His Miracle Baby

by Karen Sandler

  Fishing the key from the spine, she set the book on the bed in front of her. What if Logan was right, that there might be something in this slim volume that Shani wouldn’t want to know? What if there were secrets in here that best remained hidden?

  Then she would keep them to herself. She didn’t have to share anything with Logan from these pages. He had as much as told her he’d just as soon not know.

  Logan had brought over the portrait of Arianna as a girl, had propped it on top of the dresser with a promise to hang it later. The girl Arianna had been gazed down at Shani, her smile sweet and wistful. Shani wished she could ask that girl if she was doing the right thing by opening the Pandora’s box of Arianna’s past.

  Should I? Shani asked, the key in the palm of her hand.

  Go ahead, she imagined Arianna answering. I trust you with my secrets.

  Shani slipped the key neatly into the lock, a perfect fit. Turning it, she released the strap and opened the book.

  Chapter Twelve

  It fell open, not in the middle, but about two-thirds in where several pages had been torn out. The remainder of the diary after those torn pages was blank. There were no loose sheets tucked anywhere else in the journal.

  Setting aside that puzzle, Shani flipped to the front of the diary, where Arianna had written her name and a date—about two-and-a-half years before her death. Shani turned over the flyleaf, opening to the first handwritten page.

  This may be a hopeless cause, but the therapist insists it will help. I don’t see how mulling over my constant grief will make it go away, but I’m willing to try.

  Shani didn’t remember Arianna ever mentioning a therapist, but as private as she was about some things, it wasn’t a surprise her friend would keep that quiet. In those last two years, there had been some moments of brightness, so maybe Arianna’s time in counseling had helped.

  I have tried, throughout my marriage, to blame my unhappiness on my husband and his failings. But if I am to believe the therapist, neither my happiness nor unhappiness are his responsibility. Only my own.

  So many conversations with Arianna had centered on Logan, the things he’d said or not said, things he’d done or not done. The business trip he’d taken on their tenth anniversary. The gift of a bracelet when she’d told him she wanted earrings. The fact that during their sixteen-year marriage Logan rarely told Arianna, “I love you,” and when he did, it seemed forced and insincere.

  And yet—he’d taken Arianna out for a lavish celebratory dinner just a few days after their anniversary. He’d later given her the earrings, custom-made and a perfect match for the bracelet. And there were the cards, presented unexpected, that said on paper what he couldn’t seem to say aloud.

  At the time, the way Arianna described it through the dark-colored lens of her life, it seemed Logan was incapable of affection toward his wife unless prodded and pushed. But now, knowing him better, looking back over the ways he’d tried to make Shani’s life comfortable, how he’d so willingly given his time to help her with school, she wondered how accurate that picture of Logan had been.

  Shani continued to read, flipping past pages filled with the mundane and the sorrowful, stopping at another written about a month after the first entry.

  Was I ever happy in our marriage? Good God, have I ever been happy at all? There must have been times, there had to be. But the older I’ve gotten, the more my world has closed in on me. The more I’ve focused on grief. I’m so terrified to hope for something good, to count on joy. Because the moment I do, it will all fall apart, leaving me in a nightmare.

  The words stunned Shani. She hadn’t realized how dark Arianna’s life had been. When they spent time together, Shani had seen sorrow in her friend’s eyes, but she’d still laughed, shared jokes. Glossed over her complaints at times, at others cried in Shani’s arms.

  Never knowing better, Shani had placed all the blame on Logan. Had assumed Arianna’s cold, distant husband had created the sadness in his wife. But that bleakness had been there from the start. Even in the girl in the portrait, with her wistful smile, but sad eyes.

  Shani read on, Arianna’s struggles revealed page by page. Apparently the therapist had recommended medication several times, but Arianna had refused. Still, near the end of the written pages, there was a sense Arianna was climbing out of the abyss.

  Maybe there are different ways to show love. Maybe some of what Logan does is his way of trying to please me. Maybe I have more to do with his failures than he does.

