by Diana Palmer
Peggy laughed and threatened him with the soup ladle.
After that, there were no more questions. Amelia settled into the routine, helping her father by fixing meals while Peggy set type, doing odd jobs around the house. In her spare time, she missed Worth like mad and thought about the tiny baby she was carrying and how she was going to make a life for it. She worried about Jeanette, too. It had been such a blow to leave her friend.
Her grandfather was shelling along the beach at the end of her first week home, and she ambled lazily along the sandy stretch in a huge, floppy pink-flowered dress and sandals with her long, dark hair flying in the wind, dreamily scanning the shimmering sea on the horizon.
The grizzled, thin old man looked up from a conch shell he’d just pried from the sand. “About time you came home,” he grumbled. “Thought you’d be over to see me before this. I came to see you, after all.”
“For five minutes, in between ball games on Sunday,” she tossed back. “I’ve been busy. Somebody has to feed Mom and Dad.”
He chuckled. He wiped the conch off on his long-tailed white shirt, and his whiskers seemed to withdraw into his chin when he grinned at her. “Told them yet?”
She stared at him. “Told them what?”
“About the child.”
She froze in place. Those pale blue eyes of his saw too much. She wondered if he was guessing, and if not, how he knew.
“Women glow,” he said easily. “Seen it too often not to recognize the signs. Your grandma and I had six, you know. Your dad would probably notice, if he and Peggy weren’t so crazy about each other. They never look at you. I do.”
“I always thought you were probably the only person around who really loved me, just because I was me,” she teased, only halfway kidding.
He smiled at her. “You’re my heart, girl. Always were. The best of ’em all. Fifteen grandkids, and you’re the only one who came when Grandma was dying. Answer me, are you going to tell them?”
“I can’t,” she said simply. “They’re like children themselves. It would kill them.”
“How about the man?”
She sighed. “He hates me.”
“Oh, does he, now?” he asked, glancing past her. “Ten to one he doesn’t, or why would he make the trip down here?”
“Him? Trip?” She frowned, turned to follow his gaze and felt sick to her toes. There was only one man she knew who was as big as a house and had hair so black that it reflected in blue-black light. He was wearing a gray suit, and he looked only a little less threatening than a charging bull.
“You know him, I gather,” Grandpa chuckled.
“I’m afraid so,” Amelia said wearily.
“Good day,” Grandpa called to the newcomer. “Nice weather for fishing. Care to try your luck?”
“That depends on the fish,” Worth said coolly. His black eyes held subdued rage, and they cut into Amelia’s flushed face.
“I’ll be moving down the beach,” Grandpa said with a wink at Amelia. “Yell if you need me. Lay a hand on her,” he told Worth, “and I’ll show you why they call us Georgians crackers.”
He walked away whistling, tugging his captain’s cap lower over his eyes. Amelia watched him listlessly, wishing he wouldn’t go.
“Your grandfather, I presume?” Worth asked.
“My grandfather.” She stared at his expensive shoes. “How’s your grandmother?”
“Sickly,” he said curtly, bringing her eyes up. “So you couldn’t take it. The burden of an invalid was too much for you.”
Her eyes dilated. “That’s not why I left.”
“Like hell it wasn’t,” he said, and his face was as lacking in compassion as the beach was lacking in gold. He put his hand into his pocket and drew out a cigarette. He lit it without once taking his accusing eyes from hers. “You almost took me in, Amy. I really believed in that charitable face you showed me. But it was all a farce. You left grandmother alone in that house, barely able to sit up, and ran the minute my back was turned.”
“I didn’t run,” she said sharply. “I told her I was going, and why.”
“She wouldn’t even tell me you were gone,” he said angrily. “I didn’t know it until this morning, when I got back. You little cheat!” he accused. “You’re just like the rest of your underhanded sex, out for anything you can get!”
“I turned down a car, didn’t I?” she shot back. He was upsetting her, and she was frightened. If she lost the baby, she’d never forgive him. “Go away, Worth, leave me alone!”
