Kitabı oku: «Unexpected Babies»

CHAPTER ONE

CATE TALBOT PALMER opened her car door and stepped into the sand-blown street that paralleled the beach. Above the small, stucco building in front of her a metal sign rattled like faint thunder in the wind off the ocean. The sign read Palmer Construction, Leith, Georgia.

Her husband, Alan, was inside at his desk. Nearly two hours late for the burned five-course dinner she’d abandoned on their dining room table.

Cate ran one hand across her stomach. The stench of dry, overcooked lamb mingled with ocean salt. She swallowed, her throat almost clenching she felt so nauseous. She’d suggested a special dinner tonight because she’d finally decided to tell Alan the secret she’d been keeping. Thank God she hadn’t told him before.

She’d waited for him, staring at a bottle of sparkling grape juice she’d set on the table between their plates as a hint. She’d memorized that bottle while she’d opened her eyes to the facts. She and Alan had both kept secrets for the past sixteen weeks, only she’d been desperate enough to pretend she didn’t see what Alan was doing.

Late nights at the office, fierce silences at home, see-through excuses for the cell phone he’d practically strapped to his hand. Most women would suspect an affair, but Alan Palmer had a different problem.

His mother had left him and his father when he was ten because his dad couldn’t give her the material things she’d wanted. As a result of that longago abandonment and the way his father had used him as a confidant during the divorce, Alan tied his worth to his success with Palmer Construction.

He’d do anything to provide for Cate and Dan, their eighteen-year-old son, but he kept his emotional distance, afraid to risk the kind of pain he and his father had barely survived. His need to protect Cate had pushed her away, because she wanted a husband who would let her help him solve his problems, not pull away when troubles came.

She sprang from a long line of Talbots who’d failed at marriage or any relationship close to that kind of commitment. She and Alan had tried to create the family they’d both craved in their childhoods. Instead, they’d created an emotional divide.

She felt as if she’d already raised Dan on her own. She’d made up excuses for Alan’s absences, for his distraction when he showed up late at one family gathering after another. She couldn’t start that over again. This time, if she raised a child alone, it would be because she no longer lived with her baby’s father.

A car passed her. She knew the driver. Another mom whose son was about to graduate from high school. Cate pasted a smile on her face. After today she wouldn’t have to pretend everything was normal.

Wind from the car blew her hair across her face, and Cate brushed the strands out of her eyes. She refused to wait for Alan to tell her what was wrong with the business. Hurting from the pain of another betrayal cost her more than knowing the truth. She’d make him tell her.

Squaring her shoulders, she marched across the street to the office. Her legs felt like jelly. She opened the frosted glass doors that were engraved with the company’s name.

The moment she stepped inside, the temperature dropped. Even in mid-May, the South Georgia heat made air-conditioning a requirement. Cate swiped at perspiration on her forehead. Her hand trembled in front of her eyes.

She’d offer Alan a chance to explain because she still didn’t want to leave him. When they were good, they were very, very good.

Alan’s voice murmured from the office area. For a moment she hoped he had a late appointment with a client. Then she recognized a tone she always dreaded hearing. She couldn’t understand what he was saying, but he was in trouble.

Her anger simmered as every excuse Alan had given her in the past few weeks repeated in her head. She wouldn’t have kept her own secret if she’d trusted him.

Not that she could give him all the blame. She’d stayed. She hated feeling dependent, and her relationship with Alan made her feel dependent rather than stronger. When they were bad, they were unbearable.

Striding past models of the buildings and homes the company was contracted to build or renovate, Cate tried to imagine why her husband had decided his success here meant more than their marriage.

She passed empty offices. Her twin sister, Caroline, who worked as an interior designer for the company, had already gone home.

Alan’s office lay at the end of the hall. The air conditioning’s whisper cushioned the sound of Cate’s feet on the Berber carpet. Suddenly, John Mabry, Leith’s chief of police, leaned into Cate’s view, his bulk bending the frame of his chair as he crossed his arms behind his head.

