“I need to ask something more.”
Belle didn’t speak. She just kept looking at him.
He continued, “Mum is excited about this. She wants to be involved and she –”
Belle cut him off, “I’m happy for Joy to be as involved as she wants. She’s a lovely woman and she’s the baby’s Grandma.”
The air in the room changed. It turned unpleasant and Belle saw his face had again grown hard.
“You seem to have forgotten that when you decided to keep this from me,” he told her, his voice as hard as his face.
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.