Fools Rush In (Arabesque) (Mass Market Paperback)

by Gwynne Forster (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
After a devastating tragedy sent her into a severe depression, Justine Montgomery gave up her newborn daughter for adoption. Realizing her mistake too late, she discovered her daughter had been adopted by divorced journalist Duncan Banks—and that he was looking for a nanny. Without revealing her identity, Justine took the job and was determined that securing her child's future would be the only passion in her life. But she never anticipated Duncan's growing suspicions about her—or the powerful attraction between them.

A poverty-ridden childhood and a failed marriage left Duncan Banks unwilling to trust in anyone but himself. It didn't take him long to realize that there was something not quite right about his daughter's otherwise perfect nanny. But in trying to uncover Justine's secrets, Duncan soon found his own vulnerabilities were at stake. With divided loyalties and an unexpected passion threatening their fragile relationship, Justine and Duncan must risk revealing more than they ever imagined to achieve what they never dreamed possible…. --This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Justine let the white vehicle take her weight as she stood alone at the edge of the crowd, staring at the gutted Falls Church, Virginia motel in which, hours earlier, her faithful and loving husband of four years had perished with his white mistress. Perspiration matted her hair even as she tightened her jacket against the early fall chill. Her dry, tearless eyes stung their sockets as she gazed at the burned-out ruin still ripe with the smell of singed carpet, incinerated furniture, odoriferous rubbish, and charred flesh. Shivers coursed through her at the sight of the smoke-darkened glass and fragmented windows. Blackened bricks that had once gleamed red in the sunlight mocked her with their message of gloom and death.

"They shore musta been busy," a female voice declared, "if they was the only ones in there that couldn't hear the fire alarm."

"You tell it, girl," another agreed.

The only love she had even known. Why couldn't she cry? Echoes shouted at her from the black ruins that jeered contemptuously at her. "Love ya, Baby!" He said it that way every time

he left her. "You be ready for me, Baby." She opened the crumpled note that he'd left tacked to the refrigerator and read it again. "Sorry I couldn't reach you at work, Baby, but the company's got an emergency of gargantuan proportions, and I'm on my way to Boston to straighten things out. May take a couple of days, but I'll call you. Explain it all when I get back. You be ready for me. Love ya, Baby. Your devoted husband, Kenneth." Boston! And here he was, dead in a Falls Church, Virginia motel.

She looked up and stared in horror as men approached her wheeling gurneys carrying one long, black plastic bag and one shorter bag, each tied securely. Dazed, she would have touched the remains of her husband if an ambulance worker hadn't jumped between her and the lifeless object. Her fist pummeled the man's chest until he held her hands to restrain her and folded her shaking form to his body until she gained control. She looked at the note, read it again, shredded it into bits, and let the wind have it. Then she turned from the horrifying scene where Kenneth Montgomery had perished with his lover, rested her hand on her belly—distended with their eight-months-along unborn child—and walked away. Thirty-five minutes later as she drove the Ford Taurus home, the first pains of a premature birth began….

Justine's screams awakened her, and she sprang forward in bed, tugging the sheet to her as though to protect herself, and gazed rapidly around her bedroom. It wasn't a dream. If only it was. If only that morning had never been, and she could sleep through one night without reliving it exactly as it had occurred that awful day. For nearly twelve months, that scene had been her constant companion, filling her thoughts during the day and her dreams at night. She wiped the perspiration from her face with her left hand and shook her right fist.

"I won't let you do this to me. I won't let you destroy my faith in human beings. You with your goodness, your humanitarian-ism, and your love for the common man. You for whom I ruined my relationship with my father. You treacherous bastard. You robbed me of my child. You…

"My child. Why did I…?" She rested her head on her raised knees and folded her arms around them. What had she done? She jumped from the bed, got dressed, rushed to the social service department of the hospital in which she'd given birth, and paced in front of the door for an hour and a half until the workers arrived at nine.

Maybe if she said if often enough, they'd do something. "I want my child back. I was sick. You can't do this to me." Her screams reverberated through the social service department of Alexandria, Virginia's Presidents Hospital. She tightened the woolen stole that she wore to ward off the September chill and leaned across the social worker's desk, oblivious to the tears that wet the corners of her mouth.

"I… I'll sue you. I'll…"

"You signed the papers, Justine. You couldn't stand the sight of that baby and it was our duty to protect her."

"But I was sick, and you knew it."

"You said you didn't want the baby. We know you sustained an unusually deep postpartum psychosis; many women do. Some of them have killed their babies when the psychosis was a deep one like yours. We thought you'd never come out of it. A week ago, I'd have sworn you never would. Your refusal to look at the child, and your insistence that we do whatever the law allowed, left us no choice, but to do as you said. Your therapist agreed."

She stormed out of the social service department and, nearly blinded by her tears, made her way to the maternity ward to find the doctor and nurse who had taken care of her when she developed an embolism following the birth.

"After about a week," the nurse told her, "you became withdrawn, refused food, wouldn't talk to anybody, and wouldn't take the baby. You refused to take the baby with you when we discharged you. We had a conference with you and your therapist, and when the therapist asked you what you wanted us to do, you said, 'Suit yourself.' I've never known postpartum psychosis to last as long or to be as deep as what you've been experiencing. Look at you now. You're a changed woman; I can see that. But it's too late. We can't help you."

Nurse Jane Wilkerson watched Justine's heavy steps as she left them. "What else could we all have done?" she asked the doctor who had joined her. "Every time she saw that child, she sank deeper into depression, screaming and crying like we were beating her. I never felt so sorry for anybody in my life."

"Yeah. I don't think many women could handle learning that her husband died in a tryst with a woman he'd had a steady affair with since before he met her, and especially not if she was eight months pregnant."

