The Mother Of His Child

“Don’t push your luck,” he growled, then pulled out into the street.

“Or are you planning to fling me over the nearest cliff?”

“I’ve thought of it, believe me,” he said tightly. “We’re getting the hell out of Burnham and then we’re going to have a talk. During which I shall make a few things clear to you. In the meantime, why don’t you just shut up?”

It seemed like good advice. Marnie gazed out the window as though the drugstore across the street was the most interesting building she’d ever seen.

Once they’d left Burnham, Cal turned onto the highway that would lead eventually to Faulkner Beach. When he came to the picnic spot where Marnie had eaten her lunch the day before, he wheeled into it. There were no other cars there. Why would there be? thought Marnie. Most people don’t picnic for breakfast. He even chose the same table as she had.

She slid out of the Cherokee and sat down on top of the table, facing the sea, her feet resting on the bench. The buds were still tight on the trees, although a song sparrow was piping its melody from a nearby birch. The ocean glinted as though it were alive, the waves chuckling among the rocks. “No cliffs,” she said. “That’s a relief.”

Cal stationed himself in front of her, his back to the water. Shoulders hunched, hands jammed in the pockets of his jeans, he looked at her unwaveringly. His gray shirt was open at the throat as though he was immune to the cool ocean breeze; his hair shone with cleanliness, and he was clean shaven. He did not, Marnie noticed, look the slightest bit amused by her pert remark. Not that she really felt pert. She wasn’t sure how she felt.

She’d probably find out in the next few minutes. Cal Huntingdon would see to that.

Without saying a word, Cal reached out and pulled her dark glasses off her nose, then folded them carefully and put them on the table beside her. Then he undid the cord on her hat, the back of his hand brushing her chin, and took the hat off, placing it on the table, too. Her hair tumbled around her ears. And the whole time, his eyes were intent on her features.

Her lashes flickered involuntarily. His face was so close to hers she could see the small white scar over one eye and catch the faint mint scent of his aftershave.

She’d expected a tirade from him. Not this.

She had absolutely no idea what he was thinking.

Marnie stared back at him, forcing herself to keep her hands loose in her lap and struggling to hide her inner trembling. His action, so unexpected, had broken through a boundary that she guarded fiercely. Her voice faltering, she said, “What you just did—that’s got nothing to do with Kit.”

Cal didn’t bother denying it. “The sun in your hair…it’s like little strands of copper.”

The timbre of his voice, dusky as red wine, brought a flush to her cheeks. His eyes now looked more blue than gray and not at all like slate. She found herself gazing at his mouth, a generous mouth, cleanly sculpted, and wondering what it would be like to be kissed by him. To kiss him back.

He said levelly, “Don’t worry, I’m thinking exactly the same thing.”

Kiss him? She must be out of her mind. Cal was the enemy, the man determined to keep her from her daughter. Marnie shrank back. “Stay away from me.”

Thrusting his hands into his pockets again, Cal said in a raw voice, “What’s the matter? Not part of your game plan, Marnie?”

He’d gone so fast from what she would’ve sworn was desire to what she knew was rage that she felt dizzy. Which emotion was real? Only the anger? Had the desire been merely a facade? She rested her palms flat on the table, needing the solidity of wood to give her some kind of balance, and said with as much dignity as she could muster, “You took me by surprise.”

“You’ll forgive me, I’m sure,” he said with heavy irony, “if I don’t believe you. I think it would take a lot to surprise you. When I stationed myself on the street where Kit walks to school, I was telling myself I was every kind of a fool. You’d said you wouldn’t do anything to harm her— I assumed that meant you’d stay away from Burnham. Not risk her meeting you and seeing the resemblance between you. In other words, I trusted you.” He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. “But I was wrong, wasn’t I? You’re not to be trusted. This morning, you put yourself in a situation where you ended up twenty feet away from my daughter. I’d call that taking a risk, wouldn’t you?”

Her own temper rose to meet his. “So we’re talking about trust, are we, Cal? Why didn’t you tell me you’re a widower?”

Visibly, he flinched. “How did you find that out?”

