Читать книгу: «The Secret Heir», страница 2

Two

T yler burst into tears the moment he saw his parents, and held out his little arms to Laurel. She scooped him up, snuggling her face into his neck. “See?” she said, her voice bright and bracing. “I told you Mommy and Daddy would be close by.”

“Wanna go home.”

“I know, baby.” She shifted him more snugly onto her hip. His legs, bare beneath the thin, child-sized hospital gown, wrapped around her with a grip that let her know he wouldn’t release her again without a struggle. “We have to stay here now, but Mommy’s going to be right here with you, okay?”

“Wanna go home,” Tyler repeated, his lip quivering as he looked to his father for reinforcement.

Jackson reached out to ruffle Tyler’s fine, white-blond hair. “We’ll take you home as soon as the doctor says it’s okay, buddy.”

A chocolate-skinned nurse with a riot of black curls around her appealing face hovered nearby. She nodded toward a deeply cushioned chair on one side of the private hospital room. “That chair converts into a single bed. One of you is welcome to spend the night here with Tyler.”

A wooden rocker sat on the other side of the standard hospital bed on which Tyler had been sitting when Laurel and Jackson entered. Picking up the stuffed penguin Tyler had dropped on the bed, Laurel sat in the rocker with Tyler nestled in her lap. Leaving Jackson to talk with the nurse, she concentrated on cheering up her son.

“You and I are going to spend the night here, Tyler. Mommy will sleep right here beside your bed.”

Tyler sniffed. “Angus, too?”

“Of course Angus, too.” She patted the stuffed penguin’s somewhat grubby head. “And look, we have a TV and a stack of cartoon movies. There are some of your favorites here. We’ll watch one together, okay?”

Tyler nodded tentatively. Her promise that she would stay with him had reassured him somewhat, even if he was still clearly bewildered by what was going on.

Barely three, he was still too young to understand that even though he felt fine, there was something wrong with him that required medical intervention. To him, it must seem that one moment he had been playing with his toys and the next he’d been in the hospital being poked and prodded by strangers.

That was pretty much the way it felt to Laurel, too.

On the suggestion of Beverly Schrader, their nanny, Laurel had taken the morning off on this nice Thursday in early April to take Tyler for a medical checkup. Though she had tried to convince herself that Beverly was overreacting, she had mentioned to the pediatrician the symptoms Beverly had noted. The pediatrician had taken Beverly’s observations seriously enough to run a few tests—and the next thing she’d known, Laurel had been sitting in the Portland General Hospital waiting room while Tyler was rushed to specialists.

She had tracked Jackson down on a construction job he was supervising. He had dropped everything and hurried to join her. And suddenly they were facing open-heart surgery.

It had all happened so fast that Laurel’s head seemed to be spinning. No wonder little Tyler was confused.

She heard Jackson asking a string of questions of the patiently helpful nurse, but she didn’t try to monitor that conversation. She figured Jackson would tell her later what she needed to know. For now she focused on her child.

“I’ll be back at five with your dinner, Tyler,” said the nurse, whose nametag identified her as Ramona. “Do you like spaghetti and applesauce?”

Tyler nodded, then added, “Like ice cream, too.”

Ramona flashed a smile. “I’ll see what I can do about that.”

Left alone, Laurel and Jackson studied each other over Tyler’s head. More at home in the chaos of a construction site, Jackson looked restless and uncomfortable in the sterile and studiously cheery setting of a hospital pediatric room.

“I should probably go get my parents,” he said, glancing toward the door.

Laurel’s arms tightened spasmodically around her son and words of protest rose instinctively in her throat, but she swallowed them and nodded. Jackson had every right to want his parents with him, just as they had a right to be close to their grandchild. She was being selfish to want to keep Tyler all to herself until this whole ordeal was over.

It was just that once the close-knit Reiss family was together, Laurel always felt like the outsider. Changing her surname to theirs hadn’t made her one of them.

It wasn’t that they had ever treated her badly. They had been nothing but politely gracious to her, just as they were to everyone outside the family. She knew much of the problem was hers. Since she hadn’t been raised in a family like this, she had never quite known how to behave with them, resulting in her being a bit guarded around them.

Though adept at making small talk and swapping repartee with others, she’d turned stilted in the presence of Jackson’s parents. Jackson, for one, had certainly noticed. He had accused her almost from the beginning of not liking his parents, and the more he had pushed her, the more defensive she had become. Especially when it came to his paragon of a mother.

