Ramona turned the volume on the car radio well past comfort to prevent any more conversation. Ignoring her mother’s comments would have been great except they were all too familiar. Like a crappy song that got stuck in her head and wouldn’t go away. She also couldn’t get herself to say all the hateful things she wanted to. Distant politeness had been a fine strategy with her mother all these years, but silence seemed to be the current best option.

She pulled up to the entrance to Winston’s and stopped the car, with no intention of going in. Her mother fussed with her purse, then the seatbelt, then the door handle, giving Ramona plenty of time to change her mind. Lucas would probably be busy, but maybe she could sneak in for a hug and kiss. He would know exactly what to say to help her feel better.

Connor’s large party was evident as soon as they entered the restaurant. Congressman Winston, Lucas’ father, along with one of her uncles, and twenty or so people she’d never seen before filled the space next to a wall of windows. An eccentric-looking man in a purple jacket and bowtie held up a skinny glass and spoke to the crowd. That must be the inimitable Stanley Grayson, who everyone referred to as the Kingmaker. He was the one who was going to take Connor all the way to the White House, apparently.

Ramona seethed with anger. Even if it wasn’t a social event, it was downright rude to invite their mother, hold it in her boyfriend’s restaurant, and not even mention it. She longed for the days when her brother was a dorky bag of bones.

Connor pulled away from the crowd and embraced their mother. “You made it!”

He looked back at Ramona with a polite smile. “Thanks for bringing her.”

She forced herself to smile back. “Yeah. So, what’s this about?”

“I’m congratulating the team for all their hard work. We’ve got our most important rally in a few days and they’ve been working their butts off. And, of course, it’s New Year’s Eve, so…”

A loud laugh drew her attention away from her brother. She grimaced at their pervy uncle looking down a young woman’s blouse.

Connor cleared his throat. “If you’re done judging me now, Ramona, I’m going to head back to my party.”

“What the f-” Someone grabbed her hand while she glared at her brother.

“Stanley Grayson here. You must be the famous little sister!” Stanley pumped her hand up and down.

She looked down at the shiny little man. “Yes, nice to meet you.”

“And you. I’m a huge fan of the Barrett family. Your grandfather was one of my heroes.”

Ramona caught herself mid-eyeroll. “Thank you. Well, I’ve got to get going now.”

She tried to yank her hand out of his grip, but instead, he pulled her in, even closer. “Congratulations on your situation, by the way.”

Her stomach lurched, not only at the words he said but how he said them. In full voice.

“I’m hoping you won’t add an illegitimate child to you brother’s morality-based campaign. I know you have a willing man, and a ring on that finger should clear that right up.”

Ramona’s attention darted from her mother’s shocked face to her brother’s shame, to the crowd’s horror, and finally back to Stanley’s sneering smile.

She stepped back and gripped her stomach as if she could protect her baby from all the evil she saw in that room. Three long breaths later, she answered the still smirking man. “Well, Stanley, I see you and my brother are a perfect match.”

As she turned on her heel and headed toward the exit, the bellows of her brother and cries of her mother merged and faded into an unrecognized jumble behind her. Halfway there, Ramona was stopped by the sight of a tall, thin brunette wearing a cream suit that must have been sewn around her, sauntering out of the kitchen and brushing a palm across her tightly bound hair.

“Abigail,” fell off of a breath.

The woman’s gaze flitted from the dining room to Ramona, who expected shock and was greeted instead with a self-satisfied grin. Then, she waved as if in a parade and continued walking toward Connor’s party.

Ramona stood frozen long enough, staring in the direction of the kitchen to then see Lucas emerge, steps behind Abigail. Her eyes slid to his hands, tightening the strings of his apron around his waist.

The world screeched to a halt, and Ramona was powerless to keep her body from turning around and striding toward the front door. Accompanying her was a small number of distinct voices calling after her in the restaurant. The rush of blood and the pounding of her heart did nothing to drown out the cacophony of voices in her head.

Like a series of waves crashing against the shore, all these thoughts caused her legs to give way, and she stumbled into the door with a loud thud. Arms she recognized caught her, pushed open the door and then she was outside, cold air whipping against her face. Lucas’ repeated calls of her name eventually registered, followed by her mother. “Cariña! Is it true you’re pregnant?”

Then Connor. “Mo, are you all right? Mo?”

She pushed out of Lucas’ arms and found her legs again. As soon as she was upright, dizziness grayed out her vision before she doubled over and threw up all over the front entrance to Winston’s. Despite the collective gasp, Ramona felt better, as if all those terrible thoughts she’d been holding in were now out.

She stood up, caught her breath, and turned toward her car. Heavy footsteps trailed behind her.

“Mo, please say something. Where are you going?” His voice was compelling, but not enough to slow her down.

