Jack's Baby

The elevator doors opened. He stepped out. Something familiar about the woman waiting to step into the compartment caught his eye. He looked sharply at her and he had the weird sense of falling down an empty shaft instead of standing flat on a firm floor.

“Nina?”

Her name exploded from his throat.

Her hair was cropped short, but he couldn’t mistake that face, those eyes as she stared straight at him. Recognition, shock, disbelief, fear, anger…each expression pulsed briefly at him from a stillness that shrieked with tension. Then she whirled past him, jabbed a finger at the control panel inside the elevator and hugged herself against the back wall, glaring a fierce rejection of him until the doors closed.

The message burned into his brain. She didn’t want him. She didn’t want anything to do with him. He quelled the raging instinct to chase after her, find her, make her listen to him. Useless. She’d made her decision to shut him out. It hadn’t changed. It wasn’t about to change. She’d just done it again.

He forced himself to walk away, to check the room numbers he passed along the corridor. He’d come here to oblige a friend. Never mind that he had no heart for it. It gave him something purposeful to do. He had to forget Nina.

But why had there been fear in her eyes? He’d never given her any reason to be afraid of him.

Why anger? Surely she realised this meeting was purely accidental.

Damn it all! What had he done wrong?

CHAPTER TWO

JACK…

His name kept pounding through Nina’s mind, creating waves of pain that seemed to suck at her body, leaving her weak and trembling. When the elevator doors opened, she had to push herself away from the wall. Her legs were like jelly, her stomach a churning mess. Somehow she made it to the ladies’ rest room on the ground floor, blundered into an empty cubicle, fastened the door, then gratefully sank onto the toilet seat, safely hidden until she could pull herself together.

Tears welled into her eyes. She hunched over, burying her face in her hands, rocking in anguish at the unkind stroke of fate that had brought her face to face with Jack at such a time and place. It wasn’t fair. It was grossly unfair. She’d spent the past eight months trying to forget him, forcing herself to accept there could be no happy future with him. Seeing him again now opened up all the hurt she’d done her best to bury.

For one heart-stopping moment she’d thought he knew. But he couldn’t. And, of course, he didn’t. The surprise on his face told her he hadn’t expected to run into her.

The husky urgency in his voice had rattled memories better suppressed. Jack wanting her, making love to her with such intense passion they seemed to flow together in a fusing heat that had made her feel it was impossible to tear them apart. They’d been a perfect match in so many ways…if there were only two of them. She hadn’t known then, hadn’t realised there was a fatal flaw in their relationship, silently waiting to explode in her face, just when she’d fooled herself everything would be all right.

The hollow sickness she had felt that night swamped her again. Jack was lost to her. Irrevocably. Their paths had diverged so deeply, no meeting place was left for them. An unpredictable and accidental crossing like tonight was a cruelty, a glimpse of what might have been if Jack’s attitude about babies and having children had been different.

Nina remembered her own father’s attitude too well to inflict the same crushing sense of being unwanted onto any child, much less her own. Every time her parents had argued, they had invariably flung out the bitter accusation of being trapped by an unplanned pregnancy. Nina was to blame for her father not being in the career he wanted, for her mother being tied to responsibility instead of enjoying many more carefree years. The list of resentments was endless.

It would have been the same with Jack—different reasons for resenting the situation but no difference in the feelings aroused. He had left her with no doubt about that. Nina shut her eyes tight, squeezing back the futile tears, wishing she could erase the image of him, stamped so freshly on her mind.

He was still magnetically handsome, emanating the same powerful virility that had drawn her to him at their very first meeting. In just those few strung-out moments before she’d escaped via the elevator, the old familiarities had leapt to vivid life again—the small mole near his jawline, a tantalising little disfigurement on his smoothly tanned skin. His streaky toffee hair, at its shaggy state, needing a trim. The startling directness of his green eyes tugging at her heart.

He shouldn’t affect her like this. Not now, when it was so impossibly hopeless for them ever to get together. And this was the last place he should be. Why on earth would Jack be visiting a maternity hospital?

Someone must have pressed him to come, blindly intent on showing off a new son or daughter, not realising a baby had no appeal whatsoever to Jack Gulliver. Social politeness or professional sensibilities would have pushed him to oblige. It was the only answer Nina could come up with. She desperately hoped that seeing her wouldn’t prompt a curiosity to know why she was here. If he found out…

She couldn’t bear it. She just couldn’t bear it. Arguments, recriminations, an insistence on shouldering some responsibility, financial if nothing else. Trapped by a child he didn’t want but felt obliged to support. A tie between them going on and on…the bitterness of it. She’d hate it. She’d taken every step she could to avoid it—leaving her job, changing house, no telephone number in her name—all to make the break from Jack a completely clean one.

