“Is that why you showed up tonight?” she asked, depositing the tray on the coffee table with more force than was good for either. “To belittle someone who once played a very important role in my life, and so make me out to be an even bigger idiot than I already am?”
He slapped the album closed and replaced it on the shelf. “No, sweet pea, that’s not my style, though I don’t mind admitting to a certain curiosity about him. I already told you one reason I’m here is to apologize for pulling a disappearing act on the Island, the way I did. The other is to see how you’re coping in the aftermath of being left at the church door.”
“Perfectly well, thank you. And it seems to me that you should save your apologies for the person who most deserves them.”
“Huh?”
She poured the tea and handed him a cup. “I’m referring to your wife, Edmund, though I suppose you can be excused for forgetting you have one, given your penchant for infidelity.”
If his surprise wasn’t real, he gave an excellent imitation of the genuine article. “What the devil are you talking about, Jenna?” he exclaimed, practically slopping his tea into his lap. “I’m not married!”
“Really?” she said, regarding him levelly over the rim of her cup. “Then how would you describe yourself, given that some woman claiming to be your wife called The Inn and left a message which was urgent enough to make you cut short your holiday and leave me feeling like a one-night floozy?”
“That was my ex-wife, Adrienne.”
The only cause for Jenna’s heart to give a joyful little leap at his disclosure was relief at learning she hadn’t been party to adultery. She would admit to no other possible explanation!
“And the reason I left so suddenly,” Edmund went on grimly, “is that my four-year-old daughter had been seriously injured in a farming accident.”
“Oh…!” Dismay and embarrassment eclipsed her brief elation like storm clouds chasing away the sun. “Oh, Edmund, I’m so sorry! Is she…?”
“She’s going to be fine, but it’s been a tough haul. That’s what’s kept me away so long. I wanted to stay close until she was over the worst.”
“Well, of course! Any parent would.” Not wishing her next question to sound indelicate, she phrased her words carefully. “Will there be any permanent…consequences?”
“The doctors say not, though whether they’re right remains to be seen. But it’s the emotional trauma she’s suffered that concerns me. And her future safety.”
Every self-protective instinct Jenna possessed urged her not to get any more involved with this man than she already had. Her life was complicated enough. But when she’d hit rock bottom, he was the one she’d run to and he hadn’t turned her away.
He’d made her laugh when she’d thought she’d never laugh again. He dried her tears. And he’d loved her, if only for one night.
No laughter curved his mouth now, though. No wicked amusement lurked in his eyes. His face, his posture, the way he ran his finger inside the collar of his sport shirt as if it were strangling him, the heavy sigh he couldn’t quite disguise, spoke of a man—a parent—beset by worry. And that changed everything.
It brought home in a very real way her own impending role in a child’s life. She’d never expected to fall pregnant, least of all by a man she barely knew. But now that it had happened, she couldn’t bring herself to regret it.
Despite the gossip and speculation she knew lay ahead, not to mention the unsought advice, she wanted this baby more than anything she’d ever wanted in her life. She loved it with all the fierce, protective passion of a tigress guarding her cub. How she would survive if something happened to her child, if tragedy were to strike him or her, she couldn’t begin to imagine. It would kill her!
As if what had befallen Edmund’s daughter might somehow communicate itself to her own little one, Jenna found herself unconsciously shielding her womb with her hand. “Why do you think she isn’t safe, Edmund?”
“She’s playing where she shouldn’t be, wandering around unsupervised. And her mother’s too busy trying to be the perfect country man’s wife to remember that her first responsibility is to the child left over from a marriage gone sour.”
“Are you saying you blame your ex-wife for the accident?”
“I blame her and her husband! He should have been more careful! A four-year-old needs to be watched constantly, not left to run free wherever she pleases, especially not when there’s heavy machinery around. She damn near lost both her legs because no one was looking out for her!”
The tea Jenna had consumed lurched unpleasantly in her stomach and threatened to rise up in her throat. Horrified, she clapped a hand to her mouth.
“Hey, sweet pea, don’t get all choked up,” Edmund said, his tone gentling. “It didn’t happen. Molly’s making a good recovery, and I’m going to see to it she isn’t put at risk like that again. Just because I’m not married to her mother doesn’t change the fact that I’ll always be her father, and I’m not about to settle for a secondary role in my child’s life. I intend to assert my parental rights to the full.”
So possessively passionate a declaration made Jenna’s blood run a little cold. How would he react if he found out he’d fathered more than one child? Would he insist on his full parental rights regarding that child, too? Perhaps even try to relegate her to a less prominent role in her baby’s life, to compensate for what he’d already lost?
The mere idea made her feel ill all over again. On the surface, he came across as a man eminently reasonable and just, yet she sensed that, if stirred to anger, he would make a formidable opponent.
But what she knew was that having him as an ally had helped her through the darkest hours of her life. He’d been her champion when she had no one else to turn to. Because of him, she’d emerged from her own misfortunes all the stronger. Given that, and the knowledge that his learning the truth would not, after all, destroy a marriage, was she being fair to keep her pregnancy a secret from him?
