The Texan's Baby Bombshell

by ALLISON LEIGH,

  “Would it hurt to ask?”

  “There’s nothing that simple when it comes to Nelson Hudson.” Her mother had been manipulative and tragic. On the other hand, her father had simply been demanding. Controlling. He’d wanted the perfect family to hold up to his friends.

  What he’d gotten was Sylvia and Laurel.

  “You lived in Europe. You had a passport.”

  “I already thought of that. I would have had it with me if I’d been on my way to Canada. Surely, there is some procedure in place for people to obtain new ID when—”

  “—the unthinkable happens,” he said gruffly. She realized the car was slowing. And then he pulled off onto the dirt shoulder and stopped altogether. “Okay. You want to drive. I’ll give you one hour.”

  She was too surprised to respond and just stared at him as he put the car in Park and got out, walking around the front of the car to her side.

  He opened her door. “Changed your mind?”

  She quickly unfastened her safety belt. She slid out of the car and looked up at him. “What do you think?”

  “I think I never could make the smart decisions where you’re concerned,” he muttered.

  She narrowed her eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He waved his hand at her. “Just go on. Before I change my mind.”

  She gave him another look but then crossed around to the driver’s side and got in. She adjusted the seat so she could reach the gas and brake pedals better while he adjusted the passenger seat so he could stretch out his legs better. Then she fussed with the mirrors until they, too, were perfectly positioned.

  “Wasting daylight, sweetheart. Or don’t you feel as confident now that you’re behind the wheel?”

  She gave him a tight smile. “Don’t be nast—Oh. I see.” She pointed her finger into his face. “I see what you’re doing.”

  She put the car in gear and checked the road. It was as empty as it had been when he’d pulled over, and she started accelerating.

  She could feel her heart climbing up into her head where it pounded noisily in her ears. Her fingers were so tight it was as if they were trying to strangle the steering wheel. She unwound them, one at a time, flexing them until her knuckles were no longer white.

  How many times had she seen Adam do the very same thing?

  The wheels bumped off the shoulder as she steered back onto the highway and sped up even more until the speedometer needle was squarely on top of the bright white sixty.

  “Speed limit is ten miles faster,” he said a while later.

  She grimaced. “I know.” She managed to edge up five more miles per hour, which made it feel as though she was speeding hell-bent for leather. “Just...don’t bother me.” At least there were no other cars to be annoyed with her failure to drive at the full speed.

  He adjusted the back of his seat so that it was reclining several inches. “One hour,” he reminded sternly.

  “You’re going to sleep anyway.”

  “No.” He crossed his arms over his wide chest and exhaled audibly. “Just giving you a chance to spread your wings.”

  She was quite afraid that he meant it.

  The road ahead was one narrow sweep bisecting closely shorn fields of earth green and flaxen gold. The sky was a big round bowl of pale blue, striped with nearly translucent streaks of white cloud.

  “Last summer. You said we ran into each other.”

  “Hmm.”

  She glanced at him. His eyes were closed. But there was nothing relaxed about him.

  She watched the road again, felt the vibration of the tires. And she hated the fact that—even though the road was bone-dry, the sky clear—she still felt nervous. As if she were riding a bronco that could break out of control at the drop of a hat. She peeled one of her hands away from the steering wheel and tested the reception on the radio. She found one station. The Tejano music was faint but it wasn’t riddled with static. She turned up the volume a notch. “Where did we see each other?”

  He didn’t answer right away. A woman singing in Spanish underscored by bright horns filled the silence but didn’t keep it from feeling much too thick. “Does it matter?”

  “The fact that you’re asking makes me tend to think it does.” She could see a semi now in her rearview mirror. Gaining rapidly.

  She chewed the inside of her lip, feeling tense until it buffeted the car as it passed them. Only once it was speeding ahead of her, the mud flaps bearing silhouettes of a buxom girl, did she let out a long breath.

  “You’re doing fine.” His eyes were still closed.

  “You’re supposed to be sleeping.”

  The corner of his lips lifted slightly. He looked vaguely piratical with his dark whiskers and tumbled hair. She’d never thought she cared for facial hair on men, but there was no denying his dark appeal.

  She nudged the vent so the air-conditioning blew more directly at her face.

  “In Houston. At the art museum.”

  She almost thought she’d imagined his words. She glanced at him. “I worked there.”

  He opened his eyes. “You remember?”

  She shook her head and focused on the road again. “Did we really just run into each other, or did you come to see me?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It feels like it does.”

  “I came to see you,” he said eventually.

  “Why?”

  He shifted. “Because I was in Texas for Gerald Robinson’s wedding. Decided to look you up.”

  “Just for old times’ sake.”

  “Yup.” His voice sounded clipped.

  He wasn’t telling her everything. She knew it in her soul. Part of her wanted to force the matter. Part of her—the larger part—wanted to pretend she’d never asked. Wanted to rewind the moment altogether. “Was I engaged?”

