A tense silence settled over the room. When Neil finally spoke, his voice was curiously flat and hollow sounding. "So this is where we stand. You go your way and I go mine." He paused. "Is this any way to start our marriage, Jenna?"
* * *
Even now, hours later, his words caused an empty ache and a feeling of frustration to well up inside her. Jenna stirred on the chair and glanced at the luminous dial of her watch. It was nearly midnight. She rose and stretched her cramped muscles. In the time that she had known Neil and they had started to date, they'd had the usual heated exchange every so often. But he had never—never—walked out on her. She was sorely tempted to call him.
As if on cue, her cell phone rang. Jenna hurried to answer it, her voice rushed.
"Jenna. Were you asleep?"
Neil. "No. I was just sitting outside... thinking." Her tone was carefully neutral as she eased into a chair. Was he still angry? Upset?
"Outside? You were outside at this time of night?"
She nearly laughed at his sharp tone, reminded of her earlier thoughts. "I'm fine, Neil," she said softly.
He surprised her by pressing no further. Instead he said in that brisk, no-nonsense way of his, "I had to talk to you, Jenna. I called to apologize." When he cleared his throat, she had the feeling that for once he was at a loss for words. But when she made no response, he went on. "You were right, Jenna. Having a baby is something we should decide together. When we make up our minds to go ahead with it, I want it to be something we both want. So..." He seemed to hesitate. "We'll put the idea on hold for a while until you make up your mind."
Jenna sat quietly through the brief speech. Perhaps she should have been relieved; she had won, hadn't she? He wasn't going to try to force something on her she didn't want or wasn't ready for. Neil had come through, after all.... As she had known he would? She hadn't known that, and the thought was jarring.
"I love you, Jenna."
Jenna opened her mouth—but nothing happened. Her throat constricted tightly against the words uttered so easily up until that moment. They simply refused to come, and it was several seconds before she finally found her voice. "I—I love you, too."
"Then I'm forgiven?"
Her fingers tightened on the receiver. "Y-yes."
He didn't seem to notice the almost imperceptible hesitation, and they went on to talk for several more minutes. But while she was on the phone with Neil, the hazy shroud of doubt that had plagued her these past few days at last began to slip away, and she finally felt able to see her way clear through the uncertainty, the shadow of the past
Her thoughts were a strange mixture of hope and fear as she tumbled into bed that night. Later, she thought. Later she would sort out this jumble of emotions about Neil, but for now it would have to wait. Her marriage would have to wait. Everything would have to wait. And she could only hope that Neil would understand, because she had the feeling he would never have brought up the subject of a child if he'd known what it would trigger.
Because in the past few minutes Jenna had come to a very important decision and a startling realization about herself. She had once promised herself she would never look back, but she couldn't go on any longer as she had been—floundering in limbo, caught somewhere in time, trying to forget and never quite being able to, not wanting to go back and yet afraid to take that first step forward to sever all ties.
She was trapped and there was only one way out. In her mind there was no right, no wrong, no past and no future. There was only now . . .
And an overpowering need to see her son once more.
CHAPTER TWO
The decision finally made, Jenna was left feeling oddly at peace with herself. She slept the sleep of the dead that night, awakening the next morning feeling far more refreshed and revitalized than she had all week. She had never been one to wallow in indecision for long; once her mind was made up, she wasted no time making clear her intentions. "Willful" was what her mother called her. She smiled a little as she showered and slipped into jeans and a pale yellow T-shirt. Her father wasn't one to mince words. "Pigheaded" was how he often referred to his daughter.
She made several quick calls to the florist and caterer. But once she sat down to address the wedding invitations she'd started a week earlier, her brief respite of peace began to shatter once more. She had to force herself to plod through the remainder of the guest list. It was well after lunch when she drove over to the post office, but once there, she stood before the big blue mailbox outside for a full minute before slowly dropping the bundles of envelopes inside. Without being consciously aware of it, she found herself at her parents' house a short time later.
