From Midwife To Mummy. Deanne Anders

her. The only thing she would find charming about him would be his backside headed out of town.

      * * *

      Trent watched Lana as she bit into her sandwich. He could see she was concentrating on something, and he didn’t think it was just the sandwich she was eating—though she did seem to be enjoying it. It was nice to see a woman eat her food without any posturing about diets and calories.

      He watched as the pink tip of her tongue slipped out and caught some of the juice running down the side of her mouth. From nowhere a burst of desire filled him, and he felt a jolt of arousal as it spread down his groin. Another swipe of her tongue along the crease of her mouth had his pants becoming uncomfortably tight.

      He shifted in his seat, causing Lana to suddenly look up from her meal, and he knew the second their eyes connected that he wasn’t hiding the hunger that had hit him. The surprise came when her eyes changed and she lifted her eyebrows, silently questioning him. If this was any other woman he might have thought she was purposely playing with him, but that just didn’t seem like Lana’s style.

      “Sorry, I haven’t found a way to eat these without making a mess,” Lana said.

      “That’s okay. I’m actually enjoying watching you.” Trent said, then watched spots of color flush her cheeks.

      “Tell me why you decided to go into medicine instead of staying in the family business,” Lana said, changing the subject.

      His gut tightened as he thought of the decision he had made to follow his dreams. Would his brother still be here if he hadn’t left him behind with his father? He had let Michael down when he’d walked away from his father’s expectations for him. In saving himself from becoming the heir apparent to the Montgomery empire he had left his brother to deal with their father’s unreasonable demands and bouts of temper.

      No one had ever been good enough for their father. No one had been able to stand up to the old man’s expectations. Not him, not their mother, and certainly not his brother. He had urged his brother to follow after him and get away from his father’s influence, but Michael hadn’t been strong enough. He’d even tried to talk his brother into the two of them joining together and using their share of the company stocks to oust their father from his position as head of the company, but Michael had refused.

      Instead, Michael had continually tried to earn their father’s approval, and when that hadn’t happened he had turned to the same thing their mother had used to escape their father: alcohol. And when that hadn’t been enough he had turned to drugs, until finally the two had killed him.

      “You could say I did follow in one of my family’s footsteps. My Uncle Jim was a surgeon. He had a lot of influence on my decision,” Trent answered. She didn’t need to know the turmoil his decision had caused to his family.

      “Any regrets?” Lana asked.

      “What?” Trent asked, startled by the question.

      Did she know about the division in his family? Had she somehow learned about the threats and bribes his father constantly sent him, trying to get him to come back to the family-run business?

      “I don’t know much about the oil business, but I do know about all the demands and sacrifices a medical career requires. It just seems you could have had a pretty good thing going for you, working in your own company,” Lana said.

      “I find being a pediatrician very satisfying and challenging. And I can make far more of a difference as a pediatrician than as a businessman, don’t you think?” Trent said.

      He stood and started gathering up items from the table to throw out. For now, the less this woman knew about his business, the better.

      “You said you wanted to discuss the visitations?” Trent said.

      “Yes, I do. I hope you understand that just because I’m letting you spend time with Maggie it doesn’t mean I’ve changed my mind about keeping her?”

      “I think you’ve made that plain,” Trent said.

      The only way she could have made her intentions any plainer would have been for her to tattoo them on her body. He had no doubt this woman was going to fight him all the way.

      “Okay, then. I’m willing to allow visitations as long as it’s understood that I’m in charge of everything that concerns her. I’ll always be present and I’ll have the final word on when and where.”

      * * *

      After the short walk back, Trent watched as Lana’s car pulled out of the parking garage. Nothing he had learned so far, today or at the hospital, indicated that she was anything other than a young woman working as a midwife and raising a child she loved as her own. He couldn’t help but like her, and he hated that she was being pulled into this mess with his father, but he didn’t see any way out of it. And it was better that she had to deal with him instead of the old man. At least he fought fair. He couldn’t say that about his father.

      They had arranged a time for him to visit Maggie during their walk back to their cars and Lana had been more than fair with him. Everything he had heard around the hospital about Lana had been positive. He even felt a little guilty that he had taken a job here to see what he could dig up on her. From what he had seen so far there wasn’t anything in her character that made him think he needed to be worried about his niece not being cared for, or that there was anything he could use against her in the court case.

      But he knew how appearances could be deceptive. Hadn’t his mom had everyone fooled until it was too late? No one had ever known about the fights between his parents. or the times when his mother had never even got out of the bed in the mornings, leaving two little boys to care for themselves.

      He knew first-hand that no one ever really knew what went on behind the closed doors of a home. No matter how much Lana Sanders looked like the perfect mother, he would be sticking to the woman like glue until he had custody of his niece and knew without a doubt that she was safe.