Skeletons in the closet

Stella

Spread out naked on my desk I can’t help but wonder how I’ll ever study here without getting turned on.

“Two-forty, get dressed.” Ash slaps my ass affectionately and yanks up his jeans.

I slip back into my shorts, and just as my tank top covers my scar, there’s a knock at my office door. My office, I never thought I’d have a need for an office. I don’t really, I can study anywhere, but I love that Ash wanted to give me my own space in his home.

“Who’s that?” I whisper hopping off the desk.

“My dad is very punctual.”

“Wow, how’d he know where to find us?”

“No clue.”

Great, just how I wanted to meet my future father-in-law, sweaty and post-coital. We cross the room hand in hand and Ash unlocks and opens the door.

A man wearing an expensive navy blue pin-striped suit with a striking red tie stands in the hall. He looks like an older version of Ash. Now that I know what my husband will look like in twenty-five years, I feel even luckier to belong to Mr. Ashton Pride.

“Adam, right on time, as usual,” Ash says as if he’s irritated with his father’s timeliness. I think it’s odd that he calls his dad by his first name but he did tell me that they weren’t close.

He looks from Ash to me and back at Ash with disapproval. “Playing house with the nanny, as usual.”

“Stop it. I told you Stella’s my girlfriend, don’t be a dick.”

“You’re paying her to look after my grandson, aren’t you?”

Technically, I am still getting paid to be the nanny, but only so I can have my own money. I don't like asking Ash for things when he's given me so much. We don’t use that terminology, though. It messes with Cannon’s head. And I agree with Ash. I don't like Adam’s tone it's totally dickish.

“I was helping her out, she was helping me out, that’s what couples do.”

“Sounds like you pay her to watch your son and sleep with you.”

Ash steps forward until he’s toe to toe with his father. “You’re walking on thin ice talking shit about my fiancé in my house.”

Adam’s eyebrows shoot up at the word fiancé. “Fiancé? Really, since when?” He leans around Ash to get a better look at me. “You must be very good,” he says, and I swear Ash growls.

“Since it’s none of your business.”

“What about Abigail?”

Ash’s face scrunches up in disgust, “What do you mean what about Abigail? That whore took off five years ago, why would you even bring her up?”

“Lower your voice, son, Cannon’s in your office coloring and you’re talking about his mother.”

“Don’t tell me what to do, and that woman was nothing more than a host body that incubated my son. She’s never spent one second of time with him and she never will.”

I reach out and touch Ash’s arm. He’s vibrating with anger. “Ash, calm down, you don’t want to scare Cannon.”

His enraged eyes swing to mine and I let go and step away from him “Take him upstairs,” he says through clenched teeth.

“Yes, dear, be a good nanny and take your charge upstairs so I can talk to my son.”

Ash snaps lurching forward to grab his father by the throat. He pushes him across the hall and up against the wall. “Ash, stop!”

Adam’s face turns bright red, but Ash ignores it until Cannon follows the commotion into the hall. “Daddy! Don’t hurt Papa!” he shrieks grabbing hold of Ash’s leg.

Ash looks down at Cannon, and I move in to pull him away from the impending bloodshed. “Cannon, honey, move out of the way.” I pull, but he refuses to let go of Ash’s leg.

Ash tightens his hand around his father’s throat and gives him a hard shove against the wall hard before releasing him to gather Cannon in his arms. “You need to leave now, and don’t come back. I don’t need you in my life. I don’t need your negativity, I won't let you insult the woman I love, and I will not let my son be used as a pawn in your election again.”

Adam’s hands are around his throat, he’s gasping for breath, and his eyes are wild like a cornered animal. I wrap my arms around both of them and cup Cannon’s cheek with my hand guiding his eyes away from his grandfather. “It’s going to be okay, buddy, grandpa and daddy are upset, why don’t you come with me upstairs?’

His little hands are gripping Ash’s T-shirt, but when he hears my voice, he releases him and reaches out to me. I gather him in my arms and without a word to either of them, I make my way down the hall to the foyer.

It’s a risk to leave them alone, but Adam and Ash are grown men, they can take care of themselves. Cannon cannot, and I won't let him witness any more ill will between his grandpa and his daddy.

“I’m scared, Tella.”

“It’s going to be okay, honey. Daddy and Papa were having an argument. Daddy lost his temper, but he’s okay now.” I hope.

“Is it bout my mommy?”

I skid to a stop in the foyer and look into his chocolate brown eyes. “What?”

“Is Daddy mad cuz Papa took me to my mommy today?”

