Valentine Baby
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Gina Wilkins
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15.5K
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15
Chapter 1
Tom Lowery shook his head as he prepared to turn into the driveway of his Fayetteville, Arkansas, home. Apparently, the high-school cheerleader who lived with her parents next door was having a party again. Cars and pickup trucks—some fairly new, others barely roadworthy—were parked everywhere on the narrow cul-de-sac, hardly leaving enough room for Tom to navigate through them.
At least no one had blocked his driveway, as had happened last time Brandi had thrown a party, though one vehicle was parked right on his curb, two tires on the grass. He lifted his eyebrow when he identified that one as a late-model Lexus. Some parent was being awfully brave to entrust a teenager with that expensive vehicle, he thought as he drove into his carport.
He could hear faint sounds of the party as he climbed out of his own functional, sport utility vehicle. Wondering if Brandi’s parents were home, and, if so, how they withstood the constant pounding bass of the music blasting from a stereo, he unlocked his kitchen door. He turned on the light in his kitchen and paused to glance through the day’s mail, which he’d retrieved from his mailbox at the curb. There was a bill from the electric company. A you-have-already-been-approved credit-card solicitation. And a bright-red envelope addressed to him in his mother’s familiar handwriting. That one he opened, after tossing the others onto the counter.
He chuckled when he saw the card his mother had sent him. On the front was a photograph of a chubby, bald infant wearing nothing but a diaper and holding an enormous red heart—a captivating Cupid with a big, slobbery grin. The words “Happy Valentine’s Day, Baby” were printed inside the card, and beneath them Nina had signed, “To my favorite valentine. Love, Mom.”
He had a great mom, Tom thought with a fond smile. Always seemed to know when he needed cheering up.
Maybe it was the date that was bothering him. Friday, February 14. Valentine’s Day.
Maybe it was just his awareness of the occasion that made being alone seem lonelier than usual tonight. Or maybe it was the fact that he’d spent the past few hours with three couples who’d been so blissfully paired off. Zach and Kim, still practically honeymooners after eight months of marriage. Chris and Burle, happily entangled in a lengthy engagement. And Sherm and Sami, who’d been married for years, were the parents of a month-old daughter and still held hands and sneaked kisses when they thought no one was looking.
They’d all made every effort to keep Tom from feeling the odd man out, but they hadn’t been entirely successful. He’d been encouraged to take a date to the dinner party, but there hadn’t been anyone in particular whom he’d wanted to invite. So he’d come home early, prepared to spend the rest of the evening guzzling soda and staring at the tube. Hardly high excitement, but it sure beat sitting alone and watching all those couples falling all over each other. Especially since they all insisted on treating him as “poor, brave Tom.”
Still holding the valentine, he walked out of the kitchen, deciding to change into comfortable sweats before crashing into his favorite recliner.
His first thought when he entered his living room was that he didn’t remember leaving the lights on when he’d left.
His second thought was that he was certain he hadn’t left a baby lying on his coffee table.
The rosy-cheeked infant was strapped into a molded plastic carrier that sat squarely in the center of Tom’s large, round oak coffee table. The baby was looking around the room with bright, curious eyes, seemingly perfectly content to be there. Slowly, Tom glanced from the baby on his coffee table to the one pictured on the front of his valentine’s day card from his mother.
Cupid, he thought blankly.
A sound from the doorway into his hall brought his head up. Just as he’d started to deal with his surprise at finding a baby in his living room, he was slammed by another, even more paralyzing, shock.
Leslie Harden smiled at him.
“Hello, Goose,” she said lightly, as casually as if it hadn’t been eighteen months since she’d walked out of his life.
She hadn’t changed at all. Her figure was still willowy, graceful. Her dark-auburn hair still waved softly around a face that looked younger than her actual age. There were no lines around her clear blue eyes or her soft, sweetly shaped mouth. She was thirty now, he acknowledged slowly. Less than three months younger than he was.
