The Bride Came C.O.D. (Bachelor Fathers)

by Barbara Bretton

  "Go to stage one tracking," Ryder said after another half-hour passed without word from Kiel. The PAX operative assigned to the general area was somewhere out in the Bering Sea. He'd have to risk compromising Kiel's cover story in order to establish the current state of affairs.

  "Affirmative," said Winslow, punching in a long string of codes. "Stage one tracking, op 52AQ731, established as of now."

  Lexi leaped from the bed at the first shriek of the alarm. "Good God in heaven!" She reached for the robe draped across the foot of the bed. "There must be a fire. I'll grab Kelsey, you--"

  He was next to her in a flash. "Calm down," he said, trying to look calm. "It's not a fire."

  She broke away from his grasp and flung open the door. "Listen to that! If that's not a fire alarm, I'll--"

  "Don't worry." He grabbed for a pair of jeans and yanked them on. "It's--it's the security alarm to my lab."

  "Your lab?" She stared at him in disbelief. "Someone's out there trying to break into your lab and you look this calm? Whoever it is might be heading toward the house this instant. I'm going to call the police."

  "No."

  "No? What do you mean, no? It could be some crazed lunatic with an axe, Kiel. We have to call somebody."

  He stopped. She watched as he took a deep breath and dragged a slow hand through his thick head of hair. "You don't understand."

  "Darned right I don't understand. Sirens are going off, you tell me someone's trying to break into your lab, and when I say I'm going to call the police you look at me like I just grew a second head. You bet I don't understand."

  He pulled on a shirt, making sure he blocked her exit from the bedroom with the sheer size of his body. "It's my fault. I should've explained it better."

  She listened as he told her about the sophisticated tracking system that linked him to a central clearinghouse in the lower forty-eight.

  "You mean you have to check in every day at one in the morning?"

  He nodded.

  "And if you don't those--those sirens from hell go off?"

  He nodded again. "Sounds crazy, doesn't it?"

  It was her turn to nod. "What it sounds is unbelievable." She narrowed her eyes and stared at him. "If there's something wrong, I wish you'd tell me. I won't fall apart just because we're being stalked by a crazed woodsman or that Harry Blackburn who tried to jimmy the lock during our wedding party."

  He laughed and pulled her into his arms. She was unyielding. She didn't want to be unyielding but she couldn't help it. There was something very strange going on and she needed to know exactly what it was.

  "No crazed woodsmen, I promise you, and no Harry Blackburn either. I should've either reported in or disabled the system for the night." He stroked her hair.

  She wanted to feel safe and secure. "I suppose you did have other things on your mind last night."

  "You could say that."

  She kissed his chest. "I did say that."

  The alarm blared again.

  "Daaaaddddyyy!" Kelsey's wail sounded from the other bedroom.

  "I'd better go take care of things before we wake up

  the entire state," Kiel said.

  She nodded. "I'll check on Kelsey."

  By the time Kiel reached the front door to the lab he'd called himself every four-letter word in the book and a few more for good measure. Of all the lame-brained, stupid, irresponsible things to do this took the cake.

  PAX was in an uproar. He'd let his work slide. And now Alexa Grace had to be as suspicious as hell.

  There was one consolation: it couldn't get much worse.

  "The hell it can't!" roared Ryder O'Neal when he answered the secured phone. "We were a half-step away from sending an operative out there and you know damn well we can't afford to pull anyone off their code three assignments."

  "It was a mistake," Kiel said. "It won't happen again."

  "It can't happen again, goddamn it," said O'Neal. "What the hell do you think we're doing here, Brown, playing games?" He named two of the latest in a series of middle eastern dictators to make inquiries into the possibility of purchasing nuclear weapons from countries formerly held by the Soviet Union. "Sooner or later someone's bound to score. You're the best hope we have of disabling the material without creating an even greater risk."

  "I appreciate that," Kiel said, gritting his teeth against his rising anger, "but something came up." The irony of that statement wasn't lost on him but he was too disgruntled to laugh.

  "All we ask of you is to check in every night. If you're not dead, you do it."

