"You should consider putting the baby up for adoption," he said gently.
She shook her head. "I couldn't. Not after it's been a part of me. This baby turns somersaults. Its tiny knees poke me in the ribs at night. It hears my voice, is lulled to sleep by the music I play on my radio. Oh, Doug, the only person I could give this baby up to is its natural father."
"He's said nothing about keeping it?"
"Nothing. And he's good with children, Doug. You should have seen him today with the children at the park. He was—"
"You went to the park with him?"
"To Oktoberfest. He had to practically drag me, but Aunt May insisted, and I—" How could she explain what a wonderful time she'd had with Derek? "He's—he's a good man, Doug."
"If that's true, he won't let you undertake the raising of this child by yourself." He spoke softly; he cared about Eve. He couldn't stand for anyone to take advantage of her.
"Somehow I'll make him see that he wants this baby." The fierceness of her words startled Eve herself.
"How?" Doug wondered out loud.
"I'm not sure," she said carefully, but she remembered the close feeling she had shared with Derek that afternoon. As they grew to know each other better, perhaps he would listen to her and begin to see reason. They couldn't go on avoiding the topic indefinitely.
"Good luck," Doug said softly.
"I'm going to need it," she replied, not knowing at the time how true her statement was.
Chapter 8
Derek cast about in his mind for the thing to do next, but for the life of him it wouldn't come to him. There was no plan.
Every time he thought he had it figured out, something happened to distract him. Like stumbling upon Eve in the L & D Cafe. Like her dazzling smile when she danced the polka with him. Such events made all plans irrelevant.
This baby. There it was, like it or not. It was amazing to think that the impersonal globe of fullness under Eve's clothing was a living, growing child.
Aunt May made such a fuss over Eve's pregnancy. She was always worrying about whether Eve napped or wore her boots with the nonskid soles when she went out on damp days. "I wish she'd eat more," he heard Aunt May say to no one in particular when she was out poking around in the garden one day. "I wish he'd talk about the baby," she added, which let him know that she thought about him as well.
What was he supposed to do? He didn't want the baby now; that was all. He felt responsible for it, and for Eve. He'd sheltered her under his roof, hadn't he? And here she was, a small, bright presence to whom he had become ridiculously attached in so short a time.
Those children at the festival in the park—the little girl who lost her balloon and the kid who'd watched the Corvette for him. Cute. He liked kids. But the responsibility! Their illnesses! Their education, their clothing needs, their table manners! PTA meetings. Sewing pink satin ribbons on a girl's toe shoes. Making a pinewood derby race car for Cub Scouts. How could he take on all that by himself? With Kelly it would have been fine. Kelly managed things so well. But a child deserved to be brought up by two parents rather than a busy businessman and an eccentric great-aunt. And Kelly was gone.
Instead, there was Eve. She'd stayed out late with that fellow that she went to dinner with, and at a time when she needed her sleep, too. It angered him when she'd wandered in after midnight. Where had she been all that time? At the guy's apartment? In a bar? Both of those seemed unlikely places for Eve.
He'd started working straight through lunch in the days after Kelly died so he wouldn't have to go home as he always had at lunchtime. But on the Monday after Oktoberfest, he'd careened home in his Corvette, only to be disappointed that Eve wasn't there.
Aunt May found him in the kitchen, staring out the window at the driveway where Eve's Volkswagen should have been parked. Aunt May brightened immediately.
"Why, what are you doing home, Derek?"
"Looking for Eve," he said moodily.
"Well, you can't leave," she said in annoyance. "You just got here."
"Not leave. Eve."
"Oh, Eve. She's not here."
"Ye gods," he muttered under his breath before freeing himself of Aunt May and rushing off to a downtown lunch counter where he disconsolately made do with a soggy burrito.
What was this private life of Eve's about which he knew so little? Where did she go? Who did she see?
