Bound As His Business-Deal Bride

‘There’s nothing to understand, Mom. You lied to me. That man...’ He pointed to the man who’d raised him. Whom he’d once loved. ‘That man is not my father.’

Gus Caron looked at him. Stricken. His colour was grey. Gage didn’t care. The pain on his parents’ faces could never match the pain that was tearing him in two.

‘Betty. This is a conversation I need to have with my boy.’

‘I... I’ll get some iced tea.’

‘No. I think we need something stronger.’

‘Then I’ll leave you to talk.’ His mother looked at him, tears dripping down her cheeks, before she left the room. He’d made a woman he loved cry, yet again. His father walked to a sideboard, grabbed a bottle and held it up.

‘Want some?’

Gage shook his head. Gus poured himself a three-finger slug and his father was not a drinker.

‘Hiding this from you was never planned. It just...never seemed a good time to say anything.’

Gage gritted his teeth so hard he thought they might crack. ‘I asked you when I was nine why I didn’t look like you. You both said I took after Mom’s family.’

‘You need to understand—’

‘You all keep saying that and I’ve tried, but I’m out of ideas. Why don’t you explain it to me? Because you’ve had thirty years!’

Gus gul

ped down half his drink. Winced. ‘We were overjoyed to have you. And it didn’t seem to matter. You were all your mother and I wanted. We tried to have children when we first got married. We couldn’t. There was a problem with me.’

Gage had a small, sharp moment of bright hope, a shard that inserted itself and stuck. ‘So you used a sperm donor?’

His father shook his head and that hope was dashed.

‘You know your mom and I married young. It was one of the many reasons we were so against you and Eve, but especially given what happened to us... Marriage. It isn’t easy. Which is something you’ll learn with Eve if... But you’re both older. Better able to deal with what will come your way.’

Gage looked down at his hands, gripping the leather seat back of the chair he stood behind. His nails cut into it. There was no relationship anymore. He and Eve were done. He held on even harder, because it felt right now like he was bleeding out all over the floor.

‘We tried for so long to have a baby. Everything failed. Doctors said there was no explanation. Just one of those things. Idiopathic infertility.’

His father twirled the crystal tumbler in his hands. Took another mouthful of liquor.

‘We weren’t happy, son. Things were going wrong. And your mother and I, we both sought to ease our pain elsewhere.’

Gage rubbed his hands over his face. For as long as he’d been alive his parents had loved each other. He’d thought their marriage had been perfect. They had been an immutable force and now this? He shook his head. ‘I don’t want to know.’

‘You’re an adult and you need to hear this. It’s where it starts. Your mom fell pregnant. It wasn’t planned. It just happened. She didn’t want to be with the father. He didn’t want her either.’

‘Who is he? Do I know him? Did he know about me?’

‘Yes, he knew about you. No, you don’t know him. I can give you his name. He’s a businessman in California with a wife and two grown kids of his own. A whole lot of folks made a whole bunch of mistakes back then and in the end he didn’t want to be in your life. Your mom and I had a choice to make. We wanted children. And here was our chance.’

Gage couldn’t stand any longer. He pulled out the chair he’d been holding onto and sat, trembling. He regretted refusing his father’s offer, wanting a drink of whiskey now himself to numb the feelings that rioted inside him. ‘I wasn’t a commodity.’

‘No. You were our greatest success and greatest love. And yet you were a product of our greatest failings. Neither your mom nor I were innocent in this thing. In the end we had to fight hard for our marriage, and we succeeded. You’re a blessing. I didn’t care who your biological father was. I’d been no prince myself and it would have been hypocritical of me to criticise your mom for failing when I had first, and more than once. It wasn’t easy fixing our marriage. Both of us had a great deal to forgive the other for. The easy thing was always you. From the moment you were born you were my son. You were no one else’s.’

‘How did you do it? How did you forgive her?’

His father downed the last of his glass, sat back in his chair. Looked at him with soft warmth in his clear brown eyes. A look that had once been familiar and was now strange and confusing.

‘While saving the marriage was one of the hardest things I’ve done, in the end forgiving was easy. I forgave your mom because I love her.’