Maternal Instinct (12 page)

Nell didn't notice. She ate with single-minded concentration that was as irritating in its way as her abstraction in the car.

Hugh tried to make conversation, like a nice boy.

"So. How's it going with your daughter?"

"Fine." She took a bite of scone and sighed with pleasure before attacking the salad again.

"Didn't you have breakfast?"

"Wasn't hungry," she mumbled around a bite.

"This boyfriend your daughter has. Is it serious?"

"They
think so. But they're young. I'm praying for a blowup. Or even a pimple," she added, obscurely.

"What the hell is a pimple going to accomplish?" he asked, against his better judgment.

"Repulse Colin." She slurped half the milkshake in one go.

Hugh watched in fascination. "You think one pimple would do that."

"A big, red, oozy one. A dime-size … no. Make that a nickel-size pimple. A Vesuvius of a pimple." She paused in her eating for a moment, apparently to savor the image. "Would
you
want to get close to that?"

"No," he admitted. "I guess that might repulse me."

"Maybe I'll buy a gigantic selection of chocolates on the way home. Kim loves chocolate. She won't be able to resist. And chocolate is supposed to cause pimples. Isn't it?"

He didn't know.

She didn't wait for his inexpert opinion. After another slurp of the milkshake, she added, "And I could have a few."

"Of course, the boyfriend might like chocolate, too. He might eat them all."

Her hand stopped with the fork halfway to her mouth. Dismay changed after a moment to slyness. "Maybe
he'd
get the pimple instead."

"Chaining your daughter to the foot of her bed and locking the doors sounds like a surer bet to me," Hugh said honestly.

"You don't have a teenager."

"I don't have a kid at all," he admitted. "Just nieces and a nephew. Sometimes I'm not sure I—"

He didn't get any further. Nell
Granstrom
dropped her fork with a clatter and interrupted. "I've had enough. Let's go."

He'd said something wrong. Big-time wrong. Her face was suddenly plain, the pale skin almost translucent, so that freckles he hadn't known she had stood out on her nose and cheeks.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Nothing." She swayed and clutched the back of the chair. "I just don't feel good. I ate too much."

He didn't buy it. "I said something, didn't I?"

"No!" Her eyes blazed out of that pale face. "Why should it be you?"

Either she was an incredible flake, which was always possible, had discovered this past week that she had cancer, or…

As if he'd taken a body slam, Hugh quit breathing.
Or
was the edge of a precipice. He was too queasy to look over.

God.
What was the last thing he'd said?
I don't have a kid at all. Sometimes I'm not sure I…

…want to have children. That's what he'd been going to say, and she'd known it.

Jaw knotted, Hugh signaled the waitress. "Can I get my sandwich to go? And the rest of the scone."

"I don't want it," Nell told him.

At least she was listening.

"I'll eat it if you don't," he said shortly. He threw bills on the table, accepted the bag from the waitress and gestured for Nell to go ahead of him.

When she headed for the unit, Hugh said, "We need to talk. There's a park over there."

This was personal, not business. Not something two cops should be talking about in the public eye.

"I have nothing to say."

He wondered if she knew how sulky and
teenage
she sounded.

"Yeah. You do." He gripped her elbow and marched her across the street to the
minipark
with a few benches and brick paved paths wandering among tall dark rhododendrons. In the spring, this was a glorious spot. In the heat of a summer day, it was deserted but for a couple who seemed to have paused on a bench so the wife could change shoes. The white, heeled sandals were disappearing into her tote in favor of sneakers.

Nell didn't even glance at them.

"What's your problem?" she grumbled, yanking to free her arm.

A fountain bubbled before them. A pitiful scattering of pennies caught glints of sunlight beneath the water's surface.

"All right." Hugh stopped, sat on the bench and crossed his arms. "What's going on?"

Sitting at the far end, leaving a three-foot gap between them, she didn't look at him. "You're the one who—"

"No. I'm not."

"You dragged me over here to bicker?"

He still couldn't look down. Like a coward, he inched back from the edge. "You've been weird all week. Something's bothering you."

She was suddenly very still, head bent. Into the hush of the hot summer day, she said quietly, "Maybe I just haven't been feeling well."

His shirt was sticking to him and sweat stung his eyes. "Maybe you've been throwing up every morning. Or aren't you far enough along yet for morning sickness?"

She jerked but didn't say a word.

"When were you going to tell me?" he asked in a hard voice. "Or were you?"

"Of course I was!" Nell lifted her head, tears trembling on her lashes but her expression defiant. "I was trying to—to figure out how."

"How?"
Hugh shot to his feet and stalked ten feet away before swinging back to face her. "Here's an idea. You say it. 'I'm pregnant.'"

She stood, too, head high. "It's not that easy."

"Try it," he said between gritted teeth.

