Harlequin Superromance January 2014 - Bundle 2 of 2: A Ranch for His Family\Cowgirl in High Heels\A Man to Believe In (24 page)

“My father had a brother who was born deaf. Chance inherited his deafness through me. So might any other children we have.”

The glow of her happiness faded from her face as she stared at him. “Do you mean you don't want more children?”

“No, I don't mean that.” He crushed her in a tight embrace. “Of course I want more children with you, Robyn. I don't care if they are deaf or twins like Jake's or green as eggs and ham. I just want you to know what you're facing. I'll understand if you don't want to take the risk.”

Could she face having another deaf child? The prospect didn't frighten her as it once had. With Neal beside her, she could face any problem that life dealt her. He was her other half, the piece of her that had been missing for so long.

He held her away and looked into her eyes. “I want another Chance. I want another son or daughter. Hell, I want a dozen Chances, and I want them to grow up on this ranch. My plan is to raise and train horses with Jake and someday buy this spread from him. The place needs a little fixing up, but the thing this ranch needs most is a family. Our family. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to do the asking. Will you marry me, Robyn O'Connor Morgan?”

“Yes,” Robyn whispered, her happiness all but choking her with the emotions that swelled inside her heart.

Neal gazed tenderly at the face of the woman who haunted his dreams, and he marveled at the love that shone in her eyes. Fate had brought him back to her. Now it was up to him to keep her in his arms. Now it would be up to him to show her just how much he needed her. She would never doubt that again.

“I can't live without you, Robyn. I know because I tried. I need you. I need your love now and for always.”

“For always?” A beautiful smile trembled on her lips. She arched one eyebrow. “That's a pretty long time, cowboy.”

“For always and forever, Tweety. For always and forever.”

He bent to kiss her once more. As her soft lips parted beneath his, he knew forever wouldn't be long enough to show her how much he loved her. But it would be a start.

* * * * *

Keep reading for an excerpt from A PROMISE FOR THE BABY by Jennifer Lohmann.

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CHAPTER ONE

V
IVIAN
SAT
ON
an uncomfortable chair in the starkly decorated lobby of her husband's apartment building and waited for Karl to come home from work. She'd been waiting for hours, her feet propped up by a couple of suitcases, garnering suspicious looks, but the doorman hadn't kicked her out yet. He'd tried, but she had a marriage certificate that said she was Karl Milek's wife. Unwilling to throw her out onto the street, he'd also been unwilling to let her into Karl's apartment.

She was pretty sure he was regretting both decisions. At least Xìnyùn, her father's blue parrot, had stopped talking an hour ago. His chipper conversation wasn't welcome in this modern building and his brightness was an unwanted distraction in the white-and-black interior.

Every time someone came through the rotating doors, the February winds whistled and Xìnyùn responded with his own tune, dancing up and down the rainbow ladder in his cage. Not a single person who'd walked past had smiled at Xìnyùn's antics. Her husband lived in a building as cold as his hands.

She had called his office five times, but “he is in a meeting,” they said. “We will pass on the message,” they said. She didn't tell them she was his wife. With divorce terms agreed upon, he probably hadn't told his coworkers about his Vegas mistake. He'd probably figured—as she had—that their secret would keep until the divorce was finalized, and then it wouldn't matter anymore. They'd be divorced and have moved on with their lives. But now she needed him, and she needed him to be her husband. Outing him to his coworkers seemed a poor way to gain his cooperation.

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

She was supposed to have stayed in Vegas.

The energy in the lobby flared when her husband walked through the door. He was the cold, stiff man she remembered from their morning after, and he didn't seem to be any warmer with all of his clothes on—and
not
hungover. Maybe he didn't notice the freezing temperatures outside. He wore a forest-green scarf wrapped around his neck and a tan wool coat as though they were for show, so the people around him wouldn't wonder at his ability to walk through snow naked and not get frostbite. No hat covered his brown hair. His hazel eyes were more attractive when not bloodshot, but glasses didn't soften the sharp planes of his face. She had assumed his face only looked hard when angry—but he didn't have a reason to be angry. Yet.

She needed Karl to be the man whose eyes had been mostly brown when he'd offered to buy her a drink, but had turned a lush green when she'd brushed her hand against his as she reached for that drink. The man who'd noticed her shiver and tucked her tightly against him as they walked out of the hotel, even though they had both known she wasn't cold. The man who had made her laugh when she felt as if nothing in her life could ever be funny again.

Perhaps that man had been an illusion and as fake as the Luxor pyramid, given flesh only by the carnival lights of Las Vegas. That she was even sitting here in the lobby of this apartment building was evidence that she wasn't as immune to Las Vegas magic as she thought she'd been.

