onto his stomach, reached for the Bloody Mary Cassie had brought out to him a few minutes ago and took a long sip. The generous portion of alcohol she had added to his tomato juice burned a gulch down his throat and lit a simultaneous fire under his already well-stoked indignation. He wasn’t going to stand for Annie being so selfish. He had rights. Not to mention he was a celebrity with five commercials running on network TV.
And Tommy was his son. With his genes. His potential to be a great ballplayer someday.
But not if she brought him up believing ballet was just as admirable as baseball if that was a person’s chosen passion.
Let him decide if that’s what he wants for himself, J.D.
Wrong! On some things, a child had to be pointed in a certain direction, shoved along a little, if necessary. How exactly was a six-year-old supposed to know what he wanted to do with his life? If J.D. wasn’t mistaken, the boy was going to have his daddy’s arm. And if Tommy was told he was going to be a great baseball player like his dad, then odds were he would be.
But Annie was so convinced she was right not to push the boy. In his opinion, this was just one more way for her to pay him back. By denying him the chance to see his own talent reflected back in his son.
Who did she think she was? She’d been nothing more than a starry-eyed teenager when he’d met her in Atlanta. He’d given her a life most girls would have run barefoot across nails for a chance at. But of course, Annie had never appreciated it. Had always looked at the few negatives of his career. She’d hated the traveling, the moving around. Why had she never seen the excitement in it? Exposure to new things, new people. J.D. thrived on that. And Annie’s inability to bend even one iota had been the true cause of the end of their marriage. She could be mad at him until the sun turned blue, but the way he saw it, she was the one at fault for their splitting up, anyway.
And now she wanted to keep him from seeing Tommy.
He let that simmer for a while. Sweat began to bead on his nose, causing his four-hundred-dollar sunglasses to slip. He shoved them back in place.
The problem with Annie was that she’d developed way too big an opinion of herself. Ever since she’d stepped into his shoes as mayor of Macon’s Point—his own term as mayor had been little more than an amusing diversion while he tried to figure out how to accept that he was never going to play pro baseball again—she’d gotten just a little too big for her britches. She actually thought she was going to make a difference in that Podunk. How much difference did she think she was going to make in a place that was never going to be anything special?
“Are you still fretting over that phone call, honeybee?”
J.D. looked up. Cassie stood at the sliding glass door of their Tuscan contemporary house, peering at him over the rim of her four-hundred-dollar sunglasses, identical to his. Why was it that she wanted them to have matching everything?
She was twenty-two to his thirty-five. That explained a lot of it. Youth left a few blanks for maturity to fill in later on. Profound, J.D. He should write that one down in case he got around to penning his memoirs one day.
Cassie’s adoration was kind of cute, but if he wasn’t careful, she’d have him parading around L.A. in matching I’m Hers, I’m His T-shirts.
“I’m not fretting,” he said, planting his forehead on the chair and staring at the terra-cotta tile beneath.
She click-clacked across the pool deck and squatted down beside him, one hand lacing through his hair. “You are.”
“I’m not.”
She sighed. “Why don’t you just go get him, J.D.? I wouldn’t mind having the little sweetkins live here with us. We could hire a nanny. Maybe one from South America. I hear that’s all the rage with the better families.”
“The courts always rule in favor of the mother on custody, Cass.”
She raised an eyebrow and sent him a silly-boy look. “But that’s with regular people. You’re J. D. McCabe.”
A grin broke through his gloom. Cassie might be young, but sometimes she did have a point.
* * *
THE DOORBELL RANG at two minutes past six-thirty on Sunday morning.
Clarice. Annie knew it before she pulled back