by Diana Palmer
“I read John Donne in college,” he replied. “I can be an island if I please.”
She pursed her lips again, surveying him with marked interest. “If you really were an island, you’d have barbed wire strung around the trees and land mines on the beaches.”
She went inside, aware of the deep masculine laughter she left behind her.
The abandoned baby, Jennifer, had been placed in care, and Jessica couldn’t help going to see her. She was living temporarily as a ward of the court with a local family that seemed to thrive on anyone’s needful children.
“We can’t have any of our own, you see,” Mabel Darren said with a grin. She was in her mid-thirties, dark and bubbly, and it didn’t take a clairvoyant to know that she loved children. She had six of them, all from broken homes or orphaned, ranging in age from a toddler to a teen.
The house was littered, but clean. The social-services office had to check it out periodically to comply with various regulations, but there had never been any question of the Darrens’ ability to provide for their charges. And if ever children were loved, these underprivileged ones were.
“Isn’t she a little angel?” Mabel asked when Jessica had the sweet-smelling infant in her arms.
“Oh, yes,” Jessica said, feeling a terrible pain as she cuddled the child. She would never know the joy of childbirth, much less that of watching a baby grow to adulthood. She would be alone all her life.
Mabel would have understood, but Jessica could never bring herself to discuss her anguish with anyone. She carried Jennifer to the rocking chair and sat down with her, oblivious to the many other duties that were supposed to be demanding her attention.
The older woman just smiled. “It’s time for her bottle. Would you like to feed her while you’re here? Then I could get on with my dirty dishes,” she added. She knew already that if she could make Jessica think she was helping, the social worker was much more likely to do what she really wanted to.
“If it would help,” Jessica said. Her soft, dark eyes were on the baby’s face and she touched the tiny head, the hands, the face with fingers that trembled. She’d never known such a profound hunger in her life, and tears stung her eyes.
As if the baby sensed her pain, her big eyes opened and she stared up at Jessica, unblinking. She made a soft gurgling noise in her throat. With a muffled cry, Jessica cuddled Jennifer close and started the chair rocking. At that moment, she would have given anything—anything!—for this tiny precious thing to be her very own.
Mabel’s footsteps signaled her approach. Jessica composed herself just before the other woman reappeared with a bottle. She managed to feed the baby and carry on a pleasant conversation with Mabel, apparently unruffled by the experience. But deep inside, she was devastated. Something about Jennifer accentuated all the terrible feelings of inadequacy and made her child hungry. She’d never wanted anything as much as she wanted the abandoned infant.
After she fed the baby, she went back to the office, where she was broody and quiet for the rest of the day. She was so silent that Bess, who worked in the outer office, stuck her auburn head in the door to inquire if her boss was sick.
“No, I’m all right, but thanks,” Jessica said dully. “It’s been a long day, that’s all.”
“Well, you got to have lunch with Sterling McCallum,” Bess mused. “I wouldn’t call that tedious. I dress up, I wear sexy perfume, but he never gives me a second look. Is he really that formidable and businesslike all the time?” she asked with a keen stare.
Jessica’s well-schooled features gave nothing away. She smiled serenely. “If I ever find out, you’ll be the first to know. It was a business lunch, Bess, not a date,” she added.
“Oh, you stick-in-the-mud,” she muttered. “A gorgeous man like that, and all you want to talk about is work! I’d have him on his back in the front seat so fast…!”
Shocking images presented themselves, but with Jessica, not Bess, imprisoning Sterling McCallum on the seat of his car. She had to stop thinking of him in those terms! “Really, Bess!” she muttered.
“Jessica, you do know what century this is?” Bess asked gently. “You know, the nineties, uninhibited sex?”
“AIDS?” Jessica added.
Bess made a soft sound. “Well, I didn’t mean that you don’t have to be careful. But McCallum strikes me as the sort of man who would be. I’ll bet he’s always properly equipped.”
Jessica’s face had gone scarlet and she stood up abruptly.
“I’m just leaving for home!” Bess said quickly, all too aware that she’d overstepped the mark. “See you tomorrow!”
She closed the door and ran for it. Jessica was even-tempered most of the time, but she, too, could be formidable when she lost her cool.
Jessica restrained a laugh at the speed with which Bess took to her heels. It was just as well not to let employees get too complacent, she decided, as she opened another file and went back to work.
It was after dark and pouring rain when she decided to go home. Meriwether would be wanting his supper, and she was hungry enough herself. The work would still be here, waiting, in the morning. But it had taken her mind off Baby Jennifer, which was a good thing.
She locked up the office and got into her yellow pickup as quickly as possible. Her umbrella, as usual, was at home. She had one in the office, too, but she’d forgotten it. She was wet enough without trying to go back and get it. She fumbled the key into the ignition, locked her door and started the vehicle.
The engine made the most ghastly squealing noise. It didn’t help to remember McCallum’s grim warning about trouble ahead if she didn’t get it seen to.
But the mechanic’s shop was closed, and so were all the service stations. The convenience store was open, and it had self-service gas pumps, but nobody who worked inside would know how to replace a fan belt. In fact, Tammie Jane was working the counter tonight, and the most complicated thing she knew how to do was change her nail polish.
