Whose Baby?

For better or worse, they were tied together until Shelly and Rose were grown.

How bizarre did it get?

LYNN MADE THE LONG, winding trip back over the coastal range to the Pacific Ocean and home. Her instinct was to collect Shelly right away, to reassure herself by her daughter’s presence that nothing would ever change, that they were a family.

But there were things she didn’t want Shelly to hear, and she should make some phone calls first.

She got Brian’s answering machine and started to leave a halting message, feeling like an idiot. Why was she always taken aback when the beep sounded and she had to talk onto a tape? But this time she’d barely begun when he picked up the phone.

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“I, um, I told you I’d found her.”

“Our daughter.”

“Yes.” She took a breath. “Today I saw pictures of her. She has your eyes. And my hair.”

Strangely, what flitted into her mind at that moment wasn’t the photo, but rather the potent way Adam Landry’s gaze had touched her and the grit in his voice when he said, “She looks like you.”

“How do you know this is the right kid?” her ex-husband, the true stranger, said with an audible sneer.

Closing her eyes, Lynn said evenly, “We’ve had DNA testing done. And you’d know, if you saw her.”

He grunted. “So what do you want from me?”

“Nothing.” How glad she was to be able to say that! “I thought you should know. That’s all.”

“Uh-huh. Well, you do what you want.” His tone changed. “Hey, my call-waiting beeped. Hold on.” When he came back on a minute later, Brian said, “You don’t have her there, right?”

“The man who has been raising her didn’t hand her over to me, if that’s what you mean.”

Brian being Brian, he stayed focused on all that he cared about. “Well, I’m not paying any more child support. I mean, Shelly’s not my responsibility. And I’m not paying this other guy, I can tell you that.”

How could she ever have married this man? How had she deceived herself, even for a while, into thinking she loved him?

“You held Shelly and kissed her and changed her diaper. She thinks you’re her daddy. After all these years, don’t you love her at all?” Lynn asked, trying to understand.

“She’s not my kid,” he explained, as though she was an idiot not to grasp the concept immediately. “Maybe it’s different for a woman. But for a guy…hey, we want to pass on our own bloodlines. I mean, sure, Shelly’s a sweet kid. But she’s got a dad now, right?”

“That’s lucky for her, isn’t it?” Lynn carefully, gently, hung up the telephone receiver.

However much she feared Adam Landry, he had to be a better father than the man she’d married.

She picked up the phone again and dialed quickly. Her mother answered on the second ring.

“Mom, I saw her picture today.”

“Oh, honey,” her mother said, compassion brimming in her voice. “I wish we were there. I can hardly wait to meet her. And to cuddle Shelly and make sure she knows we’ll always be Grandma and Grandpa.”

Just like that, tears spilled hotly from Lynn’s eyes. “Oh, Mom.” She sniffed. “I wish you could be here, too.”

Her mother had raised Lynn alone, but she’d remarried right after Lynn left home. Hal would never feel like “Dad” to Lynn, but he was a kind man who loved to be Grandpa. Lynn was grateful her mother had found him. She only wished his work hadn’t taken them to Virginia.

“For Christmas,” her mother said. “I promise we’ll come for Christmas.”

She gave a watery laugh. “I’ll hold out until then. No, really we’ll be fine.”

“Do you need money? We can help more than we have been, you know. If we have to, we’ll take out a loan.”

Lynn’s mother and stepfather had loaned her the seed money for the bookstore and her mortgage on this old house. She wasn’t going to take another cent from them. She knew darn well they didn’t really have it.

“No, money’s not the problem,” she said, meaning it. “It’s just…everything.”

“Then tell me everything,” her mother said comfortingly. “And we’ll see which parts of it really count.”

Lynn saw herself suddenly, a child. What grade had she been in? Third or fourth? The teacher had accused her of cheating, and she hadn’t been! Goody Two-shoes that she was, she never would. She’d been humiliated and hurt that Mrs. Sanders hadn’t believed her. All the way home, she’d dragged her feet. What if Mom didn’t believe her, either?

She found her mother in the kitchen. Unable to speak, she began crying. Funny how clearly she remembered every sensation of her mother’s embrace, the soothing warmth of her voice. “Tell me what’s wrong,” Mom had murmured, “and we’ll see which parts of it really count.”

Mom had always said that, when troubles seemed overwhelming. And her analysis invariably did help. She brought problems down to size.

