Baby 101. Marisa Carroll
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an easy thing to erase. And she wasn’t strong enough to face the possibility that her children, raised in affluence, wouldn’t understand why she had done what she had.
So she had brought talismans with her. Three tiny sweaters, two pink and one blue, painstakingly embroidered with their names, Shelby, Lana and Michael. And a teddy bear, much worn and loved by Garrett, his daddy’s pride and joy. But her reckless, handsome husband had crashed his Harley into a concrete light post one dark, rainy night, leaving her with four babies and a mountain of medical bills. So she had given her children over to the care of strangers and gone on with her life, never searching them out until her doctor had pronounced her fate.
Today she’d gone to Austin Eats to try to find Shelby. She had been there, red-haired and vivacious, behind the counter. LeeAnn had ordered a glass of sweet tea and watched her daughter direct the busy kitchen staff and still have time to charm each and every customer with a word and a smile. Then a man came in and sat down at the counter, and LeeAnn’s breath had caught in her throat. Garrett? Or was it Michael? His coloring was the same as her dead husband’s, hair so dark a red it was almost brown, olive skin and eyes that could see into your soul.
She sat there, hands trembling, for another fifteen minutes, torn between happiness and fear. When the man got up to leave he looked around the room, his gaze flicking over her, assessing and dismissive. It was then she began to realize her fantasy might not play out as she wished. The little love offerings she had kept all these years might not be enough for her children to make up for giving them away. She had gotten up and made her way painfully out of the diner. But she hadn’t been ready to admit defeat. Going to Garrett’s ranch outside the city was out of the question, but there was still Lana. Still her sweet little first-born daughter.
A young woman turned the corner and walked to the door of the shop. Was this Lana? She had LeeAnn’s coloring, auburn hair and hazel eyes and a creamy tone to her skin that never seemed to tan. But LeeAnn didn’t have auburn hair anymore, the chemotherapy had seen to that. She raised her hand and touched the inexpensive gray wig she wore. The young woman turned her head, and their eyes met. She smiled. LeeAnn reached for the door handle.
A couple approached. The woman was pregnant, and both husband and wife immediately engaged Lana in conversation about the display of furniture in the window. She was obviously going to be busy with them for a long, long time. LeeAnn’s little store of courage gave out. She was so very tired. What if Lana didn’t understand her long-ago desperation? What if she hated her for never contacting them?
But she had to let her children know she still cared. Once before, she had trusted in the judgment and caring of a woman she had never met. Her confidence hadn’t been misplaced. One last time she would ask that woman to help her. She began to compose a note in her mind.
Dear Mrs. Megan Maitland,
Thank you for finding my babies a good and loving home all those years ago—I knew you would. The teddy bear was Garrett’s, and these three baby sweaters have the triplets’ names embroidered on them. The only fancywork I ever had time to do. My only wish is for the children to know I loved them.
Yours in gratitude.
“Do you want to go inside?” the driver asked again, sounding a little impatient. LeeAnn glanced at the meter. It was coming up on forty dollars. She gave one last look at the young woman now standing inside the bay window of her store, her hands resting on the carved finials of an antique-looking baby bed.
“No,” LeeAnn said wearily. “I don’t think I should go inside. But I want to mail a package. Take me to the post office, please.”
CHAPTER ONE
THERE IT WAS AGAIN. A baby crying. She was certain of it.
But that was impossible. She was alone in the store, had been for hours. For a split second Lana Lord wondered if someone had left an infant behind unnoticed in a quiet corner of the shop. Abandoned, just as she and her brothers and sister had been all those years ago.
Ridiculous. She placed the miniature Stetson she’d picked out as her brother Garrett’s birthday gift to their honorary little cousin, Chase O’Hara, carefully into its box. Beside it was a matching box with little cowhide boots she and her sister, Shelby, had chosen to be their brother Michael’s gift. No one had left a child behind at Oh, Baby!, she told herself sternly. There must be a television on in the kitchen of the bakery next door. Or maybe it was a lost kitten in the alley beyond the wall.
She taped the lid of the box securely and added a mass of curling blue ribbon. There, all done. For her own gift she’d selected half a dozen different outfits from the store’s inventory, but her favorite was a set of Curious George books for his momma to read to him.
A grandson for Megan. And the return of Connor O’Hara, the grown son she had given up at birth. What a tumultuous year it had been for the Maitlands, and the Lords. Scandals and mysteries and more excitement than she cared to recall. Now it seemed as if everything had sorted itself out, and most everyone she knew had found someone to love.
Everyone but her. While all her friends seemed to be making commitments to love and cherish, she was breaking off her engagement. She felt very out of step with the world at the moment.
The faint wailing came again.
Lana looked at the beaten tin ceiling. It wasn’t a hungry kitten or a TV show. It was a real, live baby crying somewhere above her, where there was supposed to be nothing but empty office space and storage areas. Or so she had been told when she opened her business three years ago. This had never been a residential building, the Realtor had said. At least not since its heyday in the Roaring Twenties. But it had also recently changed hands. Lana had just gotten her signed copy of the new lease. Maybe the owner was up there looking around, although she doubted anyone from Van Zandt Development Corporation would be inspecting the building with an infant in tow.
But a homeless woman with a child might have found her way upstairs. Someone scared and desperate, with no money to buy formula or baby food. As scared and desperate as her own biological mother must have been to leave the four of them on the doorstep of Maitland Maternity Clinic all those years ago.
Lana stood. She didn’t like thinking about her birth mother. It made her feel disloyal to her real mother, Sheila Lord. The woman who had taken three infant triplets and two-year-old Garrett and raised them as her own. Years ago Lana had made the decision not to waste time speculating and fantasizing about a woman she couldn’t even remember. And she’d mostly stuck to that resolve.
She held very still and listened for a minute or so longer. Yes, definitely a baby crying. She should probably call the police, Lana realized. Let them come and check it out. But that might take hours, and the baby sounded as if it were in real distress. Still, only a fool would head up the staircase at the back of her storage room alone and unarmed. She didn’t own a gun, but she did possess a good, heavy baseball bat.
It took her a minute or two to locate the bat and a flashlight and come up with the key to the padlock her brother Michael, the head of security at Maitland Maternity, had insisted she install on her side of the staircase door. She pushed the old-fashioned button-type light switch and was amazed to find that it worked. A low-wattage bulb at the top of the stairs glowed feebly against the dark-painted walls.
Lana clutched her bat in one hand and the flashlight in the other. She knew she ought to at least call her best friend Beth’s new husband, Ty Redstone, an Austin police detective, or her brother Michael and tell them what she was doing. But that would involve a lot of explaining and listening to demands that she stay put, and she was too impatient, and too curious, to accept the delay. The good Lord had conditioned womankind not to be able to ignore a child’s cries. At least He had this woman, and she kept on climbing.
She loved babies. She couldn’t let this one suffer any longer without trying to help. When they were girls, she and Beth had vowed to have half a dozen kids apiece. Beth had gotten her degree in childhood development and opened a day-care center at Maitland Maternity. Now she and Ty were well on their way to realizing that childhood dream. Lana had thought she was, too, until her ex-fiancé