Redemption (17 page)

“No, I never think about that. I told you, I wasn’t interested in a film career.”

“Oh, come on, you don’t regret it at all? Trading the bright lights for the boardroom?”

She bent her gaze from his too-knowing green eyes. She hadn’t often imagined how it might have been, the glamour of a Hollywood career. As a twenty-one-year-old, she had barely allowed herself to dream, preferring even then the certainty of the business world to the vagaries of a film career. That, and she was sure she could also do without the very public nature of the film industry. But it was more than her own tiny aspirations she had put behind her—it was Matt himself that she had given up. For the first time, she wondered if cutting him out of her life, out of Tripper’s life, had been the best course.

Even the thought seemed dangerous, as if he could read her mind. She glanced at him, but he was staring at the quarter in his fingers. “What do you think, Claire? Should we try it?”

“Try what?” she asked, momentarily taken aback.

“Lady Luck.” Without waiting for her reply, he gave a flip of his wrist, sending the coin flying across the water to land with a tiny
plunk
exactly under the watchful eye of the goddess.

Claire frowned. “Don’t tell me you buy that.”

“Sure, why not?” He grinned. “Don’t you believe in fairy tales? Miracles? Wishes in fountains coming true?”

“Not for a minute,” she scoffed. “You’re in the business of make-believe. You should know better than anyone it’s all special effects.” She shrugged in dismissal. “Lighting, makeup, smoke and mirrors—”

“Claire,” he chided. “Don’t you ever just let yourself believe in something you can’t see?”

“Of course. I have all the faith in the world—in gravity, atomic theory, cyclical stock markets—”

“Those can all be proven.” He dismissed them with a shrug, then eyed her with a speculative glint. “What about love? There’s no proof that exists, yet people experience it every day.”

She gave him a tight smile. “Do they? I always thought it was hormones.”

“For some people it is.” He tilted his head, staring at her inquisitively. “How about you? You ever been in love, Claire?”

She flushed, looking away. “No. Never.”

“I thought I was, a time or two. Turned out to be hormones.” An eyebrow quirked upward.

Claire started to tell him “I told you so,” but before she could speak, his gaze trapped hers.

“They’re starting to act up again,” he said, his voice an octave lower. “They keep urging me on, while my good sense is telling me to steer clear.”

She stiffened and looked away. She didn’t answer, couldn’t immediately come up with a way to turn the conversation back to safer ground.

She could feel his eyes on her, on the pulse beating in her temple. She felt like a butterfly pinned to a mounting board, wings beating furiously in a vain attempt to escape the inevitable.

“You should listen to your good sense. This time,” she managed to get out, hoping he would make this easy for her.

Then, from the other side of the foliage, she heard the murmur of voices, the light tread of footsteps. With a relieved sigh, she stood up. “We’d better leave,” she said, and then she heard Marcus’s deep voice:

“You say she’s not in her office? She must be around here somewhere. We could always have her paged.”

“Someone must be looking for me,” she said with relief. She was expecting an estimator from the contractor’s office to stop by later. She turned, catching a glimpse of Marcus’s gray head over the palms. “Marcus,” she called, her voice echoing in the empty chamber. “I’m over here.”

“Is that you, Ms. Porter? There’s a young man here to see you.”

Before Claire could react, Marcus and Tripper appeared at the opening in the foliage.

“Hey, Mom, I tried to call you! You forgot to sign my permission slip yesterday. David’s mom is taking us to practice later—Mom?” Then his eyes traveled to the man standing next to her. Marcus gave him a little salute and turned to head back toward his post by the entrance.

Claire could only stand frozen, on legs that shook like saplings, and stare at her son as if he were an apparition.

But Tripper was too busy examining the man beside her to notice her reaction. “Hey! Aren’t you—”

“Matt Grayson.” Matt stuck out a hand. “And you?”

“Tripper—I mean Trevor—Porter.”

