The Mother of His Child

by Sandra Field

  Cal said quietly, “You’ve got hair the color of fire instead.”

  Had a man ever looked at her quite the way Cal was looking at her now? “You mustn’t talk to me like that,” she cried.

  “I keep telling you I can’t help myself!”

  Her shoulders slumped. “This has to be the craziest conversation I’ve ever had in my life,” she whispered. “Cal, you’re going to drive me back to Burnham right now so I can pick up Christine’s car, and then I’m going home. To Faulkner Beach. And I swear, this time I’ll stay away from Burnham. I mean it.”

  “I don’t want you to,” he burst out. Raking his fingers through his hair, he added in total frustration, “But I haven’t got any choice, have I? My first responsibility has to be to Kit. I’m all the security she has. She’s so confused, so different from the happy kid she used to be. I’m sure I’m right in keeping you from her. I’ve got to be. I can’t risk making things any worse than they are.”

  “She has to come first,” Marnie agreed, and found herself smoothing the lines in his cheek, feeling the slight rasp of his beard beneath her fingertips with a primitive thrill of pleasure that made nonsense of her words. She added with patent honesty, “It won’t be as difficult as I thought for me not to see her again…because I know now that she has a good father. One who really loves her.”

  Cal’s face convulsed with emotion; Marnie’s throat tightened as she saw a sheen of tears glitter in his own eyes. He said huskily, “So you’re generous as well as honest. Thanks, Marnie.”

  “If I’m honest,” she said, “I have to tell you I can’t take much more of this. I’m exhausted. Drive me back, Cal, please?”

  “Yeah…we’d better get out of here.” His eyes roamed her face, where the strain of the past couple of hours was only too visible. With an inarticulate groan, he took Marnie in his arms, lowering his head. His lips were warm and by no means as sure of themselves as Marnie might have expected. They spoke to her of a side of him he hadn’t put into words, a gentler side that bypassed all her defenses and all the reasons she shouldn’t be doing this.

  His mouth lingered on hers. Then he explored her cheekbones and her closed lids, his hands stroking her arms from wrist to shoulder. She heard him mutter something against her throat; then once again he kissed her on the lips. A slow heat spread from her belly to her limbs as though the sun were rising within her, bright and warm and beautiful. Her body swayed toward him, her palms pressing to his chest.

  She could feel his heart thudding as though he’d run the length of the beach. His kiss deepened, and like a spring flower, Marnie opened to him, exulting in the astonishing intimacy of his tongue on hers. It was like nothing she’d ever felt before, nothing she could possibly have imagined. It was like coming home, she thought, where home was both safety and the wildest of adventures. Her hands slid up the hard, muscled wall of his chest, and linked themselves around his neck, brushing the unexpected silkiness of his hair. As she made a small sound of delight, Cal drew back, his eyes wandering over her dazed features and brilliant sea blue irises. “You’re so beautiful you take my breath away,” he said thickly, then pulled her the length of his body so they stood hip to hip.

  His arousal both excited and terrified her. “Cal, I—”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t want me—I know you do.”

  “But I’m not—”

  Again he closed her lips with his own, his hands traveling the long curve of her spine and the rise of her hips. In a sunburst of longing, Marnie forgot about caution and restraint, those two words that had kept her armored against men ever since Kit was born, and kissed him back with a passionate abandon that made him groan deep in his throat.

  Finally, Cal raised his head. His eyes boring into hers, he said roughly, “There’s got to be a way out of this, Marnie. I can’t just say goodbye to you today, turn my back on you as if you don’t exist. I haven’t been to bed with anyone since Jennifer died, I told you that. You’re the only woman who’s made me want to change my mind.” He clasped her by the elbows. “You live fifty miles away—that’s a safe enough distance. No reason we couldn’t have an affair. If it’s been thirteen years since you’ve made love with anyone, you’re long overdue. And I know I am.”

  Marnie stood very still and of all the emotions churning in her belly couldn’t have said which was uppermost. Desire? Fury? She said finally, “That would be so easy for you, wouldn’t it? Your daughter in Burnham and your mistress in Faulkner. Everything compartmentalized.”

