Fit for a King Read online

  She burst into tears. In all her life, she’d never been so proud to be his daughter. “I didn’t know,” she whispered.

  “Sometimes,” he replied, “we have to fall into a hole to touch the sky. The important thing is to realize that we’re never out of God’s heart, no matter what we do. And very often it isn’t until we hit bottom that we reach out for a helping hand.”

  She hugged him warmly and sighed, feeling at peace for the first time in days. “I could use a helping hand.”

  “Here’s mine. Lean all you like.”

  After she told him what had happened, he took her into the kitchen, where they joined her mother for a cozy supper of cold cuts and iced tea. Not one word of censure was spoken.

  Her mother seemed to know it all without a word from her husband. She smiled at Elissa with loving warmth. “Don’t worry,” she said gently. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  Elissa cupped her hands around her glass. “I could be pregnant,” she said, putting her most delicate fear into words.

  “Does he know?” Tina asked.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, looking up. “He made me promise to get in touch with him if that happened. But I can’t see that it would help, to back him into a corner. He loves Bess. I can’t tie him to me for all the wrong reasons.”

  “A wise decision,” her father remarked. “But I think you underestimate the gentleman’s feelings. Infatuation dies a natural death without anything to feed it. He’ll get over Bess soon enough—if he’s even still interested in her, that is.”

  “But he’s got her now. She’s going to divorce her husband,” Elissa protested.

  “Is she?” Mr. Dean looked at her over his glasses and grinned. “Well, we’ll see, won’t we? Eat your ham, darling.”

  She glanced from one to the other. “Aren’t you upset?” she began hesitantly.

  Tina lifted her thin eyebrows. “About what, dear?”

  “The baby, if there is one!”

  “I like babies,” Tina said.

  “So do I,” her father seconded.

  “But it will be …” Elissa hesitated.

  “A baby,” Tina finished for her. “Darling, in case it’s escaped your notice, I’ve brought quite a number of unwed mothers into the congregation in years past, and the children have been raised in the church. Little babies aren’t responsible for the circumstances of their birth. They’re just babies, and we love them. Now do eat your ham, Elissa. For all we know you may already be eating for two.”

  Elissa sighed. She’d never understand them, but she certainly did love them. “What’s your sermon going to be on?” she asked her father.

  He looked at her gently. “On learning to forgive ourselves, after God has. Sometimes He punishes us much less than we punish ourselves, you know.”

  She flushed, wondering how he’d learned to read her mind so accurately. “I imagine we’ll all learn from it, then,” she murmured.

  He winked at his wife. “Yes, I hope we will,” he replied, and then he concentrated on his meal.

  Warchief was back in his cage soon afterward, making enough noise to wake the dead. Elissa carried him into her room, saying a quick good-night before she closed the door.

  “Be quiet, or you’ll get us thrown out!” she raged at him.

  “Hellllp!” he screamed. “Let me out!”

  “Go to sleep,” she muttered, pulling his beak toward her to kiss his green head. He made a parroty sound and wolf-whistled softly. She kissed him again, putting the cover over his cage.

  As she slid into bed, minutes later, she wondered how King was and if he was happy now. She hoped he was. She hoped, too, that she wouldn’t be pregnant. Despite the fact that she wanted his child very much, it wouldn’t be fair to tear him between Bess and her own baby. For his own happiness, she had to let him go. She turned her face into the pillow, thanking God for loving parents and the hope of a new beginning.

  But hope wasn’t a good enough precaution. Six weeks later, after horrible bouts of morning sickness and fatigue, she went to her family doctor to have the necessary tests. And he confirmed her pregnancy.

  She didn’t tell her parents. Despite their support, which she knew she could count on, she had to come to grips with her situation alone. She went downtown to a quiet restaurant and drank coffee for two hours, until she remembered that coffee wasn’t good for pregnant women. She switched to diet drinks and then worried about the additives in them. Tea and coffee and most carbonated drinks had caffeine, herbal tea nauseated her, and she hated plain water. Finally she decided that her choices had to be decaffeinated coffee, milk and Perrier. Those should carry her through the next several months.

