I'm Having Your Baby?!

by Linda Turner

  His belief in her warmed her heart, but nothing he could say could erase the doubts that were lodged like a fist in her throat. “I need to find that out for myself. Please, Joe.”

  He wanted to argue. Dammit, he wanted to grab her and shake some sense into her! But there was a pain in her eyes that stabbed him right in the heart and as much as he wanted to believe she was being paranoid, he couldn’t dismiss her fears nearly as easily as he would have liked. “All right,” he sighed. “We’ll go talk to Sam. But I still don’t think it’s necessary.”

  Thirty minutes later when Sam escorted them into a small interview room at the police station where they could talk in private, Joe hadn’t changed his mind. “I told her she just had a vivid dream,” he told his friend as they each took a chair at the table in the middle of the room, “but she insists it was real.”

  “It was real,” Annie retorted. “I think I killed someone, Sam.”

  Unlike Joe, Sam didn’t automatically dismiss her claim as just a trick of her overactive imagination. Instead, he sat back in his chair and regarded her steadily, his thoughts well hidden behind his steady gaze. “Tell me about it,” he suggested.

  She started at the beginning, with the delivery of the cedar branch to the apartment, and told him how the sight and smell of it sickened her. Just thinking about it made her fingers tremble and she quickly locked them together in her lap, then began to recount the memories that had assaulted her in the middle of the night. “It wasn’t just a dream,” she said finally. “The details were too exact. I could feel the dirt, smell the cedar, everything.”

  “But you don’t remember shooting him? Or even holding a gun?”

  “Well, no, but—”

  “Then how do you know you killed him? Just because you buried the man doesn’t mean you’re the one who murdered him,” he pointed out logically.

  “But there was no one else there,” she argued.

  “Maybe not in your dream, no. But dreams aren’t always reliable. How big was the dead man?”

  Caught off guard, she blinked. “I don’t know. Six-one or so, maybe a hundred and ninety pounds.”

  “And you think you not only killed him in that parking garage, but somehow managed to get him in your car, then drive him out in the sticks somewhere and bury him? All by yourself? C’mon, Annie, I know you’re tough, but there’s just no way you could have done that. There had to be somebody else.”

  “Which would explain a hell of a lot,” Joe said promptly. “Like why someone keeps trying to terrorize her with phone calls and this damn thing…” he motioned to the cedar branch, which lay brown and stiff in the box it had been delivered in. “If she really did bury a corpse in a bunch of cedars, that damn branch wouldn’t mean anything to anyone but Annie and whoever was with her.”

  “But why would this person want to terrorize me?” she cried. “I don’t even remember him.”

  “Exactly,” Sam replied. “As long as you have amnesia, he’s safe. You can’t identify him.”

  His brown eyes black with rage, Joe swore. “He scared her out of remembering her own name once. Now he’s trying to do it again, only this time he wants to make sure she doesn’t remember him.”

  “Because as long as she hasn’t got a clue who he is, all we have to work with is a body that could be buried anywhere in the state of Texas,” Sam concluded. “So that’s where we’ll start.” Turning back to Annie, he said, “I know this isn’t pleasant for you, but can you describe the dead man for me? I’m going to check missing persons and anything you remember might help identify him.”

  Her mouth cotton-dry, she could see the corpse as clearly as if it lay stretched out before her on the table. “He was a white man, with thick black hair, a square jaw and chiseled face. I—I don’t know how o-old he w-was. It was kinda hard to tell.”

  “You’re doing fine,” he assured her. “Just take your time and try to remember everything you can. Was there anything odd about him? Any identifying marks like a mole or something that would make him stand out in a crowd?”

  “A scar!” she blurted out, suddenly remembering. “Right by the left side of his mouth. I remember thinking that he must have been handsome even with the scar.”

  Frowning at the description, Sam rose abruptly to his feet. “That sounds familiar. Hold it a second and let me check something. I’ll be right back.”

  He was back almost immediately with an eight-by-ten photo he held out to Annie. “Have you ever seen this guy before?”

  It was the picture of a man in a business suit. Lean and rugged, his black hair conservatively cut and styled, he had the kind of good looks that would inevitably draw women’s eyes wherever he went…in spite of the small scar that marred the left side of his mouth.

  Annie took one look and blanched. “Oh, God, that’s him!”

  “Easy, honey,” Joe said soothingly. “Whoever the hell he is, he can’t hurt you.”

  “He’s Robert Freeman,” Sam informed them, tossing the picture onto the table. “The president of Brackenridge State Bank. He’s been missing for over a week. And so has a hell of a lot of money from the bank. Up until now, we had reason to believe that Mr. Freeman had embezzled the money, then skipped the country. Apparently, we were wrong…at least about him skipping the country.”

  “You think Annie stumbled across someone killing him in the Transit Tower parking garage?” Joe asked shrewdly.

  Sam nodded grimly. “That makes more sense than her shooting Freeman between the eyes. She was probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time and got dragged into a murder. In all likelihood, the murderer planned to kill her, too, but somehow she managed to get away.”

