True Colors. Diana Palmer

Chicago bus terminal had been unwelcoming, crowded and busy. Clutching her worn suitcase in her hand, Meredith had fought down the instinctive fear of being alone and without visible means of support. There was always the YWCA if everything else failed. She’d find some place. But she felt sick and afraid, and always there was the threat of Myrna pursuing her over that supposedly stolen money.

      The first three nights she’d spent at the YMCA in tears, mourning Cy and the life that could have been. But then she’d been told about another place, a Christian home with only a few tenants. She’d decided to try her luck there, hoping for a little more privacy in which to spend her grief without the prying, compassionate eyes of the other downtrodden women at the Y.

      She remembered leaving the YWCA, wandering aimlessly down the cracked sidewalk while the cold winter wind whipped her long hair around her thin, pale face. As a few snow flurries touched coldly against her cheeks and eyelids and lips, she wondered what to do next.

      Fate took a hand when she stepped off the curb without looking and found herself flat on the pavement, beside a very expensive limousine.

      A minute later, a quiet, intelligent face came into focus, a face with deep blue eyes and thin lips, high cheekbones and brownish blond hair.

      “Are you all right?” asked a velvety voice. “You’re very pale.”

      The voice had what sounded to Meredith like a definite New York accent. She’d heard it often enough in the café when tourists passed through. She smiled. “I’m fine,” she murmured. “I guess I fell.”

      The man’s eyes lit up. “I guess you did. But we helped a little, didn’t we, Mr. Smith?”

      A second man came into view. This one was a giant with thinning dark hair and big, deep-set green eyes, with an imposing nose in a chiseled face. He was wearing a chauffeur’s uniform. “I couldn’t brake quickly enough,” he said. “But I’m sorry. It was my fault.”

      “No,” Meredith said weakly. “I felt faint. I’m pregnant….”

      The two men exchanged a speaking glance. “Your husband?” the first man asked. “Is he with you?”

      “I don’t have…a husband,” she whispered, and tears sprang to her eyes. “He doesn’t know.”

      “Oh, boy.” Henry smoothed back her long, disheveled hair with a gentle hand. “Well, you’d better come with us.”

      In her naive way, Meredith equated big black limousines with organized crime. This man was dressed fit to kill, and his driver looked every inch a mobster. She hadn’t run away from one dangerous situation to land herself in another.

      “I can’t do that,” she blurted out, her big eyes saying more than she realized as she looked from one of them to the other.

      “Will it help if we introduce ourselves?” The thin man smiled. “I’m Henry Tennison. This is Mr. Smith. I’m a legitimate businessman.” He leaned closer, his lazy eyes smiling at her. “We’re not even Italian.”

      One look at the humor in his face, and all her apprehension disappeared.

      “That’s better. Help me get her in the car, Smith. I think we’re becoming the center of attention.”

      Belatedly, Meredith realized they were blocking traffic. Other drivers were making their irritation known with their horns. She allowed herself to be put in the back of the limousine with Henry Tennison while the formidable Mr. Smith stashed her luggage in the trunk.

      She looked around her at the luxurious interior of the car. Real leather. Not to mention a bar, a television, a cellular phone, and some odd kind of computer and printer. “You must be worth a fortune,” she said without thinking.

      “I am,” Henry mused. “But it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. I’m a slave to my job.”

      “Everything has a price, hasn’t it?” Meredith asked sadly.

      “Apparently.” He leaned back and folded his arms as Mr. Smith started the car and pulled into traffic, leaving the loud horns behind. “Tell me about the baby.”

      Without knowing why she trusted him implicitly, a man she didn’t even know, she began to talk. She told him about Cy and the beginning of their love affair, her voice quiet and slow as she skipped over the passion to his mother’s interference and her speedy departure in disgrace.

      “I guess I must sound like a tramp to you,” she concluded.

      “Don’t be absurd,” he said gently. “I’m not an impressionable youth. Is the father going to come after you?”

      She shook her head. “He believed his mother.”

      “Too bad. Well, you can come home with me for the time being. Don’t worry. I’m not a lecher, even if I am a certified bachelor. I’ll look after you until you find your feet.”

      “But, I can’t—”

      “We’ll have to get you some clothes,” he said, thinking aloud. “And your hair needs work, too.”

      “I haven’t said—”

      “Delia, my secretary, can look after you while I’m away. I’ll have her move in, just to keep everything aboveboard. And you’ll need a good obstetrician. I’ll have Delia take care of that, too.”

      Meredith caught her breath at the way he was arranging her life. “But—”

      “How old are you?”

      She swallowed. “Eighteen.”

      His eyes narrowed on her thin face. “Eighteen,” he murmured. “A little young, but it will work out.”

      “What will work out?”

      “Never mind.” He leaned forward, his hands dangling between his knees as he stared straight into her eyes. “You’re still in love with him, aren’t you?”

      “Yes.”

      He nodded. “Well, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.” He sat back again. “Do you like quiche?”

      “What?”

      “Quiche. It’s a kind of French egg pie—Oh, never mind. I’ll show you when we get home.”

      Home was a penthouse apartment in one of the most expensive hotels in Chicago. Meredith, who’d never known anything grander than Great-Aunt Mary’s small house, was shocked and delighted at the luxury. She stood in the entrance to the living room and just stared.

      “Don’t let it intimidate you,” Henry said, smiling. “You’ll get used to it in no time at all.”

      Incredibly, she had. Without quite knowing how, she became Henry Tennison’s possession. She was maneuvered into marriage scant weeks later and shipped out of the country to one of Henry’s houses in the Bahamas, near Nassau. Her name became Kip Tennison. Henry undertook her advanced education in business tactics and strategy, in between natural childbirth classes with a registered nurse he hired to live in and look after Kip. During this time, he anticipated the baby with all the delight of its real father, spoiled his young wife, and seemed to lose twenty years of age as he involved himself with her pregnancy.

      She sighed, remembering how it had been. Slowly, she had begun to replace Cy’s face with Henry’s, to trust her husband, to confide in him. She warmed to him. When the baby was born, he was with her at the delivery in Nassau, and as the tiny infant was placed in his arms, tears fell from his eyes.

      It was only later that she discovered Henry was sterile, that he could never have a child of his own. It was why he was single at the age of thirty-eight—why he’d never asked anyone to marry him until Meredith came along. But fatherhood seemed to come naturally to him, and he treated Blake as if the infant were his own blood child.

      In all the months they’d waited for Blake, he’d never touched Meredith. She wouldn’t have