The Once and Future Father

Lucy said.

Maybe, if he tried very hard, he could resist his own urges. But Dylan couldn’t resist her. Hadn’t the strength to turn his back on what she was offering him so willingly, not when every fiber of his body wanted her.

Not when he wanted her.

Ever since he’d walked out on her, he’d felt as if half his soul were missing. A soul he’d only found the very first time he made love with her. When she had shown him that making love was more than a matter of body coming to body. She’d shown him that there were souls involved, and feelings that transcended the physical.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

Rising on her toes, her lips a scant breath away from his, she whispered, “Very sure.”

The last thread of his fraying resistance gave way….

The Once and Future Father

Marie Ferrarella

To Tiffany Hsiang,

For all the wonderful things you are,

and

all the wonderful things you will be

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 1

“Some guys just don’t have any luck, you know what I mean?”

The burly police detective abruptly stopped talking, a coughing fit seizing him. “I mean, this is supposed to be one of the safest cities of our size in the country, and this poor jerk gets wasted right here, in beautiful downtown Bedford.”

Separated by a four-foot-high partition, Dylan McMorrow could hear the crinkle of cellophane. Alexander, the man who was talking, was dipping into his supply of hard candy. Cellophane wrappers marked his trail in the precinct wherever he went.

“Maybe not,” Hathaway, Alexander’s partner, speculated. “The body was moved, remember?”

“Yeah, but it was found here, so that puts it in our jurisdiction.” The sound of drawers being opened and closed in quick succession floated over the partition. Alexander was always looking for something to write on. From the sound of it, he hadn’t found it. Dylan concentrated on shutting the distraction out. He had an overdue expense report to get out. “This is my first homicide. You ever handle one before?” Alexander asked Hathaway.

The other man’s laugh was tinged in disbelief. “I’m from L.A., remember?”

“Sorry.” Alexander shoved another drawer closed. “Well, at least we’ve got an ID on him. Ritchie Alvarez.”

Dylan’s long fingers froze on the keyboard. The squad room, like everything else within the Bedford Police Department’s three-story, modern building, was the last word in precision, neatness and state-of-the-art equipment. There were computers on every detective’s desk rather than a faltering, centrally located electric typewriter the way there had been at his last precinct.

But Dylan wasn’t thinking of his last precinct, or even what had brought him back here to Bedford, California, after a requested six-month loan-out.

He was thinking of a woman. A golden-skinned woman with hair the color of a sensual midnight sky, honey on her lips and laughter in her dark eyes.

Lucy.

He felt his gut tightening the way it always did when he thought of her. Dylan reminded himself to breathe. Slowly.

Alvarez was a common-enough name among those with even a marginal claim to a Spanish heritage. And as for Ritchie…

How many Ritchie Alvarezes were there in a city the size of Bedford?

Getting to his feet, Dylan looked over the partition at the two other detectives. “How do you know his name?” he asked.

Detective Marcus Alexander was startled by Dylan’s question and almost dropped his coffee mug. He steadied it at the last moment, glaring at Dylan.

“Jeez, McMorrow, don’t you know better than to sneak up on a man like that?”

There was no expression on Dylan’s face. There usually wasn’t. It made it harder for people to second-guess him that way.

“I didn’t sneak. You were standing next to my cubicle. Talking rather loudly.” Dylan’s voice, like his manner, was low, with an edge to it that warned the listener not to test him. “How do you know his name?” he asked again.

Reaching into his pocket, Alexander took out a clear plastic pouch. Inside was a single sheet of wrinkled paper.

“It’s on this bank statement. We found it crumpled up in his inside pocket.” Alexander held the pouch out for Dylan’s examination. “Killer must have missed it when he took the victim’s wallet.”

The other detective, Mick Hathaway, turned around the chair he was sitting in and looked up at Dylan, curious. “Why? You know him?”

