Читать книгу Excuse Me? Whose Baby?: Excuse Me? Whose Baby? / Follow That Baby! - Jacqueline Diamond, Isabel Sharpe - Страница 12

JIM ALMOST WISHED he’d brought his European sedan instead of his sports car. It was hard fitting Annie’s car seat into the back, and a real challenge wedging and strapping the stroller and Dex’s bike half in and half out of the trunk.

Nevertheless, once he got into the driver’s seat, he enjoyed squeezing his long legs against Dex’s soft warmth. There were advantages to being cramped.

He chose not to question his physical response to her too closely. That night of the faculty party, he’d blamed it on a few too many drinks. Today, he ascribed his reaction to that delirious spring fever known locally as Clair De Lunacy.

All this had nothing to do with Nancy Verano, his soon-to-be fiancée. She was a special case, apart from day-to-day reality.

“So,” he said as he whipped out of the parking garage into a break in traffic, “what was that business about you going away? When you told me that, I got the idea you were moving. Otherwise I’d have called.”

“I meant I was going away for Christmas vacation.” She squirmed as far to the right as possible. His knee still grazed her thigh, and he didn’t bother to move it.

“You’re sure you weren’t trying to get rid of me?” he persisted.

“Would you be angry if the answer’s yes?”

“Not angry,” he answered. “Puzzled.”

They flared through a yellow light and picked up speed, heading toward the town’s outskirts. The wind coming through the window made Dex’s mane dance around her head like a living thing. “Puzzled as to why I didn’t utterly succumb to your charms?”

“Actually, you did,” Jim reminded her.

“It was the eggnog,” she said. “President Martin made it himself. He loads it with booze.”

Jim had made the same excuse to himself, but hearing it from Dex bothered him. Not that his ego was bruised by the possibility that a woman might embrace him while drunk and reject him when sober.

Still, he’d experienced blissful sexual abandon with this woman, and all indications had been that she’d felt the same way. So why didn’t she want a rematch?

“It wasn’t necessary to make excuses,” he said. “I can take no for an answer.”

She frowned. “I don’t know why I misled you. It’s just that you’re not my type.”

She wasn’t his type, either. At least, he hadn’t thought so until he got to know her.

For someone so small, Dex had a luscious body, full-breasted and slim-waisted. Jim recalled one particular position, when he’d lain on the floor while she lowered herself onto him. They’d both cried out in pure agonized pleasure.

“We certainly fit together well enough,” he said.

“I’m not like the women you usually date,” she said.

They roared through the arching wrought-iron gates of Villa Bonderoff. “How would you know?”

“I’ve seen your picture in the paper at society goings-on,” said the unwitting mother of his child. “Your dates are always tall and skinny.”

“Really? I hadn’t noticed.” Jim tried to picture Nancy. His former high-school sweetheart was taller than Dex, definitely, and he didn’t think her breasts were as big, although they’d never gone far enough for him to find out for sure.

He couldn’t see her very clearly in his mind. It was odd, since they’d known each other for twenty years.

The driveway swooped uphill, winding between low trees. Although he’d built the house four years ago, Jim never lost his awe at veering around a corner and catching sight of the white Mediterranean-style swirl of rooms and balconies.

“Wow.” The syllable burst from Dex, followed by the dry comment, “Not exactly cozy.”

“Annie will have plenty of space and lots of toys.” He swung to the right, bypassing the front guest-parking bay. “The best schools and camps, and a horse if she wants one.”

“Is that what you think makes a kid happy? Possessions?” Dex demanded.

“I realize we have different lifestyles.” Jim chose not to harp on the shabby state of her apartment. “But wealth doesn’t preclude love, you know.”

She sat in silence as the car turned into a side driveway that led to the six garages. The butler had left the station wagon outside in one of the striped parking spaces, and Jim slotted the sports car next to it.

He wondered if Dex’s reticence meant he’d scored a point. He hoped so, because he wanted this child more than he’d ever wanted anything, and that was saying a lot.

Annie bubbled with glee as he got out and lifted her from the car seat. Those big brown peepers of hers darted from his face to Dex’s, and then across the sweep of pink bougainvillea tumbling over a retaining wall.

