Father Found

by Judith Arnold

  “Hi,” he said almost shyly.

  Glancing at him, she was once again jarred by the turbulent shadows darkening his eyes. Something was up. Something beyond Samantha’s rendering him sleepless night after night. Something beyond his ghastly dinner date with Allison.

  Something big.

  “You look terrible,” she blurted out. She recalled all the warnings she’d always heard about the risks of medical personnel becoming personally involved with patients. Jamie wasn’t exactly a patient, but it didn’t matter. She was already involved, and she couldn’t keep herself from caring about him. “What’s wrong?”

  He allowed himself a wan smile at her blunt critique of his appearance. The smile didn’t last long, though. “I went to see my buddy John Russo at the police station today.”

  “John Russo? Is he the detective assigned to Samantha’s case?”

  Jamie nodded. “He’s found out some interesting stuff about her mother.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah.” Jamie scrubbed a hand through his hair, then turned and observed his daughter resting in her stroller, as if he needed to reassure himself that she was all right. “Samantha’s mother isn’t the woman I thought she was.”

  “Meaning…?”

  “Meaning…” He sighed plaintively, and his eyes glimmered with emotion as he met Allison’s gaze. She saw desperation in them, and yearning. “I’m in a hell of a fix, Allison. I’ve spent the past how many days going without sleep, going without peace, going without—” he hesitated, his gaze sweeping meaningfully down Allison’s body and then back to her face “—going without you.”

  “Jamie—”

  “I didn’t think it could get any worse. I thought having you walk out on me Saturday night was as bad as it could get. But…” he sighed again. “It’s worse. It seems Samantha’s mother has money, she has power and…she has a husband.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  SHE HAD PROMISED herself she would never go out for dinner with him again, but this was different. This was the coffee shop across the street from the Y. It was inexpensive sandwiches and attitude-free waiters, and the emotions flowing between her and Jamie were entirely different from what they’d been on Saturday night.

  Well, no, not entirely different. She couldn’t look at him without imagining him standing naked in the glass-walled shower of his master bathroom, wet and glistening beneath the spray and framed by a backdrop of trees and sky. She couldn’t talk to him without recalling the heat of his mouth against hers. She couldn’t be in his presence without wishing he’d managed his life with a little more prudence, because if he had…

  There was no point in dwelling on ifs. What mattered was now, his baby’s future.

  They were seated at the same booth as a week ago. In the narrow space between the banquette and the table, Jamie tried to juggle Samantha, her bottle and his hamburger, and he was in serious danger of dropping at least one of the three. But Allison had learned her lesson Saturday night. She wasn’t going to risk her clean white slacks, and knit top by volunteering to hold his baby for him.

  Biting her lip to keep from offering assistance, she watched as he propped Samantha on his knee, with his right arm hooked around her and his wrist contorted to get the bottle’s nipple into her mouth. With his left hand he reached for the plastic ketchup bottle, squirted a dab of red onto his hamburger patty and closed the bun around it. Allison was dying to hear what the police had told him about Samantha’s mother, but she was at least as anxious to see if he could take a bite without spilling ketchup or formula down the front of his shirt

  He managed a hungry bite, leaning so far over his plate Samantha came dangerously close to getting squished. As soon as he had a mouthful of food, he settled back against the banquette and chewed. Samantha flapped her hands, flashing the luminous pink of her nail polish, but she didn’t stop sucking at her bottle.

  “Which would you rather tell me about first?” Allison asked once he’d swallowed. “The nail polish or the police detective?”

  “There’s nothing to tell about the nail polish. I just felt like wasting thirty dollars on a beauty treatment for her.”

  “Of course.” She smiled.

  He smiled, too, and conceded with a nod. “The truth was, I was afraid I’d hurt her if I tried to cut her nails, and they were getting so long she looked like Fu Manchu. So I took her to a manicurist.”

  “You’re joking,” Allison said dubiously.

