The Passions of Chelsea Kane Read online

  Traditionally Kevin had been the one to inquire into her work, leaving matters of the heart for Abby, and although there was something adorable in his discomfort now, there was sadness, too. Chelsea wished Abby were there.

  “We’re—“ she searched for the words to explain what was happening without giving false hope “—trying things out.”

  “I would have thought you’d already done that,” Kevin remarked. “You’re old friends. For five years now you’ve been business partners, too.”

  “But we’ve never dated in the traditional sense.”

  “Is it working?”

  She grinned crookedly. “So blunt.”

  “I don’t have time to beat around the bush. Neither do you, honey. If you want kids, you’d better be quick about it.”

  “I have time.”

  “Not much, if you want healthy kids. The risks get greater each year.”

  On impulse, because it had been preying heavily on her mind for so long, she said, “The risks of age can be handled with good prenatal care. Other risks not so. I have no idea what I’ve inherited. My medical background is a blank.”

  He scowled. “It’s sound. I checked.”

  “Checked how?”

  “Asked.”

  She pressed her lips together. Signed papers were one thing, a nonbinding “asking” something else. “Do you think someone desperate to place a child necessarily tells the truth?”

  “I got the truth. He knew there’d be hell to pay if I didn’t.”

  “Who’s he?”

  Kevin hesitated a second too long. “Walter Fritts.”

  Leave it, one part of her said, but the other part just couldn’t. She thought of the file that Graham had never seen and was sure Kevin knew more than he said.

  She stared at the pale liquid in her wineglass until it settled into mirror smoothness. “You’re right. If I want children, I should have them soon, but there’s a part of me that’s terrified. How can I be a good mother if I don’t know who I am?”

  “You know who you are. You’re a fine person, and as far as being a good mother goes, you had the best as a model.”

  Chelsea tried again. “It’s an emotional thing. I feel incomplete.”

  “You wouldn’t if you had a wonderful husband and some wonderful kids,” he said in a voice that was low but robust. “They’d make you forget about all you don’t know, because you’d realize that it doesn’t matter. You’d be fulfilled as a person. So would Carl. Tom and Sissy and I would be happy. I know your mother would have been. She always wanted you to marry Carl.”

  A pained sound came from the back of Chelsea’s throat. “Ah, the guilt.”

  “No guilt. Just common sense. You and Carl are a perfect match. I don’t know what you’re waiting for.”

  He made things sound so simple, all blacks and whites, which was very much how he saw the world. Grays were too vague for his consideration, and perhaps in his position at the hospital that had to be so. Someone had to make decisions. A test was run, or it wasn’t. An operation was performed, or it wasn’t.

  Chelsea wasn’t blessed with such decisiveness when it involved who she was. She saw grays. She saw large chasms. She saw gulfs filled with people who were tied to her by blood; only their names and faces were indistinct.

  But Kevin couldn’t understand. Even now his expression was dark.

  In an attempt to brighten it, she said, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe Carl and I will decide we’re compatible. Maybe we’ll do it big with the long white wedding dress and the three-tiered cake and enough champagne to flood the club.”

  The furrows on his brow eased. He raised his Scotch in a silent toast to that image.

  “But if I consider all that,” the driven side of her said, “all of which I know will make you happy, you have to do something for me. You have to be honest. You have to put yourself in my position. Right or wrong, good or bad, this matters to me. If you know anything more than you’ve told me about where I come from, I’d like to know.”

  Kevin took the drink that he hadn’t taken seconds before. When the ice cubes were all that remained, he set the glass on the arm of the sofa. Emboldened by the liquor, he looked her in the eye and said, “I know nothing, which is exactly how I want it. From the very beginning, you were ours. You came to us from the bed where you were born, and from that day on, you were our daughter. I wasn’t about to have a stranger come after you. So I saw to it that every record that existed was destroyed.”

