Nobody's Baby but Mine (47 page)

“I can’t think of anything I’d enjoy more.”

At that moment Rosie Darlington Bonner decided she’d been ignored long enough. This was her big moment, darn it, and she wanted some attention! After all, she had lots to do. There were pesky little brothers to welcome into the world, friends to make, trees to climb, parents to appease, and, most of all, great novels to write.

There were also
lots
of math tests to flunk along the way, not to mention an unfortunate experience in chem lab with a cretin of a science teacher who didn’t appreciate good literature. But maybe it was better the two people looking down at her with those goofy expressions on their faces didn’t know about the chem lab yet . . .

Rosie Darlington Bonner opened her mouth and howled.
Here I am, world! Ready or not!

A number of books were extremely helpful in my research, even though I only understood a fraction of them, and I’d like to acknowledge the following: Paul Davies,
God and the New Physics
; James Gleick,
Chaos: Making a New Science
; Leon Lederman (with Dick Teresi),
The God Particle
. Also Mudhusree Mukerjee’s article, “Explaining Everything,” in
Scientific American
, January 1996, proved to be extremely useful.

Thanks to my husband, Bill, for being my viewing companion as I watched superstar Professor Richard Wolfson’s sixteen-part videotaped lecture series on “Einstein’s Relativity and the Quantum Revolution,” produced by The Teaching Company. Professor Wolfson and Bill—God bless them both!—had a wonderful time.

A big thank you to everyone at Avon Books for their support, especially my editor, Carrie Feron, and her wonderfully competent assistant, Ann McKay Thoroman. Continued appreciation to my agent, Steven Axelrod.

A number of people were especially helpful in the preparation of this book. I’d like to acknowledge Dr. Robert Miller, Pat Hagan, Lisa Libman, my buddy Diane, and all the Phillips family cereal eaters. Speaking of cereal . . . Thanks Bryan, Jason, and Ty, even though you should have been studying instead. Go Boilers!

And to my readers—You’ll never know how much your letters mean. Thank you.

Susan Elizabeth Phillips is one of our biggest women's fiction stars soaring onto the New York Times bestseller list with Dream a Little Dream. She's the only four-time recipient of Romance Writer's of America's prestigious Favorite Book of the Year Award. Susan delights fans by touching hearts as well as funny bones with her wonderfully whimsical and modern fairy tales. A resident of the Chicago suburbs, she is also a wife and mother of two grown sons.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

NOBODY’S BABY BUT MINE. Copyright © 1997 by Susan Elizabeth Phillips. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of PerfectBound™.

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Mobipocket Reader edition v 1. April 2002 ISBN: 0-0607-7071-6

First Avon Books Printing: February 1998

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