Читать книгу Baby for Keeps - Джанис Мейнард, Janice Maynard - Страница 8

Two

Dylan’s wry smile and self-deprecating assessment made Mia’s heart hurt. Dyslexia was no minor roadblock. Mia knew that Dylan had scored above average on intelligence tests. When it came to creating ideas and working with people, he far outstripped her in ability. Dylan was smart and gifted. Unfortunately, his talents didn’t align with the way traditional education evaluated achievement.

She circled back to his earlier question. “You asked me why I tutored you.”

“Well, why did you?”

“I suppose it was for lots of reasons. For one thing, the teacher asked me to. And for another, I was no different than any other girl at Silver Glen High. I wanted to spend time with you.”

He rubbed his jaw. “Is that all?”

“No.” Time for brutal honesty. “I wanted you to succeed. And I thought I could help. No matter how hard you tried to pretend differently, I knew you hated feeling—”

“Stupid,” he interjected with some heat. “The word you’re looking for is stupid.”

She stared at him, taken aback that his intelligence still seemed to be a sore spot for him. “Good grief, Dylan. You’re a successful, respected businessman. You work for a living even though you don’t have to. You’ve made the Silver Dollar Saloon into something special. Why does it matter now that you struggled in school? We’re not kids anymore. You’ve more than proven your capabilities.”

His jaw clenched, his eyes stormy, though somehow she knew his agitation was not directed at her. “And what about you, Mia? What do you do?”

“I’m a medical researcher. Over in the Raleigh/Durham area. My team has been working to prove that the standard series of childhood vaccines is safe for everyone.”

“And I sell beer for a living.”

“Don’t be flip,” she said, her temper starting to rise. “It’s not a competition.”

“Of course not. I was never competition for you. How many languages do you speak?”

His sarcasm nicked her in ways she couldn’t explain. She hadn’t asked to be smart. In fact, there had been many days in her life when she would have given almost anything to be the epitome of a dumb blonde joke. She glanced at Cora, who was still sleeping peacefully.

“I should go,” she said quietly. “I didn’t mean to stir up the past. It was nice seeing you again.” A chill of disappointment clenched her heart and brought back unpleasant memories of being out of step with the world.

She and Dylan stood at the same moment.

His face registered consternation and shame. “Don’t leave. I’m being an ass. It’s not your fault you’re a genius.”

“I’m a woman,” she said flatly. “And will it make you feel better to know that I’ve made an absolute mess of my life?” Her voice broke on the last word. Tears she had worked so hard to keep at bay for the past several hours burst forth in an unattractive sobbing mess.

Inside her chest, a great gaping hole filled with uncertainty and fear made it hard to breathe. She didn’t feel smart at all. What she really felt was panicked and desperate.

She put her hands over her face, mortified that Dylan was here to witness her inevitable meltdown.

Without warning, she felt his warm hands on her shoulders. “Sit down, Mia. Everything’s going to be all right.”

“You don’t know that,” she said, sniffling and, as usual, without a tissue.

“Here. Take this.” The pristine square of white cotton he pulled from his back pocket was still warm from his body. She blew her nose and wiped her eyes, feeling hollow and shaky.

Dylan tugged her down beside him on the sofa, both of them glancing at Cora automatically to make sure she was in no danger. The baby was oblivious. “Don’t worry,” she said, trying to laugh. “I’m not going to have a nervous breakdown.”

He grinned, revealing the slightest hint of a dimple. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I’ve got all night.”

The genuine concern in his eyes disarmed her, despite her embarrassment. It couldn’t hurt to have an impartial opinion. She was at a crossroads, and perhaps she was too close to the situation and too sleep-deprived to make a rational decision.

“Okay,” she said. “You asked for it.”

“Start at the beginning.” He stretched a muscular arm along the back of the sofa, making her uncomfortably aware of his masculine scent and closeness. His khaki slacks and navy knit polo shirt with the bar’s name embroidered on the chest fit him in a way that emphasized everything about him that was male.

Her hands shook, so she clasped them in her lap. “After I turned twenty-nine, I realized that I wanted a baby. A cliché, I know, but my biological clock was ticking so loudly, I couldn’t ignore it.”

“Did the man in your life agree?”

“There was no man at that moment. Well, there was one. For about fifteen minutes. But we were a terrible match, and thankfully we both recognized it before we did anything irrevocable.”

“So who did you have in mind for a daddy?”

