Baby Times Two

  Baby Times Two

  Marie Ferrarella

  To Jessi and Nikky,

  who aren’t babies any longer—

  except in my heart

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  They didn’t want to be separated.

  Their time was coming soon and the Overseer had informed them that when it came, they were to be born to different parents. They didn’t want that.

  Tina, the braver of the two, ventured forward, not to challenge, but in her innocence, to question.

  “But why?”

  When the Overseer cast his crystal-blue gaze in her direction, Tina moved back on her cloud, intimidated. He looked at her solemnly.

  “Because.”

  It was not an answer that contented her, or Eric, the angel who sought to be her brother. For so long they had planned to be born together. To share the same parents, the same laughter. The same memories.

  They had believed it all to be settled. Their parents had been chosen and Tina and Eric had been matched perfectly.

  And then it all changed.

  The lady who was to be their mother had cried and the man who was to be their father had grieved.

  But rather than speak, they had both shouted at each other to hide the tears and the pain. The shouting had turned to silence and swiftly became a rift that had torn them apart like two halves of a single piece of paper. They ceased to be with each other.

  And Tina and Eric had been forced to wait. They were not to be conceived. Not to be born. At least, not to this couple. Because the man and the woman were not a couple any longer.

  Inconspicuously, Eric and Tina had dropped back, letting the other souls get ahead. They had dropped back, hoping.

  But hope had not borne fruit. The man and the woman had remained apart and now Tina and Eric’s time was at hand again. A time to plan for birth.

  Tina had her own plan, though it was not encouraged, or even permitted.

  “Jonathan did it,” she whispered to Eric once they were alone. “And Erin, too. They chose their parents. Why can’t we?” She looked down and an opening formed for her, a window to the world she would soon be a part of. She saw the man and the woman, though they were distant from each other. “Why can’t we choose them?”

  But Eric was not a dreamer. Like the man who was to have been his father, he saw only reality. “Because they don’t like each other anymore,” he reminded Tina.

  “Yes, they do,” Tina insisted. Then she smiled. “We can help them see that.”

  Eric looked down, puzzled, intrigued. “How?”

  Tina didn’t answer. Her eyes danced like green lights in the sun as thoughts multiplied in her head. She beckoned Eric to sit by her on the cloud. When he did, she leaned closer and whispered, “Watch.”

  Eric did as she bid him.

  Tina concentrated, and soon things began to take shape, to happen. The two people began to be drawn closer, ever closer.

  Soon, Eric was smiling as well. “Can I try?”

  Tina nodded, pleased. The window below them grew larger. “What took you so long?”

  Chapter One

  He was never late.

  Not if he could possibly help it. Never. Not as a student, certainly not as a professional. An accountant had to be meticulous, and Chase was, in all aspects of his life. Being early had always been Chase Randolph’s hallmark. His ex-wife had once commented in a fit of temper that he had raised punctuality to the realm of a religion.

  So when he found himself running twenty minutes behind schedule, it really annoyed him. He wouldn’t have been late, actually, if he hadn’t given in to curiosity and answered the telephone just before he closed his front door as he was leaving. It wasn’t as if he would have missed something. Chase had all the modern technology that went with telephones these days: Call Waiting, last call recall, a state-of-the-art answering machine that double-dated with a deluxe fax machine.

  Despite all this, for some reason, when he’d heard the telephone ringing this evening, there had been something overwhelmingly alluring about knowing now, not later, who was calling.

  If someone had asked him why, Chase couldn’t have explained it. He didn’t even like talking on the telephone. Nonetheless, there had been this irresistible need to answer the phone when it rang.

  For his uncustomary curiosity, he was rewarded with back-to-back wrong numbers. And then, as he’d placed the receiver in its cradle, the telephone had rung again, as if on cue. This time it had been a man determined to get him to sign up for a “free” tanning season. Chase had cut him short and hung up.

  Muttering to himself, he had hurried out of the house before the telephone had a chance to ring again.

  Five minutes later, he was crawling along in a traffic jam he was certain had materialized for the sole purpose of confounding him. It seemed as if every available car in Newport Beach and the immediate vicinity had queued up on Jamboree Boulevard, perversely bound in the same direction as he was.

  It didn’t do much for his disposition.

  He hated being late. Besides, being late reminded him of Gina. Gina, who had been late for everything, including their wedding. It would have been better, he thought grimly, if she had missed that altogether. He would rather have thought of her as a wonderful, unattainable dream than the stark reality she became.

  Traffic finally and abruptly dissolved. For some odd reason, given the time of day, there were very few cars going his way when Chase made his turn onto MacArthur. He thought it strange that the road that stretched before him was so deserted, but it did give him the opportunity to make up for lost time. Chase glanced in his rearview mirror to make certain that there was no friendly policeman on a motorcycle lurking about in the recesses of the winding road, waiting to hand him a friendly ticket. It was just barely dusk.

  With any luck, he could still be only a few minutes late. At least he could try. Chase pressed down on the accelerator.

