His Pretend Baby Page 17

  But he’d thought about the incident a lot over the years. Mostly because it hadn’t worked.

  What happened between them should have killed any desire he ever had for Josie. But humiliating her in front of Colin and a hallway full of students and teachers hadn’t kept his dick from going hard with memories of the one time they’d been together whenever their paths crossed his senior year or when he came home for college vacations. He’d even found himself trying to leash in his desire for her at Loretta’s funeral, which she’d attended with her husband.

  And now here he was, unable to see and completely dependent on her.

  What had happened to the husband she been with at Loretta’s funeral? And why was she acting so subservient with him? The Josie he used to know would have never deferred to him as Mr. Prescott.

  He lifted up and pulled the special phone his assistant, Carol, had given him out of his back pocket. It was a large, rectangular cell phone with oversized buttons covered in braille numbers. And, according to Carol, it was fully voice-activated and set to speakerphone, so he wouldn’t have to constantly speak a command then hold the phone to his ear to hear the answer.

  “Call Mom,” he said.

  “No number matches that request,” the phone answered in a robotic monotone.

  He frowned, hating that he couldn’t just look up the number in his contacts like he used to. Then he tried again. “Call Kitty Prescott.”

  “Dialing…” the phone said.

  And Kitty Prescott answered the phone with a breezy hello.

  “What the hell were you thinking, hiring Josie Witherspoon?” he demanded.

  “Beau, darling, is that you?”

  “Who else would it be asking why the hell you’d hired Josie Witherspoon behind my back?” he asked.

  “Don’t curse at me. I am your mother,” she said.

  “A mother who didn’t even visit me in the hospital,” he answered bitterly.

  “Oh, Beau, you know I can’t bear hospitals. Hold on a moment, darling.”

  And he was forced to listen to her order a martini, “very dry, three olives,” from an unseen waiter, before she came back to the phone and said, “I would have thought you’d be pleased. I know how much you cherished Loretta growing up, and I thought calling her daughter would be a long shot at best, but as it turns out, she’s moved back to Alabama.”

  “With her husband?” he asked.

  “No,” his mother answered. “She said she wasn’t married anymore. You know how popular divorce is these days with you young people. But it’s for the best, really, because that means she can live on the property just like Loretta did. You won’t want for anything, and I’ll know you’re in good hands.”

  Beau screwed up his face. “You can’t just switch out Loretta for her daughter. It’s not the same.”

  “I don’t see why not,” his mother answered with the entitlement of a woman who had grown up in a South at a time when daughters really did take over their mothers’ housekeeping duties. “Josie was always a very pleasant girl, and I’m sure she’ll do a fine job taking care of you. If she doesn’t, just let me know, and we’ll bring in someone else. “

  “Bring in someone else,” he said. “Now.”

  “Oh, Beau, don’t be like that. You haven’t even given the poor girl a chance!”

  “I don’t want to give her a chance. I don’t want her here. Get somebody else.”

  Kitty let out an exasperated sigh. “Beau, darling, you are letting this injury overcome the few good manners I managed to instill in you. In a few weeks, if you’re truly unhappy with the job she’s doing, then we can talk about replacing her. But really, you can’t expect me to fire her on her first day.”

  “I can and I do, since I didn’t even agree to hire her in the first place.”

  “Oh, here’s Stavros. I’ll let him know you called purely to be difficult and ungrateful yet again.”

  Stavros was his mother’s travel companion. A Greek man just a few years older than him, who she’d taken up with just a few respectful enough years after his father’s death from a heart attack.

  “Mother.”

  “Toodle-loo, darling.”

  “Mother—”

  The connection went dead.

  He let out a string of curse words and threw the phone. Then he let out another string when he realized he was going to have a hell of a time finding it again.

  He had no idea why Josie was back in Alabama, or even why she’d agreed to take the job after so vehemently swearing she’d never work for him. But one thing was certain, he was even more turned on by the girl who lived in their attic than he’d been when he was a kid full of raging hormones. And there was even less chance that she’d sleep with him now.

  4

  The next morning Josie woke up in the same twin bed she used to sleep in as a teen. Her muscles ached from all the floors she had angrily scrubbed after Beau pointed out that she was working for him now, despite her high school vow that she never would. And the first thing to greet her when she woke up that morning was a fresh wave of humiliation.

  What would her mother do if she could see Josie now? Working in the same house, doing the same job she’d done, even though Loretta had wanted so much more for her daughter?

  “We need to talk, little girl,” Loretta had said when Josie had come tiptoeing into their shared room one summer night after her curfew.

  But the sneaking in hadn’t been necessary. Loretta was sitting up in the twin bed across from hers with the lamp on when Josie crept in, obviously awaiting her daughter’s arrival.

  “Where was you at?” Loretta asked her, before she’d even closed the door behind her.

  “I was just looking at the stars again,” Josie answered, waving the large constellation book Colin bought her for her birthday the month before. “You can see Jupiter tonight.”

  “With that skinny Fairgood boy?”

  That was when Josie had begun to feel uncomfortable. No, she hadn’t been with Colin.

