Secret Daddies (Reverse Harem Daddies)

11. Maya

11

MAYA

“Hey, honey, be careful!” I called to Matty as he scrambled up the frame next to the slide in the playground we’d brought him to for the afternoon.

“He’ll be fine.” Lana laughed at me, playfully digging her elbow into my side as she took a sip of her takeout coffee. “He’s sturdier than you think, you know.”

“Yeah, well, I’m his mom,” I reminded her. “I have to worry about him. That’s my job.”

“I know, I know,” she replied, tugging her coat a little tighter around her shoulders. “Even though you should actually be worried about me catching a chill out here in the cold. God, it’s freezing today…!”

I listened to her complaining fondly, glad for the break from everything that was going on inside my own head right now. Truth be told, I didn’t know what to make of the mess that had gone down around me—the mess that I seemed to have invited into my life when I’d dared to entertain any of the guys who happened to be starring in the movie that was meant to be my return to this industry.

Lana had invited me out this afternoon, and I was glad for the distraction—after what had happened with Devon yesterday, I needed an excuse to stop thinking about the mess I’d made of my personal life, and this was the perfect one. Of course, it didn’t take long for Lana to clock on to the fact that there was something off about me, and she glanced at me out of the corner of her eye as the rest of the kids and parents rushed around the park a few blocks over from my apartment.

“Something on your mind?”

I chewed my lip for a moment before I responded. I didn’t even know where to start. But I knew for damn sure that I needed an outsider’s perspective on all of this, and Lana was the closest I would get.

“Actually, yeah,” I confessed. “But you have to promise that you’re not going to tell anyone, alright?”

Her eyes widened, already glistening with excitement at the thought of the gossip that was about to come her way. She planted a hand on her chest.

“Cross my heart,” she swore to me. “What’s happening? Is it something on set…?”

“Sort of. I…” I trailed off. Shit. What did I even tell her? Where did I even start? Even to me, most of it sounded totally outrageous, and I could only imagine what she would make of the truth. I reeled it back, squeezing my eyes shut for a moment, and tried to work out where would be the best place to start.

“So, I was working on Taylor, right? One of the main guys,” I explained. “And I got a call from Matty’s school. And…”

I caught her up on everything that had happened in the last week or so—Matty falling ill, him meeting Taylor, and Taylor setting up a get-together with my son and the rest of the cast a few days later. She listened, nodding along, watching me curiously.

“So it went well, right? I mean, the guys were all nice to him?”

“They were all great to him,” I sighed. “But I…”

“But what?” she prompted me. God, this was harder than I’d thought it would be. I had held the secret of Matty’s paternity so close to my chest for so long that coming out and saying it felt wrong. I knew Lana, of all people, would never judge me for it, but it still felt like I was betraying some fundamental secret I shouldn’t dare to share.

I turned to her, meeting her gaze seriously. “You really won’t tell anyone?”

“I really won’t,” she promised me. “Come on, Maya, you’re starting to freak me out. What could be so bad that?—”

“Devon’s his father.”

She stopped. Fell silent. Stared at me for a moment. Really stared at me, like she was expecting me to bust out laughing and take it all back. But I didn’t. I just stared back at her, nibbling on my lip, waiting for her to react.

“How does that work?” she asked, lowering her voice and shooting a look toward Matty, as though she might suddenly be able to see a resemblance between them if she just looked hard enough.

“We worked together on a set years ago, when both of us were just starting out,” I confessed, the words spilling from me faster than I could stop them. “And I…we were just hooking up, just seeing each other, I don’t think either of us expected it to be anything more than that. But I guess…I guess we should have been more careful, because I got pregnant, right as he left to take a job somewhere else. I never heard from him again after that.”

She pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead, frowning as she tried to take it all in. “You never told him?”

I shook my head. “Not after he just took off like that with no warning,” I replied. “It didn’t seem right. And I didn’t want him to come back into our lives, not if he was just going to leave again. I didn’t want to do that to Matty, or to me.”

“And you didn’t think about changing your mind on that? When he started to get big, I mean? You could have taken him for so much damn money?—”

“Yeah, and I would probably have pulled Matty into the middle of some big custody battle in the process,” I pointed out. “I didn’t want that for him. I wanted his life to be as simple as it could be, even if he did happen to be the kid of some movie star. I…”

“Shit,” she muttered, running a hand through her hair. “And you didn’t know that he was working on this movie before you?—”

“Before I signed all the contracts and made it so I couldn’t get out, yeah,” I replied with a sigh. “Trust me, if I’d had any idea, I wouldn’t have gone through with it. I wouldn’t have even entertained it.”

“Holy hell.”

“Yeah, tell me about it.”

She fell silent for a moment, her eyes wide as the sound of children’s laughter filled the air—it felt almost comically incongruous with the conversation we were having right now.

“So why did you introduce them?” she asked, changing the subject. “I mean, it’s not like you had to do that. You could have just turned him down when Taylor offered to set up a meeting with all of you guys?—”

“Oh, I don’t think Matty would have stood for that,” I laughed. “Not after he knew that I was working on the Trio movie.”

