The Cliff House. RaeAnne Thayne

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СКАЧАТЬ prayed, yearned. She had charted her cycle religiously, had pored over sperm donor files to find the perfect one, had dipped into her savings account for a healthy chunk to cover the four times she had been artificially inseminated.

      She had suffered the indignity of feet in the stirrups, the catheter, the waiting half an hour with her hips raised, then hoping and praying and yearning for results.

      If this one hadn’t worked, she wasn’t sure what she would have done.

      Nothing, she told herself. She would have been fine. She would have called the state foster care agency to see if there was any chance they would reconsider and let her foster an adoptable infant this time, as a single working mother.

      Other teachers had babies and there were certainly foster care babies who needed homes.

      If that didn’t work, she would go on as she always had, providing a stable, loving, comfortable home for older children and teenagers in need.

      She loved her work as a foster parent. It had been both necessary and rewarding, helping young people who had few options left to them. At last count there were twenty of them who had stayed with her in the ten years since Beatriz ran off with Cruz Romero, sometimes with her only a few months, sometimes a few years. Each had left an indelible imprint on her heart.

      It had all started with Bea and Daisy, of course. She had loved being a mother figure to them, struggling to form a family and build a home together when she was barely twenty-one and they were nine and eleven. She could still picture them, two lost and damaged girls who had suffered so very much because of their irresponsible, selfish, fickle mother.

      The girls were the daughters of her heart and she would always consider them such.

      Because of them, she had started Open Hearts, in an effort to do what she could to make sure all children who had to be in the foster care system received loving and supportive placements.

      She was proud of all she had accomplished, but she wanted something else now. She wanted her own child, and according to the pregnancy tests assembled around her, she would have her wish in about eight and a half months.

      Pregnant.

      Joy burst through her, incandescent and perfect, and she pressed her hands over her abdomen and the tiny life growing inside her.

      This was it. Everything she had dreamed about for the past year.

      She was having a baby!

      Dear God. She was forty years old and she was having a baby!

      She was crazy! What had she been thinking? She was going to become a mother at an age many women were starting to think about becoming empty nesters.

      Panic started to chew at her jubilation. She pushed it away. No. She wouldn’t let it take over. For this moment she wanted to simply savor the miracle of life.

      She had to tell someone. The news was too big inside her, like a dancing, whirling wind looking for an escape.

      Fortunately, her best friend, Cleo, had texted an hour ago that she would stop by with a birthday present, despite Stella’s insistence that she wanted nothing from her friends.

      She had the best gift of all.

      She touched her abdomen again. “Hello, little baby,” she whispered. “I love you so much already.”

      Her child would never spend a moment of his or her existence wondering what it felt like to be loved.

      The doorbell rang while she was whispering softly to her child and she jumped up. Cleo. She was the perfect person to tell, had been supportive from the moment Stella told her this was something she wanted. She was the only one who knew about the past months of fertility treatments. How perfect, that she was the only one who would know about the baby for now.

      She scooped up the closest pregnancy test and rushed to the front door then yanked it open.

      “Look. Just look! I did it! I’m pregnant!”

      As soon as she said the last word, a long, drawn-out affair that seemed to take about a dozen extra syllables, shock drenched her like a January rain.

      The person at her door wasn’t her best friend, the woman she considered the closest thing she had to a sister.

      The person at her door was a man, lean and distinguished and gorgeous.

      A man she hadn’t seen in nearly twenty years—and had tried her best to forget.

      All the blood seemed to leave her head to pool somewhere in the vicinity of her favorite pair of Birkenstocks and she had to grip the door frame with her free hand to keep from toppling over.

      “Ed!” she exclaimed.

      “Um, congratulations,” he said at the same moment, looking as bemused as any man would under the circumstances.

      She was still holding the pregnancy test, she realized on some appalled level. But she couldn’t think about that now. Not when Ed Clayton, the love of her life, had suddenly appeared out of the freaking blue.

      “Ed!” she said again. She couldn’t seem to make her brain connect to her voice to say anything else.

      “Hello, Stella.”

      This couldn’t be real. Maybe this was all some kind of bizarre dream, brought on by the Italian food she and the girls had the night before. No. The pregnancy tests were certainly real.

      She couldn’t seem to catch hold of her wildly scrambling thoughts. Was this the pregnancy brain she’d read about, where cheerful, perky bloggers nearly half her age warned that her synapses would turn into a jumbled mess?

      Or was this simply a normal reaction to the bizarre confluence of events, suddenly discovering the only man she had ever loved on her doorstep the very moment she learned she was going to be a single mother in approximately eight months and change?

      “May I...come in?” He sounded real enough, with a wary hesitance in his voice. She couldn’t really blame him for that. The last time she had spoken to the man, she had made it more than clear she had no use for him and never wanted to see him again.

      The blatant lie of her words couldn’t be more obvious as she all but drank in the sight of him.

      He had aged, of course, with lines at the corners of his eyes and a little sprinkling of gray in his brown hair. She found it totally unfair that those things only added to his appeal.

      “Ed. Wh-what are you doing here?”

      He gestured to the pregnancy stick in her hand. “I don’t think I’m quite the person you were expecting.”

      “How could I possibly have been expecting you when I haven’t seen or heard from you in years?”

      “I’ve obviously come at a bad time. I can come back later. You probably need to call someone else besides me to tell them the news. Your...husband? Boyfriend? Significant other?”

      She obviously didn’t have any of those things, which was why she had to be artificially inseminated.

      “I СКАЧАТЬ