The Secret Son

Kevin was trying not to stare at the brown bag Jack had sitting on his lap.

“Don’t you want to know who the surprise is for?” Jack asked, his attention on Kevin.

He’d make a wonderful father. The unexpected thought caught Erica completely off guard. In another time, another life, Jack would’ve been able to give so much. On the few occasions she’d seen him with Kevin, she’d noticed the natural affinity he seemed to have with children.

Or was it just his son?

Was she robbing them both of something vital by keeping her secret? In trying to protect them was she hurting them instead? Inflicting more pain where she tried so hard to bring happiness?

Or would telling her secret cause the greater pain?

And what about Jefferson, the man Kevin called Daddy? He might be her ex-husband but he considered Kevin his son.

“So who’s the surprise for?” Kevin’s voice rose on the last word as he stared at the bag.

“I think it’s for you,” Jack said.

Dear Reader,

The book you’re holding is very special to me. This is a story about love—in its purest form—in the hands and hearts of human beings who are not perfect. It probably isn’t the type of love story you find very often in a romance novel, yet it epitomizes everything that reading Harlequin books while I was growing up taught me about love and life. About the possibilities awaiting me. About the things I could hope for. Things I’d find only if I lived my life heroically. If I strove always to be a good person and make the right choices.

I grew up believing in the love I now write about. And then, clinging diligently to those beliefs, I flung myself out into the world where good and bad weren’t so clearly delineated, where the right choices weren’t always obvious. Where the heart could be confused.

I discovered something miraculous. The love we read about and come back to time and time again, the hope, the assurance that, in the end, right wins—it’s all true. It’s not as easy as it looked in the books I grew up reading, though. Finding that happy ending takes the ability to endure, to forgive oneself for not being perfect, to strive—especially in the face of mistakes—to do what’s right. To never stop believing you can be a good person.

So this story is for all the people like me who have the courage to live in this world full of bumps and bruises and still believe.

Please approach Erica, Jack, Jefferson, Pamela and Kevin with an open heart. I’m confident they’ll do the rest….

Sincerely,

Tara Taylor Quinn

P.S. I love hearing from readers. Write me at P.O. Box 15065, Scottsdale, AZ 85267 or visit me at www.tarataylorquinn.com.

The Secret Son

Tara Taylor Quinn

www.millsandboon.co.uk

DEDICATION

For Kevin. This is the great thing about being a writer. What you can’t have, you can create. Since the first day we met—and I fell in love—I’ve had a great yearning in my heart to have known you as a little boy….

And

For Jake Bodell. I’m fairly certain you wouldn’t read this book in a million years, or like it if you did (except for the setting and the political parts). But it was you and your ability to act upon promptings that provided me with the strength to get it written. You are an amazing young man.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

All the dog jokes contained herein are the property of scatty.com (www.scatty.com), whom the author wishes to thank for their generosity in allowing her to use them.

CONTENTS

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 ONE

September 1996

IT HAD BEEN the best—and the worst—week of her life.

Walking up Fifth Avenue, Erica was barely aware of the Thursday-afternoon crowd pressing around her. Years ago crowds had bothered her. Not anymore.

Going home to face Jefferson, now that was going to be horrible. To look into those loving gray eyes and know she’d betrayed him…

Oh, not physically. She could give herself that much credit. Sort of. In the past week she’d kissed Jack. Touched him. Let him touch her.

Okay, begged for his touch.

But they hadn’t made love.

Thinking of Jefferson, that was a huge comfort; thinking of Jack, of never seeing him again, of never knowing what it would feel like to be held, to be loved, by the man who’d awakened her heart fully for the first time in her life, there was no comfort at all. That knowledge brought such incredible grief she could hardly breathe.

But it had to be that way. She was a married woman.

And Jack, a former FBI agent, was a freelance hostage negotiator, always on call, ready to run at a moment’s notice, married to his job. A job, he’d told her, that he wouldn’t be able to do if he had someone waiting at home for him. A job filled with risks he wouldn’t be able to take if he had someone relying on him.

They’d spent this one stolen, enchanting week in New York City while he waited for the call to move and she was getting the runaround from a Wall Street Journal reporter she’d come to straighten out about Jefferson’s public support of stem-cell research. If it hadn’t been for the threat of some very real damage to Senator Jefferson Cooley’s reputation because of the bad—and worse, inaccurate—press coverage he’d received from the Journal, his communications director would not have had to risk her emotional health by staying in the city all those days. As soon as she’d met Jack Shaw she’d have hightailed it back to Washington.

To her husband.

And boss.

A man who was twenty-seven years her senior.

When she’d finally spoken with the reporter an hour ago, he’d promised a retraction. And another article, telling the real story. The story Erica had written herself and handed him as she left the meeting.

