Читать книгу The Agent's Secret Baby - Marie Ferrarella - Страница 8

After more than two years undercover, disappearing into the shadows had become second nature to Adam Serrano.

Usually the object of his surveillance was an unsavory character involved in the ever-mushrooming, lethal drug trade, not a female veterinarian with killer legs, liquid blue eyes and a soul Snow White would have been in awe of.

The anonymous tip that had appeared without warning on his computer yesterday morning had been right. Eve Walters was right here in Laguna Beach, practically right under his nose.

Who would have thought it? The irony of the situation was still very fresh in his mind. She had disappeared on him eight months ago, doing what he hadn’t been able to bring himself to do: leaving. Reading her letter, a letter he still had in his possession, had cut small, jagged holes in his soul. His first instinct had been to go after her, to find her and bring her back.

But he’d forced himself to refrain.

It hadn’t been easy. Eventually, his common sense had prevailed. This was for the best.

Though he missed Eve more than he would have ever thought possible, Adam had every intention of allowing her to stay out of his life. Being part of his life would have been far too dangerous for her.

The nature of his “business,” searching for the source of the latest flood of heroin, had brought him here, down to southern California. These days, the hard reality of it was that, despite his agency’s efforts, the drug culture was alive and thriving absolutely everywhere. The drugs on the street apparently knew no caste system, bringing down the rich, as well as the poor. The only difference was that the rich didn’t need to knock over a liquor store, or rob an elderly couple or kill some unsuspecting innocent to feed their habit. That’s what Mommy and Daddy were for, blindly throwing money at the problem instead of helping their spoiled, pampered offspring morph into respectable people.

Life didn’t work that way. But it was obviously still full of surprises.

Not the least of which was that his work had brought him down here, almost at Eve’s door, as it were.

But moving the base of his “operation” to Laguna still wouldn’t have had him skulking around, camping out in unmarked cars and hiding in doorways to catch a glimpse of her or acting like some wayward guardian angel if that anonymous message on his computer hadn’t knocked him for a loop.

“Eve is pregnant with your baby.” The terse sentence was followed by an address. Nothing more.

He’d presumed the address belonged to Eve. Minimal effort via his computer had proven him right. He recalled her mentioning that she had grown up somewhere in this area and that her dad had had an animal hospital here.

When he looked up the animal hospitals in and around Laguna, he found an “E. Walters” listed. He remembered her telling him that her father’s name was Warren. That meant that she was now running the Animal Hospital of Laguna Beach.

And she was pregnant, supposedly with his baby.

Even so, Adam had debated ignoring the message, telling himself it was some kind of trick to have him come forward. And even if it wasn’t a trick, he could do nothing about the situation. It was her body, not his. Whether or not she kept this baby was up to her, not him.

That argument had lasted all of ten minutes, if that long. Even as he posed it, Adam knew he had to see for himself whether or not it was true.

He fervently hoped that it wasn’t.

But it was. Or, at least, she was carrying someone’s child.

In his gut, he knew it was his.

Juggling things so that he could put everything else temporarily on hold for the evening, Adam stationed himself in a nondescript vehicle on the through street that ran by Eve’s house. He was careful to park on the opposite side, waiting to catch another glimpse of the only woman who had managed to break through his carefully constructed barriers.

It was Halloween and he knew the way Eve felt about kids. The same way she felt about helpless animals. No way was she going to be one of those people who either left their home for the evening every Halloween or pretended not to hear the doorbell or the noise generated by approaching bands of costumed children.

Personally, he never liked the holiday. Dealing with the scum of the earth for the last ten years, he knew what was out there. And what could happen to trusting children.

Hell, if he had a kid …

He did have a kid, Adam realized abruptly. Or would have one. Soon, if his math served him.

Damn, he hadn’t gotten used to that idea yet. A father.

Him.

Maybe the baby wasn’t his, Adam thought. A woman as beautiful as Eve Walters had to have a lot of men after her. A lot of men trying to get her to sleep with them …

Even as he made the excuses, Adam knew they weren’t true. Eve wasn’t the type to sleep around. He’d known that even before they’d made love. And when they had, he’d discovered to his everlasting surprise that she was a virgin. He’d been her first.

How?

How the hell had this happened? he silently demanded.

He’d made sure he used protection. Pausing in the middle of heated passion had been damn awkward, but he had done it, mindful of the consequences if he didn’t. Even so, she had made him lose his head and it had been all he could do to hold on to his common sense.

Common sense, now there was a misnomer. Common sense just wasn’t common. If he’d actually had any, he would’ve gotten a grip on himself then and there. Instead of reaching for a condom, he would have reached for his jeans and walked away.

Adam shook his head. Who the hell was he kidding? A saint couldn’t have walked away from Eve, not when things had reached that level. Not with that delicious mouth of hers. Not with that body, slick with sweat and desire, his for the taking. And God knew he wasn’t a saint—far from it. He was just a man. And she had made him vulnerable.

