I’m Keeping You

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First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2016

Copyright © Jane Lark 2016

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Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Cover design by Zoe Jackson

Jane Lark asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are

the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to

actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is

entirely coincidental.

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Ebook Edition © April 2016 ISBN: 9780008142438

Version 2016-03-30

PRAISE FOR JANE LARK

“Jane Lark has proved what a writing talent she really is. This is an engrossing and telling read…Be prepared to have your heart squeezed”

BestChicklit.com

“An amazing book. It is dark and edgy yet flirtatious and even made me laugh. It’s such a combination that made me not want to put my kindle down at all”

After the Final Chapters

“Dark, gritty and wholly mesmerizing…a haunting and compelling read you will not easily forget”

Bookish Jottings

“Emotional, romantic, and heartbreaking”

Imagine a World

Thank you to my wonderful editor, Charlotte Ledger, who has worked with me for the last two years, for believing in my work, seeing the potential in Jason and putting a romance book out about a good guy, which turned into the Starting Out series full of good guys. Thank you, Charlotte, for giving me the freedom to write the stories I want to tell and helping me to make them stronger.

Also I’m sure you’ll all want to join me in thanking the cover artists, Alexandra Allden and Zoe Jackson, for giving you some wonderful images to look at as you read the stories.

Then there’s one more thank you, to you all, for reading the series, and taking the time to share and post reviews and message me on Facebook and through Twitter, to tell me how much you love the books. I love hearing from you, and it’s great to know that people really understand and enjoy getting caught up in the stories and characters. Thank you.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise For Jane Lark

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Author Note

About the Author

Also by Jane Lark

About HarperImpulse

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

Rachel

I drifted from sleep to dreams to being half awake. The things Jason and I had talked about at the party the other night were stopping me from sleeping, plus the conversation we’d had with our solicitor.

Thoughts swept through my head, about my ex, Declan, and New York and meeting the guy I’d been meant to find—Jason.

I rolled on to my back. My forearm lifted to my forehead as an image of Saint came into my mind. I slid back into sleep.

I picked him up out of his buggy. My beautiful son.

We were standing on a bridge, looking at the river in the park. I showed him the clear water as we leaned over the railing. “Look, you can see the fish.” I could see them. The water wasn’t like the Hudson. It was a narrow, shallow river. I could see right to the bottom. The weeds waved, making patterns in the flow of the current as the water headed on out to join a bigger river and make its way to the coast.

The heat of the sun warmed the skin on my face and my arms. I felt superhuman, like I had a super-power. I was the best mom in the world. I was high, full of energy and charged up. Ideas fizzed around in my head. We were going to go back and paint, and bake.

A play-dough recipe—I should Google a play-dough recipe.

“Maybe I should ask Grampy to build you a sandpit. You need a sandpit, don’t you, Saint…” I looked down at the fish. Their tails swished at the water as they swam against the current.

“And you need a fishing rod, to go fishing, and a little net. But I guess a net first. Maybe we should go get a net now, so we can catch a fish.”

I lifted Saint up high, holding him above my head, above the railing. Not Lion-King style but so he looked down at me as I looked up at him. The sun shone behind him, giving my little Saint a halo. He made his three-month-old gurgling sound.

I felt like Mufasa, though, or perhaps more like Sarabi; like I was the queen lioness. I’d only just discovered Disney. Disney movies were one of the new exciting mommy things in my life. My mom had never done being a mom. I’d never stepped inside a cinema when I was a kid, or watched a movie on TV.

Since Saint was born, I’d sat down and watched more than a dozen movies with him, loads of times. I was different from Mom. I was a good mom. The best. And Saint was going to be the President, because I was going to bring him up so well, and he’d stand up before Congress and tell everyone he owed it all to his amazing mommy.

I brought him down and hugged him tight. I loved hugging him the most. Squeezing my little, solid, happy human being. My body had made him; this perfect little boy.

Sunshine heated my hair and face. I looked down at the water. It looked so cool. Jason used to swim here when he’d been a kid. He’d told me. It looked refreshing. I’d never swum in a river. I could have hardly gone for a dip in the Hudson back in New York, or dived into the Delaware when I’d lived in Philadelphia as a kid. But here, this was only a little, narrow river. “Saint, you oughta learn to swim. I bet you’d love it. Daddy said it was always fun… He liked it.”

I held Saint against my chest and walked off the bridge, leaving his buggy behind. “I bet the water’s refreshing. It’ll be nice on a hot day like this.”

There was an area where the bank sloped down toward the water. It was flat by the water’s edge.

I walked down there. “We’re gonna swim, Saint.”