She could escape New York. And the temptation of Jack.

Her flight left JFK at seven the next morning, putting her in Washington in time to make the morning staff meeting at the senator’s office.

She’d have liked to go tonight. To make it home in time to crawl into bed beside him and tell herself she’d done him no wrong.

Maggie’s Place. It was the pub where she and Jack had first met. They’d both enjoyed the place, with its long mahogany bar and Irish charm, and they’d gone there every night for the past six nights. And stayed until closing.

It had been on one of the tables set for two along the side wall of the pub that Jack’s fingers had found hers. And clung. They’d been talking about their favorite television sitcoms at the time.

Shaking her stylishly cropped head of short dark hair, Erica still couldn’t understand why she hadn’t carefully pulled her hand free. Or why she’d gone back the next night.

When she’d married Jefferson three years before, she’d promised him loyalty.

He’d known she wasn’t in love with him.

A longtime friend of her family’s, he’d been one of the guests at her wedding to Shane. She’d been a naive, idealistic twenty-two.

Four years later he’d been there to help Erica pick up the pieces when that marriage ended. She was already working in his office by then, Congress had been in session, and he’d given her very little time off, insisting that work was what would see her through.

He’d been right.

As he almost always was.

He’d told her, one night when he’d come into the office late and found her crying over the writing of what should have been a simple speech, that the happiest years of her life weren’t behind her. That eventually she’d love again.

She’d refused to believe him.

Jefferson had shaken his head, telling her to give it some time.

But love hadn’t come to her a second time, and after Shane, it never would. Or so she’d thought until this past week.

The possibility that Jefferson might have been right—and that she’d found out several years too late—scared her to death.

Until this week she’d consoled herself with the thought that she’d already endured the worst life had to offer. That nothing she had yet to face would be harder than surviving Shane’s betrayal.

She’d been wrong.

Leaving Jack was going to be worse. Far worse.

Walking around the corner to Forty-seventh Street, Erica could see Maggie’s Place just ahead. She’d been telling herself all day that she wasn’t going to the pub that night. Jack had given her a quick good-night kiss the night before. The affectionate kind of kiss shared by friends.

And she’d felt it all the way to her toes.

Jack was danger. Making her want things—believe in things—she couldn’t have. She was better off not knowing they existed. She had to stay away from him.

Her feet carried her toward the pub, anyway.

Jack risked his life whenever he went to work. He walked into highly volatile situations to save the lives of strangers, negotiating with madmen and extremists and desperate people who had nothing to lose. He’d told her she was the first person he’d connected with on a personal level in more than five years.

She couldn’t just leave him sitting there. Couldn’t go without thanking him for giving back to her what Shane had stripped from her all those years ago. Her belief in herself—and in a chemistry that made life exciting. In possibilities.

She couldn’t go without telling him goodbye.

Jefferson had her life. She could at least give Jack goodbye.

He was sitting at “their” table. The one halfway down the row. “You look beautiful,” he told her, smiling, his eyes warm with seductive appreciation as she pulled out her chair.

She’d worn the black ankle-length pants and red blouse more for him than for the Journal reporter.

“Thank you,” she said, her trepidation disappearing as she took her seat across from him.

In this city where anyone could get lost in the crowd, her time with him existed in a universe all its own.

It seemed to Erica that being with Jack brought her face-to-face with the person inside herself, the person she really was. How could anything that felt this natural, this destined, be wrong?

He was wearing jeans and a black polo shirt that hugged his chest, the bands at the bottoms of the short sleeves tight around his biceps.

“Did you get your call?” she asked, although it made no difference.

Hours were all they had left. They’d both known that from the beginning.

“Did you have your meeting?” he countered, glancing down into his beer.

He hadn’t answered her question.

Erica waited until he looked up, his beautiful eyes meeting hers, before she nodded.

In his gaze she saw a flash of the same desperate sadness she felt herself.

“When are you leaving?” he asked.

“In the morning. I have a seven o’clock out of JFK.”

“I go in the morning, too.”

Although it made no sense at all, disappointment crashed through her.

“Where?” she asked, telling herself not to be afraid for him.

“Florida.”

A teenage boy was being held hostage by a suspected drug dealer who wanted safe passage to Cuba. The FBI Crisis Negotiation chief had called Jack earlier in the week to speak with him about the situation. They’d still been searching for the boy at that point.

“The hostage-taker’s ready to negotiate?” she murmured.

Jack nodded.

“So why do you have to go?” She cringed, hoping that didn’t sound as bad to Jack’s ears as it had to hers.

“I speak the language, for one thing. The guy’s Latin American.”

“You can’t be the only one.”

He took a sip of his beer, studying the suds. “A few years ago I had a successful negotiation involving him. He’s agreed to talk, under the stipulation that I be the one he speaks to.”

