Ever Since Eve (The Keeping Secrets Series, Book 1)

by Pamela Browning

  Chapter 5

  Derek steered the Corvette around a huge puddle in the middle of the road. Tropical Storm Dondi, downgraded last night from a hurricane, had moved in from the coast and was dumping torrential rains on the North Carolina Piedmont.

  He shifted uneasily in his seat, his damp shirt sticking to his back, and wished longingly for the cool, crisp weather of October. This was the last week of an unusually humid September which meant approximately four weeks to go until relief arrived in the form of the first frost.

  He slowed his speed as he approached the L & D Cafe at Dugan's Crossroads. The windshield wipers scrambled frantically, barely able to keep up with the deluge.

  Believe it or not, there was a woman actually walking alongside the road in this horrendous weather. He noticed her, tried not to splash her, then cast a backward glance in utter disbelief.

  She wore a loose, nondescript raincoat over a white uniform, and she held an umbrella over her head, which didn't help much to protect her from the rain. But her hairstyle, blunt-cut and precise, was familiar. So were the angle of her head and the long elegant sweep of her neck.

  "Eve," he muttered, straining for a better view of her. A van loomed behind him, riding his bumper, and the last he saw of her, someone was holding the door of the restaurant so she could duck inside.

  Derek had come home to the Myers Park house from his business trip three months ago and found Eve gone. He discovered the bank passbook with its untouched three thousand dollars placed in the exact center of his desk, a silent rebuke.

  Still, he'd fully expected Eve to turn up after the abortion and ask for her money. When she didn't, he wondered why. The only way he might have found her was through the Queen City Fertility Clinic, but he didn't try—too many unhappy memories there. He convinced himself that after he'd left on his business trip, Eve had seen the light and had the abortion. He figured she'd find him when she needed the money.

  But he hadn't heard one word from Eve. After Kelly's death, Derek had fiercely attacked the many problems at work, and so he'd never followed up on his obligation to locate Eve. Moreover, when she'd left, he was wallowing in the depths of his grief, indulging in boundless self-pity. Only recently had he begun to take mild pleasure in the things he'd enjoyed before—a round of golf, a quiet dinner with old friends, and sometimes he couldn't face even those.

  Could that have been Eve going into the L & D Cafe? No. Why would Eve be at that little restaurant at Dugan's Crossroads? Still, the memory of her teased him, and the nagging idea that he'd been derelict in his duty toward her wouldn't let him rest. A week later, when he had to go to Wrayville for another round of discussions about his latest acquisition, he stopped at the L & D Cafe.

  He realized as soon as he stepped inside that he was out of his element. His dark suit was clearly out of place among the yellow hardhats and denim shirts and jeans.

  He slid across the red vinyl seat in a vacant booth and scanned the menu. From the jukebox in the corner blared the voice of John Denver whining for his old guitar. Derek drummed his fingers impatiently on the scuffed tabletop. The service was slow.

  Where was the server, anyway? He didn't see one. There was a guy with Lenny written across his chest who seemed to be everywhere at once.

  "I'd like to place my order, please," Derek said when the guy breezed by.

  "Sure," Lenny said amiably before disappearing again.

  And then, and then... he saw her. She seemed to float ethereally behind the counter, a graceful woman in white who, with her air of calm composure, looked altogether too aristocratic to be working in a place like this. But there was no doubt in his mind as he watched her slide a sandwich plate onto the counter that she indeed worked here. He held his breath.

  He hadn't remembered Eve Triopolous as being so beautiful.

  She turned on her heel and walked around the end of the counter, and it was then that he realized. He gasped with the impact of it, and the room tilted, bent in two. For when he saw her gently rounded abdomen beneath the skirt of her uniform, he knew.

  He shut his eyes, then opened them again. Eve was still pregnant. She was something like four or five months pregnant; he had never been good at determining such things.

  The buzzing in his ears reached monumental proportions, and when it stopped, she was standing beside him, marking something efficiently on her order pad, and then she inquired crisply and impersonally, "May I take your order, please?"

