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Spencer's Child
Joan Kilby
A LITTLE SECRETThe first time he left without telling herThe second time she asked him to go…Meg McKenzie, a marine biology student with a passion for killer whales, is shocked to discover that Spencer Valiella is her thesis supervisor. Spencer is an old flame–the love of her life, actually, and, although he doesn't know it, the father of her son. They met and fell in love one summer while Meg was an undergraduate student…but then Spencer left.To the surprise of neither Meg nor Spencer, the intense feelings they had for each ofhter still exist, and when Spencer learns Meg had his child, they grow even stronger.But old demons plague him–that restlessness, that yearning, that need to be unattached. In spite of Spencer's great love for her and their son, Meg knows he has to leave.It takes a terrifying experience for Spencer to see that living with Meg and his son, loving and caring for them with abandon, is what will truly make him free.
“Saying I love you—it’s like a promise,” Spencer told Meg (#u2d8c3c8e-0d38-58fa-ba6d-fb2c6266a465)Letter to Reader (#ub13cdbce-8296-51d3-a1ce-37aa9618fbc7)Title Page (#u4dba858f-2232-5208-b4c4-b33d80c1de3e)Dedication (#u23dc8d16-b608-537a-9a48-3bfa6f8a8f3f)ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#u81bed955-c323-5caf-8c26-f1263344ebd3)PROLOGUE (#u907715da-d756-5aeb-8f00-c9f939749743)CHAPTER ONE (#u9a97f4cc-09b2-5b2d-bd0f-94abf65bcf52)CHAPTER TWO (#uc07000ef-6134-5826-b05d-eb9b1e489678)CHAPTER THREE (#ua75f80f7-41b3-5243-a453-7aed7498df0c)CHAPTER FOUR (#u2933d025-c72a-5063-834c-e5d8f2558f31)CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
“Saying I love you—it’s like a promise,” Spencer told Meg
“But making promises I can’t keep is worse than any lie.”
“Cant or won’t?” she asked bitterly.
“I don’t want to stay in one place. I don’t want a house in the suburbs. It’s all too safe. Too much sameness. The monotony, the boredom scare me.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” she said.
His hand moved to the back of her neck, pulling her closer. “I’ve never forgotten you, Meg. I dream about you. When I was in California I’d look up at the night sky and think, these same stars are shining down on Meg. When I was on the water, I felt the ocean currents connecting us even though we were apart. When we’re together, I want to be with you. I want to make love to you....”
The ache inside her was part physical need, part emotional connection that defied time and logic. But could she handle a relationship on his terms? Yes, she could, she would, yes, yes—
Davis. She’d forgotten what her involvement with Spencer could do to her son...their son, though Spencer still didn’t know it. Her blood cooled Her eyes opened. She pushed on Spencer’s shoulders, clumsily trying to move him off her.
“I can’t do this, Spencer.” Another meteorite blazed across the sky and was gone. “I’ve had enough. Please take me home.”
Dear Reader,
Before I became a writer, I was a marine biologist. Although Spencer’s Child is a fictional story with fictional characters, I drew upon my experiences living and working on the west coast of British Columbia to give it authenticity. I never studied killer whales, but in researching this book I’ve learned so much about these wonderful animals I almost wish I had one.
Through the Vancouver Aquarium, I became the proud adoptive parent of Takush, a northern resident killer whale. The names of the whales Spencer and Meg work with are taken from records of whales identified on the B.C. coast, although the whales don’t all belong to the same pod in real life.
As for my characters, Spencer is one of my favorite kinds of hero—a brilliant but flawed loner, untamable and unattainable. Loving such a man could haunt a woman all her life—especially when she’s borne his child. It was a great pleasure for me to create a heroine, Meg, whose vulnerability is balanced by inner strength, and whose abiding love ultimately heals Spencer and brings them together, forever, with all the joy they so richly deserve.
I hope you enjoy reading this story as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Joan Kilby
Spencer’s Child
Joan Kilby
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To my father, for instilling in me the belief that I could
accomplish anything I set my heart on and making sure I
had the discipline to achieve my goals.
And to Nan, for giving me the gift of time.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Volker Deeke for sharing his expert
knowledge in the field of killer whale bioacoustics and for
patiently answering my many questions.
