That's My Baby! (7 page)

“No. That would bring her parents into it. According to her, they’d swoop in and bring the baby back to New York to live on their estate. They could probably swing it, too, considering the legal firepower they have. Jess doesn’t want that.”

“I wouldn’t want that, either,” Sebastian said. “Unless it’s our only choice to keep Elizabeth safe.”

“I’d rather catch the bastard and not have to worry about him,” Nat said.

Sebastian heaved a sigh. “Finally we have an area of agreement.” Then he paused to think. “It’s mighty strange that he’s been following her all this time and hasn’t snatched her yet.”

“I’ve thought about that, too. Either he’s crazy or inept.”

“Let’s hope he’s inept. I don’t suppose you have a weapon on you.”

“You know I hate guns,” Nat said.

“Yeah, I know. Listen, get here as best you can and as soon as you can. Be careful. Once you arrive, we’ll find a way through this.”

Nat didn’t respond for a moment. Then he cleared his throat. “You’re a better friend to me than I deserve.”

Still smarting from Nat’s betrayal, Sebastian was tempted to agree, but then he remembered the stories Nat had told of his childhood. Thinking of the cruelty Nat had endured made compassion easier to find. “You’ve always been too hard on yourself, buddy,” he said. “Come on home and we’ll straighten everything out.”

“Home,” Nat said, his voice husky. “That’s how I think of it, too. Listen, Jess wants to ask you about the baby. Here she is.”

Sebastian braced himself.

“Sebastian?” Jessica sounded very unsure of herself. “How…how is she?”

“Good.” Sebastian discovered that the lump in his throat made talking difficult. “Big. Growing. She has four teeth.”

“Four. Wow.”

Sebastian could hear her swallow. Her struggle to stay composed touched him. “This must have been a nightmare for you,” he said softly.

“Yeah,” she murmured. “I hope you can forgive me for all I’ve put you through, but I couldn’t think what else to do. And I didn’t realize Nat would be gone so long.”

“No kidding. None of us did.”

“Is she…what color are her eyes now?”

“Blue.” And now Sebastian could see it. They were Nat’s eyes. “She has a sock monkey named Bruce,” he added, not sure why he’d said it. “She dotes on that silly monkey.”

“She does? That’s…so cute. I wish—” Jessica broke off with a little sob. “Here’s—here’s Nat,” she choked out.

Nat’s voice was rough with emotion. “We’ll be there as soon as we possibly can. Goodbye, buddy.”

“Take care, Nat.” His heart heavy, Sebastian slowly hung up the phone and turned to the little cluster of people waiting in the kitchen doorway. They all looked anxious except for Elizabeth. She’d stopped fussing and was playing happily with the raccoon puppet Travis had brought her.

Sebastian’s chest grew tight as he looked at the baby. He’d known life couldn’t go on indefinitely like this. He’d told himself hundreds of times that someday Jessica would turn up. But the longer she’d stayed away, the more he’d built a case in his mind for challenging her right to Elizabeth. Now he could see that she’d stayed away for a good reason, an honorable reason. She’d tortured herself in order to protect her baby, and he wasn’t about to challenge her claim now. And that meant his days with Elizabeth were numbered.

“I think we’d better get Boone and Shelby over here,” he said.

J
ESSICA HUDDLED
on the bed and tried not to cry. No matter how hard she worked at it, she couldn’t picture her little baby with four teeth. Four. And blue, blue eyes instead of the smoky gray-blue they’d been at two months.

Elizabeth was so different now, but all Jessica could imagine were tiny hands, impossibly tiny fingernails, a gummy smile. She didn’t look like that anymore. And she’d found a favorite toy, a monkey named Bruce. Jessica had missed it all.

Nat hung up the phone and put his arm around her. “It’ll be okay,” he said gently.

“Will it?” She looked at him through eyes blurred with tears. “She’s changed so much. If someone walked by me
on the street holding Elizabeth, I probably wouldn’t recognize her!”

“Sure you would.” He gave her a comforting squeeze. “I’ll bet she hasn’t changed all that much.”

The knot of misery tightened in her stomach. “Maybe that’s true,” she said, pushing each word out as if it were made of lead, “but even if I didn’t know her right away, that’s not really what I’m afraid of.”

