The Gift, Book 3 (The Billionaire's Love Story) (6 page)

“What’s the matter?” Candace asked, curiously. “Why are you smiling at me like that?”

“No reason. If it makes you feel better, I told Tobias that I would show you.”

“You don’t have to show me a thing. I know everything I need to know about Word. I’m a PA, not a temp.”

“That’s what I thought. There’s not much point in being a PA if you can’t handle your Word processing.” She returned Candace’s false smile with her own and then heard the sound of the door opening behind her.

“You’re still here, Savannah?” Matthias asked, teasingly. “It seems to me that you have your eyes on an office on this side of the floor.” Before she had a chance to refute his allegation, as playful as it seemed, Tobias walked out, wearing a long black coat and giving her a look that burned right through her.

“I’m very happy in 218, Matthias,” she replied as she dragged her attention away from the man who had the ability to make her heart stop and speed up at will. “I don’t have any desire to be on this side of the floor.”

“Seems to me that everyone’s feeling grumpy today,” Matthias commented. “I’ll get my coat and meet you downstairs,” he said to his boss and then rushed off as did Candace.

“I haven’t finished speaking to you.” Tobias whispered, taking a step towards her and making her mouth turn dry.

“Was there something else?”

“You know there was.” Tobias told her. But before she could reply, Matthias reappeared in view, slipping on his coat and with a briefcase in his hand. She unintentionally gave him a once-over, in an attempt to focus on something else and to move away from the intensity of Tobias’s closeness, but when she turned to face him again, she found herself staring into Tobias’s hardened face.

“Good luck,” she said and slipped away as fast as she could.

Chapter 8

“Did you get a chance to talk to Mr. Stone today?”

It was a question Jacob had asked her every day so far. She turned around, slowly removing her rubber gloves, to find Jacob wearing his Age of Ultron Iron Man Mask. “I did,” she replied, carefully. “But like I told you, Honey, he’s been awful busy this whole week. I only saw him getting into his car. He’s not been in the office much lately.”

Jacob’s shoulders drooped.

“Why do you keep asking?” She placed the folded up gloves neatly on the side of the sink.

“I wanted to know when he can come skating with us next.”

“
That’s
why you’ve been asking me?” She coiled her hair around her fingers and placed it over her shoulder.

Jacob shrugged silently.

“He’s a busy man, Honey. I don’t expect he’ll have much time to come skating with us.”

“But he said he would!”

“I know, but sometimes grown-ups say things they don’t mean.” She couldn’t read his expression behind the Iron Man mask.

“That’s not being honest.”

“I’m sure he would love to come, one day,” she added, eager not to crush his hopes. “But when grown-ups say ‘one day’, they’re trying to be nice so that they don’t hurt your feelings.”

“I wish he wouldn’t lie.” Jacob’s voice was flat and monotone as he removed his mask. She bent over so that her face was barely inches from his. “He wasn’t lying, Honey. I don’t think he said anything he didn’t mean. I think he likes you.”

“I like him too. He’s nothing like Daddy and I wish we could have more days in the park with him.” There was a touch of anger in his voice and a temper she had never seen on him before colored his childish-features.

“What is it, Jacob? Why are you upset?” Clearly something was going on and she needed to get to the bottom of it. He’d been quiet lately and she put it down to him getting tired after being back a full week at school but looking at him now, her son looked anxious. “Jacob?”

He coughed a few times then told her. “Both of Henry Carson’s parents came to see him at the Christmas concert. Henry said my dad didn’t ‘cos he hates me.” She thought back to that night, to the Nativity play in which Jacob had been a sheep. A cute and delightful sheep who said nothing but smiled like an angel the whole time. She didn’t remember Jacob being upset that evening and he had said anything. In fact this was the first she’d heard of it. He seemed to be settling in fine at this new school and she’d been hoping things had gotten off to a good start.

“Your daddy doesn’t hate you,” she replied quickly. She liked to think that Colt cared for his son, at some level buried way down deep. Just not enough, but her son didn’t need to know that.

“Then why isn’t he here?”

“Do you
want
him to be here?” Her heart tripped a beat and anxiety flowed through her knowing that his father wasn’t in the slightest bit concerned about him. She was always mindful that the boy
had
a father but Colt had never expressed much interest in his son. He hadn’t even called on Jacob’s birthday a few months ago. It was all so different from how things had been when they had first met. He’d always been arrogant and cocksure of himself, but in the early days there had been a gentleness about him which had disappeared when the factory he’d been a foreman at had closed down. It had affected him badly, and she had never realized that his self-esteem had been wrapped up in his position. He’d refused to take on other jobs as a forklift operator or a handyman, even to get by. His pride getting in the way.

“Do you, Jacob?” she asked again. “Do you want your Daddy to be here?”

Jacob shook his head. “He scares me, Mommy. But I don’t understand, if he doesn’t hate me, why does he hate
you
?” She clenched her teeth together, thinking about her response. “He doesn’t
hate
me, Jacob. Daddy wasn’t very well back then.” She ran her hands through her hair, causing her neatly coiled up hair to come undone again and then she scooped Jacob up in her arms. In a couple of years or so he would be too big for her to carry, and another part of his childhood would fall to the wayside. She buried her face in his hair and carried him to the sofa. Sitting down with him on her lap, she held his warm, chubby hands. “I think Daddy likes being by himself. Just like you and me like being by ourselves.”

She felt his arms tighten around her.

“Do you miss being with Grandma and Grandpa?” Maybe he was lonely for family?

“Sometimes. But I wish I had a Mommy
and
a Daddy. A
nice
Daddy. Everyone else does.” She didn’t know what to say to this; she’d known that one day he would have questions but she hadn’t thought he’d have them so soon. “Is that what’s bothering you, Honey?”

