Grace Read online

  The only thing she trusted, had always trusted, was her body. She’d been a dancer her whole life, and Leah experienced everything through her body first. Perhaps that’s why she had been so taken in by Rob, by her own body’s suddenly awakened response to what she and Erica had found under Mr. Nolan’s bed. This very loft bed, with the big mahogany desk underneath, and the hidden door Erica had discovered behind the tapestry. Leah could reach out and touch that tapestry right now—it stretched from floor to ceiling, a striking oriental pattern hiding secrets she never could have imagined.

  The secret that had changed everything.

  Leah was tired of secrets, tired of lies, tired of pretending so the neighbors and the church wouldn’t be offended by her impropriety. She had been sent away a pariah as an unwed mother, deemed too immoral and wicked to be seen in public, but her only crime had been falling in love. Yet they had dinner with the clergy while ten feet away, behind a locked door, was a collection of obscene material so extensive it would probably land them in jail if it was discovered—and the irony of all ironies was that the church officials knew about it. Not only knew about it but were somehow profiting from it. Leah was almost certain of it.

  The weight of the hypocrisy threatened to bury her alive. And this man, the man she’d fallen for in spite of everything, was right in the middle of it, and although the lies and secrets were killing her, she was too afraid to uncover his secrets and expose him to the world. The truth was, she was too afraid of losing him. She’d lost so much already—not only her daughter, but the memory of a father who never existed, the mother who had betrayed her. Leah had nothing, no one, but Rob. And he loved her, wanted to marry her, had asked her to trust him.

  And she did.

  “Rob, please…” She met his kiss, her body responding instantly to him, as it always had. She’d been lost the moment he touched her the first time, was lost still in the shift of his hips and the way he whispered her name like a caress as he kissed his way down her throat. She wanted to be lost with him, to float away, never to be found. There was no man in the world who could make her feel the way he did, and she knew, even if he were to die tomorrow, she would never find a man who could complete her the way he did. She would walk around with a Robert Nolan shaped hole in her that no one could fill.

  And she knew what it felt like to be without him. Knew what it felt like to believe she’d never see him again. It made this moment even more heady and blissful than it would have been, and she gave herself to him without reserve, like she had from the beginning, when his images, his talent, his beautiful, amazingly creative mind had awakened a fire in her that still burned for him, an eternal flame.

  “Make love to me,” she whispered, arching up toward him. “Make me forget everything but this.”

  And he did, his fingers working swiftly on the buttons of her blouse, the hooks on her bra. Her skirt unzipped in the back and he rolled her over to get it, making her moan into the pillow when his teeth sank into her bottom, gently nibbling her behind. Her garters and stockings came off too, and then she was nude on his bed—their bed—on her back again, looking up at him, his heated gaze moving over her body in the slant of light from the skylight above.

  “I’m still fat from Grace,” Leah murmured, running her hands over her belly, no longer taut and smooth. Her hips swelled outward now, the indentation of her waist a deeper curve.

  “You’re beautiful.” Rob peeled off his shirt, leaning in to kiss her belly, lick her navel, making her shiver in response. She pulled him to her, reaching for his belt and unbuckling him. He moaned when she slipped her hand into his boxers, finding him satisfyingly hard.

  “I want you,” she whispered, squeezing his hips between her thighs, rocking up toward his erection, his trousers and boxers still in the way. “Please, Rob. Please.”

  “Yes, sweetheart,” he agreed, acknowledging her desperate longing, but he took his time anyway, kissing her nipples, running his tongue around her areolas, darker than they used to be before she’d given birth. She had been embarrassed by them, but Rob seemed fascinated with the changes in her body from her darker nipples to her fuller hips to the stubble growing in between her legs—they had insisted on shaving her while she was in labor with Grace.

  The first time they’d made love after she came home from Magdalene House, she had cried through it. Not because she was sad, although she was. No one had touched her there since Grace had passed from her womb into the world, and just the shock of being entered by him was enough to bring up that sadness. But they had cried together, faces buried in each other’s throats, had made love and cried for the time they’d lost, the child they’d created together who was still missing, and they’d cried because they had found each other again, were together like this, loving each other.

