D'Alessandro's Child
Autore
Catherine Spencer
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CHAPTER ONE
INITIALLY, all Mike planned to do was observe the child. From a distance. To establish, as well as he could, that all was well in the boy’s life. That done, he would pay a last visit to his dying ex-wife, ease her tortured mind and heart, then take the first flight out of San Francisco and head back to Vancouver without disclosing to another living soul that, more than four years earlier, she’d conceived a child. Mike would even try to forget it.
It seemed the most decent thing to do; the most humane. Because enough damage had already occurred, and what right had he to plow into matters at this late stage and make them worse?
But that was before. Before he could put a face to the child. Before he heard the infectious belly laugh of delight, or saw the dark hair so much like his own, or watched the sturdy, sun-kissed legs pumping across the grassy slope to the carousel at the other side of the park.
After that, observing from a distance just wasn’t enough. He wanted to touch. To speak, to listen. To learn everything about the three and a half years since this child, this son he hadn’t known he’d sired, had come into the world—little things like what foods he preferred, what his favorite toy was, if he liked music, or model trains; whether or not he could kick a ball, skate, swim.
A few yards from where he watched, the woman—the “mother”—waved to the boy as he swirled past on a painted pony. “Hold on tight, sweetheart,” she called out, her voice as musical as a genteel bell.
Hold on tight! The words held a bitter irony for Mike. Perhaps if he and Kay had held on tight to their marriage, he wouldn’t be here now, trying to devise a way to strike up a conversation without raising suspicion.
Already he felt people were watching him, wondering about the stranger in their midst. In a town as small and seriously upscale as this, a guy in blue jeans stood out from the crowd as plainly as his midsize rental car looked out of place snugged up between the Mercedes and BMWs in the tree-shaded parking area.
The merry-go-round wound to a stop with the boy on the side farthest away from his mother. Standing on tiptoe, the skirt of her pretty mauve dress billowing slightly in the breeze, she waved to catch his attention. “Over here, Jeremy!”
Jeremy? He’d come across worse names, Mike supposed, but this one was a bit on the arty side for his taste. A boy needed a name that would sit easily on him when he grew to be a man. Something strong and indisputedly masculine. Like Michael. And a last name that reflected his heritage. Like D’Alessandro.
Slithering off his pony, the boy raced around the carousel and in his eagerness to get back to his mother, tripped and went sprawling practically at Mike’s feet. Without stopping to consider the wisdom of such a move, Mike stooped to haul the little guy upright again.
There were grass stains on his knees. And the faint remains of baby dimples. The little body was sweetly solid, the eyes staring into his the same dark, fathomless brown as Kay’s.
The feelings…sheesh, how to describe them! It was as if a hollow suddenly opened up inside Mike; a sense of loss so acute that he caught his breath at the pain of it. The child fearfully shying away from him was his own flesh and blood!
He ached to reassure him. To cup the smooth round cheek in his callused hand, to hug the innocent little body close and just once whisper, You don’t have to be afraid of me, son. I’m your daddy.
Instead, he mumbled, “Hey, sport,” then dribbled into awkward silence because, while he never had to think twice about what to say to his four-year-old twin nephews, with this child he had to watch his words.
A shadow slid across the grass, just wide enough to block out the sun. “Come here, Jeremy.”
Even lightly coated with alarm, her voice remained musical and lovely. The hand which reached down to pluck her child out of a stranger’s grasp was narrow and elegant, with long slender fingers and delicate oval nails painted pink.
Glancing up, Mike found himself pinned in a wary silver-blue gaze rimmed with feathery lashes. Straightening, he took a step backward and said casually, “He took quite a nosedive, but I don’t think he’s hurt.”
She was too well-bred to tell him she no more gave a flying fig what he thought than she appreciated his touching her child, but the message came across clearly enough in her cool reply. “I’m sure he isn’t, but thank you for being concerned. Jeremy, say thank you to the gentleman for being kind enough to help you.”
“Thank you,” Jeremy parroted, inspecting him with the uninhibited curiosity of any normal three-year-old now that he had the safety of his mother’s leg to cling to.
Mike wished he dared ruffle that thick mop of black hair—just once experience the pleasure of its texture slipping through his fingers. But it was out of the question. She was watching him too intently, her protective instincts on full alert. So hooking his thumbs in the back pockets of his jeans and hoping his grin didn’t look too manufactured, he settled for, “Any time, kiddo.”
