Angel's Baby

by Pamela Browning

  She couldn’t help being curious about his profession, though. “Exactly what does a naval architect do?” she asked.

  “I design ships. The last one I designed was a floating palace for the sultan of Borju. It’s being built now at our shipbuilding facility on Cape Cod.”

  “I should think you’d have wanted to stick around to see how things are going.”

  “Not necessarily. My brother’s overseeing the project. About my financial status, if you need further assurance—”

  “I don’t,” she said, tossing the papers aside. As they stared at each other across the table, she took in the sharp planes of his face, the prominent cheekbones, the lips drawn into a firm line. Something sizzled between them, threatening to overload her circuits. Beneath what she hoped was a calm veneer, her heart was beating much too rapidly. And, she realized helplessly, she would have had exactly the same reaction to Stuart Adams if he were penniless.

  “While you’re thinking this over, could I please have a drink of water?” he asked on a note of apology.

  She rose abruptly. “I made lemonade,” she blurted before fleeing into the kitchen.

  Inside, she leaned against the counter and struggled to regain her composure. All Stuart Adams’s millions aside, the folly of having placed that ad in the personals column was beginning to be apparent. But since she left this otherwise unoccupied island only once a month or so, how else would she meet a man?

  Still, what could she have been thinking of, to want to have a child with a man she didn’t even know? How could she, a responsible and respected scientist, have come up with such a zany idea in the first place?

  Suddenly she was no longer caught up in the bravado of choosing her own destiny. This was no longer a clear-cut business deal, the details outlined in impersonal correspondence. Now that she had met the man she had selected to be the father of her child, there was a distressingly human dimension to the scheme she had hatched months ago, when she realized that if she were ever going to have a baby, it had better be soon, before it was too late.

  She reached for glasses in the small cabinet above her head and slammed the door. And then, without warning and while her back was turned, the kitchen cabinet crashed to the floor.

  Glass sprayed out across the rough wooden planks, and Angel uttered a terrified squeak and stared in horror. Dishes spilled out of the fallen cabinet even as she watched; Caloosa the cat, hair standing on end, danced into the doorway on her six-toed feet with her back arched, hissing at the damage.

  Stuart Adams shot through the door as if fired from a cannon.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, looking rattled at the sight of the cabinet on the floor, surrounded by broken glass and pottery. Caloosa took off like a shot.

  “Y-yes,” Angel managed to say, scarcely able to remove her gaze from the wreckage of glassware and dishes, including her great-grandmother’s heirloom china teapot, which had arrived in the United States from Ireland in the 1800s along with seven members of the McCabe clan.

  “You’re not all right at all. You’ve cut your foot,” he pointed out. Glass crunched under his feet as he crossed the kitchen in two giant strides and bent to look. Sure enough, a thread of blood snaked down Angel’s slim ankle. Angel couldn’t feel a thing, and she was becoming more unnerved by the minute.

  “It’s nothing,” she said, staring down, not so much at the cut as at Stuart’s back, which was defined by ropy muscles that filled out his shirt in the most arresting way. Why was it that she couldn’t feel the cut on her leg but was all too aware of the shiver of desire rippling up her spine?

  “Don’t move,” he warned. He straightened and walked swiftly to the sink while Angel stood helpless amid shards of glass, china and pottery, then ripped a paper towel from the roll. He held it under the faucet for a few seconds and then returned to blot gently at the cut.

  “The cut’s not serious,” he said, sounding relieved. “What made the cabinet fall?” He straightened so that he towered above Angel’s five feet four inches. In an attempt to distance herself from any trace of erotic interest, Angel rapidly calculated what height their offspring might attain at maturity. Let’s see— Stuart was over six feet, possibly six-two. Average that with her height of five foot four, which was sixty-four inches, and you got—

  “I asked you what happened,” he said, peering down at her.

