But he couldn’t call her. He didn’t know her phone number.
He could write her a note, then. Tomorrow, first thing. Deliver it to her house personally.
He made his way back into the main room of the gallery and pushed through the crowd toward the front door. He was already framing his note to Kerry in his mind. What if he managed to catch her at home and could tell her in person? What if he went over there tonight, say, and her eyes lit up, all silvery and golden, when she saw him?
Lost in thought, Sam was more surprised than anyone when his name was called out from a dais in the front of the room. He stopped stock-still, stared blankly, accepted congratulations that made no sense until a bubbly matron descended upon him and pressed a carving of some sort into his hands.
“You’ve won the door prize!” she enthused. “It’s Inuit! Carved by Inuits in one of their villages! By a master craftsman!”
Sam, in the middle of a bunch of gawking strangers, stammered his thanks, thinking that all he wanted was to get out of there. He looked down at the carving. Even though he liked Inuit art as well as anybody, all he could think about was that Kerry would enjoy it. The carving depicted a bear scooping a salmon from a river, and he thought it might make Kerry laugh. That is, if she were to see it.
He retraced his steps toward the door and he had almost escaped when he heard someone behind him say, “Well, hello, stranger!”
He turned, stared blankly.
“Remember me? Jolie?” The redhead smiled up at him, her face plainer than he recalled.
She wouldn’t listen to his protests that he had something else to do. She led him away to meet her friends, all of whom wanted to see the carving. While he was smiling and saying all the right things, he realized that it was too late to drop in on Kerry unannounced. She might be sleeping. She might not even be there.
Just for a moment—one wishful moment—he wanted to see Kerry walk through the door, her hair golden in the glow from the track lighting overhead, her smile just for him.
Knowing that it couldn’t—wouldn’t—happen, rocketed him to the depths of despair.
“Come to dinner with us,” Jolie was insisting, and Sam didn’t want to. But he did. He didn’t know what else to do with himself. He didn’t want to go home. No, that wasn’t right. He didn’t want to go home alone.
And tonight maybe he wouldn’t have to.
KERRY FOUND Sam’s card when she came back from having tea with Mr. Lagunoff. So he’d been around again, and she did want to talk to him.
After a night of tossing and turning and wondering if calling him was the right thing to do, she hesitantly phoned Sam’s office the next morning. The woman who answered the phone told her he was out. Kerry hung up, feeling deflated even though she wasn’t sure she’d wanted to talk to Sam anyway. It would feel so different, hearing his voice over a phone line, and she couldn’t remember how his voice sounded anyway. Or maybe she could, but didn’t want to think about it.
She should have asked the woman on the phone if there was anyone else at Harbeck Air who could help her set up regularly scheduled flights to Silverthorne.
Well, she didn’t have to include flight information on the brochure, but she did need the brochures right away so that she could mail them before Christmas. People liked to plan their summer vacations early when they were traveling to Alaska, and she could accommodate only so many guests.
As snowflakes began to drift slowly out of the sky again, she stood at the window and thought about her parents in La Jolla. For the first time, she thought she might take them up on their offer of a plane ticket. She was tired of being cold. And she was tired of being alone.
SAM WOKE UP early the morning after his encounter with Jolie nursing a humongous hangover. He made his tortuous way into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee, wondering where Shwano was. Shwano, his housekeeper, was a brand-new father and proud of it. Sam had an idea that he was in his home behind Sam’s house marveling over the new baby.
Not that Sam cared. More power to Shwano, who could at least acknowledge his own child. Who had a lovely wife who adored him. Who wasn’t invited to go to gallery openings where he would meet women who wanted to sleep with him.
That’s why Sam was so hungover this morning. He hadn’t wanted to go home with Jolie or, worse yet, to invite her to his home. So he’d stayed out late drinking, dragging Jolie to one bar after another until she’d finally said she was tired and would go home with friends.
End of Jolie. End of evening. And almost the end of him.