Two thoughts occurred to him almost simultaneously. He hadn’t gotten over Leslie Harden, and the baby in the carrier was obviously too young to be his. He was trying not to analyze his reactions to either observation just yet.
She was still waiting for him to say something. He cleared his throat and tried to speak as casually as she had. “Hello, Leslie. Er, how did you get in?”
She reached in the pocket of the red-and-black-plaid blazer she wore with a red turtleneck and black jeans. “You haven’t changed your locks,” she said as she held up a jingling key ring.
And he hadn’t asked for his key back when she’d left. He wondered how that detail had been overlooked—and if it really had been unintentional.
He glanced at the baby, noting that it still lay quietly in its carrier, and that it was staring at Tom as if studying a new life form. It was almost bald, with only a bit of dark fuzz covering its soft scalp, and it was dressed in a soft white romper thing that could have suited either gender. “Er, is this yours?”
“Sort of,” Leslie answered with a vague half shrug.
Tom rubbed a hand over his face, half-seriously wondering if he’d fallen asleep in his recliner in front of the TV and was now having a really bizarre dream. All the times he’d fantasized about Leslie’s coming back to him, he’d never imagined it happening anything like this.
He wondered if she had any idea what seeing her again did to him.
He cleared his throat. “I’ve got to admit that this is a surprise.”
She walked toward him, her expression rueful. “I know. I suppose you could charge me with breaking and entering, if you like.”
He moved his hand to the back of his neck to massage a muscle that had tightened into a knot. “When I gave you that key, I told you that you were welcome to use it whenever you liked. That hasn’t changed.”
Her lower lip quivered—just for a moment, but he saw it. His stomach clenched in reaction. Tom had always been a sucker for someone in need, and all his instincts told him that Leslie was in trouble.
“I, er...”
She didn’t seem to know how to continue, but just stood there, looking at him. Looking lost. Uncharacteristically vulnerable. And his first instinct was to take her in his arms and promise her anything.
Apparently, he’d learned little from the heartache he’d suffered when she’d walked out on him.
“Maybe we’d better sit down,” he suggested, waving her toward the couch.
She nodded and perched on the very edge of the boldly striped sofa, her gaze averted as she made a visible effort to pull herself together. Tom glanced at the empty space beside her and quickly decided to sit in one of the two matching recliners, instead. He moved toward it, grimly aware of his limp, aware of Leslie watching him.
An uncomfortable memory flitted through his mind. Leslie’s voice echoed through his thoughts, as it had many times during the past year. At least I won’t be around to watch you kill yourself, she’d said just before she’d left him. He’d been annoyed then by her implication that he was reckless and irresponsible just because he liked taking a few risks, seeking a few thrills.
He wondered if she would be able to resist the impulse to say “I told you so” when she found out about the accident that had come too damned close to leaving him confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
The baby squirmed in its seat and stuck a finger in its mouth, reclaiming Tom’s attention.
“Who is this?” Tom asked, wondering if he really wanted to hear the answer.
Leslie smiled. “This,” she said, “is Kenny. My ward.”
Ward. Tom digested the word for a moment, trying to analyze his reactions to it—foremost of which seemed to be relief. “Your ward?”
“He’s Crystal Pendleton’s son.”
Tom recognized the name. “Your stepsister.”
Looking a bit surprised, Leslie nodded. “I wasn’t sure you’d remember. You never met her, and I didn’t talk about her much.”
“You mentioned her a couple of times.” Tom could have added that he remembered almost every word Leslie had said to him during the few spectacular months they’d been together, but he didn’t. After all, he still didn’t know why she’d come back.
Crystal, he recalled, had been the daughter of a woman Leslie’s father had married after divorcing Leslie’s mother when Leslie was very young. There had been other wives and other children after that, but Leslie had mentioned Crystal with a warmth in her voice that hadn’t been there for the others.
Leslie took a deep breath, then spoke rather flatly. “Crystal died six weeks ago.”
