Pregnant and Incognito Read online

  Dana’s pictures stared up at him. “Day Quinlan and her honey, Philip Grantham, at Chicago’s Heart Ball,” said one. “Day Quinlan and Philip Grantham whoop it up in the Virgin Islands,” said another. “Day Quinlan soaks up a few rays on a friend’s yacht,” said the next. That one showed her reclining on a deck chair in a yellow bikini, sunglasses pushed up to hold her long blond hair like a headband.

  Well, her hair was shorter now and not as light in color, and Dana wouldn’t be wearing any bikinis for a while. She had gained a bit of weight in the face, which he found very attractive. No, a correction was in order—he found it beautiful. Since he’d left her, it seemed as if he had thought endlessly about the way Dana looked and the way her skin felt, the sweet smell of her and the sound of her voice.

  To his eyes and ears, to all of his senses, Dana was lovely. She merely happened to be a little bit pregnant at present. This separation from her had made him see how crazy he was about her, and he was going to tell her so. His insides clenched when he thought about telling her the rest.

  Somehow he had to tell Dana that he was going back to work for the Probe. It would make her hate him even more. But once she knew that he hadn’t told anyone at the Probe her whereabouts, perhaps she would understand that he was loyal to her. Maybe she would appreciate that quality and see his concern for his mother as a manifestation of it. After all, if he could be loyal to other important people in his life, he would be loyal to her. Because of her devastating experience with Philip Grantham, surely Dana would regard his loyalty as a plus.

  Conn was more determined than ever not to let this woman get away. He had been foolish enough to let Lindsay go without making a commitment, and he would regret it all of his life. After losing Lindsay, he had fashioned a cage of his own sorrow, and he was ready to spring himself from it now. He was ready to commit to Dana Cantrell/ Day Quinlan.

  But how could she commit to him when she hated the kind of work he did?

  STILL PREOCCUPIED with her thoughts, Dana cut a hard right off the highway, heading down the winding drive to the cabin. The car following her turned, too.

  She was instantly alert. No one else lived on this driveway. The land belonged solely to her with no neighbors closer than Conn, and he wasn’t back yet. She blinked and squinted into the rearview mirror, but the car’s headlights blinded her. Although it had drawn closer, she still couldn’t tell who was driving. Her first thought was that it must be someone from the tabloids and that Conn had done his dirty work, thrown her to the wolves.

  But what if it wasn’t a reporter? What if it was someone else, someone intending her harm? She wished now that she’d agreed to have a phone installed in her car. Even though a phone might not have worked because of the mountains, she could have tried it. But who would she call when she thought she might be in danger, like now? Esther, who would be ineffectual in a situation like this one? Billy Wayne? The county sheriff, whose headquarters was thirty miles away? Uneasily she sped up. So did the car behind her.

  When she reached the cabin, she drew the car as close to the front porch as possible. She intended to make a quick dash for the front door. But she’d have to unlock it before she could get in, so she located the correct key on her key chain and prepared to open her car door. Even as she did so, she knew with unsettling certainty that because of her pregnancy, she wouldn’t be able to run very fast.

  A man got out of the other car. He stretched, yawned and walked around the front of it so that its headlights cast his figure in sharp relief.

  Dana would have recognized that swagger anywhere, and that thin-lipped condescending smile, that pale-brown hair flecked with just the right amount of gray at the temples to make him look distinguished. But she still couldn’t believe her eyes.

  The ground seemed to tilt sideways. She clutched the car door, trying to maintain her equilibrium.

  Her voice quavered when she spoke. “Philip?” she said.

  “How touching that you still remember my name,” he replied.

  Chapter Twelve

  As she unlocked the front door of the cabin, Dana supposed she should be grateful that he hadn’t brought Myrtis with him.

  Philip followed her inside and stood looking around with upraised eyebrows. “Day, this place is a dump. How can you stand it?” he asked bluntly.

  She forced back indignation and hurt. She had mopped and painted, scrubbed and rearranged furniture. The cabin was homey now in a way that it hadn’t been before, and she was comfortable here. Philip had no right to arrive uninvited and start criticizing. Of course, that’s what he’d always done. She hadn’t cared before, but now she did.