“Not on your life,” he said curtly. “You’re coming back with me, Miss Glenn. You can work out a month’s notice, and then quit, but you’re not vanishing at your convenience.”
“I won’t go back with you,” she began.
“Like hell you won’t. Suppose I go and tell your parents exactly what our relationship is?” he challenged, and took a long draw from his cigarette while the threat turned her face white.
“Why do you want me back?” she asked bitterly. “You hate me.”
“My grandmother loves you,” he replied, his voice cutting. “She’s dying. She’s giving up, all because you walked out on her. I’ve put in too many hours agonizing over her to give up now. You’re going to come home with me and help her get her spirit back.”
“I can’t!” she repeated. Her eyes teared up as she stared at him, loving that hard face, loving every line in it. Her heart was breaking, and he was too blind to see why.
“All right, I’ll speak with your people.”
He turned. She caught his sleeve, staring up at him helplessly.
“I can’t go back there,” she whispered.
“Why not? Is your conscience hurting?” he taunted, his black eyes merciless and cold.
“You’re the one with the conscience, aren’t you?” she muttered, dropping her gaze to his chest. “I…have a job.”
“That’s too bad. I’ll help you pack.”
“She can’t be backsliding because of me,” she moaned.
“She is,” he returned. His eyes cut into her face. “She’s the only thing in this world I love. I’m not letting her go without a fight. If she needs you to stay alive, she’ll have you.”
“No matter what it does to me?” she asked miserably.
He averted his eyes. “What should it do to you?” he asked curtly, starting toward the house. “I don’t mean a damned thing to you, but I thought she did.”
“She does.”
“What an odd way you have of showing it.”
She didn’t bother to answer him. It wouldn’t do any good in his present mood, anyway. She followed after him slowly, her steps dragging. She liked to walk, but she tired so easily. By the time they reached the house, she was as pale as milk.
“Hello, darling,” Peggy called from the porch. “I see you found her, Mr. Carson.”
“I found her,” he replied. He tossed his cigarette into the sand and ground it out. “Well?” he asked Amelia. “Do you tell them or do I?”
Amelia went up the steps to the spacious beach house, avoiding her mother’s frowning gaze. “I have to go back to Chicago,” she said quietly. “Mrs. Carson’s getting worse.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Peggy said, glancing at Worth’s hard, drawn face.
“So am I,” Jack murmured dryly, hugging his daughter. “I’d just gotten used to having her home.”
“I’ll be back before you know it,” Amelia told him and reached up to kiss his wrinkled cheek. “I’d better pack.” She didn’t look back. When she reached her room, the others were talking as easily as if they’d known each other for years.
Worth drove to the Savannah airport in the car he’d rented, his eyes on the road, never wavering as they wound through the fascinating old city with its delicate houses and multiple squares and huge, shady trees. Amelia loved the architecture, and in happier circumstances would have enjoyed the trip. But the man beside her wasn’t the best of companions for sight-seeing, and she didn’t volunteer any
conversation. Now what was she going to do, she wondered miserably.
The airplane ride was going to kill her, she just knew it. She felt nausea rising in her throat as the plane started to shoot up into the clouds, and only in the nick of time did she make it to the rest room. She wiped her face with a damp paper towel and had to force herself to go back to the seat.
Worth stared at her, frowning. “Are you all right?”
“I’ve had a virus,” she lied. “I’m not feeling well.”
His jaw tautened as he studied her. “Do you have anything you can take for it?”
She did, but she didn’t like using the tablets. She was afraid they might harm the baby, despite all the assurances by the doctor and the pharmacist that they wouldn’t.
“I don’t like taking pills,” she said quietly.
“Do you like throwing up?” he returned.
She turned in the seat, and her blue eyes shot sparks at him. “I hate Yankees,” she said coldly.
He held that mutinous gaze. “That isn’t what you said the night before Grandmother’s surgery,” he said, his voice as soft and dark as velvet.
