Merry Christmas, Babies Read online

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Uh-uh.” Elise shook her head, still watching him. “I think the baby just moved.”

  “It’s probably indigestion,” he said. “You’re only four months along. That’s too soon, isn’t it?”

  “Not with quads. Look at my stomach, Joe! I’m already showing, and that doesn’t usually happen at four months, either.”

  Elise felt herself blushing when he did exactly as she asked, staring at her stomach.

  “There it is again!” she cried out, grinning, feeling idiotically close to tears. “I’m sure that’s the baby moving. I’ve never felt anything like it before!”

  “Let me feel.”

  She’d barely registered the words before Joe’s larger, warmer hand was pushing hers aside and flattening against her stomach. She wanted to tell him it was too soon to feel anything on the outside, but his hand felt so good. So right.

  She was so in trouble.

  Dear Reader,

  Happy holidays! Have you ever wanted something so badly that you can’t stop thinking about it? So badly that you’re compelled to do whatever it takes to make it happen? That’s kind of how things went with this book. When I met Elise she was going to have quadruplets. That’s all I knew about her. I’d seen this quad stroller while I was out shopping one day last fall and when the questions started coming, I knew I was going to have to write a story about a multiple birth. That was when Elise appeared.

  And then, as usually happens in my world, emotions started to appear from nowhere and take over my story. I fought them a bit. Tried to tell them who was really boss. But once I conceded that I wasn’t the one in charge here, a story unfolded that I think will touch your heart. It has certainly touched mine.

  In each of us is a drive to achieve something, whether that be financial, emotional, career based, relationship based, or something else entirely. We all have needs. This is the story of someone just like us–a woman whose heart cries out for more. For love and belonging. But with Elise, it doesn’t stop with the wanting. She steps outside the normal boundaries of societal expectations to provide her life with the fullness she craves. Her journey is lonely. It isn’t easy, by any stretch. And in the end, being true to herself and the dictates of her heart–she is successful. Beyond her dreams.

  I learned an important lesson from Elise Richardson. I don’t have to settle. This holiday season, my gift to you is the challenge to ask yourself for more. And then to make it happen… Next Christmas, we can check back with each other to see what we’ve accomplished!

  Tara Taylor Quinn

  MERRY CHRISTMAS, BABIES

  Tara Taylor Quinn

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Tara’s first book, Yesterday’s Secrets, published in October 1993, was a finalist for the Romance Writers of America’s prestigious RITA® Award. Her subsequent work has earned her finalist status for the National Readers’ Choice Award and the Holt Medallion, plus another two RITA® Award nominations. A prolific writer, she has forty-two novels and three novellas published. To reach Tara write to her at P.O. Box 133584, Mesa, Arizona 85216 or through her Web site, www.tarataylorquinn.com.

  Books by Tara Taylor Quinn

  HARLEQUIN SUPERROMANCE

  1057—THE SECRET SON

  1087—THE SHERIFF OF SHELTER VALLEY*

  1135—BORN IN THE VALLEY*

  1171—FOR THE CHILDREN

  1189—NOTHING SACRED*

  1225—WHAT DADDY DOESN’T KNOW

  1272—SOMEBODY’S BABY*

  1297—25 YEARS

  (anthology with Margot Early & Janice Macdonald)

  1309—THE PROMISE OF CHRISTMAS

  1350—A CHILD’S WISH

  HARLEQUIN SINGLE TITLE

  SHELTERED IN HIS ARMS*

  MIRA BOOKS

  WHERE THE ROAD ENDS

  STREET SMART

  HIDDEN

  IN PLAIN SIGHT

  For Rachel—my dearest gift. If you only ever learn one thing from me, please let it be always to listen to your heart and act as it directs.

  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

  “ANYONE HEAR FROM ELISE?” Joe Bennett walked into the lunchroom at the back of the suite of offices he and his partner—and the bank—now owned. Eating meals ranging from fruit and yogurt to homemade burgers, the employees Elise Richardson supervised sat at the long, elegant wooden table.

  “Not a word.” Twenty-five-year-old Angela Parks glanced over her shoulder at him from the granite-topped island marking the center of the full kitchen on one end of the room. She was making a salad.

  It was Thursday. On Fridays Elise cooked lunch for their nine-member staff. Maybe she was out grocery shopping for the next day’s offering.

  But it would be the first time in the ten years they’d been in business that she’d done so during the workday. At night, while Joe left the job and lived a life, Elise worked at home—or shopped for the office.

  “She didn’t say where she was going?”

  “I think she had a dentist appointment,” Ruth Gregory said, straightening a stem in the silk flower centerpiece in front of her. At fifty, she was the oldest B&R employee.

  “No.” Thirty-five-year-old Mark Oppenheimer popped the last of his usual peanut butter sandwich in his mouth and stood. “That was last month. Today she didn’t say what kind of appointment, only that she shouldn’t be gone more than an hour.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Nine.” As their chief financial officer, the skinny, bespectacled man was Elise’s second in command and the source most likely to be up to date.

