Everything but the Baby

“It’s been in the family for almost four hundred years,” he finished. “I intend to get it back.”

“But it sounds quite valuable. What if he’s already sold it?”

He shrugged. “Then we’ll have a problem.”

The buzzer on her desk sounded. With an apologetic grimace, she turned and answered it. “Yes?”

“I’m sorry to bother you, Ms. Cabot, but the man from Cuddles is here and the order is all wrong. Mrs. Blakeley’s crib didn’t come and you know the baby is due in—”

“It’s all right, Sylvia. I’ll be right down.”

Allison clicked off the speaker and turned to Mark.

“I’m going to have to deal with this,” she said.

“That’s all right. I’ll wait.”

“No.” She wiped her hand over her eyes. “Honestly, I think I’ve talked about this all I can today. I’m feeling a little muddled. It has been—” Her voice trembled slightly and she coughed to hide it. “It’s been a strange day. I’m sorry for everything your sister has lost, but I’m not sure how I can help you. Lincoln didn’t leave me a forwarding address.”

“But he might have said something—some detail that could give us a place to start.” He tried to read behind those sad green eyes. She looked incredibly tired, as if all the fiery indignation of the knife-throwing episode had died away.

Maybe he could fan the flame.

“He made a fool of you, Allison. Even if he didn’t break your heart, he wasted months of your life. He left you alone again, with the biological clock ticking louder than ever. Wouldn’t you like to see him get what’s coming to him?”

She hesitated just long enough. Damn it—Mark had his answer. Just like Tracy, this woman was still soft in the head where Lincoln Gray was concerned. Was the guy really that good in the sack? If not, he must have been putting stupid-drops in their bottled water.

“I don’t know,” she said finally. “I have to think.”

He made a small, harsh gesture with his left hand. Women didn’t think. They emoted and they dithered and they let bastards like Lincoln Gray get away and start this madness all over again with some other weak-minded female.

“Try to understand…” She sighed. “Just this morning, I woke up believing that this man would be my husband—my lover, for life. The father of my children. It’s a little difficult, a few hours later, to send the bloodhounds after him.”

He stood. He’d wasted enough time already. “I understand. But the bloodhounds are already after him. I’m not giving up. I just hope I find him before he insinuates his way into some other woman’s bank account—and her bed.”

She made a sound, but it wasn’t a word. It certainly wasn’t a denial.

He extracted a business card and lay it on the table. “If you think of anything that might help, call me.”

WHEN ALLISON GOT HOME that night, the brownstone was dark and cold and so empty it felt as if even the molecules of air had stopped moving.

She had come back here to change out of the wedding dress, but it had been about three o’clock. Her housekeeper, Loretta, had been bustling around making comforting noise with a vacuum and the June sun had been shining in through the tall foyer windows.

Tonight it was like a tomb.

In a way, she thought as she thumbed through the mail, not really seeing any of it, the house was exactly that. So many ghosts lived here already. Her mother’s was the palest, most insubstantial one because Allison had so few real memories of her. Mostly she was a wide, warm smile and a halo of red curls.

Her father’s ghost was disturbingly robust, his edicts echoing down the halls announcing what was acceptable and what was beyond the pale. Even now, when Allison dared to flout those edicts, she caught herself looking over her shoulder.

And now the ghost of Mrs. Lincoln Gray would float here, too, in her transparent Vera Wang gown. That contented young bride who had believed she’d never feel alone again. The happy wife who had planned to be pregnant within the year and had already picked out baby names from a book hidden in her nightstand drawer.

Amanda Anne and Michael Joseph Gray. They had become so real to Allison. In her mind, she’d already redecorated the study upstairs with all her favorite baby furniture from Lullabies. She wondered whether she’d ever be able to work in that study again without feeling haunted.

Allison, for pity’s sake, don’t become one of those superstitious Irish peasant women. She could hear her father now, wearily disdainful. It isn’t possible for the mere idea of babies to turn into ghosts.

She put her hand to her chest, where her heart seemed to be having trouble finding a steady rhythm. Big, painful squeezes alternated with fast, frightened trips.

She had to do something. Anything. She was going to fall apart. She was going to let her father down again, render futile his years of training. She couldn’t do that. He was, in the end, the only one who had stayed with her, who had loved her without leaving her. If she couldn’t be what he wanted, then she was nothing at all.

He believed in work. Emotions were just illusions, he’d said. Illusions that could be chased away by some nice, practical action.

She knew he was right. It had helped to be at Lullabies today, sitting in her office tallying columns of figures. The numbers had added up so cooperatively, so neatly. Her associates had glanced at her oddly, but so what? She had been clinging to the one firm log in a sea of confusion and self-doubt.

Work. Process inventory.

She bent down and opened a box that had come with today’s shipment from Cuddles, one of her favorite vendors. They had mixed up Jenny Blakeley’s order today, but ordinarily they were as reliable as—

The box opened. Her thoughts froze. The words disappeared.

Inside the box, nested on tufts of white popcorn packaging, were a dozen pairs of designer baby shoes. Miniature white Mary Janes, blue-striped sneakers, soft-pink leather ballet slippers…

She picked up the slippers, which fit in the palm of her hand. They were so little. What kind of magical being could wear such tiny shoes? How helpless, how fragile the creature would be, with toes the size of diamonds, whole feet not much bigger than her thumb.

So small…too small, really, to carry a big name like Amanda Anne or Michael Joseph…

And yet.

And yet…

She must be her mother’s child, after all. Because as she pressed the tiny pink slippers to her heart, she thought she heard a baby crying.

It wasn’t until the hot tears hit her knuckles that she realized they were her own.

CHAPTER THREE

THROUGHOUT HER SIX-HOUR FLIGHT from Boston to San Francisco, Allison shut her eyes to avoid chatting with the passengers on either side of her cramped last-minute coach seat and masochistically second-guessed herself.

Was she doing the right thing? Was she crazy? Could this plan even work? What would Mark Travers think when he saw her on his doorstep?

She hadn’t called him in advance to let him know she was coming. He probably would have told her to save them both the time, and stay in Boston.

She knew she hadn’t made a very good impression on him when they met the day of the wedding fiasco. She had been in shock, and she’d probably appeared irrational, inarticulate and not very bright. By the time he left her office, his disdain had been written all over his rugged face.

So he wouldn’t exactly be thrilled to see her, just one week later. She wondered if he’d even give her the time to explain her idea. And, if he did, what were the chances he’d trust her to successfully carry off a plan as bold as this one?

A million to one.

That’s why this couldn’t be done over the phone. She needed to show him, face-to-face, that she wasn’t being hysterical or vindictive or just plain dumb.