The Baby They Both Loved

“Yes, he saw Nathan, but he seemed really…shocked. Like he didn’t know his own son existed.”

“How could that possibly be?”

“I don’t honestly know. But the way he acted today didn’t jibe at all with the way Lucy said he acted three years ago.”

“What did he say?” Bonnie asked.

“Not a lot,” Kit replied. “Mostly he just asked questions. He seemed surprised by my answers, too. Very surprised. But he didn’t offer an explanation of any kind. He just got up and left without a word.”

“Do you think he’ll cause a problem with Nathan’s adoption?”

“I don’t know,” Kit answered, averting her gaze as she headed back to the kitchen, Bonnie trailing after her in sympathetic silence.

Only she had a feeling—a bad feeling—that she did know, and what she knew had her holding on to Nathan just a little tighter and with a lot more anxiety than she ever had before.

Chapter Two

S everal realizations spun out one after another in Simon Gilmore’s mind, rolling and tumbling into a stunning confusion of incredibly unbelievable information. Time ticked away slowly, one minute to the next, but he couldn’t stir himself to do anything more than sit at the steering wheel of his shiny new SUV and stare out the windshield, his gaze unfocused.

With a few devastatingly simple statements, Kit Davenport had turned his blissful little world upside down. Seeing her in the diner had triggered a youthful exuberance in him, and kissing her had seemed only natural. But then she’d brought him up to date quickly and concisely. Each of her revelations had been upsetting individually—taken altogether, the intensity of them had numbed him, heart and soul.

To hear that lovely, lively Lucy Kane had died suddenly, tragically, in an automobile accident saddened Simon deeply. Though she cut him to the quick three years ago, they had shared a lot of good times together. And lately the pain of their last parting had tempered so that the mere thought of her no longer caused his gut to twist in anguish.

He had actually been looking forward to seeing her again during his unexpected and hastily arranged trip home. Finally ready to move past her betrayal of his trust, he had hoped to gain the closure he needed to the relationship they’d once shared.

But he was never going to see Lucy Kane again, and there would be no closure for him now. Instead he found himself standing on the edge of a precipice with unforeseen and truly incredible possibilities opening out before him.

Simon had seen enough photographs of himself at an early age to know that the little boy he’d seen in the Dinner Belle Diner was his spitting image. He was also living proof that Lucy’s betrayal had been so much more deliberate and so much more despicable than he’d ever imagined.

Nathan Kane had to be the child Lucy had carried during her pregnancy three years ago. But Lucy had looked him in the eye that long-ago August night and insisted the baby wasn’t his. She had urged him—oh-so-blithely—to accept the job he’d been offered as a photojournalist for the Seattle Post following his graduation from graduate school. She had even said that he shouldn’t give her or the baby another thought because there was someone else in her life she had come to love more than him.

Had Lucy been telling him the truth as she thought she knew it? Simon wondered now. Had she really been having sex with another man that summer? She’d been so sure he wasn’t the one to get her pregnant, and he had been careful about using condoms…most of the time. Or had she lied to him intentionally?

Simon had wanted to marry Lucy three years ago and take her with him to Seattle, and Lucy had seemed to want what he wanted during those long, lazy days of their last summer together. But then she had dropped her bombshell on him. Not only was she pregnant, she was pregnant with another man’s child.

Devastated, Simon had gone away to lick his wounds, and he had stayed away till now, feigning disinterest in his hometown and the people there whenever one or the other of his parents brought up the subject.

His parents—

Muttering a curse under his breath, Simon understood at last the urgency behind his father’s insistence that he return to Belle immediately to take care of “family business.” Mitchell Gilmore hadn’t bothered to explain in detail the exact nature of the business. He had simply ordered Simon to come home at once, an order his mother, Deanna, had issued, as well, her tone holding an angry edge he’d never heard in her voice even during the most rambunctious of his teenage years.

Luckily he’d had vacation time coming—almost four weeks accumulated over the past couple of years. Traveling all over the world to shoot photographs and to write stories for the paper, he hadn’t really wanted or needed to get away from the office the way many of his fellow journalists did.

A good thing, too, he admitted now. Sorting out the situation he faced here in Belle was definitely going to take more than the week he’d originally anticipated having to spend at the ranch.

Simon had known a confrontation of some sort would be awaiting him when he arrived at the spacious, sprawling, one-story house built of cedar logs and stone twenty miles east of town. That was the main reason why he’d stopped first at the Dinner Belle Diner for a last bracing cup of coffee, a plate of eggs and bacon and a couple of Dolores Davenport’s homemade buttermilk biscuits.

No matter what news his parents had for him, he would have been better able to deal with it after a late breakfast at the diner where he’d enjoyed many similar meals since he was…well, Nathan’s age.

