Father Found

“You’re just trying to make me believe that,” she said suspiciously as they walked back toward the cabin. “I would never have proposed to you.”

He took her arm where the ground was uneven. “Why not? You were wild about me.”

She slanted him a suspicious glance. “I was?”

“You were. Followed me all the way to Portland where I was doing surveillance on a divorce case.”

She stopped again, stubbornly folding her arms over her mounded stomach. He stopped with her, his expression one of indulgent impatience.

“One of the first things I asked you when we went to our house in California was how long we’d been married.”

“Right. And I told you eight months.”

“You also told me we didn’t get married because I was pregnant.”

“Right again.” He grinned. “You got pregnant because we got married. Must have happened on our wedding night. I’m good.”

She was trying hard to hold back a smile. “So, I chased you down and proposed to you just because.”

“Yes.”

“I can’t believe I’m like that. I mean, I don’t feel like the kind of woman who’d follow a man five hundred miles and risk rejection by proposing. I don’t think I’m that brave.”

He propelled her gently toward the cabin. “That’s because you don’t remember what it’s like to be in love. It gives you power you can’t imagine if you’ve never experienced it—or can’t recall it.”

“Why did you say yes?” she asked.

He squeezed her shoulders. “Because I was in love, too. And you make the best cookies I’ve ever tasted.”

“Then why didn’t you propose to me?”

“I had, but you’d turned me down.”

They were climbing the porch steps, and through a hanging basket of ivy the sun dappled her face. It was a beautiful peaches-and-cream oval, plumped a little by her pregnancy. In it were wide, deep blue eyes, a small, nicely shaped nose, and an expressive mouth that was now parted in interest. Her hair was deep red, and there was lots of it mounded loosely atop her head. The sunlight made it look molten.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because I’ve been a cop, a soldier, a CIA agent and now a detective, and you said I must have suicidal tendencies to be that reckless. That you wanted a home and children and a husband with a nine-to-five job.”

She thought that all over, frowned as though trying to remember it and finally shook her head. “Well, what changed my mind?”

He pushed the cabin door open and ushered her inside. “I like to think it was my winning personality.”

She teased him with a smile. “No, really,” she said.

He laughed as he picked up the wood he’d dropped onto the porch table and carried it inside. “If that’s not the reason, I guess I don’t really know. You didn’t say. You just asked me to marry you.”

She held the door open for him. “Then we were happy?”

She followed him inside and perched on the arm of the pink-and-green-flowered sofa as he lowered the wood into a copper box. That question concerned him. He wanted the circumstance surrounding the birth of their baby to be perfect. He didn’t want her to worry about anything.

She hadn’t asked that many questions since they’d been here, had mostly occupied herself with preserving the garden’s bounty. In fact, she’d dedicated herself to it as though relieved to have something she obviously understood to occupy her mind.

“Yes, we were,” he assured her, turning to face her. “Why? Don’t you feel happy? Despite the amnesia, of course.”

She looked him in the eye for a long moment and he held her gaze, determined she would read nothing to the contrary there.

She finally shrugged a shoulder and said, almost with apology, “I don’t know what it is. Something makes me feel that this…” She waved a hand between him and herself. “That it isn’t right. That one of us is—” She gave up trying to explain and shook her head. “I’m not sure what I’m trying to say.”

He made an airy stack of three logs, stuffed kindling and rolled-up newspaper in the pocket underneath, then lit it and gave her a quick smile as he reached for the poker.

“You’ve always had good instincts,” he said, giving the top log a slight nudge to open up the air space. “Things aren’t right between us. We’re usually very affectionate and physical and we have a lot of fun together. This having to sleep apart and treat each other like strangers probably seems wrong to you on some level other than memory. We understand why it has to be, but something elemental in you recognizes it as wrong behavior.”

He couldn’t tell if she was encouraged or discouraged by his reply.

She got to her feet and came closer to the fire, spreading her hands out as it began to catch. “And I’m affectionate and physical with you even though you’re always telling me what to do, or getting in the way of what I want to do?”

He replaced the poker. “You appreciate it as my concern for you.”

“That’s the honest truth?”

He avoided her eyes as he put the wrought-iron gate back in place. “Yes, it is.”

“I’m very tolerant.”

“Yes, you are.”

She walked into the kitchen on the other side of the fireplace and shouted back at him, “Coffee?”

“Please,” he replied as a breath that had been caught in his lungs escaped in a soundless sigh.

“What kind of cookies do I make you?” she called as puttering sounds came from the stove.

“Chocolate chip with pecans are my favorite,” he shouted back, turning his back on the small twinge of guilt. “Peanut butter, date bars, this candy thing you call a ‘buckeye’ that’s a peanut butter ball half-dipped in chocolate.”

Her head appeared around the doorway. “How come you’re not fat?”

He went to lean in the doorway to answer. He pointed to her stomach. “Because you also help me burn the calories.”

Her cheeks pinked and she looked just a little flustered. “Insidious of you,” she said. “So I get fat instead of you.”

“You’re always eager to cooperate.”

“Says you.”

“There again,” he said, putting a hand gently to the curve of her stomach, “you bear the evidence.”

He should not have touched her. It shocked both of them—not the shock of surprise, but the electrical charge of a powerful connection.