  “Easy? No. But I want you…and I need you as my mistress far more than Kit needs you as a mother.”

  “No,” Marnie said.

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “I mean the opposite of yes,” she said vigorously. “I don’t want to have an affair with anyone. But especially not with you. Cal, you’re Kit’s father, for heaven’s sake!”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” he said sarcastically. “But that’s got nothing to do with what’s going on between us—you kissed me like there was no tomorrow.”

  “Maybe I did. But a kiss is one thing, an affair quite another. I’m not a chess piece made out of ivory that you can move around a board. I’ve got feelings and a past. Spend a couple of hours a week in bed with you and then the rest of the week pretend you and Kit don’t exist? Forget it.”

  “You told me you didn’t like to play it safe.”

  “You’re asking me to jump in the deep end of the pool when I can’t swim!”

  “Sometimes that’s the only way to learn!”

  “Not for me. The answer’s no, Cal, and now would you please drive me back to Burnham?”

  “You’re making a mistake.”

  “An affair would be the mistake.”

  His face, she saw distantly, had closed against her, his eyes like stones. “Fine,” Cal said, then carefully walked around her to climb the bank. As they got in the Cherokee, he said coldly, “You’d better put on your hat and dark glasses.”

  As the vehicle jounced through the potholes, Marnie jammed her curls under the brim of her hat and tied the cord ruthlessly tight under her chin. At least her dark glasses hid her from Cal as well as from everyone else in Burnham, she thought, and sat in total silence for the fifteen minutes it took to reach the street with the coffee shop.

  Only then did Cal speak. “If you ever need to get in touch with me, I’m head of the university engineering department.”

  The engineering school at Burnham had one of the finest reputations in the country. So she hadn’t been wrong to sense Cal’s aura of power. “There’s no need for us to keep in touch,” she said. “It’s too risky.”

  “I didn’t say we’d keep in touch. I meant if there was ever an emergency. Where’s your car?”

  “It’s that white one.”

  He pulled into the parking space ahead of Christine’s Pontiac and said flatly, “Take care of yourself, Marnie.”

  “I will,” Marnie answered with a brittle smile, slid to the sidewalk and slammed the door. Blind to her surroundings, she walked out into the street to get in Christine’s car.

  She’d lost Kit, found her and lost her again. Whereas Cal—a man different from any other she’d ever met—she’d merely found and lost.

  All in less than twenty-four hours.

  Dimly, Marnie heard a man yell something from the other side of the road; sunk in her own thoughts, she didn’t even bother looking up.

  Then everything happened very fast.

  The scream of rubber on pavement ripped through the quiet of the little side street. Someone seized her bodily and flung her into the space between the Pontiac and the Cherokee. She banged her hip, her elbow and her cheek on shiny dark green paint. Metal rasped on concrete so close Marnie squeezed her eyes shut; there was a loud clang, followed by several seconds of eerie silence.

  “Stay here!” Cal ordered.

  Her eyes flew open as he leaped from between the vehicles onto the sidewalk. Slowly, she straightened
. So it was Cal who’d grabbed her and thrown her against the Cherokee.

  A small blue truck was angled halfway across the sidewalk beyond Christine’s car. Its hood was wrapped around a metal pole, which explained the clang. Black skid marks scored the pavement; they’d come within two feet of where she’d been standing.

  No wonder Cal had reacted with such speed and violence.

  As if it were happening a long way away, Marnie saw Cal open the door of the blue truck and help the driver out: a man in his fifties who was sputtering incoherently about wheels locking and lost steering.

  Lost.

  Marnie stayed where she was. She hadn’t had the time to be frightened beforehand; now she wiped her damp palms down the sides of her jeans and felt her heartbeat racketing in her chest. A police car arrived on the scene. Cal spoke briefly to the officer, then strode back to her. He grasped her by the shoulders. “You okay? Sorry I was so rough, but for the space of five seconds I thought he was going to run you down.”

