Ever since her friend left last weekend, after painting a mural of a forest glade, complete with Lonely Bunny sitting beneath a tree, things had been…different.
Actually, the last few days with Tula had been great. Better than great. Amazing even. But it wasn’t real. It had all been staged by him. They’d laughed and talked and gone for picnics and out to dinner. They took Nathan for walks and set him in a swing for the first time, making them both nervous. He had felt closer to her than he had to anyone else in his life, he thought darkly.
But none of Tula’s responses to him were real because he had seduced her back into his bed for a deliberate reason. So if what he had done wasn’t on the up-and-up, how could her reactions be genuine?
If he felt the occasional twinge of guilt over tricking her into being a weapon to use against her father…Simon dismissed the feeling. He didn’t do guilt. Plus there was the fact that Tula was an adult, he assured himself, able to make her own choices. And she had chosen to be in his bed.
Yet, even as he told himself that, a voice in the back of his mind whispered the question, Would she still have chosen to be with you if she knew what you were really doing? If she knew she was nothing more to you than a sword to wield against her father?
Uncomfortable with what the answer to that might have been, he dismissed the mental question. Besides, he argued with himself, Tula wasn’t only a weapon he’d waited years to find against Jacob Hawthorne. She was more, damn it. He actually…cared about her. Hadn’t meant to, but he did.
Which was why he was standing at the batting cages arguing with himself while his best friend ragged on him. But the bottom line was, just because what he and Tula had together was mutually enjoyable, it didn’t mean it was necessarily more than that, did it?
Besides, this wasn’t even about Tula.
It was about her father.
After hearing what little she’d told him about her parents, she might even be grateful that he had found a way to take a slap at Jacob Hawthorne.
He snorted to himself and hit the next pitch, a slider, into right field. Sure. She’d thank him for using her. God, what universe was he living in anyway?
“This is all about your pride, Simon. You got cheated by a guy with no principles.”
“Damn right I did,” he snapped, turning his head to glare briefly at Mick. “And it wasn’t just me, remember. Jacob maneuvered my father, too. That miserable old thief almost cost us our house, damn it.”
He hated knowing that Jacob Hawthorne was out there, still chortling over getting the best of two generations of Bradleys. The need for revenge had been gnawing on him for years. Was he expected to now just put it aside because he had feelings for a woman? Could he put it aside?
“And your answer to that is to become as unprincipled as the old pirate himself?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Mick shook his head, clearly disgusted. “If you do this. If you use Tula to get at her old man, then you’re as big a louse as he is.”
Simon chewed on those words for a minute or two, then shook them off, determined to stay his course. He’d made a plan, damn it. Now he had to follow through. That was how he lived his life and he wasn’t about to change now. Wasn’t even sure he could change if he wanted to.
“It’s not who you are, Simon,” Mick told him. “I hope you remember that before it’s too late.”
A few days later, Tula was happy.
Anna had been right, she thought. Though she hadn’t actually confessed her love for Simon, she had tried to show him over the last several days just how important he had become to her. She was sure she was getting through to him. She felt it. In his easy smile. His touch. The whispered words in the night and the gentle strength in his arms when he held her as she slept.
He hadn’t mentioned again the subject of hiring a nanny. They hadn’t talked about him taking full custody of Nathan. Instead, the three of them were in a sort of limbo. Locked into a paralyzing state where they didn’t move forward and didn’t go back. It was as if they were caught in the present, while Tula and Simon tried to decide what might be waiting for them in the still hazy future.
She didn’t like waiting. She never had been a patient person, Tula admitted silently. But she was trying to fight her natural inclination—which would be grabbing Simon and shaking him until he admitted he loved her—so she could have the time to show Simon exactly how good they were together.
“Maybe this will work out, Nathan,” she told the baby as she zipped up his tiny sweatshirt for their walk to the bookstore. “Maybe we will become a real family.”
The baby laughed at the idea and clapped his hands together as if applauding her.
“That’s my boy.” She kissed him, then picked up the baby she thought of as her son and settled him into his stroller. “Now, Nathan, what do you say we go see the nice lady at the bookstore and talk about the signing this weekend?”
For days Simon had been living in two different worlds.
In one, he experienced a kind of happiness that he had never known before. In the other, there was a black cloud of misery hanging over his head, making him feel as though he was about to make the biggest mistake of his life.
He walked down the crowded sidewalk in the heart of downtown San Francisco and hardly noticed the bustle around him. His gaze fixed dead ahead, the expression on his face was ferocious enough to convince other pedestrians to give him a wide berth.
His mind raced with too many thoughts to process at once. Something he wasn’t accustomed to at all. His concentration skills were nearly legendary. But even the inner workings of the Bradley department store chain couldn’t keep him fixated for long anymore. That acknowledgment shook him to his bones. The Bradley chain had always been his focus. The one mainstay of his life. Rebuilding what the family had lost. Growing the company until it was the biggest of its kind in the country.
Those were tangible goals.
His entire life for the last ten years had been dedicated to making those dreams a reality. But lately, they weren’t his only goals.
Tula.
Everything came back to her, he thought and waited impatiently for the light to change and the Walk symbol to flash green. Around him, a teenager danced along to whatever music he had plugged into his ears. A young mother swayed, keeping the baby in her arms happy. Taxis honked, someone shouted and the world, in general, kept spinning.
For everyone but him.
Simon knew he didn’t have to go through with this. Didn’t have to walk into the exclusive restaurant precisely at twelve-thirty and “accidentally” meet the man he’d waited years to take down. He knew he still had a chance to turn away from his plan. From the decision he had made before Tula became so damned important to him.