“Then what?”

She gulped back tears. “Oh, Nat, after all this time…
she
won’t recognize
me!
”

J
ESSICA LONGED
to hop on a plane and be in Colorado by nightfall, but in order to do that she’d have to use her real identity at the ticket counter. She didn’t want to risk it.

“I think you’ll have to rent us a car,” she said as they ate a room-service breakfast, she wearing the hotel robe and Nat in jeans and a T-shirt. “I’ll be glad to pay for—”

“Don’t you dare start that.” He put down his coffee cup and glared at her.

“Start what?”

“Assuming all the responsibility.”

Even when he got gruff and bristly, she couldn’t stop the surge of lust she felt every time she looked at him. When he talked, the movement of his mouth reminded her of his kiss, and everything he touched reminded her of his caress. “But I’m the one who should have known about antibiotics and how they affected birth control pills,” she said. “If I’d been smarter, this wouldn’t have happened.”

“If you’d been smarter, you wouldn’t have been involved with me in the first place.” His tone was bitter. “I should have been proud to tell everyone that you…that you cared for me. Instead, I kept you hidden in the shadows.”

“You didn’t hold a gun to my head, Nat. I stuck around because I wanted to.” She’d noticed that they were both avoiding using the word
love
to describe their feelings for each other.

For her part, she hesitated because she didn’t want to saddle him with even more guilt. With Nat, it was probably
a way to maintain some distance, despite their obvious sexual need for each other. He might figure that if he claimed to love her, she would expect certain things.

“Nevertheless,” he persisted, “if our relationship had been out in the open, you might have gotten some advice from a girlfriend about those antibiotics.”

“But then there would have been no Elizabeth.”

“My point exactly.”

Jessica could no longer contemplate a world without her baby in it, and the fact that Nat could imagine such a thing shocked her. She put down her fork and leaned toward him. “We need to get a few things straight. I don’t regret one single minute I spent with you. I had a fabulous time. And I especially don’t regret that I became pregnant with your child. But I assume you’re not happy about the baby.”

“You assume right.”

Although she’d been expecting him to agree with her, his statement still hurt. She hurried on, not wanting him to know it. “That’s why I want to take all the responsibility, as long as I can do it. I don’t want Elizabeth’s needs handled by a man who begrudges her existence.”

“I didn’t say that, damn it!”

She stood and tightened the belt on her robe. “Yes, you did. Do you want the shower first, or should I take it? We need to get on the road.”

“Not until we settle this we don’t.” He pushed back his chair and nearly upset the breakfast tray as he got to his feet. “When you say I begrudge her existence, you make it sound like I’m upset because of the inconvenience. I don’t give a damn about the inconvenience! What I regret more than I can say is bringing a child into the world by accident, when I have zero confidence in my abilities to be a father to that child.”

So they were back to that. But things had changed since the last time they’d had this argument. She played her
trump card. “If that’s so, then what were you doing in some hellhole taking care of
orphans?
”

He flinched, and then his voice rose. “Maybe I was testing myself, okay? Maybe I wanted to see if I’d have the urge to get violent with those children.”

She thought there was a lot more to his work with the refugees than that, but she wasn’t going to question him on that point now. “And did you get violent?”

He looked away from her to gaze out the window. “No.”

“Then you must know you’ll be fine.”

He swung back to face her. “I don’t know that! You’d have to be a monster to lay a hand on those kids. They’d been through so much, patience was easy.” He ran a hand over his face. “Some of them, especially the boys, tried so hard to be tough, but you could see that inside they were terrified.”

Like you were as a child.
Gazing at his anxious expression, she could picture the frightened little boy he must have been. She wanted to wrap her arms around him and let him know he’d never have to be that frightened again, but she didn’t dare trespass on that minefield-strewn land. “It must have been terrible,” she murmured.

“It was.” He stared into the distance.

She guessed he’d seen his own experience in every child’s face. Nat might as well have been orphaned, with no mother and totally at the mercy of a violent father who didn’t know how to love. Living with a father like Hank Grady might not have been so different from living in a war zone. “You wouldn’t have to worry about being violent around Elizabeth,” she said gently. “I’ll be there.”

