Buch lesen: «Secret Baby Spencer»

Chapter One

A town away, in Belton’s substation, police captain Brick Bauer was the first to frown, rise from his desk and walk to the window. “Probably kids,” he decided, glaring at the winking, cat-eyed taillights of a suspicious-looking dented gold Cadillac heading toward Tyler, Wisconsin. “No adult around here drives a car that sounds like…like…” Brick shook his head, his mind unable to seize upon any suitable phrase.

“Like the end of the world,” Reverend Sarah Baron said decisively a few minutes later, looking up from her desk in the Tyler Fellowship Sanctuary. Vaguely, Sarah wondered if the car would wind up stopping in town and if the passenger was feeling friendless and lonely or might someday become a member of her parish, then she said, “Maybe Michael can do something about that awful-sounding muffler.” Yes, if the driver couldn’t afford a mechanic, surely Sarah’s husband would offer to look at the car free of charge, though by the sound of it, even an act of God wouldn’t fix it. “Oh ye of little faith,” Sarah sighed after a few moments, still chiding herself as, some distance away, Martha Bauer gaped through the window of a stately brick Victorian known as Worthington House, then at the ladies seated around a quilting frame.

“Look at that woman’s hair!” exclaimed Martha with a gasp.

Pausing, needles raised in midair, the other women, mostly elderly, stared curiously through the window into the twilight, scrutinizing the Cadillac sedan idling at the new stop sign on the corner. The driver had short, spiky dark brown hair, streaked with red. “Her hairstyle’s certainly inventive,” Lydia Perry remarked, knowing nothing less could have drawn her mind from the date she’d shared last night with Elias Spencer.

“And is that a wedding dress bunched in the passenger seat?” asked Martha, squinting.

“Sure looks like it,” said Bea Ferguson, determined to speak before anyone initiated another argument about whether or not the new stop sign was really necessary. “And look. She’s got a baby in the back. I see a car seat.”

“A baby?” Lydia leaned forward, wondering where the woman was headed and whether there was a man in the picture. “Do you all think that poor woman’s running from some kind of trouble?”

“Who knows?” sighed Bea. “But if she stops in town for the night, she’ll probably head for the Kelsey Boarding House or the Timberlake Lodge, which means we’ll hear the gossip if there is any.”

“Or she’ll go to Granny Rose’s,” Martha added, referring to Tyler’s bed-and-breakfast. “It’s just a good thing she didn’t park in front of Worthington House. That car looks like something bequeathed by Elvis, don’t you think?” she continued as she bent her head over the quilting frame and surveyed the fabric with sharp eyes that belied her eighty-seven years. “I’d rather walk a mile in orthopedic shoes than be caught dead in a car as awful as that.”

“Martha, not everybody can afford a late-model car,” Kaitlin Rodier reminded gently. The newest group member glanced up from the patchwork quilt. “Besides,” she chided, “with hair like that, she’s got to be from a city, and let’s face it, Tyler can always use some new blood, even if she’s just passing through.”

“City people,” grunted Tillie Phelps grumpily, cocking her head and taking in the quilt’s royal blue border. “I figure we’ve got enough excitement with Quinn Spencer stopping by to chat with us all the time, and with that woman, Caroline Benning, coming to town.”

Everyone fell silent, considering the new waitress at Marge’s Diner. The young woman’s stay at the Kelsey Boarding House had been uneventful, but just last week she’d been found tangled in the rose bushes outside Elias Spencer’s house. She’d sworn she was chasing a stray cat she wanted to take to a vet, but no cat was ever found and now most people figured she’d been spying on the Spencers.

“Well,” Bea finally said as she continued stitching one of the group’s sought-after quilts that were so popular around Tyler, “in addition to Caroline Benning’s being here, all the Spencer boys have come home. Caroline was probably trying to peek at Quinn through the window of Elias’s place, don’t you think?”

“Probably,” Martha agreed. “Quinn is awfully cute.”

“All those Spencer boys are good looking,” Emma Finklebaum mused, nodding as the Cadillac lurched past the stop sign, into the intersection. “Hey, what if that woman knows the Spencers? She does look like she’s from a city, and the Spencers came from New York, remember?”

“Who could forget?” murmured Martha, and for a moment the quilting circle fell respectfully silent again since no one intended to discuss the scandal that had followed the Spencer family to Tyler twenty-three years ago.

“Poor boys,” Lydia finally said, thinking of how her new beau, Elias, had brought his New York society family here to start a life years ago—only to have his wife run off with her New York lover. Lydia and Elias had only been on a few dates, but Lydia liked him and was beginning to fear he wouldn’t learn to love again, no more than his sons probably would.