“I know,” he said on a hefty sigh. “A trained cop had no business losing Jim Cooper in the men’s room, but I didn’t train the cops who work the Newark airport. Just chill, Alan. We’ll find him and your money before you have to shut your doors for good.”

The carpet’s warp seemed to rise up and trip Cate. Jim Cooper was their CPA, an oily man who always stood too close, tried to talk too intimately. She stumbled to a halt, flexing her fingers against the creamy, patterned wallpaper. The truth came as no surprise, but hearing it in plain words felt like a near fatal wound.

“What if we’re already too late?” Alan asked. “I’m working my creditors now as if I were the criminal.”

“What?” Mabry said in a sharp tone.

“With my banker’s help.” Alan placated the other man. “But I don’t do business this way, and I don’t like knowing my employees may be working on borrowed time.”

The scream in Cate’s head must have translated to some kind of sound. John Mabry turned to her, surprise widening his eyes. She pulled her hand off the wall. Nearly twenty years of pretending her marriage was healthy had honed her skills. She’d pretend nothing was wrong. Next best thing to acting as if Alan had talked to her about the problem.

“Hey, John.”

“Evening, Cate.”

Alan’s chair squeaked. After a few muffled steps, he came around the door, tall, dark and clueless. “Is something wrong with Dan?”

Startled at his unexpected question, Cate searched tanned features that had thinned over the past weeks to an ascetic sharpness. His problems in this office had distracted him. He’d forgotten their meal and his promise to come home early. Naturally, he only expected her to show up if something was wrong with their son.

“Dan’s fine.”

A father’s fear haunted his eyes. Alan loved the idea of family. He truly loved their son—as much as she did.

“I came because you’re late,” she said.

He turned a wary gaze on the police chief. “John…”

Mabry pried himself out of his chair. “I’ll get back to you later, Alan.”

Cate watched the other man leave. With each step he took toward the front of the building, she braced herself to face the reason for her husband’s guilty expression.

“Cate.” Taking her arm, Alan forced her to look at him before she was ready.

She shook him off. “Don’t.” All she wanted was for him to tell her she was wrong. “Why was John here?”

“Please believe I wanted to tell you.” He took her hands again. Heat throbbed from his callused palms.

She splayed her fingers over the undersides of his wrists, where his pulse tapped an alarm. A measure of calm came to her despite confusion that had become familiar. “Something’s happened. Again.”

He tightened his hands, but he couldn’t seem to answer her. She studied his face, intent on every nerve, every shadow of guilt that flitted behind eyes that knew her both too well and not at all.

“This time was different, Cate.”

“You always say it’s different, but it never is.” The future yawned in front of her like a hungry mouth. “You keep problems from me because you think I’ll leave if the business goes sour.”

Sweat beaded on his upper lip. He didn’t look well, but she couldn’t spare him any more of her empathy.

“I would have told you.” He released one of her hands so he could wipe the drops of moisture off his mouth. “I had to make sure I knew how much trouble we’re facing.”

“I don’t trust you.” She flattened her free hand over her belly, tracing the mound she couldn’t hide much longer. She wouldn’t expose another child to a part-time father. “I can’t go on the way we are, and you can’t change. You never would have told me about Jim. You planned to clean up the mess by yourself.”

“I haven’t told anyone except Mabry and the bank. Jim Cooper embezzled from the business accounts. He stole from every company he worked for. We’ve all lost money, and we’re trying to find Jim before he knows we’re looking for him.”

She fought to control her anger, but reason hadn’t worked with him in the past. “First, you should tell the employees if they’re in danger of losing their jobs. Second, I don’t work for you, and I’m not a newspaper reporter. You have no right to keep me in the dark. I’m your wife, and I have an equal share in this business. I turned myself into a stay-at-home mom for Dan, not because I’m not intelligent enough to be part of this company.”

