Piper heard a snuffle from the baby monitor on her desk and smiled. Her boy was awake and would be wanting some lunch. Piper walked out of her study and ran up the stairs to the third floor of her building, which served as the second floor of her home. The first floor was an apartment she rented to Ceri and Rainn. She padded into the smaller of two bedrooms and across to the wooden crib she’d slept in as a child. Ty turned to look at her, and love flooded her system.
He was all Jaeger, she thought, picking him up and cuddling him to her chest. He had Jaeger’s light blue eyes, his facial structure and his dark sable hair. Ty would also, she was sure, have Jaeger’s height and naturally muscular build.
Ty was a Ballantyne, she thought, in everything but name.
“There’s my big boy,” she crooned, rubbing her chin across the top of his head. Piper carried Ty to his changing mat and deftly undressed him, taking a moment, as she always did, to kiss his foot, to nibble his heel. The actions caused Ty to release a belly laugh which, in turn, made her laugh. God, she’d never thought she could love someone this much...
Piper whipped a disposable diaper from the box on the chest of drawers and slid it under Ty’s clean bottom. Under the pile of diapers was the black velvet roll of fabric, and inside the roll were the ten sapphires she’d discussed with Jaeger.
In Milan, he’d promised he’d call her so he could examine the sapphires, but he never did. When six weeks passed without hearing from him, and she’d realized condoms weren’t a hundred percent foolproof, she’d tried to contact him. Every call she made to his cell phone went directly to voice mail.
He couldn’t be hard to reach, she’d thought, so she’d tried to contact him through Ballantyne and Company. Ha! That was like trying to speak directly with one of the Windsor boys. She’d left countless messages, sent a dozen emails to the group secretary, but nothing. When she’d visited the flagship store, asking to see Jaeger, her requests to speak to someone higher up the food chain were dismissed. When she refused to leave until either Jaeger or one of his three siblings spoke with her, security escorted her off the premises.
She’d been on the internet a few days later and found an in-depth article on him in which he was quoted saying that he had no intention of ever marrying, that he did not want children. The world needed innovators and adventurers and discoverers, not more mouths to feed.
Besides, kids would seriously cramp his style...
By midnight of that awful day, she’d finally received the message that Jaeger wasn’t interested in her or her sapphires or hearing she was pregnant.
Ty, she decided, was hers; she wasn’t obliged to share his existence with a man who would not be excited or interested in her child. Mick had ignored her, and she’d always wondered why he didn’t love her. There was no way she would burden her son with an uninterested, unenthusiastic father.
Piper desperately wished she could forget about Jaeger, but that was impossible when she lived with a miniature version of the man. In Ty she saw Jaeger’s gorgeous, fallen-angel face—light eyes a perfect foil for his olive skin and dark, wavy hair—and then she remembered the scrape of his two-day-old beard against her skin, the breadth of his shoulders, the ridges of his corrugated stomach, the peace she felt in his clever assured touch.
Some nights she woke up from a deep sleep, her heart pounding, an orgasm hovering, her thoughts full of him. On occasion she rolled over looking for him, wanting him to take her to that place where only he could—a dizzying, sparkling place where time stood still and magic lived. When reality crashed down—she was a single mother and he wasn’t interested in her or her son—the following hours were dark and dismal, long on tears and short on sleep.
Ty gurgled and Piper dropped her head to nuzzle his tummy, feeling his tiny hands in her curls. When she’d first found out she was pregnant with Manhattan’s Main Man’s baby, she’d cursed God and Fate and wept and wailed. Now she couldn’t imagine her life without her little man; he was the beginning and the end of her universe.
“What about some lunch and then a walk in the park? It’s cold but sunny.” Piper put Ty on her hip and walked downstairs, ignoring her study to head for the kitchen. “You up for that, Ty?”