The Millionaire and the Pregnant Pauper Read online

  She tucked a finger in the pocket of his tuxedo jacket and tugged him in the direction she’d come. “A man in a tux,” she said in that earsplitting voice of hers. “They said she came in with a man in a tux.”

  Without stopping for breath, she pulled him around another corner to a carpeted corridor with wide doors on either side. Her voice fell suddenly to a whisper. “Sorry to interrupt your night, hon, but we’re headed for a labor-and-delivery room where you’re about to become a daddy.”

  Michael gulped. “But—”

  “But nothing.” With a whisk of her imaginary tail, Nurse Mouse had him out of the bright hall and into a dimly lit, soft-music-filled room.

  “Beth, look who I found!” she called in a cheery voice to the woman on the bed.

  The waif, looking warmer but as delicate as ever, didn’t respond. Michael noted that her hands, lying against the blanket, tightened into fists. Another contraction. He wanted to move—ahead, away, somewhere—but the mouse had a firm grip on his arm.

  A moment passed, then Beth’s hands relaxed and her head turned his way. A strand of her impossibly white-blond hair stuck damply against her cheek.

  He met her gaze and the back of Michael’s neck burned. What the hell was he doing here? Though a gown and a blanket covered her completely, something about the hospital setting and the medical paraphernalia made him feel as if he’d stomped all over her modesty.

  He smiled in apology. “I think I’d better—”

  Nurse Mouse dug her tiny claws into his forearm. “I’ve got to check on another patient, young man. You’re not going anywhere until I get back.” The door clicked like a pair of angry heels behind her.

  He smiled again at Beth and rolled his eyes in the direction of the door. “I think there’s been a misunderstanding.”

  Her answering smile was that wobbly one he’d tried to forget. “Sorry. I think they assume…”

  “Don’t worry about it.” He started backing toward the door. The waif was in good hands. Time to duck out of here and head back to his solitary New Year stakeout—what he should have done in the first place.

  Shoving his fingers in his pockets, he continued backing away. “I’ll just, uh—” His shoulders hit the door, and he pushed it open, ready to hightail it home.

  Then that prehistoric kill-or-be-killed instinct kicked in again and he looked over his shoulder down the hall. Nurse Mouse’s tiny strides were eating up the corridor carpet.

  In his direction.

  Michael stepped back in the room so quickly the swinging door slammed him in the butt. “I think she’s coming back.”

  “Oh dear—” But then Beth’s expression tensed. Two lines dug themselves between her brows.

  “Another one?” he asked unnecessarily.

  Without thinking, he backed up again, his shoulders bumping the door. “I’ll get the nurse.” Somebody—anybody—instead of him should be here.

  A barely perceptible shake of her head, but he caught it. He froze, his own hands tightening into fists as she rode the latest contraction.

  Once she could breathe deeply again, so could he. “You okay?”

  She nodded.

  “Time for me to go then.” It was. For Pete’s sake, the poor woman probably craved some privacy.

  She nodded again.

  But before he could move he saw another contraction come over her. It started somewhere about her knees—even beneath the blanket he could see her legs stiffen—and then it moved to her shoulders, and then he found himself beside her, closer than he’d been when he’d lifted her from the car.

  One of his hands enclosed one of her tight fists, and as her pain passed, the hand blossomed, its fingers relaxing into the warm hold of his.

  He realized he was sitting on the edge of the bed. The back of his neck heated again as he watched a bead of sweat roll from her temple down to her chin. He didn’t touch it, just watched it slide down the translucent skin of her face.

  “Are you okay?” Once she reassured him, he’d be able to leave her. “Tell me you’re okay.” He was whispering.

  And so was she. “I don’t want to admit this.” She licked her dry lips. They were as colorless as her face and made the turquoise blaze of her eyes even more unsettling. “So don’t tell anyone, will you? I’m just the tiniest bit scared.”

  No one left after that. People came in, though. More people. Lots of people. Some in stork stuff, the doctor in a long surgical-type robe, another someone wheeled in more equipment that Michael didn’t want to know the use for.

