A Mother's Claim

Who has the best claim on the child?

It’s been more than ten years since exhausted new mother Dana Stewart took a nap while her baby was sleeping and woke up to find him gone. The loss devastated her—and her marriage—and she’s never given up hope of finding Gabriel. She never expected that when she finally did, he’d be almost a teen, his name would be Christian...and he and his uncle Nolan Gregor would want nothing to do with her.

Nolan, a former army ranger, proves as possessive of her son as Dana is. It’s like King Solomon’s worst nightmare: she can’t rip her child away from the only parent he’s ever known. But she’s his mom, and she’ll never lose him again.

The resemblance between this woman and Christian was too obvious.

He watched her as she approached the counter. Tall and yet slight to the point of appearing fragile, Dana Stewart wore her honey-blond hair in some kind of twist on the back of her head. Her bone structure echoed her son’s—no, it was the other way around. Her cheekbones were almost too sharply defined, leaving hollows beneath. There was a tension to the way she carried herself, shoulders squared, head high, as if she wouldn’t let herself relax in any way. The hand not clutching a purse was curled into a fist.

She was a beautiful woman now, but he wondered how much more beautiful she’d been before her son’s disappearance damaged her in ways both visible and invisible.

Needing to be battle-ready, Nolan slid off the stool and stood before she reached him.

“Ms. Stewart.”

“You’re guessing,” she said, in a distinctively throaty voice.

“No.” He made a sound even he couldn’t decipher. “You look like him.”

Pleasure showed on her face. “I do, don’t I? Thank you for emailing the pictures. I know you were annoyed at me—”

“I’m not that petty,” he broke in.

Her teeth sank into her full lower lip. “I...would have understood.”

Nolan had to momentarily close his eyes to recover his resolve. I’ll fight dirty to keep you, if it ever comes to that. Of course it would come to that.

No, he might not be petty, but inevitably he would hurt this woman.

Dear Reader,

If you’re a longtime reader of mine, you’ll know that A Mother’s Claim isn’t the first book I’ve written about an abducted child. An earlier Harlequin Superromance novel, The Family Next Door, began after the heroine’s daughter had been restored to her, too. I think that story must have been at the back of my mind when I started plotting this one. In it, the daughter was young and hadn’t been gone nearly as long as is the case in A Mother’s Claim. Long after writing that book, I began to wonder what would happen if so long had passed that the very young child was nearly a teenager and had no memory whatsoever of his real mother and father. Who is this woman, asking him to betray the only mother he remembers?

Dana has dreamed for eleven long years that a miracle could happen. Sure enough, it does, with a phone call letting her know her son is alive and well. After the miracle, though...well, that’s when the real story begins. As always, I love wrestling with the aftermath of trauma. What more confusing time could there be to fall in love? Plus, as a fiercely protective parent, I identified powerfully with Dana.

I hope you’re as moved by her journey as I was.

Janice

A Mother’s Claim

Janice Kay Johnson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

An author of more than ninety books for children and adults, JANICE KAY JOHNSON writes about love and family—about the way generations connect and the power our earliest experiences have on us throughout life. An eight-time finalist for a Romance Writers of America RITA® Award, she won a RITA® Award in 2008 for her Harlequin Superromance novel Snowbound. A former librarian, Janice raised two daughters in a small town north of Seattle, Washington.

To my dearly loved daughters, Sarah and Katie.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Dear Reader

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Extract

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

IDIOT BOYS.

Having gotten Christian to the emergency room, Nolan Gregor was trying hard to be mad instead of sick to his stomach and scared out of his skull.

As a former army ranger, Nolan would have felt concern if he’d seen this much blood in the field. Panic—no. But this was Nolan’s eleven-year-old nephew with the ugly ax wound to the shoulder, which made everything different.

Yeah, he’d done his share of idiot things when he was a kid and later put his life at risk for his country. But even with a bullet wound he had never bled like this. Christian’s shirt was saturated by the time the EMT cut it off. Blood continued to flow despite the efforts to stanch it.

It took everything Nolan had to pretend nonchalance, to keep his posture confident and reassuring. A big man, he had retreated to a corner to be out of the way of the medical personnel clustered around Christian. He braced a shoulder against a wall of the emergency room cubicle. Nothing and nobody could have made him leave.

Face taut with pain, Christian kept his gaze fixed on Nolan, who was the closest thing to a father he’d ever had.

The doctor straightened, his eyes sharp above the mask. “Mr. Gregor, do you know Christian’s blood type?”

The question ramped up Nolan’s tension.

He frowned. “No. His mother is AB, but I have no idea about his father.” Or who Christian’s father was, for that matter. Nobody but Marlee knew, and she wasn’t saying.

To one of the nurses, the doctor said, “Let’s go with universal, but type him, too.”