  Willing herself to remain silent, she switched on a lamp and took in the wings of gray hair frosting Philip’s temples, his narrow straight nose, the way he looked down it with an air of superiority. She’d once thought he was handsome, but now all she really noticed about him was the cynicism reflected in the narrowing of his eyes as they took in his surroundings. Whatever had attracted her to him in the past held no interest for her now.

  She didn’t offer to take his coat, but she removed her jacket. Philip stiffened and blanched. “Day?” he said cautiously. “You’re—you’re pregnant.”

  She blew out an exasperated sigh. She didn’t have any patience for this man, someone she had once loved, someone she had once hoped to marry. She was astonished that she had absolutely no feeling for him at all anymore.

  “As it happens, I am,” she said curtly. She walked over and hung her jacket in the closet before turning to face him so that he could see the extent of her pregnancy. She felt defiantly proud and firm in her resolve to fight him for this child, fight him tooth and nail with every resource in her power.

  “My God.” Philip sank down on the green chair, and her first reaction was No, you can’t sit there, that’s Conn’s place. Then she noticed that Philip’s complexion had turned almost as green as the upholstery fabric, and that made her want to laugh. She’d hold her laughter until later when she could really enjoy it. It gave her a sense of bitter triumph, that suppressed laughter.

  “So what happened—did the National Probe publish my address for all the world to know?”

  “The Probe? No.”

  This poked a hole in her belief that Conn had sold her out, and Philip’s denial threw her off balance for a moment.

  “So who was it? Was it Raymond, when you ran into him at the health club?”

  “Not Raymond. You might as well know, Day, it was Noelle who told me where to find you.”

  “Noelle?” The walls seemed to close in on her, and she seemed to have forgotten how to breathe. It was hard to believe that her best friend would tell Philip where she was, yet in the light of her last conversation with Noelle, it could be true. With the wind knocked out of her sails, she lowered herself to the couch.

  “After she told me your phone number, it was an easy matter to have some of my people trace it to Cougar Creek.”

  Philip had minions for everything—people to run his household, people to pick up his dry cleaning, people to find other people. It figured that one of his lackeys would have stayed on the case until he located her.

  “How did you find out where I live once you got to Cougar Creek?”

  “A kid with orange-and-purple hair pointed me in this direction when I stopped at the local Conoco.”

  Philip had run into Billy Wayne, of course. “Why did you come here, Philip?” She was still numb over Noelle’s betrayal.

  “To see you,” he said reluctantly. He stared down at his shoes, wet and glistening with melting snow.

  She closed her eyes and tried to think. Maybe Conn hadn’t told Martin or anyone at the Probe where she was. Maybe—

  “It’s not my baby,” Philip said flatly.

  She opened her eyes and stared at him. “Excuse me?”

  “It’s not mine.”

  She dismissed this assertion with the scorn it deserved. “Of course it’s yours. You were the only man in
my life for almost two years.”

  His voice rose on a note of querulousness. “You had plenty of opportunity to be with other men when you went on vacation without me. You and Noelle went skiing every year.”

  “You took vacations without me, too, but I never thought you were unfaithful,” she said hotly.

  “Noelle said there was a man in Vail.”

  Sheer incredulity was Dana’s reaction to this statement. “What man?”

  “Some guy you picked up in a bar.”

  She racked her brain, trying to recall if there could have been someone, anyone, that Noelle might have thought she was interested in. Certainly she hadn’t slept with anyone else from the moment she set eyes on Philip and decided he was the one for her.

  She was aware of her anxiety honing down to a fine sharp edge. Her anger grew, burgeoned, spread. “I can’t imagine what Noelle was thinking,” she said furiously. “There was no one. No one but you. For almost two years, Philip.” As she spoke, she realized how stupid she was to argue. If he thought the baby wasn’t his, so much the better. He wouldn’t want it then.

  “No need to go ballistic,” Philip said placatingly. “I came to tell you something.”