  At every new step he looked into Beth’s eyes. He waited for her to ask him to go, but she didn’t release him. Instead of making fists, she’d taken to riding through her labor with his hands as her lifeline and pretty soon he couldn’t feel his fingers.

  What the hey. Who needed fingers when a life was being born in this very room?

  He kept his gaze on Beth’s face. What was happening below her neck was between Beth and her doctor. What was happening between Michael and the waif was eye to eye. With his gaze, he tried telling her he believed in her, that he believed in her strength and in her female power.

  And while her body brought a child into the world, Michael watched Beth transform from woman to mother—and felt as humbled by the event as a twenty-seven-year-old man in his prime could.

  Finally, just after midnight, the room was silent, and nearly empty.

  Most of the equipment was gone. But the bed was there, and a clear plastic bassinet, and Michael, and Beth and this little red thing that looked like a peanut with arms and legs.

  Beth’s baby boy.

  Snoozing, the infant lay against her chest. Beth’s eyes were at half-mast, too. Michael had lost that eye-to-eye connection with her a while ago—the instant they’d placed her baby in her arms.

  Something about the vision of woman and child brought a smile to his face. And something about that smile brought a welling surge of self-protective bachelor instinct. “I gotta get out of here,” he said loudly.

  He slapped his palms against his thighs and jumped from the chair he’d dragged beside the bed. It was high time he left. “Um, uh, congratulations.”

  She mumbled something sleepily.

  Relieved, he started moving away. She was probably glad to get rid of him.

  As it should be. His place wasn’t beside her.

  The door swung open and Nurse Mouse breezed into the room. “Don’t go anywhere yet.”

  The commanding note in the nurse’s voice set Michael’s hackles rising again. “Look, I just gave this woman a ride to the hospital, okay? I’m not—”

  “Wait a minute.” Beth’s eyes popped open and her head turned quickly toward him. She seemed to see him for the first time.

  “Just one more thing.” Nurse Mouse was beaming now. “Just one most exciting thing.”

  Smiling mouse nurses made Michael even more nervous than militant mouse nurses. She’d left the door to Beth’s room open, and he saw a suspicious gathering of people there. “I don’t have time for anything more,” he protested.

  “Wait a minute,” Beth said again. She blinked, ignoring the fusses of Nurse Mouse who was adjusting her blanket and the baby’s knit cap. “Wentworth, right? You are one of the Wentworths?”

  He nodded, aware that the suspicious gathering was edging into the room. “We can talk about this some other—”

  “Give me a second.” One hand gently supporting the baby, Beth groped around and found the remote controls for the bed. With a little buzz, her head angled up. “I came to your house tonight to tell you something.”

  One of the smiling people approaching Beth’s bed wasn’t wearing a robe or scrubs and he was carrying a camera. A premonitory chill ran through Michael and a dying-fish queasiness began flopping around in his gut. “Some other time,” he told Beth hastily. “I gotta—”

  “Please. It’s important.”

  Years of training halted Michael midhustle. He might be a wary bachelor, but he was
a gentlemanly wary bachelor. Nurse Mouse used his good manners to push him back beside Beth’s bed. “What is it?” he asked.

  The man with the camera was aiming it at them. Nurse Mouse made a grand gesture in their direction. “This is the New Year’s Baby,” she announced. “The first baby born in Travis County this year!”

  “Oh, hell,” Michael muttered, suddenly knowing where this was heading. He stepped out of the camera’s range.

  “I know where Sabrina is,” Beth said.

  “What?” Michael was so surprised, he stepped back toward her. “Sabrina?” A bulb flashed.

  And that was how the front page of the Freemont Springs Daily Post came to look the way it did. Big headline: Freemont Springs Welcomes New Year’s Baby! Big picture, too. Infant wearing T-shirt proclaiming Property of Travis County Hospital. New mama looking wan but happy. And in the daddy’s place, stood Freemont Springs’s most uncatchable bachelor. Yes, there was Michael Wentworth, staring straight ahead, eyes wide, mouth flies-welcome-here open to display as Dr. Mercer Manning, D.D.S., pointed out proudly and often, some of his very best dental work.