Christian tried to rear up, restrained by the team working on him. “Am I bleeding to death?”

“No, I’m just being cautious.” The doctor laid a gloved hand on the boy’s uninjured shoulder and squeezed. “You’ve learned a good lesson. Chop yourself open, and you might end up needing a transfusion.”

A nurse was already pulling blood to check its type. Someone else was on the phone just outside the room requesting a unit of O neg.

Christian knew the rules: he used an ax only under the direct supervision of his uncle or, on occasion, a friend’s parent. Today, after overhearing Nolan grumble about the cold and whether he’d split enough wood to last until spring, Christian and his buddy Jason had decided to surprise Nolan. They got cocky and did some roughhousing. Somehow, Jason swung an ax that dug into Christian’s shoulder. Blood spurted. Jason ran screaming to the house.

Nolan wouldn’t soon forget his first sight of Christian, crumpled to his knees, his thin shoulder sliced to the bone, blood gushing. He hadn’t felt sickening terror like that since an IED had killed two men in his squad and left three others missing body parts. As he had then, he’d forced himself to calm down and done his damnedest to stop the bleeding while he waited for help.

Now, watching the doctor and nurses work on Christian, he saw that they were finally having success. The strain gradually leached from his muscles.

Sure enough, by the time the unit of O-neg blood arrived, the doc waved it off. He did decide to keep Christian for the night to recover from the blood he’d lost.

Eventually, Nolan and his nephew were left alone while overnight arrangements were being made.

“It wasn’t Jason’s fault,” Christian said in a desperate voice. “Don’t blame him.”

“Safe to say, we’ll let you share the blame,” Nolan said drily. He felt sure Jason had already caught hell from his dad.

Christian seemed reassured. His eyelids sank, but he mumbled, “We were dumb, weren’t we?”

“Yep.” Now standing right beside the bed, smoothing the boy’s dark blond hair back from his forehead, Nolan said, “We’ll talk about it once you’re in fighting form again.”

Christian made a fist with one hand and managed to raise it a few inches.

Nolan chuckled. “Oh, I’m scared.”

The small smile on the boy’s face caused relief and something sharper to squeeze his heart. Nolan didn’t have much family: his sister, Marlee, and her son. And Marlee... He loved her, but she was a constant worry and aggravation he had inherited when their parents were killed by a drunk driver. Medication gave her stretches of stability, but more and more often she refused to take it, which meant her mental illness dominated all their lives. Nolan could deal with the ups and downs, but watching her put her son through so much enraged him.

After their parents’ deaths, he’d given up his military career to take care of his sister and her kid. When he came home to Lookout to stay, he told Marlee that, from here on out, Christian would be living with him. She was welcome, as well, or they’d arrange occasional overnights. He hadn’t wanted to hurt her, but the boy he loved had to come first. He’d made sure she knew that if she didn’t agree to his conditions, including her signature on papers giving him the right to make decisions for Christian, he’d challenge her in court for guardianship. Neither had any doubt he’d win.

So they’d made an uneasy peace, with her coming and going but Christian gaining in confidence now that he had a stable home and someone he could count on.

Thank God for that agreement. Today was typical. Nobody had been able to reach Marlee. Nolan hadn’t seen her in a couple of days. She might be holed up in the apartment she maintained with disability payments, or she might have hitchhiked to Portland or somewhere else. In the grip of her schizophrenia, she tended to wander. If she could get her hands on drugs, she took them. He knew she spent weeks and months at a time living on the streets in one city or another, vulnerable to predators. It was almost inevitable that someday she would disappear for good. His parents had tried to gain guardianship so that she could be committed to an institution when she was at her worst, but they had failed. Nolan wasn’t sure he loved that idea, anyway.

When an orderly appeared to take Christian upstairs, the boy was sound asleep.

Not liking his pallor, Nolan decided to stay behind and corner the doctor again. Maybe the boy should have received that unit of blood.

He hadn’t caught the doctor’s name but spotted him in the nurses’ station scrutinizing something on a computer monitor.

He looked up as Nolan approached. “Mr. Gregor. I’m glad you’re still here.”

Ice trickled down Nolan’s spine. “Something’s wrong.”

The doctor’s expression cleared. “Not with Christian’s condition. He should be fine. He’s going to hurt for a while, though.”

Relaxing a little, Nolan shook his head. “Hell of a lesson.” He glanced at the badge pinned to the other man’s scrub top. Dr. Karl Soderberg. “You must have a concern.”

“Not at all. Just wanted to let you know that Christian’s blood type is O positive.”

“Must have gotten that from his father,” Nolan said slowly, although something tugged at his memory.

“He might have. It does mean his mother isn’t AB, though.”

“What?” Nolan said, almost soundlessly.