The doorman scurried over to her husband, his arms out in supplication and face creased in apology. Tingles shot down her spine when Karl looked over at her. He showed no hurry as he walked across the lobby to her, his face as blank as she remembered.

“You were the woman calling my office today,” he said in greeting.

“Hello to you, too.” They hadn't planned on seeing each other again, but there was no reason not to be civil. In theory, theirs was an amicable divorce. “Can we talk somewhere private?”

His eyes took in the pile of suitcases and the birdcage sitting next to them. He didn't nod or say a word, just picked up the birdcage and a suitcase and walked toward the elevator. Vivian scrambled to her feet, slung her purse over her shoulder, picked up two more suitcases and hurried to follow him, the heels of her boots clicking on the marble floor.

On the elevator ride up to his apartment, Vivian opened her mouth a couple times to speak, but Karl silenced her with a raise of his eyebrow. “You wanted private. We can at least wait until we are in my apartment.”

She closed her eyes and nodded. She'd waited for hours; another couple of minutes wasn't going to kill her.

In his apartment, she put down her suitcases in the entryway and followed him to the couch, taking the birdcage with her. Dark wood floors made his apartment more welcoming than the lobby, though his furniture looked to be just as uncomfortable. The only sign of softness amidst the leather, glass, steel and stone was a plush rug in the living room. He didn't even have any curtains to soften the floor-to-ceiling windows. She sat on the couch. He sat in one of the armchairs and looked at her expectantly.

If she was waiting for a greeting of some kind, apparently she would be disappointed.

“I'm sorry to drop in on you like this,” she said, gesturing to the luggage near the door. “I didn't feel I had any choice.”

“Were the terms of our divorce not sufficient?” His elbows rested on the arms of the chair and he'd laced his fingers together in a bridge over the chest of his charcoal-gray suit. Anyone looking in on the scene through the windows would see Karl's cocked head and casual pose and imagine they were discussing some local curiosity. Vivian imagined that he must have soon-to-be ex-wives drop in on him as a regular occurrence if he managed to remain so self-possessed about the whole thing.

His absolute composure was the reason she'd answered “sure” when he'd gestured to the doors of the chapel, a half smile on his face, and asked, “Shall we?” She had
wanted
to be a part of his stability then; it was unfair of her to be irritated by it now. And what if she also wanted the passion they'd shared? Well, that had gotten her into this mess in the first place.

“Yes. I mean, no, they were fine. But I don't want a divorce right now.”

If she'd shocked him, his only reaction was to lean back in the chair and lift his left foot to rest on his knee. She was glad he hadn't sat on the couch next to her. She felt crowded enough by him without having to make room for his knees and elbows—
and
his infinite placidity, which took up far more space than any single lack of reaction should.

Xìnyùn said, “I fold.” At least the parrot showed a reaction.

“I'm pregnant and I want to keep the baby.”

* * *

“H
IT
ME
,”
THE
bird squeaked.

Karl looked at the blue bird dirtying his coffee table and wondered what was more ridiculous, his one-night stand/wife telling him she was pregnant or the bird asking to be punched.

If this was his punishment for indulging his emotions with liquor, he would pour every ounce of booze in the apartment down the toilet and shatter the wineglasses. Unfortunately, humoring his impulses was unlikely to allow time to flow backward until he walked into his apartment building and passed through the lobby up to his apartment without a wife—pregnant wife—in the way.

“Are you sure you're pregnant?” Three weeks ago—his birthday—he'd sat at a hotel bar and gulped down whiskey every time he remembered he was older than his father ever had been or would be, only without a wife or child. Now he had both, and he didn't want either of them. “Are you sure it's mine?”

“Yes, I'm sure. About both questions. I don't make a habit of sex with strangers.” A series of rapid blinks over her light brown eyes—barely a shade darker than her skin—were evidence of her nerves, but she didn't shrink away from him. She was on a mission and determined to see it through.

“I don't know anything about you other than you
did
once have sex with a stranger.” And her maiden name was Yap. He'd learned that from the marriage certificate he'd found under some tiger lilies on a table in his hotel suite.

“I wasn't the only one in that room.”

No, but he wished to God the man in the hotel room had been someone other than himself. His office was in the middle of a sole-source contract investigation; he didn't have time for whatever she needed from him. “If the only thing you know about me is that I also did once have sex with a stranger, then I assure you, if you are pregnant with my child, I can change the terms of the divorce. You'll get sufficient child support.”

