The Mother Of His Child. Sandra Field
motives? Motives of deception? Darker motives.
Chewing on her chicken salad, Marnie let a picture of Cal Huntingdon fill her mind. Unconsciously, and even in the midst of that turmoil of emotion in the parking lot, she realized that ever since they’d met she’d been searching for the one word that would encapsulate him. She’d come up with arrogant, sexy and masculine, and certainly each of those was accurate enough. Dangerous seemed entirely apt, as well. But something else was nagging at her mind, making her deeply uneasy. For some reason, she found herself remembering how facetiously she’d thought about the sort of scary movie she hated: the man-with-an-ax-coming-up-the-stairs kind. The bad guy.
She didn’t for one minute think Cal was a potential ax murderer. No, that wasn’t what she was getting at. But he did pose an enormous threat to her at a level that was gut-deep.
Was it his willpower? He had that all right. He’d hated her defying him.
Take away the first syllable of willpower, she thought, and what have you got? Power. That was it. The man reeked of power. His body, his voice, his actions—all of them were imbued with the unconscious energy of a man used to wielding power.
Charlotte Carstairs had been in love with power all her life. It had taken a huge and ongoing effort on Marnie’s part to prevent that power from ruining her own life, from making her as bitter and unloving as her mother.
Marnie finished her sandwich, drained the bottle of apple juice she’d bought to go with it and got back into her car. She rummaged in her haversack, found the square scarf that went with her raincoat and wrapped it, turban-style, around her head, carefully tucking her hair under it. She fished out her dark glasses and generously coated her lips with Strawberry Pearl Glaze. With some satisfaction, she looked at herself in the mirror. She did not look like the woman who’d bought an ice cream cone in the pouring rain.
Then she turned out of the picnic spot and headed back toward Burnham.
This time, she did have a plan.
She drove slowly through the town, her eyes peeled for a dark green Cherokee. At the gas station, she pulled up to the pumps and asked for a fill-up, adding casually, “I’m looking for Cal Huntingdon. Can you tell me where he lives?”
“Sure thing. Go to the fork in the road and hang a left. Moseley Street. His place is about a kilometer from the fork. Big cedar-shingled bungalow on the cove. Nice place. Want your oil checked, miss?”
“No, it’s fine, thanks.” As the red numbers clicked on the pump, she said with complete untruth, “I used to know him in my college days. Haven’t seen him for a while.”
“Yeah? Too bad about his wife, eh?”
Marnie’s fingers tightened around her credit card. “I—I hadn’t heard…is something wrong? I was in the area today and thought I’d drop in on them.”
“Well, now…she passed away two years ago. Cancer. Took her real fast, which is a blessing, I guess.”
“Oh,” said Marnie. “Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Hard on the kid. And on Cal, too, of course. That’s twenty-five even, miss.”
Feeling thoroughly ashamed of herself, Marnie handed over her card and a few moments later signed the slip. “I may phone first,” she said. “Rather than just dropping in. Thanks for telling me.”
“No problem. You have a nice day now.”
“Nice” wasn’t quite the word Marnie would have used to describe the day she was having. Her heart was racketing around in her chest again. She turned out of the gas station and asked the first person she saw for directions to the junior high school. Within ten minutes, she had a mental picture of the layout of the town and had figured out the probable route Kit Huntingdon would take to walk from Moseley Street to the consolidated school. Only then did Marnie leave Burnham.
She hadn’t seen a green Cherokee. And she’d be the first to admit she lacked the courage to drive past the cedar-shingled house on the cove.
Cal Huntingdon was a widower. Had been for two years. Which meant, unless he had a live-in girlfriend, that Kit was motherless.
Even though intuition told her Cal wasn’t the type for a live-in girlfriend, not when he had an adolescent daughter, that same intuition insisted that any woman worth her salt would be after him. Wanting to comfort him. In bed and out.
Bed? Don’t go there, Marnie. Not when Cal’s on your mind. Cal plus bed could be a combination several steps beyond dangerous. You swore off men years ago, and even thinking about Cal Huntingdon in a sexual context is lunacy. Kit’s the issue here, and only Kit.
He hadn’t told her the truth. He’d allowed her to think that Kit had two parents, a mother as well as a father. That everything was normal and as it should be in the Huntingdon household. Mother, father, daughter—and no place for Marnie.
Beneath a very real sorrow for an unknown woman who had died far too young, Marnie was aware of anger, red-hot and seething. Kit had been left, tragically, without a mother. And yet Cal had dared to warn off the woman who had borne Kit all those years ago, a woman who had, surely, some claim on his honesty.
Some claim on Kit.
CHAPTER THREE
ON MONDAY morning, just before eight, Marnie arrived at the fork in the road that led out of Burnham. Moseley Street, the sign said. She flicked on her signal light and turned left. She was driving her best friend Christine’s small white Pontiac; she’d phoned Christine last night and asked if they could trade cars for the day.
Cal Huntingdon wouldn’t even notice if a white Pontiac drove past his house.
She checked the odometer, her heart hammering in her chest as loudly as a woodpecker on a tree. The Huntingdons lived about a kilometer down the road, according to the man at the gas station. It was a pretty road, following the curve of the bay and lush with evergreens. Point-seven kilometers, point-eight, point-nine. And then Marnie saw the cedar-shingled house on the cove, the mailbox neatly lettered “Huntingdon.”
She braked. Although a dark green Cherokee was parked in front of the house, there was no one in sight, neither Cal nor a young girl hurrying up the driveway on her way to school.
It was the house of her dreams.
Marnie’s mouth twisted. She’d had a lot of dreams over the years, several of which she’d made real—by guts, determination and plain hard work. But she was a long way from realizing this particular one. For the house spelled money.
It was a low bungalow, following the sloping contours of the land and taking full advantage of a spectacular view of a rocky cove. Pines and hemlocks shaded the roof; through the bare limbs of maples, sunlight glittered on the waves. The weathered cedar shingles blended perfectly with the surroundings. The chimney was built of chunks of native stone, while the slate pathways were the color of Cal’s eyes.
It was perfect, Marnie thought. Utterly perfect.
In terms of material goods, Kit was obviously in another league from Marnie. Discovering she didn’t like this thought one bit, Marnie put her foot to the accelerator and continued down the road, reluctantly noticing that the Huntingdon property extended several hundred feet farther along the cove. But why was she surprised that Kit had been adopted into money? She’d known all along that her mother worshiped money and even more the power it conferred; Charlotte wouldn’t have placed her grandchild with anyone who lived in poverty.
In her will, Charlotte had left Marnie the sum of one hundred dollars. The rest of her estate had been allocated to build a town hall and a library in Conway Mills. The will had been dated the day of Kit’s birth; a matter of hours after the birth, when Marnie’s world was disintegrating around her, Charlotte had informed Marnie that she was disinherited.
At the time, money had been the furthest thing from Marnie’s thoughts. But at the reading of the will, only a month ago, Charlotte’s