SILVER WAS GOING to throw up. Doing the right thing was highly overrated and she was, honest to God, going to throw up. Not that she had a choice—she’d put off telling Drew about Autumn too long and now they were less than two weeks from Leigh and Denton’s wedding. Autumn was due to arrive, there was a big royal party to plan for, construction was nearly finished on the first trailer and Drew’s mother was back in town. Other than that, and telling Drew about their child, she was fine. Completely and totally fine.
She paced the length of the retail space, careful to avoid the stacks of new furniture still wrapped in plastic, and did her best not to bump into the stripper poles. She was still getting used to where they were and had crashed into one the previous day. An incredibly dumb thing to think about but better than her conversation with Drew.
He was going to be so angry with her, she thought grimly. No, he would be hurt and even as she told herself she hadn’t done anything wrong and it wasn’t as if he’d ever asked about their kid, she couldn’t help feeling...guilty.
She heard the door opening and spun to watch him walk inside. It was barely noon. He’d come from the bank for what he thought was a business lunch.
“Hey,” he said with a grin as he approached. “Tell me this isn’t about my mother.”
“It’s not.”
“Excellent. Then I have news. I have a rabbit.”
The statement was just unexpected enough to momentarily distract her. “Excuse me?”
“A rabbit. Mr. Whiskers is a standard chinchilla rabbit, which means he’s kind of gray and very soft. He’s around seven pounds and get this—he’s litter box trained. Seriously. He uses a little litter box with this wood pulp litter. He eats a special kind of hay and lots of greens. Lettuces and kale and carrot tops. He’s actually not too bad to have around. He sleeps a lot. I put him in one of spare rooms, but when I’m home I let him out.”
“A rabbit? As a pet?”
He pulled her close, hugged her, then chuckled. “Doug and Melissa adopted a newborn.”
He explained about Emily and her new baby brother and the rash and Mr. Whiskers. “I’m keeping him for a couple of weeks, while they get everything sorted out.”
She took a step back. “I really can’t see you with a rabbit, but if it’s working...”
“It is. And people say I have commitment issues.” He led her to a couple of folding chairs. “What’s up? Everything okay with the construction? I haven’t heard from Walter except to have him say they’re on schedule.”
“It’s not about work.” She looked at him and hoped this was going to go a lot better than she’d imagined. “Drew, I want to talk about the baby we gave up for adoption.”
He stared at her. “Now? It’s been years.”
“I know.” She swallowed, then told herself to just get it over with. “We had a girl.”
He looked surprised. “I figured we’d had a boy, but I guess that’s because I’m a guy.” He hesitated. “Did you see her after she was born?”
“I did. Her name is Autumn.”
“You named her?”
“No, I didn’t. I, ah, it was hard after we broke up and I found out I was pregnant. My uncle helped me find a nice couple to adopt our baby. They lived in Los Angeles and I ended up staying with them until Autumn was born.”
He surprised her by taking her hand in his. “Jeez, Silver, I’m sorry. I never thought about it before, but you were pregnant. I mean you had a baby growing inside of you for nine months. I signed some paperwork and I was done. I’ll bet it was hard.”
She briefly closed her eyes and wished he wasn’t being so understanding. In some ways, that made it harder to tell him.
“Leigh, that’s Autumn’s mom, was so wonderful to me. We became like sisters. She’d known from the time she was a teenager that she couldn’t have children. It was a congenital defect and she knew she wanted to adopt. We got really close and after Autumn was born, I stayed with them for a while.”
He pulled back and stared at her. “You lived with our baby?”
She nodded. “Just for a few weeks. Then I came back to Happily Inc, but I couldn’t settle. I started getting into trouble. My uncle gave me the tough love lecture and I ran away.” She raised a shoulder. “Not my most mature moment. Anyway, I ended up back in LA and I moved back in with Leigh.” She cleared her throat. “And her husband, of course, and Autumn.”
His expression tightened. “For how long?”