Her eyes closed. She didn’t like remembering. She reached down for her purse and took one of the tablets from the folder. She had to make sure he didn’t see that folder, because it stated in large letters that the pills were for nausea in the early stages of pregnancy. She took the coffee the stewardess had poured her and sipped a little of it with the pill.
“You look odd,” Worth said after a minute.
“I lost my lunch,” she said curtly, “how do you expect me to look? I’d walked down on the beach hoping the breeze would settle my stomach. And no sooner did I turn around than I saw you, and it started churning all over again.”
He actually smiled, although it was reluctantly and just a twitch of his wide mouth. But his eyes searched over her as if he wanted to memorize how she looked.
“My God, it seems like years since I’ve seen you,” he said under his breath.
“Does it? I’d hoped that it would be years before I saw you again,” she said waspishly. “Light-years.”
He sighed angrily and lit a cigarette.
“Do you mind?” she challenged. “I’m sick enough as it is!”
He hesitated, but only a second, before he ground it out. “You’re making this damned difficult.”
“So are you. I’m sorry about Jeanette. I love her, too. But I can’t spend my life in Chicago, and especially not near you! I hate you!”
He didn’t move a muscle. He seemed to stop breathing. His hand went blindly to a magazine in the pocket at the back of the seat ahead. He took it out, crossed his long legs and began to read as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
She leaned back against her own seat with tears stinging her eyes. She was sick and lonely and afraid. What would she do if he realized what was wrong with her? What would she tell Jeanette? She couldn’t ever remember feeling so helpless. And he didn’t even care. That was what hurt the most. He didn’t even care.
If she could have seen the blank, dark eyes that were staring so unseeingly at the pages of that magazine, she might have changed her mind. They held a kind of torment that would have intensified her tears.
Hours later, he was pulling his own Mercedes up at the door of the house. Beside him, Amelia was tired and almost asleep from the combination of the pills and the long journey. All she wanted was to lie down, but Worth wasn’t going to allow that, she knew.
She’d been so unhappy when she said goodbye to Jeanette. Now he was going to put them both through it again. How could she leave a second time?
He got out her suitcase and closed the trunk lid. “Here,” he said, tossing her overnight case toward her, “make yourself useful.”
She deliberately let it fall, afraid that the strain of trying to catch it might hurt the baby. It crashed onto the steps and bottles shattered. She stared at it blankly.
“Well, my God, excuse me,” he said curtly, bending to lift it. “I didn’t realize you were too weak to lift a case. Open the door, then.”
She did that, and she never looked at him.
“There’s just one other thing,” he said, pausing with her in the hall, and his eyes were threatening, cold. “Don’t get any ideas about staying longer than it takes to get her on her feet again. I don’t want you here. The sooner you’re out of my life for good, the happier I’ll be. You were a sweet diversion that night, but I’ve had my fill. I don’t want you, in any way, now.”
“That works both ways,” she said in a ghostly whisper.
He led her down the hall, pausing at the door of his grandmother’s room. “Go ahead. I’ll put your bags in your room.”
She opened the door, and Jeanette looked up from the bed. She looked ten years older, haggard, weak, pale as death.
“Oh, Jeanette,” Amelia whispered tearfully. She ran to the bed, and the old lady held out her thin arms.
“Dear girl,” the quavering voice whispered back. “My dear girl, I’ve missed you so much! Did he drag you back, is that why you’re here? And how are you? The trip must have been terrible for you.”
“I was sick half the way here,” Amelia whispered. Her head nestled beside the silvery one on the crisp pillow cover. “But now I’m glad I came. What’s happened to you?”
“I have no appetite,” Jeanette said wearily. “No will to live. I told you before you left, dear, I can’t see the future anymore.”
“But you must,” Amelia said. She sank down on the bed beside the withered little body and held the thin hand. “Worth is home now.”
