Another Man's Child

“I’m not going to mention it to him again,” Lisa said. Her stomach became tied in knots just remembering what had happened the first time she’d broached the subject with Marcus. She’d already tried talking to him about adoption, she’d brought home pamphlets on fostering a child, and both times Marcus had refused even to discuss the issues with her. But he’d discussed artificial insemination, all right. She still remembered the stricken look on his face.

Beth’s brow furrowed. “It sounds as if nothing else is working, hon. What could it hurt to talk about it to him again? The clinic’s designed for couples in your position.” Tragically widowed while still in her early thirties, Beth had never had children of her own. Now she spent her life helping others to do so.

“I can’t, Beth. He’ll just tell me that if I’m dissatisfied with what he can and cannot provide, then I’m free to leave him for someone who can satisfy me. The worst part is, I think he really means it. As much as he loves me, he would just let me go. He’s so eaten up with self-hatred he can’t even look at things with an open mind. And I can’t hurt him anymore. He sees his sterility as his ultimate failure, and I can’t continue to rub it in his face.”

“Do you think he’s failed you?” Beth asked.

“No!” Lisa had no doubts about that. “I’m a doctor. I know he had nothing to do with the fever that rendered him sterile. I love him, Beth, flaws and all. But…”

“But?”

“But I just can’t see either one of us being happy without a child. It’s what we both want more than anything on earth, what we’ve always wanted. Hell, Marcus and I were planning a nursery before we even planned our wedding. Every big decision we’ve ever made, every goal we’ve set, has been influenced by the family we’d planned to raise. I just don’t see how we can keep a union that’s been built on such a foundation from toppling over.”

“Answer one question for me.” Beth’s eyes were piercing.

“Sure. If I can.”

“Who do you love more, need more—your husband, or the baby he was supposed to give you?”

“That one’s easy. My husband. He’s my best friend. I can’t imagine a life without Marcus.”

Beth stood up, nodding. “Then you’ll find your answer, Lis.”

“Even though there’s a part of me, a part that’s been there as long as I can remember, who needs to be a mother, too?” Lisa asked the question softly, almost afraid even to say the words out loud.

Beth’s eyes warmed with concern. Lisa knew how much her friend was pulling for her and Marcus. The three of them had formed an unshakable bond that first year after Beth’s husband had been shot waiting in line at a fast-food restaurant. She and Marcus had insisted that Beth move in with them, and for six months they’d both taken turns sitting up with their friend on those nights when the demons had become too fierce for her to face alone. That had been more than five years ago.

“I understand your reluctance, Lis,” Beth said now, “but you need to talk to him again. Have him come visit me. Maybe if he sees how much he’ll be involved in the process, if he understands how scientific everything is, he’ll come around.”

Lisa smiled and nodded as her friend left, but she knew she wouldn’t do as Beth suggested. She’d never known Marcus to look so beaten as he had the night she’d tried to talk to him about giving him a child through artificial insemination. She’d never seen him so angry. Or so hurt. No, she couldn’t do that to him again.

TWO DAYS LATER when she unpacked Marcus’s suitcase and found the shirt rolled in with his other dirty clothes, she was tempted to change her mind. She picked up the shirt slowly, staring blankly at the lipstick-stained collar for a moment, her mind masked with disbelief. It couldn’t be.

Standing there, unable to move, to look away, she felt frightened—and stupid. Had Marcus…? Surely he hadn’t…No. Of course not. He wouldn’t. Not ever.

And then she remembered his phone call from New Jersey. Not only had he not called when he’d promised, he’d been strangely evasive.

She blinked, surprised when a tear splashed onto the incriminating collar. Had they come to this, then? Had they really come to this? Were their ties of friendship, their loyalties to each other, in jeopardy? Was the love she’d cherished for more than a decade going to slip through her fingers right along with her dream of having a child? She dropped the shirt as if she’d been burned.

And then just as suddenly picked it up again. The lipstick was still there. She could see it through the blur of her tears. She just couldn’t believe it. And didn’t know what to do about it. This happened to other women, other couples. Not to her and Marcus.

“Nothing happened.”

Lisa jumped. She hadn’t heard Marcus come upstairs.

“Something apparently did,” she said, throwing his shirt in his face. It was too much. To lose Marcus on top of everything else was just too much.

He grabbed her arm as she pushed by him. “Nothing happened, Lisa.”

She looked up at him, this man of her dreams, and even blinded by tears of anger and disappointment, she knew she still loved him. After ten years of marriage, after eighteen months of anguish, even after finding another woman’s makeup on his clothes, she felt the impact of him clear to her soul. “Her lipstick’s on your collar.”

Marcus dropped her arm and bowed his head. “We had dinner—and one dance. That’s all.”