  “It just fell,” she said. “Things around here keep disintegrating, partly because the house was built around 1940 and hasn’t been properly maintained. I don’t know how to fix things and don’t have the inclination to keep things up.” The mathematical calculations, and having to answer his question, had yanked her back to normal, sort of.

  “Where’s the bathroom? I’ll get some antiseptic, and if you have Band-Aids—”

  “The bathroom is located about fifty feet to the south, outside,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said, and clamped his mouth shut.

  “Band-Aids are in the drawer behind you,” she told him.

  He found the Band-Aids and reached out his hand. “Here, I’ll steady you while you step through the debris. Careful, don’t cut yourself. Those sandals you’re wearing don’t provide much protection.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, she took the hand he offered and clung to his strength, stepping carefully over the broken glass.

  She dropped his hand before reaching into the open drawer behind him and locating a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. She bent to dribble some on the cut, and her hair fell forward to hide her face.

  “Aren’t you upset about this?” he asked, looking around at the mess.

  “I figure there are worse things,” Angel said. “The house is still standing, anyway.” She slapped a Band-Aid on the cut.

  “Is there a broom around? I’ll start sweeping up,” he said.

  “In that closet,” Angel said, gesturing. Perhaps the fall of the cabinet had been a kind of blessing. It had certainly made them both concentrate on what needed to be done, instead of what they both, by this time, knew they’d be doing in the future.

  They would be making a baby together. Soon, she hoped.

  Stuart found the broom, and as Angel self-consciously busied herself with picking salvageable items out of the clutter on the floor, he pushed the debris into a corner.

  “I have just enough carpentry skills to tack this cabinet back on the wall,” he said. “By the way, a cat poked its head around the corner and took off at a run when it saw me.”

  “Oh, that’s Caloosa,” she said with a dismissive wave. “She’ll get used to you.”

  He leaned on the broom for a moment. “And so I’m to stay?”

  Angel inhaled a deep breath. “If you think I’ll do,” she said, trying not to think of the other women this handsome and well-connected man must have met in his lifetime, every one of them much more desirable and much more beautiful than she.

  To her surprise, Stuart Adams tossed his head back and laughed. It was a long full-throated sound that brought Caloosa scampering in from the living room.

  “You’ll do, Angel McCabe,” he said, his blue eyes crinkling at her. “And will I?”

  “I should think you would do very nicely,” she said stiffly. Her hands were trembling, and she clenched them into tight fists behind her back so that he wouldn’t see.

  The ensuing silence became so protracted that it grew awkward.

  “I guess you’d probably like to see where you’ll sleep until we’re married,” Angel said finally.

  “Won’t I be sleeping with you?”

  “No sex until after marriage. You’ll have to promise me that,” she said. She couldn’t make her eyes meet his.

  “Why? If we’re going to be married, what’s the difference?”

  “You could leave after...after...”

  “After we sleep together?”

  Angel cleared her throat. “Yes. And I could be pregnant. Then my child wouldn’t have the security I want.”

  “Would you mi
nd telling me why it’s important? Other women, single women, have babies all the time.”

  She inhaled a deep breath. “I never knew my father, and I’m not sure my mother did, either. Growing up was a struggle, and I don’t want any child of mine not to know who his or her father is, or to be financially deprived, like I was.”

  He studied her face for a long moment before nodding abruptly. “All right,” he said. “I agree to your conditions. The contract between us becomes active immediately after we marry. I start a trust fund for the child as soon as the baby is born. Shall we shake on it?”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Angel held out her hand, and he gripped it between his two larger ones, all the while smiling at her.

  Angel yanked her hand away. “There’s a pullout bed in the couch,” she said, brushing past him toward the living room, which she now noticed, in her distraction, looked even more frumpy than usual. She didn’t pay much attention to decor, since she never entertained and since she herself preferred to spend most of her time outside with her bees. Now the chintz upholstery of the couch appeared more faded than ever, and the lamp shades more outdated.

