Morgan's Child (17 page)

Kate arrived at the ferry landing and boarded the
Yaupon Island Belle
after all the tourists had disembarked.

"You look upset," Gump said, chewing on his pipe.

"Wait till you hear this," Kate said, and she launched into the story about Courtney and the contract and Morgan's proposal.

Gump stared long and hard at one of the channel markers in the middle of the sound after she finished. "Do you love this Morgan Rhett?" he asked abruptly.

"No," Kate whispered, knowing that she could never admit to Gump how she had, with some astonishment at her own passion, returned his kisses.

"You're a woman of integrity. You proved that during the Northeast Marine Institute crisis. As a woman of integrity, you can't marry Morgan Rhett unless you love him," Gump pointed out.

"The baby..." Kate said, not knowing what she wanted to mention about the baby, since it really had no say in this matter, but wanting to make it clear that the welfare of the baby was her first responsibility.

"I know, I know," Gump said, removing his pipe from his mouth. "But you can't solve one problem by creating another."

"I mean, it's not the baby's fault that we're in this predicament," Kate said sadly.

"You think I don't know that? Well, that's what happens when you take nature into your own hands. It ain't natural for babies to be made in dishes in laboratories, and just because we
can
do it doesn't mean we
should
do it."

"Man controls science," Kate said.

"Man doesn't control man, though," Gump said succinctly. "And man sure doesn't control Courtney Rhett Cobb. I don't know how you're going to put this situation right, Kate. It's a mess. I only know that there's no quick fix in marrying Morgan Rhett."

"I guess I needed to hear someone say it," Kate said distractedly.

Gump reached over and patted her hand in a touching gesture of tenderness, a side of his nature that he rarely showed to anyone.

"Is there anything I can do for you? Anything at all?" he offered awkwardly.

Kate smiled a thin smile. "Find Morgan a wife," she said before leaving the ferry to wait for Morgan.

* * *

Morgan was surprised when Kate met him at the ferry landing when he returned from the mainland.

"Mind if we chat?" she asked, hoping he wouldn't detect nervousness in her voice.

He shook his head, and she sat down beside him on the hard seat beneath the palmetto-thatched roof that provided shade from the hot summer sun.

The water shimmered tourmaline blue, and the mainland was no more than a smoky green haze in the distance. Kate tried to marshal her thoughts, something that wasn't easy to do with Morgan beside her knowing that something was on her mind and waiting for her to state it.

Kate said as she watched a pelican soaring on a wind current, "I can't do it, Morgan. I can't marry you."

"I see," he said evenly. "What about the baby? I want the baby, Kate."

"Isn't—isn't there someone else you could marry?"

"Of course not," Morgan said, dismissing her suggestion outright.

"I just thought that you must have a life. I mean, you told me about all those other women," Kate said.

Morgan made a disparaging gesture with one hand. "Women, yes. One I'd marry, no. In fact," he said in carefully measured tones, "I feel closer to you than to anyone at the moment."

"At the moment," she repeated, unsure what to make of this.

"Because of what we're going through together," he said. "Because I think we have the potential to share something special."

"Because of the way I kissed you?" she asked, her voice almost a whisper.

"We both felt something, Kate."

Kate fidgeted with a loose thread on her dress. "You might have gathered by my behavior that I want intimacy. I don't," she said. She sounded very prim and proper, but all he could think about at the moment was the swaying of her body under that thin nightgown as she walked into the lighthouse this morning.

"I don't believe you," he said.

Her head shot up and she looked him in the eye. "The first day you met me you said that if you were going to seduce anyone, it wouldn't be me."

"I was trying to reassure you," he said defensively. He wished now that he hadn't said it.

"Whatever. I got the idea. And I can't imagine that you feel differently about it now. I mean, I'm quite pregnant—
Sports Illustrated
isn't going to ask me to pose for their swimsuit issue anytime soon."

He put out a hand and touched her lips. She flinched, but even as she moved away from him, she felt the warmth rise up from her thighs, spread across her abdomen, and linger in her breasts, and it was a heat that had nothing to do with the slant of sun through the palmetto thatch overhead.

"You're as beautiful, as sexy and as desirable as any woman I've ever known," he said. His voice was deep and sonorous and had the effect of a verbal caress.

She stood up abruptly. "That's enough, Morgan," she said.

Morgan said nothing, and Kate, her back stiff, her face turned away, despaired. She didn't believe that she was that attractive to him. When she looked in the mirror, she saw a Kate Sinclair who was grossly out of shape, who could possibly get a job as a Goodyear blimp, and who could give the Pillsbury doughboy a run for his money. The only difference was that she wasn't as mobile as the blimp, and as for Poppin' Fresh, under these circumstances, she couldn't force herself to be half as cheerful.

* * *

Morgan insisted on accompanying her to take water samples later. After she'd labeled the vials, he rowed the johnboat around a curve in the creek where they relaxed as the boat rocked gently between creek banks overhung with weeping willows. Kate trailed her hand in the water and felt lazy. To tell the truth, she felt more defeated than lazy, but there was no point in mentioning this to Morgan. She figured he had enough worries of his own.

"You're not angry?" she blurted finally when the silence had dragged on too long.

