He stood up and took her small suitcase. It weighed a ton. He grinned. “Still don’t have a clue how to pack light, do you? What’s in here? Rocks?”
“If you’re going to complain all the way back to the hotel, I’ll carry it,” she said, reaching for it. “I’ve been on my own a long time, Harlan Patrick. I don’t need you.”
He grinned at the quick flare of temper. “You must be out of sorts if you can’t take a joke.”
“I lost my sense of humor when I found you in my dressing room.”
He laughed at her disgruntled expression. “Careful, darlin’, or you’ll hurt my feelings.”
“Not with your thick hide,” she muttered under her breath as she sashayed past him.
“I heard that.”
She ignored him and gave the guard a quick hug. “Thanks for everything, Chester.”
The red-faced guard gave her a smile and Harlan Patrick a suspicious look, clearly wondering how he’d turned up in her dressing room. “Is everything okay, Laurie?”
“Everything’s fine, Chester. This is an old...” She hesitated as if she couldn’t quite decide how to describe Harlan Patrick. “Friend,” she said finally. “Mr. Adams is an old friend from Texas.”
The guard accepted the explanation readily enough and beamed at him. “Well, then, it’s a pleasure to meet you, sir. I’ll bet you’re proud of our Miss Laurie.”
“I am indeed,” Harlan Patrick said.
After they’d left the building, Laurie glanced up at him. “You almost sounded as if you meant that.”
“I did,” he said simply, then sighed. “Even though your career came between us, I’m glad you made it because it’s all that ever mattered to you. I’d hate to think you gave up all we had and had found nothing to replace it.”
“It didn’t replace it,” she countered. “You mattered to me, Harlan Patrick. You still do.”
“Just not enough,” he said bitterly.
“Please, it wasn’t like that. If there’d been another way...”
“You mean like me giving up White Pines.”
“No,” she retorted, then she was the one who sighed. “Yes, I suppose that was the only other alternative, at least at the beginning. Can you see now why I said it would have been impossible for us to find a solution when I got pregnant? We live in two different worlds, Harlan Patrick, literally.”
“Two different cities,” he corrected as if the distinction made a difference, knowing it didn’t.
“Whatever. You have to admit it was an impossible situation.”
“No. What I see is that our baby wasn’t important enough for you to even try.”
Her hand connected with his cheek before he even realized what she intended. “Don’t you ever say something like that, Harlan Patrick Adams. Not ever. Our baby is the most important thing in my life.”
Harlan Patrick rubbed his cheek, but he didn’t back down. “What would happen if it came to a choice between her and your music, Laurie? What then? What happens when it’s time for her to go to school? Will she lose then the same way I did? Will you shuffle her off to some boarding school?”
He let those words hang in the air as he opened the rental-car trunk and tossed her suitcase inside. He noticed that she was very subdued as she joined him. She got into the car without a word and, aside from giving him directions, she remained silent all the way to the hotel.
It was an old hotel, three stories high with a creaky elevator and a half-asleep clerk behind the desk. In the lobby Laurie paused. “Please wait until morning to see the baby,” she pleaded for the second time that night.
Harlan Patrick met her gaze evenly, then slowly shook his head. “I can’t.”
“Because you don’t trust me to be here in the morning.”
“That,” he agreed, “and because I can’t wait any longer. I want to see my daughter, Laurie. I want to hold her and discover whether she smells like talcum powder the way all the Adams babies do. I want to look into those blue eyes of hers and see if she instinctively recognizes her daddy. You owe me that.”
She gave in then without another argument and led the way to her suite on the second floor. He didn’t doubt that it was luxurious by the hotel’s standards, but the two rooms were probably half the size of what she was used to and furnished in an eclectic mix of styles that aimed for comfort, not fashion.
There was a young woman curled up on the chintz-covered couch with an open book in