Chapter 7

Rhonda looks at him sleeping softly and silently in his crib and then softly slips her little finger in his slightly open fist which he grabs hold of almost immediately. It was like he instinctively knew that his mother was close and he had nothing to fear at all. And so he smiled in his sleep. Rhonda had read somewhere that babies smiled in their sleep because angels came down to play with them. The innocent creature who filled her with such awe that she could not even believe that she was the one who had given birth to him sometimes. He was so beautiful and yet so dangerously vulnerable that her heart clenched with fear at the mere thought of losing him.

“There is absolutely nothing of you in him at all Rhonds,” her father growled in a low voice as he studied her sleeping one-month old son. There was a disgruntled look on his face and Rhonda could not help but feel sorry for him that he still could not get out of the damage that his first wife had done in the course of their marriage. Cheating and cuckolding, that too by the woman he adored was not easy to get over so easily, and might be twenty-seven years was also too less for that.

Actually, nothing of him, he could see in his grandson, thought Rhonda. She had never been too sure that if there was some kind of natural hang-up with him--- some primitive male basic need to see his genes being passed down and that too visibly and that his imprint was being re-iterated by some miracle of nature. She was her father’s only child from all the three marriages and he adored her beyond death.

Rhonda’s own life-experience through her entire childhood and even also when she was an adult and all the scandals that she had to keep on hearing about all this time had ultimately fed her determination to keep a very simple family for herself and her son. No marriages, no divorces. No messy extended relationships or weird step-family and then meeting them and greeting them on holidays making things far worse and complicated than they already were.

Only this was sure that her son would be growing up knowing that he had a mother who loved him more than her heart and more than she could love anything or anyone else and nothing else mattered. The genetic pattern did not matter to her and it would not matter to him. She had given birth to her beautiful baby and he was hers. Only hers. All hers.

“He does have curly hair Dad,” said Rhonda, smiling slightly as she looked at her father who was still dissatisfied by the entire thing and how it had turned out. But he had been supportive nonetheless.

“Yeah and you got that from your Mum. Not me Rhonds,” said Rupert Brint as he touched his mop of straight hair which covered his head. It was as straight as a hair brush, and the one which was auburn before had gone all white, but it had not done anything at all to reduce the enigma that he still held over all. His blue eyes were as sharp as ever and they wanted to pin down his daughter in order to ask all the questions that she had been evading carefully since the past year.

They were sitting in the courtyard of their ancestral Singleton property both of the, having taken time out from their busy lives and schedules in order to make time for each other. Rhonda had wanted absolute privacy and secrecy for her child till she was ready to expose him to her world which was filled with glitz and glamour most definitely but also scandals and she did not want Ruriel’s life to be marred and overshadowed by those under any circumstances. And since this was the first grand-child of the Brint family her father had readily agreed to let her live her for the first few months until the baby was slightly older.

“Are you going to tell me who the father is Rhonds? I mean, it is me!!!” said her father as Rhonda smiled.

“It does not matter who, Dad. He is mine,” she replied as her heart filled up with absolute maternal love filled her up as love oozed out for the dark haired green eyed baby still smiled in his sleep. She kept on moving the rocker at her feet lightly as her father’s grunt made him turn in his direction.

“What are you going to tell him Rhonds? Are you going to never say him about his father as well?” asked Rupert as Rhonda sighed and looked at Ruriel again.

“That is going to be quite a few years from now Dad. And I am going to have a lot of time to think by then what I am supposed to tell him,” said Rhonda and this time the older man sighed.

“I get the part that you did not want to marry him Rhonda, you younger people have a different concept of love and marriage now-a-days and I am not against it but…” he was not allowed to finish his sentence and Rhonda interrupted him in the middle.

“He would not have wanted to marry me either dad. It is not something that I am very keen on discussing at all,” said Rhonda, he voice growing wary each passing second.

“Why would he not want to marry you? What is wrong with marriage when there is a child coming on, huh?” asked Rupert and when Rhonda remained silent he looked at her and whispered,” You did not tell him, did you?”

Rhonda nodded her head saying no.

“But why? It is his child as well, isn’t it? Wouldn’t he want to know?” asked Rupert in an urgent voice as suddenly Rhonda remembered the night that she had conceived Ruriel. The look of utter horror on his face when the sexual daze had died down.