“I asked. At the gas station in Burnham last night.” She raised her chin. “I don’t like being ordered around.”

“Not even when it’s for the good of your daughter?”

“You have to allow me some part in that decision.”

“I didn’t tell you I’m a widower for the very obvious reason that I wanted you out of town. Out of my life. Mine and Kit’s.”

Marnie pushed her palms hard against the wooden table; his eyes were those of a man in torment, his jaw an unyielding line. How he must have loved his wife: a realization that filled her inexplicably with envy. She’d never known that kind of love and doubted she ever would. Forcing herself to continue, she asked, “Are you living with someone else? Or is Kit motherless?”

“That’s got nothing to do with you.”

“It’s got everything to do with me!”

“You’re forgetting something. You gave up your rights to Kit when she was born.”

Although her palms were sweating, the rest of Marnie felt ice-cold. Knowing she was fighting for her life, she said in a cracked voice, “I turned seventeen three months before Kit was born. Until this morning, I’d never even laid eyes on her.”

“Unfortunately, some decisions we make in life are irrevocable. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”

“Are you really that hard, Cal?” she whispered. “Is there no room in you for human frailty?”

He said flatly, “I’d guard Kit’s peace of mind with my very life.”

Marnie pounced. “So is she happy? Tell me she’s totally happy with her life the way it is, and I’ll go away. I promise.”

Abruptly, he swung away from her, gazing out to sea. The breeze toyed with his hair; his shoulders were rigid with tension.

Swiftly, Marnie stood up, putting herself between him and the water. In unconscious pleading, she rested her hand on his bare arm and said, “I hate this, Cal…this feeling we’ve got to score off each other, that Kit is some kind of prize we’re fighting over, when surely what we both want is what’s best for her. Can’t we do this some other way?”

“There’s no other woman in my house,” he said evenly. “Do you really think I’d live with someone else so soon after Jennifer died? It would be the worst thing in the world for Kit.”

And for him, too? Was that what he meant?

“Look at me, Cal.” As he reluctantly obeyed, Marnie said, “I’m sorry your wife died. I’m truly sorry.”

Her turquoise eyes were wide with sincerity and her fingers still lay loosely on his arm. “You mean that, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. She was so young. It must have been dreadful for you—and for Kit.”

He said in a voice from which all emotion had been removed, “That’s why I can’t risk your meeting Kit. She changed after Jennifer died. She started questioning everything and bucking authority, and she’d spend hours in her room listening to music and refusing to talk to me. I didn’t know how to handle her. Still don’t. She’s not ready for another emotional upheaval, Marnie. You’ve got to believe me. She’s not.”

With a huge effort, Marnie kept her voice even. “I do believe you.” She believed something else: that very likely Cal was also talking about himself.

Quickly, Cal covered her fingers with his own. “What I just said—it hurt, didn’t it? Because it means you can’t see Kit again. God, this is such a mess….”

“Just the same, I’m glad you told me about her.”

Absently, he was playing with her hand. It was her left hand. “No rings?” he said. “But you must be married.”

“Oh, no,” she said, and snatched her hand back. “I’ve never married. Never wanted to.”

His eyes were suddenly appalled. “Surely to God you weren’t raped? That’s not how Kit—”

“No! No, of course not. Her father’s a good man, always was. He didn’t even know about Kit until I told him five years ago. I never told him at the time.”

“Why didn’t you? Why didn’t you marry him when she was born? If he was such a good man.”

Marnie reached up and plucked a branch from the birch tree that brushed her arm, systematically starting to tear the buds apart with her nails. “Yesterday you virtually accused me of making up stories about how I lost Kit,” she said in a low voice. “Give me one good reason why should I tell you about it now.”

He took the twig from her fingers and dropped it to the ground. “Let’s go down to the beach, sit on the rocks,” he said, and for the first time that morning smiled at her. “We both need a break.”

His smile transformed him, investing him with a wholly masculine vitality to which Marnie couldn’t help but respond. As she gaped at him, he added quizzically, “Did I say something wrong?”