“He’s taken hostages before?”

“No.” Jack shook his head, frowning. “He was a hostage.”

“Oh!” Taken aback, Erica studied him.

And she’d thought she had a tough job.

“So—” he looked across at her, his weathered face solemn “—tonight’s it, then.”

“Yeah.”

His hand was close to hers on the table. Just the smallest movement would bring their fingers together again.

“Maybe we should go upstairs to the dining room or something as a sort of send-off.”

“I’d rather stay right here.” Where they’d spent every minute they’d ever had together.

He sat back, his hand sliding off the table. “I’m glad we had this week,” he said.

“I am, too.” The words were almost a whisper. Her throat hurt with the effort to get them out at all.

How was she going to live the rest of her life without ever seeing him again?

He finished his beer and motioned for another. “Knowing that you’re in the world gives my life a whole new dimension,” he said quietly.

She couldn’t speak, afraid of what might spill forth, afraid of the regrets she’d have to face when she left their world and returned to her own.

“It’s something we can take with us,” he added.

Erica tried to smile. “Thank you for that.”

“Hey.” He leaned forward, his thumb following a path down her cheek. “We have hours yet.” His face was softly lit with a half smile that almost made her cry. “Let’s not lose them.”

Her face, her entire body, responding to the light touch of his thumb, Erica nodded.

“I think pita pizzas are in order.”

It was their favorite of Maggie’s munchies. They’d tried them all.

Erica forced a grin and determined that she’d make the next hours the absolute best they could be.

By the time the pizza arrived, she’d just about managed to pretend that this was like any other night that week—a beginning, instead of the end.

Except for the underlying desperation. Now when they talked, they didn’t hesitate before they jumped into any topic. If they only had this one night, they didn’t have time for deliberation, for careful phrasing or circumspect questions.

Erica couldn’t take her gaze off him, even for a second, frightened of losing the chance to store up one more memory. He seemed to be having the same problem, his eyes more intent—though she wouldn’t have believed that possible—than they’d been all those other nights.

They were drinking faster.

Eating faster.

They were doing everything faster, speeding through years of their lives, trying to squeeze in every single memory.

And then, suddenly, they stopped. The noise in the pub continued around them—the murmur of conversation, intermittent laughter, the clinking of glasses—but Erica and Jack were surrounded by silence.

Emotions engulfed her. Confused her. There was so much, so many feelings. And yet not nearly enough.

“Why do you have to be a hostage negotiator?” she blurted out, terrified for his safety, although it wasn’t her business to be.

Shaking his head, he took a protracted swig of beer. And then he said, “I was married once. A long time ago.”

Erica’s stomach tensed. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“I know.” Both hands grasped the cold mug, and he didn’t meet her eyes, gazing someplace over her shoulder, instead.

“I’d just joined the agency,” he finally began. “Completed my training. She was a flight attendant. We’d met in college.”

“She went to college to be a flight attendant?”

“Melissa had a degree in education. Loved kids, hated teaching.” Jack’s tone of voice, the faraway look in his eyes, testified that he’d loved his wife.

“She liked flying?”

“She liked traveling, and I was gone a lot.”

“So what happened?”

He glanced back at Erica and some of his tension—the stiffness in his shoulders, the whiteness of his knuckles around that mug—dissipated. “She got pregnant. We’d been married a little over three years and were both ready….”

Pregnant. Jack had a child.

Erica was finding it difficult to breathe, but she listened anyway, feeling his love for his family—sensing his pain.

When he reached across and took her hand, holding it with both of his, it was the most natural thing in the world. His palms felt cold from the mug of beer.

“We had a girl, Courtney Marie….”

Jack swallowed with apparent difficulty. His eyes had a definite sheen.

“When she was a couple of months old, Melissa took Courtney to see her mother out in California. My mother-in-law taught at a high school in Malibu, and Melissa went to meet her for lunch one day.”

He paused again. Erica squeezed his hand, holding on.

“A couple of kids went crazy, pulled guns out of their backpacks, started yelling.”

“Oh, my God,” Erica whispered. “Jack, don’t. You don’t have to do this.”

“According to the reports, it was all pretty chaotic after that. Some random shots were fired, but apparently no one was hurt. Officials started closing in on the kids. They got scared. And around the corner walked Melissa with Courtney in a carrier on her chest….”

Erica, seeing the story’s end, swallowed back tears.

“One of the kids grabbed her, held her in front of him while he made his way out of the school. They were holed up in his van for more than three hours before gunshots were heard again. When the authorities got inside the van, Melissa and Courtney had been killed by a single shot. I was working here in New York and they couldn’t reach me.”

“What happened to the kid?” It didn’t matter. Erica didn’t give a damn about the kid. She just had to get her mind off that young woman and her baby.