Nervously, she smoothed her right hand over the fingers of her left. The answers were no longer as clear-cut as she’d once thought, and she wished he’d leave so that she could be alone and sort out her thoughts.
“You do that a lot you know,” Edmund said.
She looked up, puzzled. “Do what?”
“Trace your thumb over the place where you used to wear Armstrong’s ring.”
“Really?”
“Really. Still crying yourself to sleep every night over him?”
“Absolutely not! He’s out of my life.”
“You almost sound as if you mean that.”
“I do,” she said emphatically.
She’d been making the same claim for weeks and couldn’t have said when it had shifted from proud denial to relieved truth. There hadn’t been a thunderclap to mark the day or moment. It was more that distance had not lent Mark enchantment. Instead, it had stripped him of his carefully cultivated mystique and revealed such inherent weaknesses that she had been able to let him go without regret.
Now, other events—her baby, motherhood—filled the space in her heart which once he’d occupied. “He wasn’t as crucial to my happiness as I believed,” she said. “In fact, I’m enjoying being my own person again.”
“That’s good,” Edmund said. “I’m glad.”
“I wish more people shared your opinion! I’m forever being set up to meet someone new. My friends refuse to believe I’m happy being unattached, and as for my family…!” She shook her head disbelievingly. “They think the breakup is the tragedy of the decade and I should try to get back together with him, if you can imagine.”
“And you’d never consider the possibility?”
“Never. It’s out of the question.” For a reason you can’t begin to imagine!
“Then I don’t need to worry about you anymore.” He smothered a yawn and got to his feet. “I should push off. You’re looking a bit peaked again, Jenna, and I’ve had a long day.”
An h
our before, she’d have said he never should have come to begin with. Now, surprisingly, she found herself reluctant to see him go. “It was nice of you to stop by.”
“That’s me, all right…Mr. Nice Guy!” He closed in on her and for one wild, exhilarating moment, she thought he was going to try to kiss her. Instead, he smiled and cuffed her gently under the chin. “I’ll stay in touch.”
From the third-floor balcony off her living room, she watched him leave the apartment building and cut across the lawn to the street where the Navigator was parked. He walked with a long, easy stride, a tall, dark and handsome man who exerted a powerful fascination for her above and beyond the fact that he’d fathered the child she carried.
Mark had taught her the hard way that men weren’t always what they seemed, yet she found herself wanting to believe in Edmund and to trust him. Which brought her back to the question which had been hammering to be heard since he’d told her he was no longer married: dare she risk telling him he was the father of her unborn child? Or should she play it safe and sever all connection with him?
More confused by the minute, she backed into the living room and closed the glass doors to the balcony. Her faith in her own judgment had been badly shaken by the fiasco with Mark. She needed to discuss her predicament with someone clear-sighted enough to see the big picture, and unbiased enough to offer an impartial opinion. She needed to talk to her best friend, Irene.
“What I’d do,” Irene decided the next day, while the toddlers napped in the shade of the cherry tree in the day-care center’s back garden, and the older children played in the sandbox, “is wait to see if he contacts you again. If he doesn’t, the message coming through loud and clear is that the guy’s not interested in pursuing…whatever it is the two of you have going, and you’d be asking for trouble if you’d tried to force the issue.”
“And if he does call?”
“Play it by ear. Heck, Jenna, you know the drill—ask him why his marriage failed, scope him out about having more children some day, get him to tell you more about his work, his lifestyle.”
“More?” Jenna’s laugh was strained. “I don’t know the first thing about his work or where he lives or what he does in his spare time. I don’t know how old he is, where he was born, whether he has all his own teeth, if he’s an only child or one of ten, a foundling, an heir…I don’t know the man, period!”
“Seems to me you’ve got some homework to do then, before you even think about springing the news that he’s going to be a daddy again. You’ve been through enough this year, Jenna, without winding up with another loser.”
“But it’s his baby! Don’t you think he has the right to know that?”
“Look around you,” Irene said. “More than half these children spend their days with us because their mothers are out working full-time, and why is that?”
“They have no place else to leave them.”
“Right. The women married deadbeats who didn’t stick around to carry their share of the load so that mommy could stay home and look after her kids herself. How often have we heard those same women say that today’s the day the father’s supposed to pick his child up after work and spend some ‘quality’ time with him? And how often have we had to phone Mom to say Dad was a no-show, and her little guy’s huddled in a corner, sobbing his heart out with disappointment?”
“Too often.”
“Exactly! So no, I don’t think this Edmund Delaney has the right to know a thing, just because he happened to get you pregnant. You’ve got to be sure he’s willing to go one step further and be a father as well, before you invite him to get involved in raising the child. If he’s not, spare yourself the possibility of unpleasant complications down the road.”
Jenna agreed with everything Irene had said—except for one part. Every child deserved to know his father if it was remotely possible, and she wasn’t willing to risk denying her baby that opportunity by leaving matters to chance. When a week passed and she still hadn’t heard from Edmund, she took matters into her own hands, looked up his number in the phone book, and called to invite him to dinner the following Friday.
