The Billionaire Husband's Regret

Chapter 3

W-why are you doing that?” Alice stammered. Both men ignored her, and Jack turned back to his sleeping daughter, with his heart in his eyes.

“Mikayla . . .” he murmured, running a gentle finger down the baby’s soft cheek. “What a beautiful name.”

“What’s going on here?” Alice asked in a voice bordering on hysteria, before convulsing into a series of painful coughs. Kayla stirred a little, disturbed by the violent coughing, and Jack picked the little girl up and cradled her to his chest.

“Give me your flat keys. Rick and Nancy will pack your things.” Her eyes were blurry with tears as the coughing tore at her throat and chest. She was unable to respond to the autocratic demand and was appalled when Jack simply reached for her handbag and tossed it to Rick.

“They’re probably in there,” he told his brother. The younger man nodded and turned away.

“Wait!” Alice called painfully, trying to get her coughing under control. Jack handed her a glass of water that she gulped down thankfully. “Why were you using sign language?” she asked urgently, her throat on the verge of giving out. Rick turned back with naked disgust on his face.

“This display of ignorance is an insult to our intelligence, Alice!” he hissed, and her eyes widened with hurt.

“I don’t know what’s going on here!” Her voice was strained but she hoped she managed to convey her urgency. “Can you hear me, Jack?”

“I haven’t heard much of anything over the last two years, Alice.” He shrugged scornfully. “And you know it. You did this to me, after all.”

“Me?” Alice did not know what to react to first: the unbelievable news that her beautiful, strong husband was deaf, or the accusation that she was somehow responsible for his condition. It was all too awful to comprehend. “But . . . I . . . how?” Rick made an impatient sound at the back of his throat, seemingly sickened by her continued ignorance. He touched his brother’s arm to gain his attention. Jack turned to face him.

“I’ve asked that girl Katrina where she lives.” He nodded toward Alice, unable to even say her name. “Some dump downtown. I’ll pack a couple of bags for her and Mikayla.”

“Pack only a change of clothes for the little one,” Jack ordered, his gaze softening as he looked down into his still-sleeping daughter’s pretty face. “If the rags she’s wearing right now are any indication, there won’t be anything worth keeping. I’ll clothe my own child.” Alice’s eyes stung with tears at that terrible insult; if only he knew how much she had sacrificed and slaved for every single item of clothing the child possessed. She had worked double shifts, bypassed meals, and taken on extra jobs to keep her baby fed and clothed. They may not have been the most expensive clothes, but they were pretty and serviceable enough for an active toddler.

“Pack her toys though,” he told Rick. “God knows they’re probably not much better than the clothing, but she’s bound to have her favorites.”

“What do you mean I did this to you?” Alice asked, letting the matter of Kayla’s wardrobe slide in favor of a much more pressing matter. He didn’t respond and she understood that he must have been lip-reading all along. She tugged at his sleeve to get his attention and he directed his arrogant gaze down to her pinched face.

“What do you mean I did this to you?” she repeated, and he frowned before turning away from her, deliberately blocking her out and making her feel about as significant as a fly.

“What are you . . .” She diverted her gaze to Rick when she saw that Jack was ignoring her. A neat trick that, turning his back on someone when he didn’t care to know what he or she was saying. It was certainly effective. “What is he accusing me of?” Rick couldn’t ignore her as successfully as Jack could, but he was definitely doing a good job of trying. He and Jack were speaking quietly, sometimes lapsing into sign language and cutting her out completely. Feeling muddled, exhausted, and on the verge of hysterical tears, Alice had no clear idea of how to deal with this problem. The situation had just spiraled completely beyond her control and she was too ill to deal with it. She watched as the talking men left the room and took her baby with them and she felt an overwhelming sense of dread. She wanted to snatch her child back and run as fast and as far as she could but all she could do was watch helplessly as the door swung shut behind them.

She covered her face with her hands, feeling as wrung out as a dishcloth. Hot tears seeped through the cracks of her fingers as she allowed herself to weep for everything that she had lost and was still losing. She was so wrapped up in her own misery that the first she knew of another presence in the room was a comforting arm around her narrow shoulders.

“Shhh, it’s okay, it’s okay . . .” Rick’s pretty wife was perched on the side of the bed, her head bowed toward Alice’s. “You’ll be all right, both you and your beautiful little girl will be absolutely fine. Jack will take care of you.”

“Jack hates me,” Alice negated miserably.

“Jack could never hate the woman who has given him such a gorgeous daughter,” the other woman denied.

