Keeping Baby Secret Read online

  “Let Me Be The Big Strong Man. Let Me Be Your Man,”

  Frank said, grabbing Leenie by the shoulders.

  “You want to be a buffer between me and the big bad world, don’t you?”

  “Something like that,” he replied. “After all, I am Andrew’s father. I wasn’t around while you were pregnant or when you gave birth. I should have been. I need to be the one to bring Andrew home safe to you. I need to do this for you.”

  Leenie swallowed, then offered him a fragile smile, before he cupped her face with his hands then kissed her.

  “Beverly Barton writes with searing emotional intensity that tugs at every heartstring.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Linda Howard

  Dear Reader,

  Welcome back to another passionate month at Silhouette Desire. A Scandal Between the Sheets is breaking out as Brenda Jackson pens the next tale in the scintillating DYNASTIES: THE DANFORTHS series. We all love the melodrama and mayhem that surrounds this Southern family—how about you?

  The superb Beverly Barton stops by Silhouette Desire with an extra wonderful title in her bestselling series THE PROTECTORS. Keeping Baby Secret will keep you on the edge of your seat—and curl your toes all at the same time. What would you do if you had to change your name and your entire history? Sheri WhiteFeather tackles that compelling question when her heroine is forced to enter the witness protection program in A Kept Woman. Seems she was a kept woman of another sort, as well…so be sure to pick up this fabulous read if you want the juicy details.

  Kristi Gold has written the final, fabulous installment of THE TEXAS CATTLEMAN’S CLUB: THE STOLEN BABY series with Fit for a Sheikh. (But don’t worry, we promise those sexy cattlemen with be back.) And rounding out the month are two wonderful stories filled with an extra dose of passion: Linda Conrad’s dramatic Slow Dancing With A Texan and Emilie Rose’s suppercharged A Passionate Proposal.

  Enjoy all we have to offer this month—and every month—at Silhouette Desire.

  Melissa Jeglinski

  Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire

  BEVERLY BARTON

  Keeping Baby Secret

  Books by Beverly Barton

  Silhouette Desire

  Yankee Lover #580

  Lucky in Love #628

  Out of Danger #662

  Sugar Hill #687

  Talk of the Town #711

  The Wanderer #766

  Cameron #796

  The Mother of My Child #831

  Nothing but Trouble #881

  The Tender Trap #1047

  A Child of Her Own #1077

  †His Secret Child #1203

  †His Woman, His Child #1209

  †Having His Baby #1216

  *Keeping Baby Secret #1574

  Silhouette Intimate Moments

  This Side of Heaven #453

  Paladin’s Woman #515

  Lover and Deceiver #557

  The Outcast #614

  *Defending His Own #670

  *Guarding Jeannie #688

  *Blackwood’s Woman #707

  *Roarke’s Wife #807

  *A Man Like Morgan Kane #819

  *Gabriel Hawk’s Lady #830

  Emily and the Stranger #860

  Lone Wolf’s Lady #877

  *Keeping Annie Safe #937

  *Murdock’s Last Stand #979

  *Egan Cassidy’s Kid #1015

  Her Secret Weapon #1034

  *Navajo’s Woman #1063

  *Whitelaw’s Wedding #1075

  *Jack’s Christmas Mission #1113

  *The Princess’s Bodyguard #1177

  *Downright Dangerous #1273

  Silhouette Books

  36 Hours

  Nine Months

  The Fortunes of Texas

  In the Arms of a Hero

  3,2,1…Married!

  “Getting Personal”

  Lone Star Country Club:

  The Debutantes

  “Jenna’s Wild Ride”

  Lone Star Country Club:

  The Rebel’s Return

  Family Secrets

  Check Mate

  BEVERLY BARTON

  has been in love with romance since her grandfather gave her an illustrated book of Beauty and the Beast. An avid reader since childhood, Beverly wrote her first book at nine. After marriage to her own “hero” and the births of her daughter and son, Beverly chose to be a full-time homemaker, aka wife, mother, friend and volunteer. This author of over thirty-five books is a member of Romance Writers of America and helped found the Heart of Dixie chapter. She has won numerous awards, and has made the Waldenbooks and USA TODAY bestseller lists.

  In loving memory of our cocker spaniel, Cole, who was my faithful companion for nearly fifteen years.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  Leenie checked the refrigerator for the third time. The bottles of milk were there, as she knew they would be. Just where she’d put them. But she simply had to check a final time, had to make sure nothing had been left undone. After all, this was a turning point in her life, a make-or-break night. As she hurried by the computer desk in her kitchen, she glanced at the list of phone numbers posted by the telephone. Emergency numbers, her cell number, her private number at work, as well as the switchboard number.

  Rushing out of the kitchen and down the hall, her heartbeat rapid and her stomach painfully knotted, she wondered why this had to be so difficult. It wasn’t as if she was the first woman in the world to go through this painful separation. Millions of women throughout the world had done what she was doing and most of them could probably sympathize with her feelings of guilt and fear.

