Her Soldier's Baby

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  She’d thought Pierce was being overprotective when he’d arranged her escort back to the hotel, but was glad he had as she pulled off.

  What was wrong now?

  And when was this all going to end?

  Pulling to the side of the road, she waited for the officer to approach. And was more confused than anything when she heard that she had a tire that was severing. She called Pierce. Got in the police car as he instructed. And talked to him until she was safely in her hotel room.

  They talked for hours that night.

  About life. Vacations they’d always wanted to take but hadn’t. About a guest she’d never met, an elderly gentleman who’d amused Pierce when he’d checked in. They talked about the show. The dishes others had made. The reasons the judges had chosen her dish. They talked about social hour, and she hung on while he made certain that Margie was okay doing it without him. They talked while he did all of the dishes afterward so their friend could go up to the room she was staying in that night so she could serve breakfast early in the morning and be on-site should anyone need anything.

  They talked about a lot of things. But not one that mattered. He told her he loved her. She told him back.

  And meant it.

  Still, when she got on the plane to go home the next morning, she was nervous about what the coming week would bring.

  * * *

  FOR ALL HER WORRY, the next days were almost eerily placid. As the week wore on with no emails or texts or phone calls from her son, Eliza started to realize that she’d built his one visit to the adoption agency months ago into something much bigger than it was.

  Started to realize that she probably hadn’t needed to tell Pierce about the boy at all. Hadn’t needed to train-wreck her marriage or her husband’s peace of mind.

  Not that her marriage was falling apart. It wasn’t. She and Pierce were as in love, as good to each other, as always. She needed him. He needed her.

  But there was something missing.

  The something that meant the most.

  There was no intimacy between them. Off work for another week, at least, Pierce was around more. Tending to her, the inn, as much as he could. He was kind and thoughtful. Present.

  He just wasn’t hers. Not in the way he always had been.

  An element of trust was missing.

  A sense of ending had taken its place.

  They didn’t talk about their baby, the one that she’d given away.

  He never asked if she got a call or email or text.

  They didn’t talk about the future—not even to discuss the painting they’d been planning to do in a couple of the upstairs rooms that month.

  It could wait.

  Pierce got his stitches out. He could stop wearing the elasticized bandage around his wrist whenever he felt comfortable doing so. His bruises had healed, and he’d been released to go back to work in another week.

  They tended to their guests. They chatted with Margie. They got along.

  And she practiced making her Bolognese sauce for the last competition. The final week’s category was sauce, but the contestants were expected also to prepare whatever the sauce was meant to complement.

  Her secret ingredients, other than dual meats and very little tomato, were cream and wine—something her grandmother had taught her. Bay leaves gave it an Italian flair. Thyme, sea salt and olive oil were finishing touches to the otherwise classic mixture.

  Sea salt was one of Eliza’s signatures, she’d been told by the judges the previous week. She found unique and different ways to use it. She hadn’t realized it but could see that they were right.

  The ocean, coming to Rose Harbor to be with her grandmother—they’d saved her life. She clung to them.

  Loved them.

  And incorporated her love for them in her cooking.

  She wondered if Pierce loved the ocean and Shelby Island. A month ago she’d have been certain he did. Now, she didn’t feel like she knew him well enough to be sure.

  Was he just there because she’d been so rooted?

  She wanted to ask him. But she didn’t. They weren’t that close anymore.

  Instead, she made the sauce and spread it on pizza dough, timing herself, on Tuesday night.

  And then made it again, timing herself, mixing it with pasta the next night.

  Either base would be doable from ingredients stocked in the general pantry on the set.

  Pierce preferred the sauce over pasta, he told her Wednesday night as they were eating a late dinner. Then, “I’d like to come with you this weekend.”

  In the beginning, she’d guarded her time in California as her own.

  Because of her son—about whom he knew nothing.

  And then later, too... She didn’t know why. But she’d needed the space. To be focused on her task there.

  Now, the thought of herself in that hotel room for another weekend felt...lonely.

  She smiled at her husband. From the inside out. “Okay,” she told him. Talked about her flight, the airline she was on, getting him a seat, maybe even getting them seats together. Talked about them renting a car for Friday afternoon and driving around the area. And arranging for Margie to have help at the inn.

  Pierce listened. Smiled once. Let her go on until she was finished.

  “I had a call from the Palm Desert police department,” he said in response. A reply she felt like a slap in the face.

  He wasn’t deciding to join her because he wanted to sit next to her on the plane. He wanted to come because of the unexplained attacks.

  Still, it was something.

  He had her back.

  Eliza decided to be happy with what she could get.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  PALM DESERT POLICE had traced the phone call to Eliza’s room to a hotel house phone located in the lobby. And while there were surveillance cameras, there were none that covered that particular phone. Breakfast had been ordered from the same phone to be sent to Eliza’s room and charged to her account, which was paid for by the studio. Police traced the call to the studio as having come from the hotel, as well. They picked up no usable fingerprints. And no one noticed anything unusual.

