Secret Baby Scandal

Yet, as soon as the elevator stopped on her floor and the doors slid open, she knew she couldn’t let him find out this way.

“We do have a lot of plans to make.” She spun to face him, the words spilling out fast. “But not the kind you think.”

“I don’t understand.” His jaw flexed, his gaze narrowing.

She drew in a deep breath.

“Remember that night last winter?” She didn’t wait for his reply, as she heard a long, high-pitched wail from inside her apartment. “I should have told you sooner, but you walked out the next day and said it was a mistake. Talking was all but impossible after a parting like that and then, well—” She shook her head, impatient with herself and the excuses that didn’t matter now, with her baby crying on the other side of her front door. “Come and meet your son, Jean-Pierre.”

Two (#ulink_ce0a83cc-51fd-525c-9358-51ca1354cf5b)

Son?

Jean-Pierre had taken hits from the toughest, strongest, meanest players in the NFL. Afterward, as he lay in the grass with his ears ringing and his vision blurred, he would struggle to snap out of the slow-motion fog that felt kind of like being underwater.

That was exactly how he felt walking into Tatiana’s apartment, her words slowly permeating his consciousness along with the cry of an infant. Dazed, confused and trying to stand up straight despite the floor shifting under his feet, Jean-Pierre stood in her foyer and waited for her to return from wherever she’d disappeared.

“Mr. Reynaud?” An older woman in a simple gray dress stepped into the living area to his right. “Miss Doucet asked if you wouldn’t mind joining her in the family room. It’s just past the staircase on the left.” She pointed the way and then went about her business, picking up a few things in the living room.

A bright blue blanket. A baby bottle.

Seeing that bottle was like the second hit when you were already down.

At the same time, it was enough to make the mental fog evaporate and get his feet moving.

Fast.

He needed answers now. Hell, he needed answers months ago. Tatiana had done a whole lot more than throw his career into a tailspin tonight with her unguarded remark to a member of the press. She’d been hiding the biggest possible secret that was going to bind their lives together forever.

“Tatiana?” Her name was a sharp bark on his lips as he entered the spacious suite overlooking Central Park.

Framed playbills lined the walls along with photos of Tatiana and her family. Tatiana with her father at her graduation from Columbia. The Doucets outside of a downtown skyscraper with the brass name plaque of her prestigious law firm. Every picture was a reminder of the life he might have had with her if her family hadn’t turned her against him.

A blaze crackled in a fireplace on the far side of the living area. And beside it, in that warm glow of flickering light, he spotted her on the dark leather love seat, cradling a tiny bundle of blankets to her breast. Tatiana’s dark brown curls shielded her body as much as the blanket, the firelight making the skin of one shoulder glow where she’d unfastened her dress to feed the baby.

Her baby.

His...son.

Something shifted inside Jean-Pierre, his whole world tipping on its axis as everything changed irreversibly.

“I am sorry,” she said softly, her hand shifting to cover a tiny foot kicking free of the cotton bundle. “I left New York in my sixth month so that no one would find out. I wanted you to be the first to know.”

He had moved deeper into the room, drawn to the sight of woman and child, trying like hell to focus on them and what they meant for him. To him. But his brain was scrambling to catch up on nearly a year’s worth of living in mere moments.

“What about your family?” Had he been playing games for Jack Doucet’s team while the guy kept this news hidden from him? If so, it was going to blow the Doucet-Reynaud feud wide-open again, because Jean-Pierre could not deal with that kind of duplicity. Lowering himself to the chair across from her, he sat with his back to the view of Central Park at night, his eyes on the only thing that mattered. He needed Tatiana to keep talking. To explain why he had no knowledge of this development in their lives.

“They only know I took an extended vacation. I couldn’t tell them before I told you.”

The tone she used suggested that was the only sensible approach, when in fact, none of this made sense to him. Who kept this kind of news from their family? Jean-Pierre might not be as close to his brothers as he once was, but damn straight they wouldn’t keep something like this from each other. He’d told her how much a secret like this had hurt his own family—had hurt his half brother. “I think I’m going to need you to spell this out for me more thoroughly.”

