The Seven Year Secret. Roz Fox Denny
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room, which had bubbled with sound, now lay quiet as a tomb.
“Where are you going?” Connor’s ragged voice halted her retreat. “Lord, Mallory. What in hell am I supposed to think—to do—here?”
“The report is self-explanatory, Connor. Read it, think about it, call Dr. Dahl.” She shrugged nervously. “No point in wearing out my welcome. There’s really no need for us to deal with each other again. I imagine you’ll want to meet Liddy Bea. I can leave authorization with the nursing staff at Forrest Memorial if you visit while she’s there. Or…other arrangements can be made. From here on, though, any contact you have will not be with me but with Dr. Dahl or his staff. That should ease your mind a lot.”
“Really?” He stalked toward her, the report in one hand, Liddy Bea’s baby picture in the other. He shook them both under her nose. “You waltz in here after seven years of…of…nothing, announce I fathered a child, and oh, by the way, she needs one of your kidneys, Connor. Then you flit merrily out again. That’s a hell of a monkey wrench to throw in a man’s life, Mallory.” His lips twisted harshly.
She took in each feature of his rugged, anguished face before saying quietly, “You have a right to be angry with me, Connor. But it won’t change the fact that we had a child together. Nor will it alter Liddy’s situation. I’m not going to fight with you. I will get down on my knees and apologize if that’s what you need from me. There’s nothing I won’t do for Liddy Bea. Nothing.” Her quavery voice broke.
A muscle in Connor’s jaw jumped twice, and his face contorted in pain. He turned away from Mallory and made his way back to the desk, where he dropped the items he held. Flattening both palms on his desk, he braced himself with his back toward her. “I have arrangements to make, people to consult before I can go to Tallahassee,” he said, sounding raw.
Mallory noted how the muscles in his shoulders bunched beneath his knit shirt. She resisted a strong impulse to cross to him and massage away his tension. The feeling came as a shock, considering he’d gone off seven years ago and never looked back once to see how she’d survived the breakup. Or even if she’d survived.
But she no longer had the right to console him in any fashion. The right now belonged to his fiancée. Merely thinking about Connor’s engagement almost crushed the breath from Mallory’s lungs.
Whirling, she ran from the room, damned if she’d let him see a single one of the tears that blinded her.
CONNOR SENSED THE MOMENT Mallory left. It was more than an absence of a perfume called Desire, a scent he never failed to associate with her. One he’d missed so terribly that first year he’d been stuck on a solitary outpost, he’d wandered up to a department store perfume counter on his first R and R to Honolulu, just for a whiff of the bergamot-and-magnolia mixture. A whiff he’d never, ever assumed would lodge in his nostrils for so many years.
He lifted his hands then slammed them down on the desktop, hoping the subsequent pain would eject him from this pointless reverie. Needless to say, it didn’t.
“Dammit to hell!” He’d finally made a new life for himself. One that didn’t include lingering memories of Mallory Forrest. He had found a new love. Claire Dupree, who was at home with her best friends in the midst of a bridal shower.
Claire’s shower. For their wedding, scheduled the day after tomorrow!
“Lord.” Groaning, Connor lifted the picture of a child fashioned in his image. “How in hell does a guy break this kind of news to his fiancée?”
Staggering around the desk, he dropped into a swivel chair. Pulling the most recent of the photos toward him, he traced dark-lashed gray eyes, an off-kilter smile and a slightly narrow yet stubborn jaw. The O’Rourke jaw. Connor couldn’t refute the evidence staring him in the face. And Lord help him, deep down, unmistakable pleasure seeped upward until it squeezed his heart.
He had a child. A daughter Mallory had named after his mother. Why had she done that? It seemed out of character for someone who hadn’t seen fit to answer any of his damned letters, who’d ignored every one of his pleas for forgiveness.
Connor rocked gently in his chair as the anguish surfaced, displacing even his outrage at Mallory. His mom, Lydia O’Rourke, had lost her life in a storm the folks in the weather-reporting business had failed to class as a hurricane. She would never experience the joy of meeting her first grandchild.
The telephone sitting near Connor’s right hand jingled loudly, making him jump. He fumbled it to his ear, scrabbling to gather up the baby pictures the cord had knocked askew.
He shut his eyes. Claire. He wished he could ward off the questions that would undoubtedly come.
“Hi,” she said cheerily. “I know you didn’t expect to hear from me until we met at the church on Sunday. But Paul just came by the house to pick up Lauren. He acted really odd. He said your bachelor party broke up early, but he wouldn’t say why. In fact, he was so insistent I ask you, it frightened me. Of course, I realize I’m suffering prewedding nerves.” She gave a short laugh. “Janine and my other bridesmaids said I wouldn’t feel better until I phoned you. So here I am.”
Connor felt the pressure of her unspoken need to have him alleviate her fears. He ran a hand through his hair, not having a clue where to begin. He’d known Claire for almost a year. In their early, getting-to-know-you phase, he’d mentioned that there’d once been someone special in his past. Hadn’t he? Still silent, he tried to recall those initial conversations.
“Connor? Say something. You’re really frightening me.”
“We have to talk,” he said abruptly. “But not over the phone. Can you get away if I come by in…say, twenty minutes?”
“I guess so,” Claire said a little shakily. “It’ll be after nine o’clock, though. You have to have me home by midnight. Not that I’ll turn into a pumpkin,” she murmured, stabbing weakly at humor. “But if the groom sees the bride the day before the wedding, it’s supposed to be bad luck for a marriage….” Her voice trailed off.
“We’ll go for coffee at that burger place just off Twenty-seventh, okay? I could use a cup of strong Cajun coffee about now.”
“Did you overindulge tonight? I know you didn’t really want a bachelor party.”
“No,” he said stiffly. “But I’ll admit we made a fair dent in the keg Paul brought. If you’d rather not go for coffee, Claire, I can do without.”
“Coffee’s fine. And twenty minutes will give me time to tell the hangers-on goodbye, and hide away all the lacy lingerie I received at the shower,” she said, giving a feeble rendition of a sultry growl.
“That’s right. I forgot you had a—what did you call it?—personal shower.”
The woman at the other end of the line sighed. “Honestly, Connor, aren’t you intrigued enough to sound at least a little excited about the lingerie I got?”
“Sorry, I guess my mind’s not the sharpest it’s ever been. Knowing Janine, Lauren and Abby, I suspect what they bought won’t leave much to a man’s imagination.” This time, his drawl could be considered closer to normal.
“No. My friends aren’t what you’d describe as conventional.”
“That’s a fact.”
“You sound as if you disapprove of them.”
“Because I agreed with you? Look, Claire, I’ve explained that I’m not myself tonight. And for whatever reason, you seem oversensitive. Perhaps it’d be best if we saved the rest of this conversation for when we’re sitting face-to-face.”
“One question first,” she said abruptly. “Connor, why haven’t we slept together yet?”
“What?” he said too loudly as a strange wave of guilt washed over him. If Claire had asked that question even last week, he wouldn’t have known why he’d continued to resist their spending an entire