Bringing Baby Home Read Free Page A

he understood Ray’s maxim for life. In Ray’s world, only Ray mattered. The bodies, David feared, were real. And, in a way, included his.
    Hegot back in the truck and drove carefully, never exceeding the speed limit. Faster cars passed him impatiently, but David was a follower of rules. Most of them, anyway.
    “Thou shalt not kill”—unless you count poisoning thousands of unsuspecting consumers.
    “Thou shalt not lie”—unless the truth means losing profits in any given year.
    “Thou shalt not covet your neighbor’s wife”—well, he could honestly say he’d never done that. His neighbor’s life, maybe. All he’d ever wanted was a home and a family of his own. The kind he’d known as a child, before his parents were killed in a car accident and he was told he had to stay with his grandmother, who had considered her work over and done when the daughter she raised got married.
    June, as his grandmother preferred to be called, did her duty. She even sent her grandson to the best college his inheritance money could buy, but it hadn’t occurred to her to try to replace the love he’d known in his parents’ arms.
    He’d tried to find that as an adult, and thought he’d succeeded with Kay and the children. Until, fate ripped that family out of his hands, too. And seldom a night went by that he didn’t think about the pain his “death” must have caused the children he’d called his own.
    As he pulled into his driveway, he caught a glimpse of his landlady. Mimi Simms was eighty if she was a day. Her red hair was brighter than a poinsettia in bloom. She was an odd combination of nosy and antisocial. David preferred the latter. Once he’d made up his mind to speak out, to become a high-profile whistleblower, he’d had no choice but to leave the past behind and disappear.
    For four years, he’d been lucky. He’d also never once had an altercation with a customer and drawn attention to himself. He could only hope that the beautiful lady withthe kind eyes would shrug off his embarrassing faux pas and forget about him.
    “You’re a fool,” he muttered as he pulled the truck to a stop in front of his little shack. “You had your chance at a normal life, but you chose to work for Ray Cross, instead. Now, you can’t ever go back.”
    Nor could he start a new life with someone else. He’d made a vow never to put anyone through that kind of torture and distress again. His decision to give up his old life and enter the federal Witness Protection Program had been relatively easy—it was either that or wake up some morning with Ray Cross’s gun in his face. The deputy U.S. marshals who had been assigned to his case had come up with an elaborate plan that included an inferno at the lab where David had spent most of his time. No body. No funeral. No fuss. Or so David had assumed. But apparently no one had informed his ex-wife.
    Dying had been difficult, but it had been a lot easier on him than on his loved ones. He would regret that for the rest of his life.

Chapter Two
    “Okay. Whowants to go first?” Alex asked, looking around their mother’s table.
    Alex, who was a year and four months older than Liz, often acted as the CEO of the Radonovic family. But beneath the businesslike facade was a gentle heart that made nearly every child at her Dancing Hippo Day Care and Preschool fall in love with her.
    Neither Liz nor Kate volunteered. These weekly breakfast meetings just weren’t the same without Grace, the youngest of the Radonovic sisters. She’d always shown up bubbly and full of topics for discussion. Sometimes Alex and Kate would share their problems, too, but nobody really expected Liz to contribute. She didn’t dump. She preferred to keep her problems to herself. Things seemed to sort themselves out eventually without her sisters’ help.
    “Has anyone heard from Grace?” she asked.
    Newly engaged, Grace had followed her fiancé, Nick Lightner, to Detroit, where she was settling in and planning