Tom looked from the baby to Leslie. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“She had cancer. She discovered it during her pregnancy. She could have had treatment in the early stages, but she refused because she didn’t want to harm the baby. By the time Kenny was born, it was already too late to stop the spread of the cancer. She and the baby were living with me when she died in her sleep just after Christmas. She was only thirty-two.”
“I’m really sorry, Leslie. I know you were fond of her.”
“She was my sister.” A quiver ran through her voice, but she steadied it quickly. “She made a will before she died, naming me as the baby’s guardian.”
“What about the child’s father?”
“She never told me his name. She said it didn’t matter, that the guy was married to someone else and didn’t want anything to do with his son. I have no way of finding out who he is.”
Tom looked again at young Kenny, trying to imagine Leslie raising him alone. He was having a little trouble visualizing it. During the time he and Leslie had been together, she’d never expressed any real desire to have children of her own. Not that they’d ever talked about anything that permanent between them, of course.
Career was all that had seemed to matter to her, he thought with a touch of lingering bitterness. It had been her career as an up-and-coming young attorney that he’d blamed for their breakup.
“There was no one else to take him?”
Leslie shook her head. “No. Crystal’s mother died years ago, and her only other living family member was an elder brother, Steve. He and Crystal were estranged. They hadn’t spoken in a long time when she died.”
Tom remembered that name, too. Steve had been several years.older than Leslie, and she’d said he intimidated her the few times she’d seen him as a child. She’d described him as an angry teenager who’d detested his stepfather—Leslie’s father—and had wanted nothing to do with Leslie.
Tom could remember the night he and Leslie had talked about her childhood. They’d been lying in bed, their bodies limp and sated, her head on his chest. He’d told her a little about growing up as the beloved only child of a woman who’d been an unmarried teenager when he was born. Leslie had talked very briefly about her parents’ ugly divorce and the remarriages that had followed for both of them, causing a lot of confusion in her childhood as she’d struggled to adapt to new homes, new families, new situations. He’d felt sorry for her, though he’d had enough sense not to tell her so, and he’d been grateful that his own mother, young as she had been when she’d had him, had never caused him to doubt that she’d loved him above everything else.
So now he knew what she was doing with a baby, but he still couldn’t quite understand why she was sitting in his living room. “Leslie—why are you here?”
She twisted her fingers in her lap, something she’d always done when she was nervous—another memory that had remained with him long after she’d gone.
“I have a favor to ask you,” she admitted.
Aware of a faint sense of disappointment with her answer, he braced himself. “What can I do for you?”
“I, er, don’t think I’m quite ready to ask,” she said ruefully, tucking a strand of auburn hair behind her ear. She seemed to search for words, then blurted, “How have you been, Goose?”
It was such an obvious stalling tactic that he had to smile, though the silly nickname that only she had ever called him sent a pang through his heart. “Fine, thanks. What’s the favor, Les?”
She avoided answering by asking another question of her own. “I noticed you were limping just now. Have you and Zach been jumping out of planes again?”
Tom didn’t quite wince, but it took an effort. “No. Not in a long time.”
He fell silent, and she apparently got the message that he wasn’t going to explain his limp, at least not yet. So she tried something else to delay the inevitable moment when she would have to explain the favor she wanted of him. Tom was beginning to sense that whatever it was, it was serious. And extremely difficult for her to put into words.
“Zach’s doing okay?” she asked.
“He’s fine. I spent the evening with him and his wife and a few other friends.”
Leslie’s blue eyes widened almost comically. “Zach McCain has a wife?”
Tom nodded. “They’ve been married almost a year.”
“Wow.” She shook her head, looking bemused. “I’ll bet that wedding broke some hearts.”
Tom took the comment as rhetorical. It was well-known that handsome, dashing Zach McCain had been extremely popular with women, yet believed to be a confirmed bachelor. Zach himself had thought so until he’d met Kim.
Leslie seemed to take a sudden interest in a loose thread on the sleeve of her jacket. Avoiding Tom’s eyes, she plucked at it as she asked a bit too casually, “What about you? Thinking about following Zach’s example any time soon?”
