Sutherland’s Pride (4 page)

Flynn shoved his hands in his pockets and paced the office. Perhaps her story might have been more believable if she hadn’t sprung it on him the moment he returned from spending several weeks in Europe on business. The moment he got home, eager to see Pride again, she informed him of her pregnancy.

Pride Donovan had lied to him. She had topped off her lies by following him around for two weeks, demanding that he listen to her. It had been damned embarrassing. He’d better remember that, and quit dwelling on the green eyes and the lovely face with its sculpted planes. Otherwise, he was likely to find himself right back in the same situation.

Flynn sighed. That might not be so bad, come to think about it. Only, this time he’d take damned good care to see that Pride didn’t have time to even look at another man.

That trip to Europe had been really bad timing.

• • •

“I can’t believe I’m seeing this,” Gloria said.

“You can’t believe anything else that’s happened today,” Pride observed. “Why should this be any different?”

Gloria had marveled all day about Flynn Sutherland’s inability to recognize Johnny for what he was.

“If I hadn’t witnessed it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it,” Gloria said. “Johnny even looks like him.” She leaned forward to peer at her cousin’s face in the dresser mirror. “Add another one on this side. They look lopsided.”

“Freckles always look unbalanced. That’s the beauty of them.” Pride dotted at her nose with a brown eyebrow pencil. “If Flynn wants to see freckles, here are lots of them to admire.”

“You’re crazy,” Gloria said, with conviction.

“Not me. I always aim to please my man.” Pride added a few more dots to her cheekbones with the eyebrow pencil and studied the effect. “Is that natural, or what?”

“Or what,” Gloria said.

“Oopsie.” Pride grinned at her own nose in the mirror. “Maybe I’ve gone just a tad overboard. Oh, well. It’s too late to do anything about it now. Flynn can consider it revenge for making my nose smell like coffee this morning.”

“What are you wearing?”

“An old favorite of Flynn’s. Daddy still had all my old clothes carefully preserved in the closet.”

Pride rose, fished around in the closet, and withdrew a blue-green silk dress covered with a plastic bag. Flynn had claimed to dislike the dress on the grounds that it made her eyes look blue rather than his favorite green.

“If Flynn wants to see the Pride of three years ago, then that’s what he’ll see.” Pride hoped Flynn suffered a little harmless annoyance over her antics.

“Don’t you think you ought to tell him about Johnny?”

“Come on, Gloria.” Pride unzipped the plastic bag and took out the dress. “Would you make things easy for him? You’re just sore because you had to pay for lunch.”

Gloria grinned back, but her voice was serious. “It’s obvious that everything you said about Flynn’s single-mindedness is true. It just seems so unfair that his own blindness might rob him of something he’d probably give his right arm for.”

“He’ll get over it.” Pride shored up her mental defenses with all her might in order to show him she was no longer the starry-eyed girl who had loved him so much.

“You don’t mean that.” Gloria studied her closely. “If you want to know what I think, you’re just mad at him.”

“You’ve got that right.” She shook out the dress and dropped it over her head. “This time, he’s going to have to come to a realization on his own. I’m through beating my head against the wall trying to talk to him. All that ended three years ago.”

“Pride, don’t let your father’s sins wreck your life.”

“No one is going to wreck my life,” Pride said, with determination. “Or my son’s life. So long as Flynn is the slightest bit unsure about who Johnny’s father is, he will get no rights to Johnny.”

On that, she refused to budge. Her son deserved a father who loved and wanted him. She intended to keep him very far away from Flynn if Flynn so much as hinted at even a tiny little doubt.

She turned her back to let Gloria raise the zipper of the blue-green silk dress and stared at herself in the mirror. Yes, she looked a lot like the Pride Donovan Flynn remembered, and if she tried very hard, she could discuss something other than baby and child care.

The silk dress accentuated her small waist, and the shimmering blue-green color made her eyes look like blue jewels. The only difference between her and the old Pride Donovan was the mass of tawny curls that fell over her shoulders. In Pride’s opinion, the new hair color was a definite improvement.

Dinner with Flynn Sutherland. Pride smiled at her freckled self in the mirror and wondered what had gotten into her. More to the point, what had gotten into Flynn? He had made it very clear just what he thought of her and her morals three years ago.

