blondes, he started dating anything but. He dated lots of women. He stopped seeing women altogether. Nothing helped.
Shamus led Delainey across the room until she stood next to him. When she looked up at him, her features were intentionally blank, an empty champagne glass in her hand.
Shamus filled each of their glasses and held his up until the two of them were obliged to clink their glasses together against Shamus’s.
“To Morrison and Morrison, may it live forever.”
“Hear, hear,” they chorused, and sipped.
“I had forgotten you knew each other.” Shamus smiled between them. “That’s great. The transition will be all the easier for it. Hunter, Delainey is the beating heart of this office. Harriet and I look so much smarter with her here.”
Neither he nor Delainey said anything. When they stared at each other, it was like two sides of an urgent conflict sizing up the enemy. Maybe it was just that.
Shamus gave Delainey another arm-around-the-shoulder squeeze. “I’m sorry to spring all this on you so suddenly. Things happened and I had to move quickly.”
The blank expression left Delainey’s face and now she looked defeated. That nearly tore Hunter open. Of all the things he wished for the woman who’d ruined all women for him all those years ago, defeat was not one of them.
“I’m sure you did what you needed to do, Shamus.” Her words rang a clear false, as if she was saying what Shamus needed to hear. Then she gently removed the old guy’s arm from her shoulder and ran away. She actually walked quickly, but it was not hard to see flight in her steps.
* * *
DELAINEY RACED UP the front steps, stalked down the hallway, yanked the door to her office open and once inside closed it quietly. The lock that might never have been locked before clicked sluggishly into place. Then she leaned against the door and sank to the floor.
Hunter Morrison.
She pinged a fingernail against the champagne glass she couldn’t seem to let go of. She sipped a bit and then pressed the cool of the glass against her cheek.
He had a lot of nerve showing up in Bailey’s Cove. He had left her behind. After three glorious weeks together, he’d told her he had accepted an internship in Chicago at one of the largest international law firms and he needed to focus on that, make it his priority. He’d said he had a lot to accomplish. He’d never asked her to join him; they hadn’t even discussed it.
Hunter had attended law school while she’d prepared for a child and attended paralegal training mostly on the job at Morrison and Morrison, where she had been an office assistant during the previous summer.
She remembered well the day he drove away. She’d run as fast as she could from her parents’ home to his grandmother’s old house. Then, when she missed him by seconds, she’d stood in his driveway and watched until his car disappeared down the street. She had been too late to say goodbye. She wasn’t sure he wanted to see her anyway. After being friends for ten years, they apparently had nothing much to say in the end.
They’d carried on a distant but friendly relationship after that, but she had ended even that—abruptly.
Not that any of her life was Hunter’s fault. She’d wanted to have sex with Micky—the dark, mysterious outsider. Micky’s motorcycle with the Arizona plates might have been a clue she should be at least careful if she was going to be rash.
Micky was long gone when she discovered she was pregnant. A month after he’d left, the stick had indicated her life plans had suddenly changed for the sake of what she had to admit felt more like revenge than any kind of real attraction.
She hadn’t known she had any such capabilities until Hunter told her he was finished in Bailey’s Cove. Her Bailey’s Cove, the place she had always loved, had pined for when she was in college and had always been glad to be back to in the summers.
That made her an oddity. A large percentage of the young people who attended college in a city had a tendency to find jobs and lives elsewhere. Not that she blamed them. The road to advancement in life didn’t usually involve a town that struggled to grow.
In an email later, she’d told Hunter there was nothing left for them because she had someone else in her life, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell him any of the details.
It hadn’t been a lie, but it had given him the impression, she was sure, that he wasn’t welcome in her life. The whole truth was she didn’t deserve him in her life. She couldn’t ask him to care for her and the child of another man.
Shame made her sink closer to the floor. It was all her fault. Both of them had been so young, so full of their own plans. If they had parted today, she liked to think they would have been able to find some center ground, some compromise. At the very least, she would amicably wish him well and maybe that way there wouldn’t be a damaged heart beating in her chest.
She couldn’t take Shamus to task, either. He had taken in a newly pregnant woman, barely a woman, twenty-two. He and his staff made her feel needed and loved, never ashamed. Knowing there were people in the world outside her family who would also embrace her made the uncertain journey easier. Made Bailey’s Cove more dear.
She wondered if Hunter knew about Brianna, if friends of his grandparents stayed in touch with him. Even as time passed, especially as time passed, she didn’t feel it particularly appropriate to inform him. What could she say? Dear Hunter, you know after you walked away and broke my heart, there was a guy I went out with for two days, and, well, he and I have a child. Best Regards, Delainey.
All during her pregnancy she wondered how this could happen to her—not how she got pregnant but how she could have such bad luck. She wasn’t some loose woman who slept around. She had slept around with exactly two men. First with Hunter and then for two confusing days with the darkly handsome older Micky.
Her parents had surprised her when she told them she was pregnant. She had expected them to be angry, but her mother had said, “It’s a baby, dear. You don’t get angry about a baby.”
Her parents and friends had loved her all the way through the process of pregnancy and childbirth. Her daughter, Brianna, lived and breathed, with her long softly curling dark hair and big, intense dark eyes, as the silver lining in all of their lives.
Not that being a single mother was easy or, in her thinking, particularly fair to the child, but the people around her had blessed the two of them with love and acceptance.
Maybe that was the small-town way. It certainly seemed to be the way most of the people in Bailey’s Cove were.
Hunter would be right if he asked about the child, though.
While pregnant, she wondered at times if the child was Hunter’s, and even hoped on some days that the baby was his, but the math said otherwise. Then when she went into labor four weeks early, she hoped again that the predictions of the date she got pregnant were wrong.
When the desperate hope consumed her in the dark of night, all sorts of guilt about not telling Hunter there was a slim chance he was going to be a father oozed in and made her doubt her ability to make any rational decisions.
Then Brianna had come into the world, a small beautiful baby with dark, dark hair and eyes.
