Mary's Child Read online

  It was only Hallie, Joe thought.

  Letter to Reader

  Title Page

  Books by Terese Ramin

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  It was only Hallie, Joe thought.

  But it wasn’t. Her scent, the subtle essence of her, curled like breathable lightning in his gut.

  He didn’t know what he’d expected to feel when she opened the door, but this wasn’t it, this raw and avaricious need.

  Joe had never in his life reacted to Hallie Thompson—or indeed, any woman—like this.

  Had never even considered he might.

  He drew a harsh, steadying breath. This reaction was enough to warn him that he should run far and fast—and now. But then he looked at her, took in all the things that made her Hallie, and knew he was damned.

  “Hallie?”

  “Joe?”

  Numb, he eyed his best friend’s defensive stance and suddenly noticed the infant in her arms. Everything inside him lurched and twisted. He had a daughter. He was a father.

  And then he heard himself ask, “She’s mine, isn’t she?”

  Dear Reader,

  The kids are on their way back to school, and that means more time for this month’s fabulous Intimate Moments novels. Leading the way is Beverly Barton, with

  Lone Wolf’s Lady, sporting our WAY OUT WEST flash. This is a steamy story about Luke McClendon’s desire to seduce Deanna Atchley and then abandon her, as he believes she abandoned him years ago. But you know what they say about best-laid plans....

  You also won’t want to miss Merline Lovelace’s

  If a Man Answers. A handsome neighbor, a misdialed phone call...an unlikely path to romance, but you’ll love going along for the ride. Then check out Linda Randall Wisdom’s A Stranger Is Watching, before welcoming Elizabeth August to the line. Girls’ Night Out is also one of our MEN IN BLUE titles, with an irresistible cop as the hero. Our WHOSE CHILD? flash adorns Terese Ramin’s wonderful Mary’s Child. Then finish up the month with Kylie Brant’s Undercover Lover. about best friends becoming something more.

  And when you’ve finished, mark your calendar for next month, when we’ll be offering you six more examples of the most exciting romances around—only in Silhouette Intimate Moments.

  Yours,

  Leslie J. Wainger

  Executive Senior Editor

  * * *

  Please address questions and book requests to:

  Silhouette Reader Service

  U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

  Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3

  * * *

  MARY’S CHILD

  TERESE RAMIN

  Books by Terese Ramin

  Silhouette Intimate Moments

  Water from the Moon #279

  Winter Beach #477

  A Certain Slant of Light #634

  Five Kids, One Christmas #680

  An Unexpected Addition #793

  Mary’s Child #881

  Silhouette Special Edition

  Accompanying Alice #656

  TERESE RAMIN

  lives in Michigan with her husband, two children, two dogs, two cats and an assortment of strays. When not writing romance novels, she writes chancel dramas, sings alto in the church choir, plays the guitar, yells at her children to pick up their rooms (even though she keeps telling herself that she won’t) and responds with silence when they ask her where they should put their rooms after they’ve picked them up.

  A full-fledged believer in dreams, the only thing she’s ever wanted to do is write. After years of dreaming without doing anything about it, she finally wrote her first romance novel, Water from the Moon, which won a Romance Writers of America Golden Heart Award in 1987 and was published by Silhouette in 1989. Her subsequent books have appeared on the Waldenbooks romance bestseller list. She is also the recipient of a 1991 Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award. She hasn’t dreamed without acting for a long time.

  For Sharon, who gave me The Pen:

  Love you, my dear, T.D.

  With gleeful thanks to Becky Barker,

  who told me about frogs.

  “A great lover is not the man who romances a different

  woman every night. A great lover is the man who

  romances the same woman for life.”

  —Ancient Chinese saying

  Prologue

  January 8—traditionally the coldest day of the year

  “Oh, God, I didn’t miss this.”

  Pale and shaky, Hallie Thompson hoisted herself up from her knees in the women’s-room stall and fumbled her way across to the sink. The mirror above the stainless-steel ledge designed to hold combs and compacts confronted her with a face that looked drawn and haggard, showed every bit of her thirty-four years.

  “I look like hell.”

  Stiff-armed, she leaned over the sink, head hanging, gathering strength.

  “Jeez, Thompson, how stupid are you, anyway?”

  Grimacing at her reflection, she yanked a pair of paper towels out of the dispenser and turned on the cold water. In another couple of months or so she would no longer ask herself the “stupid” question, she knew. In another couple of months she would feel healthy as all get-out, full of vim and vinegar—quite literally. Just now, however, in the company of this always-unpredictable afternoon morningsickness, she felt the way she looked: like death or some of the indecipherable lunches left too long in the squad room refrigerator.

  At the very thought of “lunch” her stomach flounced and heaved. Oh, hell, not again, she silently begged. She swallowed back the flex of bile in her throat, dampened the paper towels and dabbed at the perspiration-dotted corners of her mouth, at her throat, at the back of her neck. What in creation had possessed her to suggest to Joe and Mary that she’d be willing to undergo an embryo transfer and carry their baby for them when they’d found out Mary absolutely would never be able to carry a child to term?