  The thought of the baby was new and delicate, and she sat pondering it through a fog of confusion. Would it be a boy or a girl? Would it have her coloring or King’s? She smiled, thinking about dark eyes in a dark complexion and holding the tiny life in her arms and rocking it on soft summer nights.

  The more she considered the future, the more appealing it became. She wouldn’t have King, but she’d have a tiny part of him. Someone to hold and love and be loved by. Maybe that was her compensation for a broken heart. She smiled, overwhelmed by tenderness. She could still work; pregnancy wouldn’t hamper designing clothes. And her parents weren’t going to throw her out in the street, although she worried about the impact her unwed-mother status was going to have on her father’s congregation. She might get a cottage farther up or down the coast to prevent any gossip from harming his career. He’d find it hard to get another job at his age, despite his protests. He loved her, but she loved him, too, and she wasn’t going to be the cause of any grief to her parents. Well, she’d think about that later.

  Right now, the thing was to get back on her feet. She’d grieved so for King that she could hardly function. She had to learn to live with the fact that he wasn’t coming after her. She’d spent the past few weeks gazing hopefully at the telephone and jumping every time it rang. Cars slowing down near the house threw her into a tizzy. She checked the mailbox every day with wide, hopeful eyes.

  But there were no phone calls from Oklahoma. No visitors. And no letters. Eventually even her stubborn pride gave up. King finally had Bess, and Elissa was well and truly out of his life. So she began to make plans of her own. She was going to move someplace far away, and she wasn’t going to tell anyone where she was going, not even her parents. She’d write to them, but she’d find one of those forwarding-address places that would confuse the postmarks. Yes, she had to do this on her own. She and the child would grow close over the years, and someday she’d tell him about his father.

  That was when she remembered that King didn’t know where his own father was and had always blamed the man for running out on him. She’d decided when Margaret told her about it that one day she’d tell King where his father was and make sure that he got to sit down and talk with him, to hear his side of it. But for now, she didn’t have the right to deny King at least the knowledge of this child. She’d promised.

  She went home, resigned to do the right thing, no matter how much it hurt. Bess would be there, surely, whether or not the divorce was final. Maybe they were preparing for the wedding already. She hesitated, but in the end she reached for the phone and called the number King had once given her in case she needed to reach him at the ranch.

  Her parents were visiting a sick member of the congregation, so it was a good time to make the call. She didn’t want them to see her go to pieces when she tried to tell King what had happened.

  It rang once, twice, three times, four. She was about to hang up when a breathless, familiar voice came over the line.

  “Hello?”

  “Bess?” Elissa faltered.

  “Oh, it’s Elissa, isn’t it?” came the enthusiastic reply. “Kingston isn’t here right now, I’m afraid, but …”

  Elissa paused. “Do you know where he is?”

  “Not offhand, but I can take a message.”

  “No.
Thank you.” She hesitated, desperate to ask if the divorce had gone through. She settled for, “Is Bobby doing all right?”

  “He’s already back at work,” Bess said, her voice oddly soft, “cast, crutches and all. I … Are you sure I can’t take a message for Kingston? I’m not sure he’ll be home tonight, but I could—”

  “No. I’m glad your … I’m glad Bobby is doing well. Goodbye.”

  “Wait!”

  But she hung up, trembling all over. So now she knew. Bess was living with King.

  She almost let it go at that and made her plans without trying again. But that was the coward’s way out. She phoned his office, only to be told that he wasn’t in and they didn’t know when to expect him. She left word, but the secretary didn’t sound reliable. As soon as she hung up, she wrote a terse note and dropped it in the mail, addressed to his Oklahoma City office. Perhaps he could find time to read it, she thought unreasonably, and went back to her designs.

