Her Soldier's Baby

CHAPTER FOUR (#ucc7f806e-1278-584b-abdb-3f3f430e767c)

THAT FIRST WEEK there was no televised show he could watch. The contestants would be shuttled from the hotel to the studio for their first taping the next morning, but it was for footage that would be woven in throughout the series as warranted. They were being introduced to each other, shown their kitchen pods, their green room and lockers. And then toured around the studio. Natasha Stevens, the show’s host, wanted them familiar with their surroundings when the competition began the next weekend.

For the next five weekends, Pierce was going to be sleeping alone. If Eliza won any of the four weekly competitions, there’d be a sixth trip to Palm Desert for her. And he’d be expected to accompany her in the event that circumstance came to pass. If she actually won the whole thing, he’d be called up on stage to stand beside her as she accepted her award.

Lying in bed alone that Friday night, his arms folded on the pillow, his hands propping up his head, Pierce stared at the ceiling. And pictured his beautiful, vivacious, loving wife up on stage, on national television, announcing to the world that he, Pierce Westin, was her husband.

It was way too early for him to be lying in the dark, too early to have stripped down to his T-shirt and briefs. Guests were still up and about. Someone could need something.

But social hour was over. And if no one had a problem that Margie couldn’t handle, he could lie there alone until morning without being missed.

When he’d come in, he’d kind of had a plan to turn on the television mounted on the wall across from their big four-poster bed. Thought maybe he’d take in one of the more violent suspense flicks he liked. The ones that Eliza read through. If she could bear to be in the room with the sound at all.

Kill ’em and die movies, she always called them.

He grinned. What did that really mean? If you killed them, you didn’t die. That was the point.

He’d brought a fresh glass of iced lemon water in with him. And a plate of Eliza’s macaroon cookies. They were sitting where he’d left them, side by side on his nightstand.

In the dark. Just like him.

He was waiting for Eliza’s call telling him her cocktail party downstairs was over and she was up in her room for the night. With the three-hour time difference, it might be a while. Still, he’d wait to speak with her before turning on a light.

Or starting a movie.

With the lights out, he could almost pretend she was there with him.

Not that he’d ever tell her—or anyone—that he had those kinds of thoughts. Doing so would only raise emotional expectations he’d be sure to fail to live up to.

And while he was more comfortable with his wife by his side, he wasn’t a sap. Or even a warmhearted guy. He was a man who’d done wrong. Who could never right that wrong. And who was spending the rest of his life serving others to pay an unpayable debt.

He was a man whose heart had ever been completely open only to one other—Liza Westin. She didn’t go by Liza anymore. And he wasn’t the same man who’d once loved with such trust and abandon. But he remembered...

He must have dozed off—a shock in itself—and sat upright when his cell phone pealed, catching it on the first ring.

“How’d it go?” He’d seen her caller ID with bleary eyes.

“Good!” Her upbeat tone had him on edge. Eliza wasn’t one to get overly excited. Not anymore, at any rate.

But then, she’d never been to California, or been about to be on national television before, he reminded himself as he listened to her tell him about the contestants she’d met that night.

A set of identical twin sisters who co-owned a bistro in New Orleans and were both contestants. Neither had ever been married, which Eliza found hard to believe because they were both quite striking, with dark hair and eyes and infectious smiles. There was the computer genius—she called him that because of his glasses, clean-shaved face and haircut—who learned to cook from his mother when he was a kid. He worked in a bank and entered cooking contests. The Family Secrets qualifier was his fourth major win, but he’d won hundreds of local contests.

“You’d have hundreds of wins, too, if you’d ever entered a cooking contest before,” Pierce told her, stacking their pillows together and settling back against them. Content to sit in the dark and listen to her voice for the rest of the night.

“I don’t know about that.” She chuckled. “All we really know is that I’m good enough to keep our guests happy.”

“You won the first contest you ever entered,” he reminded her dryly. “You won the audition contest to be there. That’s how good you are.”

“Yeah, well, you’re good for me, Pierce Westin, you know that?”

He wasn’t. But with her so far away, he wasn’t going to let on to her that she’d caught the raw end of their deal.

She told him about a man who owned a culinary cooking school in Idaho. Another one with a popular fast food stand on the beach in Florida. And a woman from California who’d confessed that she really wasn’t all that great a cook. She’d used a friend’s recipe to audition for Family Secrets because she was trying to break into the business.

“The cooking show business? If she’s not into cooking, why does she want to be in the business?” he asked, grinning. He loved it when Eliza’s tone took on that slightly sarcastic note. Not quite poking fun at people, but sounding as though she were asking him, Can you believe it? To his knowledge, she’d never used the tone with anyone but him.

Which was probably why he liked it so much...

“I wondered the same thing,” Eliza said, “but only to myself. Luckily, Mr. Beach Food Stand wasn’t as reticent and was able to ask her questions and draw her out. She’s hoping to break into show business,” Eliza said.

Pierce wondered what she looked like, but didn’t ask. He wasn’t going to spend what time he had with his wife talking about another woman’s appearance.

“Apparently she’s spent the past two years going on auditions, and this is the first gig she got.”

A gig that didn’t pay unless you won. Which you weren’t likely to do if you couldn’t cook.

“She’s hoping to get discovered when the world sees how photogenic she is,” Eliza continued. “From what I hear, several former contestants on Family Secrets have been offered full-time positions on other shows. One even got a show of her own.”

Pierce was ready to move on. Way on.

Eliza was photogenic. Gorgeous, in fact. And a fabulous cook. She could get offers...be lured from their quiet life. The only kind of life he could endure with a reasonable assurance of maintaining his equilibrium.

Was this the beginning of the end for them? Would this be how he lost her?

Shaking his head, he sat up. Turned on the light. Fear was a waste of time. And flights of imagination were not allowed in his world. Were not anything he could afford to indulge in. Ever.

He had a hard enough time keeping the nightmares manageable when he controlled every thought.

“You got the light on?” Eliza’s voice broke into the moroseness he’d allowed to enter their room.

“Yeah.”

“And the TV?”

“Not yet.”

“Sleep with the TV on, Pierce, please? Don’t try to prove anything...”

Sweet woman. Didn’t get that proving himself was all he ever did. “I won’t,” he told her. And then added, “And I will sleep with the television on.”

“We’ve gone almost a year without a nightmare,” she told him. “I’ll feel awful if they start up again because I’m off having a dream moment...”

She’d done the audition as a lark. Hadn’t expected to win. And had offered, many times, to turn down the opportunity when she did win.

“You have nothing to feel awful about, Eliza,” he said now, his voice filled with command. “The fact that you put up with the nightmares at all makes you an angel. I won’t have them preventing you from enjoying the best life has to offer you...”

Or forcing her to be less than her potential would allow, he finished silently, remembering a long-ago night when his not-yet father-in-law had come to him. Issuing the warning to stay away from his daughter.