“I called ahead to have my butler fix lunch,” he told Dex as she joined him and Annie on the pavement. “He promised he’d send someone out for formula and baby food.”

“Someone?” Dex trooped alongside as Jim strolled toward the house, taking three steps for every two he made. “How many people work here?”

“Not many,” he said. “There’s Rocky, the butler. And the gardener and the maid.”

“Do they live here?”

“They have apartments over the garages.”

“They sound like kindred spirits,” she said.

Unaccountably, Jim felt a prick of jealousy.

They mounted a curving stone staircase from the driveway to the garden above. The many levels of the site had been one of its primary appeals, although Jim had experienced some regrets later when he saw the problems it created for Rocky. His butler had lost a leg while serving in the Marines.

Still physically fit at forty-one, Rocky hated having anyone give him special treatment, though. He’d always been tough, and he still was.

Come to think of it, Rocky probably figured kids ought to be treated like Marine recruits. For the first time, Jim felt a twinge of worry at the possibility that Annie might not fit into his household quite as easily as he’d assumed.

If Nancy didn’t agree to marry him, he supposed he would have to hire a nanny on a long-term basis, but he didn’t like the idea. Dex was right about a child needing to be with people who loved her.

At the top of the steps, his guest paused to drink in the profusion of flowers peering shyly from a rock garden. There were primroses and petunias, pansies and dianthus and something yellow and daisy like whose name he didn’t know.

“This looks so natural,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”

“My landscape architect designed the whole thing, right down to—” Jim frowned at a major weed sprouting near the edge of the bed. “Well, not that.”

He made a mental note to mention it to Kip LaRue, the gardener. It wasn’t the fellow’s fault he was sometimes inattentive. He’d been lucky to survive a helicopter crash that left him with head injuries three years ago.

Jim’s household was a testament to his early years in the Marines. He’d made rough-and-ready friends then, and now he employed some of them.

He was glad he’d called ahead to alert them to Annie’s arrival. Surely at least Grace, the maid, would warm to the little creature.

The smell of disinfectant hit Jim as he opened the side door that led into a sunroom. Dex wrinkled her nose, and Annie stuck out her tongue.

“What’s that smell?” Dex asked. “Never mind, I recognize it. Is somebody sick?”

“Not that I know of.” Jim regarded the glass-topped ice cream table set with expensive china. “It looks like we’re going to eat in here.”

If not for the smell, it would have been a lovely place for lunch. The high-ceilinged room had tall glass windows, a couple of designer trees and a profusion of hanging ferns and fuchsias. Filtered green light gave the air a magical quality, as if it hovered in another dimension.

Someone, however, had scrubbed the flagstone floor with disinfectant and applied liberal doses to the walls. Jim hoped this wasn’t Grace’s idea of how to prepare a house for a baby, but he suspected that might be the case.

“Can we open a window?” Dex blinked, and he saw that her eyes were red-rimmed from the fumes.

“Sure.” When Jim transferred the baby into her arms, Annie grabbed onto her mother like a baby monkey. He had to admit, the kid had strong ideas about whom she belonged to. “Do you have allergies?”

“Not usually. I may be allergic to your house, though,” Dex said.

As he cranked open the tall windows, Jim hoped she was joking. “My maid gets a little carried away sometimes with the cleanser. She used to be a Marine drill sergeant.”

“Are you serious?” Dex buried her nose in Annie’s cheek.

“She mustered out four years ago.”

Before he could explain further, the interior glass door crashed open. It hung on such well-oiled hinges that the slightest push made it crunch into the wall. As always, he jumped, and so did his guest.

A wheeled tray clattered through, covered with domed dishes and a small silver dish mounded with puréed fruit. It was pushed by a big man in camouflage fatigues.

“Attention!” shouted Rocky Reardon, drawing himself up to his full six-foot-five. “Mess is served!”

Dex’s entire body quivered as if the sound had set her vibrating. Annie clapped her hands over her ears. “Ow,” they both said.

Jim glanced anxiously at his butler. In the five years that Rocky had worked for him, the man had maintained strict discipline. Since he treated Jim as his superior officer, this posed no problems. But where would he put a baby in the chain of command?