She glanced up warily at the threatening purple storm clouds gathering overhead as she switched off the car engine. A gusty wind blowing in from the Gulf rattled the leaves of the huge cottonwood tree bordering the sidewalk as she hurried toward the white two-story house, wrapped on three sides by a wide porch. Jenna had come to live in this house when she was five years old, and even though she had been on her own since she'd finished her nurse's training, this was the one place in the world she would always think of as home.
A drenching sheet of rain began to fall just before she reached the shelter of the porch. Mindful of her wet feet, she ran around to the back entrance and slipped off her sandals.
"Whew! Just in time!" she muttered, stomping into the kitchen. She reached for a towel and smiled at her mother as she wiped the moisture from her face.
Marie Bradford looked worriedly from her daughter's rain-spattered cotton blouse to the moisture trickling freely down the windowpanes. "Oh, dear," she murmured, "your father will be dripping wet by the time he gets back."
"Dad's gotten lazy since he retired," Jenna said with a shake of her head. "I suppose he's out fishing again."
Her mother nodded. "I'll have to dig out the hot water bottle before he comes home. His circulation isn't what it used to be."
"Oh, come on, Mom," she said softly. Already she could feel herself relaxing, and her lips twitched as she held back a smile. "Can't you think of a better way to keep him warm?"
"Like what?"
"Like body heat, for instance," she murmured. "If it were my husband out there getting soaked to the bone, that's the first thing I'd recommend. And as a nurse, I can't think of a better remedy."
Marie Bradford turned to face her daughter with her hands planted squarely on her hips. "I know what you're trying to say, young lady, and I don't think I need to remind you that you and Neil are half our age!"
Jenna didn't miss the amused glimmer in her mother's brown eyes. She sat back and eyed her as she bustled around the kitchen, wiping the counter and spooning fragrant grounds into the coffeemaker. Her mother was in her mid-sixties, and if it hadn't been for the snowy white hair that she wore in a loose bun on her nape, she might have been taken for a woman twenty years younger. Her skin was smooth and free of wrinkles, her brown eyes snapping and vivacious.
"I hope Neil and I are as happy as you and Dad have been all these years," she said suddenly, last night's argument with Neil abruptly jumping into her thoughts. Her parents had been married for forty-five years, and she couldn't help but wonder—would her own marriage last that long?
There was a hint of wistfulness in her tone, and Marie looked at her in surprise. "I'm sure you will be," she said softly, moving to sit across from her daughter. "Dad and I were happy and content before you came to us, but there was something missing. I'll never forget how you looked the first time we ever saw you. You were so tall and straight, and you tried to look so brave—" She shook her head in remembrance. "But I could sense how lost and alone you were." Her eyes lifted to Jenna's and a soft smile lighted her face. "And I knew then how much joy you'd bring into our lives."
Jenna's thoughts drifted fleetingly backward. When she was four years old, her parents had been killed in a collision with a train. Miraculously she had emerged with barely a scratch. With no family other than an eighty-year
-old great-aunt in Maine who was too old to be burdened with a small child, custody had been given over to the state. Her memories of that time were few: stark white walls, hard narrow cots, being shuffled from foster home to foster home for over a year. She had been too young to understand the whispered excuses...too quiet, too withdrawn...but old enough to understand the loss of warmth, the absence of love from her young life. Two people whom she had loved and depended on had been wrenched from her, and there was no one to replace them. No one who willingly gave what her tender four-year-old self craved so desperately: a warm pair of arms to hold her, the solid strength of a shoulder to lay her head upon.
Not until Jerry and Marie Bradford had entered her life.
She smiled across at Marie, her heart filled with tender emotion for this unselfish woman who had given her so much. She reached across the table and squeezed her mother's hand. "And you brought love back into mine," she said softly. Their eyes met and held, but suddenly a troubled light entered Jenna's.
"Mom—" She traced an idle pattern on the tablecloth, trying to find the right words. "What you said before... were you trying to say that children have a way of bringing people together?"
Marie shrugged. "I suppose so. Some people—the right people." She paused. "Not that I think it's a way to cure a troubled marriage, but I know that my own marriage to your father wouldn't have been nearly as meaningful without you."