“You’re gorgeous, freckles and all,” Gloria said. “You’ll knock old Flynn’s socks off.”

“Great. He can eat his heart out.” Pride picked up a tiny, leather clutch, checked its contents, and tucked it beneath her arm. “I’d better go kiss Johnny goodnight, or we’ll have a little boy trying to follow us out the door.”

Johnny and Sylvia had already been tucked into the bed in Pride’s old bedroom. Johnny was wide awake when Pride entered. He sat up.

“Johnny Donovan, you’re supposed to be asleep,” Pride said. “Get back under those covers. You aren’t going anywhere.”

Johnny pleaded, adding tears when his mother remained adamant.

“No, sir. You’ve had a busy day today, what with eating Flynn’s watch. You need some sleep so your digestive system can get to work on that watch stem.”

Johnny retired beneath the covers, sniffing pitifully.

“That’s better.” Pride leaned down to kiss her son. “Go to sleep, sweetheart. I’ll see you in the morning.”

She walked into the living room, where Eric and Tracy played with plastic trucks. It had changed little since the day she had last walked out three years before. The heavy green velour carpet was accentuated by the white brocade sofa and padded chairs. Nothing had happened to the pristine furniture yet, but Pride didn’t hold out much hope for it, what with four active youngsters in the house.

“I feel awful, letting them play in here.” Gloria gestured at the white furniture.

“I hope they wreck it.” Pride grimaced. “I used to be afraid to even sit in here.”

The doorbell sounded. Pride, conscious of an acceleration of her heartbeat, hastened to open it.

Flynn stared at her. “You look beautiful.”

“Thank you.” She smiled at him in the manner of one old friend acknowledging another. “So do you.”

His white-streaked, dark blond hair had been tamed to sweep across his tanned forehead, and his brown eyes beneath the level brows were dark with unidentifiable emotion. He held out a hand to take hers.

“Flynn’s.”

Pride whirled. Johnny approached at a run, having shed his pajama bottoms somewhere along the way. He had spotted the watch on Flynn’s wrist and wanted to re-stake his claim.

“Oh, no, you don’t.” She scooped him up. “You’re supposed to be in bed, young man. What did you do with your pajamas? Shame on you. Sorry, Flynn. I’ll be back with you in a moment.”

“Flynn’s,” Johnny pleaded, stretching his arms toward Flynn.

“That’s about the size of it,” Pride said. “It’s Flynn’s, not yours, and you can’t have it. It’s bedtime.”

Johnny fought but was overruled. He filed motion after motion for a review of his case, but his clever tactics only won him a promise of corporal punishment.

He quieted, but his sharp brain remained on the search for mitigating circumstances that would win him a reprieve.

“Flynn’s,” he said, in insistent tones.

Pride, who sat on the edge of the bed, glanced over her shoulder. Flynn stood in the doorway, watching her.

“That’s right. It’s Flynn’s, not yours. You’ve done enough damage for one day. Go to sleep.”

“Flynn’s,” Johnny promised.

When Pride tucked the covers beneath his small chin, his large, brown eyes remained fixed on Flynn’s left wrist, where the gleam of gold had last been seen.

“I’ll see to him,” Gloria said. “You’d better go ahead, Pride. This could go on half the night.”

“It had better not,” Pride said, with a glance at her son that guaranteed dire consequences if it should.

Flynn smiled at Gloria. “He’s very active, isn’t he? How do you keep up with four of them?”

Gloria looked helplessly at Pride, who had to suppress a chuckle.

“It isn’t easy,” Pride said. “But it helps if two of them are already in bed. Let’s go, Flynn. You’re part of the reason Johnny is being such a pain tonight.”

Flynn looked back at Johnny and raised a hand in salute. “That kid reminds me of me. I never wanted to go to bed, either.”

“Johnny is a real chip off the old block,” Pride said. “See you later, Gloria. Call me if there’s any trouble.”

“Sure,” Gloria said, in faint, choked tones. “Have a good time.”

Pride walked out the front door and down the sidewalk with Flynn at her side and debated whether to laugh or to cry. Most men would have realized the truth without her having to say a word, but Flynn truly believed he could never father a child.

It was probably for the best, she decided, waiting while Flynn unlocked the door of a dark green Bronco. She’d never allow anyone to make Johnny feel unwanted or unworthy.