“Two years. I worked, went to community college and—”
“Two years?” He came to his feet and glared at her. “You lived with our baby for two years and never said a word?”
“What was I supposed to say?” she asked as she stood, telling herself to stay calm. This was all new to Drew and of course he would react.
“Drew, you weren’t interested in our child. You said it yourself—you signed the paperwork and you were done. I’m not trying to be mean or judge you, I’m just pointing out that it was different.”
“Of course it was different. You had a relationship with our child and you never told me. You kept it a secret from me all this time.”
She felt her temper flaring. “It’s not as if you were asking for information. You went on with your life. I’m sorry if you feel like you missed out on something, but if you do, it’s only in the last five seconds. Because for the last eleven years, you haven’t given her a single thought.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Tell me I’m wrong.”
He leaned toward her and lowered his voice. “You are wrong. I did think about her. I wondered. You’re right—you were the one dealing with your pregnancy and I was in college. Fine. I accept that. But once you stayed in touch with her, you should have said something. You owed me that. If not then at least now.” He waved his arm toward the rest of the room. “We’re supposed to be business partners. We’re sleeping together and starting something personal between us. How am I supposed to trust you now when you kept this from me? And where on earth do we go from here?”
Instead of waiting for an answer, he turned and walked out. The door slammed behind him.
Silver shivered slightly, then sank onto the chair. Her eyes burned, but she didn’t cry. She told herself to keep breathing, that he would calm down and they would talk again later. Because there was a whole lot more he had to know.
* * *
DREW CALLED HIS assistant from his car and told her he wouldn’t be coming back into the bank today. He pulled off his tie, tossed his suit jacket into the backseat and drove east nearly seventy miles before turning around and driving back.
For the first hundred and ten miles, he cursed Silver and told himself he hadn’t done anything wrong. For the last thirty, he thought maybe there might be more than one side to the story. He exited the freeway just before he reached town and drove for a few minutes. It was nearly two o’clock when he pulled up at a pair of big gates and pushed the intercom button to connect to the main office in the stable.
“Drew?” Cade’s voice was scratchy through the speaker system. “What’s up?”
“You got a second?”
“Sure. I’m in back, in my office.”
“Thanks.”
Drew knew the way. He drove around the large farmhouse to the parking area by the massive stables. It was a sunny day and several people were exercising the horses Cade bred. Drew got out of his car and walked toward the biggest barn and Cade’s office. His friend met him just inside the open double door.
Cade took one look at him and shook his head. “How bad?”
“No one’s dead.”
Cade didn’t say anything.
“No one is dead or injured or arrested,” Drew amended. “Good enough?”
“For now.”
Cade led him to his large office. There was a desk with a computer, a dry erase board mounted on the wall and a few file cabinets. In the back was a battered sofa. Drew took a seat on it and Cade pulled up his desk chair.
“It’s Silver,” Drew started, then paused, not sure what exactly to say. He was still processing information, still trying to figure out what he felt. Confusion, sure. Anger. Maybe a little guilt. But more than any of that, he felt a massive sense of betrayal while at the same time he wasn’t sure he had the right.
“You remember when I told you Silver got pregnant that summer?”
“Sure.”
“There’s more. I hadn’t wanted to break up when I left for college, but she insisted. She said I’d want to be free to do whatever I wanted at college. I fought her on it, but in the end I agreed. Three weeks into my freshman year, I knew she was right. I missed her but it wasn’t the same.”
Cade waited, his expression both concerned and patient.
“She showed up around my sixth week and told me she was pregnant,” Drew admitted. “Scared the crap out of me. I was angry and horrified and resentful as hell, but I didn’t say any of that.”
“You said before you offered to marry her.”
“I did. She turned me down. She said we should give up the baby. I signed the paperwork and that was that.”
Cade didn’t say anything.