  She’d finished her collection, mailed the completed designs to Angel Mahoney and picked out a nice town near St. Augustine to move to. She packed her things, careful not to let her parents see the baggage. She’d leave in the morning. It had been over a week since she’d mailed that note to King, and she was sure he’d seen it by now. Perhaps he didn’t want any complications and was going to ignore it. That wasn’t like him, but men in love weren’t always rational, she guessed. He’d wanted Bess for a long time, and now he had her. It wasn’t his fault that he wanted to look ahead and not behind him.

  Warchief was quiet these days, almost as if he knew he’d lose his home if he kept being noisy. He purred at Elissa and talked to her, but he’d stopped making such wild noises at dawn and dusk. She wondered if he was sick.

  Heaven knew, she was. The morning sickness hadn’t let up, and she was beginning to feel pregnant. Her slacks were tight, and her breasts were sensitive. She grinned at all the little disadvantages. None of them mattered, because she was going to have a baby and love it so much that it would feel as wanted as she always had.

  She settled down to bed that night, leaving her parents sitting up to talk. There was a full moon and a scattering of stars, and she closed her eyes with a sigh. King would be seeing that moon out his window in Oklahoma, probably with Bess lying beside him. She hoped Bess would be kind to him. Tears stung her eyes. Instead of getting easier, bearing the knowledge that she’d never see King again was getting harder every day. But she’d better get used to it, she chided herself. Forever was a long time.

  About two o’clock in the morning, she and Warchief were awakened by a thunderous knocking on the front door. With a white chenille bathrobe thrown hastily over her nightgown, she rubbed her sleepy eyes and stumbled to the door, calling, “Who’s there?”

  “Kingston Roper,” came the gruff reply.

  She fumbled the door open. With his jacket slung carelessly over his arm, his tie hanging haphazardly around his neck, and his face hard and drawn and in need of a shave, he looked haggard and weary but devastatingly handsome. And Elissa wouldn’t have cared if he’d been covered in mud.

  “Come in,” she said, fighting down the impulse to throw herself at him, trying to appear calm when her heart was beating her to death and her breath was stuck somewhere below her collarbone.

  He stood looking at her as she shut the door again, his eyes dark and troubled and oddly hungry. He didn’t move, as if riveted to the spot, staring.

  “What was that noise? Oh, hello, Mr. Roper,” Tina said, smiling at him from the door of their room off the living room. “You look exhausted. Elissa, there’s some decaffeinated coffee you can reheat, and some of that cake I made. You can put Mr. Roper in the spare room if he’s staying. Good night, dear.”

  She closed the door again, and King turned back to Elissa.

  “I’ll heat the coffee if you’d like a cup,” she said quietly.

  He searched her face, looking for any sign of welcome, but there was none. His eyes dulled. He’d hoped so desperately that she might have missed him even a fraction as much as he’d missed her. He’d stayed away deliberately, denying himself the sight and sound and feel of her all this time to try to make her miss him, to make her see the light. And he knew that it hadn’t worked. He looked at her and thought he’d die of emptiness if she sent him away. He followed her into the kitchen without another word, as cold inside as an empty tomb.

  Chapter Twelve

  King sat down in the chair Elissa indicated and watched her move around the kitchen, slicing cake and heating cups of coffee in the small microwave oven. She looked delicious. Glowing. Wait a minute—didn’t they say that pregnant women glowed? He took a slow breath, feeling warm all over with the possibility of it, with possession in his eyes as they followed her. He’d win her back somehow. He had to.

  “I didn’t expect you,” she said.

  “I went back to the office tonight to check some figures,” he said as she placed mugs of steaming coffee on the table, along with saucers and forks and slices of cake. “I’ve been in Jamaica,” he added, glancing up.

  “Have you?” She nibbled at her cake.

  “Your cottage had a young redhead in it,” he remarked. “She said her parents had bought the cottage from you. Warchief was gone, too.”

  “I have him here,” she said. She took another bite of the cake, still without looking at him. “You found my letter tonight, I guess?”

