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If not for promising her brother she’d talk to Blake, she’d be the one eager to disappear. But she’d made up her mind on how to proceed with her life, and she couldn’t do it without Cole’s support.
He’d made it clear he’d give that support only on the condition that she speak with Blake.
“Ask Blake for his help” was actually what her brother had said. But that was a small detail she didn’t need to concern herself with. She’d say the words, Blake would walk away, and she could move on to the next step of the rest of her life.
With Cole’s support.
“Cole says you’re crazy.”
Blake’s words interrupted Annie’s thoughts. Obliterated her confidence in fact. It seemed as if he’d always had the ability to make her doubt herself. It was something she wasn’t crazy about in him.
Probably the only thing she wasn’t crazy about in him. And it wasn’t even his fault.
The rest of it—his long absences, his inability to be there when she needed him— she understood. She just hadn’t been able to live with it.
Or him.
“My little brother has always had a problem with exaggeration,” she said now.
“So what’s this about?”
Right to the point. That was Blake. No “How you been these past two years?” No “You’re looking good.” She knew better than to even hope to get an “It’s good to see you.”
It wasn’t good.
For either of them.
Seeing him hurt. A lot. Far more than she’d expected, and she’d had a glass of wine and a big hug from her best friend, Becky Howard, to prepare herself before she’d set out on tonight’s mission.
“I’m going to have a baby.”
The startling words got her firmly back on track. She’d identified her goal, and for the first time in her life she felt absolutely, completely sure about the decision she’d made.
“Why do I need to know this?” His words were cold; the tone of his voice spoke volumes.
Blake wasn’t just angry, he was hurting, too. Damn Cole for insisting on this. As big as his heart was, sometimes Annie’s brother just didn’t know when to stop believing in things that could never be.
“The only way Cole would agree to stop trying to talk me out of this was if I asked you to be the father.”
THE COOL AIR WAS SUPPOSED to have cleared his mind. But Blake’s thoughts were fuzzy, and there was a very loud humming in his brain.
“So…you aren’t pregnant?” He could feel a headache coming on.
“Not yet.”
There was no reason for him to be relieved at the news. No need to care.
The cords at the base of his neck loosened just a little, and he tried to think.
“But you plan to be.”
“I’m determined to have a child, yes.”
Blake eyed his ex-wife as well as he could in the darkness. Was Cole right? Had she lost her mind?
Thoughts of the baby she’d lost surfaced. The child that for four long years, Blake had imagined himself raising. Along with the thoughts came the sharp pain that lived in his chest most of the time. While he’d grown somewhat used to the discomfort, its sting was much worse when he thought about Annie suffering from it, too.
“You can’t bring back what’s been taken from you, Annie.”
“I have absolutely no plan to try.” Her words were tough enough. The vigor in her tone gave him a hint of the determination she was holding in check.
Life should never have done this to her. She didn’t deserve it.
He was to blame.
“I don’t want to spend my life alone, Blake. I’m lonely, and I’m missing something important. I want to be a mother, and I believe I can be a good one.”
“Of course you’d be a good mother.” Blake was scrambling to make sense of all of this—to be a good friend to Cole, and to extricate himself as rapidly as possible. “You more or less became Cole’s mother when you were barely thirteen, and he turned out great.”
She blinked and looked up at Blake, as if he’d surprised her. Her curly hair was longer than it had been when they were married, longer than it had been when she’d met his flight in San Antonio two years ago.
Had she expected him to tear her to ribbons? To hate her for choosing to stay with the husband she’d married two years after Blake’s disappearance when he’d been presumed dead, instead of coming back home with him?
“I’ve had the magic.” Her words were soft, but her gaze was steady as she continued to look him in the eye. He felt as if he’d been kicked when he realized she was speaking of him. “I took the risk and trusted that marrying the love of my life would be enough, and then I crashed so hard I was afraid I wouldn’t ever recover.”
This was why he couldn’t be around her. Couldn’t even see her. Did she think he didn’t know all this? That he didn’t torture himself with the same knowledge every time he thought about her? Four years of captivity had been a cakewalk compared to the pain he had suffered daily since his return home.
