EXPECTING HIS CHILD (10 page)

There was a silent pause. "Is this the Coltrane residence?" a female voice asked.

"Yes, it is," Martina replied, her curiosity growing.

"I'd like to speak to Noah Coltrane, please."

Martina felt a sinking sensation in her stomach. "He can't come to the phone right now. Can I take a message?"

"This is Wendy Holden, and Noah and I had dinner a few months ago in Dallas. I own a travel agency and I'd like to discuss his fencing camp. Tell him to give me a call, and this time, I'll give him a home-cooked meal in my home. That way we can avoid interruptions," she said in a smoky voice.

Martina felt the ugly scrape of jealousy. Fierce and intense possessiveness coursed through her. She took a careful breath. "I'll give him the message. Does he have your number?"

Wendy
, whom Martina was certain was blond, thin and had no problems with swelling ankles, happily recited her number and hung up.
Wendy
probably had no problem seeing her toes.

Martina nearly broke the pencil lead as she wrote the message for Noah. She was so upset she could pop. When had he seen her? Who else had he courted and seduced during the time they'd been apart?

While she'd been heaving with morning sickness, he could well have been seducing half of Texas. Make that Texas and Chicago.

Martina knew she wasn't being rational, but the inviting tone in the woman's voice pushed all the wrong buttons. She stared at the beige wall and decided she couldn't stay in this house one minute longer. She heard the back door slam, signaling Patch's return.

She male tracks to the kitchen and placed the offending message on the kitchen table. "I need to go out for a while. Please make sure Noah gets this message."

"Where you going?" the small, older man called after her.

"Out," Martina replied as she stepped through the front doorway and headed for her car. She needed to think.

* * *

As he watched his last trade of the day fill, Noah finally took a breath. The market had been especially volatile today, and since he'd been out of commission several days this week, he'd wanted to take advantage of his opportunities. He felt stiff and sore, and he wanted to see Martina.

She had made love with him with such abandon last night. It had been better, more powerful than he remembered. She had the strange ability to satisfy him completely at the same time that she made him want more.

He stood and resisted the urge to
stretch,
knowing it would hurt more than it would help. He could tell his lung was better. He didn't feel the damn rattle every time he breathed. Sick of babying his ribs, he figured he'd still have to put up with sleeping upright a while longer.

Noah couldn't deny he was improving, but he was determined to find a way to keep Martina with him. Last night was a start. He wondered where she was. "Martina," he called, whipping open his door. "Martina."

"She's not here," Patch said, appearing at the bottom of the steps and waving a piece of paper. "She told me to make sure you got this message,
then
she left."

Noah frowned as he made his way down the stairs. "Left? Where'd she go?"

Patch shrugged. "When I asked her, she said, "Out." He raised his bushy gray eyebrows. "You might want to read the message."

Noah scanned the piece of paper and felt his gut sink. Wendy Holden was a man-eater and proud of it. His only interest in her had been her suggestion to promote the ranch's fencing and roundup weekends through her travel agency. When Wendy had indicated she wanted more, Noah had sought other avenues for promoting the ranch's expansion activities. Martina didn't know any of that, though. He could easily imagine what had gone through that pretty head of hers. "Damn," he muttered. "She didn't say anything about where she was going?"

"Out," Patch repeated with emphasis. "That was the last word I heard before the door slammed behind her. She took her car."

"Damn," Noah said again, and took the steps two at a time. If she was leaving permanently, she might have left her clothes, but would have taken her computer, he thought, swinging open her bedroom door to view her room. Her laptop was still on the small desk. He gave a small sigh of relief.

He stood in her room and stroked his chin, thinking.
If I
were
Martina and I was upset as hell, where would I go?

An answer immediately came to him. An answer that did not please him. His gut twisted. "Damn," he said for the third time, and headed for his
brother
Adam's truck.

Chapter 10

«
^
»

N
oah spotted Martina's blue Mustang just as the
Logan
house came into view. He felt an odd mix of relief and ingrained wariness as he looked at the large, impressive home. Damn. Sometimes he hated being right.

The pretty house, the pretty flowers and the pretty life represented the exact opposite of what the Coltrane ranch had to offer. He narrowed his eyes as he pulled the truck to a stop. That was in the past. If they wanted, the
Coltranes
could plant flowers with the best of them.

He swung out of the truck and headed for the front door, stiffening his spine in preparation for battle with Martina's family. He punched the bell and glared at the door as he waited.

The housekeeper answered the door, casting a suspicious look at him. "Good afternoon, Mr. Logan."

"I need to see Martina," he told the woman.

"She's in the library. I'll have to ask if she's receiving visitors," the housekeeper said with a sniff.

Noah made a face at the woman's back and didn't wait for an invitation. "I'll announce myself," he said, brushing past her.

"If she shoots you with one of her daddy's rifles, don't say I didn't warn you. She ain't in a pretty mood."

