ANOTHER MAN'S CHILDREN
When Raine Paxton asked her estranged husband, famous-- investigative journalist Morgan Paxton, for a divorce, she never thought she'd see him again. But suddenly he was on her doorstep--and obviously wondering who had fathered her unborn twins...
STILL HIS WOMAN
Morgan couldn't believe his wife was pregnant after a visit to a sperm bank! Well, they were still married, and even if they didn't share his blood, these were his children. Morgan wouldn't give Raine up without a fight, not when he had finally realized how much he loved her.
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Contents:
Prologue
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
Epilogue
© 1997
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Prologue
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A paper end to a paper marriage.
It seemed fitting, Morgan Paxton decided as he tossed the letter from his wife Raine's attorney to the floor of the tent. All very neat and tidy, just the way he liked his life. No more ties. No more responsibilities.
No more Raine.
Closing his eyes, Morgan focused on the night in an attempt to assuage the sudden pain that lanced through him. Beyond the canvas walls of the tent, the booted feet of faceless men pummeled packed clay as the communal meal was prepared. The scent of spices that would be considered exotic back home in the States filled the air, mingling pungently with the acrid heaviness of campfire smoke and the occasional whiffs of camel dung.
Ah … the joys of being on assignment. Visiting foreign shores. Sleeping on a cot. Shaving without water. What more could a man want? Excitement, challenge, living on the edge. Morgan Paxton, journalist extraordinaire. He had the world by the tail.
A bitter smile twisted Morgan's mouth. Knowing he shouldn't, he slipped his hand under the pillow on the bunk where he was sitting to touch the dog-eared leather folder that had been his constant companion for almost eleven years—since Raine had sent it to him a few weeks after their wedding. Inside, in one of the compartments was their wedding picture. He drew it carefully from its niche, the pad of his thumb caressing one corner where eleven years of handling had worn away the edges of the photo. Not that he adored the woman, or anything. Hell, no. According to Raine, he was too consumed with passion for his work to care deeply about anything or anyone else.
The backs of Morgan's eyes burned as he studied the wedding picture. In direct contrast to her name, Raine was all sunshine and sweet warm silk. As Morgan gazed down at her precious visage, the photo lost definition and his memories of her took over.
In his mind's eye, he saw her almost as clearly as if she were in the tent with him, her sable dark hair glowing with golden highlights, shimmering around her small face whenever she moved. A lovely fire burned in her big brown eyes, drawing him closer with its promise of warmth. Warmth he'd craved since the age of seven when his gentle, careworn mother had walked out of their roughly constructed cabin into the wild, briar-covered Kentucky hills and disappeared.
Raine. She had been the ultimate prize. A gentle spirit to soften the hard corners of his personality. A caring nature that forgave his faults and flaws, many though they were.
What had he given her in return? A child she'd adored, but who had worn her out with his hyperactive ways and inexplicable tantrums. A home and enough money to allow her to give Mike the kind of constant attention he had required. A husband fighting his way to the top, who was gone more than he was with her and their son.
At the time he'd told himself he was doing the right thing. The decent thing. Zebulon Paxton had grudgingly given his only child, Morgan, a shack with a leaking roof and a dirt floor. In direct contrast, Morgan had provided increasingly lavish houses for his own family, houses that Raine transformed into lovely havens.
Now, when it was too late, Morgan realized his mistakes. Okay, so he'd made sure Mike had a fat college fund—his son was to have had the first-class education Morgan had secretly coveted—but did money make up for his not being there while the boy had cut his first tooth or taken his first step?
Hell, no, it didn't. Nor had any of his other offerings. Cards and phone calls instead of his presence. Visits at Christmas that were over almost before they'd started. Awkward conversations with a child who had changed from visit to visit.
Reluctantly, dreading the hard punch of guilt he knew to expect, he shifted his gaze to the other picture in the folder, the last photo of Mike ever taken. His son at eight, only a few weeks before his death, smiling up at him, his blond hair mussed as always, his brown eyes alight with mischief.