She held on to the car door as she addressed Lucas. “I’m going home now. I know it’s your house, but it’s also my home. And you’re not welcome there until you’re ready to tell me the whole fucking truth about Abigail.”

He staggered back as she peeled out of the parking lot.

She drove with an unexpected calm and a noticeable absence of fear. It’s not that she didn’t care about the scene she’d left - the hurt on her mother’s face, the concern from Connor, and the pain from Lucas. It was that it suddenly felt very funny.

She’d just thrown up in front of a large crowd of people at a very fancy restaurant. Her pregnancy had been announced to a group of strangers. She’d just threatened her boyfriend that he wasn’t allowed back into his own house.

The humor of it all bubbled up to the degree that she laughed hysterically for the first several minutes of the typically short ride. The third time she passed the same drugstore, she knew something was wrong. Getting between the restaurant and the house was second nature at this point. She could do it without much thought, but as she stopped in front of a fast food restaurant she’d never seen before, Ramona had to admit she was utterly and completely lost.

The situation could be rectified by retrieving her phone and using her navigation app. But her phone was likely full of messages she had no interest in seeing. And what would she put into the GPS, anyway? Where the hell was she trying to go?

Ramona dropped her head onto the steering wheel and sobbed. Old Ramona would have pointed the car toward the airport and gotten the hell out of there. Maybe even just headed west and kept driving until she was back in California. The realization that there was nothing for her there brought another surge of tears.

She’d lived this grand life - traveling the world, doing great things - but hadn’t left a single trail. Even her father, whose footprint had been so faint to have been nearly invisible, had always had somewhere he could point to and say, “This is home.”

Hell, even her mother, while fighting against any sort of label, had settled down. Her home was in those villages, with those people as her new family. People found their places, built their nests, created something to hold them.

Ramona blinked away the last of the tears and retrieved her phone from the bottom of her purse. Maybe she could just stop fighting, stop driving around in circles, stop all of it. Maybe she could finally stop letting all those other voices pull her from where she knew she wanted to be.

It didn’t need to be hard or fraught or painful. It could be as easy as opening up her navigation app and tapping on the top listing, the one with a bright red star next to it. Home.

---

Ramona walked around the house to the back, destination beyond question. Lucas would probably be at the restaurant for hours, which was fine. A good, long soak, accompanied only by her own thoughts, was exactly what she needed. There was a lot to parse: choices, actions, declarations.

She stepped into the tub, the lists already forming in her busy mind. Even before she’d submerged herself, the first level of decisions had been made, answers obvious:

Stay vs. Go.

Punish Lucas vs. Give him a chance.

Kill Connor vs. Let him live.

Her fucking brother. He’d been coming between her and Lucas since the beginning. That had to end, even if it meant making a stand. In so many ways, she’d mothered him. They all had. But the Connor issue was not going to be solved by either her coddling or her silent anger. A hard talk was in their future.

She sank down to the tip of her chin, warmth finally penetrating her body. She’d sat across from Lucas in this tub, not too long ago, scared to death. She was convinced that her actions had made her un-wantable. Had made her undeserving of love and care and belonging. Prepared that all her comfort would be suddenly ripped out from under her as he forced her out of his life.

How foolish.

She didn’t have to protect herself from being evicted. Hell, she’d evicted herself her whole life. Not anymore. This was her home. So much so that she was going to be adding another human being to it. Ramona’s hand skimmed over the skin of her belly. If she looked at it just right, she could see the beginnings of a bump. Her bump. That baby sure didn’t have any problems claiming where it belonged and to whom.

Sudden pressure on her bladder reminded Ramona of baby Winny’s ownership. Ramona stepped out of the tub and paused under the warming lamps. The door to the bathhouse swung open. Lucas’ panicked expression had not left his face, but on it was added the surprise of finding her naked and wet.

“Ramona, baby, I’m sorry. I-”

She held her hand up, and he scurried to the cabinet to retrieve a towel. She wrapped it around herself while keeping both eyes on him, chest rising and falling with increasing upset. “What are you doing here? It’s New Year’s Eve, the busiest night of the year. The restaurant must be-”

“I don’t care about any of that.” His voice cracked. “The only thing that matters is you.”

She let that statement sink in and be absorbed into her skin, into her mind, into her heart. This was what commitment looked like. Take note, Ramona.

He swallowed. “I had no idea Abigail was in town or going to show up at the restaurant. I swear - nothing is going on between us. You have to believe-”

“I know.”

“You - Wait. What?”

“I know nothing is going on between you and Abigail.”

It was as if all the parts of his face shifted position. “Oh.”

She walked over to the bench and sat down. This conversation was going to take a while. “I’d like to start from the beginning. What was the deal with her threatening me when I first got here?”

