Child of His Heart

Erin took a deep breath and started to walk away, heart pounding.

“Wait!” He strode after her and put a hand on her arm. “I don’t understand. What happened between Saturday evening and this morning to change your mind?”

Lifting her eyes to his, she answered, “I—I’ve had time to think. You know how people in small towns talk.”

“You’re not going to tell me you’re worried about the town gossips. What could anyone say that could possibly harm either of us?”

She conjured up a vivid image of herself hugely pregnant, and Nick cast unfairly as the father. She couldn’t put him in such an untenable position.

Nor could she bear to sit and wait for him to reject her.

She shrugged, forcing herself to appear nonchalant. “I’m sorry. I just don’t want to get involved. Please accept my decision.”

Shutting her heart to the hurt and anger in his eyes, she put her chin in the air, straightened her shoulders and walked out of his life….

Dear Reader,

Kids—you gotta love ’em. They say that mothers always know who their children are, but a father can never be certain. Until the advent of DNA testing, that is. The idea for Child of His Heart came by playing around with the writer’s favorite creative tool—what if? What if suddenly you discover that the child you always thought was yours might not be?

Nick Kincaid’s wife confessed on her deathbed to having an affair around the time their daughter was conceived. The galling knowledge doesn’t diminish Nick’s love for his daughter, Miranda, but he does think twice about getting romantically involved with Erin Hanson, who is pregnant by her ex-fiancé. The last thing he wants is to raise another child that isn’t his. Or does he?

Child of His Heart explores what it means to be a parent. Is fatherhood purely genetic? Or is a commitment to a child’s welfare on a daily basis just as important, perhaps more so? I think any parent, biological or adoptive, knows the answer to that.

Erin figures out pretty quickly that Nick would make a better father to her child than the biological father, despite Nick’s protestations. Nick gets there in the end, with Erin’s help, but not before he risks losing those he holds dearest. It’s a happy man who knows that, child of his loins or not, the child he loves and cares for is a child of his heart.

I hope you enjoy this story as much as I did writing it. I love to hear from my readers. You can contact me c/o Harlequin Enterprises, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada, M3B 3K9; or e-mail me at www.superauthors.com.

Joan Kilby

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For the children of my heart—Ryan, Gillian and Matthew

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

THE PHONE WAS RINGING when Erin entered her Seattle apartment late one Sunday night in early August. She longed for a hot shower and a quiet finish to the weekend with her fiancé, John.

Correction—her ex-fiancé.

“Hold on,” she muttered at the phone. “I’m coming.”

Slipping off her Prada slingbacks, she tossed her overnight bag onto the living room sofa and moved through the dark to the granite-and-oak kitchen. Three of her seven clocks chimed the quarter hour and she automatically looked at her watch—11:45.

The phone clicked onto voice mail. “Hi, Erin. It’s Kelly. Call me—”

At the sound of her sister’s voice, Erin snatched up the phone. “Kel? I’m here. I just got in.”

“Erin, thank God. I’ve been calling since yesterday morning.”

“I was away for the weekend with John. What’s up?” Stifling a yawn, she flicked on the lights and wriggled onto a bar stool, pushing back the spiraling blond strands that fell around her shoulders.

“It’s Gran,” Kelly said. “She’s fine now—”

“What do you mean now? What happened?” Erin hugged the cordless phone to her ear, one arm wrapped around her waist. Please, God, not Gran.

“She had a slight heart attack,” Kelly explained.

“Oh, my God.” Erin slid off the stool, her free hand pressed against her forehead. “Where is she? Is she okay?”

“She’s back home. She’s fine, honestly,” Kelly reassured her. “The doctors did all kinds of tests and they say there’s no serious damage to her heart. But I’m worried, Erin. When it happened, I was at work. She felt pain in her chest, and instead of going to the doctor she went around the house and penciled a name on the back of all her needlepoint pictures so we wouldn’t fight over them in case she died.”

“As if we would.” But Erin could just see Gran doing that.

“Well, Geena might,” Kelly said. “You know she’s always coveted the one of the lighthouse.”

Erin chuckled, and Kelly joined in. Laughing was okay because they both knew that like them, Geena wished Gran could live forever. No amount of needlepoint pictures would make up for her loss.