“Well, Tripper-I-mean-Trevor, it’s nice to meet you. Claire, you didn’t tell me you had a son.”

Claire was struck mute, unable to speak over the buzzing in her head, a cacophony of lies, all wanting to break out in a symphony of self-preservation.

Tripper shifted in his sneakers, a self-conscious grin on his face. “Tripper’s just a nickname. My real name is Trevor, but no one calls me that.” Oddly, it struck Claire that he didn’t usually bother telling anyone his real name.

“Trevor,” Matt repeated. “Porter, you said? Like your Mom?” he asked, and Claire knew the pieces would soon fall together, unless she forced a lie from her frozen lips.

Then Matt seemed to notice Tripper’s outfit. “Basketball practice? Aren’t you a little short to play for the Sixers?”

Tripper smiled, a shy, closemouthed grin that usually broke Claire’s heart. But the block of ice she had become thankfully had no emotions.

“My mom just bought this for me to wear. It’s not my uniform or anything. We play for a league at the Y.” He glanced at Claire. “It’s called ‘Basketball Bridges.’ It’s so inner-city kids and kids from the suburbs can play on the same team—isn’t that right, Mom?”

She struggled to locate her voice. “That’s right. Do you have your permission slip? I’ll sign it.” Her voice sounded like a layer of thin ice that threatened to crack at any moment.

“Need a pen?” Matt reached in his pocket and pulled out a ballpoint. Claire stared at it, afraid to reach for it with her shaking hands. “Claire? You okay?”

She grabbed the pen, pulling herself together. “Yes, I’m fine.” She even managed a little smile to prove it. “David’s mother must be waiting. You need to hurry—”

“She’s waiting at the door. They wouldn’t let her in. Marcus said it was because of the movie people.”

“My fault.” Matt shrugged.

Claire knew his interest was piqued, the inevitable questions piling up. Her throat dry, she wished she could simply press pause and rewind the film. But instead the action continued, surely damning her more with every moment.

Matt crossed his arms casually and sized up Tripper. “You must be about, what? Ten, twelve years old?”

“I’m nine.”

Matt’s eyebrows lifted ever so slightly. “Tall for your age, aren’t you?”

With a tiny touch of pride in his voice that pierced Claire’s heart, Tripper told him, “I’ll be ten in March. March tenth.”

It took exactly nine seconds for the smile on Matt’s face to turn sickly. “I see.” And then it was his turn to be struck dumb.

Claire scribbled her name on the permission slip, silently cursing herself for forgetting when he had asked her earlier in the week. This she couldn’t blame on the gods.

“Okay, honey, you’d better run. Candace is waiting.” She gave him a weak smile, silently urging him to go.

“And I need a check for thirty dollars, remember?”

“I’ll have to get it from my purse.” She seized the excuse as a drowning woman grabs a rope. “It’s in my office. We’ll have to go upstairs,” she added, relief coloring her voice.

“Can I stay here?”

“No—”

“Sure,” Matt said, the agreeable tone a tad too hard to ring true. “You go on, Claire. I’ll wait here with Tripper. We’ll talk basketball.” The look he gave her was bland, impossible to read. Then he turned to Tripper. “So what position do you play?”

Claire didn’t know how she managed to walk away, but she heard her footsteps on the cool marble floor, the sound echoing in rhythm with the heavy thudding of her heart against her chest.

Chapter Eleven

W
HEN
S
HE
R
ETURNED
F
IFTEEN
M
INUTES
L
ATER
, check in hand, Matt and Tripper were talking like old friends. But Matt, she noticed, avoided meeting her eyes.

She handed Tripper the check, and with a grin and a wave of farewell for Matt, he hurried toward the front entrance.

When he was gone, Claire braced herself for the inevitable.

“You’ve got some explaining to do,” Matt said quietly.

She stared at the fountain, the water silent and still now. All the excuses she had invented during her brief escape to her office—the lies—came creeping to her throat, where they snagged on a vestige of honesty.

