His Forever Family

“Is he okay?” Liberty asked anxiously.

“I think he’s perfect,” Hazel said as she guided them through a small dining room and past two doorways that led to a bedroom and a television room. The third doorway was the nursery. “I understand your concerns, though. I’ve had children who were coming off drugs or the like and he doesn’t seem to have those problems.” She stopped and sighed. “His poor mother. One has to wonder.”

“Yes,” Liberty said. “One does.”

Hazel gave Liberty a maternal smile as she patted her arm. “It’s good you’ve come. This way.”

They all crowded into the small room. A metal crib was by one wall and a larger, wooden crib up against another. There was a dresser with a blue terry-cloth pad on it next to a worn rocking chair. Marcus had to wonder how long Hazel Jones had had these things—since her own children had been babies?

All over two of the walls were pictures of babies, he realized. Old pictures, with the edges curling and the colors faded to a gold and brown that matched the furniture in the rest of the house. There were hundreds of pictures of little babies all over the place.

Next to a window was an antique-looking swinging chair that squeaked gently with every swing. And inside the swing was the baby boy. He was clean and dressed and Marcus swore he’d grown in the past five days, but there was no mistaking that child. Marcus would know him anywhere. How odd, he thought dimly.

Liberty made a noise that was half choking, half gasping. “Oh—oh,” she said, covering her mouth.

Hazel patted her on the arm again. “You’re his guardian angels, you and your boyfriend. He would have likely died if it hadn’t been for you.”

“We’re not—” Liberty started to say, but Hazel cut her off.

“It’ll be time for his bottle in a few. Would you like to feed him?”

“Could I?” Liberty turned to Marcus, her brown eyes huge. “Do we have time?”

As if she had to get his permission. “Of course.”

“I’ll be right back.” In contrast to her slow climb up the stairs, Hazel moved quickly to the kitchen. “Don’t go anywhere!” she jokingly called out.

“Is this what you wanted?” Marcus asked Liberty as they stared at the baby.

“Oh, God, yes. He’s okay,” she said as if she still couldn’t believe it. The baby exhaled heavily and turned his head away from the window. Liberty gasped and flung out a hand in his direction and Marcus took it. He gave her a squeeze of support and she squeezed back. “Look at him,” she said in awe.

“Is this place okay for him, do you think?” Marcus looked around the room again at the worn, battered furniture. “They said it was one of their best homes...”

“No, it’s really lovely.” Marcus stared down at her, but she was still looking at the baby. “And it seems like she only has him right now. This is amazing.”

There was something in the way she said it, the way she meant it, that struck him as odd. But before he could ask about it, Hazel said brightly, “Here we are.”

He dropped Liberty’s hand and stepped out of the way. Hazel handed him a bottle and he took it, even though he had no idea how to feed a baby.

“Does he have a name yet?” Liberty asked Hazel.

“Oh, no. He’s still Baby Boy Doe.” As if on cue, the baby began to lift his little hands and scrunch up his eyes. “I suppose he should have a name, shouldn’t he?”

“William,” Liberty said without hesitation. “He’s William.” She said it with such conviction that again, Marcus found himself staring at her.

“Oh, that’s lovely. My husband was Bill. That’s a good name.” The baby began to fuss and Hazel deftly carried him over to the dresser and laid him out on the pad. She unzipped his blanket-thing—a blanket with arms? Was there a name for that? Hazel began to change his diaper with the kind of practiced motion that made it clear she could do this in the dark, in her sleep. Marcus wondered how many babies she’d changed just like that.

“We never had children,” Hazel went on as she got out a clean diaper from the top drawer, all the while never taking her hand off the baby’s belly. “But I loved babies so... I was offered an early retirement from my teaching position back in 1988 and I decided that I was going to be a grandmother one way or another.”

“All babies?” Liberty asked.

“Oh, yes. I just love this age. They’re such little angels. I can’t keep up with them when they start crawling and walking, though.” Hazel shook her head. “Babies are just my speed.”

Marcus watched as Hazel changed the diaper. She made it seem easy but the mostly naked infant was squirming and then there was the cleaning part and...

Suddenly, he was terrified. It wasn’t the same kind of terror he’d felt when he’d opened the box and found this child—that had been stark panic, with a life hanging in the balance. That danger was safely past, thank God. But when Hazel got the diaper on and asked Liberty if she wanted to help re-dress William, and Liberty still looked as if she might start sobbing with relief at any moment, the whole scene was so far outside his realm of experience that he might as well have landed on Mars.

Liberty got his tiny little feet back into the blanket contraption and zipped him up. “Here we go,” Hazel said in a singsong voice as she picked William up. “Dear, why don’t you sit in the rocker?”

Liberty sat and Hazel laid the baby in her arms. In that moment, everything about Liberty changed; it was as if he were looking at a different woman. This wasn’t his take-charge assistant—this was Liberty, the real woman.