“Well….” The mother folded the boy’s hand protectively in her own and turned away. “We must be going. Thank you again.”
“Sure thing.”
He watched them leave, her with the erect carriage of a duchess, and his boy with the agile enthusiasm that only the very young and innocent could know. You’ve accomplished what you came to do, Mike’s rational mind informed him. The child’s well-dressed, well-fed, and well-mannered, and even a fool can see the mother dotes on him. Convey the news to Kay, then stick to your original idea and forget this afternoon ever happened.
“Fat chance,” he murmured, his gaze trained on the pair as they joined the lineup at the buffet tables set out under striped, open-sided tents.
The scene, perfect down to the last detail, might have been lifted from a painting. Too bad it couldn’t erase the picture indelibly imprinted on his mind of the room in St. Mary’s Hospital in San Francisco, and Kay’s face, already pared by illness to skeletal proportions, rendered even more pitiful by her mental anguish.
“I gave him away,” she’d whispered, her sunken eyes filling with tears and her fingers, so bony they resembled claws, worrying the hospital sheet stretched across her painfully thin body. “Finding I was pregnant, just when I was starting out afresh…with such ambitions. I was so close to achieving my dream…I could smell the success. I couldn’t handle a baby, Mike. Not then.”
But I could have, he thought bitterly. The brief taste he’d just enjoyed told him that, and he was ravenous suddenly, not for the food people were heaping on their plates, but for closer acquaintance with a child who should have belonged to him.
He could no more walk away and forget the boy existed than a starving man could refuse nourishment.
“Who’s your secret admirer, Camille?”
Though lightly phrased and threaded with amusement, the question brought a flush to Camille’s cheeks which completely undercut her offhand, “I haven’t the foggiest idea what you mean.”
“Oh, come off it! This is me you’re talking to!”
She should have known better than to try fooling the woman who’d been her best friend since kindergarten. Frances Knowlton hadn’t shared her secret passion for Mortimer Griffin at nine, helped her dye her naturally blond hair a horrific ruby red at fifteen, supported her at twenty through a wedding involving four hundred guests, and kept her together when her marriage fell apart the year she turned twenty-eight, without learning a thing or two along the way.
“If you’re referring to the man at the table over there,” she said, refusing to glance his way even though her eyes would have been happy to feast on him indefinitely if she’d allowed it, “we met very casually over by the carousel. He was kind to Jeremy.”
“Which no doubt explains why you’re practically drooling at the mere mention of him now. Not that I blame you.” Fran, never one to care too much about social protocol, lowered her sunglasses and subjected the stranger to a frank inspection before fondling her husband’s knee under the table. “If I weren’t already happily married to the sexiest man on earth, I’d be sticking a Sold sign on Mr. Blue Eyes’ forehead before anyone else, including you, Camille, beat me to it.”
He did have the most gorgeous eyes, Camille was forced to admit. Not the pale blue-gray she’d been cursed with, but a deep, tropical indigo that blazed with an almost electric energy from his tanned face. And he did keep switching that gaze to her. She could feel it pulsing across the distance between them, a magnet persistently drawing her attention away from Jeremy who was up to his elbows in crabmeat salad.
“Isn’t it a shame that, like you, he’s here alone?” Fran observed, flinging down her paper napkin and swinging her long legs over the picnic bench. “In the spirit of small town hospitality, I think I should do something about that.”
Heat rushed into Camille’s face again. “Please don’t, Fran! For a start, I’m not alone, I’m with Jeremy, and….”
But she might as well have saved her breath. Fran had already descended with single-minded determination on the man seated two tables away. He was acknowledging whatever she said to him, his initial look of inquiry giving way to a dazzling smile.
A moment later, he’d scooped up his plate and was loping behind her as she wove her way back to where Camille sat stony-faced with embarrassment.
“If I were you, I’d try to keep my wife under better control,” she informed Adam Knowlton.
Adam grinned. “Short of keeping her on a very short leash and muzzling her, there’s not much I can do. She’s her own woman, always has been, and I wouldn’t have her any other way.” Then, as Fran made a beeline for a seat next to her husband, thereby leaving the stranger with no choice but to sit beside Camille, Adam leaned forward and muttered, “Better take the scowl off your face and smile, sweet thing. You’re about to be introduced.”