He picked up the phone and punched out the number of his office.
“Ann?”
“Yes, Mr. Harbeck.”
“I’ll be in a little late. Hold my appointments until eleven o’clock, will you?”
“There’s someone here to see you, and—”
He sighed. “Okay, okay, I’ll be right in.” This was exasperating, but his visitor was probably Weeb Carlin, who was pestering him about buying those planes. It wasn’t a bad deal, but Sam didn’t want to think about it now. Only thing was, he’d put it off long enough, and Carlin was impatient.
He drained his coffee cup and hurried back upstairs to shower and shave.
KERRY PERCHED on the edge of a leather couch in the anteroom to Sam’s office and sneezed. Someone was waxing the hall floor, and the odor of the wax seemed awfully strong.
“Are you all right?” The woman behind the desk, identified by the nameplate on her desk as Ann Blyler, was instantly solicitous.
“Oh, it’s the smell of the wax, it tickles my nose,” Kerry told her. She was beginning to regret her split-second decision to stop by here on the way to the printer’s, which was only a few blocks away, but she’d thought she’d catch Sam in his office, have a quick and impersonal conversation about flights to Silverthorne and then be on her way. Unfortunately, Sam wasn’t around yet. She glanced at her watch. It was already ten o’clock.
As the drone of the buffing machine drew closer, Ann stopped what she was doing and aimed a sympathetic glance at the bulge under Kerry’s coat.
“How far along are you? Oh, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t ask such a personal question, but I just had a baby a year ago.” She smiled at Kerry.
Kerry didn’t mind talking about the baby. In fact, it seemed to her that there were too few people in Anchorage with whom she could discuss it. “Almost five months,” she said.
Ann rose from her desk, moved closer to talk over the sound of the machine. “There’s no reason why you can’t wait in Mr. Harbeck’s office. I can close the door, you won’t smell the fumes, and he’ll arrive in a few minutes. Do you think you’ll be here long?”
“No, I doubt it. I only need to ask him about scheduling flights to Silverthorne Lodge, and we’ve discussed it before.” Kerry waved her brochure materials under Ann’s nose.
“Well, come with me.”
This was a relief; Kerry had begun to feel the familiar stirrings of nausea from the fumes. She followed Ann into Sam’s office, which she remembered from previous times she’d been there with Doug. The scenery outside the window was all wide and blue with a view of snowy Mount Susitna in the distance, and she sank gratefully into the plush chair near the corner of Sam’s desk.
“There,” said Ann. “You’ll be more comfortable here.” She went out and closed the door behind her.
A runway was directly in her line of vision, and for a while Kerry watched planes taking off, tucking their landing gear and disappearing into the sky, but when that grew tiresome, she began to look around Sam’s office. He had eclectic taste, that was for sure. A sealskin robe, probably an antique, was draped across a couch. A modern mobile swayed gently in the air from a heating vent. A model airplane that looked as if it had been built by a child sat on the corner of his desk. Perhaps Sam had built it himself. That seemed likely, and captivated by the idea, Kerry leaned closer for a better look. That was when she saw her own name on a file folder.
Why on earth woul
d Sam have a file folder with her name on it?
She stared at the folder, its manila surface blank and innocent except for her name typed neatly on the label. She leaned closer and saw that the folder held several papers and an envelope. At that point curiosity got the better of her, and she edged the folder out from under the others in the stack. Surely she had a right to know what Sam thought important about her. Didn’t she?
That question didn’t seem at all relevant when she saw to her astonishment that the papers were typed on the letterhead of the Oliver Fertility Clinic in Seattle. She shuffled through them, scarcely believing her eyes. There were donor applications, signed by Sam, and appointment sheets for Sam, and a summary of the fertility clinic’s services. Now that’s peculiar, she thought, but it seemed to her like nothing but the oddest of coincidences, and in no way did she comprehend what she was seeing. She certainly didn’t think it had anything to do with her.