“Rocky, this is Annie,” he said. “I hope you two will get along.”

Rocky’s gaze fixed on the little girl. It was a quelling look that had once set recruits’ knees to trembling—Jim’s included.

“Ba ba?” said the baby, unafraid, and held out one hand to him.

“She likes me.” Wonder trembled in Rocky’s voice. “Look how little she is! Sir, she’s the spittin’ image of you. Only a whole lot cuter.”

“You like babies?” Dex peered at him. Jim had to admire the way she refused to back off even when faced with this mountain of a man.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Rocky. “I sometimes take care of my nieces and nephews. Can I hold her?”

“Sure.” She waited as the butler walked stiffly across the room. People never suspected that Rocky had an artificial leg unless he chose to take it off and wave it at them, which he’d only done twice—once during a bar fight and another time when the maid demanded he cook hash the way they used to serve it in the Marines.

Rocky cradled the infant. From this great elevation, Annie studied her parents. “Whee!” she said.

“I could feed her in the other room,” the butler suggested. “I’ll hold her on my lap, since we don’t have a high chair yet. She’ll be perfectly safe, ma’am.”

“I suppose that would be all right.” Dex clasped her hands, as if worried but unwilling to insult the man.

“Grace went out for supplies, ma’am, but I processed this fruit here.” With his free hand, Rocky scooped up the silver bowl. “It’s all-natural canned peaches, no additives.”

“Thank you, Rocky,” Jim said.

“Yes, sir.” The man shifted as if trying to figure out how to salute with a baby in one hand and a bowl of puréed fruit in the other, then settled for a nod and left the room. Jim was relieved. He’d been trying for years to get his butler to stop saluting.

Dex peeked under one of the domes. “This meal looks great.”

“Help yourself.” Jim removed another of the covers.

Rocky hadn’t had time to prepare anything hot, but he’d done a fine job on the triangular tuna-salad sandwiches with the crusts trimmed. They were topped by sprigs of mint and accompanied by scoops of homemade potato salad.

They sat down with their plates and glasses of iced tea. A couple of times, Dex looked toward the door as if trying to see where Rocky had taken the baby, but by now they’d vanished into the depths of the house.

It occurred to Jim that a woman who’d just met a child, particularly a child she intended to give up for adoption, shouldn’t be so concerned about its wellbeing. He wondered if Helene Saldivar had shown this much devotion, especially in light of her selection of Miss Smithers as nanny.

“What are you thinking?” Dex asked after downing a couple of rapid bites.

“I was wondering what kind of mother Dr. Saldivar made,” he admitted.

“Cold and calculating,” she replied promptly.

“I didn’t realize you knew her,” he said.

“So you agree? About her personality, I mean?”

He recalled Dr. Saldivar as he’d last seen her, at a fund-raiser last fall for the fertility center. “She did seem aloof, but I assumed it was her professional demeanor.” Yet, knowing that she’d borne his daughter not long before the fund-raiser, he found it amazing that she’d been able to hide that fact. What a bizarre woman. “You’re right.”

“She must have been warped,” Dex said. “She lied without compunction.”

“On the other hand, you’ve been known to shade the truth yourself.” Jim downed a sandwich and helped himself to seconds.

“You mean about moving away?” Dex said. “I panicked. So did you.”

“Excuse me?”

“You mean it’s a coincidence that you ran off and proposed to another woman one month after we…made each other’s acquaintance?” she said. “You can’t expect me to believe that!”

Jim frowned. He hadn’t seen anything odd about proposing to Nancy a month after loving, and losing, Dex. It had seemed perfectly natural.

He’d planned to marry Nancy for a long time, but their careers had gotten in the way. Especially hers. She’d left Clair De Lune to teach at a small college in Alaska, then jumped at an offer of a university position and research grant in Washington.

Along the way, she’d refused to accept any help from Jim. A word in the right ear, and she could have been working much closer to home. She’d wanted to succeed on her own merits, though, and he respected her decision.

Somehow the years had slipped away without his realizing it. He hadn’t wanted to press her and hadn’t felt any particular urgency about getting married. Not until recently.

“I figured nature was telling me something,” he mused. “That I was ready to settle down.”