“And I’ve played it safe, too,” she continued, as if completely unaware of the hell going on inside of him. “After you, I married a man I’d known all my life—one who’d loved me for most of it. I chose security and reliability over passion. And I not only ended up still just as unhappy, but I hurt someone else horribly. I’ll live with that for the rest of my life.”
They had that in common.
“I’m not going for strike three, Blake. But that doesn’t mean I can’t have a family of my own.”
She’d clearly given her future a lot of thought. And she made a good point.
Her idea might be crazy, but Annie was not.
“So…will you be the father?” She was good for her word. She’d told Cole she’d pose the question and she had.
“What do you plan to do when I say no?”
“I’ve already started looking around.”
“For a sperm bank?” Was that how these things were done?
Annie’s head dropped—something that had happened a little too often during their time together. And always when she was suffering from the low self-esteem, the doubts, that had plagued her since her father’s death.
But what did her father’s suicide have to do with this?
“I can’t take that chance,” she said, quietly but firmly. And then she looked up. “I’ll have to know the man,” she said adamantly. “I’ll have to know that he’s emotionally strong.”
Blake could understand. He really could. But… “Annie, you can’t just go up to a man on the street and ask him to give you a baby. In the first place, you have to think of him, too. What role is he going to play? And do you want the father of your child to be someone who’d be willing to father a child and then walk away?”
The problems with her plan were numerous, coming at him from all directions.
“Are you planning to use artificial insemination?” he asked before she could respond to his first set of objections. “Because I don’t think you’re the kind of woman to have casual sex with a man and then walk away. And even if you were, you’d have to hope he either had a very understanding significant other or that he was completely unattached. And that he would remain unattached for the length of time it took to get you pregnant. Because your chances of getting pregnant on one try are pretty slim…
“And what if he does have a wife or partner? What if she decides she wants to have a part in raising his child?”
Annie shaking her head brought him back to reality. This was none of his business.
He didn’t care what she did. He hoped she’d be safe. Happy. And that was all.
“I’ve had a legal contract drawn up that will cover all of those eventualities and more,” she said. “I’m going to do this, Blake.”
He could see that she was. And that scared him.
He turned to go.
“What should I tell Cole, when he asks me what you said?”
“Tell him I’ll think about it.”
It wasn’t the response he’d wanted to give. He just needed some time—and a good night’s sleep—to figure out how to be a friend to Cole and also stay as far away from Annie and her plans as he possibly could.
Maybe, if he was lucky, he’d be able to suggest a safe, healthy and relatively innocuous replacement for himself.
But one thing was certain. He and Annie were not going to make another baby together.
CHAPTER TWO
THURSDAY MORNING, exactly eight hours after she’d watched Blake get into his seven-year-old Lincoln Continental and drive away, Annie wasn’t concentrating well. She’d held on to his uncle’s car after Alan Smith—having heard the news that Blake was presumed dead—had had a fatal heart attack. And then she’d sold the trading company the two men had operated together, but she hadn’t spent a dime of the proceeds—almost as if some part of her had known, even after she’d married Roger, that Blake was still alive.
And if that was true, if she had known, marrying Roger had been the act of a coward. And a weak, disloyal thing to do.
At least she’d had a nest egg—and a car—to give Blake upon his difficult return home two years before.
Now, she wished he’d sell the damn car. Let go of the past. Let go, period.
Blake was the most controlled and logical human being she’d ever met. Just once, she’d like to hear him yell at the top of his lungs.
Positively Alive! Annie looked at the column heading on her computer screen. Her focus had to be on the future and not on a past she couldn’t change. And for the next hour, her future contained the column that was promised to the River’s Run editor and publisher, Mike Bailey, her boss, by ten o’clock.
The readers of River’s Run, the local five-days-a-week newspaper, would be expecting Annie’s weekly tidbit on living positively. She could talk about taking control of your life, about being a doer rather than a victim. She could even tell them about the baby she was going to have.
