Cal wondered if Morgan had any idea how strong she was. She was heroine material if ever there was a living embodiment of fictional perfection.
Her fingers moved in his, striking an answering flicker inside of him, and he knew he had to end this.
“What evidence does he have to use against you in a custody battle?”
Her sigh sounded as though it came from her very depths. She glanced his way and those big brown eyes affected him as her fingers had. He could feel her.
Cal didn’t much like to feel.
Unless he was naked with a woman.
“Like I said, I’ve made some pretty bad judgment calls. Not so much lately. But a few years ago I was so busy rebelling against my father’s control that I did some stupid things.”
The words were said so calmly, so matter-of-factly, Cal wasn’t sure he’d heard them right. And then he couldn’t make sense of them.
“You’re a single mother with a job you’ve held more than ten years, finishing your last semester on a college degree. You drive a trustworthy car, live in a safe neighborhood and have a healthy son who gets good grades. I’m not seeing evidence to support his case.”
“My father hasn’t seen much of me in the past several years. What he’s going to point out to the court is that I’m a single mother because I trusted a gold-digging son of a bitch when he told me he loved me more than my father did. I knew Sammie’s father had lied to me a few times, but I put the lies down to his issues because he’d never known a secure home life. I knew he had trouble with his temper, but told myself that was a product of frustration, and understandable, considering the abuse he’d suffered in his last foster home. Mostly, I think I married Todd because my father was so adamantly positive that I couldn’t. I had to prove to him, and to myself, that I could make own decisions.
“My poor choice got my parents robbed, their home ransacked, priceless memorabilia ruined. It resulted in my being abandoned and pregnant at nineteen with no way to support myself and having to testify against the father
of my child in court. It garnered my son a father who was in prison at the time of his birth and who has disowned him ever since.”
“You aren’t the first woman to fall for a guy who didn’t turn out to be who he seemed, Morgan.”
“I know.”
Well, then…
“Todd is only one in a long line of errors in judgment,” she continued. “I trust too easily. I don’t know for certain, but I imagine one of the things my father is going to claim is that it’s only a matter of time before I trust someone in Sammie’s life who will hurt him. I’m not sure that it matters all that much. This past weekend is pretty strong evidence that I don’t have control of my son.”
“Lots of kids run away just to assert their independence.”
“I realize that. But my father’s going to capitalize on what happened. I guarantee it.”
“He won’t get far without more to go on,” Cal said, breathing a little easier. “Give me another example of what he might use against you.” He’d do his job, set her free and move on to assessing the term papers in one of the folders on his desk.
“My first apartment, after Sammie was born, the landlord let me stay in exchange for cooking all of his meals for him until I could get a job and get on my feet. I planned the first week’s meals—twenty-one of them—bought the groceries with the money he’d provided me to do so, and had to kick and bite my way away from his table the very first day when he let me know that what he wanted for breakfast wasn’t the ham and cheese omelet I’d prepared.”
His neck was warm. His tie too tight.
“By the time I made it back upstairs Sammie was awake and screaming for attention.”
“He didn’t…get what he was after…did he?” It was none of his business. He had to know.
“No. But I got a few bruises I hadn’t been planning on. My mother saw them and told my father.”
“I’m guessing that guy hasn’t been renting out property since.”
“He claimed that I’d offered my services in exchange for room and board, which Daddy might have believed, but Mom wouldn’t even consider the possibility. My father’s subsequent investigation turned up some questionable money practices, which led to some other things, and the guy is now doing twenty-to-life for selling drugs to a minor who subsequently died of an overdose.”
So her father had been instrumental in putting away two men with whom Morgan had associated.
“You were trading honest work for honest compensation, Morgan. There’s no way you’ll be found an incompetent parent over that.”
“I’ve trusted two men that ended up in prison. One of them fathered my son. The other I exposed to Sammie. And when I was serving breakfast, I left Sammie alone in the apartment.”
“For the few seconds it would take you to deliver food downstairs. He was asleep and you never left the building.”