  Sympathy and forgetfulness, probably, coupled with love, insanity and the certain knowledge that Mary would be the most beautiful mother in the universe, Joe the special kind of father who’d always made such a wonderful extra “uncle” to Hallie’s own two boys.

  There was also Hallie’s treasured mental picture of her oldest, her best friend, Joe, manfully trying on maid-of-honor dresses when they were attempting to decide what he should wear to be her “man of honor” when she’d married Zeke twelve years ago. Her mother had entertained conniptions over the very thought of Joe standing up for Hallie, so the pair of them had decided to, uh, “make Mom happy.” Her marriage to Zeke hadn’t lasted, but the image of her mother’s apoplexy when a straight-faced Joe modeled the dress he and Hallie had settled on for him to wear was something she cherished beyond anything.

  Hallie grinned weakly at her reflection with the memory. Knowing that both Joe’s loyalty to her and his droll sense of humor made him fully capable of following through on his threat to wear the flamboyantly frothy creation, Hallie’s mother had blown a gasket, then backed down immediately.

  Joe had looked very nice in his departmental dress uniform holding Hallie’s lilac-and-lavender bouquet for her throughout the ceremony.

  But that was a long time ago, forever
and a day Before. Now was After. After was Mary dead—murdered during a carjacking-gone-wrong six weeks ago, barely three hours after the embryo transfer had taken place, and within two miles of Hallie’s house after Mary had dropped her there post-release. After was Joe in a hell so dark, Hallie couldn’t reach him; Joe unable to grieve, shattering wineglasses, water glasses within the clench of a fist, punching holes in the thin plasterboard of the run-down old house Mary had loved and insisted they purchase; Joe as Hallie had never seen him—not even when his younger brother had been killed during Desert Storm.

  In the blink of an eye he’d become a man she didn’t know, a frightening shadow of a beast she’d never have wanted to meet. She’d stayed with him anyway, because he was Joe, her best friend ever—and she had to.

  Hallie had made the funeral arrangements, but Joe had arrived late at the memorial-park service where Mary’s ashes were scattered beneath the sere prewinter branches of a dogwood slumbering till spring. The Michigan sky had been gray, the ground damp, layered thinly with a light late-November snow that quickly turned to slush. He’d looked as haggard as the sky: hollow-eyed, unshaven, with scarcely banked rage threatening.

  The tempest broke back at the office the day after the service.

  In the four days since the discovery of Mary’s body beside her Blazer, the entire Cuyahoga County sheriffs department had been on twenty-four-hour duty—most of it voluntary—looking for the killer.

  With no success.

  Raids on each of the county’s known chop shops looking for a possible killer had proved unproductive: the coroner could find no fingerprints on the body, and Cuyahoga County was full of isolated areas that made unwitnessed crimes distressingly easy to orchestrate. Three 9-mm bullets had been recovered from Mary’s body, but without a weapon to match them against, they were of little help. Mary’s jewelry and purse were missing; the jewelry had not been pawned within the county and the purse had not been dumped or found.

  DNA testing of hair and fiber removed from the front seat of the vehicle was inconclusive without a suspect. The Crime Scene Unit was still collecting samples for comparison with those of anyone who might conceivably have been in the vehicle, including Joe, Hallie, Hallie’s boys, the garage mechanic who’d serviced the Blazer the previous week, the elderly shut-ins Mary had ferried out to the grocery store as needed.

  Bullet and blood patterns indicated the killer had probably stood eye-to-eye with Mary, within five feet, when the fatal shots were fired. No blood or tissue was found under her nails, suggesting there’d been no physical battle.

  And that was the thing right there—the puzzle piece that didn’t jibe, the thing that none of them could live with: the fact that all appearances suggested that Mary had exited the vehicle, tossed her keys onto the driver’s seat where the police had found them, then moved aside to let the carjacker have the Blazer without a fight.

  The fact that in order to steal the vehicle, the carjacker hadn’t needed to kill Mary at all.

  Joe couldn’t live with leads that led them in circles to nowhere. He went on a rampage, ransacked his files looking for possible connections to old cases, possible released cons who might have it in for him. He tore Hallie apart verbally in private, publicly castigated deputies who’d already worked every possible lead from every possible angle and had been awake as long as he. He refused to take time off; he wanted results. And he wanted them four days ago, before Mary had died.

  He lost it. And the department forgave him, embarrassed but understanding, cutting him stack because God knew how they’d react in the same situation—possibly worse.

  Then, suddenly, three days later, it was as if the berserker Joe had never existed; an uncommunicative, lone-ranger ice-Joe had replaced him. In a calm as dead as an ocean’s doldrums he’d arrived at the office in civvies and stalked into the sheriff’s office. A single jerk of his head when he passed Hallie called her in with him. There he’d handed the sheriff his weapon, badge and resignation. In the sparest possible language he’d thanked Hallie for handling all the arrangements for Mary’s funeral; told her to thank the department for everything they’d done to try to catch Mary’s killer; said he was leaving town for he didn’t know where in an attempt to sort out himself and his future. Then he’d left.

