An Unexpected Addition Read online

  Letter to Reader

  Title Page

  Books by Terese Ramin

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prelude

  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 17

  Postlude

  Copyright

  Kate suddenly realized that until Hank Mathison had set foot on her farm, she hadn’t known she could feel like this. Alone. Lost. Alive. Blossoming.

  She’d always known she was a woman, but until Hank Mathison she’d never known what it was like to feel like a woman. To want to be a woman, in every sense of the word.

  Intensely.

  To need to understand the physical subtleties of her body, to covet a knowledge she didn’t possess.

  Unconditionally.

  To quite simply and emphatically crave Hank and everything he was, everything he would be.

  Passionately, unequivocally, irrevocably.

  To understand that for more than thirty-five years she’d been missing a piece of herself that she hadn’t even realized existed, and that piece had a name—and its name was Hank....

  Dear Reader,

  I hope you’ve got a few days to yourself for this month’s wonderful books. We start off with Terese Ramin’s An Unexpected Addition. The “extra” in this Intimate Moments Extra title is the cast of characters—lots and lots of kids—and the heroine’s point of view once she finds herself pregnant by the irresistible hero. The ending, as always, is a happy one—but the ride takes some unexpected twists and turns I think you’ll enjoy.

  Paula Detmer Riggs brings her MATERNITY ROW miniseries over from Desire in Mommy By Surprise. This reunion romance—featuring a pregnant heroine, of course—is going to warm your heart and leave you with a smile. Cathryn Clare is back with A Marriage To Remember. Hero and ex-cop Nick Ryder has amnesia and has forgotten everything—though how he could have forgotten his gorgeous wife is only part of the mystery he has to solve. In Reckless, Ruth Wind’s THE LAST ROUNDUP trilogy continues. (Book one was a Special Edition.) Trust me, Colorado and the Forrest brothers will beckon you to return for book three. In The Twelve-Month Marriage, Kathryn Jensen puts her own emotional spin on that reader favorite, the marriage-of-convenience plot. And finally, welcome new author Bonnie Gardner with Stranger in Her Bed. Picture coming home to find out that everyone thinks you’re dead—and a gorgeous male stranger is living in your house!

  Enjoy them all, and don’t forget to come back next month for more of the most exciting romantic reading around, right here in Silhouette Intimate Moments.

  Yours,

  Leslie Wainger

  Senior Editor and Editorial Coordinator

  Please address questions and book requests to:

  Silhouette Reader Service

  U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

  Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont L2A 5X3

  TERESE RAMIN

  AN UNEXPECTED ADDITION

  Books by Terese Ramin

  Silhouette Intimate Moments

  Water from the Moon #279

  Winter Beach #477

  A Certain Slant of Light #634

  Five Kids, One Christmas #680

  An Unexpected Addition #793

  Silhouette Special Edition

  Accompanying Alice #656

  TERESE RAMIN

  lives in Michigan with her husband, two children, two dogs, two cats and an assortment of strays. When not writing romance novels, she writes chancel dramas, sings alto in the church choir, plays the guitar, yells at her children to pick up their rooms (even though she keeps telling herself that she won’t), and responds with silence when they ask her where they should put their rooms after they’ve picked them up.

  A full-fledged believer in dreams, she says the only thing she’s ever wanted to do is write. After years of dreaming without doing anything about it, she finally wrote her first romance novel, Water from the Moon, which won a Romance Writers of America Golden Heart Award in 1987 and was published by Silhouette in 1989. Her subsequent books have appeared on the Waldenbooks romance bestseller list. She is also the recipient of a 1991 Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Award. She hasn’t dreamed without acting for a long time.

  For Sean, because he is.

  And for Damaris, who said, “Write the book you want to write.” Thanks.

  To Jeanne,

  who took the pictures, made suggestions, worried and always lets me take her for granted. Thanks for keeping the Complaints Department open.

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to Sheila Davis and Tom Pettipren, who talked with me about their own and others’ experiences with foster children and foreign adoptions. You taught me a great deal. Blessings on you and all of your children. Thanks also to Kathleen Daly, med tech, Denver V.A.M.C., for putting me in touch with live Ilamas and their people, and with the V.A.M.C. prosthetics service. Thanks and appreciation to Bob Riley of Boulder Ridge Ranch, Boulder, Colorado, for spending so much time answering my questions and introducing me to his llamas, indulging my curiosity, and for his patience and humor when I induced his normally mellow friends to spit when they usually don’t—at people, that is—ever. Special thanks to Dennis Luse, Certified Prosthetist, of the Denver V.A.M.C. prosthetics lab, for his time and patience in answering my questions about juvenile amputees, prosthetic limbs and for showing me practical solutions to impractical problems. I would also like to acknowledge a research debt to the work Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss, by Hope Edelman, Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1994. Any mistakes, stretches of reality and leaps of faith are entirely my own.