"I don't think you should be driving yourself places," he told her seriously that night after dinner. They'd been watching television with Eve in charge of the remote control. He spoke during a commercial featuring a bald man whose shiny head was being sectioned off with Magic Markers. To his relief, Eve clicked the TV off as the man turned around with a whole new head of hair.
The silence was deafening.
"Dr. Perry says I can drive right up until the last minute unless something goes wrong," she said at last and with a cheery smile.
"But I worry about you," he said, as though that should be enough to make Eve hang up her car keys for the duration.
"Do you, Derek?" She regarded him calmly with a level gaze.
"Well, of course," he said, wishing suddenly that he hadn't begun this.
"I'm glad to hear it. Because that must mean you're concerned about the baby, too."
"I suppose so," he allowed cautiously. He didn't like the glint in her eyes.
"I'm concerned, too, Derek. About what's going to happen to the baby after it's born."
"It should be put up for adoption. There's a shortage of babies, and somebody out there is looking for a healthy infant."
"You would put Kelly's baby up for adoption?" Her voice was softly incredulous.
"Do we have to talk about this?" Impatiently, he stood and walked to the window. Outside, cars whooshed silently by the house. The air hung heavy with the smoke from neighborhood fireplaces. He'd have to lay a fire in the fireplace soon himself. He felt a definite chill in here.
"Derek, how long are you going to avoid this issue?"
"Eve, I—"
"This baby was a wanted child once," she reminded him in a troubled tone. "Your and Kelly's child. Your firstborn, Derek."
She almost didn't catch the murmured words he spoke. "Not my firstborn," he said.
"What?"
"Not my firstborn. Kelly was pregnant once. Didn't she tell you?"
"N-no," Eve breathed, sinking down on the couch. "No."
He turned to face her, his eyes dark. "She was pregnant. It was before her hysterectomy. She lost the baby in her seventh month."
"I'm so sorry. I didn't know." She sat perfectly still on the couch while Derek paced the floor, agitated now.
"She was so happy to be having a baby. We were so happy. And I went to the Far East on a trade mission for the textile board, and Kelly was here with Aunt May, and she tried to lift a heavy chair to move it, and she felt pains and was rushed by ambulance to the hospital. If I had been here, I would have done that lifting for her, but no, she couldn't wait.
"I could have come home a week early. I wanted to, in fact, but at the last minute the coordinator of the mission had to put a report together and I stayed to help him. I knew Kelly was all right at home; I mean I thought I knew it, and she wasn't. And she had the miscarriage all alone, with no one but Aunt May, and I wasn't even in the country. Didn't get home until days afterward." He lifted his hands helplessly, and there was no mistaking the anguish in his eyes.
"Derek, chances are you could have done nothing to prevent it," she said comfortingly.
"That's what they all said. But I still felt responsible. I had the chance to come home, and I didn't take it. Because I wanted to be the boy wonder, not just a tagalong on the trade mission. I wanted to show my stuff and prove that I could wheel and deal as well as the rest of them even though I got my position and my power by inheritance, not because of anything I did to earn it." His mouth curled downward in self-disdain.
"Oh, Derek," was all she could say. He sank down on the footstool and
stared up at her, his voice hollow.
"Afterward she had the hysterectomy because of complications; she was never all right again after that miscarriage. Poor Kelly. It was very hard on her. I tried to forget by burying myself in work, and I neglected her. Work was a convenient excuse—I was never there for her."
Eve's hand moved slowly to touch his bowed head ever so gently. "It's all right, Derek," she said soothingly, softly. "It's all right. You can't go on blaming yourself." She couldn't comprehend the weight of guilt under which Derek Lang had lived for so long. But maybe she could alleviate it.
"It's not all right," he whispered as her thumb began to caress his jaw line. He closed his eyes under the comfort of it. It had been so long since anyone had touched him in tenderness. He lifted his own hand and held hers where it rested against the plane of his face, and the inside of his arms ached with the yearning of wanting more of her comfort and touch.