“I never said you weren’t bright enough to understand the business, Cate.” He frowned, deep lines leaving furrows between his nose and mouth. “John told me the police had tracked Jim to the Newark airport.”

“That part I understood. You’re obviously worried, and I’m sorry, but I don’t know why you won’t let me help you.”

“What could you have done?”

“I don’t know, but you never gave me a chance. You prefer to suffer alone.”

“I’m supposed to protect you and Dan.”

“Please don’t start that old story again.” She freed herself from him. “I’m not like your mother. I don’t need a house or a car or clothes that impress our neighbors. If the business burned to the ground, I’d want to help you rebuild, but you wouldn’t turn to me. You want to protect me, but Dan and I can’t count on you if something goes wrong in this office.” She spun blindly toward the reception area. She had one thought—to escape this building without him—but he kept pace with her as if she were crawling.

“Where are you going?” His stunned tone hurt most of all.

“I told you I wouldn’t stay if you hid anything else from me.”

“Tell me how I’m different than you, Cate. How often are you at Aunt Imogen’s or Uncle Ford’s houses? They don’t need a nursemaid.”

“They’re family, and they took Caroline and me in when Mom and Dad didn’t want us.” Her parents, both officers in Naval Intelligence, had dropped her and her sister off at Aunt Imogen’s on their way to an isolated duty station in Turkey. From there, they’d gone on to one unaccompanied assignment after another, and Cate and Caroline had remained with their maiden aunt and bachelor uncle in Leith. “They’re both alone and over seventy. I look in on them.” And they continued to give her the unconditional love she’d never had from either her parents or Alan.

“What about Caroline? You run to her and Shelly every time they try to change a lightbulb.” Her sister had raised her daughter alone since Caroline’s husband had abandoned them when Shelly was only four. Alan had never seemed to resent her attention to their extended family before, but desperation edged his tone. “You cushion them and Dan in cotton wool. I’m only trying to give you the kind of care you give our family.”

His last, self-serving point pushed Cate too far. She turned on him, but momentum carried her too close to him. His familiar, spicy scent triggered a basic need whose power had always frightened her. Wanting him so much, she felt weak and angry with herself. “Don’t look for someone to blame because you and I failed at our marriage.”

He reeled backward, stumbling into a model of the library they were supposed to refurbish. Instinctively, Cate caught his arm before she was certain whether she wanted to shove him or help him.

No, she knew what she had to do. “I stayed for Dan, but he leaves for college in a few weeks. I don’t have to pretend you and I are going to live happily ever after. Not together, anyway.”

“Cate.” His husky plea caught her unawares. He reached for her, his wedding band glowing gold in the building’s artificial light.

She arched away from him. Tears clouded her vision, but she grabbed the chrome rail on the front doors. Approaching night had strengthened the ocean breeze, and she had to lean her whole body into the door to open it.

Outside the wind whipped her hair into her eyes. She bumped into a soft figure that had to be a woman. Cate muttered a tear-choked apology and broke for the street. But she stumbled into a parking meter and fell off the sidewalk.

Her right ankle turned over. Pain nearly paralyzed her as her foot skidded through sand. Behind her, a woman’s voice shrilled, but the deep blast of a car horn seemed to finish her shriek. Cate straightened, turning. A green sports car, coming fast, froze her.

“Cate!” Alan must have followed her. He was furious, afraid and too far away.

She reached blindly into thin air, twisting back toward the sidewalk. Seconds stretched, defying the laws of nature. Alan caught her hands. She recognized the strength of his long fingers, the breadth of his palms. She grabbed at him, but she couldn’t get her feet beneath her in the sand. Holding on to her husband, she peered over her shoulder at the driver.

Intensity crumpled his face. His body lifted in the seat, as if he were standing on his brakes.

They screamed, and time lost its elasticity. Cate willed her body away from the car. Alan yanked her, but something glanced off her leg, more a jarring thump than real pain.

At first.

Alan pulled her hard against his body as a fire-edged knife seemed to slice through her thigh. Behind her, the car’s tires ground into the road and chaos faded to silence.