  She’d only been on the roof for a few minutes when Beau had come climbing up with a backpack strung over his shoulders.

  “What are you doing here?” she’d asked. She hadn’t seen Beau on a Friday night in who knew how long. Unlike her, he was the kind of boy who always had things to do and people to do them with come the weekend.

  But here he was after dark, pulling a wooden box out of his backpack. “Saw you up here from my bedroom window and I thought you could use this. Found it in some of our old stuff.”

  He opened the box and pulled out a brass spyglass. It was obviously an antique, and it gleamed in the moonlight. “My dad only uses it when he goes out boating, but it should work out here, too. Here, try it.”

  Their hands touched when she took it from him, and Josie could only hope to God he couldn’t hear how fast her heart started beating when that happened.

  Lately Beau had gone from being just a boy she thought about like a pseudo big brother, to the guy who set her heart to racing at break-neck speeds whenever he came to occupy the same space as her. And what had started out as a little flutter of liking at the beginning of summer had developed into a full-blown crush by the end.

  She’d done her best to hide her feelings. Beau was the town’s football star, he was dating a pretty cheerleader, and from what she’d seen the few times she and Loretta had gone to see him play, there were plenty of girls lined up to take Mindy’s place when he was done with her.

  Josie, on the other hand, was poor, nerdy, and black. There was no way a guy like Beau would be interested in a girl like her.

  She busied herself pulling the spyglass out to its full length and using it to scan the night sky until she found a bright circle with two dots on either side. Jupiter and its four moons. “Hey, I found Jupiter, and… wow! It’s so beautiful.”

  She turned to thank him for bringing up the antique telescope, but her smile faded to confusion when she found him staring at her instead of the stars.


  She cleared her throat, which had suddenly gone very dry, and said, “Here, you take a look.”

  She carefully handed him the spyglass, and this time she made sure their fingers didn’t touch.

  He peered carefully through the lens and then gasped softly. “Yeah, I see it! Ain’t that something! This nerd stuff of yours isn’t half bad, Josie.”

  “Yeah, it’s something all right.” She kept her eyes firmly on Jupiter, which could also be seen with the naked eye, just not as clearly as with the help of a more powerful lens. “So why are you up here instead of out with your girlfriend?”

  “Got grounded,” Beau answered. “Old man’s pissed because he found out I was back in two-a-days this week.”

  Two-a-days were the morning and afternoon practices Forest Brook football players were expected to attend almost two full months before school began. “But Mr. Prescott’s been telling everybody you weren’t going to play this year, since your already won the state championship last year.”

  “I know that’s what he’s been telling people, but I never agreed to that.”

  “You just let him believe it,” Josie said.

  Beau lowered the spyglass. “I just let him believe what he wanted to believe and got Mom to sign the permission slip after she came back from tennis at the club.”

  Josie cracked a small smile. Mrs. Prescott ostensibly went to the Forest Brook Country Club every week to play tennis with the other trophy wives, but almost always came home without a bead of sweat on her body, slightly unsteady on her feet, and smelling of the expensive bourbon the club used in their mint juleps.

  “So now he can’t threaten to yank you out of football because Mrs. Prescott already signed the permission slip.”

  “And, more importantly, him yanking me out of football would make us look bad.” He lowered his voice to his father’s grave registers. “We Prescotts must never show dissension in our ranks.”

  Josie laughed.

  “So now he says I’m grounded until the beginning of the school year unless I either quit football or apologize for going behind his back.”

  These options, Josie knew, were actually a trick. Prescott men didn’t apologize, and on the few occasions Beau had done so as a child, he’d gotten leveled with an even worse punishment for daring to break one of the family’s most steadfast rules. So really, Mr. Prescott was telling his son to either quit football or spend the rest of the summer in the house.

  She took the spyglass back from him. “I think you can see Saturn tonight, too.” She scanned the sky. “There it is, and you can sort of make out the rings.”

  She handed the telescope back to him and pointed to a star shining less brightly than Jupiter. “Take a look for yourself.”

  “Oh, yeah, I see it,” he said. But then after a few beats went by, he said, “I know Dad wants me to grow up to be like him and all those other Prescott men, but the truth is, I’m scared to death of becoming like him.” He lowered the spyglass. “I’d rather die than turn into my dad.”

  She peeked sideways at him. “If you don’t want to be like him then you should keep on playing football. Don’t let him take it away from you.”

  Beau turned to look at her then, his silver eyes gleamed almost as brightly as the stars in the moonlight. “You think it’s that simple?” he asked, his voice laced with skepticism.

  “If you wanna do the things you love and not the stuff your daddy says you should, then yeah, it is,” she said. “So I guess the question is, do you love football like that?”

  He regarded her with the strangest expression on his face, and then he said, “Yeah, yeah I do.”

  She grinned. “Then you don’t have to worry. You won’t turn out like your daddy.”

  She would have thought he might have left after that. Gone to watch TV or talk on the phone with Mindy. But he had stayed up there with her on the roof, helping her look up constellation after constellation and then find it with the telescope. And even though it was a Friday night, he’d acted like there was no other place he’d rather be.

