Loe raamatut: «Surprise, Doc! You're A Daddy!»

Chapter One

Meg Avery twisted in her seat to peek at the baby in the back seat. Cradled in her carrier, tiny Dana slept like an angel.

“Has she grown any more toes in the thirty seconds since the last time you checked?” teased her husband Joe from behind the wheel.

Reassured, Meg settled into place. “Babies can get tangled up, or scared or—well, who knows?” Of course, that hadn’t happened. If it did, she had a feeling Joe would know about it before she did.

He had formed an almost mystical bond with their daughter from the moment of her birth a month ago. Maybe it was because, after Meg suffered pains two weeks early and delayed going to the hospital because she thought it was false labor, Joe had ended up delivering Dana himself.

A doctor couldn’t have done a better job, the paramedics said when they arrived. Ever since, Joe had been the first one to get up and attend to Dana during the night and whenever he was home.

Meg turned her attention to the freeway ahead of her. Through the windshield of her aging sedan, it unrolled for miles as they bypassed downtown Los Angeles, heading north toward her father’s home in Santa Barbara.

Although her dad had had a drinking problem in the past, he was sober now, working as a shoe store manager and eager to meet his first grandchild. Meg looked forward to introducing him to Dana.

She turned around and checked on the baby again. Despite earlier efforts to tame them, wisps of red hair stuck up at odd angles.

“You don’t have to keep checking. There’s no need to worry as long as you follow a few simple precautions,” Joe said, speaking in a formal manner that always puzzled her. For a restaurant worker who, like Meg, had never finished high school, he sometimes talked pretty fancy.

“How would you know? You never had a baby before,” she pointed out.

“I’m not sure how I know.” He rubbed his forehead as if it hurt.

“You’re not getting another headache, are you?” Even though her husband seemed healthy, his recurring headaches made Meg worry that he hadn’t fully recovered from his near fatal accident eighteen months ago. “I can drive if you like.”

“I’m fine, but we are a little low on gas,” Joe said. “I’ll pull over at the next off-ramp.”

“Good idea.” She could rely on Joe to keep track of the gas level the same way he kept track of their finances and every other aspect of their lives. She couldn’t understand how he’d once had a reputation for being irresponsible.

While he watched for an exit sign, Meg indulged herself in admiring the man to whom she’d been married for an incredibly happy year.

From the side, she studied his well-shaped nose and strong jaw. The morning light transformed his blond hair into spun gold and, when he turned his head to smile at her, his deep green eyes glowed like emeralds.

Joe Avery would make a perfect prince in a fairy tale. To Meg, that’s exactly what he was.

Handsome strangers didn’t often wander into Mercy Canyon, the small southern California town where she’d lived most of her life. The few who did paid no attention to waitress Meg O’Flaherty, with her bushy reddish-brown hair and freckled cheeks.

Joe hadn’t had much choice, she reflected with a glint of humor.

He’d come west from Franklin, Tennessee, to take a job he’d arranged on the Internet at the Back Door Cafe, where Meg worked. En route, he’d stopped at the beach town of Oceanside, twenty miles away.

While fishing from the pier, he’d fallen off and bashed his head. Lifeguards had searched for half an hour until, some distance away, they found him thrashing in the surf.

It was a good thing he’d left his wallet on the pier, because he didn’t remember who he was. In his motel room, police had found the phone number of Meg’s boss, Sam Hartman, who’d collected Joe and brought him to Mercy Canyon.

Meg had fallen for Joe on sight and nursed him to health. He’d never regained his memory, although she’d learned plenty about him when she contacted a cousin of his in Tennessee.

She learned that, in the past, Joe had drifted from one job to another, impulsively leaving Tennessee for a post that didn’t pay any more than he was already earning. The police suggested he might have been drinking before he tumbled off the pier.

Meg didn’t care. She knew from personal observation that her Joe Avery was rock-solid. Maybe, she joked to her friends, a blow to the head wasn’t always a bad thing.

Tender and funny and amazingly sexy, Joe had claimed her heart and given her his. After surviving a rough childhood during which she and her younger brother Timmy were shuffled in and out of foster homes, Meg couldn’t believe her luck. Regardless of what anyone else might believe, she trusted her husband completely.

He pulled off the freeway and down a ramp to a service station. In the back seat, Dana began fussing.

“She needs a diaper change,” Joe said, halting at a gas pump.

“I’ll do it.” Meg knew her husband was as good at changing diapers as she was, but he needed to fill the tank. “I’ll take her inside. This chain of gas stations has great baby facilities.”

