He’d given her an hour since the second knock. In case she was in the bathtub.
But even if she were, he’d never known her to soak in bubbles that long. Because she got too pruny, she’d always said.
He knocked more sharply, trying to curtail the gnawing inside him. “Laurel.”
Still nothing. When he pressed his ear against the connecting door, the only thing he could hear was the mumbling drone of the television.
He shouldn’t have left her alone. He should have sucked it up and given some excuse about needing to share a room again, no matter how many more sleepless nights he added onto his life as a result.
He palmed his room key and left the room. He went to her door and pounded to no avail, then wheeled around and strode down the hall and around the corner, nearly plowing into the housekeeping cart that sat there.
Seizing the opportunity, he glanced into the room next to the cart and spotted the uniformed girl inside.
“Excuse me.” When she looked up with a start from the pillow she was fluffing, he managed a friendly smile. “Sorry to startle you.” He jerked his head. “I locked myself out of my room. You wouldn’t by chance be able to let me in?”
She was shaking her head before he even finished. “You’ll have to go to registration to get another key.”
One part of him was glad she wasn’t going to be so easily talked into opening up a guest room. But another part was aggravated. All he wanted to do was verify in the most expedient way possible whether Laurel was in her room.
If she were, and was refusing to respond for some reason, that was problem enough. If she weren’t, then he needed to find her. He wasn’t going to let her disappear on him again.
“Look.” He offered a chagrined laugh. “You don’t even have to let me in. Just look inside and tell me—” he thought fast “—if I left my cell phone sitting on the bed.”
She returned to the heavily loaded cart and reached up to the top of the folded towels stacked higher than her head and when she did, he realized she was pregnant.
He raised his hand, oath-like. “I’ll stand at the end of the hall in full view of the security cameras. It’s just—well, the thing is my girlfriend went into labor a few hours ago in Texas and I haven’t been thinking straight since.” He spread his palms. “I just want to know if the phone’s there or if I forgot it at the meeting I was at. She’ll be calling me, you know?” He waited a beat. “Please?”
Her lips compressed. But he could tell by the way her shoulders softened that she was going to do it even before she nodded.
“Room four-three-two,” he told her quickly.
She tucked her hands into the patch pockets of her uniform tunic and quickly headed around the corner.
He followed until he stood in the middle of the adjoining corridors where experience told him the security camera would be focused. When she reached the end of the hallway and glanced back at him once more, he spread his hands. “Staying right here,” he promised.
She knocked on Laurel’s door, waited a moment for some response and then used her passkey to enter. She emerged a second later, pulling the door closed behind her. She shook her head at him as she approached.
“No phone on the bed,” she told him.
And obviously no Laurel, either, he concluded. “Thanks.” He took the corner in a hurry, aiming for the elevator. The maid headed the same way, pushing the cumbersome cart.
Laurel had no money. No identification. If she left the hotel, how far could she get?
His gut churned with the possibilities, and none of them was good.
He’d go straight to the security office. He’d paid for both rooms. The same security cameras that might have captured Laurel leaving the hotel were the ones that had seen them entering together. He figured his chances were about even whether they’d be helpful to him.
“Is it your first?”
The housekeeper’s question interrupted the plan he was mapping out inside his head and he glanced back at her.
He thought of Linus. The baby who had Adam’s bone marrow flowing in his system. Who also had Adam’s DNA at his core. The baby he’d never even held or touched.
“Yeah.” His voice sounded gruff.
“Everything’ll be fine,” she told him kindly, coming abreast with him. She patted the small mound at her waist. “My second.”
“Congratulations.” He could see the elevator now. Right beside a door with the word Housekeeping printed on a small oval plaque.
“It ought to get easier.” She sounded breathless. “But my husband is as much a wreck this time as he was the first.”
Adam hadn’t had an opportunity to be a wreck the first time. He knew there wouldn’t be an opportunity to be a wreck the second time, either.
He heard the soft ping of an arriving elevator. “Are you headed there?” He pointed to the Housekeeping door.
“Yes.”
He closed his hand over the cart.
“Sir, there’s no need—”
“I owe you.” He pushed the cart close enough to the door that all she’d have to do was nudge it through once she’d unlocked it. “Thanks for checking the room,” he told her just as the elevator doors began sliding open.
A slender virago shot out of the car before he reached it, and Laurel nearly skidded to a halt on the carpet when she spotted him. “You!”
That first jolt of pure relief he felt nosedived into abject alarm. Her features were twisted as she hovered there on the balls of her smiley-faced tennis shoes. He started to reach for her. “Laurel, sweetheart, what’s—”
She suddenly launched herself at him and shoved him so hard, he nearly fell back.
He heard the housekeeper’s gasp.
“Why didn’t you tell me!” Laurel’s voice was high. Thick with tears. She raised her hands again and he caught