“Tragic, what Violet Spencer’s leaving Tyler did to those boys,” Emma continued in a hushed, sympathetic tone. “Seth was the oldest, but he was only fourteen at the time. Of course they’re not boys anymore, they’re full-grown men, but you can bet none of them will ever trust a woman.”

“Much less marry one,” Martha agreed with a sad sigh as the gold Cadillac vanished from sight, pulling into Tyler proper and around the town square, prompting a worried Cooper Night Hawk to stare from inside the police station, instinctively double-checking for his gun and badge.

“Ten to one, there’s no current inspection on a vehicle that sounds as bad as that,” Cooper muttered in disgust. At least the driver was a woman, which meant she wasn’t the armed male felon Cooper had just heard about on the dispatch radio. Cooper continued staring through the window, running a hand through his long dark hair, his dark eyes narrowing. Even without seeing the license plate, he now recognized the Cadillac as registered to the rent-a-wreck business at the Madison airport. Whoever the stranger was, she’d flown into Wisconsin.

Sighing, Cooper watched the car continue around the town square. It was dark outside, the gunmetal gray, late October sky both windy and carrying the first whipping sting of winter. As the car passed under a streetlamp, the interior was illuminated and Cooper’s hawklike eyes made out the driver’s delicate features. Striking, he decided. She had a birdlike face with a thin, straight nose and sculpted cheekbones; the artfully cut, jagged ends of her jaw-length hair spiked against a creamy jaw, then feathered down, sweeping her neck. She was a volcano, he decided. Secretly seething and possibly volatile, at least according to his sixth sense. “But what’s a woman who looks like that doing here?” Tyler was hardly a hub. And she wasn’t alone, either. She had a baby in the back seat.

Whatever the case, she and the baby weren’t posing any threat to Tyler’s peace, so the lawman finally turned toward his desk, just as Nora Gates Forrester glanced through the windows of her department store. She’d been rearranging a Halloween display, and as she gawked at the out-of-place gold Cadillac, her well-manicured hand continued fluffing the green wig atop a mannequin dressed as a witch. “I bet that’s a friend of those Spencer boys,” Nora murmured on a premonition as the car rounded the tree-filled square, passing the town hall, dry cleaners and drug store. “Or maybe not,” Nora amended, frowning when the sedan didn’t stop at the corner, or in front of the Spencer-owned bank, the Tyler Savings & Loan, but instead continued toward The Hair Affair, where Marge Phelps, owner of Tyler’s favorite eatery, Marge’s Diner, popped her head out from under a hair dryer. “Now there’s a hairstyle,” she declared, peering through the window at the passing car. “Get a gander, everybody.”

“Your daughter’s acting on Broadway in New York,” chided Sandy Stirling who’d come in for a trim after leaving her job at the town’s most successful homegrown business, Yes! Yogurt. “And you go to New York all the time, Marge. You, of all people, should be used to seeing weird hair.”

“Maybe, but there’s a wedding dress and a baby in the back seat of that car,” countered Marge.

“A baby? Oh, good! For a minute, I was worried,” confessed Molly Blake who, despite the expense, had run in to get her nails done. “I thought it might be that artist…you know, that friend of Seth Spencer’s who agreed to come to town to design the logo, invitations and menus for the bed-and-breakfast I want to open. She said she wouldn’t be here until tomorrow, so I’m not ready to meet her, but if that woman’s got a baby…”

“Then it can’t be her,” finished Tisha, who owned The Hair Affair. “That artist—uh, Jenna Robinson’s her name, right?—she didn’t say she had a baby, did she, Molly?”

Molly swallowed hard. “No, but now that I think about it, I guess she might. How would I know?” Molly still couldn’t decide what to make of the call she’d received from Jenna, who’d introduced herself as an old friend of Seth Spencer’s. Molly had figured she was in luck. If a good friend of the local bankers was designing the menus for the bed-and-breakfast Molly wanted to open, he’d be more likely to give Molly a loan, wouldn’t he? Still, why would an artist call Molly all the way from New York, offer to pay her own traveling expenses to Wisconsin, then agree to do the artwork so cheaply? Even more suspiciously, Jenna had made Molly swear not to tell Seth Spencer she was coming to town, saying she wanted to surprise him.

Dear Lord…what if the woman in the Cadillac is Jenna Robinson? What if she’s come to Tyler with a baby of Seth Spencer’s…a baby Seth doesn’t even know exists?

There goes my loan.

