“We Need To Talk,” Tom Rasmussin Said. Letter to 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 Epilogue Teaser chapter Copyright

“We Need To Talk,” Tom Rasmussin Said.

Jacy James walked toward him. His gaze slid to her belly. It looked flat still. He had a sudden, visceral memory of her. Oh, yes, he did want her, wanted to touch her one more time, wanted the thrill and insanity of losing himself in her. He’d never experienced fire like hers before that night, their one night together.

She damned sure didn’t look like a mother-to-be. But she was carrying his baby.

He took a ragged breath, fighting back the welling emotion. “I want to do the right thing, Jacy.”

“Good. That’s good.” She even smiled.

“You want to also, don’t you?”

“Of course.” The smile tilted into a frown.

“All right, then, will you marry me?”

Dear Reader,

Where do you read Silhouette Desire? Sitting in your favorite chair? How about standing in line at the market or swinging in the sunporch hammock? Or do you hold out the entire day, waiting for all your distractions to dissolve around you, only to open a Desire novel once you’re in a relaxing bath or resting against your softest pillow...? Wherever you indulge in Silhouette Desire, we know you do so with anticipation, and that’s why we bring you the absolute best in romance fiction.

This month, look forward to talented Jennifer Greene’s

A Baby in His In-Box, where a sexy tutor gives March’s

MAN OF THE MONTH private lessons on sudden fatherhood. And in the second adorable tale of Elizabeth Bevarly’s BLAME IT ON BOB series, Beauty and the Brain, a lady discovers she’s still starry-eyed over her secret high school crush. Next, Susan Crosby takes readers on The Great Wife Search in Bride Candidate #9.

And don’t miss a single kiss delivered by these delectable men: a roguish rancher in Amy J. Fetzer’s The Unlikely Bodyguard; the strong, silent corporate hunk in the latest book in the RIGHT BRIDE, WRONG GROOM series, Switched at the Altar, by Metsy Hingle; and Eileen Wilks’s mouthwatering honorable Texas hero in Just a Little Bit Pregnant.

So, no matter where you read, I know what you’ll be reading—all six of March’s irresistible Silhouette Desire love stories!

Regards,

Melissa Senate

Senior Editor

Silhouette Desire

Please address questions and book requests to:

Silhouette Reader Service

U.S.- 3010 Walden Ave., PO. Box 1325, Buffalo. NY 14269

Canadian: P.O. Box 609. Fort Erie. Ont. L2A 5X3

Just a Little Bit Pregnant

Eileen Wilks

www.millsandboon.co.uk

EILEEN WILKS

is a fifth-generation Texan. Her great-great-grandmother came to Texas in a covered wagon shortly after the end of the Civil War—excuse us; the War Between the States. But she’s not a full-blooded Texan. Right after another war, her Texan father fell for a Yankee woman. This obviously mismatched pair proceeded to travel to nine cities in three countries in the first twenty years of their marriage, raising two kids and innumerable dogs and cats along the way. For the next twenty years they stayed put, back home in Texas again—and still together.

Eileen figures her professional career matches her nomadic upbringing, since she tried everything from drafting to a brief stint as a ranch hand—raising two children and any number of cats and dogs along the way. Not until she started writing did she “stay put,” because that’s when she knew she’d come home. Readers can write to Eileen at P.O. Box 4612, Midland, TX 79704-4612.

This book is for my friend Gayle,

whose support has meant so much to me.

It’s also for the people of Houston,

a wonderful, sprawling megalopolis of a city

as vital as it is varied.

I hope they will overlook the small liberties

I’ve taken with my fictional version of their city.

One

The woman sitting across from Dr. Nordstrom didn’t fit in his pleasant pastel office.

He’d redecorated after buying the practice last winter. Studies had shown that patients found white cold and clinical, so the decorator had used pale peach for the walls, with muted blues and greens for the carpet and accents—colors intended to soothe anxious patients.

Dr. Nordstrom doubted that Jacinta Caitlin James’s presence had ever soothed anyone. Particularly anyone male.

She was too vivid, for one thing, in her crimson top and her gauzy skirt splashed with tropical flowers. She was too exotic, with her Gypsy’s hair, her tip-tilted eyes and full breasts.

She was also suddenly too pale. Much too pale.

“Ms. James?” he said. “Ms. James, are you all right?”

Jacy’s name echoed hollowly in her ears, as if the doctor were calling her from the other end of a long tunnel. “I’m fine,” she said automatically. In defiance of the darkness lapping at the edges of her vision, she pushed to her feet.

“Please sit down, put your head between—”

“I’m fine,” she repeated as she waited for the dizziness to pass.

Over the years Jacy had been called a lot of things, from persistent to pigheaded. Any number of cops, crooks and politicians had referred to her as “that damned reporter,” but even her detractors agreed she was as compulsively truthful in print as she was passionate about lost causes and underdogs. Her co-workers at the Houston Sentinel had nicknamed her “Outlaw” in honor of her comfortable relationship with chaos, and her boss had once, in a fit of good humor, been heard to call her the best investigative journalist in the state.

The one name Jacy had never expected would apply to her was Mother.

She inhaled raggedly. The darkness receded, leaving her standing in the middle of Dr. Nordstrom’s pleasant office. He sat behind his big desk looking up at her with an expression of professional concern. The way the oval lenses of his glasses reflected the overhead lights made them seem to be winking at her.

He had no wrinkles. That bothered her. How could he know enough to advise her on what was happening with her body when his face was as smooth as a baby’s behind? Jacy didn’t want to look at his too-smooth face. She didn’t want him looking at her. Quickly she glanced around the office as if she might find an escape route.

A picture on the nearest wall caught her attention, and she took four quick steps to it. Her skirt swirled around her legs, and if the rest of the world swirled a bit, too, she was convinced she could ignore it.

The picture was an artist’s rendering of a woman’s torso featuring the poor lady’s insides. Her exposed womb held a baby curled up, head down. Both the baby and the woman had pinkish pale skin.

Jacy didn’t. People often assumed she was part Mexican, and maybe she was. She didn’t know. Her dusky complexion might have been due to a number of possible heritages, from Mediterranean to Bedouin—but her eyes, those Irish green eyes, announced some international mixing and mingling in her genetic past.

“So when am I due?” Her voice was steady, which pleased her. Her question even made sense. Maybe her brain was working, even if her head felt stuffed with ghosts instead of thoughts—haunted, irrational wisps she couldn’t quite grasp.

“Next March.”

“Of course.” Apparently her brain wasn’t working after all. It hadn’t occurred to her to add nine months to the only possible date of conception.

Conception? A hint of wonder slipped past the other emotions. Her hand went to her middle. Her palm felt warm on her midriff through the stretchy knit of the top she’d chosen that morning because the bright red reminded her of courage, and of Sister Mary Elizabeth.

“Ms. James, this has obviously upset you. Please, sit down.”

“I’m fine,” she repeated. “I just...don’t know how to do this.” Now there was the understatement of the decade. How could someone who’d never had parents be one? She shook her head.

More gently, he said, “You must have suspected your condition when you made the appointment to see me.”

But she hadn’t believed it. That was one of the reasons she’d given herself for not mentioning the possibility to Sister Mary Elizabeth on her visit last Saturday. “Look,” she said, turning around, “I’m no more logical than most people. I guess I knew...but it didn’t seem possible. I haven’t been sick in the morning or anything. And...”

And it had been just that one night, she wanted to cry. It wasn’t fair, not fair at all—and if that plaintive thought made her feel closer to sixteen than thirty-one, well, wasn’t an unplanned pregnancy something that happened to careless teenagers? Not to a savvy career woman who respected herself too much for casual sex—who had never even been tempted to have a one-night stand. Never, until that night two months ago.