  Prelude

  Tuesday after Mother’s Day

  Evening sun slanted harsh and red through the low-slung windows, cutting a brilliant swath across the living room to catch in the miniature glass panes of the Victorian dollhouse that leaned half overturned against the couch toward the middle of the carpeted floor.

  For an instant, when he saw the apparent chaos through the watery glass panels of the door in his vestibule, Hank Mathison’s heart stopped. Megan, he thought. The voiceless mental whisper was filled with all the terror, panic and paranoia of a former undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration who was also a parent and whose home didn’t look the way he remembered leaving it this morning, and whose teenage daughter had failed to meet him when and where she was supposed to.

  With an effort he forced himself to breathe slow and even, to remember that he hadn’t worked deep cover in almost five years or done any undercover work at all in the past thirteen months. He was involved in nothing at the office that should cause his family to be the target of conspiracy. Panic, as he had firsthand reason to know, was a killer; composure was the only thing that would get you through a crisis. Especially if, as often happened, the crisis turned out to be imaginary.

  On the other hand, no matter how foolish he might feel afterward, it never hurt to be careful. Especially where Megan was concerned.

  Turning sideways to the door to make himself the narrowest target possible, Hank reached under his jacket for the weapon holstered at the small of his back, then stretched to turn the old glass doorknob. A gentle shove creaked the cantankerous portal open. He stepped into the house.

  Silence lay about him, sharp and caustic, accusing. Dust
motes, settled since the Molly Maids had been through the previous week, startled in the sudden soft swirl of air and fizzed against the sunlight. The stale scent of burned toast hung limp in the stillness, laced with the memory of this morning’s loud generation-gap conflict and—

  Muscles he’d long ago forgotten existed slumped gratefully. As quickly as panic had risen it stilled; the calm underside of his brain recognized “situation normal” as recall stirred. Megan, yesterday morning; him reminding her he’d leave work early to pick her up for their family counseling session after school; her cutting her last class and blowing him off, then not coming home until well after dinner last night.

  She’d been much too giggly high to benefit from the wherethe-hell-have-you-been, you-scared-me-to-death tongue hiding he’d needed to give her after an evening spent making frantic phone calls and calling in markers from his local law-enforcement buddies trying to find her. Worried as he’d been about her, and rebellious and hell-bent as she’d seemed the past couple of years, it was the first time he’d ever seen her come home high. And that had frightened him more than anything else she’d ever done.

  Her behavior always peaked for the worst near and during the holidays. Mother’s Day had never been meaner.

  Disbelief, denial, anger—three of the five stages of grief. Even after five years, she had never bargained—with him or God—over her mother’s life, and was nowhere near acceptance. Her anger seemed resolute. It was the world she lived in—at least at home with him—and dragged him into daily. As she reminded him often, he was the one with the sudden-death job, but Gen was the one who’d died suddenly. Damn him.

  “Why couldn’t it have been you?” She was passionate, filled with an anguish that refused to abate with time. “Why wasn’t it you?”

  He’d taken in her dilated pupils, the strained, pouchy softness beneath her eyes, the drugged lassitude of her movements and forced himself not to react to her bait, deliberately leaning over to smell her breath.

  She’d shoved him away with a disgusted, “What do you think I am, Hank, stupid? I had to drive Zevo’s car. I’m not drunk.”

  “You’re high on something, Meg. What is it?”

  “Oh, Daddy, you are such a narc.” She’d rolled her eyes and given him “The Look,” which proclaimed him stupid, naive and too damned old to get it. Her skin seemed unnaturally chalky against the artificial jet of her hair and the blackness of her clothes. The diamond stud piercing her left nostril flashed in the light when she moved her head. It was one of a pair Hank had given Gen on their tenth anniversary; he’d passed them on to Megan as Gen had intended to for her sixteenth birthday. He doubted that Gen had meant for Megan to wear one of them through her nose. “Lighten up and remember what it was like to be sixteen, would you?”

  “Damn it, Megan, I remember perfectly well what it is to be your age, and this isn’t it. Now what the hell are you on?”

  She’d turned her back on him with a flutter of her fingers, pale against the dark leather of her fingerless gloves. The collection of earrings around the lobe of each ear bounced and clinked lightly against each other. “Don’t get your boxers in a twist, Pop, it’s nothing illegal.” Then she’d added, airy, scornful, “It’s not even prescription.”

  “Then what the hell is it and why are you high on it?”

  “You call this high?” She’d laughed at him, shrill, delighted, and flounced off toward her bedroom, her calves a white flash between her short black socks and ankle boots and the hiked-tothe-knee wrinkles of her tight black spandex workout pants.

  So far as he knew, she didn’t work out.

  “This isn’t high, Dad, this is endorphins. This is just exercise trippin’.”