Well, not even Mom was going to be able to shrink this one.

But she told her mother everything anyway, the way she always did.

THIS WAS THE SECOND toughest phone call Adam had ever had to make. Both to his parents-in-law.

He probably should have told them these past weeks what was going on, so that they could absorb the shock slowly, as he apparently had.

But he hadn’t wanted to alarm them. It might all come to nothing. Jenny Rose was all they had left of their Jennifer. They always called her Jenny, and sometimes he was sorry he’d named his daughter after her mother. He’d turn, half-expecting to see Jennifer. Besides, Rosebud shouldn’t have to live up to such an intense emotional demand. She wasn’t her mother, and shouldn’t have to fill Jennifer’s shoes. Her own were enough, right?

So he hadn’t told them. Unfortunately, the time had come. Some things couldn’t be avoided forever.

“Mom,” he said carefully, when Angela McCloskey answered the phone.

“Adam, dear! Oh, I was just thinking about you. And Jenny, of course.” She chuckled. “Christmas is coming, you know.”

It was barely autumn. Adam was interested in how retailers did in November and December, but he didn’t do his own shopping until the last week or two before Christmas. How hard was it to take a day and fill the trunk of his car?

He made a noncommittal sound. “Mom, something has happened.” At her intake of breath, he regretted his choice of words. “Rose is fine. Nothing like that. The thing is…” Oh, hell. He didn’t know how to be anything but blunt, but instinct told him he needed to edge into this.

“What?” His tone had given something away. His mother-in-law sounded scared.

“There was a mix-up at the hospital.”

“Not Jenny’s…Jenny’s ashes.”

“No,” he said hastily, then closed his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Not Jenny. Rose. We’ve, uh, had DNA testing done. Rose isn’t my biological daughter. Or Jennifer’s.”

“Rose isn’t…I don’t understand.” She was pleading with him.

How well he knew the feeling. He’d begged God himself. Some prayers weren’t answered.

“The other mother and I met today. We…exchanged pictures.”

“You’ve found her, then?” Angela latched on to the idea with frightening, pitiful eagerness. “Our Jenny’s little girl?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll be bringing her home, won’t you?”

He pinched his nose again. “Mom, we’re taking it slowly. This mother…she loves Shelly. That’s the girl’s name. Shelly Schoening. And I love Rose.”

“We do, too, of course,” she agreed, but he heard no conviction in her voice. “But…but Jenny’s daughter. You can’t leave her to be raised by someone else.”

“How can I not?” he said brutally. “I wouldn’t trade Rose away, even if I could.”

His mother-in-law was crying now, he could hear hitches of breath, the salty pain in her voice. “No…but our granddaughter…”

“I hope you’ll still think of Rose that way.”

“Jennifer was all we had.”

How well he knew!

Gently he said, “I’ll try to arrange for you to meet Shelly as soon as possible. The, uh, mother seems like a decent woman.” He still had his doubts, but he wasn’t sharing them with Angela, reeling from one blow already. “I can’t imagine that she won’t be willing to involve you in Shelly’s life.”

“Shelly! That wasn’t even on Jenny’s list of possible names.”

“No, but it’s pretty, isn’t it?” he soothed. Had she even heard him?

“Yes, I suppose. Adam…”

“We have to take it slow. For the girls’ sake.”

“Does she know?”

“She” wasn’t Rose, he guessed, anger stirring. “Neither Rose nor Shelly has been told. They’re really too young to understand. We’ve agreed to meet, get to know the other child, so it’s less frightening when they have to be told.”

“You’re just going to leave her?” Fixated, his mother-in-law made it sound as if he was deserting his own flesh and blood.

“I am not going to wrench her from the only home she’s ever known, if that’s what you mean,” Adam said evenly. “We’ll see what happens. You’ve got to be patient.”

“We want to meet her.”

He suppressed a profanity. “I’ll try.”

But he saw suddenly that he couldn’t let them near Shelly too soon. They couldn’t be trusted not to tell her they were Grandma and Grandpa. And, God! When they saw her resemblance to Jennifer…

He got off the phone after a dozen more promises he didn’t mean. He paced his office, anger and pity and intense frustration churning in his belly. Rose had just lost her grandparents, he knew. Angela and Rob McCloskey would say the right things, but without meaning them. He wondered about the other grandparents. Would they be as desperate to meet Rose?

