THE HEIRESS'S BABY
Silhouette Special Edition
August 2010 US

Chapter One

August, San Diego

She was still in the bathroom.

Nate had spent the past half hour in the hotel bar downstairs having coffee with his sister Krystal, a rendezvous that she had called “putting our heads together and coming up with a strategy” and he’d mentally renamed “hitting up her big brother for money.” Lannie had been in the bathroom when he left their luxurious room, and she still was.

Was she?

It was very quiet in there. The door was closed. No sound of shower water running, no whine from a blow dryer, or the little chinking sounds of make-up items being placed on a marble surface. He listened, feeling as if he was invading her privacy, feeling his stress levels rise. Thanks to his family, those levels had been high to begin with.

His mind circled pointlessly as he attempted to solve his sister’s problems. He’d written her a check for the money she wanted, discharging her latest debt and more, but would it really help? What could he do that might have a snowball’s chance of yielding a more long-term benefit?

And as for his mother…

It wasn’t something he could deal with this minute, he told himself. Stick with what was really important.

Was Lannie okay?

Was she in there?

Or had she bailed on him, ordered a car for the airport and taken the next flight out of San Diego, the way he’d half-expected her to ever since they’d arrived on Thursday? He’d seen her checking airline schedules on her phone last night.

He pivoted toward the mirror-fronted closets and wrenched open the doors, seriously expecting a gaping void instead of the six or seven gorgeous outfits that had been hanging there half an hour ago. He deserved it, really. He could have made the past few days easier for her, if he’d tried. He could have kept her away from Friday’s dinner, refused to let her help with everything on Saturday. He could have refused the coffee with Krystal, told his sister to deal with her own problems – or simply cut to the chase and written her the check while standing in the hotel lobby.

In the closet he met flashes of bright color. Gold, red, sepia, green… Lannie’s outfits were still there, above a line of matching shoes.

His heartbeat slowed again and the blood stopped beating in his ears. For a long moment, relief made him light-headed.

She hadn’t left.

She was still here.

He caught sight of his reflection in the mirror and saw the tension in his tightly held fists, his dark hair rumpled and overdue for a cut, the shirt tail that had come untucked.

Then he heard the sound of the faucets running in the bathroom basin and reverted to his original, and almost as stressful, question. Lannie hadn’t bailed out of San Diego – out of Nate’s life - but she’d been in the bathroom for so long. Was she okay?

“Lannie?” he called out.

“Yup, I’m here.” Her voice sounded strange.

“Are you okay?” It seemed lame to him after he’d been asking it in his head for the past five minutes - not sufficiently concerned, or maybe… new thought… not sufficiently confrontational. He knew they were on a knife edge. They both knew it. There’d been episodes of talking about it, circling around a couple of heavyweight issues, like boxers circling in the ring without throwing a punch. Nothing was resolved. Nothing was even fully said, out in the open.

They both just knew.

“I’m… yeah… sort of okay,” she answered.

“Sort of?”

“Give me another minute.”

More sounds of running water, and a high-pitched whine he recognized as her electric toothbrush, less strident than the blow-dryer. Finally she emerged.

And she wasn’t okay.

Even without her pale skin, hair roughly knotted at the back, and water splodges down the front of her top, he’d have known she wasn’t okay. The look in her eyes, the tightness around her mouth, the daunted, hunted quality in the way she held her body – all of it so different from how he normally saw her, so bright and beautiful and confident and carelessly – sometimes defiantly - strong. “How was your coffee with Krystal?” she asked.

“Fine. It was fine. The usual. But - ”

“Were you right about what she wanted? You were. I can see. What did you - ?”

“I don’t want to talk about that right now. What’s the matter? You look - ”

“Just give me another moment.”

“Tell me,” he said.

“I will. I will.” She sat on the bed, as if gathering her strength, or sorting through her mind for the right words.

He was torn between wanting her to just say it, cut and dried, put them both out of their misery, and wanting to put his arms around her, pull that messy twist out of her hair and bury his face in it, breathe it in and kiss her and tell her she didn’t need to say it, not yet, not if she didn’t want to, not for hours if she didn’t want to. To tell her that whatever it was, it would be okay in the long run because he was here, and they were so strong together. They’d work it out. He always managed to work things out. He always stepped up to the plate.

But would she want to hear all that? He didn’t think she would.

Instead, he compromised. Sat beside her and took her hand, brushed the skin over her knuckles softly with his thumb. “No hurry, Lannie.” Her skin was so soft. He wanted to lift her hand to his face and breathe in the powdery scent of her moisturizer.

He wanted, as always, to take her to bed.

But her thoughts were a thousand miles from anything like that. She seemed to wish that her body was a thousand miles away, also. A thousand miles from him. A thousand miles from whatever had happened in the bathroom and was still haunting her.

She took a big, wobbly breath, pressed her palms against her cheeks as if to cool her heated skin, raked her perfect teeth over her lower lip. “I don’t want you to think I’ve been – that I’ve been holding this to myself without even hinting. I mean, it didn’t add up until just now, when I got sick in there. The various - You know, we’ve been - The signs, and what they might mean. I didn’t put it all together. But now… I’m scared! This is huge! I didn’t expect it. I’m not ready. I haven’t had time to think. And this trip has been challenging enough. I’m so scared!”

Oh hell… hell!

“Just damn well say it, Lannie.”

“Okay. Yes.” Another breath. She looked at him with burning blue eyes. “I think I must be pregnant, Nate. In fact, I’m almost sure.”

Of course. In the space of three seconds, give or take, it went from being the farthest thing from his mind to the most obvious thing in the world.

Of course.

Pregnant.

Life was like that, wasn’t it? His mother and sister could both have told him that.

And he knew exactly what must be going on in Lannie’s head, exactly what her instincts and her previous track record would tell her to do. She’d always pulled the strategy off so well, in the past.

It had worked for her.

It had helped her survive everything from her parents’ conservative and stereotypical expectations to machine-gun toting brigands in a mountain wilderness.

He shouldn’t have said it out loud, and it sure as heck shouldn’t have been the first thing he said, but, hell, this had been a rough few days, and it was one of the big issues they’d been circling around – maybe even the issue, as far as he was concerned.

So he opened his mouth and the words just fell out. “Pregnant. And I guess you’ve already worked out, haven’t you, before you even shared the news with me, exactly how you’re going to bail?”