Jack's Baby

by Emma Darcy

  EMMA DARCY nearly became an actress until her fiancé declared he preferred to attend the theater with her. She became a wife and mother. Later she took up oil painting—unsuccessfully, she remarks. Then she tried architecture, designing the family home in New South Wales, Australia. Next came romance writing—“the hardest and most challenging of all the activities,” she confesses.

  Books by Emma Darcy

  HARLEQUIN PRESENTS

  1745—THE FATHERHOOD AFFAIR

  1771—CLIMAX OF PASSION

  1785—LAST STOP MARRIAGE

  1815—MISCHIEF AND MARRIAGE

  1833—THE FATHER OF HER CHILD

  1848—THEIR WEDDING DAY

  EMMA DARCY

  Jack’s Baby

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  BABIES, Jack Gulliver darkly reflected, undermined every normal, congenial intercourse between intelligent adults. They infiltrated people’s lives even before they entered the world, then took over like tyrannical dictators. Nothing was safe from them.

  Jack brooded over these truths as he drove through the tunnel under Sydney Harbour, taking the shortest route to Paddington and the Royal Hospital for Women. He wished Maurice had been satisfied with hearty congratulations on the birth of his son. It was totally unreasonable of him to insist Jack actually come and view the new pride and joy. Paternal enthusiasm run rampant. Jack wondered how long it would last.

  One by one his friends had succumbed to the lure of fatherhood, only to find themselves knocked off their happy perches of being the main focus of attention in their households. They’d groaned out their misery and their complaints to him, envying his freedom from the chaos they had brought upon themselves.

  “Good sex is impossible.”

  “You’re lucky if you get any sex.”

  “Who wants sex? I’d like one—just one—full night’s sleep.”

  “Forget spontaneity. The baby comes first, first, first and first.”

  “I haven’t got a wife. She’s turned into a slave to the baby.”

  “There’s no time for us any more.”

  “It’s like moving an army to go anywhere. I’d rather stay at home. Save the aggravation.”

  There was no doubt in Jack’s mind that babies were destructive little monsters. They probably should be born with a 007 warning engraved on their foreheads—licenced to kill. He knew of several couples who had broken up under the stress of parenthood, and the rest were struggling to adjust to changes they resented.

  Jack now had a fair appreciation of why his own parents had limited their progeny to one only, why he had been brought up by nannies and shunted off to boarding school at age seven. Quite clearly he had interfered too much with their lives. From his current view as an adult, he understood they had taken practical steps to minimise the damage to their rights as individuals, but as a child, Jack hadn’t liked being on the receiving end of their solutions.

  The lonely, shut-out feeling of his youth was still an unhappy memory. No way would he inflict the same process on a child of his. On the other hand, he was quite sure he wouldn’t like such a disruptive influence in his life, either. The solution, as he saw it, was simple. Don’t have children.

  Any curiosity he might have had about the experience of fatherhood had been more than fulfilled by what he’d observed with his friends. Apart from which, he felt no urge to perpetuate his bloodline. He enjoyed his life, loved his work, had the financial freedom to do what he liked when he liked. What more could he want?

  Nina…

  Jack grimaced as he tried to expunge that thought and the gut-wrenching sense of loss accompanying it. Nina had shut him out even more thoroughly than his parents had, not even giving him the chance to open the door again. All over a stupid argument about babies.

  Or maybe there’d been other reasons. He shook his head, still frustrated by the way she’d cut him out of her life, leaving him wondering what he’d done wrong. He’d chosen that very night to ask Nina to move in with him, sure in his own mind he’d found a woman he’d enjoy living with, and just because he’d made a few entirely appropriate comments about the baby who’d wrecked the dinner party they’d attended, Nina had gone off her brain and dumped him, then and there. No comeback. Total wipe-out.

  It made no sense to him. He was probably well rid of a woman who could act so irrationally. Yet there’d never been a glimmer of such behaviour in all the time they’d spent together—months of sheer joy. He could have sworn they were completely compatible, even to their pleasure in the creative work they did. She was the first and only person he’d ever felt really at home with.

  There were times he missed her so badly it was a physical ache. He could still visualise her as clearly as if she were with him now, sitting beside him—dark velvet eyes with stars in them, a smile that made his heart dance, shiny black hair swinging around her shoulders, her soft, feminine curves a sensual promise he knew to be absolutely true. He could hear her infectious laughter and the sexy murmurs that excited him when they made love.

  Futile memories. He wished he could forget Nina Brady and how he’d felt with her. There was no shortage of women wanting to interest him. Sooner or later he’d meet one who’d strike that special spark. It was only a matter of waiting. Eight months hardly rated as a long time. In a year or two, Nina’s rejection wouldn’t mean a thing.

  The traffic lights favoured him right up to Taylor Square. As he turned into Oxford Street, he switched his mind to Maurice and tried to work himself into a lighter mood. Maurice Larosa was a good friend and a valuable business associate. He not only gave Jack all the French polishing work on the antiques he sold, but frequently sent clients who wanted to have pieces made to match furniture they’d bought. Favours like that deserved favours in return, and if it meant smiling benevolently at a baby, Jack was resolved on obliging. At least this once.