I walked to the edge and kept walking, the cool water washing over my sneakers. It was a lovely sensation. I could see me teaching Saint to swim, holding his hands as he kicked out. I’d seen babies swimming in ads. Saint could do that. He was a clever baby. The water came up to my knees, getting the hem of my skirt wet, but I didn’t stop walking. I loved the cool sensation pushing against my legs and caressing my skin as the water ran around me and flowed on downstream. It was exciting to be in a river—to do what Jason had done as a kid. I was the best mom.

The water came up to my waist and surged against me, swirling around me, creating little eddies. Saint’s toes dipped into the river, they were bare, it was a warm day; I hadn’t put socks on his feet. He made a gurgling sound.

“Does the water tickle?”

My clothes were soaked and clinging to my body, but even that was nice—a good feeling—because they were cool—and I was manically happy.

The water spun in whirlpools just in front of us. It was dancing. The sunlight caught on the surface, making it sparkle. The world was magic. I imagined us swimming with the fish. I knew the whirlpools implied the current was stronger, but I was supermom—so that didn’t matter to me. My mind was full of images of me teaching Saint to swim; there was no space in my head for other thoughts. I took another step out. The water was up to my shoulders and up to his shoulders, and it was so good. The current and the pressure of the flowing water pulled at my feet. I fought to keep my balance, but it didn’t disturb me. Saint was just looking at me, with wide eyes, bemused by the new sensations. I laughed. I was going to let him go—I was going to let him swim.

“Hey! Hey! What the fuck are you doing?” A strange guy called out from the bank. He was yelling at me.

“Hey! You! Get back! You’ll drown the kid!”

I hugged Saint tight as the guy waded into the water. He was trying to steal Saint. Another guy ran in and between them they got a hold of me and dragged me out. I fought against them, hanging on to Saint. But then the second guy growled into my ear. “What are you trying to do, kill him?”

The words punched me. Kill him… No. “No. I’m teaching him to swim!”

“He’s a baby!”

One of the guys took Saint from my arms and began looking at him, all over, like he might be hurt. I sat on the bank shivering. The guys fussed over Saint, and they wouldn’t give him back. Other people came.

The water hadn’t been cool, it had been cold. But I was just teaching Saint to swim.

“Hi. Yeah. Cops.”

One of the guys had his cell to his ear.

“Yeah, some woman in the park just tried to drown her kid.”

I stood up. “I didn’t. I was teaching him to swim. Kids need to swim. His daddy used to swim here. We were just swimming.” I hit the guy’s arm and tried to take his cell.

“You weren’t teaching him to swim…” the guy who held Saint growled at me.

I held out my hands. I wanted to go home now. “Let me have him.”

The guy held on to him.

“Let me have him!” Panic pulled tight around my chest, solidifying in my lungs, as euphoria spun into fear. The guy’s face became Declan’s face.

“Let me have him!”

The guy wouldn’t let me take him back. My baby. “He’s mine! Let me have him! He’s mine!” My screams became louder and louder.

“Hey. You okay?” Jason’s hand ran over my shoulder. When I opened my eyes, I escaped the dream, but every muscle in my body trembled from the shock and fear. It hadn’t been a dream. I’d walked into that river for real with my three-month-old baby, and it had changed our lives, maybe forever.

“You alright? You were dreaming…” Jason’s arm wrapped around my shoulders then pulled me against his chest. We were in bed. The room was dark.

My forehead pressed into his shoulder and I shook my head. I wasn’t alright. The cops had picked me up but they hadn’t arrested me, they’d taken me to Jason’s parents and explained what had happened. His mom had looked at me with pity, and his dad with confusion, and then they’d called Jason. He’d been working in the store. He’d closed the store that day. It was the only time I’d ever known him close the store.

But I hadn’t waited for Jason to come home. I hadn’t needed him to tell me I was a failure. I knew I was a failure. My mood had crashed, hurtling down. I’d walked out of his parents’ house. I hadn’t wanted to face Jason, and I hadn’t wanted to see Saint.

I’d failed.

I didn’t see how I could be a mom anymore—or a wife.

Jason had found me in a park, on a swing, hours later, I’d been lost in despair, it had been agony, a heavy, dense pain—too intense for words. I’d been too ill to even talk.

He’d called for an ambulance. It had taken me to the hospital. The doctors there had started me on a heavy dose of mood-controlling meds.

I didn’t remember much about my days in the hospital.

“What were you dreaming of?”

“The river,” I breathed against his skin.

His other hand stroked over my hair.