  He shifted again. “You had an enormous diamond on your finger. Two of those bridal magazines sitting on the desk in your office. You were looking at gowns. And flowers, if I remember.”

  She wished she could remember.

  “Did I tell you Eric and I were pregnant?”

  “No.”

  No hesitation in that answer.

  She chewed the inside of her lip for another quarter mile. “Did you meet him then? Eric?”

  “I didn’t meet him until the day of the transplant.”

  She tried to make the pieces fit inside her mind. But it felt as fruitless as pounding a square peg into the proverbial round hole. “How could I abandon my own baby, Adam?”

  “Pull over.”

  “What? No! No,” she added more calmly. “You’re the one who needs to sleep. How long have you been awake now?”

  “Too long. Pull over.”

  Her hands tightened. “I don’t want to.”

  He swore. “Laurel, pull the damn car over.”

  He hadn’t raised his voice. She was pretty sure that if he had, she could have ignored him. But he hadn’t.

  She slowed and steered onto the shoulder. “If we keep stopping like this, it’s going to take forever to get to Houston.”

  “We’ll be there soon enough.” He barely waited for the tires to stop before he pushed open the car door and got out. His long legs ate up the ground as he paced, then turned around and strode back to the car. He gestured at her. “Get out.”

  She put the car in Park, exhaling. Then she got out of the car and walked around to the passenger side, prepared to get in, but he held out his hand. “Wait.”

  She went on the toes of her smiley-faced tennis shoes. Then back down again. She nervously fingered her necklace just below the buttoned collar. “Okay. I’m waiting.”

  He shoved his fingers through his hair, then hooked them in his front pockets. “There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to—�
� his lips pressed together “—to lay it out there.”

  “The more you talk like that, the more I think I have to brace myself,” she warned. Half lightly, as if she could force him into agreeing.

  “You didn’t tell me you were pregnant,” he said abruptly. “And you particularly didn’t tell me you and Eric were pregnant.”

  “This was a year ago, though. Last June? I had to have been pregnant. The baby was born in January.”

  “He wasn’t due until February.”

  An SUV roared past and she saw the flash of a face in the window looking their way.

  “Is that why he got sick? Because he was early?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “When we get to Houston, Dr. Patel will give you the same answers he’s already given me. It’s not likely.”

  “How do you know when I was due, anyway?” She pressed her finger to the pain that had appeared in the center of her forehead.

  “Because I know exactly when he was conceived.”

  Another SUV zoomed past them. If there were any faces staring their way, Laurel didn’t notice. “I told you that?”

  “You didn’t tell me anything.”

  “Then Eric—”

  “He didn’t tell me anything, either.” He hooked his hand behind his neck as if it were paining him. “I know when Linus was conceived, because I was there. Linus is my son, Laurel. Mine and yours.”

  She felt the ground tilt. She opened her mouth, but nothing emerged. Her head was roaring.

  From somewhere far off, she heard Adam swear.

  And after that she heard nothing at all.

  * * *

  Adam cursed himself to hell and back all over again when Laurel’s eyes rolled. He barely managed to catch her before she hit the ground.

  Her head lolled against his shoulder when he picked her up and carried her to the car, carefully lowering her onto the rear seat.

  He crouched alongside the vehicle, leaning inside. “Come on, baby.” His hand shook as he gingerly touched her cheek. “Wake up, sweetheart. We’ll figure all of this out, I promise.”

  She didn’t stir. Her face was unearthly pale but she was breathing.

  He pressed his forehead against her cool cheek and forced himself to stay calm. His mom had fainted once when he’d been a kid. She’d been pregnant with Arabella. Out cold for several minutes. The longest minutes of his life, until he’d been an adult and had offered a ring and his heart to Laurel Hudson.

  He reached across her for the water bottle sitting in the cup holder. It was practically empty but he poured out what was left on a crumpled napkin and pressed it to her forehead. He undid the button at her throat and loosened her collar. The gold L on her necklace glinted in the light.

  After everything that had happened, why did she still wear the necklace?

  “Come on, sweetheart. Come back to me.” He wedged himself onto an edge of the seat and lifted her feet. Above the heart, if he remembered his first aid correctly. Considering the panic piercing through him, it was hard to think at all. “I shouldn’t have told you.” He propped her heels on his shoulder and moved the wet napkin from her forehead over her cheeks. “Not on top of you remembering your mother. I should have waited. I should—”

  She stirred and her foot slipped from his grasp, landing hard on his hip. He barely noticed. He cupped her cheek, breathing only slightly easier when he saw the sliver of aquamarine between her long eyelashes.

  “What—”

  “Shh. You’re fine. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  Her expression crumpled. “How can anything ever be fine?”

  “I told you. You’re here.”

  “Everyone would be better off without me.”

  “Don’t even go there,” he warned flatly. “That’s the kind of thing your mother used to tell you and you hated it.”

