Her Sister's Child

“I know,” Meg nodded. “That was the one thing that made her death easier for Dad. That she’d turned her life around. That she died doing what she had wanted to do, and was on the edge of real success.”

“So I was just about to put the whole thing in the hands of a private investigator. I even wondered if she might be living on the streets.”

“I know,” Meg nodded again. “We’ve had those fears, too, in the past.”

“Then I was flipping through an old notepad by my phone and I caught sight of her handwriting, and there it was. Just a scribble. It had to be well over a year old, and I could hardly read it. ‘Dad in ’Frisco after November 1st.’ Something like that, followed by his address. She hadn’t mentioned him often. I didn’t know if she was still in touch with him. But it seemed like the best lead I had, so I tried it. I just addressed it to ‘Mr. Fontaine.’ I never knew Fontaine was only Cherie’s professional name.”

“Her legal one, too, for most of her life. Mom had it changed officially when she was seven. It was meant to help Cherie’s modeling career, as well.”

“Part of Amy’s name, too. Amy Fontaine Callahan.” He said the “Callahan” part with deliberate emphasis, claiming his child. Amy was a Callahan, and she would stay a Callahan. His.

Was the pretty lawyer, Cherie’s sister, trying to soften him up? Of course she was! He distrusted her. He must not lose sight of that fact. He’d trusted Cherie at first, too, believing that she was as bright and sincere and in control of her life as she’d then seemed.

They didn’t look alike, the two sisters. They had the same mouth, that was all. Cherie had been model-perfect, with a lifetime of training in how to be beautiful, thanks to the roll call of pageants her mother had pushed her through for years. By twenty, when he’d met her—although initially she’d lied and told him she was twenty-four—she had a model’s tall, lean build, wide sultry eyes, carefully graceful movements and gorgeous, pouting mouth.

Yes, Meg definitely had the same mouth. The rest of her was different, though. She wasn’t blond. She wasn’t as tall, and she wasn’t as lean. Her blue suit covered some very feminine curves. And you couldn’t really say she was beautiful. These days, beauty wasn’t an innocent quality, and in Meg Jonas’s unstudied prettiness, there was an unmistakable innocence.

Hey…

Adam pulled himself up short. What was happening to him? Who was he kidding, here? This woman? Innocent? She was a lawyer! She practised a profession that could draw the cynics and hard-hearts and opportunists of this world like blood drew sharks. She was Cherie’s sister, under her very different skin. And she was trying to win his daughter away from him.

So he’d better keep that fact firmly in the center of his mind. She was no innocent.

Okay, so maybe everything Meg had said so far was true. All that feeling spilled from her pretty lips and that suffering in her big gray eyes. But it was still a game, part of a strategy and a plan. Her dad wanted custody, and she was acting for him.

Adam understood a little more now about how Burt Jonas must feel. A chance to regain his lost daughter through her child. Yes, Adam understood the power of that hope. But had Meg Jonas deliberately tried to foster this empathy in him in order to strengthen the Jonases’ claim?

I’m the one that endured those weeks in the hospital after Amy’s premature birth, when her doctors thought that she might not make it, he reminded himself, while his hands tightened into fists.

I’m the one who endured it when Cherie took her for nearly three months and disappeared. I’m the one Cherie left her with when she disappeared again, leaving only that scribbled note in Amy’s diaper bag. “Adam, you take her. I can’t deal with her anymore.”

I’m the one who’s had her for the nine months since Cherie abandoned her: caring for her, loving her, watching her learn and grow.

And I’m the one who had to face those test results four-and-a-half weeks ago, telling me my baby girl is seriously ill…

Chapter Two

Meg hadn’t missed the steel in Adam Callahan’s voice when he said his daughter’s full name, and she knew that Dad and Patty were kidding themselves if they thought this man would give his little girl up without a fight.

Hell, she’d been kidding herself in the exact same way a week and a half ago when she’d drafted the legal letter she’d sent to him, after what seemed like hours of phone calls between herself here in Philly and Dad and Patty in San Francisco, talking about what they wanted. They’d still been reeling from the revelation that Cherie had had a child.

She wasn’t kidding herself anymore.

The trouble was, Adam Callahan was nothing at all like what she had imagined. Nothing at all like Cherie had described, one of only two times they’d spoken about him together, nearly two years ago. The phone call from her sister was carved into her memory. It had come out of the blue after the usual months of silence, made from some gas station phone booth in a midwestern town whose name Meg couldn’t even remember. Maybe Cherie hadn’t been that specific. Somewhere in Indiana?

She’d sounded wild that night. Giggly. Happy. In love. Out of control. Some guy on a motorcycle who sounded dangerous and bad. She’d called him by some in-your-face nickname. Slash?