  Shani flipped to the last entry, just before the torn-out pages. Only one line written there—Three more e-mails today—should I tell him? Shani fanned through the remainder of the diary, searching for anything further, and came up empty.

  Tell who? It had to be Logan. But tell him what? Could she have met someone, was she having an affair? She never gave Shani so much as a hint that that was happening, but obviously Arianna kept plenty to herself. Could that have been the source of her occasional lighter mood the last few months before she died?

  Shani shut the diary, locking it again and tucking it into the nightstand drawer. She had no business speculating on Arianna’s enigmatic question. As curious as Shani was, the truth behind what her friend had written was better left laid to rest just as Arianna was.

  But what about the other insights—that Arianna had started to see Logan as a good man despite the cool facade. That as clumsy as his demonstrations of affection had sometimes been, he’d given his best to his wife. That maybe with time, they might have made a happier marriage.

  Shifting on the bed, Shani tugged aside the comforter and lay back against the pillows. Arianna’s words eddied through her mind, reshaping her thoughts, breaking down and rebuilding the foundation of what she thought she understood. She needed time to process this, to see how to cope with this reshaping of her world.

  Snapping off the bedside light, she eased herself under the comforter, willing herself to relax. She needed a nap, to rest her body, to shut down her conscious mind. Then she would know where to go from here.

  Logan walked out of Patrick Cade’s El Dorado Hills office, relieved for the first time since the discovery of the break-in Saturday night. He’d already called Mrs. Singh to alert her to the imminent arrival of one of Patrick’s men, a no-nonsense ex-marine with an impeccable résumé. He asked Mrs. Singh to pass the information along to Shani, then after he hung up, nearly called back to speak with Shani himself. Even though he’d be home again in less than an hour, would be sharing dinner with her. After not having seen her all afternoon, he felt an urgent need to hear the sound of her voice.

  He put his preoccupation with Shani aside and focused on the afternoon’s next meeting. His attorney, John Evans, had agreed to see him at Evans’s home in Fair Oaks on a Sunday. Despite Shani’s refusal of his marriage proposal, Logan wanted to clarify some legal issues in the event he could persuade her otherwise. In particular, the surrogacy agreement she’d signed stipulated that Shani had no rights to the child she carried. Logan wanted to know if, should they marry, Shani would have to adopt the baby or if they could rescind the earlier document.

  His cell rang just as he exited Highway 50 at Sunrise. At the stoplight, he made a quick check of caller ID. Not Shani, he noted, disappointment knotting in his stomach. Even worse, it was his father.

  Pressing the answer button on his earpiece, he continued north on Sunrise. “What’s up?”

  “Not much,” his father answered, his voice slightly raspy in Logan’s ear. “How’s that little bun doing?”

  Alarms clanged in Logan’s head. It had been just over a week since his dad had called last. Colin Rafferty never called more frequently than once a month.

  “What do you want, Dad?” Logan asked warily.

  “Can’t a father just call to talk?”

  He turned right on Sunset, then pulled into a strip mall parking lot to focus on the phone call. “How much do you need this time?”

  “Who says I need money?” />
  Logan rubbed at his temple. “I transferred funds to you ten days ago. Have you gone through it already?”

  His father didn’t answer. After several long moments of silence, Logan wondered if his cell had lost the signal. “Dad?”

  “When’s that kid due, anyway?” The rasp in his father’s voice seemed more pronounced.

  “Early June.” Unease prickled up Logan’s spine.

  “Did I ever tell you what a loudmouth you were as a baby? You’d wake up at o’dark-thirty screaming your head off. I’d wear a track in the carpet trying to quiet you down.”

  His father had walked him at night when he’d been an infant? Impossible to believe. More likely Colin Rafferty had done it once and embroidered the memory into a more frequent occurrence.