A miniature Morgan, everyone said. The image of his daddy, with Morgan's wanderlust and rebellious bent.
Mike would have been ten in a few weeks. Poised on the edge of manhood. Probably would have been as tall as his mom by now. Close, anyway. Filling the house with his clutter and noise and energy. A house that had to seem terribly empty now.
Not that he would know.
It had been eighteen months since he'd been home. Eighteen months of trying to smother his grief, of driving himself so fiercely, he was teetering on the edge of massive burnout. A year and a half since Raine had asked him to leave and not come back. Having him there, seeing Mike in his every expression was only exacerbating her grief.
Besides, without Mike, she had no claim on him. No right to demand anything from him but her freedom. As an observer of life's twists of fate and odd symmetry, he had to appreciate the irony. After all, wasn't that the one thing he prized above all—his freedom.
"Yo, Pax, you awake?"
Lanky and leathery and pushing fifty, Dave Stebbins was reputed to have ice water for blood and a computer for a brain. As a producer he had no equal, as he never failed to remind the suits at the network come contract time. He was also the closest thing Morgan had to a friend in the dog-eat-dog world of network journalism.
"Yeah, I'm awake. What do you want?"
"Your presence, O Mighty Media Star. In thirty minutes."
Morgan muttered an obscenity that had Stebbins grinning. "A thousand bucks says you don't have the guts to repeat that on the air."
"Don't tempt me," Morgan muttered as the tent flap dropped, blocking Stebbins from sight. The man's footsteps receded, then blended with the muffled cacophony of camp activity.
Though it was several hours before dawn, the desert air was already heating. The crew would be sweating as they prepared to establish the satellite uplink for his live report on the nightly news. Though blessedly brief, the skirmish in the desert he'd been covering had been as violent as he'd ever seen, with one sect battling another over possession of a strip of hot, arid sand no larger than Rhode Island.
God, but he hated war. The noise and smells and the waste. The pain. Pain he'd experienced up close and personal in Southeast Asia. He'd fought that war rather than observe it. His own physical wounds had healed, leaving him with a few scars here and there and a constant dull ache in his shoulder, the one ripped apart by a Vietcong bullet a lifetime ago.
Lord, but he had been young and innocent in those days. An idealist willing to die for the "greater good." Just like those poor kids who'd bled out their short lives into the sand only a few hours ago. According to their religion, they were now in heaven, revered as martyrs.
Once the uplink with the communications satellite was completed and the camera readied, he would go before the world to reveal yet another exclusive snippet of information previously unknown about one of the terrorist leaders trying to provoke another unholy war. It would be an additional coup for a man whose place in the history of broadcast journalism was already secured.
Oh yeah, Morgan Paxton was one great journalist all right. Just his face on the screen guaranteed the netw
ork a good four or five more rating points for the nightly news. He had the contract to prove it, signed almost three years ago with fanfare and celebration, guaranteeing him an obscene amount of money.
At the time he'd signed it, he'd thought it was the pinnacle of a long uphill climb, a real coup for a moonshiner's kid from Hound Dog Hollow. Every poor boy's dream of success. A quintessential power trip.
Raine used to call him her proud lion. Undaunted. Undefeated. Her protector. Another sharp, agonizing pain ran through him at the thought. Instead of protecting her as he'd promised, he'd left her alone and vulnerable while he went off to prowl the world, looking for bigger and better stories to lay at the altar of his much-coveted success.
But hadn't that been what had drawn her to him in the first place? His fierce ambition? His drive to make his mark on an increasingly complex world? To reveal the insanities of war and oppression for what they were so the powers-that-be would be forced to make changes? In short, he had been a card-carrying idealist. A crusader for truth, justice and the American way.
