by Mary Brady
Poor thing was in for a big shock.
Some hope lay in that thought. She took a sip of champagne and let the bubbles fill her mouth with flavor. Whoever he was, she hoped he’d be interested in Morrison and Morrison for a couple years and then when he figured out his income would no longer support his expensive suits, cars, women, et cetera...
“Hunter,” Patty called from beside her.
The man turned to face them.
Her heart seemed to thud once and stop dead cold.
The grin on his face faltered the moment he spotted her—at least that was what it seemed like to Delainey before he recovered and smiled as he moved across the room toward her.
He stopped in front of her.
Hunter Morrison. His deep blue eyes touched by sienna near the irises scorched her soul as they had when she and Hunter were pals in high school and when they were lovers after college.
She gulped champagne until she’d drained the glass. The urge to flee nearly overran her good sense. Instead of giving in, she stood fast and as steady as the rocky Maine coast facing the ocean tides. She was a Maine woman, bred of hardy stock.
Then why couldn’t she seem to make her brain function or her heart beat?
He put a hand on her shoulder and leaned in to kiss her on the cheek. “Hello, Deelee,” he whispered. His breath hot on the shell of her ear restarted her heart and slammed anger to the forefront inside her head.
“Hunter Morrison.” Of all people. The one man who had never wanted to stay in Bailey’s Cove was back. She should welcome him, but right now she just wanted to kick something...or someone.
* * *
HUNTER FORCED HIS smile to stay put, but smiling to placate an obnoxious client was easier than smiling at Delainey Talbot. How in the hell was it possible she was still here in Bailey’s Cove?
He had expected law school to have opened her eyes to the world, to have shown her other options. His gaze shot to her wedding-ring finger and he was disgusted with himself and almost glad she had her hand bunched up in the unseasonal sweater covering a body that had sent a college graduate to heaven. Deelee, who, when he left Bailey’s Cove behind, saw fit to kick him out of her life for good. Her marital status was none of his business.
When she suddenly reeled and hurried away as if he had threatened her, he saw Shamus Murphy watching him. His puzzled gaze shifted back and forth between the two of them.
Greeting her as Deelee would have already given her the impression he had thought about her more than a few casual times in the years since he’d left Bailey’s Cove. He had thought of her often and none of his thoughts about Delainey Talbot had been casual.
Shamus intercepted her and gave her a long hug. The older man had not mentioned anything about Delainey being an attorney in the office. Shamus said something to her that made her look across the room at him and then nod with a dazed look as if she was trying to make sense of what Shamus was saying.
Her long blond hair still hung to the middle of her back. Age had defined her features and made her gray eyes bigger, her high cheekbones more pronounced. Her face was fully adult now and as alluring as the rest of the package, he was sure, that she hid under the large sweater with the ducks wearing Christmas wreaths.
No woman, no matter how hard he tried, had ever morphed into Delainey Talbot. When he’d found himself dating only blondes, he started dating anything but. He dated lots of women. He stopped seeing women altogether. Nothing helped.
Shamus led Delainey across the room until she stood next to him. When she looked up at him, her features were intentionally blank, an empty champagne glass in her hand.
Shamus filled each of their glasses and held his up until the two of them were obliged to clink their glasses together against Shamus’s.
“To Morrison and Morrison, may it live forever.”
“Hear, hear,” they chorused, and sipped.
“I had forgotten you knew each other.” Shamus smiled between them. “That’s great. The transition will be all the easier for it. Hunter, Delainey is the beating heart of this office. Harriet and I look so much smarter with her here.”
Neither he nor Delainey said anything. When they stared at each other, it was like two sides of an urgent conflict sizing up the enemy. Maybe it was just that.
Shamus gave Delainey another arm-around-the-shoulder squeeze. “I’m sorry to spring all this on you so suddenly. Things happened and I had to move quickly.”
The blank expression left Delainey’s face and now she looked defeated. That nearly tore Hunter open. Of all the things he wished for the woman who’d ruined all women for him all those years ago, defeat was not one of them.
“I’m sure you did what you needed to do, Shamus.” Her words rang a clear false, as if she was saying what Shamus needed to hear. Then she gently removed the old guy’s arm from her shoulder and ran away. She actually walked quickly, but it was not hard to see flight in her steps.
* * *
DELAINEY RACED UP the front steps, stalked down the hallway, yanked the door to her office open and once inside closed it quietly. The lock that might never have been locked before clicked sluggishly into place. Then she leaned against the door and sank to the floor.
Hunter Morrison.
She pinged a fingernail against the champagne glass she couldn’t seem to let go of. She sipped a bit and then pressed the cool of the glass against her cheek.
He had a lot of nerve showing up in Bailey’s Cove. He had left her behind. After three glorious weeks together, he’d told her he had accepted an internship in Chicago at one of the largest international law firms and he needed to focus on that, make it his priority. He’d said he had a lot to accomplish. He’d never asked her to join him; they hadn’t even discussed it.
