So why was she turning white now, instead of looking relieved?
“Young women in difficult situations need options,” Hannah said, “not booties. The more we talked about it, the more I realized Lissa knew what she was talking about when she said if those girls had real choices, they’d make better decisions. Decisions they wouldn’t regret later. So, when neither of you seemed to want this big old house, I got to thinking about how it might do as a group home—a place where single mothers could come for a while, rent-free, till they get on their feet. There could be classes in how to be good parents, help to get jobs, a cooperative nursery to take care of the babies while the mothers went out to work so they didn’t have to pay for daycare.”
“Good idea, Gran,” Kurt said. He hardly heard what he was saying. “Of course there may be a bit of a hitch in how to pay for it all, but—”
Hannah didn’t pause. “So as soon as the holiday’s over, Lissa, I want you to invite your friend who runs the women’s shelter out here, and we’ll sit down and talk about it—about how we could make it all work.”
Lissa swallowed hard. “Whenever you like, Hannah. But let’s talk about it some other time. Aren’t you going to open the rest of your gifts?” She reached for another package herself and started to tear off the paper.
Kurt’s stomach felt as if he’d just topped the first peak of a rollercoaster and dropped into freefall, without the slightest idea of how he’d gotten on the ride. All his suspicions came rushing back like a tidal wave. There haven’t been any babies in the family for twenty-five years—as far as his grandmother knew. But was that the truth?
I realized Lissa knew what she was talking about, Hannah had said. If these girls had real choices, they’d make better decisions. Decisions they wouldn’t regret later.
Lissa knew what she was talking about…how?
From firsthand experience?
In some situations there aren’t any good choices, she had told him once. You just deal with it and go on, that’s all. It had been the voice of experience speaking then—matter-of-fact, almost toneless, with no pain. Not because there hadn’t been any pain involved, but because she was long past feeling it. It had been the voice of a woman who had looked a bad break in the eye, dealt with it, and survived.
That had been the moment when he’d first started to wonder if she was talking about something other than her father’s terminal cancer and her own bout of illness. But when he’d confronted her about the possibility of a pregnancy she’d almost ridiculed the idea.
What do you think I did with this supposed infant?
I hope you’re satisfied that it never happened….
She had assured him there had never been a baby.
Or…had she?
He was struggling to recall exactly what she had and hadn’t said when a crash reverberated from the kitchen. It was a full three seconds before Kurt, his reflexes paralyzed by the sudden shocking questions whirling through his mind, realized that the echo of metal clanging, glass shattering, and something heavy thudding to the floor was real.
Janet had taken a fall.
Maybe, he thought, his grandmother had waited just a little too long to make her move into retirement.
Hannah jumped up, untangled herself from her blanket, and rushed toward the kitchen. Lissa was only a couple of steps behind her, but as Hannah vanished around the corner and into the hall Kurt reached out and grabbed Lissa’s arm, holding her back.
She skidded to a halt and glared at him. “What are you doing? We should go see what’s happened out there!”
“In a minute. I can hear Janet swearing a blue streak—she sounds a whole lot more angry than hurt. Lissa….” He took a deep breath. “About this woman who runs the shelter…”
She couldn’t believe her ears. “Can we do this later, Kurt? After the crisis is past?”
“No, we can’t. How long have you known her?”
“Several years. If you’re asking whether she’s the sort of person who would take advantage of a kind-hearted old lady who only wants to help girls who are in trouble—”
“No.” His eyes were dark, the lines around them deeper than usual, as if he had a sudden, splitting headache. “I just wondered how you’d happened to meet her. And how you know all that stuff you told Gran—about young women and choices, and decisions, and regret.”
Lissa bit her lip. The moment Hannah had started talking she’d been afraid of how Kurt might react, what he might say. If he let any of this slip to Hannah it would only cause pain, without doing anyone any good. She had to try to stop it, to convince him. “Are we back to that again? I told you, Kurt—I did not have your baby. I did not give your child up for adoption.”
He was silent for a long moment. But not, she thought warily, because he was convinced.
When he finally spoke, his voice was very low. “Those aren’t the only possibilities. You never said you weren’t pregnant, Lissa. Just that you didn’t have a baby.”
They say men don’t have intuition, she thought. Well, this one must. “And that’s the truth,” she said, as firmly as she could. “I didn’t.”
“But it’s not the whole truth, is it?” He paused, took a deep breath. “Why didn’t you tell me you were pregnant?”
In the face of his certainty, Lissa couldn’t keep silent any longer. “Because there was nothing to say, Kurt.”
All right, you’re going to have to tell him. The man’s a bulldog; he’s not going to back off till he gets an answer.
She took a deep breath and tried to think. I didn’t tell you I was pregnant because I didn’t know myself…not for sure. It was the absolute truth; it would have to do.
“You’d already made up your mind what you were going to do, hadn’t you?” His voice held a hard edge. “So what I might have thought about it didn’t matter a damn.”