  Tension began to ease away like a carelessly slung dish towel slipping off his shoulder. Chase turned up the sound on his radio. An old seventies tune came on. Without realizing it, he began to sing along.

  It hit him a moment later that he was singing along with a tune that had once been “their” song—his and Gina’s. Chase stopped singing and switched stations.

  All in all, he thought almost doggedly, life was going rather spectacularly for him. After a relatively short amount of time—if he didn’t count the incredibly large amount of long hours put in at night—he had managed to work his way up to junior partner in the accounting firm of Lawson, Dougherty and Lane. With a bonus and a sizable raise in salary to fund his dream, Chase had gone out and purchased a condo in Newport Beach. He had been aching for a long time now to move out of the crammed bachelor quarters he’d been residing in since his divorce.

  A frown creased his lips.

  The divorce. He hadn’t thought about it very much recently. It came up now like an annoying black mark on a perfectly white page. The song had reminded him of the divorce, he thought. Reminded him of that and the tempestuous marriage that had come before.

  God, he must have been crazy to have done what he had, he speculated.

  It had been madness to marry her, sheer, utter madness. But then, he mused as shadows sneaked through the tall foxtails lining either side of the road, everyone was entitled to a little madness.

&
nbsp; And Gina had been his.

  Gina, with her long, curling black hair and her flashing blue eyes, had been nothing short of madness encapsulated in a five-foot-one frame. Drunk on love, or what he mistook for love, he’d known her all of three weeks before he did the stupidest thing he’d ever done in his life.

  The stupidest and the most impetuous.

  The only impetuous thing he’d ever done, he corrected himself silently. He’d married her. No home of his own, no job, twenty-two years old, a sheepskin, not yet dried, in his hand, and he had married her.

  Marry in haste, repent at leisure, wasn’t that the old chestnut? Well, that was exactly what had happened in their case. He had repented. Oh God, had he repented. The glistening fairy tale he thought he had bought into had turned into a badly written sitcom once they got down to the business of daily living. They saw nothing the same way, approached problems from opposite ends of the spectrum, and what he thought was a problem, she didn’t. And vice versa.

  Very rapidly, it became clear that he and Gina had absolutely nothing in common. Nothing, he recalled, except the sparks that flashed and flew between them whenever they made love.

  But a different set of sparks ricocheted between them once they were out of bed.

  While it had taken him more than a year to get over and cease longing for the former, the latter had left him almost battle weary. The endless sparring had been too great a price to pay for sensuous nights when symphonies played while their bodies melded. Certainly it was no way for him to go through life, constantly bobbing and weaving, constantly being on his toes, waiting for the next salvo to be fired.

  This way was quieter and a great deal easier on the nerves.

  Chase realized that his hands had tightened on the steering wheel. He loosened his grip.

  He wondered what she was doing these days. If she’d remarried and was bedeviling some other poor son of a gun the way she had him.

  A small, sharp sliver of jealousy pricked him like the point of a stiletto, the way it always did whenever he thought of someone else being with Gina. Of someone else enjoying the sweet taste of her mouth and learning the secrets of her warm, giving body.

  He was being stupid, he knew. After all, she was no longer any of his concern and he was certainly better off without her than with her.

  Sometimes, it just took a little more to convince him than at others. But it was nonetheless true.

  Chase looked at the green-faced clock on his dashboard. The minutes refused to freeze and were wantonly spilling away. With a huff, he pressed down harder on the accelerator.

  Despite his headway, he was probably going to be a good twenty-five minutes late for this meeting with the firm’s new client, a flamboyant, unorthodox self-made millionaire by the name of Nicholas James.

  Chase thought of his senior partner. Reed wasn’t going to be happy about his being late. Reed Lawson had inherited his seat in the company from his father. Sitting at the helm, Reed had guided the accounting firm for a long time, skillfully building its reputation. Anyone working for him soon learned that while Reed could add two numbers together, accounting, at least for him, was a lost art. His talent, and it was an exceptional one, lay in finding the right people for the job. People, Chase liked to think, like him.

  Late people like him.

  Chase sighed, curbing his impatience. Better late, he counseled himself, than never.

  He didn’t really believe that.

  * * *

  Gina Delmonico struggled with an incredible urge to give her car a good swift kick as she circled the dormant beige vehicle in mounting irritation.

  But kicking it would only scuff her shoes and hurt her toe. It certainly wouldn’t hurt the car. She sighed as she shook her head. Talk about timing. What a miserable time for this to have happened.

  She glared at the hood. The grillwork almost seemed to be grinning at her.

  The beast, she thought.

  She called her car Brutus because she thought of it in those terms, as a brute. It had given her trouble almost from the moment she had signed the purchase papers. She had changed its name from Oliver to Brutus the third month she had it.

