A Mother's Secret by Janice Kay Johnson Read Free Book Online

to accept.
    “I would have said no,” she lied. “You were making it pretty plain you’d lost interest in me. To my mind, love’s definitely a requirement for marriage.”
    “Then we would have shared custody. I’d have helped you out financially.”
    “But you see,” Rebecca said quietly, “I didn’t need your financial help. And shared custody may be equitable for the parents, but it sucks for the kids.”
    His eyes narrowed. “Your parents were divorced.”
    Gee, he remembered a tidbit about her background. How nice to know.
    “Yes, they were. Which meant Lea and I might as well have been tied to the end of a bungee cord. Plummeting down one day, yanked up the next, completely powerless. One year at Mom’s, the next year at Dad’s. Sometimes a month here, a month there, depending on what some judge decreed. It was horrible! I refuse to do that to my child.”
    There was a long silence. She was shaking, aware of how passionately she’d spoken, how much she’d given away. But if she’d hoped to soften him, to make him listen, she had failed.
    “Got news for you.” His jaw muscles spasmed. “From here on out, you’ll be sharing him, whether you like it or not.”

CHAPTER THREE

    S OMEHOW SHE ’ D PULLED her knees up without realizing it and was huddled in the corner of the sofa while Daniel still stood, staring at her with such contempt.
    “You don’t know him!” she cried. “You don’t love him. Why are you doing this?”
    “Tell me. What does he know about his father?”
    She hesitated. “He hasn’t asked much.”
    “Much?”
    One day after his friend Evan’s father had spent an afternoon patiently teaching the two boys how to hit a ball off the batting tee, Malcolm had asked on the way home how come he didn’t have a dad. She had explained that his father was someone who hadn’t been in her life for very long, and that they’d chosen not to get married and be a family together. He had seemed satisfied, if rather quiet for the rest of the drive.
    “It’s not something four-year-olds think about.”
    “What did you intend to say when he was ten? Fifteen? Eighteen? Were you going to admit that you’d never told his dad he existed? Or did you plan to tell him, ‘I’m sorry, he’s not interested in you’?”
    She’d lain awake nights worrying about just that. Should she be honest and tell her son she hadn’t wantedhis dad involved in his life? Would he come to resent her for making that decision? She hadn’t found an answer. Like Scarlett O’Hara, she’d thought tomorrow was soon enough. It was hard right now to imagine him feeling she’d somehow deprived him by ensuring he had a stable home.
    “I wouldn’t have said that.” Her voice came out thin, hopeless. “I would have been honest.”
    Past tense, she realized in despair. However much she might fight Daniel over this, she would lose. Legally, Malcolm was his, too. If he took her to court, she’d look bad for having deprived him of his son.
    “Are you married?” Daniel jerked his head toward the short hall that led to the bedrooms, as if she had a man stowed in one of them. “Is there someone he considers a dad?”
    Oh, she wanted to lie! She certainly wasn’t going to admit that there had been no man since him.
    Nor did she want him to suspect that she’d been breathless since she opened the front door because he was still the single sexiest man she’d ever met. She didn’t even know why she reacted this way to him and no one else. She hated finding out that was still true. Yes, he was big and well-built and his eyes, a stormy dark gray, had sometimes seemed to reveal a vulnerability that had made her weak-kneed.
    Or weak in the head, she scolded herself, to think for a minute that a softening of his usually closed expression meant anything deep.
    “No. There’s no one right now.” Rebecca chose her words carefully. “I…haven’t wanted him to get attached to anyone I wasn’t serious about.”
    He