Somebody's Baby (5 page)

There he’d said it. He’d given her plenty of ammunition to take a potshot at him and do some emotional damage. He did not deserve this child. But, as he hoped both his words and tone made quite clear, he would do whatever it took to be a part of young Nathan’s life.
Because it suited him.

“Oh.” Clearly she did not know what to make of that. But she did not seem even remotely willing to use his confession against him. “Are you saying that if you had known sooner, you’d have returned sooner?”

“No.” Again he spit the hard truth out. He had worked diligently this past year and a half to put himself in a position to do the most damage to…or good for, depending on one’s vantage point, the Carolina Crumble Pattie Factory. If he had learned about his son sooner, he would have come for the child, but not until the time was right. “No, I can’t say I’d have come back sooner. But I can say I am here now and that’s what we have to deal with.”

They stood in silence for a long, anxious moment.

Adam could practically see the thought process playing out over Josie’s features. He wanted to say something to tip her confidence in his favor, but in the end he could only say straight-out what was on his mind. “You asked me earlier tonight not to take your son away, Josie, and I agreed. I won’t. I can’t do that to him—or to you.”

He focused on her, standing in the shaft of light from the open door.

She seemed so small and alone in the otherwise dark room, that he felt drawn to her and the child cradled against her body.

He moved in, so near that he could see the fearful questioning in her eyes. He knew how it felt to wonder if anyone was on your side. To pray not to lose the person you loved most in the world and wonder how you would survive if the worst came to pass. He had prayed that prayer the night his mom died. But he had not come to destroy
this
little family. He had it within his power to prevent his son from losing the only mother he had ever known. He would not fail little Nathan in that regard.

Because, even though he had only known about him for a short while and had yet to even properly see him, Adam already loved the little guy. He supposed that among all his many faults and flaws, this redeemed him just a little. That in this feeling he knew a small taste of the greatest love of all, the love of God.

He placed one hand upon his baby’s head and one protectively on Josie’s tense shoulder. “Since you know I’m not going to take the boy, Josie. Why don’t you just let me…hold him?”

She wet her lips. Hesitated.

“Please.”

In one fluid movement Josie swept her hand beneath the child legs and then carefully laid him in his father’s arms.

His son.
Adam caught his breath. For all his good intentions and promises, holding his child for the very first time made him wonder if he’d spoken too soon. He did not want to tear this baby from the only mother it had ever known, but this was his son. His flesh and blood. And Adam would not settle for weekends and every other Christmas, just experiencing bits and pieces of his childhood.

He felt Josie tense at his side, but he didn’t focus on her discomfort. Adam had always made his own rules in life—or figured a way around the ones he didn’t like. That’s exactly what he was going to do now.

He gazed into the baby’s bright blue eyes and found just enough voice to whisper, “Hello, son. Daddy’s here now. Daddy’s here—and nothing is going to come between us ever again.”

“N
othing’s going to come between us again.”

Adam’s words to Nathan still rang in Josie’s ears twelve hours later as she rushed about the diner trying to get ready for the morning coffee crowd.

Yes,
crowd.

Large cities and fancy coffee shops and cafés with big noisy machines were not the only places that people liked to gather to chat on their way to work in the mornings. There had always been the usual fellows, the retirees who liked to do a little of what locals lovingly called, “pickin’ and grinnin’, laughin’ and scratchin’.’’ They met every day but Sunday, of course, to solve the problems of the world, tell jokes and stories they had all heard a hundred times, and reward their long-suffering wives with a little bit of “me” time.

Then there were the commuters. Ever since the layoffs had started at the Crumble, more and more folks began their drives to workplaces in other nearby towns with what Josie had listed on tent cards on the tabletops as “Cup O’Joe To Go.” It wasn’t the kind of thing you could get at those fancy places. No
grande
or
venti
size disposable cups with insulated wrappers to keep the drinker from burning his or her hands or fancy tops that looked like Nathan’s sippy cup. No, this was a bank of coffeepots, sweetener options and creamers where people walked in, filled up the coffee conveyance brought from home, dropped a dollar or two in an old pickle jar and headed off to face the day.

Often stopping to share a word of encouragement with one another or to check the chalkboard for messages or new prayer requests. Always with a sense of community that one couldn’t find anywhere else.

This was, to Josie, the essence of why she lived in Mt. Knott. It was also one of the reasons she had brought Nathan to work with her this morning. She felt safe here and felt her son would be safe here, as well.

Not that she thought Adam would do any harm to Nathan or even break his word about taking the child but…

But in her whole life she could not recall ever having felt so vulnerable.

A product, she suspected, of more than just Adam’s introduction into Nathan’s life. This emotion was also a byproduct of her realization that the man would be a presence in
her
life for a long time to come, as well.

She went up on tiptoe to peer over the cash register at the baby playing quietly in the bright blue portable playpen in the corner of the café.