  “You can keep your clothes in here,” she said, indicating a small closet.

  “When can we be married?”

  Angel made herself face him, hoping that she looked calmer than she felt. “This is Tuesday. When the mail boat comes back on Thursday, we can go to Key West, get our marriage license, and be married the same day in a civil ceremony in the county courthouse.”

  He nodded slowly. She realized belatedly that they were standing very close, almost touching, in front of the tiny closet, and she stepped backward in a hurry. Stuart Adams did something to the air when he was around, made it difficult to breathe—or maybe it was his scent, which was overwhelmingly masculine and fragrant with the tang of brine.

  “I never got that lemonade,” he reminded her as she turned to go. He followed her back into the kitchen.

  “It’s in the fridge,” she said.

  “I—” he began.

  “A few ground rules, for the record,” she said. “I won’t wait on you. I won’t do your laundry. You’re on your own for breakfast and lunch. I like to cook a good dinner, and we can eat together if you like.”

  “Maybe we could go out sometimes,” he said.

  “There’s hardly anyplace to do that.”

  He shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. “It was kind of a joke,” he said.

  “A joke,” she repeated slowly. “I see.”

  “Lighten up, Angel. You’re much too serious,” he said, but he said the last couple of words to her back, because Angel was already out the back door and into the liberating freedom of sunshine and sea air.

  Jokes, she thought to herself as she walked purposefully past twin banyan trees and on toward the west end of the island. What next?

  She made herself think of the baby that would result from their marriage, and she grinned to herself. She’d better keep reminding herself that she needed Stuart Adams for one reason only. Next year at this time, she’d be a mother.

  Caloosa scampered alongside her, chirruping in happy anticipation of a long walk to the beach. The cat knew from past experience that this was Angel’s customary time for an afternoon swim.

  “Well, he’s here, Caloosa,” Angel said to the cat. “And better than we expected, don’t you think?”

  Not that the cat paid any attention. She had already chased a chameleon into the brush.

  Chapter Two

  Stuart Adams found an unbroken glass on the kitchen counter and poured himself some of Angel’s lemonade. It was slightly too tart for his taste; it was a lot like her. Not that Angel didn’t have compensating attributes, he reminded himself.

  When he stepped onto the dock an hour or so ago, he hadn’t been prepared for a woman whose sexuality simmered so seductively beneath the surface. Whose big brown eyes were of the bedroom variety. Whose gently rounded curves of breasts and hips and buttocks seemed sculptured for the purpose of making a man want to make love to her.

  A scientist, she had written. Studying bees. A loner who lived by herself on this small island slightly west of Key West and seldom came into contact with other people.

  He had translated this information to mean that she was something of a misfit in society, albeit a highly intelligent one. Now he knew that his long-distance assessment had been incorrect. There was nothing about Angel McCabe that wouldn’t fit in anywhere. In fact, he had an idea that she’d fit very well, and he grinned. The sexual chemistry was there, and he couldn’t be happier.

  And, he reminded himself, the best thing about the deal was that he would become a father. He’d given up on that idea since Valerie’s death two years ago, thinking that the child she would have borne, had she lived, was his last link to immortality, and that when she died, all hopes of having a child had died with her. He’d known in the aftermath of that tragic night on Nantucket that he would never care about another woman enough to marry her. Never.

  And yet here was Angel McCabe—someone he had met through a personals ad in a singles newspaper he’d picked up at a Miami marina on his way to another hemisphere—and she was willing to bear a child with no strings attached.

  He’d almost passed up the ad in the first place. Who could take such an advertisement seriously?

  Let’s Make A Baby Together, it had said in bold type. Intrigued by the possibilities, he’d written to her, and Angel had replied right away. Her letter had so piqued his interest that he’d told the skipper of the racing yacht on which he was crewing at the time to go on without him, so that he could wait for Angel’s next letter. As he’d exchanged letters with Angel and as it appeared that the two of them might be able to strike a mutually beneficial deal, Stuart literally couldn’t believe his luck. And now he was sure he had stumbled into a fantasy.