“Made up my mind about what?” Then it hit her—the unthinkable thing he was accusing her of—and Lissa reeled from the impact. “If you’re saying I had an abortion, Kurt—”
“What else am I supposed to think? Sometimes there aren’t any good choices. You said that yourself. If there was no baby, no adoption, what else is left? And you didn’t even bother to tell me—”
Fury roiled in her stomach. “If I had told you I was pregnant, Kurt, what would you have done about it?”
“I sure as hell wouldn’t have let you kill my baby.”
My baby.
He had made a bet with his buddies that he could get her to sleep with him, and no doubt he had celebrated with them and collected his winnings. He had given her not a single additional thought. Not then. Not when his buddies had tormented her. Not when she’d vanished from the class.
But if that night of carelessness had resulted in a child…that he would have cared about. Not Lissa—she didn’t matter. She had never mattered to him. But a baby…
You’ve always known where you stand with him, Lissa told herself. Nothing’s changed.
But it had changed. Everything had changed. For him to coldly look at her and assume that she was capable of ending a child’s life simply because she’d found it inconvenient to be pregnant….
Rage rose in her. She was damned if she’d beg him to believe her. He had appointed himself judge and jury and issued a verdict. The overwhelming urge to hurt him just as deeply as he’d hurt her swept over her.
Her conscience whispered, A lie is still a lie. No matter how much he deserves to be wounded, you shouldn’t sink to lying to him.
But the words were out before she could think it through. “Sure—that’s what happened,” she said coolly. “You’re always right, aren’t you, Kurt? But then it wasn’t a baby. Not really. It was a nuisance, that’s all.”
The instant the words were out she hated herself for saying them—though not because they had hurt him. She still felt he deserved all the pain she could inflict because he’d assumed she could do such a heinous thing.
What she regretted was that in her fur
y she’d soiled the memory of her child—the baby she was morally certain she had carried for just a few brief weeks. So short a time, in fact, that a pregnancy test hadn’t yet shown up positive when the bleeding had started and wouldn’t stop….
“Kurt,” she said desperately. “I’m sorry. Let me explain—”
His face was like stone. “Sorry you did it? Or sorry I found out?”
Hopelessness swept over her, but she was taking a breath to try again when Hannah came back into the room.
“It’s a pity,” she said cheerfully, “but there won’t be pecan rolls for breakfast. Janet’s wrist gave out as she was transferring them to a plate and she dropped the whole lot on the floor. Kurt, you’ll have to run down to the grocery and get some donuts.” She looked from one of them to the other and frowned. “Are you two all right?”
“Sure,” Lissa said. “Fine. I’ll go help clean up.”
“That’s a great idea.” Kurt’s voice was hard. “You’re so experienced at getting rid of messes, Lissa. Aren’t you?”
CHAPTER TEN
KURT SEIZED HIS coat from the closet and stormed out of the house. The silence he left behind was thick, the atmosphere so heavy that it was like trying to breathe underwater.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Hannah asked.
As if, Lissa thought, this was a simple lovers’ spat. Kiss and make up….
“No.” She shuddered uncontrollably; chills were coursing up and down her spine. She wanted to follow Kurt, explain, but how could she? “No, I don’t want to talk about it. If you’d like me to go away, Hannah—”
“Where would you go?” Hannah asked practically. “It’s Christmas Day.”
The reminder would have brought tears to Lissa’s eyes if she hadn’t been in too much pain to cry. How could she and Kurt have forgotten the holiday, and how much it meant to Hannah? “I’m sorry to ruin your Christmas.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time.” Hannah’s voice was matter-of-fact. “When Kurt’s parents were still together—” She seemed to think better of saying it. “If you’d give Janet a hand in the kitchen, I’d appreciate it.”
Lissa nodded, and looked over her shoulder as she left the living room. Hannah was already standing by the sideboard, sherry bottle in hand. Lissa might have joined her—only for her the sherry wouldn’t have been nearly strong enough.
Still-steaming pecan rolls lay scattered on the kitchen floor in a puddle of caramel sauce, absurdly crowned with shards of the milk-glass cakestand that Janet had been transferring them to.
By the time the mess was gathered up and the floor scrubbed, Lissa was starting to wonder if Kurt was going to come back at all. But just as she was wringing the last of the sticky sauce from the mop the side door banged open and he came into the kitchen, two big white bakery bags clutched in one hand.
I’m sorry I let my temper get the best of me, she wanted to say. I shouldn’t have lied to you. I should have told you that I think I had a miscarriage so early that there’s nothing to prove I was ever pregnant at all. But it was too late for that; he’d never believe her now.
He came straight toward her, and the iciness in his eyes chilled her blood. “We aren’t going to ruin Gran’s Christmas.” There was a thread of steel in his voice.
“Now’s a fine time for you to consider that.” Deliberately she let a hint of sarcasm creep into her tone. It was better than breaking down in tears. “But I suppose an afterthought is better than nothing. What’s your plan?”
“I pretend you don’t exist, you pretend I don’t exist, and we get through the day the best we can.”
She felt compelled to say, “I’ve already offered to leave.”
“Don’t bother. I’ve bought a ticket. I’ll be flying out late this afternoon.”
He was so anxious to get away that he didn’t even want to wait for his private jet to pick him up. It was no surprise that he wanted to avoid her. Still, for her own sake there was something she had to say.