He stepped toward her. “She was scared that being cut off from my family would tank her campaign. She needed my dad’s Congressional connections, but he stopped talking to her. She thought if you were out of the picture, she could ingratiate herself with him again.”

Now, that made much more sense than the ridiculous story Abigail told her about wanting Lucas back. But still, it wasn’t as if Ramona was the Winston’s favorite person. Moving on. “Why did she stop?”

“At the funeral, Tyler told me about their… activities.”

She hadn’t known that Tyler was there. It was still such a blur.

“I threatened her. Told her it would be hard to hold on to any of what remained of her sympathy votes if everyone knew about her extracurriculars. It worked. But then she found out Connor had hired Stanley Grayson. She wanted Grayson for herself. He would be her only hope in saving her shot.”

“So she came to the restaurant to see Grayson?”

He knelt in front of her. “She came to see me, force me to pressure Connor. Of course, I wouldn’t, so she was going to confront him herself. That’s when you…” He dropped his head.

She ran her thumb across his brow, and he looked up with love and hurt and determination all flashing across his eyes. “After you left, things got even messier. She made a scene and I threw her out. I can’t guarantee she won’t come after us again, but I can guarantee that I will protect you. Even if that means your brother has to deal with the consequences.”

The force of that statement sent her arm out to the edge of her seat for balance. “You are not allowed to protect me by keeping things from me.”

“I understand. And I regret ever thinking that. It’s just I never know what’s going to…”

She waited for him to finish. And waited some more. “What’s going to what?”

He cinched his eyebrows together. “Everything I do, I worry that you already have one foot out the door. One more step and you’ll be gone.”

That statement felt like an electric jolt. One foot out the door was how she’d been leading her whole life. Pretty successfully, too. But all those paths had led her to this bench, across from the man who’d brought her back. “Is that why you won’t consider the Dubai offer? Because you don’t trust I’ll stick around?”

An exasperated sigh filled the quiet space. “No. But I wonder why it’s so important to you. Is it because you want me to have it or you want to test if I would go?”

Any chill from her damp skin dissipated under the heat of her discomfort. She loved and hated his ability to see all the stuff she preferred to hide. “I don’t want you to ever feel like I held you back. Like I messed up and you had to pay the price.”

“Please hear me, Ramona.” He waited until his silence forced her to look at him. “Being with you is the reward, not the price. Another fancy restaurant would be the poor consolation prize. I really need you to believe me when I say that.”

She closed her eyes and nodded. It wasn’t that different from the offer she’d gotten to go to London. It would have never crossed her mind to think that Lucas had held her back from that opportunity. Compared to being with him, that project, great as it might have been, was inconsequential.

Suddenly, his reasoning made total sense. “I do.”

Relief softened the line between his brows. “Why would you ever think that you messed up, anyway?”

That was easy, although explaining it would be challenging. “Everyone kept reminding me what a big deal it was that I had moved back. You, Connor, even Dad and Camille. I wouldn’t hear it. In my mind, I was doing this for my father and for the children’s center and being with you was going to be a fun and sexy side project. I thought it would be easy.”

He flinched as if she had struck him.

“Sorry, I know that sounded bad.”

An audible swallow preceded a slow bob of his head. “I want you to be able to tell me the truth. Please go on.”

She wished she had a better plan for what she was going to say. A framework or bullet points, at least.

He wrapped his hands around hers. “Please, Mo. I need to hear this.”

Here goes. “When I got here, I had no idea about family, and now I’m making my own. I’d just begun to wrap my head around this thing called home and now I have one. I don’t like not having a plan or not knowing what’s next, but nothing that’s happened here was in my control. It’s wonderful and terrifying, and I have to admit I had no idea what I was getting into. Or what I’m doing. I feel dumb and powerless. And always afraid.”

Sadness clouded his features. “I know that’s hard for you. It always has been. Even when we were kids, and there was nothing you could do about your parents, you took charge of us. Con and I joke about it all the time.” The dimple appeared. “Actually, we kind of liked it. You were the only one parenting us, sometimes.”

Parenting. That idea brought a tremor to her breath. “I want to be good at this. I want to be a good mom.”

He dropped his head onto her lap, broad shoulders wrapping around her legs. She ran her fingers through his soft, sandy curls.

“I’m scared too, Mo.” His whisper was barely audible.

Her breath caught. “What scares you?”

He looked up at her, eyes glistening. “What if it’s not enough for you? This simple life in the quiet suburbs, with me and our child. It’s a far cry from jet-setting from one glamorous city to another. Or what if it’s too much for you? What if I hold you so tightly that I force you to run? What if you do what your mother did and…”

“That’s not going to happen.” She was relieved he didn’t finish his sentence. As horrifying as the thought might have been, it was not unfamiliar. Convincing them both that she was not her mother vaulted to the top of her list.