"Are you saying…? You're joking."

"Wish I was. Alexandria's a small town, and the upper middle-class African American community here is minuscule. Marian Iverson had been Kenneth Montgomery's mistress for at least twelve years—since their college days, I'm told. Uninterrupted. Long before he met Justine. But he couldn't marry a white woman and run for congress in that all-black district he claimed to represent. African-American women don't seem able to hack that from us black guys; though, believe me, they take whoever they please."

"Well, I'll be. Can you beat that? I never would have thought it of him. And such a distinguished man, too."

"Yeah. But if his wife didn't know about it, he must have done his best to be good to her. Poor fellow just got caught."

Jane Wilkerson adjusted a blond curl beneath her crisp white cap and walked off, more certain than ever that being single and staying that way made good sense.

Justine walked aimlessly out of the building as a white Cougar pulled up, and the Washington, D.C. license plate on another white car flashed through her mind. Eleven months earlier, she'd just left her therapy session when a man walked out of the hospital carrying a newborn baby, and the woman beside him had seemed to drag her steps. They got into a white Mercedes, and the man held the tiny form wrapped in a little pink blanket as the woman drove them away. She hadn't associated them with her child, but the scene had made her curious about it, and she had run back inside and asked the social worker's secretary if they'd found an adoptive family for her baby.

"Yes," the woman had beamed, "they just left. Now you can relax and get on with your life."

Not one emotion had made its presence felt. She hadn't tried to understand her unusual behavior, her lack of concern that her child had a new mother. She and Kenneth had planned to have three children—one every two years—but he wasn't there and he'd lived a lie. Every time he'd held her and made passionate love to her, telling her that he loved her, that she was his world; he'd lied. He'd made a mockery of her love. She shivered, wondering if he had laughed with his mistress about his unresponsive wife, frantic to climax with him only to have it elude her every time. If only he were alive so she could despise him!

She shook off the unpleasant memories and gathered her wits. She'd get her child back, no matter what anybody said or did. They shouldn't have let her sign those papers, knowing she had an illness fairly common among women who had just given birth. She couldn't undo the past, but she was back to her old self now, and getting her child would be her number one priority. Her child would be hers again. She'd find her and nobody was going to stop her from getting her back. She remembered the license plate number now—dredging it up from the bowels of her subconscious mind. At the time, she'd thought that only someone rich and famous would have the number GDB 1800. She wrote it down and headed for Indiana Avenue and the municipal building in northwest Washington.

Hours passed while first one official and then another treated her to a dose of government bureaucracy, bouncing her from office to office. Anxious and frustrated, she called one of Kenneth's fraternity brothers in the mayor's office and, an hour later, had the information that she wanted. That car belonged to G. Duncan Banks, an investigative reporter for The Maryland Journal, a paper in Baltimore.

She searched in the Library Of Congress, the internet, and records of the Society of Professional Journalist, learning all she could about the man whom she believed called himself the father of her child. The information she treasured most concerned his character and his address. He lived in affluent Tacoma Park, at the edge of the Maryland/District line. Now, what could she do with that information? She couldn't drive up to his house and demand her child, because he had a legal right to the child, but he'd hear from her. And soon.

Duncan Banks stretched his long frame out on the floor beside Tonya's crib, his mind idling while his eleven-month-old adopted daughter's chubby brown fingers examined his right thumb. She had wedged herself so deeply into his heart that he hat... --This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 313 pages
• Publisher: Kimani Press (October 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1583140379
• ISBN-13: 978-1583140376
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,751,076 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Everybody plays the fool sometime!, May 1, 2000

By A Customer

The main characters in this story had both been played for a fool by their spouses. Imagine being 8 months pregnant and finding out that your spouse had been having an affair, and has just died in a motel fire with his white mistress. Would you not mentally and emotionally freak out? The heroine of the book, Justine did just that...which leads her to doing something she would never have done under normal conditions---give her baby girl up for adoption. Once she was emotionally healed enough to go looking for her baby, she found not only her daughter, but the love of her life in Duncan, the man who had adopted her. Duncan had issues of his own, but it just made the story more interesting. A great read which I highly recommend.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fools may rush in, but love conquers all!!!, September 28, 1999

By A Customer

I absolutely adored this novel. Gwynne is one of my favorite authors. Her characters and story plots are unlike any other author. I enjoyed the story of Justine, Duncan and Tonya. I was also impressed that Mrs. Forster incorporated characters from one of her early novels. Not to mention the love affair and marriage of Duncan's sister and Wayne Roundtree. I washappy that Justine and Duncan finally got together at the end of the novel and despite her treachery, they made amends. Excellent reading!!! Keep up the good work Gwynne.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars When "Fools Rush In"....love prevails, September 22, 1999

By	Sherrie Powell (Fairburn, Georgia United States) - See all my reviews

This is another winner from the incomparable Gwynne Forster. No other writer has quite her talent for taking such seemingly insurmountable issues--a child, her biological mother and adoptive father, and the secrets and betrayal haunting them both--and coming up with such an engrossing love story.

I made the mistake of taking this book to work and hardly got any work done because I could not wait to find out what would happen next. Duncan Banks is every woman's fantasy of the perfect man...loving, passionate, community-minded, and a fantastic father. And Justine is his perfect match. I cried tears of joy as these two realized the love they shared not only for their precious daughter, but for each other.

Last but definitely not least, I want to thank Ms. Forster for reintroducing Banks and Wayne Roundtree. I absolutely loved the way their story worked out. Please keep me updated! And Duncan's housekeeper Mattie was an absolute riot. Keep up the excellent work, Ms. Forster. I look forward to your next novel.