  As she neared the end of the hall, she slowed her pace, took a deep breath and told herself that she could do this. She was a strong woman. An independent woman. When she reached the nursery, she looked from Debra, who smiled compassionately, to Andrew, who lay sleeping peacefully in his bed, totally unaware of the trauma his mother was experiencing.

  “Everything will be all right.” Debra draped her arm around Leenie’s shoulders. “You’ll be gone only a few hours and he’ll probably sleep the entire time you’re away.”

  “But if he wakes and I’m not here…” Leenie pulled away from her son’s nanny, walked over to Andrew’s bassinet and watched her six-week-old baby as he slept. His little chest rose and fell softly with each tender breath he took. She reached out to touch his rosy cheek.

  “If he wakes, I’ll be right here,” Debra assured her. “And if he’s hungry, you left breast milk in the fridge. You aren’t deserting him forever, you’re just going to work.”

  “Maybe we should postpone this another week or so.” Leenie couldn’t bear the thought of being separated from Andrew, even for the four hours it would take her to drive to WJMM, do her two-hour midnight talk-show on the radio, set things up for her morning TV show and then drive home.

  “No, we won’t postpone it,” Debra said firmly. “We can continue taking Andrew to the station every morning for your daytime show, but he shouldn’t be dragged out of his bed every night.” Debra crossed her arms over her chest and narrowed her gaze. “Go to work, Leenie. You do your job and let me do mine.”

  Sighing heavily, Leenie admitted her deepest fears. “But one of my jobs is being Andrew’s mother and if you do your job too well, my son will bond with you and n
ot me.”

  Huffing loudly, but following up with an understanding smile, Debra patted Leenie’s arm. “Andrew has already bonded with you. He knows you’re his mother. If I do my job well, and I’d like to think I’ve been doing that since the day we brought Andrew home from the hospital, then he’ll think of me as a favorite aunt or as a grandmother.”

  “I’m being silly, aren’t I?”

  “No, you’re being a good mother.”

  “Am I a good mother? I’m not sure what makes a good mother. As you well know, I didn’t have one of my own. No mother at all raised me, good, bad or otherwise.”

  “Jerry and I were parents to over fifty foster kids in our thirty years of marriage.” Debra sighed dreamily, as she always did whenever she mentioned her late husband, who had died two years ago at the age of sixty-three from a heart attack. “I’ve seen all kinds of mothers and I know a good one from a bad one.”

  “Yes, I imagine you do. You were certainly an excellent role model for me when I lived with you and Jerry. I learned by watching the way you were with all of us foster children what a good mother is.” She had been fifteen when she’d been sent to live with Debra and Jerry Schmale, a young minister and his wife who’d been told they could never have children of their own and had decided they would give their love and time to unwanted, neglected kids of all ages. The three years she’d spent with the Schmales had been the best years of her childhood.

  “You, Dr. Lurleen Patton, are a good mother,” Debra said.

  “Even though I’m a single parent? Even though I didn’t provide Andrew with a father?”

  “You told me that Andrew was the result of a very brief affair with a man you barely knew. A man who showed no interest in settling down. A man who was very careful to use protection each time y’all made love.”

  Leenie nodded. “One of those times, that protection failed. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have gotten pregnant. But that wasn’t Frank’s fault.”

  “You made the decision not to tell Andrew’s father about his existence because you felt it was the best thing for everyone concerned. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Have you changed your mind?”

  No, she hadn’t changed her mind. Although, truth be told, sometimes she wished she had called Frank the day she’d found out she was pregnant, called him and told him he was going to be a daddy. But she’d been so shocked herself that it had taken her weeks to figure out what to do. By the time she decided she wanted to keep her baby and raise it herself, she had also decided that the last thing Frank Latimer would want in his life was a child. Their entire relationship had lasted less than two weeks. Love hadn’t been involved. Just a major case of lust.

  “No, I haven’t changed my mind. If Frank knew he had a child, it would simply complicate his life and mine, not to mention Andrew’s.”

  Debra turned Leenie around, grasped her shoulders and all but shoved her out of the room. “If you don’t leave now, you’ll be late.” Debra walked Leenie into the hallway and all the way to the back door. “Call me every thirty minutes, if that will make you feel better—but go. Now!”

  Leenie sighed. “Thanks. I don’t know what I’d do without you. Sometimes I think I need you even more than Andrew does.”

  Debra hugged her, then lifted Leenie’s jacket and purse from where they hung on a coatrack near the door, handed them to her and said, “Drive carefully, call as often as you need to, have a great show tonight and I’ll be waiting up for you when you come home.”

  Leenie slipped into her coat, draped her purse straps over her shoulder and opened the back door that led into the garage. She unlocked her new GMC Envoy SUV, a vehicle she’d purchased a month before her son’s birth. Of course she’d kept her sports car, but hadn’t used it since Andrew had been born because she never went anywhere without him. Use it tonight, she told herself. Get in your Mustang and fly off down the road.