She wanted to howl out her fear and frustration, but if someone heard her it would draw unwelcome attention. A nurse might be fetched. Her chest hurt. Her throat ached. She grabbed some toilet tissue and mopped her eyes and cheeks, determined to rise above this dreadful stress.

Yet if the decisions she had put into action were sabotaged now, how would she cope? Her emotional state was shockingly fragile as it was, without Jack intruding on the life she had to establish and maintain. With Sally’s help she could manage. She didn’t need Jack’s money, and her child certainly didn’t need his attitude.

Maybe she was worrying for nothing. Jack’s surprise didn’t necessarily mean he was still interested in her. He could be attached to some other woman by now. There would have been plenty wanting to interest him in the past eight months. A good-looking man of substance didn’t go begging for female company.

But what they had shared had been special. And Jack was choosy. He didn’t give out to many people. The look in his eyes after the initial shock of recognition—eagerness, hope—would he shrug it off and let it go?

With any luck he might have assumed she was another visitor, passing through, leaving as he was arriving. Had he noticed she wasn’t wearing proper clothes? She groaned as she realised it was more than clothes adding up the evidence against being a visitor. No make-up, hair in disarray, no handbag. She hoped she hadn’t given him enough time to register those details.

Time…She glanced at her watch. Seven thirty-six. She couldn’t risk running into Jack again. Best to stay hidden in this rest room until after the eight o’clock curfew for visitors. Sally would stay with the baby until she returned to the ward. There was no cause for panic. Sally expected her to spend twenty minutes or so browsing through the magazines available at the kiosk. Nina had left her happily chatting to the other two new mothers and their visitors—husbands, happy husbands and fathers.

The tears welled again. It was miserable being a single mother when she was faced with families celebrating their new offspring. Sally was a great friend and wonderful support, but it wasn’t the same.

If only Jack…

Damn him! Why couldn’t he have been different? Why were children so wrong for him?

CHAPTER THREE

SMILING benevolently did not come easily. Jack had to work hard at repressing the angry frustration that seeing Nina had stirred. He wanted to snap and snarl. He felt a deep empathy with his dog’s behaviour when a great bone was moved out of his marked territory. He felt no empathy whatsoever with the drivel coming out of Maurice’s mouth.

“He’s got my ears, poor little blighter.”

Jack smiled. “Well, one can always resort to plastic surgery.”

Maurice laughed indulgently. “They’re not that bad. He’ll grow into them.”

“Bound to,” Jack agreed, his face aching with smiling.

Maurice looked besottedly at his wife. “I’m glad he’s got Ingrid’s nose.”

Jack obediently performed the comparison, studying the straight, aristocratic nose of Maurice’s buxom blonde wife and the longer, slightly bumpy one of his friend. He forced another smile. “Yes. Much the better nose.”

Why was it obligatory to divide a baby’s features between the parents? It was inevitably done, like a ritual, perhaps affirming true heritage, or an assurance that a little replica would fulfil its parents’ expectations. Not only was it a deadly boring exercise to Jack, it almost drove him to snap, “Let the kid be himself, for God’s sake!”

But that wasn’t the done thing.

He wondered whom Nina had been visiting on this floor. Not that it mattered. No point in trying to find some contact point with her. From the attitude she had flashed to him, it would probably constitute harassment. Besides, Jack had a built-in inhibitor against going where he wasn’t wanted.

“Give me the baby, darling, while you open Jack’s present,” Ingrid commanded, brandishing the newborn power of being a mother. This was definitely one time she could boss Maurice around. The proud and grateful Dad would undoubtedly lick her feet if she asked him to. Jack knew from observation that the flow of uncritical giving wouldn’t last.

He watched Maurice lay the precious bundle in his wife’s arms with tender care. It was really a pity such blissful harmony didn’t last. They looked good—loving mother and father with child. Idyllic. The rot didn’t set in until they went home from hospital.

Ingrid’s long blonde hair gleamed like skeins of silk falling over her shoulders. Jack frowned at the reminder of Nina’s hair, which some idiot had clearly butchered. What had possessed her to have her beautiful hair cut? She’d looked like a ragamuffin, wispy bits sticking out as though she’d run her fingers through the short crop instead of brushing it. The style didn’t suit her. It made her face look thinner.

Maybe her face was thinner.

Had Nina been ill?

It was a disturbing thought. Frustration boiled up again. He hated not knowing what had been happening to her. Her face had looked paler than he remembered, too, all healthy colour washed out of it. If she’d been ill, was ill…no, it still made no sense for Nina to look at him with fear and anger.

It was no reason to cut him out of her life, either. She could have stayed with him. He would have looked after her. Did she have anyone looking after her now?

“My favourite champagne, Veuve Cliquot!” Maurice beamed at him. “Great gift, Jack.”