  And yet…Logan had a dim recollection of a photograph of himself as a baby, bright eyes wide open, head nestled on his father’s shoulder. “Sorry you lost sleep over me.” Logan instantly regretted the harsh edge to his tone.

  “Your mother couldn’t soothe you.” The rough whisper was barely audible. “And she was dead tired. So I’d tuck you against my chest, walk you back and forth in the moonlight.”

  Logan softened inside at the mental picture. He knew better—this was the same man who was never home throughout Logan’s childhood, who had left him with a neighbor’s nanny for a week after his mother died. Not the revisionist loving father Colin Rafferty tried to evoke now.

  It didn’t matter anymore. “What did you want, Dad?” Logan asked again. “If it’s money, you’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”

  “I don’t need a damn thing,” Colin said, although there was no heat in his words, despite the expletive. “I have to go.”

  The phone disconnected, leaving Logan staring down at his cell. He hadn’t had a conversation with his father that hadn’t involved money in fifteen years or more. As Logan’s fortunes rose and Colin Rafferty’s sank, his dad’s requests for just a little to get him by had grown with each contact.

  And why the sudden interest in the baby, after he’d chided Logan for going through with the surrogacy at all? Logan tried to suss out what scheme his father might be hatching that his grandchild-to-be might provide leverage for, but he came up empty.

  Stopping to talk to his father had made Logan late for his appointment with his attorney. Pulling back out into traffic, Logan continued on his way, redirecting his attention to his upcoming meeting. Whatever his father’s game was, Logan would just have to deal with it when the time came. No point in wasting energy on it now when he had much more important issues to handle.

  As November came to a close, Shani remained on edge waiting for Logan to bring up the subject of marriage again. If she’d been sure of what her answer would be, she might have brought it up herself just to clear the air. But as she reread Arianna’s diary again and again, late at night when she should have been asleep, as she spent her days with Logan and felt her love for him growing, she became more and more confused as to what to do.

  But two weeks after he’d made his proposal, he still hadn’t revisited it. When they went to dinner to celebrate her twelfth week, the point at which her injections ended and her pregnancy would proceed as any normal pregnancy would, Shani thought he would take that opportunity. He didn’t.

  December kicked off its increasingly shorter days with an Alaskan cold front that frosted the rooftops and the lawns with white. With finals looming, they spent the weekend indoors, Logan quizzing Shani in the areas she felt she needed to review the most. All the while, the expectation perched on her shoulder that he’d bring the discussion around to marriage. By Sunday afternoon, two weeks before Christmas, he still hadn’t.

  As if that stress wasn’t enough, an air of sensuality overlaid every word, every look, every interaction between them. As aware of her body as the pregnancy made her, she felt Logan’s presence turn up the volume until she could barely think of anything else. If not for his constant patient drilling of the material from her textbooks, none of it would have adhered to a single brain cell. She would walk into her finals a blathering idiot.

  As Shani brooded in the kitchen over a cup of decaf Earl Grey, Mrs. Singh called Logan into the living room for a quiet conference. Shani had been grateful for the woman’s presence over the weekend. Besides the delectable meals Logan’s housekeeper had served up, Mrs. Singh provided a buffer between Shani and Logan. If Mrs. Singh hadn’t been there, Shani might have thrown herself at Logan by now, torn off his clothes and dragged him off to the bedroom.

  Which would have been horrifying, considering Logan’s apparent indifference to her. Maybe that episode on Thanksgiving had been enough for him to decide she really wasn’t his type after all. He’d kept his distance since then, touching her only to help her in and out of the car when they went out to dinner, or when their fingers brushed accidentally when he passed her the bread basket. She seemed to be the only one who sensed the electricity that crackled between them.

  Logan returned to the breakfast bar where Shani sat with her tea. “Mrs. Singh is going over to Fairfield tonight to babysit her grandsons. She’ll be back in the morning.”

  Every nerve in Shani’s body went on full alert. “Did you want to go out to dinner?” she asked in what she hoped was an ordinary tone of voice.

