Page 27 of Written with Regret (The Regret Duet 1)
With a hurricane brewing inside me, I slammed my fist on the granite counter. “None! The chance of her getting any kind of custody is none. It’s not happening. Not today. Not four years from now. Not fucking forty years from now. I don’t give a damn what it costs. Hire the best family attorney the country has to offer and get a team going. This—”
“I can’t.”
“What the fuck do you mean you can’t?”
Doug rose to his feet, his stool scraping the hardwood. “Beth Watts is already working for Hadley.”
My head snapped back and I stared at him. The best was expensive. This was true in pretty much every facet of life, but especially when it came to lawyers. I didn’t know shit about Hadley; the one night I’d spent with her, we hadn’t done a lot of talking. But the fact that she’d robbed me on her way out of my apartment told me she wasn’t loaded.
“How is she affording this? Fifty-thousand-dollar bond and a bigwig attorney? That Prius we had towed did not scream cash.”
Doug sank down on the stool. “That I don’t know. Beth is known to take pro-bono work as long as it makes her look good. I can definitely see her taking on Hadley’s case knowing that she might get some press for going head-to-head with you.”
My stomach wrenched. The press. Fuck.
I was far from famous. Paparazzi didn’t stalk me in the streets or camp outside my house, but thanks to Kaleidoscope, my name was well known enough to hit the gossip news if anything juicy happened to me. Like, say, the mother of my child coming back and causing an uproar.
No one batted an eye when they found out I had a child. Reproduction by a one-time tech owner wasn’t interesting enough to warrant a ping on anyone’s radar. However, if the facts about Rosalee’s birth and how she’d been delivered to me were revealed in a messy court battle, it was going to ping on everyone’s radar.
“Son of a bitch,” I snarled, resuming my pace.
“What about a payoff?” Ian suggested. “Give her some cash and tell her to take a hike.”
“I’m not giving that bitch a fucking penny.”
He rose to his feet, his anxiety finally making an appearance. “Not even if it got her to leave? For fuck’s sake, Caven, this is not the goddamn time to hold a vendetta. We’re talking about Rosalee.”
I planted my hands on my hips. “I know what the fuck we’re talking about. She’s my daughter. But I’m not doing this every fucking four years. So what if I pay her off this time? Maybe we’ll get lucky and she won’t come back for another four years? I am not the Bank of Hadley. She does not get to use my daughter as collateral to blackmail me any time she’s short on cash. For all we know, that’s what she’s been planning from the start. Who the hell knows how many other men she has on the hook with this bullshit. But I’m not playing into it. I want this over. Once and for all.”
“Caven,” Ian growled, I assumed to scold me for my outburst.
That is until I heard, “Daddy?”
Clearing my throat and tamping down my anger, I walked toward the mouth of the stairway, calling up, “Yeah, baby?”
Her little feet appeared first. Then her favorite polka-dot Minnie Mouse nightgown brushed her shins as she made her way down. She had a plush baby doll in one hand, the other firmly anchored to the rail like I’d taught her the day I’d taken the baby gate off the top stair.
I had no idea what my blood pressure was, but based on the throbbing of my head, I’d definitely say it was in the red zone. Despite feeling like my head was in a vise that wasn’t planning to let up anytime soon, I plastered on a mega-watt smile and asked, “Is everything okay?”
She pouted her bottom lip. “Nobody gave me a ferret for my birthday.”
I chuckled, the tiniest bit of tension leaving my chest. “This is probably for the best. I’d hate for you to have to move into your own apartment now. You haven’t even started kindergarten yet.”
She yawned, taking the last few steps down, and lifted her arms for me to pick her up. It was an offer I never refused. “At my new birthday party, can we ride ferrets instead of ponies?”
“You have no clue what a ferret looks like, do you?”
“I do too,” she argued and then yawned again. “Can I sleep in your bed tonight? It’s still Rosie Posie Day.”
A pang of guilt struck me. This was the first year she really understood all the traditions we did on her birthday. Up until then, they were all just silly things I’d done to feel like a decent parent. Now, she expected them, and because of Hadley, I’d failed on nearly all of them.
