Owning Beauty (Taking Beauty Trilogy 3)

“Or him,” Jen said, drawing my curtains shut for good measure. “You’d think she was his mother, or something! That poor guy.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, rolling my eyes as I made my way toward the couch. I needed to sit before my knees gave out from underneath me. “Poor Julian Bastille, who not only got a one-night stand out of the deal, but has upended my life, barged into my home demanding I play into this like it’s some kind of publicity stunt, and who doesn’t have to carry a child for the next nine months.” I sat down, hard, and let myself sink into the cushions. “He’s sure got it rough!”

Jen turned to look at me. She smiled a little pityingly as I shook my head and whined, “Oh, God, I’m pregnant. I’m really pregnant. How? How does something like this happen to someone like me?”

“The usual way, I’d suspect,” she joked, coming to sit beside me. I put my head on her shoulder. “Or it could be karma. This is what you get for going around sleeping with my dream man!”

“I hate you so much,” I sighed, shaking my head. But as the two of us settled into silence, the real weight of the world—my new reality—finally closed in on me in earnest.

This had gone from some embarrassing legal snafu to a full-on ordeal, with doctors and custody to be considered. This wasn’t part of my very detailed life plan.

There was so much to do. I had doctor’s appointments I had to deal with. I didn’t have anywhere near enough time or money to take care of a child on my own—and yet the thought of taking those two up on their offer made my skin crawl. I began to wonder just how good of a parent I’d be, or even if I was cut out at all for parenting—hell, my own parents were hardly the best role models, which was one of the reasons I had shied away from the idea of motherhood as I grew up. What if I ended up just like them?

“I’m scared, Jen,” I said, hiding my face in my best friend’s curls. Her hair always smelled so good, like jasmine and honeysuckle and vanilla. It was soothing, like chamomile tea taken straight through the nose—without the choking and sputtering, obviously. “I didn’t ask for any of this.”

I had, in fact, an itemized list of everything I did ask for. Nowhere on that list was “make a baby with Julian Bastille”.

“I don’t think I’m ready to be a parent.”

“Don’t I know it, hun,” she murmured, rubbing my arm and letting me seek solace in the scent of her shampoo. She was also so indulgent of me. Then again, wasn’t everyone indulgent of the ones they loved? “But for what it’s worth, I think you could be a great mom—hell, you take care of my tipsy ass every weekend. What’s one more helpless human being for you to worry about twenty-four-seven?”

“Now I’m thinking of putting you up for adoption,” I said, playfully pushing her away.

“Adoption?” She laughed. “No one would take me, but if you’re looking for someone to raise a hot British rock star’s baby, I’m gonna be at the front of that line.”

I shook my head. “Great. You can have it. Just be ready to catch when it comes out.”

“Gross!” she said, looking at me askance as she reached for the remote. “Come on, let’s get your mind off things, huh? You’ve got months to go before you need to make a decision and everything is going to work out. What do you want to watch?”

“Put on something scary,” I said, drifting into a lazy half-consciousness. Sleep felt so inviting, and Jen made the best pillow.

“Right, Rosemary’s Baby it is,” she said, surfing through the on-demand movie channels.

Leave it to Jen to rub it in, even when she was trying to help. I caught the mischievous tilt of her lips and settled back into the couch with a shake of my head. If there was one thing I could’ve used a little less of in my life, it was people all too willing to show off their smart mouths.

“Fuck you,” I grunted half-heartedly, hiding my smile as best I could while Jen’s peal of laughter echoed through the living room. She was right. I had plenty of time to decide what I was going to do. Plenty of time to come to terms with this situation and all it entailed.

Julian’s eyes flashed in my mind—not his typical tipsy leer, but the way he’d looked at me just before he’d left. Like he didn’t want to leave—like he’d had every intention of staying, if I’d told him it was all right to. But I hadn’t, had I? I’d sent him away. I’d been telling myself that was the best thing to do, but as I replayed what he’d said to me—the sadness in his tone, the way his shoulders slumped, how his gaze had darkened and lost that brilliant shine—I wondered if maybe I’d gotten it all wrong. Maybe he deserved a second chance, somewhere far away from Tessa and her publicity schemes.