He snapped out of his daze and glanced at her. He looked so heartbreakingly vulnerable. “I don’t know how to do this, Jess. With the orphans, it was easy. Get them clothes, get them food, find them a bed. Comb through the dona
tions coming in and look for a stuffed animal they could hold.”

The picture of him doing that brought a lump to her throat. “And did you hug them when they got scared?”

“Well, sure, but—”

“And when they were sad, did you tell them funny stories to make them laugh?”

“Once I learned the language, but—”

“And if they did something wonderful, if they were kind or generous or brave or smart, did you tell them they were great?”

“Of course.”

“Nat, that’s all there is to it, whether you’re talking about a refugee child in a faraway country or Elizabeth. That’s all you have to do.”

“The hell it is! What if they do something stupid? How do you keep them from doing dumb things?”

She thought about her restrictive childhood in which she’d hardly been allowed to make a mistake. She’d broken free of that, and maybe she’d been stupid when she accidentally got pregnant. But as a result she had Elizabeth.

“Got you there, haven’t I?” he said.

She met his gaze. “I think, within reason, you have to let them be stupid.”

He snorted in derision. “Yeah, so they can get themselves killed, and maybe somebody else in the process.” He said the words so automatically he seemed to be reciting a memorized lesson.

“Is that how your father justified beating you to a bloody pulp? That he was keeping you from killing yourself?”

“Sometimes.” He glanced at her. “Sometimes I think it was for the pure enjoyment of it.”

Talk about monsters, she thought. “You have to know you’re nothing like him.”

He didn’t reply as he continued to hold her gaze.

“Nat, you’re not like him! I’m sure of it.”

“Better go take your shower.”

She recognized the wall he’d just put up between them. She’d seen him construct it often enough in the year they’d been seeing each other. Once that wall went up, she had no hope of breaking through to him. But he hadn’t seen Elizabeth yet. Jessica clung to the hope that the baby,
his
baby, might be the one thing that could breach that wall.

“Okay,” she said.

“I’ll call and arrange for a rental car, and I don’t want to hear about you paying for it.”

She hesitated. Letting him pay for things seemed almost as if she’d be giving him the easy way out. She didn’t want his money. She wanted his participation in raising Elizabeth, or she wanted nothing.

“Please, Jess.” His mask slipped a little. “It’s what I can do for now. Can you accept that?”

She took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay. For now.”

“Good. I’ll call and get us a car.”

As he walked over to the phone, she went into the bathroom and started the shower.

Nat was liable to break her heart all over again, she thought as she slipped out of the robe, tied her hair into a knot on top of her head and stepped under the hot spray. She wanted to believe that he would see Elizabeth and fall in love with the baby, so deeply in love that he’d be willing to rethink his position about marriage and children.

But that might not happen. He’d walked away once, and if the baby scared him enough, he would walk away again.

With that possibility hanging over her head, she probably shouldn’t continue to make love to him. She was only setting herself up for a worse fall if she became accustomed to his sweet loving on a regular basis. If he couldn’t cherish Elizabeth as she did, then she’d have to tell him goodbye.

But she’d better let him know they wouldn’t be making
love. She needed to tell him before they started on their trip to Colorado. Considering her behavior up to this point, he would be justified in expecting to continue their physical relationship. After all, she hadn’t made sleeping with him contingent on anything. She’d simply fallen into his arms at the first opportunity.

She didn’t want to set up contingencies for when they would make love again, as if he had to agree to marry her before he could enjoy her body. That was too much like blackmail. But she had to create some distance between them. Surely he’d understand that she was only protecting both of them from worse heartache.

She turned off the shower, fumbled for a towel on the rack nearby and dried herself while standing in the warmth of the leftover steam. That’s when she heard the steady snip of a pair of scissors.

Wrapping the towel securely around herself, she stepped out of the shower to find Nat standing there wearing nothing but his low-slung jeans. He’d propped a wastebasket up on the counter to catch the hair from his beard as he clipped it very short.

