The Agent's Secret Baby. Marie Ferrarella

out, he’d gotten in contact with his handler, Hugh Patterson, who in turn had turned Spenser onto the task. Spenser was a wunderkind when it came to the computer. When Spenser failed to find where the e-mail had come from, he knew that they were dealing with a five-star pro.

      Good pro or bad pro?

      Adam hadn’t the slightest idea, but for now, his anonymous tipster didn’t seem to have an agenda, other than passing on this tidbit of information. Why he or she had done that, Adam hadn’t a clue. Was it to taunt him, to show him he was vulnerable, or to get him to stand up and do the right thing? Or was this tipster just out to entertain himself or play deus ex machina behind the scenes?

      Adam wished he knew.

      But he did know what his next step had to be. And he took it.

      Laura Delaney sat down at her desk, getting back to her Web site. Jeremy was finally in bed, asleep, or at least, asleep for the time being. She had no doubt that at least some of the candy he’d collected tonight had found its way into his bottomless tummy despite her strict rules about his only eating two pieces tonight and evenly doling out the rest for the following week. She’d offered those terms, hoping that a compromise would be reached at five. Maybe six.

      Bid low, go high, she thought, amused.

      She loved this holiday, loved seeing the excitement in her young son’s eyes. Taking after her, Jeremy had started planning his costume right after school began in September. Most of all, she loved seeing life through his deep brown eyes. Everything felt so fresh, so new again seeing it from Jeremy’s perspective. After all the time she’d spent in the CIA, this new outlook was a godsend to her.

      Getting pregnant with Jeremy was definitely the best thing that had ever happened to her.

      Although it certainly hadn’t felt so at the time.

      At the time, making the discovery a week after her intense debriefing in Singapore, the pregnancy had knocked the pins right out from beneath her world. And there was never any question as to who the father was. Jeremy’s father was a dynamic, larger-than-life handsome man who had quite literally saved her life.

      The whole thing had been almost like a scene out of the movies. The one where the hero put out his hand to the heroine and growled darkly, “Come with me if you want to live.”

      She’d wanted to live all right. Pinned down in a hopeless situation, knowing she’d be dead by dawn if she stayed, she’d had no recourse but to come with the man who had suddenly burst into her life.

      In true knight-in-shining-armor style, he’d used his body to shield hers and had hustled her out of what would have been a terminal situation. A hairbreadth away from being captured by the people she, as a CIA operative, had been sent to spy on, Laura had had no illusions about her situation. Had he not suddenly materialized in that embassy room, seemingly out of nowhere, she knew she would not have lived to see another sunrise.

      Instead, she’d lived to watch the sunrise in a small fishing hut, sequestered in his arms. Funny how almost dying makes you so anxious to live, to experience and savor everything. The escape, the pursuit and then hiding in a fishing village, posing as fishermen, had all contributed to her heightened desire to live. Her desire to seize all that life had to offer.

      What life had offered was a man whose name she never learned.

      She had learned that she hadn’t been afraid to seize the moment, and neither had he. They were drawn to one another like the missing two halves of a whole. Their coming together was nothing short of earthshaking. It had been predestined.

      Then came the dawn and the rest of life.

      He smuggled her out of the village, put her on a transport plane and then, much too quickly, faded out of her life. Faded even though she asked more than one operative who the masked man was. Time and again, she received conflicting answers. The upshot was that no one seemed to know who he was or where he came from. It was almost as if he was a phantom.

      Laura went on asking more urgently when she discovered that she was pregnant. But the result remained the same. No one could tell her. The few leads she had all ended in a dead end, taking her to operatives who turned out not to be the man who had saved her life and planted another inside her.

      Pregnant, she had another life to think about other than her own. Laura decided she had no choice but to leave her present life behind. Because of her love of animals and having been raised on a ranch, she took up horse training in an effort to create a stable—no pun intended—normal life for her son.

      These days, the life she’d once led almost seemed like a dream, or an action novel she’d read a long, long time ago. The only thing left to remind her that she had once actually been a CIA operative was her ability to utilize information—and sources—to allow her to find people. Ironically, despite numerous tries, she couldn’t find Jeremy’s father, but once she’d read Eve Walters’s e-mail and learned the woman’s story, she had used all the information available to her to see if she could track down the so-called “drug dealer” who had impregnated the woman.

      As she read Eve’s story, her gut almost immediately told her that the man who had fathered Eve’s baby wasn’t the drug pusher the woman believed him to be. Laura knew the life, knew the deceptions that were so necessary in order to maintain a cover. Something she couldn’t put into words told her that Eve’s “Adam” was part of some kind of government agency.

      A little research and calling in several favors from old friends proved her right.

      Adam Smythe was actually Adam Serrano, a DEA agent who had been working undercover for the last two years. There was more background on the man, but that was all she was interested in. Laura saw no reason to delve into the man’s history any further than was absolutely necessary. The life she led now made her acutely aware of the need for, and seductive appeal of, privacy. She gave Adam Serrano his.

      Armed with this information, it took little for her to find both Adam’s Internet server and with that, his e-mail address. Her stark e-mail message to him went out the moment she secured it.

      If Adam was anything like her, she reasoned, his sense of family would leap to the foreground, especially since he had none. She was fairly certain that he would lose no time trying to track down the mother of this unborn child he hadn’t realized was in the offing.

      Laura was more than a little tempted to e-mail Eve and let her know that Adam was coming, but that might have made the woman bolt. Bolting was the last thing she needed to do at this late stage in her pregnancy.

      Eve needed exactly what she was most likely going to get.

      What she, herself, would have loved to get, Laura thought wistfully.

      But, except for an occasional daydream, she had given up the fantasy that had her mystery man knocking on her door, the way she envisioned Adam doing now, or definitely in the very near future, on Eve’s door.

      Laura smiled as she replayed the thought. It wasn’t every day a girl got the chance to bring Adam and Eve together, she mused, more than a little pleased with herself.

      With renewed purpose, Laura went on to read the next e-mail that had been sent to her site from another single mom.

      The doorbell was ringing.

      Eve pressed her lips together. She had just shut down her computer for the night. Glancing at her watch, she saw that it was almost nine o’clock.

      Nine o’clock and she was struggling to keep her eyes open.

      Some party girl she was, Eve mocked herself. She could remember going two days without sleep when she was in college. Three days once, she recalled. There was no way she could do that now. But then, this pregnancy and the tension that had come with it served to drain her and make her overly tired more than she cared to acknowledge.

      This was probably nothing compared to how tired she was going to be once the baby learned how to walk and get into things, she thought. She was looking forward to that, she realized. Looking forward to being a parent—