  Chelsea swallowed. “Every record?” She had taken for granted that Walter Fritts’s files were gone, but she was counting on there being something else somewhere.

  Kevin nodded, and to her horror, she believed him. If he wanted it done, it was done.

  “The court papers?” she asked weakly.

  “Gone.”

  “How?”

  “Bribery.”

  “Oh, Dad.”

  “It mattered to me,” he said, throwing her own words back at her. “Right or wrong. Good or bad. You’re my daughter. I love you. I won’t have you chasing rainbows and being hurt.”

  “They’re not rainbows,” she protested. “They’re shadows, and they’ll haunt me until I can see them more clearly.” She struggled to make a lie of what he had said.

  “There must be something in Norwich Notch. The hospital must have some record.”

  “The birth took place at home.”

  “There must have been a doctor.”

  “You were delivered by a midwife, who has been paid well for her silence.”

  “I’ll pay her more,” was Chelsea’s first thought. She made the mistake of saying it aloud.

  As she watched, Kevin withdrew from her. He straightened his shoulders and his chin, and a distant look lowered over his eyes like a shade. “I wish you wouldn’t,” he said stiffly.

  “I want to know,” she whispered. She wasn’t sure which frightened her more—his withdrawal or the knowledge that he had deliberately sabotaged her search. “What you’ve done isn’t fair. It’s my blood, my genealogy. I’m an adult. I have a right to know who I am.”

  “If you don’t by now, something’s amiss. For God’s sake, what was all that rebellion about when you were growing up, if not finding out who you were?”

  “I was looking. I’ve always been looking.”

  He dragged in a breath and shook his head in dismay. “You know, Chelsea, I see people die every day, and there’s nothing pleasant about that. I see people who would give anything to have the good health and fortune that you do. But you’re not satisfied.” He looked at her as though she were foreign to him. “What is it you want?”

  She didn’t answer. She couldn’t. Her throat was too tight, clogged with too many emotions. Besides, it had all been said before.

  As though suddenly realizing that, Kevin pushed himself to his feet. “After all your mother and I did, after all we shared with you, this obsession you have with a bunch of people who did absolutely nothing for you is a slap in the face. Abby didn’t deserve it, Chelsea, and neither do I.”

  She sat forward and cried softly, “It’s not an obsession.”

  He opened and closed his pocket watch without looking at its face. “I think I’ll forgo dinner. I’m not very hungry.”

  She opened her mouth to apologize, but he had already turned and was stalking away.

  SHE WAS DEVASTATED. FOR DAYS AFTER HE WALKED OUT ON her, she went through life with a fine tremor in her stomach. She knew he was punishing her and knew it was wrong. She also knew she should tell him that, and she would have, if it had been anyone else. But he was her father. She couldn’t risk antagonizing him more than she already had.

  Carl was a godsend, not only in keeping contact with Kevin, but in consoling Chelsea. They spent nearly all their free time together and were closer than ever. They didn’t discuss marriage, though. They hadn’t yet made love.

  “Sex matters,” Chelsea told Cydra Saperstein in rationalizing that fact.

 
Cydra was a psychotherapist whom Chelsea had met at the health club. They had been running together for nearly five years, during which time they had become good friends. Since their lives overlapped in no other respect—no mutual friends, lovers, or job prospects—they could share their feelings with impunity.

  Wearing similar spandex tights and tank tops, and with their hair bouncing in tandem from high ponytails, they talked in clipped phrases as they ran through the early morning streets.

  “I’m not an innocent,” Chelsea went on. “Neither is he. Sometimes sex works. Sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, it’s bad. We both know that.”

  “But you won’t know how it is until you try. So why don’t you?”

  Chelsea had asked herself the same question dozens of times. “Carl’s like a brother. It seems wrong.”

  “Does he turn you on?”

  “I don’t know. I still don’t think of him that way.”

  “What do you feel when he kisses you?”

  “Nice.”

  “Just nice?”