  Glancing at his multi-dialed designer watch—which his then-wife had bought him for Christmas a few years ago and which Joe wore because it would be a waste not to, even though he preferred the simple large-faced cheap number he’d worn in college—he frowned.

  “That was almost four hours ago.”

  Mark wiped the crumbs he’d left on the table onto the floor—a man after his own heart. “I know,” he said.

  “And she hasn’t called?”

  “No.”

  After another few seconds of standing there blankly, Joe started to leave. And then turned back.

  “Anyone think to call the hospitals to make sure she wasn’t in an accident?” He was only half joking, but their chuckles followed him down the hallway.

  “I’ve got lunch with Anderson, Anderson and Bailey,” he told his secretary on his way out. The law firm was the biggest in the state of Michigan—a six-million-dollar account—and B&R had been courting them for a couple of years. “Text message me the second Elise gets in, will you?”

  Bennett and Richardson Professional Employee Organization, or B&R PEO, offered companies a comprehensive package that included payroll, workers’ compensation, tax compliance and group insurance, all at a rate lower than they could arrange for themselves. Joe Bennett was in charge of sales, and Elise Richardson, his best friend from college, oversaw virtually everything else.

  Normally his cell phone was in the Off position when he was in meetings—commonly disguised as social gatherings now that he had two salesmen who made the office calls to sit with managers and work out logist
ics. Today he turned his cell on to Vibrate instead, so he’d know if and when a message came through. He didn’t have an urgent need to speak to his business partner. He just wanted to assure himself that she was going to be around at some point to nag him about something.

  THE LONG, FAMILIAR private road across the front of the cemetery was potholed and narrow, barely wide enough to fit the Corvette. Elise passed several lanes that sectioned off areas filled with headstones of varying sizes, many with urns bearing colorful floral arrangements planted on Memorial Day two and a half weeks before. As she rounded the back border of the carefully tended green acreage, she slowed to a stop, then climbed out of the car, wrapping her short, three-quarter-sleeved white sweater more closely around her.

  She’d thought this stage of her life was about moving on. Becoming.

  Yet it turned out, at the moment, she needed her family.

  Concentrating on the feel of the soft, cool grass, Elise walked barefoot toward the stone bearing her family name. It brought a happy memory of running through the grass in bare feet, chasing her older brother—because if she could catch him, he’d let her ride on the back of his bike to go for an ice cream cone.

  Back then, she’d thought that she’d always managed to catch him because she was so strong and fast. Now she understood that he’d allowed her to. And she smiled.

  “Hi,” she said.

  Tucking her calf-length, white-and-pink floral cotton skirt beneath her, she sat directly in front of the main stone marked Richardson. And didn’t know what else to say. Normally her visits were to take care of their gravesites—pull weeds, plant flowers, scrub their stones. And while she worked, she’d tell them about the business, something that happened with an employee or a new building in town—not that they’d ever even heard of Lowell, Michigan.

  She’d bought the plot and buried what was left of their ashes, brought with her from Arkansas, as part of her therapy about eight years before.

  “Mama?”

  Her voice broke when she heard the word come out of her mouth. So she turned to another of the individual stones, bearing first and middle names, birth and death dates. “Daddy?”

  It wasn’t any easier. Her gaze moved again. “Danny?”

  And again. “Ellen?”

  “Baby Grace?”

  There’d been four of them once. Four children filling her parents’ home and hearts.

  Now there was only her.

  And…

  “Mama?” She cried openly because she couldn’t help it, and because there was no one around to see. Wiping her eyes with the bottom edge of her skirt, she finally admitted, “I’m scared.”

  Complete silence followed the confession. Inside of her and out.

  “I’m scared, Mama,” she said again, more firmly. “I know I’m not supposed to be, that I’m a survivor, but sometimes I wish I’d died along with the rest of you.”

  She quieted, waited to be struck for the ungrateful thought. But nothing happened. She wasn’t punished. And the thought didn’t leave, either.

  “Why did I have to be the one they got? Why did my bedroom have to be on the farthest side of the house? Why did Ellen share a room with Grace and not me? Why only me?”

  Because you’re special.

  The words were a whisper in her mind, almost as though carried on the light breeze. They were a memory from her early childhood. And from the physically and emotionally agonizing months and years that stretched from her eleventh year to her twentieth. She’d lost track of the number of people who’d said the words to her.

  But she could still hear them in her mother’s voice the day she’d asked her why she couldn’t have been the oldest like Danny, or the first girl like Ellen, or the baby like Grace. She’d been searching for her place, even then, stuck in the middle with no solid sense of how she fit.

  She stared at the smaller stone bearing her mother’s name. Wanting. Wishing. Needing.

  “I’m pregnant, Mama.”

  The stone in front of her blurred again. Pulling her knees up, her arms wrapped around them, Elise sat still and let her life settle around her as it would. And as the tears continued to flow, she lifted the edge of her skirt a second time, wiping her face. A face that none of the people whose names were engraved on those small, cold stones would ever recognize.