Dylan regarded the bank statement. It was to notify one Ritchie Alvarez that his checking account was overdrawn. Again. That was Ritchie to a T, Dylan thought. He gave the evidence back to Alexander. “Might.” His eyes shifted to Hathaway, the more experienced of the two. “You have the crime scene shots on you?”

“Right here.” Brushing his jacket aside, Hathaway reached into his inside pocket. One by one he lay down on the desk the four instant photographs taken of the victim. Hathaway slanted a glance in Dylan’s direction.

“Damn,” Dylan commented.

“Then you know him?” Hathaway asked.

Dylan dragged his hand through his unruly black hair, wishing he’d been wrong. “Yeah, I know him. Knew him. The name’s right.”

“Know if he has a next of kin?” Hathaway questioned.

Dylan blew out a breath, and tried to blow back memories he didn’t want crowding him. It didn’t work. “A sister. Last I remember, he was staying at her place. Always did when he was down on his luck.”

Hathaway shook his head. “Looks like he got even more down.”

“Looks like.” Dammit, Ritchie, why weren’t you more careful with your life? Dylan wondered.

Disgusted at the waste, bright shining moments shimmering in his mind’s eye, Dylan let the photograph drop back amid the others. He fought a brief tug-of-war between his conscience and his need for self-preservation. It wasn’t much of a contest.

He looked at Alexander. “Look, I know it’s your case, and I’m not trying to horn in here, but if you need someone to break it to his sister—”

Alexander looked relieved beyond words. “Hey, be my guest. I wouldn’t know where to begin.” Belatedly, he looked at Hathaway. “Okay with you?”

Collecting the photographs, Hathaway carefully tucked them away again. “More than okay. If you want to take down her statement—”

Dylan nodded. Lucy wouldn’t have had anything to do with whatever it was that had brought Ritchie to this miserable juncture. But to say so might arouse further curiosity, and the two other men were already looking at him as if he’d just bared his soul to them. Though partnered, Dylan kept to himself most of the time, and he made a point of never saying any more than he had to. It gave the other guy too much ammunition that way.

He glanced at his watch, but he knew what time it was even without checking. He was on his own time right now. He’d come in early to finish up the expense report, but that would have to wait until he got off later. “I’m not due for my shift until another couple of hours. The sister’s statement probably won’t be much to take down.”

As Dylan began to leave, Hathaway rose to block his path. Dylan saw the questions beginning to form in the other detective’s eyes. Maybe Dylan shouldn’t have said anything, but to leave this kind of news for a stranger to break to Lucy just didn’t seem right.

“Where do you know him from?” Hathaway asked.

Dylan sidestepped the older man. “We shared a couple of classes.” It was far more than that, but he didn’t want to get into it. Into the friendship they had enjoyed and what had come after.

Surprised, Alexander called after him. “You mean he’s from around here?”

“Born and raised” was all Dylan said as he walked out the door.

He knew the way to Lucy’s place by heart.

Lucy would probably say he didn’t have a heart. Not that he could blame her. But he’d done what he’d done more for her than for him. Someday, she’d appreciate that.

Or not, he amended. Eventually, it would all be one and the same. Time would see to that. Maybe it already had, he mused. Over the last nine months, he’d purposely lost track of her, purposely stayed away from all the old haunts where he thought he might run into her.

The only place he couldn’t escape her was in his mind. But he would. Eventually.

He’d known Ritchie a number of years before he ever met the sister that Ritchie was so fond of. There had been something different about Lucy from the first moment Dylan saw her, but he’d tried not to notice, tried not to pay any more attention to her than he would any one of a number of beautiful women who passed through his life. But she’d been more, right from the start. And for a while, for eight precious months, he’d deluded himself that he could have a normal life, the kind he’d only heard about.

Part of him figured he had to be crazy, seeking Lucy out after nine months of a self-imposed moratorium. Dylan knew he wasn’t in a place where he could say he was over her. He doubted that he would ever really be over Lucinda Alvarez, but at least it had gotten to the point where she didn’t start and end each day, lingering in the perimeter of his thoughts like the deep scent of roses. He’d managed to get through whole chunks of the day without so much as thinking of her.