Hunter had attended law school while she’d prepared for a child and attended paralegal training mostly on the job at Morrison and Morrison, where she had been an office assistant during the previous summer.
She remembered well the day he drove away. She’d run as fast as she could from her parents’ home to his grandmother’s old house. Then, when she missed him by seconds, she’d stood in his driveway and watched until his car disappeared down the street. She had been too late to say goodbye. She wasn’t sure he wanted to see her anyway. After being friends for ten years, they apparently had nothing much to say in the end.
They’d carried on a distant but friendly relationship after that, but she had ended even that—abruptly.
Not that any of her life was Hunter’s fault. She’d wanted to have sex with Micky—the dark, mysterious outsider. Micky’s motorcycle with the Arizona plates might have been a clue she should be at least careful if she was going to be rash.
Micky was long gone when she discovered she was pregnant. A month after he’d left, the stick had indicated her life plans had suddenly changed for the sake of what she had to admit felt more like revenge than any kind of real attraction.
She hadn’t known she had any such capabilities until Hunter told her he was finished in Bailey’s Cove. Her Bailey’s Cove, the place she had always loved, had pined for when she was in college and had always been glad to be back to in the summers.
That made her an oddity. A large percentage of the young people who attended college in a city had a tendency to find jobs and lives elsewhere. Not that she blamed them. The road to advancement in life didn’t usually involve a town that struggled to grow.
In an email later, she’d told Hunter there was nothing left for them because she had someone else in her life, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell him any of the details.
It hadn’t been a lie, but it had given him the impression, she was sure, that he wasn’t welcome in her life. The whole truth was she didn’t deserve him in her life. She couldn’t ask him to care for her and the child of another ma
n.
Shame made her sink closer to the floor. It was all her fault. Both of them had been so young, so full of their own plans. If they had parted today, she liked to think they would have been able to find some center ground, some compromise. At the very least, she would amicably wish him well and maybe that way there wouldn’t be a damaged heart beating in her chest.
She couldn’t take Shamus to task, either. He had taken in a newly pregnant woman, barely a woman, twenty-two. He and his staff made her feel needed and loved, never ashamed. Knowing there were people in the world outside her family who would also embrace her made the uncertain journey easier. Made Bailey’s Cove more dear.
She wondered if Hunter knew about Brianna, if friends of his grandparents stayed in touch with him. Even as time passed, especially as time passed, she didn’t feel it particularly appropriate to inform him. What could she say? Dear Hunter, you know after you walked away and broke my heart, there was a guy I went out with for two days, and, well, he and I have a child. Best Regards, Delainey.
All during her pregnancy she wondered how this could happen to her—not how she got pregnant but how she could have such bad luck. She wasn’t some loose woman who slept around. She had slept around with exactly two men. First with Hunter and then for two confusing days with the darkly handsome older Micky.
Her parents had surprised her when she told them she was pregnant. She had expected them to be angry, but her mother had said, “It’s a baby, dear. You don’t get angry about a baby.”
Her parents and friends had loved her all the way through the process of pregnancy and childbirth. Her daughter, Brianna, lived and breathed, with her long softly curling dark hair and big, intense dark eyes, as the silver lining in all of their lives.
Not that being a single mother was easy or, in her thinking, particularly fair to the child, but the people around her had blessed the two of them with love and acceptance.
Maybe that was the small-town way. It certainly seemed to be the way most of the people in Bailey’s Cove were.
Hunter would be right if he asked about the child, though.
While pregnant, she wondered at times if the child was Hunter’s, and even hoped on some days that the baby was his, but the math said otherwise. Then when she went into labor four weeks early, she hoped again that the predictions of the date she got pregnant were wrong.
When the desperate hope consumed her in the dark of night, all sorts of guilt about not telling Hunter there was a slim chance he was going to be a father oozed in and made her doubt her ability to make any rational decisions.
Then Brianna had come into the world, a small beautiful baby with dark, dark hair and eyes. By the time her wonderful daughter learned to smile, her eyes had stayed dark brown, almost black, and her stare was intense, as if she already understood the world. There hadn’t been a dark-haired and dark-eyed relative in Delainey’s family tree that she knew of and all notion she could have been Hunter’s daughter had to be put to rest.
Delainey’s only regret was her child might never know her absent father. She had only Micky’s name. They had never gotten around to phone numbers, let alone emails. Even as she tried to remember any contact information, she had realized Micky had been very elusive. All searches, even those the private investigator had conducted, had come up empty.
When Delainey could no longer harbor the slightest hope Hunter was the father, she gratefully acknowledged her beautiful daughter could help her deal with never seeing him again, ever.
Now Hunter was here and she couldn’t even be in the same room with him.
When she had been shifting papers around for an hour, she glanced at the clock.
Three o’clock. Her mother would have picked up Brianna from school. They were probably having a snack, or Dad had taken her out sledding by now.
