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Brodie made arrangements so he would not be interrupted with business while he was on his surprise wedding and honeymoon trip, but he did take a few minutes before bedtime to send a note to his estate lawyer to set up a meeting so they could go over his assets with Julie. He was about to sign part of his empire over to her, if anything happened to him, and there were a lot of documents and forms to be reviewed and signed.
They spent a fabulous evening together, but Brodie pushed himself to the limit. He was ready to hit the hay, entirely spent. He went to bed with his mind finally at peace, but that only made it all the more alarming when he was awakened from his slumber by a great deal of hysteria and chaos.
“Come to the living room...now!” Julie said, shaking him violently. “Hurry!”
He tried his best to clear his head and throw on some clothes before he followed her, but she was already storming out of the room before he even got his left arm through his sleeve. “What’s wrong? Is it the baby?” he asked.
“No,” she said shortly. “Just come on.”
Halfway down the hallway, Brodie stopped. It was as if an invisible hand had punched him in the gut, and he almost lost his footing and his breath. There, in the entryway, surrounded by an entourage of several security guards and the vineyard manager, was his ex, and he had never gotten around to telling his new wife that he’d been in recent contact with her.
“Angelique said she’s worried about what she read in the tabloids,” Julie snapped, folding her arms across her chest.
“Yeah?” said Brodie helplessly, fully aware that Julie wasn’t through with him yet.
Struggling not to lose it completely, Julie spoke in a voice more raw than he’d ever heard before. “She said that after your discussion last week,” she barked, throwing air quotes around the word, “after your dinner discussion... I got that right, didn’t I? The two of you had dinner just last week, right?”
Brodie didn’t answer.
“Well, it seems your former lover just wants you to know she’s available if you need her.”
“Thank you,” said Brodie, a little tipsy on his feet, either from his skyrocketing blood pressure or the virus. He was woozy but coherent enough to know it was time to come clean. “I was at work, and she texted me. She said she wanted to apologize to me in person for the way she acted and to thank me for raising our son. She asked me to meet with her for dinner. I thought about it for a while, and in the end, I decided to go.”
Julie pressed her palm to her mouth, shocked and clearly not wanting to hear it.
“She admitted she had a lot of problems, but she went to rehab. She’s in an outpatient program now, and she just wants our son to know his mother loves him. Is that such a bad thing?” Brodie stupidly asked.
“Such a bad thing? What part of any of this is not a bad thing?” Julie demanded in a barely audible tone.
“Julie, I just wanted—”
She put her hand up to stop him and tried to regain her composure. She looked at him with pain in her eyes, but she managed to speak very civilly. “Thanks for letting me know,” she said in a tone that somehow lacked the deserved sarcasm. “We’ll talk more about this later.”
He felt horrible for keeping secrets and horrible for embarrassing her, but at the moment, he had to do his best to get her nemesis out of there. “Angelique,” he said, approaching the foyer, “how did you find out we’re here?”
“The tabloids, of course,” she said. “You’re just as popular with them as you ever were, Brodie.” She spoke and grinned in such an odd way, as if something was off and she was an entirely different woman than the reformed one he’d dined with.
Brodie didn’t want to hate the woman, but it was obvious to him that she had either relapsed or had fooled him completely and never really recovered in the first place. He was torn; she was the woman who gave his beloved son to him, but she was also the vicious criminal who had brutally injured the woman he ultimately married. It would take a great deal of cunning to deal with her, and while he didn’t want to hurt her or spur her on to vengeance, he knew it pained Julie greatly that she was there. His beautiful new wife was blindsided, and once again, he had betrayed her trust by not confessing the truth to her in a timely manner.
“Thanks for stopping by, Angelique,” he said, as politely as he could. “You can’t believe everything you read. We’re absolutely fine, so if you’d like me to have my driver take you to the airport or wherever—”
“I want to see him, Brodie. I want to see our son,” she asked pitifully.
“He’s asleep right now,” said Brodie steadily, ready for her to take her leave. He turned to his security director and said, “Please take Ms. Meyer to...” He sighed and turned back to Angelique. “Where are you staying?”
“I-I don’t know. I didn’t think that far ahead. I guess I just thought I could...” She silenced abruptly, and her eyes took on a dazed, faraway look.
“We are kind of busy at the moment. If you want to visit, you’ll have to text or email me, and we might be able to set that up. Will that work for you?” Brodie asked, being purposely vague.
“I just want to see him!” Angelique shouted. “I have every right to...” She shushed herself by touching her fingers to her lips, as if she realized she was making a huge mistake. “I’m so sorry. I just... I miss him. Can’t I please just peek in on him?”
“It’s early...er, late, depending on how you look at it,” Brodie argued. “It’s just not a good time, Angelique. Please let this nice gentleman give you a ride.”
Fortunately for everyone, she complied and followed the buff security guard out of the house.
As soon as she was out of sight, Brodie hurried to the baby’s room to make sure he was okay and that all the commotion had not disturbed his sleep as well.
“Well? Were you ever going to tell me or not?” Julie demanded hotly, raising her voice.