“I had so many things to organize,” she continued. “I needed a good midwife. And at first I requested a leave from my job. But then I realized I needed to change my role with the law practice so that I’d be doing legal research and writing briefs instead of taking cases to trial.” Her eyes were bright and worried as they flashed up to his.

At least she seemed to understand how thin her reasons sounded. But then, she’d always placed a higher priority on appearances than him. The framed photos on the walls around her sure never showed a single misstep in her perfect life. He wouldn’t be surprised if the pregnancy had thrown her into a panic trying to find a way to tell her parents.

“Where did you go when you left New York?” He knew he needed to process this fast. To move past the shock of what she was telling him and start being a support to her and this new reality. But the truth of the situation was like waves at high tide, thrashing him over and over.

She’d had months to come to terms with this. He had minutes. And he didn’t dare make a mistake.

“The Caribbean. Saint Thomas has a good hospital in case I needed one. I rented a villa on the beach.” Her voice wavered. “I was trying to be discreet. To keep this out of the press and away from the old family drama until I spoke to you and we could figure out how to handle the future. But just when I had everything set and was ready to call you, I went into labor three weeks early.”

Now that knocked the wind out of his rising anger.

“Is he okay? Are you?” A stab of fear jabbed Jean-Pierre hard, outweighing every other emotion. His brother’s wife, Fiona, had lost a baby. He understood the danger.

“We’re fine. Thirty-seven weeks is within normal range. César was six pounds and fourteen ounces.”

The pain in his chest eased, a small sliver of the tension giving way to an unexpected tenderness.

“César,” he repeated, gaze shifting to the squirming blanket and restless tiny foot.

“For your great-grandfather and for my—”

“Grandfather,” he interrupted, knowing they both had Césars in their family trees. He remembered the roots of the Doucet family almost as well as his own. He’d been a guest at their home when he’d dated Tatiana, before his grandfather Leon had fired Jack from the Texas Mustangs after two seasons of poorly performing teams.

An old bitterness that would have to take a backseat now.

“Our son is five weeks old. We just flew in from Saint Thomas two days ago. His nanny, Lucinda, made the trip with me. She watched him tonight while I went to find you.”

That must have been the woman he’d seen earlier.

“May I see him?” Jean-Pierre didn’t want to interrupt a feeding, but the urgency of the infant’s small suckling sounds had slowed from when he’d first entered the room.

“Of course.” Tatiana shifted the bundle in her arms. She lifted the baby upright, her dress falling closed. “Here’s a cloth.” She nodded to a square of white cotton folded beside her on the love seat. “For your shoulder if you want to—”

She trailed off as he took the baby, who was possibly quieted by Jean-Pierre’s sure grip. At least half the Gladiators had kids, so he’d handled plenty during private team events. But holding this one...

“He has the Reynaud eyes.” They were brown and flecked with green. The tiny hands were covered by the sleeves of his shirt, the fabric folded over them. But the boy’s color was good—pink and healthy. A thatch of dark hair, spiky but soft, stood on end as if he’d been caught in a wind tunnel.

“I was only with you last year, no one else,” Tatiana said softly, her dark curls brushing Jean-Pierre’s shoulder as she leaned closer to look down at the infant. “He is yours.”

“No question.” He trusted this implicitly. He might not be happy with her decision to keep the news of her pregnancy to herself—and he was shoving aside a whole lot of unhappiness about that, in fact—yet he knew her well enough to know that she was careful with relationships.

“May I?” She reached for César. “Just to finish the feeding?”

Wordlessly, he passed the baby back to her. He watched as she slipped her dress off her other shoulder, vaguely aware that many women preferred privacy for such a moment. But he’d been denied too much time already, so he didn’t take his eyes off her as she cradled the tiny body to her swollen breast and helped him to find the dark pink nipple.

“You look so...” Beautiful, he thought. But the moment was too intimate already with them sitting almost shoulder-to-shoulder, her curls still clinging to the sleeve of his jacket. “At ease with him.”