The Cliff House. RaeAnne Thayne
few options left to them. At last count there were twenty of them who had stayed with her in the ten years since Beatriz ran off with Cruz Romero, sometimes with her only a few months, sometimes a few years. Each had left an indelible imprint on her heart.
It had all started with Bea and Daisy, of course. She had loved being a mother figure to them, struggling to form a family and build a home together when she was barely twenty-one and they were nine and eleven. She could still picture them, two lost and damaged girls who had suffered so very much because of their irresponsible, selfish, fickle mother.
The girls were the daughters of her heart and she would always consider them such.
Because of them, she had started Open Hearts, in an effort to do what she could to make sure all children who had to be in the foster care system received loving and supportive placements.
She was proud of all she had accomplished, but she wanted something else now. She wanted her own child, and according to the pregnancy tests assembled around her, she would have her wish in about eight and a half months.
Pregnant.
Joy burst through her, incandescent and perfect, and she pressed her hands over her abdomen and the tiny life growing inside her.
This was it. Everything she had dreamed about for the past year.
She was having a baby!
Dear God. She was forty years old and she was having a baby!
She was crazy! What had she been thinking? She was going to become a mother at an age many women were starting to think about becoming empty nesters.
Panic started to chew at her jubilation. She pushed it away. No. She wouldn’t let it take over. For this moment she wanted to simply savor the miracle of life.
She had to tell someone. The news was too big inside her, like a dancing, whirling wind looking for an escape.
Fortunately, her best friend, Cleo, had texted an hour ago that she would stop by with a birthday present, despite Stella’s insistence that she wanted nothing from her friends.
She had the best gift of all.
She touched her abdomen again. “Hello, little baby,” she whispered. “I love you so much already.”
Her child would never spend a moment of his or her existence wondering what it felt like to be loved.
The doorbell rang while she was whispering softly to her child and she jumped up. Cleo. She was the perfect person to tell, had been supportive from the moment Stella told her this was something she wanted. She was the only one who knew about the past months of fertility treatments. How perfect, that she was the only one who would know about the baby for now.
She scooped up the closest pregnancy test and rushed to the front door then yanked it open.
“Look. Just look! I did it! I’m pregnant!”
As soon as she said the last word, a long, drawn-out affair that seemed to take about a dozen extra syllables, shock drenched her like a January rain.
The person at her door wasn’t her best friend, the woman she considered the closest thing she had to a sister.
The person at her door was a man, lean and distinguished and gorgeous.
A man she hadn’t seen in nearly twenty years—and had tried her best to forget.
All the blood seemed to leave her head to pool somewhere in the vicinity of her favorite pair of Birkenstocks and she had to grip the door frame with her free hand to keep from toppling over.
“Ed!” she exclaimed.
“Um, congratulations,” he said at the same moment, looking as bemused as any man would under the circumstances.
She was still holding the pregnancy test, she realized on some appalled level. But she couldn’t think about that now. Not when Ed Clayton, the love of her life, had suddenly appeared out of the freaking blue.
“Ed!” she said again. She couldn’t seem to make her brain connect to her voice to say anything else.
“Hello, Stella.”
This couldn’t be real. Maybe this was all some kind of bizarre dream, brought on by the Italian food she and the girls had the night before. No. The pregnancy tests were certainly real.
She couldn’t seem to catch hold of her wildly scrambling thoughts. Was this the pregnancy brain she’d read about, where cheerful, perky bloggers nearly half her age warned that her synapses would turn into a jumbled mess?
Or was this simply a normal reaction to the bizarre confluence of events, suddenly discovering the only man she had ever loved on her doorstep the very moment she learned she was going to be a single mother in approximately eight months and change?
“May I...come in?” He sounded real enough, with a wary hesitance in his voice. She couldn’t really blame him for that. The last time she had spoken to the man, she had made it more than clear she had no use for him and never wanted to see him again.
The blatant lie of her words couldn’t be more obvious as she all but drank in the sight of him.
He had aged, of course, with lines at the corners of his eyes and a little sprinkling of gray in his brown hair. She found it totally unfair that those things only added to his appeal.
“Ed. Wh-what are you doing here?”
He gestured to the pregnancy stick in her hand. “I don’t think I’m quite the person you were expecting.”
“How could I possibly have been expecting you when I haven’t seen or heard from you in years?”
“I’ve obviously come at a bad time. I can come back later. You probably need to call someone else besides me to tell them the news. Your...husband? Boyfriend? Significant other?”
She obviously didn’t have any of those things, which was why she had to be artificially inseminated.
“I don’t need to call anyone,” she said. “This is my baby. Mine alone.”
He arched an eyebrow. “You do remember I was a medical student with plans to become an OB-GYN when you walked away. I’ve been in practice for more than a decade now. I think I have a pretty firm grasp on the basics of what’s required for a successful pregnancy.”
He had been twenty-three when they met, already finishing his second year of med school, earnest and compassionate and eager to make a difference in the world.
While she could never claim to have any gift for telling the future, she had known without a doubt that he would be a brilliant doctor someday.
How many times over the years had she wondered about him? She could admit to herself it had taken all her self-restraint not to google him or find him on social media.
Somehow she had known that making contact with him would be a mistake, would stir up all the emotions she had struggled bitterly to overcome.
“This is obviously not a good time.” He scratched his neck, looking rueful. “I think it would be better if I came back later.”
Yes, she wanted to tell him. Go away.
Stella needed at least a few moments for the joy to sink in, to savor the idea of being pregnant. She wanted to imagine burying her face in her baby’s neck to inhale the intoxicating scent, to think about how wonderful it finally would be to cradle that sweet, warm weight against her after all these months of dreaming.
She had no desire to traipse down memory lane with a man she had done her best to forget.
She should invite him in but she didn’t want to. She wanted him to walk back out the way he had come, to go on and live his life without her, as she had forced him to do.
Good manners wouldn’t let her go quite that far. “You’re here. You obviously have a reason for that. You might as well come in.”