Chapter 5
Jessa awoke with a start, her eyes wandering around the room and trying to make sense of where she was. It took her a minute to remember this was her home now, the large apartment in the second-story walk-up of an old Victorian house.
She looked down at her outfit. Scrubs.
Ugh.
She’d walked in the door from working second shift at Mercy and flopped down on the couch. Judging by the sunlight shining in the windows, she’d slept here all night, the second time in the past week she’d done so.
The first trimester of her last pregnancy, she was crazy sleepy, too. She laid her hand on her flat lower abdomen and joy filled her heart. Just a week ago, a home pregnancy test confirmed what she suspected. She was going to have a baby.
She thought of the nursery she and Ralph had decorated together between his trips with HERO Force. They’d known they were having a boy, and everything was done up in blue and green.
Maybe this time, I won’t find out the sex.
Why? So you can protect yourself from loving this child in case something happens?
“I already love you more than anyone in the world,” she whispered.
Today was Friday, her day off, and she desperately wanted to spend the whole thing in bed with some fuzzy slippers and a book.
But as her stare slipped guiltily to the boxes stacked three and four high along the dining room wall, she knew what she’d be doing instead.
She’d already been here almost a month, and those boxes weren’t going to get any easier to unpack as she got further along.
Resigned to the task ahead, she walked into the kitchen, started some decaf brewing and checked her cell phone.
One new message.
She hit the speaker button and opened the fridge, grabbing the orange juice.
“Jessa, it’s Jax.”
She spun around so fast she dropped the juice to the floor, where it sprayed everywhere. She crouched down after it, trying to find the hole while her body responded viscerally to Jax’s voice. An image of them making love flashed through her mind.
“I want to take you out to dinner sometime,” he said. “I know you moved to Savannah, but if you’d like to get together, I don’t mind the drive.”
She found the leak and covered it with her finger, then closed her eyes tightly.
“I’d really like to see you again, Jess.”
The message ended, and she could hear her pulse pounding in her ears.
Four weeks and three days she’d been gone, and he found her.
Hell, he probably knew where she was even before that and just didn’t pick up the phone.
She stood up and dumped the juice container in the sink.
She looked at her arms and hands and clothes.
“Aaagh!” she yelled, so frustrated she couldn’t see straight.
She hadn’t counted on this in her quickly laid plans to get pregnant. Right now it wasn’t such a big deal, but what if he looked her up six months from now, or a year? If he found out he had a child, he’d want to be part of its life, and that was definitely not part of her plan.
But what could she do? With the technology at his disposal, he’d be able to find her anywhere she went. All he had to do was type her name into his damn computers, and there she’d be.
Forever.
It might even tell him when she had a dependent.
There had to be a way to stop him, a way to keep her whereabouts from popping up on a screen just by typing in her name.
My name.
A horrible idea came to her mind.
She’d chosen Savannah because her extended family was here, both her mother’s upper-middle-class contribution and her father’s shadier side of the family tree. Since her parents passed away, she was desperate to forge some deeper kind of connections with her living relatives.
Now that would never happen. She had closer family she needed to protect.
Two of her cousins had served time, one for stealing cars and the other for forgery. She grabbed her cell phone with shaking fingers. If memory served her correctly, her cousin Ricky’s crime had been making fake IDs and selling them on the Internet.
Before that, they’d been friends. Long before.
When her father was alive and well and trying to make a difference in the lives of his sister’s children, who always seemed a little too far gone to be pulled back to safety.
Ricky had certainly acted like he remembered her when she ran into him at her uncle’s birthday party recently.
She opened her contacts, scrolling for her cousin’s name, praying he would trust her enough to help her. “Ricky, it’s your cousin, Jessa McConnell.”
He sounded pleased to hear from her, and she exhaled a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. “I’m in trouble, really bad trouble.” She bit her lip to keep her emotions from erupting. “I’m hoping you can help me.”