Meg Pocklington (who has the same name as my heroine
purely by coincidence!) of the Vancouver Aquarium was
of great assistance in helping me gather information on
killer whales.
Any technical errors are mine.
PROLOGUE
MEG PEERED THROUGH her microscope at the marine polychaete curled on its side in the petri dish. With one hand she held open the identification guide to marine invertebrates of the Pacific Northwest; with the other she used a probe to count the bristles arranged in paired sets on each segment. She’d almost finished when the chair next to hers scraped back and someone dropped into the empty seat.
Her concentration broken, Meg glanced up. And her heart beat a little faster.
Spencer Valiella. His brown hair was long and unkempt, as though permanently ruffled by the wind that blew in off the Pacific. He wore khaki pants and a faded black sweatshirt with the sleeves cut out. On the crest of his tanned biceps rode the tattoo of a leaping killer whale.
No one knew much about Spencer. He was a loner. Also a fourth-year honors student here at the University of Victoria and reputed to be brilliant. Yet not the kind of boy her parents would approve of. But she’d noticed him around the building, found him wildly attractive and now he was sitting right beside her.
“His,” she said. “I’m Meg.”
“Spencer.” Barely glancing her way, he hauled his beat-up leather satchel onto the table and began to rummage inside.
Her gaze slid back to the killer whale tattoo. She’d been fascinated with the sleek black-and-white marine mammals ever since she was eight years old and one had leaped straight out of the water not fifty feet from her father’s cabin cruiser. She’d gone into biology with the sole intention of studying them.
“Are you sure you’re in the right class?” she asked, trying to engage him in conversation. “This is Marine Invertebrates 301—a third-year course.”
His features were clean and straight, his sea-green eyes so dark that when she gazed into them she swore she could hear things that went bump in the night.
He took in her styled blond hair, miniskirt and designer top and smiled briefly. “I’m where I have to be, princess.”
Meg turned up her nose and pretended interest in the worm.
Spencer pulled a laboratory manual out of his satchel. A folded square of paper came out with it and slid across the table. From the corner of her eye, Meg saw it coming and stopped it with her hand. She recognized the pale greens and blues and dotted curving lines of a navigation chart.
“Are you into boating?” she asked, sliding it back. “My dad has a cabin cruiser. We go over to Port Townsend all the time.”
“I have a kayak.”
For a second she thought he was being apologetic. But the look that accompanied his words withered that notion and made her cheeks flush. Spencer Valiella was not impressed by clothes or looks or wealth. Meg had brains, too, but she doubted he was interested enough to find out.
He tucked the chart back into his satchel and leaned closer to her microscope. “What have you got there—a polychaete?”
He seemed oblivious to the fact that his knee was now touching hers. She found it hard to focus on anything but the heat generated by the point of contact. Or the wild clean scent of salt air on his skin. “I’m almost finished the ID,” she said without looking up. “You can have the worm when I’m done.”
With a flick of his finger, Spencer turned the worm onto its dorsal surface. “Abarenicola pacifica.”
Meg blinked. It had taken her twenty minutes just to get the family name. “Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“How many segments is it supposed to have?”
“Twenty,” he said, sounding bored. “Three pairs of branched gills containing hemoglobin on the anterior segment.”
“Wait a minute.” She flipped through the pages of the identification key to the species’ descriptions. “You’re right.”
Meg wrote the name in her notebook beside her pencil illustration of the worm. “Thanks,” she said, and gave him her most brilliant smile. “I’m interested in killer whales, too. Are you studying them for your honors thesis?”
One corner of his mouth curved slowly upward. Above his high cheekbones, his dark eyes gleamed. “Only one thing you need to know about me, princess. I’m here for a good time, not a long time.”
“Oh, really.” She started to close her notebook, annoyed with herself now for even trying to get through to the guy.
“Wait a minute.” He reached for the notebook and took a closer look at her drawing of the worm, which was accurate and detailed, down to the very last segment and bristle. “This is good.”
Pride put a bloom in her cheeks. She whipped her notebook away and stuffed it into her bag. She didn’t need approval from Spencer Valiella.
With the eraser end of a pencil, he pushed back the lock of hair that hid her face. “I’m studying communication between maternal groups of resident killer whales, Meg.”