His name was Michael D’Alessandro. He was, he said, on a working vacation. He lived north of the border, in Vancouver, and owned a construction company and was chiefly interested in building town houses. Back home, the Californian style of architecture was very popular, and he’d come south in part to solicit bids for designs on a gated community he hoped to develop on a tract of land he’d recently acquired.
He said a lot of other things, too: that he couldn’t believe his luck in running into Adam who was an architect specializing in earthquake-proof residential construction; that he’d discovered Calder by chance and found it very picturesque.
He answered Fran’s not-so-subtle questions with forthright charm. Married? Not anymore. Traveling alone? Yes. Just passing through or planning to stay in town awhile? No fixed time frame; he was his own boss and could pretty much do as he pleased.
He even found time to pay attention to Jeremy, drawing him out with the ease of someone used to being around small children. Jeremy responded like a starving plant to water, bursting into infectious giggles and showing off with three-year-old pride. “I can swim,” he announced. “And I’ve got a football and I got my hair cut,” all of which information Michael D’Alessandro received with absorbed attention.
But the only thing that really registered with Camille was the instinctive feeling that everything about the man spelled trouble, from his mesmerizing, take-no-prisoners eyes, to his stunning smile and his sexy, come-hither voice.
Sexy? She almost fell off the bench in astonishment. How had sexy managed to sneak into her thoughts? She must have a touch of sunstroke! “Sexy” was no more a part of her vocabulary these days than “romance.” She’d renounced both and concentrated all her love and passion on Jeremy ever since the day her marriage fell apart and Todd walked out not just on her, but on their child as well.
“So what’s this public picnic all about, or do people in Calder always get together for a crabfest on summer weekends?”
Fran kicked her under the table, alerting Camille to the fact that the sexy voice had finally got around to addressing a direct question at her. Flustered, she avoided meeting his gaze and stared instead at his hands.
He had a working man’s hands, big and tanned and capable. Like his arms and, no doubt, all the rest of him so snugly encased in white T-shirt and blue jeans softened to doeskin by numerous washings. Nothing like Todd, who turned a fiery red if he stayed out in the sun very long, and who thought muscle sat best on those who didn’t have much in the brain department.
“Tell Michael about the women’s shelter, Camille,” Fran prompted, in much the same tone of voice one might use with a social incompetent suddenly turned loose in public.
“Women’s shelter?” As he shifted to look at her more fully, Michael D’Alessandro’s arm brushed against Camille’s. If finding herself the focus of those arresting blue eyes wasn’t disturbing enough, the shock of his actually touching her ran clean past her shoulder and settled somewhere in the vicinity of her throat, temporarily impairing her vocal cords—not to mention her mental faculties.
“I….” she croaked, shredding a corner of her paper napkin. “We—a group of us, that is…it’s a project we thought was…um, worthwhile.”
“As usual, she’s being too modest,” Fran chimed in, rolling her eyes in exasperation when Camille stumbled into silence. “She’s chair of the fund-raising committee—is the one who started the ball rolling in the first place, come to that, and it’s mostly thanks to her efforts that it’s been so successful.”
Camille swallowed, and vowed she’d throttle Fran the very first chance she got.
“Is that so?” Laugh lines creased the corners of his eyes as he let loose with a smile that could have melted the polar ice cap. “I wouldn’t have expected there’d be a need for such a place in a town like this.”
“There isn’t. It’s in San Francisco,” she said baldly.
“I see.” A shadow of sadness seemed to cross his face and he lowered his eyes briefly. He had ridiculously long lashes. And sleek level brows as black as his hair which needed a trim. An inch longer and the ends would touch the crew neck of his T-shirt.
Aware she was staring, Camille turned her attention to Jeremy on her other side, glad that the conversation seemed to have petered out.
Fran, though, wasn’t about to let that happen. “If you’re interested in supporting the cause, you’re welcome to buy a ticket to our annual gala next Saturday,” she informed the man breezily. “You’ll get a fabulous evening’s entertainment in return—gourmet catering, live dance music, fabulous door prizes—and the really good part is, it’s all tax deductible.”
“Not for Mr. D’Alessandro,” Camille put in quickly. “He’s not a U.S. resident. In any case, I doubt he’d be interested in attending a function where he doesn’t know anyone.”
“I know you,” Michael D’Alessandro said, bathing her in another sultry smile. “Not well, perhaps, but enough that I’d like to know you better.”