Why else would a gently reared, brilliantly accomplished professor's daughter have been interested in a guy who'd quit school at fifteen in order to help his daddy turn out the best sour mash in Hanks County, Kentucky? Who'd lied about his age and joined the army at sixteen in order to evade the net of federal agents who'd hauled Zebulon Paxton off to jail for bootlegging? Hell, at first, even his fellow soldiers thought he was little better than a hill rat, a hick who'd never owned more than one toothbrush in his life and thought that bathing regularly was for sissies.
By the time he'd met Raine Connelly, however, he'd been thirteen years older, a lot more cynical and a great deal more polished. The ignorant country boy had still been there, all right, buried under the changes he'd forced on himself. Persistence, practice and steely determination had changed the all-but-illiterate mountain twang into a lazy drawl. Constant reading and study had taken the hard edges off an education that was at best third rate. And a heretofore undiscovered acting talent had helped him fit into any crowd when the notion struck him.
Because they'd met on a college campus, where she was a student and he was delivering an address to an honors journalism class, and because she was an American lit major, he made it a point to talk about books. Mark Twain was his favorite author, he'd told her, and Huckleberry Finn his favorite book. Because Huck reminded him of himself, he'd admitted with one of those engaging grins that proclaimed to the world it no longer stung him to talk freely about his lowly beginnings.
Something in those soft brown eyes of hers had told him she'd seen through the sophistication and bravado to the ill-clothed, ill-fed, neglected boy he'd been. That realization had both touched and scared him. He'd told himself to make tracks fast. Instead, he'd asked her to dinner. And that night he'd taken her into his arms and kissed her.
Though he'd bedded his fair share of willing women by the age of thirty-five, he'd felt like a virgin that night. Trembling inside that he would make a mistake and drive her out of his life forever. Instead of catching the plane to Tahiti where he'd planned to spend his much-needed vacation, he'd stayed in the little Oregon town of Bradenton Falls where Raine had been attending college.
Every night for three weeks he'd told himself he was "leaving first thing tomorrow." And every morning he'd found another reason to stay one more day. No matter what words he'd used, however, the reason was Raine. Her smile. Her twinkling eyes. Her bright wit and clever mind. And most of all, her total acceptance of the man beneath the image. More than anything he wanted to please his gentle princess who thought he was special.
But now…
Maybe he should just let her go, he thought, staring down at the laughing face of his bride. Free her to find her happiness with another man. A man who wasn't wandering the globe more than he was home. A man content to live a quiet, ordinary life. A man who could give her the security and serenity she now claimed to need.
In short, someone not obsessed with himself and his precious career.
A better man than Morgan Paxton.
Oh yeah, a better man would do the right thing, all right. Give her up for her own good. Let her get on with her life in any way she chose.
On the other hand, a selfish bastard like Morgan Paxton would fight to keep her. Fight like the very devil, no-holds-barred, because to lose her would be like ripping a part of himself away. The best part.
A cynical jerk like Morgan Paxton would use any weapon, devise any strategy to make her love him again.
Because he needed her. Because without her he was only half a man. Because he was too much of a coward to even contemplate living the rest of his life knowing he'd held sunshine and joy in his hands and, like the ignorant country boy he really was under all the polish, he'd been too stupid and too clumsy to keep his lady safe and happy.
No wonder she'd asked him to leave.
Night after night as he'd lain alone in a strange bed in some distant part of the world, he had comforted himself with plans for the new start they would make. This time he would take special pains to cosset and cherish her.
He'd been so sure she'd just needed time alone to heal.
Give me a chance, Raine, he pleaded silently. I swear I'll make it up to you.
Please.
His only answer was silence—and the hard, steady agony of guilt.
Chapter 1
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Three months later
Morgan was going home. And he was scared.
His stomach was giving him fits, and his mouth was cotton dry. He knew his hands would be ice-cold to the touch, even when the rest of his body was drenched with sweat. It was the same feeling he had whenever he went into combat, the same feeling he'd had when he'd gone on the air for the first time. And when he'd asked Raine to marry him. When he was younger, he'd spent some time trying to overcome it. Now he simply accepted it for what it was—a deeply ingrained fear of failure.
