Chapter 15
I was sitting looking over the reports JLC had sent over.
I needed to find out just what they were up to, and why I still hadn’t got a deal on their properties yet.
Ellis was at his desk looking over them with a fine tooth comb.
I was in the conference room, needing the space to spread out the vast amount of paperwork that this was creating.
When I looked up, a little girl with cute curls and pretty brown eyes was looking at me.
“Hello.” She smiled.
“Hello.”
“Have you seen my daddy?”
I shook my head. I didn’t think that we had anyone else working on the floor tonight aside from myself and Ellis. “What’s your name?”
“I am Addison Baxter,” she said, punctuating every word with a little nod from her sweet head.
Baxter? Ellis? My heart sank. He was involved with a woman and had a child with her? “What’s your daddy’s name?” I hoped I was wrong. She couldn’t really be Ellis’ could she?
“My daddy is called Ellis.”
Shit . That hit me like a kick in the balls.
Ellis had a child. And what’s more, in all our little getting to know each other chats here and there, not once had he mentioned her.
Was he in the closet? Was he bisexual? Or worse, was this some sort of messed up game from one of my leading competitors to see us ruined with scandal?
God forgive me, but I needed to get information from this little girl.
“Where’s your mummy?”
She looked sad. “I don’t have one. I had two daddies, but Daddy Tim went to live in heaven with the other angels. I can’t see him for a very long time.”
Fuck . Now I just felt like a complete asshole. Ellis had been with someone, loved them enough to have a child with them, and somehow, they were now dead, and he was a single dad.
How did I ever read a situation so wrongly?
“Come sit with me.” I gestured, and she cautiously walked into the room and around the table to me. I held out my hand for her to shake. “My name is Aiden, and I work with your daddy. It’s very nice to meet you.”
Addison grinned and shook my hand fiercely.
“Would you like to sit on my knee and draw me a picture?”
She nodded. I pulled her up onto my knee, gave her a blank page and my pen, and watched.
“What are you going to draw?”
Her little hand moved with the pen over the page. “I’m going to draw my daddy working at his computer.” A form appeared; a large oval of a body, a similar oval for a head, a line out of the body on each side. Each line ended in a circle with five lines out of each.
“How old are you?” I asked as I watched.
“Four, but I’ll be five in two weeks.”
I grinned. She was adorable. “Well, I think you are an amazing artist for someone who is five in two weeks.” She nodded in agreement and continued to draw a portrait of her father.
We sat there, chatting back and forth about the picture she was drawing and all the little details she was adding to it for some time.
Eventually, I was aware of eyes watching us.
Addison felt them too and looked up to find her dad standing in the doorway.
“Daddy!” She held up her drawing for him to see.
“Look! It’s you. Aiden says I’m a very good artist.”
Ellis smiled. “You’re a very good artist, monster, but I told you not to move from the sofa!”
The little girl looked up at me with a grin. “Oops.”
Ellis and I both laughed at her reaction, and I caught his gaze and tried to let him know just how amazing I thought they both were in a single look. Something in his expression softened and he came over to sit on the same side of the table as me and the adorable Addison.
He leaned over and kissed her. “Sorry about this.” He looked at me.
“You should be for not telling me you have such an amazing daughter.” I tickled her and her giggles filled the room. Ellis beamed with pride when he looked at her, but I could see the touch of sadness when he did.
“It’s complicated.”
“She told me.”
“Aiden asked where my mummy is, and I told him Daddy Tim is in heaven,” Addison interrupted. I looked at her in awe. So, that’s what they meant when they said kids didn’t miss a thing.
“Oh, did you now?” Ellis mouthed ‘sorry’ to me over Addison’s head. I just smiled.
“Daddy. Can Aiden read me The Last Noo Noo ?”
I crinkled my forehead. The who?
Ellis smirked. “Yes, he can read your bedtime story, but only if he wants to, monster.”
I gave her a little squeeze. “I would be honoured to read your bedtime story to you, Addison.”
She slid herself off my knee and ran out of the room “I’ll go get it!” she called out as she disappeared.
“I’m sorry I never mentioned her.”
“I get it. Life is complicated, for everyone. But she’s adorable. Can I ask what happened?”
Ellis didn’t get the chance to answer, because Addison came barrelling back into the room with her favourite book. She slammed it on the table and Ellis pulled her onto his lap. I lifted the book, opened to the first page, and started to read to her about Marlon.
By the time I reached the end, Addison was asleep on her dad’s lap.
He smiled down at her. “That book never fails.” I sat there, awestruck, watching him snuggle the sleeping form on his knee.
He kept his eyes on her as he started to softly speak.
“Tim was the love of my life. I met him when I was twenty.” I stayed silent, wanting to know more.
“Tim was athletic, he was smart, he was training to be a geography teacher back then. Not exciting, I know, but it meant the world to him. He wanted to make a difference. His dad had been like my own family. He didn’t want a gay son, and told his mother that it was him or Tim.
” Ellis laughed. “Sylvie told him that if he thought she would pick him over her beautiful boy, he had another think coming. He walked out the very next day. She’s like a mother to me.
I don’t know where I would be without her.
She and this little thing are my world.”
“What happened?”
“About three years ago, Tim got what he thought was just a chest infection. He was a teacher by then and schools are a breeding grounds for germs. After about a month and a few courses of antibiotics, he still had this nasty cough that just wouldn’t leave.
He kept going back to the doctor, things just weren’t right, and eventually after some CT scans they told us that it was lung cancer.
Stage three B, with a nine percent survival rate at the five-year mark.
He had two masses on his left lung, and it had spread to his lymph nodes.
He fought, he had chemo, and surgery, but Tim passed away eight months later. Addison was just a baby really.”
I took his hand in mine and squeezed it. This man was outstandingly brave. He had lost the man he loved and was a single dad raising a gorgeous little girl. My heart fluttered in my chest to think of him in pain at all. All I wanted to do was to comfort him.
“How did you get this pretty little girl?”
“We had a civil partnership in 2007 and did the whole marriage thing when this little one was about a year old. She’s his.
We had a surrogate, and we used Tim’s sperm and a donor’s egg, and next time…
” His voice caught in this throat, and I put my other hand over his.
“Next time it was going to be my sperm and a donor egg. We planned for at least two.”
I didn’t know what to say after that. I was lost in a well of emotion of my own.
I wanted to hold him. I wanted to be his comfort.
I wanted to help him honour the memory of his husband and raise their little girl with him.
I had never even remotely thought about anyone like this.
Sure, I’d had boyfriends, usually men still in the closet, who wouldn’t blab about it all over London. Ellis had changed everything.
“I don’t think we’ll get much more done tonight with that little beauty lying there. Can I take you both home?”
Ellis shook his head. “It’s fine. We’ll just get the train.”
I shook my head in reply. “Aww, she’s fast asleep. It wouldn’t be fair to disturb her. Let me take you home.”
Ellis nodded.
“Okay, just let me go and grab some things from my office and call the car to meet us downstairs.”
“Thank you.”
I smiled at him, feeling a pull towards him, and I headed for my office.