Morgan shook his head slowly. "No. Confused, maybe, and unsure of my next move, but it's not you that I'm angry with. It's Courtney, for getting you into this."

"I played a part in it. I thought it would be so simple. Just get pregnant, experience it, and walk away afterward. And now—" Her shoulders rose and fell in a shrug of helplessness. "What will you do now?" she asked.

"Sue my ex-wife," he said. "Her contract with you should be declared null and void. Courtney had no right to demand that the baby must be adopted by a married couple. I want my rights as the father reinstated."

"I thought you said you couldn't stand another court battle."

"Maybe we can reach an agreement out of court," he said. "Maybe we can amend the contract, or tear up the contract or—well, something. Maybe we can make a deal."

"All that sounds pretty lame, Morgan," Kate said.

"If you'll go with me to Charleston to discuss it with the lawyers, I'll set up the appointment," he told her.

"I'll go. I don't know what else to do," she said.

Kate knew that they were both convinced that no one else in the world understood what they were going through and that neither of them had anyone else in whom to confide. They were allies. And yet they stared at each other uneasily, unsure how much to trust each other or if they even should.

Chapter 9

Trust, Kate thought, was a fragile commodity.

Without trust, love couldn't exist. In the past she'd been betrayed by both her mother and her lover, and Kate was sure she could never wholly trust anyone again. Therefore, she'd never love again. It was all very logical.

Not so logical was the difficulty that she and Morgan were in at present, though she kept telling herself it had nothing to do with love. Certainly there was no love lost between the two sets of lawyers, and when she and Morgan conferred with them, Kate felt as if she'd somehow landed in the middle of a free-for-all.

At the meeting the lawyers wrangled, Morgan punctuated his remarks with angry gestures, and Kate sat staring at the shiny finish of the conference table until her head ached, wishing that she were back on the research vessel trying to figure out how to breed disease-resistant oysters. And at the end, after all the bickering, Ted Wickes's advice to Morgan was the same: either get married or pursue a lawsuit.

"Look at it this way," Ted said to Kate and Morgan over lunch, "you don't want her to get away with this. The woman's a shark, and that husband of hers is—well, there's no name I can call him in polite company."

They weren't pressuring her, but Kate felt under duress anyway. If she would only marry Morgan, he wouldn't have to initiate a court action.

But she couldn't marry Morgan. She didn't love him.

After they left Ted Wickes, she and Morgan walked slowly through the waterfront park on the nearby Cooper River. Children splashed in fountains, people basked on park benches, and babies in their prams sucked their thumbs as their mothers visited. Kate and Morgan seemed to be the only couple present without a child, but then the baby stirred and she remembered. They had a child. It just wasn't born yet.

"I could move away," Kate said suddenly. "No one would know where I was. We could arrange for you to adopt the baby in another state before Courtney and Damien found me."

"You're grasping at straws," Morgan said.

"I could go to Maine and hide there. I have a friend—remember I told you about Penelope?—who would help."

Morgan knew that this was the moment when he should mention casually that Tony Saldone was presently in Maine trying to find out about the plans of the Federal Health Foundation and how the FHF's investigation would affect Kate.

But Kate had enough to think about. It wasn't the time to sock her with Tony Saldone.

"Look, Kate," he said, "you're not going to Maine or anywhere else. You said you wanted to stay on Yaupon Island, didn't you?"

"Of course," Kate said.

"Then that's what you'll do. In fact, I've had enough of the city. Let's get back to the island. Right now."

She looked surprised. He took her hand and smiled at her. "When the going gets tough, the tough go back to the island," he said.

* * *

When they arrived on Yaupon Island, members of the bulldozer crew were standing around a gushing hole in the ground and shaking their heads.

"Looks like we broke the water line," one of them called to Kate as she and Morgan approached the lighthouse. "Disrupted your water service." He lifted one foot and stared with disgust at the mud on it.

"Well, you'll have to fix it," Kate said.

"Might take a few days to do that. You can get somebody to haul in fresh water from the mainland to drink, I guess."

Kate stood with her mouth open, looking at the spectacle of her beloved lighthouse standing in the middle of a huge mud puddle, her flowers smashed and scattered. The sharp pungent odor of crushed marigolds filled the air.

Kate lifted her eyes to the heavens. "I wonder what else could possibly happen around here. First the septic tank, now the water. Maine is beginning to sound better all the time." She looked more closely at the excavation, from which water was running down the slope toward the creek.

"Pack a few things, and you can move into the lodge with me," Morgan said.

"All right, all right, I give up. I'll be right back," she said in exasperation, stalking through the mud into the house.

When Morgan followed her inside, he saw that she had kicked off her mud-spattered shoes and was standing barefoot on the scuffed wooden floor as she threw things into a suitcase.

He wanted nothing more than to gather her into his arms and reassure her that everything—the baby, her job, the final move away from the island—would be all right. Not that he quite believed it himself, but he wanted it to be true for Kate's sake.

Kate saw him staring at her and dropped a hanger. He picked it up for her and handed it over, and when she read the sympathy in his eyes, it was almost her undoing. She curbed the impulse to rest her head on his broad chest and let him soothe away her worries with caresses.