"Fine!" The tears ran down her cheeks, but anger as hot as his shimmered in her voice. "I'm pregnant. I was stupid. Stupid,
stupid.
I had a drunken one-night stand, the memory of which humiliates me, and now I'm pregnant."

"You weren't the only one there." He should wish she
wanted
to take sole responsibility, but for some reason he resented her independence and bitter anger at herself. It seemed to suggest he was nobody. An accident.

Wasn't that exactly what he'd been to her?

She wrapped her arms around herself as if in protection. "No," she agreed. "But you're not the one who has to explain to her sixteen-year-old daughter how Mom screwed up this bad twice in her life."

"You aren't thinking of getting an abortion." Pro choice in a general way, he was shocked by how much the idea bothered him.

It was his child she was carrying, which made an astounding difference.

With sudden impatience, she swiped at her cheeks.

"No. I … can't. Won't," she amended, narrowing her eyes at him.

"Okay," he agreed.

Still bristling, she argued, "It's not your decision."

"It's my child, too."

Abruptly his partner sagged back onto the bench. "Yes. I guess it is."

He took a step forward, then another. "Are you all right?"

Her expression said,
What kind of idiot are you?
"I'm dripping with sweat, I'm sick to my stomach, I'm scared to death, and you ask if I'm all right?" She gave a shaky laugh probably not as bitter as she'd intended. "I'm fine."

"You haven't told your daughter?"

She moaned and shook her head. "That's the worst part. I … like being a mother. I can manage this. But Kim is at that scary age when she's one seething cauldron of hormones. Love and sex are—are—" She stuttered, apparently at a loss for a conclusion.

"Fun and transitory?" he suggested.

"Earth-shattering," Nell corrected him. "Romantic, tragic. But not
real.
At her age, you think you might kill yourself if your parents won't let you see him, but it never occurs to you that you might get syphilis or find yourself having to drop out of school to have a baby on your own."

"And you know what it feels like," he said quietly. She was his age, give or take a year or so, which meant her daughter had been born when Nell had been no older than Kim was now.

"I know." More tears leaked out. She hated to cry, he could tell, because she sopped them up with an angry wipe of her shirtsleeve.

Squaring his shoulders, Hugh went back to the bench and sat beside her. "This child is mine, too."

"You said that." She sounded pugnacious.

"And I meant it." He'd never expected to find himself in this spot, but his mother hadn't raised her sons to be less than honorable. "I'll pay child support, and I want visitation. I want him—or her—to know a father."

Her face crumpled and she gave a small nod.

Without thinking, he reached for her. She surrendered to his embrace only briefly, weeping onto his shoulder before she pulled herself together and moved away, as fiercely independent as ever.

"Yes. Okay." Her voice was choked.

"Does Kim know her father?"

Nell shook her head. "He, uh, wanted me to get an abortion. He had a football scholarship, and she was inconvenient."

Years too late, Hugh wanted to punch the selfish little bastard. "You could have made him pay…"

"No. What good would that have done Kim? I managed."

She wasn't a pretty woman, especially not now with her face unnaturally pale but for tearstains and blotches. Tiny hairs clung damply to her forehead. But Hugh, who didn't count a single woman among his friends, unless you counted his two sisters-in-law, suddenly realized how much he liked Nell
Granstrom
.

And while she wasn't exactly pretty, she was sexy, if his memory wasn't toying with him. Not sexy in the way of satin and plunging necklines and heavy-lidded, come-hither eyes. More in the unintentionally provocative way of high-necked flannel gowns and white cotton underwear and cheeks flushed pink at a gentle compliment.

Pregnant, he thought incredulously. All his girlfriends, and this had never happened. One night in the Explorer, with him on his knees between Nell
Granstrom's
legs like a randy teenager, and he was going to be a father.

What would
his
family say?

Hugh winced at the thought of his mother's reaction. He had a bad feeling she'd want to know when the wedding was.

The worst part was imagining how they might look at Nell. Fair or not, a drunken one-night stand sounded worse when you were talking about the woman instead of the man.

Even John didn't really know her. A female cop who'd had her first kid when she was a teenager and now had gotten pregnant again by a man she hardly knew? None of them would guess that she had a soft spot as wide as Connor's, a hint of shyness and the guts to make it on her own with a baby.

Maybe it didn't matter what they would think—they'd be polite—but knowing bothered him. She was going to be the mother of his son or daughter.

He'd never imagined a woman being that, unless she was also his wife.

Unsettled, he said, "Do you want me with you when you tell Kim?"

"No!" She looked horrified at the very idea. "No. I … need to think about how to do it best." Suddenly anxious, she asked, "You won't say anything?"

"I've never even met your daughter," he protested.

"But you might call, or…" Those wide eyes fixed on him, she pressed, "Promise. You won't say anything."

"Word of honor."

She seemed to sag a little again. "Okay."

Hugh couldn't think of anything else to say. Would she want him to go to the doctor with her? Be with her when the baby was born?