He had loved Kelly so much that he didn't think he could love another woman that way again, but suddenly he wanted to. It was more than an awakening of desire. It was a longing for all the other things love meant to him, for companionship, for parallel thoughts, for caring and nurturing. But he didn't want to mix these longings up with Eve, with the way he felt about her, with his wistful wish for her gentle, abiding warmth.
Still, his arms reached out to her, went around her shoulders, and his head came to rest on her breast. The scent of her was fragrant and sweet, filling his nostrils and lingering at the back of his throat. The skin of her cheek was as soft as a butterfly wing upon his, and a swinging arc of silky hair, black as midnight, feathered across his temple.
She murmured something, lots of things, but the words were only shapes and not real. The comfort was real, the comfort of Eve. Without thinking, he sought her lips. They were pliable beneath his, sensitive, responsive. He could have gone on kissing her—it would have been easy—but as he drew even closer to her, the hard, round knob of her pregnancy pressed against him. Startled, he pulled away. He hadn't expected the child to feel so hard. He thought it would be soft, like Eve herself. But there it was, between the two of them, implacable in its presence.
"I'm sorry," he said with dignity. "I shouldn't have done that."
Eve's eyes were round and soft and vulnerable. "Derek, it's—"
"No," he said harshly. "No." He whirled away from her and walked swiftly from the room.
It was only afterward that he wondered what she had been about to say.
***
"Evie, Evie, you look like a million bucks!" Her father held her away from him, his eyes sparkling.
"Thanks, Dad," she said, laughing. It was so good to see him again, and he wasn't wheezing as much as he had been. She was sure of it.
"Got your recorder ready?"
Eve pulled it out of her purse. "I stopped at Doug's office on the way over. Mrs. McGill is waiting for us at her house."
Her father beamed. "Let's go," he said, holding out his arm. She took it, and they walked the short distance to the McGill house where Ada-Lucy had a snack ready and started immediately on her narrative.
She'd started working in the cotton mill when she was seventeen years old. She talked about the camaraderie among the workers and the disabilities caused by inhaling too much cotton dust. She talked about living in a mill house all her life and mentioned how excited she was that her grandchildren could have the option of finding jobs in Wrayville if the mill became a retail complex.
"When the mill closed, I thought Wrayville was a goner. A ghost town," she said. She glanced out the window at the smoke stacks on the hill. "I have to say I'm kind of glad that the old place might survive."
Eve and Al enjoyed the afternoon, and Al was enthusiastic about interviewing more people as soon as Eve could visit again. She left him at Nell's house, where he and Vernon, the other boarder, were trying to figure out a computer game that Vernon's son had brought earlier.
Eve stopped by Doug's office on her way out of town. "Thanks for helping," he said. "Ada-Lucy phoned and said she had a great time. Did she make her famous cheese straws?"
"Yes, and we ate a bunch. It was fun, and Al looks so much better."
Doug laughed. "You can attribute that to the widow Baker. They sit on her front porch in the evening and laugh and talk like two kids."
"Really? Amazing!"
"Yeah, I know. Nell and Al have known each other for years, but I don't think they ever really knew each other until Al moved in with her."
Eve grew suddenly quiet. It was much like her situation with Derek, she thought. She was getting to know him so well now that they lived in the same household.
Getting to know him well but not yet well enough. Not well enough to convince him to do the right thing by this baby.
* * *
"Where is she?" Derek fumed, pacing up and down the foyer. It was Monday, and Eve wasn't home yet. She was never home when he got in from work on Mondays.
"He wants to know where she is," Aunt May explained to nobody.
"She should have been home before this storm started. The roads are icing up."
"What did you say?"
"The roads are icing up," Derek said, peering out one of the sidelights at the front door.
"Rising up?"
"Icing up," he repeated, none too patiently.
"Right," Aunt May said. "I think I'll help Louise get dinner on the table."
She teetered off and Derek resumed his vigil. He supposed he wouldn't worry so much if it weren't for what happened to Kelly. Now he distrusted damp pavements.
He interrupted his pacing to switch on the TV in the den. The program was interrupted by a weather bulletin.
