One in a Million (13 page)

Q
UINN LOOKED UP
from his computer screen and laced his hands behind his head as he swiveled his desk chair to look out the window. He'd just gotten off the phone with Gil Sizemore. The topic of their discussion, as usual, was Gil's driver Eli Ward. A few days before the night race at Bristol Quinn had laid down the law to the charismatic, but erratic, NASCAR Sprint Cup driver threatening to withdraw his sponsorship if Eli didn't rein in his high-flying lifestyle and begin driving up to his potential.

The shock of losing a twelve million dollar sponsorship seemed to have done the trick and Eli finished sixth at the famed Tennessee short track. Not that Quinn wanted to withdraw his sponsorship of the No. 502 car, but he would if he had to. He wasn't paying that kind of money to sponsor the playboy of the Western world. He wanted to see the Rev Energy Drinks car in Victory Lane as badly as Gil Sizemore and his team did. Quinn crossed his legs on the scarred windowsill and looked past his shoes to the neglected yard. Eli was a natural, a born race-car driver, a born showman. His rivalry with Double S Racing's top dog, Rafael O'Bryan, had been worth its weight in gold as far as publicity and product placement went. But having an out of control driver associated with Rev Energy Drinks wasn't the image Quinn wanted to project. He sighed. Time would tell.

He continued to stare out into the backyard. It was even more neglected than the front of the house—if that was
possible. The lingering summer twilight had smudged the stark outline of the old barn and softened the ragged edges of the overgrown vegetable garden he remembered his grandmother tending when he was a little boy. The soft light hid a lot of the blemishes, making it all appear a little more as he remembered it from his childhood, before his mother married August Carlyle and took him away from the one place he'd ever felt like calling home.

He picked up his glass of whiskey and took a swallow letting the smooth liquor slide down the back of his throat. He hadn't been able to spend much time out here in the decade since his grandparents had died within three months of each other, his grandfather from a heart attack, his grandmother from a broken heart, he suspected. But since he'd returned to the States it had become his base of operations. He settled lower in his chair, rubbing the back of his neck to relieve the ache of sitting too long hunched over a computer screen. He wondered if his grandparents had had any inkling how much their hardscrabble farm would be worth one day. Probably a pretty good one or they wouldn't have held on to it through good times and bad, watching the march of progress along the shore of Lake Norman grow closer with each passing year.

He'd mortgaged the farm to the hilt to enter into partnership with an old college friend whose equally hardworking ancestors had left him a small, marginally profitable soft drink bottling company. Together they developed Rev Energy Drinks. His partner had been the brains; he'd been the marketing talent. Rev had taken off just as they hoped it would—a genuine overnight success—if you counted five years of eighty-hour workweeks an overnight success. Rev Energy Drinks had found its niche market in the newest generation of NASCAR nation and since then they hadn't looked back.

And best of all he'd done it without taking one red cent from August Carlyle.

A sound caught Quinn's attention and overrode his memories with more immediate concerns. Daisy was up and moving around in his bedroom—he'd been sleeping on a futon in his office since she'd been staying at the cabin. He'd had the plumbing and electrical circuits upgraded, put in central air and a new furnace and bought a flat screen TV for the living room but beyond that the place was pretty much the same as it had been when his grandparents lived here, including slippery pine floors and what seemed like dozens and dozens of throw rugs—dangerous for a woman on crutches, especially one who had given birth to a baby only a few days ago.

He surged out of his chair and headed down the short, dark hallway toward the main room. Sure enough Daisy was up and headed down the hallway. She was still wearing the clothes she'd left the hospital in but she'd pulled her hair up into a kind of swirly knot on top of her head. The effect of the hairstyle made her look closer to her true age than she had that afternoon, but she still seemed very young to be a mother. There were dark circles of fatigue shadowing her huge, brown eyes and he was reminded yet again of all she'd gone through in the last seventy-two hours. He wondered if she should even be out of bed.

“What do you need? What can I get for you?”