  “Her nails aren’t important,” he responded, which was enough to inform her that he hadn’t been joking at all. “What’s important is…” He leaned forward precariously once more, this time to sip some iced tea through a straw. “I had quite a chat with John Russo over at the Arlington police station. First thing, her mother’s name isn’t Luanne Hackett. Not anymore.”

  Not anymore? Then she’d changed her name? Why would she do that? Because she was in hiding? Hiding from Jamie and her baby? Exercising great willpower, Allison held her questions and nibbled on her turkey sandwich, giving Jamie the chance to proceed in his own way.

  “Hackett was her first husband’s last name. Her current name is Luanne Pierson.”

  “She went back to her maiden name?”

  Jamie shook his head grimly. “She’s on her second marriage. She was married when I met her.”

  Allison’s appetite evaporated. Even giving Jamie the benefit of the doubt—that he hadn’t known the woman was married when he’d had his fling with her at that Caribbean resort—the idea still bothered her deeply.

  Obviously, it bothered him deeply, too. He seemed to have lost interest in his burger. Sinking back against the vinyl upholstery, he eased Samantha into a more natural position in his arms and concentrated on holding her bottle at the right angle, watching her guzzle her formula.

  “I mean…hell, you probably think I’m some sort of degenerate, messing around with a married woman. But I swear to God, I…” He couldn’t seem to finish the sentence. Instead, he peered down at Samantha, who was devouring her meal with gusto. Slowly, trying not to jostle her, he reached for the napkin dispenser at the end of the table, plucked out a napkin and dabbed dribbles of formula from her chin.

  The sight made Allison’s eyes blur with tears. She didn’t want to become involved with him, honestly she didn’t—and yet his plight moved her. No, he wasn’t a degenerate. He was simply a man who had botched things up splendiferously just because, like the typically brainless guys he celebrated in his column, he’d let an available woman paralyze his intellect for a few idyllic days on a resort island ten months ago, and now the consequence lay snuggled cozily in his arms, drooling and making tiny, contented grunts as she guzzled her formula.

  “What else did the policeman tell you?”

  Jamie sighed. “Her maiden name is Luanne Eldridge. She’s from the Washington D.C. area. Her father made a fortune investing in real estate, and now he gets even richer by investing in congressmen. He’s a very powerful guy, apparently.”

  “What does it matter how powerful her father is? If his daughter abandoned her child—”

  “She registered at the resort in Eleuthera using her first husband’s name and her father’s home address. Detective Russo told me he could arrange to have the D.C. police pay a call on Mr. Eldridge and find out his daughter’s whereabouts, but if he did that, Eldridge owns enough people to protect his daughter and make Russo’s life hell. And my life, too. Not to mention Sam’s.” He gazed down at the baby in his arms again.

  “So,” he continued, “Russo’s trying to track Luanne down without dragging her father into it. She paid for the hotel room on a credit card; Russo thinks he might be able to get information on her from the issuing bank. But that could also draw suspicion, plus he would have to get a search warrant and all that. Meanwhile, he was able to find out the address of a condominium she and her husband own in Boston. No one’s there, though. The building manager thinks they’re at one of their vacation homes.”

  “So she�
�s with her husband? In spite of what happened in Eleuthera?”

  “It’s possible he doesn’t know what happened in Eleuthera.”

  “How could he not know? She spent nine months being pregnant, didn’t she?”

  “They were separated when I met her. The way I figure it, I was some sort of revenge. She was mad at her husband, so she had an affair with me. Apparently they remained separated for another nine months. She dumped Sam on me and now she’s reconciling with her husband.”

  “Oh, Jamie.” Allison gnawed on her lip to keep from saying what she was really feeling: that anyone who would hide a pregnancy from her estranged husband, give birth and abandon the baby and then get back together with her husband had to be the most selfish, coldhearted person imaginable. She wanted to leap across the table and gather Samantha in her arms. She wanted to vow that she would never let anyone so horrible gain custody of that precious little girl.