  Gina named everything, inanimate or thriving. It was a holdover from her childhood. The plants on her windowsill had names, as did her computer at work. As a child, she had had a huge imagination. It was the only way she felt she could survive the loneliness. In her mind she had spawned a bevy of imaginary friends. It had helped her fill the void that was recreated each time her parents moved to yet another barracks, yet another state. Imaginary friends didn’t take much packing and they never subjected her to the awkward moments of making their acquaintance. They accompanied her each time she was the new kid on the block.

  The habit of naming things remained with her as she grew into an adult. Chase had thought it was silly and had laughed. And hurt her feelings.

  She caught hold of herself as she felt her mind drifting toward memories of him. She didn’t know why, after almost four years, she was suddenly thinking of him again. Thinking and yearning...

  No, not yearning—breathing a sigh of relief, she corrected. Life with him would have driven her out of her mind. He’d had no imagination, only goals. Goals that had seemed to take her place so easily.

  She was lucky to be rid of such a cold fish.

  As if to prove her wrong, a vignette popped into her mind. A tiny pearl of a scene, recalling one of their passionate nights together.

  Gina blinked, as if that would erase the chalk drawings in her mind. She didn’t have time to daydream. She had a problem on her hands.

  Dusk was slowly stealing about her, wrapping the area in a soft gray stole. Gina frowned.

  Well, she wasn’t Lieutenant Colonel Delmonico’s little girl anymore, but she certainly wished she had picked up on some of his mechanical expertise. Right about now, it would have been invaluable. Moving the cuff of her white summer suit aside, she looked at her watch in the fading light. Almost seven. She was late.

  For once in her life, she had made an early start, and look where it had gotten her. Stranded a half mile or so from her destination.

  Gina sighed, eyeing Brutus malevolently. This wasn’t supposed to have happened. She’d just had the car in for maintenance. With a shake of her head, she thought of Rene, sitting in the restaurant, drumming on the table with his long, artistic fingers.

  She knew he would be in a snit, but there was no helping that. She smiled slightly as she thought of her fastidious partner. Twenty years or more her senior, though twenty was all he’d admit to, Rene DuBois had brought an incredible amount of expertise to the small business that she had begun on a shoestring. He’d been patient and, in his own way, kind to her as he helped guide her and Decorate! into the successful business it was today.

  “Right again, Rene,” she murmured. Rene was always insisting that she get a portable telephone, or at least one in her car. Stubbornly, because she enjoyed having a certain amount of freedom and impulsiveness, she had resisted. Besides, she wasn’t one for gadgets, even though the rest of the world obviously thrived on them.

  Maybe that made her old-fashioned, she mused.

  Her ex-husband had another term for it. Pigheaded and archaic. That made two terms, didn’t it? Her mouth curved in a smile.

  The next moment, the smile was gone. There he was again, Chase, invading her mind at the least possible excuse. Chase, her ex-husband. After almost four years, it was still difficult for her to apply that term to him. He’d been such a vital part of her life, albeit for a short while, that it was hard pasting any label on him other than his name. Chase.

  Chase said it all, she thought.

  Damn, this wasn’t getting her anywhere, least of all to her destination.

  Her eyes narrowed as she looked at the car. “Okay, Brutus. I’m willing to let bygones be bygones. I’m going to get into this car and start it up. You are going to do the starting up, got that?”

  Exhaling a mighty sigh, Gi
na slid in behind the steering wheel. She shut her eyes, mumbled a prayer and turned on the ignition.

  Nothing.

  Not even so much as a sputter. The car was stone cold dead.

  Exasperated, Gina leaned back in her seat. “This isn’t very friendly, Brutus. I see a used car lot in your near future.”

  Pumping the accelerator, she tried again. More of the same. Nothing.

  Gina laid her head against the steering wheel and gathered her thoughts. She had two options. Sit here until Rene—hopefully—became worried and came looking for her, or start walking. The shopping center that housed the restaurant where she was to meet him wasn’t that far away, she supposed. Although it appeared a great deal farther away by foot than by car.

  Gina looked down at her shoes. She wasn’t exactly wearing the kind of footwear that went well with walking along the highway. But then, she hadn’t dressed for a prolonged walk, either. She had dressed for what promised to be a very rewarding dinner meeting. Business was burgeoning at an amazing rate. Word of mouth was serving her and her partner well. It had reached the ear of a wealthy financier who had recently acquired a hotel in Albuquerque and wanted it completely redecorated. Citing a busy schedule, Nicholas James had asked to meet them at Sir Walter Scott’s for dinner. Thinking of the fee involved, Gina would have been willing to meet him on the back of Moby Dick for brunch if the whale had existed.

  Either way, it was a meeting, she thought, that was now going on without her.

  Sprinkling Brutus with a few choice words she had picked up around the various bases where her father was stationed—words he would have washed her mouth out for, even now—Gina removed her key from the ignition and got out again.

  She tossed the thin chain of her purse over her slender shoulder and looked at the road. She had no recourse but to start walking.

  It wasn’t that she minded walking. Exercise exhilarated her. Usually. Rain or shine, most mornings would find her jogging along the main drag in the residential neighborhood where she lived. What she minded was making the hike in four-inch heels.