  "It won't happen again."

  "So what happened?" O'Neal asked. "Where the hell were you at one a.m.?"

  "None of your business," Kiel shot back.

  "Everything you do is my business," O'Neal said. "You take a shower, it's my business. You go into town for milk, it's my business."

  "Yeah, well, this isn't your business."

  He heard O'Neal's intake of breath. "Geez," he said, "don't tell me you and Lexi are--"

  "I'm not telling you anything," Kiel roared. "I'll transmit a progress report in the next five minutes."

  He would have enjoyed breaking O'Neal's nose but he settled for breaking the connection.

  Lexi was dressed and nursing a cup of coffee in the kitchen when Kiel returned.

  "Where's Kelsey?" he asked, glancing around the room.

  "Brushing her teeth." She looked at him, noted the tension around his mouth and felt a flutter of apprehension. "Is everything all right?"

  "It's what I figured it was," he said, forcing a smile. "I reset the alarm."

  She rose from her chair. "I'll get you some coffee."

  "None for me," he said. "I'd better get back to work."

  "You can't work on an empty stomach."

  "No time," he said. "Gotta play catch-up today."

  "Let me fix you something to take with you." It was her turn to force a smile. "I'm not much of a cook but even I can make a sandwich."

  He shook his head. "Thanks but I'll pass."

  She looked at him. He looked away. Her heart felt heavy inside her chest and she fought to regain her self-possession. "I may not have a great deal of sexual experience," she said, "but you don't have to worry that I'll expect something from you just because we slept together. We said there would be no complications and there won't be."

  "Shut up," he said, moving toward her.

  She held her ground. "We got carried away," she continued, ignoring the murderous glint in his eyes. "I, for one, can guarantee it won't happen again."

  He grabbed her by the upper arms. "I told you to shut up."

  She swallowed hard and looked up at him. "The hell I will. I know everything isn't as it seems, Kiel, and I know--"

  His kiss was hungry, fierce, filled with heat and anger. She hated him for that kiss and she hated him because it didn't last half long enough.

  "It won't be much longer," he said when he broke the savage kiss, "and then we can sort everything out."

  "You're not really an environmentalist, are you?" she asked, suddenly certain of that fact.

  "What the hell makes you think that?"

  "I--I don't know." But it would explain so much. His odd working patterns. His lack of interest in the natural world around him. The alarms that went bump in the night. "The only thing I don't understand is how Joanna and her husband figure into this."

  "Don't ask questions now, Lexi," he said as he started across the snow-crusted yard toward his lab. "You might not like the answers."

  The last thing Lexi felt like doing was strapping Kelsey into the truck and driving to Imelda Mulroney's house for little Matthew's birthday party but Kelsey was so excited at the prospect of being with other children that Lexi didn't have the heart to refuse.

  Besides, it didn't look as if Kiel was going to poke his head out of his lab for the rest of the day. She'd taken a deep breath and called him on the intercom to let him know they were leaving and he barely grunted a response.<
br />
  "Coward," she said as she slammed down the receiver. Running away at the first sign of intimacy. I'll have you know I don't like this any better than you do, she thought as she paced the living room while she waited for Kelsey to finish in the bathroom. The last thing she'd bargained on when she agreed to this whole ridiculous enterprise was getting involved with the man she married. Just thinking about the things he'd done last night, the things she'd encouraged him to do to her, made her feel lightheaded and warm all over.

  She wrapped her arms around her chest and looked out the front window. The only other time she'd ever been frightened was when her father died and she realized that, thanks to the provisions in his will, she might lose the entire framework of her existence. He'd wanted to push Lexi toward building a future for herself with a man who loved her. What he'd done was send her running headlong into marriage with a perfect stranger, all so she could lay claim to her money.

  She'd believed she couldn't live without her penthouse apartment, her live-in help, Bloomingdale's. The thought made her laugh out loud. She hadn't so much as given Bloomie's a second thought since she left New York. She'd learned a great deal about herself in the past four weeks. She'd learned that she wasn't incompetent or selfish or flighty. At least not all the time. Faced with a little girl who'd lost her mother and a very lonely man, she'd discovered she had a heart. And she'd discovered how to share it.