She gestured toward the bathroom doorway, her face turning pink. “Oh,” he said, hastily. “I…I guess I can't—”

“Right,” she said. “I'll have to manage the bathroom on my own.”

“Um, sure.” He ran his hand through his hair. He had lived alone for so long it threw him off stride to have someone sharing his space, especially a woman.

And a baby.

As though the thought was her cue, Brianna began to
fuss and then cry. Quinn glanced at his watch. Exactly three hours since Daisy had fed her after he'd settled them and all their paraphernalia in his bedroom. That had been a disaster, too. He hadn't known what to do when she started crying—Daisy, not the baby.

He'd never considered the fact that she would feel she had to reimburse him for all those things; he'd only wanted Brendan's baby to have whatever she needed so he'd had his middle-aged, motherly personal assistant buy them for him and have them delivered to the cabin. He'd had to do some fast thinking and fast talking to persuade Daisy she didn't have to pay him a cent. If she really wanted to buy her own things for Brianna after she left his care, he'd told her, then he would donate all these things to a women's shelter. She had agreed to go along with that plan, but reluctantly. She was adamant she didn't want to be any more in his debt—in his family's debt—than she already was.

It had taken all Quinn's considerable willpower not to prolong the argument by insisting that he in no way considered himself a part of August Carlyle's family, no matter how much he had loved his charming, heedless and self-indulgent stepbrother. He had thrown out the donation to the women's shelter as a way to end the standoff and Daisy had stopped crying.

He wished he could say the same for her daughter. He could hear water running in the bathroom. He wondered how long Daisy would be in there. Should he tap on the door and tell her Brianna needed her?

Or should he go get the baby himself?

Brianna began crying harder and louder. The water was still running. The trembling, infant howls were impossible to ignore. He walked into his bedroom and stared down at the tiny being in the bassinette. Her face was red and her eyes were squeezed shut. He wondered what color they were. Blue, he supposed. Most babies had blue eyes when
they were born, didn't they? But he'd never seen her awake in the hospital so he couldn't be certain.

She must have sensed someone was in the room with her because for a moment she stopped crying, opened her eyes—he still couldn't tell what color they were in the dim light—and stared up at him for the space of a couple of heartbeats. She didn't look like Brendan. She didn't even look like Daisy that he could see. She just looked…like a baby. Then she smiled, or did something with her mouth that looked like a smile—and his heart flipped over in his chest.

She was beautiful, even red-faced and wrinkly.

She'd howled again and kicked off all her blankets. Once her legs were free they began to pump in spasmodic jerks. One of her little booties had come off and he marveled for a moment at her perfect baby-doll-size feet. Maybe she was cold? He reached out and touched her miniature toes with the tip of his finger. They were velvet soft and cool to the touch. He picked up the little pink bootie and slipped it back on, then tucked the blankets around her as best he could. She stopped crying and stared fixedly at him, or at least she seemed to be staring at him. He'd read somewhere that newborns couldn't see objects that weren't very close to them.

Evidently his face was close enough because she was definitely staring at him. Quinn straightened up slowly and prepared to tiptoe out of the room. Her tiny fists flailed in the air and she started crying again. He didn't know what to do to make her stop. Chilly toes obviously weren't her only problem. She wanted to be fed, or changed, or something else he couldn't decipher. He needed to get Daisy out of the bathroom to tend to her; he certainly couldn't do it. Could he?

Maybe he could. How hard could it be to pick up a baby
barely heavier than a sack of sugar, and hold her until her mother could take her?

Really hard, he decided and turned on his heel, determined to stand outside the bathroom and pound on the door until Daisy answered.

He didn't have to. Daisy was standing in the doorway, balanced on her crutches, watching him with her daughter. He wondered briefly how long she'd been there. Long enough to have seen him touch the baby?

He cleared his throat. “She's cold, I think,” he said.

“And hungry,” Daisy added, tilting her head to give him a Madonna-like half smile. “I'll fix her a bottle.”

“No, I'll do it.”

