Pregnancy Of Convenience

“Where was he from?”

“Central Canada.” Franz gave a bark of laughter. “The prairies. Not a hill in sight. His parents live there still.”

“I have a good friend in Winnipeg,” Cal remarked. “I’ve known him for years.”

Franz sat up straight, dropping the pick on the grass. “You do? Would you be interested in visiting your friend and also doing a last favor for a climber who deserved better than the fate he met?”

“What do you mean?”

“I have Gustave’s gear back in Zermatt. I was going to mail it to his parents. But how much better if it could be delivered to them personally by a fellow mountaineer.”

Cal said slowly, “I do have a week or so free early in the new year…after I bring my daughter back to school here in Switzerland. And it would be great to see Stephen and his wife again. Providing they’re around.”

“It would help the Strassens a great deal. Their hearts must be broken. Gustave’s wife, she wasted no time after his death—she got rid of the baby. It could have been Gustave’s child, that was certainly possible…in which case she got rid of the Strassens’ grandchild, their only connection to their dead son.” He spat on the grass. “I curse the day Gustave married that woman. She brought him nothing but grief.”

“Mr. Freeman?” Dieter Strassen said, with the air of a man repeating himself.

With a visible start, Cal came back to the present; and to the simple and horribly unwelcome fact that the woman in his arms was the direct cause of a good man’s death and the deep grief of that man’s parents. “Sorry,” he mumbled, and tried to pull himself together. There was no reason in the world for him to feel so massively disillusioned about a woman he hadn’t even known existed half an hour ago. An unconscious woman, to boot, with whom he hadn’t exchanged as much as a word.

“Mr. Strassen,” he said, “I can see my arrival here is causing you and your wife great distress, and I apologize for that. But right now I don’t see any way around it. I can’t just dump her in the snow, no matter what she’s done.”

“So you know the story?” Dieter said sharply.

“Franz Staebel, the alpine guide who had your son’s gear, told me about your daughter-in-law a month or so ago.”

“Gustave thought highly of Franz.” Moving like a much older man, Dieter turned to his wife. “Maria, we’ll put her in the back bedroom, it’s the only thing we can do. She’ll be gone by morning.”

“Someone else can look after her,” Maria said in a stony voice.

Into the silence Cal said, “I will.”

“That would be best,” Dieter said with evident relief. “I’ll show you the room, and in the meantime Maria will heat some soup for you. We are being bad hosts, Mr. Freeman.” He gave a rather rusty bow. “Welcome to our home.”

Two could play that game. “Thank you,” Cal said, and smiled at Maria.

Her response was as cold as a glacier. “That woman will leave here tomorrow morning,” she said, “and she must never come back.”

Cal’s brain, which seemed to have gone to mush since finding a raven-haired beauty on the side of the road, finally made the connection. “Oh, of course—she’d just been here?”

“She had the audacity to bring us Gustave’s silver watch, his album of family photos. As though that would make us take her in. Forgive her for all that she’s done.”

“Now, Maria,” Dieter warned.

“Our grandchild,” Maria quavered, “she even destroyed our grandchild. Aborted it.”

“According to Gustave, it might not have been his child,” Dieter said wearily, running his fingers through his thatch of grizzled hair. “Gustave radioed a message out the very day he died, Mr. Freeman. About the pregnancy and his doubts. He wanted to divorce her.” His gaze flicked contemptuously over the woman in Cal’s arms. “But he knew that would mean no contact with a child who could be of our own flesh and blood.”

Maria bit off her words. “She took everything from us.”

“Enough, now,” her husband said. “I’m sure once Mr. Freeman has settled her, he’ll be hungry.”

“Please call me Cal…and some soup would be delicious,” Cal said with another smile.

Maria turned on her heel in the direction of the kitchen. Dieter lead the way along a narrow hallway to a back annex of the house; the furnishings were sparse, Cal noticed, glancing into what appeared to be a formal parlor, everything immaculately tidy and painfully clean. The back bedroom was no exception. It was also very cold.

Dieter said, “You must excuse my wife, Mr.—Cal. She is very bitter, understandably so. I’ll leave you to settle in, and whenever you’re ready, please come through to the dining room.”

Cal laid Joanna Strassen on the double bed, straightened, and said forthrightly, “Once she comes to, she’ll need something hot to eat.” And with annoyance realized he’d adopted the Strassens’ habit of referring to Joanna Strassen as she. Never by name.

“I’ll look after that. And I’ll show you to your bedroom in the main house.”

“I think I’d better stay here and keep an eye on your daughter-in-law,” Cal said with a depth of reluctance that took him by surprise. But if he didn’t look after her, who would? “After a blow on the head, it’s always a good idea to be under supervision for at least twelve hours.”