It was enough. She knew him that well. Wrapping her arms around her middle, she warded off the darkness that threatened to consume her. “You wanted her.”

“She wanted me. And yes, I guess part of me wanted her, too, wanted to be with a woman who didn’t know I could only do half the job.”

A sob broke through the constriction in Lisa’s throat, and she backed away from him.

“Who was she?” She willed herself to speak calmly.

Marcus swore and strode over to her, grabbing her arms, forcing her to look at him. “Nobody. She was nobody, Lis. Just a woman. Any woman who’d looked at me the way she did would probably have had the same effect. Which, in the end, was no effect at all. Because she wasn’t you.”

“Was she pretty?” Lisa couldn’t let it go.

“She was pretty, sure, but so are you. And you’re the one I want to be with. You’re my best friend, Lis.”

She studied his face, his blue unblinking eyes. “Are you sure about that?”

“Absolutely.”

His gaze bore into her, telling her things mere words couldn’t, and suddenly some of the tension that had held her rigid, barely able to breathe, drained away, leaving her feeling weak and helpless. She sank against his chest.

He held her silently, his hand rubbing the back of her head soothingly as she soaked the front of his shirt with her tears. He was still wearing his business suit, and Lisa burrowed her arms beneath his jacket, taking comfort in his lean hard strength, letting his love console her, just as it had done for well over a decade. She needed him more than life itself. And she felt it all slipping away.

“I love you, Lis.” His voice was thick through the whispered words.

“I love you, too.”

But she knew that love might not be enough, not if he refused to believe in the strength of that love, not if he continued to blame himself for something he couldn’t help and was convinced that she blamed him, too.

MARCUS LAY FLAT on his back, staring at the shadows the moonlight made on the ceiling as he listened to Lisa breathing beside him. He’d made love to her that night, giving her everything he had to give, and she’d been smiling when she fell asleep in his arms. But still, he knew that what he had to give wasn’t enough. It was never going to be enough. Because no matter how often or how expertly he made love to her, he was never going to leave behind the seed of that love. He was never going to impregnate his wife. He wondered how long it was going to be until she started to think about leaving him for a man who could.

She stirred in her sleep, snuggling up against his chest, and Marcus automatically put an arm out to pull her close, settling her head in the crook of his shoulder. He used to love these moments in the night when he lay awake and cradled her, glorying in the knowledge that this gorgeous, intelligent, caring woman was his. Until he’d met Lisa, the only kind of affection he’d known had come in terms of discipline, respect and loyalty—necessary, but so cold. It had taken years before he’d really believed that Lisa’s body curled warmly and lovingly into his was something he could count on for the rest of his life.

Now the feel of her against him was merely a reminder of how he’d failed her, of what he couldn’t do, of things he couldn’t make right.

Being careful not to disturb her, Marcus got up from the bed and went downstairs, hoping to dispel his demons with a shot of whiskey. But after the second shot, he knew the hope was in vain. He sat alone in the living room of the home where he’d grown up, where his father and grandfather had grown up before him.

He had it all. He’d taken the family shipping business and turned it from a solid respectable venture into an enterprise that far surpassed even his father’s vision. Cartwright Enterprises had been through many transitions since its inception almost two centuries before. His early ancestors had made the family’s first millions in whaling and sealing, and the generation following them were glorified Yankee Peddlers. His grandfather had expanded into imports and exports. Marcus’s father had doubled the Cartwright shipping fleet before a car accident had taken his life—and his wife’s, as well.

But in the eight years since Marcus had taken over, Cartwright Enterprises had become a business of the nineties. It owned several of the companies it had once shipped for. It was no longer just the middle man.

And like his father before him, Marcus had done it all for the son to whom he would one day pass his heritage. He was a Cartwright. One of the Cartwrights. His ancestors, English gentry with everything but money, had come to the New World with dreams and determination. Through the early battles with Indians, the revolutionary war, the Civil War and both world wars, the Cartwrights had remained strong, determined and successful, each generation continuing and surpassing the achievements of the one before. And from the time he was old enough to understand, Marcus had worked hard to fulfill his responsibility to his birthright, to ensure that the breath of his ancestors, when he passed it on, would continue to thrive.

But unlike his father, who’d worked for financial power, Marcus had worked like a madman for another reason. He’d done it to buy his freedom, to have the time to be at home with his family when he had one, to make it to every school play, to watch each and every game, to attend all recitals, birthday parties and Christmas pageants. He wanted to make enough babies with Lisa to fill the rooms in the home he was born to, and to dispel forever the emptiness of his boyhood.

He didn’t look back on those lonely years with any fondness. His parents had been interested in raising the Cartwright heir, not a child.