Family in Progress. Brenda Harlen

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СКАЧАТЬ expectant mother laughed and laid a hand on her belly. “Junior certainly thinks so.”

      Samara watched her friend’s hand move over the curve of her expanded tummy as if to soothe the baby. Her eyes were lit with joy and soft with emotion, and Samara felt a tug of something that might have been envy deep within her own heart.

      “We were talking about your interview,” Jenny reminded her.

      “I don’t know what else to tell you.”

      “Maybe I should talk to Steven, to get his perspective on it.”

      “No,” Samara responded quickly. “Not that I don’t appreciate the offer, but if I get this job, I want it to be because I deserve it—not because the man doing the hiring is my best friend’s brother-in-law.”

      “You will get the job because you deserve it,” Jenny assured her.

      Samara wished she could share her friend’s certainty. Instead, she said, “You never did tell me why he was looking for a new photographer at the magazine.”

      “Did you look at the back issues I gave you?”

      “The pictures were good,” she said. “Uninspired, maybe, but technically good.”

      “Definitely uninspired,” Jenny said. “But Steven has some great ideas for the magazine, so when he realized he had to replace Erik Hendriksson, he decided to look for a photographer who could implement them.”

      “Why did he have to replace Hendriksson?”

      “Off the record?”

      Samara rolled her eyes. “I’m a photographer not a reporter, and your best friend, so ‘off the record’ is implied.”

      “Professional hazard of having been a journalist in a previous life,” Jenny explained. “But to answer your question, the managing editor found out Hendriksson was taking more than pictures of the vehicles. He was pilfering parts and fencing them to support a gambling habit.”

      Samara winced sympathetically. She understood betrayal. But even if she wasn’t a scrupulously honest person, there was no fear of her stealing anything on the job. She didn’t know the difference between a spoiler and a spark plug and was counting on her skill with a camera making up for that lack of knowledge.

      The waitress brought their plates to the table then disappeared again.

      “Speaking of previous lives,” Samara said, picking up the thread of the conversation as she reached for a fry. “Do you really not miss being a reporter?”

      Jenny shook her head as she stabbed her fork into a wedge of tomato. “I thought I would, but being the media communications coordinator for the newest division of TAKA-Hanson is such a challenge. Not to mention that I have the pleasure of working with my handsome husband now, as well as continuing to build a relationship with Helen and her extended family.”

      Despite her friend’s easy response, Samara knew she’d had some difficult moments when it had been made public that she would be working for the new TAKA-Hanson Hotels, a branch of the corporation that would ultimately and directly compete for business with Anderson Hotels, owned by Jenny’s adoptive parents. But the Andersons had always been—and continued to be—supportive of their adoptive daughter. In fact, they were the ones who had encouraged Jenny to reach out to her biological mother when she’d come into her life only a few years before.

      “Okay, enough shop talk,” Samara decided. “How are you doing?”

      “Other than being the largest mammal currently walking the face of the earth, you mean?”

      “Other than that,” she agreed with a smile.

      “I’m getting excited,” her friend admitted. “I can’t believe there’s only five more weeks to go before I’ll finally get to hold my baby in my arms.”

      “Unless he’s late. First babies usually are.”

      Jenny laid a hand on her rounded belly. “God, I hope not.”

      Samara laughed.

      “I wanted to thank you again,” Jenny said. “For painting the nursery. Richard’s been working a lot of long hours lately and I can hardly negotiate stairs in this condition never mind climb a ladder with a paint roller in hand, so I’m not sure the room would have been ready before the baby if you hadn’t done it.

      “I know we could have hired someone,” she continued. “But I wanted the nursery to have a more personal touch, and I know the baby’s going to love the cars and trucks you painted above the crib.”

      “It was the least I could do while I was living there,” Samara said. “And I had fun with it.”

      “I’ll remember that if it turns out the doctors are wrong and my daughter refuses to sleep in a blue room.”

      “It’s sky-blue, not boy-blue. And I doubt, with today’s technology, that the doctors made a mistake.”

      Jenny’s lips curved. “From the beginning, I said the baby’s gender didn’t matter so long as he or she was born healthy, and I meant it. But I think I would like a boy—with blue eyes and a smile just like his dad’s.”

      “And Richard’s probably dreaming about a baby girl with green eyes and copper hair like yours.”

      Jenny’s lips curved. “Well, maybe we’ll try for one of each.”

      “You’re really happy together, aren’t you?”

      “I never dreamed I could be so happy,” Jenny admitted. “Especially not when I think back to the day we first met.”

      “You mean the day you tried to brush him off?”

      Her friend smiled. “Yeah, that day.”

      But Richard had pursued Jenny with the single-minded focus and determination of a man who had found what he wanted and wasn’t ever going to let her go.

      That was all Samara wanted—for someone to love her the way Richard loved Jenny.

      Chapter Two

      It was with a tremendous sense of relief—and no small amount of guilt—that Steven realized Tyler’s principal hadn’t tracked him down at work to tell him that his son was in trouble but that he was sick. Apparently he’d tossed his Honey Nut Cheerios all over the floor in his math class, an unfortunate accident which might have mortified anyone else but seemed to be a topic of tremendous interest among nine-year-olds in general and those of the male gender in particular. Even more so because on this particular day the necessity of vacating the classroom had thwarted the teacher’s plans to administer a geometry quiz.

      Steven had known about the quiz, of course, and had assumed that his son’s complaints of a sore stomach at breakfast had been nothing more than pre-test jitters. Yet one more reason to question his judgment in parenting matters.

      In the almost three years that had passed since his wife’s death, not a day had gone by that he hadn’t thought about her with longing and regret. But it was incidents like СКАЧАТЬ