His own parents wouldn’t be, he knew. Not especially warm with him, they were pleasant and remote with Rose. One or the other might become interested when Rose reached school age if she displayed a real spark of artistic ability—Mom—or a powerful interest in anatomy or oceanography— Dad.

Adam made the call nonetheless. For better or worse, they were his parents.

His mother listened without interrupting.

Only when he was done did she ask, “Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

He couldn’t believe he’d hurt her feelings. “I wanted to be sure.”

“Is going further with this a good idea?” she asked unexpectedly. “Rose is a sweet child. I don’t see how this can end happily for her.”

Adam assured her that he wasn’t going to let anybody take his Rosebud from him. But she’d stirred a different kind of uneasiness that ate at him from the moment he set the phone down in its cradle again.

Saturday seemed a century away and, at the same time, too close. What would he feel when he saw her, that little girl with his eyes and Jennifer’s face? Would there be some instant connection? In a way, he hoped not. He didn’t want anything to affect his love for Rose. To lessen it. Emotions shouldn’t be so insubstantial. They shouldn’t be dependent on blood tests or facial features.

It had unnerved him, though, to see how much of Rose had come from her mother. That hair. On the ride down in the elevator, it had been all he could do not to touch it, see whether the texture was the same as Rose’s.

The sweetness of her face had stunned him. He’d arrived certain he would hate her, but how could he hate someone who looked like his Rosebud?

Now he didn’t know what to think of her. Her ex-husband had thought her capable of having an affair, which didn’t speak very well for her morals. And yet, she’d defended her Shelly as fiercely as he had his Rose. Whatever her other flaws, she seemed genuinely to love the little girl she’d raised.

Or had it all been an act?

He sank into the leather chair behind his wide bird’s-eye maple desk and cursed. How could he know? How could he trust her?

Did he have any choice?

CHAPTER FOUR

OTTER BEACH REMINDED ADAM of Cannon Beach, just up the coast: charming, but self-consciously so. Inns, bed-and-breakfasts, bakeries, restaurants and shops lined the brick main street. It was one of those towns that existed for visitors, not for the people who lived there. Where did they buy groceries? he wondered. Or get tune-ups for their cars, or their teeth cleaned?

On the other hand, this was a hell of a beautiful spot. Maybe, living with this view, you didn’t mind having to drive an hour just to go to a hardware store. Between shingled cottages that were now shops and restaurants, he caught glimpses of the pebbly beach and the two famous sea stacks just offshore. Bright, tailed kites rose in a brisk breeze, and beachcombers wandered. Tendrils of smoke gave away the presence of small fires shielded by driftwood. He cracked his window and breathed in the scent of the ocean.

Rose was sound asleep in her car seat, he saw with a glance in the rearview mirror. Good. He wasn’t in the mood for her excitement. He’d told her only that they were going to spend the day with a friend who had a daughter Rose’s age. They’d go to the beach, he promised. Maybe out for lunch. The trunk of the car was full of plastic buckets and shovels, sand molds and towels, plus an ice chest with drinks and snacks. Rose was ready for anything.

Adam wasn’t. He was doing his damnedest not to think about what lay ahead, about why they were here. He didn’t care about Otter Beach. If he let the crack in his self-control open, his mind filled with images, people—Shelly, Lynn, Jennifer lying in the hospital pale as marble. Questions. What would he feel when he saw Shelly? Would Rose notice how much she looked like Lynn? What would they talk about? And after today, what?

How the hell could they pull this off?

Sheer willpower allowed him to slam the crack shut. Brooding would get him nowhere.

Per her directions, Adam turned down a side street. Then right one block. He heard stirring behind him. The tires on brick had woken Rose. On the corner was an antique store, the windows filled with bottles and knickknacks. Next door, espresso was being served on the canopied sidewalk, where half-a-dozen wrought-iron tables jostled for room. Finally, the bookstore.

A simple, old-fashioned wooden sign declared, Otter Beach Books. Beneath it dangled a smaller sign, Open. The old house was painted butter-yellow with the trim deep pink—rose colored, he supposed, with awareness of the irony. The white picket fence was a nice touch. Yellow and white roses, fading now, scrambled over a broad arch. He could only see partway up the brick walk, which led between tangles of asters and other flowers he didn’t know to the porch steps. He did recognize the hollyhocks leaning drunkenly against the clapboard wall of the house. His grandmother had grown ones just like them.

