Baby In The Making. Elizabeth Bevarly

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      Maybe the wine had affected her more than he thought. Probably, he ought to just drop it and pay her for his shirt. Definitely, he should be getting the hell out of there.

      Instead he heard himself ask, “Do you want to talk about it?”

      At that, she finally pulled her gaze from the floor and met his squarely...for all of a nanosecond. Then she lifted both hands to cover her beautiful silver-gray eyes. Then her lips began to tremble. Then she sniffled. Twice. And that was when Yeager knew he was in trouble. Because Hannah crying was way worse than Hannah panicking. Panic eventually subsided. But sadness... Sadness could go on forever. No one knew that better than he did.

      She didn’t start crying, though. Not really. After a moment she wiped both eyes with the backs of her hands and dropped them to hug herself tight. But that gesture just made her look even more lost. Especially since her eyes were still damp. Something in Yeager’s chest twisted tight at seeing her this way. He had no idea why. He barely knew her. He just hated seeing anyone this distraught.

      “Holy crap, do I want to talk about it,” she said softly. “I just don’t have anyone to talk about it with.”

      That should have been his cue to get out while he still had the chance. The last thing he had time for—hell, the last thing he wanted—was to listen to someone whose last name he didn’t even know talk about her life-altering problems. He should be heading for the front door stat. And he would. Any minute now. Any second now. In five, four, three, two...

      “Give me one minute to change my shirt,” he told her, wondering what the hell had possessed him. “Then you can tell me about it.”

      * * *

      While Yeager changed his shirt, Hannah moved to the love seat, perching herself on the very edge of the cushion and wondering what just happened. One minute, she’d been double-checking the fit of his shirt and had been almost—almost—able to forget, if only for a moment, everything she’d learned today from Gus Fiver. The next minute, Yeager had been offering a sympathetic shoulder to cry on.

      Not that she would cry on him. Well, probably not. She didn’t want to ruin his shirt. But she appreciated his offer to hang around for a little while. She hadn’t felt more alone in her life than she had over the last few hours.

      She’d taken Gus Fiver’s advice to close Cathcart and Quinn early, then had sat with him in the empty shop for nearly an hour as he’d given her all the specifics about her situation. A situation that included the most stunning good news/bad news scenario she’d ever heard. Since then she’d been here in her apartment, combing the internet for information about her newly discovered family and mulling everything she’d learned, in the hope that it would help her make sense of the choice she had to make. Maybe someone like Yeager, who didn’t have any personal involvement, would have a clearer perspective and some decent advice.

      She watched as he changed his shirt, doing her best not to stare at the cords of muscle and sinew roping his arms, shoulders and torso. But in an apartment the size of hers, there wasn’t much else to stare at. Then again, even if she’d had the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel surrounding her, it would still be Yeager that drew her eye. So she busied herself with filling her wineglass a third time, since the two glasses she’d already consumed had done nothing to take the edge off.

      “You want a glass of wine?” she asked Yeager, belatedly realizing how negligent a hostess she’d been.

      Also belatedly, she remembered she’d picked up the wine at Duane Reade on her way home from work. She reread the label as she placed it back on the table. Chateau Yvette claimed to be a “wine product” that paired well with pizza and beef stew. It probably wasn’t a brand Yeager normally bought for himself. But it was too late to retract the offer now.

      “Yeah, that’d be great,” he said as he finished buttoning his shirt.

      She retrieved another glass from the kitchen and poured the wine. By then, Yeager had draped the plastic back over his new shirt and was sitting on the love seat—taking up most of it. So much so that his thigh aligned with hers when she sat and handed him his glass. She enjoyed another healthy swig from her own and grimaced. She honestly hadn’t realized until then how, uh, not-particularly-good it was. Probably because her head had been too full of Omigod, omigod, omigod, what am I going to do?

      “So what’s up?” he asked.

      She inhaled a deep breath and released it slowly. It still came out shaky and uneven. Not surprising, since shaky and uneven was how she’d been feeling since Gus Fiver had dropped his Chandler Linden bombshell. There was nothing like the prospect of inheriting billions of dollars to send a person’s pulse and brain synapses into overdrive.

      If Hannah actually inherited it.

      She took another breath and this time when she released it, it was a little less ragged. “Have you heard of a law firm called Tarrant, Fiver and Twigg?” she asked.

      Yeager nodded. “Yeah. They’re pretty high-profile. A lot of old money—big money—clients.”

      “Well, I had a meeting with one of their partners this afternoon.”

      Yeager couldn’t quite hide his surprise that someone like her would be in touch with such a financial powerhouse, though he was obviously trying to. Hannah appreciated his attempt to be polite, but it was unnecessary. She wasn’t bothered by being working class, nor was she ashamed of her upbringing. Even if she didn’t talk freely about her past, she’d never tried to hide it, and she wasn’t apologetic about the way she lived now. She’d done pretty well for herself and lived the best life she could. She was proud of that.

      Still, she replied, “I know. They’re not exactly my social stratum. But I didn’t contact them. They contacted me.”

      “About?” he asked.

      “About the fact that I’m apparently New York’s equivalent to the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia.”

      Now Yeager looked puzzled. So she did her best to explain. Except she ended up not so much explaining as just pouring out her guts into his lap.

      Without naming names, and glossing over many of the details, she told him about her discovery that she’d been born to a family she never knew she had in a town she would have sworn she’d never visited. She told him about her father’s addiction and abuse and about her mother’s custodial kidnapping of her. She told him about their false identities and their move from Scarsdale to Staten Island. She told him about her mother’s death when she was three and her entry into the foster care system, where she’d spent the next fifteen years. And she told him about how, in a matter of minutes today, she went from living the ordinary life of a seamstress to becoming one of those long-lost heirs to a fortune who seemed only to exist in over-the-top fiction.

      Through it all, Yeager said not a word. When she finally paused—not that she was finished talking by a long shot, because there was still so much more to tell him—he only studied her in silence. Then he lifted the glass of wine he had been holding through her entire story and, in one long quaff, drained it.

      And then he grimaced, too. Hard. “That,” he finally said, “was unbelievable.”

      “I know,” Hannah told him. “But it’s all true.”

      He shook his head. “No, I mean the wine. It was unbelievably bad.”

      “Oh.”

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