“I thought that was it,” Drew continued. “Or rather I never thought about our kid again. Okay, maybe every couple of years. We had a girl, by the way.” Autumn, he remembered. Her name was Autumn.
“For me, it was done, but not for Silver. She and her uncle found a nice couple and Silver went to live with them so no one knew she was pregnant.”
“I wondered how that had been kept a secret.”
Drew thought about the rest of it. What had seemed like such a horrendous crime a couple of hours ago suddenly didn’t seem so very awful. So why was he angry?
“She stayed in touch with them. The mom and the girl. Autumn. She lived with them for a while. She knows our daughter and she never told me that. Never told me any of it.”
Cade looked at him for several seconds before asking, “Did you want to be told?”
“I don’t know. I never had the chance to wonder. I thought she was just gone, but she’s not. Silver kept her from me.” He leaned forward and rested his forearms on his thighs. “Everything is completely messed up. My mother’s back and she’s all about your party. She wants a private audience with the king, by the way, so you’ll want to avoid that. Then Silver and I went into business together.”
“How is that messed up? I thought you wanted to go into business with her.”
“I do and it’s great. Expanding her business is the right thing to do. She and I are getting involved and that’s great. It’s all coming together and now this. She dumped it on me with no warning.” He looked at his friend. “She knows our kid and I don’t.”
“Do you want to?”
“Yes. Maybe. I think so.” Drew still couldn’t grasp the truth of it. “She’s my daughter and I know nothing about her.” Meet Autumn? Could he? Another question was why was Silver telling him this now? Why after all these years did she suddenly feel the need to share the news?
“When I moved back to Happily Inc, I knew I wanted to take over the ranch,” Cade said unexpectedly. “I worked out a deal with Grandpa Frank where I would buy him out over time.”
“Makes sense.” All Grandpa Frank’s grandchildren would be left money, but the ranch was a much-bigger prize. No way Cade could simply have it.
“I had a plan, a good one. Being able to buy an El Baharian stallion made that plan possible.” He smiled. “But I didn’t just get the horse—I got the girl, too.”
Drew remembered how Bethany had come with Rida as a lowly stable hand. It wasn’t until she and Cade had already fallen in love that she’d admitted to being a royal princess.
“Loving her was easy,” Cade said. “As for the rest of it, let’s just say it took me a while to figure out what was important to me. I had to give up my ideas about doing everything myself. Bethany wanted to be an equal partner. I had to be open to that, and to being a prince. But it’s worth it. She’s worth anything.”
Drew shook his head. “I’m not in love with Silver.” That he knew for sure.
“Not now, but you were. Both of you. Silver loved you and had the smarts to know what was going to happen. Loving you, she let you go. Then she turned up pregnant and when she could have trapped you into marriage, she didn’t. She gave you an out and you took it.” He held up a hand. “I’m not saying you were wrong, but look at it from her point of view. The guy she loved more than anyone ever had gone off to college and when she found out she was pregnant, he basically signed a couple of papers and told her to have a good life. He got off with nothing while she had to deal with finding people to adopt their baby, go through the pregnancy, recover, and then go on with her life as if nothing had happened. For you, it was out of sight, out of mind. Sorry, Drew. You’re not the victim here.”
His cousin’s words were blunt. The emotions that had been battling for dominance suddenly retreated, leaving only shame as the winner.
He stood and looked at his friend. “I was a total shit.”
“Yup.”
“I should probably go hear her side of the story.”
“It wouldn’t be the worst decision in the world.”
* * *
SILVER HAD CHOSEN that particular afternoon to tell Drew about his daughter for a couple of reasons—first, because time was running out and second, because she’d had a feeling it might not go well and she didn’t have any other appointments to worry about. Watching a vendor break down emotionally never made a bride feel good about her upcoming wedding.
After Drew walked out, Silver decided that rather than have a mini breakdown she would get busy. She cleaned her entire loft, then signed for a delivery. The large, flat box turned out to be the perfect distraction—it was her dress for Leigh’s wedding.