It’s me that’s in the wrong, thought Marnie. Thirteen years ago, I swore off sex and now I’m practically fainting at Cal’s feet. Why do I keep forgetting that he’s Kit’s father? “No, no,” she sputtered. “No, you didn’t. I—I just can’t figure you out, that’s all.”

“I’m just an ordinary guy, Marnie.”

She snorted. “And the sea’s made of cherry swirl ice cream.”

He began to laugh. “It took me a whole box of Kleenex to clean off my car. Do you always mix your flavors?”

If his smile was sexy, his laugh was dynamite. “Always,” she said. “Life’s too short to play it safe.”

Her words hung in the air between them. “So you believe that, too, do you?” Cal said. “Is that how Kit was conceived?”

Her smile died. “It always comes back to that, doesn’t it?”

“You know what keeps throwing me?” he said with underlying violence. “You look so like Kit and yet you don’t. You’re a woman, where Kit’s hovering between child and adolescent. You’ve suffered—don’t think I can’t see that—and it’s given you a beauty that’s been tested. A beauty that’s far more than a question of good bones, skin like silk, eyes as blue as the sea.” His gaze raked her from head to foot. “Along with legs that go on forever and a body that could drive a man crazy…” Running his fingers through his hair, he finished explosively, “Dammit, I never meant to say any of this! But there’s something about you that takes all the rules and turfs them out the window.”

Frightened out of her wits, Marnie blurted, “If you have rules, so do I. We can’t afford to forget them, either one of us, because of your daughter. Your daughter and mine.”

“You think I don’t know that?” he blazed.

“This isn’t about you and me,” she persisted wildly. “It’s about Kit.” She was right, she knew she was. Not since that one time had she ever let a man seduce her, not with words or with his body. So what was so different about Cal Huntingdon?

Power, she thought with an inward shiver. The power of his words, which had both terrified and exhilarated her. And, she admitted unwillingly, the power of his body. His height, the way his muscles moved in his throat when he swallowed, the gleam of sunlight across his cheekbones… Oh God, what was wrong with her? She’d never in her life been so aware of a man’s sheer physicality.

Why did it have to be Cal, of all people, who was causing her to break all her self-imposed rules?

Be careful, Marnie. Be very careful. It’s Kit you want. Not Kit’s father.

Unable to stand the direction her thoughts had taken her, Marnie pushed her way through the bayberry shrubs onto the rocks.

Cal was right. She did need a break.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE beach was made of shale, gray blue shale on which the blue green waves were advancing and retreating. Like Cal’s eye color and her own, Marnie thought edgily. Finding a smooth boulder, she perched herself on it.

Cal bent and picked up a sliver of rock, then threw it so it skipped over the water half a dozen times before it sank. He said absently, “Kit loves to do that. Hers usually bounce more than mine—she’s really got the knack.”

Then he turned to face Marnie, his face clouded. “I knew she had a math test today, so I made her stay in last night to study when she wanted to be out with her friends. And do you know what she said? Her mother wouldn’t have made her stay in, her mother hadn’t been mean to her like me, she went on and on, and the irony is that Jennifer was stricter with her than I am. A couple of months ago, we went to a counselor, but Kit refused to even open her mouth. My best friend’s wife has done her best to draw Kit out—same result. I normally travel three or four times a year as an adjunct to my job, but I’ve even cut that out, figuring she needs me home.” His laugh was tinged with bitterness. “She needs me like she needs a hole in the head. It’s almost as though she hates me for being alive now that Jennifer’s dead.”

Her heart aching, Marnie ventured, “She seemed happy enough with her friends this morning. She did tell Lizzie you’d made her study, but she didn’t sound too upset about it.”

“I warned her she’d be off the school basketball team if her math marks didn’t improve. She’s their star forward, so she won’t risk that.”

Even though as an adult Marnie preferred solitary pursuits to team sports, she’d played basketball when she was a teenager, and now she helped out with the Faulkner Fiends, the junior high girls’ basketball team in her own school. One more link to Kit, she thought unhappily.

“Lately, she’s even…” Then Cal broke off, picking up another rock and firing it at the water. It hit at the wrong angle and sank with a small splash.

