He blinked, taking in her puffy, red eyes and curled upper lip. She was… leaving him? What was she going to do? Raise his child without him? No, no. He wouldn’t allow it. She was angry; saying things she didn’t mean. First, he’d talk his way into her room, give her the name book, then pull out the list he’d made and they would work this out.
“If not for us”—he swallowed thickly and tried again—“then for the baby.”
She lifted her chin, her eyes filling with tears. “There is no baby.” She shot him the coldest, hardest glare he’d ever seen. Landon’s heart dropped into his stomach, the air snagging in his lungs.
Then she slammed the door in his face.
CHAPTER ONE
16 years later.
Another shout sounded from beyond the bathroom door and Landon reached out and silently flicked the lock. He didn’t know how long he could remain in here undetected, but it was worth a shot.
“Hang on,” he said into the phone.
His sister, Angel, chuckled. “Where are you, anyway? You sound all echoey.”
He pressed his cell phone to his cheek and lowered his voice. “Echoey is not a word. I’m hiding in the bathroom.”
She barked a laugh. “From our nephew? Landon, really.”
“I think I bit off more than I can chew,” he mumbled, pacing the tiled floor. On his second pass between shower and sink, he noticed the ruckus that had driven him in here had stopped. Suspicious. He shushed Angel and held his breath, pressed his ear to the door to listen. Nothing. He unlocked it and poked his head out.
“Hello?” she whispered.
“He’s gone into stealth mode,” he said quietly. She erupted into another fit of laughter. “Send reinforcements.”
Tiptoeing in his socks through his bedroom, he sidled along the wall and around the dresser. Back pressed against the bedroom door, he peeked into the hallway.
“Rawr!”
A blur that may well have been his life flashing before his eyes nearly took Landon’s head off. He stilled the object with one palm—a plastic light saber—and Lyon grinned up at him, a gap where one of his front teeth should be. Thankfully, the tooth had been missing when he got here.
“You’re dead!” Lyon shouted.
“Not in the hall.” His voice held a comical tremor. “You’re going to break something.” Like my nose.
“Okay!” With that, Lyon turned on a heel and went tearing down the hallway, swinging the light saber with renewed vigor.
“Do you want Auntie Angel to talk to him?”
Landon stepped into the hallway and, with one more cautious look over his shoulder, made a break for the kitchen. “I can’t get anything done with him here,” he said as he neared the end of the hall. “How did you keep him for two weeks?”
The way he’d said it made two weeks sound like two years. May as well be. Lyon had thwarted both attempts at getting on his company’s conference call and several other attempts to check his e-mail from his phone. “Seriously, did you drug him or something?” he asked, only half kidding.
“Maybe I’m more maternal than you think,” she quipped. He thought of Angel’s struggle to get pregnant and felt the pang of loss for his only sister. She would make an excellent mother, and they all knew it. Never one to welcome pity, she shifted subjects before he could respond. “First of all, I took off work the first week he was here. After that, he had a routine and I was able to work some in between.”
“And you had Richie.” Her husband. Landon had himself, and the team of designers he’d assigned to the account, who were having a conference call without him with their client and the owner of Windy City potato chips, Otto Williams, this very minute. “I can’t take off this week.”
“Yeah, well our billionaire cousin used to say the same thing. Funny how after Shane found Crickitt, he found time for a vacation.”
At the mention of his cousin, he thought back to Shane and Crickitt’s summer wedding last year. Shane was a lucky bastard. He’d managed to meet Crickitt, who was not only considerate and kind, but also understood him. Landon had yet to find a woman who possessed one of those qualities, let alone all three.
That thought brought forth one involving his ex-girlfriend—technically ex-fiancée—Lissa, and his eyebrows scrunched together. They were better off apart, especially since their relationship had been an empty husk for years—way before she’d locked lips with actor Carson Robbins on the temporarily-famous YouTube video that had gone viral. Carson Robbins, Landon thought with a chuff, his pride stinging despite his efforts to keep from it. Why she had left him for that no-talent ass clown, he had no idea. The mind boggled.