And now, apparently, he had returned the favor and done the same to her.

He had no family, not anymore. And when it was only him, the danger didn’t matter.

But now it mattered.

If she was pregnant, he was going to need to protect her. If these rich lowlifes he dealt with found out she was pregnant with his baby, there was more than a slim chance, if things went awry, that they would do something to her. He put nothing past them, nothing past the middle man he was currently working with, a college senior majoring in heroin distribution. Danny Sederholm might kidnap Eve—or the baby—if it gave the kid the advantage and secured leverage against him. Nobody trusted anybody in this so-called “business.”

Adam shifted in his seat, feeling restless and confined. Where were the hoards of kids, wandering around the neighborhood and ringing doorbells in their quest for cavities? Had they all suddenly come to their senses and abandoned the trick-or-treating ritual?

Get a grip, Serrano.

He wasn’t usually this impatient. But this was different. This wasn’t just about him.

Hell, he would have felt a lot better just knowing who the message had come from.

The fact that it could all be a trap was not lost on him. No computer novice, he’d spent a good part of yesterday trying to trace where the message had originated. A good part of yesterday was spent in frustration.

Striking out, he’d gotten in contact with his handler, Hugh Patterson, who in turn had turned Spenser onto the task. Spenser was a wunderkind when it came to the computer. When Spenser failed to find where the e-mail had come from, he knew that they were dealing with a five-star pro.

Good pro or bad pro?

Adam hadn’t the slightest idea, but for now, his anonymous tipster didn’t seem to have an agenda, other than passing on this tidbit of information. Why he or she had done that, Adam hadn’t a clue. Was it to taunt him, to show him he was vulnerable, or to get him to stand up and do the right thing? Or was this tipster just out to entertain himself or play deus ex machina behind the scenes?

Adam wished he knew.

But he did know what his next step had to be. And he took it.

Laura Delaney sat down at her desk, getting back to her Web site. Jeremy was finally in bed, asleep, or at least, asleep for the time being. She had no doubt that at least some of the candy he’d collected tonight had found its way into his bottomless tummy despite her strict rules about his only eating two pieces tonight and evenly doling out the rest for the following week. She’d offered those terms, hoping that a compromise would be reached at five. Maybe six.

Bid low, go high, she thought, amused.

She loved this holiday, loved seeing the excitement in her young son’s eyes. Taking after her, Jeremy had started planning his costume right after school began in September. Most of all, she loved seeing life through his deep brown eyes. Everything felt so fresh, so new again seeing it from Jeremy’s perspective. After all the time she’d spent in the CIA, this new outlook was a godsend to her.

Getting pregnant with Jeremy was definitely the best thing that had ever happened to her.

Although it certainly hadn’t felt so at the time.

At the time, making the discovery a week after her intense debriefing in Singapore, the pregnancy had knocked the pins right out from beneath her world. And there was never any question as to who the father was. Jeremy’s father was a dynamic, larger-than-life handsome man who had quite literally saved her life.

The whole thing had been almost like a scene out of the movies. The one where the hero put out his hand to the heroine and growled darkly, “Come with me if you want to live.”

She’d wanted to live all right. Pinned down in a hopeless situation, knowing she’d be dead by dawn if she stayed, she’d had no recourse but to come with the man who had suddenly burst into her life.

In true knight-in-shining-armor style, he’d used his body to shield hers and had hustled her out of what would have been a terminal situation. A hairbreadth away from being captured by the people she, as a CIA operative, had been sent to spy on, Laura had had no illusions about her situation. Had he not suddenly materialized in that embassy room, seemingly out of nowhere, she knew she would not have lived to see another sunrise.

Instead, she’d lived to watch the sunrise in a small fishing hut, sequestered in his arms. Funny how almost dying makes you so anxious to live, to experience and savor everything. The escape, the pursuit and then hiding in a fishing village, posing as fishermen, had all contributed to her heightened desire to live. Her desire to seize all that life had to offer.

What life had offered was a man whose name she never learned.

She had learned that she hadn’t been afraid to seize the moment, and neither had he. They were drawn to one another like the missing two halves of a whole. Their coming together was nothing short of earthshaking. It had been predestined.

Then came the dawn and the rest of life.

He smuggled her out of the village, put her on a transport plane and then, much too quickly, faded out of her life. Faded even though she asked more than one operative who the masked man was. Time and again, she received conflicting answers. The upshot was that no one seemed to know who he was or where he came from. It was almost as if he was a phantom.

Laura went on asking more urgently when she discovered that she was pregnant. But the result remained the same. No one could tell her. The few leads she had all ended in a dead end, taking her to operatives who turned out not to be the man who had saved her life and planted another inside her.

