“Heroes always choose drainpipes,” he told her, smiling. “It’s far more heroic.”
“But much bumpier.” She managed a chuckle. “Not to say risky—especially if you’re thinking about the future production of little superheroes. Think of what all those sharp edges on the way down could have done to your manhood.”
That took him aback. He stared at her in shock. His quiet, demure secretary making remarks about his manhood! And then slowly, his deep green eyes creased into laughter.
HE CHUCKLED, a low, lazy rumble that Jenny hadn’t heard before. Very few people had. Michael Lord wasn’t much given to laughter.
It transformed him, she thought. Michael was big and solid, with a blaze of burnt-red hair, deep green eyes and strongly boned features that made him classically good-looking. His aloofness had repelled her, though, during the time she’d worked for him. She hadn’t noticed what she was noticing now, that the laughter behind his eyes made him seem not just classically good-looking. Impossibly good-looking!
She had other things on her mind, though, apart from Michael’s good looks. She tore herself away from the laughter in his eyes and forced herself to answer his question. After all, she did owe him the truth.
At least talking bought her time. She didn’t have to get out of this lovely car quite yet and face whatever was before her alone.
“I told you. Gloria is my mother-in-law,” she said in a low, husky voice that Michael had to lean forward to hear. “Or she was my mother-in-law.”
“You’re divorced?”
“No.” She gave a half smile but it didn’t reach her eyes. “My husband…Peter is dead.”
“Oh.” It was hopelessly inadequate. “I’m sorry.”
“He died seven months ago,” Jenny said tonelessly. “I’m used to it now.”
“Seven months isn’t long.” Michael thought back to the death of his partner on the police force. Was it two years already since Dan had died?
Grief and shock stayed with you forever, he thought, and the emotional damage lasted a lifetime. No, seven months wasn’t long at all.
Jenny was studying him curiously. “You look like you understand.”
“I don’t know how it feels to lose the person you love,” Michael said. “But I’d guess it must be just about as bad as it can get.”
“It is,” she said forcibly, staring at the river. “One minute I was telling him I was pregnant and watching his face, and he…” She shook her head as if shaking off a nightmare. “No matter. The next thing, the hotel phone’s ringing and they’re telling me Peter’s plane crashed and I’d best get to the hospital because he’s dying.” She flinched, and her eyes looked inward. “Peter died four days later, but in the hospital we talked about the baby… And his mother came from England and he told her…told Gloria…”
“Told Gloria what?”
“That I was pregnant.”
He frowned, still not understanding. “So there’s a problem with that? I’d imagine it might have been the only piece of good news in the whole tragedy.”
“But you don’t know Peter’s mother. She’s Gloria Hepworth-Morrow, eighth Duchess of Epingdale,” Jenny said bitterly. “The title makes a difference.”
“I imagine it might.” Then he shook his head. Maybe he couldn’t imagine. “No. I can’t. Why does it make a difference?”
“Because Gloria wants my baby.”
SHE LOOKED DESOLATE.
It took sheer, Herculean effort for Michael not to lean forward and take her in his arms.
Which was stupid. He didn’t get involved. Not ever.
Did he?
“Why does she want your baby?” he asked, and if his voice ended up sounding half-strangled, she didn’t seem to notice.
“You have no idea what she’s like,” Jenny said bitterly. “She’s so…regal. She swans around chairing her charities and opening fairs and making pronouncements on the state of the world, and people think she’s wonderful. What a matriarch, they say. But she controls everyone. She must. Her husband had no will of his own, and Peter…”
“Peter, your husband?”
“Yes. Peter, my husband, her son. She never let go, even though he could never live up to what was expected of him. She tried to control him every way she knew how, and I saw what it did to him. She used every means in her power to impose her will, and when he married me…”
“She didn’t like the match?”
“My father was a coal miner from Wales,” Jenny said bitterly. “What do you think?”
“I think Peter made a very good choice of wife,” Michael said, and Jenny flushed.
“Do you? It’s nice of you to say so, but I’m not so sure Peter did. In fact, I know he didn’t. After a while…after a while I figured that he’d just married me as one more act of rebellion. He didn’t stop, you see. It wasn’t enough that he’d married someone she hated and was ashamed of. He kept taking risks, doing things she disapproved of—making headlines in his own right.
“He brought us to Texas because there were so many extreme sports over here that he hadn’t tried before, and he was killed doing aerobatics in an aerolite that was sold to him by people only a fool would be crazy enough to trust. We fought about it all the time. I was so frightened. We’d…we’d been thinking of separating, and then I found I was pregnant.”
“Which was a disaster?”
That brought her chin up and the spark into her eyes. “No! There’s no way I regret my baby. He wasn’t planned, but I want him so much.”
“And so does Gloria?”
“Of course. And I have no money to fight her. My parents died a long time ago, I have no family, and Gloria’s moving in for the kill. As far as she’s concerned I’m only the breeder—a very poor-class breeder at that—and I deserve no say whatsoever in the way he’s raised. My baby is the next Earl of Epingdale, and that’s all she’s interested in.”
He thought this over and found a flaw. “Your baby might be a girl.”
“No such luck. I checked.” She grimaced. “It was a strange reason for gender testing, but there it is. I was desperate. So yes, I’m carrying the ninth earl. Gloria doesn’t know it yet, but the minute he’s born she will. She’ll pay to find out, and her spies are everywhere. That’s why the immigration officers arrived today. She’ll have been watching, waiting, and she’ll see her chance to move.
“I was lucky in a way that we were here when Peter was killed, but if she gets me back to England, there’s no way I can immigrate here—or anywhere else—with a tiny baby. She’ll have bribed whoever