It was my stupid, distorted bipolar view of the world that had given my ex, Declan, Saint’s biological father, a chance to take Saint. He was saying I was unfit to care for Saint because I’d walked into the river. But I didn’t understand why Declan wanted Saint. He had kids already and he hardly had anything to do with them. He didn’t like kids. He was a shitty dad.

“It’s going to be okay,” Jason said over my head.

Jason was a good dad, but that didn’t seem to matter, and it wasn’t okay, nothing was okay, and that’s why we were flying out to New York tomorrow and I was leaving Saint. Because I was a bad mom. I’d failed him.

My arm slipped about Jason’s waist and I held on to him. His fingers gripped my shoulder and he pressed a kiss on to the crown of my head.

He’d never judged me for my error, just loved me. He understood me. He’d taken time to learn about my illness since we’d gotten married last year and he’d said a hundred times he knew it hadn’t been a choice, I’d just been sick.

The anxiety that had clasped at my lungs and sent my pulse soaring into a manic dance rhythm in the dream swept back in. Terror. I was terrified of losing Jason. As terrified as I was of losing Saint. Maybe because Jason was so special, and I’d done nothing to deserve a good guy, so how could he keep loving me? But he still did. He’d spent hours in the last few days reassuring me he did and that him leaving me would never happen.

I fell asleep again, holding him, and being held by him… I belonged with him… and Saint belonged with him.

When I woke sunlight shone into our room in Jason’s parents’ house.

Jason wasn’t in bed, or in the room, but I could hear Saint in his crib. I got up, picked him up, and held him tight, breathing in the smell of his hair as his breath stirred the tiny, fine hairs on my neck. Love was a great, deep well and it filled me up. The room became a shimmering blur. I’d die if I lost him as much as I’d die if I lost Jason. I wouldn’t want to be alive without either of them. Before I’d met Jason and had Saint, I didn’t even know if I could love a child, especially a child of Declan’s. But I didn’t think of Saint as Declan’s, he wasn’t. Saint was Jason’s son, in every way that mattered. Jason had been around for Saint and me right from the get go, from the moment I’d discovered I was pregnant, not just when Saint was born.

He was still here. I hoped he always would be. That’s what I wanted.

I brushed Saint’s hair back and kissed his head, wiped away my tears, then walked over to the door, turned the handle and went to find Jason.

Saint babbled away in his baby language. He’d laughed the other day. On Halloween. At the silly Halloween trick Jason had bought him. That had been the best sound I’d ever heard.

I heard Jason talking to his mom in the kitchen. I walked in there, wearing one of his old tees and just my panties, my legs bare. I hugged Saint against my chest. Jason turned around, a smile broke his lips apart immediately. I loved it when he smiled like that—he hardly ever smiled like that now.

“Hey, honey.” He walked across the room to us, and his fingers stroked over Saint’s head as he leaned over to kiss my lips. “You okay?”

I nodded.

But we both knew I wasn’t.

I’d been terrified for ages that he didn’t love me anymore, I’d gotten so lost. I didn’t know how to be me anymore since I’d gone on to this last batch of meds. But the other day, over Halloween, we’d talked stuff out, and he’d gotten cross that I even doubted it. He did still love me—us. I’d been telling myself that as much as he had in the last few days, trying to convince my head what my heart knew.

When we’d talked stuff out, we’d kind of found each other again—that’s what he’d said. But I hadn’t found my old self and he’d admitted that he missed the me I’d been before I’d started on the strong meds. I missed that person too—desperately. She used to laugh a lot, and she’d felt free. This me… felt trapped, lost, and afraid.

“I love you,” he whispered in my ear, before he pulled away. I smiled.

He winked at me.

We’d had a lot of sex this week. It had been another of his ways of reassuring me, we hadn’t done it much for a while before that.

“Morning, Rachel,” his mom called. She was cooking pancakes. The scent of them filled the kitchen.

I didn’t want to leave here, or Saint. This was home. But Jason and I had to go. If we didn’t, Saint would leave us.

Maybe I’d explode, suddenly, the weight pressing down on me was so heavy. Jason took Saint from my arms and hugged him. I didn’t know if I was well enough to go to New York. I didn’t know if I’d cope.

But I knew some things; I didn’t want to have to deal with Declan when the doctors had me all drugged up and knocked out like a zombie, I couldn’t carry on as I was, and I couldn’t let Declan take Saint.

Those things had to change.

I had to stop them happening.

