The Black Sheep’s Baby

into the cradle of his arm, he pushed away from the counter. No one said a word when he moved toward the door.

Halfway there, though, he turned. Again, he felt as if he had no choice as he softly said, “Tell me something, Devon. How can you do this? To Emily. After-”

“What?” She’d gone wary and still again, just like before. “After what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He took a breath, then shook his head. No. He couldn’t do it, couldn’t say it, not with his parents-his mom- sitting right there. Instead, he smiled a hard little smile. “Susan used to say she had nobody-you know that? Nobody who cared a damn about her. Nobody in this world, that’s how she put it. That includes you, doesn’t it? You said, you imagine she probably thought she was being mistreated. Don’t you know what was going on in that house? Where were you when your sister needed you?”

It was cruel, and he knew it. It wasn’t like him; he knew that, too. He felt the weight of his mother’s reproachful glare and fortified himself against it, bracing himself to meet instead that other pair of eyes…green-fire eyes.

There was no flinching this time; she lifted her chin and those eyes stared back into his. “I was away-in law school-when Susan left. I’d have been there for her, if I’d known-”

“Yeah, keep telling yourself that,” Eric said softly. He turned and left them there.

His going left a void that wasn’t quite silence. To Devon it felt like a sort of hum, a current of tension and distress that was almost audible.

She heard Lucy exclaim, “I don’t know what’s happened to him, I swear,” and probably would have gone after her son then and there if her husband hadn’t tightened his hand on hers and held her where she was-a tiny, private gesture. She also saw the tight, shiny look of worry on Lucy’s face, the tense and skittery way she sat, like a little brown bird perched on a fence, half a heartbeat away from flight.

“How ’bout some of that coffee you made? Sure smells good.” Mike’s gaze, thoughtfully appraising, rested for a long moment on Devon, and she felt a curious tickle of unease. She couldn’t have explained why; his eyes held only kindness and compassion.

They’ve seen a lot, those eyes. They understand too much.

“I’ll get it,” said Devon, and was surprised when her voice came out sounding as rusty as Lucy’s. “How do you take it?”

“Black is fine.”

“Lucy?”

“What? Oh-yes…black for me, too.”

Devon busied herself with the cups, and it didn’t seem strange to her that she, the guest, was serving coffee to her host and hostess. She was bemused and dismayed, though, to find that she felt shaky and nervous doing it.

I’m probably just hungry, she told herself as she bit savagely into cold leathery toast.

Chewing stolidly, she thought about the scene that had just played itself out in the predawn quiet of a farmhouse kitchen…her first meeting with the Opposition. Her thoughts weren’t happy ones. She hadn’t handled it well. She’d allowed herself to be blindsided, and that never happened. When she thought about why it had happened, all she could come up with was an appalling list of mistakes. Her mistakes. Devon hadn’t gotten to be where she was-that is, one of the most respected and feared young attorneys in Los Angeles-by making mistakes.

Mistake number one, she’d failed to prepare herself. So far, the information she’d been able to assemble on Eric Lanagan was proving to be woefully inadequate. Most of what she knew was in the form of statistics gleaned from Emily’s birth certificate: age, race, state of birth. From that, with the help of her firm’s private investigators and a judge’s court order, she’d been able to put a trace on his credit cards. Finding him, tracking him down-that had been the easy part. Finding out who he was-that was where she’d slipped up.

Mistake number two, she’d fallen victim to her own preconceived notion of what kind of person Eric Lanagan was.

Which had led directly to Mistake number three, seriously underestimating her opponent.

And why not? she furiously asked herself. Twenty-eight-year-old man with no employer of record befriends nineteen-year-old homeless woman and gets her pregnant-that sure said Punk-Sleazebag-Loser loud and clear to her! Didn’t it?

She’d come prepared to despise Eric Lanagan and to fight him tooth and nail on behalf of her parents for custody of her sister’s child. But she hadn’t expected this. Hadn’t expected him to have parents who would unhesitatingly take her in in the middle of a blizzard and give her a bed and pajamas and an old flannel bathrobe that smelled of sunshine. She hadn’t expected Eric Lanagan to have such an interesting and compassionate face, and eyes-like his father’s, she was startled to realize-that gave the impression they’d seen way too much of the world’s failures and cruelties.

And, she thought with a curious little flutter high up under her ribs, it was damn hard to despise a man while he was holding a tiny baby in his arms, tenderly, expertly feeding, burping and then rocking her to sleep.

“So-you live in Los Angeles, then?”

Devon jerked her gaze and her attention back to the two people who were sitting at the table, sipping coffee and watching her-one warily, the other with that quiet curiosity she found so unnerving. She chewed toast, drank coffee, swallowed.

“That’s right-downtown L.A., actually.” It was Mike who’d asked, but she addressed her reply to Lucy as well. And all the while she was telling the Lanagans about her high-rise corner condo-from one side of which, on a clear day, she could see the Pacific Ocean, and from the other, snow-capped mountain peaks-making bright, tension- easing conversation, with another part of her mind she was gnawing and nibbling at the problem-the enigma-of their son, like a dog with a thorn in its paw.

I need to find out more. I have to get to know him.

Footsteps thumped on the stairs, making no effort to be stealthy. Devon’s heart lurched, and so did her hand; she swore under her breath as hot coffee slopped onto the front of the flannel bathrobe. Again Lucy started to get up, and again Mike held her where she was. The footsteps clumped down the hallway; a bulky shape flashed past the service room, past the open kitchen doorway. The door to the back porch opened, then banged shut. A moment later the outer door did, too. Three pairs of eyes jerked toward the windows, as if pulled by the same string.

“Chore time,” Lucy announced. And this time when she pushed back her chair, her husband didn’t try to stop her.

The windows were filled now with a swirling, milky light. Dawn had come, and no one had noticed.

Devon retreated to her room while around her the farmhouse awoke to the routines of a snowy winter morning. Footsteps clumped up and down stairs, doors banged, buckets rattled-activity as incomprehensible to Devon as some mysterious ritual performed by aliens. She wished she could be interested in, or at least curious about what was going on. When, after all, was she ever again likely to find herself on a farm? But all she felt was frustrated. Thwarted. Boxed in. She had things to do, important things. But right now none of those objectives seemed achievable. Without the means to accomplish her purpose, without the ability to change her circumstances, she felt powerless-and Devon O’Rourke did not like feeling powerless.

She’d have to call her office, at least-let them know what had happened. Still too early for that, though; the offices in L.A. wouldn’t be open for hours. Even if she’d had her cell phone with her, which she didn’t. What had she been thinking of, to leave it in the car? And where, exactly, was the car?

Pacing to the windows did nothing to soothe her restlessness. In fact, it made her feel even more as if she’d been shut into a box-all she could see out there was a wall of swirling white. Now and then the snow thinned enough to unveil shadowy shapes-nearby, the gnarled skeletons of great oak trees, and farther away, the hulking mass of a huge old barn, the kind she’d heretofore seen only on the pages of calendars and in children’s picture books. She couldn’t see any sign of the rented Lincoln Town Car complete with GPS-though she knew it had to be out there, somewhere, under all that snow. She hoped it wasn’t in the road, at least. She hoped it wasn’t-though she suspected it might be-in a ditch.

Someone, a bulky and indistinguishable shape in a parka, was crossing the snowy swath between the house