Not that she’d known it was going to be a one-night stand. Not even when Tom had climbed out of her bed and started pulling his clothes on. Not until he’d paused on his way out the door and looked at her. “This was a mistake,” he’d told her. Then he’d walked out.

Jacy held her head high and firmed her shoulders. “He used protection.”

“Yes, and condoms are quite reliable when used with a spermicide, but I believe you said you didn’t use any cream or foam.” Dr. Nordstrom shook his pale blond head. “The sheath was probably torn or improperly applied. People accustomed to other methods of birth control sometimes find condoms a bit tricky to put on.”

She smiled without humor. Somehow she didn’t think Tom lacked experience in donning protection. But he had been in a hurry, hadn’t he? Oh, yes, he’d been urgent enough. She’d thought him as desperate, as involved, as she was.

Memories pushed at her from where she kept them trapped deep inside—dark, heated memories that she fought back down. She never wanted to feel again what she’d felt that night.

When she shook her head to chase the ghosts away she realized the smooth-faced doctor was speaking.

“...need to know, first, whether you intend to continue with this pregnancy.”

“Continue—oh, God.” Abruptly she did want to sit down. She came back to the pale green chair that faced the doctor, and sat. She hadn’t thought...hadn’t even considered...

As quickly as spring in Houston turned into the baked heat of summer, Jacy turned an inner corner. In that instant what the doctor had told her became true and real. “Yes,” she said. Her hand went to her still-flat stomach. “I want my baby.” A baby. Her baby. However many doubts and fears threatened her, she had no doubts at all about keeping her baby. That certainty steadied her.

“Very well. I’m afraid my predecessor’s records are not complete, so I must ask you a few questions. Your medical history doesn’t identify your ethnic background.”

“Pick one.” She gestured widely. Her old doctor had known about her, and briefly she resented the stranger who’d taken his place when he retired last year. “I was raised in an orphanage. I have no idea who my parents were.”

“I see.” He frowned, tapping the medical record on his desk. “Also, the nurse said you refused to discuss the father’s identity. We are not being nosy, Ms. James. For the sake of your baby’s health as well as your own, I need medical information on the father, particularly since you have Rh-negative blood.”

She was going to have to tell Tom.

For one brief, craven moment Jacy reached for a way, a trick, some justification for keeping this from him—something other than the fact that the idea of contacting him made her sick to her stomach. But Jacy had spent the past several years of her life fighting to uncover and report on the truth. She was no good at avoiding or concealing it.

God help her, she would have to tell him.

“Ms. James?”

“Give me a few days,” she managed. “I’ll get his medical history, or have him come in and fill out some of your forms. Just give me a few days.”

When she left Dr. Nordstrom’s office fifteen minutes later she had a prescription for vitamins, an appointment in another month and a couple of colorful brochures.

It was August, it was Houston, and it was hot. By the time she crossed the parking lot, sweat dampened the nape of her neck beneath the heavy fall of her hair. She slid into the cherry red ’65 Mustang she’d finished having restored last year, leaving the door open to let some of the sunbaked air out. The humidity was high that day, and the car’s interior felt like a sauna. The white leather seat burned the back of her legs through the crinkled cotton of her skirt.

Jacy welcomed the heat. It made her feel more real.

She started the car to get the air-conditioning going, and then she just sat there with her door open, listening to the radio. The sound of the Beach Boys praising California girls rolled over her comfortingly.

Jacy loved old rock music, especially the soppy, sentimental songs of the fifties. Few people were aware that she had an equal weakness for old TV shows like “Lassie,” “My Friend Flicka” and “Leave It to Beaver.”

When Jacy was seven and a half, Sister Mary Elizabeth had moved her to the top bunk in the room she shared with three other girls, right above the newly arrived Seraphina Pfeister. Seraphina’s nightmares had lasted for months, long past the time it took for her arm to come out of the cast, her bruises to heal and her mother to start serving her sentence for child abuse.

Jacy used to lie in that upper bunk and plan her marriage to Beaver’s big brother, Wally. The lavish wedding. A wedding dress so full-skirted no ordinary human could have walked down the aisle in it. The two-story house they would live in afterward and the pets she and Wally would have.... Oh, yes, that had been a favorite daydream. Even after Sera stopped crying at bedtime, Jacy had liked to lie in bed and think up names for the dogs she and Wally would have.

She had known then that her “plans” were fantasy, just like the old sitcoms. It hadn’t mattered. Those fantasies had nourished something in her.

Jacy sat now in her gradually cooling car and tried to remember if she had ever fantasized about having a baby. A puppy, yes. She’d longed quite hopelessly for a puppy to take care of. But another whole, entire human being? Had she ever thought she could be responsible for anything as helpless and endlessly important as a baby?

When she shivered, it wasn’t from any outside chill.

Jacy closed her car door at last and slipped her seat belt into place. She picked up the cellular phone she kept in her car for calling in stories or getting answers while trapped in traffic, and punched in a number she knew by heart.

Tabor answered his own phone for once. She told him she’d be out the rest of the day, doing research.

She would be, too. Jacy only knew one way to approach a problem—head-on. She intended to get a grip on her situation the same way she explored a story on any unfamiliar topic. She’d look up what the experts had written on the subject before she tried to figure her particular angle. There were bound to be plenty of experts on a subject as important as motherhood.

She just regretted the half-truth she’d told her boss. Tabor would have to know about her pregnancy soon, of course. He wasn’t just her boss, after all. He was her friend.

But she wouldn’t tell him quite yet, she thought as she pushed in the clutch and shifted into Reverse. Another man had to hear the news first However much the idea turned her stomach, however little consideration he rated otherwise, Tom would have to know he was going to be a father.

Her baby deserved a father.

But that, too, would have to wait. Jacy felt lost in the suddenly altered landscape of her life. She was too unsteady to face the man who’d walked out on her. Friday, she decided as she shifted gears and pulled out into traffic. She’d tell him on Friday, four days from now.

In the meantime, she had some research to do.

Four days later

The carpet on the fourth-floor office of the Houston police headquarters building was gray. So were the battered metal file cabinets lining one wall of one of the offices in the Special Investigations section. Late-afternoon sunlight streaked through the blinds of the office’s single window to land in hot bars on the gray carpet, the corner of one file cabinet and the left shoulder of the man who sat at the big metal desk.

It was a broad shoulder, covered in white cotton with thin blue stripes. On that Friday afternoon the desk was full but orderly, with a black Stetson hat placed brim-up on one corner and the usual office paraphernalia neatly arranged. An extension to one side held a computer. The credenza behind the man held nine neat piles of papers and miscellany, and four family photos in brass frames.

Another photograph, larger than the rest, sat on the corner of his desk. Those pictures provided the only color in the office.

Tom Rasmussin seldom chained himself to the desk for the entire day, but he’d arrived before the sun this morning and stayed in the office all day, trying to clear away enough paperwork to go to the family beach cottage at San Padre Island with his brother this weekend.

His early arrival that morning was nothing unusual, though. He normally came in early and left late. There was no one to object to the hours he kept. Not anymore.

He was working on the last report when his office door opened. When he glanced that way, one corner of his mouth turned up. “Aren’t they checking IDs downstairs anymore?”

The man who sauntered into Tom’s immaculate office wore torn jeans, a three-day beard and a faded black T-shirt with an obscene suggestion printed in Spanish on the front. A greasy bandanna tied Indian-style across his forehead held shaggy light brown hair out of his eyes. “Hey, you got a problem with how I look, man?” He stopped and glanced up and down his grungy body. “I don’t see anything wrong. I even changed my underwear this morning.”

Tom leaned back in his chair. “I’m surprised you’re wearing any. Maybe you should run by Mom and Dad’s place and get her opinion on your wardrobe.”

