The Mother Of His Child

She rolled her window partway down and said jaggedly, “I am not going to turn up on your doorstep, and once I’ve filled the car up with gas I’m going home. Goodbye, Mr. Huntingdon.”

“Oh, no,” he said softly, “it’s not quite that simple. Before you go anywhere, I want you to swear you won’t try to get in touch with Kit.”

“I wouldn’t be that irresponsible!”

“Swear, Marnie.”

If looks could kill, his would have blitzed her in her seat. Pushing her hair back from her face, Marnie scowled right back. She needed to blow her nose. Which, she knew from past experience, was undoubtedly bright pink after her crying jag. “I won’t do anything to harm my daughter. And you’ll have to be satisfied with that—because it’s all you’re getting from me.”

She turned the key in the ignition, and for once her car started on the first try. But as she reached for her seat belt, Cal inserted his hand through the gap, yanked on the lock button and pulled her door open. He barked, “You’re not calling the shots here—I am. As Kit’s father. You say you’re going to get gas. You think they won’t look at you down at the station and see Kit Huntingdon written all over you? You’re a walking time bomb, and I want you to promise you’ll head out of Burnham right now and you won’t come back. Do you hear?”

His voice had risen during this speech; Marnie might not care for large, angry men, but on the other hand she wasn’t about to show Cal Huntingdon she was shivering all the way to her very wet shoes. “All right, I’ll buy my gas out of town! Now will you please shut the door and let me get out of here before anyone sees me? The last thing you should be doing is holding me up. What if a friend of yours comes along?”

A muscle twitched in his jaw. “The next time I come to the supermarket for milk on a Sunday, I’ll think twice,” he snarled. “Remember what I said, Marnie Carstairs. Get out of Burnham and stay out. And don’t you dare try to get in touch with Kit.”

He slammed the door in her face. She pushed the clutch into first gear, flicked on the wipers and drove away without a backward glance, her fingers gripping the steering wheel as though it were Cal’s throat. At the exit to the parking lot, she turned right. Right led her out of town. Away from the local gas station and away from Moseley Street.

Away from Katrina Elizabeth Huntingdon, her daughter. Known as Kit. And away from Cal and Jennifer Huntingdon, the couple who nearly thirteen years ago had adopted her.

It would take a woman of extraordinarily strong character to live with Cal. What was Jennifer Huntingdon like? And was she a good mother?

Was she beautiful? It was unlikely Cal would be married to someone who wasn’t. Yet he’d called her, Marnie, beautiful…. Why had he done that?

A mile out of town, when she’d passed the vinyl-sided Baptist Church and the boutiques temptingly arrayed for the tourists, Marnie pulled into a take-out stand. It was one-thirty. She hadn’t had lunch, and her ice cream had ended up on Cal’s Cherokee instead of in her stomach. She’d buy a sandwich. And then she’d do some hard thinking.

She took her sandwich to a small picnic spot along the shore, choosing the end table so she’d have privacy. The rain had stopped; the undergrowth smelled damp and pungent. She sat down on the wet bench and started to eat. Cal shouldn’t have tried ordering her about. She’d never liked being told what to do. Charlotte Carstairs had been long on orders and short on love, and there was no question in Marnie’s mind but that her own child had been conceived—at least partly—out of rebellion.

The sandwich tasted good. Chickadees were chattering companionably among the trees, and waves lapped on the rocks. Gradually, Marnie calmed down, all her new knowledge settling more gently into her mind. Her daughter’s name was Kit. Kit looked so like Marnie that Cal had ordered Marnie out of town. Because he didn’t want anyone knowing about Kit’s real mother. He certainly didn’t want to run any risk of Kit and Marnie meeting.

Which hurt. Hurt quite dreadfully.

With a jolt, Marnie suddenly remembered the one question Cal hadn’t answered. An extremely important question. In fact, the most essential question of them all. Whether Kit was happy.

He’d sidestepped it by telling Marnie Kit’s name. Whereupon she’d cried a bucket and forgotten to ask the question again. Was it just a genuine oversight on his part? Or had he had other motives? Motives of deception? Darker motives.

Chewing on her chicken salad, Marnie let a picture of Cal Huntingdon fill her mind. Unconsciously, and even in the midst of that turmoil of emotion in the parking lot, she realized that ever since they’d met she’d been searching for the one word that would encapsulate him. She’d come up with arrogant, sexy and masculine, and certainly each of those was accurate enough. Dangerous seemed entirely apt, as well. But something else was nagging at her mind, making her deeply uneasy. For some reason, she found herself remembering how facetiously she’d thought about the sort of scary movie she hated: the man-with-an-ax-coming-up-the-stairs kind. The bad guy.

She didn’t for one minute think Cal was a potential ax murderer. No, that wasn’t what she was getting at. But he did pose an enormous threat to her at a level that was gut-deep.