  His jaw rigid, Joe would have given anything to have five minutes alone with the bastard who had terrorized her. No wonder she’d blocked it from her memory! Frowning at her pale face, he reached over to cover her clenched fingers with his. “Does any of this sound familiar, sweetheart?”

  “Not really,” she said with a regretful shake of her head. “I know I buried him. That’s all. Whenever I try to remember anything else, I just run into this black wall.”

  And it was that black wall of forgetfulness that could get her killed. Somehow the killer had found out who she was and where she lived and was doing a good job of scaring her. But as long as she lived, there was a possibility that she could remember him at any time. Eventually, he would have to come after her. And when he did, he would have a distinct advantage. Because he could pass her on the street and look her right in the eye, and she probably wouldn’t know him.

  Joe glanced at Sam and saw the same knowledge in his friend’s eyes. “I think this would be a good time to get Annie out of town for a while,” he told Sam. “We’ve got a cabin in the Davis Mountains that we used to get away to when we were first married, but we haven’t been there in a few years. She’ll be safe there. It’s forty miles from town and out of sight of the road. No one will even know we’re there.”

  “But what about the restaurant?” Annie protested. “And the opening for the new place? It’s just a couple of weeks away, isn’t it? I can’t ask you to drop all that and run away to the mountains with me. You need to be here to handle things.”

  If he hadn’t been so worried about her safety, Joe would have laughed at the irony of the situation. In the months before she’d left him, she’d done nothing but complain about how little time they spent together because he was always working. And now she was finding excuses for him to stay in town and work.

  “Your safety is more important than the damn restaurant,” he said. “Anyway, Drake can handle a lot of things for me. And it’s not like I’ll be completely out of touch. If something crops up that I need to handle personally, he can call me on my cellular. Anything else will just have to wait until we get back.”

  “But when will that be?”

  “When you get your memory back or Sam catches the bastard who did this to you—whichever happens first.”

  “But that cou
ld be months!”

  “You’re already starting to remember things,” Sam pointed out. “Granted, there are still a lot of pieces missing, but knowing that you’re safe at the cabin may be just what you need to let your guard down and remember the rest. And while you’re gone, we’ve got some new leads to follow,” he added. “Knowing Freeman is dead changes things. We’ve been looking for him in Canada and Mexico, not in a grave in the country. We’ll find him, Annie. Then we’ll find his killer.”

  “But he could be buried anywhere. There’s cedar all over Texas. You could look for years and never find his body.”

  “True, but you’ve given us more information about that night than you realize. We know that you had an eight o’ clock meeting at the Transit Tower and that you showed up at your and Joe’s apartment sometime around two or three in the morning. You didn’t have a car or any money to catch a cab or bus, so you must have walked all the way home once you got away from the killer. That means he couldn’t have taken you too far out in the country to bury Freeman. That narrows our search considerably.”

  “So you see? It won’t be that long,” Joe said. “Just a couple of weeks. And getting away will be good for you and the baby. You need the rest.”

  And they needed this time together. He needed it. He didn’t know if he’d ever be able to trust her again, and when she got her memory back, she could hurt him all over again, but that was just a chance he would have to take. There were still feelings between them, and he had to see if there was any chance of a future between them.

  Her eyes searching his, she hesitated, but he saw in a glance that he’d already won. Giving in, she grumbled, “I still feel guilty about taking you away from your work, but if the two of you think this is for the best, who am I to argue?”

  Elated, he only nodded. “Good. We’ll leave at dawn.”

  Chapter 7

  When Joe had first started looking for property to buy, six years ago, he’d wanted someplace completely isolated from the rest of the world, a retreat from phones and faxes and temperamental chefs, not to mention a never-ending stream of customers it was his responsibility to please. He worked long, hard hours and seldom took any time off for himself, and when he did, he wanted to look out his front door and see nothing but a wide expanse of uninhabited land that stretched all the way to the horizon. He’d had to go all the way to West Texas, but he’d finally found what he was looking for in the Davis Mountains.

  There, the air was clean and dry, the population minimal. His neighbors were hard-working ranchers who minded their own business and didn’t have time to come calling, which was just fine with him. He didn’t want to be rude, but he didn’t want to be bothered, either. Not here. And he wasn’t. With his cabin located at the end of a private road halfway up the side of a mountain, his only visitors were mule deer and skunks and an occasional mountain lion.

  He’d brought Annie there for the first time on their honeymoon, and now, as they drove up the drive to the cabin, memories came sweeping back. God, it seemed like yesterday! The night had been clear, the stars brighter than anywhere else in the country, but not nearly as bright as the love shining in Annie’s eyes. She’d spied a falling star and tried to get him to wish on it, but he hadn’t been able to look away from her. She was everything he’d ever wanted, and that week they’d spent there—and the getaways they’d managed over the next few years after that—had been the happiest of his life.

  Wondering if the simple frame structure would strike a spark in her memory, he braked to a stop next to the front porch and cut the engine. Silence, soul deep, immediately engulfed them. Watching her in the starlight, he waited for recognition to flare in her eyes, but there was nothing there but natural curiosity. She didn’t remember.

