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“We need to talk. We’re not – don’t do this, Jack.”
“Seems to me that you’re doing it, too, sweetheart.”
“I’m trying not to. I don’t want to,” she said while he stroked his hands down her back and kept up a constant rain of those sweet, hungry kisses.
“Why?”
“Because this isn’t enough,” she said. “This doesn’t make up – it can’t make up – for the places that are all wrong.”
“It can. We have to work on it, not let it go. When it’s this strong, Carmen, you just have to take it on faith and –”
“No. No. Stop.” Shakily, she pushed him away and walked out of the house towards his car, parked in the street.
“You still want to eat?” He followed her, sounding angry and at sea.
“I’m hungry,” she snapped at him, because it was either I’m hungry or I’m pregnant, and she didn’t want to give him her news that way.
LILIAN DARCY
has written more than seventy-five books. Happily married, with four active children and two very rambunctious kittens, she enjoys keeping busy and could probably fill several more lifetimes with the things she likes to do – including cooking, gardening, quilting, drawing and travelling. She currently lives in Australia but travels to the United States as often as possible to visit family. Lilian loves to hear from readers. You can write to her at: PO Box 532 Jamison PO, Macquarie ACT 2614, Australia, or e-mail her at: [email protected].
Dear Reader,
I’m a cat person, so you won’t be surprised to find that there’s a very cute kitten in this book. I’d actually written this scene without any recent experience of choosing kittens, but just a few weeks after I wrote it, our much loved ten-year-old black-and-white cat, Gus, died, and my children decided that what we most needed to cheer us up was a new black-and-white kitten… or even better, two.
Sometimes, life does imitate fiction! We went off to the animal shelter and there were the most gorgeous black-and-white boy kittens – twin brothers, seven weeks old, with snowy white tuxedo fronts, glossy black backs. We claimed them instantly.
That night, we all sat around trying to think of the right names, and somehow, without my influence and without the kids’ even knowing the names of the characters in this book, our twin kittens ended up with the names Jack and Davey, just like my hero. Although we will never forget our beloved Gus, I cannot tell you how much fun we are having with these two.
I hope you enjoy the story of Carmen, Jack, Ryan…and a kitten named Tux.
Lilian Darcy
A Mother in the Making
LILIAN DARCY
Chapter One
Jack heard his cell phone start up when he was partway through the slow, careful process of getting dressed. It was sitting downstairs on the coffee table where he’d left it the night before. Shirtless, barefoot and cursing, he took the stairs too fast, swung around the banister post on the landing halfway down and bumped his shoulder into the opposite wall, which meant that the half-healed wound in his left side was screaming at him by the time he picked up the phone.
T-shirt balled in his free hand and lopsided with pain, he heard Terri’s voice. He’d been expecting her call. Had thought about it when he’d lain awake in the night, unable to get back to sleep.
“Sorry, did I get you out of bed?” she cooed at him, and he caught the veiled put-down like a pro baseball player catching a kid’s practice throw.
Yeah, Terri, okay, I get it, you think I’m lazy. It was seven-thirty on a New Jersey Monday morning. Terri’s new husband, Jay, arose at six every day, went to the gym for an hour, ate a power breakfast and still managed to make a couple of billion dollars by lunch.
“Out of the shower,” he told her, after a silence that lasted a fraction too long. His side was still burning and he couldn’t be bothered attempting to change what his ex-wife thought of him.
What she thought of him had become pretty clear during the process of their divorce.
The only thing that mattered in their relationship anymore was Ryan, and he mattered down to the marrow of Jack’s bones. Ryan came first.
He took some cautious breaths and paced up and down the splintered old hardwood floor, willing the pain to ebb. What had he done in there? Ripped open his stitches? Did the agony show in his voice?
Terri knew that he’d just come out of the hospital, but he’d played the whole thing down when he’d told her what had happened. She no longer considered straight-talking cops to be heroes. Wall Street pirates with fat bank accounts and a polished line in doublespeak were the real he-men, as far as she was concerned.
She hadn’t been like this when they were first married at age twenty, fourteen years ago. He’d never seen this side of her back then, when they were so young. Deciding that she didn’t love him anymore seemed to have given her the license to fight as dirty as she could, and it set his teeth on edge.
“Did you and Jay have your meeting?” he asked.
“Family council,” Terri corrected quickly, as if the distinction was important.
Jack thought it was typical of Jay Kruger that he ran his new family the same way he ran his corporate takeovers, complete with meetings and agendas and power plays, but Terri didn’t want to see things this way.
He waited. He wasn’t going to dutifully echo the words family council just to ease her conscience. Nor was he going to let on how emotional he felt about the possible outcome.
“Yes, we had it…” she said, letting her sentence trail off enticingly.
Jack clenched his jaw. He knew this routine. She wanted him to wait and beg. It was like those pointless thirty-second pauses on reality TV shows before they announced the winner or loser’s name. Did his ex really think he didn’t see the emotional manipulation?
“Cut to the chase, Terri,” he growled at her.
“The chase? I’m not sure that I like what you’re implying, Jack. This is not a game.”
“I know it’s not.”
“These are incredibly serious issues.”
“I know they’re serious issues. Tell me what you and Jay decided.”
“See, and I hate to hear you sounding so aggressive. It makes me wonder if I’ve made the right decision after all…”
His heart leaped. The right decision. Did she mean…? “Please tell me straight, and don’t keep me dangling.” There. She had him begging, the way she wanted. “What decision have you made?”
“I’m getting to that.” Her voice pointedly soothed his impatience. “But you need to know the process we went through first. This was not decided lightly, Jack.” She gave him several minutes on the nonlightness of the process, her feelings, her priorities, and yet another rehash of how she’d never wanted to hurt him, then finished, “And we feel that the most important issue in all of this, Jack, in all of this,” she repeated, in case he thought she meant only forty-three percent of it, “has to be Ryan’s well-being.”
She spoke as if generously sharing a profound new insight. In reality, Jack himself had been making the same point to her for almost three years, as clear and direct as he could, and was never heard. He’d dealt with stalling and manipulation and outright lies. Only six months ago had he resorted to the threat of going to court. “We