Wild Honey. Veronica Sattler
name was Matthew—Matt, according to a night nurse he’d charmed into sharing what she knew. Matt. He liked the sound of it. A solid masculine name. Which the kid would need, considering who was raising him: a pair of females, with not a male in sight. Or at least, none anyone at the hospital could tell him about.
He’d learned that Nurse Miranda Terhune was unmarried and to anyone’s knowledge, had never been married. She was a single parent to four-year-old Matthew, and they both lived with her sister, who was helping her raise the kid. Two women, both of them single.
The thought of a child, especially a boy, being raised without a father, or at least a father figure, didn’t sit well with him. Why hadn’t a beautiful woman like Randi Terhune ever married? Why did she want to raise a kid by herself? More importantly, why had she used a sperm-bank doner to have one? Was she involved with a guy who was infertile, maybe planning marriage at the time she’d made use of the clinic’s resources? But if that was the case, where was the guy now?
These were the kinds of questions he couldn’t ask of the people she worked with. As it was, he’d treaded on dangerous turf in seeking the answers he had. Hospital personnel, like personnel everywhere, were hardly obliged to divulge personal information about coworkers. Only by spreading his inquiries among a number of nurses and using that old standby—charm—had he managed to get the information he had. That, and the fact that Terhune was so well liked, people were happy to talk about her.
To give Nurse Randi her due, everyone he’d spoken to regarded her as an excellent mother. But what did they know? Coworkers saw only certain facts of a person’s life. Maybe only the facets the person wanted them to see. So how much insight did anyone have into her home life? Into how she handled her son?
His son. Almost certain the child was his, he wasn’t content to leave it alone. Which was why he was heading for Langley. He needed to know more. And headquarters, with its vast data base, was a good place to get information on people.
He came upon a slow-moving van in the right lane and swung out to pass. As he did so, he felt a twinge of conscience regarding the ethics—or lack thereof—in using the CIA’s data base to serve his own personal ends. He decided to ignore it.
A state-police car appeared in his rearview mirror, and Travis checked his speed. He wasn’t over the limit. He rarely broke any laws, traffic or otherwise—a legacy of Judith McLean’s rearing. Even as a youth, he’d never experimented with drugs, never raced the little MG they’d given him for graduating prep school with the highest honors. He’d been a super straight arrow, all right. Except for one fine summer night in Cambridge, when he’d gone out on the town and…
Muttering an expletive, Travis focused on his immediate objective: the life and habits of one Miranda Terhune. The final tidbit he’d learned about the lovely nurse was that she was shortly leaving on a “much deserved” three-week vacation. He hadn’t been able to ascertain where, but that shouldn’t present a problem. Airline tickets and hotel reservations were usually secured with credit cards. And credit-card use was traceable.
He frowned. The problem was getting past Jason Cord.
“YOU NEED TO WHAT?” Jason Cord thundered, his straight black brows meeting in the middle.
“I said, I need to use the main computer for a bit.” Travis ignored the scowl that rearranged Cord’s features—his aunt Louise would have called them disgracefully handsome features—and kept his voice casual. “It’s nothin’ that’ll compromise security, Jace, ol’ boy. I’ll only be a few minutes, ‘n’ then—”
“In a pig’s eye, you will!” Cord rose from behind his desk and thrust out his arm, pointing to the door. “Get your injured hide out of here, McLean, now, and I’ll forget what you just asked.”
Travis stood his ground. Cord intimidated a lot of people with that scowl. But not Travis. For one thing, he was taller than his superior, although Cord came in over six feet. For another, they’d been through hell and back together. In the old days, when they’d been field operatives, along with Rafe O’Hara and Brad Holman. Hell, when they’d lost Brad, Travis and Jason had wept in each other’s arms.
Not that he was about to mention Brad. His death was still a raw wound to the three men who’d regarded him as a good friend. Brad had been tortured and killed by a Mexican drug lord; Rafe, despite orders to take the man alive, had recently gunned the bastard down. While Travis sympathized totally with Rafe’s action, he doubted Jason felt the same.
Travis wished he’d confide in him, but fat chance of that. Jason was a closemouthed bastard when he wanted to be; the best thing, when he was in one of his moods, was to avoid him entirely. If he hadn’t needed the info on Terhune, Travis would have already been out the door.
“Look, Jason,” he said calmly, “you know me. Would I ask for somethin’ like this if it wasn’t important? In fact, when before have I ever—”
“Stuff it, McLean! You’re asking now, and it’s one time too many. Get the hell out of here.”
Travis heaved a sigh. He’d known it wouldn’t be easy, yet he’d been hoping…Ah, hell. He hadn’t wanted to tell Cord what this was all about, but it looked like that was the only way.
“Jace…this really is important,” he said quietly.
Jason had his mouth set to blister his friend’s ears, but the look on Travis’s face stopped him. McLean was a rogue sometimes, using that Southern charm to get his way. Sometimes, when he had to, he trod the gray areas—they all did—but he wasn’t dishonest and he wasn’t devious.
In fact, the worst that might be said of him was that he never took life too seriously. Not his personal life, anyway. That break with his family—it could have gotten to some men, but not McLean. “Life’s too short to sweat what you can’t change,” he’d once said when someone asked him about it. And then there was his famous pronouncement on love—that if it existed, it was for poets and fools.
No, Travis McLean wasn’t known for getting “deep-down” about things. Not that he didn’t have depths; if McLean were shallow, he’d never have had the bond they shared. It was just that Travis rarely tapped into those depths in the day-to-day. Which was why the look in his eyes now stopped Jason short.
“How important?” he found himself asking.
Travis sighed. Hooking the chair across from Jason’s desk with his foot, he swung it out and dropped into it. “This’ll take a bit,” he said. He motioned for Jason to sit, much as if their roles were reversed and it was Travis’s office.
Jason snorted, but sat.
“What I’m about to tell, ol’ buddy, stops here, okay?” Travis indicated the confines of Jason’s office. “I mean, I want it treated like it’s classified.”
“You’ve got it,” Jason said.
And then Travis told him—about the night in Cambridge, about a nurse at Johns Hopkins who’d looked familiar, and finally about a little boy with blond curls.
“And I need to find out about them, Jace,” he finished with an intensity few ever saw. “I can’t just ignore it. The kid’s almost assuredly my own flesh and blood. My son.”
Jason pursed his lips and whistled softly. When Travis decided to get deep-down, he didn’t mess around.
“Travis…” Jason began slowly, focusing on a paperweight he toyed with on his desk as he gathered his thoughts. He tried to put himself in Travis’s shoes: what would he do, faced with such a thing? And what a thing! What an incredible helluva thing! “Let’s say I…I look the other way while you do this.” He met Travis’s eyes. “What then? Where do you go from there?”
“I’m not sure. I s’pose that depends on what I find out. And I’m gonna find out, Jace, make no mistake about that.” Travis’s gaze was resolute. “If not through our files here,