“What?” It was the tallest of the youths-a kid of about nineteen-and his bravado sounded a bit shaky. “How do you know who I am?”
“We want your car, lady,” another youth butted in, his voice threatening. “Get out or we’ll take you-”
“Me?” There was laughter in Jenny’s voice. She didn’t sound one inch afraid. “Come on, Tommy. That’s not your speed. Driving with pregnant women.”
“I’m not-”
She didn’t let him finish. “Tommy, I’ve seen you with ten different ladies since I moved in here, and every one is a heap more attractive than me. I don’t want to ruin your reputation.”
“You live here?” It was the same voice, raised in incredulity.
“I sure do. I know your mom, Jason-and yours, too, Tommy. In fact, I helped your kid sister with her homework last night. Adele’s your sister, isn’t she, Tommy? She’s a real cutie. I live up in number thirty-seven.”
“Hey, I think I’ve seen her around,” one of the boys said, his voice nervous. “She’s not lying.”
“So why are you driving this?” Tommy was disbelieving.
“Me? Driving this? You have to be kidding! It belongs to my boss,” Jenny said cheerfully. “He’s loaded. Isn’t it the best?”
“We want it.”
“You and me both, but you want to get me sacked?” Her voice grew reproachful. “Or me to have my baby right here?” A tremor entered her voice, and Michael started forward. Maybe she was afraid. He stopped again as he heard what she was saying. “I’m off to the hospital.” She sounded almost proud. “I’ve got labor pains. My boss offered to drive me. He’s just gone up to get my toothbrush.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Nope.” Michael peered around the corner and saw Jenny open the car door, get out and stand so they could see just how huge she was. She staggered a little and put her hand to her back. “You want to know what a baby on the way feels like? He’s kicking so hard. Heck, it hurts, though.”
“You-you’re having the kid?” It was the first voice- Jason-and all the aggression was gone. “It’s Jenny, isn’t it? I recognize you now. Heck. You want me to get my mom?”
“Thanks, Jason, but I think I need a hospital more than your mom.” Jenny was allowing the tremor in her voice to grow. “If Mr. Lord would only get back…”
That was a cue if ever he heard one. Michael emerged from the shadows, carrying her suitcase.
“Mr. Lord.” Jenny practically fell on his neck. “You took so long.”
“Is it getting worse?” Following her lead, he appeared not to notice the youths.
“Two minutes apart,” she said, clutching her back and grimacing. “I’m having a bad one now. Please…let’s go.”
Michael threw the case in the back and climbed into the car. His face was grim. “Yeah, right.”
“Good luck,” one of the boys said, and Michael looked up as if he’d only just noticed him.
“Thanks.”
“I meant the lady,” the boy said, and as the car started, he added, “hey, don’t spit the kid out onto his leather seats, Jenny. You’ll be sacked for that, no sweat!”
There was good-humored laughter as they headed out of sight.
“THAT,” MICHAEL SAID carefully as they nosed onto the street, “was amazing.” He moved the car forward, not fast enough to draw attention-the Corvette got enough of that as it was-but fast enough to be out of there if anyone had followed him down the fire escape. “I thought there was going to be trouble. That was great acting.”
“Who said I was acting?”
He almost crashed. The car veered toward the wrong side of the road, and Jenny grabbed the wheel and chuckled. “Hey, okay, I was joking. Watch the road.”
His blood pressure lurched and settled, and he glared at the woman by his side. “Thanks for the advice.”
She dimpled. “My pleasure. Honest, though, there was no problem. They’re not bad kids.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. They steal cars, but maybe I would, too, if I was as bored as they are. And they won’t hurt anyone. Besides, it’s stupid to drive a car like this.”
“Yeah, right.” He grimaced. “You sound like a schoolmarm.”
“Well…” She managed another smile. Smiles seemed her specialty, and he realized suddenly why he’d liked having her around the office the past few months. Her smile lit up all sorts of dark places, and some of those dark places were right inside him.