  Now they were hungry, greedy, and Leah begged him to do it, please, put it in me, I want you, I need you, now, now, and Rob let her tug and twist and pull at him while he bathed her nipples with his tongue and she tried to guide him in. He only gave up to her need when she grabbed his hair, making a fist, and pulled his head up to hers, shoving her tongue deep into his mouth.

  “Yes!” Leah cried out in triumph as Rob shifted his hips and slid inside of her, burying himself deep and staying there, holding his breath as he held himself above her.

  “Okay?” he murmured, just like he had the first time after she’d come home, checking to make sure she wasn’t in any pain. She tried to explain to him that she was healed—the stitches had dissolved, the bleeding long ago stopped—but he had hesitated, insisting on making sure.

  “Yes, yes,” she whispered impatiently. Rob began to move inside of her, slow and easy—far too easy for Leah’s liking. She whimpered and clawed at him, shifting her hips up to meet his easy thrusts.

  “Rob!” she gasped. “Please!”

  He knew what she wanted, but he was holding back intentionally. She hit him on the shoulder, giving a frustrated sigh, and he chuckled.

  “Tell me,” he whispered, nuzzling her ear. “Tell me, Leah. Tell me what you want.”

  “You know what I want!” she cried.

  “I want you to tell me.” He teased her, shifting his hips just slightly. “I want to hear you say the words.”

  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 naïve 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.

  She related the story as matter-of-factly as she could, like Joe Friday said on Dragnet, revealing just the facts, ma’am, watching the lawyer writing everything down on the yellow legal pad, filling up one page and flipping to the next as she talked. Leah answered his questions when he had them, feeling her breath caught in her chest, shallow and light, her heart beating as fast as a bird’s.

  She told him what happened, but it was the things she didn’t tell him that tore her apart. How sweet Grace’s little rosebud mouth had been when she made sucking motions in her sleep. How thick her dark hair had been, already curling around the tiny shell of her ear. How the baby’s hand had grasped her mother’s finger, those dark eyes tinted blue as they looked up into Leah’s face. How, the first instant she had looked into her baby’s face, she had fallen in love instantly, more completely and without any reserve, than she ever had or would again in her life.

  Those things weren’t important, not to Donald Highbrow, even though, for Leah, they were the only things that mattered.

  “You’re certain that Mrs. Goulden told you they were hospital discharge papers?”

  “Yes.” Leah insisted. “She intentionally tricked me.”

  “Were there any witnesses to that fact?”

  “I don’t know.” Leah cocked her head, trying to remember. “There were no nurses in the room, but it wasn’t a private room. There were other girls with their babies. Someone might have overheard us.”

  He nodded, taking more notes. “You were discharged that day, correct?”

  “Yes. My mother arrived to take us home but… Grace was gone. And
I went home with Rob.”

  “But I understand you were readmitted to the hospital two days later?”

  “She was…” Rob interjected, squeezing Leah’s hand again. “She had a little breakdown. We called our family doctor in, and after he made a house call, he felt it best to admit her overnight, so he could sedate her more fully… “

  “Is that bad?” Leah swallowed shameful tears. “I didn’t mean to. I just… kind of… lost it…”

  “I understand.” Donald Highbrow gave her a long, sympathetic look. “It wasn’t your fault. But I need to be honest with you, Leah. You have to understand, if we end up in court, they will use that against you.”

  “I was hysterical with grief!” she protested,

  “They will twist everything you said or did to fit their purpose,” he explained slowly. “You will be presented as an unwed mother, and that will be bad enough. Most courts would see you as unfit for that reason alone.”

  “She won’t be an unwed mother for long,” Rob snapped. Leah saw his jaw working and knew he was angry—really angry.

  Donald smiled sadly. “I can’t change the way the world works or how the judge will see things. If we end up in court, they will do everything in their power to show you as unfit, Leah, even if your circumstances have changed. I’ve gone through enough of these cases to know their tactics.”

  “But I’m not unfit!” Leah choked, blinking back the tears that threatened.

  “I know that,” the lawyer reassured her. “But even your overnight stay in the hospital could be used as proof that you’re mentally unstable.”

  Leah covered her face with her hands, defeated. “Oh my god.”

  Donald wasn’t done dealing out the facts. “They’ll want to force you to submit to a psychiatric exam with one of their doctors. He, of course, will diagnose you as sexually deviant because you got pregnant out of wedlock in the first place, and hence, you may be judged unfit to be a mother.”