She had promised herself she wouldn’t make a habit of bringing Nathan to work. Maybe when he was older, she had thought, she would have him come by after school. He could do his homework in one of the booths and she would serve him a snack and whatever advice she could spare until he got into calculus or something else she knew nothing about. But until then she had determined she would have him at work as little as possible.

Josie didn’t need to bring him here, really. She had been blessed with a network of moms and grandmothers around town who had taken turns watching her son since Ophelia left him in her care. The original plan was to depend on this patchwork safety net just until the newborn was old enough for day care. Well, that had been the plan, but then when the jobs began to dry up, so had the town’s only day-care center.

She wondered if Adam Burdett would see that as unacceptable and use it as a wedge to take Nathan from her. He had promised he wouldn’t do that, but then, what did she really know about him?

“Adam Burdett?” The first person she had asked, not giving the particulars behind her sudden interest in the man, had pondered it a moment. “Oh, Stray Dawg! Yeah. Yeah, I know which one he was, uh, is. The one who cashed out. Cut and run.”

“Heard he went through that cash in nothing flat.” The woman at the cash register took her change from Josie and, as she dropped the quarters and nickels into her coin purse, she elaborated, “Gambling.”
Clink.
“Drinking.”
Clink.
“Women.”
Clink. Clink.

“Gambling?” Josie shoved the cash drawer shut. “Drinking?”

“And women!” Warren and Jed confirmed in unison as they broke off from the morning gathering of curmudgeons to take their usual seats at the counter.

Of course Adam had women. A wealthy, handsome man like that probably had all kinds of girlfriends. She blushed at her own lack of sophistication and what many people would
tsk-tsk
as simple, out-of-date values. To hide her chagrin, she ducked back into the kitchen to check on the morning’s first offering of pies still cooling on the racks beside the oven.
Girlfriends?
She doubted very much that a man like that thought of his conquests as girlfriends.

The aroma of apple and cinnamon and other spices filled the air. The tart sweetness of cherries bubbling in deep-red juices stung her nose. All buffered by the homey smell of flaky crust and Josie’s specialty topping.

She went to the back door and cracked it open a tiny bit, to allow some fresh air into the hot, almost steamy kitchen. She paused only a moment, lifting her ponytail and turning her head to cool the back of her neck before hurrying back to her tasks, and to talk of Adam. She peered through the door and shut out the noise and views of the room around her.

“Ended up with a factory job, they say.” A man took a wad of bills from his wallet, showed them to some fellow coffee-bar patrons as if to say “this one’s on me” then stuffed them into the pickle jar. “Ironic, huh?”

“Reap what you sow.” One of his cohorts raised his mug in grateful salute for the freebie. “Bible says.”

Josie glanced around for one of the silicon gloves she used to handle hot pie plates and the like. When she didn’t find it immediately, she grabbed the nearest dish towel and used it to cover her hand as she picked up one of the cherry pies. She didn’t want to miss a word of the conversation in the dining room.

“I spotted that Adam at a hotel in Raleigh a year ago. Back when my husband went to that International Snack Cake Expo deal, remember?” spoke up Elvie Maloney, who had just started coming in after she went back to work when her husband lost his middle-management job at the Crumble. “Kept to the outskirts of the show. Didn’t interact with the old gang, not at all.”

“Well, can you blame him?” Micah Applebee scoffed. Micah had worked out at the Crumble for even longer than Elvie’s husband. “After the mean-spirited way the Burdetts treated him?”

“The way they treated him was to make him a millionaire,” Elvie shot back.

“Wish they’d up and treat me like that. I wouldn’t even care if it was mean-spirited,” Warren joked.

“You say that now but you’d come in here blubbering like a baby,” Jed teased.

“Yeah, and using hundred-dollar bills to dry my tears,” Warren said right back. They both laughed.

“Well, that Stray Dawg Burdett boy might have done better using money for hankies. It might have got it soggy but at least he’d have some of it left.” Elvie whirled her spoon through her coffee.

“How do you know he doesn’t?” Jed asked.

Elvie tapped the spoon on the edge of her cup, making everybody look her way. “Because he was at that conference working for somebody else. If I had millions, the last thing I’d want to do is work in a snack-cake factory all week and go to conferences on snack cakes on the weekend. Real suspicious if you ask me.”

“Suspicious don’t begin to tell it when you’re talking about that one.” A man wedging himself between two other people at the coffee bar snatched up a decaf pot and poured two cups worth into a thermal travel mug as he called out. “He’s a wild one.”

“The
smart
one, you mean,” someone else at a nearby table chimed in. “Got out while the getting was good.”

“Really?” Josie tried to fit the pieces of information together. That wasn’t as easy as it seemed. While she sincerely wanted to believe the best of the man, she didn’t dare allow herself to dismiss words like
suspicious, cut and run, gambling
…and
women.
As in multiples.
Many.