Laurel had fifteen minutes alone with her son, and she savored every one of them. Though his vocabulary was limited, he managed to tell her about the people who had looked at him and done so many things to him. Laurel and Tyler had actually been separated for just over an hour, but it had seemed much longer to both of them. Tyler admitted he had rather liked nurse Ramona, but he was glad to be with his mommy again.

Snuggled into her arms, he stuck his left thumb into his mouth and allowed himself to relax, his eyelids getting heavy. Laurel rested her cheek on his silky blond hair and closed her own eyes, desperately wishing—

“There’s my sweet baby.” Donna Reiss rushed into the room on a wave of floral perfume and grandmotherly concern. She knelt beside the rocking chair and rested a trembling hand on Tyler’s arm. “Gammy’s here, darling, and so is Gampy. We’re all going to take very good care of you.”

“Gammy,” Tyler murmured with a sleepy smile. But it was Laurel’s heart he nestled closer to as he drifted into a restless nap.

It was almost eight o’clock that evening when Jackson convinced Laurel to leave the hospital room for a short break. Reminding her that she had missed lunch, he persuaded her to join him in the hospital cafeteria for a quick dinner. Tyler was sleeping, and Donna and Carl said they would stay with him until Laurel returned. They had already eaten, Carl having almost dragged Donna out of Tyler’s room for forty-five minutes earlier.

Laurel had tried to talk Jackson into joining his parents then, but he had refused to eat until she did. Though she wasn’t hungry, and she hated to leave her son even for that brief time, Laurel finally conceded because she knew Jackson needed the break.

The serving line closed at eight, so there weren’t many diners left, and not much food, either. Laurel ordered a bowl of soup, Jackson a sandwich.

They carried their trays to a small table next to a glass wall that looked out over a beautifully landscaped courtyard bathed in soft lighting. Because she knew he would insist, Laurel forced herself to take a few bites of the soup.

“How is it?” he asked, looking up from his food.

“Rather cold,” she replied with a shrug. “But it tastes fine.” At least, she assumed it did. For all the attention she had paid to the soup, it could have tasted like wet sawdust.

Jackson finished his sandwich while she made a pretense of eating, both of them lost in their own thoughts. And then he pushed his plate aside, leaving the chips and pickle untouched. “I guess I wasn’t as hungry as I thought.”

Laurel set down her spoon. “Neither am I.”

“You barely touched your soup. You’ll need to eat to keep your strength up. We’ve got a tough time ahead.”

“I’ll eat. I’m just not hungry now.”

He nodded and looked down at his hands, which were gripped together on the table in front of him. “This has all come up so fast that we’ve hardly had time to think about details. We’ll have to talk about what we’re doing for the next few days.”

“I’ll be staying here with Tyler, of course. I’ll take an indefinite leave of absence from work. It’s a bad time for the agency, with all the rumors and investigations going on there, but they’ll have to manage somehow without me.”

Jackson raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure they can?”

Because her work had been such a sore subject between them for so long, Laurel immediately went on the defensive. “Regardless of what you so often imply, I have always put Tyler’s needs ahead of my job.”

He held up a hand, his expression suddenly weary. “I’m not trying to start anything. I know Children’s Connection depends on you, that’s all.”

“Yes, they do, but Tyler needs me more. I’ll call Morgan first thing in the morning to arrange for my leave.”

He nodded. “I’ll need to check in on the job site a few times during the next few days, but I won’t have to spend much time there.”

Laurel bit her tongue, but her expression must have revealed more than she had intended. This time it was Jackson whose defenses went up. “I’ll be here as much as I need to be, but I can’t afford to lose my job now. I’m the one who carries Tyler’s health insurance, remember? Your job isn’t going to pay the medical bills, especially with you taking a leave of absence.”

Laurel looked down at her lap and shook her head. “I’m not trying to start anything, either. I didn’t say anything about your work.”

“You always make it clear enough that you think I spend too much time working. Even though you know we need the money.”

“And you make it just as clear that you’ve never wanted me to work at all, even if it helps with the money.”

His eyes narrowed. “I’ve never needed help supporting my family.”

It was an old argument, and one Laurel doubted they would ever settle. When it came to family roles, Jackson’s attitudes were straight out of the last century—the early part of the last century.