  In fact, it had been she who’d ended the constellation search shortly after realizing it was midnight and that she had totally blown her curfew.

  “Oh crap! I’ve gotta go or my mama’s going to be real mad,” she told him.

  For a few seconds he just stared at her, his eyes thoughtful, like he was trying to make a decision. But in the end he said, “Sure, run on. I’m probably going to call Mindy anyway.”

  She had to school her face to keep from showing how much the thought of him talking with another girl hurt her feelings. And as she walked back to the house, she reminded herself that despite how big her feelings for Beau were becoming, there was no way on earth he’d ever feel the same way back.

  But now here was Loretta, looking at her hard, like she could see through the skin on her chest into her heart of hearts where she nursed her hopeless crush on Beau.

  “No, not with Colin,” she answered. “I was with Beau. He brought an old telescope up to the shed roof to help me look up constellations.”

  She expected her mother to drop the subject then since she’d never had any problem with Josie and Beau hanging out alone before, but that night it was as if Loretta could smell the teenage pheromones coming off her daughter.

  “You like that boy?” she demanded.

  “Colin?”

  Her mother glared at her. “You know who I’m talking about. The one you done spent all night with. You got feelings for Beau?”

  “Beau?!” she said, hoping her extreme questioning tone would throw her mother off the scent. “Why would you even ask that?”

  “Because when I was just a little older than you I made the mistake you about to make.”

  Then Loretta told her a terrible story: about a naïve little girl, working her first job as a maid for an Italian-American family in Birmingham. There’d been a son living there, too, three years older and home from college for the summer.

  “He was just like Beau. Confident—a big deal around those parts. He used to bring me little presents, roping me in until my heart was all in my eyes. I didn’t think nothing about raising up my skirt for him. I thought he was in love with me, too. I wrote him every day after he went back to college up North.” Loretta’s face contorted at that part of the story. “But then my monthlies didn’t come and I went to the doctor, who told me it for sure. I was with child. I used just about my whole weekly paycheck to call him at that college of his. At first he sounded happy to hear from me, but when I told him what was in my belly, he acted like I was a stranger. He must’ve called his parents because his mama came in the maid’s quarters and dragged me out of my bed, called me a whore, and made me pack up my little suitcase. I had to go back home to live with my mama in our family trailer. She was so disappointed in me and nobody in Birmingham would hire me—at first because that boy’s family turned my name to mud by telling anybody who would listen that I’d been stealing from them, and then because I was showing.”

  Josie listened to this story in rapt horror. When Josie’s grandmother had been alive, she’d told Josie her father had been a Navy guy passing through Alabama and that her mother had gotten in trouble because she couldn’t keep her legs closed. Loretta, however, had never told her anything about her father, and had refused to answer any of the questions Josie had asked about him. But she never would have guessed this was her origin story, or that her father was white.

  According to Loretta, her father had been dark and swarthy, and Josie had come out dark enough that she’d had no problem passing off the story Josie had heard about the Navy guy “just passing through.” In Alabama, Loretta explained, it was better to be so loose you’d have a one-night-stand with a black Navy fellow than to be so stupid as to get knocked up by a white man. In any case, Loretta and Josie stayed with Josie’s grandma, picking up housework here and there, until the theft rumors blew over and Kitty Prescott hired her on to take care of Beau.

  By that time, Kitty
had already gone through eight housekeepers and Beau had only just turned four. But Loretta had been too long without a job to let this one slip away.

  “I put away my pride and let Mrs. Prescott talk to me any way she wanted. I put up with her and I tried my best to raise Beau and you right.” Loretta looked at her daughter forlornly, and for the first time Josie realized what all these years of docile servitude had cost her mother in pride and self-esteem. “I don’t want this for you, Josie. Promise me you won’t let some white boy with a bunch of smooth talk take away your future like I did.”

  “I won’t. Beau and me are just friends. I promise you, Mama, nothing will ever happen between us.”

  It had been an easy promise to make in the heat of the moment. And then Beau had shown his true colors on her very first day of school, embarrassing her in front of his cretin friends and letting her know he didn’t think of her romantically at all.

  Or at least that’s what she had thought…

  After days of squinting in order to see anything, when he’d brought those glasses out to the shed and said all those nice things to her, she temporarily lost her mind. For a moment, she’d thought Beau Prescott actually liked her as much as he claimed, as much as she secretly liked him.

  Afterwards, she even felt bad about rejecting him the many times he’d tried to talk about what had happened over the course of the following weekend. He hadn’t seen how hysterical Loretta had been, how she kept saying she’d lost Josie in-between sobs. Her mother, who she’d never seen shed so much as a tear, actually sobbed over what she had caught her daughter and Beau doing in the shed.

  Josie couldn’t have been more embarrassed or remorseful. And she spent the weekend in the somewhat strange position of assuring mother that really, it was just sex and that she and Beau had only been messing around, mostly out of adolescent curiosity. They’d used a condom, she told her mother, and Josie was not in love with him the way her mother had been in love with Josie’s father.