“He blames me for what happened to him,” Alice groaned. “And I don’t even know what happened to him! How did he lose his hearing?” She lifted her tear-drenched brown eyes to Nancy’s face, and the other woman frowned, her expression thoughtful.

“It was an accident. Rick and I hadn’t been dating for long—barely a month since the day he first walked into my bookshop—but we were serious enough that he was talking about introducing me to you guys.”

So Rick had met Nancy while Alice was still with Jack. She remembered how euphoric and secretive he’d been during those few weeks before she had left. She’d even teased him about it over dinner one night and he’d stammered and blushed like a schoolboy. The memory warmed her somewhat, but Nancy’s sympathetic voice dragged her back into the horror of the present.

“One night Rick called me to cancel one of our dates because his brother had been in an accident. It was pretty bad. I met Jack a few weeks later while he was still recovering in the hospital. Rick and I married about four months after the accident, when Jack was well enough to attend. If I hadn’t been two months pregnant at the time, we would have postponed the wedding. Both Rick and Jack refused to talk about you again. I think Rick was merely following Jack’s lead on that score. He was so completely wrecked by what had happened to his brother that he would have walked over hot coals if he thought that it would make Jack happy. From the rare bits of information about it that I managed to get out of Rick over the past twenty months of our marriage, I thought that you’d opted out because you couldn’t cope with his deafness.”

“But I didn’t even know he was deaf until just now.” She coughed painfully and Nancy stroked her hair soothingly.

“Why did you leave him?” Nancy questioned gently.

“I would never willingly have left him. I love him . . . loved him.” Nancy raised her eyebrows at the telling slip and nodded.

“I know that now. I took one look at you this morning and I knew. So why did you leave him?”

“Because he told me to leave. He kicked me out,” Alice recalled miserably. “He was unhappy about my pregnancy because we had agreed to wait a few years before starting a family. He accused me of getting pregnant deliberately, of tricking him. It was awful.”

“I don’t understand.” Nancy frowned. “Why would he go off the deep end like that? Surely a pregnancy is something to be celebrated?”

“I don’t know,” Alice confessed. “I left to give him some time to cool off and went to our house in Knysna. I knew that once he had calmed down enough he would come looking for me. I never believed he wouldn’t come . . .” Her voice faded away as she remembered the pain, betrayal, and disillusionment she had felt when it became apparent that Jack would not be coming for her.

“What did you do?” Nancy asked sympathetically.

“I waited. For two weeks I waited. Jack is usually pretty good about keeping his temper under control, and when he does lose it he usually needs only a couple of hours for his logical thought processes to kick in again. But I’d never seen him as angry as he was that night, so I figured that it would take him a little longer than usual to come to his senses.” She shrugged helplessly, battling to keep the pain she still felt at the memory from showing. “After a week, I tried calling him. But I was stonewalled. His staff had closed ranks around him. I couldn’t reach him or Rick and I didn’t know what to do. It felt as if my whole world had imploded.” She bowed her head.

“After the initial disbelief and pain, the anger and resentment kicked in. I decided that if he wanted nothing to do with the baby and me, then I wasn’t going to make it easy for him to come crawling back. Not that I believed he would come back. I suppose I started thinking that way to preserve my pride. I went off the grid—no credit, no bank accounts except the one I already had in my maiden name. The only jobs I was qualified to do didn’t exactly keep stellar employee records. I never believed he would actually try to find us.” She shook her head dazedly.

“I thought he loved me.” It shamed her to admit that now, embarrassed her to confess such a foolish belief in front of this woman who was so obviously confident in her husband’s love. “Now he blames me for his deafness, and he’s practically accusing me of stealing Kayla from him when he had made it abundantly clear that he had no interest in her!” She heard the bitterness creeping into her voice. “He undoubtedly thinks that the way we’ve been living is beneath him, but I took good care of my baby. I fed her, clothed her, and loved her after he had abandoned us! How dare he waltz back into my life and presume that he’d be the better parent just because he has so much more money than I do!”

“Jack has kept pretty much to himself in the time since I got married to Rick. He’s a difficult man to get to know,” Nancy said into the silence that ensued after Alice ran out of steam. “But what I do know I like and respect. I can’t really reconcile the picture you’ve just painted with the man I’ve come to know.”

Alice nodded miserably. “I’m sorry,” she responded, forcing the words past her tortured throat. “I don’t mean to place you in an awkward position. I shouldn’t have said those things.”

“No, that’s not it at all,” Nancy hurriedly corrected. “It’s just that you each seem so convinced of the other’s wrongdoing that there must have been some crossed wires somewhere.”