“Even what?” Marnie prompted.

Restlessly, he shrugged his shoulders. “Never mind. Tell me how the adoption came about.”

She winced. “What’s the point if I can’t see Kit again?”

“Maybe it’ll help me understand.”

“You don’t need to understand, Cal! Because I’m finally getting the message. I’ve got to go home and forget my daughter lives fifty miles down the road.”

“Why did you give her up, Marnie?”

The breeze was freshening, molding Marnie’s shirt to her breasts and teasing her hair. She stood up, rubbing her palms down the sides of her jeans. “I didn’t. My mother deceived me—I told you that.”

“So tell me more.”

She stared out at the horizon. Wisely or unwisely, she knew she was going to do as he asked. But because she’d never told anyone but Terry about her pregnancy, and because it was all so long ago and yet so painfully present, her voice sounded clipped and unconvincing, even to her own ears. “Terry and I were best friends all through school. Most of the kids either hated me or avoided me because of my mother. She owned the mill. Everyone in the town owed their livelihood to the mill. Try that one on for size in a small town. But I had Terry and his parents and a couple of girlfriends, so I was okay.”

“Were you in love with him?”

“With Terry?” she said blankly. “No! I’m sorry if best friends sounds corny, but that’s the way it was. Until the night of the first school dance my final year of high school. My mother and I had had a huge fight. She didn’t want me going with him—he was the son of a sawyer, after all. She locked me in my room, but I got out through the window and went anyway.”

“What floor was your bedroom?”

“I do wish you’d stop interrupting,” Marnie said fractiously. “The second floor. Why?”

“Did you jump?”

“I climbed down the Virginia creeper—the stems were thicker than your wrist.”

“You really don’t like being ordered around, do you?”

“Oh, shush! Anyway, we went to the dance. I had a couple of drinks too many, we drove to the lake to see the moon, and you can guess the rest.” She sighed. “Bad mistake, and I’m not just talking about pregnancy, I’m talking about sex. It ruined everything between us—the fun, the friendship. Terry and I avoided each other like the plague for the next few months.”

“Was it worth it?” Cal asked softly.

She gaped at him, feeling color creep into her cheeks. “Are you asking if it was good sex? How in the world was I supposed to know? I was sixteen, Cal!”

“You’ve been with men since then.”

She hadn’t. But she was darned if that was any of Cal’s business. Doggedly, she went on with her story, reciting it as though it had happened to someone else. “I didn’t tell my mother I was pregnant. I didn’t tell anyone. I wore baggy sweaters and let the waistband of my jeans out and forged a doctor’s certificate so I could stay away from gym class.”

“Were you that afraid of her?”

His voice was unreadable. “I was afraid she’d make me have an abortion,” Marnie said curtly. “So I kept it a secret until it was too late for that. She had tremendous power, Cal. She ran the town. She could give you one look and you’d find yourself doing exactly what she wanted. I hated that! Yes, of course I was afraid of her. Besides, she was as cold as—as the Atlantic Ocean in April.”

“She found out, though.”

“Oh, yes….” Marnie’s smile was twisted. “Now that was a scene, let me tell you. But in the end she got it out of me that Terry was the father.”

She kicked at the shale with the toe of her sneaker. “I was sent to a private clinic. The town was told I’d gone to a fancy girls’ school, and my mother said my cousin Randall from Boston would marry me when the baby was born.” She talked faster, only wanting done with this. “It was a hard labor, so I was out of it when Kit was born. When I came to, my mother was sitting by the bed. The baby was gone. She’d lied about Randall and the marriage, and she made me sign the consent forms by threatening to fire Terry’s father. She’d see he never got another job in the province, that’s what she told me. And if I ever tried to trace my child, she’d set a bunch of roughnecks on Terry and his brothers.”

Marnie shivered. “I knew she’d do it. I couldn’t risk anything happening to Terry or his family—they were the ones who’d taught me all I ever knew about kindness. So I signed.” As an afterthought, she added, “My mother also told me I was disinherited. As if that mattered.”

