His Best Friend's Baby (18 page)

Suddenly his body went rigid; his arms dropped from her and he strained away.

Her own hands fell to her sides. She hated, oh, hated, to see his face, because she knew what it would show. Revulsion, shock, anger. Please not pity.

There was no pity, but every other emotion she’d feared blazed on his face as he backed away from her. In a thick voice, he said, “Dean hasn’t even been dead a year. I’m sorry, Mindy. I’m sorry.”

He was sorry because he had to reject her. Sorry because he’d been tempted even for a moment to kiss her back. Most of all, he was sorry for her, because she was... was...

She pressed her hand to her mouth. Her stomach roiled. She was like her mother. Just like her. A sad widow who wanted another man with indecent haste, because she couldn’t bear to be alone.

“No,” she whispered. “No, no, no.”

Quinn’s expression changed, but she was hardly aware.

“Mindy...”

“No!” she cried, half fell over the coffee table, and ran for the bathroom, where she lost her dinner and her self-respect.

She had never been so grateful in her life as she was to see that the lights were out and Quinn’s bedroom door was shut when she emerged.

She’d have to face him in the morning. But not now. Not now.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“A
NOTHER
STORE
AGREED
TODAY
to start carrying my birdhouses,” Mindy said.

Quinn lay stretched out on her floor with Jessie on his chest. “Great!” he said, and lifted the baby to swoop her through the air like an airplane.

She laughed in glee. Quinn was way more fun than Mommy.

He laughed back at her, his often somber face as bright with merriment as baby Jessie’s.

Mindy shook her head in bemusement. Who’d have ever thought the word fun would apply in any way to Brendan Quinn?

Settling Jessie back on his chest, Quinn asked, “You’ll let me know if your money gets short?”

In mock offense, she retorted, “I’ll have you know I’m becoming quite prosperous!” Then she made a face. “Okay, I’m not making enough to live on yet, but I’m getting there.”

And she was. Mindy was amazed at her success. She’d apparently found a niche. Country-style decorating was still hot and magazines increasingly touted the allure of “outdoor rooms.” Seattle had half a dozen stores that specialized in garden art and pottery. Three of them now carried her birdhouses, as did a couple of gift shops. A plant nursery she’d approached the other day had expressed interest. If her birdhouses kept selling the way they had been, she would soon have trouble producing them fast enough.

“Someone suggested a Web site.” She sat cross-legged next to Quinn, her back against the couch. “But I don’t know. I’d have to pay someone to build it and maintain it. And then I might have to make a whole bunch of identical birdhouses. And that seems boring.”

“But profitable,” he pointed out, swooping Jessie again.

“Mmm.” She mused for a moment then said, “Oh, well. It’s just something to think about. Can you stay for dinner? I thought about ordering a pizza.”

He didn’t often stay; usually he stopped by for an hour after work, or later in the evening on his way home from the gym. He’d say hi to her, then lavish attention on a delighted Jessie.

Tonight, he surprised her by agreeing, “Sure. Sounds good.”

They’d been going on this way for a month now. She and Jessie entered through the side door to his garage every day, after he was safely gone to work. There, Mindy worked in fits and starts as Jessie allowed. She’d found an old chaise hanging on the wall, which she sat in to nurse. Much of the day, Jessie napped contentedly in the playpen Mindy had bought from the Bensons. Fortunately, she seemed impervious to the whine of the saw and the drill and even the wham of her mom pounding with a hammer.

About an hour before Quinn usually got home, Mindy tidied the work space and she and Jessie slipped out. She was trying very hard to be unobtrusive.

When she’d first moved out, he’d gone several days before stopping by. After he’d all but flung her from his arms and she’d fallen over the coffee table running away, moving day had been horrible. With Selene and her boyfriend and another friend helping, Quinn and Mindy had managed to avoid looking each other in the eye. Which had made the first time he’d stepped into her apartment more than a little awkward. She’d thought about saying something blithe like, “Wow, that kiss! Wasn’t it silly?” but face to face with him, she couldn’t do it. The kiss was the farthest thing from silly.

So they just didn’t mention it. And in avoiding the subject, it loomed like Mount Saint Helens letting off bursts of steam, obviously ready to erupt. They just pretended it wasn’t there and wouldn’t explode in fire and ash someday.

Mindy still hadn’t dealt with her horror at her own behavior. So, okay, she had a better understanding of her mother now. That didn’t erase the memory of how passionately, at fourteen, she’d hated and despised her for inviting a man into her life when Dad had only been dead a few weeks. Dean had been gone longer—but not
that
much longer. A little over ten months now.