"Motorists are warned to drive carefully," the announcer intoned. "With temperatures below the freezing point and a light drizzle falling on Charlotte tonight, ice will be a hazard on area roads."
Morosely, Derek opened the front door and stood framed in the doorway for a moment, as if such action would conjure up Eve's VW at the end of the street. When it didn't, he went back inside and slammed the door, hard.
"Is that Eve?" Aunt May called from the kitchen.
"No," he replied.
He considered phoning the police to see if any accidents had been reported in the area. Which was ridiculous. She wasn't late, not in the strictest sense of the word. How could she be late when he never knew what time to expect her home? Well, he could hardly impose a curfew on her.
He considered calling an emergency room. Which one, though? Not a good idea, he decided. He could imagine calling and telling the answering nurse, "I'm looking for Eve Triopolous," and the nurse would say with annoyance, "What relationship, please," and he'd answer blankly, "What do you mean?" and the nurse would say impatiently "What relationship—sister, wife, mother, niece, grandmother?" and he would hang up. Because she was no relation.
Mother of my child. The words came out of nowhere, focused on the deepest recesses of his mind and branded themselves there. For the first time, he confronted the fact that his tender feelings for her were more than that.
Eve was the mother of his child, and he panicked with the fear of one who had already lost the most important person in the world to the whims of the weather. The weather had been responsible for the accident that had taken Kelly's life, and he couldn't bear the thought that Eve was endangered in any way.
"I'm going to go out and find her," he said, reason eroded by his terror.
"I'm not sure that's such a—" Aunt May ventured. "Why don't you just—"
But he'd already yanked on his raincoat. He raced out the back door through the garage to where his Corvette was parked in the driveway.
He'd forgotten the key, so he had to run back inside and all the way upstairs where his car keys reposed on his dresser. He grabbed them and took off down the stairs, taking them two at a time all the way down. Dropping his keys, scooping them up off the slick pavement of the driveway, his fingers shook.
He looked up through
the misty drizzle illuminated by the headlights of an approaching car. A rainbow surrounded it for a moment until Eve shut off the lights and engine and stepped blithely out into the rain.
She was surprised to see Derek there.
"Oh," she said, and he could have sworn that the simple one-syllable word wore shades of disappointment. "You're going out."
"I was going to look for you." Mist beaded on her eyelashes. It glittered in the overhead outside light.
"What on earth for?" She stared at him through the mist.
"I was worried," he said.
"Oh, Derek. You shouldn't have been." She gestured at the bag of groceries in the back of her car. "I stopped off at the store. I've taken over the grocery shopping. You'll be pleased to know that I've bought a beef roast for Sunday dinner. No more pickled sausages, I'm afraid. And guess what—I bought you a package of cheese doodles." She smiled, then laughed. "And here we stand out here in the rain like two people who don't have enough sense to come in out of it." She whirled, light on her feet, and his heart flew to his throat.
"Careful," he said tightly, grasping her arm above the elbow. "Don't prance like that! You could fall. Do you have on your boots with the nonskid soles?"
"Prance! Derek, my prancing days are over. And yes, these are the proper boots for the weather. Honestly, you're getting as bad as Aunt May. Look, why don't you carry in that bag of groceries?"
But thinking about what might have happened to her, about how worried he had been, Derek remained serious all through dinner and the rest of the evening, during which he barely left Eve's side while she watched television and then dozed.
"Anybody want to play Trivial Pursuit?"
Eve jerked awake to see Aunt May standing in front of her. She held the Trivial Pursuit boxes and playing board in her hands.
"Not now, Aunt May," Derek said peremptorily. "Eve's tired."
"Oh, but Derek," Eve said gently as a look of disappointment slid over Aunt May's pudgy features. "I think I'd like to play Trivial Pursuit. Yes, I really think I would." She gazed mutely at Derek, and he knew she was tired but was thinking of Aunt May's feelings.
Ever Since Eve (The Keeping Secrets Series, Book 1) Page 11