She looked as if she would refuse his help, then must have decided better of it. “Thank you,” she said, the smile fading away to a slightly anxious look. “I don't know my way around your kitchen yet. It will be quicker if you do it. Not too warm, you know, just so it feels comfortable on the inside of your wrist.”

He'd seen people do that on TV. He could handle that. He nodded.

“If you hand her to me I'll feed her here.” She pointed to the rocker his grandmother had kept in the kitchen, the room with the biggest windows, where she could sit and rock and watch over her half dozen birdfeeders made from gourds she grew in the garden. His bedroom wasn't as bright or cheerful as the kitchen. The single window was small and high up on the wall. The room looked gloomy and dark, and face it, downright shabby, something he hadn't really paid much attention to before this very moment.

“Would you be more comfortable in the living room?” he asked.

Daisy's expression brightened momentarily. “I…I don't want to disturb your evening,” she said, not quite meeting his eyes straight on.

“You're not disturbing me. I was just going to watch an old John Wayne movie on TV. Want to join me?”

“I love John Wayne movies.” Daisy's smile was spontaneous and bright as sunlight. She laughed and it sounded like the tinkling glass of the old-fashioned wind chimes that still hung beside the back door.

“Great. Make yourself comfortable in the living room and I'll get Brianna's bottle ready.”

“Will you carry her for me?”

That stopped him cold. “Carry her?” He hadn't had to deal with picking up the baby—until now.

“I can't manage with the crutches,” she said, giving him a quizzical look. “You do know how to pick up a baby, don't you?”

“Well, I uh—”

“You've never held a baby?” She sounded as if she couldn't quite believe her own ears.

“I was an only child,” he explained and knew it wasn't much of an excuse.

“Well,” she said with a mischievous sparkle in her brown eyes. “You're going to have to learn. Ready?”

“Ready,” he said, not sure he was at all.

“Put one hand under her head and one hand under her bottom and lift.”

“That's it?”

“That's it. Oh, and don't drop her. Babies are champion wigglers.”

“Gotcha.”

“Think you can manage?”

“I was a wide receiver in high school. I'm pretty good at holding on to a football. She's not a whole lot bigger than a football.” He hoped he sounded confident because he wasn't. He reached down and did as Daisy had instructed. The moment he slipped his hands beneath Brianna's head and little bottom she stopped crying. She felt light as a feather in
his hands. He propped her against his shoulder being careful to keep his hand at the back of her neck so her head didn't flop around, the way he'd seen other men do when they were holding an infant.

He turned his head to see Daisy staring at him with a strange, sad look on her face. “What's wrong?” he asked, and then answered his own question. “You're thinking it should be my stepbrother holding the baby.”

She blinked; her eyes bright with unshed tears. “Yes,” she said, “I was thinking of Brendan. But not for the reason you're thinking. Not because I still love him, but only because Brianna will never know him and that is so very sad.”

“We'll tell her about him. We'll show her pictures,” Quinn said, jiggling the baby very gently against his shoulder, not because he'd seen someone else do it, but because it seemed the right thing to do. “We'll watch all the videos of his birthdays and Little League games. My mom has hours and hours of them.” It was the wrong thing to say; he knew it the moment the words left his mouth.

“Sure. Someday.” Daisy's expression turned guarded and she refused to meet his gaze once more. “Maybe I'll just feed her in here, after all.”

“No,” Quinn said, “go on into the living room. We won't mention my mother or my stepfather again.”

“I'm sorry,” she said, turning awkwardly on the crutches. She looked back at him over her shoulder. “It's just—”

“My mother raised Brendan from the time he was four,” he explained, owing his mother that much loyalty at least. “She loved him like a son.”

“I can't help the way I feel right now,” Daisy said. She looked as if she might start crying again.

“You don't have to explain. I promised you in the hospital they wouldn't bother you here. I gave you my word. I'll stand by it.”

“Thank you.” She began to limp toward the living room. “But I won't put you in the middle again. I'll fight my own battles with your parents when the time comes.”