Free Morgan's Child by Pamela Browning Page B

label on the bottle and dropped it into a padded mailing envelope. "Give it to Gump on your way back," she said as she handed the envelope to Morgan. "He knows what to do."
    "You'll hear from me," he said in a tone of voice that made it difficult to discern if he had uttered a promise or a threat.
    She watched as he retreated, his clothes still wet, his feet still bare. She hadn't even thought to offer him a towel.

Chapter 5

    Two weeks later Kate opened the kitchen door one afternoon and found a wrathful Gump tapping his foot impatiently on her doorstep. She invited Gump into the sitting room for a visit and listened horror-struck while he poured out a story about being accosted on the dock by a man named Tony Saldone, who pretended to know Kate.
    "He bought me a drink or two in the tavern, and I told him more than you'd want him to know," Gump said mournfully.
    Kate froze while she digested Gump's words. "And then what?" she asked carefully.
    "I realized after a while that I'd made a mistake and told the guy to leave me alone. He rubbed the stubble on his chin and shrugged his shoulders, and then he rambled off along the dock. I wish he'd slipped on a loose board and fallen in the drink," Gump said.
    "There's only one thing this can mean. Morgan Rhett has hired someone to check up on me. He wants to know if there's any chance that someone else could be the father of this baby," Kate said. She should have known that Morgan would be thorough. Still, she was angry, and certainly not with Gump, whose weaknesses at the Merry Lulu were well-known to her.
    "I'm pretty sure I set that fellow straight about that," Gump said, but his face became serious. "What if this Morgan Rhett doesn't take the baby?" he asked.
    "Morgan has to take the baby," Kate said. "He has to."
    Gump was silent for a moment. "Any luck yet in you finding a job?" he asked.
    "How can I expect anyone to hire me after the big flap at Northeast Marine Institute? In case you've forgotten, I testified against my superior in front of Congress, and his position was upheld. My reputation is nil."
    "I didn't think you cared about your reputation," Gump retorted.
    "Scientific reputation is one thing," Kate said. "Personal reputation is another. I couldn't care less what Willadeen Pribble and the rest of those women on the mainland think of me."
    "Not that they ever lack for gossip," Gump said, shaking his head unhappily as he prepared to leave. "Goodbye, Kate. If any more of Morgan's people come calling, I'll clam up."
    "Send them to me, and I'll give them a piece of my mind," Kate said. She folded her arms across her belly as she watched Gump depart, thinking that the person she'd really like to tell off was Morgan Rhett.
    * * *
    At that moment Morgan was pacing back and forth across the floor of his office at Morgan Rhett & Company.
    "So the ferry captain told you that Kate never has male visitors?" he asked Tony Saldone.
    "That's about it," Tony said.
    "And how did you pry that information out of him?" Morgan asked skeptically.
    Tony winked. "A couple of cups of grog at the Merry Lulu Tavern. But when I asked this guy Gump to explain the Sinclair woman's pregnancy, he shut his mouth and said he didn't want to talk about it. Changed the subject, in fact. He started rambling on about Kate's mother and how she left when Kate was nine years old. Said he felt responsible."
    "I know, Kate mentioned that her mother had abandoned her," Morgan said, waving away this extraneous information as if it were a pesky fly in his face.
    "Well, you want to hear a good story, this one's all that and a bag of peanuts. Eloise, Kate's mother, ran off with some guy on a motorcycle and never came back, even after the guy cracked up the bike and killed himself. After that, Eloise departed for Africa and joined some do-gooder health organization."
    "All that is irrelevant. You turned up no dirt on Kate Sinclair?"
    "As far as her personal life is concerned, no dirt—in spades," Tony said with a