  2

  Joy radiated through Beth Masterson as she held her child against her breast. She touched her lips to the warm, downy head of her newborn son and peeked out the window at the morning sunlight. “A new year is a new beginning,” she whispered to him.

  Alice Dobson, the woman who raised Beth, had said those words every January first and probably still did. Though Beth had only exchanged a couple of letters with Alice since leaving the Thurston Home for Girls five years ago, she’d never forgotten the wisdom she’d learned from the older woman. “And I won’t let you forget any of it, either,” she said to her brand-new little boy. “Anything I’ve ever learned I’ll pass along to you.”

  Which might not be saying a whole heck of a lot, she admitted to herself. In his sleep, her son’s brow furrowed. She smiled, and tried smoothing out the wrinkles with a gentle fingertip. “Don’t worry, baby. Mommy’s getting smarter every day.”

  She sighed, wishing she’d been a little smarter months ago. Maybe then she’d have realized that Evan wasn’t the kind of man to love her forever—if he ever had at all. “But then I wouldn’t have you,” she said out loud, tracing one tiny baby ear. Nothing would make her regret her son.

  With just a few winces, she managed to slide off the bed and lay him in the clear isolette. She had more pressing things to wish for, anyway. With the baby’s arrival almost a full month early, her savings account was a full month lighter than she’d hoped. And she should be wishing for a new—cheap— apartment to appear, too. Bea and Millie had rented her the room above the bakery only temporarily, and Millie’s elderly mother was due to move there in four weeks.

  Beth bit her lip. “But wishes don’t wash dishes,” she whispered to the baby. “Alice taught me that, too.”

  Determined not to surrender to her worries, Beth ran a hand through her tangled hair. A nurse had popped in a few minutes before and suggested she take a shower in the attached bathroom. A deluge of hot spray and she’d feel like a new woman.

  A knock sounded on the door. Probably the nurse who’d promised to help her into the shower. “Come in.”

  The door opened and a man stepped into the room.

  A flush burst over her skin and Beth clutched the thin fabric of her hospital gown. Oh, shoot. Had she wanted to feel like a new woman? Make that a completely different woman. Because the tall, dark and handsome near-stranger coming toward her had last night held her hand and shared the most intimate and miraculous moments of her life.

  If only the mint-green-and-mauve hospital linoleum would develop a woman-size sinkhole right at her feet.

  “Beth?” She remembered his voice, deep, like a man’s should be. Slow too, like all Oklahoma voices were in comparison to the speedy Los Angeles chatter she was accustomed to.

  He came three steps closer and held out his hand.

  She reached across the baby’s isolette to shake it. Memories welled up from the night before. His dark brown eyes serious, but speaking to her. Her fingers holding on to him as if she could wring strength from his hands. More embarrassment flooded her face with heat and she quickly broke their grasp.

  “I’m Michael,” he said, shoving his freed hand into the pocket of his jeans. “Michael Wentworth.”

  She hadn’t forgotten. They’d sorted out his name last night, just after the reporter had snapped the New Year’s Baby photo. Then Michael had disappeared. To be honest, she’d been so focused on her son since then that she hadn’t given him much more thought.

  Until this moment.

  Now all she could think about was how he had seen her last night, how she must be looking this morning, how she wished she had taken that shower thirty minutes sooner…

  How maybe she could nicely, politely, get rid of him right this instant.

  Michael almost laughed out loud. Beth’s expression was as readable as the front page headlines— God, squash that sore subject—let’s just say he knew exactly what she was thinking.

  She wanted him gone.

  Well, too bad. The lady owed him an explanation and a few details. At the very least in repayment for that damn front page photo that had resulted in more pre-Wheaties phone calls than he’d ever received.

  He smiled, the one he’d perfected in third grade Sunday school class. “I’ll just take a few minutes of your time.”