But she hadn’t noticed his reaction. “I guess if you’re rich enough to afford it then you can drive it,” she said, “but you should have an ordinary one so you can pretend to be an ordinary person sometimes.”
“Pretend?”
“I’d never presume to call you an ordinary person,” she said, eyes twinkling. “After all, you’re my boss.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“I know which side my bread’s buttered on.” She dimpled nicely, as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, and then hesitated, her laughter fading. “But I guess you’re not my boss now. If you could take me to the bus station…”
“The bus station?”
“It’s where you go to catch a bus when you don’t have a car like this to drive. Or any car to drive.” Her smile suddenly didn’t reach her eyes. “Michael-Mr. Lord-I’m really grateful-”
“You’re not working for me anymore, so it’s Michael,” he said curtly. “And you’re not going to any bus station. The immigration guys were arriving at your apartment as I left. Your landlady will let them in, they’ll discover your gear is gone, and they’ll think, ‘She knows we’re looking for her. She’s on the run.’ So where do you think they’ll look?”
“The airport?” she asked doubtfully, but he shook his head.
“No. They’ll never let you on board a plane looking this pregnant, and immigration knows that. So where?”
She was silent, sitting in the plush leather seat and trying to make her jumbled mind think. “I guess the bus station’s not such a hot idea, then.”
“No.”
More silence. Michael turned off the main road and headed to the river.
“Where are we going?” she asked. She chewed her lip, stubbornness returning. “I guess if you could drop me at a hotel, somewhere cheap-”
“They’ll think of that, too. It’ll take them twenty minutes to phone every hotel in town, and you’re not exactly easily disguised.”
She closed her eyes.
“Do you have any money?” Michael asked her curiously, and he saw her anger flash again.
“Of course I have money. Why do you think I’ve been living so cheaply for the past six months? I’ve saved everything.”
“So you’re intending to live on what you’ve saved from six months’ salary while you have the baby?” Michael asked incredulously. “No wonder the immigration people want you out. You’re hardly independent.”
“I’m independent.”
“You’re not.” He sighed and steered his car to where the oaks lined the cliff tops overlooking the river. There was a place there he knew. Quiet. Private. It was hardly the sort of place detectives would look for a fugitive.
He pulled to a stop and turned to face the woman beside him, and discovered she had the look of someone who expected to be slapped. Hard. It was a dreadful look. He gazed at her for a long moment and discovered feelings shifting inside him that had never shifted in his life. Feelings he didn’t understand one bit.
It put him off balance. Michael Lord was unemotional, detached, cool as ice, and now he suddenly found himself emotional, attached and hot as fire. Damn, who had done this to her? he thought savagely. He had to know.
“Tell me about this person you’re so afraid of, this Gloria,” he said, and waited.
For a while he didn’t think she’d tell him. She sat staring straight ahead at the deep-running river below. The weather was perfect, Michael thought inconsequentially, autumn perfect. He’d put the top down on the Corvette, and the sun wa
s warm on their faces.
She looked as if she needed its comfort, he thought, and suddenly had to resist the urge to put an arm around those frail shoulders. She was making him feel too proprietary for words.
But he still had to know about Gloria. “Tell me,” he said softly. “You can trust me, Jenny.” He teased her gently. “Have I not shinnied down drainpipes on your behalf?”
That brought an answering smile. “There was a perfectly good fire escape. If you chose the drainpipe…”
“Heroes always choose drainpipes,” he told her, smiling. “It’s far more heroic.”
“But much bumpier.” She managed a chuckle. “Not to say risky-especially if you’re thinking about the future production of little superheroes. Think of what all those sharp edges on the way down could have done to your manhood.”
That took him aback. He stared at her in shock. His quiet, demure secretary making remarks about his manhood! And then slowly, his deep green eyes creased into laughter.
HE CHUCKLED, a low, lazy rumble that Jenny hadn’t heard before. Very few people had. Michael Lord wasn’t much given to laughter.