He paused at the wry tone in the housekeeper's voice and offered his own wry grin as he tipped his hat. "Thank you very much, Miss…"

"
Addie
," she said with a look of pleased surprise at his politeness. "The library's at the end of the hall. Good luck."

He took in the comfort and beauty of Martina's childhood home and felt his gut tighten. A woman could feel at home here, whereas at the Coltrane ranch… He stopped just outside the last open doorway.

Martina stood, shredding the
stuffings
of a pillow. Small wads of the stuff clumped around her feet. She made a whimpering sound that clutched at his heart. "I wish you were here," she said. "A million times I've wished it, but never more than now."

She must have sensed his presence because she looked up and saw him in the doorway. She shredded another piece of stuffing. "Go away."

"Like hell I will," he said, walking into the room. "What do you think you're doing taking off and not telling anyone where you're going? You're pregnant. You can't do that."

"
Addie
would have helped me handle any emergency. She still will." Martina frowned. "I can't believe she let you in," she said, shooting him a look of disdain.

"If this is about Wendy…" he began.

"Ah, yes." She smiled sweetly. Too sweetly. "Wendy, Wendy, Wendy. She sounded like she very much enjoyed the dinner you two shared a few months ago—"

"Nothing happened," he interjected.

"—while I was spending every morning hugging the porcelain bowl," she continued as if he hadn't spoken, "and you were apparently sowing your seed all over Texas."

Noah narrowed his eyes and moved closer, crowding her. "You just hold on to that knife you call a tongue. The only thing I was sowing with Wendy was the possibility that her travel agency might promote my fencing camps and roundup weekends. You may have forgotten the fact that I just learned I was fathering a child a month ago, but I haven't. You haven't given a tinker's damn what I've been doing by myself, let alone with another woman, for the last seven months, so why do you care now?"

He held her laser-sharp blue gaze. "You walked out on me with no warning. If you expect me to live like a monk just because you made love with me, then left me like yesterday's garbage, then…" He took a deep breath. "Then you'd be right."

She
blinked,
her eyes shiny with tears. "Oh, I can't believe you lived like a monk."

"Believe it." His heart swelled with such confusing emotions that he looked away to gather his wits. His gaze landed on a portrait of a woman who looked exactly like Martina. "Is it you? Is that—
"

"My mother," she said, sniffing. "I'm told I look a lot like her."

Blinking, he stared at the picture and shook his head. "The resemblance is incredible." When he realized she had been talking to the portrait when he'd first seen her, his chest grew tight.

Martina hugged the shredded pillow to her chest. "That's what everyone says. That's why he couldn't stand to look at me," she said, nodding toward the portrait beside her mother's.

Martina's father. He had been a hard man, Noah concluded from the picture and what he'd heard of the man's reputation. Losing his wife hadn't softened him.

Noah gazed at Martina and saw the look of an orphan in her blue eyes. He put an arm around her shoulders. "Why'd you come here?"

"I needed to go somewhere that I belonged," she said.

Noah gritted his teeth at the surprising stab of pain her words caused. "Haven't you learned you belong with me?"

She drew in a deep breath and sighed. "I'm not sure about that."

Impatience tore at him. "What's not to be sure? I'm the father of your child. I will be good to you and the baby. You can count on that."

She stepped away from him. "I want more than that."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, I spent my whole childhood trying to get my father to love me. I don't want to spend my whole adult life trying to get a husband to love me."

Noah felt caught between a rock and a hard place. "You mean a lot to me," he said, but the words sounded insubstantial to his own ears. He tried again. "I want you more than any woman. You know I care about you."

"But you don't love me."

He shoved his hands in his pockets. "I've always thought love was unpredictable at best, not something a man with any sense bets much of his gold on. Other things like family and commitment are more important." He could tell he wasn't getting through to her. Frustration raked across him. "There are some things too important to let emotions mess up. You are one of them."

Her eyebrows furrowed in confusion and indecision. Although Noah firmly believed in allowing each individual his or her freedom to choose, at this moment, he wished he could choose for Martina.

"You don't believe in love?"

"I didn't say that," he asserted. "I just don't bank on it. Here's an example. What if I had decided I'd fallen in love with you when we met in
Chicago
? After you left me, what was I supposed to think?"

Quiet for a long thoughtful moment, she seemed to have stepped outside herself. "Did it hurt you when I left?"

Noah immediately felt a barrier go up inside him. He looked away and struggled to answer her question honestly. "Yeah," he finally said. "It did. And it hurt even more to find out you were pregnant and hadn't gotten around to telling me."

"How much did it hurt?" Martina asked, shredding the stuffing of the pillow again.

He remembered the pain that had dulled only when he'd lost himself in his work. At night, however, he'd been unable to escape it. "I couldn't sleep," he reluctantly revealed.