  Angel McCabe was the most beautiful woman Stuart Adams had ever seen, more beautiful even than Valerie had been. With that long hair slipping and sliding around her tan shoulders like strands of gold washed in silver, with those wide eyes holding just the slightest hint of surprise, with that firm, lithe body— Angel was the kind of woman most men saw only in their dreams.

  Stuart had been unlucky in life and love. But the unlucky part was over and done with, and he didn’t want to think about it now that he was finally recovering and on the way to making a new life for himself. It was hard, though, really hard, not to think of what might have been, especially now that he was actively pursuing fatherhood.

  He sauntered over to a framed map on the kitchen wall and saw that it was a map of the island. He’d looked up Halos Island on a nautical chart earlier, but it hadn’t shown as much detail as this map. The crescent-shaped twenty-square-mile island was one of a cluster of coral-reef atolls flung west of Key West across the Gulf of Mexico like a scattering of emeralds.

  Embracing a wide bay, Halos Island was surmounted by a huge oyster-shell Indian midden and bordered by wide pink-sand beaches. There were caves on the north shore overlooking the Straits of Florida. The surrounding water was turquoise in its depths, and so clear in the shallows that you could probably see George Washington’s face on a quarter lying twelve feet below the surface. It pleased Stuart that for however long it took, he would live on Halos Island. With Angel McCabe.

  After he drained two glasses of lemonade, Stuart decided that his carpentry skills, honed the summer that he and his brother Fitz had undertaken the building of a boat in their shed on Nantucket, were equal to hanging the cabinet back on the wall. He’d get started on that chore tomorrow. But first he wanted to look around.

  As a former outpost of the U.S. Navy, the house—if you could call it that—was spartan in the extreme. Furthermore, it looked as if it would crumble to sawdust if the termites stopped holding hands. Out of curiosity, he peered into Angel’s bedroom first. The small cubicle was almost fanatically neat, the double bed, with its graceful folds of mosquito netting, pushed into a c
orner, and the shutters at the windows folded back to admit as much sunlight as possible. The bed was covered with a white plissé coverlet, and the hand-hooked rugs on the floor were white, too. There were no pictures, no frills, no furbelows.

  “Doesn’t look as if Angel McCabe has much of a personal life,” he muttered to himself. Maybe that was good. She’d have plenty of time to devote to a kid. As a child who had often been left in the care of lackadaisical servants, Stuart thought he’d rather be smothered than ignored. A child, he’d always thought, deserved thoughtful, caring attention from the significant adults in his or her life.

  He resisted an urge to peek into Angel’s dresser drawers and went into the living room. Here there was a bouquet of fresh wildflowers on the rattan coffee table, and an overhead fan stirred the air into a sultry breeze. As Angel had pointed out, there was no inside bathroom. And he had already seen what was left of the kitchen. So the place was just three rooms—four, counting the porch.

  He let himself out of the house, inhaling a long, deep breath of clean sea air. He could hear the sound of the surf from here; in fact, he’d be willing to bet that there wasn’t a place on the island where you couldn’t hear the ocean. That suited him superbly.

  The old brick icehouse between the bungalow and Angel’s small garden was a dank and unwelcoming three-foot cube. A glance inside the slant-roofed outhouse told him all he needed to know—the toilet facilities were even more primitive than he had expected. This was the typical one-holer, with a bucket of lime in one corner, a cobweb in the other. He wondered how Angel, who looked like a woman of taste and refinement, could stand it.

  He followed a sandy path through a thicket of pesky sandspurs that clung to the hems of his jeans. Once he heard the scurrying of some creature nearby and was startled when Caloosa the cat leaped out from behind a palmetto tree. She pounced on his shoelaces before he reached down and caught her in his arms.