  “You sure move fast,” Marnie said, rubbing her sore elbow.

  He gave her a wolfish grin. “There are some situations where you act first and worry about the consequences afterward.”

  She gazed at him speculatively. She’d learned a lot about Cal in those few moments. Decisiveness, lightning-swift reflexes, a total disregard for his own safety—he’d displayed them all. And he was still blazing with an energy he was unable to tamp down. “Did it occur to you that he could’ve hit you?” she asked in a neutral voice.

  “Nope.”

  She added thoughtfully, “What do you do for excitement, Cal?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re an engineer, a widower, the father of a twelve-year-old. But there’s a lot more to you than that.”

  “Come off it, Marnie. Anyone else would have shoved you out of the way.”

  Others might have tried, but Marnie rather doubted they would have succeeded with as much efficiency and panache as Cal. “You mentioned something about Third-World guerrillas yesterday—is that where you got your tan?”

  “Kit and I went sailing in Tortola on the March break,” he answered impatiently. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

  “In other words, mind your own business, Marnie Carstairs.”

  “Brains as well as beauty,” he said with another of those fierce grins.

  But Marnie was quite unable to get angry with him. She said soberly, “Thanks, Cal. You took a terrible risk there.”

  “Not really. He didn’t even touch your friend’s car.”

  “You as good as saved my life,” Marnie said stubbornly.

  “You’re sure you’re all right to drive?”

  He wanted to be rid of her; that was the message. If he couldn’t take her to bed, he didn’t want her at all. Her heart like a boulder in her chest, she said steadfastly, “Yes, I’m okay. Goodbye, Cal.” Then she got in Christine’s car and drove away from the flashing lights on the police cruiser, from the small crowd that had gathered, and from Cal, who’d risked his life for her and who wanted a tidy, long-distance affair with her.

  The whole way home, Marnie forced her attention to her driving, determined not to think about Kit, whom she’d seen so briefly and inconclusively, or to replay all the complexities of the episode with Cal at the picnic table. What had happened there had broken every one of her self-imposed rules. She’d talked about Kit’s birth. She’d allowed a man past her defenses.

  Bad moves, both of them. Yet had she had a choice?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  FOR the next few days, Marnie felt as though her sense of time was utterly distorted. Sometimes the minutes crept by so slowly she thought she’d scream—minutes during which she knew she was exiled from her own daughter—and time became an abyss of longing and loss that almost incapacitated her. During these periods, she wished with all her heart that she’d never—from a sense of duty—gone through her mother’s papers after her death. Ignorance had been far better than this dull ache that she carried with her everywhere she went.

  Her wounds had healed over in the years since she’d given birth; she’d become resigned to her child’s absence and been more or less at peace. To discover Kit Huntingdon’s existence, so near to her and yet so unutterably far away, had torn all the old scars open so that they were raw and bleeding.

  She wasn’t sleeping well. She lost weight. Several of her fellow teachers kept asking her what was wrong. Christine was openly worried about her. And to all of them Marnie gave the same safe lies. “I’m fine. Maybe it’s a touch of the flu…or spring fever.”

  But then sometimes she’d be at her desk in the school library or sitting on her deck after work watching the ocean, and she’d realize a whole hour had gone by without her even realizing it, an hour during which she’d gone over in her mind, again and again, every little nuance of that scene in the coffee shop. Every tone of Kit’s voice, every implication of her words. Searching for her child. Trying to connect with her the only way she could.

  A futile exercise if ever there was one.

  Kit was one thing. Cal another.

  Marnie thought about him, too, and about his offer of an affair. He haunted her dreams, some of them graphically sexual in a way that made her extremely uneasy. She couldn’t afford any breaching of her self-imposed celibacy; she’d been content with it for years. And to end it with Kit’s father, of all the men in the world, would be disastrous. Yet Cal’s kisses were imprinted on her, body and soul; she couldn’t erase them from her memory no matter how hard she tried.

  Which didn’t stop her from trying.

