The Passions of Chelsea Kane

by Barbara Delinsky

  THE

  PASSIONS

  OF

  Chelsea

  Kane

  BARBARA

  DELINSKY

  Contents

  E-book Extra

  A Note from the Author on The Passions of Chelsea Kane

  Prologue

  She fought a compelling urge to push.

  One

  From the plush comfort of the velvet love seat . . .

  Two

  I’d like a large double-cheese pepperoni pizza with . . .

  Three

  In early February Chelsea received a phone call . . .

  Four

  Late March was a wet time in Norwich Notch.

  Five

  Chelsea hadn’t intended to phone Carl . . .

  Six

  “A partnership?” Carl repeated later that night . . .

  Seven

  Donna Farr stood at the front of the general store . . .

  Eight

  The bell above the door tinkled when Chelsea entered . . .

  Nine

  Chelsea spent Sunday driving back to Baltimore.

  Ten

  Chelsea stood in the attic . . .

  Eleven

  Judd missed the pancake breakfast . . .

  Twelve

  Chelsea wandered from booth . . .

  Thirteen

  Chelsea wasn’t the only one to brood.

  Fourteen

  The Norwich Notch Historical Society was . . .

  Fifteen

  Chelsea knew his footsteps.

  Sixteen

  “Are you sure it was one of ours?”

  Seventeen

  Chelsea met Leo Streeter when . . .

  Eighteen

  Judd felt as though his shoulder . . .

  Nineteen

  Coincidentally, the first of the season’s . . .

  Twenty

  “It’s due in February,” Chelsea said . . .

  Twenty-one

  “You’ve been avoiding me,” Chelsea said . . .

  Twenty-two

  Donna didn’t often seek out Oliver.

  Twenty-three

  Neil arrived in time to clean things up . . .

  Twenty-four

  At the time when Abby should have . . .

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  By Barbara Delinsky

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  E-Book Extra

  A Note from the Author on The Passions of Chelsea Kane

  There were several motivating threads behind my writing The Passions of Chelsea Kane. First was the issue of adoption. I had read stories of adopted children rebelling against their adoptive parents and seeking out their biological ones, but I wanted to write a different scenario. I wanted to write about the adopted child who adores her adoptive parents, but who feels a need to learn more, genetically, about her past. I wanted to examine the response of her adoptive parents to that. I wanted to reaffirm the love between adoptive parents and their children.

  Second, having twins of my own, I wanted to explore bonds that might or might not exist between twins who are separated at birth.

  Third, I wanted to create a small town. The Passions of Chelsea Kane was the first book where I consciously did that. I drove through southern New Hampshire until I found a town that captured the intimacy I wanted, then I used it as a physical model for my own. I have since done this numerous times — most notably in Lake News and Three Wishes. Part of me does find solace in the simplicity and intimacy of small town living, which is perhaps why my husband and I love our lake house!

  A final word on The Passions of Chelsea Kane; the book was newly published when my family adopted our very first pet. She was a kitten, ten weeks old, weighing a pound and a half. We call her Chelsea, hence immortalizing the book.

  Adapted from Barbara’s website, www.barbaradelinsky.com.

  Prologue

  She fought a compelling urge to push. She didn’t want the baby born yet. She wasn’t ready to let it go, wanted to keep it with her longer, but her body wouldn’t cooperate. It had taken charge and was relentless in its goal. From the onset of labor the evening before, the contractions had been strong, one more brand of punishment to add to what had already been. Now, though, they seized her even more cruelly, strangling her belly and stealing her breath. They forced the child in her womb steadily downward until she could no more have kept her trembling thighs from opening than she could have kicked away the girl reaching between them.

  The room was dim, lit only by the glow of the woodstove and the fragile veil of dawn. In hallucinatory moments between pains, she imagined that he had decreed her baby born then, with no one awake to see or hear, no one to know. In the dark, the baby that had been a black mark on the fabric of Norwich Notch would be banished, the stain washed clean. With the sunrise, the town would be pure once again.

  Another pain came, this one so cutting that she cried out. The sound echoed in the stillness, followed by another cry, then, when the vise around her belly began to ease, the frantic gasping for air. That sound, too, reverberated in the quiet, and with the return of reason, the irony of it hit her. A great blizzard should have been swirling madly around the small shack to mark the birth of the child that had created such a stir—and if not a blizzard, she decided on the edge of hysteria, certainly the kind of torrential rain that often hit New Hampshire at the tail end of March. Mud would have made the roads impassable. No one could have reached her. She might have kept her baby a little longer.

  But there was no gusting wind or swirling snow. There was no battering rain, no mud. The dawn was silent, mocking her with its utter tranquillity.

  Her stomach knotted hard. Unbearable pain circled her middle in coils that tightened with each turn. She wanted a hand to hold for the comfort of knowing someone cared, but there was no hand, no caring soul. So she clutched fistfuls of the wrinkled sheet and gritted her teeth against a bubbling scream.

  “Push,” came the soft voice from between her legs. It belonged to the midwife’s sixteen-year-old daughter, who had been relegated the task of delivering the town’s least wanted child. In her innocence her voice was gentle, even excited, as she urged, “Push. . . . There. I see a head. Push more.”