  Oh, Daddy, she thought, that might be a better inheritance than the one you had in mind.

  Connecticut

  Joanna placed the slip of paper on the desk in front of her husband. "Bad news," she said, her voice tight.

  Ryder looked down, read the typed message, and then balled the paper in his hand. "Shit," he said. "It's starting."

  "It's starting," Joanna agreed. "What are we going to do?"

  "We have no choice," he said. "We have to bring them in."

  "Today?" asked Joanna.

  "Yesterday," said Ryder. "I don't like this. Now that Harry Blackburn's dead, we don't have anyone close enough to keep an eye on things until we can move them."

  "How about--"

  Ryder shook his head. "Still out on the Bering Sea."

  Joanna pushed the secured phone toward him. "You'd better get on it."

  Ryder said the code words into the mouthpiece, waited while the voice I.D. system analyzed matched his speech patterns to the module on file, and then dialed. "We still have time," he said to Joanna while he waited for Kiel to pick up.

  She nodded. "A good twelve hours, I would think."

  "We won't need that long. Kiel's the organized type. Once I tell him what to do, he'll have Lexi and the kid in the truck and on their way to the pickup spot." He paused, listening to the sound of the phone ringing in Nowhere, Alaska. "He's not answering."

  Her eyes widened with concern. "Maybe there's a glitch on the line. Try again."

  He did.

  Still no answer.

  No doubt about it. The trouble had begun.

  "Everything's going to be okay," Kiel said out loud as the guided the car over the rutted road that passed for a highway. Kids came down with strange flus and viruses every day of the week. Just because it had never happened to his kid was no reason to think something strange was going on.

  "Meet me at the hospital," Lexi had said to him, her voice trembling with fear. "We're taking Kelsey there as soon as I hang up." Apparently Kelsey had been stricken with a vicious flu bug during the birthday party for Imelda Mulroney's grandson.

  He'd been out the front door in a flash. The car, provided by PAX for just such an emergency, started on the first try.

  Someone must be watching over him, he thought as he wheeled into the hospital's tiny parking lot. Less than ninety minutes had elapsed since Lexi's frantic telephone call. Nothing terrible could happen in ninety minutes.

  He ran across the light dusting of snow that covered the walkway then burst through the front doors and grabbed the first person he saw.

  "Emergency room," he snapped. "Where is it?"

  "Down the hall," the man said. "Through the double doors."

  He was halfway there before the guy finished his sentence.

  Lexi was standing near the nurse's station. She saw him the moment he pushed open the door.

  "Kelsey," he said, blood pounding in his ears.

  She laid a hand on his arm. "It's bad, Kiel," she said softly. "Very bad."

  Chapter 12

  "Kelsey's temperature's still spiking," said the doctor, a dark-haired woman in her early forties. "It was 105 a few minutes ago."

  "Jesus Christ!" Kiel slammed his fist against the wall of the waiting room. "Can't you bring it down?"

  "That's what we're trying to do," the doctor said in an even tone of voice. "Believe me we are doing everything in our power to stabilize her."

  "Stabilize? What the hell do you mean stabilize? This was a perfectly healthy kid just a few hours ago."

  "I realize that, Mr. Brown, and we're running a full battery of tests to determine the exact nature of this fever."

  It wasn't good enough. It wasn't nearly good enough but Kiel realized he'd pushed as hard as he could.

  "She's my only kid," he said, meeting the doctor's eyes.

  The doctor nodded. "I understand. Believe me when I say we'll move heaven and earth to bring that fever down into range."

  "Jesus," he said to Lexi after the doctor disappeared down the corridor, "she sounds like she's not sure she can do it."

  "She can do it," Lexi said, taking his hand in hers. "Of course she can do it."

  "Things happen," he said as Lexi drew him over to the sofa in the waiting room. "Her mother wasn't supposed to leave her but she did."

  Lexi's expression was unreadable. "I'm sorry about your wife," she said, "but that won't happen to Kelsey."