Apparently he’d just finished that part, because he set the wastebasket on the floor, lathered up the remaining stubble and picked up his razor. The spicy scent of his shaving cream brought back vivid memories of all the times she’d watched him do this little chore. Often he’d capped off a shaving session by making love to her and rubbing his baby-soft chin all over her body.

Yet she missed that beard already. Then she remembered the vow of abstinence she’d just taken in the shower. Whether he had a beard or not meant nothing to her now. “I see you’re shaving it off,” she said.

“Yep. I want to go out of here looking different from the way I came in, in case your friend saw us together.”

“That’s a good idea.” And it was, but she still struggled
with disappointment as he stroked the razor over his chin. On the other hand, she liked seeing his strong jaw emerge from under the lather. And his skin would be very smooth after this first shave. He’d be heaven to kiss, all spicy scented and silky to the touch.

As he paused to meet her gaze in the mirror, his eyes seemed bluer than ever before. “If you stand there much longer with that look on your face, you won’t be wearing that towel anymore,” he said.

A familiar tingle of desire settled between her thighs. Keeping her vow wouldn’t be easy. “We need to talk about that.”

He continued to watch her as he shaved. “I wasn’t thinking of having a conversation.”

A deep, trembling need seized her. “All things considered, maybe it would be better if we didn’t make love anymore.”

He paused and narrowed his eyes. “Ever?”

“Well, at least not until…we know where we stand with…with each other, and the baby, and everything.” That sounded like a contingency, after all, but she really didn’t mean it that way.

“Mmm.” He continued shaving, but his hand didn’t seem perfectly steady. “Are you trying to bribe me?”

“Absolutely not!”

“Might work.” He shifted his weight and stopped leaning against the sink. “I want you pretty damn bad.”

“I don’t operate that way.” Heat sizzled through her veins as she realized he’d moved back from the sink because the edge of the counter was pressing into his erection. She swallowed. “I’m trying to think of both of us. Maybe we should protect ourselves.”

“It might have been better if you hadn’t made that speech while you’re standing there wrapped only in a
towel. Funny how when someone says you can’t have something, that’s the only thing in the world you want.”

So did she. Right this minute. “I think it’s for the best, don’t you?”

“Jess, guys
never
think going without sex is for the best. But if that’s the way you want it, that’s the way it’ll be.”

Her glance took in the fit of his jeans from behind. She’d forgotten what a fabulous view that was. She licked dry lips. “That’s the way I want it,” she said.

“Then quit checking me out,” he said in a low voice, “and go get dressed.”

“Right.” Heart pounding, she left the bathroom.

S
TEVEN DAMN NEAR MISSED
Jessica leave the hotel. He’d known she’d have on another one of her crazy wigs. It was blond this time. He got a real high out of knowing she was going through all this trouble hoping to fool him, especially when he knew she’d lose in the end. The fact that he was playing with her gave him a buzz that was almost sexual.

Once he had her and got the money from Russell P., the challenge of the thing would be over. Maybe he’d be too rich to care about challenges at that point, but he wasn’t altogether sure about that.

Her boyfriend might present some real obstacles, though, and the prospect of a new player in the game got his blood pumping. The boyfriend was obviously sharper than Steven had given him credit for.

Steven had been keeping an eye out for a scruffy guy with a beard. He’d noticed the tall, clean-shaven man who’d come out to claim a rental car, but he hadn’t made the connection because everything was smooth about this character. His suit and hat were technically western in style, but the look was far more polished than Steven had ever seen on a cowboy. Even the longish hair looked avant-
garde. He hadn’t realized it was Jessica’s boyfriend until she hurried out and hopped in the car with him.

In the past six months Steven had become an excellent carjacker. He had an instinct that allowed him to spot a car with the passenger door unlocked, and he found one now. No one on the busy street noticed when he got into the green sedan and quietly put a toy gun against the driver’s ribs.

Once he’d explained to the gasping, quaking man that all he wanted was for him to follow the white rental car, the guy complied with Steven’s request, as everyone so far had had the good sense to do. Once they were on the open road, he launched into his well-rehearsed covert-operations speech and showed the driver that the gun wasn’t real. His altered press card looked official enough for most people. In all his carjackings, he’d never had to pull the .32 out of his boot.