Marie Ferrarella - A Billionaire and a Baby

“Yes,” Sin-Jin shouted again, then lowered his voice, “in a very irritating sort of way.” He took the empty glass out of her hand and put it squarely on the table. “Now, I think it’s time you showed me where this car of yours allegedly died.”

Sherry looked up with wide eyes. “I don’t think I can do that.”

“And why is that?”

Spacious or not, the room began to feel as if it closed in on her and there was this awful pain emanating from the center of her body. “Because I think my water just broke.”

Sin-Jin was almost disappointed. You’d really think a reporter could do better than that. “Ms. Campbell, I wasn’t born yesterday or the day before that.”

She was having trouble breathing. “I don’t think that when you were born is going to be an issue, but this baby…wants to be born…today.”

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Brenda and Frank Corl,

with affection.

earned a master’s degree in Shakespearean comedy and, perhaps as a result, her writing is distinguished by humor and natural dialogue. This RITA ®Award-winning author’s goal is to entertain and to make people laugh and feel good. She has written over one hundred books for Silhouette, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide and have been translated into Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Polish, Japanese and Korean.

Come join the fun and excitement of Marie Ferrarella’s new miniseries, The Mom Squad—four single mothers who come together to experience life’s greatest miracle.

is…

Sherry Campbell—newswoman extraordinaire, benched when her boss discovered her little predicament….

A Billionaire and a Baby, SE #1528, available March 2003

Joanna Prescott—this teacher wanted a baby more than anything, and she found one at the local sperm bank!

A Bachelor and a Baby, SD #1503, available April 2003

Chris “C.J.” Jones—as an FBI agent and expectant mother, C.J. was always on the go, even when the risks were high. Was love and happily-ever-after just what C.J.’s heart needed?

The Baby Mission, IM #1220, available May 2003

Lori O’Neill—at the helm, this Lamaze teacher soothed and instructed her pregnant charges—and had her own little bundle about to appear.

Beauty and the Baby, SR#1668, available June 2003

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Epilogue

“Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

The question was finally directed at Sherry Campbell after ten minutes of covert and not-so-covert staring on the part of the new office assistant as she copied a file. The assistant, standing at the Bedford World News’s centrally located copy machine, wasn’t even aware that the state-of-the-art machine had ceased to spit out pages and was now content to sit on its laurels, waiting for her next move.

The assistant’s next move, apparently, was to continue staring. Her brow furrowed as she attempted to concentrate and remember just where and when she had seen her before.

Sherry stifled a sigh of annoyance.

It wasn’t that she was unaccustomed to that look of vague recognition on a person’s face. Sometimes Sherry was successfully “placed,” but as time went on, not so often. There was a time, at the height of her previous career, where that was a regular occurrence. She couldn’t say that she really minded. Then.

These days, however, people were just as apt to rudely stare at her swollen belly as they were at her face, that being the reason why her former career was a thing of the past. It was her unscheduled pregnancy that had gotten her dismissed from her anchor job and brought her to this junction in her life. Not in so many words, of course. Television studios and the people who ran them had an almost pathological fear of being sued because of some PC transgression on their parts. So when she had begun to show and told Ryan Matthews of her pregnancy, the executive producer of the nightly news had conveniently found a way to slip her into something less visible than the five o’clock news anchor position.

Within a day of her notifying Matthews that her waistline was going to be expanding, he had given her place to newcomer Lisa Willows and transformed her into senior copy editor, whimsically calling the move a lateral one. When she’d confronted him with his transparent motives, he’d lamely told her that demographics, even in this day and age, wouldn’t have supported her “flaunting her free lifestyle.” People, he’d said, still found unmarried pregnant women offensive and weren’t about to welcome them into their living rooms night after night.

Matthews’s words, even after five months, still rang in her ears. The fact that Sherry delivered the news behind a desk that was more than equal to hiding her increasing bulk from the general public, and that she’d never had a so-called free lifestyle—the pregnancy having arisen from her one and only liaison, a man who took no responsibility other than giving her the name of an abortion clinic—carried no weight with Matthews. With his spine the consistency of overcooked spaghetti, Matthews bent in the general direction of the greatest pressure. In this case it was the studio heads.

“If they can shoot around pregnant actresses on sitcoms to hide their conditions, why not me?” Sherry had insisted, but even then she knew it was no use. Matthews’s mind had been made up for him. She was politely and firmly offered her new position or the door.

She took the door.

Her first inclination to “sue the pants off the bastard” faded, even as her friends and family rallied around her, echoing the sentiment. The last thing Sherry wanted was to draw negative attention to the baby she was carrying. She’d come to the conclusion that the less attention, the better.

In mulling over her options, she’d decided to take her circumstance as a sign that she should return to her first love: the written word. This meant following in her father’s footsteps. Connor Campbell had been a well-respected, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist before his retirement. It was because of him that she had gone into the news business in the first place.

Determination had always been her hallmark. So, after allowing herself an afternoon to grieve over her late, lamented career, Sherry moved full steam ahead, firing all torpedoes. She went to Owen Carmichael, her father’s best friend and her godfather and asked for a job. Having started out with her father in the days before electric typewriters, Owen Carmichael was now the editor in chief of the Bedford World News.

Owen had been glad to hire her. Of course, she’d thought that he’d start her out with something a little more meaty than lighter-than-air fluff.

That was where her mind was right now, on the latest puff piece she was facing, not the assistant who stared at her with intense blue eyes and a puzzled frown on her face.