Baby 101

Dear Diary,

Today the past reached out to me. I recognized the handwriting on the package the moment I saw it. It was the same round, unformed hand I had read on the note pinned to Garrett’s shirt all those years ago, begging me to find a home for her babies.

Inside the box was more of the past. Tiny pink and blue sweaters painstakingly embroidered with Lana’s, Shelby’s and Michael’s names, and a ragged-eared teddy bear that could only have belonged to Garrett.

But that’s all. Only the mementos and a short note asking me to give them to the Lords. No signature, no address, not even a telephone number.

Terrence and Shelia’s children are as dear tome as my own. How will they feel to know their birth mother has stepped back into their lives, and in such a mysterious fashion?

And why after all these years has she tried to contact them at all?

There’s never a dull moment at

MAITLAND MATERNITY

Lana Lord: Hearing a voice from her past only reinforced Lana’s belief that it didn’t take the bonds of blood to make a family. Now she had to teach this lesson to Dylan before it was too late.

Dylan Van Zandit: Dylan wanted to do right by the tiny life in his care. Could he overcome the betrayal he’d felt ever since his late wife had told him the baby wasn’t his?

Megan Maitland: Though never happier than when putting children into the arms of loving parents, what would happen if Megan gave the Lord siblings a message from the mother they never knew?

LeeAnn Larrimore: Her decision to give up her children all those years ago had affected countless lives. Would her attempt to reach out bring joy or more sorrow?

Baby 101

Marisa Carroll

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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Marisa Carroll is the pen name of the award-winning writing team of Carol Wagner and Marian Scharf, two sisters born and raised in northwestern Ohio. They have won several industry awards, including Romantic Times magazine’s Career Achievement Award, and have appeared on numerous bestseller lists, including USA TODAY ’s. Together, Marian and Carol have published over thirty romance novels in the past fifteen years, and have established a goal of fifty published books, a kind of golden anniversary for the partnership. And they intend to stick to it—no matter how many arguments it takes.

Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

SHE COULD SEE the sign as soon as the taxi turned the corner. It was halfway down the block in a row of sand-blasted brick storefronts. It was pink and blue neon, with a baby cradled in a diaper hanging from a stork’s beak. The name Oh, Baby! hung beneath it. The style was nostalgic, in keeping with the twenties-era feel of the street. Trees in wooden planters with waves of red and pink petunias at their bases lined the brick sidewalks, and wrought-iron tables and chairs in front of coffee shops and German delis were shaded by green canvas awnings. People sat at the tables and strolled along the street looking in the windows of art galleries and vintage clothing stores, enjoying the unusually cool and clear early September day.

The neighborhood had a cozy, small-town feel. It was hard to believe she was only three blocks away from bustling Mayfair Avenue in the heart of downtown Austin, Texas, and the noisy lunchtime crowd at Austin Eats Diner.

“Park there, driver,” she said, motioning. “In front of the baby shop.” The taxi driver maneuvered into the space and waited for her to make up her mind.

He caught her eye in the rearview mirror. “You want to get out, ma’am?” he asked. He’d seen how difficult it was for her to open the heavy door when she went into Austin Eats.

“No, not yet.”

She had given him fifty dollars when she got into the cab. She didn’t want him to be tempted to leave her stranded somewhere along the route or to worry that she would stiff him for a large fare. “Just let me know when you want to go inside,” he said, and settled back in his seat, content to wait.

She didn’t know if she was going to go inside. She wanted to, she wanted to as badly as she’d ever wanted anything in her life. But if there was one thing LeeAnn Larrimore had learned in forty-seven hard years, it was that you didn’t always get what you wanted.

Forty-seven. Not young anymore, but not old enough to die. She looked at her hands, clutching the cardboard box in her lap. They were skeletal, her wrist bones jutting below the sleeves of her shirt. Her whole body looked like that. She was dying of cancer and she didn’t have much time left. But even that sense of urgency couldn’t overcome the reluctance she felt at going inside her daughter’s store.

What if Lana should recognize her? She didn’t know how that was possible, though. The last time she’d seen her daughter, she had been an infant. For twenty-five years LeeAnn hadn’t even known what had happened to Lana, or her brothers and sister, after she’d left them on the doorstep of Maitland Maternity Clinic with a note pinned to Garrett’s shirt asking Megan Maitland to find a home for her babies.

It wasn’t until she had been told her condition was terminal that she had given in to that ruthlessly unanswered need to learn their lot in life. It hadn’t been hard. She had gone to the library and searched the Internet for news of Maitland Maternity. Not only the clinic’s high-tech and professional Web site, but all the news outlets she could find. And there had been news, lots of it. Maitland Maternity, it seemed, had been embroiled in a scandal throughout the past year.