It transformed him, she thought. Michael was big and solid, with a blaze of burnt-red hair, deep green eyes and strongly boned features that made him classically good-looking. His aloofness had repelled her, though, during the time she’d worked for him. She hadn’t noticed what she was noticing now, that the laughter behind his eyes made him seem not just classically good-looking. Impossibly good-looking!
She had other things on her mind, though, apart from Michael’s good looks. She tore herself away from the laughter in his eyes and forced herself to answer his question. After all, she did owe him the truth.
At least talking bought her time. She didn’t have to get out of this lovely car quite yet and face whatever was before her alone.
“I told you. Gloria is my mother-in-law,” she said in a low, husky voice that Michael had to lean forward to hear. “Or she was my mother-in-law.”
“You’re divorced?”
“No.” She gave a half smile but it didn’t reach her eyes. “My husband…Peter is dead.”
“Oh.” It was hopelessly inadequate. “I’m sorry.”
“He died seven months ago,” Jenny said tonelessly. “I’m used to it now.”
“Seven months isn’t long.” Michael thought back to the death of his partner on the police force. Was it two years already since Dan had died?
Grief and shock stayed with you forever, he thought, and the emotional damage lasted a lifetime. No, seven months wasn’t long at all.
Jenny was studying him curiously. “You look like you understand.”
“I don’t know how it feels to lose the person you love,” Michael said. “But I’d guess it must be just about as bad as it can get.”
“It is,” she said forcibly, staring at the river. “One minute I was telling him I was pregnant and watching his face, and he…” She shook her head as if shaking off a nightmare. “No matter. The next thing, the hotel phone’s ringing and they’re telling me Peter’s plane crashed and I’d best get to the hospital because he’s dying.” She flinched, and her eyes looked inward. “Peter died four days later, but in the hospital we talked about the baby… And his mother came from England and he told her…told Gloria…”
“Told Gloria what?”
“That I was pregnant.”
He frowned, still not understanding. “So there’s a problem with that? I’d imagine it might have been the only piece of good news in the whole tragedy.”
“But you don’t know Peter’s mother. She’s Gloria Hepworth-Morrow, eighth Duchess of Epingdale,” Jenny said bitterly. “The title makes a difference.”
“I imagine it might.” Then he shook his head. Maybe he couldn’t imagine. “No. I can’t. Why does it make a difference?”
“Because Gloria wants my baby.”
SHE LOOKED DESOLATE.
It took sheer, Herculean effort for Michael not to lean forward and take her in his arms.
Which was stupid. He didn’t get involved. Not ever.
Did he?
“Why does she want your baby?” he asked, and if his voice ended up sounding half-strangled, she didn’t seem to notice.
“You have no idea what she’s like,” Jenny said bitterly. “She’s so…regal. She swans around chairing her charities and opening fairs and making pronouncements on the state of the world, and people think she’s wonderful. What a matriarch, they say. But she controls everyone. She must. Her husband had no will of his own, and Peter…”
“Peter, your husband?”
“Yes. Peter, my husband, her son. She never let go, even though he could never live up to what was expected of him. She tried to control him every way she knew how, and I saw what it did to him. She used every means in her power to impose her will, and when he married me…”
“She didn’t like the match?”
“My father was a coal miner from Wales,” Jenny said bitterly. “What do you think?”
“I think Peter made a very good choice of wife,” Michael said, and Jenny flushed.
“Do you? It’s nice of you to say so, but I’m not so sure Peter did. In fact, I know he didn’t. After a while…after a while I figured that he’d just married me as one more act of rebellion. He didn’t stop, you see. It wasn’t enough that he’d married someone she hated and was ashamed of. He kept taking risks, doing things she disapproved of-making headlines in his own right.
“He brought us to Texas because there were so many extreme sports over here that he hadn’t tried before, and he was killed doing aerobatics in an aerolite that was sold to him by people only a fool would be crazy enough to trust. We fought about it all the time. I was so frightened. We’d…we’d been thinking of separating, and then I found I was pregnant.”
“Which was a disaster?”
