Whose Baby?

He didn’t react to her sugar pill, continuing as if she’d said nothing, “It’s going to scare the hell out of her if I suddenly announce she isn’t my daughter at all. And, oh yeah, here’s your real mommy.”

Lynn had imagined the same conversation a million times. To a child this age, parents were the only security. They were the anchor that made exploring the world possible.

“Maybe we should meet first,” she suggested. “Would it be less scary once they know us?”

“Maybe.” He made a rough sound in his throat. “Yeah. All right. We’ll all just be buddies at first.”

She let his irony pass, giving a small nod. When he said nothing more, Lynn clutched her purse in her lap. “Shall I bring Shelly to Portland one day?”

“Why don’t I come there instead? Rosebud would enjoy a day at the beach. It might seem more natural.”

Rosebud. She liked that. She liked, too, what the gentle nickname suggested about this man. Perhaps he wasn’t as tough as he seemed.

“Fine. Saturday?”

They agreed. He wrote down her address and phone number, then gave her a business card with his. It all felt so…mundane, a mere appointment, not the clock set ticking for an earthshaking event.

He escorted her out of the conference room and, with his hand on her elbow, hustled her past the cluster of lawyers and administrators lying in wait.

Over his shoulder, he told them brusquely, “We’ll be in touch once we figure this out.”

Lynn imagined the consternation brewing at their abrupt departure. Together.

She and Adam Landry rode down silently in the elevator, Lynn painfully conscious of his physical presence. She caught him glancing at her once or twice, but each time he looked quickly away, frowning at the lighted numbers over the door. Of course, he couldn’t help being so imposing at his height, with broad shoulders and the build of a natural athlete. Nor could he help that face, with Slavic cheekbones and bullish jaw and high forehead that together made him handsome enough to displace Mel Gibson in a woman’s fantasies.

She was glad that Shelly looked like her mother and not her father. It would have been too bizarre for words to see her daughter in this stranger’s face. As though they must have had sex and she just didn’t remember it, or else how could she have breast-fed his child, raised her, loved her?

Heat suddenly blossomed on her cheeks. Had he had the same thought, she wondered, about her? As though he must know her on a level deeper than he understood? No wonder he didn’t want to look at her!

When the elevator doors opened, he gripped her arm again as if she wouldn’t know where to go without his guidance. Habit, she gathered, when he was with a woman. “Where are you parked?”

“My car is right out in front.”

He urged her forward, his stride so long she had to scuttle along like a tiny hermit crab just to avoid falling and being hauled ungracefully to her feet. Outside the hospital doors, Lynn balked.

Adam Landry looked so surprised when she pointedly removed her elbow from his bruising grip that she might have been amused under other circumstances.

“My car is right over there.” She gestured. “I don’t see a purse snatcher lurking. I can make it on my own, thank you, Mr. Landry.”

“Adam.”

“Adam,” she acknowledged. “I’ll see you Saturday.”

The lines between his nose and mouth deepened. “We’ll be there.”

Neither moved for an awkward moment. Then he bent his head in a stiff goodbye and stalked away across the parking lot. With a sense of unreality she watched him go, wondering how she would have viewed him if they’d passed in the halls earlier, before she knew who he was.

I would have thought he must be a doctor, she decided. He had that air of money and command, as though he could make life and death decisions before breakfast and assume it was his right.

He would be a tough opponent, way out of her league.

Then she didn’t dare let him become an opponent, Lynn thought again. Although she disliked the idea acutely, she must accommodate him, coax him, play friends—do whatever it took to stay out of court.

Her stomach roiled. It was bad enough that a divorced woman with a child had to spend the next twenty years somehow getting along with her ex-husband. Now she, Lynn Chanak, had gone one better: she had to get along with a man she hadn’t chosen, even if foolishly. A man she’d never married, never made love with—a total stranger. All for the sake of the child they shared.

For better or worse, they were tied together until Shelly and Rose were grown.

How bizarre did it get?

LYNN MADE THE LONG, winding trip back over the coastal range to the Pacific Ocean and home. Her instinct was to collect Shelly right away, to reassure herself by her daughter’s presence that nothing would ever change, that they were a family.

But there were things she didn’t want Shelly to hear, and she should make some phone calls first.

She got Brian’s answering machine and started to leave a halting message, feeling like an idiot. Why was she always taken aback when the beep sounded and she had to talk onto a tape? But this time she’d barely begun when he picked up the phone.

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“I, um, I told you I’d found her.”

“Our daughter.”

“Yes.” She took a breath. “Today I saw pictures of her. She has your eyes. And my hair.”

Strangely, what flitted into her mind at that moment wasn’t the photo, but rather the potent way Adam Landry’s gaze had touched her and the grit in his voice when he said, “She looks like you.”

“How do you know this is the right kid?” her ex-husband, the true stranger, said with an audible sneer.

Closing her eyes, Lynn said evenly, “We’ve had DNA testing done. And you’d know, if you saw her.”

He grunted. “So what do you want from me?”

“Nothing.” How glad she was to be able to say that! “I thought you should know. That’s all.”

“Uh-huh. Well, you do what you want.” His tone changed. “Hey, my call-waiting beeped. Hold on.” When he came back on a minute later, Brian said, “You don’t have her there, right?”

“The man who has been raising her didn’t hand her over to me, if that’s what you mean.”

Brian being Brian, he stayed focused on all that he cared about. “Well, I’m not paying any more child support. I mean, Shelly’s not my responsibility. And I’m not paying this other guy, I can tell you that.”

How could she ever have married this man? How had she deceived herself, even for a while, into thinking she loved him?

“You held Shelly and kissed her and changed her diaper. She thinks you’re her daddy. After all these years, don’t you love her at all?” Lynn asked, trying to understand.

“She’s not my kid,” he explained, as though she was an idiot not to grasp the concept immediately. “Maybe it’s different for a woman. But for a guy…hey, we want to pass on our own bloodlines. I mean, sure, Shelly’s a sweet kid. But she’s got a dad now, right?”

“That’s lucky for her, isn’t it?” Lynn carefully, gently, hung up the telephone receiver.

However much she feared Adam Landry, he had to be a better father than the man she’d married.