Fran jumped on that faster than a flea on a well-fed dog. “Well, isn’t it amazing how things work out sometimes! Would you believe that, less than an hour ago, Camille told me she hasn’t yet lined herself up with an escort? You’d be doing her a double favor if you bought a ticket and offered your services.”
“Fran, honestly!” Truly annoyed, Camille turned a scathing glare on her friend. “I don’t need you to set me up with a man, and I’m quite sure Mr. D’Alessandro doesn’t appreciate being pressured like this. Drop the subject, please.”
“I don’t feel pressured,” he said mildly. “Surprised, perhaps. I’d have thought your husband would be your date.”
“I don’t have a husband. My marriage broke up two years ago.”
For some reason, the news rendered him temporarily speechless. She couldn’t imagine why. People got divorced all the time, as he should know. She was hardly unique.
He soon recovered, though. “In that case,” he said, “I’d be honored to act as your escort.”
“I can’t allow it. For a start, you’re on vacation and might have other plans for next Saturday.”
“As a matter of fact, I don’t, at least not in the evening. So unless you’re afraid I’ll step all over your feet—”
“It’s not that!”
He regarded her quizzically. “Then what is it?”
“Everything!” She shook her head, bewildered by her agitation. “Even discounting the fact that we’ve barely met, I haven’t been part of the singles scene in over ten years.”
“Perhaps,” he suggested gravely, “it’s time you got used to the idea again.”
Just seconds before, she’d have sworn nothing would persuade her to go along with such a notion. But the warmth in his tone of voice, the sympathy she saw in his eyes, had her suddenly thinking, Why not?
It had been months since she’d known any real excitement; longer still since she’d met a man as attractive as he was. And it wasn’t as if they’d be alone. Fran and Adam would be there, and so would her parents, along with just about everyone else in town. If it turned out that she and Michael D’Alessandro had nothing to say to each other after the first half hour, there’d be plenty of other people willing to carry the conversational ball for the rest of the evening.
“Perhaps it is,” she agreed. “All right. If you’re still here and of the same mind next week at this time, I’ll be glad of your company.”
He subjected her to another of those long, intense looks. “You can count on it, Camille,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere, any time soon.”
She hadn’t expected to see him again before the night of the gala, but avoiding anyone in a town as small as Calder was near to impossible, especially when that person was as eye-catching as Michael D’Alessandro. Over the next three days, she ran into him on three different occasions.
The first time they met was at Dolly’s Coffee House. Camille and Jeremy were sitting at one of the outside tables, he with an ice cream cone and she with an iced cappuccino, when her Saturday night escort suddenly showed up. He stopped just long enough to say hello, let his glance linger a moment on Jeremy, and observe, “He’s a fine-looking boy, Camille. You must be very proud.”
“I am,” she said. “And very lucky, too.” Then, fearing her reply sounded unnecessarily clipped, felt obliged to add, “Would you care to join us?”
“Wish I could,” he said with what seemed to be sincere regret, “but I’m meeting Adam Knowlton and a couple of his associates in a few minutes.”
Later that morning, they ran into him again in the delicatessen. “Thought I’d put together a picnic lunch and eat down by the river,” he said. “I’m told there’s a swimming hole just outside town that’s well worth a visit on a day like this.” Then, seeing the way Jeremy’s face lit up, added, “Don’t suppose I can talk you into joining me this time?”
“Afraid not,” she said. “We’re due at the dentist in an hour for our six-month checkups.”
Then, early on Tuesday afternoon, he drove into the service station on the highway right after she did, and pulled up to the gas pump behind hers.
“I’m on my way into San Francisco,” he told her, coming to her car and bending almost double to look in the window while the attendant checked under the hood. “Thought I’d better fuel up here, rather than risk running short in the tunnel or on the Bay Bridge.”
If it hadn’t been preposterous, she’d have thought he was deliberately seeking her out, but after this opening comment, he seemed more interested in Jeremy than her, joking about his being the back-seat navigator for mom and a lot of other nonsense.
Again, Jeremy flowered under the attention. Apropos of nothing, he announced, “I’ve got teeth!” and bared them in all their pearly infant glory.
Michael D’Alessandro had teeth, too, and promptly showed them off in a smile that, annoyingly, set Camille’s heart to fluttering. “You sure have, pal,” he said. “Bet your dentist gave you a gold star for looking after them so well.” He swung his glance back to her with obvious reluctance. “I guess I should get going.”