The weird part was, those ten months could have been two or three years. Mindy had trouble remembering who and what she was back when she’d first discovered she was pregnant. Maybe the fact that these ten months had been so eventful had something to do with it. If Dean hadn’t died that night, she probably wouldn’t have changed so much. She would still believe she was in love with him, and with the birth of Jessie she’d be convinced they were a perfect family. Quinn would still be Dean’s difficult friend instead of her savior and a man of complexity and depth then unimagined by her.

At least, she thought her world would still be sunny and simple. But she wondered sometimes how Dean would have handled her need for bed rest. Would he have been willing to come home straight from work to wait on her, as Quinn had done? To give up fishing expeditions and eighteen holes of golf with his friends, because she needed him? Or would he have been solicitous when he was home, and full of excuses when he wasn’t? He’d always been restless, wanting to eat out, have friends over, go somewhere.

She no longer knew whether she was being fair to Dean. She’d come to see him more clearly, she thought, than she had in only a year of marriage. Quinn and the Howies had all said things that made her think.

At the same time, since leaving Quinn’s house Mindy had been able to recover some of her memories of the Dean she’d loved. With that huge grin and freckled face, he’d been one of those rare people everyone liked. He was kind, funny and an eternal optimist. She’d marveled then, considering his background, at his faith that everything would always come out well. Now she knew it for what it was: a major case of denial. But, oh, how nice it was to live with someone who was always upbeat!

She wanted to believe she would have stayed happy with Dean. That she wouldn’t have looked up one day, met Quinn’s eyes across the room, and realized that she’d fallen in love with her husband’s best friend. But she couldn’t imagine that happening; Quinn, too, had changed. All she had to do was recall the cold, critical man determined to do his duty by her after Dean’s murder. She’d come close to hating him!

Mindy was starting to find peace in the knowledge that she’d never know how their lives would have turned out if only Dean had waited for the police that night instead of swaggering in to confront the intruders himself. Just because now she loved Quinn with a frightening intensity didn’t mean she would have betrayed Dean had he lived. She was a different person. Quinn was a different person. And Dean was dead.

But she did hate knowing how quickly she had been willing to replace her husband. So, she was in love; did that make her any better than her mother, who had probably just been frightened of being alone?

As she went to order the pizza, she thought with profound depression that all of her attempts to reconcile her wedding vows with her deep, passionate feelings for Quinn were irrelevant, anyway. He obviously wasn’t interested in her. Not that way. She should just be grateful that he plainly intended to continue to be a presence in Jessamine’s life.

And surely, surely, these visits would get easier with time.

* * *

H
E
SHOULDN
’
T
HAVE
STAYED
for dinner, Quinn thought during the lonely drive home. All he’d done was torture himself.

Quinn wasn’t sure he should remain in Mindy’s life at all, but some temptations were too great for a man to resist. Yeah, he was the closest thing Jessie had to a daddy, and he told himself she needed him. But he knew he was there as much to see her mommy.

Just to make sure she was all right, that she didn’t need him. Maybe to give himself an early warning should she start to date someone. A wedding announcement without the chance to inoculate himself might kill him.

These few hours with her and Jessie, snatched a couple of times a week, were lifesaving if painful at the same time. Quinn could hardly bring himself to go home anymore. His house was worse than the morgue: dark and silent and empty. He’d really hoped that, as the weeks went by, he would find he was glad to regain his solitude.

Grind that hope under his heel. All he wanted was to have Mindy and Jessie back.

Except he knew that, too, was a lie. Because he wanted a lot more from Mindy than her cheerful presence as a roommate. He wanted promises and passion from her. He wanted her in his life every minute. He wanted the illusion that she and Jessie were his to be reality.

And that made him feel like scum.

If there’d been one constant in his life, it had been Dean. Dean had never let him down. Quinn would have died before he let Dean down.

But here he was, wanting to step into Dean’s shoes and have his wife and kid.

He tried not to think about that kiss and what it might have meant. His worst fear was that Mindy had intended to peck him on the lips in gratitude. Friends kissed lightly.

But, he thought in anguish, there she’d been in his arms. Every dream come true. Desire had smashed into him with the force of a semi speeding on the freeway.

Until he’d felt...something. A ghost behind him. A hand tapping his shoulder. A voice threaded with amusement and anger saying, “Hey, buddy, she’s mine, remember? Find your own woman.”

