Page 104 of Child of Mine

That smile fades when he sees me huddled under the covers. “Oh no. Did it not go well?”

Sitting up, I just hold out my arms. After he shucks off his sport coat and shoes, he crawls into bed and pulls me into his side. We just sit there for a long time, and the role this man should play—is already playing—in my life is suddenly crystal clear.

“I need you, Henry Cornelius Smith.”

* * *

HENRY

When I enter the hotel room, I’ve got plenty of news to share and I’m guessing she does too. But when she tells me she needs me, I know it’s a huge step for her, and I’m struck dumb.

But only momentarily. Hugging her even closer, I whisper, “I’m here for you. Whatever you need.”

“Thank you. That means so much to me right now.” She nestles her cheek into my chest, arms still around me. “I wish we could stay here forever.”

“I agree about the forever part, but I think I’d rather it be somewhere else.”

“Like where?” she asks, her tone uncharacteristically tentative.

Wanting to reassure her that I’m not planning on going anywhere, I say, “The location doesn’t really matter—Boston, New York, North Carolina, or the moon, I don’t care about that. I just want to snuggle with you in a bed big enough that a little one could join us here.”

“Like Ribsy?”

The tease in her voice makes me ridiculously happy. “Ribsy, yep. Maybe even those cats of yours.”

“That’d be interesting.”

“Then there’s Lilah and…”

“And?”

“You know, the six or seven other babies we could make.”

She pulls back to narrow her eyes at me. “That’d be an awfully big bed.”

I stroke a hand down her back to palm her butt. “Big beds are good for other things too.”

Chin on my chest, she grins. “I’d suggest we try some of those things, but”—with a groan, she pulls away and sits up—“I think we need to talk before that can happen.”

After grabbing a shirt from the floor and putting it on, she sits cross-legged on the bed to face me. “I’m not going to get any rest until I start solving these problems.” She squeezes my knee. “Then we give the bed a workout.”

“Well, in that case,” I say, swinging off the bed and grabbing my briefcase, “put some pants on too, girl, or I won’t be able to concentrate.”

We meet at the tiny table in the corner. Bella shuffles through the stack of Polaroids we brought with us as I open my briefcase and pull out a few documents.

“You first,” she says, as I set my briefcase on the floor.

“Your wish is my command.” I’m dying to know what happened with her dad, but this is her show, so I flip through the photocopies of the agreement Bella’s family signed until I get to the highlighted sections. “Basically, Joe and I went over the non-disclosure, and long story short, he’s not going to fight you on this. He wants you to feel comfortable living your life and telling whoever you need to about your history. At the same time, he said that if push came to shove and you tried to drag the network’s name through the mud over it, they do have a very well-funded legal department.”

Her brow furrows. “So, what does that mean in terms of dealing with this blackmail andBoom?”

“If it goes public, they want to be on top of it. He offered to deal directly with the WGBH legal team.”

She’s churning through way too much in her head, so I draw a finger across her brow. “We’re on your side, Bella. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

She takes this in, nodding slowly. “My dad and I had a big talk.” Her smile is fragile but hopeful as she continues. “We still have a lot to work through, but I’m glad we got the ball rolling. The letter wasn’t from him, but after we went through the Polaroids together, we’re pretty sure we know who it is.”

Setting one of the photos on the table between us, she points to the blurry image of a woman in a mirror, the camera flash obscuring part of her face. “That’s the photographer. She always had a Polaroid camera with her on set to keep track of things, but my dad remembered that she’d whip it out to catch what she called ‘memories’ too. I never thought anything about it until now.” Bella taps the image, in which she’s wearing a colorful, sparkly dress that I can’t even imagine her in now. “I remembered her taking this. It was my seventeenth birthday.”

---