Wild Honey by Veronica Sattler Page A

far, so good.
    Then there was the fertility clinic in Cambridge, where she’d worked before having the kid. He’d learned it was still being operated by Dr. Philip Burgess, its founder. Posing as a journalist doing an article on such clinics, Travis had learned a few interesting facts. Facts that convinced him Randi Terhune had acted on her own unethical initiative if she’d availed herself of the clinic’s services.
    Make that when, not if, he amended. Any uncertainties he’d had about whether she’d done so had all but vanished. The facts he’d assembled were just too overwhelming to amount to a coincidence. Yeah, she’d acted unethically, all right. According to Burgess, a stern no-nonsense New Englander, employees had always been barred from using the clinic themselves.
    But Travis was deeply concerned about the final piece of info that had turned up about Matt’s mother: both she and her sister, Jill Terhune, had undergone years of psychological counseling when they were younger. He’d been unable to find out why, but the discovery jarred him. Just the thought of Matt being raised by two women who’d required extensive therapeutic counseling raised his hackles.
    Cresting the dunes, Travis halted, his concerns thrust aside for the moment. The salty tang of the sea filled his lungs. Gulls screeched overhead, their cries vying with the rhythmic susurration of the waves. For several minutes he didn’t move. He simply drank in the panorama of sand and sea, of sunlight glinting on blue water.
    Located north of Ocean City, the bed-and-breakfast and a handful of cottages enjoyed a stretch of shorefront relatively free of the crowds that packed the busier tourist spots. He noted a sprinkling of people in the water andknots of sunbathers here and there. In between were mercifully vacant stretches of clean white sand.
    He grinned, his mission forgotten for now. Dropping his towel, he flexed his arms, barely aware of the protest of unused muscles from his injured side. A black T-shirt with the sleeves torn off hid the waterproof bandage on his shoulder. Of course, water would likely find its way to the wound, anyway. And ol’ Doc Reston would howl if he could see him. But Travis didn’t give a damn. He was going for a swim!
    T RAVIS WALKED along the beach at an easy pace, enjoying the sun on his body. The swim had felt good, but he’d kept it brief; he was well enough versed in medicine to know how far he should push his body in its present state. He’d take it slow, increasing the exercise by increments. By the time his leave was up, the gunshot wound would be history.
    He was several hundred yards down the beach when he spotted the top of a flagpole just beyond the dunes. He’d seen the pole from the road and had carefully noted its location with regard to Mrs. Muncie’s. It belonged to Randi Terhune’s rental cottage.
    Glancing around, he noted even fewer people on this section of beach. Maybe a dozen in all. A pair of family groups with young kids, a couple strolling at the water’s edge, holding hands….
    Travis went absolutely still. His eyes fastened on a woman in a yellow bikini tossing a beach ball to a small boy in navy trunks: Randi Terhune…and Matt.
    They were about twenty-five yards away. Intent on the ball, they hadn’t seen him. Travis couldn’t take his eyes off them, his gaze moving from mother to son, then back again.
    Randi Terhune’s lithe sun-kissed body was as elegant as he remembered, and her honey blond hair was already streaked from the sun. Its shining length swung around herlightly tanned shoulders as she moved; now and then the breeze lifted a yard-long tendril that rippled like silk.
    Yet lovely though she was, it was the child that claimed Travis’s attention in the end. Matt’s sturdy body already held evidence of the long-boned height that was as much a McLean trait as the square jaw and springy blond curls. His legs pumped furiously as he went after the ball when a gust of