“Think she’d give me hell, don’t you?” Tom’s only brother grinned, turned one of the wooden chairs around backward and straddled it. “If there’s any woman who would understand, it’s Mom.”

Raz had a point. After being married to a cop for forty-one years, Lydia Rasmussin understood the necessities of police work, including undercover assignments. “Even the shirt?” Tom said, raising both eyebrows.

“Hey,” Raz said, “you’re conservative enough for both of us. Do you even own any shirts that aren’t white?”

Tom grunted. “Run along and get some coffee, why don’t you, and quit bothering the grown-ups.”

“Are you kidding? That stuff’s bad for you.” Raz shuddered. “Especially the sludge you desk jockeys in S.I. brew. You aren’t ready to go?”

“I’ll be done in fifteen minutes, if you can be quiet that long.” Tom turned back to his computer.

Raz didn’t have a problem with being quiet, but sitting still was another matter. After a moment he stood and moved restlessly around the room. Raz had been known to say that his brother got the family quota of patience while he got all the charm.

Few people took the two men for brothers on first glance, or even on second. Both had their father’s bone structure, the sort of angular face Clint Eastwood had made famous a generation earlier, but in other ways they were opposites. Tom’s hair was nearly black. Raz’s was light brown. Yet it was Tom who had the pale eyes, while Raz’s were cocker spaniel warm. Tom was cool, orderly and reserved; Raz was outgoing, energetic and worried about his brother.

His drifting carried him over to the window. He ran a finger along one of the slats of the blinds. “This office is revoltingly neat, you know.”

“Send a complaint to maintenance,” Tom said without looking up, “so they’ll quit doing such a good job.”

The office wasn’t just clean, Raz thought. It was sterile. Like everything else in Tom’s life since Allison died. He didn’t know what it would take to jolt his brother out of the half-dead existence he’d settled into after the initial grief faded.

Dynamite, maybe? Tom was one stubborn son of a bitch. He wandered over to the wall where Tom’s various certificates and awards were distributed. “Got your gear together?”

“It’s in the Jeep.”

“Want to check out that new exotic dance club while we’re down there?”

Tom grimaced and reached for a small black notebook, checking something in his report against his notes. “Not much point in getting hot and bothered and then going back to the cottage with you, bro.”

Raz shrugged, unsurprised. It wouldn’t occur to Tom that he didn’t necessarily have to go back to the cottage with only his brother for company. Tom had changed a lot in the three years since his wife died, but he was an intensely private man. Raz couldn’t imagine him bringing a one-night stand to the family beach cottage.

A loud bzzz announced an in-house call. Tom reached out one long arm, snagged the receiver, and held it between his chin and shoulder, still typing. “Yeah?”

Raz couldn’t hear what the caller said, but he couldn’t miss his brother’s reaction. Tom dropped the receiver.

He caught it before it hit the floor, but Raz stopped pacing and stared in disbelief at his normally imperturbable brother.

“What?” Tom barked, then, “No! No, don’t send her up. Tell her—uh, tell her I’m about to leave on a trip. I’ll call her when I get back.” He hung up.

Raz felt a smile starting. “What was that about?”

“Nothing.” Tom’s expression would have kept anyone but a brother from pursuing the subject.

“Didn’t sound like ‘nothing’ to me.” Raz felt downright merry as he straddled the chair once more. “Sounded like you’re dodging some woman.”

“Don’t be any more of an ass than you have to.” The phone rang again, and Tom grabbed it. “What?” he barked. In the pause that followed, his expression went from forbidding to deadly. “Send her up,” he snarled, and slammed the phone down.

“Fantastic.” Raz grinned and thought hopefully of dynamite. “I can hardly wait to meet this woman.”

“Get out of here.”

“No way. I wouldn’t miss this for anything.”

Jacy had been to police headquarters before, of course, for press conferences or general badgering purposes. So she was familiar with the security, from the heavy steel door the desk sergeant unlocked electronically, to the visitor’s badge she clipped on her shirt, to the cameras perched in every corner like metal-and-glass spiders.

The flutter of panic in her stomach wasn’t familiar, but the fury that powered her into the elevator and out again almost drowned out other feelings.

Almost.

She’d never been to Tom’s office. She had never, she reminded herself, even been to his apartment. He’d talked his way into hers.

No, she told herself, her fingers tight and sweaty on the folder she carried. Be honest. Talk hadn’t had much to do with it.

She’d wanted him. From the first time she interviewed him about a case two years ago, she’d been fascinated, drawn. Jacy wasn’t accustomed to feeling shy, but it had taken her months to get up the courage to let him know she was attracted.

He’d been quite killingly polite when he told her he wasn’t interested.

In spite of that, they’d evolved a good working relationship—as good as a cop and a reporter ever had, at least. Tom occasionally fed Jacy information both on and off the record. She sometimes passed him facts or rumors. They met for drinks sometimes to exchange information and argue about who owed whom. Over the past year they had become friends, or very nearly.

If Jacy had taken a little too much care with her clothes and makeup for those meetings, she’d told herself it was wounded feminine vanity that made her care how she looked. Tom had always made it clear he considered their meetings strictly business.

Until the last time they got together—on June tenth, two months and four days ago. He’d called that Friday to ask her to meet him for a drink. She’d gone, expecting business as usual, thinking he wanted a name, maybe, or the down-and-dirty gossip on some public figure. They’d met at the usual place, a bar not far from police headquarters.

From the moment their gazes had tangled that night, she’d known he didn’t have police work in mind this time. And she’d been thrilled.

Infatuation. Jacy’s lip curled in a sneer as she left the elevator and headed down the long hall, following the desk sergeant’s directions. She’d been as blindly, stupidly infatuated as any teenage girl who didn’t know better. She’d not only wanted the man, she’d admired him for his integrity, his strength. Around him she’d felt...different. Softer. More alive.

Well, he’d cured her of that, hadn’t he?

But at least, she thought, when the subject came up someday, she would be able to tell her child that it hadn’t been all physical attraction. Not on her part, at least. Her child...

The clutch of panic, cold and clammy, added to her anger. When the nameplate outside the last office on the left announced that she’d reached her destination, she shoved the door open without knocking—and stopped two feet inside the room.

Tom sat behind his desk, his thick mustache framing a scowl that held all the friendly charm of a half-starved timber wolf. His office was stark, orderly, all-business—pretty much what she’d expected. The only color came from the row of framed photographs behind him, and the one on his desk—a large, professional photo of a pretty young woman in a checked dress.

Another time Jacy might have had to acknowledge what she felt when she saw that prominently displayed picture. Not now.

She and Tom weren’t alone. Another man, a stranger, grinned at Jacy from where he sat on a wooden chair. He was as dirty, disreputable and smiling as Tom was clean, controlled and angry.

It hurt. It shouldn’t have, not anymore. But Tom truly hadn’t wanted to see her or speak with her. Not even for these few moments. She’d had to threaten to tell the sergeant downstairs why she’d come before Tom would agree to see her—and he still hadn’t bothered to grant her privacy.

Well, so be it. She straightened her shoulders and marched up to his desk.

“I don’t care much for your methods,” Tom growled. “I don’t know what you hoped to accomplish, but—”

“Shut up, Rasmussin.” She slapped the folder she’d been clutching on the desk between them. Then, for the first time in two months, she met his eyes.

Oh, God. His eyes...colorless as rain, looking at her...looking right through her. Her stomach jumped, and lower down a knot of feeling tightened and spread electrically. A hateful, detestable feeling. She couldn’t crave this man anymore. She wouldn’t.

“Aren’t you going to introduce me, Tom?” the dirty stranger asked, still grinning.