  “We’re not into heavy passion. He’s giving me time.” Chelsea thought about that as she ran on. “He’s nervous, too. He wants it to work. He’s afraid it won’t.”

  “There’s a message in that, don’t you think?”

  Cydra was big on messages.

  “But you’d better try it, Chels. You’re damn right, sex matters. If it’s no good, you’re asking for trouble. That’s why Jeff and I are getting divorced.” They had discussed Cydra’s marriage many a morning when Cydra had needed to vent her anger. She claimed that of the many reasons for its failure, sex was the biggest one. “He wanted it, I didn’t. I thought the attraction would come in time. It didn’t. The attraction is either there or it isn’t.”

  “What if it isn’t?”

  “Then you’re wasting your time. There are other men. You can come do the singles scene with me.”

  “I hate the singles scene. I want it to work with Carl.”

  Cydra grinned. “Then try it and see. It may be great, in which case you’ll kick yourself for having waited.”

  But Chelsea wasn’t rushing things, and as it happened, work helped her on that score. Harper, Kane, Koo was busier than ever. She had personally finished the design for the library in Delaware and was in the process of designing a health center, a skating club, and an insurance building. At the same time she was supervising the roughing out of two other projects.

  Passion took concentration. So the rationalization went. With all the work she had to do, she didn’t have time for that kind of concentration, and Carl understood.

  What he didn’t understand was why, in the midst of all the work, she decided to fly north to look at granite. “I’m thinking of incorporating white granite into the insurance company design,” she tried to explain. “You know how hard that is to find.”

  “I also know,” Carl said from his perch on the corner of her desk, “that there are local representatives for each of the major granite companies who would be happy to show you samples.”

  “I don’t want a sample. I want to see the real thing.”

  “What you want,” he said, flipping a plastic triangle from one side to the next, to the next, “is to get a look at Norwich Notch. That is Norwich Notch that you’ve written there, along with Plum Granite, along with a telephone number. What do you plan to do—stand in the middle of town and say, ‘Here I am. Come claim me’?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then, what?”

  She raised her eyes to his, feeling more than a little defiance. If he thought that the deepening of their relationship gave him the right to dictate what she did and didn’t do, he was wrong. She was a free agent. She was an equal partner in the firm. She could travel when and where she saw fit without explaining herself.

  For the sake of all he meant to her, though, she didn’t deny that she had more than one reason for going to Norwich Notch. “I want to see the town. Just see it. The company is quarrying a vein of white granite, there’s no local rep with samples, and I’d like to take a look. I won’t learn anything about me. I won’t be asking any questions about me. It would be totally inappropriate.”

  “The insurance company plans are still rough. They haven’t said they want granite. Aren’t you jumping the gun a little?”

  She let out a breath. Quietly she said, “I think we need a break.”

  He continued to flip the triangle.

  When she couldn’t bear his silence any longer, she turned and in a burst of honesty cried, “We have to do something, Carl. Our relationship seems to go so far, so far, then stop. What’s wrong?”

  He said nothing. She imagined he was as perplexed as she was and, irrationally, was annoyed. She wanted him to be strong. She wanted him to have answers. She wanted him to entice her to stay by telling her that he was madly in love with her and would miss her if she went away for even as few as three or four days. She wanted him to want her desperately. That was what she needed—which he surely knew, if he knew her at all.

  The triangle finally came to a rest on his thigh, its tallest sides meeting in the air like a high hurdle to be crossed. “Maybe we need more time.”

  She sighed, discouraged even though she knew it was unfair to ask him to be everything she wasn’t. “Maybe.”

  “It’s hard to stop thinking one way and start thinking another.”

  It struck Chelsea that something right shouldn’t take so much work, that they were pushing it, that maybe, just maybe, they wanted love and passion and babies more than they wanted each other, in which case it was good that she was going north. She needed time to think, time to discover whether absence made the heart grow fonder. If it didn’t, she had a tough decision to make.

