Sweet Sinful Nights(76)

He waved a hand as they pulled apart. “You make it easy.”

When they landed in Los Angeles, her phone was silent. No messages. No texts. No calls.

Her heart sank. Brent had been radio silent all through the night and early morning.

But she’d survive, she reminded herself, as they deplaned on the tarmac, the sun shining brightly. No matter what became of the two of them, she would survive. She always did; she always had. She knew how to keep on living, keep on moving, and keep on fighting.

She had her brothers. She had the three men who had never abandoned her. The three men who would always be by her side. She would stand by them, too, through anything.

The four of them had an unbreakable bond. They were her people.

*

October.

The pictures he’d seen were from October. She’d been four months pregnant then. If the pregnancy had continued, she’d have carried to March.

He’d have a nine-year-old son.

As his real estate attorney talked about neighborhoods in Chicago that were ripe for nightclubs, Brent ran his palm across his chin, trying to process the passage of time.

What grade was a nine-year-old in? Third? Fourth? Hell if he knew. The only kid he’d spent any time with lately was Carly and she was one. He knew nothing about children. Would his nine-year-old have been a sporty kid? Wanting to play catch or baseball or whatever kids wanted to play these days? Or would he have liked video games and Xbox? Would he have been a mama’s boy or just like his dad?

He twirled his pen between his thumb and forefinger, a long-time habit. He stared at his hand in motion as if it were a new addition to his body. Was this part of his DNA? Was something as mundane as pen twirling at a conference table a genetic trait he’d have passed on to a kid?

Brent lifted the pen to his face and studied it. Was his son right-handed or left-handed? Would he have been a good speller, or a whiz at math? Would he have liked being read to at night? Kissed on the forehead before he fell asleep?

“So there you go. We should be able to secure the property in Chicago, and I hope that we can get this one you had your sights set on in Atlanta. Ten-four, gentleman?”

Tate raised his eyebrows and glanced around the conference table, waiting for an okay from Brent and James.

But Brent was seeing his boy before his eyes, watching Shannon tuck him in at night, planting a kiss on his forehead.

“Where’s Daddy?” his kid said. “I want Daddy to say goodnight to me, too.”

Brent closed his eyes briefly. The scene was too much to hold onto. Too much to let go of. Because he couldn’t even put himself in the scene. He was seeing Shannon and his phantom son, but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t saying goodnight to the boy he didn’t have. He hadn’t been there to help his son’s mother.

Guilt clawed at him. His chest ached as if it had been carved up and hollowed out. He was left with a strange new feeling—missing.

He missed someone he never knew. This kind of missing was hard like a fist, its knuckles pushing up against skin and bones. He missed a person he’d never met, and would never know. A person who was a part of him, and a part of the woman he loved madly.

Tate and James were asking him questions, but they might as well be speaking Swahili. Hell, everyone was speaking in foreign tongues today. Sanskrit and Latin and Greek rained down on him. He had no clue what anyone was saying, and he had no notion of how to speak. It was as if his voice had been snatched away. His voice—his goddamn instrument, the tool he’d relied on when on stage, and now in business—was gone, turned into the ash that was coating his throat.

“Sounds great,” he somehow managed to say, finding those words deep within some primordial part of him that remembered how to communicate.

After the attorneys left, Brent stood too, but James sat him back down. Concern was etched in his eyes. “Never seen you like this.” James gestured heavenward. “It’s not even like you weren’t here. It’s like you were on another planet.”

Brent rubbed his hand over his jaw, the day-old stubble reminding him that he hadn’t even bothered to shave this morning. He glanced down at his outfit, making sure he’d remembered to put on clothes. The jeans and button-down he wore were the only reassurance that he hadn’t gone completely insane. He’d remembered to dress.

“Sorry,” he said, because that was the only thing he could say.

James patted him on the shoulder. “Hey, no worries. I’m here for you. This is your ship, and you run this baby,” James said, and Brent cringed at that word—baby. “You sure you’re okay? Why don’t you take the day off?”

Before Brent could answer, James’s phone rang. He looked at it quizzically. “New York number. Let me grab it.”

As James talked on the phone, Brent tuned it all out, parking his chin in his hand, and staring at an abstract piece of art that hung on the wall—a series of red, gray and yellow geometric shapes jutted across the canvas at harsh angles. He studied it, as if he could make out the meaning, but he saw nothing. He let his eyes go blurry, let the shapes melt into each other, into one jumble of colors. The one color he could still make out was yellow.

Like those damn sunflowers.

What was up with those sunflowers? That was the part he didn’t get. Why did she have all those pictures of sunflowers? Where they were taken?

“Earth to Brent.”