of them. She didn’t bat an eye when Finn stood naked before her with his finely sculpted muscles and other God given assets in full view. Charlotte blushed furiously, seeing her husband standing next to the small woman in all his masculine glory, so generously endowed and unashamed. He smiled and reached for Charlotte’s hand and drew her to him, her rounded belly pressed against the tautly defined bands of muscle that crisscrossed his abdomen. The baby kicked suddenly, stirred by the sudden rush of adrenaline as her body contemplated the pleasure her husband would give her.