  But Samantha wasn’t hers to protect. That was Jamie’s job—if he decided he wanted it. For all Allison knew, he might ultimately prefer not to be stuck with custody of the baby. That he had accepted his responsibility for the time being didn’t mean he wouldn’t jump for joy if the multimarried Luanne Pierson reappeared to claim her child.

  But Jamie wouldn’t really give up Samantha, would he? Not after buying that adorable mobile, the finely constructed crib and the most expensive stroller in the world. Not after he’d sat through Daddy School classes. Not after he’d bonded with his daughter, learned to juggle her dinner and his own and found a way to adapt to fatherhood even at the cost of his sex life.

  Which, as far as Allison knew, might have already resurrected itself, rising like the phoenix from the ashes of Saturday night. Just because things had gone poorly with her didn’t mean Jamie had any intention of living like a monk, or even a near-monk, while raising his daughter.

  She took a bite of her sandwich even though her appetite hadn’t returned. Every time she glimpsed Jamie she saw too much: his ambivalence, his anguish, his anger…and other emotions, intimate emotions, emotions that had less to do with his baby and that baby’s mother than with Allison. Or maybe it wasn’t Jamie’s emotions she saw; maybe it was her own emotions, reflecting off him and returning to her.

  She was ambivalent, too. The notion of falling for Jamie filled her with dread. She’d already had the dismal experience of loving a man too caught up with himself and the complications of his own life to give her what she yearned for. Frank had been charming, he’d been handsome, he’d been endowed with his share of sex appeal—and he’d lived from crisis to crisis, challenge to challenge, always just a bit too busy concentrating on those things to remember that Allison was supposed to matter to him, too. She’d always been supportive, serving as his sounding board, listening to him complain and analyze and work out every last detail of his life. By the time he’d finished contending with this crisis or that challenge, he’d never had any energy left for her.

  At first she hadn’t minded. Helping people was her profession and her passion. Few things satisfied her as much as giving of herself so a person in pain could hurt a little less—or even heal if luck was running the right way. And so she’d helped Frank, advising him on a job switch, counseling him through his conflicts with his father, listening patiently as he bounced ideas off her and sought her approval.

  But when Grammy had fallen and bruised her bad knee and Allison had been shaken and upset by this evidence of her grandmother’s growing frailty, Frank had offered little consolation. “She’s old,” he’d summed up. “What do you expect? Look, if you’re down in the dumps, let’s go grab some pizza and take in a movie. That’ll get your mind off your grandmother.”

  She hadn’t wanted to get her mind off her grandmother. But Frank had wanted her to, because he hadn’t wanted to listen while she worked out her feelings. If it wasn’t about him—or about good food or good times or good sex—he wasn’t interested.

  Allison didn’t need to be the center of a man’s life. But if she was going to love a man, she wanted him to think of her as his lover, not his crutch. And she certainly didn’t want to love a man who needed to give so much of his attention to himself that he was never going to have anything left to give her.

  Jamie had only one thing going on in his life—but it was the most important thing in the world. A baby, his daughter.

  “You hate me,” he muttered.

  She was sure she’d misunderstood him. Lowering her sandwich, she frowned. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You’re sitting there thinking I’m the biggest moron ever to walk the earth. I go off on a vacation, make a fool of myself over some stranger simply because she’s tosses some bait my way and then I find out she’s not what I thought.”

  “I’ll admit you showed a lack of judgment, Jamie. That doesn’t mean I hate you.”

  “It means you don’t respect me.”

  She startled them both by laughing. “I thought only women cared about being respected.”

  “Men need respect, too—especially after they’ve done something stupid. Which, if you’re a regular reader of my column, you know is a common occurrence. All that testosterone makes it hard for us to be respectable, you know? But we try so hard.” He attempted a plaintive smile.

  She was still laughing. To her great pleasure, Jamie joined her, his cheeks denting with dimples and the skin at the corners of his eyes pleating with smile lines. “I think I understand—men are trying, so women are supposed to respect them.”