  After locking the SUV, she went over to the Mustang, unlocked it and got in, then revved the motor and hit the remote that opened the garage. Within minutes she was zipping along the highway that led from the suburbs of Maysville, Mississippi, into the downtown area where the studios for both WJMM radio and TV stations were located. She’d been doing a late-night radio talk show and a morning TV show for quite a few years and enjoyed being a local celebrity, a psychiatrist who doled out advice over the airwaves five days and nights a week.

  When she’d been younger, she had longed to create a family of her own. Having grown up in a series of foster homes and remembering very little about her own parents, she had always felt so alone. Her mother had died when she was four and her father when she was eight. A skinny, gangly girl, who had talked too much and tried too hard to make others like her, she’d never had a real chance of being adopted. From eight to eighteen, she’d been shifted around from foster home to foster home. She’d felt unloved and unwanted all her life and by the time she hit thirty and Prince Charming hadn’t entered her life, she’d pretty much given up hope for that fantasized happily ever after ending in her life.

  Although she’d been around the block a few times, as the old saying went, she wasn’t promiscuous. Each time she’d been in a committed relationship, she’d wanted it to be “the one.” And she’d never had a one-night stand. Not until Frank Latimer entered her life. Or should she say breezed in and out of her life. And technically, he hadn’t really been a one-night stand. More like a ten day mini-affair. She’d taken one look at the big lug and fallen hard and fast. They had set the sheets on fire and what she’d thought would be a one-nighter turned into a very brief, extremely passionate relationship.

  Leenie wished it wasn’t late November already so she could put the top down on her car and achieve that wild and free feeling it gave her to ride with the wind. Maybe that’s what she needed—some cold night air to clear away the cobwebs. As hard as she tried to relegate Frank Latimer to the back of her mind, to put him into the past where he belonged, she found it difficult, if not impossible, to do. Although Andrew had her blond hair and blue eyes, he resembled Frank or the way she was sure Frank had looked as a baby. And every time she looked at her son, she saw his father. How could she—a psychiatrist who’d been trained to understand the human psyche—have ever thought she’d be able to forget about the man who had fathered her child? Whether or not he was actually in her life, he’d always be a part of it. Andrew was the living, breathing proof of that.

  She’d told Debra that she wasn’t having any second thoughts about contacting Frank to let him know he had a child, but maybe she’d been lying to herself as well as Debra. Maybe she should call Frank, feel him out, see if there was somebody special in his life these days. Or maybe she should just fly to Atlanta and take Andrew with her. No, she couldn’t do that, couldn’t just show up on Frank’s doorstep.

  Stop debating the issue, she told herself. You’re not going to call Frank. And she wasn’t going to fly to Atlanta. If he had the slightest interest in renewing his relationship with her, he’d have called by now. After all, it was over ten months since he’d said goodbye and walked out of her life without a backward glance. She had to accept the fact that Frank wasn’t her Prince Charming, accept the fact that there was no such animal. Just because he’d been different from the other men she’d known didn’t mean she was as special to him as he had been to her. What they’d had wasn’t love. It was just sex.

  One

  Leenie glanced across the table at Jim Isbell, a good-looking, likable guy. He had asked her out after their initial meeting last week when he’d appeared on her morning TV show in a segment about group therapy. Jim was a psychologist who worked with families in trouble—drugs, alcohol, infidelity and various other problems that plagued many people in today’s complex modern society. This was their first date—one she’d been looking forward to eagerly. It was a simple workday lunch between friends. No strings attached. Nothing that would put pressure on either of them. Everyone who knew her, including Debra, had
encouraged her to start dating again. After all, she hadn’t been out with a man since she’d found out she was pregnant. Now Andrew was nearly two months old and adjusting beautifully to having a working mother. Debra brought him to the studio several days a week, but kept him home in his own bed at night. Although Leenie loved her job, her son was the center of her world.

  “So, are you interested?” Jim asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “Dinner and a movie this weekend,” Jim said.

  “Oh, uh…yes. That might be nice.” Nice. Such an odd word, with so many meanings. And often a bland word, one that conveyed very little emotion. Oh, jeez, Leenie, don’t overanalyze your response about the date. You meant the word nice in the…well, in the nicest way. She smiled to herself. You like Jim. Obviously he likes you. You’ve had a pleasant lunch, so why not follow up with a dinner date?

  Nice? Pleasant? Why not fantastic or great or fabulous or wonderful? What if Frank Latimer asked her out for a dinner date? You wouldn’t be using such lukewarm adjectives, now would you? An inner voice taunted. Stop it! She shouldn’t compare Jim to Frank. They were apples and oranges. Yeah, sure they were, but Jim was such a boring apple and Frank had been such an incredible orange.

  Frank with the sexy gray eyes and hard, lean body. Frank, who had memorized every inch of her with his bedroom eyes, with his big hands and his mouth and tongue. Frank, who always looked like an unmade bed and had a way of curling her toes without even touching her.

  “Lurleen?”

  “Huh?” Apparently Jim had said something to which he expected a response and since she’d been thinking about another man, she hadn’t heard a word Jim had said.

  “You’re a million miles away, aren’t you?”