“Shut up, Raz.” Tom reached for the folder that held the papers she’d drawn up after some of her research. “What the hell is this?”

Raz? Mr. Law-and-Order had had a brother, she remembered. A brother who worked undercover. She gave the bum in the wooden chair a measuring glance, then turned back to face the neatly groomed bum behind the desk.

Jacy smiled a nasty, satisfied smile. Tom really should have agreed to talk to her privately.

She leaned over his desk and tapped the folder. “This is a summary of my probable medical expenses, with the amount my insurance should cover indicated. I’ll expect you to pay for half the remaining balance. That’s not negotiable. I’ve also made some suggestions about support payments and visitation rights. Do take your time to think this over—just as long as you get back to me by Monday. That way you’ll save us both some legal fees and court costs...Dad.”

His face went as suddenly pale as hers had at the doctor’s. Satisfied, she turned around and marched out.

Two

At 10:20 that night Jacy pulled into the parking lot of her apartment. She wore a yellow T-shirt with the sleeves torn out over a hot-pink leotard and turquoise bike shorts. Her windows were down, though the temperature still hovered near eighty. After a workout she liked to feel the wind on her damp skin as she drove home, even if it was only muggy city air lifting her hair from her neck.

Another woman might have called a friend after the confrontation with her baby’s father. Although Jacy considered a couple of people at the paper good friends, it didn’t occur to her to call them. Not then. Instead, she’d driven for hours, using the excuse of an interview to hit the highway. When that didn’t help, she’d gone to her gym to try to work through her emotions physically.

That hadn’t done much good, either.

Jacy’s neighborhood straddled the line between respectable and scary. Her apartment complex was fifty years old and hadn’t been anything special even when new, but it was centrally located and she liked it. The walls were thick, the plumbing worked and every spring the azaleas burst into exuberant bloom.

No flowers bloomed this late in the summer. Tonight the air smelled of exhaust fumes and charcoal from the fast-food place down the street.

Jacy turned off the engine, rolled up her windows, grabbed her tote in one hand and her pepper spray in the other. She’d taken three steps away from her car when she saw the man sitting on the outside steps to her apartment. Waiting. Watching her.

She froze.

Night and the harsh light from the lamppost nearby laid hard black shadows across the man’s face and form, turning him into a fluidly changing study in black and white as he stood. His hat threw his face in shadow, but she didn’t need to see his features to know whose body uncoiled from one of the lower steps.

“If you have to carry pepper spray to walk from your car to your apartment, you’re in the wrong neighborhood,” Tom Rasmussin said.

The sudden starkness of Jacy’s face hit Tom like a blow to the stomach. He hadn’t meant to frighten her. But then, he hadn’t intended most of what he’d done to this woman, had he?

Guilt had a bad taste, yet there were worse emotions. “We need to talk,” he said.

She walked slowly toward him. Damn, it ought to be illegal for women to wear those exercise clothes in public. Especially a woman like her. Jacy had a body that could make a strong man beg, a body he remembered only too well.

His gaze slid to her belly, mostly hidden now by the yellow T-shirt. It looked flat still.

“You picked a lousy time to talk,” she said. “It’s late.”

“This isn’t exactly the time I picked. I’ve been waiting here two hours.”

For the first time she smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant expression. “You would have waited longer if I’d known you were here.”

He didn’t doubt that. “I’d like to come up.”

She studied him a moment longer before nodding. He didn’t need to be a mind reader to know how reluctant she was to let him in—every stiff muscle of her body as she passed him on the stairs spoke clearly of how little she wanted to be around him. He didn’t much blame her. The night probably wouldn’t get any better for her, either, considering what he had to say.

Her apartment made him jumpy. The large living area overflowed with color and clutter... and memories of the one other time he’d seen it. Books and magazines were scattered everywhere, from the hedonistic couches crowded with pillows to the small dining table where her computer sat.

The book on top of the nearest pile had a picture of a mother and a baby on the dust jacket. Tom looked away.

She’d told him no that night. After a long, hot kiss, she’d told him he was going too fast. His hand had been on her breast. She’d looked up at him with eyes slumberous with hunger and shiny with feelings he should have respected—and he’d never hesitated.

It hadn’t been hard to change her mind.

Tom took a deep breath. He’d known this wouldn’t be easy, hadn’t he? He took off his hat and bent to set it on her coffee table.

“You want a drink?” Jacy asked.

He looked at her, standing stiff and wary at the other end of the red couch. Her hair fell loose around her shoulders as if she’d just climbed out of bed. He had a sudden, visceral memory of her, of how she felt from the inside—and he wanted her. Oh, yes, he did want her, wanted to touch her one more time, wanted the thrill and insanity of losing himself in her, letting the fire have them both until everything else, past and future, was burned away. He’d never experienced fire like hers before that night, their one night together.

Memory melted into fantasy. What would it be like if he reached for what he wanted and tumbled her down onto one of the brightly colored couches? What if he slid his hand up under that yellow T-shirt as they fell...

Hell, was he completely crazy? He ran a hand over his hair, shaken by how quickly he lost control. “You shouldn’t drink, in your condition.”

Her lips tightened. “You have a pretty low opinion of me, don’t you?” She turned. “I’m having a diet soda. Join me or not, as you choose.”

He watched the sweet sway of her hips in that skintight thing she was wearing and hardened even more. She damned sure didn’t look like a mother-to-be. Jock, he thought, but didn’t say. He’d called Jacy that on more than one occasion, giving her a hard time because she liked to work out—partly because it bugged her, but mostly because it had helped him pretend he didn’t see her as a woman.

He forced his eyes to move up, and said the first of the things he’d come there to say. “How sure are you that I’m the father?”

She stopped a few steps away and turned slowly. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that I used protection. Both times. Before I accept responsibility, I want to know why you picked me for the father instead of one of your other lovers.”

She moved fast. He would have had to really work at it if he’d wanted to stop her. He didn’t.

Her slap rocked his head back. When her arm drew back to repeat the action, he caught her wrist. “I’m sorry,” he said as gently as he could while struggling with his own pain—a dull, terrible ache trying to swallow him, an ache that had nothing to do with the way his cheek stung from her blow. “I had to ask.”

He couldn’t doubt her anymore, as much as he wanted to.

She was carrying his baby. Oh, God, she was carrying his baby. Abruptly he turned away, stalking over to the window, where floor-length drapes closed out the night. He stood with his back to her.

There was no doubt in Tom’s mind what he had to do. Twenty years on the force hadn’t destroyed his belief in certain absolutes. He would do what was right.

He didn’t expect it would be easy, though. Or without cost. “You think I could still have that drink?”

The last thing he expected was her low, ragged laugh. “Sure, why not? Wish I could join you. Scotch, right?”

“Yeah. Thanks.” On the times they’d gotten together for a drink to exchange information, Tom had usually had a single shot of scotch, neat. He wasn’t surprised that she’d noticed. Jacy was damn good at her job—good enough to be a royal pain at times—and reporters of her caliber paid attention to details.

Of course, he knew what she’d had to drink at every one of their meetings, too—everything from orange juice to diet cola to tequila. Jacy liked to have candy bars or greasy hamburgers for lunch and steamed vegetables for supper. She was the least consistent health nut he knew. He’d told her that, too, in the past. Back when they were friends of sorts.

He took his time turning around, waiting until he had himself back under control. When he did, she was nowhere in sight and a brief, absurd spurt of panic stirred in him.

“I can’t find the scotch,” she said. Her voice came from beyond the dining alcove, where an open doorway gave him a glimpse of a tiny kitchen. “Is beer okay?”

What had he thought—that she’d left? Gone to the store? Moved out of town? “Whatever you’ve got is fine.”

