took a step forward. “Ryder, just listen to her.”
Ryder pushed his brother’s arm away and gulped more champagne. Amelia wanted to tell him that drinking wasn’t going to help, but she suddenly felt a burning desire to escape. She said, “Whether or not you want to be part of your child’s life is up to you, Ryder, but I can’t believe you would deprive your parents of knowing their first grandchild. Tell them. It’s the only decent thing to do.” With an apologetic glance at Rob, she released his hand and escaped the Hogan twins.
The tears started in the ladies’ room and continued for five minutes. After Amelia finally stopped crying, she became violently ill and lost every bite of lunch. By the time she’d mopped up her face and washed out her mouth, almost a half hour had passed. Her only desire now was to get out of the building without encountering Nina and Jack Hogan, Ryder’s parents. With any luck at all, they would never even know she’d been there.
Long ago, she’d decided to protect them from the Ryder she knew. Sometimes she wondered how they could have raised him and not understood what a manipulator he was. She’d taken the heat for their breakup, blaming a change of mind, hiding the fact that Ryder had slept with her after a phony marriage proposal and then blithely skipped off to the bed of another woman. It was too late now to change game plans, especially at their eldest son’s wedding.
Besides, she knew Jack Hogan’s heart condition was serious and she wouldn’t dream of doing anything that might make it worse. She loved Nina and Jack—it was that simple, and that hard.
She was unlocking the door of her car when a commotion at the front of the country club caught her attention.
“Ryder, don’t be a fool. You can’t drive in your condition,” Rob said as he tried to keep Ryder from entering a red sports car pulled up to the curb.
“Mind your own damn business!” Ryder snarled.
“You haven’t changed a bit since college, you know that?”
Ryder held up his fists. “You want to put your muscle where your mouth is?”
“This isn’t the time or place for these kind of antics,” Rob said. “Use your head. Philip just got married.”
Ryder shoved Rob’s shoulder so hard that Rob stumbled backward. Ryder said, “What’s wrong, brother? Chicken?”
Rob, apparently pushed to his limit, tore off his jacket and threw it on the grass. Ryder did the same. As the two of them squared off, Amelia murmured a silent apology to her unborn child. Some gene pool she’d chosen.
Before a punch was delivered, Ryder did a quick double step, and with his usual cunning and agility, bolted back to the car and got behind the wheel. Amelia watched as Rob sprinted to the passenger door and tore it open, still arguing with his belligerent brother, begging him not to drive. The engine started with a roar, the car lurched forward, and Rob flung himself into the empty seat.
The car barreled past Amelia who was stunned speechless and motionless at what she’d witnessed. Neither man seemed to notice her, but she would never forget the sight of the two of them, father and uncle-to-be, speeding away from the country club, away from her, away from her child.
Amelia spent the night on the sofa, encased in a sleeping bag. It was her last night in the apartment she had rented furnished for the past three years, and as the morning light stole into the room via the big window over the table, she looked around. The place seemed bare and lonely without her personal belongings, most of which she’d packed in the car the day before. All that remained to be done was to roll up her sleeping bag and throw a few last-minute items into a suitcase.
She snuggled deeper in the folds of flannel, reluctant to get up and begin the long drive to Nevada. She hadn’t been back since burying her father the year before. But now that her student teaching job was over and she’d earned her teaching certificate, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to return to her dad’s old house and have her baby with her favorite aunt and uncle to help. This was not how she had dreamed of starting a family, but she was determined to make the best of the situation.
A little kick deep within her body brought a smile to Amelia’s lips and an overwhelming feeling of contentment. The pregnancy was unplanned, sure, but that didn’t mean the baby was unwanted. “Kick away, little one,” she murmured. The baby complied.
For an instant, Amelia thought about Rob and the disturbing physical reaction she’d had to a man who turned out to be a virtual stranger. That was the way it had started with Ryder, too. She’d met him after her father died and she needed legal advice. Later she learned that Ryder was an up-and-coming star at his firm, way too hot to handle her measly problems, but he was pinch-hitting that day for a co-worker. At first, she’d thought it was fate that threw them together.
In the beginning, he had seemed like the answer to her prayers—he’d been warm, kind, loving. It took far too long to realize that his behavior was self-serving.
Underneath the good looks and the compassionate words, down in his core, was Rob like Ryder? Did he start out irresistible and slowly turn selfish?
What did it matter? In a couple of days, she would be miles away. Ryder was history…and Rob? No doubt he was another smooth-talking Hogan intent on looking out for number one.
As she tried unsuccessfully to button slacks that had fit a few days before and were now too tight in the waist, the phone rang. For several seconds, she stared at it in surprise. She’d been under the impression the phone service had been turned off the night before. She could think of no one she wanted to talk to, but the darn thing was persistent.
“Thank God you’re home,” Nina Hogan’s voice cried.
Amelia slid a hand through her shaggy, blond hair, brushing the long bangs off her face. As much as she cared for Nina, she didn’t want to talk to her, not now, not until Ryder had had a chance to do it himself. Or maybe he already had! Maybe that was why Nina’s voice sounded so distraught.
Amelia steeled herself. “I’m sorry, I was just leaving—”
“You’ve got to come, Amelia. Say you’ll come.”
Amelia felt a stir of alarm. “Come where, Nina? What’s wrong?”
“We’re at the hospital.”
Amelia’s first thought was of Ryder’s dad. She sank down on a kitchen chair. “Is it Jack? Is it his heart?”
“No,” Nina cried. “Oh, Amelia, it’s Ryder. He’s been in a terrible automobile accident. Please say you’ll come—”
Amelia found she was standing again. She mumbled, “Ryder?”
“I saw you and him talking at the reception. I know you two were trying to patch things up.”
“Well, Nina, actually—”
But Nina interrupted with a swallowed sob. “Philip is off on his honeymoon, and Jack looks so awful he’s scaring me half to death. I don’t know who else to call—”
“Where’s Rob?” Amelia said automatically, though she was already shrugging on her blouse and searching the room with her eyes for her purse. Of course, she’d go, if not for Ryder, then for Nina and Jack.
Nina