“Don’t spend too much time. I hate having you out of my sight in a strange place.” Joe wasn’t a controlling person but he’d told her that, since his accident, he felt life was precarious.

“We’ll be quick.” Meg swung out of the car, grabbed the diaper bag and removed Dana from her infant seat.

She took one last, appreciative glance at her husband as he stood at the pump. His muscular build reminded her that he was, indeed, her protector as well as her best friend.

Across the pavement, a red sports car pulled away from a pump. When it went by, the woman driver studied Joe with interest.

Look but don’t touch, Meg thought. That man belongs to me.

JOE’S HEART squeezed as his wife crossed toward the station’s mini-mart with their daughter on her shoulder. Those two people meant everything in the world to him.

He had no one else. Heck, he didn’t even remember the people he’d worked with back in Franklin. Maybe if he’d had some close family, they might have jogged his memory, but his parents had died a few years earlier and there were no siblings.

He wished someone could fill in the inexplicable gaps, the parts of himself that made no sense. When he delivered his daughter, he’d known exactly what to do, yet, when asked, his cousin back in Tennessee couldn’t remember him helping with a birth before.

Well, what difference did it make? He was happy being assistant manager of the Back Door Cafe and happy being married to a woman who laughed a lot, had the warmest heart in the world and drove him crazy in bed.

The automatic shutoff on the pump clicked, prompting Joe to remove the nozzle. He’d been so lost in thought that he hadn’t noticed two young men in baggy clothing walking toward him, he realized with a start.

Where had everyone else gone? Despite the freeway traffic roaring along nearby, the station was deserted. From out here, Joe couldn’t even see the attendant inside the mini-mart.

The men separated, one heading directly toward him and the other coming around the far side of the car. Please don’t let Meg come out of the station now, he thought with a spurt of alarm.

He would willingly give up his wallet and the car, too. Just so no harm came to his family.

“Can I help you?” Joe asked.

“Yeah.” The man closest to him pulled a gun from his gray jacket. “Get in the car.”

“Here’s the keys.” Joe held them out, along with his wallet.

“And leave you to yell your head off?” Gray Jacket swiped the wallet and waggled the gun. “Get in or I’ll shoot.”

Joe shifted uneasily, trying to figure out what to do.

“Now!”

His buddy, a stocky guy in a blue baseball cap, cut off escape in the other direction. Joe weighed dodging between the gas pumps, but if Meg emerged at the wrong moment, things could turn deadly. “Okay, okay.” He got into the driver’s seat. Blue Cap swung in beside him while Gray Jacket hopped in back, keeping the gun aimed at Joe’s head.

“Move it. Fast! South, toward L.A.”

The muzzle pressed into his neck. Joe rolled the car forward.

If only there were a way to leave a message for Meg. He hoped that at least someone had witnessed his abduction, so she would know he hadn’t run off.

His cousin in Tennessee had told her how unreliable he was. For all he knew, that might once have been true. But he would never leave Meg.

Blue Cap rifled through the glove compartment, cursing at finding nothing but maps, candy and baby wipes. The men grew angrier when they extracted only a small amount of cash from Joe’s wallet.

They were looking for drugs and drug money, he gathered. He hoped they would leave when they couldn’t find any.

It made him uneasy to realize how many miles were disappearing between him and Meg. Why didn’t the men let him pull over and get out?

As he drove, the Los Angeles freeway system began to seem familiar, which was strange considering that Joe hadn’t driven much around here before. Not as far as he knew, anyway.

Finally his captors ordered him to exit the freeway in a central city area full of boarded-up buildings covered with graffiti. Blue Cap and Gray Jacket muttered to each other. “Not here.” Although Gray Jacket spoke in a low voice, Joe’s hearing was keen. “Some place less public.”

“Naw. Around here they won’t notice the shots,” hissed Blue Cap.

They were going to kill him.

Joe’s gut tightened. Why would they want to shoot him? Because he could identify them for a crime that so far had done no serious harm? It seemed a ridiculous reason to take someone’s life, but these men obviously didn’t care.

He had to get away. Had to get back to Meg, to let her know how much he loved her.

At a yellow light, Joe halted sharply. While the two men were regaining their balance, he thrust open the door and leaped out.

“Hey!” Gray Jacket started to roll down his window. About to run across the street, Joe had to scramble back as a truck sped toward him.

Expecting to hear the crack of a bullet at any moment, he zigzagged around the front of the car. Blue Cap grabbed the wheel and hit the gas, coming after him.