Molly squelched the thought. Yes, she’d definitely started reading too much romance fiction in the lonely times after her husband died. In real life, women didn’t putter into small, uneventful towns like Tyler, driving old gold Cadillacs and wielding babies they’d kept secret from banker daddies. Frowning, Molly stared down at her drying, passion-pink nails, trying to assure herself that tomorrow’s interview with Seth Spencer would go well. Surely, her uneasiness about Jenna’s arrival was unfounded. As soon as possible, maybe even tomorrow, Jenna and Seth would be jointly surveying Molly’s Victorian home. On the phone, Jenna had been responsive to Molly’s ideas for transforming the place into a romantic hideaway; now Molly was hoping Jenna’s artistic excitement would help convince Seth to fork over the start-up capital.

No, Molly decided with finality, the wild-looking woman in the Cadillac with the wedding dress and baby couldn’t be Jenna Robinson. Fate simply wasn’t that unkind. Nevertheless, Molly was still exhaling a worried sigh as the car halted, idling outside Eden Frazier’s flower shop, The Garden of Eden. Inside, Eden brushed back her brown hair, lifted a watering can and stepped around a bucket of eucalyptus. As she inhaled the deep, sweet scent of some nearby roses, her violet eyes squinted, taking in the ancient gold tank. A whimsical smile stretched her lips when she saw the wild-looking woman inside the car who was staring toward the Savings & Loan. “Where did she come from?” Eden whispered.

“New York City,” muttered the only resident of Tyler who could accurately answer that question. Seth Spencer watched the car and driver from his office in the bank. “But what for?”

Me.

“Seth,” he growled, “that’s not Jenna.”

But ever since he’d left New York, Seth had been glimpsing Jenna everywhere: in the Alberta Ingalls Memorial Library, in Amanda Baron Trask’s law offices, outside Marge’s Diner. The woman never really was Jenna, of course. Never would be, either. Jenna’s feelings—or lack of them—were clear when Seth calmly left her Soho loft six weeks ago.

No, the woman in the gold Cadillac couldn’t be Jenna.

Seth glanced past Molly Blake’s loan proposal and today’s copy of the Tyler Citizen, both of which were on his desk, then around the bank’s homey, old-fashioned interior, taking in the red-carpeted floors leading to the teller area. Maybe he should at least head into the lobby and check out the car…

Seth, it’s not her!

Fighting the urge to reach behind him and grab the gray wool jacket to his suit, he swallowed hard, denying his emotions. He shifted his oxford-clad feet, then started to take an unlit cigar out of his mouth and tighten the silver Hermés tie around the collar of his white-pressed shirt. But he didn’t move. Even if it is her, which it’s not, let her come to me.

That was more his style. He’d never let a woman, especially Jenna, see him come running. The house he’d foolishly bought near his father’s Victorian on Maple Street flashed through his mind, and he damned Jenna again, now for how unhappy he’d felt living there these past six weeks. One too many times, he’d found himself standing in the foyer, staring down the block, taking in the wraparound porch and gingerbread trim of his father’s house, a place that had lost its womanly touch after Seth’s mother, Violet, ran off with a man named Ray Bennedict when Seth was fourteen.

Too late Seth had realized that the last thing he needed was to own a four-bedroom house on the same block where he’d grown up. “Too much history,” he muttered now. The sparse steel furniture he’d brought from Manhattan barely filled the living room, and when Seth crossed the hardwood floors, his echoing footsteps sounded empty and hollow, evoking exactly what he’d felt when his mother vanished from Tyler.

He blew out an angry sigh. He should have known Jenna wouldn’t stick around, no more than his mother had. Even worse, before his return to Tyler, he hadn’t thought about his mother for years. In New York, he’d always flown high on external stimulus, his blood rushing with the sound of car horns or ticker tape announcing the latest hot deal on Wall Street. But six weeks ago Seth had landed in Tyler again, harboring still-raw feelings he hadn’t noticed for years. Which was why he needed to quit imagining Jenna was in town. Just like his mother, Jenna had proven she didn’t give a damn.

“Get over it,” he muttered, reaching for the phone. He’d been expecting one of his brothers, Quinn or Brady, to call before quitting time to see if he wanted to get supper at Marge’s Diner, but now Seth thought maybe he should take the initiative for once and call them. But no, somewhere along the line, he’d learned to watch and wait, to gauge how much others extended themselves while holding his own cards close to the vest. Whether the lesson had come from his mother’s abandonment or from working in New York’s cutthroat financial industry, Seth wasn’t sure. Either way, he wound up not picking up the phone.