Oh God no, no, no, no. He did not take Cannon to meet Abigail without Ash’s permission. If that’s where their argument is going, I need to get some backup, because it’s about to get real ugly real fast.

Ridge, I need to find Ridge.

“Um, honey, I don’t know. Let’s, uh, let’s get you up to your room so you can play your video games for a little while and rest before dinner.”

“You want me to play my game?” he asks in disbelief. I always make him read a book or do an art project before he’s allowed to play a video game. Today I need him totally zoned and focused on something in case a brawl breaks out downstairs.

“Yeah, just this once, though, then we can read before bed.” He frowns at first, and then he shrugs, “Okay.”

Upstairs on my way to Cannon’s bedroom, with him still wrapped around me like a monkey, I glance down into the living room off the foyer and see the top of a blonde head.

“No fucking way,” I whisper to myself.

Cannon gasps and rears back taking my face in his hands, “Tella, you said the F word!”

“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry, buddy. Sometimes I think a word in my head and it slips out of my mouth before I can catch it.”

“It’s okay. Daddy does that, too.” I smile and kiss him on the nose continuing to his bedroom at a faster pace. I want him safe in his chrome fortress before daddy’s F words start slipping out all over the place.

When he’s all set up with his Xbox One, LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens game, and a healthy snack from his chrome mini fridge, I step out into the hall and call Ridge.

“Ridge?”

“You need me to come sit with the kid or get rid of the blonde?”

Wow, I didn’t even have to ask, and he’s offering me options I hadn’t thought of yet. “I, um, I was going to ask you to stay with Cannon but, you can get rid of her?”

“I can do anything you want, Miss Stella. Boss made it pretty clear from day one that your every wish is his desire,” he says in his deep, commanding, sexy voice.

“He did?”

“Yes. Which will it be?”

I silently move through the house in my bare feet on my way back to the living room where Abigail is waiting. “I think maybe you should come and keep an eye on Cannon and I’ll find out what the blonde wants.”

“Alright, I’ll be right up. And ma’am, the blonde is Cannon’s biological mother Abigail, thought you should be warned.”

“Yeah, I figured. Did you know she came here a couple of weeks ago asking to see Cannon?”

“Yes, ma’am, I did.”

When I reach the atrium that surrounds the foyer on the second floor, I take a step across the hall and look for her blonde bun. Yep, she’s still here. “Has she been here since then? Other than today, I mean.”

“No. She’s being monitored, though.”

“She is? By whom?”

“Ash has somebody on her.”

“Did his somebody know that Adam took Cannon to meet with Abigail today?”

Silence fills the line and then, “No, ma’am, he didn’t know that.”

I wonder if the person monitoring Abigail is Ridge. “Well, he did, and when Ash finds out I’m afraid of what might happen.”

“I’ll send Felicia to keep an eye on Cannon. I’m coming down there.” I can hear him moving, his shoes on the marble taking the stairs at a clipped rate.

“Where are you?” I’ve always wondered where Ridge disappears to when he isn’t doing things for Ash.

“I was in my office on the third floor when you called, but I’m halfway to the foyer now. Where’s Ash?”

“With Adam outside the library, last I saw.”

“You fucking did what?” Ash roars from the hall leading to the library.

Ridge hears, “Fuck, I’m almost there. Stay out of their way. This is going to get ugly.”

“Okay, Ridge, I’ve never heard him yell like that. Not gonna lie, I’m sorta scared.”

“Just stay out of the way.” The line goes dead, and I watch Ash drag his father into the foyer by the throat. His nose is bleeding badly, and his eyes are already blackening. Adam must have told him what he did.

“You don’t fucking take my son on pretenses so you can introduce him to that whore without my permission!” Ash pulls back his fist, and I hear a crack and a splat when it connects with Adam’s face again. Adam’s head lolls to one side, his eyes are glassy and unfocused, and his knees are buckling.

“Ash!” I yell. His head snaps up to me on the balcony.

“Go back to Cannon’s room, Stella. I don’t want you to watch me kill my father.”

I hold his eyes and skitter down the curved staircase into the foyer. “You’re not going to kill anybody. Ash, let him go, I think he’s learned his lesson.” I tear my eyes from Ash’s to look at Adam’s bloody face, “Right? You won’t take Cannon to meet his mom without Ash’s permission again, right?”

I’m trying like hell to save this piece of shit man’s life, not because I care about him but because I love Ash. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he murdered his father and I just found him. I’m not about to hand him over to the police.

“I make no promises. The boy deserves to have his mother,” Adam says. What a fool.