  He spotted a car pulling out of a convenient space and shot into it, grateful not to waste time hunting for a parking slot. The hospital was only a short distance away. The dash clock showed seven-fifteen, plenty of time to get there, perform as expected and take his leave with the excuse of giving Maurice and his wife privacy to say their good nights.

  He picked up the gift-boxed bottle of champagne from the passenger seat, smiling over this particular forethought as he alighted from the big Range Rover and locked it. Other visitors would undoubtedly shower presents on the baby. Some French bubbly might give the new and soon-to-be-frazzled parents a pleasant hour or two together. He knew from his other friends that babies killed any sense of romance stone dead.

  Although it was April, there wasn’t so much as a nip of autumn in the air. The lingering Indian summer made it a pleasant hour for walking. A waste of a nice evening, Jack thought, as he entered the hospital and headed for the inquiries desk. Having received directions, he caught the elevator to the correct floor, mentally bracing himself to endure baby talk with jovial indulgence for a minimum of twenty minutes.

  The elevator doors opened. He stepped out. Something familiar about the woman waiting to step into the compartment caught his eye. He looked sharply at her and he had the weird sense of falling down an empty shaft instead of standing flat
on a firm floor.

  “Nina?”

  Her name exploded from his throat.

  Her hair was cropped short, but he couldn’t mistake that face, those eyes as she stared straight at him. Recognition, shock, disbelief, fear, anger…each expression pulsed briefly at him from a stillness that shrieked with tension. Then she whirled past him, jabbed a finger at the control panel inside the elevator and hugged herself against the back wall, glaring a fierce rejection of him until the doors closed.

  The message burned into his brain. She didn’t want him. She didn’t want anything to do with him. He quelled the raging instinct to chase after her, find her, make her listen to him. Useless. She’d made her decision to shut him out. It hadn’t changed. It wasn’t about to change. She’d just done it again.

  He forced himself to walk away, to check the room numbers he passed along the corridor. He’d come here to oblige a friend. Never mind that he had no heart for it. It gave him something purposeful to do. He had to forget Nina.

  But why had there been fear in her eyes? He’d never given her any reason to be afraid of him.

  Why anger? Surely she realised this meeting was purely accidental.

  Damn it all! What had he done wrong?

  CHAPTER TWO

  JACK…

  His name kept pounding through Nina’s mind, creating waves of pain that seemed to suck at her body, leaving her weak and trembling. When the elevator doors opened, she had to push herself away from the wall. Her legs were like jelly, her stomach a churning mess. Somehow she made it to the ladies’ rest room on the ground floor, blundered into an empty cubicle, fastened the door, then gratefully sank onto the toilet seat, safely hidden until she could pull herself together.

  Tears welled into her eyes. She hunched over, burying her face in her hands, rocking in anguish at the unkind stroke of fate that had brought her face to face with Jack at such a time and place. It wasn’t fair. It was grossly unfair. She’d spent the past eight months trying to forget him, forcing herself to accept there could be no happy future with him. Seeing him again now opened up all the hurt she’d done her best to bury.

  For one heart-stopping moment she’d thought he knew. But he couldn’t. And, of course, he didn’t. The surprise on his face told her he hadn’t expected to run into her.

  The husky urgency in his voice had rattled memories better suppressed. Jack wanting her, making love to her with such intense passion they seemed to flow together in a fusing heat that had made her feel it was impossible to tear them apart. They’d been a perfect match in so many ways…if there were only two of them. She hadn’t known then, hadn’t realised there was a fatal flaw in their relationship, silently waiting to explode in her face, just when she’d fooled herself everything would be all right.

  The hollow sickness she had felt that night swamped her again. Jack was lost to her. Irrevocably. Their paths had diverged so deeply, no meeting place was left for them. An unpredictable and accidental crossing like tonight was a cruelty, a glimpse of what might have been if Jack’s attitude about babies and having children had been different.

  Nina remembered her own father’s attitude too well to inflict the same crushing sense of being unwanted onto any child, much less her own. Every time her parents had argued, they had invariably flung out the bitter accusation of being trapped by an unplanned pregnancy. Nina was to blame for her father not being in the career he wanted, for her mother being tied to responsibility instead of enjoying many more carefree years. The list of resentments was endless.

  It would have been the same with Jack—different reasons for resenting the situation but no difference in the feelings aroused. He had left her with no doubt about that. Nina shut her eyes tight, squeezing back the futile tears, wishing she could erase the image of him, stamped so freshly on her mind.

  He was still magnetically handsome, emanating the same powerful virility that had drawn her to him at their very first meeting. In just those few strung-out moments before she’d escaped via the elevator, the old familiarities had leapt to vivid life again—the small mole near his jawline, a tantalising little disfigurement on his smoothly tanned skin. His streaky toffee hair, at its shaggy state, needing a trim. The startling directness of his green eyes tugging at her heart.