  “I’d rather stay in.” Logan leaned against the other side of the breakfast bar, his hands gripping the edge of the black granite countertop. “I wanted to get some work done.”

  His tone was dry, neutral. His expression bland, his eyes unreadable. What seemed momentous to Shani—that she and Logan would be alone in the house—apparently concerned him not at all.

  Then her gaze fell to those strong hands, fingers curled around the edge of the counter. She saw the tendons popping out in sharp relief, the rigidity of his arms, the taut way he held his shoulders. When she lifted her gaze to his face again, she caught a glimpse of what he probably didn’t want her to see—a searing, barely banked fire.

  “Dinner at home would be fine.” She could scarcely speak. “Maybe something easy, like omelets.”

  “Sure.” He pushed off from the counter. “Excuse me.”

  He walked off in the direction of Mrs. Singh’s room. A few minutes later, they came through the kitchen, Logan carrying the housekeeper’s overnight bag. Shani doubted the sturdy woman, who regularly toted heavy sacks of groceries and laundry baskets, needed help out with her suitcase. Likely, Logan needed something to keep his hands occupied.

  Shani certainly did. She rinsed her cup and set it in the dishwasher, then went into the dining room where she and Logan had been working. Stacking her textbooks, she carried them upstairs to her room.

  A quick glimpse out the window told her Mrs. Singh was about to pull out through the gate. Then the front door slammed shut. Shani stepped out of her bedroom and to the railing of the landing. Logan, still by the door, looked up at her.

  He started up the stairs. Her heart pounding in her ears, Shani struggled to breathe as he approached. One hand still on the rail for support, she turned as he took the last few steps and drew near.

  He stood over her, millimeters between them. “I’ve tried to keep my hands off you,” he whispered, “wanted to give you the space to think about my proposal.”

  She nodded, not quite able to muster her voice. The heat in his eyes burned her to her core.

  But still he didn’t touch her. “I didn’t want sex getting in the way. Didn’t want it to be part of your decision.”

  “Don’t you think it should be?” The challenge in the words shocked her. She stunned herself even more when she reached for him, pressing her hand against his cheek and bringing him down to kiss her.

  Eyes shut, she absorbed multiple sensations—his skin against her palm, roughened by the day’s growth of beard, his mouth stroking across hers, his tongue tracing along the seam of her lips. His hands, one at her waist, the other cupped behind her head. His chest, warm under the T-shirt he wore, the ridge of his
response pressing against the vee of her legs.

  The weeks since he’d brought her to climax in her mother’s house had honed her desire to an exquisite edge. She wanted everything at once—his hands everywhere on her body, and hers on his. His mouth tasting her again. Him settling in the cradle of her legs and entering her.

  Logan plunged his tongue into her mouth, his hand at the small of her back fitting her against him. She would have dragged him down onto the carpeted landing, she had so little self-control in that moment. He let her drag his shirt from the waist of his jeans, to slide her hands underneath the knit, but when she tried to push it up and off, he eased away and lifted her into his arms.

  She felt dizzy as he carried her down the hall toward his room, light-headed with arousal. He laid her on his bed, standing over her, chest rising and falling as he dragged air into his lungs. His gaze on her felt as palpable as his touch. Her body responded, sensation pooling between her thighs, her nipples growing tight and aching.

  Then he leaned over and pushed up her T-shirt, tugging it off. With slow deliberation, he unbuttoned her jeans, lowered the zipper, peeled them from her hips, down her legs. He slipped off her shoes one by one, then tossed shoes and jeans aside.

  She shivered as cool air eddied on her heated skin, gooseflesh rising where her body wasn’t covered by the teal bra and panties she wore. Sitting on the edge of the bed, Logan pressed his mouth against her belly and rested his rough cheek there.

  “When will I feel the baby move?” he asked, his mouth stroking her as he spoke.

  “A month or two. It doesn’t feel like much—” she sucked in a breath in response to his kisses “—at first. Just a fluttering.”