He started moving around the room, examining it with his own eye for detail. He wanted—needed—to know more about this woman who would be the mother of his child. He’d lusted after her for nearly two years, but he’d been careful not to learn too much about her.

It was an absence, not a presence, he noticed first. There weren’t any photographs, either framed or in albums. No family photos, because Jacy didn’t have any family.

Emotion welled up inside him like blood from a gut wound, a feeling livid and nameless in its complexity. Guilt was part of it. And fear.

Tom believed in honesty the same way he believed in the rule of law. One was necessary to keep the jackals from taking over; the other was essential to keep a man’s soul clear of the unpayable debt of regrets. Yet in that moment he knew he would do whatever he could to keep Jacy from learning the truth about the night he’d taken her to bed.

The knowledge didn’t comfort him.

Jacy’s tastes in reading were eclectic. She seemed to like everything from Sartre to Garfield the cat. A text on agricultural methods sat on the coffee table next to a ragged Rex Stout paperback and a slim book on aromatherapy... and several volumes on childbirth and parenting.

He took a ragged breath, fighting back the welling emotion.

So. She was bright, and curious about pretty much everything. He’d known that much. She was also messy. In addition to the books and magazines scattered around the living room he saw two pairs of shoes and a shopping bag. The coatrack near the door held an umbrella, a fanny pack, a T-shirt and a towel.

So she didn’t spend a lot of time picking up. That might be a problem, he conceded. He preferred order. But he didn’t see dirt—no unwashed glasses, empty pizza boxes, crumbs or spill marks on the couches or carpet.

Untidy, but clean. He nodded. He could live with that.

The dining table held a computer, printer, printouts, books, newspapers—everything that a reporter might use in a home office. Her mail sat there, as well, in two piles—one opened, one not. He picked up the unopened pile instead of the opened one—his version of respecting her privacy—and was sorting through it when she came out of the kitchen with a glass of pop in one hand, a mug of beer in the other and a scowl on her face.

He wondered if she was going to throw the mug at him.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.

He put her electric bill back in the unopened pile. “The same thing you’d do if you were at my place, I imagine. You and I may not have much in common, but we’re both nosy by nature and by profession.”

She grimaced and held out his mug.

He couldn’t help smiling as he took it. She knew he was right, and as much as she wanted to, she wouldn’t deny it. That was one of the things he’d liked about Jacy from the start, one reason he’d fought to overcome his damnable reaction to her to achieve some sort of working relationship—she was scrupulously fair.

It was a rare quality. It was also why he couldn’t doubt her anymore. If she was certain he was the father, then he was.

He lifted his mug and downed half the beer.

“If you’re that eager for oblivion, I’ll be glad to hit you over the head with something.”

“You already have,” he muttered.

“It’s obvious you aren’t exactly thrilled by my news.” Her chin was up, but he saw something in the depths of those jungle green eyes, something very much like fear.

“Hell.” He set his beer on a clear spot on the table. “I’m not going to duck out on my responsibilities.”

“Are you going to sign the child support agreement I suggested, then?”

“Paying child support won’t turn me into a father.”

She got that look again, the one that had troubled him earlier, when she saw him waiting for her on the steps—a stark, anemic look, as if something vital had drained out. He hated it.

“No, it won’t. And if that’s your attitude, well, I’ll still take you to court for the money because it’s only right. It can go into a college fund. But you can forget about visitation rights.”

“That’s not what I meant.” He ran a hand over his hair. Lord, couldn’t he do any of this right? “You aren’t going to have to take me to court to get me to support my child.”

“You just don’t want to be bothered with spending time with the baby, then?” she said, her upper lip lifting in a definite sneer. The expression looked damnably gorgeous on that exotic face. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll do fine without you.”

“No, dammit, listen. I meant that, however much of a shock your news was, I want to be a father to my child. A real father, not a once-a-month baby-sitter.”

She didn’t give herself away by much...the movement of her throat as she swallowed. The pause that went on a little too long while she collected herself. Another man might not have noticed, or understood that she fought to control emotions swinging in wild, breath-stealing arcs.

Tom noticed.

“Well, good,” she said at last. “I’d thought—hoped—you were the sort of man who would want visitation rights, would want...it’s important, you know. A child should have a father who wants to be a father.”

Tom knew Jacy hadn’t had a father. Or a mother. “What about you?” he asked quietly. “Are you well? You and...the baby?”

“Sure.” She shrugged. “The doctor didn’t mention any problems, anyway. I feel fine.”

Yeah, she was just fine. Pregnant and alone and scared—though she would deny it. He had a feeling he could have found her in a dead faint and she would deny feeling anything as vulnerable as fear.

“Look,” she said, “if I give you the name of my doctor, will you go by and fill out his forms?”

“I want to do the right thing, Jacy.”

“Good. That’s good.” She even smiled—not an entirely successful effort, but she was trying. “With both of us wanting what’s best for the baby, we can work things out.”

“You do want to do the right thing, too, don’t you?”

“Of course.” The smile tilted into a frown quickly enough.

“All right, then.” He took a deep breath and got it said. “Will you marry me?”

She just looked at him, as expressionless as if he’d spoken in another language. In spite of every reason he had not to, he couldn’t keep from smiling at her blank expression. “Marriage,” he said. “You have heard of it?”

“You’re crazy,” she said.

“That’s not quite the response I’m looking for.”

Jacy stared at Tom. She had trouble believing she’d heard what she’d heard. “It’s all you’re getting.” Nuts, she thought. The man is Obviously nuts.

All at once she needed to move. There was nowhere to go, no place to be except here, dealing with this—with him—but she didn’t have to stand still to do it. “What century are you living in, anyway?” She tossed the words over her shoulder as she paced. “People don’t get married because they have to anymore.”

“We both want what’s best for our baby. Having two parents is best.”

“Not if they can’t stand each other.” Jacy paced as if she were race-walking. When she reached the other end of the room she flung herself into a quick turn.

“I’m not surprised if you can’t stand me, under the circumstances. But I don’t feel the same.”

She scowled at him in disbelief and paused. “So maybe you don’t absolutely detest me. You don’t think much of me, period.”

“I... respect you.”

For some reason that infuriated her. “Don’t choke on it!”

“Jacy, I know you don’t want anything to do with me. But we’re not talking about what you want, or what I want.” There was something deliberate about his smile, something wicked—oh, yes, definitely wicked—a sexy twitch of his mustache, a knowing gleam in his eyes. “Though the fact that you want me almost as much as I want you ought to help us make a marriage work.”

She laughed at him. Put her hands on her hips, and laughed. “Oh, tell me another one. You want me? Sure—you took me out, took me to bed and decided once was enough. If I hadn’t gotten pregnant I’d never have seen or heard from you again unless I was interviewing you for the paper.”

“I can’t believe a woman like you could be so wrong about this sort of thing.” He started toward her.

What did he mean by that—“a woman like you”? A woman who had so many lovers she might not be sure which of them fathered her child? Jacy held herself steady against the fresh hurt. “Look,” she said, “I think this discussion is getting out of hand. I am not marrying you or anyone else.”

“Fine,” he said as he reached her. “We won’t talk for a while.”

Jacy was slow to understand. Later she would try to figure out why she’d been so slow, but now—now all she could do was step back. Only somehow she didn’t move fast enough. Or far enough. Even as she moved away he followed, reaching out.

His big hands cupped her face.

She should have been able to move then. He held her face firmly, his wolf-silver eyes fixed on hers—but she wasn’t hypnotized. She should have been able to move while he bent slowly over her.

Jacy braced herself. She knew what to expect The memory of how much Tom Rasmussin demanded of a woman made her body soften and ache for him even as she closed her mind and heart against him.

But he tricked her, damn him.

