Page 1 of Broken SEAL'S Secret Baby
Chapter one
Kate
Why am I here again? I don’t know Charles Winthrop Emory very well. He’s my brother’s best friend.
And I didn’t know his wife, other than to greet her when she dropped her daughter off and picked her up at Bit o’ Heaven Preschool where I’m the education director.
This is a wet, miserable day when you should not even expect a duck to be out, yet here I am with my favorite pupil, attending her mother’s funeral.
It is March 25, of 2020 and Emily Jean Emory (say that ten times fast) is dead. By all accounts she was excellent at her work. She was the head nurse at a local hospital and was well thought of by other nurses who brought their children to Bit o’ Heaven.
Her daughter was and is a well-adjusted child who happily said good-bye to her mother and was equally happy to be picked up and go home with her. She was just as pleased to go home with her father, when he returned from his duties, and took his turn collecting his child.
Emily didn’t need to work. Charles Emory, the CEO of Agri-Oil was as rich as Croesus. I know this because my brother, James Bailey, was acting CEO while Charles was deployed. James had wanted to be an architect. He had an abiding interest in sustainable building that made its own energy, provided food, and recycled waste in as nearly a closed loop as human homes could manage.
It was not his fault that he’d graduated when construction experienced an extreme slowdown, or that his dream was viewed as being kind of crazy.
When Charles came home to stay, he could have put James out of a job. Instead, he made my brother his CFO, and added purchasing and several other duties that didn’t make a lot of sense to me. But it seemed to suit both of them.
There were a lot of things that didn’t make sense to me. I knew several women who would have loved to stay home with their children. Economic constraints dictated that they must work.
It was for the sake of those mothers, fathers, and guardians that I wanted to go into child care as a business. Bit o’ Heaven was a good daycare and preschool that went above and beyond essentials. But I’d worked for several, before I landed my current position, where the management put making money ahead of the children’s welfare.
Cece seemed to take her mother’s going to work in stride. It was just the way things were. She did visit me in my office a little more often than some of the other children. She was curious and inventive – traits that didn’t always go over well with some of the other teachers.
Naptime seemed to be an exceptional trial for everyone involved. I enjoyed Cece but tried not to show it. When you work with groups of students, it doesn’t go over well to have favorites – even if I was fond of her.
Then her mother was invited to speak at a medical convention somewhere out of the country. It was an honor.She was delighted to accept, and Charles seemed proud of his wife’s accomplishment, willingly picking up the slack with childcare for his daughter.
Emily was supposed to be gone for two weeks. But illness among the convention attendees kept them at the center, then Charles told the administrator at Bit o’ Heaven that Cece might need some extra attention. The quarantine had become serious, and several of the attendees were gravely ill.
Cece became sad. She cried when her father left her. She interrupted story time. She called another student a big meany-head, and a poopy-face because he asked if her parents were getting a divorce.
She wasn’t necessarily wrong in her assessment of the student. He was something of a bully, but his parents were divorcing, and he was getting traded back and forth between them.
Then, Charles told us that Emily was a hero. She had helped nurse the other members of the convention as one by one they had become ill, and she had paid a heroes price.
Not even her body would be returning home. Because she had died of a virulently contagious disease that turned up in China back in December, she had to be cremated. All that remained of Emily Jean Emory came home in an urn.
Cece cried all morning on the day she’d learned of her mother’s death. Then she threw a block at the mean kid when he’d asked if she was getting a new mommy.
I took her to my office and held her while she cried some more. I didn’t have the heart to put her in time out, as the rules said I should. Late that afternoon, the administrator told us all that Bit o’ Heaven would be closing its doors until “the medical authorities have this silliness all straightened out.”
That left me without a paycheck, with a month of college classes to go. So, when James called later that evening and asked if I could help with Cece, he didn’t have to talk veryhard to get me to agree to begging off from my classes for a couple of days and looking after Cece until after the funeral.
So here we were, on a cold day in spring, going through an odd funeral. James, Charles, Cece and I were the only people physically present. Most of the other “attendees” were viewing the ceremony via a camera that sheltered under a canopy.
It was a reasonable solution, and I wasn’t sorry there was just an urn of ashes. One of my aunts had told me I should kiss my great-uncle’s corpse in its coffin. I took one look and ran screaming to my mother. At least Cecily Elizabeth Emory, usually called Cece, would be spared the barbaric practice of viewing the dead. The poor child had been through enough.
Cece had refused to stand in a taped-off section of lawn by herself and now clung to my knees. I put my arm around her shoulders, trying to share my raincoat and umbrella with her.
Charles Emory stands in a square on my left, his handsome face set like a granite craig. A black medical mask covers the lower part of his face, but I could see the muscles clench in his jaw. Dark eyebrows shade storm-cloud eyes fringed by sinfully long eyelashes. The hair I can see under his J.B. Stetson hat is dark, with a sprinkling of gray at the temples. Mostly, it is cut short in a severe military style.
His wide shoulders, held in stern parade-rest, are covered with a dark peacoat. His legs, which look athletic and strong, are covered by black, severely pressed slacks. Even with all the mud and rain, his dress shoes have a high gloss that would have put your eye out if there’d been any sun to reflect off them.
“I want to go home,” Cece whimpers, shivering as a blast of icy wind threatened to topple the tents. She is wearing a little black, woolen dress, black tights, and black patentleather ballet flats. The jacket that matches her dress is stylish but doesn’t look very warm.
“Soon,” I say to her, reaching down to pick her up.