Or what they could have had.

If he had been someone else.

But another part of him knew he had to do this. Owed it to her for the history they had. She didn’t deserve to hear about Ritchie from either Alexander or Hathaway, good men both, but not exactly sensitive when it came to something like this.

Yeah, right, like he was Mr. Sensitivity, he silently mocked himself as he waited for the traffic light to change.

She didn’t deserve to hear the words at all, he thought impatiently, but that was life and he hadn’t written it. All he could do was try to change some of the footnotes.

Dylan realized that he was gripping the steering wheel as if he were engaged in a life-and-death struggle and loosened his fingers. He wished he could change this particular footnote. Ritchie had been a good guy. Just incredibly unlucky.

Weren’t they all? he thought.

“I’m sorry, Lucy,” he whispered under his breath as he turned down her street and saw the neat dove-gray-and-blue-trimmed stucco house.

So where was Ritchie, already?

Impatient, Lucy Alvarez glanced at her wristwatch, the one with the band she had yet to replace. But she was still stupidly sentimental about the watch. It had been a gift. The first gift. When there had been promise in the air.

She sighed, squelching the temptation to look out the window again. It wouldn’t make her brother appear any faster.

Ritchie probably forgot, she thought. She’d asked him to take her to the doctor just this one time, because it was so hard for her to find a comfortable position behind the steering wheel these last few weeks. Two weeks overdue, she was painfully aware of every second that went by beyond her delivery date.

He’d promised to be here.

But Ritchie’s promises were always the same—made quickly, with enthusiasm, and then forgotten. Not from any malice, but just because that was Ritchie. He had the attention span of a gnat.

Lucy nibbled on her lower lip, debating whether or not to call a cab. She didn’t want to be late for her appointment.

However, by the time the cab finally arrived, she would probably miss it altogether.

Still, if he wasn’t here… Lucy picked up the receiver and began to dial.

The sound of the doorbell ringing had her hanging up the telephone. Ritchie was here. Finally. The fact that he was ringing the doorbell instead of unlocking the door himself didn’t strike her as particularly odd. He’d probably forgotten his key. Ritchie would’ve misplaced his head if it hadn’t been attached.

Someday, he was going to drive whatever poor woman he made his wife crazy. Until then, he was hers to look after. Moving awkwardly, Lucy made her way to the front door. The doorbell rang once more.

“What’s the matter, Ritchie, lose your key again, not to mention your watch? You’re late—”

Flipping open the lock, Lucy began to launch into a lecture she knew would do no more good than any of the others she’d given him over the course of the last few years. Her tolerant smile faded as she abruptly stopped and stared at the man standing in her doorway. Her heart leaped up, and then down, lodging itself somewhere, uncomfortably, halfway in between.

For just the briefest of seconds, she thought she was hallucinating.

But she was wide awake and he was here, filling out her doorway with his dark good looks the way he had once filled out her entire life.

Dylan.

Funny how much smarter you can become in just nine months.

Her hand on the door, she kept it where it was, half opened, half closed, a barrier to keep him out. The way he had kept her out.

Pressing her lips together, she raised herself on her toes to look over his shoulder, hoping to see the broken-down car her brother drove coming up the street. But it wasn’t in sight.

Her eyes narrowed as she looked at Dylan. “What are you doing here? If you’re here to see Ritchie, he’s not home. I’m waiting for him myself.”

Dylan’s mind went blank as he stared at her. At the one woman who had managed to somehow get past his defenses.

She was pregnant.

Not huge, the way Hathaway’s wife had been just before she’d given birth to their twins, but Lucy was pregnant, carrying a life inside of her, there was no missing that.

She’d said she’d love him, no matter what.

This, he guessed, was “what.”

