Читать книгу Wanted: Father for Her Baby: Keeping Baby Secret / Five Brothers and a Baby / Expecting Brand's Baby - BEVERLY BARTON, Beverly Barton - Страница 6

Leenie checked the refrigerator for the third time. The bottles of milk were there, as she knew they would be. Just where she’d put them. But she simply had to check a final time, had to make sure nothing had been left undone. After all, this was a turning point in her life, a make-or-break night. As she hurried by the computer desk in her kitchen, she glanced at the list of phone numbers posted by the telephone. Emergency numbers, her cell number, her private number at work, as well as the switchboard number.

Rushing out of the kitchen and down the hall, her heartbeat rapid and her stomach painfully knotted, she wondered why this had to be so difficult. It wasn’t as if she was the first woman in the world to go through this painful separation. Millions of women throughout the world had done what she was doing and most of them could probably sympathize with her feelings of guilt and fear.

As she neared the end of the hall, she slowed her pace, took a deep breath and told herself that she could do this. She was a strong woman. An independent woman. When she reached the nursery, she looked from Debra, who smiled compassionately, to Andrew, who lay sleeping peacefully in his bed, totally unaware of the trauma his mother was experiencing.

“Everything will be all right.” Debra draped her arm around Leenie’s shoulders. “You’ll be gone only a few hours and he’ll probably sleep the entire time you’re away.”

“But if he wakes and I’m not here…” Leenie pulled away from her son’s nanny, walked over to Andrew’s bassinet and watched her six-week-old baby as he slept. His little chest rose and fell softly with each tender breath he took. She reached out to touch his rosy cheek.

“If he wakes, I’ll be right here,” Debra assured her. “And if he’s hungry, you left breast milk in the fridge. You aren’t deserting him forever, you’re just going to work.”

“Maybe we should postpone this another week or so.” Leenie couldn’t bear the thought of being separated from Andrew, even for the four hours it would take her to drive to WJMM, do her two-hour midnight talk-show on the radio, set things up for her morning TV show and then drive home.

“No, we won’t postpone it,” Debra said firmly. “We can continue taking Andrew to the station every morning for your daytime show, but he shouldn’t be dragged out of his bed every night.” Debra crossed her arms over her chest and narrowed her gaze. “Go to work, Leenie. You do your job and let me do mine.”

Sighing heavily, Leenie admitted her deepest fears. “But one of my jobs is being Andrew’s mother and if you do your job too well, my son will bond with you and not me.”

Huffing loudly, but following up with an understanding smile, Debra patted Leenie’s arm. “Andrew has already bonded with you. He knows you’re his mother. If I do my job well, and I’d like to think I’ve been doing that since the day we brought Andrew home from the hospital, then he’ll think of me as a favorite aunt or as a grandmother.”

“I’m being silly, aren’t I?”

“No, you’re being a good mother.”

“Am I a good mother? I’m not sure what makes a good mother. As you well know, I didn’t have one of my own. No mother at all raised me, good, bad or otherwise.”

“Jerry and I were parents to over fifty foster kids in our thirty years of marriage.” Debra sighed dreamily, as she always did whenever she mentioned her late husband, who had died two years ago at the age of sixty-three from a heart attack. “I’ve seen all kinds of mothers and I know a good one from a bad one.”

“Yes, I imagine you do. You were certainly an excellent role model for me when I lived with you and Jerry. I learned by watching the way you were with all of us foster children what a good mother is.” She had been fifteen when she’d been sent to live with Debra and Jerry Schmale, a young minister and his wife who’d been told they could never have children of their own and had decided they would give their love and time to unwanted, neglected kids of all ages. The three years she’d spent with the Schmales had been the best years of her childhood.

“You, Dr. Lurleen Patton, are a good mother,” Debra said.

“Even though I’m a single parent? Even though I didn’t provide Andrew with a father?”

“You told me that Andrew was the result of a very brief affair with a man you barely knew. A man who showed no interest in settling down. A man who was very careful to use protection each time y’all made love.”

Leenie nodded. “One of those times, that protection failed. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have gotten pregnant. But that wasn’t Frank’s fault.”

“You made the decision not to tell Andrew’s father about his existence because you felt it was the best thing for everyone concerned. Right?”

“Right.”

“Have you changed your mind?”