“He’s in trouble with the law, but I don’t care. He takes me places, Meg, heights I didn’t know existed. He makes me quiver. My modeling? That’s meaningless. I just want to be with him, travelling, forever, on the back of his bike, feeling the air. I don’t care about anything else. And neither does he…”

The second time Cherie had talked about him was over a year later, and this time she’d made more sense, seemed more grounded. The guy had turned out to be “bad news.” He’d “nearly killed” her in a motorcycle smash, then walked away. A lot had happened…Baby Amy, for one thing, although typically Cherie hadn’t mentioned that. Who could fathom her motives there? She’d just claimed vaguely that Meg didn’t need the details…But finally, “I realized he wasn’t going to change.” She had signed with a new, much better agency and she was getting back into modeling. The guy was history.

None of that sounded like the man who sat in Meg’s office right now. Oh, Adam Callahan looked like a man who could make a woman quiver, all right. No problem there. And he rode that big black motorcycle.

But the rest of it didn’t gel. He was a doctor, and he wasn’t just some guy who fathered a child with a woman then shrugged off the responsibility and moved on. It was already very apparent that he was passionate about keeping his little girl. Look at the suppressed tension in him now! The power of it mocked the carefully chosen decor of Meg’s office.

She was proud of the restful, creative touches she’d given to her work environment. The shelf of knickknacks, mainly hand-carved Inuit animals in wood and stone. The botanical prints with their earthy, natural colors. The soft, comfortable leather of the sage-green chairs.

But the strength of what Adam Callahan felt and the strength of who he was as a man made this office suddenly feel like a prison, and Meg couldn’t even pretend to herself that she was fully in control anymore. It had begun the moment she saw him, and continued during that disturbing instant when their hands had touched over the coffee. The sense of a connection that went beyond logic and reason.

Now her heart was racing. She had no clue as to how she would report this meeting to Dad and Patty, even though she knew they’d both be hovering by their phone in San Francisco tonight, waiting for her call. And she had a growing suspicion that there was something vital Adam was holding back, the most potent ingredient of all in this sizzling emotional mix.

They’d both been silent now for more than a minute. She sipped her rapidly cooling coffee, just for something to do with her mouth and hands, then saw that he was gulping his for the same reason. His eyes, almost as dark as the bitter black drink, were narrowed and he was thinking, calculating.

Thoughts that were painful, almost desperate, if his expression was any guide. There were lines scored from each corner of his mouth, and tight little balls of muscle at his jaw. Lines of strain around his eyes, too.

And she had the most impossible need, suddenly, to go over to him, kneel in front of him, take his head in her hands and smooth away all that tension with her fingers. Crazy! She was already far too involved emotionally, with her own side of this brewing custody dispute. To feel anything but the strictest professional distance and neutrality about Adam Callahan would be a nightmare!

She forced herself to ignore what she could read in his face. Instead, she took another shaky sip of her coffee, then watched as he brought his own cup to his lips once more. His hands were strong and lean and well-kept as a doctor’s had to be. They were folded around the thick white cup as if he needed the heat, yet it wasn’t cold in here. In fact, Meg herself felt steamy hot in her suit, and very conscious of the state of her body.

For her own protection, this silence had to be broken, and broken soon!

“How long had you been trying to track Cherie down, then?” she asked quickly, then added, “No wait! Can we go further back? How long since you lost contact with her in the first place? I’m not clear at all about the progression of your relationship.”

He laughed harshly. “I don’t think there was a progression. Or a relationship. We were only together, truly, for a couple of months.”

“A couple of months?” Meg echoed, fighting to keep her voice neutral. This didn’t remotely gel with what Cherie had said, but if she’d caught Adam Callahan out in a lie she didn’t want him to realize the fact. “Okay…” she added blandly, inviting him to go on.

He did, wrapped up in remembering. She controlled a sigh of relief. He hadn’t guessed that she’d spotted his inconsistency, which gave her time to think—frantically, without answers—about what the inconsistency meant.

“She disappeared within a month of us discovering she was pregnant,” he said. “Wouldn’t consider marriage.”

“You wanted to? You did?” Again Meg tried to hide her disbelief.

Not very successfully this time. He looked up. “Yes. For a while. For Amy’s sake. Until I saw how impossible it would be. Why? What did Cherie tell you?”

“Nothing.” Nothing that meshed with Adam’s story, anyway. And she had to remind herself, as she was reminding Adam, “I had no contact with her at that time, remember?” And Cherie was adept at changing her stories as time went by. Maybe it wasn’t Adam Callahan who’d got it wrong…

No! Why am I feeling this need to find ways to trust him?

“Then what are you—” he began.

“I’m implying nothing.” She fudged quickly. “I guess it doesn’t fit the stereotype, that’s all. Usually, it’s the woman who wants marriage and security for her child, while the man ducks it with every strategy he can think of.”

There was a tell-tale beat of silence. “You’re a lawyer. I keep forgetting,” Adam said with a snort. “Cynical is your middle name.” He hadn’t thought about Garry in recent years, but even in hindsight, the guy’s attitude still stank.

“It’s not cynicism.” She bristled. “It’s statistics. I don’t like those statistics any more than you seem to. I’m—well, impressed that you have such a responsible, caring attitude, okay?”

“Okay,” he conceded.