His mustache was soft. So was his mouth—soft and hot and riveting, gathering all her attention to her own lips as surely as a magnet draws iron. He passed his mouth slowly, gently, over hers. Once. Again...and again. The sweet persuasions of his lips undid her with every pass, unraveling her thoughts and her pride, leaving her balanced in some windless place where nothing existed except the quiet attention his mouth paid hers.

Her lips burned. Her breasts tingled. Her belly ached with the rich lightning pouring into her veins, while a longing as rich and forbidden as moonshine, as clear and potent as moonglow, banished sanity.

She reached for him.

In an instant the past surged up into the present. When her arms slid around him he circled her tightly, pulling her against him—body to body, wrapped tightly in each other’s arms, trapped together by passion. His tongue entered her mouth. She tasted him then as she had before, and she went a little crazy.

Jacy’s hands insisted on knowing his body again. They raced over him. The ache in her intended to have more than this delirious press of clothed bodies, and her mouth silently told him this was so. In return, Tom kissed her as if he were able to do nothing else, as if his next breath depended on tasting her, knowing her.

Just like he’d kissed her the last time. Before he’d left her without a backward glance.

Jacy didn’t cool down as fast as she’d heated up. But her mind awoke, filled with thoughts as jumbled and unpleasant as the aftermath of a tornado. She wrenched herself away.

Her body was cold, separated from his. In a minute, just a minute, that cold would reach the rest of her, and she’d be able to speak.

“You understand now,” he said, his voice hoarse with strain. “I wanted you. All along, I’ve wanted you.”

“And you hated it.” She knew it was true even as she spoke—saw the truth of it in the sudden flicker of emotion in his startled eyes. “You wanted me and you hated it.” She stepped back another pace, trying to steady herself with distance. And failing. “That’s why you never called, isn’t it? Because you couldn’t stand wanting so much.”

“Yes. In part, at least.”

She ignored the catch in her breath, the sudden stab of pain, to pursue truth the way she always had. “What’s the rest of it, then?”

“Maybe I thought you had feelings for me. Feelings I can’t return. Whatever makes a man capable of love died in me, Jacy, three years ago. When I buried my wife.”

His honesty was as quick and certain as a sword thrust, and for a second or two she couldn’t draw a breath. She answered with equal honesty. “You don’t need to worry about my feelings anymore. I thought I felt something for you, too, but I was wrong.”

Oh, yes, she’d been wrong. Not about what she’d felt—her feelings had been too strong to mistake, too frightening for her to want to claim them if she hadn’t had to. But the man she’d been falling for, the lonely man she’d thought lived inside those pale, watchful eyes, didn’t really exist. That’s what she’d been wrong about. Because that man, the one she’d always dreamed of finding, was someone a woman could count on, no matter what. That man would never have left her the way Tom had.

“I think,” she said, “that you should go now.”

She expected him to argue, or even to refuse to leave until she’d agreed to his stupid proposal. However she might have confused herself about him in some ways, she knew Tom wasn’t a man to be turned aside from a course he’d set himself. But he just looked at her. His gaze drifted down her body, and she realized he was looking at her middle, where the baby rested. It gave her an odd, uncomfortable feeling.

He nodded, and bent to pick up his hat from the coffee table, then turned away. At the door he paused, his hat in his hand, and she was reminded of the other time he’d paused on his way out her door.

This time he didn’t speak of regrets. “We’ll talk more later,” he told her. “Be sure to lock the dead bolt behind me,”

The door closed quietly behind him.

Lock the dead bolt? That’s all he had to say? Jacy started to laugh, but the high-pitched sound that came out scared her into silence. She stood next to her bright red couch in the living room she’d filled with her things and she wrapped her arms around herself for warmth.

She’d wanted to say yes. When Tom asked her to marry him, she’d wanted to say yes. Knowing he didn’t love her, couldn’t love her, she’d still felt as if she’d come home when he’d put his arms around her. For a few insane minutes she’d wanted to take him on any terms she could have him.

The truth tasted dark and sour, like a bitter candy held too long on the tongue. When she swallowed, it went down like ground glass.

Eventually she moved. Her elbows felt stiff and creaky as she unwrapped her arms from around herself. She walked slowly to the door and slid the dead bolt home just like he’d said, because this world was a very unsafe place indeed, and she had no intention of being taken by surprise again.

Three

Pandemonium was the normal order of things at the Sentinel as deadline approached. Saturdays were especially crazy as the paper geared up for the Sunday edition, and this Saturday was no exception. Phones rang. People yelled or cussed. The smell of microwave popcorn competed with that of stale cigarette smoke, though the newsroom was supposedly smoke-free.

A row of glass-fronted cubicles faced the big room where people rushed, typed, argued or talked on the phone. In one of those cubbyholes, the Rolling Stones moaned about a lack of satisfaction from a radio perched high on a cluttered bookcase. Yellow sticky notes bloomed on printouts, clippings and miscellaneous piles of paper that threatened to bury the empty soda cans on the desk. A small ceramic planter held a dead plant surrounded by crumpled candy wrappers.

The nameplate on the desk read simply Outlaw.

No traditional family photos were on display, but two framed photographs from news stories and three press awards crowded the bit of wall that showed between file cabinets.

Someone down the hall dropped something large and metallic. The resounding clatter drowned out all the other noises, but Jacy didn’t notice. Like anyone accustomed to living with a large, noisy family, she was good at tuning the rest out. Surrounded by the clutter of her crowded cubbyhole, she was intent on her story.

The chaos and demands of Jacy’s job soothed her. After a miserable night she’d plunged into work that morning the way an Olympic swimmer dives into a pool—with the abandon and discipline of total commitment. She knew who she was here at the paper, what she wanted.

It wasn’t a major story. Yesterday a man died of stab wounds. In a city like Houston, death was as commonplace as births, weddings and brutality. But honor required Jacy to treat every article as if it were destined for the front page—no slacking, no skimping.

As soon as she finished the story she sent it, with a few swift keystrokes, to her editor’s desk for approval. Her chair creaked as she leaned back in it.

Damn, she was tired. She slipped her sandals off and pulled her legs up onto the chair under the gauzy cover of her loose sundress. Jacy had figured out a couple years ago that an unstructured dress was the coolest thing she could wear in the summer, and she seldom put anything else on from June to the end of September.

She laid her head on her upraised knees for a moment, and sighed. It was close to seven o’clock and she’d been on her feet nearly all day, after getting precious little sleep last night.

“Hey, what are you doing, sleeping on the job?” a cheerful voice asked.

Jacy raised her head. “One of these days,” she observed, “that cheeriness is going to get you killed.”

Nannette Tompkins grinned and held out a folder. “Records said you wanted this, and I offered to trot it up to you. You have any more of those chocolate-covered raisins?”

Jacy sighed as she took the folder from her friend. Nan was cute. There was no other word for it. She was short and curvy, with frizzy red hair, freckles and a smile to rival the young Sally Field’s. “I’m not up for chitchat now, okay?”

“That was obvious from the moment you showed up this morning, growling at everyone. Which is why I offered to bring this file up.” She came around to Jacy’s side of the desk and opened the bottom drawer. “You talk and I’ll listen.”

“Go away, Gidget.”

“Insults roll off me like water. Oh, here they are.” She retrieved what was left of Jacy’s stash of chocolate-covered raisins. “Now,” she said, sitting in the one extra chair the tiny office boasted, “tell Mama what’s wrong. It has something to do with that hunk of a cop you went out with a couple months ago, doesn’t it?”

“Nothing’s wrong.” Since Nan was as shrewd as she was cute, Jacy had little hope of being believed.