“Whatever you say,” Dieter replied, and for a moment directed a look of such implacable hostility toward the unconscious woman on the bed that, even knowing the story, Cal was chilled to the bone. “There’s extra bedding in the cupboard and the couch makes another bed,” Dieter went on, just as though nothing had happened. “I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

As soon as the door closed behind him, Cal went into action. He drew the curtains against the snow that lashed the windowpanes, jammed the thermostat up several notches, and swiftly built a fire in the woodstove that stood in the corner. Touching a match to it, he watched briefly as the flames gained hold. Then he turned to the woman on the bed.

Joanna Strassen. Widow of Gustave. By all accounts an unfaithful and ungenerous wife, who apparently had destroyed her own child.

Nothing he’d learned made her any less beautiful.

CHAPTER TWO

CAL rubbed his palms down the sides of his cords, and with the same deep reluctance that he’d felt a few moments ago, approached the bed. Resting his palm on Joanna’s cheek, trying to ignore the satin smoothness of her skin, he registered how cool she felt. He pulled off her gloves, chafing her cold fingers between his warmer ones. Ringless fingers, he noticed. Long and tapered, with neatly kept nails. She wore no jewelry, which rather surprised him. He met a lot of women, one way or another, and because he was rich and unmarried, spent a fair bit of energy keeping them at bay; most of them dripped with diamonds. So why didn’t the wealthy widow, Joanna Strassen?

As though he had spoken her name out loud, she moved her head restlessly on the pillow, her lashes flickering. Her left hand plucked at his parka, trying to pull it around her chin. Then she gave a tiny moan of pain, a deep shudder rippling the length of her body.

Quelling an instinctive surge of compassion, Cal eased off her boots, practical low-heeled boots that looked as though they came from a factory outlet. Definitely not leather. This, like her lack of rings, seemed oddly out of character. Her tights were black, her plain sweater a deep blue. Her figure was just as much an attention-grabber as her face, he thought grimly, and almost with relief noticed that she was shivering. Hastily he pulled the covers from underneath her body, then tucked them around her.

The room was noticeably warmer, so much so that Cal stripped off his own thick wool sweater. Catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror by the door, he ran his fingers through his disordered hair, which was the dark brown of polished leather. As for the rest, he’d always figured he had the right number of features in the right places and that was that. He’d never understood his appeal to women, blind to the unrevealing gray of his eyes, the strength of his chin and jaw, the flat planes of his cheeks and his air of self-containment, which many might see as a challenge. He’d been rather less than amused just before Christmas, when he was trying to avoid the attentions of a local divorcée, to have his daughter Lenny say to him impatiently, “You don’t understand why every woman you meet is after you? Get a grip, Dad. You’re a hunk. Big-time macho man. You should hear the girls in my school go on about you.”

“Oh no, I shouldn’t.”

Lenny had rolled her eyes. “You’re also intelligent, rich, charming when you want to be, rich, and a famous mountaineer. Oh, and did I mention rich? I rest my case.”

“Rich you got right,” he’d replied. “The rest—forget it.”

Lenny had laughed and cajoled him into helping her with some supplemental geometry, a subject that was as much a mystery to her as literature was a delight. Cal loved his daughter Lenny more than he could imagine loving anyone else in the world…more than he’d loved her mother for the last few years of his marriage, he could now admit that to himself. Although never to Lenny.

He should remarry. Settle down and provide a proper home for Lenny, add a woman’s presence to her life. Trouble is, he didn’t want to. Nor had he met anyone who gave him the slightest desire to embrace—for the second time—the state of holy matrimony.

If only he didn’t travel so much; it made it more difficult with Lenny. He’d curtailed his mountain-climbing expeditions the past few years. But he also had to travel for his work. Cal had inherited money from his adventurous, immigrant father; after multiplying this money many times over in a series of shrewd investments, he’d purchased an international brokerage firm; then, later, a chain of prestigious auction houses in Europe and New York, dealing with antiques and fine art. Although computer technology had cut back a certain amount of travel, there was still no substitute for a hands-on approach to his various business concerns.

One more reason why Lenny was in a private school in Switzerland.

The woman on the bed gave another of those low moans. Cal came back to the present, thrusting a birch log into the heart of the flames, and turning his attention to the bed. Despite the heaped-up bedclothes and the warmth of the room, Joanna Strassen was still shivering. Moving very slowly, his eyes trained on her face, Cal lifted the covers and got into bed beside her. Gathering her in his arms, he drew the whole length of her body toward his.

She fit his embrace perfectly, as though she had been made for it. Her cheek was resting against his bare throat, her breath softly wafting his skin; he could feel her tremors, the small rise and fall of her breathing against his chest, and the firm swell of her breasts pressed to his rib cage.