He still wasn’t sure he would have had the self-control to stop if he hadn’t seen Mindy’s face. Her mouth had looked swollen, her eyes huge and dilated and wet with tears. Revulsion at what he’d done had sent him staggering back, especially when he saw her fall across the coffee table in her haste to escape him.

At home tonight, he parked in the garage, stopped to look at the birdhouses she had in various stages of completion, and went on into the house, where he sank into his easy chair without turning on lights.

Was it possible to go on like this, half living? Maybe he should say to her, “I don’t want to let you down, I don’t want to let Jessie down, but I love you and if I can’t have you I think we’re all better severing this relationship now.” Given a few months, a baby Jessie’s age wouldn’t remember him, wouldn’t miss him.

But then he wouldn’t even have this half life. He’d be left in the dark for good. Once upon a time, he might have been content to exist that way, but he wasn’t anymore.

He made an animal sound of pain and continued to sit without moving for a long, long time.

* * *

R
EPLETE
WITH
THE
LUNCH
Nancy had put on the table, Quinn lifted his brows at George. “Like to walk down to the dock?”

“Wouldn’t mind if I do.”

After extracting a promise from Nancy that she would let them wash the dishes, they left her clearing the table. George pulled a heavy Irish-knit sweater over his head and Quinn shrugged on his leather jacket. They stepped out the back door to find that the day had remained chilly but fine, clouds scudding across a pale blue sky. Spring might actually be arriving. Quinn had spotted some crocuses about ready to open near the front porch.

The two men walked slowly down the long flight of wooden steps toward the narrow inlet, Quinn keeping the pace slow.

“Watch that one,” he said once. “Board’s getting rotten.”

He noticed the handrail, constructed of two-by-fours, was getting shaky, too. Seemed to him Dean had meant to get over here last summer and do some work. Quinn felt bad that it hadn’t occurred to him to come in Dean’s stead.

“Don’t get as much done as I used to,” George said regretfully. “I can replace that board, though. I’d hate to have these stairs rot away.”

“Once spring comes, I’ll come over and give you a hand,” Quinn said. “I’m pretty well done with my house. Wouldn’t want to forget how to saw a board.”

George glanced at him, blue eyes faded but shrewd. “You wouldn’t want to do that,” he agreed. “I’d appreciate it, son.”

Years ago, Quinn and Dean had helped their foster father build a bench along one side of the small floating dock. It, too, was gray and beginning to rot in places. Choosing their spot carefully, the two men sat, lifting their heads to smell the salty breeze.

“What’s on your mind?” George said after a long pause.

Nice to know he was transparent, Quinn thought. Or maybe he only was to this man.

The question that came out of his mouth wasn’t the one he’d intended to ask. Where it came from, he had no idea. “Did you and Nancy ever think about adopting Dean and me?”

“Sure we did. But it was pretty clear neither of you would have it. Dean would have felt he was abandoning faith in his mother, and you’d have thought we were trying to hog-tie and brand you. You didn’t want to be claimed.”

Quinn shook his head. “I must have been crazy.”

“Just scared.” George laid a hand gnarled with arthritis on Quinn’s for a brief moment. “I’m glad to see you’re not running so scared anymore.”

Quinn gave a grunt that could be interpreted as a laugh, by a charitable man. “I’m not so sure about that.”

George studied him. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve been seeing Mindy and Jessamine.”

“Dean’s little girl. Of course you are.”

Voice thick, Quinn confessed, “I’m in love with Mindy.”

The gnarled hand patted his knee. “I know you are.”

Quinn turned his head to stare at his foster father. “You know?”

“The way you looked at her... Nancy and I could tell.”

Quinn groaned.

“Oh, I don’t think Mindy noticed, if that’s what worries you.” George sounded quietly amused. “It’s outsiders looking in who see that kind of thing.”

Bracing his elbows on his thighs, Quinn let his head fall. “She’s Dean’s wife.”

“She’s Dean’s widow,” the older man corrected.

“Does it matter?” Quinn asked, with near violence.

“Sure it matters. He’s gone, Quinn. You can’t bring him back. None of us can. You and Mindy and Jessie, you have to go on with your lives. Have you got yourself convinced Dean would mind if you and Mindy fell in love now?”

“I thought...” His throat closed. This sounded stupid. “I felt him.”

“Ghosts are mostly the voices of our conscience. That’s my suspicion, anyway.”

Quinn hunched his shoulders.

“Do you want to know what I think?”

This grunt was closer to a real laugh. “You haven’t noticed I dragged you down here for a talk?”