Reluctantly, yet irresistibly, she raised her eyes to his.
“I’ll take you along sometime if you’re seriously interested,” he said.
“Oh, yes,” she replied as casually as she could. “I’m interested.”
CHAPTER ONE
FROM THE TOP FLOOR of his rented house. Spencer gazed out over the tiled roofs of Monterey Bay. Beyond the rocky shore lay the Pacific, blue and wrinkled, darker in patches where kelp forests swayed beneath the surface. The ocean stretched northward, its currents linking this temporary home with another he’d known in Victoria, British Columbia.
In his thirty-one years Spencer had moved thirty-five times. Victoria was one place he’d sworn never to return to. He still thought about Meg. Still felt the tug on his soul across the miles, across the years. A tug he’d resisted seven years ago and finally fled.
But Doc Campbell, his honors supervisor, had just suffered a stroke. Doc, his good friend and mentor, wanted Spencer to take over his marine mammals class until he could return to work. Christmas, at the latest, Doc had promised. The plea had been followed up by a formal request from Randolph Ashton-Whyte, the head of the biology department.
Spencer paced the sparsely furnished living room. His postdoctoral fellowship at the Monterey Aquarium had wound to a close. He’d applied for another research position in Bergen, Norway, but it could be months before he got word on that.
He didn’t want to go back to Victoria and memories of Meg. But for Doc he’d do it.
Two days later Spencer roared through Victoria in his beat-up Camaro with the California plates and muffler fall of holes. He had a kayak strapped to the roof rack, and the back end was loaded down with boxes of books, electronic gear and the few personal effects he’d hung on to over the years. He’d come straight up from Monterey, driving all day and all night, stopping only for gas and coffee and microwaved burritos that tasted like the cardboard they were served in.
It was eight in the morning when Spencer turned onto the potholed ribbon of asphalt that led to his father Ray’s beach cottage in Sooke, west of Victoria. A patchwork of brightly colored wooden houses lined the beach. Across the road, towering Douglas firs spilled their resiny scent into the mid-August heat where it mingled with the salt of the ocean. Spencer rolled down the window and his fingers tapped out the bass of an old Queen song on the hot black roof of the Camaro.
He slowed as he came around the bend, an eye out for the cottage his father had bought twenty years ago with the proceeds from the sale of his first record album. Ray’s flirtation with domesticity had been brief, coinciding with the birth of Spencer’s younger sister, Janis, and lasting only until the next big gig lured him across the continent. Except for the two years Spencer had spent at the university, the cottage had been inhabited off and on by itinerant musician friends of his father’s. His mother had split long ago, taking Janis and Spencer south to her native San Clemente, where she’d eventually settled down with, of all people, an investment banker. Spencer guessed he couldn’t blame her. Some people needed stability.
Around a bend he spotted the mailbox carved from driftwood and slowed to pull into the gravel driveway beside the tiny wooden house with peeling blue paint. The yard was overgrown with weeds and a wind chime of oyster shells clattered in the breeze that drifted around the porch.
He unfolded his limbs from the car and sucked the strong salt air deep into his lungs. Across the grass-strewn sand dunes, the ocean beckoned. The seemingly limitless expanse made him breathe easier. Home. The thought made him laugh. Like the tortoise, his home was on his back. Or more precisely, in the Camaro.
Yawning from lack of sleep, he pulled his duffel bag and laptop computer from the trunk and deposited them on the porch. The house appeared to be empty, as he’d hoped. He reached into a side pocket of the duffel for his key ring. Not the one with the brass killer whale that held his car keys, but the plain steel circle that held the keys to the cottage. And the keys to Doc’s laboratory and office. He’d never returned those when he left. If he believed in fate, he might have thought it was because he was meant to return.
Spencer opened the torn screen door and put the key in the lock knowing it wasn’t fate that had made him hang on to the keys. The research vessel he’d worked on that last summer had set sail early to follow a bumper salmon run that was drawing the killer whales north of their usual habitat. He hadn’t had time to drop off the keys. Or to say goodbye to... anyone.