But none of that tangle of false identities and lost sons returned to their families had meant anything to her after she read of the shoot-out that had wounded Garrett Lord, the adopted eldest son of a prominent Austin family, and Megan Maitland’s godson.

Garrett Lord, adopted son and godson. Garrett. Her son’s name. Her long-dead husband’s name. She had searched further. And there it was, a matter of public record. Four children, infant triplets and a toddler boy, had been adopted by Terrence and Sheila Lord, a well-respected banker and his wife, twenty-five years ago.

God had answered a desperate young mother’s prayers and given all four of them a loving home. More than that. He had given them parents who could supply them with all their earthly wants and needs.

But that wasn’t enough now. She had to know if the Lords had also given them love. The kind of love that had driven her to give them up in the first place, rather than subject them to the hand-to-mouth childhood she had experienced. And that her circumstances dictated would be all she could offer them if they remained a family. A lifetime of secrecy wasn’t an easy thing to erase. And she wasn’t strong enough to face the possibility that her children, raised in affluence, wouldn’t understand why she had done what she had.

So she had brought talismans with her. Three tiny sweaters, two pink and one blue, painstakingly embroidered with their names, Shelby, Lana and Michael. And a teddy bear, much worn and loved by Garrett, his daddy’s pride and joy. But her reckless, handsome husband had crashed his Harley into a concrete light post one dark, rainy night, leaving her with four babies and a mountain of medical bills. So she had given her children over to the care of strangers and gone on with her life, never searching them out until her doctor had pronounced her fate.

Today she’d gone to Austin Eats to try to find Shelby. She had been there, red-haired and vivacious, behind the counter. LeeAnn had ordered a glass of sweet tea and watched her daughter direct the busy kitchen staff and still have time to charm each and every customer with a word and a smile. Then a man came in and sat down at the counter, and LeeAnn’s breath had caught in her throat. Garrett? Or was it Michael? His coloring was the same as her dead husband’s, hair so dark a red it was almost brown, olive skin and eyes that could see into your soul.

She sat there, hands trembling, for another fifteen minutes, torn between happiness and fear. When the man got up to leave he looked around the room, his gaze flicking over her, assessing and dismissive. It was then she began to realize her fantasy might not play out as she wished. The little love offerings she had kept all these years might not be enough for her children to make up for giving them away. She had gotten up and made her way painfully out of the diner. But she hadn’t been ready to admit defeat. Going to Garrett’s ranch outside the city was out of the question, but there was still Lana. Still her sweet little first-born daughter.

A young woman turned the corner and walked to the door of the shop. Was this Lana? She had LeeAnn’s coloring, auburn hair and hazel eyes and a creamy tone to her skin that never seemed to tan. But LeeAnn didn’t have auburn hair anymore, the chemotherapy had seen to that. She raised her hand and touched the inexpensive gray wig she wore. The young woman turned her head, and their eyes met. She smiled. LeeAnn reached for the door handle.

A couple approached. The woman was pregnant, and both husband and wife immediately engaged Lana in conversation about the display of furniture in the window. She was obviously going to be busy with them for a long, long time. LeeAnn’s little store of courage gave out. She was so very tired. What if Lana didn’t understand her long-ago desperation? What if she hated her for never contacting them?

But she had to let her children know she still cared. Once before, she had trusted in the judgment and caring of a woman she had never met. Her confidence hadn’t been misplaced. One last time she would ask that woman to help her. She began to compose a note in her mind.

Dear Mrs. Megan Maitland,

Thank you for finding my babies a good and loving home all those years ago—I knew you would. The teddy bear was Garrett’s, and these three baby sweaters have the triplets’ names embroidered on them. The only fancywork I ever had time to do. My only wish is for the children to know I loved them.

Yours in gratitude.

“Do you want to go inside?” the driver asked again, sounding a little impatient. LeeAnn glanced at the meter. It was coming up on forty dollars. She gave one last look at the young woman now standing inside the bay window of her store, her hands resting on the carved finials of an antique-looking baby bed.

“No,” LeeAnn said wearily. “I don’t think I should go inside. But I want to mail a package. Take me to the post office, please.”

CHAPTER ONE

THERE IT WAS AGAIN. A baby crying. She was certain of it.

But that was impossible. She was alone in the store, had been for hours. For a split second Lana Lord wondered if someone had left an infant behind unnoticed in a quiet corner of the shop. Abandoned, just as she and her brothers and sister had been all those years ago.

Ridiculous. She placed the miniature Stetson she’d picked out as her brother Garrett’s birthday gift to their honorary little cousin, Chase O’Hara, carefully into its box. Beside it was a matching box with little cowhide boots she and her sister, Shelby, had chosen to be their brother Michael’s gift. No one had left a child behind at Oh, Baby!, she told herself sternly. There must be a television on in the kitchen of the bakery next door. Or maybe it was a lost kitten in the alley beyond the wall.