He let the silence spin out, while her lies decomposed.

“You gonna tell me that kid’s not mine?” he finally said, his voice oddly neutral.

“Would you believe it?” she asked, daring to glance at him for a reaction.

“Not without a blood test.”

“I’m not putting him through that!”

“Right now, what you want is not my primary concern,” he said, arms crossed as if reining himself in. “I’ve got a strong suspicion that kid’s my flesh and blood, and you haven’t bothered to inform me of that in almost ten years. And that, lady, makes my blood boil. All this crap about not letting us in here to film—that was just to cover your lovely little ass, wasn’t it? You didn’t want me getting near enough to find out your ten-year-old secret—”

“Stop it!” Claire hissed, alarmed. “Someone will hear you!”

“I don’t give a damn if that statue there turns into a tabloid reporter and starts taking notes! You lied to me, and you’re gonna start explaining right now!”

“For God’s sake, please!” she said, her voice shaking. “Do you want him to find out, this way? Do you want him to read it in the paper, or worse, hear it on the playground, that his father—his mother—” She broke off, desperately afraid she would give in to the tears that threatened.

“He has no idea who his father is, does he? What did you do, lie to him too?” He looked at her in disgust. “What kind of mother are you?”

Despite her agitation, she bristled at his words. No one had ever called into question her abilities as a mother. In fact, throughout the years, she had grown accustomed to shrugging off the figurative pats on the back from her harried colleagues, struggling to raise kids in two-parent households. She alone was responsible for Tripper’s upbringing, and she wasn’t about to take a hit, no matter how well deserved, for a lack in that department.

Gratefully, she seized the anger that bubbled to the surface and let it rout that old urge to cringe, to flee and hide where nothing could reach her. Her gaze hardened as she answered him. “I’m the kind of mother who’ll protect her son at all costs. Yes, I lied to him, and to you, and to whoever I had to, because to tell the truth would have meant ridicule. For my child. For an innocent little boy, whose only sin was being born to parents who should have known better. Don’t you see what a field day they would have had? The papers, the TV, those horrible things they said…It would have reflected on him. On my son.” Her voice caught. “Matt, please—”

She stopped, trembling, staring at him, the anger dissipating into stark terror. The thought of public exposure, for her son this time, was infinitely more upsetting than anything that had been done to her.

But she was seeking understanding from a man who regularly had his life dissected by the press. How could he comprehend her maternal fear, a fear that had held on to a secret that affected him equally?

He seemed to be trying to get a grip on his own emotions, undoubtedly too ripped apart to comprehend hers right now.

“My son, Claire. That kid is my son.” He said it as if now there were no doubt. “You’ve kept my son from me. All these years, that kid was growing up, not knowing who his father was, while I hadn’t a clue there was a kid somewhere running around with my genes.” His voice steadily raised. “You know what you’ve done to us—to both of us, Claire? Do you have any fucking idea how I feel right now?”

She flinched.

“That’s right. I’m angry.” He pointed a finger at her. “I’m pissed as hell. And that’s exactly why I’m not going to talk to you about this right now.” He gave her a grim look. “Because I’m not a very nice guy when I’m angry.”

He let that hang and then turned and said over his shoulder, “You’ll be hearing from my attorneys soon. Don’t go anywhere.”

Claire stood as if turned to stone while his footsteps echoed faintly in the rotunda. Thank God the foliage had muffled their voices—otherwise, anyone could have overheard.

She struggled to organize her thoughts. Briefly she considered, then rejected, a plan to escape, to run, just as he had warned against. Matt would find them. Or worse, the hounds of the press would.

Attorneys. She would hire a lawyer, the best one she could afford—as would he, she realized. There was no way she could beat him on legal grounds.

That left appealing to his better nature. She was sure he had one. Right now he was angry, justifiably so, but the stakes were too high to allow him to react out of anger toward her. Somehow she had to make him see that Tripper would be the one to lose from any animosity he felt.