She bit her lip. "This is a mess," she said in a broken voice.

"Yeah, you've mutilated that pillow."

Martina glanced down at the pillow and made a sound somewhere between a sob and a chuckle. "I wasn't talking about the pillow. I was talking about us and our situation. I don't see how it can work."

The hopelessness in her eyes cut like one of his swords. "Let me take care of it. I'm known for my innovative solutions."

"This is going to take a miracle."

"I've never let that stop me before. What are you afraid of, Martina?"

"That I'll never know what it feels like to have a husband who loves me. That I'll disappoint my brothers if I stay with you. That the
Logan
curse will cause a lot of heartbreak."

"You don't really believe in that curse, do you?"

"It's hard not to believe when I heard about it all the time from my father. There's a lot at stake here, Noah."

"I know, Martina. You can count on me."

Doubt shimmered in her eyes. He longed for her unswerving confidence, but understood he had yet to earn it. He had time, he told himself. Not as much as he'd like, but he had time.

She walked toward the baby grand in the center of the room. "My mother played this piano. She taught my brothers, but I never learned."

"You're still carrying on her tradition," he told her.

"How?" she asked skeptically. "I can't even play 'Chopsticks'."

"You play a different kind of keys," he said. "Computer keys."

A slow smile lifted her lips and subsequently his heart at the same time. "I never thought of it that way."

He crossed to her and pulled her into his arms. "Come home with me. You want to hear chapter two of
The Hobbit
."

She looked torn. "I can't stay with you much longer," she said. "My brother Brock and his family will return from
New York
, and I don't like concealing my whereabouts from him or Tyler. I owe them that much."

"What do you owe them, Martina?" he asked. "Now that you're a grown woman ready to give birth to our first child, what do you owe your brothers?"

She bit her lip and shredded more pillow stuffing. "I don't know, but I do know I hate feeling disloyal to them." She shook her head as if she wanted to shake off the discussion. "
Addie
has homegrown tomatoes for me. And I crave homegrown tomatoes so much I would probably trade my body for them."

Noah tucked that vivid image-inducing comment in the back of his mind and took the pitiful-looking pillow from her arms. "Is surgery possible, or should we go ahead and dig the grave?"

"We can always send it to Wendy," she said in that too-sweet voice again as she turned and walked from the room.

Watching her, Noah wasn't offended by the dig. If Martina was the tiniest bit possessive, then perhaps she could be possessed.

Martina listened to the second chapter of
The Hobbit
and fought the lulling seductiveness of Noah's voice. She remembered the way he'd touched her the night before. She remembered how right it had felt, so right to be possessed by him, to possess him. But she was fooling herself because although she might have a piece of Noah's heart, she would never have all of it. Would that be enough to last her the rest of her life?

Her stomach twisted and desperation tightened the back of her throat. The whole situation felt like a no-win for everyone involved, even the baby. That thought tore at her.

She needed to go back to her condo in
Dallas
. She needed to think clearly. This was too important. Noah was right about that. In the meantime, she wished Noah would stop going shirtless and get laryngitis.

Her heart and body softened just hearing him read.
Which showed how insane he was making her.
She bit back a sigh of disgust at her reaction to him. Looking at him in the glow of the lamplight, she knew he would make it so easy to fall into his arms and bed, but she'd learned making love with him would just confuse her further.

As he finished the last words of the second chapter and closed the book, Martina sprang from the bed. "Well, I'm beat and I'm sure you are, too. Good
ni
—"

Noah stood and took her hand. "No need to rush," he said, pulling her to him.

Oh, yes, there is,
she thought. "I need to go to bed," she said, trying very hard to ignore the way her heart raced and the fact that he stood before her nearly naked. "Without you."

He toyed with her hair. "Why?"

"Because making love with you isn't a good idea," she said.

"You didn't like it?"

His gaze wrapped around her with a combination of warmth and seduction. "I didn't say that. You told me that you didn't want emotions getting in the way of your thinking, that this situation is too important. I think you're right, so we shouldn't make love."

"How do you know that making love with me doesn't make you see everything more clearly?"

Because my brain turns to mush when you are within five feet of me
. His fingers in her hair had a drugging effect on her. It was all she could do not to lean into him and put her hands on his bare shoulders. She could easily drown in his eyes.

"I just know," she said. "So I'll go."

"Just one moment," he said, and eased his hand under her shirt to her bare belly at the same time that he lowered his mouth to hers. "I want to say good-night to both of you," he murmured, and kissed her and caressed her abdomen.

Martina willed herself not to melt, but his hands were
both soothing
and arousing, his mouth both gentle and seductive. His clean, musky smell and the promise of all the sensation and emotion he stirred in her drew her. Noah made her feel everything in 3-D Technicolor. She could have kissed him and let him touch her all night.

And if she didn't move away, she was going to dissolve into a puddle on this very spot.