“Yes, he is,” came the grudging reply. “About ten minutes a day, he’s home. And when he’s here, he roars around like a train, and curses the servants…. I don’t know what happened while he was gone, but he’s changed dreadfully.”
“What about the nurse you were going to hire?” Amelia chided gently.
Jeanette pursed her lips and made a rude sound. “I hate nurses.” She glanced up at the younger girl. “I missed you. We had a lot of fun together.”
“Yes, I missed you, too,” Amelia said with a soft smile. “But I don’t know how I’m going to manage being here until he thinks I’ve worked out enough of my time. I’m afraid he’ll notice.”
“You could just tell him, you know,” Jeanette suggested. She sighed, as if talking was an effort. “He’d understand. It isn’t completely your fault, the man has to take some of the blame. It isn’t easy to get pregnant without help, you know, even Worth would realize that.”
“Pregnant?”
The man in the open doorway had turned a pasty shade, his tan eclipsed. His dark eyes went homing to Amelia’s body, and he stared at her while wheels clicked over in his head. Amelia could almost see them turning. Her nausea, the loose clothing, the way she’d dodged that bag he tossed her, her unwillingness to come with him on the plane. His eyes closed. His face hardened.
“Oh, sweet God,” he whispered, shaken. “And I forced you to come here, putting the child at risk. What have I done?”
Eleven
Amelia stared at him with conflicting emotions. He looked devastated by what he’d learned so unexpectedly, but how did he feel about the baby? Trapped, angry, contemptuous, afraid…how? Her big blue eyes watched him closely, like a hunter trying to find a sign in a dark forest. But when his eyes opened again, they were as blank as a piece of paper. He simply looked at her, and looked and looked, as if he’d only just met her.
“I’m sorry,” Amelia whispered unsteadily.
“I didn’t want to come back, you know. If you hadn’t insisted, you’d never have found out.”
His face contorted. “My God, is that why you left?”
“Of course it’s why she left,” Jeanette broke in, glaring at him, and her voice was stronger than it had been since Amelia walked into the room. The elderly woman dragged herself upright in her frilly pink bedjacket and fixed a scalding eye on her grandson, who was still looking as if he’d
been shot. “She knew you had a low opinion of her, Worth, she was afraid that you’d hold her in contempt if you knew. She swore me to secrecy before she left.”
Amelia had to struggle for the right words. She shifted restlessly on the bed. “I’ve told your grandmother that the father doesn’t know,” she told Worth, making it sound as if the father was some shadowy person because she didn’t want to betray him. Her eyes pleaded with him to go along with the fiction, not to upset his grandmother with such a personal scandal. “I don’t want him to know. It’s my baby. I’ll have it and raise it and love it, all by myself.”
“You will not,” Jeanette said haughtily. “You’ll stay here and I’ll help you. And if Worth doesn’t like it, he can move out,” she added with a sharp glance at the frozen features of her grandson. “A child around the place might keep me alive for years and years. I love children.”
Worth finally jerked away from the door frame and came into the room. He stared down at Amelia with eyes so dark they seemed like black marbles. He ran a rough hand through his thick, straight hair, so that it fell roguishly onto his broad forehead. He looked so big, and Amelia knew so well the touch of his skin, the strength in those hard muscles. She dropped her eyes to the bed, so that the memories wouldn’t have to torment her.
“Amazing,” Worth said quietly, “that you’d try to protect me, after the way I’ve treated you.”
He dropped down in the chair beside the bed, staring at Amelia while Jeanette glanced from one set face to the other and frowned.
He took Amelia’s free hand in his, feeling its coldness. His dark eyes went to meet his grandmother’s. “There’s something I have to confess,” he said gently. “The man she’s trying so hard to protect is me. I went to her for comfort the night before your surgery, Grandmother, and out of misplaced generosity, she gave everything I asked for. The baby is mine.”
Amelia looked up at him, pained. “Oh, Worth,” she whispered. “I’m sorry!”
His fingers contracted around hers. “It takes two,” he said, his voice deep and rough.