With a long sigh, Jessica pulled the truck out onto the highway and said a silent prayer that she would be able to make it home before the belt broke. The squeal that usually vanished when she went faster only got worse tonight.
The windshield wipers were inadequate, too. A big leaf had gotten caught in the one on the driver’s side, smearing the water rather than removing it. Jessica groaned out loud at her bad luck. It had been a horrible day altogether, and not just because of the predicament she was in now.
She pulled onto the dirt road that led to her home. The rain was coming down harder. She had no idea how long it had been pouring, because she’d been so engrossed in her work. Now she saw the creek ahead and wondered if she’d even be able to get across it. The water was very high. This was an old and worrying problem.
She gunned the engine and shot across, barely missing another struggling motorist, her elderly CB-radio-fanatic neighbor. He waved to her as he went past, but she was too occupied with trying to see ahead to really look at him. She almost made it up the hill, but at that very moment, the fan belt decided to give up the ghost. It snapped and the engine raced, but nothing happened. The truck slid back to the bottom of the hill beside the wide, rising creek, and the engine went dead.
Six
Jessica sat in the truck without moving, muttering under her breath. She hoped that her eccentric neighbor had noticed her plight and alerted someone in town on his CB radio, but whether or not he’d seen her slide back down the hill was anyone’s guess.
She decided after a few minutes that she was going to be stranded unless she did something. The creek was rising steadily. She was terrified of floods. If she didn’t get up that hill, god only knew what might happen to her when the water rose higher. The rain showed no sign of slackening.
She opened the door and got out, becoming soaked within the first couple of minutes. She made a rough sound in her throat and let out an equally rough word to go with it. Stupid old truck! She should have listened to McCallum.
Sh
e managed to get the hood up, but it did no good. There was no source of light except the few patches of sky on the horizon that weren’t black as thunder. She didn’t even have a flashlight. Well, she had one—but the battery was dead. She’d meant to replace it….
The deep drone of an engine caught her attention. She turned, blinded by headlights, hoping against hope that it was her elderly neighbor. He could give her a ride home, at least.
A huge red-and-black Bronco with antennas all over it and a bar of lights on top swept up beside her and stopped. She recognized it from McCallum’s house. It had been sitting in the garage next to the patrol car he used when he was on call at night. He got out of it, wearing a yellow rain slicker. The rain seemed to slacken as he approached her.
“Nice wheels,” she commented.
“I like it,” he replied. “Fan belt broke, huh?”
She glowered, shivering in the rain. “Terrific guess.”
“No help here, until I can get a new belt and put it on for you. Nothing’s open this late.” He closed the hood and marched her around to the passenger side of the Bronco. “Climb in.”
He helped her into the big vehicle and she sat, shivering, on the vinyl seat while, with the four-wheel drive in operation, he drove effortlessly up the muddy hill and on to her cabin.
“What were you doing out at this time of night anyway?” he asked.
“Trying to get stranded in the rain,” she told him.
He glared at her.
“I was working late.” She sneezed.
“Get in there and take a bath.”
“I had planned to. Have you…had supper?” she added, without looking at him.
“Not yet.”
She touched the door handle. “I have a pot of soup in the refrigerator. I could make some cornbread to go with it.”
“If you could make some coffee, I’d be delighted to join you. I’d just got off duty when I monitored a call about a stranded motorist.”
She grinned, because she knew which motorist he meant. “Done.” She got out and left him to follow.
The minute he walked in the door, Meriwether, having come to meet his mistress, bristled and began spitting viciously at the newcomer.
“I like you, too, pal,” McCallum muttered as he and the cat had a glaring contest.
“Meri, behave yourself!” Jessica fussed.
“If you’ll show me what the soup’s in, I’ll start heating it while you’re in the shower,” he offered.
She led him into the kitchen, dripping everywhere, and got out the big pot of soup while he hung up his drenched slicker.
“I’ll make the cornbread when I get back. You could preheat the oven,” she added, and told him what temperature to set it.
“Okay. Where’s the coffee?”
She showed him the filters and coffee and how to work the pot. Then she rushed down the hall to the bathroom.
Ten minutes later, clean and presentable in a sweatshirt and jeans, with her hair hanging in damp strands down her back, she joined him in the kitchen.
“You’ll catch a cold,” he murmured, glancing at her from his seat at the table with a steaming cup of black coffee. “Sit down for a minute and I’ll pour you a cup.”
“I’ll make the cornbread first,” she said. “It won’t take a minute.”
And it didn’t She put it in the preheated oven to bake and then sat down across from McCallum to sip her coffee. He was wearing a brown plaid shirt, with jeans and boots. He always looked clean and neat, even when he was drenched, she thought, and wondered if his military training had a lot to do with it.
“Do you always keep your house this hot?” he asked, unfastening the top buttons of his shirt.
“I don’t have air-conditioning,” she explained apologetically. “But I can turn on the fan.”
“Are you cool?”