An unnatural silence, empty of voices or traffic, footsteps or the constant whisper of the ocean. Cate knew only pain and an overwhelming nausea. Panic clutched at her. Was she sick because of the baby, or the torture of her leg? Was she going to lose her baby?

“I’ve got you. You’re safe.”

She looked up. Alan’s fear fed her terror. She hadn’t trusted him enough to tell him about her pregnancy, and now she didn’t know how to say the words.

“Focus on me.” Alan turned his head. “Somebody call 911!”

Around them, cell phones erupted in a cacophony of beeps. Somehow, Cate found a smile, but Alan stared at her, amazed.

She concentrated on his green eyes. “You’ve always wanted to save my life.”

With his face pale as beach sand, Alan didn’t smile back. “Don’t talk.”

People she knew, Alan’s busiest carpenter and Mr. Parker, who owned the Bucket O’ Suds, edged into her peripheral vision.

“Look at the blood running down her leg, Alan.” Mr. Parker pushed a man-smelling apron beneath her nose. “Maybe you need this.”

“Get a damn ambulance,” Alan snarled, but then the muscles around his mouth worked as he fought to maintain his composure. “Cate, you’re all right.”

A resounding roar overwhelmed her silent prayer that he’d keep holding her too close for her to look down and see the blood. Pressure, like a giant hand, seemed to push her toward the ground. “I think I’m not all right.”

She was going to faint. First time she could ever remember fainting. Was she dying? “Alan, I—Dan—I want—”

“Dan’s fine.” Alan’s voice cracked. “You’re fine.”

“I have to tell you…” That strange pressure swathed her in darkness. Only Alan’s arms kept her from falling. She forgot what she had to tell him, but she hung on until the darkness swallowed her whole.

DR. BARTON’S CALM infuriated Alan. “After a thirty-six hour coma, we can’t know how she’ll be when she wakes up. She lost a lot of blood from that gash in her thigh, and she went into shock.”

Each word the doctor spoke embedded itself in Alan like a gut shot. Infuriated that he couldn’t help her, he stared at his unconscious wife. Her vulnerable, wounded body rumpled the blanket on her bed. The bank of blinking monitors that surrounded her screeched persistently enough to wake the dead. Alan bit the side of his cheek.

Men didn’t cry. So his father had preached, weeping into his beer or scrambled eggs or the ironing they’d both avoided after Alan’s mother left. Clutching Cate’s unresponsive hand, Alan alternated between an urge to bawl with unmanly pain and an acute need to break everything in the small hospital room.

“She’ll wake up,” Dr. Barton said, as if he saw through Alan’s attempt at stoic silence. “She’s healthy—no sign of infection in her wound. We just have to see where we stand. Tests, physical therapy—Excuse me, Alan, Nurse Matthews wants me.”

The doctor barely cleared the doorway before Cate’s twin, Caroline, slipped into the room.

She shared his wife’s fragile bone structure and dark auburn hair. In the old days, only he could tell them apart until Cate had begun using a blow-dryer to straighten her hair into a sleek curtain that brushed her shoulders. She’d looked more like a bank president than a loving creative homemaker. Caroline, a pragmatic businesswoman, never bothered to tame the wild curls she used now to cover her face. Neither of them seemed to see the contradiction in their hairstyles, but maybe Cate had expressed her altered feelings about her life in a not so subtle change.

Alan rubbed his fist against his temple, annoyed that he hadn’t asked her such questions before she’d decided to leave him.

Caroline eased around the bed. “What does Dr. Barton say?”

The sisters were so close they sometimes shared each other’s thoughts. If only Cate could sense Caroline’s pain, she’d wake up, feeling a compulsion to help her twin.

“Barton says the same thing over and over. We have to wait.” He stroked his wife’s forearm, grateful for the body heat that warmed her silky skin. How long since he’d touched her? How had he not noticed she was avoiding him, even in their bed? “I’m fed up with waiting.” Waiting and thinking about all the signs he should have read as he and Cate traveled to the end of their marriage.