His thoughts turning again to the little boy who surely had to be his son, Simon finally understood the urgency and the anger he’d heard in his parents’ voices when they’d finally caught up with him two days ago. They must have only just realized themselves that the orphaned child left in Kit Davenport’s care was his son, their grandson.

And when they did, they must have assumed, as Kit so obviously had, that he had not only left Belle, but also stayed away the past three years, to avoid his responsibility to Lucy and their baby.

But that wasn’t true at all. He would have never abandoned Lucy or his child. He had fancied himself in love with her back then, and though he had since realized he’d been more infatuated with her freedom of spirit than anything else, he would have gladly married her.

She was the one who had ended their relationship, and she had done so in a way guaranteed to drive him out of her life for good.

But why had she treated him so hurtfully? Simon wondered. Had she been sexually intimate with another man? Had she really believed that he—Simon—wasn’t the father of her child?

He wouldn’t have thought she’d had the time or energy to fit another man into her life three years ago. They had been together every spare minute they’d had that summer. Kit Davenport, Lucy’s best friend, had spent a lot of time with them, too.

Kit and Lucy had been extremely close, sharing all sorts of intimate secrets. And if Kit’s hostility toward him in the diner was any indication, then she had been led to believe that he’d known he was Nathan’s father all along—

A sharp rap, rap, rap against the SUV’s driver’s-side window startled Simon out of his reverie. Turning, he saw Winifred Averill staring at him, an accusatory look in her eyes as the morning breeze ruffled her mop of frizzy iron-gray curls.

Just what he needed—a lecture from one of Belle’s oldest and most revered senior citizens, he thought as he rolled down the window. He had always admired the elderly woman’s independence, and he had often been amused by her outrageous behavior. But at that particular moment, he would have preferred not to be the focus of her unabashed attention.

Since he didn’t seem to have any choice in the matter, though, Simon met her gaze with a gracious smile. He had no reason to act as if he’d done anything wrong because he most certainly hadn’t.

“Good morning, Mrs. Averill. It’s nice to see you again. Weren’t you having breakfast in the diner earlier?” he asked politely.

“Good morning to you, too, young man, and yes, I was having breakfast in the diner earlier,” she acknowledged, though her tone was anything but friendly. “As for the pleasure of seeing you again, that’s yet to be determined. By my reckoning, you’ve been less than dutiful the past few years.”

He shouldn’t be surprised that Winifred Averill assumed the worst about him. The tone of his last conversation with his parents indicated that they had, as well. Yet he couldn’t recall doing anything in the past that would have made it so easy for people, especially those who should have known him best, to convict him without even hearing his side of the story.

Simon had never been intentionally cruel or neglectful in his life. But somehow he’d been painted as the villain where Lucy Kane was concerned. For the life of him, he couldn’t begin to understand why.

“I guess it wouldn’t cut any ice with you if I said that I only just found out about that little boy in the diner,” he replied, trying not to sound as defensive as he had begun to feel.

Winifred held his gaze for several long, silent seconds. Then she gave a nod of seeming satisfaction.

“Most anybody else told me that, I’d say likely story. But you always struck me as a decent young man, Simon Gilmore, and you surely come from decent folks. Lucy Kane never pointed a finger at you publicly. I doubt people would have been any the wiser if that child’s resemblance to you hadn’t become so obvious lately. You’re here now and you seem aware of your responsibilities. I imagine you’ll do right by the youngster and by Miss Kit, as well. I believe that’s what really matters.”

“I’ll certainly do my best, Mrs. Averill,” he assured her, though he wasn’t certain exactly how to begin.

Seeming to read his mind, Mrs. Averill tipped her head in the general direction of the diner, a few doors down the street from where Simon had parked his SUV.

“Might be wise of you to smooth Miss Kit’s ruffled feathers,” the elderly woman suggested. “She’s had a lot to deal with the past six months. First her mother got sick. Poor Dolores only lasted a few weeks before the cancer took her in December. Then Lucy Kane ran her silly self into a tree, and Miss Kit took on the boy. She’s been trying to sell the diner so she can go back to school in Seattle, but she hasn’t had any takers. I’d say she could use a strong shoulder to lean on right about now.”

“I hadn’t heard about Mrs. Davenport,” Simon said.

He understood even more how callous his behavior must have seemed to Kit. What had he been thinking, strolling up to her and kissing her the way he had?

That he’d been truly glad to see her just as he’d said….

“Not surprising with your folks gone as much as they are, but I’d head south for the winter if I could, too.” Mrs. Averill nodded agreeably, then tapped a bony finger on Simon’s arm. “You go on back to the Dinner Belle and talk to Kit. Take a few minutes and get to know that little boy of yours, too. He’s a fine one, if I do say so myself—just like his daddy, too,” she added, favoring him with a knowing smile before she headed off down the sidewalk to her rusty old pickup truck parked in front of the post office.

Daddy…