  He was shaking, angry, impotent, scared beyond belief for her. She looked more fragile to him than usual, more...vulnerable. Her face looked pouchy and shadowed, almost mottled, beyond what she did to herself with cosmetics.

  Too late to gain her trust, he wondered if she’d been crying. Her eyes were bright, shining with liquid and hidden pain, pupils swallowing irises, the whites around them lined with red. She was hiding stubborn secrets behind bravura, but he knew she was scared. He wanted to grab her and rattle her senseless and force her to trust him, to tell him what had happened, what was wrong—besides the obvious.

  But he wouldn’t touch her while either his anger or his fear could hurt her.

  Disbelief, denial, anger.

  “Tell me, damn it, in case I have to take you to the hospital in the middle of the night to get your stomach pumped.”

  Another mocking giggle, filled with the knowledge that there was nothing he could do—short of physical violent—to force her confidence. And the sword she wielded was the recognition that he loved her too much to come near her in anger.

  “Megan—” he’d begun, softer and steadier this time, his ire, if not worry, controlled.

  “Sorry, Dad.” She’d yawned big and stretched. “Can’t talk, gotta catch some Z’s. School tomorrow.”

  Then she’d left him standing helpless and distraught, staring after her when she sashayed carelessly down the hall to her bedroom and shut him out of her life. Her Nirvana CDs played quietly deep into the night.

  He’d gone to his own room and tried to sleep, but climbing the Matterhorn on his hands would have been easier. Hell was knowing that in her eyes his most grievous offense was that he wasn’t Gen.

  You’re the one who should have died, damn you, not Mom.

  Their conflict was old, charged with the moldering pain of them both still needing the woman who’d loved them and run interference between them; the wife and mother who’d died without warning and left them alone—strangers within their own skins—to cope with each other five years earlier.

  Disbelief, denial, anger...bargaining...acceptance. God, he wished Megan could. That she would.

  Instead, Megan told him constantly, one way or another, that the choices she made had to be her own for better or worse and he had no right to raise hell because of them. Of course, he knew all he really wanted was to prevent her making mistakes that would cost her more than her inexperience would allow her to imagine.

  This morning he’d tried to talk with her—not at her, as she’d accused him; as he’d once accused his own parents—but sleeplessness and disquiet had taken their toll on calmness. Instead he wound up doing exactly what his parents had done: preaching and lecturing, while she grew more and more sullen and withdrawn.

  He’d told her to be home tonight, that she was grounded for a week. She responded better to requests than commands; he tried to remember that, but didn’t always—especially when she seemed to deliberately try to force his patience beyond bearing.

  She’d told him to take his grounding and go to hell; he might be her keeper, but he couldn’t force her to stay in his jaiL

  They’d had a rip-roaring argument about the previous night, other nights, other days that ended with Megan storming down to her room, grabbing up the dollhouse he’d made her for Christmas when she was five and storming back to dump it at his feet—a symbol, she’d said, of her returning all the love he’d attempted to buy and coerce out of her over the years instead of simply being there for her, the same as he’d never been there for Mom. She’d accused him, as she had often through the intervening years, of being the reason Gen was gone. She’d denied his right to censure her conduct, impugned his parental responsibility to monitor and teach—or attempt to—however badly he might do it, and rejected his right to be concerned for her.

  Then she ran from him again, darting out the door to the car of a waiting friend in her omnipresent black uniform: Oversize T-shirt and too tight pants, black socks and scuffed half boots. Her punk-spiked, ebony-dyed hair and eyebrows, eyelashes, eyes and lips lined with obsidian kohl...only the almost vampire whiteness of her skin contrasted the unrelieved stygian mourning of her look. He hurt for her and for himself, but for all his years and experience with the world it seemed there was nothing he could do
to relieve either of them.

  How much do you love her? How badly do you want her back? Do you love her enough to...?

  The questions wafted, too often asked, too often unanswered. Unanswerable.

  To what? he wondered, not for the first time. To give her up, let her go, give in, get tough, request an intervention, walk away? To put a constant monitor on her behavior by quitting his job completely, living in her pocket twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week?

  The last thought was neither realistic nor practical. He had to earn a living for them somehow, keep up with the mortgage, insurance and groceries, see to the needs of the living; she had to have some independence. Regardless of how irresponsibly she spent it, achieving some autonomy from her father was integral to Megan’s growth, her future well-being and self-respect. Mistakes were part of the process. He just hoped neither she nor anyone else got hurt or worse while she went about sorting herself out.

  Not to mention that short of nailing her into a barrel and feeding her through the bunghole until she was thirty, there wasn’t a chance in hell he could make her do anything she didn’t choose to do.

  She was old enough to defy him, to demand his respect for her right to do what she chose with her own body. But she wasn’t emotionally mature enough to understand that respect was a twoway street, that it must be given to be received. That she had to respect herself before she’d ever be able to comprehend respect accorded her by anyone else.