  Four

  Late March was a wet time in Norwich Notch. Puddles gathered in ruts, turning unpaved roads to mud, while in the north shade stubborn clumps of ice lay, granular and aged, withering slowly as the ground began to thaw. When cars and pickups passed, their tires shushed over the wet pavement. In the lull between them, the air was filled with the rush of water through brooks from the top of Acatuk Mountain, down the ravine, and into the Notch.

  Until Chelsea parked her car at the base of the triangular town green, though, the only sound she heard was the steady drumming of rain on her roof, the rhythmic slap of her wipers, and the thud of her heart pounding excitedly against her ribs.

  It had been that way for the last hour. She had taken a dawn flight from Baltimore to Boston, rented a car, and driven north, and though she had explicit directions, she’d kept expecting to find Norwich Notch around every turn. Impatiently she’d passed through one tiny town after another until white-spired churches, steamy-windowed diners, and low stone walls had run together. She had felt the car climbing once she’d passed Stotterville, which abutted the Notch, and her excitement had mounted. Now rain, cold, and all, it hit a high.

  She had been born here. On one of the narrow streets that branched out from the center of town was the very house, and though she had no idea which street or which house or whether either still existed, the thought was impressive. So was the one that her mother must have walked these streets when she’d been pregnant with Chelsea, passed along this very side of the green, sat on the old wood benches at its center, admiring the window display at Farr’s General Store.

  Most impressive of all, though, was the possibility that while Chelsea watched, one of her birth parents might pass by in the flesh. Granted, she didn’t see anyone out in the rain, let alone someone the right age, but if she waited long enough, it might happen.

  She had no intention of waiting, of course. If either of her parents was still alive—and it was a mighty “if”—they had forgotten her. Since sending Abby the key, there had been no attempt at contact. Chelsea was a woman of means now, a professional here on business. It would be poetic justice, she thought, if someone looked at her and saw a ghost from the past.

  With a fast breath she twisted
out of the car, pulled her raincoat over her head, and ran toward the store as fast as her low heels would allow on the lumpy pavement. She hadn’t allowed for the weather when she’d planned her trip. She needed an umbrella.

  A bell tinkled when she opened the door. Taking the coat from her head, she dropped it over her arm and combed her fingers through the tumble of thick waves that spilled over her shoulder from a clasp behind her ear. The style was softer than her usual business twist, which was why she had chosen it. This was the country. People were simpler here. She didn’t want to seem pretentious. For the same reason she had worn a short skirt, a sweater, and a long, slouchy blazer. The effect was serious but relaxed, which was how she wanted to be taken, and she did feel serious—though not quite relaxed. Her emotions were in a state of turmoil. She wasn’t sure what she’d find here. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to find here.

  Bemused, she looked around. A young woman with a child on her hip was selecting a head of lettuce from the fresh produce bin. Two other women, mother and daughter, Chelsea guessed from their resemblance to one another, were alternately inserting and removing dried flowers from a wicker basket. An elderly man with rimless spectacles and a shiny head was reading a tabloid at the newspaper stand, above which were signs touting, most prominently, an upcoming April Fool’s Day Dinner Dance at the church.

  Chelsea took a steadying breath. The people she saw all wore coats, which meant they were shoppers, which meant she might browse without a salesperson watching. She wanted time to adjust to being here. She also wanted to learn something about the town. To that end, she began wandering up one aisle and down the next.

  The first thing she learned was that the people of Norwich Notch had the option of eating well. In addition to fresh produce, there was a meat bin offering everything from kidney lamb chops to boneless chicken breasts to sirloin steaks. There was Brie, Camembert, and Havarti with dill. There were canned goods, dry goods, and mineral water, and where Chelsea might have expected nothing fancier than Maxwell House coffee in a tin, she found a dozen varieties of coffee beans, each in a self-serve canister.