  Hallie hadn’t believed him for an instant. She’d torn after him to pump the real story out of him, but Joe had shaken her off with a silence as bottomless as his pain. Neither he nor Hallie had mentioned the embryo transfer because, quite frankly, in the face of more traumatic matters, they’d both forgotten it. When he’d handed Hallie the keys to his house, climbed onto his Harley and roared away, she’d let him go even though she’d felt in her gut that he would go underground and do whatever it took to find Mary’s killer. Even if “what it took” would cost Joe himself in the process.

  He was her best friend. She’d understood and felt his pain. She’d trusted him—wanted to trust him. And that meant she could have done no less.

  But of course, that was then and this was now. Now she was six weeks pregnant with his baby—Mary’s baby—and he hadn’t even called once to say where he was. And so far, because Joe was law enforcement and knew as well as any big-time criminal how to effectively disappear when he didn’t want to be found, all the fugitive-finding resources at her disposal hadn’t turned him up, either.

  Whether or not the infant she carried would ever get to meet its surviving biological parent, Hallie hadn’t a clue.

  The door to the women’s john slammed open hard; Hallie’s current partner stuck his head in the door.

  “Hey, Thompson, beat feet, will ya? We got a fled, trail’s gettin’ cold. Let’s rock.”

  “On my way.” Hallie grimaced and shoved herself away from the sink. Her stomach objected. Strenuously. She clutched it and headed back into the vacated stall. Strength, someone had once said, came when you were in a very narrow alley and had no way of turning around. Well, she was about to find out whether or not that was true. “With you in a minute, Frank. Get me some soda crackers and I’ll meet you at the car.”

  Hail Mary, she prayed, bowing low to the bowl. Find that bastard Joe fast and let the next seven months be worth this....

  Chapter 1

  November 25, new moon

  He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to feel.

  He had to get his keys.

  Parked in his weathered truck across the street from Hallie’s house, Joe Martinez hardened his heart with the thrust of his jaw and waited—prayed, in fact—for welcome numbness to set in.

  He prayed in vain.

  Sensation quivered in every nerve, emotion made harsh inroads along every vein and pore. And he’d thought it would be easier to stop by Hallie’s first before he had to go by the house that until almost a year ago, he and Mary had called home. Had he been wrong! He should never have come. Shouldn’t have let himself get talked into hunting down this particular bail jumper in this particular portion of his past.

  Spit, he thought. Friggin’ bloody spit.

  The house looked the same as ever: medium-size twostory, slightly worn, cedar shingles ragged in spots—welcoming. A pinecone wreath decorated with white fakesnow flowers and bright red berries adorned the front door; a plastic version of a Victorian Christmas village meandered across the wide, single-pane front window. An angel wind sock belled gently beneath the front-porch roof, its golden trumpet extended.

  Familiar.

  Something wretchedly painful expanded in Joe’s chest. Mary had given Hallie the wind sock the Christmas after Hallie’s youngest son, Sam, was born. Damned woman always did decorate too early.

  Hallie, not Mary. He wondered briefly if Hallie had decorated at all last year.

  His mouth thinned. God, he didn’t want to be here. But he still had to get his keys.

  Could stay at a motel, his mind suggested. Don’t let her know you’re in town.

  Coward, his conscience replied.

  Same thing the guys in
the FAT squad room had called him when he’d made sure Hallie wasn’t there, then gone in to pump them for old favors and information regarding his latest quarry.

  “You seen Hallie yet?” they’d asked instead of answering. The Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Fugitive Apprehension Team was a tight unit, they’d reminded him. They took care of their own.

  What’s that got to do with Hallie? he’d wondered—and ducked just in time when one of his oldest friends suddenly and inexplicably took a swing and threatened to deck him. Then, prevented from following up on the first swing by two other members of the unit, the man who’d succeeded Joe as Hallie’s partner cursed the prodigal roundly as a coward who’d get no courtesy from the FAT until after Joe saw Hallie—and then, only if she gave the word.

  Coward.

  Hanging his wrists over the steering wheel, Joe studied the house for an instant longer. Hell, what was he afraid of? This was only Hallie, right? Best friends since kindergarten; best friends for life.

  Inside his chest his heart hammered. Only Hallie. Yeah, right.

  Folding up his feelings and putting them away the way any cop who stayed a cop was able to do, Joe grabbed the winter flight jacket with the bounty-hunter patch on the sleeve from the bench seat beside him and eased out of the truck. Slid into the jacket and zipped it, then waited for one car, two cars to pass before crossing the street to face Hallie.

  The doorbell rang at the precise moment Hallie finally managed to disengage the sleeping-but-still-faintly-suckling Maura from her breast. The eleven-week-old started and reattached herself hard. Hallie winced and swore beneath her breath. With Maura, timing was everything.