over to James and they shook hands. They knew each other from school. “Man, were the rumors about you and Tracy Taylor true?” James asked looking down at Bart.
“Rumors?” Beck asked, with a raised eyebrow.
James gave him a schoolboy smirk as he gestured at Bart. “Rumors that you had a baby with her.”
Beck was shocked. “Hell no.”
“It was all over the Autumn Festival and Dance. Tracy even confronted your sister about where was the father of her baby, yada, yada,” James said, with a speculating gaze looking down at Bart. “Your sister was crying, and she ran out.”
Beck cursed silently, he had dated Tracy for maybe one outing to a party or something. But he’d found out she was a self-centered woman and he’d never asked her out again. He certainly never touched her and he’d damn well never gotten her pregnant.
Besides at the time he’d still been sinfully lusting after his stepsister big time, and they’d finally hooked up.
Beck’s mind started placing dates, and he frowned, but to James he emphatically said, “This is not Tracy’s baby.”
“Okay, man,” James said, holding up his hands.
He looked as if he was going to get into whose baby it was, and Beck glared at him. So then James wisely started a new conversation.
“Man, I heard you sold that damn company you were working on all the time. While your head was in that, I got picked up by the pros, but drop from that team after an ASL injury. Now, I’m looking around for a new team, keeping my options open.”
Beck held his smirk back, thinking that meant his old friend was having a hard time finding a new pro team to take him. Next came what Beck was finding out was becoming inevitable, since he’d worked very hard and made money doing it—friends or relatives asking him for money to invest or basically outright asking for it, like his stepmom had done that morning on the phone.
Beck tried to be polite blowing James and his money request off, but he still wished him well. Like he’d done with Phyllis that morning, who had wanted a million dollars so she and Murray could really start over, she’d said.
As if that was his responsibility, Beck thought, pushing Bart’s stroller to the nearby park. In fact, as he sat on a bench by the play area, deciding where he and Bart were going to start playing first, he realized about the only person that hadn’t hit him up for money was Millie.
Beck picked Bart up out of his stroller and he put him on his knee to look out at the play area filling with kids on a sunny morning. Right then Millie was working her butt off, and she’d never once tried to swindle him for money over Bart like she could have or definitely as some women would have.
But he knew his stepsister wasn’t like that, and now he wondered if she’d had more of a legit reason than only plain cowardice to run off with his son without telling him. Millie had never mentioned the Tracy thing to him ... ever.
After he and Bart had played most of the morning, with three young mothers on the playground coming onto him in the process, Beck had a wayward thought that would not leave him alone.
So without thinking it through, which seemed to be his non-work mode he was discovering, he took Bart, who was comfortably worn out sucking on his bottle, and he headed to his rental car in the hotel garage.
On the way, he and Bart picked up a bag of food from the deli. Once he had Bart in his car seat, Beck typed an address into his GPS, which he’d just happened to hear that morning when he’d picked Bart up at Millie’s.
While he’d been getting Bart ready that morning, Millie had been on the phone and he’d been eavesdropping, so now he was satisfied to see Millie’s car in the driveway of a huge upper scale home as he pulled up to the curb and parked. Beck got out and rounded the car to get Bart and the sack from the deli.
“Come on, buddy, let’s go surprise your mommy,” Beck said.
He lifted Bart up, who caught his