“Nobody,” she said simply. “I was well educated and financially secure. I decided that I could raise a child on my own.” She couldn’t fault the skepticism she saw on his face. In retrospect, she had been both naive and overly confident in her abilities.

“There’s still the matter of sperm.”

His droll comment made her cheeks heat again. “Well, of course, but I had that all figured out. As part of the scientific community in Raleigh, I possessed a working knowledge of what was going on in most of our experimental labs. And of course, fertility research was and still is a majorly funded arm of study.”

“Still no sperm.”

“I’m getting there. Once I found a doctor and a facility that I trusted, I had all the initial tests to see if I was healthy and ovulating well.”

“And were you?”

“Definitely. So I knew the timing was right. Then all I had to do was visit a sperm bank and select the proper donor.”

“Who, I’m assuming, would be a doctoral student with intellectual capabilities matching your own.”

He was entirely serious.

She shook her head vehemently. “No. Not even close. I would never do that to a child of mine. I wanted a normal baby.”

“Good Lord, Mia. You mean to tell me you deliberately tried to make little Cora less smart than her mother?” The baffled shock on his face gave her a moment’s pause.

“I wouldn’t say that.” She heard the defensiveness in her words and winced inwardly. “But I selected a candidate who was a blue-collar worker with average intelligence.”

“Why?”

“I wanted her to have a happy life.”

* * *

Dylan honestly didn’t know what to say. I wanted her to have a happy life. Those eight words, quietly spoken, told him more about Mia than if he’d had her résumé in front of him. For the first time, he understood that even if his school career had been painful and difficult, Mia’s had also, but in an entirely different way.

The knock on the door saved him from having to respond to that last, heart-wrenching statement. Soon he and Mia were enjoying appetizers and burgers. Based on the drinks she had ordered downstairs, he avoided anything alcoholic and instead opted for Cokes to accompany their meal.

Mia ate like she hadn’t eaten in a week. “This food is amazing,” she said. “Thank you so much. I’ve been living off frozen dinners and frozen pizza for days. My mom helped out for the first week and a half, but the baby exhausted her, so I finally encouraged her to go home.”

He lifted an eyebrow, helping himself to another handful of French fries. “You’ve left me hanging,” he said. “Finish your story, please.”

“I was hoping you’d lost interest. The whole sorry tale doesn’t put me in a very good light.”

When she wiped a dab of ketchup from her lower lip, to his surprise, he felt a little zing that was a lot like sexual interest. Squashing that thought, he leaned back in his chair. “I’m all ears.”

Mia was slender and graceful. Though she wore neither makeup nor jewelry, she carried herself with an inherent femininity. Back in high school, he had kissed her once upon a time, more out of curiosity than anything else. The heat had surprised and alarmed him. He needed Mia’s help with schoolwork. He couldn’t afford to alienate her, just because his teenage libido was revving on all cylinders.

Now, thinking back to how he had perceived the fifteen-year-old Mia, he wondered what had attracted him. She’d been quiet and timid, although she had managed to stand up to him on more than one occasion when he tried to blow off a project or an assignment.

Her looks and figure had been nothing spectacular in the eyes of a teenage boy. Mia had been on the cusp of womanhood, with no breasts to speak of, and a body that was still girlish despite her maturity in other ways. Yet something about her had appealed to him. In all of their interactions, she had never once made fun of his ineptitude, nor had she patronized him.

Now, from the vantage point of adulthood, he marveled that she had put up with his arrogance and antagonism. Though eventually they had become friends, for weeks at the beginning of their relationship he had acted like a total jerk. And an ungrateful jerk at that.

He kept silent, counting on the fact that she would eventually talk to him if he didn’t push.

Mia finished the last swallow of her drink, stacked her dishes neatly and curled her legs beneath her. “The thing is,” she said, wrinkling her nose as if about to confess to a crime, “artificial insemination is expensive. I assumed, quite erroneously, that since I was young and healthy I would get pregnant the first time.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. And every month when I got my period, I cried.”

“Why was it so important to you?”

She blinked, her expression one of shock, as though no one had ever dared ask her that question. “I wanted someone of my own to love. You may not remember, but my folks were older parents. They had me when my mom was forty-three. So though I love them very much, I understood why they wanted to retire and move south. Even when we lived in the same state, we didn’t see that much of each other.”

“Why not?”

She hesitated. “They were proud because I was smart, but they had no idea what to do with me. Once I was out on my own, the gulf widened. I’m sure part of it was my fault. I never quite understood how to talk to them about my work. And besides...”

“Go on.”