Both of Nan’s eyebrows went up. “Okay.” She tossed a few raisins into her mouth, tilted the chair back and propped her feet on Jacy’s desk. “Nothing’s wrong. You’ve just got the world’s worst case of PMS and felt like reading some obituaries and it’s pure coincidence that the one Records sent you belongs to Rasmussin’s wife.”

Jacy flushed. “Dammit, Nan, you had no business—”

“I care,” Nan interrupted, and for once there was no smile on her round face. “Whether that gives me a right to snoop or not we can argue about later. Now tell me what’s up.”

Jacy sighed, leaned back in her chair and opened the folder. “I’m pregnant.”

Nan’s feet came down with a thud. “You’re what!”

“You heard me,” Jacy muttered. The folder held two sheets of the slick, smeary paper used in the microfilm machine at the morgue, and a glossy photograph. One of the sheets was a copy of an article from a few years ago. The other was an obituary.

“It’s his? Rasmussin’s?”

“Yeah.” Jacy scanned the article. It read:

Three people were killed today when a westbound car crossed the center lane of the Central Expressway and crashed head-on into oncoming traffic.

“Have you told him?”

“Yeah.” The article added that the driver of the westbound car had been drinking and was ruled dead at the scene. His victims hadn’t been so lucky. One hemorrhaged to death before the ambulance arrived. The other died at the hospital during emergency surgery.

Allison Rasmussin was the one who died in surgery.

“Well? What did he say?”

Jacy took out the photo and tossed the folder on her desk. “He wanted to know why I thought it was his.”

Nan used some words that would have gotten Gidget’s mouth washed out with soap.

Jacy smiled for the first time. “Look,” she said, feeling the strain of the long day settle around her, “I know you mean well, but I need to sort some things out before I talk about it, okay?”

If one of the cubs from the city-hall beat hadn’t stuck his head in the door, looking for Nan, Jacy might not have prevailed. But between the rumor of a city councilman’s arrest for driving while intoxicated and Jacy’s smiling plea for time, Nan was persuaded to leave.

Jacy’s smile faded as soon as she was alone again. She looked at the picture in her hand. It was a duplicate of the one on Tom’s desk, she realized. Allison Rasmussin still smiled shyly out at the world from it, a delicate Dresden lady in a blue-and-white checked dress.

A pretty woman, Jacy thought—not beautiful, or especially striking. Just pretty. Had she been as delicate as she looked? Had she gone to college, drunk beer, crammed for exams, entered a profession? What had she dreamed, longed for, resented?

Had she loved her husband as much as he still loved her three years after her death?

When Jacy’s phone buzzed she dropped the picture on top of the folder, relieved to be dragged away from a subject she kept worrying like a sore tooth. But the interruption wasn’t quite the change of subject she’d hoped for.

Her boss was ready to see her now.

Jacy took a deep breath, trying to clear her weary mind. Tabor wasn’t going to take the news of her pregnancy well.

Theobold Tabor was over sixty but didn’t look it, though the deep grooves along his cheeks suggested his scowl was a frequent fixture. He had long, bony arms and legs, and skin the color of the polished teak cane that leaned against the desk where he sat. Back in the sixties some Klansmen hadn’t approved of the series of articles he’d done on civil rights. They’d taken a baseball bat to his knees.

Jacy respected Tabor more than any other journalist on the face of the planet, and she liked him almost as much as she respected him. At the moment, though, she was considering using his cane to hit him over his very hard head. “It’s none of your business,” she repeated.

“None of my business? You come prancing in here, tell me you need to take maternity leave in a few months and expect me to leave it at that?”

Well, no, she hadn’t expected him to “leave it at that.” That’s why she’d been dreading this discussion. In an office full of professional snoops, Tabor could have won an award, hands down, for being the nosiest. Especially with his friends. “My maternity leave is your business,” she said. “The name of my baby’s father isn’t.”

Indignation faded into sorrow on Tabor’s long face. “I thought we were friends.”

“We are, but—”

“You can’t trust me?” He put the question quietly. With resignation.

Oh, he was good, all right. Jacy rolled her eyes. “You already gave yourself away when you asked if the ‘sorry so-and-so’ was going to marry me.”

“A perfectly reasonable question.”

“I am not going to cater to your medieval ideas by telling you his name. You have no shame. You’d probably call him and tell him he had to marry me or something.” Jacy shuddered. That was all she needed—having Tabor and Tom both telling her she had to marry for her baby’s sake. She’d have to leave the state to get any peace.

“The man should be willing to give his baby a name,” he said firmly.

“I’ve got a name to give my baby. James. I may not know where it came from, but it’s a perfectly good name.”

He was silent for a moment before switching tacks. “Setting aside my ‘medieval’ notions, it’s not going to be easy raising a child alone. You’ll let me know if I can help, won’t you?”

“Well,” she said, weakly relieved that he’d dropped the cross-examination for now, “I might want to borrow Camille for a few words of advice sometimes.” Tabor’s wife had raised three children while working full-time as an architect before she and Tabor met and married a few years ago. Jacy figured she’d know plenty about how to balance parenting with a professional life.

“She’ll tell you the first thing you need is a supportive husband,” Tabor returned promptly. “And I...good God—”

“What is it?” she asked suspiciously.

Tabor grimaced. “Tell me that isn’t the baby’s father coming toward us across the newsroom. Please.”

Jacy’s whole body jolted. Tom? Here? She turned in her chair—and sighed. The stranger she’d seen in Tom’s office yesterday was winding between desks out in the main room. He was dressed slightly better today. His T-shirt was a truly virulent green, but it lacked yesterday’s slogan. He still sported the bandanna and a couple days’ growth of beard.

“Not the father,” she said. “The uncle.”

Jacy spoke the words, then stopped. Her baby was going to have an uncle? Her hand dropped to her stomach. She hadn’t realized, but...through Tom, her baby would have relatives. Like grandparents. An uncle. Maybe some cousins. Everything Jacy had lacked.

She was anxious, suddenly, to know more about Tom’s family. What were they like? Would they accept the baby?

“An uncle, eh?” Tabor said thoughtfully.

Jacy grimaced. She’d slipped. Given that much, Tabor would have Tom’s identity in a day or two. The man was uncanny that way. “All right,” she said, standing. “I’ll tell you now if you promise you aren’t going to call him and tell him to ‘do right’ by me.”

“You don’t really believe I’d interfere in your life that way, calling some man I’ve never met and—have I ever met him?”

“No hints,” she said firmly, heading for his door. If she hurried she could intercept Tom’s brother before he got here and Tabor interrogated him. “Do you promise?”

“All right, all right. I won’t call him.”

Which didn’t mean he wouldn’t go harass Tom in person, but she was out of bargaining time. “Tom Rasmussin,” she told him, and turned the door handle.

“The cop?” He sat up straight, astounded. “You’re involved with a cop?”

“Not anymore,” she said, and escaped.

Raz saw Jacy emerge from a glass-enclosed office. As she headed toward him he added details to his impression of her yesterday. Physically she was a knockout, of course—not beautiful, but she fairly shimmered with energy. And her body—down, boy, Raz told his own body. He was going to have to learn to think of this woman as a sister.

She asked him to join her in her office. He followed, aware of the half-dozen people staring at them curiously—aware of the sway of her hips beneath her loose, gauzy dress.

He smiled. Maybe seeing her as a sister was asking too much of himself. He could still appreciate the view, couldn’t he?

He followed her to a tiny cubicle where the Supremes were singing about being a “love child.” She grimaced and switched off the radio. Raz settled in the only chair without waiting for an invitation.

She didn’t look happy to see him when she sat behind her desk. She looked wary and tired...and sinfully hot, like a week’s worth of mind-blowing sex wrapped up in wrinkled cotton. Hot enough, maybe, to break down the milehigh walls of a certain stubborn fool.