But there was more to it… On some fucked up level, I wanted this to happen. I wanted things to work between us.

“Plenty of time,” I reminded myself out loud, taking a deep breath as I mentally added Julian’s name to the list of things that might be worth looking into over the next handful of months.

Julian

I laid back against the pillow in my hotel bed. I had what was, by far, the best room that Billford Hills had to offer, but that wasn’t saying much compared to the places I’d been.

Tessa had left the meeting with Elizabeth absolutely furious. She couldn’t seem to understand why her compensatory offer for putting up with me wasn’t as well-received as she’d imagined it would be. She seemed to think she’d offered Elizabeth the world back there, while I was pretty sure everyone else in attendance had seen it for what it was: a shrew of a woman trying to manipulate everyone around her into doing her bidding. She kept saying it was for my benefit, even for Elizabeth’s, but in the end, I was certain Tessa’s plans only ever had one beneficiary in mind… and that was Tessa.

The more I had listened, the more I had wanted to run away from all of this. The world was so much simpler when life could be boiled down to one of four things: drinking, fucking, singing, and sleeping; anything else was either too much to bother with, save maybe eating. Usually Tessa was only up my ass about my performances, but these last few months she had been constantly nagging me about my publicity, telling me that “we” needed to be in the papers as much as possible.

“Why?” I’d asked her on numerous occasions. “Why would I want to turn myself into a sideshow?” But that only made her more angry. The way she’d torn into me was the same way most people scolded their dogs for pissing on the carpet.

“I just want to go home,” I whispered to the empty room.

We all grow up having dreams of how your life will turn out, childlike fantasies of being a famous… whatever the hell people dream of being. Me? I wanted to be more than just a rock star. I wanted to be loved.

Really that’s all I ever wanted, to feel like I was loved by someone, but the more I tried the less the love I was trying to find seemed to stick. Sure, I was a pretty lad, someone that all the girls fancied, but beyond the physicality of it, the love I’d experienced had been so fleeting. So superficial. It never lasted long.

Part of that was my fault. It was hard for me to trust in anyone, even myself. The kind of home I came from, I was raised to doubt my every thought, my every feeling, my every action and word. Not only mine, but those of everyone around me. My father certainly never kept his promises, and Mum… well, she was probably the biggest disappointment of all.

How? How do you just stand there and watch your son being beaten like that? How do you watch from the doorway and not say a bloody word? How do you live with yourself, how do you sleep at night, you’re a mother, for God’s sakes, how…

So instead of trying to find a deep, meaningful relationship—something that constantly seemed to elude me—I delved into the pit of meaningless flings. It was easier that way for everyone involved, no attachments, no heartache. I left no broken hearts in my wake, only blissful smiles and dreams come fucking true. All I had to do was keep moving and never let myself think about what I was missing.

Love. The real deal. Not the phony shit I write songs about.

But e

ver since we’d left Elizabeth’s house, something had changed. Deep in my gut I could feel this strange sensation, almost like I was about to be sick, and yet at the same time I knew there was nothing wrong. The world seemed to float along at a snail’s pace while I moved just the way I’d always done—so was it me that had changed, or everything else?

My mouth felt dry despite all I’d had to drink, and yet my vision was swimming in different ways than it normally did, not from my own intoxication, but from the onset of what I was beginning to realize was reality asserting itself despite my drunken stupor.

“I’m going to be a dad,” I mused, saying the words for the first time out loud, acknowledging them for the first time—period. I was going to be someone’s father. This wasn’t some meaningless fling. I couldn’t just walk away.

Maybe it was the fact that this Elizabeth girl wasn’t just some bird I’d knocked up… I’d married this girl! Even the thought of being hitched sent my mind spinning farther afield. What the hell was I thinking?