  His hand clutched her wrist, and her eyes widened in alarm as she looked up, completely unaware. She hadn't paid any attention to him; he was just another customer.

  When she recognized Derek, her knees went weak. They stared at each other for a long moment, startled brown eyes converging with steely gray ones. Eve felt her world, the one she had constructed so carefully in the past few months, crumble slowly to dust.

  "What are you doing here?" was the best he could manage.

  She wrested her arm away. "Working," she said evenly. "Did you want to order something?"

  "My God, Eve."

  She lifted an eyebrow. "Are you ordering or aren't you? I have a job to do."

  "We have to talk."

  "We don't have anything to talk about."

  "You can stand there with my baby in your belly and say that we don't have anything to talk about?"

  A curious glance from one of the construction workers made him lower his voice at the end of his sentence.

  Eve flushed. "Please, Derek. Don't embarrass me."

  That brought Derek to his senses. It was embarrassing enough, he was sure, to have to work in a place like this, with all these men looking at her day in and day out, watching her pregnancy progress.

  One thing he knew—he couldn't eat anything. "Look," he said wearily, "can I come to the place where you live?"

  "No," Eve said quickly, thinking of Al. Her father was still struggling to understand the forces that had compelled Eve to volunteer as a surrogate mother. His attitude toward her unmarried pregnancy was touchy enough without the baby's father appearing on the scene.

  "Then you come to my house," he told her. "Please."

  "Why? Have you had a change of heart?" Her tone was sarcastic. Maybe he deserved it.

  "If you don't agree to meet me somewhere, I'll be back here again and again until you do," he said through clenched teeth.

  "Eve? Eve!"

  It was Lenny, calling her from the kitchen.

  "I can't have you coming here," Eve said, glancing worriedly over her shoulder toward the kitchen and feeling something akin to panic. "You'll jeopardize my job."

  "You shouldn't have a job like this, on your feet all the time."

  Her features stiffened into an impenetrable mask. Her eyes were full of disdain. "This job is going to enable me to support your child, Derek," she said tightly, flipping the pages of her order book over and stuffing the book in her uniform pocket.

  He tried to avoid looking at her bulging abdomen, but it was right in his line of vision. Guilt washed over him.

  "My office," he said with effort. "Tomorrow. Eleven-thirty?"

  "Tomorrow is my day off," she said. She wondered at the bleakness in his voice, the pain in his eyes. What was she getting herself into? She would be a fool to agree to see him, to risk upsetting her life again for him.

  No, said a voice deep inside her. Do this for Kelly.

  It was what Kelly would have wanted; Eve was sure of that. If there was any chance that Derek would accept his child, any chance at all, Eve would have to take it.

  "Eleven-thirty," she said quietly. "All right, Derek. I'll be there."

  Without speaking, aching inside, he handed her his business card in case she didn't know where he worked. Then he got up and walked out of the restaurant. He knew she was watching him from the window as he unlocked the Corvette and slid inside. As he drove onto the highway from the gravel parking lot, he couldn't remember feeling this despondent since the day Kelly died.

  It was clear t
o Derek as he drove back into the city that something had gone terribly wrong with his life. He'd always had a plan. Things came easily to him, he was convinced, because he had made an overall plan for his life when he was still in his teens.

  This was the result of having a mother who would say to him when he was six years old and on the way out the door with his playmates, "Derek, what's the plan?" Early on, he got the idea that there must be a plan for everything. Get an education, find a suitable wife, get married. Have two children, a boy and a girl, who would go to prep schools and then to prestigious colleges and who would grow up to have plans that would include summer visits to their parents who would by then be stooped and gray-haired and retired according to plan.

  All was guided by the plan. But then Kelly had the problem about not being able to have babies. That had certainly not gone according to plan. After Kelly's hysterectomy he'd thought, Oh, well, sometimes you have to alter the plan; we'll adopt. He hadn't realized how much she wanted a child of their very own until she'd come up with the surrogate-mother plan.