Jenna took a deep breath. "I suppose a lot of people feel that way. People like—like Megan and Ward Garrison." Her fingers closed tightly around her coffee cup.
Marie regarded her steadily. "There's nothing wrong with that, Jenna."
"I never said there was," Jenna said quickly. She hesitated, then blurted out, "Neil... he—he'd like to have a baby right away."
For a long moment her mother's eyes remained riveted on Jenna's carefully controlled features before drifting to the white-knuckled grip of her hands around her cup. After all these years, there was still so much that Jenna held inside—Marie offered a quiet statement, "And that bothers you."
There was a tight little silence. "Yes and no," she finally admitted, her tone carefully neutral. Fingers that weren't entirely steady traced the rim of her coffee cup. "We—Neil and I had decided to wait a while before we had a baby, but now he's changed his mind." She hesitated. "And nothing would make me happier...eventually. But right now...right now it brings back so many memories, and I can't help but think of—" She broke off, stung to the core by her suppressed pain.
"Robbie," her mother finished for her softly. Again her hand reached out to cover Jenna's.
She nodded slowly, drawing both strength and comfort from the touch of her mother's hand. "Tomorrow I'm going to Plains City to see him, Mom," she said quietly. "Even if they won't let me touch him or hold him." Her eyes seemed two huge pools of longing in her pale face. "I have to do this, Mom. I have to." She looked across at her mother, somehow not surprised to see a kind of gentle comprehension reflected "in the soft, brown depths. Instantly the years fell away—
***
It was a newspaper article that had first caught Jenna's eye nearly five years earlier, "childless couple seeks surrogate mother" was how the headline in the Houston newspaper had read. Since her adoptive mother had been unable to have children, Jenna was intrigued by the unique approach to the problem of infertility. On reading the story, she discovered that Megan and Ward Garrison, a couple who lived in northern Texas, were actively searching for a woman to bear Ward's child. Married for fifteen years and puzzled by Megan's inability to have a child in all that time, both had undergone a battery of tests several years earlier, only to find that Megan's fallopian tubes were blocked by scar tissue and she could never become pregnant.
Jenna was working as an office nurse for a physician with a family practice in Texas City at the time, and both the receptionist and the bookkeeper could talk about little else.
"You wouldn't catch me offering to have this guy's baby," Vera, the bookkeeper, declared later that morning. She flicked a disdainful finger at the newspaper. "My sister was sick for weeks on end when she was pregnant—and she looked like a cow from the time she was two months along!"
Marsha, the mother of a ten and a six-year-old and infinitely more mature than Vera, held a different viewpoint. "Your sister also had twins," she pointed out. "And some women love being pregnant—"
"Not me!" snorted Vera.
Marsha had simply smiled and shaken her head. "Wait until you're married," she said with a smile. "You might feel fat and ugly and you might be so sick you feel like you could never hold your head up again, but the minute you hold that tiny bundle of life in your arms, it's all but forgotten."
Vera cast a wary eye at the older woman. "That might be," she sniffed a little indignantly, again waving a hand at the newspaper, "but if you ask me, this is a little weird. I'd say that any woman who volunteers for this is doing it strictly for the money!"
"I'm not sure," Marsha said thoughtfully. Her eyes skimmed over the article. "It says here that the man is an engineer, and I doubt if they make all that much money. And though it says all hospital and legal expenses will be taken care of, it doesn't specify how much the fee is."
"It would have to be one heck of a lot before I'd do it," Vera snorted.
Jenna and Marsha exchanged a glance that seemed to indicate Vera needn't worry about the possibility. Marsha glanced down again at the newspaper. "It also says that any woman applying will be tested physically and psychologically." She frowned, then said slowly, "I guess that makes sense. I suppose that they would want to make sure she really knew what she was getting into, and after all—" she shrugged "—if a person went to all that trouble and expense, I guess they'd want the mother to be reasonably intelligent."