  Unfortunately, it was spring. The sap was rising, the buds were thickening, the birds were mating. Why should she be exempt? Put that together with a man as handsome and sexy as Cal Huntingdon and it spelled trouble. With a capital T. Or sex, she thought ruefully, with a capital S.

  Any number of springs had passed since Kit’s birth without her wanting to haul a black-haired man into her bed and throw all her inhibitions out the window. To say yes instead of no.

  To once again, metaphorically, take to the Virginia creeper.

  Sure, Marnie, and look where that landed you. In the mess you’re in now. Forget Cal Huntingdon! Forget he even exists.

  As so often happens, that which she was striving to forget forced itself upon her. The first weekend after she’d met Cal, Marnie went rock climbing with her friend Mario on Saturday, and on Sunday she plunged into an orgy of housecleaning; it beat sitting around feeling sorry for herself. She bundled up clothes she no longer wore, scrubbed the kitchen cupboards and cleaned the oven, then went through all her books, sorting out a pile she’d take to the secondhand bookshops in Halifax. When she was halfway through a pile of magazines, a headline across the cover leaped out at her. Engineer With A Difference, it said.

  She flipped the magazine open and turned to the article. With a strange sense of fatality—did she really think she was going to escape him?—she found herself staring at a photo montage of Cal. Cal wearing a summer-weight suit, posed with a group of officials in Ghana. Cal naked to the waist beside a new water-purifying system in southern India. Cal in steel-toed boots and dirty khaki pants supervising the construction of an eye clinic in Bangladesh.

  Her housecleaning forgotten, Marnie hunkered down on the floor and started to read. Fifteen minutes later, she was sitting staring into space. Cal’s other commitment, besides being head of the engineering school, was as a consulting engineer to various charitable organizations on a strictly volunteer basis. So this was what he’d meant by travel.

  The magazine was dated two and a half years ago. Before Jennifer died.

  Oh, damn, Marnie thought helplessly. Damn and double damn. Why do I have to find out Cal’s everything I admire? A man who takes risks. A man who cares about other people and puts his life on the line to show that he cares. Because one thing the article made clear was that Cal had, on occasion, found himself face-to-face with rebels who didn’t appreciate his humanit
arian acts, as well as with regimes who’d rather he went elsewhere. Face-to-face with danger. Very real danger.

  This was where he’d honed his reflexes, the alertness to threat and disregard for his own safety that he’d demonstrated on that side street in Burnham, and where he’d met up with the guerrillas he’d mentioned. She’d been right to guess there was more to him than showed on the surface. A great deal more.

  She had no recollection of ever having read the article before. But then she often canceled her magazine subscriptions because she never seemed to get around to reading them.

  Marnie put the magazine to one side and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. And that night she dreamed about Cal again.

  Two days after Marnie had read the article about Cal, she stayed in school after hours. The Compton Junior High Cougars were to play her own school’s basketball team; the finals were just getting under way. Marnie’s duties included providing a canteen during the game and hot dogs afterward. She liked doing this. One reason she’d become a teacher was to keep in touch with kids.

  She hurried down the corridor carrying an armload of wiener buns. Ketchup, mustard and relish were next on the list, and she mustn’t forget to check the cooler. By the time she got to the canteen, a couple of the visiting players were waiting for her. With a frown of puzzlement, she realized they weren’t wearing the red-and-green uniforms of the Cougars.

  Across the blue singlet of the nearer girl was inscribed Burnham Bears. Marnie dropped the buns in an untidy heap on the counter and said faintly, “What are you doing here? Your team doesn’t even belong to our league.”

  “Yep,” one of the girls said, “we do now. There was a big shuffle a couple days ago.”

  The other girl said, “Wow, you sure look like one of our forwards. I was just reading about movie look-alikes…that’s cool. C’n I have a bag of dill chips?”

  “Yes,” Marnie said. Clamping down on a terror that could easily reduce her to a blithering idiot, she opened the cash box and somehow counted out the right change. Then she locked the cash in a drawer and hurried back down the corridor toward the staff room. She’d get on the phone. Christine would spell her. And she’d get out of here as fast as she could.