  “Buried in a stack of bids,” he confirmed. He left half his cake uneaten and leaned back in the chair with his coffee cup in his hand, studying her. “Was that note the best you could do?” he added. “A terse ‘Need to talk to you when you have time. Best wishes, Elissa’?”

  She flushed. “I’d already tried your ranch and your office. Nobody seemed to know where you were.”

  “Nobody did, for a while,” he said. He didn’t mention that the past few weeks had been pure hell. His temper had become so vile that it had already cost him two of his best junior executives. So much for testing that absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder business, he thought angrily. She didn’t look any the worse for wear, but he sure as hell did. He stared at her coolly. “Are you having any morning sickness?”

  She almost dropped the coffee cup.

  “Well, why else would you bother to contact me?” he chanced. “It wasn’t out of love. You told me how you felt when you left,” he said curtly, his dark eyes glittering at her across the table. “The only possible reason was that I’d made you pregnant. So here I am.” He didn’t mention that he’d practically bought an airline to get here that fast.

  “There was no rush,” she said. “I’ve got everything worked out. My parents know,” she added softly. “They didn’t make accusations or rage at me or even try to shame me. They said …” She bit back tears. “They said people are human.”

  “Oh, God,” he whispered roughly. Though he himself was delighted—surely she’d reconsider and marry him now—he hadn’t thought about how her parents would take the news. He wasn’t surprised that they’d stand by her, though. They were good people, and they loved her.

  “It’s all right. I make more than enough money to take care of myself and the baby. And you can visit if you like,” she told him. “But I’d rather you waited awhile,” she said, lifting tired eyes to his. “I don’t want people gossiping, and it’s the last kind of complication you need right now.”

  He stared at her blankly. Bess said Elissa had called, so didn’t she know that Bobby and Bess were back together? “It’s my baby,” he said simply. “I want to take care of you both.”

  “I don’t need taking care of, thank you,” she said with forced calm, remembering that he hadn’t bothered to make a move toward her in seven weeks and that Bess was now living with him.

  He exhaled angrily, leaning forward to pin her with his dark, quiet eyes. “I’m responsible for you,” he said. “This is all my fault.”

  “I’m not blaming you,” she replied. “That isn’t why I contacted you. I g
ave my word that I would, if it happened.”

  He stopped breathing for an instant. “That’s the only reason you got in touch with me?”

  Her eyebrows arched with practiced carelessness. “What other reason would I have had?”

  He wanted to throw something. “You loved me once,” he growled.

  “Oh, I’ve gotten over that,” she assured him, rising to put the empty cups into the sink and praying that he wouldn’t see through the fiction of what she was saying to the agony underneath. She swallowed down tears. “It was just infatuation. I was pretty naive, you know, and you were very experienced. Any girl can lose her head with a sexy man. I just happened to be a little too naive. You see—” She turned to tell him a few more choice lies, but he wasn’t there. Seconds later, she heard the front door open softly and close. Then a car engine roared once, and she heard the vehicle drive away.

  It had no sooner pulled away than the phone rang. What a night, she thought miserably. At least, thank God, she’d kept her composure. King hadn’t guessed how she’d grieved for him, and that was something. He’d leave her alone now, and she and the baby would be each other’s world. King wouldn’t have to sacrifice his happiness with Bess on Elissa’s account.

  She lifted the receiver on the second ring, hoping her parents hadn’t been disturbed again. “Hello?” she said, wiping away a tear.

  “Elissa?”

  It was Bess. Elissa glared at the telephone. “If you’re looking for King, you’re too late. He’s on his way back to you—I made sure of that—and you don’t have to worry. I won’t bother him again. The baby and I will manage just fine.”

  “Baby?” Bess sounded shocked.

  “King will tell you all about it, I’m sure. It’s no concern of his anymore.”

  “Please don’t hang up,” Bess said suddenly.

  “I can imagine what you have to say to me, but—” Elissa began quietly.