Unless Flynn was willing to tell the world that Johnny was his son and he was proud to claim him, she’d see to it that he never got close enough to hurt the little boy.

Never mind that her heart urged her to grab Flynn and shake him until he saw the light. She had to think about Johnny.

“I see your freckles have come back,” Flynn noted, handing her into the four-wheel-drive vehicle.

“I knew you’d appreciate the thought.”

Flynn studied her in the orange light cast by the setting sun. “You’re right. I do. I really missed those freckles today.”

He shut the door and came around to slide in beside her. “I thought I’d take you to a place in Houston. It’s quiet enough that we can talk business.”

“It sounds wonderful. Once I get Daddy’s affairs settled, I intend to put the house up for sale.”

“You don’t want to move back to Anahuac?”

And live where bad memories assaulted her every day? “No, thank you.”

The calm, decisive way she spoke seemed to disturb him. He guided the Bronco through the tree-lined streets of the small town toward the highway and contemplated it.

“What are you doing now?” he asked, at last.

“Actually, I’m still into journalism,” Pride answered. “I do a lot of the same kind of freelance work.”

Pride had worked for various companies as a freelance writer when she lived in Houston. She wrote company histories and contributed regularly to Houston’s major newspapers and several regional magazines.

“It came as a shock to me, when I learned you’d been as close as Lake Charles all this time,” Flynn said.

He sounded as though he had more to add, but Pride knew better than to get into the details of what she’d been doing.

“What about you, Flynn? When did you open your own office?”

He gave her a wry smile. “I got fed up with taking orders from Dad, if you want to know. I decided to practice general law and still do some work for Dad on the side.”

She smiled back, remembering Morgan Sutherland. Morgan had a tendency to run things, including your life, if you let him. When she claimed pregnancy, Morgan had wanted to run one-thousand tests designed to ferret out the truth about her baby’s paternity. He also wanted to move Pride in with him and his wife so he could be sure she was well-cared for.

Pride wondered momentarily what Morgan would say if he met Johnny. She smiled. Morgan would probably claim the child right away, regardless of what Flynn said. Morgan was that kind of man.

That was beside the fact that Morgan and Bettricia Sutherland loved children, and Flynn was their only child. They’d had no hope of grandchildren … or so they thought.

“What are you smiling about?” Flynn studied her as well as he could while driving.

Pride decided to forget showing Morgan Sutherland her son. It was Flynn’s place to tell his parents about their grandchild.

“I was remembering the way you were always fighting with your father over how the company should be run,” she said. “Now that you’ve left, your life must be boring.”

“Actually, Dad respects my opinion now that I’m a self-employed consultant. So long as I was a part of the company, I was a yes-man as far as he was concerned.”

“Even though you spent very little time saying yes?”

Flynn laughed and agreed. He began telling her about how he finally decided to leave Sutherland Investments and strike out on his own, and Pride enjoyed listening.

Why shouldn’t she? she asked inwardly. After this night, she’d probably never see Flynn Sutherland socially again.

Incredibly, Flynn had other ideas.

“I’d like to take you out in the boat tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “Do you think Gloria and the children would enjoy it?”

Pride turned her incredulous gaze toward him and wondered what on earth had gotten into Flynn. “Of course they’d enjoy it. The real question is, are you sane?”

He grinned. “Why do you say that?”

“Because you’ve obviously lost your mind. Have you any idea what it’s like to have four children below the age of five together on a boat? Together, period? When did you get so fascinated by children?”

Flynn drove in silence a moment. That silence confirmed her deduction. In the past three years, Flynn had been examining the idea of having children and found it pleasant.

“Since you told me you were pregnant,” he said, at last. “Before then, children hadn’t entered into my plans. I grew up knowing I couldn’t have any of my own, so I put it out of my mind and planned to adopt at some point in the distant future.”

“You aren’t sterile, Flynn,” she said, with extreme patience. “I suspect you have a low sperm count. That is not the same as sterile. Remember the basic premise of human biology. All it takes is one sperm and one egg.”

“The doctors all said I was sterile,” Flynn said, in the adamant tones that brooked no argument. “Do you think I wanted to believe you had another lover? It nearly killed me.”