Page 35 of Paradise

They were all eating … cake. Lots of tiny samples were spread across the kitchen counter, and they were eating them and laughing, and they looked perfectly happy, and wasn’t that somethinghewas supposed to do today?

Jonah doesn’t want me in the briefing, and Claudia doesn’t need me for the wedding. Great.He could have gone in, but that would have felt like crashing a party. Instead, Garrett turned around and headed back to his suite, but even once he was on the bed, curled onto Jonah’s half, he couldn’t sleep. He’d known he wouldn’t, but he couldn’t even relax. Garrett felt superfluous to his own existence.

Superfluous … a fluid word, thin and slippery, a word tossed off the top of a very high, very important building that oozed at great speed down the slick sides, dissipating more and more with every second until it was nothing but a glaze sliding into a foggy, bogged-down oblivion.

There was an uncomfortable starkness to the whole thing that Garrett couldn’t tear his eyes away from. He didn’t even move the first few times someone shook his shoulder. “Garrett?” Soft voice, sweet sounds. “Gare?” Her hand was too gentle. “Honey, it’s time for the meeting.”

“What?”

“Gare?” Claudia sat on the bed next to him and brushed his hair away from his forehead. “Jack Vendam and his lawyer are here. You need to come to the meeting. Jonah and Mr. Bowman are waiting for you.”

“I’ll be right there.” He smiled for her, and it must have been convincing because she left. Garrett stopped in the bathroom and ran a freshening cloth over his face. He looked at himself critically, then added some foundation beneath his eyes. There. Now he looked like he had rested. He left his room and walked back into the belly of the beast and found Jonah there with the gunny, looking better than Garrett had expected.

“Hey, darlin’.” Jonah took his hand and pulled him down next to him on the couch. “They’re coming in.”

“Showtime,” Garrett said. The sergeant snorted. Garrett refrained from kicking him in the head, just barely, before Jack and his lawyer were shown in.

Jack was not what Garrett had expected. He was tall and broad, good-looking but in a simple, hearty way. His curly hair was a dark mirror of Cody’s, but beyond that, the boy could have been all Jonah.

He was also angry. He was seething, quietly, but Garrett could see it in the set of his shoulders and the shallowness of hisbreathing. He was probably furious at being turned on by Kilroy, and now this. His gaze fell on Garrett, dark and calculating, and it felt like two knives being driven through Garrett’s eye sockets. Tiny, tiny, super-sharp knives. Monofilament blades, too thin to see but big enough to do damage.

Jack didn’t speak. His lawyer, a thin, hatchet-faced woman, did. “We’ll be suing for full custody of the child.” Boy, she went on the offensive fast. Jonah stiffened in shock.

“There’s no basis of law for that,” Gunnery Sergeant Bowman said immediately. “Your client has willfully ignored his parental rights for the past four years, no child support given, no efforts to reach out to the child taken.”

“My client was denied his parental rights when your client absconded with the boy.”

“Your client knew full well the intention and destination of his former spouse and could have reached out to stop them or become a part of the process at any time. He didn’t.”

The words continued. This was no game, nothing cooperative about it like the last one. Each sentence was a salvo at the other side, and Jonah and Jack just stared at each other, neither of them willing to give an inch. Garrett sat still and absorbed the energy of the words if not the words themselves; they were too rapid and too spiky for him to latch onto.

A file was displayed on the table. “Medical records,” Jack’s lawyer said briskly. “Concerning Cody’s health while in the sole custody of Jonah Helms. Three incidences of broken bones, two incidences of illness requiring hospitalization. These are hardly indicative of a caring and competent father.”

“Cody Helms is a natural; he’s genetically prone to incidents like this,” Bowman fired back. “Most children can be treated for minor injuries in an hour; for Cody, recovery takes weeks, even months. His father took appropriate medical action for each incident.”

“But the circumstances surrounding the very incidents themselves are suspect,” she argued. “Letting a child with special needs run rampant on a Drifter ship? This is the definition of neglectful parenting.”

“I’ve never neglected my boy,” Jonah said, and his voice was hardly above a growl. “And anything you’re getting’ from that particular source isn’t reliable. My mother and I aren’t on the best of terms.”

“And yet you stayed on her ship and allowed her to watch your child?” The lawyer sniffed derogatorily. “Yet another example of poor decision-making.”

“Either she’s a credible witness or a useless sack of a person; you can’t have it both ways,” Bowman said irritably.

“We have other witness statements on their way in right now. This is just a preliminary meeting.”

“Good, then we’ll have plenty of time to compile our own statements concerning your client’s utter lack of parenting skills and inability to be a decent human being.”

“Mr. Vendam has never been convicted of a crime.”

“That hardly makes him a model citizen.”

The lawyers continued sparring for a while before things finally ran out of steam. Garrett was seeing a rainbow of colors in his head, all of them dripping down into his mouth and making it taste bitter, but then Jack spoke up for the first time, and Garrett refocused on him with needle-point scrutiny.

“I want to see Cody.”

“No,” Jonah said immediately.

“I want to see my son,” Jack repeated. “I’m entitled to take a look at the boy you’ve kept from me for so long. Does he even remember me?”

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