The Secret Baby Bond

John offered all the answers, provided all the solutions—all but one. She didn’t love him. Not that way. Not the way she’d loved Michael.

The fire crackled. She looked from the blue/yellow flame to her left hand and the two-carat diamond solitaire John had given her three weeks ago. Firelight glinted off the brilliant and perfectly faceted marquise. She thought of the inexpensive, plain gold band Michael had given her, remembered the love and the hopes and the dreams he’d offered with it.

Love, however, hadn’t solved the problems they’d amassed during their turbulent five years together. Love hadn’t been the be-all or end-all to everything that had gone wrong between them. For that reason, it didn’t seem essential for love to factor in to her relationship with John. She cared for him, as much, she thought, as he cared for her. In the end, it seemed reason enough to finally agree to marry him.

“So,” her father persisted as he lifted the one scotch he allowed himself every evening. Ice shifted, clinked softly in the Waterford crystal glass. “Are you close to setting a wedding date?”

She let out a deep breath. Like her father, John had also been pressing her to set a date. She’d been dragging her feet ever since the story had been picked up by every legitimate and illegitimate news publication in the country. The public announcement of their engagement two weeks ago had seemed like an act of betrayal. It also seemed so final.

She rubbed a finger across her brow, unable to ignore the dull headache pounding there. She hadn’t been prepared for the media circus the announcement had become. The tabloids had taken cannibalistic delight in catching pictures of her and John together, pictures of Brandon.

The worst, though, was the resurrection of the photographs of the train wreck in Ecuador that had claimed Michael’s life. Reliving the sensationalized and gruesome accounts of Michael’s disappearance had been a nightmare. Because of it, she hadn’t been able to think about setting a wedding date with John. For reasons she didn’t fully understand, she hadn’t wanted to.

“It’s a little early for definite plans considering…”

Grant frowned at his drink, then at his daughter when her words trailed off.

“Considering that you’ve never gotten over Michael.”

She folded a corner of the quilt over Brandon’s little body. The flannel felt soft and real beneath her fingers. Very few things felt real lately. She scooted back until her shoulders rested against the sofa.

“I was over him before he died,” she said, trying to make them both believe it.

“And yet…” Grant covered her slim shoulder with his hand. She was his little girl and she was hurting. “And yet it hurts you to think of his death as an absolute.”

“Yes,” she admitted, covering his hand with hers, feeling the strength there, needing the compassion. “It hurts.”

After all this time, it still hurt.

“I think of him,” she confessed, drawing her knees to her chest. “I think of Michael more and more often lately.”

She looked over her shoulder, met her father’s troubled eyes and shrugged self-consciously at her admission.

“Sometimes…sometimes, I’ll see someone in a crowd and the likeness to Michael will startle me so that for a moment, I actually think it’s him.”

Returning her gaze to the fire, she wrapped her arms around her legs and rested her chin on her knees.

“Those damn crank calls haven’t helped,” her father muttered angrily.

She thought of the phone calls she’d received the past two weeks—the ones where there had been nothing but silence on the other end. The ones that had shaken her enough that she’d stopped by to talk to her brother Drew. When she’d met up with Kristina, Drew’s new bride, instead, she’d pocketed the phone numbers of private detectives Tom Reynolds and Lucas Starwind that Kristina had given her.

“I wish you would have called Tom or Lucas, or even the police,” Grant added.

She’d been spooked enough by the calls that she’d actually considered calling them—considered, but not followed through.

“They have their hands full investigating the problems you’ve been dealing with since last December.”

Grant grew silent.

The problems all appeared to be tied to the unsolved murders of her grandfather, King Thomas Rosemere of Altaria, her uncle, Prince Marc, and the subsequent attempted assassination of her brother, Daniel, who, as the eldest son of Emma Rosemere Connelly, had taken Thomas’s place as king.

Absolutely, the Chicago P.D. and her father’s hired investigators had their hands full.

“Besides,” she said, “what would I have told them? That I’d received some strange phone calls? ‘No. No heavy breathing. No, the calls hadn’t seemed ominous. No, they hadn’t felt like pranks, either. Hadn’t felt like wrong numbers.’

“It’s not much for anyone to go on, Dad, and it wasn’t enough for me to follow through with the detectives. And yet…”

“And yet what?” he asked when she paused.

“Last week,” she said, speaking more to herself than to her father, “I was walking out of a shop and…it was like I felt Michael there, watching me, waiting for me.”

“It’s all this business with your grandfather’s death and Daniel’s attempted murder,” her father said with gentle concern. “All the extra security I’ve had set up is making you nervous. This whole damn situation is making you nervous.”

“No. No,” she assured him. “It’s not that. I’ve never felt threatened on that front even though I know you’ve been concerned for me. For all of us. It’s… I don’t know. Like today in the park. There was a man.” Her heart stuttered now as it had when she’d seen him. “I couldn’t stop thinking about Michael.”

She rubbed her arms, closed her eyes. “Sometimes lately, it feels like he’s…still here, Dad.”

Her father sighed. “It’s because you never had closure.”

No. There had never been closure. Instead, there’d been a train derailment in the jungles of Ecuador, endless nights of not knowing, the empty ache of waiting. The helplessness of uncertainty. Of needing to hear. Of wanting to know, yet not wanting to know the worst of it. Then just wanting to know anything.

The jungle was dense and wild, the cavernous cliffs below the derailment site impassable. Michael’s body hadn’t been the only one that had never been recovered. And Tara had never recovered from the guilt of knowing that the last words she’d spoken to him had been the last words he’d expected to hear.

She still remembered every moment of that day as if it were yesterday. She drifted back to that day at the airport—that horrible day. She could still see the shock and pain on Michael’s face in her mind. Still heard the hurtful words….

“You don’t have to see me off at the gate,” Michael said as he closed the trunk, hefted his flight bag over his shoulder and set his Pullman on the curb by the car.

Around them horns honked, hotel shuttles jockeyed for parking. Travelers hunched their shoulders against the cold, struggled with their luggage, rushed to make their flights.

It was so cold. Cold outside. Cold inside. The bite of it stung her cheeks as she stood there, the collar of her red wool coat turned up against the wind, the air as heavy as the lead-gray sky. Stray snowflakes taunted, promising the bitter Chicago winter to come.

Michael’s eyes were troubled as he watched her face. He knew something was wrong. Finally, he knew. After months of combative silences and fractured truths, he finally understood. Finally. Too late.

“We’ll talk,” he promised as he gripped her shoulders and turned her to face him. “You know I have to go on this trip. It could make or break my promotion, babe.” He rocked her gently, lifted one corner of his mouth in that crooked smile she’d never been able to resist.

When she didn’t react, he bent his knees, met her at eye level. “When I get back, we will talk.”

“It’s too late, Michael. It’s too late to talk.” Her words sounded as frigid as the wind that whipped off Lake Michigan and picked up speed and force as it funneled through the city and cut its way to O’Hare. “It’s been too late for a long time now.”

He straightened, his hands tightening on her shoulders. He drew her toward him protectively when a woman sprinting for the terminal doors bumped against them with a mumbled apology. His breath puffed out in smoky white clouds of frost that crystallized on the brittle air.

“It didn’t feel like it was too late last night.”

Last night when they’d made love.

Against all odds, when they could no longer communicate on a verbal level, they’d never lost their ability to communicate in bed.

As she stood there, feeling the heat of his strong hands through her winter coat, seeing the passion in his eyes, she knew that sex had been the only thing keeping them together for some time now.