“No. Actually, she was looking for a job. Maybe she thought your wife would hire her since you weren’t around. I told her she’d have to talk to Mike.”
“Good.” He took out his wallet and gave Elaine the money for his lunch.
When she left, he leaned back in his chair, propping his feet on the edge of the desk.
Hearing that someone had asked to speak to his wife stirred up memories of Gina.
Bad memories.
He had met Gina in college, when he was attending Florida State to get a degree in agriculture. She was two years younger and studying to be a teacher, but when his father passed away right before Nick graduated, she bluntly said she wanted to marry him, quit school and help him with the family business. He was not resistant to the idea. Gina was pretty, and the sex was great. His mother had died a few years earlier, and he had not looked forward to going home to live alone.
But there was an obstacle—a painful, embarrassing secret he had kept to himself till the time he felt he should tell Gina. The sad news was that he could not father a child. Childhood mumps had left him sterile. But she said it didn’t matter. They could always adopt.
And so they had married and everything had been fine—for a couple of years. Then Gina began to complain about living in a rural area. She didn’t like the family home and complained it wasn’t modern enough. Nick’s grandfather had built it more than fifty years ago, and though it had withstood savage winds from several hurricanes, Nick agreed that maybe it was somewhat old-fashioned. So he’d given her free rein to redecorate, and she’d spent a fortune doing so, even putting in a swimming pool.
But it hadn’t been enough. She was still miserable and began spending more and more time in Orlando, shopping, she said, with girlfriends from college days.
Then when they had been married about four years, Gina dropped a bombshell. She had been having an affair, had fallen in love with the man and wanted a divorce so she could marry him. Fool that he was, Nick asked her to reconsider, suggesting they go to a marriage counselor and try to work things out. Nick was not the sort of man to take marriage vows lightly.
Gina quickly dashed all his hopes and smashed his heart into little bits and pieces with the news that she was pregnant. To twist the knife, she cruelly reminded him that all the marriage counseling in the world couldn’t change the fact he couldn’t father a child.
At least he could be grateful Gina had not taken him to the cleaners financially. Florida was a no-fault divorce state, and, ordinarily, she would have been entitled to half of everything. But all of his assets had been premarital. They owned nothing jointly, so there had been nothing to divide. Still, she had asked for a mind-staggering sum of alimony. But when it was revealed that she was pregnant by another man, the judge had denied her.
Nick swiveled in his chair to look out the window at the rows of orange trees stretching as far as the eye could see. Perfectly straight lines like soldiers at attention.
Maybe he was a fool, but he just hadn’t felt right about Gina leaving with nothing when he had so much. So he had written her a generous check, which she had snatched from his hand and walked out without a word. He hadn’t heard from her or seen her since.
He had thrown himself into his work, and there had been plenty of it. Once in a while, he dated but never let things go too far. Never again did he want to feel the crushing humiliation of having a woman cut him down because of his sterility. So he tended the groves, went deep-sea fishing in his boat now and then, read a lot and told himself he was content with his life.
After all, being lonely was better than having another woman make him feel like less of a man.
Chapter Three
By the time Scotty’s things were loaded into the Jeep, there was scarcely enough room for Carlee’s few belongings. Alicia had worked almost up to her due date to make enough money to buy him everything she thought a baby might need. The crib had to be left behind in favor of the easier-to-pack portable crib, along with the playpen, but Carlee managed to cram in the bouncing swing he loved, along with the high chair.
She only hoped Elaine Streeter had not been exaggerating about Starke Groves’ facilities for their migrant workers being so nice. It made her cringe to think of some of the conditions she had heard about—outdoor plumbing, windows with no screens, broken-down furniture and sparse appliances. Mr. Burns made a special effort to make his workers comfortable, but even he did not provide day care with an LPN in charge. That sounded too good to be true, especially when she found it hard to believe Nick Starke cared about children in general. Knowing that he had been aware of Alicia’s pregnancy all along filled Carlee with so much anger and resentment she wondered how she could even be civil to the man.
But she would manage, of course. After all, Scotty’s welfare, as well as his future, was at stake here, and for his sake, she wouldn’t blow it.
Give the man the benefit of the doubt, a part of her argued. Get to know him before forming an opinion.
Yeah, right, another side fired back. He was just one more selfish, self-centered man with the morals of a tomcat, possessing the same lack of conscience as her father and Alicia’s father had. And, Carlee grimaced, her ex-husband, as well.
With Scotty sleeping soundly in his car seat, she headed north up Interstate 95 to Titusville, then west to the sleepy little town of Snow Hill near Lake Harney. The trip took about an hour. Very convenient for Nick Starke to drive down to Cocoa Beach to see Alicia. Had she not gotten pregnant, he’d probably still be seeing her and making her think he was still having a difficult time getting a divorce.
Several times she started to turn back, afraid she was wasting her time. After all, a man who had done what Nick Starke had was, in all likelihood, not going to turn out to be the answer to her problems. But she had nowhere else to go and couldn’t have stayed where she was, not when she was being evicted. At least now she would have a job and a good place to leave Scotty while she worked.
But most of all, it was just something she felt driven to do, because she hated to see another man walk away from his moral and financial obligations.
Though she had been up before dawn, it had been almost noon before she was finally ready to leave. It felt strange not having anyone to say goodbye to. The only friend she’d had was Alicia. She did, however, take time to call Mr. Burns and let him know she was planning on returning to work for him when the season opened again. She regretted having to say she’d had to drop out of school. She told him about Scotty, and he said he understood and commended her for taking him as her own. He assured her that her old job would be waiting in the fall, and he’d also find room for her in one of his migrant cottages. She did not tell him where she was going, and he politely did not ask. There were meetings from time to time for citrus growers in the state, and he knew them all. She didn’t want to chance him saying anything to Nick Starke about her. Or worse, mention how noble he thought she was to agree to raise her girlfriend’s baby. Carlee intended to control any information given out about Scotty and her.
She did not have to ask for directions to Starke Groves. It was advertised on billboards all along the interstate and even more so as she drove across a bridge and into Snow Hill.
Once she turned off the main highway, a winding road led the way between lines of orange trees as far as the eye could see. At the end was a lovely two-story white frame house that looked like something out of Gone With the Wind, except there were towering royal palms swaying in the breeze instead of sheltering oaks.
The road curved around as she followed signs pointing the way to the office and the grove operations. Reaching a large clearing among the orange trees, she passed long, open-sided, tin-roofed structures that housed the processing belts and packing area. A paved road led in another direction, and she realized she had taken the tourists’ way in.
The gift shop caught her eye. It had