She taped the lid of the box securely and added a mass of curling blue ribbon. There, all done. For her own gift she’d selected half a dozen different outfits from the store’s inventory, but her favorite was a set of Curious George books for his momma to read to him.

A grandson for Megan. And the return of Connor O’Hara, the grown son she had given up at birth. What a tumultuous year it had been for the Maitlands, and the Lords. Scandals and mysteries and more excitement than she cared to recall. Now it seemed as if everything had sorted itself out, and most everyone she knew had found someone to love.

Everyone but her. While all her friends seemed to be making commitments to love and cherish, she was breaking off her engagement. She felt very out of step with the world at the moment.

The faint wailing came again.

Lana looked at the beaten tin ceiling. It wasn’t a hungry kitten or a TV show. It was a real, live baby crying somewhere above her, where there was supposed to be nothing but empty office space and storage areas. Or so she had been told when she opened her business three years ago. This had never been a residential building, the Realtor had said. At least not since its heyday in the Roaring Twenties. But it had also recently changed hands. Lana had just gotten her signed copy of the new lease. Maybe the owner was up there looking around, although she doubted anyone from Van Zandt Development Corporation would be inspecting the building with an infant in tow.

But a homeless woman with a child might have found her way upstairs. Someone scared and desperate, with no money to buy formula or baby food. As scared and desperate as her own biological mother must have been to leave the four of them on the doorstep of Maitland Maternity Clinic all those years ago.

Lana stood. She didn’t like thinking about her birth mother. It made her feel disloyal to her real mother, Sheila Lord. The woman who had taken three infant triplets and two-year-old Garrett and raised them as her own. Years ago Lana had made the decision not to waste time speculating and fantasizing about a woman she couldn’t even remember. And she’d mostly stuck to that resolve.

She held very still and listened for a minute or so longer. Yes, definitely a baby crying. She should probably call the police, Lana realized. Let them come and check it out. But that might take hours, and the baby sounded as if it were in real distress. Still, only a fool would head up the staircase at the back of her storage room alone and unarmed. She didn’t own a gun, but she did possess a good, heavy baseball bat.

It took her a minute or two to locate the bat and a flashlight and come up with the key to the padlock her brother Michael, the head of security at Maitland Maternity, had insisted she install on her side of the staircase door. She pushed the old-fashioned button-type light switch and was amazed to find that it worked. A low-wattage bulb at the top of the stairs glowed feebly against the dark-painted walls.

Lana clutched her bat in one hand and the flashlight in the other. She knew she ought to at least call her best friend Beth’s new husband, Ty Redstone, an Austin police detective, or her brother Michael and tell them what she was doing. But that would involve a lot of explaining and listening to demands that she stay put, and she was too impatient, and too curious, to accept the delay. The good Lord had conditioned womankind not to be able to ignore a child’s cries. At least He had this woman, and she kept on climbing.

She loved babies. She couldn’t let this one suffer any longer without trying to help. When they were girls, she and Beth had vowed to have half a dozen kids apiece. Beth had gotten her degree in childhood development and opened a day-care center at Maitland Maternity. Now she and Ty were well on their way to realizing that childhood dream. Lana had thought she was, too, until her ex-fiancé told her he didn’t really want kids. At least not for a long, long time, and then only one or two. So today, instead of planning the last-minute details of her wedding and throwing away her birth control pills, she was picking out baby clothes and wrapping presents to give to another woman’s child.

At the top of the stairs the hall was dark, the window at the far end painted over. It might as well be the middle of the night. What if it wasn’t a homeless young mother on the other side of the transom-topped door, but a drug-crazed kidnapper? If that was the case, then she was not only foolish but plumb crazy to do what she was about to do. She put her ear against the panel, heard nothing, then stepped back, took a deep breath and knocked with the end of the bat. If some wild-eyed, wild-haired psycho opened the door, she’d grab the child, kneecap the bad guy with the Louisville Slugger and take off running like a bat out of hell.

She stepped into the shadows and waited.

“Who’s there?” A male voice, low and rough with a hint of cowboy drawl, came from behind the closed door.

“Lana Lord.” Her hands were shaking, her knees wobbly, but her brothers had taught her the best defense was a good offense. “Who are you and what are you doing here?” she demanded.

The door opened and sunlight spilled out, framing the man standing before her. He wasn’t particularly tall, an inch or so under six feet, but broad-shouldered and well-muscled. Strong enough to make short work of Lana and her baseball bat despite the tiny baby he held cradled against his chest with one long-fingered hand. But it was also obvious he wasn’t a deranged kidnapper. He was wearing chinos and a blue dress shirt with the collar open and the sleeves rolled past his wrists. The baby was holding a handful of his shirtfront in his tiny fist. The cotton was damp, as though the baby had spit up on him and he’d tried to wipe away the stain.