It wasn’t until she saw the envelope with her name on it that she felt a tremor of shock running down her spine. KERRY, it said in Sam’s bold handwriting.
But why would he put an envelope addressed to her in a file folder with documents showing that he’d been a sperm donor at the clinic where she had become pregnant?
She didn’t have to think twice about the ethics of snooping; in her opinion, it wasn’t snooping if an envelope was addressed to her. With trembling fingers she withdrew a packet of papers from the envelope and unfolded them. She read quickly, her eyes scanning the lines of print, scarcely believing what she saw. A release form, meant to be signed by her so that the clinic would destroy vials of sperm. A letter from Doug to Sam, thanking him “from the bottom of my heart, good buddy” for donating to the cause—namely, what was to be Doug and Kerry’s baby.
She was so engrossed in the damning evidence that she didn’t even hear the door open. Footsteps behind her made her look up, and she expected Ann Blyler to be there. Instead it was Sam standing there, one lock of hair falling across his forehead in that way that she found so endearing.
When her eyes locked with his, a panoply of emotions played across his features, among them astonishment, shock and a sudden sickened look when he realized what she’d been reading.
The papers slipped to the floor in a flurry. Sam’s gaze followed them down and then moved up again to her face.
“Kerry, I want to explain,” he said, taking a step toward her. His voice sounded gruff, tense.
“I don’t believe any explaining is necessary,” she said. “I read the documents. Doug should have told me that you and he—”
“Doug didn’t want you to know.”
A dull ache throbbed across her forehead. “But why?” She was bewildered, confounded, totally at a loss.
Sam walked around his desk, tapped his fingers on its surface, looked up at the ceiling and blew out a long breath. “I don’t feel right telling you,” he said.
“Doug and I were husband and wife, and he kept a secret from me! You’d better spill, Sam.”
He looked stricken. When he spoke, it was as if he was weighing each word. “Kerry, Doug didn’t want to tell you this, but he couldn’t stand the idea of raising a stranger’s child.”
“He didn’t want to tell me? Why not?”
“He didn’t want to disappoint you. You both wanted a baby and you were already choosing baby clothes and crib bumpers by the time you’d decided to go the artificial insemination route. He wanted you to be happy, and I volunteered when I realized how he felt, and—well, it was supposed to be a good deed. You were never supposed to find out.”
“I was never supposed to know the donor’s name. That much is true. The clinic always keeps it a secret, revealing it is unethical or something, I’m sure of it. So I never would have known that you and Doug—that—oh, I can’t even say it.” She felt dizzy with this new knowledge. How could this have happened? How?
“That Doug and I planned for me to be the father of your child,” Sam said in an even voice. His eyes never left hers. “Things didn’t go as planned. I never expected you to go ahead and get pregnant after Doug died. I thought that signing the papers permitting the clinic to destroy those vials was merely a formality.”
“You didn’t come to Silverthorne to make sure I was okay?”
“I came to Silverthorne to ask you to sign the release. I had no idea. You have to believe me, Kerry. I had no idea that you’d gone ahead with having the baby. And after you told me, well, I’d promised Doug I’d never tell anyone that I was the baby’s father. That was okay with him. That’s the way he wanted it.”
Kerry’s eyes flashed. “And what about what I wanted?”
“You wanted a baby. You got a baby.”
“I’m pregnant with your baby,” she said, the words falling into the room like stones. “Your baby.”
“My baby. That’s right.” Sam made a conciliatory move toward her.
She spun away from him, blinded by tears.
“Don’t touch me,” she said. “Don’t even think about it.” She was carrying Sam’s baby and she didn’t know how she felt about that. Didn’t know how she was supposed to feel about it. Didn’t think that any woman on earth should be in this situation.
“Kerry—”
“I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want you to talk to me. I hate you!”
She yanked the door open, and again her nostrils were assailed by the pungent odor of floor wax. She wanted to throw up.