  She tried not to. To expel her baby was to expel the only life she was ever to create, and once gone from her body the child would be lost to her. She wondered if it knew that. She wondered if it wanted that, it seemed so determined to be born. She couldn’t blame it, she supposed. She had nothing to offer but love, and that wasn’t nearly enough to keep it clothed and fed. So for the child’s sake she was giving it up. She had agreed to the decision, but she hated it, hated it.

  The pain that hit her next drove all thought from mind but the one that she was surely dying. Her whitened fingers twisted the worn sheet, while the rest of her body contorted in agony. For an instant, when the pain subsided, she was disappointed to find that she remained, trembling and sweaty and hurting all over. The disappointment was still strong in her when she was seized again. Instinctively she bore down.

  “That’s right,” the young girl coaxed in a tremulous voice. “A little more. . . . Oooooh, yes. Here it is.”

  The baby left her shaking body, but the pain lingered. It rose to encompass her heart and mind and wasn’t helped by the tiny new cry that rose poignantly over her own labored breaths. She tried to see the child, but even if there had been more light, her stomach remained a bulbous barrier. When she tried to prop herself higher, her quivering arms wouldn’t hold.

  “Is it a girl?” she cried, falling back to the bed. “I wanted a girl.�
��

  “Push a little more.”

  She felt a tugging. There was another contraction, another fierce cramp, then with its ebb a harrowing sense of loss. “My baby,” she whispered, devastated, “I want my baby.” As though in answer, the infant began to wail from the foot of the bed. The sound was cruelly lusty. Had the child been stillborn, she might have mourned and survived, but to give birth to a healthy child only to give it up was double the heartbreak. “I want to see my baby.”

  There was no response. She was aware of activity at the end of the bed and knew the infant was being cleaned.

  “Please.”

  “They said no.”

  “It’s my baby.”

  “You agreed.”

  “If I don’t see it now, I never will.”

  The work went on at the foot of the bed.

  “Please.”

  “He told me not to.”

  “He’ll never know. Just for a minute.”

  Again she tried to raise herself, but the baby was in a basket by the warmth of the woodstove, and her strength gave out before she could do more than struggle to her elbows. When she fell back to the thin mattress this time it was with a sense of defeat. She was weak and hurting and so very tired. For nine months she’d been fighting, and that was before hard labor had begun. She was too old to be having a baby, they’d said, and for the first time she believed them. She couldn’t fight any longer.

  Closing her eyes, she let herself be bathed—the birth area, then the rest of her that was damp with sweat. The tears that trickled down her cheeks were slowed by sheer exhaustion, but her thoughts moved ahead. She knew the plan. Everything was arranged. The lawyer would be coming soon.

  A clean gown was slipped over her and the covers drawn up to keep her warm, but the comfort that was intended by the young girl’s kind hands only heightened the desolation she felt. Her future was as barren as she had thought herself all those years. She wasn’t sure she could go on.

  Suddenly she felt a new movement on the bed and the weight of a small bundle tucked against her side, along with a whispered, “Don’t tell.”

  Opening her eyes, she drew back a corner of the swaddling blanket and sucked in a broken breath. In the pale light of dawn the child was perfect. Large, wide-spaced eyes, a tiny button nose, and rosebud mouth—she was definitely a girl, definitely the best of her parents, definitely sweet and strong—and in that instant her mother knew she had made the right decision. There would be no run-down shacks, no shabby clothes or meager meals for this child. There would be no scorn on the part of the townsfolk, no humiliation, no abuse, but rather a life of privilege, respect, and love.

  Rolling to her side, she hugged the infant to her breast. She kissed its warm forehead, breathed in its raw baby scent, ran her hands over its tiny form, then hugged it tighter when tears came again. They fell faster this time, gathering into sobs so gripping that she barely heard the knock at the door.

  The girl by her side quickly reached for the child. “He’s here.”

  “No—oh, no.” She clutched the baby to her, covering its head with her own not so much to protect it as to protect herself. Without the child she was nothing.

  “Please,” came the frightened whisper, along with a tugging. “We have to leave.”

  We. Already her daughter belonged to someone else—the midwife’s daughter now, then the lawyer, then the lawyer of the adopting couple, then the couple themselves. The process had been set into motion. There was no way to stop it without incurring his wrath, and no one knew the consequences of that wrath better than she. It was a silent wrath, all the more dangerous in a man as stubborn as he was powerful. But he was a man of his word. Just as he had warned her that she would suffer if she chose to carry her child and she had, so he had promised to have the child delivered to its destination unharmed and he would.

  She raised the infant to her cheek. “Be someone, baby.”

  “Let me take her.”

  “Do it for me, baby, do it for me.”

  “Please,” the girl begged. “Now.”

  “I love you.” With an anguished moan, she hugged the baby again. “Love you,” she sobbed softly. When a second, louder knock came, she jumped. She made a sound of protest, but it was a futile expression of the grief she felt. Her own fate was sealed. In the hope that her daughter’s would be kinder, she released the whimpering infant into the hands that waited. Unable to watch the child pass from her life, she turned away from the warmth of the room and closed her eyes.