“I found out when I was a teenager that my parents had never really wanted children. It was a Pandora’s box kind of thing. I read one of my mom’s journals. Turns out that when I was conceived, my mother was going through menopause and thought she couldn’t get pregnant. So I was an unwelcome surprise in more ways than one. They did the best they could. I’m grateful for that.”

Dylan thought of his big, close-knit, sometimes rowdy family. And of the way his mother cherished and coddled each of her sons though they were now grown men. They all had their moments of discord, of course. What family didn’t? But he couldn’t imagine a life where his brothers and his mom weren’t an integral part of who he was. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “That must have hurt.”

Mia shrugged. “Anyway, you asked why the baby was so important. The truth is, I wanted someone to love who would love me back. I wanted a family of my own.” She laid a hand gently on the baby’s blanket. “It took eight tries, but when the doctor told me I was pregnant, it was the most wonderful day of my life.”

Since Dylan had witnessed her tears not so long ago, he surmised that the euphoria hadn’t lasted. “Was the pregnancy difficult?”

“Oh, no. Not at all.”

“And did people ask questions?”

“My staff was actually fairly small. And we each worked on a particular aspect of the project. So we were more like professional acquaintances than the kind of deeper connections you sometimes make in an office environment. My friend Janette knew the truth. Frankly, she thought it was a bad idea all along...tried to talk me out of it more than once. But she was supportive once I actually became pregnant. She even went with me to childbirth classes and stayed with me at the hospital when Cora was born.”

“So what went wrong? Why did you come back to Silver Glen and walk into my bar?”

She leaned her head against the back of the sofa, her gaze bleak. “A dreadful domino of events. My job paid well, and I had a healthy savings portfolio. But I drained all of it trying to get pregnant. Even that didn’t seem so irresponsible, because I knew that I could live on a strict budget and build up my savings again. Only I hadn’t counted on the fickle finger of fate.”

“Meaning?”

“While I was on maternity leave, the funding for my research and my lab was eliminated. Big-time budget cuts. So now I had a brand-new baby and no job. And, as a wonderful dollop of icing on the cake, my roommate with whom I rented a condo decided to move in with her boyfriend.”

He leaned forward and rested his hands on his knees, smiling at her with an abundance of sympathy. “That sucks.”

She managed a somewhat teary chuckle. “I probably wouldn’t be such a basket case if little Cora here slept at night. But no matter how many books I read and how many theories I try, all she wants to do is snooze during the day and play all night.”

“I don’t blame her. That’s my M.O. sometimes.”

His droll humor made her smile, when the last thing she felt like doing was smiling. She remembered that about him. Dylan was always the life of the party. He could rally a crowd around a cause, and best of all, he wasn’t moody. Some guys like him, i.e. rich and handsome, were egotists. But Dylan was the opposite.

He’d spent his high school years trying to prove that he was one of the gang. No one special.

She felt embarrassed suddenly. He must think she was a total nutcase. It was time to go. But just as she was gathering herself to depart, little Cora stirred and cried out.

Dylan’s face softened as he focused on the tiny hands that flailed above the edge of the blanket. “Somebody is about to get mad.”

“I need to feed her.”

“Do you have baby food with you? I can send one of the staff to the store to get some.”

“Um...no...thanks. I need to feed her. You know...nurse her.”

His neck turned red. She could swear his gaze brushed across her breasts before landing somewhere on the far wall. “Of course. No problem. There’s a comfy chair in the bedroom. Will that work?”

“That would be perfect.” She rummaged in the bag for a clean diaper and a pack of baby wipes, conscious that he noted her every move. “I won’t be too long. But don’t feel like you have to entertain me. It’s been fun catching up. I’ll leave when I’m done.”

He stood when she did, watching intently as she scooped Cora into her arms and bounced her so the baby’s displeasure didn’t escalate into a full-blown crying fit. Fortunately, Cora settled down and even smiled.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Dylan said. “I don’t want you to rush off. In fact, I’d love to hold Cora for a little while when you’re done. Would you mind?”

She gaped at him. Big, brawny Dylan Kavanagh wanted to hold a baby? The thought sent a warm curl of something humming in the pit of her stomach. What was it about men and babies that made women go all gooey inside? “Of course I don’t mind. But don’t you have things to do?”

He tucked his hands in his back pockets and shook his head, his face alight with mischief. “Are you kidding? Mia Larin has come back to town all grown up. This is the most interesting encounter I’ve had in a month. Go feed the little one. I’ll be here when you get back.”