A wild, hot jealousy rippled through Dylan, born years before he had been, a seed his father had passed down to him and his father before him. For one horrid second, it felt as if that jealousy, that seed, had taken him over, changing the very world that was around him, sending it into tints of red and closing off his air.

Dylan struggled to banish the feeling the way he’d banished his father from his life.

This wasn’t why he was here. Lucy’s life was her own. He’d given it back to her when he’d withdrawn from it, leaving her alone.

Whose baby was it?

The question throbbed through his brain like a bad migraine.

“Did you hear me?” Lucy demanded, her voice rising. “I said Ritchie’s not home. He’s working. I’ll tell him you stopped by.”

Because it hurt just to look at Dylan, she began to close the door. But his hand went out, stopping her. She hadn’t the strength to oppose it.

“What?” she demanded, trying to hang on to her temper, on to the angry tears that had suddenly sprung up inside of her, demanding a release. Why was he back now, after all this time? She was just getting her life back in order. She didn’t need this. And why was he looking at her like that?

“This is about Ritchie,” Dylan said.

She turned pale right before his eyes, holding the door now not so much to block him as for support, to keep from sinking down like a balloon that had suddenly lost all its air. His hand went out to steady her, but she ignored it, stiffening with her last available ounce of dignity. The message was clear. She didn’t need him to touch her.

Lucy felt herself getting light-headed. “What about Ritchie?” she asked, holding on to the door for support.

“Lucy, let’s go inside.”

She didn’t budge. She didn’t have the strength to budge. Ritchie was her older brother, but she had always felt responsible for him. Especially after their parents had died in a train derailment the summer she turned eighteen. Ritchie was the one who could laugh, who could see the bright side of everything even when the chips were down. She was the strength that helped them go on.

She didn’t feel very strong now.

Summoning what reserves she had left, Lucy glared at Dylan. Why was he playing these games with her? Why did he have to be the one to come and tell her whatever it was he had to say?

She clenched her teeth together and repeated. “What about Ritchie?”

Dylan didn’t want to tell her this way. Not on the steps of the house where he had once held her in his arms, breathing in her scent and contemplating things he had no right to contemplate. But Lucy was making no move to let him in, standing instead like some steadfast soldier guarding the borders of her small country, refusing him access.

He tried not to think of a time when things had been different.

Dylan looked at her face. She was fiercely trying to protect herself against what she probably knew was coming. He had no idea how to couch this, how to make something that was so utterly devastating a little less so.

Without a choice, Dylan gave her the news straight and braced himself for the consequences.

“Ritchie’s dead, Lucy.”

Lucy’s breath caught. She looked into Dylan’s eyes and knew he was telling her the truth. She knew even when she wanted to scream at him that he was lying, that he was playing some sort of horrible trick on her, the way he had when he made her believe he loved her. He had never said the words, but there had been feelings between them then, feelings she would have gone to her grave swearing were true.

Except that they weren’t. At least, not for him.

But now it was Ritchie who was going to his grave.

Everything around her began to merge into one color, one huge mass. And then the world began to swim and swirl.

“No,” she mouthed just before everything went black and swallowed her up.

Dylan realized a heartbeat before it happened that she was going to faint. The golden hue of her skin had gone whiter than the snow on the mountain where they had once gone skiing. It was almost translucent.

Dylan reached her side just in time.

The swell that was her unborn child came between them. He felt something move, something kick just as he tried to gather her in his arms. The kick caught him by surprise and he almost dropped her to the floor. The sudden jolt when he caught her seemed to travel through the length of her. Dylan swallowed a curse.

He felt the baby kick again. Amid his concern, jealousy threatened to take control of him.

She’d gone on to love someone else while he had suffered in his own private hell.

A hell, a voice deep inside him whispered, of his own making, not hers.

But it had been the only choice.

He wouldn’t allow himself to feel anything now. It wasn’t any more right now than it had been then.

As gently as possible, Dylan picked her up in his arms. Shouldering his way into the living room, he placed Lucy down on the sofa. Probably the bedroom would have been a better choice, but he couldn’t bring himself to go there.