An uncomfortable silence fell between them as Tom tried to decide what, exactly, she was asking. If he was involved with anyone else? He wasn’t, and hadn’t been since she’d left him, for various reasons, foremost of which was that he hadn’t been able to find anyone who appealed to him the way that she had.
Was she trying to find out if he was interested in getting back together? He didn’t quite know how to answer that, even to himself.
Sure, he’d fantasized about it. Dreamed about it, occasionally. But she’d hurt him when she’d left, though he’d made sure that neither she nor anyone else knew just how hard her desertion had hit him. He wasn’t sure he wanted to open himself up to that sort of pain again. Not without some sort of assurance this time that she wouldn’t just walk away again.
He tried to speak as lightly as she had. “Hardly. I’m not even dating anyone in particular at the moment.”
An expression that seemed to be an odd mixture of relief and anxiety crossed her face. She started to speak, then stopped, tugging industriously at the loose thread as she seemed to be working up her nerve to ask whatever favor she’d come for. The room grew quiet, the tension thick.
His patience wearing thin, Tom cleared his throat. The rough sound startled Kenny, who had been lying so patiently in the carrier during the conversation. The baby jumped and squawked in protest, his face creasing, his tiny mouth opening to cry.
Leslie hurriedly released the baby from the safety straps that held him in the carrier and took him into her arms. Rocking him against her shoulder, she patted his back and crooned reassuringly to him. The child quieted, snuggling contentedly against her shoulder.
“He’s tired,” she explained, looking more than a little weary herself. “We’ve been on the road all day.”
Tom stared at them with mixed emotions, still finding it hard to believe that Leslie had simply reappeared in his house after so long, that they’d been having this polite, detached discussion after the heated words they’d exchanged the last time they’d been together.
He’d regretted some of the words he’d spoken ever since. But he’d regretted even more some of the words he hadn’t been able to say.
“Why are you here?” he asked, unable to bear the suspense any longer.
She looked straight into his eyes. “There’s something I have to ask you,” she repeated. “It isn’t going to be easy for me. But I want you to know in advance that I’ll understand completely if your answer is no. In fact, I wouldn’t blame you a bit. It’s just that—well, I didn’t know where else to turn...but don’t let that influence you, okay? I’ll work it out...somehow...if you can’t help me. I don’t want you to feel any obligation or any...”
“Leslie,” he broke in impatiently, “for God’s sake, just ask the question.”
She moistened her lips and patted Kenny’s back. Her request came out in a nervous rush. “Tom—could you possibly consider marrying me?”
It took Tom maybe thirty seconds of stunned immobility to decide that he couldn’t possibly have heard her correctly. “Would you repeat that?”
Leslie’s expression held a jumble of emotions. Embarrassment. Nerves. Apology. A plea for understanding. Tom saw all of that and more in the minute or so it took her to work up the courage to say it again.
“I asked if you would marry me.”
Which was exactly what he’d thought she’d said the first time. He just hadn’t believed it.
He looked from her colorless face to the child now dozing peacefully in her arms. It seemed obvious to him that there was some connection between the baby and the unexpected marriage proposal, but he couldn’t quite figure out what it was.
He’d bet that Leslie the attorney would have effectively argued that there was no reason at all that a woman needed a man to help her raise a child. She made plenty of money—certainly more than Tom ever had—and could pay for any assistance she required. So what was making her so desperate that she’d abandoned her considerable pride and taken the potentially humiliating risk of asking her ex-lover, a man she hadn’t even seen in more than a year, to marry her?
Seeming to hear the questions in his silence, Leslie drew a deep breath.
“I’m sorry. I’m not usually so blunt and clumsy.”
“No.” She did, after all, make her living with cleverly phrased questions and carefully chosen words.
“It’s just that...I didn’t know where else to go. And you said that if there was anything I ever needed from you, anything at all—”
“All you had to do was ask,” he finished with a rueful nod. Even as she’d walked out on him, he’d made one last attempt to keep the door open behind her. He’d fallen back on the only thing he’d had to offer—his help, if she ever needed rescuing for any reason.
