The President's Daughter - Mariah Stewart [66]
Jude had had no illusions about how difficult that time had been for Blythe, who, in spite of the situation, had never complained. After Dina’s birth, Jude and Blythe had celebrated with champagne and performed their own private christening, with Miles Kendall arriving to serve as godfather and Jude serving as godmother. All had gone so well. All had been so right. Dina was a darling baby and a joy.
Things should have just kept right on going as they had been.
Then Blythe went back to Washington to see Graham.
And in the blink of an eye, everything changed.
It had happened so fast that even now, years later, Jude wondered how such a thing could have been true.
There had been the call from Blythe, telling Jude how fine everything was. How happy she and Graham were just to see each other again.
Graham’s plans had changed, however. In spite of his protestations to the contrary, he’d been talked into running for that second term. Blythe hadn’t sounded at all surprised, nor was she upset with his decision.
“I knew they’d never let him quit. But I think it made him feel noble to tell me that he’d give it all up for me and for Dina. I don’t mind. We’ll have the rest of our lives to spend together,” she’d told Jude.
Then, two nights later, the second call. The one from Miles, who had had such trouble getting the words out.
It had been incomprehensible.
And Blythe’s death made no more sense to Jude now than it had thirty years earlier. . . .
Waylon moved closer and sat on Jude’s feet as he had a habit of doing. Absently Jude petted the dog and wondered where all this would end.
How could she now tell Dina that which she’d hidden from her all these years?
Oh, Jude had always known she should tell her— had to tell her someday. And she’d meant to do that. Someday.
Of course, Dina had to know the truth. Deserved to know the truth. There had just never been a right time, a right way, to tell her.
It had all happened so fast. . . .
After Blythe’s death, there had been that hasty visit from Miles, offering a new birth certificate naming Jude as Dina’s birth mother, in order to protect the baby from anyone who might have gotten wind of Blythe’s relationship with Graham. No one, Miles had cautioned Jude, no one must ever know of Dina’s true identity.
At the time it had seemed like a good idea, and it had been nothing for Miles to secure such a document. The only discussion concerned who to name as the father. Miles had offered to supply a phony identity, but Jude felt the baby deserved a real flesh-and-blood father, even one she would never know.
Jude had known just the man to call on.
Frank McDermott had been Jude’s friend since grade school. At one point they’d been high school sweethearts, but always more than that. Together they’d spent long summer nights sitting on Jude’s back porch talking about what they would do after graduation. With a combination of scholarships and loans Jude would be realizing a dream and heading east to attend college. Frank had just gotten his draft notice—a gloomy prospect in those days when young American boys were being loaded onto planes and flown into a jungle a half a world away. On those nights when the world was so full of possibilities, neither of them could have imagined that Frank would spend the next few hellish years in a cage as a prisoner of war and that the injuries he received there would end his life before he reached the age of thirty.
So when Jude came to Frank with a story about how she’d gotten pregnant by one of her professors—the only story she could come up with—and said that she needed a name to place on the child’s birth certificate, Frank had gladly offered the use of his. As he knew that death was close, the thought of leaving behind a child that bore his name, even though he hadn’t fathered her himself, had brought Frank a great deal of peace. The navy chaplain had performed a simple ceremony right there in Frank’s hospital room, and in the blink of an eye Jude Bradley had become Jude McDermott. She brought the baby to the hospital for Frank to see, and the