“How did you know your baby was a girl?”

“You sound like a lawyer for the prosecution,” she snapped. “One of the cleaning women told me. No one else would say a word, it was as if nothing had ever happened, as if I’d dreamed the whole pregnancy and birth. It was awful. I waited until I felt well enough, then I packed my suitcase and left via the window.” She glowered at him. “Ground floor this time. I wrote to my mother two or three times, and after that I wrote every Christmas and for her birthday. But she didn’t answer a single one of my letters, and I never saw her again. I found the paper with your name on it in her safe when I went back for the reading of the will. End of story.”

“It all sounds so feudal,” Cal said.

“So you don’t believe me.”

“I didn’t say that, Marnie.”

“You’re thinking it.”

“You’ve got to admit it’s an incredible story,” he said, frowning.

Marnie’s mind made an intuitive leap. “You think I’ve invented all this—straight out of a gothic romance—to cover up my guilt for abandoning my baby.”

“Dammit, I don’t! I don’t know what I think.”

Aware of an immense weariness, Marnie said, “It doesn’t really matter, does it? The fact is, Kit was adopted, your wife died, and it’s in Kit’s best interests that I stay out of the picture.”

“The fact is,” Cal said harshly, “that I don’t want you out of the picture. My picture. Despite Kit. Despite common sense and logic and caution. Explain that to me, why don’t you? Is that another scene from a gothic romance? I hardly think so.”

She folded her arms across her chest. “I don’t know what—”

“Don’t you, Marnie? Come on, tell the truth.”

Her heart was beating in thick, heavy strokes. “No, I don’t,” she said with a defiant toss of her head.

“Then let me show you.”

Cal’s footsteps crunched in the shale. His eyes blazing with an emotion she couldn’t possibly have categorized, he took her by the shoulders and bent his head. A wave collapsed on the beach in a rattle of stones. The tide’s coming up, we should get out of here, Marnie thought foolishly, and felt the first touch of his mouth to hers.

His fingers were digging into her flesh, his lips a hard pressure. Rigid in his embrace, she felt a shudder run through his body. Then gradually his kiss changed, questioning rather than demanding, and his hands left her shoulders, smoothing the rise of her throat and tangling themselves in her hair. Beneath her closed lids, the sun blazed orange.

As abruptly as he’d drawn her to him, Cal pushed her away. Marnie’s eyes flew open as he said in a staccato voice, “I shouldn’t have done that. Kissing you—Kit’s mother—it’s the stupidest move I could make.”

Marnie asked baldly, “Are you involved with anyone?”

“Are you kidding? In a town the size of Burnham with a twelve-year-old girl in the house? I haven’t slept with anyone since my wife died, and why the devil am I telling you something wild horses normally wouldn’t drag out of me?”

“I’ve had exactly one sexual experience in thirty years and that was with Terry.”

In sheer disbelief, Cal rasped, “Come off it, Marnie. You don’t have to lie to me.”

And quite suddenly, Marnie had had enough. The gamut of emotions she’d experienced ever since she’d bumped into a black-haired man in a parking lot in the middle of a thunderstorm now coalesced into pure rage. “I’m sick to death of your disbelieving every word I say!” she cried, wrenching free of him. “Let me tell you something, Cal Huntingdon. You think I’d jump in the sack with another man after what happened to me? For nine months I carried my child. That may not sound very long to you because you’ve had her for almost thirteen years. But to me that was a lifetime. Sure, I was terrified of being found out, and no, I had no idea what I was going to do or whom to turn to. It didn’t matter. I loved being pregnant. I felt fiercely protective of my baby and I knew I was going to be the best mother in the whole world.”

She realized through a haze of anger and pain that tears were streaming down her cheeks. Furious with herself for crying, she let her words tumble over each other. “And then she was taken from me. I never saw her. I had no way of tracing her or getting her back. I’ve never even known if she was loved.” Her voice broke. “How do you think that felt? I’ve lived with that loss for years, and if you think I was going to risk anything so terrible happening to me again just for the sake of a roll in the hay, you’re out of your tree. And I’m not crying!”

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