  He wiggled his eyebrows lecherously. “No, Allison. Women are supposed to respect men because they’re so hard.”

  She would have blushed if she weren’t enjoying his palaver so much. The truth was, she did respect him, for his honesty and his willingness to do the right thing in the face of such upheaval. “What steps does your policeman plan to take?” she asked, deciding to focus on Jamie’s tangled life so she wouldn’t start thinking about specifically what he wanted to do to deserve her respect.

  “He’s going to find Luanne if he can. If he can’t, he’ll go after her husband.”

  “Not her father?”

  “Her father is a last resort, given the old man’s clout and connections. The husband knows where she is. And if he finds out about the baby, he might be more inclined to help the police. Her father would be more inclined to try to fix things for her.”

  “Do you think the policeman knows what he’s doing?”

  “Yeah.” Jamie shifted Samantha slightly and took another bite of his burger. “Russo’s a father himself. He cares about kids. He also seems smart. And organized.” He took a long sip of iced tea, then sighed. “He said something, though…”

  “What?”

  “He brought up that whole issue of whether Sam was really my daughter.”

  “You don’t even want to consider that, do you?”

  “I don’t know.” His voice was low, thick, pushing through a knot of tension in his throat and emerging barely louder than a whisper. “I had a good talk with Russo. I was pleased that he’d found out so much about Luanne. I mean, I was shocked, but I was also impressed. I figured, if anyone can straighten this thing out, John Russo can.” He drained his glass and adjusted Samantha in his arms once more, easing the empty bottle out of her mouth and placing it on the table. “But then, when I was getting ready to leave, he hit me with his parting shot. ‘It’s always possible,’ he said, ‘that Luanne Pierson’s husband could be the baby’s father.”

  “But they were estranged.”

  “Maybe they did the deed just before they split. I don’t know. I’d think that if she thought there was a chance the baby could be her husband’s, she would have told him. But maybe she was still angry with him and didn’t want him to know.” He shrugged. “I’m just guessing.”

  “She could have gotten an abortion,” Allison noted.

  “She didn’t,” he said fiercely, holding Samantha a bit more snugly, as if to protect her from the very idea.

&nbs
p; It dawned on Allison that in his own way, Jamie loved Samantha deeply. “If your dream could come true,” she asked, “what would you want? Would you want it to turn out that Samantha wasn’t your daughter?”

  “If my dream could come true…” He mulled over his response, his eyes drifting until he was staring at something no one else could see, something deep inside himself, that secret place where his dreams were stored. After a long moment, he brought his gaze back to Allison. “Sam would be mine—but she wouldn’t be Luanne Eldridge-Hackett-Pierson-Whatever’ s. The mother would be someone I could trust, someone I could marry. Someone who would love Samantha with all her heart.”

  Allison trembled slightly, pinned by the sharpness of his gaze. She told herself he was looking at her that way only because she was challenging him to think, to consider things he might not wish to contemplate. It had nothing to do with her personally. Yet for a brief, insane moment, she couldn’t escape the comprehension that in his dreams, she would be the mother, the woman who loved Samantha with all her heart.

  Interesting that he wouldn’t want any part of that woman’s heart for himself.

  Still, that he would put his daughter’s need for love ahead of his own softened Allison’s opinion of him in a dangerous way. She watched him eat, watched him hold Samantha, watched him watch her—and she wondered what she could do to make his burden easier…besides take Samantha over, onto her lap and into her heart

  Allison wasn’t going to do that. She wasn’t going to risk her heart on Samantha—or Samantha’s father—when the odds of losing were so great.

  HE WASN’T READY to leave Allison when they departed from the diner. The evening was mild, the sky a watercolor of bleeding pastel shades as the sun inched down toward the western hills. Unlike the sticky midday heat, the air had grown dry and balmy.

  It was a night for a walk. A night to take Sammy cruising in her spiffy stroller—and a night to keep Allison by his side for a little while longer if she would let him.