His Baby. Muriel Jensen

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СКАЧАТЬ his stepmother’s fashion show for charity, she’d have considered herself the last woman on the planet who’d pursue a man who didn’t want her. But gut instinct told her that he did still love her and that his sudden withdrawal from her was a self-inflicted punishment for some imagined guilt over Abigail’s disappearance.

      Kezia had told her the story shortly after Cordie and Killian’s Thanksgiving wedding. Kezia and Daniel had been working for the Abbotts less than a year one late December night when they were planning for a New Year’s Eve celebration in two days’ time. Killian, eleven years old, had been at a sleepover at a friend’s house, and Sawyer, nine, Campbell, five, and fourteen-month-old Abby were asleep in their beds. Kezia had been up late baking pies when she heard the screams.

      She and Daniel had run upstairs to find Kate Bellows, the nanny, pacing the second-floor hallway, screaming. She wore a billowing silk robe, her gray hair hanging in one long braid. “‘She’s gone!’ she kept saying over and over. ‘She’s gone! I got up to go to the bathroom and checked the children like I always do—and she’s gone!’ For a minute, I didn’t know who she was talking about, until Mr. Abbott came out of Abby’s room and I saw the empty crib.

      “Mr. and Mrs. Abbott searched the house like mad people,” Kezia had said, her eyes sad and focused on the memory. “Mrs. Abbott kept screaming Abigail’s name while Sawyer ran up and down the stairs looking for her, and Daniel and Mr. Abbott searched the grounds. Campbell and I cried.

      “Mr. Abbott called the police, but they found no evidence of a break-in. They thought either the laundry chute or the dumbwaiter might have been entry points if someone had gotten into the basement. But the door was still locked from the inside, and none of the windows was broken. They interviewed the staff, thinking, I guess, that one of us might have kidnapped her, but that was preposterous. We all loved the children like our own.” Kezia paused and sighed heavily, spreading her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “They even sent the police to get Killian at five-thirty in the morning to see if he remembered seeing anyone around the place, or if any of the many tradesmen who’d worked on a plumbing and carpentry repair problem several weeks earlier had shown a particular interest in Abby. Killian was a sharp little boy and never missed anything. He didn’t remember anyone with an interest in his little sister, but he did recall the name of everyone who’d been in the house. Then…” Kezia drew a ragged breath. “I remember him turning to his father and telling him he was sorry he hadn’t been home. That if he had been, the kidnapping might not have happened. His father told him not to think that, that he’d been home and he hadn’t been able to stop it. But Killian was a dedicated big brother, and I think he carries guilt to this day.” Kezia swiped a hand across her eyes and went on.

      “Then it was as though life in this house just stopped. There were no clues, nothing at all to go on, and the Abbotts just waited and prayed. At that point, they’d have been happy to get a call for ransom, to know that Abigail was alive and could be paid for and brought home again.

      “They went on television and begged for her return. They spoke to any reporter who’d listen. And we all waited. No conversation in the house, no laughter and eventually no hope.”

      “How horrible,” Cordie whispered.

      Kezia nodded. “Then one day Mrs. Abbott got up, called us all together—husband, kids, staff—and said we weren’t going to live this way any longer, that there were three other children to think about and everyone’s lives had to move on. We would hold Abigail in our hearts and keep praying, but we were to start living again.” Kezia’s lips trembled. “I thought it was very brave of her.”

      “Yes.” Cordie wrapped her arms around herself and tried to imagine how she would feel if a child was stolen from her with no evidence of what had happened and no knowledge whether he or she was dead or alive.

      “But Kate was devastated, felt responsible and finally quit the following year to go live with her sister in Los Angeles.”

      “How awful for everyone.”

      “Yes, it was. Everyone was affected. I think all the boys carry scars from the ordeal. Chloe dedicated herself to her remaining children, but sometimes I see a terrible sadness in her eyes. And Mr. Nathan put on a good front, but Abby was his little girl and he never got over losing her. He died with her name on his lips.”

      Cordie groaned and put a hand over her eyes as tears welled. What an old and deeply rooted pain for Killian—for all the family. Killian, though, was her primary concern, and wanting to remove his guilt so she could put her love there, instead, would be no easy task.

      She wondered now if her initial approach had been wrong. He was so serious-minded, such a workaholic, that when she’d married him, she’d tried to joke him out of his grave nature, lure him away from work once in a while in the hope that his having a personal life would help him loosen up, open up. But in the end he’d resented her for it.

      This time, she had to find another way. Take things more seriously, so that he didn’t mistake her for a lightweight. Work as much as he did so that he’d know she wanted success for Abbott Mills as much as he did.

      She groaned again and laid a forearm across her eyes, propping her feet on the coffee table. That would be a big job. She generally found life amusing, so she was always joking, pulling pranks. She liked sound and color and gravitated toward those things. That was why she loved fashion and concerts and parties.

      Of course, all she had to do was reconsider the status of her relationship with Killian—that put a genuine pall over everything. Working a lot would give her less time to think.

      She carried her untouched tray into the kitchen, covered the lasagna with plastic wrap, put it in the refrigerator and left the salad out to pick at.

      She should call her parents and let them know how she was. They’d been worried about her when she’d gone to Scotland, and finally flown out from Texas to check on her. They’d been horrified to find her pale and thin and holed up in the lodge like a recluse.

      “He isn’t worth it,” her mother had said firmly. Judith and Gregory Hyatt had loved Killian, though they’d known him only briefly. But Judith had always been her only child’s staunchest support system, and though Cordie had been caught in another man’s bed, Judith was sure the problem couldn’t be with Cordie and therefore Killian had to have misunderstood.

      When Cordie had told her parents she was going back to New York to apply for the position of buyer that had miraculously opened up at Abbott Mills, her father had thought her crazy. “Cord, he’s furious with you. He’s divorcing you. Why give him the chance to deny your application or use it as an excuse to dump all over you again?”

      Cordie had shaken her head. “He won’t even know about the job until it’s time for the quarterly personnel report. The hope is that I’ll be so entrenched by the time he notices I’m on board that my immediate superiors will support me.”

      “She loves him, darling,” her mother had tried to explain to her father.

      He didn’t get it. “You said this divorce was all his fault.”

      “It is.”

      “Then why does she love him?”

      “Because…the separation is his fault, but the problems he has that are making him do it aren’t.”

      Her father, the CEO of one of the country’s finest furniture makers and a millionaire in his own right, though not in the Abbott class, stared dumbly at his wife.

      Her СКАЧАТЬ