Excuse Me? Whose Baby?: Excuse Me? Whose Baby? / Follow That Baby!

“What baby?” Jim glanced at Dex. “If Dr. Saldivar adopted a child, what could that possibly have to do with either of us?”

“Ayoka isn’t adopted. She’s yours. Uh…both of yours.”

Dear Reader,

Small colleges are delightfully offbeat places where eccentric personalities can bloom. Perpetual students like my heroine, Dex, live in a world apart from the rest of us, so for her I dreamed up Clair De Lune, California, and De Lune University for Excuse Me? Whose Baby?

I practically grew up on a college campus. My school in Nashville, Tennessee, was affiliated with Peabody College for Teachers, where my mother was an art professor. I later attended Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.

My hero, Jim Bonderoff, needed a different brand of individuality from Dex, so I created a household of ex-marines with literally no holds barred! I enjoyed seeing how these two different realms meshed in my new book and I hope you will, too.

Please write me at P.O. Box 1315, Brea, CA 92822!

Sincerely,

Books by Jacqueline Diamond

HARLEQUIN DUETS

2—KIDNAPPED?

8—THE BRIDE WORE GYM SHOES

37—DESIGNER GENES

HARLEQUIN LOVE & LAUGHTER

11—PUNCHLINE

32—SANDRA AND THE SCOUNDREL

In loving memory of Ambrose “Joe” Mercier and his wonderful sense of humor.

1

“YOUR LAWYER CALLED.”

Dex Fenton was trotting down the creaky wooden steps of the English building, carrying a pile of essays she’d just collected from a Shakespeare class, when she heard Professor Hugh Bemling’s remark.

Lawyer? Whose lawyer was he talking about?

The thin, bearded professor stood in his office doorway, cleaning his glasses with his shirttail. Shaking back a mass of flyaway brown hair that threatened to block her vision, Dex looked around the hall, but she didn’t see anyone else he could have been addressing.

“I don’t have a lawyer,” she ventured.

“Well, a lawyer called and asked for you,” he said.

Dex tried to ignore the sinking sensation in her stomach. She didn’t know any lawyers and she preferred to keep it that way. Nevertheless, she refused to let herself be intimidated by anyone, ever. “Did you catch his name?”

“I wrote it down.” Hugh, who regularly got lost in the library stacks and had addressed Dex as Dixie for her first three months as his teaching assistant, fished through his pockets. He dragged out a laundry receipt and his campus health card before handing her a crumpled note.

Dex squinted at the ink-smeared letters. “‘O wavy hair, O beauteous maiden,”’ she read, and stopped. Obviously, this was not a telephone message but a poem of an embarrassingly personal nature.

Hugh’s cheeks, or what was visible of them beneath his gray-flecked facial hair, flushed bright red as he snatched back the paper. “That’s…some random thoughts I jotted down. I can’t think where I put your message.”

Dex adjusted her stack of essays. “I’m sure it was for someone else.” And so was the poem, she hoped. “I’d better get going. I’ll have these graded by Monday.”

“Have what graded? Oh, the papers, yes.” Hugh patted his shirt pockets. “I know that note’s here somewhere. Let me check in my office.”

“Thanks, Hugh, but you don’t need to…” She didn’t bother to finish. He was already gone.

There was no point in waiting. Once inside, he would get so busy pawing through piles of journals that he’d forget what he was looking for.

Anyway, Dex had another job to do. In addition to assisting the professor, she made ends meet by working as a campus courier.

She’d earned a B.A. and a master’s degree in English, but her parents, both college professors, weren’t impressed. Dex had completed the coursework for her Ph.D., but found herself stuck on writing her dissertation.

She just couldn’t seem to work up much enthusiasm for it. Or, maybe, for becoming Dr. Dex Fenton and having to leave the friendly environs of Clair De Lune, California, to take whatever college teaching post she could scrape up.

So she worked two part-time jobs and rode a bicycle and lived in an efficiency apartment over a garage. Most of the time, she rather enjoyed things the way they were.

Out in the sunshine, she hurried around the brick building to the bike rack, where she stuck the essays into her bike’s side compartments and put on her helmet. She hoped she had enough room left to carry today’s campus deliveries. Fortunately, today was Friday, usually a light mail day.

As she mounted her bike and set off, a few jacaranda blossoms drifted onto Dex’s arm. Some of the lavender petals, which appeared every spring as sure as the swallows came back to Capistrano, clung to her pink sweater and blue jeans.

“O wavy hair, O beauteous maiden.” Spring was certainly getting to Professor Bemling, Dex thought. He was a cute guy, if you liked absentminded forty-year-olds. At twenty-six, though, she considered him too old for her.

The kind of guy she wanted was in his early thirties, with sun-streaked dark hair and alert brown eyes. He gave the impression of being tall, although he wasn’t quite six feet, and he had slim hips that moved with a sensuous rhythm.

She shook her head. Why on earth was she thinking of a man she wanted nothing to do with?

The main section of De Lune University was laid out in an old-fashioned rectangle, its symmetry marred only by the jutting addition of the glass-and-steel faculty center. Dex was passing that facility, which was probably why her mind had gone skittering across memories from a crisp evening four months ago.

The holiday faculty party had featured mistletoe and dance music, tipsy flirtations and a general letting-down of inhibitions. In an eggnog-induced blur, she’d felt a man’s dark eyes catch hers with unexpected intensity.

He’d asked her to dance and laughed at everything she said. She didn’t resist when he whirled her onto the patio.

He’d smoothed her unruly curls with both hands, then kissed her senseless. It was all so blurry, so sensational and so…insane. Dex pedaled faster, trying to put the scene, and the memory of what had followed, behind her.

Half a quadrangle farther, at a rear entrance to the administration building, she banged on the door. This was the squirrely abode of Fitz Langley, the maintenance and communications supervisor.

“Hey, Fitz!” she yelled. “Got any stuff for me to deliver?”

The door rattled and shook as the rusty lock stuck. Finally, it wrenched open and out poked a head worthy of mounting on a hunter’s wall. A shaggy chestnut mane framed a broad leonine forehead, a flattened nose and a mouth that could roar but rarely did.

The door opened wider under pressure from Fitz’s short, stubby frame, and he handed her two padded envelopes and a box. “Most of the stuff’s already been delivered, but these just came in. By the way, some lawyer called you.”

Dex got that sinking feeling again. Apparently an attorney really was looking for her. And looking hard.