“Come on, you could have,” she replied, leaning toward me. “Why did you let them meet? If you really want to keep them apart…”

I hesitated. I didn’t know quite what to tell her, because I wasn’t certain I had an answer for that question myself. Sure, there was a part of me that could just dismiss it as a chance for my son to meet his heroes that I didn’t want to deny, but I knew there was more to it than that. Far more than I ever wanted to admit.

“Because…because I wanted to see how he would react,” I confessed finally. “I wanted him to know, I guess.”

“And does he?”

“Not…exactly.”

“He must have clocked that something was up,” Lana remarked. “Didn’t he ask you anything about it?”

“He did. But we just got…distracted before we could say anything else.”

“Distracted?” she replied, cocking an eyebrow at me. “Distracted like how?”

“Distracted like…like we had sex in his trailer.”

“Maya!” She exclaimed my name so loudly that a few people glanced around to see what the commotion was, and my eyebrows shot up as I lifted a hand to quiet her.

“Keep your voice down!” I hissed, and she leaned in closer to me.

“You had sex with him?”

I nodded. “He called me over, and I guess he wanted to confront me about Matty, but things got heated, and we…we ended up having sex again.”

“Goddamn, Maya, but you are a dark horse!” she told me, almost laughing. “You got pregnant by a movie star and then you seduced him again…”

“It wasn’t like that,” I protested. “I didn’t—I didn’t seduce him. That wasn’t what I set out to do.”

“Yeah, but it’s what you did,” she teased, waggling her eyebrows at me. “Don’t tell me you’ve got any more secrets swept under the rug. Any more movie stars you’re romancing that I should know about?”

I fell silent for a moment. I knew she was just kidding, but as soon as she noticed my hesitation, she let out a strangled squeal of surprise.

“No! No fucking way! Is there another one…?”

I winced. “Lee…”

“Lee!” she whisper-shouted. “As in, one of the other Trio guys…?”

I nodded.

“How did that happen?”

“I don’t even really know,” I confessed. “I didn’t—I mean, nothing happened between us before, I’d never even met him before I started on this movie. He was flirting with me a little when I came by to do his makeup, and I was really only doing it because I knew Devon was watching and I wanted to make him jealous, but then Lee came by my trailer one day and we…yeah.”

“You what?”

“We fooled around.”

“Goddamn, Maya.” She giggled. “I didn’t know you were such a player.”

“I think when it’s a woman they just call it slutty,” I muttered back, picking at a loose thread on my jacket. She smacked my arm lightly.

“Hey, we don’t buy into any of that shit, you hear?” she told me off. “You’re not being a slut. You’re single, you’re allowed to have sex with anyone you want to. Get it?”

“Yeah, I know,” I agreed. She was right, of course, but I had been damn close to a nun in the last few years, and it felt crazy to have hookups with two different guys so close together like this.

“So what are you going to do?” she asked me, furrowing her brow.

“About what?”

“About all of it.”

“Oh, I have no idea,” I confessed. “I don’t know where to start. I mean, I…I know Devon is going to have more questions. And I don’t know what I’m going to tell him, really. I don’t know if he deserves to know, not after how he left me before, but…”

“But he might find out anyway,” she mused aloud, nodding. “And what about Lee? Are you going after something with him?”

“Oh God no,” I snorted. “He’s got a crazy reputation with women, you must know that. I’d be crazy to think there was anything there other than just another conquest for him.”

“And what’s wrong with that?” she teased. “Sometimes it’s nice, being conquered.”

“Ugh, don’t put it like that,” I giggled. “That sounds horrible.”

“Yeah, I know, but I’m just saying,” she continued, nudging me again. “You can relax and just enjoy having some attention if you want. You’ve been so focused on taking care of Matty these last few years, if you want to let yourself get ravished by a couple of movie stars…why not?”

“Uh, because it’s going to make my life way too complicated?” I countered. “Because one of them is his father and doesn’t know it yet?”

“You make a good point,” she agreed, tapping her finger on her bottom lip. “Just…play it by ear. You know what’s best for you, and for Matty. That’s what you have to focus on.”

“Yeah, I guess so…”

“Well, that and finding some way to hook up with the other guy too.”

“Lana!”

“What, I’m just saying!” she protested, holding her hands up and playing innocent. “You’ve had two of them. It would be rude not to go for the whole set…”

“Taylor’s not like that,” I muttered, and she waggled her eyebrows at me.

“See? Taylor. You’re already on first-name terms with him,” she teased me. “Is he cute too?”

I paused for a moment, considering. I knew the answer. Taylor, for all he might not have the slick charm of Lee or Devon’s earnest boyishness, was seriously hot, in that confident, cool way that older men sometimes were.

“He is, isn’t he?” she laughed. “God, Maya, you’re such a dark horse, I didn’t know you had it in you!”

“Me neither,” I admitted. I knew she was just kidding about getting with Taylor too—but after everything that had happened, I had no idea what would go down next. It had all been crazy enough as it was. Who was to say it wouldn’t get even crazier?

Just a few more months, and I would be done with it. I would be finished with the shoot, and I could forget about all of this and go back to normal. It would be like none of it had ever happened. But in the meantime…

In the meantime, I was sure there was a whole lot more to uncover. And I was as nervous as I was excited about finding out where it took me from here.