Was it his willpower? He had that all right. He’d hated her defying him.

Take away the first syllable of willpower, she thought, and what have you got? Power. That was it. The man reeked of power. His body, his voice, his actions—all of them were imbued with the unconscious energy of a man used to wielding power.

Charlotte Carstairs had been in love with power all her life. It had taken a huge and ongoing effort on Marnie’s part to prevent that power from ruining her own life, from making her as bitter and unloving as her mother.

Marnie finished her sandwich, drained the bottle of apple juice she’d bought to go with it and got back into her car. She rummaged in her haversack, found the square scarf that went with her raincoat and wrapped it, turban-style, around her head, carefully tucking her hair under it. She fished out her dark glasses and generously coated her lips with Strawberry Pearl Glaze. With some satisfaction, she looked at herself in the mirror. She did not look like the woman who’d bought an ice cream cone in the pouring rain.

Then she turned out of the picnic spot and headed back toward Burnham.

This time, she did have a plan.

She drove slowly through the town, her eyes peeled for a dark green Cherokee. At the gas station, she pulled up to the pumps and asked for a fill-up, adding casually, “I’m looking for Cal Huntingdon. Can you tell me where he lives?”

“Sure thing. Go to the fork in the road and hang a left. Moseley Street. His place is about a kilometer from the fork. Big cedar-shingled bungalow on the cove. Nice place. Want your oil checked, miss?”

“No, it’s fine, thanks.” As the red numbers clicked on the pump, she said with complete untruth, “I used to know him in my college days. Haven’t seen him for a while.”

“Yeah? Too bad about his wife, eh?”

Marnie’s fingers tightened around her credit card. “I—I hadn’t heard…is something wrong? I was in the area today and thought I’d drop in on them.”

“Well, now…she passed away two years ago. Cancer. Took her real fast, which is a blessing, I guess.”

“Oh,” said Marnie. “Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Hard on the kid. And on Cal, too, of course. That’s twenty-five even, miss.”

Feeling thoroughly ashamed of herself, Marnie handed over her card and a few moments later signed the slip. “I may phone first,” she said. “Rather than just dropping in. Thanks for telling me.”

“No problem. You have a nice day now.”

“Nice” wasn’t quite the word Marnie would have used to describe the day she was having. Her heart was racketing around in her chest again. She turned out of the gas station and asked the first person she saw for directions to the junior high school. Within ten minutes, she had a mental picture of the layout of the town and had figured out the probable route Kit Huntingdon would take to walk from Moseley Street to the consolidated school. Only then did Marnie leave Burnham.

She hadn’t seen a green Cherokee. And she’d be the first to admit she lacked the courage to drive past the cedar-shingled house on the cove.

Cal Huntingdon was a widower. Had been for two years. Which meant, unless he had a live-in girlfriend, that Kit was motherless.

Even though intuition told her Cal wasn’t the type for a live-in girlfriend, not when he had an adolescent daughter, that same intuition insisted that any woman worth her salt would be after him. Wanting to comfort him. In bed and out.

Bed? Don’t go there, Marnie. Not when Cal’s on your mind. Cal plus bed could be a combination several steps beyond dangerous. You swore off men years ago, and even thinking about Cal Huntingdon in a sexual context is lunacy. Kit’s the issue here, and only Kit.

He hadn’t told her the truth. He’d allowed her to think that Kit had two parents, a mother as well as a father. That everything was normal and as it should be in the Huntingdon household. Mother, father, daughter—and no place for Marnie.

Beneath a very real sorrow for an unknown woman who had died far too young, Marnie was aware of anger, red-hot and seething. Kit had been left, tragically, without a mother. And yet Cal had dared to warn off the woman who had borne Kit all those years ago, a woman who had, surely, some claim on his honesty.

Some claim on Kit.

CHAPTER THREE

ON MONDAY morning, just before eight, Marnie arrived at the fork in the road that led out of Burnham. Moseley Street, the sign said. She flicked on her signal light and turned left. She was driving her best friend Christine’s small white Pontiac; she’d phoned Christine last night and asked if they could trade cars for the day.

Cal Huntingdon wouldn’t even notice if a white Pontiac drove past his house.

She checked the odometer, her heart hammering in her chest as loudly as a woodpecker on a tree. The Huntingdons lived about a kilometer down the road, according to the man at the gas station. It was a pretty road, following the curve of the bay and lush with evergreens. Point-seven kilometers, point-eight, point-nine. And then Marnie saw the cedar-shingled house on the cove, the mailbox neatly lettered “Huntingdon.”

She braked. Although a dark green Cherokee was parked in front of the house, there was no one in sight, neither Cal nor a young girl hurrying up the driveway on her way to school.

It was the house of her dreams.