  She was instantly suspicious of where he was going with this. “Like what?” She rubbed her arms through her sweater. It was cold in here. She wanted to turn on the wall heater to get the dampness out of the air, but she suddenly felt a lack of energy for getting up and crossing the room. Her stomach had begun to hurt—heartburn from the horseradish gravy at dinner, she thought distractedly.

  Philip went on talking. “I’m here to discuss something important. I want closure, Day. I couldn’t believe it when you left Chicago without a word. Not after all we meant to each other.”

  “We evidently didn’t mean enough to each other for you to stay away from Erica,” she pointed out. “You’re the one who cheated, not me.”

  Philip narrowed his eyes. “I wouldn’t have been interested in her if you hadn’t been such a bitch. You and my mother, hounding me, making my life miserable.”

  Oh, that was a nasty cut, but she wouldn’t let him get away with it. “Your mother, maybe, but not me. When was I ever anything but kind, Philip? When did I ever start an argument? When did we ever fight, for that matter? I always gave in to you.”

  “You’re starting an argument now,” he said smugly.

  “I’m not—” Her stomach was really hurting.

  “I didn’t come to talk about you and me, actually.”

  Did he want to talk about the baby? But no, he wouldn’t have come here to discuss the baby if he hadn’t even realized that she was pregnant, and she was sure his surprise had been genuine.

  Despite the intensity of this scene, she was beginning to feel slightly foggy, as if her thought processes were scrambled. “You want something,” she said heavily.

  “Yes, Day.”

  “But you said the baby’s not yours,” she said woodenly.

  He looked startled. “It’s not the baby I want. It’s your blessing.”

  Totally confused, she could only say, “What?”

  “Your blessing. Noelle and I are going to be married, Day.”

  THE SNOW WASN’T AS BAD when he reached Cougar Creek, but it had made driving on the interstate risky, and Conn was glad to be almost home. By prearrangement, he dropped off the rental car with Billy Wayne at the Conoco station for pickup by the rental company later.

  “I fixed the oil pan leak in your truck, and it shouldn’t give you any more trouble,” Billy Wayne told him. “And, like you said when you called, I put up the extra tarps on the sides of the hawk cages so they’d stay warm in the storm.”

  “That’s fine, Billy Wayne,” Conn told him. Quickly, eager to be on his way, he paid Billy Wayne for his work on the truck and for his help with the hawks before heading out of town. He wanted to see Dana, and it was the first time in his whole life that he had experienced such exquisite longing for another person. He had to convince her that he would always be true to her, and he’d make her understand why he was going to go back to work at the Probe.

  The wind had picked up, and the falling snow was a gauzy curtain that blurred everything but the thin black ribbon of lonely road, marked with tire treads as if someone had recently passed. The weather reports he had heard on the car radio during the drive from Flagstaff had not indicated that the snowfall would be this heavy.

  His truck jounced over the bumps in Dana’s driveway the way it always did. Here the snow was beginning to stick to the ground, wisping across the dead leaves and rocks in lacy patterns. Tomorrow perhaps they would wake up to a new landscape, pure and clean and new.

  At the end of the driveway, the truck’s headlights bobbed across Dana’s familiar gray sedan and then flashed off the chrome of another car.

  Another car? Who would be here at this hour and in this weather?

  Mystified, Conn braked to a stop and slid out of his truck. He heard angry voices inside the cabin, and, suddenly worried, he quickened his step. He was at the door in a matter of seconds.

  He pounded on the wood. “Dana?”

  The voices ceased, and he heard Dana’s footsteps crossing the floor inside. When she saw who it was through the window, she threw the door open.

  “I heard an argument,” he said. “Is everything all right?”

  She stood aside so he could enter. “Not exactly.”

  There was no doubt in Conn’s mind as to who the fellow standing behind her was. Nevertheless, Dana introduced them.

  “Conn, this is my former fiancé, Philip Grantham. Philip, Connor McTavish. Philip came to see me one last time, Conn, before he marries my very best friend. Now why don’t you leave, Philip? Give my regards to your blushing bride.”