“No argument about my keeping the baby?”

He swallowed his irritation. The night they'd stumbled around Las Vegas now seemed like a mirage, and if he concentrated on his memories, the images wavered before disappearing completely. The alcohol and the lights had made every smile the secret smile of a lover, and when she'd slipped her hand into his, he'd felt as though they'd shared souls.
Also the alcohol talking.
The alcohol and being surrounded by the constant—fake—sounds of people winning had turned him into a man charming enough to pick up a woman in a bar.

Vivian would soon learn that the man who had made jokes and removed the sadness from her eyes didn't exist outside of that night in Vegas.

But she'd taken a chance coming here. She couldn't know for certain that he'd meant what he said when he'd spoken about the responsibility a man had to his family. Or that he would never argue about an abortion with a woman, because her body was her body and his faith was his faith.

That night she had also talked about the importance of family—had argued with him when he had referred to a “man's responsibility to his family.” Every member of a family, she'd said, had responsibility for keeping the unit whole. She'd squeezed his thigh when she'd said that, probably more to make her point than out of any sexual advance, though he hadn't had the wits about him to care either way.

Were the opinions she'd expressed about family a product of the night—as his sudden charm had been—or were they as heartfelt as his words, alcohol or no alcohol? It didn't matter. She was pregnant and he'd learn about her dedication to family soon enough.

“I respect your choice, though you don't need to be here in Chicago for me to send you child support.”

She drew back in surprise, covering her jeans and still-flat stomach with a hand. “You wouldn't want contact with our baby?”

He thought about the tiny infant she would give birth to. With its small fingernails and fat face not yet grown into Vivian's pointed chin. Food poisoning. Croup. The shattered glass of a car accident ripping a dimpled face to pieces. Better not to see the child at all. Better to get them both out of his apartment and back to Las Vegas.

“I would want to know you cared for it.” Him? Her? When could you find out the sex of the baby? What was he supposed to call it until then?

She folded her other hand over her stomach. There was a baby under there.
“I need health insurance.”

“You said you had a job.” Back in his hotel room, when he'd been sober, and the harsh lights of the hotel bathroom had ripped the dream away, he'd accused her of marrying a stranger for money. She'd told him to keep his damn money and that maybe there was room for it wherever he stored his ego. She'd said she had a job and didn't need to have sex in exchange for handouts.

“I lost it.” She kept her hands on her stomach, the twisting of her fingers another sign of her nerves. “I will find another—I was hoping to find one in Chicago—but until then, I need health insurance. The baby needs health insurance. I have no other place to go.”

Karl did some quick math in his head. They still had four days to get Vivian and the baby on his health insurance. “I'll need the marriage certificate.”

“Just like that?”

“Double,” the bird squeaked, then whistled.

“Do you want health insurance?” At one time in the distant past, he'd thought he understood women. Exposure had cured him of such idiotic thinking.

“Yes, but, you didn't say so much as ‘hi' to me downstairs. You accuse me of trying to sell you a pig in a poke, insinuating I'm some kind of slut who bangs tourists for fun, but when I say I need health insurance for a baby you don't believe is yours, you say ‘sure'?”

“Even if that baby isn't mine, you should have insurance while you're pregnant. And you
are
my wife. If the baby is mine, I can provide it with health insurance and child support. If it's not mine, I can provide it with health insurance until you are able to provide for it yourself. I won't force a fetus to get less care than I can provide because I don't trust its mother.”

“I can get a DNA test done while pregnant, as early as the ninth week.”

“Where are you staying?”

She turned her head to look out the windows of his apartment, the first time she'd not been willing to meet his eyes since he had walked into the lobby of his building. “I was hoping to stay here.”

“You don't have another place to go?”

She faced him again, the pertness of her chin softened by her full, pale pink lips. How had he not remembered the lushness of her lips? “I have ten dollars, three suitcases and a parrot to my name.”

“Family?”

“They're not available.”

When he'd considered her presence punishment for his behavior, he'd lacked the imagination to envision how the situation could get worse. If mother and child needed medical care, they also needed a roof over their heads. Not to mention the little bird she called a parrot. Chicago had enough wild parakeets without him adding to the population.

“What did you do in Las Vegas?”

“I wasn't a prostitute.”

Any twinge of guilt he'd felt over accusing her of that the morning he'd woken up married to a stranger had long since vanished. Three weeks ago he'd hurled accusations at her, but he hadn't asked what she actually did. He wasn't going to ask more than once now. If he was silent long enough, she would share. She needed a place to stay and didn't know him well enough to know he'd offer her a bed regardless.