“Yes. Do you have friends in the city?”
As it had the day they’d met, a brief cloud of sorrow dimmed his smile. “I…wouldn’t say that, exactly. Just getting to know the area better, that’s all.”
She’d asked purely to be polite, and wondered why such a straightforward question made him uncomfortable. From the little she’d seen, he didn’t strike her as a man easily put offstride.
Seeming to recognize that his hesitancy was out of character, he said, “I found Golden Gate Park the other day and thought I’d explore it further. It’s huge.”
She nodded. “Over a thousand acres, I believe. Just don’t get caught in the rush hour traffic on the way back to Calder. It’s a dreadful commute.”
“So I’ve discovered. I plan to stay downtown well into the evening.”
The attendant slammed down her car hood, wiped his hands on a rag, and gave her the thumbs-up sign. “Everything looks good, Ms. Whitfield.”
“Well…!” She offered Michael D’Alessandro a cool smile. “See you on Saturday, if not before.”
“It’ll be before,” he told her. “The Knowltons invited me to dinner the day after tomorrow, and I understand you’ll be there, as well.”
“Really?” It was her turn to be caught offguard. “We usually do get together on Thursdays but I hadn’t realized Fran had asked you to join us.”
“I think she feels sorry for me wandering around on my own, so she’s taken me under her wing.”
Camille thought Fran’s motives were more devious than that, but she wasn’t about to put ideas in his head by saying so.
Fran poured the last of the Chardonnay into their glasses, dropped into the chair next to Camille’s, and kicked off her shoes. “Well, was the evening as bad as you thought it’d be?”
“Bad?” Camille sipped her wine thoughtfully. “I wouldn’t say ‘bad’ so much as ‘pointless.’ Why go to all this trouble to cultivate an acquaintance with a man who’s only passing through town? It might be different if he were moving here permanently.”
“Because he’s a nice man, and it looks as if he and Adam are going to be doing business together, and it’s my wifely duty to entertain a client.”
“But why include me?”
Fran, who tended to favor forthrightness over tact, took an unusually long time to answer. Finally she said, “When was the last time you felt any kind of excitement about life?”
“I don’t need excitement. I had enough of that trying to keep my marriage intact. These days, I’m happy to settle for peaceful and uneventful.”
“You’re too young and beautiful to settle for anything, least of all that.”
“I’m thirty years old, Fran.”
“Exactly! And most of the time, you talk and act as if you’re pushing ninety!” Fran leaned forward emphatically. “But you came alive tonight, Camille. The old sparkle was back in your eye. And we both know why.”
“If you’re suggesting Michael D’Alessandro’s the reason—”
“He’s the reason, all right! He flirted with you—in an entirely gentlemanly way, I might add—and you flirted right back. He made you laugh, and he made you blush almost as much as you’re blushing now.”
“For heaven’s sake, I did not flirt!”
“You didn’t hoist up your skirt and fling yourself in his lap, perhaps, but I saw you giving him the old eyeball treatment.”
“He was my bridge partner. I was trying to warn him not to overbid.”
Openly snickering, Fran said, “I see. And I suppose when you were ogling him during dinner, you were trying to warn him there might be caterpillars in his salad?”
Camille slammed down her wineglass with rather more force than was good for it. “I’m not up for this discussion tonight. I’m going home.”
“Just because I’m pointing out truths you’d prefer not to hear is no reason to take it out on my good Steuben crystal,” Fran said equably. “Nor do I understand why you’re getting so hot about this. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with your finding a man attractive. Nowhere is it written that a divorced woman has to shut herself off from the opposite sex and act as if she’s taken holy orders.”
“But I don’t know this particular man! How often do I have to repeat that before it sinks in with you, Fran?”
“Most adult relationships start out that way, my dear. It’s what comes of getting to know someone that counts.”
“Michael D’Alessandro isn’t going to be around long enough for me to get to know him—at least, not in any meaningful fashion.”
“So forget ‘meaningful’ and just have a fling. Heaven knows, you’re ripe for one, and the opportunity’s staring you in the face. Lighten up and have some fun for a change. You might find you like it.”
Was it possible Fran was right, and she was ripe for a fling? Did that explain the heady feeling that had begun during dinner and lasted throughout the short drive from the Knowltons’ house to her own—as if she were a little giddy from too much champagne, even though she’d had only two and half glasses of wine all night? And if so, might she not be better off experimenting with a man who just happened to be passing through, rather than someone she’d known all her life? At least that way, if the whole thing turned out to be a disaster, he wouldn’t always be around to remind her of it.