Pregnant, she had another life to think about other than her own. Laura decided she had no choice but to leave her present life behind. Because of her love of animals and having been raised on a ranch, she took up horse training in an effort to create a stable—no pun intended—normal life for her son.

These days, the life she’d once led almost seemed like a dream, or an action novel she’d read a long, long time ago. The only thing left to remind her that she had once actually been a CIA operative was her ability to utilize information—and sources—to allow her to find people. Ironically, despite numerous tries, she couldn’t find Jeremy’s father, but once she’d read Eve Walters’s e-mail and learned the woman’s story, she had used all the information available to her to see if she could track down the so-called “drug dealer” who had impregnated the woman.

As she read Eve’s story, her gut almost immediately told her that the man who had fathered Eve’s baby wasn’t the drug pusher the woman believed him to be. Laura knew the life, knew the deceptions that were so necessary in order to maintain a cover. Something she couldn’t put into words told her that Eve’s “Adam” was part of some kind of government agency.

A little research and calling in several favors from old friends proved her right.

Adam Smythe was actually Adam Serrano, a DEA agent who had been working undercover for the last two years. There was more background on the man, but that was all she was interested in. Laura saw no reason to delve into the man’s history any further than was absolutely necessary. The life she led now made her acutely aware of the need for, and seductive appeal of, privacy. She gave Adam Serrano his.

Armed with this information, it took little for her to find both Adam’s Internet server and with that, his e-mail address. Her stark e-mail message to him went out the moment she secured it.

If Adam was anything like her, she reasoned, his sense of family would leap to the foreground, especially since he had none. She was fairly certain that he would lose no time trying to track down the mother of this unborn child he hadn’t realized was in the offing.

Laura was more than a little tempted to e-mail Eve and let her know that Adam was coming, but that might have made the woman bolt. Bolting was the last thing she needed to do at this late stage in her pregnancy.

Eve needed exactly what she was most likely going to get.

What she, herself, would have loved to get, Laura thought wistfully.

But, except for an occasional daydream, she had given up the fantasy that had her mystery man knocking on her door, the way she envisioned Adam doing now, or definitely in the very near future, on Eve’s door.

Laura smiled as she replayed the thought. It wasn’t every day a girl got the chance to bring Adam and Eve together, she mused, more than a little pleased with herself.

With renewed purpose, Laura went on to read the next e-mail that had been sent to her site from another single mom.

The doorbell was ringing.

Eve pressed her lips together. She had just shut down her computer for the night. Glancing at her watch, she saw that it was almost nine o’clock.

Nine o’clock and she was struggling to keep her eyes open.

Some party girl she was, Eve mocked herself. She could remember going two days without sleep when she was in college. Three days once, she recalled. There was no way she could do that now. But then, this pregnancy and the tension that had come with it served to drain her and make her overly tired more than she cared to acknowledge.

This was probably nothing compared to how tired she was going to be once the baby learned how to walk and get into things, she thought. She was looking forward to that, she realized. Looking forward to being a parent—

The doorbell rang again.

What kind of a responsible parent allowed their child to still be out, trick-or-treating at this hour? The little ones needed to be home, asleep in their beds, or at least in their beds.

Most likely it was another one of those high school kids, she thought, bracing her hands on the chair’s armrests and pushing herself to her feet. She’d had several of those tonight, costumed kids who towered over her. One looked old enough to shave.

She hated the way they abused Halloween, horning in on a holiday that was intended for little children to enjoy. Oh, well, she still had some candy left over. She might as well give it to them. It was better for her that way.

Eve knew her weakness. If there was candy hanging around in a bowl, no matter what she promised herself about being good, the pieces would eventually find their way into her mouth. The problem was, Eve thought, she had never met a piece of candy, chocolate or otherwise she didn’t like.

“Time to get rid of the temptation,” she told Tessa. Gently snoring, the dog ignored her.

Picking up the bowl, Eve carried it with her as she made her way to the front door.

“Some guard dog you are,” she quipped, tossing the remark over her shoulder. Tessa still didn’t stir.

About to open the door, she had to stop for a second as yet another pain seized her, stealing her breath and causing her to all but double over. This was getting very old. Just as perspiration broke out all along her brow, the pain receded. She let out a long breath and then reached for the front door.

Since she was right-handed, Eve had to shift the bowl over to her left side and then open the door with her right.

But this time, no chorus of “Trick or treat!”—even a baritone chorus—greeted her.

Instead, the uncostumed, tall, dark and still pulseracingly handsome man who was standing on her doorstep said, “Hello, Eve.”

The lights in the living room behind her seemed to dim slightly, even as her head began to spin about. Eve struggled to catch hold of it. Reality and everything that went with it distanced itself from her.

The bowl she was holding slipped out of her hand and onto the light gray tiled floor, shattering the second it made contact.

It was only by sheer luck that she hadn’t gone down with it.