The screen door banged shut behind him. Inside, the cottage wore the somnolent air of endless summer that seemed to inhabit all beach houses. Before his mother’s defection to southern climes, she’d hung curtains of sand-colored handwoven cloth shot with strands of aqua. The detritus of beach-combing expeditions littered the windowsills: shells, bits of twisted and polished driftwood, colored glass fishing floats washed ashore after perhaps decades at sea.
The plain board floor creaked beneath his feet, the sound muffled by a large oval rag rug. He crossed to the far wall, drawn by an enlarged black-and-white photo of Subpod C3: Kitasu, the matriarch; Geetla and Joker, her two grown sons; and Takush, her daughter. Takush was old enough to have a calf of her own by now. Spencer could still recognize individual killer whales by the shape and size of their dorsal fins and the scars on their sleek black-and-white hides. They seemed more like old friends than the subjects of his honors thesis.
He wondered if their dialect of calls and whistles had altered in the years he’d been gone. He planned to paddle out to see them for old time’s sake, but there was no point starting a research program when he’d be leaving again so soon. Doc had sounded robust in spite of his slurred speech when Spencer had called the hospital from Seattle. He’d surely be back by Christmas.
Dropping his duffel bag next to a low bookshelf crammed with tattered paperbacks, Spencer carried his laptop into the kitchen. His head was fuzzy with fatigue but he wanted to check his e-mail—the closest thing he had to a permanent address—before he hit the sack for a few z’s. He set the laptop on the table, plugged it in, then attached the modem to the phone jack on the wall beside the fridge. As he flicked the switch he realized belatedly there might not be any electricity or phone connection. To his surprise, numbers flashed across the screen as the system booted up. He dialed his service provider in California, waiting for the dialog box that would tell him he couldn’t connect...
Brrrinnng.
So the phone was on, too. He hit “receive messages” and got up to look around while the in-box filled.
A used coffee cup sat in the sink. An empty milk carton peeked out of the garbage bin. Damn. Someone was here, after all.
Spencer strode back to the living room and stood at the entrance to the short hall where the two bedrooms were. “Hello? Anybody home?”
Silence.
He knocked softly on the door to the main bedroom and when there was still no answer, pushed it open. The bed was a tangle of thin wool blankets and forest-green sheets. A pile of dirty clothes sat on the floor beside the open closet.
Who was staying here? And where were they now?
Then Spencer noticed the battered guitar case propped against the wall behind the door. The medley of souvenir stickers from cities across the continent spoke of decades of life on the road. He knew that guitar case. A grin spread across his face. His father was in town. He hadn’t seen Ray for a few years, not since he’d driven down to San Francisco from Seattle to catch the Brass Monkeys in concert. Ray had been riding high, a new record deal and a promotional tour in the offing.
Spencer had a flash of memory of doing schoolwork in a bus seat while music blared and his father and the guys in the band played cards or wrote songs. As a kid, he’d loved going on the road with them. Pulling out of the hotel parking lot at dawn, a new city every night, the excitement of the unknown—all were magnified in his young mind. As an adult he still got a kick out of moving on. As if maybe this time he was going to find the Holy Grail, whatever that was. Victoria was a step backward, but seeing Ray would make the trip worthwhile.
Where the hell was he? Spencer shut the door to his father’s room and went back to the kitchen. Ray would turn up sooner or later. Meanwhile, at the top of his in-box was a message from the head of the biology department at University of Victoria.
Dr. Valiella,
Did I mention that Angus Campbell has an honors student? Please give her a call ASAP. Her name is Meg McKenzie, phone number...
Spencer rocked back in his chair, his pulse thrumming. Meg. Could this be his Meg McKenzie? No way. She’d only been one year behind him. She would have finished her degree long ago and gone on to either graduate studies or a job somewhere.
Spencer got up to pace across to the window overlooking the tiny backyard. Meg’s image, tucked away in his subconscious, surged forth. Impish smile, bright eyes the blue of a robin’s egg, hair the color of sunlight. The memory of her laughter rang in his ears, the careless confident laughter of a girl possessed of talent, brains and wealth.
He shut his eyes and the blackness behind his lids pulsed with pinpricks of light. They were the stars above a campsite on Saltspring Island. Sleeping bags zipped together, bare limbs entwined. The wonder of their first time together.
And their last. For a few short hours he’d been able to give her what she wanted.