Crack! Another punch to the face puts him on his knees. “She is not his mother, you earn that title with actions, and she left him when he was one week old for some piece of shit guitar player in Vegas,” Ash says, in a frightening calm voice.

The clicking of heels on the marble floor draw my attention to the beautiful blonde bombshell entering the room.

One side of her cherry red lipstick covered mouth lifts in a smirk, “You’ve been keeping tabs on me, Ashton? That’s sweet.” She catches sight of Adam’s bloody face, and her skin pales, but she recovers quickly fixing her gaze on Ash.

“I haven’t thought of you for five years.”

“You knew I was with Leighton, lead guitarist for Violent Violet, that’s something.”

“Abby, don’t talk about your sordid past. We’re here to focus on your future,” Adam gurgles through the blood from his place on the floor. Abigail flashes him an irritated look that she thinks no one caught, but I did.

Ridge materializes behind me touching my shoulder as he passes on his way to Ash’s side.

Ash ignores Ridge’s presence looking down at his father, “Shut up.” He releases his collar dropping him in a heap on the floor and turns to Abigail. “Call it a sick curiosity, but it only happened once. After I saw the trash you were hanging with I washed my hands of you. Now, tell me why you’re really here. I’m not giving you money, or drugs, or alcohol, so if that’s what you’re…”

“Ashton, stop. I’m only here to see Cannon. I told you I cleaned up my act over a year ago. I wanted to be clean, so I could get to know my baby.”

Ugh, yuck, the way she calls him Ashton instead of Ash makes me sick and is she an idiot? Cannon’s not exactly a baby anymore. Nobody stuffed him in a time capsule to preserve until she got her life together. Ridge and I share a look of disbelief from across the room.

“Great, congratulations, Abigail, I’m glad you got your shit together, but Cannon hasn’t been a baby for a long time. You’d know that if you were around, at all, ever. But you weren’t, were you? Not even one visit, you just disappeared in the night and never looked back.”

“That’s not true. I did look back, a lot. But I couldn’t get out of the hole I dug for myself, and every time I tried, I just sank deeper and deeper until I finally hit rock bottom. That’s when I realized my life went to shit the day I left you. I shouldn’t have done it, I know, but I can’t take back the past. I can only work on the future, and I want to be a part of my son’s life.”

“No.”

Her hands fly to her hips, and she pushes out her chest, “You can’t tell me no, I’m his mother.”

Ash curls his lip and clenches his teeth and fists. Ridge lays his hand on his shoulder as a reminder that we don’t hit girls. Unfortunately, I’d love to see her pretty perfect nose crooked and bloody. Wrong? Yes. Do I care? Nope.

He wants to bloody her like he did his father, but he knows he can’t. The way he looks right now, it wouldn’t surprise me if his body spontaneously combusted all over the room.

“You deserve the title of a mother about as much as Michelle Carmichael, the woman who gave birth to me, does. You do not get to call yourself that. You walked out on him, the same way my mother did. He didn’t even know what you looked like until today. He never knew your name or your touch or your voice. If his life depended on picking you out in a crowd before today, he’d be dead. And do you know why? I never wanted him to know you, that’s why. You’re poison, Abigail, and I’m not about to let you into his life now, or ever.”

Her full bottom lip pokes out in a pout. She looks ridiculous, like a grown woman with the expression of a two-year-old little girl. She’s beautiful, don’t get me wrong, long legs, long blonde hair all twisted up in a fancy bun, expensive clothes, and perfect makeup. But her aura doesn’t match her look. She’s faking who she is and underneath the pretty well-manicured exterior hides an ugly twisted, selfish bitch.

“Abigail, I’m marrying Stella, I love her, and she’s going to be Cannon’s, no she already is, Cannon’s mother. She is the polar opposite of you. Stella is everything that you aren’t, good and wholesome, kind, compassionate, loving, intelligent, and patient… I could go on forever, believe me, but I think you get the point.”

I move from the last step to his side and lace my fingers with his in solidarity.

“Ash, I worked hard in rehab to get better. Can’t you cut me some slack and let me into his life? Please?” I can’t help rolling my eyes when she whines. She sounds so ugly.

“I said no. You want to see him get a lawyer and petition the court. It’ll be a waste of your money, though, and your time. Now tell me what you’re really here for?”

“I told you, like five times already, I don’t want anything from you. I just want to see my son. He should know his mama, he should know my side of the family, his grandparents, his aunt, his… sister.”

