Janice Johnson - A Mother's Claim

Who has the best claim on the child?

It’s been more than ten years since exhausted new mother Dana Stewart took a nap while her baby was sleeping and woke up to find him gone. The loss devastated her—and her marriage—and she’s never given up hope of finding Gabriel. She never expected that when she finally did, he’d be almost a teen, his name would be Christian...and he and his uncle Nolan Gregor would want nothing to do with her.

Nolan, a former army ranger, proves as possessive of her son as Dana is. It’s like King Solomon’s worst nightmare: she can’t rip her child away from the only parent he’s ever known. But she’s his mom, and she’ll never lose him again.

The resemblance between this woman and Christian was too obvious.

He watched her as she approached the counter. Tall and yet slight to the point of appearing fragile, Dana Stewart wore her honey-blond hair in some kind of twist on the back of her head. Her bone structure echoed her son’s—no, it was the other way around. Her cheekbones were almost too sharply defined, leaving hollows beneath. There was a tension to the way she carried herself, shoulders squared, head high, as if she wouldn’t let herself relax in any way. The hand not clutching a purse was curled into a fist.

She was a beautiful woman now, but he wondered how much more beautiful she’d been before her son’s disappearance damaged her in ways both visible and invisible.

Needing to be battle-ready, Nolan slid off the stool and stood before she reached him.

“Ms. Stewart.”

“You’re guessing,” she said, in a distinctively throaty voice.

“No.” He made a sound even he couldn’t decipher. “You look like him.”

Pleasure showed on her face. “I do, don’t I? Thank you for emailing the pictures. I know you were annoyed at me—”

“I’m not that petty,” he broke in.

Her teeth sank into her full lower lip. “I...would have understood.”

Nolan had to momentarily close his eyes to recover his resolve. I’ll fight dirty to keep you, if it ever comes to that. Of course it would come to that.

No, he might not be petty, but inevitably he would hurt this woman.

Dear Reader,

If you’re a longtime reader of mine, you’ll know that A Mother’s Claim isn’t the first book I’ve written about an abducted child. An earlier Harlequin Superromance novel, The Family Next Door, began after the heroine’s daughter had been restored to her, too. I think that story must have been at the back of my mind when I started plotting this one. In it, the daughter was young and hadn’t been gone nearly as long as is the case in A Mother’s Claim. Long after writing that book, I began to wonder what would happen if so long had passed that the very young child was nearly a teenager and had no memory whatsoever of his real mother and father. Who is this woman, asking him to betray the only mother he remembers?

Dana has dreamed for eleven long years that a miracle could happen. Sure enough, it does, with a phone call letting her know her son is alive and well. After the miracle, though...well, that’s when the real story begins. As always, I love wrestling with the aftermath of trauma. What more confusing time could there be to fall in love? Plus, as a fiercely protective parent, I identified powerfully with Dana.

I hope you’re as moved by her journey as I was.

Janice

A Mother’s Claim

Janice Kay Johnson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

An author of more than ninety books for children and adults, JANICE KAY JOHNSON writes about love and family—about the way generations connect and the power our earliest experiences have on us throughout life. An eight-time finalist for a Romance Writers of America RITA® Award, she won a RITA® Award in 2008 for her Harlequin Superromance novel Snowbound. A former librarian, Janice raised two daughters in a small town north of Seattle, Washington.

To my dearly loved daughters, Sarah and Katie.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Dear Reader

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

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

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Extract

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

IDIOT BOYS.

Having gotten Christian to the emergency room, Nolan Gregor was trying hard to be mad instead of sick to his stomach and scared out of his skull.

As a former army ranger, Nolan would have felt concern if he’d seen this much blood in the field. Panic—no. But this was Nolan’s eleven-year-old nephew with the ugly ax wound to the shoulder, which made everything different.

Yeah, he’d done his share of idiot things when he was a kid and later put his life at risk for his country. But even with a bullet wound he had never bled like this. Christian’s shirt was saturated by the time the EMT cut it off. Blood continued to flow despite the efforts to stanch it.

It took everything Nolan had to pretend nonchalance, to keep his posture confident and reassuring. A big man, he had retreated to a corner to be out of the way of the medical personnel clustered around Christian. He braced a shoulder against a wall of the emergency room cubicle. Nothing and nobody could have made him leave.

Face taut with pain, Christian kept his gaze fixed on Nolan, who was the closest thing to a father he’d ever had.

The doctor straightened, his eyes sharp above the mask. “Mr. Gregor, do you know Christian’s blood type?”

The question ramped up Nolan’s tension.

He frowned. “No. His mother is AB, but I have no idea about his father.” Or who Christian’s father was, for that matter. Nobody but Marlee knew, and she wasn’t saying.

To one of the nurses, the doctor said, “Let’s go with universal, but type him, too.”

Christian tried to rear up, restrained by the team working on him. “Am I bleeding to death?”

“No, I’m just being cautious.” The doctor laid a gloved hand on the boy’s uninjured shoulder and squeezed. “You’ve learned a good lesson. Chop yourself open, and you might end up needing a transfusion.”

A nurse was already pulling blood to check its type. Someone else was on the phone just outside the room requesting a unit of O neg.

Christian knew the rules: he used an ax only under the direct supervision of his uncle or, on occasion, a friend’s parent. Today, after overhearing Nolan grumble about the cold and whether he’d split enough wood to last until spring, Christian and his buddy Jason had decided to surprise Nolan. They got cocky and did some roughhousing. Somehow, Jason swung an ax that dug into Christian’s shoulder. Blood spurted. Jason ran screaming to the house.

Nolan wouldn’t soon forget his first sight of Christian, crumpled to his knees, his thin shoulder sliced to the bone, blood gushing. He hadn’t felt sickening terror like that since an IED had killed two men in his squad and left three others missing body parts. As he had then, he’d forced himself to calm down and done his damnedest to stop the bleeding while he waited for help.

Now, watching the doctor and nurses work on Christian, he saw that they were finally having success. The strain gradually leached from his muscles.