Brodie’s blood pressure dropped to near-normal at the sight of his little son fast asleep and unaware. He stepped out of his room and whispered to his wife in great frustration, “If you want to have a conversation, we can. What I will not do is have a shouting match with you.”
“What?! You don’t get to dictate my volume or anything else to me, Brodie Rogan,” she said. “I know you’re used to that, but it’s not going to work on me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked with a tilt of his head.
“You’re very manipulative. You act calm and talk like a smart-ass, then act like I’m the lunatic for being upset. How could you do such a thing to me? She said you saw each other last week!” she bellowed.
“Lower your voice,” he warned again. “You’re going to wake and scare the baby.”
“Did you run that one by his mother?” she hissed. “And here I thought I had that title now.”
“You do. As soon as we get back, my lawyers will start the adoption process. That goes hand in hand with the division of assets.”
“I’m not sure I can believe you, Brodie,” she said, her lips tight and thin with anger and a whole world of other dark emotions.
Brodie regarded the woman he loved. Her face was taut with white-hot rage, the sting of something far worse than some love-struck prank. He had acted impulsively, and he was a fool to think it wouldn’t come back to haunt him. “You’re pissed,” he said. “I get that.”
“You always get that, don’t you?” she snapped. “What does that even mean? You knew what you were doing before you got that, mister. You just go around acting however you want, taking huge gambles that you only hope will pay off. That might work in your business meetings, Brodie, but I’m not a damn deal! I am your wife, not something you can just pawn off if we don’t work out. You’ve already screwed with my life in a big way, and I thought you were trying to make amends, but now I just don’t know. I don’t trust you, Brodie Rogan. Do you get that too?”
Brodie was so tense he feared he might actually explode, and his chicken pox rash began to itch something fierce because his nerves were so on edge. “I want to talk about this with you. I really do,” he said. “All I’m asking is for a chance to tell you how it happened.”
“Skip it,” she said, shaking her head. “You always have a good story for everything, and I’m tired of your excuses. You blow so much smoke that I’m surprised people don’t have to call the fire department! You need to make up your damn mind about what you really want and quit sabotaging it.”
“Make up my mind?” Brodie said, feeling hotter than his fever ever made him. “Julie, just a week ago, you were working with a real estate agent so you could run back to DC. You wanted out, and I knew that, so when Thomas’s birth mother texted, I replied. Tell me how that was wrong of me.”
“You know, I don’t think that’s wrong. That’s not what’s wrong here,” she said. “What’s wrong is that you didn’t tell me.”
“The woman seriously injured you,” he continued, without paying an ounce of attention to her words. “She can be dangerous, and we both know that firsthand. I knew that having any discussion with her was betrayal on some level, but if she was still a threat, I had to know.”
“I understand that,” she said, “even if it does hurt and upset me.”
“I didn’t want to hurt and upset you.”
“Secrets do that, Brodie. You should have told me before now. I would have understood,” she countered.
“Would you have?”
“Yes!”
“Well, things happened, didn’t they?” he said.
“Yes,” she said with a sniffle.
“We’re here together, aren’t we? We’re man and wife, right?”
“Yes, but—”
“Julie, everyone has problems, but that doesn’t mean we’re not a valid couple. This marriage is real because we are real. Thomas was born to a person who has a mental illness. When I saw her that night, I almost didn’t recognize her. She seemed stunningly well, so much so I couldn’t believe my eyes or ears. Anyone would have been fooled, even you.”
“Apparently, she fooled you into dinner,” she murmured.
‘“Hey!” he scolded, and he was just about to tell her he’d had enough, but he heard the baby stir.
Little Thomas was wide awake, in the midst of another drama storm, but he was definitely happy to see his father.
“Somebody’s gonna need loving parents to support him when he learns about how he was born,” Brodie said in baby-talk, tweaking his little boy’s nose. He then turned to Julie, who was glaring at him. “He’s going to need you, Julie, his mother.”
“You’re not playing fair, Mr. Rogan,” she said. “You can’t use the baby as a buffer.”
“I’m not,” he promised, hiding a smile. “It’s just that a cute little fella like this shouldn’t have to wake up to his mother and father quarreling about the lady who gave birth to him. She isn’t well, Julie. You know that.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Speaking of that, I can’t make him sick again, can I? I know I still have a touch of the bug, but he’s immune now, isn’t he?”
“No, you can’t make him sick,” she replied reluctantly. Whether it was because she was a nurse or because she was feeling motherly, Julie instinctively reached out to feel the little one’s forehead.
“Everything’s so off kilter,” Brodie said rationally. “We’ve all gone through a lot of big changes, even in our schedules. I want us to work, Julie. I know we can fix this, that we can come up with ground rules for communication. Whatever they are, I am willing to stick to them.”
“Schedules? Communication? For starters, can you stop being such an expert at changing the subject?” she asked.
“Look, all I’m saying is that if you want to kick the shit outta me some more, I’ll have to pencil you in,” he said wearily, “but for now, I need to lie down.”
“Well, sweet dreams,” she said, with a roll of her eyes, taking the baby from him.