“A parent with blood type AB can have children that are A, B or AB, but not O, even if the other parent has type O. It’s just not possible. You might want to ask your sister again for her blood type.”

Nolan was too stunned to speak. He’d taken leave and flown home after the car accident that killed their parents and left Marlee injured. He’d always known they had the same blood type as their mother, a fact confirmed when Marlee received a transfusion.

All he said was, “Thanks. Will you print that off so I can keep it with Christian’s vaccination records?”

“You bet.” A moment later, Soderberg handed over the piece of printer paper. Summoned by a nurse in the door of another cubicle, he walked away.

Nolan was left to stare at a couple of lines of basic information that carried the force of a grenade capable of wiping out his small family. He wanted to believe the lab had made a mistake, mixed up two samples of blood. He would, of course, take Christian to his own doctor for verification. But Marlee wasn’t your average, everyday mom. A part of him knew.

Christian could not be her biological son.

* * *

ONE MONTH LATER, almost to the day, Nolan buried his sister.

When their parents died two years ago, he had acted on intuition—or had it only been fear?—and purchased not two cemetery plots but three. Now he laid Marlee to rest beside her mother.

He’d seen too much death and devastation himself to gain any comfort from that—he’d ceased to believe in an afterlife or the rosy fiction that Mom had met Marlee with outstretched arms. But Christian seemed to find it some consolation, which was all that mattered.

Christian had insisted on staying to watch as earth was shoveled atop the casket. Only two cemetery workers in rain gear remained with them. Friends and the minister who’d said a few words over the grave had all given the man and boy kind, pitying glances and walked away, sheltered by black umbrellas. Nolan held the same kind of umbrella and kept Christian close to him with an arm around his shoulders. Cold rain dripped from the bare branches of the maples that lined the paved cemetery lane. The heap of soil beside the grave had been protected by a tarp.

As the first shovelful pattered down, Christian’s body jerked.

“That’s enough,” Nolan said harshly and turned him away.

To his relief, Christian didn’t protest.

They walked across the squishy ground to Nolan’s SUV, decorated on each side with the logo of his business and the name: Wind & Waves.

Shivers racked his nephew’s thin body. “I can’t believe...” he mumbled.

That his mother was dead? Nolan had no trouble believing that. What he struggled with was the knowledge of how she died. Marlee committed suicide after Nolan insisted she tell him the truth about Christian. He, who had vowed to care for her, had killed her.

When he first confronted her, she screamed, “That’s a lie! That’s a lie! That’s a lie!” and covered her ears with her hands. He had insisted she stay with them so she couldn’t run from questions she didn’t want to answer. He’d also figured that with Christian out of school recuperating, she could be there to help while Nolan was at work. Nolan had grown grimmer, Marlee more hysterical. He had become reluctantly convinced that she truly believed she had carried Christian for nine months and borne him with the help of a midwife rather than in a hospital.

Did that mean Christian had no birth certificate? Hadn’t Marlee or their parents needed one to enroll him in school?

Nolan would forever be thankful that he—not Christian—had found her dead from an overdose. The law had required an autopsy, and Nolan had asked if the pathologist could tell if she had ever borne a child.

The pathologist’s report had left no doubt, detailing changes childbirth made to a woman’s body. Marlee Gregor had never birthed a baby.

And she’d taken to her grave any answers about who Christian’s biological parents were and how she had come to claim him.

She had also left Nolan with a shattering emotional and moral dilemma.

He loved Christian like a son. Any effort to trace those parents, to find out whether his sister, in the grip of her madness, had stolen a baby boy, could result in Nolan losing Christian.

Reason said he should keep what he knew to himself. Christian had experienced too much turmoil already in his life. As it was, he could cling to the belief that, despite everything, his mom had loved him, that the grandparents he still missed had been his, that he was safe with his uncle Nolan.

And Nolan couldn’t imagine his life without the boy who was his only family.

And yet...what if somewhere were parents who still mourned their lost child? He didn’t want to think his sister had been capable of snatching a baby from a loving family, but he couldn’t be sure.

Christian’s DNA might have been entered in databases of missing children and been waiting all these years for a match.

Perhaps the boy’s biological mother had been a teenager living on the street, unable to care for him. Marlee might even have found him abandoned.

God, how Nolan wanted to believe in that as an explanation.

In the weeks that followed, he had trouble thinking about anything else. His heart and his conscience engaged in silent warfare.

It’s the right thing to do.

I could lose him.

If his parents pop up and want him back...what will that do to Christian?

He told himself constantly that he could take his time, think about the consequences of every conceivable choice. That baby boy had become Christian Josiah Gregor a very long time ago, which meant there was no hurry for Nolan to make a decision. A few weeks, months, at this point, what difference did it make?

