Something inside her, a bit of her grandmother coming out for once, made her lift her chin, look him in the eye and defend herself.
Mainly because, she thought, she had every bloody right to do what she did.
“You’re absolutely correct,” she agreed. “I did. I completely forgot about Joy and the fact that she’s a lovely woman. My only thought was to stay well away from you and your brother.” She watched his jaw tense. It frightened her a little bit but she sallied forth anyway because this was her child she was talking about and when you had a child, you had no choice but to develop a backbone. “And James, as the years pass, if I get even a suspicion our child is learning to behave in the ways demonstrated during my encounters with you and Miles then we have a problem.”
She didn’t give him the chance to retort. She turned the knob and got the heck out of there, nearly running back to the sitting room.
James didn’t follow.
In fact, he didn’t join them for tea.
In fact, she didn’t see him again until Joy was walking them out to the car, chattering happily with Mom and Gram (there was, Belle was both pleased and weirded out to note, serious bonding going on between her family and James’s).
They were all giving hugs good-bye when, out of nowhere, James appeared at her side.
He handed her his business card.
“I’ll expect a call about the doctor’s appointment next week,” he stated.
Belle took the card, looked at his ear and nodded.
“If you have trouble with the appointment, you tell me and I’ll arrange it,” he continued.
Belle’s eyes didn’t leave his ear when she continued nodding.
“I’ll expect news about your planned arrival at The Point next week as well,” he went on.
Belle licked her lips then nodded again.
She saw his head jerk toward Mom and Gram then without another word he strode away.
The Cavendish/Abbot family were silent in the car for several very long minutes as they drove from Chy An Als Point.
Finally, Gram (as usual) broke the silence by grandly declaring, “I do not like that man.”
This was not a surprise.
The surprise was Mom’s verbally stated opinion. An opinion that made Belle’s head twist toward her mother, her mouth open, her mind thinking that maybe Mom had finally jumped straight into the deep end.
“I do, I like him a lot.”
“What?” Gram shouted.
“You do?” Belle breathed.
“He may be a jerk in a lot of ways –” Mom began.
“May be?” Gram demanded.
“Yes, he may be,” Mom returned. “We don’t know him all that well and these are emotional times.”
“Um, were you not present when I explained what happened with James and his brother?” Belle asked incredulously.
“And were you temporarily blind when your daughter poured out her story through fits of tears?” Gram snapped.
“And do you not hear the reporters’ rude questions shouted at me practically every day?” Belle didn’t let up.
“I hear them, Bellerina. Still, I can’t help but like him,” Mom replied softly.
“She thinks he’s sexy,” Gram said on an annoyed sigh. “Her brain always gets addled around sexy men.”
This, unfortunately, was true.
“Well, he is sexy,” Mom admitted.
This, unfortunately, was true too.
“But that’s not it,” Mom continued.
“What is it, then?” Gram demanded to know.
“I don’t know. I have a theory,” Mom replied and Belle rolled her eyes and turned away.
Her mother had a lot of theories and they were usually daft at best, preposterous at worst and they were mostly at worst.
“Would you like to share your theory?” Gram asked, sounding like she’d rather not hear it but curiosity was getting the better of her.
For her part, Belle didn’t want to know.
She didn’t want to think of James at all.
Pretty soon, she’d be living in his house and therefore likely having to think about him all the time.
Then she’d have their baby and she’d have to see him far more than she wanted to.
For the rest of her life.
Therefore, she would have preferred a brief respite from James Bennett.
And she always preferred a respite from her mother’s theories.
“I don’t want to share it, not yet. It isn’t fully formed,” Mom said and Belle sighed in relief.
Finally, something went her way.
“I still can’t help but like him,” Mom muttered stubbornly.
Well, not entirely her way.
“Can we stop talking about this?” Belle asked.
“Of course, Bellerina,” Gram stated inflexibly, her meaning clear to everyone in the car most, especially Mom.
Mom drove and they were all silent.
Then Mom’s hand came out and squeezed Belle’s knee.
“Everything’s going to be fine, Bellerina. I feel it in my bones,” she whispered.
Hearing these words from her mother on many occasions in her life, Belle knew that Rachel Abbot felt a lot in her bones. Her bones were very busy sensing intuitive communications other mere mortals could not interpret.
However, unlike much of what Rachel Abbot did and said, when her bones spoke, they were rarely wrong.
Belle didn’t know what to make of that.
But since it was her Mom’s bones speaking, for the first time in a long time, Belle felt a very tiny, nearly imperceptible but still there, smidgeon of hope.
Chapter Seven
Shredded
Olive
Olive Mayfair closed her office door on the private investigator and turned back to her cluttered desk.
It was after eight o’clock in the evening and even though she had two days before the deadline Jack gave her on the Abbot report, she wanted to get it done so she could get what she’d learned out of her mind and move on.
She could, of course, simply give him the files but that wasn’t Olive’s way of doing things.
Jack was a tremendously busy man, indeed, impossibly busy.
Therefore, even though she knew he would read every single page of the investigator’s file after he read Olive’s synopsis of its contents, she was still going to write her summary.
She sat at her desk and stared at the thick file with distaste.
Then she opened it to the first page, a copy of a divorce decree, which she flipped over and saw the first of many medical reports.
Olive turned to her computer and started typing.
Belle Abbot’s divorce from Calvin Cole had been granted under what amounted to irreconcilable differences.