Margaret Jane had been born.
Now that little girl had lost both her parents and was living with a woman who cared more about facials and status symbols than lullabies and kisses good-night. At the funeral, Leeann had mentioned that she and Meg would be flying to San Francisco to visit her aging parents for Christmas; she wasn’t certain when they’d return.
Christmas was only three months away.
Jenna clutched the bench slats at her sides and prayed.
I’ll do anything, give anything. Just help me find a way.
Shadow trotted back and carefully placed the stick at Gage’s polished shoes. He stooped, cast the stick spinning with absentminded skill, then laid an arm along the back of the bench. The heat of his hand radiated near her nape and some crazy, needy part of her almost leant back to absorb it.
“Who has the baby now? Leeann?”
She nodded then forced her mouth to work. “She’s always wanted a child of her own.”
Leeann’s parents had shuffled her off to boarding school at a young age. Jenna and Amy had decided that because Leeann hadn’t felt loved growing up, there was a great gaping hole where her heart ought to be, and Leeann thought a child would fill it. A couple of years back, in her early forties, Leeann had faced the fact she might never conceive—which couldn’t be a bad thing. From what Jenna had sampled of Leeann’s parenting skills, a starving rat would treat its young better.
“Amy told me that Leeann was getting desperate,” Jenna continued. “She’d looked into in vitro fertilization and even adoption.”
After doing a story on an orphanage in the Jiangxi Province last year, Jenna had wanted to adopt every dewy-eyed child there…so vulnerable and innocent. Now there was another orphan in the world.
“She’s the testamentary guardian?”
Jenna’s burning gaze drifted up from her sandals. “My father and Leeann were both named as Meg’s guardians in her parents’ wills.”
“Not you?”
“I guess Amy and Brad thought if they’d ever needed someone to step in, my father was settled here, while I wasn’t in one place long enough to take care of the day-to-day needs of a child.”
“They were right.” When she slid him a look, Gage shrugged. “I’ve seen your byline on travel articles from all over the world. The ones I’ve read were very good.”
The compliment sank in. Perhaps she should thank him, but she didn’t want flattery. What she needed now was a solution.
“Brad had no living relatives,” she continued, peering past the pines to the orchid hothouse her father had loved. “I know they both trusted Dad, and Amy wasn’t the type to hold grudges, not even against Leeann.” Family fractures had been Jenna’s specialty. “But Amy would never have meant for Leeann to take sole responsibility for Meg. No one could’ve foreseen this kind of tragedy—all three gone. If she had, Amy would have known I’d give up everything—” Her rush of words ran dry. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Because I didn’t have a family I was close to?”
Although he’d crushed her heart when he’d left, she scanned his questioning gaze now and found she didn’t want to hurt him. But the truth was too obvious. She pressed her lips together and nodded.
He broke their gaze, threw the stick, and Shadow sped off again. “Have you spoken to a lawyer?”
“My father’s. He said babies are a full-time job, and Leeann has the resources and sense of commitment Meg needs. But he’s being narrow-minded. There’s no reason I couldn’t find work here and settle down.”
“Would you want to?”
Images of Hawaii at sunset and the iridescent greens of Germany in spring clicked like snapshots through her mind, but she pushed them aside. There was no question. She would give it all up tomorrow.
But if Gage had implied that people who moved around somehow lacked a sense of responsibility…“I doubt you’re in a position to cast any stones,” she replied.
He flicked open his jacket button and his deep chest expanded beneath his crisp white shirt as he leant back more. “Oh, I understand a wandering spirit, Jenna. Owning stock in companies across the globe gives me a reason to migrate regularly and often. I don’t like to grow roots.” His approving gaze brushed her cheek. “Neither do you.”
A tingling rush swept over her skin, but she wouldn’t respond based on physical awareness. Instead she fell back on cynical amusement. “Well, who’d have guessed? We’re practically a match made in heaven.”
“Heaven’s a little too tame for us.”
When his eyes crinkled at the corners, a delicious warmth seeped through her veins.
So, after all this time, at their deepest level, they knew each other still. She felt so fragile—so much in need of his strength—she could almost forget the heartache of that summer, fall into those powerful arms and actually forgive him.
A phone rang. Gage slipped the cell from his belt and checked the display. “Excuse me. I’ll be five minutes. Ten tops.”
Letting go of the tension, she inhaled a lungful of pine air and Gage’s frighteningly familiar scent. Then she stood and moved away, leaving Gage to his call.
Her laptop and Internet connection were still open in her father’s study. She’d been about to hit SEND and decline an offer on a story about a chain of bed-and-breakfasts from Tuscany down through to Campania when Shadow had barked and she’d crossed to the French doors. A tall dark stranger had been walking up the path from the arched iron gates. Two disbelieving seconds later she’d realized her visitor was none other than the man she’d fallen in puppy love with after her first year of college.
Jenna passed through those French doors now, crossed the spacious room decorated in forest-green leather and handcrafted oak, then folded herself into the chair set before her laptop. Her gaze settled on the photo her father had kept on his desk—herself and Amy, aged eight, in Cinderella dress-up. Amy, the nurturing one, was fixing Jenna’s lopsided tiara.
Jenna picked up the photo, as she’d done so often these past days. But this time her thoughts drifted back to her visitor.
Gage and his mother had lived in a house next door, which had been supplied by her father. For five years she’d glimpsed her young male neighbor only at a distance. Then she’d come home from college that summer and the brooding ruffian had grown into a man—deep-chested, muscled and sexy in a dangerous way that had left her breathless whenever he’d looked at her with a slanted smile that said he’d noticed her too.
Puppy love. The term was too naive for the wonderfully wicked feelings he’d planted and nurtured within her. Far more explicit phrases came to mind.
The simmer of remembered longing trickled through her bloodstream then swirled and sparked like a lit match down below. But she shrugged off the smoldering sensation. Her father had said Gage wasn’t the type of man a young woman should get involved with.
Jenna rested her forearms on the desk.
Twenty-nine