Carl Reiss had taken such pride in the fact that his wife—a hardworking, financially strapped waitress when he’d met her—had never had to work since he’d married her. Jackson had always believed it was his responsibility to provide his son with a full-time mother, like he’d had during his entire childhood.

No matter how often Laurel had tried to explain it to him, he just couldn’t seem to grasp the fact that her work gave her something she simply couldn’t find within the walls of their nice, middle-class home. And it wasn’t money. Yes, she dealt with every working mother’s guilt and stress, but she truly felt as though she was a better mother because of her career.

Jackson had never quite understood that Laurel was nothing like Donna Reiss, whose whole life revolved around her husband, son and grandson, and who had never seemed to need anything more. Unfortunately, Laurel and Jackson had been married for several months with a child on the way before that first glow of giddy infatuation had dimmed enough to let them see their differences.

Drawing a deep breath, Laurel reminded herself that a crisis with a child’s health could cause stress in even the healthiest marriage. She and Jackson were facing months of difficult times ahead. It would do no one any good, especially their son, if they fell apart now.

“I really don’t want to quarrel with you tonight,” she said, making no effort to disguise her fear and exhaustion. “I just want to get back to Tyler.”

Jackson released a long sigh. “I don’t want to quarrel, either. I’m sorry. It’s been a…rough day.”

Because she understood him well enough to know what Tyler’s illness was doing to him, especially considering Jackson’s compulsive need to take care of his family, she felt her irritation with him fading. “Yes, it has. For both of us. And I’m sorry, too.”

Their eyes met across the table. For just a moment they were connected again, mentally bonded, the way they had been that first time they had met at a party he hadn’t wanted to attend. It was as if they had been able to sense each other’s emotions, an ability they seemed to have lost sometime after the birth of their child.

Someone dropped a tray on the other side of the room. The crash made Laurel and Jackson start, breaking the visual contact between them, along with everything else. Laurel reached for her purse while Jackson disposed of their trays.

They didn’t say much as they returned to Tyler’s room, simply agreeing that Jackson would return early the next morning with a change of clothes for her. He offered to stay the night with her, but she reminded him of how small the room was, adding that someone had to take care of things at home during the next few days.

Tyler was still sleeping when they entered his room, his beloved penguin clutched against his chest. Donna sat in the rocking chair, very close to the bed. Carl paced from his wife’s side to the single window and back again.

“Go home, Mom. Get some rest,” Jackson urged her. “It’s going to be a long week.”

Donna reached out to smooth Tyler’s hair. “I hate to leave him here.”

“Laurel’s staying with him.”

“Yes, of course.” Without looking at Laurel, Donna bent to brush a kiss over Tyler’s flushed cheek. “Good night, precious. Gammy will see you tomorrow.”

Jackson ushered his parents out. Donna bade Laurel a polite good night, but it was Carl who stopped in front of her, taking her hands in his work-roughened ones as he searched her face. “You’ll be all right?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“You call if you need anything, you hear? Anything at all.”

This was where Jackson had gotten his deeply in-grained sense of responsibility to his family. Just as Carl had been providing for Donna for more than thirty years, he now seemed to feel as though he should offer his protection to his son’s wife in a time of crisis.

Donna thrived on being pampered and cosseted, while Laurel was more likely to feel smothered and stifled. Still, she couldn’t help but respond to the genuine concern in Carl’s kindly eyes. “Thank you. I’ll let you know if I need anything.”

Satisfied with her answer, he released her and turned to follow his wife out of the room. Jackson stayed another hour. Keeping their voices low to avoid disturbing Tyler, he and Laurel continued to discuss the practicalities of the next day—rearranging their work schedules, contacting their insurance agent, canceling a couple of appointments. Both very cordial and efficient, they kept their emotions—about their son and each other—tightly reined.

Eventually, Jackson glanced at his watch and sighed. “I might as well head home. You’re sure you don’t need anything before I go?”

“Just bring back the things on the list I gave you when you come back in the morning. I’m set until then.”

He nodded. “Call me if you think of anything else.”

“I will.” She watched as he stood for a moment beside the bed, looking down at their sleeping child. Jackson reached out a hand as if to stroke Tyler’s tousled hair, but then drew it back, perhaps because he didn’t want to disturb the boy. He turned away from the bed with visible reluctance.