She shook her head. “I’m rather cold-blooded, I’m afraid. But if you’re too hot…”
“Leave it. It’s probably the coffee.” He leaned back. The action pulled his shirt away from his chest and she got a glimpse of the thick mat of curling black hair that covered it.
She averted her eyes in the direction of the stove and watched it fanatically, not daring to look at him again. He was devastating like that, so attractive physically that he made her toes curl.
He saw the look he was getting. It made his heart race. She was certainly less sophisticated than most women he knew, but she still made him hungry in a new and odd sort of way.
“You said you monitored a stranded motorist’s call?” she asked curiously.
“Yes. Your neighbor called the office on his mobile unit, and when I heard where the stranded motorist was, I told Dispatch that I’d respond.” He grinned at her. “I knew who it was and what was wrong before I got here.”
She took an audible breath. “Well, it might have been something besides the fan belt,” she said.
“You’re stubborn.”
“I meant to have it checked,” she defended herself. “I got busy.”
“Next time you’ll know better, won’t you?”
“I hate it when you use that tone,” she muttered. “I’m not brain dead just because I’m a woman!”
His eyebrows raised. “Did I imply that you were?”
“You have an attitude….”
“So do you,” he shot back. “Defensive and standoffish. I’d have told a man no differently than I told you that your fan belt needed replacing. The difference is that a man would have listened.”
She put her coffee cup down hard and opened her mouth to speak just as the beeper on the oven’s timer went off.
He got up with her and took the soup off the burner while she checked the cornbread in the oven. It was nicely browned, just right.
She was silent while she dished up the abbreviated meal, and while they ate it.
“You’re a good cook, Jessie,” he commented when he’d finished his second helping. “Who taught you?”
“My grandmother,” she said. “My mother was not a good cook. She tried, God bless her, but we never gained weight around here.” She pushed back her bowl. “You’re handy enough in a kitchen yourself.”
“Had to be,” he said simply. “My mother was never sober enough to cook. If I hadn’t learned, we’d both have starved. Not that she ate much. She drank most of her meals.”
“You sound so bitter,” she said gently.
“I am bitter,” he shot back. He crossed his long legs, brushing at a smudge of mud on one polished black boot. “She robbed me of my childhood.” His eyes sought her. “Isn’t that what most victims of child abuse tell you—that what they mourn most is the loss of childhood?”
She nodded. “That’s the worst of it. The pain and bitterness go on for a long time, even after therapy. You can’t remake the past, McCallum. The scars don’t go away, even if the patient can be made to restructure the way he or she thinks about the experience.”
He turned his coffee cup around, his eyes on the white china soup bowl, now empty. “I never did what young boys usually get to do—play sports, join the Boy Scouts, go on trips, go to parties…From the time I was old enough, I did nothing except look after my mother, night after drunken night.” His lean hand contacted absently on the bowl. “I used to hope she’d die.”
“That’s very normal,” she assured him.
His broad shoulders rose and fell. “She did die, though in jail. I had her arrested when it all got too much after she attacked me one night. She was convicted of child abuse, sent to jail, and she died there when I was in my early teens. I was put to work as a hired hand for any family that would take me in. I had a room in a bunkhouse or in the barn, never with the family. I spent most of my life as an outsider looking in, until I was old enough to join the service. The uniform gave me a little self-esteem. As I grew older, I learned that my situation wasn’t all that rare.”
“Sadly, it isn’t,” she told him. “Sterling, what about your father?”
> Her use of his first name made him feel warm inside. He smiled at her. “What about him?”
“Did he die?”
“Beats me,” he said quietly. “I never found out who he was. I’m not sure she knew.”
The implications of that statement were devastating. She winced.
“Feeling sorry for me all over again?” he murmured gently. “I don’t need pity, Jessie. I’ve come to grips with it over the years. Plenty of people had it worse.”
She traced the rim of her coffee cup soberly. “I’m sorry that it was that way for you.”
“Different from your childhood, I imagine.”
“Oh, yes. I was loved and wanted, and petted. I don’t suppose I had a single bad experience in my whole childhood.”
“They say we carry our childhood around with us, like luggage. I’ll have to worry about not being too rough on my kids. You’ll be just the opposite.”
She felt sick inside, and tried not to show it. “Have you managed to find out anything else about little Jenny?” she asked, changing the subject.
“Nothing except dead ends,” he had to admit. “I did find one new lead, but it didn’t work out. How about you? Anything on the midwives?”
“I’ve spoken to two, but they say they don’t know anything.” She twirled her spoon on the tablecloth. “I’m not sure they’d tell me if they did,” she added, looking up. “Sometimes they get in trouble for helping with deliveries, especially if something goes wrong. What if the mother died giving birth, Sterling?”
“That’s a thought.” His lips pursed. “I might check into any recent deaths involving childbirth.”
“It might not lead to anything at all, but someone has to know about her. I mean, she didn’t come from under a cabbage leaf.”
He chuckled. “I don’t think so.”
She liked the sound of his laughter. She smiled as she got up to put the dishes in the sink.
“No dishwasher?” he teased as he helped.
“Of course I have a dishwasher—myself.” She smiled at him. “I’ll put these in to soak and do them later.”