  Her fine eyebrows tugged together. Color was coming back into her cheeks. “I did hate it,” she whispered. She pulled the wet napkin away from her face and grimaced at it before tossing it aside. “I fainted.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ve never fainted in my life.”

  “Sure about that?”

  Her lips twisted and she pulled her legs off his. She pushed herself up until she was sitting. “I can’t be sure of anything, can I?”

  You can be sure of me.

  He didn’t say the words, though. Last year at the art museum when he’d seen the diamond, seen the wedding magazines, seen the truth in her eyes, he’d finally faced the truth. Despite everything, despite that night together in New York after the muddy festival, she still hadn’t chosen him. Chosen them.

  He’d told her he was done. Never again. He wasn’t ever again going to be the safety net she’d kept dangling from her fingertips. When she was upset about her mother, when she was struggling against her father’s controlling expectations, when she was frustrated with the dullness of the jobs she’d taken in one museum or art gallery after another because what she really wanted to do was create her own art. She could dump it all on the fiancé she hadn’t even had the guts to tell Adam about before the two of them had been climbing inside each other’s skin barely a month earlier.

  Then he’d turned on his heel and walked away.

  Now she pushed at him until he got out of the car. She followed. “Let’s just get to Houston, please. You can explain everything else you’re not saying along the way.” She lowered herself into the passenger seat and began adjusting it.

  He pushed her door closed. Houston. Where the man whose diamond she had been wearing last year was still waiting.

  He rounded the car and got in, shoved the seat back as far as it would go, and started driving. Again.

  Only this time, he told her the rest.

  He told her everything.

  Except for the fact that he had never stopped loving her. And that if he were a better man, she’d have never felt so alone and so desperate that she’d believed leaving their child was the only option left.

  * * *

  The wing of the Houston hospital where the transplant unit was located was smaller than Laurel had pictured in her mind.

  By the time they’d entered and were standing in a waiting room that bore cartoon characters all over the walls, she was sweating. She could feel beads of it sliding down her spine and her hair kept clinging to her face no matter how many times she tucked it behind her ears.

  “Are you sure you’re up to this?” He took her hand and squeezed gently. They were waiting for the duck who’d greeted them to come back and grant permission to pass through the castle door. “You look ready to pass out again.”

  She did feel ready to pass out, but she was loath to admit the obvious.

  She could feel the panic coming, but knowing what was happening and being able to stop it were two different things. “I have to—I have to get out of here.” Before the horrible, terrible clawing shredded her from the inside out. While his expression was still forming a frown, she bolted out the door and immediately found herself standing in the middle of a city she couldn’t remember.

  One hand on the stitch in her side, one on the ache in her chest, she searched for a street sign. A building sign. Anything that would help ground her back in something remotely approaching reality.

  Intersection. She needed an intersection. She ran again. Skidded to a halt at a corner where dune buggies and chariots crisscrossed in busy confusion along with pedestrians. She read the street signs. They were in French and meant nothing to her.

  “Please,” she said frantically, “please can you help me?” She stretched her hand toward a man in a gray suit and red tie who swerved away with a look of pure distaste. She whirled again toward another pedestrian. Dark sunglasses perched on her patrician nose. “Do you know where the hospital is?”
r />   Laurel’s mother tugged down her sunglasses with scarred wrists. “You have to choose,” she screeched.

  Laurel gasped, her eyes flying open. But instead of her mother, she stared into Adam’s frowning face.

  She blinked. She wasn’t standing on a strange street corner in Houston. She hadn’t run out on her child, yet again.

  She let out a shuddering breath. She was with Adam.

  The father of that child.

  And they were parked at the curb in front of a small house.

  “You were having a bad dream,” he said. “You want to talk about it?”

  “No.” She rubbed her eyes, wishing she could also rub away the dregs of the nightmare. Was it better to have a dream about a panic attack or actually have a panic attack?

  At least she didn’t feel like she was having a heart attack. So maybe that was progress.

  “Where are we?”

  “My place.” He pushed open the car door and climbed out, moving stiffly. “In Rambling Rose.”

  She looked quickly at the house again.

  Then Adam opened her door. “Come on.”

  His fingers closed warmly around hers as she climbed from the car. But as soon as she was standing beside him, he let go of her again.

  She crossed her arms in front of her, tucking away her hands. “I didn’t know you wanted to stop in Rambling Rose.”

  “Only to switch to my truck.” He opened the trunk and removed his overnighter and her canvas tote. She wasn’t even sure when he’d moved them from the back seat. “I talked to the hospital again while you were sleeping. The fever’s gone.”

  She blinked. “Just...just like that.”

  “Just like that.”

  She was relieved. Desperately so. She also felt decidedly off-kilter. “How long did I sleep?”

  “Five hours.” He strode up the quaint stone walkway to the front door and pushed open the door, waiting for her. “It’s too hot to stand out there in the sun.”