No, she hadn’t changed her mind. Although, truth be told, sometimes she wished she had called Frank the day she’d found out she was pregnant, called him and told him he was going to be a daddy. But she’d been so shocked herself that it had taken her weeks to figure out what to do. By the time she decided she wanted to keep her baby and raise it herself, she had also decided that the last thing Frank Latimer would want in his life was a child. Their entire relationship had lasted less than two weeks. Love hadn’t been involved. Just a major case of lust.

“No, I haven’t changed my mind. If Frank knew he had a child, it would simply complicate his life and mine, not to mention Andrew’s.”

Debra turned Leenie around, grasped her shoulders and all but shoved her out of the room. “If you don’t leave now, you’ll be late.” Debra walked Leenie into the hallway and all the way to the back door. “Call me every thirty minutes, if that will make you feel better—but go. Now!”

Leenie sighed. “Thanks. I don’t know what I’d do without you. Sometimes I think I need you even more than Andrew does.”

Debra hugged her, then lifted Leenie’s jacket and purse from where they hung on a coatrack near the door, handed them to her and said, “Drive carefully, call as often as you need to, have a great show tonight and I’ll be waiting up for you when you come home.”

Leenie slipped into her coat, draped her purse straps over her shoulder and opened the back door that led into the garage. She unlocked her new GMC Envoy SUV, a vehicle she’d purchased a month before her son’s birth. Of course she’d kept her sports car, but hadn’t used it since Andrew had been born because she never went anywhere without him. Use it tonight, she told herself. Get in your Mustang and fly off down the road.

After locking the SUV, she went over to the Mustang, unlocked it and got in, then revved the motor and hit the remote that opened the garage. Within minutes she was zipping along the highway that led from the suburbs of Maysville, Mississippi, into the downtown area where the studios for both WJMM radio and TV stations were located. She’d been doing a late-night radio talk show and a morning TV show for quite a few years and enjoyed being a local celebrity, a psychiatrist who doled out advice over the airwaves five days and nights a week.

When she’d been younger, she had longed to create a family of her own. Having grown up in a series of foster homes and remembering very little about her own parents, she had always felt so alone. Her mother had died when she was four and her father when she was eight. A skinny, gangly girl, who had talked too much and tried too hard to make others like her, she’d never had a real chance of being adopted. From eight to eighteen, she’d been shifted around from foster home to foster home. She’d felt unloved and unwanted all her life and by the time she hit thirty and Prince Charming hadn’t entered her life, she’d pretty much given up hope for that fantasized happily ever after ending in her life.

Although she’d been around the block a few times, as the old saying went, she wasn’t promiscuous. Each time she’d been in a committed relationship, she’d wanted it to be “the one.” And she’d never had a one-night stand. Not until Frank Latimer entered her life. Or should she say breezed in and out of her life. And technically, he hadn’t really been a one-night stand. More like a ten day mini-affair. She’d taken one look at the big lug and fallen hard and fast. They had set the sheets on fire and what she’d thought would be a one-nighter turned into a very brief, extremely passionate relationship.

Leenie wished it wasn’t late November already so she could put the top down on her car and achieve that wild and free feeling it gave her to ride with the wind. Maybe that’s what she needed—some cold night air to clear away the cobwebs. As hard as she tried to relegate Frank Latimer to the back of her mind, to put him into the past where he belonged, she found it difficult, if not impossible, to do. Although Andrew had her blond hair and blue eyes, he resembled Frank or the way she was sure Frank had looked as a baby. And every time she looked at her son, she saw his father. How could she—a psychiatrist who’d been trained to understand the human psyche—have ever thought she’d be able to forget about the man who had fathered her child? Whether or not he was actually in her life, he’d always be a part of it. Andrew was the living, breathing proof of that.

She’d told Debra that she wasn’t having any second thoughts about contacting Frank to let him know he had a child, but maybe she’d been lying to herself as well as Debra. Maybe she should call Frank, feel him out, see if there was somebody special in his life these days. Or maybe she should just fly to Atlanta and take Andrew with her. No, she couldn’t do that, couldn’t just show up on Frank’s doorstep.

Stop debating the issue, she told herself. You’re not going to call Frank. And she wasn’t going to fly to Atlanta. If he had the slightest interest in renewing his relationship with her, he’d have called by now. After all, it was over ten months since he’d said goodbye and walked out of her life without a backward glance. She had to accept the fact that Frank wasn’t her Prince Charming, accept the fact that there was no such animal. Just because he’d been different from the other men she’d known didn’t mean she was as special to him as he had been to her. What they’d had wasn’t love. It was just sex.