  Derek hadn't known much about surrogate mothers. Oh, he'd heard something about it on a television news show. He googled it a few times. But then Kelly had presented the surrogate-mother idea to him as a plan, and that is what convinced him. They'd find a suitable surrogate, Kelly's egg and his sperm would unite, and not too long afterward, the baby would be born. Kelly would, of course, manage the whole thing in her own efficient way.

  And then, most inefficiently, she had died. It wasn't fair for Kelly to disrupt things. He felt a quick stab of anger toward Kelly, which subsided immediately but left him feeling foolish about being angry over something over which she had no control.

  The only thing to do, thought Derek unhappily, was to make a new plan. His grief had prevented that until now. But since he had seen Eve and come face to face with her unmistakable pregnancy—oh, damn. The situation was preposterous. How was he going to make a plan that would accommodate it?

  * * *

  Eve's mind was not on accommodation as she dressed to meet Derek the next morning.

  "Daughter," Al said as she leveled steady brown eyes at her reflection in the mirror beside the door of Lenny's little house. "Are you sure you know what you're doing?"

  "No," she admitted, fluffing out the silken strands of her straight dark hair with her fingers. "But I have to take the chance."

  Al heaved a wheezing sigh. "Stay home, Eve. Derek Lang has shown the kind of man he is. He never even tried to find you."

  "You'd understand if you knew what kind of shape he was in after his wife died," Eve said firmly.

  "But Evie—" Al began, but Eve refused to listen. She pecked Al quickly on the cheek before escaping out the door. She didn't want any more advice.

  Al was better now, but it had been rough going when she'd had to inform Al of her pregnancy and the circumstances surrounding it. She never wanted to deliver a blow like that again.

  She had chosen a quiet moment a few days after she'd started work at the L & D Cafe. She'd prepared Al's favorite Greek dish, moussaka, and had even spent precious money on a bottle of the imported resinated wine that Al loved so well. When Al was mellow with good food and spirits, she'd taken the plunge.

  "I have something to tell you, Al," she'd said gently, in her most direct manner.

  Al had had a good day. He'd spent the afternoon with Doug and talking into a recorder for the oral history project, and he was feeling expansive.

  "So what is it, Evie?"

  She swallowed the lump in her throat.

  "I—" She could not continue.

  "Something that's hard for you to tell me?" A shadow of foreboding passed across Al's face.

  Eve drew a deep breath. "I'm pregnant, Al. I'm going to have a baby."

  Al stared at her. His face fell. He looked old, tired.

  "It's not what you think," Eve hurried on. "I'm not involved with anyone. I hired myself out as a surrogate mother."

  "A surrogate mother," Al said. "I've heard of such a thing. But you—" And he stopped and stared at her again in disbelief. "You let your body be used that way?"

  "I wanted to. They were going to pay me twenty thousand dollars. They were a lovely couple, Derek and Kelly Lang, and they wanted a baby." Tears sprang to her eyes as she remembered Kelly's longing for a child.

  "Don't cry, Eve," her father said, his voice breaking. "I can't believe you let them do that to you."

  Eve blinked back the tears. "There's more," she whispered.

  "More? What else could there be?" Al's eyes flashed with anger, but when he saw the effect this had on his daughter, he clamped his lips tightly.

  "I was going to bear the child for the Langs. There was no job in Charlotte, Al. I was living with the Langs. I'm sorry, but I lied because I didn't want to tell you about it. At the time I thought it was for the best." She stopped and swallowed. "Mrs. Lang—Kelly—was killed in an automobile accident. It was awful, Al. She was my friend. And then—and then Derek said I should have an abortion."

  Al sank back in his chair. He had paled, and his breathing was labored.

  "Al, are you all right? Shall I get your inhaler?"

  Her father shook his head grimly. "Go on," he said. "Tell me the rest of it."

  "I refused to have the abortion. I ran away instead. I'm going to have the baby, Al."

  With a curse, Al struggled to his feet. Eve followed him as he paced heavily into the living room.

  "We needed the money," she said desperately to Al's back as he stood, his shoulders heaving, his head resting on one arm raised against the doorjamb.