  "You don't get it, do you? Helena left us six months before she died. She packed up her bags, left a note on the kitchen table, and walked out the door."

  "My God," Lexi whispered. "I had no idea."

  "Neither did I," said Kiel with a bitter laugh. "Not one goddamn idea in hell that she was sleeping with another man until I found that note. I wanted to kill her with my bare hands...."

  "But what about Kelsey? Surely Helena would have wanted her daughter with her once she was settled."

  "Think again," he said. "She signed away all claim to her own flesh and blood."

  "You asked her to do that?"

  "I asked her not to. She said she wanted to begin a new life unencumbered." Again that bitter laugh. "'Unencumbered.' Great word, isn't it? Kind of says it all." He met Lexi's eyes. "You've shown that kid more love in six weeks than Helena did in eighteen months."

  "How did she--"

  "Boating accident. Her boyfriend lived. She didn't."

  They sat together in silence for what seemed like hours. Each time a nurse or doctor walked past Kiel leaped to his feet, eager for news on Kelsey's condition.

  Lexi held his hand. She smoothed his hair off his forehead. She ached to hold him close and share his pain. I love your daughter, she thought, wishing she had the right to say the words. I don't think I could love her more if I'd given birth to her. Another, more frightening thought surfaced.

  And what about your husband, Alexa Grace, are you starting to love him too?

  "We know what it isn't," said the doctor two hours later. She listed a terrifying array of diseases. "And that's all good. At least we're narrowing it down a little."

  "Is it bacterial or viral?" Kiel asked.

  "We're fairly sure it's viral," the doctor said, sounding less sure than Kiel would have liked. "We'll keep you posted."

  "I want to see her."

  "I don't think that's the best of ideas right now."

  "She's only four years old. She's probably scared to death."

  "Kelsey is a very brave little girl, Mr. Brown. She's doing quite well."

  "Then let me see her."

  There must have been something
about his tone of voice that told the doctor that he'd tear apart the hospital brick by brick if she didn't let him see his daughter.

  "Five minutes," said the doctor. "No more."

  Lexi hung back. "I'll wait here," she told Kiel. "You go."

  He hesitated then nodded and vanished down the hall.

  Lexi paced the length of the waiting room, her thoughts a tangled mess of conflicting hopes and dreams and prayers and all of them centered around the man and child in the room down the hall. I want to see you, too, Kelse. I just don't have the right. She wasn't the child's mother or even a legitimate stepmother. Her marriage to Kiel was based on expediency not emotion and not even the magical night she'd spent in his arms could change the fact that what they had was first and foremost a business arrangement that would come to an end one day soon.

  He could have asked her to go with him, but he didn't. That omission told her everything.

  "Alexa."

  She looked up, eyes stinging with unshed tears, and saw Kiel standing before her.

  "Five minutes are up already?" she asked, her voice uncharacteristically husky.

  "No." He held out his hand.

  "I'm not family."

  "You are to Kelse.

  She took his hand and tried to ignore the glimmer of hope inside her heart. She was still holding on tightly to it when they entered the ICU. How tiny Kelsey looked in the big white bed. An I.V. dripped fluid into her left arm while a tube down her nose kept her air passages clear. Her little face was flushed with fever and her eyes had that heated glaze that came with it.

  "...hot..." Kelsey managed. "...want water...."

  Lexi glanced at the nurse standing near the foot of the bed. "I don't know what to do," she said, feeling both useless and helpless. "I've never been around a sick child before."

  Puzzled, the nurse looked at Kiel. "The child's birth mother is dead," he said in a flat tone of voice.

  The nurse looked back at Lexi. "She can have some ice chips, Mrs. Brown."

  One by one Lexi placed the shavings of ice against Kelsey's parched lips as she kept up a steady stream of meaningless conversation that was more for her benefit than the child's. She talked about Barney the Dinosaur and Mr. Rogers and Big Bird and sang all the lyrics to one of Kelsey's favorite songs while Kiel sat on the edge of the bed and held his daughter's hand in his.