Gravel crunched as he turned the Lexus into the driveway and joined one other car in the slot. Business didn’t appear to be booming, or, come to think of it, most shoppers probably came on foot.

Ignoring the dread that sat like a heavy meal in his belly, he turned off the engine. “Hey, Rosebud, we’re here.”

She rubbed her eyes and swiveled her head. “Where’s the beach? Is there sand?”

“I bet we can find some. In a few minutes. This is where my friend lives. She owns a bookstore.”

“Oh.” Rose momentarily gazed at the garden. “There’s Tigger.”

Good God, she was right. A garden statue of Pooh Bear’s buddy Tigger looked ready to bound over a cluster of pansies.

“Hey, maybe Pooh’s there, too.”

She began to struggle. “I want to get out! I want to see!”

“Hold your bouquet, kiddo!”

He went around the car, aware of the house behind him and the small-paned windows. Was she looking out, even now? He was unsettled to realize that the she he imagined with such disquiet wasn’t Shelly.

Well, that was natural, Adam told himself as he unbuckled his daughter. Lynn Chanak was the one who shared his emotional turmoil. The one who understood, the one who might turn out to be an enemy. He and she—Adam made a sound in his throat that brought a single curious glance from Rose before she scrambled under his arm and out of the car. His mouth twisted. He and Lynn Chanak were going to have one strange relationship.

Rose was quivering with eagerness, taking everything in, but she waited for him as she knew to do in a parking lot. When he slammed the car door, she snatched his hand. “Come on, Daddy.”

A touch on Tigger’s rough, concrete head, and Rose tugged her father under a second white-painted arch thick with huge blue saucer-shaped flowers—clematis?—and into the small front garden.

In its heart was a tiny brick-paved courtyard with a birdbath, a garden seat and Pooh Bear peeking shyly from a tangle of another bluish-purple-flowered perennial Adam didn’t recognize. Rose squatted in front of Pooh.

Maintaining this garden must take time, but it was damn fine marketing, Adam decided. Any passerby would be seduced into stepping beneath the rose arch. Once that far, why not go in? The mood was set, the imagination captured. Lynn Chanak was a smart woman. It was a shame the store wasn’t on the main drag.

“Let’s go in,” he said, suddenly impatient to have the first meeting over. Shelly would just be another little girl; he wouldn’t feel anything but a sense of obligation and perhaps regret. Maybe he and Ms. Chanak would agree to leave things as they were. Stay in touch. He’d help out if she needed it. With her ex out of the picture, she wouldn’t be able to put Shelly through college on the income from a bookstore, for example.

Someday Jennifer’s parents would have to meet Shelly, he remembered with a frown. But he could explain, refuse to tell them where she was.

“I like books,” Rosebud told him slyly as they started up the steps. “I’m tired of all the ones I have.”

Adam’s mood lightened, even as that lump stayed, grew, in his stomach. “Then pick out a couple of new ones before we go to the beach. They’ll give us something to remember the day by.”

“Is…Shelly nice?” She stumbled over the name, although she’d asked the same question half-a-dozen times. “Will she like me?”

“What’s not to like?” He scooped her up and settled her on his hip, liking the idea of walking in the door with her plainly claimed. Mine. “And I’ve never met Shelly.”

A bell rang when he opened the door to a room filled with warmth and clutter and bright colors: a bookstore the way they were meant to be. Dark wood shelves, tables heaped with books, a comfy rocker in what had been a sunporch, a playhouse…and at least a couple of customers browsing, including a teenage boy with tattoos and a pierced eyebrow.

He heard her voice first. “Mary, can you help this gentleman find…”

They saw each other at the same moment. The words she’d intended to speak trailed off. He had a violent moment of reaction to that damned resemblance to Rose. After a moment, he recognized it as anger. He hated seeing his daughter all grown up in a woman he didn’t know.

After that first shocked instance, Adam realized she was no longer looking at him. Her gaze devoured Rose. The book she held slipped from her hand and slapped to the floor. Heads turned, but Lynn Chanak kept staring.

“Daddy?” Rose said uncertainly. “Is that lady your friend?”

Friend. The way she was looking at his daughter scared the hell out of him.

“Yeah.” He swallowed. “This is my friend Lynn. Lynn, my daughter Rose.”

“I…” Lynn couldn’t seem to tear her eyes from the child. “I’m happy to meet you, Rose.”