  "We didn't need it so much that you had to sell yourself."

  "I wasn't—" But she couldn't go on. She'd known all along that her father would see it that way.

  "Come sit down, Al," she said, going to him and turning him gently by the shoulders. He let her propel him to his favorite chair.

  "I know how you must feel," she said, clasping his hand in hers. "But it will be all right. I've got a real job this time, and I've found a place for us to live."

  "The man," her father said. "This Lang. He won't help you?"

  She bit down hard on her lip and shook her head. "I'm afraid there's no chance of that."

  "He must be a real jerk to leave you all alone with this responsibility." Al spat out the words contemptuously.

  "He was so devastated by the loss of his wife—" she began.

  "He fathered a child and walked away from it! What kind of a man would do something like that? Don't expect me to have sympathy for the man."

  "Aren't you glad I found us a place to live? Don't you want to hear about my job?"

  Al regarded her balefully. "Tell me," he said.

  Eve had spoken haltingly about the little house Lenny had offered and her job at the restaurant.

  "You, with your college degree, are going to work as a waitress?" Al began to cough.

  "It's a job, Al. A way to live, and I like working for Lenny. He's a nice guy."

  Al had had no choice but to let Eve remain in control. He'd hated moving out of the Wrayville house, but once Doug helped them unpack their boxes, Al conceded that Eve had found a nice place. Soon he made friends among the construction workers at the restaurant. They jollied him along, and if they weren't the cronies he'd had in Wrayville, at least they were company. He liked Lenny, too. Eve, maneuvering now through downtown Charlotte traffic, supposed Al's adjustment was the best she could hope for.

  The tall building that housed Lang Industries was impressive. Eve rode the elevator to the twelfth floor and presented herself.

  Maisie Allen was openly curious, but she cut short her stare. "Walk right in, please." She indicated a door across a wide expanse of gray carpet.

  Hesitantly, Eve pushed open the door to Derek's office.

  He sat at his desk with the wide window at his back. Outside, the air looked heavy with smoky mist, blurring the blue of the sky.

  Derek was on the phone, but he
looked up when he saw her.

  "I'll get back to you on it," he said into the phone, and then he hung up abruptly.

  Eve stood, her chin held high, regarding him with that cool expression on her face. Her hair swooped into the hollows beneath her cheekbones. Her eyes watched him warily from beneath eyelashes that were too short to cast a dusky shadow on those perfect high cheekbones, a fact for which he was suddenly and absurdly grateful, for it occurred to him in a flash that those cheekbones should never be hidden in shadow but splendored in light.

  "Please sit down." He gestured at the chair across from his desk.

  "Derek, I agreed to meet you because I hope there's some chance that you'll accept the baby as yours," she said.

  His eyes rested for a moment on her breasts, so full above the mound that was the baby. He cleared his throat. "You're how pregnant now?" he asked.

  "Four and a half months. I had amniocentesis, and it's healthy. I didn't ask if it was a boy or a girl."

  "So it's too late for an abortion?"

  "It was always too late for that," she shot back.

  His eyes flew to meet hers, and he was surprised that there was no animosity in their depths. He sighed and decided to be direct.

  "Eve, why did you run away? Why didn't you have the abortion? I thought you had. I thought—"

  "Didn't you believe me when I said I wouldn't?" Her voice was deeper now, stronger.

  He didn't take his eyes off her face. "No," he said quietly. "I guess not." Then he was silent for a moment. "I should have figured it out when you didn't take the passbook with the five thousand dollars. That should have tipped me off."

  She crossed her legs, and Derek found himself mesmerized by the exposed white skin on the inner part of her calves.

  "No amount of money could convince me to get rid of Kelly's baby," she said.

  "It's my baby, too," he said before thinking.

  Her gaze was level. "That's exactly what I hoped you'd say. I told you I'd take care of the baby if you won't, and that's still true. I love this baby, have grown to love it, carrying it under my heart all this time—" Her voice broke off, and he was amazed to see that her eyes glistened with tears.