Best of all, she looked nothing at all like Allison. The only other woman who had stirred his brother’s interest in the past three years had looked entirely too much like his dead wife. Fortunately, she’d ended up marrying their cousin Seth. “We haven’t exactly been introduced,” he said with one of his best grins. “I’m Tom’s brother Raz, and I am very pleased to meet you.”

“Raz?” Her eyebrows rose. “I could have sworn it was Ferdinand,” she murmured.

He winced. “Apparently my brother’s been giving away family secrets.”

“Nope. But I’m a reporter. I’ve got my sources.”

He glanced at the folder on her desk, where Allison’s photo smiled back at him. “So I see.”

She snatched the picture and stuck it back in the folder. “So what can I do for you?”

“First, you can accept my apology. I didn’t realize when I insisted on staying in Tom’s office yesterday quite how personal your business with him was. I’m sorry I intruded.” He hesitated. “Well, I’m sorry if my presence was awkward for you, anyway. I’m not really sorry I was there. This way I got to hear the good news right away.”

She hesitated, then smiled tentatively. “I’m glad you consider it good news. Apology accepted.”

She was sharp, sexy, successful...and, he realized when he looked at that uncertain smile, vulnerable. Raz recognized that and responded instinctively. He couldn’t lust after a woman with wounds hiding in her eyes, wounds he suspected his brother had a lot to do with. “You shook Tom up pretty thoroughly.”

“Good.”

“He’s not really as much of an idiot as he seems, you know. He’s...not good with surprises.” Raz knew both too much and too little to say more—too much about his brother’s side of what had happened between him and this woman, too little about her.

“I don’t—” A yawn interrupted whatever else she was going to say.

“Long day?”

“Saturdays always are.” She eyed him curiously. “That’s the ugliest shirt I’ve ever seen. You’re undercover with Vice, aren’t you?”

He laughed. “If you’re trying to excuse my taste—”

Her phone rang. She picked it up, shrugging an apology for the interruption. She listened, asked a couple questions, then hung up and stood. “That was my boss,” she said, her eyes shiny with excitement in spite of the shadows beneath them. “I’ve got to go. The old Rutger Hotel is burning, the reporter who normally covers that beat is on another story and Tabor’s holding the front page.”

Big fires are noisy. The sounds of this one reached Jacy while she was still in her car a couple blocks away—water roaring and hissing, men shouting and a deep, bass rumbling, as if some huge monster were under assault. Adrenaline ate at her lingering exhaustion as she hunted for a parking place—adrenaline and dread.

Her years as a reporter had never taught her how to approach human disaster with detachment. Even as she parked her car illegally in an alley, she wondered if anyone burned in the belly of that beast or crouched in one of the yet untouched rooms, waiting for rescue or death.

But when she shut her car door behind her, she did her best to shut away both her dread of what she might discover at the fire, and the last remnants of her fatigue. She had a job to do.

It was summer, so it was still light outside when she approached the barricades. And hot. She felt the heat of the fire sharply through the thin gauze of her dress as she hunted up witnesses, and she breathed in air that stank of burning. Smoke billowed out of the windows of the historic old hotel, chased upward by a lurid underskirt of orange flame.

Four fluorescent yellow fire engines hemmed in the blaze. From eighty-five feet off the ground, two men in the basket of the snorkel truck directed a thousand gallons of water a minute on the roof of the nearest building. Below, firefighters in protective gear aimed the powerful umbilical lines of their fire hoses at the monster devouring the building.

It took Jacy fifteen minutes to confirm that all of the hotel guests were believed to have gotten out. Within another half hour she had some names, a possible cause of the blaze and interviews with the battalion chief and one of the evacuees. The fire wasn’t out, but it was under control—and back at the newsroom, Tabor was holding a spot on the front page. Time to leave.

Darkness was slipping over the city when Jacy headed back to her car, where her cellular phone waited. She ran possible lead lines through her head as she walked.

Halfway there, she started to feel dizzy.

Jacy was used to good health. She’d never felt anything like the light-headed, fading sensation that swept over her. She stopped, uncertain. A little scared.

Had she forgotten to eat? Yes, she decided. That was it. That’s all that was wrong with her—low blood sugar. She’d skipped supper. Obviously delaying meals was a mistake in her condition. After a brief pause she felt slightly better and started walking again.

Then the first cramp hit.

Wounded animals make for their lairs. When the walls of Tom’s apartment started closing in on him that afternoon, he headed for headquarters. The window of Tom’s office faced west. He stared out at the dying day as the thickening gray of twilight gave way to the darkness that spread itself over the city, watching as lights winked on in windows. Tom had spent half his lifetime defending the people in the houses behind those winking lights from those who preyed on their fellows.

Protect and Defend.

Twenty years ago, when he’d graduated from the police academy and pinned on his badge for the first time, he’d known so much. A man did, at that age. He’d been certain of what he wanted from life and how to get it. He’d wanted to be a cop like his father, and he’d wanted to settle down with a good woman and raise children.

It hadn’t occurred to him, at twenty, to wonder whether he deserved either of those sweetest of life’s gifts.

By the time he met the good woman twelve years later, Houston’s streets had knocked most of his certainties out of him. He’d still wanted to marry, but he’d no longer dared to want children.

Allison had, though.

Tom turned away from the window and walked to his desk. Slowly he picked up the photo that had sat on the same corner of that desk for six years—three years before Allison died, and three years, now, after.

It wasn’t Allison he’d dreamed about last night.

Tom knew what love was. He’d loved his wife, so he knew it wasn’t love he felt for Jacinta James. This hot, urgent craving was too selfish, too physical and too nearly desperate to be that tender emotion. But it wasn’t anything as simple and clean as lust, either. Lust by itself wouldn’t burden him with guilt this way. Lust would have been eased by taking her to bed, not doubled.

Obsession, maybe.

The name didn’t matter. Whatever he felt, he was going to have to deal with it, and he hoped, he prayed, he could get a handle on how to do that quickly. She was carrying his baby. His baby. He’d treated her badly and she wanted nothing to do with him, and he couldn’t blame her for that. But he couldn’t let her continue to hold him at arm’s distance, either.

He had to change her mind. Somehow, some way, he had to change her mind about marrying him.

Tom stared at the photo in his hand. He couldn’t ask Jacy again to marry him while Allison’s picture sat on his desk, could he?

The phone rang. Tom set the photo on his desk, facedown, as he picked the receiver up. “Rasmussin here,” he said.

“Tom?” The voice at the other end was so shaky and uncertain that for one jarring second he didn’t recognize it. “Tom, there’s something wrong. Really wrong. I—I’m cramping and I—”

“Jacy? Where are you?”

“I’m in my car near the Rutger. The hotel. There’s a fire and I—I’m bleeding.” Her voice broke, and she was crying. Jacy, whom he would have sworn could take a beating without crying, choked her words out between sobs. “I’m afraid I’m losing the baby. I’m scared, Tom. I’m so scared!”

“Stay there. Stay right there in your car and I’ll get someone to you.” He could do this, he told himself. Hadn’t he done this hundreds of times, talked to a victim or a witness, kept his voice steady, detached, so they would stay calm while he did his job? “Stay there,” he repeated, and his voice broke. “I’ll get you some help, Jacy, I swear it.”

Four

The emergency room at Medical Center Hospital smelled like hospitals everywhere. The medicinal stink of disinfectant overlaid the faint, grim mingling of sweat, blood and less pleasant odors. Jacy lay on the examining table in a small white room with gleaming metal fixtures and a punishingly bright light. She wore a hospital gown and a thin sheet. A clear plastic tube led to the back of her right hand, where tape held the needle in place while the IV machine hummed as it pumped fluids into her.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.