She groaned, grabbing the back of his head again, his hair easy to clench in her fist, growling into his ear, “Do it! Fuck me!”
Rob moaned at the sound of the words from her mouth and he kissed her, plunging deep. Leah sighed in relief, wrapping her long, dancer’s legs around his hips, her heels digging into his back, driving him in deeper.
“Do it to me!” She begged him, feeling each thrust deep in her belly as he drove her across the sheets on the bed. “Yes! Fuck me! Oh like that! Yes, yes, yes!”
She felt him begin to slow and knew he was close, too close. Reaching her hand down between their bellies, she began to rub her sex, faster and faster. Rob paused to watch her, his eyes growing dark with lust as he watched her pleasure herself.
“Come for me,” he whispered, his gaze moving up to her face, their eyes locking. “Now, sweetheart. Now. Come right now.”
“Now!” Leah gasped, taking herself there, her muscles clamping around him again and again as she climaxed, head thrown back, fingers making fast, furious circles at the top of her throbbing cleft.
“Oh! Now!” Rob roared, pulling back and thrusting one time, just once, the rhythmic, telltale pulse of his orgasm chasing hers as he exploded inside of her.
Leah didn’t let him go. She kept him right there, still inside of her, cradling him against her breasts-they were fuller now too-and pulling the sheet over their sweaty bodies.
“What an awful day,” Leah said with a sigh, watching the snow fall through the skylight.
Rob chuckled. “Merry Christmas, huh?”
“Well, it started out well,” Leah mused, looking at the ring on her finger. She kissed the top of his head. “And it ended well. It was the middle part that was awful.”
He raised his head to look at her. “I have some news that might cheer you up.”
“What?”
“There’s good news and bad news,” he said cautiously.
She made a face. “What’s the good news?”
“I found a lawyer who says he can get baby Grace back.”
“Oh Rob!” She threw her arms around his neck, kissing his cheek. Then she pulled back, frowning. “Wait, what’s the bad news?”
“The bad news…” He cleared his throat. “Well, the bad news is…it’s Donald Highbrow.”
Leah blinked at him, confused, and then she finally recognized the name. “Donald Highbrow? The lawyer my mother works for?”
“He’s the best, Leah,” Rob explained. “He specializes in adoption law. And there aren’t many lawyers who do.”
“Oh I don’t care.” She kissed him again, too thrilled at the thought of getting her baby back. Her arms ached, they literally ached, to hold her. And poor Rob-he’d never gotten the chance to hold her at all. Every day that went by was a day they could never get back.
“I love you, Leah,” he whispered, nuzzling his face in her hair, breathing in the scent of her. “I would do anything to make you happy.”
“You do,” she whispered back. “You do.”
When Leah was a little girl, she couldn’t pronounce the name of the man her mother worked for, so she called him Mr. Eyebrows-instead of Mr. Highbrow-and the nickname had stuck in her head ever since. She couldn’t help thinking it, even if she didn’t call him that, when the lawyer shook hands with Rob across the table before they all sat down.
Seeing her mother sitting at her desk, answering the phone, had been a shock to Leah’s system, but Rob had assured her, if anyone could get Grace back, it was Donald Highbrow, so she was willing to risk the awkward silence, sitting in the dark paneled waiting room, listening to the clack of her mother’s typewriter, occasionally interrupted by the phone.
When her mother announced, “He’ll see you now,” Leah and Rob stood together, holding hands, and Leah dared her mother with her eyes to say something, but she didn’t. Patty Wendt just waved them into another dark paneled room with a conference table in the middle surrounded by big leather upholstered chairs. Clearly, after the fiasco on Christmas, her mother had received the message loud and clear-Leah was nowhere near ready to “kiss and make up.”
Especially since she fully believed her mother had something to do with Grace’s kidnapping, even if she couldn’t prove it. Leah insisted on calling it a kidnapping, although everyone from her own mother to Erica to the doctor who had written her a prescription for sleeping pills had tried to dissuade her, even giving her helpful, alternative phrases like “forced-adoption” and “disappearance” and her favorite and her mother’s-”the mixup.”
“Leah, you’re looking well.” Donald smiled as reached into the inside pocket of his suit coat, pulling out a Bic ballpoint pen and slapping a yellow legal pad onto the desk.
Leah shrugged, not knowing what to say to that, considering the last time she’d seen him, she had been placed in four-point restraints and had so many sedatives and various other drugs in her system, she saw three of him walking into the hospital room, with three of her mother bringing up the rear.
“As I told you, we’ve fully cooperated with law enforcement, but they haven’t been much help,” Rob began, looking at Leah and squeezing her hand in reassurance.
Donald snorted, scribbling on his notepad. “I’m not surprised.”
“Neither am I,” Rob agreed with a sigh. “That’s why I hired a private investigator immediately, but so far, he’s been unable to turn up anything.”
“Nothing at all?”
Rob shook his head sadly. “It’s like she disappeared off the face of the earth.”
“Well, that’s unlikely.” Donald wrote something else down, frowning. “But if Leah’s recount of the story is accurate, and she really was coerced or forced into signing the adoption papers-”
“She tricked me!”
“Yes, well, if that’s the case, the social worker will have gone out of her way to put Grace somewhere inaccessible.”
“Far away?”
“Probably,” Donald agreed. “But that doesn’t mean we won’t get her back. It just means that private investigators aren’t going to be much help. We’re going to have to do this legally.”
Rob nodded. “That’s why we’re here.”
“Leah, I know it’s painful, but I want you to tell me again what happened. Everything you can remember about the day Grace was… the day she was-”
“Kidnapped.” Leah reached for a glass and the water pitcher sitting in the middle of the table, pouring and then sipping, giving herself time and the courage to go back to that day. It had only been a little over two weeks- two weeks! — but it felt like a lifetime.
Then Leah began to speak, slowly at first, then faster as the memories flooded in. She told him the facts-the social worker, a woman all the girls at Magdalene House had nicknamed “the ghoul,” had come in for her final visit that morning at the hospital. Leah had decided to keep her baby. She’d told the ghoul this in no uncertain terms, and Leah had naively believed the social worker had accepted this decision. Leah’s mother was due to come pick them up-Leah’s plan was to get on a bus to New York with her baby and start a new life.
That plan had come crashing down around her head, simply because she had been too naive to believe the social worker would do something so underhanded, so utterly heinous.
Leah told him the social worker had presented her with hospital discharge papers and asked her to sign them. She had been distracted, getting Grace ready to go, waiting for her mother to arrive, and she’d signed them without thinking after the ghoul told her what they were.
And that’s when all hell broke loose.
Leah remembered it only vaguely, even now. The sudden loss of her baby, the way Joan Goulden had lifted her right from her bassinette and walked out with her, the mass of doctors and nurses who had descended on Leah like a swarm of locusts straight out of the Bible, like they’d all just been waiting for that very moment. It was a well-orchestrated dance, all the moves pre-choreographed, steps those doctors and nurses had taken a hundred, a thousand times, restraining Leah and preventing her from running after the woman who had stolen her baby.