She stared at him. “You can’t mean that you had any settling-down thoughts about me!”

No, he didn’t mean that. Did he? Jim tried to recall exactly what he’d been thinking and feeling four months ago, but he couldn’t.

He wasn’t accustomed to self-examination. For heaven’s sake, he was on top of his life, his business and, above all, himself, so why flail around in search of renegade emotions? “Certainly not. The timing was purely coincidental.”

“I see.” Having cleaned her plate, Dex eyed the plates of carrot cake, cheesecake and chocolate mousse arrayed on the cart’s lower shelf. “Do you always have three desserts?”

“Rocky didn’t know what you liked,” he said. “So he gave you a choice.”

“I have to choose?”

“Have all three. There’s more in the kitchen.” Jim watched in amazement as she took him at his word, plopping three plates onto the table.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a woman eat one dessert, let alone three. None of the skinny executive ladies he sometimes dated did, and as for Nancy…well, he couldn’t remember.

They hadn’t spent much time together since she’d moved away five years ago. Mostly they saw each other on holidays, when she came to visit her parents, or when he went to Washington on business.

It was time to get back to the subject that had brought him and Dex together. “How did you meet Dr. Saldivar, anyway?”

Busy making short work of the carrot cake, she didn’t immediately answer. She approached eating, like everything else, with total absorption.

Jim flashed back to their night of lovemaking. She’d brought him alive in ways he hadn’t known were possible. Her mouth, her hands, her breasts had excited him almost past bearing.

“One of my jobs is campus courier,” Dex said, serenely unaware of the direction of his thoughts. “I met her while delivering mail to her department. I don’t remember how the subject came up, but she said she needed a donor to help some of her desperate patients have children. So I agreed.”

“Maybe she was sincere,” he said. “Initially, anyway.”

“Dr. Saldivar didn’t see patients,” Dex said.

“She didn’t?”

“I found that out today. That’s why I’m so angry. It was a con job, pure and simple.” She patted the corners of her mouth with her cloth napkin. “How about you? How exactly did she get her hands on your sperm?”

The way she phrased the question was so startling that Jim choked on a bite of sandwich and went into a coughing fit. Before he could recover, Dex hopped up, ran around the table and grasped him from behind.

As he struggled to break free, he felt a fist prod into his stomach. Three short thrusts against his solar plexus threatened to launch his entire set of internal organs into outer space.

“Should I call the paramedics?” she shouted.

Somehow, perhaps because his life depended on it, he managed to wheeze, “No.” After a couple of swallows of iced tea, he added, “Not unless you plan to attack me again. Then I might need a stretcher.”

Dex resumed her seat. “It’s called the Heimlich maneuver.”

“I’ve heard of it. I just didn’t realize it was a new form of assault.” He waved away her response. “I’m kidding. It’s a good skill to know, but you were too quick off the launching pad. I could have coughed that food up by myself.”

“Better safe than sorry,” said Dex.

He didn’t have a response. Not a coherent one, anyway. Instead, as soon as he caught up on his breathing, he returned to her earlier question. “You asked about Helene.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have.” Dex quirked an eyebrow. “What went on between the two of you really isn’t my business.”

“Me and Dr. Saldivar?” He felt like coughing again, but restrained himself. “Not even remotely. Besides, don’t you think I’d have questioned her motives if she suddenly whipped out a vial and preserved a specimen?”

“She could be very persuasive.”

He laughed. “I suppose so, but in my case, she was doing me a favor. Making sure I was fertile.”

“Why?” Dex asked.

It was disconcerting, the way she asked such personal questions without blinking. It threw him off balance, and Jim wasn’t accustomed to anyone else getting the upper hand. Or forming one into a fist and plunging it into his midsection, either.

“There’s no need to go into details,” he said. “If you’re going to be living here, we need to respect each other’s privacy.”

“Whoa!” She stopped halfway through the slice of cheese cake. “I haven’t agreed to that.”

So she wanted to play hardball. Well, Jim was a master at that game.

“Fine. I’ll have my lawyer draw up the custody papers, you can sign Annie over to me, and that’ll be the end of it.” He folded his arms and leaned back to await the fireworks.