In a sudden bout of shyness, Rose buried her face in his neck. She whispered, “Why is she looking at me so funny?”

“Maybe,” he whispered, too, “because your hair is the same color as hers. How many people have curls like my Rose?”

She giggled, but shakily, because even her three-year-old intuition knew something was up.

God, he thought with gritted teeth. They looked so much alike. Everyone in the store must notice. They probably all thought he was the proprietor’s ex-husband, and this her daughter. How was she going to explain the resemblance?

“Rose is anxious to meet Shelly,” he said, too loudly. He didn’t so much want to meet his daughter, as he wanted this woman to quit staring at Rose as if she were royalty. Or, hell, a baboon. Something she might never see again.

“I…” Lynn blinked and turned her head, cheeks pale and her eyes unfocused. “I…I’m not sure…”

He glanced around and saw that the shoppers had gone about their business. A young woman behind the counter was ringing up a purchase. At the same moment, a giggle wafted from the sunporch.

“I’m here, Mommy! Remember?”

The playhouse. It must be two-story, because framed in an upper window of the fake castle was a little girl’s face, flushed with delight because her presence had been a secret.

The rock that had been sitting in his stomach was suddenly a boulder, craggy and painful. It pressed his lungs until he couldn’t breathe.

Rose was wriggling, so he set her down without tearing his gaze from the child. He felt his lips move, knew they formed a name: Jennifer.

Even the voice. Sounding confident and open, she invited Rose to come up. Shyly his daughter went, bending to crawl across the mock drawbridge and inside. As if Rose couldn’t figure out how to climb a ladder, Shelly gave her directions and told her what she’d find up at the top and how Mom had said they’d go to the beach and did Rose like hot dogs ’cuz Mom said maybe that’s what they could have for lunch. The words flowed like a stream over stones, making a kind of song, and all as inevitable as water finding its way downhill.

Jennifer, he thought in agony.

She peeked out the window at him, her face, alight with laughter, looking for all the world like a nineteenth-century children’s book illustration of an elf perched on a flower stem. Shelly’s ears stuck out just a little. Jennifer had hated hers, though he had thought them cute. Just like Jennifer’s, Shelly’s face narrowed from high cheekbones to a pointy chin, and just like Jennifer’s, her eyes shimmered with amusement and devilment.

“It’s worse than seeing the picture, isn’t it?” the woman beside him said softly.

Taking a ragged breath, he turned his head and met Lynn Chanak’s eyes. “God.”

She nodded.

“Do you see yourself?” he asked, keeping his voice low.

“I suppose.” Like him, she gazed toward the playhouse. Neither girl was visible in the window, although whispers and laughter drifted out. “She does look like pictures of me at that age, but I don’t exactly remember my face in the mirror from when I was three, so it’s not quite as big a shock as Shelly must be for you.”

He fumbled for his wallet and, with shaking hands, took out a photo of his dead wife and handed it to Lynn.

She looked at it for a long moment. When she lifted her head, her gray-green eyes were misty. “She was beautiful.”

“Shelly is going to look like her.”

A tear dropped, shimmering, from her lash. She wiped it from her cheek. “Oh, I wish…”

“This hadn’t happened?”

She squeezed her eyes shut, as if willing back further tears. “No,” Lynn said finally. “Because then I wouldn’t have Shelly, and she’s my life. No, I was going to say, I wish we’d never found out. But now…” She gazed again toward the playhouse where first one girl’s laughing face, then the other, popped up. “But now, I’m not so sure.”

“Jennifer’s parents want to meet her,” he heard himself say.

Lynn squeezed her hands together without looking at him. “I thought they might. But how can we do that, without Shelly knowing who they are?”

“I told them they might have to wait.”

She smiled with obvious difficulty. “Thank you.”

“What about your parents? And your ex-husband’s?”

“My mother and stepfather love Shelly, and I’m sure they’ll love Rose, if you give them the chance. They’ll support whatever we decide. Brian’s parents…” She hesitated. “I don’t know. At the moment, he’s washed his hands of the whole thing. My pregnancy wasn’t planned, and…” She swallowed whatever she had been going to say, perhaps suddenly aware that she had been going to reveal too much that was private to a relative stranger. “Well,” she said, a little awkwardly. “Certainly there’s no rush, where they’re concerned. Right now, it’s just Shelly and me.”