Margot Early - Forever And A Baby

He wanted to thank her for loving that child so unconditionally. “I love you,” he said.

Dru watched his lips. Her legs shivered, her heart pounded. A prickling warmth needled her face and scalp. She hugged herself.

Ben stood closer, touched her cheeks.

“I love you,” he repeated, his body almost brushing hers, ready to catch her if she fell into another fearful trance—a memory of their past, in the desert. Ready to catch her whenever she fell, or at least help her up. “Will you marry me?” he asked.

Dru saw the man across from her, and on the thought that she’d never love another, her eyes filled.

She’d believed that about Omar, too. Her husband. Now dead.

But Ben Hall was this baby’s father—and would be her husband. Soon.

Dear Reader,

I’m happy to introduce the fourth book in my continuing Harlequin Superromance series, THE MIDWIVES. While the characters from You Were on My Mind, Talking About My Baby and There Is a Season enjoy the love they’ve found, we meet two new midwives, best friends Dru and Keziah.

Keziah attends home births on the island of Nantucket. But Dru, a certified nurse midwife, was torn from her vocation years ago by family notoriety and her marriage to a renowned financier. Just as it seems all her dreams will be lost, her husband’s death brings her a chance at love with childhood friend Ben Hall, and much more. Finally Dru has the chance to regain herself—and to bear a child of her own.

I hope you enjoy this story and that you’ll be eager to learn what happens between Keziah and Dru’s twin, Tristan, in The Story Father. And what happened between them in the past.

Thank you so much for reading my books.

Sincerely,

Margot Early

HARLEQUIN SUPERROMANCE

625—THE THIRD CHRISTMAS

668—THE KEEPER

694—WAITING FOR YOU

711—MR. FAMILY

724—NICK’S KIND OF WOMAN

743—THE TRUTH ABOUT COWBOYS

766—WHO’S AFRAID OF THE MISTLETOE

802—YOU WERE ON MY MIND (THE MIDWIVES)

855—TALKING ABOUT MY BABY (THE MIDWIVES)

878—THERE IS A SEASON (THE MIDWIVES)

www.millsandboon.co.uk

The nature of this book, its landscapes and seascapes, its peoples and their backgrounds, dictated two things. One is that I would do extensive research; the second is that I would both take artistic license and make some mistakes (which are two different things, though they can look the same). The following people generously gave of their time:

Marina Alzugaray, MS, ARNP, CNM, Cathy Hartt, CNM, and Bill Dwelley, MS, LM, WEMT-I, thoroughly answered extensive questions about the art, science and business of midwifery.

David M. Good, M.D., P.C., thoughtfully addressed the mental health questions I asked. Without his help, this book would not have been written.

My sister Joan Early Farrell, Matt Hunder and James M. Early, my father, answered questions about fishing, boating and sailing. My family has always speedily assisted when I’ve needed help with my books.

Deb Kidwell, owner and breeder of the Azawakh of Kel Simoon, told me about these noble sighthounds and helped me name both of the heroine’s dogs, always increasing my appreciation for this beautiful and unusual breed.

Julie Elliott allowed me to use invaluable information for sections of the book having to do with belly dancing. Nearly all of my information on belly-dancing, including song translations, came from her rich and fascinating Web site, The Art of Middle Eastern Dance.

Finally, this book required the use of numerous reference texts. They include: Serpent of the Nile by Wendy Buonaventura, Return of the Tribal by Rufus C. Camphausen, The Hungry Ocean by Linda Greenlaw, Nantucket: Seasons on the Island by Cary Hazlegrove, The Ocean Almanac by Robert Hendrickson, The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger, Ethnic Dress by Frances Kennet, Sahara Unveiled by William Langewiesche, Veiled Sentiment and Writing Women’s Worlds by Lila Abu-Lughod, Nantucket Gardens and Houses by Taylor Lewis and Virginia Scott Heard, Lonely Planet Travel Guides, the mystery novels of Francine Mathews, Black Tents of Arabia by Carl R. Rasway, Dangerous Places and Come Back Alive by Robert Young Pelton, Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger. Internet resources were too numerous to mention.

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

Orange Street

Nantucket Island

“WE NEVER KNOW OUR ANCESTORS because it’s their prerogative to lie to us.” Dru said this to me while standing beneath the oldest portraits her family owns, full-size likenesses of a thirty-nine-year-old whaling captain and the fourteen-year-old girl he brought back from Morocco. The girl wore long gossamer pants and a floor-length gown, with a belt of silver coins at her waist, coins everywhere but at her throat. There, an elaborate necklace of hammered silver. Cuffs of silver covered her wrists, and bangles of silver and dyed leather interrupted her forearms, while a crown dripping with more coins swirled round her head. From the crown fell hair as thick as Dru’s but hennaed red. Henna stained her skin, as well, in the intricate designs Dru called mehndi. The shade beneath, her own, was luminescent. The artist had not altered it. It was the color sand takes on in the shade. Weak coffee with a spoon of skim milk. Slavery had left Nantucket long before 1842. Nudar was Captain Haverford’s wife. I found her exquisite. They were my ancestors, too.

“Imagine it, Ben,” Dru said. “Imagine being forced into marriage with a man of a different color, a different culture, a different country, twenty-five years older than you—”

She stopped.

Her eyes fell. Her back to me, her thick black hair caught on the hood of her sweatshirt, she lifted a riqq, a small tambourine, from the seat of the grand piano. Like mehndi, this instrument had different names in different places. She played, and I heard the desert sing and smelled indigo on skin. The music stopped. “But perhaps she loved him.”

Perhaps she did.

Ancestors, as she said, can and do lie. Which alters things. Dru has said it this way. “Our family is large and interconnected. We have married cousins and stayed on this island. We like each other.”

Like the Bedouin, I thought when she said it. The Bedouin would say that it is good to marry cousins, just as one must know one’s lineage, or how can one have a name, the kind of name that comes from Allah? A name that names the person by naming the loved ones. There is a debt and a weight on this name, and there is a duty to it, a duty to one’s line.

I know this because I hadn’t stayed on Nantucket, nor had my father, Robert Hall. The desert is in my blood.

One must know one’s lineage.

Ancestors can and do lie. And they may omit…falls.

A fall can change the course of history. Not just the fall of Rome or a fall in the Dow Jones, but a human being falling down.

For instance, my grandmother’s fall, as told to me by the father who raised me, Robert Hall. Not an omission. Something he chose to tell.

In the year of her accident, 1947, Faith Hall was Nantucket’s only midwife. Dad was thirteen that year. His father, Ben, for whom I’m named, was a veteran of the recent war and a Nantucket scalloper. The family lived in a fishing shack in ’Sconset, the cottage my father never sold and where I sometimes came from Africa to hammer and saw and keep the building from the sea, while the Atlantic steals prime real estate by inches. On the day of my grandmother’s fall, it had rained, and my father came inside with muddy feet, and his mother scolded him to clean the floor, and he did. She went outside to empty dishwater in her garden, and mud from his feet had tracked the steps, as well. My father heard her body strike the shack’s flimsy siding. She had fallen head-first four feet and broken her neck. Even before the funeral, her mother came for the year-old baby, Dad’s little sister, to raise her in her dark home on India Street in town. The men—Dad and his adopted brother and their father—harvested scallops.