Laurel stood beside the door as Jackson prepared to leave. Though it was quiet in this room, sounds from the hallway outside drifted in—staff talking and laughing at the nurses’ station, carts squeaking on the linoleum, the rhythmic swishing of the janitor’s broom. They were sounds she heard often in her job as a placement social worker for the Children’s Connection adoption agency, which was affiliated with this hospital, but it was all different tonight. Unnervingly so.

Jackson must have read something in her expression. “You’re sure you don’t want me to stay?”

Even as she assured him once again that everything would be fine, she wondered how many more times she would have to say it before she believed it herself.

Jackson bent his head to kiss her goodbye. The very slight hesitation just before their lips touched had nothing to do with current circumstances; she had noticed it several times when he’d kissed her during the past few months.

Watching the door close behind him, she couldn’t help thinking of the kisses they had shared early in their whirlwind courtship—eager, passionate, joyous and thorough. There had been no hesitation between them then, not even at the very beginning. She couldn’t pinpoint exactly when the kisses had changed, or what had caused the change, but she felt the gulf between them growing wider all the time.

Impatiently shaking her head, she turned back to the rocking chair. She had a sick child to worry about now. This was no time to analyze the condition of her ailing marriage.

Thursday was, perhaps, the longest day in Jackson’s life. Every minute seemed to crawl past with agonizing slowness. He had never been one to sit still for very long, and the forced inactivity of hospital waiting was a frustrating ordeal for him.

Laurel’s attention was focused exclusively on their son, of course. Jackson’s mother spent most of the day at the hospital and she, too, dedicated herself to keeping Tyler calm and entertained. Laurel and Donna were, as always, impeccably polite to each other.

Jackson paced, restlessly roaming the room and the hallways, rocking on his feet, trying not to think about the surgery tomorrow and trying not to envy his father, who had decided to spend the day working, since there was nothing productive he could do at the hospital.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to spend the day with his family, Jackson assured himself with a touch of guilt. It was just that there was nothing here for him to do. Nothing to make him feel as though he was accomplishing something worthwhile.

He lasted until midday. When it occurred to him that he, Laurel and Donna were all simply sitting there watching Tyler eat his lunch, he surged impatiently to his feet. “I think I’ll go see how things are going at the job site.”

Tyler immediately set down his spoon and pushed away the rolling bed tray. “I go, too.”

Forcing a smile, Jackson ruffled his son’s hair. “Not this time, buddy.”

The boy’s lower lip protruded in a familiar manner. “Don’t wanna stay here.”

“I’ll be back soon. I promise.”

But Tyler had had enough of this place. Shaking his head, he held out his arms to his father, looking fully prepared to launch into one of his rare, but daunting, tantrums. “Daddy. Wanna go with Daddy.”

Jackson could almost feel Laurel’s disapproving look on the back of his neck, silently blaming him for starting this when things had been going so well before. He grew immediately defensive in response, as he so often did with her lately. “There’s really nothing I can do here for now,” he said to her. “And I have responsibilities to my job.”

“As do I,” she murmured.

Always the peacemaker, Donna jumped in hastily to avert Tyler’s impending outburst and placate his parents. “Tyler, sweetie, Gammy’s going to play a game with you as soon as you’ve finished eating, remember? We talked about it. And, Jackson, there’s no reason for you to stay here twiddling your thumbs now when you’ll very likely be here all day tomorrow. Run along to take care of things at your job site. Actually, Laurel, you can check in at your office, too, if you’d like. It isn’t as if you would be far away. Tyler and I will be just fine here, won’t we, darling?”

She spooned a bite of orange sherbet into the boy’s mouth as she spoke. That treat, and the promise of a game with his beloved grandmother, was enough to mollify him somewhat. He sniffed and reached again for the spoon.

“I’ll stay with my son,” Laurel said.

Was that another dig at him? Jackson could no longer tell if he was only imagining disapproval in her eyes when she looked at him. “Guess I’ll go on, then. Have fun playing your game with Gammy, Tyler. I’ll be back soon and I’ll have a surprise for you, okay?”

He heard Laurel sigh, but Tyler smiled. For now Jackson told himself that was enough.

As he left the hospital room, he couldn’t help remembering a time when Laurel had smiled at him with such affection. And he wondered sadly whatever had happened to those smiles. He missed them. He missed her, damn it.

Stalking through the hospital exit doors, he headed for his truck on the parking deck. He needed to be at work. At least he felt somewhat in control of that part of his life, if nowhere else.