She could talk about Wade Barstow, the richest man in town, and the generous contributions he’d made to the schools and the city and the local churches. Wade was generous when it came to money. Annie just wasn’t sure his motives were philanthropic.
She could talk about what a gift the beautiful weather was.
Yet what she really felt like doing was crying. Which made no sense at all. Nothing had changed in the past twenty-four hours. She’d been twice divorced then, too. No one close to her was sick or dying.
Annie settled her laptop more firmly on the card table that served as her kitchen table, coffee table and desk, reminding herself of all the reasons she was glad to be alive.
Yet all she could think about was Blake. The things she’d had and lost. The things she’d wanted and never gotten.
Standing abruptly, she shut down her computer, closed the lid and put it in its case. She made a quick trip to her bedroom, past the twin bed and trunk that took up too little space in the room, and into the adjoining bath to fasten her hair back with barrettes and freshen her lipstick. Then she returned to the kitchen, stopping for only a brief moment to survey the bedroom next to hers, with its new carpet and the hand-carved, Tim Lawry-original crib. A changing table and matching rocker in wood, and the wallpaper she’d bought the previous weekend… The nursery was coming along nicely.
As soon as it was done, she’d start on the rest of the house.
For now, however, she was going to the office. And she’d pray that she found some positive inspiration when she got there.
SHE’D TALKED ABOUT the importance of honesty and self-awareness, and Mike thought it was the best column she’d ever written. Annie didn’t know about that—she wrote three columns a week, and also covered most of the small town’s more newsworthy stories—but she felt one hundred percent better than she had earlier that morning.
Strapping the laptop case to the rack on her bicycle outside the River’s Run offices on Main Street, she threw one leg over the bike and started off. Becky Howard, the highschool nurse, only had half an hour for lunch, and Annie was eager to talk to her best friend—to tell her about the previous night’s encounter with Blake.
Everyone in River Bluff knew about Annie’s past—her fairy-tale marriage to Blake Smith, his disappearance and declared death, her second marriage and then Blake’s homecoming. She’d felt as if the eyes of the world had been upon her the morning she’d gone to meet Blake’s plane. People she’d never spoken to in her life had been waiting to see if she’d stay with Roger or return to Blake. And most—with the exception of Roger’s friends and loved ones—couldn’t help being a little saddened by her choice.
Many had told her so, thinking she’d turned her back on true love.
Only Becky had understood. And maybe Blake.
Her mother certainly hadn’t. But then, June Lawry and Annie hadn’t seen eye to eye since Annie had been in junior high.
River Bluff High School was on the outskirts of town, part of a complex that also housed the junior high where Annie had been the day her father had shot himself. Avoiding that part of the school grounds where she’d heard the news, she unlatched her laptop from the bike carrier—theft happened even in River Bluff, if you made the temptation great enough—and left her yellow ten-speed unlocked in the rack with a dozen other bikes.
Becky wasn’t in her office.
Nor was she in the lunchroom. Or the teachers’ lounge.
Fifteen minutes of her friend’s lunch break had already passed and Annie had no idea where to look next.
“Hi, Ms. Kincaid.”
“How you doing, Katie? Tell your mom thanks for the apple jelly. It was great!”
“I will.” The blond senior smiled as she continued on her way down the hall, and then turned. “You wouldn’t happen to know where Shane is, would you?”
“I hope in class,” Annie said, wondering why the girl would be asking about a boy who was three years younger than she was. Wondering, too, why the girls here all thought it was okay to expose themselves in those extremely low cut pants and two-inch shirts.
And when had Katie gotten that butterfly tattooed on her lower back? Her mother must have shed some tears over that.
SHE FOUND BECKY IN HER silver Tahoe—sitting alone in a parking lot filled to capacity with cars, but no people.
One look at the tears on her friend’s face and Annie opened the passenger door without waiting for an invitation.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, sliding in and closing her door with a quick jerk on the inside handle.
“Oh.” Becky gave her an embarrassed glance, sniffled and made a swipe at her face, as if she could erase the evidence of her distress. “Hi. I didn’t know you were here.”