The idea percolated at the back of Camille’s mind all the time she was arming her home security system for the night, sending Nori, her Japanese nanny, off to bed, and making a last check on Jeremy. By the time she, too, was ready to turn in, she’d half convinced herself Fran was right, and the prospect of being escorted to the gala by Michael D’Alessandro didn’t seem such a bad idea, after all. In fact, it had assumed intriguing new possibilities.
Kay’s condition seemed to have deteriorated by the Friday. After leaving her, Michael drove along the western rim of Golden Gate Park, found his usual bench overlooking the water, and sat there, elbows on his knees, fingers steepled in front of his mouth.
A light mist had drifted in earlier, turning the June evening cool and leaving that particular stretch of park almost deserted. Just as well. If he was going to start bawling, he didn’t need an audience.
“How much longer?” he’d asked the nurse, before he left the hospital.
She’d shaken her head. “Maybe weeks, maybe days. It’s hard to tell.”
He’d asked his next question before and already knew the answer. Chemotherapy had failed, radiation had failed. Still, he’d had to ask again, “Is there nothing that can be done for her?”
“We’re keeping her comfortable, Mr. D’Alessandro. I’m afraid that’s the most we can offer. If she’d seen a doctor and been diagnosed sooner….”
His sense of helplessness had spilled over into anger. “Why the devil didn’t she? She had medical insurance.”
The nurse shrugged sympathetically. “Perhaps she was afraid of what she’d find out. A lot of people are. By the time she did come for help, it was too late.”
Too late in more ways than one!
Just before he left her, Kay had pinned him in a haunted, pleading gaze. “I’d like to see my baby, Mike…just once…just for a minute. Couldn’t you find a way…please…?”
But she didn’t know how she looked now; had no idea how terrifying a three-and-a-half-year old would find her. Once again, she’d left it too late. And even if she hadn’t, there was no way he could have arranged a visit without telling Camille the whole story—which opened up another can of worms he wished didn’t exist.
As a woman, Camille Whitfield was off limits to him. He knew that with utter certainty and to behave as he had last night would bring nothing but disaster. Yet she pulled him like a magnet.
He tried to justify his response by telling himself he had to cozy up to her if he wanted to get closer to his son. The woman was no longer married, after all, nor, as far as he could determine, involved with another man, so what was wrong with cultivating a bit of a relationship? He’d even gone the route of thinking that the reason he found her so attractive lay in the fact that, physically, she was the antithesis of Kay: clear-eyed, sweetly fleshed, golden.
There was no doubt that seeing his ex-wife in her present condition affected him more deeply than he’d ever expected. Each time he left her in that narrow, sterile hospital room, every instinct cried out for him to hold on to a warm, healthy body and let it drive away the specter of the woman he used to know.
Maybe that was natural enough. But if so, it shouldn’t be Camille Whitfield’s body he reached for! Bad enough he was already using her. To compound the sin by encouraging anything that might fan the flames of sexual attraction between them was out of the question and he simply couldn’t allow it to happen.
It couldn’t be Jeremy he held on to either, even though he’d have given ten years of his life to be able to wrap his arms around that little boy and hug him close to his heart. The same blood might run in their veins, but circumstance had relegated him to the role of friendly stranger in his son’s life. He couldn’t do anything which might jeopardize strengthening so fragile a link.
Hell, what a mess!
Lifting his head, he stared out at the blurred lights pricking the darkness—and knew it wasn’t mist obscuring his vision, it was tears. How many times had he come to this spot to get himself back together after visiting Kay? How often had he wound up sniveling like a kid? And how many more times, before it was over for her?
Damn! He hadn’t been a tenth as broken up when their marriage went bad. Been glad to see the back of her, in fact. So why all this emotion now when it was too late to do either of them any good?
Swiping an impatient hand over his eyes, he hauled himself off the bench and started back to where he’d left the car. Enough of the brooding and self-pity. He’d promised Kay he’d find a way to photograph the child and bring her a copy.
Sitting there asking questions no one could answer wasn’t going to get the job done. He’d be better off thinking up ways to wheedle his way further into Camille Whitfield’s good graces without compromising his integrity any more than he already had—and hope to high heaven he wouldn’t give in to temptation along the way.