The man who wanted to claim his place as her son’s father had been up to something since he’d left town, and Josie needed to know what. And why he had come back, if it wasn’t for Nathan’s sake alone. She stole a peek at her boy and exhaled in relief to see him happily laughing over a game of peekaboo with Jed. She’d done the right thing by bringing Nathan with her today. She simply could not risk letting that wild one, that stray, that Adam Burdett get his hands on her son.

Not until she knew more about the man.

She set the pie down, wiped a blob of cherry filling on her starched white apron and asked, as she headed back toward the kitchen, “Is that when things soured at the factory? When Adam left?”

“Die was cast long before that.” Jed paused with his red bandanna kerchief held up between him and Nathan.

“Oh?” Josie tried to sound as if she didn’t care, but deep down it gave her some solace to know Adam hadn’t been involved in the downward spiral of her beloved Mt. Knott. “I worked there for years, part-time most of it, but still, I never once saw any signs of the place heading for disaster.”

“What’s the Bible say? Pride goes before the fall? I reckon that place ran on pride, mostly, the last few years. When the mama died, that really tore things, though.” Jed made a show of inhaling the scent of pie, sighed then jerked the kerchief back down and made a face at the baby, much to Nathan’s delight. “Can’t say how many times my wife came home after a quarterly meeting worried for her job. Hear her tell it, the son that took off was the only one bold enough to stand up to his daddy and say things had to change or they’d go under.”

Josie’s heart swelled a little at that. It warmed her to know her son’s father had once shown true concern about the business that supported so much of her hometown.

She took up another pie, using only the dish towel as a hot pad and whirled around to peer into the front room from the kitchen. “So then, Adam Burdett is basically a good guy?”

“Yes he is,” came the whispered response from behind her. “And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk about me behind my back.”

Splat.

“Awww.” Came the collective groan from the patrons.

The damp smell of pie, apple this time, rose around her. The heat from a stray piece of fruit burned Josie’s toe through her discount-store tennis shoe. Bits of crust lay smashed to smithereens all over the brown-red tile.

“Can you salvage any of it, honey?” either Jed or Warren asked.

She didn’t try to distinguish between them as the other one quickly followed up with, “I had my mouth all set for a slice of that.”

Josie walked farther back into the kitchen, shut out all the comments from her sympathetic customers and fixed her attention on the man who had slipped in through the open back door.

“I wasn’t talking about you behind your back.”

“No? Well, you sure were
listening
about me behind my back.” He managed to sum up the situation without coming off arrogant or angry.

She smiled. “Then come on out in the open. I’m sure people here will be more than happy to talk about you right to your face.”

He did not look amused.

Josie felt bad. She hadn’t meant to hurt his feelings. She’d only tried to lighten the mood, to distract the man a bit after he’d caught her trying to find out more about him. And…and she wanted to show him her diner.

There. That was it. For some reason she wanted her baby’s father to see what she had accomplished this last eight months since the first round of factory layoffs. She wanted him to know his son was being cared for by someone with drive, ambition, good sense and…and her very own pie carousel.

“I was just kidding, Ad—”

He put his index finger to his lips to cut her off. “Please. Don’t say my name.”

She glanced over her shoulder toward the dining room, which had gone uncharacteristically quiet. “Why not?”

“I don’t want anyone to know I’m here. Not yet. I’m staying at a hotel on the highway and being very careful about the streets I take. Please don’t undo all that now.”

“I have to ask again, why not?”

He glanced toward the dinning room as well, then lowered his head and his voice. “Look, I just came by to see the kid. Went by your house and your neighbor told me you had to take him to work with you today.”

Wanted to, not had to, she thought. To keep him safe from you. And she was wise to do it, apparently, since the man had already been by her home and it wasn’t even 9:00 a.m. yet.

As if he sensed her trouble, the small boy in the playpen in the corner of the café shouted and threw a toy in the direction of his mother.

And on the heels of that, Jed, who had been playing with the child, stood up and called out, “Everything all right in there, Sweetie Pie?”

“Sweetie Pie?” Adam stood just inside the door of the kitchen.

Josie rolled her eyes then began pushing at the mess on the floor with the toe of her already pie-plopped shoe. “That’s what everyone around here calls me.”

“Oh?” Adam squatted down and used the pie pan to scoop up the mess. Unlike the spoiled, rich, suspicious-acting man she had been warned about, he didn’t seem to mind getting his hands dirty. Josie could not say the same for his sense of humor. “I thought that your sister was more the everybody’s sweetie type.”

“Leave my sister out of this,” she snapped.

He dropped the pie—pan and all—in the trash, then wiped his hands off on a towel.

Josie rushed over and snatched the pan out again. “I already lost the cost of ingredients on that. I can’t afford the price of a perfectly good pan, as well.”

“Sorry,” he said, and seemed to actually mean it. “My mind was on other things…Sweetie Pie.”

Josie heaved an exaggerated sigh, then went to the cherry pie that had been cooling all this time, cut a healthy slice, slapped it on a plate, then pressed that into his hand. “They call me that because of this.”