Chapter 4
YVES
Ollie shook his head. “Um, no?” he said, balking when I stopped in front of our seats. “This isn’t my seat.”
“Yes,” I said, smiling for no reason other than how enchanting I found every single thing about him. “It is.”
“This definitely isn’t where I’m supposed to be, Mr. Toussaint.
It’s first class.” He fumbled for the stub of his boarding pass as he spoke, managing to drop it…
and then dropping right down to his knees and giving me decidedly impure thoughts as he looked up at me anxiously, feeling around on the ground for the little slip of paper, as he kept talking.
“I’m somewhere back… back there? It’s called coach?
These seats are only for, um, you know. People like you. ”
“And also like you, mon chaton,” I informed him, wondering if he would consider the fact that I’d had his seat reassigned overstepping, overbearing, or any of the other overages that I’d been accused of by boys who I’d hoped might be mine over the years.
He finally stood, looking down at the little stub in his hand with an adorable furrow on his brow. Then he looked up at the seat numbers. Then back down at the stub. Then—with helpless eyes that made my heart surge with protective tenderness—at me. “I don’t understand? This can’t be my seat.”
I cleared my throat, feeling an uncharacteristic frisson of nerves. “While you were refreshing yourself, I took the liberty of requesting an upgrade for you.”
He blinked. “Why would they give me an upgrade?”
Because I’d handed over my American Express black card, that was why. But that wasn’t what he was really asking, and a fresh surge of anger flared inside me at more confirmation that he hadn’t been treated the way he deserved by the man who’d left him all alone in the airport.
I fought it back, not wanting to upset my bo—to upset Ollie.
And yes, despite my selfish indulgence in ensuring that he’d be close to me during the flight, I really did need to remember that he was not, in fact, “my boy.”
Not yet, whispered the devil on my shoulder.
Not ever, corrected the angel on the other shoulder primly. Not if he can’t let you be the type of Daddy you really are.
Sometimes, I wondered which one was actually which. Or, since the angel looked an awful lot like the devil, but in drag, if they were actually one and the same.
“Mr. Toussaint?” Ollie asked hesitantly, looking up at me as if he trusted me to take charge and make sense of it all for him.
The devil grinned, reaching around to poke the angel with his pitchfork and send her tumbling off her perch.
“Come, Ollie, let us allow others to find their seats,” I said when another passenger waiting to board made an impatient sound behind him, saving me from any confessions.
I ushered Ollie into the row we would occupy and then placed his carry-on in the overhead compartment… but not before I removed the item I’d tucked inside it earlier. One I would not pin my hopes on winning Ollie over with, I told myself sternly.
The angel clambered back up to my shoulder to inform me that was a lie.
I sighed. She was right. Mon Dieu, I was hopeless and should know better… and yet clearly, I did not.
I wanted Ollie to be mine.
“Are you sitting here, too?” he asked softly, looking up at me nervously as I stalled, delaying the moment when I’d either find out that he could not be the one… or allowed my hope to blossom. “Mr. Toussaint?”
It wasn’t what I wanted to hear him call me, and since putting off the inevitable had never been my style, I firmly banished my hesitation, closed the overhead bin, and took my seat, placing his gift in his lap as I did so.
“I am,” I told him. “I will enjoy the flight much more with your company, Ollie, as long as you don’t object. And I hoped that… that possibly this token would help you enjoy it more, as well.”
He ran his fingers over the soft, plush fuzz of the little dinosaur, then looked up at me with wide eyes. “You bought it for me?”
“I did.”
He swallowed. “But… it’s a kid’s toy.”
My heart sank, but honestly, what had I expected? I made myself smile anyway because Ollie didn’t deserve my disappointment.
“It was only meant as a memento of our unexpected meeting,” I said, plucking it out of his lap. “It is truly nothing, mon choupinou. It brought your smile when I found you, so I thought it might do so again, but I will dispose of—”
“No,” he blurted, grabbing it back and hugging it to his chest tightly. Then his eyes widened and a deep red flush colored his face under the brighter pink of his sunburn. “I’m sorry, I just meant…thank you? I don’t object. To, um, to anything. Not from you. And I’d like to keep it, please.”
“Of course,” I said, hoping the surge of emotion his reaction brought up in me couldn’t be heard in my voice. The last thing I wanted was to scare him off, but…
Not to anything?
Not from me?
The boy was trying to kill me, as they say, softly.
And I would have to make him mine now, have to, because when he relaxed back into his seat and looked down at the small toy again, a secretive smile hovering over his lips as he petted its head?
I needed neither the angel nor the devil to tell me what was true.
I would have to make him mine, because I was, quite firmly and completely, already his.