“I don’t want a Daddy who makes you and me cry. I want someone kind like Mr. Stone.”

“Honey,” she slipped her arms tightly around his small frame but he soon wriggled out of her hold. “Why can’t Mr. Stone be my Daddy?”

Ok, enough madness.
“Because he can’t, Jacob.” She lamented the lack of positive male models in her life. Apart from her father there were none. She had no brothers, and neither did Kay. They didn’t keep in contact much with her father’s side of the family and she had no male friends she could occasionally ‘borrow’ who would take Jacob to a game, or to watch a movie. And now to make matters worse, to remind him even more of what he didn’t have, Tobias Stone had stolen into her life, and into her son’s heart and had shown him, in vivid technicolor glory, the very thing that was missing from his life.

“Why not?” Jacob persisted. “He was all by himself that day at the park, and we were all by ourselves and we had a good time together, didn’t we?”

Damn Tobias Stone.
She nodded, because she knew Jacob had had a good time, but she had to knock this nonsense out of his head. “It’s not as simple as that.” That meeting last week at the park had been freakily weird. “Jacob, I know he seems like a kind man.” At this Jacob’s face clouded over, “I mean, he
is
a nice man and he’s wonderful—“

“You
do
like him, Mommy?”

“What? No, that’s not what I mean.” She shook her head, worried that her son might get the wrong idea. “I’m saying he’s wonderful to work with,” she struggled to keep her chain of thought, “but our work life means he’s very important and everyone listens to him and I’m just one of the little minions. He’s in charge of hundreds of people.” She wasn’t sure where she was going with this, in her quest to put Jacob off.

“He’s in charge of that many people?” Jacob asked, full of admiration. Tobias Stone just went up another notch in Jacob’s book. “I want to be just like him when I grow up.”

Eager to change the subject, she told him, “People like Henry Carson don’t know that your Mommy loves you two hundred million times as much. I’m sorry you feel alone, Honey. But you’re not alone and it’s wrong of other kids to say things like that, but people sometimes say nasty things to other people because it makes them feel better about themselves.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“You did?” She replied, proudly, knowing that some of what she tried to pass onto her son had helped.

“I told him he was being unkind because he had a big nose.”

“Jacob!”

“He has! It’s a real hooter.”

“Jacob Samuel Page. That is being unkind, picking on someone because of the way they look. You don’t say things like that to other children.”

“Why is that unfair? He was nasty to me because I don’t have a dad.”

“You
do
have a dad.”

“Not one who cares about me.”

“He does…” She bit back on her tongue as Jacob buried his head in her shoulder. “Henry said my daddy didn’t love me, and that’s why it was just you and me.” His muffled words stabbed her heart.

“Your daddy loves you but it was better for him to be alone, and for us to be alone. Don’t you agree?”

He nodded and she ran her fingers through his floppy brown hair. It was darker than hers, more like Colt’s, but unlike his father’s, Jacob’s was fine and soft. “I like it here.”

“I like it too,” she said, gently stroking the back of his head. It killed her, his worries and his sadness, especially over
this
.

The divorce hadn’t been painful, not as painful as staying too long in the marriage, hoping things might get better. But what had hurt was the finality of it, that a partnership that was meant to last forever had been severed and a boy had been effectively left fatherless. She was doing her best for her son and trying to make theirs a life that wasn’t one full of struggle, but being a single mother had shown her the reality of just how hard it really was.

Not that Colt had ever been there, much, especially in the later years, but if he’d been the same man she had married, even half of that man, they might have somehow survived. If the emotional abuse, and the times he had lashed out at her, had never happened, they might have had a chance.

She was even more worried now that she had uncovered the worries Jacob had been carrying around on his tiny shoulders. In her struggle to make ends meet, she’d lost sight of the things her son desperately wanted; a home, a family, a father.

“So when can we see Mr. Stone again?”

Goddamnit.

He coughed again and this time she heard the low rumble in his chest. “Jacob Samuel Page, did you wear your scarf and hat and gloves today?” It was the tone and his full name she used to express her gravity. Losing her married name and giving Jacob her maiden name hadn’t been as hard as she thought it might have been. She’d been determined that her son didn’t bear the name of a man who didn’t really want him.

“Jacob?” His looking at the floor gave her the immediate and right answer. She leaned her head against his chest. “Does your chest feel tight?”

He shook his head.

“Can you breathe easy?”

He nodded.

“I don’t care how excited you are to go out and play, Jacob. You still have to make sure you put your hat and scarf on first, do you understand?”

He nodded.

“I can’t hear you,” she said, lifting his face up.

“Yes, Mommy.”

“And always make sure you—”

“Have the inhaler on me. I know, Mommy.” He parroted the words she said all the time, fearful that one day he’d need it and not have it. He yawned and rubbed his eyes. “Can you read to me, Mommy?”

“Sure I can. Come on. Brush your teeth and change into your PJs. I’ll be over to tuck you in.”

“And read to me,” he reminded her.

“And read to you.”

He scampered away to get ready and she walked over to the coffee table where the laptop was and hit the keyboard, jerking it back to life. She re-read the email from the new agency telling her the company was interested in interviewing her, and that they would get in touch with her soon.

Chapter 9

“I still don’t trust him.” Tobias stared out of the car window, his brow creasing into tiny grooves.

“You don’t trust Xian Yanling?” Disbelief echoed in Matthias’s voice. Tobias turned to face him. “No.”

“Why the hell not?” his colleague asked, stunned. “We’ve been having meetings with him and his associates all week. You’ve been interested in him for a long time. You said yourself that Yanling is a big player in the Far East.”