Cindy Gerard - The Secret Baby Bond

“I was over him before he died,” she said, trying to make them both believe it.

“And yet…” Grant covered her slim shoulder with his hand. She was his little girl and she was hurting. “And yet it hurts you to think of his death as an absolute.”

“Yes,” she admitted, covering his hand with hers, feeling the strength there, needing the compassion. “It hurts.”

After all this time, it still hurt.

“I think of him,” she confessed, drawing her knees to her chest. “I think of Michael more and more often lately.”

She looked over her shoulder, met her father’s troubled eyes and shrugged self-consciously at her admission.

“Sometimes…sometimes, I’ll see someone in a crowd and the likeness to Michael will startle me so that for a moment, I actually think it’s him.”

Returning her gaze to the fire, she wrapped her arms around her legs and rested her chin on her knees.

“Those damn crank calls haven’t helped,” her father muttered angrily.

She thought of the phone calls she’d received the past two weeks—the ones where there had been nothing but silence on the other end. The ones that had shaken her enough that she’d stopped by to talk to her brother Drew. When she’d met up with Kristina, Drew’s new bride, instead, she’d pocketed the phone numbers of private detectives Tom Reynolds and Lucas Starwind that Kristina had given her.

“I wish you would have called Tom or Lucas, or even the police,” Grant added.

She’d been spooked enough by the calls that she’d actually considered calling them—considered, but not followed through.

“They have their hands full investigating the problems you’ve been dealing with since last December.”

Grant grew silent.

The problems all appeared to be tied to the unsolved murders of her grandfather, King Thomas Rosemere of Altaria, her uncle, Prince Marc, and the subsequent attempted assassination of her brother, Daniel, who, as the eldest son of Emma Rosemere Connelly, had taken Thomas’s place as king.

Absolutely, the Chicago P.D. and her father’s hired investigators had their hands full.

“Besides,” she said, “what would I have told them? That I’d received some strange phone calls? ‘No. No heavy breathing. No, the calls hadn’t seemed ominous. No, they hadn’t felt like pranks, either. Hadn’t felt like wrong numbers.’

“It’s not much for anyone to go on, Dad, and it wasn’t enough for me to follow through with the detectives. And yet…”

“And yet what?” he asked when she paused.

“Last week,” she said, speaking more to herself than to her father, “I was walking out of a shop and…it was like I felt Michael there, watching me, waiting for me.”

“It’s all this business with your grandfather’s death and Daniel’s attempted murder,” her father said with gentle concern. “All the extra security I’ve had set up is making you nervous. This whole damn situation is making you nervous.”

“No. No,” she assured him. “It’s not that. I’ve never felt threatened on that front even though I know you’ve been concerned for me. For all of us. It’s… I don’t know. Like today in the park. There was a man.” Her heart stuttered now as it had when she’d seen him. “I couldn’t stop thinking about Michael.”

She rubbed her arms, closed her eyes. “Sometimes lately, it feels like he’s…still here, Dad.”

Her father sighed. “It’s because you never had closure.”

No. There had never been closure. Instead, there’d been a train derailment in the jungles of Ecuador, endless nights of not knowing, the empty ache of waiting. The helplessness of uncertainty. Of needing to hear. Of wanting to know, yet not wanting to know the worst of it. Then just wanting to know anything.

The jungle was dense and wild, the cavernous cliffs below the derailment site impassable. Michael’s body hadn’t been the only one that had never been recovered. And Tara had never recovered from the guilt of knowing that the last words she’d spoken to him had been the last words he’d expected to hear.

She still remembered every moment of that day as if it were yesterday. She drifted back to that day at the airport—that horrible day. She could still see the shock and pain on Michael’s face in her mind. Still heard the hurtful words….

“You don’t have to see me off at the gate,” Michael said as he closed the trunk, hefted his flight bag over his shoulder and set his Pullman on the curb by the car.

Around them horns honked, hotel shuttles jockeyed for parking. Travelers hunched their shoulders against the cold, struggled with their luggage, rushed to make their flights.

It was so cold. Cold outside. Cold inside. The bite of it stung her cheeks as she stood there, the collar of her red wool coat turned up against the wind, the air as heavy as the lead-gray sky. Stray snowflakes taunted, promising the bitter Chicago winter to come.

Michael’s eyes were troubled as he watched her face. He knew something was wrong. Finally, he knew. After months of combative silences and fractured truths, he finally understood. Finally. Too late.

“We’ll talk,” he promised as he gripped her shoulders and turned her to face him. “You know I have to go on this trip. It could make or break my promotion, babe.” He rocked her gently, lifted one corner of his mouth in that crooked smile she’d never been able to resist.

When she didn’t react, he bent his knees, met her at eye level. “When I get back, we will talk.”

“It’s too late, Michael. It’s too late to talk.” Her words sounded as frigid as the wind that whipped off Lake Michigan and picked up speed and force as it funneled through the city and cut its way to O’Hare. “It’s been too late for a long time now.”

He straightened, his hands tightening on her shoulders. He drew her toward him protectively when a woman sprinting for the terminal doors bumped against them with a mumbled apology. His breath puffed out in smoky white clouds of frost that crystallized on the brittle air.

“It didn’t feel like it was too late last night.”

Last night when they’d made love.

Against all odds, when they could no longer communicate on a verbal level, they’d never lost their ability to communicate in bed.

As she stood there, feeling the heat of his strong hands through her winter coat, seeing the passion in his eyes, she knew that sex had been the only thing keeping them together for some time now.

“Michael…this is hard.” She worked up her courage to say the words but she couldn’t look at him. “I…I want a divorce.”

She felt his shock like the blow that it was. For a moment he was utterly still. Then his hands loosened their hold on her shoulders, dropped to his side.

“You don’t mean that,” he said after a moment in which they both felt the truth and the finality of her decision like the cut of the wind against their faces.

“Look at me,” he demanded, each word a command, each breath an effort. “I deserve to have you look at me when you tell me you want to rip my life apart.”

“Our life.” She raised her head, felt her heart beating with anger and hurt and utter helplessness. “It’s our life that’s being ripped apart, and I’m not the only one responsible. This didn’t start here, Michael. Not today.”

She felt the tears and couldn’t blink them back. “I—I can’t do it anymore. I don’t want to.”

“I don’t accept that.” His words were as clipped as the wind.

She lifted her chin, looked past him at the glut of humanity crowding toward the terminal doors.

“I’m sorry. But your acceptance doesn’t change things. I want a divorce,” she repeated, meeting the bleakness and the anger in his gray eyes one last time. Then she turned away.