Delainey wondered if she should just slip out the back door, go home and never come back. Maybe if she had $150,000 for law school. Loans, grants and scholarships went only so far. She needed a job, this job, for the next three months and then as often as law school would allow. As much as she hated to admit it, she needed her parents to help care for Brianna while she went to school. She’d pay them back. She’d use her increase in pay from being an attorney to make Brianna’s life the best it could be and she’d boost her parents’ meager retirement funds.
The piles she still had stacked on her desk reminded her she didn’t have to hurry away or even leave her office. She had enough work on her desk to keep her busy for a month. Right now she’d do her job.
That was the best revenge she could come up with.
Oh, heaven help her.
* * *
“MAMA, WILL YOU be looking for a daddy for me when you’re away at law school?”
Brianna’s sweet high-pitched voice came from the backseat of Delainey’s small car. She had made a quick stop at her parents’ home and hustled Brianna into the car in case her mother had heard about Hunter.
Helen Talbot would have to chat about wasn’t it wonderful that such a nice and handsome man like Hunter Morrison was back in town, and maybe they could invite him to dinner and maybe they could invite him to marry this single mom and rescue her from the disappointment of a life she had arranged for herself. Her mother would never say most of those things, but she would think them from time to time. Delainey couldn’t get upset, as her mother only wanted what was best for Brianna and her.
“Law school is going to be very hard, sweetie, and I don’t expect to have much time to look for a husband,” she answered in her mother voice.
Brianna was silent, and Delainey was sure the subject wasn’t finished.
“How hard can it be?”
Delainey smiled at this one. “What brings this up all of the sudden?”
“Duh.”
Delainey stayed silent. Duh had been banned from their conversations as too derogatory and too often used.
“Sorry, Mommy. Sorry I said duh. I know you’re very smart. But I’ve been looking for a daddy for years.”
“Years?”
“Well, I think I’ve been wondering all my life if I could get one.”
“That’s fair....” And normal, and it broke Delainey’s heart that there had been no prospects.
“What about Lenny? He was at our school talking to us about being a police officer. He’s not married.”
“That’s Officer Gardner to you. He’s engaged to be married. In fact, we’re invited to his wedding reception in a few weeks.”
Delainey pulled into the driveway of her small two-bedroom home on the upper part of White Pine Court. The house was surrounded on three sides by the beautiful long-needled tree designated as Maine’s state tree.
“Do I get to wear a new dress?” her daughter asked as Delainey pulled into the one-car garage and turned to look at her daughter.
She had to laugh at the expression on her daughter’s face. “If you use those big brown eyes of yours on Grandma, I think you’ll get a new dress. You two pick out a pattern and we’ll go shopping for the cloth.”
“Yeah. Maybe she’ll make a new one for you, too, and you can find a daddy for me at Lenny—at Officer Gardner’s wedding ’ception.”
As Delainey opened the rear door, Brianna clicked the safety belt and leaped from her booster seat.
“How would you do it, if you were looking for a husband for me?” Delainey asked.
Brianna raced to the door ahead of her mother, as was their normal pattern.
“Well, I suppose I could make a pro-and-con list like we did in school last week when we were deciding where to send the money we raised for charity.”
Delainey squeezed her daughter’s hand as she let the two of them into the mudroom, wondering what Brianna truly wanted to know.
“But, Mommy.” Brianna stopped and tugged until Delaine
y paused and faced her. “If looking for a daddy means you have to go away, I don’t think I want a daddy at all. Are you sure you have to go away to school?”
“I’m not going to be very far away, only a couple hours. I’ll see you every weekend.”
Brianna looked up at her with pleading eyes. “Can I come and stay with you in your apartment?”
“I won’t be there much and when I am, I’ll be studying or sleeping. Maybe both.”
“You can’t study and sleep at the same time,” Brianna said in a very sober tone as she put her backpack on the desk in the corner of the kitchen and then washed her hands at the sink.
“Apple and chicken breast or green salad and a hamburger?”
“Apple. I want to eat while I do my daddy list.” She hummed as she dug a pad of paper out of her pack. “I need to decide if I need a daddy at all.”
How much of Brianna’s life was she going to miss while she was at school? It had never seemed to be the right time to leave her daughter. When Brianna was a baby, leaving her for weekdays, even with loving grandparents, had been out of the question—even if her mother’s arthritis had been up to it.
She washed an apple and cut it into chunks.
“Mama?”
She looked down to see Brianna, who had appeared suddenly at her side, staring up at her.
Delainey smiled. “Here’s your apple. Do you want peanut butter?”
Her daughter’s eyes widened into the look Delainey knew meant she was troubled. “Mama, is there something wrong with us?”
CHAPTER THREE
“WRONG WITH US?” Delainey’s chest squeezed. Here it was. The real question her daughter wanted to ask. She put a hand on the girl’s shoulder and hunkered down so they were eye to eye.
“Yeah, because I don’t have a daddy and you don’t have a husband.”