Bachelor Father. Pamela Bauer
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Adam that Faith wasn’t Megan’s mother. It should have, but it didn’t because Adam had seen and spoken to Faith. The attorney hadn’t.
“If this woman has only had amnesia for the past few weeks, how could she be Christie?” the lawyer had asked. “The accident happened last September. Where would she have been for over five months and why wouldn’t she have contacted Megan?”
Adam could have given him one of the farfetched scenarios he had come up with, but he knew he would only sound like someone who’d watched one too many B movies. Besides, they were rhetorical questions that the lawyer didn’t expect Adam to answer.
“Everyone in town knew Christie loved Megan,” the attorney had reasoned. “It would take a lot for you to convince me she would ever abandon her own daughter. She wasn’t that kind of person.”
Adam wished he could state with the same confidence as the attorney that he knew what Christie would or wouldn’t have done, but the truth was he hadn’t spent enough time with her to get to know her at all. They’d spent one night together. Less than twelve hours. It had been enough time to make a baby, but not enough time to discover who she was. Most of what he knew he’d learned after her death from a lawyer and a six-year-old.
His thoughts returned to the night they’d met. He’d followed her out of the bachelor party calling after her, “Hey, it’s a great night for a cruise down the St. Croix. I’ve got a yacht if you want to go.”
That had raised an eyebrow on her pretty face. “A yacht?”
She hadn’t believed him, but then why would she? Not many college students had a boat moored at Marine on St. Croix. “I designed it myself,” he’d boasted, then had proceeded to use the same words he’d heard his grandfather use to lure customers at boat shows.
It had worked. She’d said she would go with him to see his boat on one condition—that they take her car. He hadn’t argued and within minutes they’d been on their way to the marina.
Once there, he discovered she knew more about boats than any other woman he’d dated. That was because she’d grown up in the small town of Silver Bay on Lake Superior where her father had been the captain of an iron-ore freighter and her brother had been in the merchant marine. She’d told him that she planned to return to the North Shore once she got her life back on track. Adam had wanted to know why it had gone off track, but she’d said it wasn’t important how it happened. All that mattered was that she was now going in the right direction.
When he’d questioned whether stripping was the right direction, she’d told him that it was the best way to make a lot of money in a short amount of time. “Not all of us are born with a silver spoon in our mouths,” she’d said in a derisive tone.
Then he’d been the one on the defensive, making sure that she knew he wasn’t some rich kid who’d taken her to his father’s yacht. He’d given her a brief history of Novak Boats, emphasizing that it was only because of hard work and long hours that it was a success.
He’d never had a problem charming women and this time was no different. She’d spent the night with him and the following morning he’d awakened with a hangover and the realization that he was alone on the yacht. She’d gone, leaving nothing behind except a small scrap of paper with her phone number on it.
He hadn’t called her. After his friend’s wedding, he’d left for a summer internship in California and gotten busy with life. He hadn’t thought of Christie again, until the lawyer had called with the news that she’d named him as Megan’s guardian in her will.
They were memories Adam thought he had buried in the back of his mind. He’d brought them out briefly when he’d learned of Christie’s death, but he’d had no trouble returning them to their rightful place. Now that he’d met Faith, they’d resurfaced again and were refusing to be put away.
And he doubted he would be able to put them back in their place until he had proof that Christie and Faith were not the same person. For his peace of mind as well as his daughter’s, he needed to know the truth. The attorney said there were two alternatives he could pursue. One was to contact Christie’s brother, Tom, and have him come to St. Paul and meet Faith. Unfortunately Megan’s uncle had been called out of town and would be gone for at least six weeks, so Adam knew he would have to use the second method. A DNA test.
Adam was familiar with DNA testing. When he’d been notified that he was Megan’s father, his own attorney had recommended he be tested to make sure what Christie had stated in her will was true, that he was Megan’s father. His DNA had been a match.
Now a lab test could be used to see if Faith was Christie—and Megan’s mother. With a simple swab of the inside of a cheek the relationship between a child and her parents could either be established or denied. All Adam had to do was convince Faith to take the test and wait three to five days to get the results.
To a man who hated waiting for anything, three to five days seemed like an eternity. He wanted the matter resolved. He wanted his daughter to stop fantasizing about having a mother again. Most of all, he wanted peace of mind. Proving Faith the baby rocker was not Christie was going to bring that to him.
CHAPTER FOUR
FAITH LAY AWAKE in her bed, wishing she could stop replaying the conversation she’d had with Adam Novak. She fluffed her pillow and turned over for what had to be the hundredth time, refusing to look at the clock. She didn’t want to know how late it was. Sleep would eventually come. It always did, no matter how troubled her thoughts were. The past few weeks had proven that.
Only, tonight was different from any of the other nights she’d spent at the Carsons’. Her insomnia wasn’t due to the fact that she couldn’t remember her past, but rather the possibility that she could be about to find it. She’d been given a ray of hope that a force existed strong enough to crack the darkness that held her memory in its grasp. And all because of a little girl who’d needed surgery at the hospital.
Megan Novak. The thought of the six-year-old crying for her mommy made her heart ache. She remembered how the girl had begged Faith not to leave her after surgery. At the time Faith had thought she was simply frightened, but now she realized it was more than fear that had Megan reaching out to her.
If Megan were her daughter—and Faith knew that possibility was a slim one—she would find one giant piece of her memory puzzle. Unfortunately she would need a lot more pieces to understand what had happened to cause her to be found far away from the North Shore where Christie had disappeared.
Although Faith hadn’t admitted it to Adam, she knew it was unlikely that she was Megan’s mother. Adam believed that the authorities were right, that there was no way Christie would have survived the boating accident last autumn. It was that very aspect of the situation—the fact that they hadn’t found a body—that gave Faith a spark of hope that she could be the missing woman. Her heart, however, refused to believe that she could ever abandon her own child. As much as she wanted to solve the mystery of her identity, she didn’t want to be the reason why an innocent child like Megan had been forced to suffer such grief.
After much tossing and turning, Faith’s weary body finally succumbed to sleep. She awoke several times, her slumber interrupted by disturbing dreams. At Dr. Carson’s suggestion, she’d placed a pencil and paper next to the bed in the event that she might find clues to her past from the images passing through her mind while she slept, but so far her notepad was empty with the exception of one word. Outcast.
She’d written it down not because of anything she remembered dreaming, but because of the feeling she always had when she awoke—as if she were being excluded from something. Faith questioned whether that feeling was associated with the content of her dreams or if it was simply the result of having no memory of her past. Because her amnesia made her a stranger to her own life, denying her access to people and places, she often felt like an outsider to her own thoughts.
That morning, she was wakened by a dream. This time she could recall the content and quickly reached for her notepad and pencil. She jotted down