“Kerry, don’t go like this. Can’t we talk?” His eyes implored her, but in that moment she wished she’d never laid eyes on Sam Harbeck, much less slept with him. She felt hurt, betrayed, furious—and nauseated.
When she spoke, she was half sobbing with rage. “I’m out of here. I’m going to La Jolla to be with my parents. I never want to see you again as long as I live.”
She slammed out of his office and past the wide-eyed Ann Blyler, who said, “Excuse me, is there anything I can get for you?”
“A barf bag would be nice,” Kerry flung over her shoulder, but she didn’t wait around.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
With the sound of the slammed door pounding on his hangover and reverberating in his ears, Sam closed his eyes and cautioned himself not to run after Kerry. Anything he did at this point would only make things worse.
“Mr. Harbeck? Mr. Carlin is here.” Ann stood in the doorway and she was looking at him strangely.
He reached for the bottle of aspirin in his desk drawer. He didn’t know how he was going to make it through another hour of Carlin’s blather, but he’d have to. One thing for sure, the secret he’d been forced to keep would no longer burn a hole in his heart. He’d get rid of Weeb Carlin as soon as possible and then he’d go and find Kerry, make her understand that he’d never meant to hurt her.
Somehow.
KERRY RAN most of the way through a softly falling rain to Emma’s house, sucking in the strong salty scent of the sea as if it was a magic elixir that would make everything right. She clutched her stomach because it hurt so much, and tears and rain froze on her face in the crisp wind from the inlet.
She thought she spied Mr. Lagunoff’s concerned face in the window next door as she fumbled in her purse for the front door key, but she let herself in before he came over to inquire what was wrong. Her coat fell on the hall floor, she bent to slip off her boots, and, since she was awkward with the increased weight of the baby, she lost her balance and sat down abruptly on the hardwood floor.
It was then that the tears really started. They coursed down her cheeks in mighty torrents, dripped onto her blouse, clogged up her nose. She sobbed, crying for Doug and his mistake in setting her up for this, for herself for not suspecting that something was amiss and for Sam.
He would never know his own child.
Running all that way had given her a stitch in her side. Kerry dried her eyes as best she could on the sleeve of her blouse and hauled herself to her feet. Only she didn’t quite make it all the way up, she fell back to
her knees and gripped the legs of a nearby chair. Panic rocked her; was this achy feeling in her back normal?
She waited to see if the pain abated, and when it didn’t, she reached for the telephone and tried to recall her obstetrician’s phone number.
SAM DECIDED that he would take Kerry a peace offering. The Inuit sculpture of a bear might make her laugh, might make his perfidy easier to accept. Not that it would make everything all right. Things would never be all right between them again. If only she wouldn’t go to her parents’, maybe they could patch things up, but he doubted that she’d stay in Anchorage; he’d been burned by that familiar fire of resolve in her eyes before.
Well, Harbeck, you’re true to form, he told himself. He had sabotaged this relationship, too. And Kerry was the most beautiful, the brightest, the best woman he had ever met. So why would a woman like that be interested in the stupidest guy who ever lived? His eyes glazed over with tears, and he blinked them away.
Kerry Anderson was the only woman who had ever been able to make him cry.
Ann walked in, and he had to turn his back to her to conceal his sorry emotional state.
“Mr. Harbeck?”
It was with great difficulty that Sam controlled his expression. When he turned to face Ann, he was holding the sculpture in its box.
“Would you please wrap this for me, Ann?” he blurted.
“Certainly. Will that be birthday wrap?” she asked.
He tried to think. He didn’t even know when Kerry’s birthday was.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said finally. “Make it something nice.”
Ann favored him with a puzzled look before she bore the box away to wherever she did such things. After half an hour or so during which Sam took a vigorous walk and made every effort to vanquish his mounting despair, the box reappeared on his desk adorned in silver-and-white paper and topped with a silver bow.
“I hope that’s satisfactory,” Ann remarked when he left.
“So do I,” he said fervently.
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