  Six of her competitors were staying at the hotel. Technically, any one of them could have made the calls, or asked someone else to do so, and any of them could have had access to the kitchens. It took only a second to grab a bag of mushrooms or switch out a water bottle.

  The question was, why Eliza? Starting before she’d even won?

  “The thing that points away from any of your competitors,” Pierce was telling her, not for the first time, as they waited for the rental car he’d arranged at the airport, “is the car. Your tire was slashed while you were on stage. None of them could have made it off set, outside, slashed a tire and then back on set without being noticed.”

  “Anyone but Grace could have done it,” she told him. “There’s a passageway between the kitchen pods for us to leave the set if we need to. The cameras just stay away from our kitchen while we’re gone. Someone could have taken a kitchen knife, left to use the restroom, headed outside, slashed my tire and made it back on stage in less time than a commercial break.”

  “No one left the stage during last week’s taping.”

  She wasn’t just repeating what they’d already discovered. She hadn’t actually been aware whether or not anyone had left. Natasha’s stage manager had relayed the information to the police.

  “Think, Liza. Who have you spoken to? Ignored? Has anyone said anything that made you think they were jealous? What about family members or friends who are in the green room during the taping? Have you talked to any of them?”

  He’d already asked the questions multiple times that week. He was focused. And determined to protect her at all
costs.

  It would help if he knew what or who he was protecting her against.

  He was avoiding the fact that he was entering territory where she was living her own life apart from him. As a successful, soon-to-be famous professional chef. And as a mother...

  “Grace’s friend Albany is the only person I’ve really spoken with. I could see building a possible motive case with her. She and Grace have been best friends since childhood—more than seventy years—and she knows this is probably the only chance Grace is going to get for something like this. But she’s as sweet as can be, and she can’t move without her walker. I hardly think she’d be able to get that outside to slash my tire without being noticed.” He ignored the slightly droll tone in her voice.

  She could be bored with the conversation. He couldn’t be. He was watching for an unknown. They were the hardest kind of perps to catch.

  No one who’d been watching the taping in the green room the week before had noticed anyone going outside. No one had noticed anything or anyone unusual in the green room. Their usual snacks had been delivered. They’d watched the taping. Albany had had to use the restroom a few times. She’d joked about it with the rest of them. In all there were five people in the room. The same five who’d been there the week before.

  Pierce had already run background checks on all of them, turning up nothing.

  None of them had ever been on the set.

  In the car, with navigation activated, Pierce hardly noticed the flowered street corners and palm trees that Eliza had raved about. He didn’t pay attention to the vast mountain ranges in the distance. He focused on traffic.

  And keeping his wife safe.

  “It only makes sense that someone on Natasha’s team, someone from the studio, could be behind this,” he said now. “Who else could have been on stage without standing out?”

  “Anyone with access to the studio. There are several sets and stages.”

  “The Family Secrets section is locked when not in use.”

  “A lot of people have keys.”

  Again, more information they’d already covered. It’s what they had to work with. Someone wanted his wife to suffer. He had to find that person.

  “And someone on the show wouldn’t have been at the hotel, making those calls,” she reminded him.

  Which brought him back to one of the contestants or a friend or family member of a contestant. All of whom he’d have access to, starting that afternoon.

  “You go nowhere without me or the security escort Natasha has assigned at the studio,” he reminded her. And then, with a sideways glance, he said, “Not to cop an attitude. I apologize for how harshly that came out.”

  Her grin turned his insides to mush. “It’s okay, Pierce. I love you, too.”

  He nodded.

  And squinted against the sun’s blinding brightness reflecting off the fender in front of him.

  * * *

  ELIZA DIDN’T WANT to be on an investigation. Pierce was with her in California. He knew they had a son. She had nothing to hide.

  And so much to show him.

  She wanted them to use the weekend away as a chance to rekindle whatever had slipped away over the past few weeks.

  They’d loved each other for too long, overcome too many odds, to lose each other, right?

  Or was there just too much in their way? From the moment she’d introduced him to her parents when she was just fourteen, they’d disapproved. Then, days before her sixteenth birthday, when she’d conceived a child, they’d hated him. He’d left without a word to her. No explanation. Nothing to let her know that he cared.

  She’d had a feeling, since the first day she’d finally heard from him after all those years apart, that Pierce could be taken from her again. Was theirs a love that had been doomed from the beginning?

  Eliza didn’t believe in such things.

  She also didn’t know how to make things good for both of them. She needed, desperately, to have their son in her life. And...maybe...for them to raise a child.

  She wanted to win Family Secrets. To be a renowned chef. Not to give up Rose Harbor, but to be more than just an innkeeper.