That brought her chin up and the spark into her eyes. “No! There’s no way I regret my baby. He wasn’t planned, but I want him so much.”
“And so does Gloria?”
“Of course. And I have no money to fight her. My parents died a long time ago, I have no family, and Gloria’s moving in for the kill. As far as she’s concerned I’m only the breeder-a very poor-class breeder at that-and I deserve no say whatsoever in the way he’s raised. My baby is the next Earl of Epingdale, and that’s all she’s interested in.”
He thought this over and found a flaw. “Your baby might be a girl.”
“No such luck. I checked.” She grimaced. “It was a strange reason for gender testing, but there it is. I was desperate. So yes, I’m carrying the ninth earl. Gloria doesn’t know it yet, but the minute he’s born she will. She’ll pay to find out, and her spies are everywhere. That’s why the immigration officers arrived today. She’ll have been watching, waiting, and she’ll see her chance to move.
“I was lucky in a way that we were here when Peter was killed, but if she gets me back to England, there’s no way I can immigrate here-or anywhere else-with a tiny baby. She’ll have bribed whoever she had to bribe, or blackmailed them if they can’t be bought.”
“But, Jenny, you’re this baby’s mother,” Michael said gently, still puzzled. “No court in the land will take your baby.”
“No, but…” She shook her head. “You don’t understand. If I stay in England it’ll be easy for Gloria to take control. I saw what she did to Peter. She ruined any chance he had for happiness, and she’s not doing the same for my little one. She’s already told the British press I’m pregnant, so there’ll be no privacy. The minute my baby’s born she’ll be showering him with expensive gifts, pushing me into the lifestyle she dictates.”
“Maybe it’s not such a bad lifestyle. Other people have learned to live with money.” He tried a smile, but she didn’t smile back.
“You don’t know Gloria. She just takes. She’s so strong. Peter tried to fight her, but she destroyed him. She’ll destroy my baby with her corrupt values. The only things that mat
ter to her are publicity, money and power. I won’t let her give my son those values.”
“You don’t have to accept.”
“Ha!” She laughed mirthlessly. “Can you see a child refusing what she offers? Being given a trip to Disneyland with his wonderful grandmother, and his dragon of a mother refusing? Or me refusing to let him go to the most expensive schools? Gloria will make sure the press knows, and the press would have a field day. ‘Mother makes ninth earl live in poverty.’ I can’t afford to do anything but send him to a government school and live in an apartment. Do you think Gloria will let her heir do that?
“She can be charming and she’s absolutely ruthless. She wants this child, and if she has her way he’ll be brought up in a goldfish bowl of publicity with the eyes of the world press on him. But there’s no way. He’s mine!”
And she put her arms around her swollen body and hugged it, as though she was protecting her baby while it was still in the womb.
Michael sat back, stunned.
Things were starting to be clear, but the clearer they became, the less he liked them. If so much money and power were involved…
What would he have done, he thought, if he’d been Gloria and he wanted this child home in England?
Exactly what Gloria had done, he decided. Keep tabs on Jenny while she was pregnant. Watch from afar because there was little he could do to pressure her before the baby was born. Then, as the birth neared and Jenny wasn’t in England, he’d make sure she returned. Warn the immigration officials that she was planning to make a run for it. Even offer…
“How much money does Gloria have?” he asked, and Jenny shuddered.
“Millions. I don’t know, exactly. I’ve never asked, but Peter said it was ridiculous for one person to control so much wealth.”
“So if she wanted you back in England, she could offer immigration a private jet with a doctor on board?”
“I’d imagine so. Yes. Of course.”
“They’d go for that, too,” Michael guessed. “It’d get the problem out of their hair, and you could hardly plead the case that you needed refugee status. Fleeing from money doesn’t meet any refugee criteria I’ve ever seen.” He sighed. “Jenny, why didn’t you leave the U.S. before this and go someplace where there was a chance of you staying permanently? Pregnant, with no family support, you meet no immigration criteria at all.”
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