  Not sure if he was disappointed or relieved, he reminded himself he was going to have to be careful not to rush her into something that either one of them might not be ready for. He shouldn’t have needed the reminder—he hadn’t forgotten that she could be carrying someone else’s baby—but lately, he found it harder and harder to believe that she’d walked into another man’s arms and bed so quickly after leaving him. For the sake of his own bruised heart, he needed to keep his distance until he knew if he could live with that or not if she had, but with every passing day, that became more and more difficult. He wanted her close, skin to skin, without the past between them. He dreamed of her, ached for her, longed for what they had once had, even though he knew what they’d once had could be gone forever.

  Another man might have hated her for that, for the doubts that he was now forced to live with because of her, for the limbo that there was no way out of until she got her memory back, but he couldn’t. He still loved her. He’d suspected it the first time she’d had morning sickness, and he’d known it for sure when she’d opened that damn florist’s box and seen that cedar branch. The terror in her eyes was something he never hoped to see again, and given the chance, he would have gladly turned back the clock and been the one in the parking garage that Thursday night when she stumbled across a murder and changed their lives forever.

  He was a one-woman man—he knew that now and accepted it. And she’d been his woman from the first time he laid eyes on her. They didn’t, however, live in a fairy tale, and he had some serious thinking to do. If the baby turned out not to be his, could he raise another man’s child without seeing Annie’s betrayal every time he looked at it? Because it was a part of her, he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from loving it if he tried. But a dagger of jealousy twisted in his heart at the thought of her loving another man. Until he could get past that, he had no business touching her.

  It was, he thought, clenching his jaw, going to be a long couple of weeks.

  “Well, this is it,” he said, shattering the silence. “Does anything look familiar?”

  Annie stared at the rustic cabin that sat like a hulking shadow in the darkness and shook her head. She was sure that it was probably charming by the light of day, but right now, it was hard to tell. During the long drive from San Antonio, Joe had told her that the place had all the comforts of home, including hot and cold running water and electricity, not to mention a view that was out of this world. And gazing at the stars that twinkled overhead like a brilliant, glittering canopy, she had to admit that the promised view, at least, was spectacular. But the cabin looked awfully small.

  “No,” she said regretfully, “but things might look different in the morning. Did we spend a lot of time here?”

  “As much as we could when we were first married. Not so much over the last couple of years.” Pulling the keys from the ignition, he pushed open his door. “Why don’t you stay here while I open up and check for uninvited visitors?”

  Surprised, she lifted an eyebrow at him. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Snakes,” he said succinctly. “They have a way of finding a way inside since the place sits empty for so long.”

  “Oh, God,” she whispered faintly. “And this is where you come to relax?”

  “Yeah,” he laughed. “I guess I’m a glutton for punishment. Hold on, and I’ll be right back.”

  He was out of the car and striding up the porch steps before she could warn him to be careful, and a split second later, a light flared on as he unlocked the cabin door and stepped inside. He disappeared from view. Suddenly cold, she shivered. She didn’t have to search her nonexistent memory to know that she didn’t like snakes.

  He was back almost immediately and pulling open her door for her. “All clear,” he announced. “Let’s get this stuff inside and then we’ll see about supper. You’re probably starving.”

  She’d passed that state about fifty miles back, but she hadn’t wanted to suggest that they stop because it was getting so late and he’d seemed in a hurry to reach the cabin. Now, at the mere mention of food, her stomach growled with embarrassing enthusiasm. Laughing, she admitted, “I guess it wouldn’t do any good to deny it, would it? What can I carry?”

  Chuckling
, he handed her a grocery bag of fruit. “Maybe you’d better start with something edible. I know how you are when you haven’t eaten in a while. Even the furniture starts to look good.”

  “I’m not that bad.” She gave him a withering look, only to ruin the effect by reaching into the bag for an apple.

  Grinning, he said, “I rest my case. Get the screen door, will you?”

  He hefted a large ice chest filled with perishable items and started up the porch steps. Hurrying around him, Annie quickly pulled open the screen door for him to pass through, then followed him inside. Two steps past the threshold, she stopped abruptly and swallowed, her heart knocking against her ribs as she got her first good look at where they would be spending the next few weeks, possibly the next few months.

  Except for the small partitioned area that jutted out of a corner, which she presumed was a bathroom, the cabin consisted of one room. One very small room when compared to the apartment they’d left behind in San Antonio. There were no other walls or partitions, nothing but pockets of living space and no privacy whatsoever. The kitchen, with its apartment-size stove, refrigerator, and tiny table took up one corner, while an overstuffed couch sat before a corner fireplace in what served as the living room. It was the last remaining corner, however, that drew her gaze and made her heart stumble in her chest.

  A bed. There was one bed, a double, that looked like it had come right out of a bordello in an old western movie. Made of iron and painted white, the headboard and footboard were shaped like hearts and delicately decorated with iron roses. Annie took one look at it and knew somehow that this was where she and Joe had spent their honeymoon.

  Her knees weak and her pulse wild, she stared at it, transfixed, and wondered why he’d brought her there. Was this his way of telling her that he didn’t care whose baby she was carrying—he was ready to resume their marriage? Or was he so completely over her that it truly didn’t bother him to bring her there because the place had no meaning for him?