She lived in an older apartment near English Bay, one with high ceilings and fancy molding around the doors and windows. The mantel over her fireplace was Edwardian, the light fixture in her dining room classic art deco, the leaded windows of a quality not to be found today. They’d immediately caught his eye, the first time he’d seen them, and were one reason he’d been happy to fall in with her suggestion that they get together again. He was interested in the history of the building and any plans that might be underway for modernizing it.
The other reason was to make sure she’d recovered from food poisoning. Nothing more. She wasn’t ready for another heavy-duty relationship and even if she were, he wasn’t the man for the job. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t engage in a purely platonic relationship.
Parking was tight along her street but he’d driven the convertible that night and managed to squeeze it into a parking spot better suited to a motorcycle. She’d said seven, and it was only ten to, so he took his time strolling through the gates and past lush gardens planted with old-fashioned roses to the stone portico at the main entrance of her building.
She buzzed him inside the building so promptly that he figured she must have spotted him coming up the drive, yet when she opened her door, she seemed strangely flustered. “Oh…Edmund! You’re here! Already…!”
“Hello, Jenna. You’re looking better,” he said, putting her manner down to the fact that he’d shown up ten minutes early. “Not nearly as green around the gills as you were last week.”
In fact, she looked stunning. Not that he pretended to be any fashion expert but he knew what he liked and in his view, too many women were blinded by designer labels, regardless of the clothes attached to them. But she’d got it just right in a light blue sleeveless dress belted at the waist. He liked her shoes, too. Pretty, feminine things, instead of the trench hoppers so may women seemed to go for lately. Made him glad he’d decided to wear a jacket and tie, even though his usual preference ran to something more casual.
“Do come in,” she said, massaging her ring finger nervously. “It’s such a lovely evening, I thought we might sit on the balcony for a while and…chat.” She indicated a brass tea wagon set up as a bar, with a couple of decanters, bottled water, a bucket of ice and dish of sliced lime, then scurried away from him as if he had a communicable disease. “Help yourself to a drink while I take care of a couple of last-minute things in the kitchen.”
“May I fix something for you?”
Her voice floated back down the hall. “I’ll stick with Perrier, thanks.”
He poured himself a scotch and wandered out to the balcony. She’d grouped antique wicker furniture around little stone urns filled with scarlet geraniums and some sort of blue trailing flower. A wrought iron stand about three feet high held six fat candles. At the far end of the balcony, positioned where it would catch the afternoon sun, was a padded chaise with a small fountain beside it.
Nice. Very nice—except for the tension which hung in the air like invisible fog. Something wasn’t right about the whole setup, and if he’d had any doubts about it, she put paid to them when she eventually came out to join him.
Perching gingerly on the edge of her chair like a bird ready to take flight at the first hint of danger, she launched into painful conversation, although he might as well not have been there for all the eye contact they exchanged. “Well, here we are,” she said woodenly, addressing the wall behind him.
“Indeed.”
“I made lemon chicken. I hope you like it.”
“I’m pretty easy to please when it comes to food.”
“The weather’s been wonderful, hasn’t it?”
“Wonderful.”
Her glance skittered past him and settled on the trees lining the street. “Exceptionally dry, even for July.”
“I guess.”
She sipped her
Perrier, set the glass down on the low table between their chairs, and started drawing imaginary rings on her finger. Again. “They’re forecasting a long, hot summer.”
Okay, he’d had enough! “When two people can’t find anything else to talk about but the weather, it’s usually an indication that they’re not having a very good time. Are you wishing you hadn’t asked me here tonight, Jenna?”
That caught her off guard enough that she locked gazes with him and if he hadn’t known better, he’d have said she was on the verge of panic. “N-no!”
“Then why don’t you just relax and enjoy my company?”
Like a diver about to plunge into a very deep pool, she drew in a breath which made her breasts heave, and said, “Because I have an ulterior motive for inviting you. I need to ask you something.”
“So, fire away,” he said. “What do you want to know?”
He wasn’t sure what he expected—something that needed fixing in the apartment, possibly—and so was completely unprepared when she started quizzing him as if he were running for public office and might have a dirty secret in his past.
“For a start,” she said, “where do you live?”
“Near Lost Lagoon.”
“In an apartment?”
“Yeah,” he said, “but it’s nothing near as interesting as your place.”
“Have you always lived downtown?”
Without a clue as to where all this was leading, he shook his head. “Uh-uh. I owned a house in West Vancouver when Adrienne and I were together.”
“Which do you prefer?”
“A house made sense when I was married, especially once Molly was born, but an apartment’s easier now that I’m single again.” Mystified, he tossed her a quizzical glance. “What’s with the third degree, Jenna?”
“I’m interested in you, that’s all.”
“I’m flattered—I think.”
She brushed that aside as if it were of no consequence how he felt, and started off down another avenue. “How is Molly?”
“Doing well, thanks.”
The Pregnant Bride Page 6