“Where’s your dad, Alan? He’s the only member of our families unaccounted for in the waiting room, and I think you need him.”

Richard Palmer hated hospitals. Sickness scared the pants off him. “You know his phobia.”

“I thought he might have handled it for Cate.”

She clearly disapproved, and Alan didn’t blame her. “He calls our answering machine at home every ten minutes.” Alan roused himself. Last time he’d been out of this room, the waiting area had been empty. “Is Dan out there?”

Caroline shook her head. “I sent Shelly to look for him, and she called when she found him carrying a gas can down the highway. They’ll come here after she takes him to a service station and then back to his car.”

He nodded, twisting his hands on the metal bed rail. “A full gas tank probably seems pretty mundane to him right now.” He and Dan had stumbled blindly through the past two days. Cate anchored their family. Alan only hoped he was taking up enough of her slack to be a good father.

Caroline’s eyes seemed unnaturally wide as she tried to smile. “We’re all afraid. What if she doesn’t wake up? How long are we supposed to—”

“Don’t think about giving up.” Alan briefly hugged his sister-in-law. “She feels what you feel, Caroline.” It was ridiculous, putting such an airy-fairy notion into words, but Caroline met his gaze with Talbot determination.

“Don’t you worry.” She gripped Cate’s hand. “I refuse to lose her.”

Caroline’s tenacity almost renewed his faith. But it might be too late for him and Cate. Her serious injuries and the possibility she’d never let him try to win her back lingered in his mind.

He’d wanted to make her life comfortable and easy. Instead he’d let her down, and even now, he wasn’t sure what he’d done wrong.

The door swished open, and Aunt Imogen entered the room without speaking. Her bare head made Alan take a second look. She habitually wore oversize straw hats that she’d trimmed with flower displays never seen in nature. Today, only her fine gray curls clung to her temples.

Courage in her tired gaze touched Alan. He’d swear she hadn’t closed her eyes since he’d had to tell her about Cate. Neither had he, but she looked fragile.

He dragged a chair to the side of Cate’s bed. The way he’d let Cate think he resented her care for Aunt Imogen shamed him. According to local gossip, the older woman had been in midheartbreak over an affair with a married navy pilot when she’d taken in Cate and Caroline. Her emotionally hungry nieces had loved their aunt back to health, and Aunt Imogen and her brother, Ford, had shown Cate and Caroline the only true family affection they’d ever known. They’d also convinced Alan he belonged to the Talbot clan from the first day Cate had brought him home. He owed them as much as Cate ever could.

Taking Caroline’s hand, Aunt Imogen sat and smoothed the sheet beside Cate’s hip. “I guess you spoke to Dr. Barton this morning, Alan?”

Before he could answer, Uncle Ford prodded his way into the small room with the aid of a cherry cane and his great-niece Shelly’s hand at his elbow. Behind them, Dan craned for a glimpse of his mom.

Alan sidled through the others to wrap his arms around his son’s surprisingly broad shoulders. Dan hugged back, to Alan’s relief, but then he quickly pulled away. Dan preferred a handshake in recent years.

Alan met Aunt Imogen’s questioning gaze. “Barton can’t say much until Cate wakes up.”

“Until she breaks out of that coma,” Caroline said, as if the coma were an animal that had wrapped her sister in its vicious grip. “Let’s face facts.”

“I won’t face that word.” Aunt Imogen stood, her expression a faultless display of barely controlled fear. “Take this chair, Ford. Stop banging that cane.”

Her brother gave her an annoyed glance. “Good thing I’m not sensitive about having to use it.” He patted his sister’s hand. “I know you’re just worried.” Bellowing at a decibel level that compensated for the hearing loss he refused to admit, Uncle Ford nevertheless took Aunt Imogen’s seat. “Maybe the racket will wake—” he actually lifted his voice “—Cate.”

