“What?” Harris asked, his voice urgent. “Greyson, you know nothing about babies!”
“I’m sure I’ll be fine,” Greyson said, his usual arrogance coming to the fore, and Tina choked on her pasta and then suffered a coughing fit, violent enough to cause both men to stare at her in alarm. Her eyes streaming with tears, she chugged down some water before finally getting herself under some control.
“Jesus, Tina!” Harris’s voice trembled with shock. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, no thanks to you guys! I could have been choking, and neither of you even considered doing the Heimlich maneuver.”
Harris had the nerve to smile, and she narrowed her eyes at him, all but daring him to say something flippant. He must have recognized the warning in her eyes and held his hands up in surrender.
“You weren’t clutching your throat and gasping for air. I assumed you had things under control.”
Tina clicked her tongue in dismissive disgust before refocusing her attention on Greyson, who was staring longingly at the door. He took a hesitant step in that direction.
“Uh-uh! Hold up, mister! What do you mean, you’re watching Clara tonight?” she asked, and he threw his eyes up to the ceiling before bringing his grim focus back on her.
Cold.
Well, it looked like Greyson was back to his usual frigid self, then.
“Exactly what I said.”
“That’s ridiculous—she needs to be close by so that Libby can breastfeed her.”
“She said something about a mixture of breast milk and formula.”
“God, give me strength,” Tina muttered beneath her breath. She met Harris’s concerned gaze. “Excuse me.”
“Of course.”
Tina hurried into the kitchen, where Libby was delicately piping meringue onto lemon tartlets.
“Libby, I need to have that chat with you right now,” Tina stated in her most authoritative voice, and Libby’s focus shifted from her task to Tina. She looked set to argue, but her shoulders slumped when Tina tacked a fervent “please” onto the end of her demand.
“Agnes, take over, please,” she instructed her eager second, and Agnes stepped in seamlessly. Libby’s kitchen was nothing if not a well-oiled machine.
Libby followed Tina into the office, and Tina sat down behind her desk to stare at her friend. She felt mentally and emotionally spent, and it wasn’t even one in the afternoon yet. She scrubbed her hands over her face, trying to think of what to say.
“Please don’t allow my shortcomings to affect the way you raise your child, Libby,” she finally said, and Libby sank into the chair opposite hers. The other woman’s brown eyes were probing and intent.
“What do you mean?”
“Ignoring for a moment that you’re letting Greyson watch Clara tonight, I’m talking about the fact that you wanted to continue partially breastfeeding her until she was six months old, and now you’ll be pumping milk so that she can be fed off-site. That wasn’t our arrangement. The deal was she would be in the office during dinner service so that you could feed her whenever possible.”
“Tina . . . I can’t overlook the fact that you’re uncomfortable around her. I know she’s just an infant, but babies can pick up on stuff like that. She’s so tiny—I don’t want her to fret over things she can’t possibly understand. That I, quite frankly, don’t understand myself.”
Tina swallowed audibly, trying to lubricate her parched throat, while fighting desperately to keep her breathing manageable and her panic on lockdown. She wrapped her arms tightly around herself, hoping the gesture would help her keep it together for what was to come.
“I-I . . .” She swallowed again. Her eyes felt dry and scratchy, and she fought hard to keep the incipient tears at bay. “I want to be different. I love Clara. But . . .”
She shut her eyes. It needed to be said. In order to preserve this friendship that meant the world to her, she needed to let her friend in. And finally reveal her most private pain and her darkest secret.
“I once had a baby,” she whispered, the words scraping across her throat as they clawed their way out. She heard Libby gasp and opened her eyes to meet her friend’s shocked gaze. Her breathing was fast and shallow, and she fought to keep the dizziness at bay as she forced the rest of it out. The unvarnished, irrevocable, soul-destroying truth. “He died.”
Chapter Nine
Greyson had ultimately allowed himself to be coerced into having lunch while Harris ate dessert and kept him company. They watched Tina and Libby march back toward the office, and Harris saw the concerned and curious gazes of their staff as they, too, observed the grim pair. It had certainly been an eventful afternoon so far.
If nothing else, a lot of the patrons would return in hopes of witnessing the staff’s continued personal drama. They’d be getting dinner and a show.
“How did you manage to talk her into letting you babysit?” Harris asked, and Greyson lifted his broad shoulders before dropping them heavily.