  She gave him the same suspicious look that old Miss Walters had when he’d sworn he hadn’t cribbed the day’s Bible lesson. “I was just about to—” She made a vague gesture behind her and went back to twisting a bit of the hospital gown in her hands. “I really need to—”

  “Answer just a few questions,” he interjected smoothly. Someone had faxed his grandfather the front page of the Freemont Springs Daily Post this morning, and Michael’s first phone call had been assuring Joseph that there wasn’t another secret Wentworth heir. “I talked with my grandfather today and we’re eager for your information on Sabrina.”

  Beth bit her lip. “Listen, um, I was in a really strange state yesterday. I cleaned out the trunk of my car. Then the glove compartment. I found thirty-seven cents between the cushions of the back seat. Next I started on my apartment.”

  Michael noted the color suffusing her face and found himself staring at her. Last night she’d been so pale. Moonbeam hair, pale complexion, colorless lips. But now a flush accented her delicate cheekbones. Her lips had reddened, too. The brightness took nothing away from the clear, beautiful color of her eyes.

  Shaking himself, he realized she’d stopped speaking. “I’m sorry. You were saying? Thirty-seven cents?”

  When she bit her lip again, the bottom part of her mouth went even rosier. “It’s a pregnancy thing, you see. I read about it, but didn’t even realize it was happening to me. I was nesting.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “You know, getting everything ready. I had this compulsion to clean things, take care of loose ends. Two people I know have birthdays in March. Yesterday I had this undeniable urge to buy them cards and mail them.”

  None of this was getting him any closer to the Sabrina information. And, dammit, he didn’t want to know any more about her. Not her March birthday friends, not her nesting urges, not the intriguing shape of her rosy mouth. “But about Sabrina—”

  Three female hospital staffers entering the room shut him up. Two wore maternity nurse’s scrubs, one a business suit. He looked at them in irritation, then realized he knew two of the three. “Hello, Deborah. Eve.” He’d dated Deborah—the one in the suit—oh, two or so years ago. Eve had been his date last Halloween.

  “Michael,” Eve said, a curious expression on her face.

  Deborah chimed in. “We thought we saw you come in here.”

  That dying-fish flip-flop started in his gut again. “I’m just talking with Ms: Masterson here.”

  “Ms. Masterson.” Deborah giggled. “Ho ho. We saw that picture in t
he newspaper.”

  He suddenly remembered why he’d stopped dating Deborah. Ho ho. A glance at Beth showed she wasn’t any more comfortable with the conversation than he was. “Did you come in to talk to me or the new mother?”

  All three women looked embarrassed. Deborah spoke up. “I’m here to collect some hospital paperwork.” She turned to Beth. “Is everything I gave you filled out?”

  Michael ran his hands through his hair as Beth shuffled through some papers on the table beside the bed. Get everybody out of here and get on with the questioning. Being caught in Beth’s room this morning was going to set the wheels of the Freemont Springs rumor mill turning.

  As if they needed any help after this morning’s photo.

  Paperwork handed off, the three women headed back out the door. Michael didn’t even wait until they were gone to get right to the point.

  “What about Sabrina?” The sooner he got the information, the sooner he could get out of here and start recouping his bachelor reputation. “Listen, I promise I’ll get out of your way if you’ll just tell me what you know about her.”

  Beth leaned against the hospital bed. “I saw the photo and article about your search for her in a Tulsa newspaper last week. I wasn’t sure exactly what to do…” She shrugged. “But last night I suddenly decided I had to tell what I know.”

  Michael held his breath. This could be the piece of information the family needed to find the mother of his brother’s unborn child. “And?”

  Beth hesitated, bit her lip, then squared her shoulders as if coming to a decision. “Sabrina is here in Freemont Springs. Or was here, anyway, until at least two weeks ago. We had some Lamaze classes together.”

  Here in town! “Thank you, Beth.” A torrent of relief sluiced through him. “You don’t know what this means to us—to my grandfather.” God, if this could be the lead they needed! A grin broke over his face. “I could kiss you for this.”

  “And maybe for this, too,” Deborah tittered as she peeked back around the half-open door.

  The smile dying on his face, Michael swung to look at her.