The whole time, his liquid brown eyes stayed riveted on the Cadillac idling in front of Eden’s flower shop. Outwardly, he didn’t move a muscle; inwardly, he was going crazy. From here, the woman did look like Jenna. For a second, he pretended it was, and that she was impressed by the one-story brick Savings & Loan that was now his. Seth Spencer, said the brass nameplate on his office door. President.

Not that Jenna would care. Against his will, Seth visualized her Soho loft, the tasseled pillows, stacked books, and rock-hard, thigh-high queen-size bed that was perfect for lovemaking. The image was razor-sharp since Seth had showered, shaved and slept there with enough regularity over the past year and a half that the place felt like home.

Jenna had been naked in bed when he told her he was leaving a job at Goldman Sachs to return to Tyler as president of the family’s S&L, since his father, Elias, was retiring.

“Wonderful,” was all Jenna had said.

“Wonderful,” he muttered now. She hadn’t voiced concern for the future of their relationship, nor asked if he wanted to keep in touch. In fact, she hadn’t even quit painting her toenails. Even now he could see her: wearing a crimson nightie, sitting on the mussed covers of the bed, tilting a bottle of mint-green polish in one hand and brushing the nail of her baby toe with the other. She hadn’t been the least perturbed that he was leaving. Why couldn’t he just accept it?

He blew out another sigh, this one more murderous than the last. And why was that ugly gold junker still idling? Was it really Jenna? Was she waiting for him to notice her? To come out and strike up a conversation?

“If that’s what you’re thinking, sweetheart, keep dreaming,” Seth whispered around the unlit cigar, unaware his posture was exactly as it had been twenty-three years ago, on Thanksgiving Day, when he’d sat ponderously at his father’s kitchen table after hearing that his mother had disappeared. Later that day, he’d been told she’d run off with Ray Bennedict. Before nightfall, Seth had decided his mother was never coming back, and he’d promised himself he wouldn’t hope for a phone call or a knock at the door. He wouldn’t torture himself with the usual, ridiculous adolescent fantasies…wouldn’t imagine his mother coming to the schoolyard fence, her haunted eyes searching for him and his brothers, Quinn and Brady….

No, once she left, it was best never to expect a woman to return.

Seth leaned forward, anyway, wishing the woman in the Cadillac didn’t look so much like Jenna. He didn’t trust his perceptions, though, no more than he could admit how her lovemaking had affected him. Model-tall and fire-hot, Jenna had burned in his arms like a flaming torch. She possessed wild, short, red-streaked hair and a trendy wardrobe of sequined sweaters, feathered earrings and capes that electrified Seth’s every last male nerve. Where he strictly wore muted browns and grays, Jenna’s wardrobe exploded in magenta and turquoise, violet and crimson. All brightly colored motion, she’d been like a bird, flitting around him while Seth stayed still as a statue.

Somehow they’d fit, though.

“Our bodies sure did,” he growled, gritting his teeth against the sudden, unwanted ache of his groin. Ever since he’d happened into the Soho gallery where she worked, he and Jenna had dated. Not seriously, they’d assured each other, even though they’d wound up in bed on the first date. The next evening, on the second, they’d ordered takeout and made love while devouring Chinese food, and on the third date they’d quit bothering with the food.

But it was only sex, they’d said. Unusual chemical attraction. Nothing more.

They’d even gone months between dates as if to prove their continued emotional sovereignty. But now, as Seth stared at the car idling in the road, he admitted the truth. He still wanted her. He missed her like the devil.

Maybe he should have initiated a talk about their relationship before he left New York, but Jenna knew that wasn’t his style, didn’t she? Sighing, he tried to ignore the panic in his gut. He shouldn’t have minded the feeling. He was used to money deals and playing daily roulette with the stock market, and now that he had his own bank, the stakes were even higher. But when he made banking decisions, rows of neat, orderly figures backed him up. The panic he felt now was different. This panic was female-related, and Seth knew next to nothing about females.

Banking, he understood. Slowly and steadily, he’d worked for years, garnering the experience needed to run the S&L, a business in which his brothers Quinn and Brady had no personal interest. Seth had followed their father’s every step, going from Columbia to Wharton, then to Goldman Sachs—all so that now, at the age of thirty-seven, he could run this bank.

He’d never imagined that only six weeks after taking the job he’d be fighting the urge to turn his back on everything he’d ever worked for, just so he could return to New York and Jenna. Jenna, who doesn’t even want you.

The Cadillac started moving again.

His heart missed a beat.