CHAPTER TWO

Rachel

My fingers held on to the arm of the seat as I stared out the window of the small United Airlines plane. It was taxiing out to the runway. My body was so heavy with fear it felt like I’d been tied down to the seat with iron chains. They held me in place. I wanted to run. I could see Saint, in my head, reaching out his hands for me when I’d walked away with Jason. My heart hadn’t beaten in a normal pattern since.

But I was doing this for Saint. To protect him. To keep him.

Jason could have gone alone. But I didn’t want him to go alone. I didn’t want Jason to leave me. I wanted to be with him—but I wanted to be with Saint too. I was breaking in half. The two guys in my life were ripping me in half.

I sighed out. My breath became moisture on the small oval window. My teeth sank into my lower lip, holding in the emotion threatening to well over in a flood of tears as I lifted a hand and wiped the moisture away.

“Are you okay?” Jason’s hand rested over mine on the seat arm.

I didn’t look at him, just turned my hand up the other way and clasped his, clinging to any connection that held me closer to normal.

“Rach…” He pushed, worry catching in his voice

“Yeah.” No. I was a fucked-up mess. But he knew that already.

The plane taxied around, turning on to the runway, then stopped.

I breathed in deep and held the air in my lungs. The image in my head became the packet of meds I’d left in the drawer in our room. The meds I’d stopped taking a week ago. I couldn’t be the zombie I was when I took them. I needed my brain to be working. Declan was clever. I needed to be able to think when I faced him. The meds made me feel like I was drowning all the time, trapped under an ocean and looking at the world through a fog; I couldn’t breathe through it, or reach through it. I needed to be alive and awake to cope with Declan and New York.

My head was full of memories, memories that said the meds would make everything too hard to deal with—and there was the memory of Jason telling me at the Halloween party the other day that he missed the me who’d had crazy moments. He’d liked my crazy moments. The meds stomped on all my crazy—I wanted to be able to be crazy sometimes. I wanted to make him laugh and smile wide. I wanted to make sure he wouldn’t stop loving me.

“It’ll be okay,” Jason said as the pilot switched up the engine and the plane started speeding along the asphalt highway to the sky. G-force pulled at my stomach, making it queasy.

“Don’t worry,” Jason reassured again. “It’s going to be alright.”

I looked at him and tried to smile. He smiled back, closed lipped, but considerate. It wasn’t the smile I longed for. Nothing was right. Not now.

I wanted it to be right.

“Sorry, I’m missing Saint.”

“I miss him too, so we’ll get to New York, sort everything out as fast as we can, and get back. Two weeks. That’s what I’m giving us. We have to have this fixed by Thanksgiving.”

I nodded.

The nose of the plane lifted, pressing us back into the seats, and then we were off the ground and rising, climbing through the air, up into the sky. I wanted to climb like that in spirit. I wanted my bipolar, spinning-top of a brain to whiz up. I hated the swamp of middle road. I wanted to feel high. I wanted to be buzzing with happiness.

Jason’s fingers squeezed mine.

I looked back out the window, down at the earth, at the city beneath us, as Portland became like a toy town. Saint was miles away from us already, but soon he’d be hundreds of miles away from us. There was a hook in my heart trying to pull me back. The pain of it became sharper the higher the plane climbed.

We breached the clouds and flew above an ocean of glistening vapor, caught in the brightest sunlight.

“Saint will never remember this, you know. I bet you don’t have any memories before you were one… So don’t worry about what he’s thinking, he’s fine with Mom and Dad. They’re going to feed him and cuddle him loads, and he’s going to be okay.”

I was learning to hate the word okay, but I nodded as tears slipped from my eyes while I watched the swirling clouds making patterns below us.

“Hey…” Jason’s fingertips touched my cheek and turned my head, then he kissed a tear away. “It’s going to be okay.” I think he thought if he used the word enough he’d make it happen.

I nodded, then looked back out the window. I didn’t feel that in my heart, and he didn’t know my ex like I did. Declan had been Jason’s boss for a year, but I’d lived with Declan and I knew the darkness that was in him. Jason had only glimpsed it.

I didn’t see how we could win; Declan had money and contacts and influence. We had us, love for Saint, a sense of right and wrong, and a small-time solicitor in Portland.

The tears tightened into a lump in my throat. If I hadn’t messed up we wouldn’t be on this flight, we’d be at home with Saint.

Jason lifted my hand and kissed my fingers.

I looked back at him. I was such hard work. I felt sorry for him.

“Hey, we’re nearly there. We’re over New York.”

My eyelids were heavy as I opened them and lifted my head to look at Jason. I’d slept on his shoulder. I was drowsy and there was a density in my body that made my limbs feel like stone. It could be the meds lingering or my mood falling. The meds had made me feel asleep even when I was awake.