“Just for the record,” she said, trying to hold back the emotion. “I didn’t have an abortion.” She shoved the mop into the tall cupboard beside the sink and left the room without a backward look.
Just get through the day, Lissa told herself. Just get through this day and you’ll never have to see him again.
The winter felt endless, and spring was late, wet, and cold. Some days it seemed to Lissa that the sun would never shine again. But the months went by, and she plodded through the last of her classes and the last of her shifts at the student union, and eventually she reached a level of acceptance and almost peace. Whatever Kurt thought of her, it no longer mattered.
Her graduation day, late in May, was perfect—sunny, but not too warm. The scent of lilacs drifted across the campus from the rows of groomed bushes near the quadrangle where the ceremony was being held, and the long tassel on her mortarboard stirred in the breeze and tickled her ear as she half listened to the speaker.
Perhaps, she thought, it had been silly to dress up in cap and gown and go through the motions of the formal ceremony. She’d be a graduate just the same, whether she walked across the stage or not, and she could have spent the day polishing up her job applications. Between working, studying, and writing her senior project, the not-so-small problem of what she was going to do next had not gotten the attention it deserved.
And it wasn’t as if there was a proud family waiting in the stands to cheer her accomplishment.
She hadn’t invited Hannah to the ceremony. In fact, Lissa hadn’t seen her for several weeks—and even then they’d been meeting with the director of the women’s shelter, so the only subject had been the transformation of Hannah’s house to make it accommodate more than half a dozen young women and their babies. But, even if the agenda had been less crucial, Lissa was reasonably certain Hannah wouldn’t have mentioned Kurt. In fact, since he’d left the house late on Christmas afternoon, Hannah had not once brought up his name—even during the following week, when his presence had still been palpable and the scent of his aftershave still hiding in unexpected corners of his grandmother’s house, lurking as if to ambush Lissa.
Lissa didn’t know what Kurt had told his grandmother—if anything—about that last fight. She was fairly sure he hadn’t breathed a word, and that Hannah was still as much in the dark as she’d been on Christmas Day, when they’d been frigidly polite to each other over the dinner table. For if he’d told his grandmother about Lissa and his suspicions that she’d deliberately ended a pregnancy then he’d have had to admit that he was the man who’d caused it.
Not long after the pumpkin pie was cut Kurt had left for the airport, and Lissa hadn’t heard from him since. Not that she’d expected to, though for a while she’d felt the clench of fear in her gut whenever she went to work and found a message waiting for her at the union—because, she thought, that was the only place he’d have known to reach her.
But as the weeks had gone by she’d gradually come to accept that it was really over. She was still angry at him for judging her, hurt that he could have thought her capable of such a thing. And she still regretted that she’d lied to him—even though she knew he wouldn’t have believed her if she’d told the truth right then.
She wished the end could have been less painful and less public, and that Hannah hadn’t walked into the crossfire and been hurt. She wished that she could still consider the old woman a friend, not just an acquaintance.
And, in a few dark, middle-of-the-night contemplations, she’d found herself wishing all over again that things had turned out differently. Not because having his baby would have kept Kurt in her life—she wouldn’t have wanted him there if he’d had to be forced, and he’d made it clear enough that nothing short of a child would have drawn him to her. But, as complicated as her life would have been under those circumstances, she would have had her reward in watching her child grow.
Instead, she’d barely begun to suspect the existence of a pregnancy, much less come to terms with how
she would manage life with a baby, before it had all been over.
But the time was past for all those sorts of thoughts. This was the end of a long and difficult chunk of her life, and it was time for a fresh start.
The university president called her name. Lissa held her head high as she climbed the steps to the temporary stage set up in the center of the quadrangle and walked across to receive her diploma. There were a few cheers; she saw her fellow workers at the student union in a clump right down front, yelling, and her heart warmed. The dean of the business college presented her diploma, shook her hand, and whispered, “Congratulations, Lissa. You have a bright future, I know.”
The parade of names was the very end of the ceremony, and as the black-gowned graduates came down the steps at the far end of the stage, diploma in hand, they moved off to the side, out onto the quadrangle where they could mingle and celebrate.
The stairs were makeshift, and she had to watch that the heel of her shoe didn’t slide down into the metal grid, or that her toe didn’t catch in the hem of the long black gown. Going down was harder than ascending had been, and she was grateful for the arm which was offered in support as she climbed off the stage.
Until she drew her next breath and caught the scent of an aftershave she’d thought she would never smell again.
Her hand stilled on Kurt’s arm.
“Congratulations,” he said.
She nodded. It was the only thanks she could manage; for her life, she couldn’t have forced a word out.
Though she was off the stairs, once more on solid ground, the grass seemed to sway under her, and Lissa was afraid to trust her feet. As if he’d read her mind, Kurt pulled his arm closer to his body, trapping her hand, and drew her away from the stage.
She looked around. “Is Hannah here?” Her voice was little more than a breath.
Kurt shook his head. “Since you didn’t officially invite her, she couldn’t get a seat—and she didn’t think she could stand through the whole ceremony.”
The Tycoon's Proposal Page 16