But no, it really couldn’t be Jenna. She was from a Podunk North Carolina town she’d professed to hate, and once she’d left for the big city, she’d never looked back. Jenna would never venture into a place that lacked a cappuccino bar, a foreign film theater or inch-thick tabloids dripping with juicy celebrity gossip. Not that Tyler lacked gossip, Seth thought with remembered anger, his broad, powerful back stiffening to ward off buried emotions left over from adolescence. After his mother ran off with Ray, Seth had endured more than his share of pitying glances and hushed whispers. It hurt having the whole town know the Spencers hadn’t been man enough to hang on to the woman they loved.

It was why, if Seth was honest, he’d rather be anywhere in the world than Tyler, Wisconsin, this time of year. October was nearly gone, and Canadian air—cold, crisp and thin—was sweeping south into the region and chilling him to the bone.

Twenty years, he thought. Hard to believe, but it had been twenty years since he’d lived in Tyler. A lifetime. He’d been sure that when he came back home, the old feelings of loss and longing would be gone, but this was cold, hard, wintry country, with glassy lakes and too much empty space, the kind of country that always left a man with too much time on his hands to think about his past.

One too many nights Seth had needed Jenna to keep him warm. Now he cursed the stranger in the car for making him remember how her soft, smooth skin had burned under his greedy hands, and how easily her damp, wanting mouth had slackened for his, memories that made his groin tighten.

Memories, Seth thought, were damn powerful things.

Outside, the car swerved. Silently, he watched the headlights sweeping the pavement as the car rounded a corner, then disappeared. Only then did he rise. He kept staring into the dark, his eyes inadvertently searching, his heart aching with familiar loss and the firmly held conviction that once a woman was gone from a man’s life, she never returned.

“WHERE’S THE Kelsey Boarding House?” Jenna Robinson groaned, twisting the sparkling engagement ring on her finger and glancing into the rearview mirror, to where Gretchen was strapped in a car seat. “Hey there, sweetie,” she added. “You holding up okay?”

The two-year-old yawned.

Jenna chuckled. Gretchen looked adorable, dressed in black corduroy overalls and a pint-size black leather jacket. “We’re almost there,” Jenna assured, freeing a hand and flattening Molly Blake’s directions against the cracked vinyl of the ample dashboard. Staring through the windshield, Jenna tried to ignore her hammering heart. “What was I thinking?” she murmured, knowing she shouldn’t have stopped outside the S&L. Was Seth working? Or had he left the office for the day?

“Jenna, you’re pathetic.” She had only one piece of business to take care of in Tyler, Wisconsin—informing Seth she was getting married next week. And who could blame her for wanting to deliver the news as soon as possible? After she’d endured a painful year and a half of Seth’s noncommittal behavior, somebody else had fallen desperately in love with her and wanted to help her raise the baby she was carrying. Just thinking of the life growing inside her made her eyes soften.

Seth’s baby.

Pushing aside the thought, she decided that she had to get some rest and change clothes before she told him the news. She was covered with road grime. Besides, one look around the Madison airport had made perfectly clear that Jenna was all wrong for Wisconsin, not that her fishnet stockings, feathered sweater and miniskirt were that strange. Nor did she think she’d packed anything much more conservative. Nevertheless, she was tired of people staring at her as if she were wearing a Halloween costume. “This place could sure use some action,” she muttered, glancing around the dark, tree-lined street. With Halloween upcoming, maybe she’d dress as a bank robber and target the Spencer family’s bank.

Meantime, every horse, wire fence and mile on the odometer of the Cadillac reminded her of why she’d fled Bear Creek, North Carolina, for the Fashion Institute of New York the second she turned eighteen. Her hands tightened on the wheel as she thought of North Carolina and her parents, not that she exactly wanted to dwell on Nancy and Ralph, who were so close they’d scarcely ever seemed to notice their daughter existed. It was probably why Jenna had so foolishly pursued Seth, willing to take the crumbs he called affection.

“Face it, Jenna, it’s your cross to bear.” She glanced at the faded paperback cover of Women Who Love Too Much, which was beside her on the seat. She’d brought it to reread on the plane. When it came to attracting unavailable men, she was like the magnet inside an MRI.

Or she had been.

But now she was loved. Cherished. Cared for in the exact way she deserved. Her throat tightening, she thought of the Soho art gallery owned by her friend, Sue Ellis, who was Gretchen’s mom, and then she thought of the gallery’s co-owner, Dom Milano.

Even now, she could barely believe Dom had proposed. Buoyed up by the passion he’d expressed, Jenna felt her heart ache. She’d met the two gallery owners only a week after moving to New York, and over the past sixteen years, they’d become her substitute family. It was why Jenna had agreed, at the eleventh hour, to watch Gretchen while Sue went on an impromptu art buying trip to Paris.