Jack’s baby.

“He was dead, too.”

Jack’s eyes were bleak. Vacant. And completely dry.

Erica had to fight not to cry for him.

“Jack,” she said, attempting to bring him back to her if she could. “I’m sorry. So incredibly sorry.”

As he refocused on her, Erica could see the raging emotions he was struggling to control. “I know,” he said.

There was nothing she could do for him, nothing she could say that was going to make any difference at all to the despair he was fighting. She could only sit there. Give him her love. And hope that there really was some healing power in a human heart.

“She was only two months old. Not even rolling over yet.” His voice was low. “That’s when I joined the Crisis Negotiation team.”

Erica ached to hold him in her arms.

She ached for a lot of things she couldn’t have.

CHAPTER TWO

HOURS PASSED. Erica drank four more glasses of wine, well past her limit. But without the numbness it brought, she’d never be able to walk away from Jack and go home to the man she’d married.

Maggie’s was closing within the hour. There were only a few late-night stragglers left.

“I’m glad Jefferson is good to you.”

“I don’t deserve his goodness,” Erica said. She’d always felt that way, but never more so than she did at this moment, sitting here with Jack, clutching his hand, afraid that she’d fallen in love with him.

“How can you say that?” Jack argued. “You spend your life presenting him in the best possible light, giving everything you have to the building of his reputation.”

“He’s in love with me.”

“I sure as hell hope so.” The words were sharp.

“I love him, too, but I’m not in love with him.”

“You said he knew that going in.”

She nodded. “I’d been working in his office for several years, and I’d recently received the promotion to communications director.” Erica, remembering back three years before, could hardly make sense of decisions that had seemed so logical and clear-cut. “The Republican senatorial race in Massachusetts was going to be brutal that year. While Jefferson’s reputation was good, so was the reputation of the state prosecutor hoping to win his seat. No matter how much we pumped the issues, the campaign was going to come down to the fact that the prosecutor had a beautiful wife and three honor-student kids, and Jefferson was childless and had been divorced for several years.”

She didn’t want to waste precious time talking about this. And yet, it was important to know he understood.

She stared at their hands. His tanned skin was in stark contrast to her paleness. She loved the back of his hand, covered with a sprinkling of the same sandy hair that fell across his forehead.

His touch was bittersweet, promising things she’d stopped believing in.

“One night, late, after consuming almost an entire bottle of wine to unwind from a particularly grueling week, Jefferson confessed that he’d been in love with me for years.”

It was well past midnight now. Their hours had turned into minutes.

Jack’s eyes narrowed. “He just blurted it out?”

“No.” She shook her head. “That’s not Jefferson’s style. He was arguing with me, actually, disputing a statement I’d just made about the nonexistence of love. I told him the emotion was a fantasy. That its power was ephemeral. That the happiness I thought I’d found with Shane didn’t really exist.”

It had been one of her many misconceptions, though she hadn’t discovered that until this past week.

“We debated through another glass of wine, and then I finally just told him that if love did exist, it wasn’t anything I was going to allow in my life again. I refused to be that vulnerable. Wasn’t going to give someone else the power to hurt me that much.”

“A wise decision.”

Erica wasn’t surprised he agreed. After sharing a sardonic grin with him, she continued. “At that point, with the conversation at a standstill and the bottle of wine gone, Jefferson’s confession lay between us like…like some shocking indiscretion.”

The bartender came over and handed Jack their final tab. Without letting go of her hand, he fumbled with his wallet, threw his credit card on the table. He caressed her palm with his fingers—and the rest of her with his eyes.

Time was almost up.

She needed more to drink. She wasn’t numb enough yet.

“What happened next?” he asked, as though their world wasn’t coming to an end.

“We talked awkwardly about the campaign for a few minutes, trying to get back on familiar ground. The talk came around to Jefferson’s single status, and the solution seemed obvious. We should get married. He must’ve asked me fifteen times if I was sure I didn’t harbor some secret dream about a knight in shining armor.

“I pointed out that I hadn’t had a date since my divorce and that I didn’t want one.

“He said he hated the thought of me living my whole life alone. I told him I wasn’t thrilled with the idea myself, but that it was far better than the alternative.

“He asked me to marry him and eventually I accepted.”

The bartender came back with the receipt for Jack to sign. Resentment shot through Erica. Couldn’t the man have given them a few more minutes?

“Two months later we were married, and four months after that, he won.” She continued telling her story as though they hadn’t been interrupted, as though they weren’t supposed to be standing up, heading toward the door, leaving the pub.

And each other.

“I had a lot of reservations because I knew he was in love with me and I couldn’t return those feelings. But in the end, he somehow convinced me that being allowed to share my life would make him happy. I let him convince me it would be enough.”