His Baby

Kezia nodded. “Then one day Mrs. Abbott got up, called us all together—husband, kids, staff—and said we weren’t going to live this way any longer, that there were three other children to think about and everyone’s lives had to move on. We would hold Abigail in our hearts and keep praying, but we were to start living again.” Kezia’s lips trembled. “I thought it was very brave of her.”

“Yes.” Cordie wrapped her arms around herself and tried to imagine how she would feel if a child was stolen from her with no evidence of what had happened and no knowledge whether he or she was dead or alive.

“But Kate was devastated, felt responsible and finally quit the following year to go live with her sister in Los Angeles.”

“How awful for everyone.”

“Yes, it was. Everyone was affected. I think all the boys carry scars from the ordeal. Chloe dedicated herself to her remaining children, but sometimes I see a terrible sadness in her eyes. And Mr. Nathan put on a good front, but Abby was his little girl and he never got over losing her. He died with her name on his lips.”

Cordie groaned and put a hand over her eyes as tears welled. What an old and deeply rooted pain for Killian—for all the family. Killian, though, was her primary concern, and wanting to remove his guilt so she could put her love there, instead, would be no easy task.

She wondered now if her initial approach had been wrong. He was so serious-minded, such a workaholic, that when she’d married him, she’d tried to joke him out of his grave nature, lure him away from work once in a while in the hope that his having a personal life would help him loosen up, open up. But in the end he’d resented her for it.

This time, she had to find another way. Take things more seriously, so that he didn’t mistake her for a lightweight. Work as much as he did so that he’d know she wanted success for Abbott Mills as much as he did.

She groaned again and laid a forearm across her eyes, propping her feet on the coffee table. That would be a big job. She generally found life amusing, so she was always joking, pulling pranks. She liked sound and color and gravitated toward those things. That was why she loved fashion and concerts and parties.

Of course, all she had to do was reconsider the status of her relationship with Killian—that put a genuine pall over everything. Working a lot would give her less time to think.

She carried her untouched tray into the kitchen, covered the lasagna with plastic wrap, put it in the refrigerator and left the salad out to pick at.

She should call her parents and let them know how she was. They’d been worried about her when she’d gone to Scotland, and finally flown out from Texas to check on her. They’d been horrified to find her pale and thin and holed up in the lodge like a recluse.

“He isn’t worth it,” her mother had said firmly. Judith and Gregory Hyatt had loved Killian, though they’d known him only briefly. But Judith had always been her only child’s staunchest support system, and though Cordie had been caught in another man’s bed, Judith was sure the problem couldn’t be with Cordie and therefore Killian had to have misunderstood.

When Cordie had told her parents she was going back to New York to apply for the position of buyer that had miraculously opened up at Abbott Mills, her father had thought her crazy. “Cord, he’s furious with you. He’s divorcing you. Why give him the chance to deny your application or use it as an excuse to dump all over you again?”

Cordie had shaken her head. “He won’t even know about the job until it’s time for the quarterly personnel report. The hope is that I’ll be so entrenched by the time he notices I’m on board that my immediate superiors will support me.”

“She loves him, darling,” her mother had tried to explain to her father.

He didn’t get it. “You said this divorce was all his fault.”

“It is.”

“Then why does she love him?”

“Because…the separation is his fault, but the problems he has that are making him do it aren’t.”

Her father, the CEO of one of the country’s finest furniture makers and a millionaire in his own right, though not in the Abbott class, stared dumbly at his wife.

Her mother patted his chest. “It’s love, dear. You just don’t understand those things. Trust Cordie. She’s always known what she’s doing.”

While she appreciated her mother’s confidence in her, she now hoped it wasn’t misplaced.

Suddenly, taking a shower and going to bed had it all over eating and spending an evening watching television.

Loving Killian Abbott was exhausting.

Chapter Three

Killian intended to sleep late Saturday morning, but his room was flooded with sunlight at 6:00 a.m. After tossing and turning for an hour, he finally got up, pulled on shorts and a T-shirt and went down to the kitchen and made himself an omelette.

Kezia discovered him as he was buttering toast, her expression horrified. “You fend for yourself all the time,” she said, looking with surprise into the frying pan. “When you’re home, I’m supposed to cook for you.”

He kissed her cheek, scooped his omelette onto the plate that held his toast and headed for the porch. “It’s okay,” he said over his shoulder. “It’s the weekend for you, too. I told Daniel I wouldn’t need him until Monday. Don’t fuss.”

She grumbled further, but he stepped out onto the deck and closed the door behind him. A large lawn sloped to blueberry bushes, then a small apple orchard that sheltered a path to the beach.

He was just beginning to mellow out from a hectic week when again Cordie came to mind. He envisioned her in the back room of her department, her red hair in two French braids looped around the back of her head, giving her a false air of dignity. Her brown eyes had been enormous against her natural redhead’s pallor, but they’d had little of the frivolity he remembered from their marriage. She was taller than average, but looked thinner now. Their separation had probably upset her, but he could make no concessions. They weren’t compatible. They never had been.

Too bad he hadn’t seen that when they’d first met. But he’d been blinded by her glorious hair and her ivory shoulders in a little black dress.

He shook his head against the thought and reminded himself that he was here to relax.

He ate his omelette and made himself count the bank of trees in the distance to prevent himself from thinking of her.

He went to the beach with an old paperback copy of a Robert Parker book and read until he reached a point in the dialogue where the hero and heroine argued about their relationship. Suddenly, his mind was replaying his conversation with Cordie rather than focusing on the dialogue he was reading.

He got to his feet, wondering why a very busy man ever thought his body would allow him to relax for a weekend. It was accustomed to action—albeit corporate action—and his brain was used to making big, quick decisions.

He went back to the house and called Lew Weston, Abbott Mills’s troubleshooter and one-man think tank.

“I thought you were taking the weekend off,” Lew said.

“I am,” Killian replied. “I just wondered if we got that report I asked for on the Florida Shops.”

“We got it. It’ll wait for you until Monday.”

“Your wife wasn’t upset that you volunteered to work the weekend?”

“No. I promised her dinner and the theater.”

“Smart man.”

“Yes, I am. So let me do my job and you get back to the beach or whatever it is you’re doing.”

Killian hung up and headed for the Vespa Campbell kept in the garage. He took a tour of the acreage. Nothing to find fault with here. Acres of apple trees blossomed in perfectly formed rows all the way up to the trees on the neighboring property. Campbell knew what he was doing.

The roads were bumpy and dusty, but the air smelled of sea grass and salt and held the unmistakable sweetness of early summer. The fragrance filled his being, and for reasons he couldn’t explain, seemed to distill itself into the image of Cordie.

With a growl, he rode the bike back to the garage and went into the house to find Kezia fixing dinner despite his insistence that he was self-sufficient. So he went upstairs to take a shower, dressed in fresh slacks and a white cotton sweater and asked the staff to join him for dinner.

Winfield frowned at him. “We know you’re a democratic despot, Mr. Abbott,” he said politely. “You don’t have to prove it to us.”

He denied that was his point. “You eat with Mom all the time. She told me.”

“But that’s Miss Chloe,” Daniel said with the same frown Winfield wore. “You’re…you’re…”