Unbuttoning the three tiny buttons at her throat, he tried to remember what a man did in a case like this. And tried not to think about the last time he’d undressed her.

He realized that his hand was shaking slightly.

Dammit, whatever might have been between them was over now. She was carrying somebody else’s baby. He glanced at her left hand. There was no ring on her third finger, but that meant nothing. She could have taken the ring off because her hand had gotten swollen.

He should have left this to Hathaway and Alexander. At least if he had, he wouldn’t have found out that Lucy was pregnant.

Cursing himself for coming and Ritchie for being stupid enough to get himself killed in the first place, Dylan hurried into the kitchen to look for something to use as a compress. He found a single kitchen towel neatly folded on a rack. He’d once marveled how she managed to keep everything so neat, given Ritchie’s penchant for creating havoc wherever he went. Grabbing the kitchen towel from the rack, he held it under running water.

Wringing the towel out, he looked around the kitchen. A sense of nostalgia permeated. As with the living room, nothing had changed in here.

Only she had.

Not his concern, he told himself tersely.

The wet towel fell from his fingers when he heard the scream. Racing back, he found her trying to sit up. There was pain etched into the planes of her face. Lucy was digging her nails into the upper portion of the sofa, whether to try to drag herself up or to try to get away from pain, he didn’t know.

“What’s the matter?” The question came out far more sharply than he’d intended.

“The baby.” Trying to catch her breath, Lucy pressed the flat of her hand against her stomach. Her eyes were huge when she raised them to his face. “Dylan, the baby’s coming.”

Chapter 2

Her words cut through Dylan like a sharp razor. An edgy sense of panic hovered over him. “Are you sure? You just fainted, maybe—”

“There’s no ‘maybe’ about it—the baby is coming.” Her eyes widened as another thrust of pain, on the heels of the last, began burrowing to the surface. “Now.”

“Hang on,” he cautioned. Dylan could feel his own heart rate accelerating. Pulling out his cell phone, he dialed the precinct’s dispatch. “This is Detective McMorrow. I need an ambulance ASAP.” He gave the woman on the other end Lucy’s address, then flipped the phone shut. “They’ll be here in ten minutes.”

Lucy’s breaths came in snatches, like someone, already exhausted, climbing up the side of a steep mountain. The thick black hair that had been so seductively sensuous to touch was plastered against her face. Dylan could see that she was fighting pain with every fiber of her being.

There was no use trying to distance himself from the scene. It got to him. Dylan couldn’t stand seeing her like this.

Her eyes rose to his for a single moment before she shut them again. “I don’t think that’s going to be fast enough.”

All the labor horror stories that Dylan vaguely recalled hearing came back to him now. Wasn’t the process supposed to go on for interminable hours? “You’re kidding, right?”

Unable to answer, Lucy moved her head from side to side, her teeth sinking into her lower lip so hard he was afraid she was going to bite straight through it. Momentarily at a loss, Dylan took her hand and felt his fingers immediately caught up in a viselike grip. The strength of it took him by surprise.

“No,” she said, finally managing to breathe, “I’m not. I can feel the pressure…it’s like…I’m being…pulled apart…like a giant…wishbone.” Lucy shrieked the last part of the word as a salvo of pain thundered through her. Her eyes were wide as she looked at him.

He saw the fear and forgot his own. He forced himself to stop thinking of her as Lucy and start thinking of her as a woman who needed his help. After all, he was a cop and that was what he did, he helped people in need. He couldn’t let it get any more complicated than that.

But it was, a voice whispered inside of him. No matter how hard he tried to block out the truth, this was still Lucy. And he was going to have to help her give birth to another man’s child.

The realization hit hard into his soul.

With fingers that were in danger of going numb, he managed to squeeze her hand, reassuring her the only way he knew how. Silently.

“Okay, Lucy, if he’s going to come now, let’s get this going.”