"Good Lord." Vera looked disgusted. "Imagine having to apply to have a baby—just like applying for a job!"
"It wouldn't be easy giving up a baby," Jenna put in pensively. "I suppose if you looked at it in terms of a job right from the start, it might make it a little less traumatic when the time came to hand over the baby."
"And that's not all," Marsha added. "It says here that single women are preferred. Apparently both the couple and their lawyer seem to think a woman who's never had a baby wouldn't be as likely to have second thoughts about giving it up."
"Well, they can count me out!" Vera's voice rang out loudly. "I might be single, healthy and intelligent, but there's no way I'd get involved in anything like this!"
There was a pause, and then two pairs of eyes simultaneously turned to Jenna.
"Don't look at me!" She held up her hands and laughed. "I tend to agree with Vera. It's a little too bizarre for me." The plight of these two people was rather sad; she felt a small stab of pity that they were so desperate for a child of their own, and the fact that they were willing to go to such lengths even made her admire them to a degree.
But beyond these thoughts, the realization of the heartache these two people were going through didn't hit home until several days later, when she walked in on her mother watching a local talk show that featured this same couple. More out of courtesy for her mother than any vested interest, she sat down to watch.
Seeing the actual faces of those two, instead of merely reading names in a newspaper, made the situation all the more real and all the more heartrending. Her first impression of Megan Garrison was that of a woman in intense pain. She was very blond, and small-boned and fragile-looking. Her husband, Ward, was as dark as she was fair, good-looking in a rough sort of way. There was something in the quiet tautness of his tone that caught Jenna's attention as they pleaded their cause, but it was his wife she responded to. She listened as they related how a previous attempt at locating a surrogate had ended in heartbreak: after carrying the baby to term, the woman had changed her mind at the last minute. And adoption was all but ruled out; the waiting list was seven years long at the least—they had been waiting years already.
Jenna's heart turned over i
n her chest as she heard the woman say, "I die a little inside with every day that goes by, and I see the hope that someday I may hold a child in my arms grow dimmer and dimmer. And hope is all I have—" Her voice broke tearfully, and long painful seconds ticked by before she was able to speak again. "Hope is all I may ever have."
The desperation, the fear, the despair, the realization that the woman had only this one small thread to cling to, touched something deep inside Jenna's soul. She longed to reach out and comfort Megan as her husband was doing, to wrap her arms around her and tell her that it was only a matter of time before her hope became a reality.
When it was over Jenna turned to her mother with a murmur of sympathy on her lips, only to find her doe-soft eyes swimming with unshed tears.
Jenna rushed to her side. "Mom, what is it?" Her tone was anxious as she pressed a handkerchief into her hand.
Marie attempted a watery smile. "I'm all right." She dabbed at her overflowing eyes and leaned her head back tiredly. Concerned, Jenna sat on the arm of the chair and searched her mother's face.
"I'm fine, really," Marie said again. She set aside the handkerchief and turned to Jenna with a sigh. "It's just that seeing that couple brought back so many memories." She lapsed into silence, but again her eyes grew red.
Jenna sat very still. She knew that she had been adopted because of her mother's fierce desire for a child, but for a moment she was almost stunned at her mother's heartfelt reaction to the plight of two people who were, after all, strangers. Instinctively she said, "You know exactly how that woman feels, don't you?"
"Oh, yes—exactly." Marie dashed at her eyes, and Jenna patiently handed the handkerchief back to her. "I wanted a child so badly I could taste it. Everywhere I looked—the grocery store, the drugstore, the doctor's office—there were mothers with children, mothers about to have a baby. And there I was, helpless, frustrated, hating myself for being jealous and wanting what they seemed to take for granted." A pained expression flitted across her face. "No one knows how worthless the inability to have a baby can make a woman feel—except perhaps a woman who's been through it herself." A pensive smile curved her lips as she looked up at Jenna. "But your father was wonderful through it all. He was the one who suggested adoption." She reached up a hand to cradle Jenna's cheek in her palm. "You'll never know how much of a blessing you were. Like a day of sunshine after a storm."
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