Apparently, Leslie had no idea that Tom’s rescue days were long behind him now. If she was looking for a hero, she’d come to the wrong place.
“What kind of trouble have you gotten yourself into, Les?” he asked warily.
“I’ve lost my job and my home. I’m almost broke. I’m solely responsible for a four-month-old infant. And now I’m being taken to court,” she recited flatly, her blue eyes glittering with chagrin and with tears she was too proud to shed. “Would you say any of that qualifies as trouble?”
“Whoa.” Trying to comprehend the magnitude of her plight, he put up a hand to rub his forehead, which was beginning to ache. “Maybe you’d better start from the beginning.”
“The beginning?” Leslie shook her head wearily. “I’m not even sure when that would be.”
“Just start talking. If I get confused, I’ll ask questions.”
She began further in the past than he’d expected. “My parents divorced when I was six,” she said.
Tom nodded to show that he remembered.
“My father remarried only weeks after the divorce was final. He’d been having an affair with the woman, who was also married when they met. She was the mother of two children—Steve, who was almost fourteen, and Crystal, who was eight. Crystal and I were two bewildered little girls whose homes had just been ripped apart. We were shuttled between battling parents and stepparents, and in our mutual pain and confusion, we became sisters.”
“And Steve?”
“Hated my father. Hated me,” Leslie answered simply. “His father was devastated by the divorce and blamed mine, of course. It was very ugly. It didn’t help that my father dumped Steve’s mother for yet another woman four years later. By that time, my mother had remarried—also a man with children of his own—and it was getting very complex just keeping the families sorted out. Since we all continued to live in the same little south Arkansas town, Crystal and I went to the same schools and remained friends.”
Again, she wasn’t telling him anything he hadn’t heard before. “Go on.”
“Neither of my parents had any more biological children, so I never had a true sibling, only a series of stepsiblings. Crystal was the only one who ever felt like family to me. She and I both grew up with too many scandals, too little security, too many people who thought they had a right to tell us what to do, too few who put our needs ahead of their own.”
Leslie stroked Kenny’s downy head, her eyes focused somewhere in the past. “Crystal’s emotional damage came out in her rebellious behavior during her teen years. Boys. Booze. Drugs. I thought she was bold and gutsy and incredibly cool. I probably would have followed right in her footsteps, had my mother been more lenient. As it was, she kept a close eye on me, limiting my contact with Crystal, giving me few opportunities to get into trouble. Of course, she couldn’t watch me every minute, and the few times I was around Crystal, I always ended up getting into mischief with her. People began to whisper that I was just like her. Steve was very angry with her for causing him so much embarrassment, and he resented the bond she and I had, no matter what happened within our dysfunctional families.”
Tom only nodded again, silently encouraging her to continue.
“As soon as she was old enough, Crystal left small-town life and gossip behind and moved away. She sent me postcards and little gifts from the most exciting places. New York. L.A. London. Rome. She was beautiful—tall, brunette, well built—and she made her living modeling. Sometimes with her clothes on, more often with them off. As I grew older and a bit wiser, I stopped wanting to emulate her, but I never stopped loving her. We’d been through too much together.”
Despite the less-than-flattering picture he was getting of Crystal, Tom could still identify with the friendship between her and Leslie. There’d been a time when he and Zach McCain had been closer than brothers, their kinship formed through experience and affinity rather than blood. Despite their natural differences, they had uniquely understood each other.
Losing that bond with Zach had hurt Tom almost as much as Leslie’s earlier desertion. He’d felt very much alone during the past months. If it hadn’t been for his headstrong and sweetly relentless mother, he might well have given in to the depression that had threatened during the months of pain and therapy following the accident.
“Anyway,” Leslie went on flatly, breaking into Tom’s musing, “as you know, I entered the university here in Fayetteville when I was eighteen, right out of high school. Earned my degree, then got accepted into law school. I chose the law because it interested me, because I was good at it and because I saw a chance to make enough money to be truly independent. I thought I could find the security, the respect and the control of my own life that I’d lacked as a child.”