Joe flung himself over the curb a split second before the car reached it, but he wasn’t safe yet. As he ducked into an alley, he heard a gunshot.

Desperately, he flung himself to one side. His foot connected with a slippery patch of sidewalk, some kind of spilled food, and he couldn’t check his fall.

Flailing in a desperate attempt to regain control, Joe twisted and toppled off balance. For a suspended moment, he registered the fact that his skull was about to hit the corner of a building.

Blinding pain shot through his head. Vaguely, Joe heard a distant siren and the screech of tires as the carjackers fled. Then darkness closed in.

“EVEN WITH the recent advances in imaging technology, there’s still a lot we don’t know about brain damage,” a voice said somewhere in the stratosphere.

A throbbing ache kept his eyes shut. He inhaled the scent of antiseptic and heard a familiar blur of noises: doctors being paged on an intercom, carts jouncing out in a hallway.

“This fresh injury on top of the old one, how is it going to affect his memory?” asked a woman’s dry voice.

He recognized the sound, but he couldn’t place her. A faint image came into his mind of a rounded face with a charming touch of freckles.

Someone leaned over him. He squinted up through the harsh light.

The face belonged to a woman in her sixties, with wavy silver hair and hazel eyes. Instinctively, his mouth formed the name, “Mom.”

His parents were dead. That’s what people said in…where?

He tried to recapture the name of the town, or the face he’d visualized earlier. It seemed terribly important, but all he could see was his mother’s startled expression.

“He’s awake!” she cried. “Hugh’s awake!”

Hugh. He rose on a warm cloud of relief. Of course, his name was Hugh, and he’d just come out of an immense black hole. The last thing he remembered was struggling to breathe through shattering waves of cold water.

He’d been sailing with his friend Rick when the boat overturned in the wake of a cabin cruiser. “How’s Rick?” Hugh asked thickly.

“Oh, thank God!” his mother cried. “He can speak!” She squeezed his hand. “We’ll talk about Rick later.”

Something was wrong, he gathered, but couldn’t figure out what. Was he worried about Rick or something else?

Impossible to concentrate.

Whatever was nagging at him, he couldn’t deal with it now, and he didn’t have to. He was safe, in a place where he belonged.

After all, where should a doctor feel more at home than in a hospital?

HOURS LATER, Meg sat drinking tea across the table from her father in his Santa Barbara home. She was still trembling with disbelief.

The events of the day had passed in a nightmarish glare of unreality. Coming out of the gas station to find no sign of her husband. Calling the police, answering endless questions, listening to speculation about how and why Joe had disappeared.

“Somebody must have forced him,” she kept saying, but no witnesses could be found. Zack O’Flaherty had driven down when she called and waited for her, clumsily offering to help with Dana, tactfully refraining from voicing the suspicions Meg knew he must feel. She would always be grateful that, at this time of need, her father had come through for her.

The phone rang, startling her so badly she spilled tea on the table.

“I’ll get it.” With his thin face and pouchy eyes, Zack looked older than his forty-five years, but he walked to the phone with a steady gait.

Meg couldn’t bring herself to look at Dana, sleeping nearby in a crib borrowed from a neighbor. What if the police had found Joe’s body? What if her little girl had to grow up without a father?

“Yes, I see. Where—? Was there any sign—? I understand. Thank you, officer.” Gently, Zack put down the phone.

He isn’t dead. If he were, Dad would have asked about claiming the body. Meg managed to breathe again.

“They found your car at a train depot in Los Angeles.” Her father resumed his seat across from her. “It was ransacked, but that might have happened after it was abandoned.”

“A train depot?” she repeated, trying to derive some useful information from this development.

“They didn’t find any blood in the car or nearby,” Zack went on. “And no bodies…no injured men have been reported near freeways. For now, Joe’s classified as a missing person.”

“He was kidnapped!” Meg said.

“I don’t doubt it, honey.” Her father covered her hand with his. “He had no reason to run off. Even if he suffered some kind of panic attack, he’ll come back.”

“He didn’t leave of his own free will,” she said. “I know that, Dad.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

He couldn’t be sure, though, Meg thought. No one could, except her, because no one else knew Joe so well.

A gurgle from the crib drew her attention, and she walked over to monitor the baby. Her daughter wiggled beneath the blanket, then settled back with a blissful sigh.

Joe wouldn’t leave her and Dana. Wherever he was, whatever had happened to him, his connection to his wife and daughter would bring him home.

Meg would never stop searching for her husband or believing in him. No matter how long it took.