maybe he wasn’t surprised at all, Lucia thought, her cheeks warming with shame. Perhaps those predatory men had the ability to see past a woman’s air of reserve, all the way into the banked fires and hunger in her eyes.
At the end of the weekend, when the cab was waiting to take him to the airport, he’d asked politely if he could call her when he was in Texas again, and she’d refused.
“We both knew the ground rules at the beginning,” she’d told him. “A weekend, nothing more. We’ll never see each other again, but it’s been nice all the same.”
How relieved he’d appeared at her dismissive words, standing in the doorway of the hotel room with his leather garment bag slung over his shoulder.…
Lucia stared down at the notepad.
They’d been so careful, and used a condom every time they made love. But obviously, they hadn’t been careful enough.
She wondered if she had a responsibility to contact that handsome politician and let him know about this child. He certainly didn’t want a relationship with a thirty-seven-year-old Texas school principal, let alone the complications of a baby. In this situation, he’d really been nothing more than a sperm donor.
The problem was Lucia’s alone, and all the decisions would have to be hers as well.
But still…
Through the window she saw a muddy pickup truck pull into the school parking lot. In the back were two bales of hay and an upended saddle, as well as a big brown-and-white spaniel whose long ears flapped in the breeze.
A man got out of the truck, said something to the dog and then strolled toward the school, checking his watch. He wore faded jeans, a white cotton shirt and a black felt Stetson, and walked with the lithe, confident stride of a born cowboy.
Absently, Lucia watched the man until he disappeared around the front of the school. Then she returned to her gloomy thoughts.
Again she longed for someone she could talk to, a trusted friend who would answer her panicky questions and give her sensible advice.
Lucia realized, of course, that it wasn’t necessary to carry this baby to term. She was still very early in her pregnancy, and the procedure was probably simple enough. She could drive over to Dallas for a couple of days and solve all her problems, and nobody in this town would ever have to know.
But Lucia couldn’t bring herself even to contemplate such an action.
Her own childhood had been so sad and lonely, filled with people who gave her money and material goods but nothing else. She’d been rejected as surely as any unwanted waif. The thought of doing the same thing to her own unborn baby was simply beyond her.
On the other hand, bearing this child was a prospect so daunting she could hardly even begin to imagine it. Lucia thought of Gloria Wall’s malicious eyes, and the sly, barely disguised triumph of people like Leslie Karlsen. The struggle to save her school while she was coping with a swollen body and the bewildering complexities of impending motherhood…
Motherhood.
Lucia touched her flat abdomen under the trim pleated trousers. For the first time it dawned on her that if she went through with this pregnancy, she was going to be somebody’s mother.
In rising panic, Lucia thought about her own mother, a woman so bitter and self-absorbed that she’d hardly noticed her family. After years of abusing prescription drugs, Marie Delgado had killed herself with a deliberate over-dose when Lucia was eight.
Nowadays she had only dim memories of her mother’s erratic moods, stormy tears and occasional rare moments of tenderness.
A couple of years later Pierce Delgado had brought home a new wife, a lovely young woman named Claire who gave birth to Isabel in the year following their lavish wedding ceremony. But soon after that, Claire had resorted to alcohol to help her deal with the stress of marriage to one of the wealthiest and most selfish men in Texas. It took Claire a lot longer to kill herself than it had taken Pierce’s first wife, almost twenty years of a sloppy, vodka-induced haze that finally led to liver cancer and a painful death.
How could you possibly be a mother when your own life had never supplied you with a personal example of the way a mother was supposed to behave? And how were you supposed to—
“Ms. Osborne?”
Lucia looked up blankly. “Yes, Jean?”
“Are you feeling all right, honey? You look a little pale.”
Jean Mulder was tall and thin, fifty-five years old, with a severe manner that concealed a warm, generous nature. For decades she’d been a surrogate mother to every student in the school, and many of them came back year after year to visit her.
Under the woman’s sympathetic gaze, Lucia felt her defenses begin to crumple dangerously. Tears stung behind her eyelids. She blinked rapidly, looking down at her desk. “I’m fine,” she said, struggling to control herself. “Just a touch of flu or something, I guess. Do you need me for something, Jean?”
“One of the applicants is here about that seventh-grade teaching position. He claims he has an appointment with you.”
Lucia paged through the papers on her desk. “What did he say his name was?”
“James Whitley.”
Lucia found the teacher’s résumé and forced herself to concentrate on it.
“Thanks, Jean,” she murmured. “To tell the truth, I’d forgotten all about the appointment with Mr. Whitley. Can you give me five minutes to look this over, and then send him in?”
“Sure thing.” Jean paused in the doorway. “You want me to make you a nice pot of herbal tea?”
“Thanks,” Lucia said, her voice unnaturally stiff because she was battling another embarrassing threat of tears. “That would be very nice. You can bring it after Mr. Whitley leaves, okay? Our meeting shouldn’t take very long.”
When she looked through the teacher’s application form, Lucia began to recall why she’d decided to give this man an interview.
One of her two seventh-grade teachers had quit without warning just into the new school year when her husband, an oil company employee, was abruptly transferred to Dallas. Lucia had sensed that the young woman was relieved to get out of her job, since the class was large and unruly.
They’d been coping for the past two weeks with a succession of substitute teachers, but desperately needed a qualified person to take the job on a permanent basis. However, not many good teachers were available on such short notice, especially in rural areas like Crystal Creek. Most of Lucia’s applications had been from people just out of college and looking for a first job, or teachers unable to find employment because of old career problems or gaps in their training.
But James Whitley was eminently well-qualified, and supplied glowing recommendations from other schools he’d worked in. The only problem was that his employment record was oddly erratic. He would stay at a particular school no more than a year or two, then go a few years without working at all before he popped up somewhere else in the educational system.
Still, without exception, the man’s