  He needed to work the streets and come home to a quiet life. To have his time off be in a small, peaceful community. He needed a personal life that did not require him to be responsible for, or a role model to, an impressionable young person.

  There was compromise...and then there was impossible. Her father had said that to her once, in the early days of her pregnancy, when she’d been begging them to find a compromise. A way for her to finish school and meet the potential her father insisted she meet, but still keep the baby she and Pierce had created together.

  She’d eventually allowed herself to be convinced that her father was right...

  Pierce didn’t go straight to the hotel as she’d expected. He took her to downtown Palm Springs instead—to the famous shopping district. Patiently walked with her from designer to designer, telling her to pick out whatever outfit she wanted for the show the next day. Trying to throw herself into the mood, she settled on a black Lycra jumpsuit with a white silk belt and white silk trim around the cuffs and pockets. He bought the wedge shoes that were shown with it.

  Took her for an early dinner at one of Palm Springs’s famous eateries.

  And then back to the hotel to meet with the other contestants in the lobby. He was polite. Attentive. Charming.

  And becoming a stranger.

  * * *

  HIS CONTACT WITH Palm Desert police, Ernie Ryan, was going to let Pierce sit in with him on Saturday as he made the rounds of everyone associated with Family Secrets. Since they weren’t looking at murder here, only possible intent to harm, there’d been no point in calling everyone in to the station or spending the man-hours to seek them out at home.

  Still, the attacks on Eliza were escalating, which indicated the possibility of future physical harm, as well as a host of other minor crimes, so they were taking the situation seriously. More security cameras had been installed around the studio—both inside and out. More security was on-site, including an officer whose sole duty was to remain on guard in the green room. And after the taping, everyone associated with the show was being asked to stick around until Officer Ryan had had a chance to speak with them. He’d been given a soundproof room down the hall for his task. A recording studio.

  Eliza had been invited to sit in the sound booth upstairs and listen in. She’d be able to watch the questioning on a television monitor—not a requirement, just something that was possible due to the studio’s technology and so had been offered to her.

  It was costing Natasha Stevens a lot of money for the show to go on, but she’d stand to lose a lot more if it didn’t.

  “Everyone’s so on edge,” Eliza told him, waiting for a call with him standing beside her. He’d walk her to the edge of the stage, and then she’d be on her own.

  “Is there anyone here who seems to you to be acting out of character?” he asked her. He’d never been on a television set before. Should have been fascinated.

  All he could think about was keeping her safe. And figuring out who’d tried to sabotage her to begin with.

  It was all he could let himself think about. Anything more and his thoughts started to scramble. There was no good to come of indulging in what-ifs. He’d fought a long, hard battle after combat to find out who he was, to find peace with himself and his place in the world.

  He wasn’t going to lose all of that now.

  “There’s a lot more nervousness,” she said, “None of the usual camaraderie. Yet everyone’s as close as always.”

  He’d noticed the closeness already. Felt like an outsider in a family Eliza had joined without him. Figured he could be jealous. But knew he wasn’t.

  He gave her a hug before she we
nt on stage, but no kiss. He didn’t want to mess up her makeup. He wished her good luck.

  Grinning, she left him with a nod and a little skip. But no “I love you.”

  Pierce watched from the green room as Eliza and her competitors cooked. More, he watched those watching. He took in everything, the food on the sideboard, the drinks, even the tea dispenser. When he grew restless, he walked to the side of the stage and watched what he could of the proceedings from behind the scenes.

  Nothing felt out of place except him.

  He was there when participants plated their food for the judges. And when Natasha took her microphone to the middle of the stage and announced that the second runner-up was Grace Hargraves.

  Natasha talked. Grace talked. Clearly excited. And it was time for the first runner-up. Pierce didn’t realize he’d actually been holding his breath until he heard Jason Wright’s name called. His sauce had been some warm chocolate, banana and liquor mixture that he’d served over ice cream. Something his father had taught him to make, apparently.

  And then it was time for the winner. Natasha went into her usual bit of rhetoric, and Pierce tuned it out, as always. He didn’t need any suspense.

  Couldn’t allow himself to get caught up in it.

  That afternoon, it caught up with him. As badly as he wished they could just turn back the clock, that Eliza was home, fulfilled and gloriously happy without needing a son or chef accolades, he really wanted her to win.

  Because the truth was, he’d had only thought she’d been gloriously happy before. She was a woman who found the good in everything, who found glory in every day, who made the best of what she had.

  But all of the time he’d been with her, there’d been a part of her that had mourned for her son. Yearned for him.

  And a part of her that hadn’t been content as keeper of her grandmother’s inn. Because she knew Pierce appreciated the peace and beauty of her small island home?

  As her father had said, she had potential. He was not going to keep her from it...

  “Today’s winner is...Eliza Westin!” Pierce heard the ocean. He heard his wife squeal. Heard other contestants call out congratulations as they clapped. He felt deeply, deeply proud of her.