Wild Honey

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Without warning, an image came to mind. Of a big blond man who resembled her son. Travis McLean. Randi stiffened. She’d actually pictured him sitting on the blanket with them!

“That’s great, son,” she said hastily, banishing the image as she rose to her feet. She reached for the pail and shovel. “Let’s see about that sand castle, okay?”

But as Matt followed her cheerfully to the wet sand near the water’s edge, McLean’s lean handsome face hovered at the fringes of her mind. Kneeling in the sand beside her son, she began digging with a spurt of energy meant to drive the image away. That, and something else. Something that felt suspiciously like guilt.

Don’t be silly, she told herself as she molded the damp sand. Matt can’t miss what he’s never had. As for McLean, what he doesn’t know isn’t hurting him, either.

Yet the argument in her head persisted. She told herself McLean’s actions precluded his right to know of the son he’d fathered. He’d chosen to donate his sperm, chosen to be an anonymous father, hadn’t he?

But far more disturbing was the question of whether it was right for her to choose to bring a fatherless child into the world. Unbidden, more questions came, try as she might to ignore them. Had she robbed her son of one of life’s inalienable rights? The right to have and know a father? Had she been selfish in doing what she’d done? Had she stolen from her own child’s future?

The sand castle was the largest, most elaborate structure built on the beach that day. Other children and their parents came to admire it, including the trio of redheads. Matt grinned at all the praise, even boasting to a man and his young daughter, “Me ‘n’ my mom’s the bestest team in the world for makin’ sand castles!”

And through it all Randi laughed and smiled, determined to shut out the doubts. Doubts that made her wonder if the happiness of one-parent families and sand castles didn’t have something in common.

Perhaps neither was built to last.

CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_d5528095-0c73-5728-97ce-a3e7a0b516b4)

“HERE YOU ARE, Mr. McLean.” The owner of the bedand-breakfast handed Travis a beach badge. “Go around the side porch and you’ll find a path leading straight to the beach.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Muncie,” Travis said with a smile for the elderly widow. He fastened the badge to his trunks, relishing the simple pleasure of having both hands free; the bullet wound was healing rapidly, and he’d discarded the sling. Waving to Mrs. Muncie, he slung a towel over his shoulder and headed for the beach.

With any luck, he’d find Randi and Matt Terhune on that beach. One of the things the Agency’s computer had turned up was the location of Ms. Terhune’s vacation spot. She’d rented a cottage on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, just a stone’s throw from Mrs. Muncie’s bed-and-breakfast. Through sheer luck, he’d called Mrs. Muncie just after she’d received a cancelation; he was now booked for the weekend and two weeks following. A stay that just happened to coincide with the remainder of Randi Terhune’s vacation.

The computer had turned up other information, too. Terhune and the kid lived in a quiet suburb near D.C., sharing a home—as he’d already learned—with her older sister. Their modest house was in a good neighborhood, served by a decent public-school system. It had been left to the sisters by the aunt who’d raised them; they were orphaned in their early teens.

Randi had a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in nursing, and had twice graduated in the top ten percent of her class. She had an excellent work record, had advanced rapidly in her career.

So far, so good.

Then there was the fertility clinic in Cambridge, where she’d worked before having the kid. He’d learned it was still being operated by Dr. Philip Burgess, its founder. Posing as a journalist doing an article on such clinics, Travis had learned a few interesting facts. Facts that convinced him Randi Terhune had acted on her own unethical initiative if she’d availed herself of the clinic’s services.

Make that when, not if, he amended. Any uncertainties he’d had about whether she’d done so had all but vanished. The facts he’d assembled were just too overwhelming to amount to a coincidence. Yeah, she’d acted unethically, all right. According to Burgess, a stern no-nonsense New Englander, employees had always been barred from using the clinic themselves.

But Travis was deeply concerned about the final piece of info that had turned up about Matt’s mother: both she and her sister, Jill Terhune, had undergone years of psychological counseling when they were younger. He’d been unable to find out why, but the discovery jarred him. Just the thought of Matt being raised by two women who’d required extensive therapeutic counseling raised his hackles.

Cresting the dunes, Travis halted, his concerns thrust aside for the moment. The salty tang of the sea filled his lungs. Gulls screeched overhead, their cries vying with the rhythmic susurration of the waves. For several minutes he didn’t move. He simply drank in the panorama of sand and sea, of sunlight glinting on blue water.

Located north of Ocean City, the bed-and-breakfast and a handful of cottages enjoyed a stretch of shorefront relatively free of the crowds that packed the busier tourist spots. He noted a sprinkling of people in the water and knots of sunbathers here and there. In between were mercifully vacant stretches of clean white sand.