  JOE WASN’T SURE what to think when, at five after six that Thursday evening in mid-June, he walked up the steps of his partner’s elegant, colonial-style home on Lakeshore Drive overlooking the Flat River and knocked on the door. She pulled it open, looking as normal and fine as she did any other day.

  “You’re okay.” He hadn’t meant to sound disappointed. Hell, he wasn’t! He was relieved as hell. But—

  “I’m fine.”

  “You haven’t missed a day of work since we opened shop ten years ago.”

  “Then I guess I was due.”

  “You didn’t call.” Sweating in his short-sleeved shirt and tie, although the evening was a balmy seventy degrees, Joe shifted from foot to foot.

  “I own the company, Joe. I don’t have to call.”

  She was right, of course. “Co-own.”

  “How many times have you missed coming into the office and not called in about it?” Her chin lifted a notch, her dark, short, sassy hair falling away from her neck.

  It was different for him. He made outside calls. And even when he took a day off… “I take my cell phone everywhere. You can always reach me if there’s an emergency.”

  “I had mine, too.”

  “You didn’t answer.”

  “I listened to the messages.”

  Then she realized he’d been checking to make sure she was okay. And she hadn’t bothered to call him back, to assure him that she was.

  Odd.

  “Can I come in?”

  She hesitated and then nodded, stepping away from the door.

  He followed her through the formal living room, dining room and kitchen to the family room in the back of the house. He’d never understood why a woman who lived alone wanted so much space around her, but then, he’d never understood Elise, period.

  Outside the office, that was.

  A half-filled and perspiring glass of what appeared to be mostly juice and melted ice sat on the end table. The lamp was on. The large-screen television in front of the creamy white leather sofa was silent. There were no books, remote controls, or papers to indicate that his partner had been doing anything while she’d been sitting there.

  Tucking her feet beneath her white skirt, she curled up on the sofa. And picked at her fingernails.

  Her cats, Darin and Samantha, settled behind her on the back of the sofa.

  “You mind if I get myself a bottle of water?” He wasn’t thirsty. Except, perhaps, for a shot of bourbon. Straight up.

  He hadn’t consumed alcohol straight up since college.

  “Of course not.” Her smoky gray eyes were more mysterious to him than usual as she glanced at him. Why did the woman’s expression so rarely show him what she was thinking, like everyone else’s did? “Help yourself.”

  Retrieving a bottle from the top shelf of the refrigerator, he glanced around the kitchen. The red-and-gold-flowered canisters that matched the wall paper border topping the golden accent wall were all neatly in place. Salt and pepper shakers that went with the set were on the stove where he’d always seen them in the past. If she’d eaten anything, she’d already cleaned up. And dried the sink, as well.

  She’d had Kelly and him for dinner on a regular basis when they’d still been married. Joe couldn’t remember her ever drying out the sink when she’d finished the dishes.

  Hadn’t she eaten?

  “So what’d you do today?” He tried for casual as he approached her again, unsure whether he should join her on the couch or remain standing.

  Now her eyes were moist when she looked at him, as though, while he’d been perusing her kitchen, she’d been crying. Or was about to start.

  This was new
ground for him. In the almost fourteen years they’d known each other it had somehow always been her picking up the pieces for him. He stared at the polished gleam on his wing-tip shoes.

  “Mostly I stayed home.”

  Joe thought about the times he’d taken off work—they weren’t as rare as hers, but rare enough that the hours were filled to the brim.

  “Mostly?”

  Elise’s smile settled his nerves some. “It’s okay, Joe. You can go. I’m fine. Really.”

  He wanted to go.

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  She nodded. Darin opened one eye and closed it again.

  Joe drank the bottle of water, recapped it, planning to throw it in the trash in the kitchen on his way out. He had a frozen Salisbury steak and mashed potato dinner to get home to. And then was meeting a couple of bankers for drinks at nine, after their racquetball game. If all went well, he’d be signing on their chain of financial institutions, Michigan Local Banks, to begin payroll at the beginning of July. It was a ten-million-dollar account—a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year payout to B&R—his largest yet.

  Joe glanced at his partner, the woman who’d been his buddy in college, challenging his thinking at every turn, challenging him to put his money where his mouth was and go into business, intimidating the hell out of him a time or two, listening to him whine and then curse when Kelly left him to make babies with a man who wanted them. She’d gotten drunk with him the day his divorce papers came through.

  “I can’t go until you tell me what’s going on.”

  That perfectly sculpted chin lifted again.

  “I’m six-and-a-half weeks pregnant.”

  Joe dropped his water bottle.

  “I WON’T LET the business suffer.”

  Shocked at the emotions running through him—anger at the man who’d done this to her, feelings of protectiveness—Joe loosened his tie and sat. Darin and Samantha both leaped from the sofa and scurried out of the room.