All of which confirmed Tom’s suspicions that her aversion to serious commitment was directly connected to her unstable upbringing. She’d been working in a law firm in nearby Springdale when he’d met her, and though he’d fallen hard and fast, he hadn’t pushed for more than she’d wanted to give, had allowed her all the time and freedom he’d thought she needed. Even when she’d gotten the job offer from a prestigious firm in Chicago—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for her—he hadn’t said much. He had told her he would miss her, but he hadn’t begged her to stay, as he’d been tempted to do.
He clearly remembered the day she’d told him about the offer. She’d been glowing with satisfaction and excitement, but there had been a hesitation in her manner, as if she wasn’t sure exactly how he would react. He remembered his sense that she’d been waiting for something from him, and he’d wondered if she’d expected a scene, but he’d merely congratulated her and told her to make the decision that seemed right to her. He’d been a firefighter then, overworked and underpaid and loving every minute of it, and he’d had little to offer in comparison with the very advantageous offer from the law firm.
She’d taken the job.
Things had become strained between them during those last few weeks as she’d prepared to move. Tempers and patience had gotten short; words had been exchanged. She’d accused him of being reckless and irresponsible, risking his life for fun on a regular basis with his thrill-seeking buddies from the fire department, inconsiderate of those who cared for him and worried about him. She claimed to be thinking only of his mother, who would, she insisted, be devastated if anything happened to her sole child. In return, Tom had accused Leslie of being a control freak, so obsessed with her career and her security that she took no risks at all.
“I still don’t understand—” he began, only to be interrupted by a loud, hard knocking on his door.
Tom looked curiously at his watch. It was almost 9 p.m., and he wasn’t expecting company this evening.
He shoved a hand through his hair. “Let me see who that is and then we’ll finish this.”
Leslie nodded and cradled the sleeping baby in her arms. Acutely aware of his limp, which was always worse at night when he was tired, Tom crossed the room to open the door. He knew he’d have to explain his physical limitations to Leslie eventually, but he wasn’t looking forward to it.
The man on Tom’s doorstep was a stranger. Tall. Dark haired. Dark eyed. Somewhere in his late thirties. He looked angry.
“May I help you?” Tom inquired.
“I’m looking for Leslie Harden. I understand she’s here.”
There was an audible gasp from behind Tom’s left shoulder. He turned to find Leslie standing there, the baby in her arms, her eyes wide. Instinctively, Tom moved between her and the stranger. “Who are you?” he demanded. “What do you want with Leslie?”
“How did you find me here?” Leslie demanded before the guy could answer. “How on earth did you know where to look?”
“I had you followed,” the man replied, and there was a touch of smugness in his voice, as if he were quite pleased with his own cleverness. “I figured you would try something like this. There’s been someone parked out on the street watching this place since you let yourself in. I’ve been an hour and a half behind you, ever since you sneaked out of your apartment in Chicago.”
“I did not sneak out of my apartment. I moved out. I don’t have to report my whereabouts to you, Steve.”
Steve Pendleton, Tom thought. Crystal’s brother. Leslie’s one-time stepbrother, who’d never liked her.
“You do as long as you’ve got my nephew,” Pendleton growled, moving as though to take the baby away from Leslie, who shrank back, cradling the infant to her chest.
Tom planted himself more firmly between Leslie and Pendleton. “This is my house,” he said flatly. “You haven’t been invited inside.”
Dark eyes glittering, Pendleton glared at Tom. “Stay out of this,” he ordered curtly. “It doesn’t concern you.”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, it does,” Tom corrected him coolly, reaching out to wrap an arm around Leslie’s waist.
His frown deepening, Pendleton looked from that protective, possessive arm to Tom’s carefully expressionless face. “Who the hell are you?”
Tom felt Leslie stiffen, but he kept his attention on Pendleton’s face as he answered with a touch of the old recklessness, “The name’s Tom Lowery. I’m Leslie’s fiancé. And just who the hell are you?”