“I wasn’t imagining things. I did hear a baby crying.” Lana couldn’t take her eyes off the infant. So tiny, so fragile, especially in contrast to the hard wall of the man’s chest.

“That’s all he seems to do. Cry.”

“You’re holding him wrong,” Lana blurted.

“What are you, some kind of expert?” Dark brows drew together over eyes whose color she couldn’t quite make out.

“In a way. I own the baby store downstairs. And I’ve done a lot of baby-sitting in my day.” In fact, she and Beth had worked summers and weekends at a day-care center all the way through college. Her hands itched to reach out and touch the little one. “But that doesn’t answer my question. Who are you and what are you doing here?”

“My name’s Dylan Van Zandt, and I own the building.”

“You’re Van Zandt Development Corporation?”

“In the flesh. Look. Thanks for checking up on us. It’s good to know I have such conscientious tenants. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to see to my son.”

Lana usually spoke her mind, and this was no exception. “I think it’s time you take your son home. Whatever you’re doing up here in the dust and dirt can wait until tomorrow.”

His frown deepened. “We are home.”

“What?”

“You heard me. This is our home.”

“But…here?” She couldn’t quite see over his shoulder into the room behind him. “No one told me—” She’d been away from the store since Friday afternoon. She’d spent the weekend at her brother Garrett’s ranch and hadn’t returned to Austin until early that morning to collect her gifts for the birthday celebration.

“I haven’t exactly had time to send out engraved announcements.” The baby screamed. Dylan Van Zandt didn’t budge, just stood there stiff and unmoving.

Lana leaned the baseball bat against the door frame, tucked the little flashlight into her pocket, and held out her arms. “Let me have him.”

“What?”

“I said let me have him. He’s probably afraid you’re going to drop him.” She wiggled her fingers. “Come here, sweetheart.”

Still frowning, Dylan let her take the child. The infant was tiny, a newborn, light as a feather in her arms. Where is his mother? She wanted to ask but didn’t. Instead she cuddled him against her breast, one hand under his bottom, one hand gently patting his back. He didn’t stop crying. His legs were drawn stiffly up against his belly, his face screwed into a scowl that was a perfect match for his father’s.

Dylan Van Zandt stood aside and let her precede him into the apartment. And it was a residence, not unused office space as the real estate agent had led her to believe. The ceilings were high, with ornate plaster cornices. A small marble fireplace graced one wall. Light streamed onto the hardwood floor, dulled by years of neglect, from long windows that looked onto Kings Avenue. The room was empty except for half a dozen cardboard packing boxes piled in the middle.

“This way.” Dylan Van Zandt gestured toward another doorway. It led into the kitchen, Lana discovered. Green and white thirties-era linoleum covered the floor. Glass-fronted cupboards reached to the ceiling above a granite countertop. The refrigerator was so old it had a round compressor on the top, but it was humming away. The gas stove belonged in a museum. A brand-new microwave oven was on the counter, probably because the gas had been shut off up here years ago. She wondered if the water was also shut off. There was no way he could take care of a baby properly with no water and no heat or air-conditioning, although it was surprisingly cool in the big high-ceilinged rooms.

The kitchen was long and narrow. A small table and two chairs sat in one corner. An overstuffed recliner, a man’s chair, held pride of place by the window. Beside it an end table held a lamp, a combination radio and CD player and long metal tubes that looked as if they contained blueprints or architect’s drawings. The bathroom was directly ahead of her. She could see the corner of a claw-footed tub and a pedestal sink with a black leather shaving kit on the rim. The only baby items in view were a diaper bag and a glass bottle of formula with a screw-on nipple top like the ones they gave new mothers when they left the hospital. And a top-of-the-line infant carrier, draped with yellow and blue blankets.

“He doesn’t like you holding him any better than he does me,” Dylan said over his son’s continuing screams. He was standing behind her, and she couldn’t tell if she heard frustration or anger in his tone.

She turned. “He’s colicky. Does he cry like this often?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I…I haven’t been around him that much. He’s only been out of the hospital two weeks. He was a preemie. He weighed three and a half pounds when he was born.”

Lana took a closer look at the baby. “How old is he now?”

“Ten weeks.”

“He’s so tiny.” The sound of her voice penetrated the infant’s self-absorbed misery. He opened cornflower blue eyes and stared at her for a long moment while Lana held her breath. He was the most beautiful baby she’d ever seen. Perfect little ears, creamy skin, a button nose and silky hair the color of winter sunshine.

He didn’t look anything like the dark-haired, hawk-nosed man in front of her. Maybe he had kidnapped the child, after all.

“What do you do for colic?” Dylan was asking her.

“What?”

“How do I stop him from crying?”

“You really don’t know anything about babies, do you?”

“No.” There was no smile, no self-effacing shrug to soften the denial.