Donovan's Child by Christine Rimmer Page A

soup.
    Olga appeared with the salads. She took their empty bowls away, refilled their wineglasses. And vanished again.
    They ate the salad, sipped more wine.
    The whole dinner was like that. He didn’t talk. Neither did Abilene.
    But he felt…together with her, somehow. In collusion. Connected.
    And that made him wonder, as he had more than once that day, if he might really be losing his mind somehow, slipping over the edge into some strange self-delusion.
    On the mountain, in the snow cave, alone with his pain, he’d known he was going mad. He was crazy. And he was going to die.
    On the mountain, he understood everything. He talked to Elias.
    He was ready to go.
    And there had been peace in that, a kind of completion.
    When they dragged him back to the world, peace became the thing that eluded him.
    Until tonight, for some unknown reason. Tonight, in the quiet of the dining room. Sharing a meal with Abilene.
    It ended too soon. She got up, smiled again at him, said good-night.
    â€œGood night,” he answered, and watched her go.
    The room seemed empty without her. Yet another sign of his current slide into total insanity.
    Tomorrow, he promised himself, in the bright light of morning, the world would right itself. He would be the man he had become in the past year. Self-contained. Wanting no one. Needing no one.
    Alone.
    Â 
    In her rooms, Abilene changed into the old pair of sweats and worn T-shirt she usually slept in. She brushed her teeth. And then she paced the floor for a while.
    What had just happened, in the dining room?
    She had questions for Donovan. And she’d fully intended to ask them. She had planned to be delicate about it. And respectful. But really, there was so much she wanted to know.
    And she’d accepted that Luisa was right. If she wanted answers—about whether Donovan had been married, about his wife, if there had been one, about the child he had lost—well, it was only fair that she ask the man himself.
    But then she’d turned from the doors to the courtyard to find him sitting there, so gorgeous, so self-contained, so guarded….
    And she couldn’t do it. She didn’t even want to do it, to pry into his mind and his secret heart. To ferret out the answers he didn’t want to share.
    All she wanted was to be with him.
    Simply. Gracefully. For an evening.
    To share a meal with him, if not as a friend, at least as a temporary companion, a guest in his house. She was grateful to him, she realized, for teaching her so much, for guiding her at the same time as he proddedher forward. For demanding so much of her, for never letting her off easy.
    For being such a fascinating man.
    So she had done exactly what she wanted. She’d shared a quiet meal with him.
    And now she paced her sitting room, feeling edgy and full of nervous energy, not understanding herself any better than she understood him.
    Eventually, she gave up wearing a path into the hardwood floor. She got out her cell and called home, called her mom, and her sister, Zoe, who was just back from her honeymoon.
    Yes, she was tempted to ask Zoe if she would speak with Dax, try to find out from him if he knew that Donovan had had a son. But she didn’t. She reminded herself that Donovan was the one she should ask about the child.
    If she ever asked anyone at all.
    She called Javier to see how things were going with him—and then ended up going on and on about the design for the children’s center, about the idea for the facade that still wasn’t coming together, about how much she was learning from Donovan. As always, he encouraged her and he asked all the right questions.
    By the time she hung up with Javier, it was after ten. She got into bed and turned off the light and told herself that she was glad she’d decided not to hound Donovan anymore about his past, about his secrets, about his private life.
    From now on, she would do the job she had come here to do, period. She would