Hazel took the bottle from Marcus and showed Liberty how to hold it. The older woman got a little pillow that had been next to the rocking chair and used that to prop Liberty’s arms up. “There we go. He’s been eating quite a bit, poor dear.” For the first time in a while, she seemed to notice Marcus. “Oh—would you like a chair?”

“I’m fine,” he insisted. He couldn’t take his eyes off Liberty and William. There was something about them—something he’d seen that first time in the park...

“You’re amazing with him,” he told Liberty and he meant it. Yeah, he’d found the child, but it was Liberty who’d cooled him down and got him to stop crying. It was because of Liberty that Marcus had used his clout to make sure the baby got into the best home.

It was Liberty who’d named him.

Then she looked up at him and smiled and everything that Marcus knew to be true about himself was suddenly...not true. Not anymore.

He was Marcus Warren. A trust-fund billionaire, gossip column fodder and a potential reality-television star. He had a business and a reputation to manage. He had to carry on the Warren family name.

And quite unexpectedly, none of it mattered. What mattered was seeing Liberty rock that tiny baby and smile at him with that silly joy on her face, as if she’d been waiting her whole life for this exact moment.

What mattered was knowing he’d made this moment happen. Because he wanted that silly joy on her face. He wanted to be the one who made her smile, who gave her everything her heart desired. Not because it would give him leverage, but because it made her happy.

His entire life had been about accumulation. Things, power, favors—more and more and more. Never enough.

What if...

William’s mouth popped off the bottle and he squirmed. “Oh, is he okay?” Liberty asked Hazel.

The two of them fussed over the baby and Liberty got him burped. Then Hazel took William back and turned to Marcus. “Would you like to hold him?”

“Sure,” he said, sitting in the rocking chair. Liberty propped the pillow under his arm. He tried to position his arms the way she had.

She looked down at him skeptically. “Have you ever held a baby before?”

His face got hot. “No?”

Liberty sighed, but at least she was grinning as she moved his hands into approximately the right position as if it was no big deal to physically rearrange him. But it only made that nearly out-of-body experience he was having that much worse.

What if...

“Here we are,” Hazel said, handing William to Marcus. The baby sighed and scrunched up his nose.

Marcus was dimly aware that Hazel and Liberty were still talking, but he didn’t really hear them. Instead, he stared down at the child in his arms.

William was so small—how was this human going to grow up and be a regular-sized person? “Hi, William,” Marcus whispered as the baby waved one of his hands jerkily through the air.

Without thinking about it, Marcus shifted and held one of his fingers up against William’s hand. The baby grabbed on at the same time his little eyes opened up all the way, and in that moment Marcus was lost. How could anyone have walked away from this baby? This must have been what Liberty had felt when she’d held the baby in the park.

They couldn’t lose this baby. He’d thought he’d done his part, getting William into one of the best foster homes—but now that Marcus had seen Liberty with him, now that he’d held William himself, how could he walk away from this child?

He looked around the room again. Hazel was a good foster mother for a baby, he decided. But the stuff she had to work with was ancient. Marcus eyed the baby swing William had been in when they got here. The thing looked like a deathtrap of metal and plastic.

His phone buzzed in his pocket, which startled the baby. William began to fuss and Hazel swooped in and plucked him from Marcus’s arms. “There, now,” she soothed.

“Sorry,” Marcus said as he dug out his phone. The missed call had been from his mother. This couldn’t be good. It was already past five.

“We should go,” Liberty said. “Hazel, thank you so much for letting us visit William. This was wonderful. I’m so glad he’s got you.”

With William tucked against her chest, Hazel waved the compliment away. “You’re more than welcome to come back. Just give me a call!”

“Could we?” Liberty glanced at Marcus, her cheeks coloring brightly. “I mean, I’ll do that.”

“We can come back,” he agreed. And he wasn’t just saying that—he really did want to see the baby again. More than that, he wanted to see Liberty with the baby again.

Liberty gave him another one of her shy smiles, as if she’d been hoping he’d say that but hadn’t dared to ask.

As they walked toward the front door, Hazel followed them. “You two should consider applying for adoption,” she said. “A nice couple like you? And because you found him, you might have a better chance of getting him. If they don’t find his birth mother, that is,” she added, sounding sad. “Poor dear.”

Liberty jolted. “I don’t—”

“We’ll discuss it,” Marcus said. He put his hand on Liberty’s back and guided her down the stairs. “Thanks so much.”

He made sure to shut the door behind them.

Six

Liberty stood on the sidewalk in a state of shock. She knew she needed to pull herself together but she was weirdly numb right now.

“That place was a time warp,” Marcus said, stepping around her to the car and opening the passenger door for her.