  The door opened. There was a low murmur, the rustle of clothing and the creak of the wicker basket, the closing of the door, then a bleak and wrenching silence. She was alone again, just as she had been for most of her miserable life, only now there was no hope. The last of that had been stolen from her along with her beautiful baby girl.

  She let out a low, animal sound of despair, then clutched at a sudden searing in her stomach. Her eyes grew wide. Her bewilderment had barely eased when the second pain hit. By the time the third came, she had begun to understand. With the fourth, she was ready.

  One

  From the plush comfort of the velvet love seat that had been brought into the library for the occasion, Chelsea Kane studied the blond-haired, blue-eyed, beak-nosed members of her mother’s family and decided that wherever she was from herself, it had to be better stock than this. She detested the arrogance and greed she saw before her. With Abby barely cold in her grave, they had been fighting over who would get what.

  As for Chelsea, all she wanted was Abby. But Abby was gone.

  Bowing her head, she listened to the whisper of the January wind, the hiss of a Mahler murmur, the snap of her father’s pocket watch, the rustle of papers on the desk. In time she focused on the carpet. It was an Aubusson, elegantly subtle in pale blues and browns. “This carpet is your father,” Abby had always declared in her inimitably buoyant British way, and indeed Kevin was elegantly subtle. Whether he loved the carpet as Abby had remained to be seen. Things like that were hard to tell with him. He wasn’t an outwardly demonstrative man. Even now, when Chelsea raised her eyes to his face in search of comfort, she found none. His expression was as heartrendingly somber as the dark suit he wore. Though he shared the love seat with her, he was distanced by his own grief. It had been that way since Abby’s death five days before.

  Chelsea wanted to slide closer and take his hand; but she didn’t dare. She was a trespasser on the landscape of his grief. He might welcome her, or he might not. Empty as she was feeling, she couldn’t risk the rejection.

  Finally ready, Graham Fritts, Abby’s attorney and the executor of her estate, raised the first of his papers. “‘The following are the last wishes of Abigail Mahler Kane . . .’”

  Chelsea let the words pass her by. They were a grim reminder of what was all too raw, an extension of the elegantly carved coffin, the minister’s well-meaning words, and the dozens of yellow roses that should have been poignantly beautiful but were simply and dreadfully sad. Chelsea hadn’t wanted the will read so soon, but Graham had succumbed to the pressure of the Mahlers, who had come to Baltimore from great distances for the funeral and didn’t want to have to come again. Kevin hadn’t argued. He rarely took on the clan. It wasn’t that he was weak; he was an eminently capable person. But where he championed select causes at work, there his store of fire ended, rendering him nonconfrontational at home.

  Abby had understood that. She had been as compassionate as compassionate ever was, Chelsea realized, and let her thoughts drift. She remembered Abby bathing her in Epsom salts when she had chicken pox, ordering gallons of Chelsea’s favorite black cherry ice cream when the braces went on her teeth, excitedly sending copies to all their friends when a drawing of Chelsea’s won first prize in a local art show, scolding her when she double-pierced her ears.

  More recently, when Abby’s system had started to deteriorate, as was typical of long-term polio victims, the tables had been turned, with Chelsea doing the bathing, doting
, praising, and scolding, and she had been grateful for the opportunity. Abby had given her so much. To be able to give something back was a gift, particularly knowing, as increasingly they both had, that Abby’s time was short.

  “‘. . . this house and the one in Newport I bequeath to my husband, Kevin Kane, along with . . .’”

  Houses, cars, stocks, and bonds, Kevin didn’t need any of those things. He was a successful neurosurgeon, drawing a top salary from the hospital and augmenting it with a lucrative private practice. He had been the one to provide for Chelsea’s everyday needs, and he had insisted that it be that way. Abby had taken care of the extras.

  Often over the years Chelsea had wished she hadn’t, for it had only fostered resentment among the clan. Abby’s brothers and sisters had felt it wrong that a Mahler trust should be established for Chelsea, who had no Mahler blood. But Abby had been insistent that Chelsea, as her daughter, was to be treated like every other Mahler grandchild. So she had been, technically at least. She had a trust in her name that provided her with sufficient interest to live quite nicely even if she chose never to work.

  “‘. . . to my daughter, Chelsea Kane, I leave . . .’”

  Chelsea was an architect. At thirty-six she was one of three partners in a firm that was landing plum jobs up and down the East Coast. Moreover, she had personally invested in a well-chosen few of those projects, which meant that her profits were compounded. She lived quite nicely on what she earned.

  For that reason, perhaps, the accumulation of assets had never been of great interest to her, which was why she barely listened to what Graham read. She didn’t want to inherit anything from her mother, didn’t want to acknowledge that the woman was dead. Her aunts and uncles didn’t seem to have that problem. Trying to look blasé, they sat with their blond heads straight and their hands folded with artful nonchalance in their laps. Only the tension around those pointy noses and their ever-alert blue eyes betrayed them.

  “‘. . . to my brother Malcolm Mahler, I leave . . .’”