Fear, hell, he thought as he stared through the tiny window of the 757 at the cloud bank below. It was a full-blown terror.
He'd tried to drown the sucker in Scotch, only to add a pickled brain to the mix.
Exercise sometimes helped, but it was damned inconvenient to go for a run at thirty thousand feet.
So he pulled inside himself and brooded behind a polite mask.
About the mistakes he made and flaws in his character he hadn't bothered to correct. About grief so deep, he'd wanted to die, and the numbness he'd embraced to escape the pain and the guilt.
But mostly he thought about the woman he was traveling halfway around the world to see.
He'd thought about asking her to meet him at the airport the way she'd always done in the past. He considered it during the noisy, butt-jarring helicopter trip out of the desert, the endless transatlantic flight, the layover at Kennedy with the predictable delays.
When he should have been grabbing some much-needed sleep in the VIP lounge, he'd found himself staring at the gleaming pay phone, trying to talk himself out of placing the call to her new number, the one he'd had to move heaven and earth to wangle out of her father, who lived in Salem, Oregon.
Hell of a note, he thought. Not only was he being divorced, but his wife hadn't bothered to send him a change-of-address card when she'd left the East Coast.
Probably her father's idea. The overprotective bastard.
He scowled as he reflected on his relationship with his father-in-law. Arthur Connelly was overeducated, even tempered and fussy about details—the exact opposite of Zebulon Paxton. He was also devoted to his only child. Though Arthur never said it aloud, Morgan had sensed the older man's dismay at his daughter's choice of husband.
Arthur had still been half-asleep when he'd picked up the phone, his cultured professor's voice reflecting equal parts fear and annoyance at the middle-of-the-night intrusion. At the sound of his son-in-law's voice, Arthur's tone had turned icy.
Though it hurt, Morgan couldn't very well hold that ag
ainst the man. If he ever got lucky enough to have a daughter of his own, he sure as hell wouldn't want her tied up with a self-involved, ambitious, success-driven jerk.
No, Arthur was right to be wary.
It would take more than a multimillion-dollar contract and a high Q rating to turn Morgan Paxton into a valuable human being. No doubt Raine's father had strongly supported her decision to file for divorce.
More times than Morgan cared to count during the last leg of his flight to Portland, he'd pulled the leather folder from his pocket and opened it to stare down at her face. Each time, he'd studied every precious line of her features until his tired eyes had lost focus and his mind had begun to substitute an image of her waiting impatiently for him by the door to the Jetway.
She'd always been easy to spot. A slender pixie not quite five feet three inches tall, radiating energy, dressed in one of those bright, gauzy dresses she loved. Small on top, generously curved below the waist, she fitted his image of the perfect woman to a T. Soft and yielding where a man needed softness, her skin like silk beneath his skimming fingertips, her dark shining hair smelling like spring.
But it was the welcoming excitement in her eyes he craved. The eagerness in her smile. He was never really home until he touched her. Until he felt her sigh into his mouth as he kissed her.
Looking forward to taking her into his arms and swinging her around had become a ritual, one of the many that had gotten him through some pretty tough times.
Rituals had been important to him for a long time. He'd discovered their power during the miserable months he'd spent in Letterman Army Hospital, playing one-handed poker with the other hollow-eyed vets while he'd endured an endless series of operations to reconstruct his destroyed shoulder. Boredom. Pain. Physical therapy. He'd suffered through it all because he'd had no choice.
It was then that he'd discovered a hard truth. When a man didn't have nice warm memories to sustain and anchor him, he clung to his silly little self-imposed practices when times got rough. Small things, like eating the same breakfast every day whenever possible, and putting on his clothes in exactly the same order. Reserving the same window seat in first-class when he flew. Never throwing anything away if he could help it.
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