She blinked at him. Hazel was a warm, loving, capable woman who had only one child in her charge and, by all appearances, would dote on William as if he were her own. That was weird enough, but now? Marcus Warren was opening her door for her. In what world did any of this make sense?

“Liberty?” Then he was touching her again, his hand in the small of her back as he gently propelled her toward his waiting car as if he was her chauffeur instead of her billionaire boss. Warmth flowed up her back from where he touched her and she wanted nothing more than to lean into him. “Are you all right?”

No. No, she wasn’t. Everything had changed and she didn’t know how she’d ever be the same again. But she had to try. “I can’t—you don’t have to come back.”

Marcus snorted in amusement. “I never have to do something I don’t want,” he said. “You were right. We can’t lose him.”

“We?” That word sounded different in her ears now, foreign almost. There was no “we” where Marcus and she were concerned. Not outside the office or off the jogging path. Or beyond her carefully guarded fantasies. “But...”

“Come on,” he said, almost pushing her into the car. “Let’s get some dinner. We can talk then.”

“Dinner?” She couldn’t make sense of anything he was saying. We. Dinner. “No—wait,” she said when he got into the driver’s seat. “You don’t have to take me to dinner. You should be taking a potential wedding date—not me.”

“Maybe I am taking a potential date to dinner.”

And they were right back to where they’d been earlier. Well, this time she was not going to mess around. The sooner he realized how radically inappropriate she’d be as a wedding date, the sooner they could get back to their regularly scheduled programming. “Marcus, I’m not going. I’m not good enough for you, for that crowd. I know it. Everyone else there will know it. You’re the only one who doesn’t seem to realize it.”

“That’s not—”

She cut him off because he had to see reason. She didn’t know how much longer she could be this strong. “That’s not all. Why would I want to go to this wedding? Why would I want to watch Lillibeth hurt you again? Because you know she’s going to try. And everyone will be watching to see how bad it’s going to be. You’ll be back in the media again. And I don’t want to be a part of that. I don’t want to be another reason people try to tear you down. I care too much about you to let that happen.”

The last part just slipped out. She hadn’t meant to say that she cared about him at all, but she’d built up a head of steam. But it was the truth—a truth that she couldn’t bury anymore.

“Liberty,” he said. And then something horrible and wonderful happened—Marcus touched her. He cupped her face in the palm of his hand.

“I just don’t want you to be hurt again,” she breathed. And even though she knew she shouldn’t, she reached up and held his palm against her skin.

“You won’t hurt me. I know you too well for that.”

There it was again, that blind trust he had in her. And she knew—knew—that if he learned the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about her junkie mom and her unknown father, he would be hurt.

She wanted to lean into his touch, but she couldn’t because she was already starting to slip up and if she let herself get swept away in his touch, in his longing looks, something even more damaging might come out of her mouth.

So she shook him off. “If you don’t want to, don’t. Don’t go to the wedding. Don’t do the reality show. You said it yourself—your reputation isn’t everything. You don’t need to do any of that stuff. Do what you want.”

He stared at her for a moment, but she refused to make eye contact because she didn’t know if she could handle it. One searing look from Marcus Warren might break her resolve. So she kept her gaze locked on the windshield.

He started the car and began to drive without answering.

“Please take me back to the office. I’ll finish the work I didn’t get done earlier.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. He sounded distant.

She fought the urge to apologize, to backpedal—to take it all back. She wanted to go back to the way things had been a week ago, when he’d tease her during the run and she earned his respect by being invaluable to his business, when she didn’t offer opinions on his personal life and she didn’t run the risk of letting the facts of her life slip out at every turn.

But then, that’d mean not finding William—not knowing that he was alive and healthy and cared for. And she couldn’t imagine that. She’d seen that baby for a total of an hour and a half and she couldn’t imagine life without him.

You two should consider applying for adoption. Liberty would be lying to herself if Hazel’s idea didn’t sound like a dream come true. She’d long fantasized about Marcus. He was gorgeous, one of the richest men in the city, and she liked him. She hated running but she liked running with him. She liked his jokes and how he treated her and how he’d put that shower in the ladies’ room so she could change without going all the way back to her apartment in Logan Square.

And she’d liked the way he looked holding that baby and smiling down at him as if he really did care. It hadn’t mattered that he’d had on a suit that probably cost thousands or that William was one burp away from ruining that suit. Marcus had smiled and cooed and held his hand anyway. William was important to Marcus because William was important to her.

She’d spent her entire adolescence and adulthood trying so hard to overcome her abandonment. Her life was built around making sure no one could forget about her again. She worked harder than anyone else. She never stopped working. In college, she’d held down two jobs and carried a full class load and never done anything fun like party or date. Never. She’d passed as white because she could and because it meant she was that much further away from Jackie Reese’s life, because passing meant that she had to work only twice as hard to get ahead, not four times as hard.

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