  Conn, his hand extended for a handshake, was ignored. Philip flushed angrily, a nervous tic tugging intermittently at his right eyelid.

  “Noelle was a great comfort to me after you left. She is hoping you’ll be happy for us,” Philip said.

  Dana inhaled deeply. “Yes, I guess I am, but I’m even more happy for myself. I’m happy that I won’t have to have anything more to do with either of you. I was afraid you’d want the baby, Philip, and I’m really glad you don’t. Because you wouldn’t get it, not as long as I draw breath.”

  “Noelle wants to have my children,” Philip informed her stiffly.

  Dana started to laugh. “Noelle have more children? That’s the first I’ve heard of any desire on her part to increase the size of her family.” In fact, Noelle had complained about Timmy and Katie’s births so often that Dana had tired of hearing about it. Timmy had been too big for her, she said, and Katie took too long coming. Noelle had vowed many times that she would never have another baby no matter what. She had even talked about having her tubes tied.

  “She knows my mother is eager for someone to carry on the family name,” Philip said.

  “Let’s hope your first child is a boy, then,” Dana retorted.

  “You won’t tell Mother that you had a baby?” Philip said, looking worried.

  Dana knew what he feared—that his mother would want the baby, a child that he was clearly not prepared to accept. “Tell Myrtis? Not a chance. And now, Philip, will you please get out of my house?”

  Philip’s jaw worked as if he were ready to fire off another salvo, but Conn stepped forward.

  “You heard what she said, Grantham. Butt out.”

  “And exactly who are you to tell me what to do?” Philip was bristling, but not very effectively. Conn figured he could punch his lights out without even working up a sweat.

  “Conn is my neighbor,” Dana interjected.

  “And her friend,” Conn said, not even trying to keep the menace out of his voice.

  “What kind of friend?” Philip’s voice was heavy with insinuation. “It could be your kid.”

  Conn clenched a fist. “Listen, you—”

  Dana inserted herself between them. “I only met Conn a little over
a month ago. Philip, you’re way out of line.”

  “I’ll say,” Conn added.

  “I’ll go, but not because this big SOB says so,” Philip said. He brushed past Conn to the door, but Conn was hot on his heels. The cold outside was clear and clean against his face, but it didn’t dispel his fury.

  “Who are you calling an SOB?” As he spoke, Conn’s mind reddened with unparalleled rage, and he grabbed the guy’s coat. Anger pounded in his veins as Philip whirled, pale eyes hard as agates.

  “Get your hands off me,” Philip said. The words shot out in short bursts, hanging in the air between them. Philip wrenched away. Behind him, large clumps of snow mixed with sleet were coming down faster now.

  Dana stood watching from the doorway. Conn was afraid she might step out onto the porch and try to put an end to this.

  Before he could warn her to stay where she was, she spoke, clearly determined to get her own licks in. “Philip, how could you expect me to appreciate your announcement that my best friend is planning to marry you? I confided in Noelle, I told her things I wouldn’t tell anyone else in the world. And what does she do? She tells you that I was unfaithful? It was a lie that served her purposes, obviously.” Her words rang with indignation and something more. This man had hurt her, and so had her friend.

  Philip brushed off the lapels of his coat, which was cashmere from the look of it. “Okay, so we won’t be sending Day Quinlan an invitation to the wedding,” he told Dana, all but jeering.

  “Day Quinlan has ceased to exist,” she said, her chin lifting in defiance. “I’m Dana Cantrell now.”

  “You can call yourself whatever you want. It doesn’t matter to me.”

  “That’s enough, Grantham,” warned Conn.

  “I’ve said what I came to say.” He seemed about to leave. Then, unbelievably, Philip’s balled-up fist swing out, aimed smartly at Conn’s jaw. Overriding Conn’s surprise that this guy would resort to physical violence was his instinct to block the punch with his left, but instead he lunged sideways so that the blow barely glanced his cheek. Then he retaliated with a quick jab to the side of Philip’s face and, while he was at it, a satisfying knee to the gut. Grantham let out a surprised oof! and, his feet flying out from under him on the slippery porch, he went down doubled over.