Her foot twitched beneath the blanket. Alan went back to her bed. “Cate?” Could waking her be that easy?

Her eyelids fluttered. For a horrified moment, he was afraid she couldn’t open her eyes.

“Cate,” he said, “wake up. Uncle Ford, why didn’t you shout at her before?”

“Shall I try again?” Uncle Ford struggled to his feet, maybe to lean a touch closer to Cate’s ear. He might have yelled again, except Dan appeared at his side to help him—or maybe to hold him back.

Alan flashed his son a grateful smile and took Cate’s hand. “Wake up,” he said again. “Please, Cate.” He didn’t beg easily, and his reticence had been a sore spot between them. He’d beg pretty damn freely now. “Cate,” he said again, and she opened her eyes and held them open. Her steady blue gaze made him want to shout, but he knew better than to scare her.

“Are you in pain?” He didn’t dare look away. Something different in her expression bothered him—some level of detachment he’d always expected to see. Wives detached themselves, no matter what you did to keep them with you. “Caroline, get the doctor.”

As Caroline left, Cate’s gaze followed her. She studied each person around her bed. Nothing that made her the Cate he loved was in that gaze. She eyed her aunt and uncle, her son and her niece with the same strange, dreamy look until she focused on Alan again.

“Who are you?”

The courtesy in her tone chilled him.

Trying to ask her what the hell she was talking about, he choked on his first breath. Confusion threaded the air, like a piece of twine that slipped from body to body. Strangling them all.

Aunt Imogen finally cried out, but then she covered her mouth. Uncle Ford’s cane clattered to the floor. Alan reached for both older people, steadying them with hands that shook hard enough to remind him how his father felt about men who gave in to their emotions.

But even his dad would understand this. Cate had left him after all.

THE LOVELY WOMAN with copper hair had raced out of the room, and the others, except for the dark man, poured after her. Just as well. Breathing took such an awful effort, and that many people must use a lot of oxygen.

Why would a hospital let such a crowd mill around a patient’s room? She stopped in midthought. She must be the patient. She was in bed.

How she’d come there escaped her, although she felt as if someone had welded a hot metal plate to her right leg. Nausea hovered, as if she were on a boat that refused to stop rocking.

She willed her queasiness away and concentrated on the man. Watching her from wide, dark-green eyes, he was clearly waiting for her to speak. As if he knew her.

She didn’t know him.

She must have been in an accident. Had she interrupted a family reunion? That many people in the same place had to be a family.

She took a deep breath that seemed to fill her head. The truth rocked her. Strangers didn’t hang around a hospital bed, even if they’d banded together to rescue an accident victim.

She didn’t remember what had happened to her. She remembered—nothing.

At her shoulder, a monitor’s steady beep grew more rapid. The sound drew her gaze as she tried to pry her own name out of her blank memory. She didn’t seem to have a name.

She knew her name. Everyone knew her own name. It was—She could feel it on the tip of her tongue. She ought to know. The monitor began to ping like sonar.

She didn’t know.

Suddenly aware of the man’s harsh grip on her hand, she turned toward him. “I don’t know you.”

“I’m your husband. I’m Alan.”

He terrified her. She tried to sit up in bed, but a powerful, formless weight held her down.

“I’ll help you,” he said.

He wrapped his large hands around her upper arms, but his strength made her feel weak, and she pushed him away.

“I don’t need your help.”

Stung, he straightened, looking impossibly tall. “What’s the matter?” He reached for her again, but something in her eyes must have shown him how seriously she wanted him to keep his hands off her. He fisted them at his sides.

“You act as if you have some right to touch me,” she whispered. “Who am I?” She wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

“My wife,” he said. “Cate…Palmer.”

“Why don’t I know you?” She darted a glance at the window. Low clouds hung above a sandstone building. It all looked completely unfamiliar. The glass offered a faint reflection, but she couldn’t see the details of her face. “Let me see what I look like. Maybe I’ll rememb—”