* * *

FLOATING ON A cloud of well-being, Dana Stewart didn’t want to open her eyes. The aftereffects of a dream lingered. She could feel the precious weight of her son in her arms, smell baby powder and his natural sweetness. The sensation of happiness was so rare she would have given anything to hold on to it.

But, inevitably, she woke up and the glow succumbed to crushing pain and guilt.

Still she lay there, refusing to open her eyes. If she did, she’d have to see her empty, lonely bedroom, the one she’d once shared with her husband. She and Craig had divorced a year after Gabriel’s disappearance.

Too awake now to hold on to the dream, she opened her eyes at last to see her bedroom door open to the hall, as always. She never closed her door or the one into Gabe’s room, not anymore. Dana knew how irrational she was being, but she couldn’t fight a desperate need to...hear.

She followed her usual routine: check her phone to be absolutely sure she hadn’t somehow missed a call or text, get out of bed, choose something to wear, shower, force down some toast or a bagel with peanut butter.

It had taken her years to do more than snatch a few hours of interrupted sleep. Even now, she didn’t sleep deeply.

She didn’t enjoy eating anymore, either. It had always puzzled her that she hadn’t gone the other way; she’d loved food, once upon a time, loved to cook and had been just a little plump. Now...she ate to sustain life. She doubted Craig would recognize her. Occasionally, she encountered an old friend and saw shock.

Really, she was healthier than she’d ever been. She ran up to five miles a day, usually when she got home from work. Her diet consisted of whole grains, vegetables, fruit and nuts. She had a runner’s thin body but didn’t care how she looked.

On the surface, she lived—had friends, spent time with her family, held a fulfilling job. But she would sacrifice every other relationship to find Gabriel. That hole inside her, the search, secretly consumed her.

She haunted websites devoted to missing children, posting reminders of her lost son wherever she could. Once a year, she called the detective who had investigated fruitlessly, even though he was now a district commander in the Aurora, Colorado, police department. He was always polite and sympathetic; yes, he would do some follow-up. He always called a few days later to say that nothing new had come up. Although she knew he was thinking it, he didn’t say, Lady, your son is dead. You need to deal with reality.

If she had believed, truly believed, that Gabe was dead, she wasn’t sure she’d have reason to live. But if Gabriel ever was found, he would need her. She couldn’t surrender entirely to despair.

She would go to work, immerse herself in other people’s problems, try to find them help, soften their burdens. She’d come home, run until her body ached, eat what she must, read or watch some meaningless television show and finally go to bed, where she would only allow herself to sleep lightly, listening for the faintest of sounds.

She would keep doing it.

But every hour, every day, every week and month and year, scoured her out until less and less of the old Dana survived.

* * *

UNCLE NOLAN HAD been really quiet since Christian got home from school. Well, not home home—most days, if he wasn’t hanging with friends, he rode his bike to his uncle’s business, which had a private beach on the Columbia River. Uncle Nolan had bought the business when he came back from Afghanistan for good, and immediately made a deal with a really cool small inn to take over an old boathouse and expand it on land leased from them. Then he’d sold the original building on the main street.

It wasn’t like he’d been busy today; hardly anybody wanted to rent windsurfing gear or a sailboat or kayak in late January, when the weather was this cold and wet. Usually Uncle Nolan didn’t seem to mind slow stretches; he said the busy seasons more than made up for them.

But today he’d been sitting behind a computer and barely looked up when Christian walked in. All he said was, “Homework.”

Uncle Nolan used as few words as possible, listening more than he talked. This was kind of different, though. Usually he at least said hi and asked about Christian’s day. He’d been more withdrawn since Mom died. He brooded a lot, which was okay. Christian did, too, going up to his room to lie on his bed, stare up at the ceiling and wonder how Mom could have done that. Hadn’t she worried about him at all? He knew she was sick, but hadn’t she loved him? What if she had changed her mind at the last second but it was too late?

Was dying like they said, following a white light? In killing herself, had she committed such a sin she was condemned to a horrible eternity? Or was she just...gone? Erased? Uncle Nolan had talked with him about what different people believed and had shaken his head when Christian asked what he thought.

“I wish I could tell you.” He’d stared into the distance, but not as if he was seeing anything. “You know what I did in the military.”

Christian nodded.

“I saw a lot of men killed.”

Christian knew his uncle had probably killed a bunch of those men. Sometimes he thought that’s why Uncle Nolan was so quiet. Maybe those dead men haunted him.

But what he’d said then was, “I’ve never seen a ghost. Never had a hint of one of my buddies coming back to let me know he’s okay on the other side. Not sure I believe it when someone claims Grandma appeared the day after the funeral to say goodbye. But I can’t discount the possibility that there is an afterlife. Any minister will tell you there is, and most people believe it.”