Holy shit, now that’s a bomb. Abigail has another kid, a girl, and she probably needs help supporting her financially so she thought she’d show up here and try to play house with Ash and Cannon.

“You have another child?”

“Yes, she’s two, her name is Michelle.”

She fucking named her kid after my biological mother? What kind of person does shit like that? Abigail Nelson, that’s who.

“You… you named her after my… why the hell would you do that?”

He can’t even verbalize the word mother when referring to her. That bitch really did a number on Ash.

“She did it for me,” Adam says.

Oh my God. This isn’t happening. Adam did not have a baby with Ash’s ex fiancé. That is way too twisted and fucked up even for this group.

“What? Why?” Ash asks, lagging behind in the understanding department.

Adam leans to his side on one hand looking down at the floor. “Ashton, your mother didn’t run away and leave you, she died giving birth to you. And when Abigail showed up on my doorstep looking for help getting clean three years ago, I secretly took her in and paid for her rehab. She stayed with me for a while when she got out and ended up pregnant with my child. She gave birth to Michelle, but I couldn’t marry her not when she already had a son with you. How would that look to the public when I’m trying to become Governor? So I got her a little place and a simple job that wouldn’t stress her into using again, but she did twice before it stuck this time.”

Oh boy, this is too much, too much for me, and way too much for Ash. He stumbles back a step from his father. I grasp his arm and Ridge supports him on the other side. “I’ve got him, grab a chair,” Ridge says, and I reluctantly let go of his arm and hurry to get the chair next to the front door.

Ash is sitting stunned and overloaded with new information about his past and present. I’m seething mad seeing him this way.

“What the fuck kind of man has a kid with his grandson’s mother?” I direct my question at Adam, but I don’t let him answer. I’m not done. “A sick fuck like you, Adam, that’s who. I don’t know you, but I do know what Ash has told me about the way you treated him growing up, blaming him for your wife’s disappearance, insinuating he had done something to make her run away. Do you know what that does to a kid? Do you understand abandonment at all?” I switch my focus to Ash for a moment, “I’m sorry, baby, but this has to be said. I swing back to Adam who is still looking down, blood dripping on the white marble looking pathetic and ashamed, as he should. “There’s a big difference between dying in childbirth and running away. Your wife died, she had no control over that, she didn’t choose to leave. Yet, you led your son to believe his whole life that he was such a terrible little boy that his mother couldn’t stand the sight of him, so she had to run away. That’s so sick, so fucking sick.”

“I …” Adam tries to speak but I cut him off.

“I’m not done yet. When I am, believe me, you’ll know. So tell me this, what was your plan here? Were you going to try and get Ash to take your little girlfriend back and move her into his house with your daughter, so they looked like the perfect family to the people of the fine state of Montana? Or were you going to marry her yourself and try to get custody of Cannon so you could have the perfect family over at your place? No, that couldn’t be it, there’s too big of an age gap and besides, everybody knows Cannon is Ash’s son.” I crouch down in front of Adam and take ahold of his bloody chin forcing him to look at me. “What. Was. Your. Plan. Adam?”

“Where is she buried?” Ash asks before Adam can answer my question. I turn my head, and the pain on his face rips my heart in two.

“Castle Dale Cemetery, Plot 160, on the top of the hill next to a hundred-year oak tree.”

“I’m going there.” He stands, and I stand with him. “I’m going to leave my house and go visit my mother’s grave site. When I get back, you two are going to be gone, and I don’t want to see either of you again.” He eyes Abigail across the room wringing her hands.

“And if you so much as mention custody or visitation to a lawyer, Abigail, I’ll tell the press you’re fucking my dad, the future Governor of Montana, and that you have a daughter with him and a son with me.”

Then he looks down at Adam again. “You’re something else, you know that? All these years I’ve been blaming myself for my mother’s death, keeping women at arm's length because I didn’t trust any of them to stick around. I thought my mother didn’t love me. You made me think the one person in the world who was supposed to love me unconditionally walked away like I was nothing.”

“You killed her! She bled to death bringing you into the world. You deserved to suffer for taking her away from me. I loved your mother, she was everything to me, and you took her!” Adam screams.

“I was a baby, Adam. I had no control over what was happening. You can’t blame me for her death, I won’t let you. I won’t accept responsibility for an act of God.”

He steps over his injured father, leaving him broken and bleeding like his father has done to him for thirty-four years. He calmly crosses the room and opens the front door, and without turning around, he says, “Stella, I need you.”

Barefoot I follow him out and climb into the Range Rover. He starts the engine, and we are off to see his mother, for the first time in his life.