  He shouldn’t affect her like this. Not now, when it was so impossibly hopeless for them ever to get together. And this was the last place he should be. Why on earth would Jack be visiting a maternity hospital?

  Someone must have pressed him to come, blindly intent on showing off a new son or daughter, not realising a baby had no appeal whatsoever to Jack Gulliver. Social politeness or professional sensibilities would have pushed him to oblige. It was the only answer Nina could come up with. She desperately hoped that seeing her wouldn’t prompt a curiosity to know why she was here. If he found out…

  She couldn’t bear it. She just couldn’t bear it. Arguments, recriminations, an insistence on shouldering some responsibility, financial if nothing else. Trapped by a child he didn’t want but felt obliged to support. A tie between them going on and on…the bitterness of it. She’d hate it. She’d taken every step she could to avoid it—leaving her job, changing house, no telephone number in her name—all to make the break from Jack a completely clean one.

  She wanted to howl out her fear and frustration, but if someone heard her it would draw unwelcome attention. A nurse might be fetched. Her chest hurt. Her throat ached. She grabbed some toilet tissue and mopped her eyes and cheeks, determined to rise above this dreadful stress.

  Yet if the decisions she had put into action were sabotaged now, how would she cope? Her emotional state was shockingly fragile as it was, without Jack intruding on the life she had to establish and maintain. With Sally’s help she could manage. She didn’t need Jack’s money, and her child certainly didn’t need his attitude.

  Maybe she was worrying for nothing. Jack’s surprise didn’t necessarily mean he was still interested in her. He could be attached to some other woman by now. There would have been plenty wanting to interest him in the past eight months. A good-looking man of substance didn’t go begging for female company.

  But what they had shared had been special. And Jack was choosy. He didn’t give out to many people. The look in his eyes after the initial shock of recognition—eagerness, hope—would he shrug it off and let it go?

  With any luck he might have assumed she was another visitor, passing through, leaving as he was arriving. Had he noticed she wasn’t wearing proper clothes? She groaned as she realised it was more than clothes adding up the evidence against being a visitor. No make-up, hair in disarray, no handbag. She hoped she hadn’t given him enough time to register those details.

  Time…She glanced at her watch. Seven thirty-six. She couldn’t risk running into Jack again. Best to stay hidden in this rest room until after the eight o’clock curfew for visitors. Sally would stay with the baby until she returned to the ward. There was no cause for panic. Sally expected her to spend twenty minutes or so browsing through the magazines available at the kiosk. Nina had left her happily chatting to the other two new mothers and their visitors—husbands, happy husbands and fathers.

  The tears welled again. It was miserable being a single mother when she was faced with families celebrating their new offspring. Sally was a great friend and wonderful support, but it wasn’t the same.

  If only Jack…

  Damn him! Why couldn’t he have been different? Why were children so wrong for him?

  CHAPTER THREE

  SMILING benevolently did not come easily. Jack had to work hard at repressing the angry frustration that seeing Nina had stirred. He wanted to snap and snarl. He felt a deep empathy with his dog’s behaviour when a great bone was moved out of his marked territory. He felt no empathy whatsoever with the drivel coming out of Maurice’s mouth.

  “He’s got my ears, poor little blighter.”

  Jack smiled. “Well, one can always resort to plastic surgery.”

 
Maurice laughed indulgently. “They’re not that bad. He’ll grow into them.”

  “Bound to,” Jack agreed, his face aching with smiling.

  Maurice looked besottedly at his wife. “I’m glad he’s got Ingrid’s nose.”

  Jack obediently performed the comparison, studying the straight, aristocratic nose of Maurice’s buxom blonde wife and the longer, slightly bumpy one of his friend. He forced another smile. “Yes. Much the better nose.”

  Why was it obligatory to divide a baby’s features between the parents? It was inevitably done, like a ritual, perhaps affirming true heritage, or an assurance that a little replica would fulfil its parents’ expectations. Not only was it a deadly boring exercise to Jack, it almost drove him to snap, “Let the kid be himself, for God’s sake!”

  But that wasn’t the done thing.

  He wondered whom Nina had been visiting on this floor. Not that it mattered. No point in trying to find some contact point with her. From the attitude she had flashed to him, it would probably constitute harassment. Besides, Jack had a built-in inhibitor against going where he wasn’t wanted.

  “Give me the baby, darling, while you open Jack’s present,” Ingrid commanded, brandishing the newborn power of being a mother. This was definitely one time she could boss Maurice around. The proud and grateful Dad would undoubtedly lick her feet if she asked him to. Jack knew from observation that the flow of uncritical giving wouldn’t last.

  He watched Maurice lay the precious bundle in his wife’s arms with tender care. It was really a pity such blissful harmony didn’t last. They looked good—loving mother and father with child. Idyllic. The rot didn’t set in until they went home from hospital.