As promised, it was perfect for The Great Gatsby theme. The silky, pale pink dress was sleeveless with a V neckline, but what made the dress was the beading. From the shoulder to midthigh, the dress was beaded in a swirling, elegant art deco style. She could practically hear ragtime music playing in the background.
She hurried up to her loft and got out of her clothes. She pulled on the dress and headed for the full-length mirror in her bathroom.
The fit was perfect. The material hugged her body, and then fell to the floor. It was a little too long, but she knew all the best alterations experts in town. Once she decided on her shoes, she would get the gown hemmed.
Her hair was a problem. The long, straight style wouldn’t work at all. Neither would any kind of a braid. She twisted her hair, then pulled it up. That was better, she thought and walked out in the living room area to get her phone. She was going to need a hair appointment the morning of the wedding so she could have her hair done. All she generally went in for was a trim and a little color. Her stylist would be thrilled.
She took a couple of selfies to text to Leigh and was just about to change back into her jeans when she heard someone knocking on the door to her loft. She opened it and saw Drew standing there.
In her excitement over the dress, she’d momentarily forgotten about their earlier discussion. Seeing him brought all her feelings back at once. She went from happy to defensive and unsure in less than a second. Emotional whiplash, she thought, feeling more than a little sick to her stomach.
She stepped back to let him in, then closed the door behind him.
“Obviously we have to talk,” he said, then frowned. “What are you wearing?”
She glanced down at the dress, then back at him. “Give me a second to get changed. I’ll be right back.”
She hurried to her bedroom area, grateful for the screens that gave her privacy. It only took her a second to slip off the dress and hang it, then pull on jeans and her T-shirt. She returned to the living room. Drew stood by a window, facing her.
“You first,” he said.
With the light behind him, she couldn’t see his face and she had no idea what he was thinking. Not that it mattered, she told herself. He could be as angry as he wanted. She’d done the best she could at the time. She’d been dealing with a lot and she’d been on her own. Whatever complaints he had now were his own fault.
“I didn’t tell you about Autumn for a lot of reasons,” she began. “I stayed in LA with Leigh for almost two years. I helped her with the baby and went to school and worked and tried to figure out what I wanted with my life. When I came back, you were still in college, then you took that bank job back East for a couple of years and when you returned to Happily Inc, you were engaged. Why on earth would I say anything about our daughter?”
Before he could say anything, she continued. “I’ve continued to stay in touch with Leigh. She and her first husband got a divorce and that was hard, but he’s still close to Autumn and Leigh’s amazing. I talk to them on the phone or do FaceTime or Skype regularly. I see Autumn a couple of times a year. She knows she’s adopted, she knows I’m her birth mother, but it’s no big deal. It’s all she’s ever known. She calls me Silver because Leigh is her real mom. I’m just a really good friend of the family who happened to give birth to her.”
“Does she know about me?” he asked.
“She knows she has a biological father, yes.”
“Why now? Why did you want to tell me now? You could have done it two years ago or in five more years. Why now?”
And there it was—the real complication in an already-difficult situation.
“Leigh’s getting married. Denton is a great guy and he’s going to make them both so happy.” She cleared her throat. “The thing is Leigh has heard me talk about Happily Inc for years, but she’s never been here. I’ve always gone to LA. So when she was thinking about where to have the wedding, she thought about it being here. She talked to Pallas and found out there was a cancellation.”
Silver squared her shoulders. “That’s, um, why I was wearing that dress before. I’m going to be a bridesmaid in Leigh’s wedding. She’s coming here to get married and she’s bringing Autumn with her. Then, while Leigh and Denton are on their honeymoon, I’ll be keeping Autumn. Here. For a week.”
Drew finally moved away from the window. She could see his stunned expression. “Our daughter is going to be here for a week and you’re going to babysit her?”
“Yes. That’s about it. There were a lot of reasons to tell you but the biggest one is that Autumn really wants to meet you.”