The Baby Gamble

“I can’t take that chance,” she said, quietly but firmly. And then she looked up. “I’ll have to know the man,” she said adamantly. “I’ll have to know that he’s emotionally strong.”

Blake could understand. He really could. But… “Annie, you can’t just go up to a man on the street and ask him to give you a baby. In the first place, you have to think of him, too. What role is he going to play? And do you want the father of your child to be someone who’d be willing to father a child and then walk away?”

The problems with her plan were numerous, coming at him from all directions.

“Are you planning to use artificial insemination?” he asked before she could respond to his first set of objections. “Because I don’t think you’re the kind of woman to have casual sex with a man and then walk away. And even if you were, you’d have to hope he either had a very understanding significant other or that he was completely unattached. And that he would remain unattached for the length of time it took to get you pregnant. Because your chances of getting pregnant on one try are pretty slim…

“And what if he does have a wife or partner? What if she decides she wants to have a part in raising his child?”

Annie shaking her head brought him back to reality. This was none of his business.

He didn’t care what she did. He hoped she’d be safe. Happy. And that was all.

“I’ve had a legal contract drawn up that will cover all of those eventualities and more,” she said. “I’m going to do this, Blake.”

He could see that she was. And that scared him.

He turned to go.

“What should I tell Cole, when he asks me what you said?”

“Tell him I’ll think about it.”

It wasn’t the response he’d wanted to give. He just needed some time—and a good night’s sleep—to figure out how to be a friend to Cole and also stay as far away from Annie and her plans as he possibly could.

Maybe, if he was lucky, he’d be able to suggest a safe, healthy and relatively innocuous replacement for himself.

But one thing was certain. He and Annie were not going to make another baby together.

CHAPTER TWO

THURSDAY MORNING, exactly eight hours after she’d watched Blake get into his seven-year-old Lincoln Continental and drive away, Annie wasn’t concentrating well. She’d held on to his uncle’s car after Alan Smith—having heard the news that Blake was presumed dead—had had a fatal heart attack. And then she’d sold the trading company the two men had operated together, but she hadn’t spent a dime of the proceeds—almost as if some part of her had known, even after she’d married Roger, that Blake was still alive.

And if that was true, if she had known, marrying Roger had been the act of a coward. And a weak, disloyal thing to do.

At least she’d had a nest egg—and a car—to give Blake upon his difficult return home two years before.

Now, she wished he’d sell the damn car. Let go of the past. Let go, period.

Blake was the most controlled and logical human being she’d ever met. Just once, she’d like to hear him yell at the top of his lungs.

Positively Alive! Annie looked at the column heading on her computer screen. Her focus had to be on the future and not on a past she couldn’t change. And for the next hour, her future contained the column that was promised to the River’s Run editor and publisher, Mike Bailey, her boss, by ten o’clock.

The readers of River’s Run, the local five-days-a-week newspaper, would be expecting Annie’s weekly tidbit on living positively. She could talk about taking control of your life, about being a doer rather than a victim. She could even tell them about the baby she was going to have.

She could talk about Wade Barstow, the richest man in town, and the generous contributions he’d made to the schools and the city and the local churches. Wade was generous when it came to money. Annie just wasn’t sure his motives were philanthropic.

She could talk about what a gift the beautiful weather was.

Yet what she really felt like doing was crying. Which made no sense at all. Nothing had changed in the past twenty-four hours. She’d been twice divorced then, too. No one close to her was sick or dying.

Annie settled her laptop more firmly on the card table that served as her kitchen table, coffee table and desk, reminding herself of all the reasons she was glad to be alive.

Yet all she could think about was Blake. The things she’d had and lost. The things she’d wanted and never gotten.

Standing abruptly, she shut down her computer, closed the lid and put it in its case. She made a quick trip to her bedroom, past the twin bed and trunk that took up too little space in the room, and into the adjoining bath to fasten her hair back with barrettes and freshen her lipstick. Then she returned to the kitchen, stopping for only a brief moment to survey the bedroom next to hers, with its new carpet and the hand-carved, Tim Lawry-original crib. A changing table and matching rocker in wood, and the wallpaper she’d bought the previous weekend… The nursery was coming along nicely.

As soon as it was done, she’d start on the rest of the house.

For now, however, she was going to the office. And she’d pray that she found some positive inspiration when she got there.

SHE’D TALKED ABOUT the importance of honesty and self-awareness, and Mike thought it was the best column she’d ever written. Annie didn’t know about that—she wrote three columns a week, and also covered most of the small town’s more newsworthy stories—but she felt one hundred percent better than she had earlier that morning.

Strapping the laptop case to the rack on her bicycle outside the River’s Run offices on Main Street, she threw one leg over the bike and started off. Becky Howard, the highschool nurse, only had half an hour for lunch, and Annie was eager to talk to her best friend—to tell her about the previous night’s encounter with Blake.

Everyone in River Bluff knew about Annie’s past—her fairy-tale marriage to Blake Smith, his disappearance and declared death, her second marriage and then Blake’s homecoming. She’d felt as if the eyes of the world had been upon her the morning she’d gone to meet Blake’s plane. People she’d never spoken to in her life had been waiting to see if she’d stay with Roger or return to Blake. And most—with the exception of Roger’s friends and loved ones—couldn’t help being a little saddened by her choice.

Many had told her so, thinking she’d turned her back on true love.

Only Becky had understood. And maybe Blake.

Her mother certainly hadn’t. But then, June Lawry and Annie hadn’t seen eye to eye since Annie had been in junior high.

River Bluff High School was on the outskirts of town, part of a complex that also housed the junior high where Annie had been the day her father had shot himself. Avoiding that part of the school grounds where she’d heard the news, she unlatched her laptop from the bike carrier—theft happened even in River Bluff, if you made the temptation great enough—and left her yellow ten-speed unlocked in the rack with a dozen other bikes.

Becky wasn’t in her office.

Nor was she in the lunchroom. Or the teachers’ lounge.

Fifteen minutes of her friend’s lunch break had already passed and Annie had no idea where to look next.

“Hi, Ms. Kincaid.”

“How you doing, Katie? Tell your mom thanks for the apple jelly. It was great!”

“I will.” The blond senior smiled as she continued on her way down the hall, and then turned. “You wouldn’t happen to know where Shane is, would you?”

“I hope in class,” Annie said, wondering why the girl would be asking about a boy who was three years younger than she was. Wondering, too, why the girls here all thought it was okay to expose themselves in those extremely low cut pants and two-inch shirts.

And when had Katie gotten that butterfly tattooed on her lower back? Her mother must have shed some tears over that.

SHE FOUND BECKY IN HER silver Tahoe—sitting alone in a parking lot filled to capacity with cars, but no people.

One look at the tears on her friend’s face and Annie opened the passenger door without waiting for an invitation.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, sliding in and closing her door with a quick jerk on the inside handle.

“Oh.” Becky gave her an embarrassed glance, sniffled and made a swipe at her face, as if she could erase the evidence of her distress. “Hi. I didn’t know you were here.”