Page 24 of Monster
“Hi, Mom,” she greeted, smiling as she took Liam’s car seat out of the stroller and set it beside her as she took a seat. “I’m sorry I haven’t come to see you in a while. Life’s been crazy.” Setting down the three arrangements she’d chosen earlier, Eden raised her hand to the thick, marble headstone, tracing the engravings of Helen Parker, Beloved Mother, with her fingertips. “I brought someone very special to meet you,” she said with a watery smile, reaching for Liam. “Mom, this is Liam, your grandson.” Eden raised a hand to swipe at the tears on her cheeks before releasing a sound that was both sigh and laughter. “He’s four months now. He’s such a sweet baby boy, Mom. He reminds me of you sometimes. There’s so much I want to tell you about him, about me…just everything.” And she did; she spoke of her pregnancy and delivery, and how she’d wished that she’d had her there to share the joys along with the pains of motherhood. How she’d wanted guidance, especially in those first few precious weeks when hormones, emotions, and fatigue had run extremely high. She refrained from divulging her marriage issues and how, hopefully by the end of the year it would all be over, nothing more than a bad memory. She kept to the subject of Liam, spoke of the simple things he did that awed her and made her smile and laugh for no particular reason sometimes. Eden spoke of nothing and everything that encompassed her child and expressed how desperately she was missed and loved.
“I promise to come see you more often. I’ll bring Liam every time I come.” With a sigh Eden rose to her knees and set Liam back into the car seat. “I love you so much, Mom, and I miss you. But I know you’re in a better place and probably looking down on us. I know you’re probably worried sick about me, but I promise I’m okay, Mom. I have Liam now, and he and I will be just fine.” With a silent prayer, Eden came to her feet and commenced her trip back to her car.
Sometime later, after a long leisurely walk around the park Eden found a nice shaded spot beneath a tree to set up her little blanket. The weather had grown increasingly warm over the last few hours, so the tree provided ample shelter from the scorching sun and had the added benefit of concealing Eden as she nursed Liam. But for added protection, she’d taken his swaddling blanket out of his bag to cover herself. While he fed, Eden sat back against the tree and amused herself in people watching. There were joggers, mothers walking with their children or pushing their strollers, elderly couples walking hand in hand around the park or sitting on benches feeding the geese over by the pond. There were others, like herself, who’d found prime real estate beneath other trees and had laid out blankets for picnics.
It was while her gaze veered back around that she saw him and tensed; even at a distant Eden was instinctually aware of him. She had only moments to assess him while his long, even strides brought him that much closer to her. Eden wasn’t even sure the word jeans and casual was part of Dominic’s extensive repertoire of vocabulary, but then if one could wear a tailored suit as well and impeccably as he did, one wouldn’t bother with such menial things. Grey sharkskin suit, royal blue silk tie, pristine white shirt, and trousers that accentuated his long, powerful legs that reeked of wealth and power made him look wholly out of place. More than a few heads turned to look at him, but it seemed he only had eyes for the lone woman seated beneath the tree, holding a covered bundle in her arms.
He was breathtakingly handsome and her heart skipped a beat as he drew nearer, thudding in her chest when he finally came to stand before her. She was at a complete disadvantage seated as she was on the ground with her child nestled to her chest, but Eden would not crane her head back to stare up at him, and he instantly figured that out as seconds later she found that he’d lowered his immense frame to the blanket, not quite sitting but poised on his haunches. “Hello,” he greeted after a moment.
“How did you find me?” she fired back, angry, but not at all surprised that he’d recanted on the promise he’d made of not following her. “You told me you wouldn’t follow me.”
“We agreed that my security wouldn’t follow you,” he countered smoothly. “We said nothing about me doing the following.”
“It’s always a technicality with you,” she said reproachfully, glaring at him.
“The devil is always in the details, my pe…Eden.”
Eden looked at him for an eternal second after that, and he stared back at her evenly, not entirely open with emotion, but showing enough that she knew the utterance of her name had been done to please her. “What do you want?”
“Far more than you’re willing to currently give me,” he murmured, reaching out involuntarily to tuck a tendril of hair behind her ear, his index finger lingering on a caress down her cheek. “But for now, I simply wanted to spend time with my son.”
Eden tilted her head away from his touch. “You could have waited until I got back to the mansion.”
He shrugged his broad shoulders, finding interest in the picnic basket she’d packed. “I lost patience.” He retrieved a roll of crackers and went on to tug it open. “How is he?”
“Sleeping,” she said curtly. “You’re not leaving, are you?”
“Not just yet, no.” And just to prove his point, he sat down on the blanket. “When was he born?”
The unexpectedness of the question surprised Eden but she quickly recovered. “March, twenty-third,” she answered quietly.
“Tell me about him.”
“I’m sure you have a folders filled with information about him.”
“Yes,” he admitted, “but not with what matters. I want to know more about him. Tell me.”
Forced to look beneath the order to the quiet desperation she heard in his voice, Eden sighed. “What do you want to know?”
“Whatever you wish to tell me.”
“He was born on March, twenty-third, at five-thirty in the morning. I was induced and ten hours later he was born. He weighed just under six pounds, but he was very long. He was very colicky at first, but we got through it. The thing with the hospital…” Eden swallowed hard, looking at everything but him, “it…it was an accident,” she murmured. “It was a few weeks after I had him. I was still trying to get used to being a mother. I was exhausted and I…I would never do anything to purposely hurt him.”
“Go on,” he urged succinctly, his green eyes focused on her completely.
“I overslept and when I woke up he wasn’t breathing. But someone came to help, and he got Liam to breathe again. We took him to the hospital soon after.”
It was as the report read, and as Dominic listened to her retell the story now with her own words, he tried not to condemn her for her mistake, but still, the thought that her actions had nearly cost him the life of the child he hadn’t even known he’d wanted until he’d finally held his son, made him want to lash out at her, use this in some way to make her pay. He filed the information for later, to further contemplate when he was alone. For now he simply looked at the mother of his child, fresh faced and astoundingly beautiful and tried not to compare her actions with the woman who’d given him birth. “Tell me more.”
The situation was quite surreal, and she didn’t know how to process it. She never would’ve imagined this in her wildest dreams—this outing, Dominic and herself and their child sitting beneath a tree, the appearance of a perfect family. It was too strange and it was probably that strangeness that kept Eden from losing her head. This wasn’t normal. She and Dominic were the furthest thing from a family, and regardless of the fact that they had a child together, there was nothing between them but a sham marriage and a contractual agreement that would come to an end in a few months. She would be afoolish woman if she allowed herself to buy into this fantasy, this misconception of bliss that was creeping in.
They returned home some time later in the afternoon, with Eden arriving at the mansion first and Dominic pulling up behind her in a sleek black car that was quiet but radiated power, he parked behind her Nissan and was there to help her unload Liam, holding him in a cradle at the crook of his elbow. “Leave it,” he said in reference to the other items that remained in the car. “Someone will come get them.”
“I can do it—”
“You’re stubbornness is unparalleled,” he pronounced with scathing frustration, putting a hand on her arm to lead her away.
“Yes, and you’re still a brute. Let go of me.”
