Somebody's Baby (4 page)

T
hey both shuffled quietly inside the room, using only the stream of light from the hallway to guide them.

“Hush, now, Nathan, shhh. Quiet down. It’s all right.” Josie, standing in profile to Adam, cooed some kind of magical, maternal comfort to the lumpy blue blanket she pulled from the crib.

“Nathan?” He turned the name over and over in his mind. He liked it. “Is what you named him?”

“Yes. It means…” She snagged her breath and held it a moment. “It’s Biblical. It means gift.”

“I like it.” He found himself nodding slowly to show his approval.

“I’m glad,” she whispered, but nothing in her body language underscored her claim. She cuddled the baby close and spread the blanket out over the two of them so that Adam could not even see a tiny finger or a lock of fine baby hair.

He longed to lay eyes on his boy for the first time, show himself and say, “Hello, Nathan. I’m your father. I’m here now. I won’t allow you to grow up feeling as if the people who should have done anything within their power to keep you, gave you away and didn’t care.”

Adam knew most adopted children did not feel this way. But he had. He had been
made
to feel that way. And now that he had returned to Mt. Knott, he would not only shield his child from those emotions, Adam would make his remaining family pay for having treated him so callously. He had the means and the motivation. The news of his unexpected fatherhood had hastened his plan but had not quashed it. If anything, it gave him new passion for the battle that lay ahead. He would do this not just for the child he had been, but for the child lying in this small, dark room before him.

Adam strained to get a good look at the kid without getting too close. Deep in his gut, he truly wished to step forward and scoop his son up in his arms. But somehow his body would not cooperate. He hung back, his back stiff, his legs like lead, folding then unfolding his arms across his chest, then letting them dangle limp at his sides.

“Is he…” He craned his neck to peer around a tossed-back flap of the blanket that draped from Josie’s shoulder to her midthigh. “Is he okay?”

“Well, he’s not wet or…otherwise.” She rocked her body back and forth, and the crying died to gurgles and gasps.

“Maybe he’s hungry.” Just saying it made Adam feel all fatherly. Maybe this wasn’t such a hard thing after all, to take care of a baby.

“I doubt that.” She patted the bundle gently, still rocking.

“He would have had a bottle before bed.”

“But babies eat at all hours.” He spoke like a veritable authority on the subject even though, deep down, he felt like a complete dolt. Him! Adam Burdett, one of five highly valued and overpaid vice presidents of acquisitions and mergers for Wholesome Hearth Country Fresh Bakery, a division of Cynergetic GlobalCom Limited. How could one small, totally dependent creature reduce him to such uncertainty and ineptitude? “Don’t they need to, um, refuel, during the night?”

“Refuel?” For the first time she laughed faintly.

But still, something in the sound of it made Adam long to hear it again.

“Yeah, you know. Like a minijet with diapers?” He pressed his lips together and made the sound of a sputtering engine. “Or a rechargeable battery.”

“If they ever find a way to channel this kid’s energy into a battery or an engine, I’ll have to give up my job and chase him around full-time.”

“Yeah, you wouldn’t want that.”

“Are you kidding? I’d love to give up worrying about how I’m going to keep the Home Cookin’ Kitchen open and be a full-time mom to Nathan.” Her eyes grew wide suddenly. “Not that I want my business to fail. I love what I do. I love providing a service to Mt. Knott and seeing everyone, and I love cooking. Especially…well, my specialty is not important beyond, you know, being a mother being my specialty.”

She was babbling. Not in a ridiculous, silly way. She was just nervous. And relieved. Nervous and relieved all at once. He could sense that in the way her words all ran together, then stopped suddenly. He didn’t learn much from what she said, of course, but it did help him see her inner conflict over her roles as a woman business-owner and a mother to his son.

“But if I could somehow not have to keep the crazy hours at my Home Cookin’ Kitchen and could just spend all my time with Nathan, at least in these early years, I’d do it in a heartbeat. No regrets. No complaints.” She stopped abruptly again, and this time her eyes grew wide before she added, in a little slower and more pronounced voice, “Not that I’m hinting that’s what I expect you to provide.”

She’d babbled until she had spoken the truth. In doing so, she’d given Adam a glimpse into her desires and perhaps some future negotiating power. He filed the information away and, on the surface, let it go. “So, he’s not hungry?”

“No. I don’t think he’s hungry.” She kept swaying back and forth and jiggling the baby, who had begun to fret and grunt quietly beneath the blanket. “He’s been sleeping through the night for a couple of months now.”

“He has?” Adam was rocking now, too. He couldn’t seem to help himself. Though he wasn’t sure, he figured this was how it felt to carry on a conversation on a boat. “Well, maybe he’s sick, or needs some—”

“Maybe…” she interrupted in the same soothing murmur she used with the baby “…he just had a bad dream.”

“Dream?” He stopped rocking long enough to consider that. “What on earth does an itty-bitty baby like that have to dream about?”

“He’s not so itty-bitty. He’s got plenty of things to dream about, a whole lifetime of experiences.
His
lifetime.” She shot him a look that even in the dim light Adam interpreted as a challenge.
I have been this child’s mother for his entire life. Where have you been?
“He’ll have his first birthday in two weeks, won’t you, tiger?”

“He will?” Adam stretched out his fingers, needing a kind of visual cue to help him do some lightning-fast math. “That means he was born in September, so August, July, June—”

“January.”

“What?”

“He was conceived in January, one year, eight months and two weeks ago.” She faced him, her mouth set in grim accusation. “Don’t tell me that doesn’t even ring a bell. Maybe you’ve just been with so many women that it’s all a blur.”

“Oh, it’s a blur all right, but not for the reasons you think.” He scratched at his cheek while his mind struggled to force all the pieces together. “Maybe you don’t recall this, but…”

Adam faced a choice. Speak the truth and risk having it sound like a plea for pity or at least leniency for his behavior or skim over it. He could stand here and own up to that bad behavior without any preface or attempt to put it in context.

His mother had died. He felt he had not only lost the only one who’d seen him truly as her own but that he had also lost his place in his family. When his suggestions to take the Carolina Crumble Pattie to a wider market had been ridiculed by his father and brothers, Adam felt he had lost his reason for staying in Mt. Knott as well. By the time he met Ophelia, a beautiful woman who shared his disdain for the small town, he had not been thinking about right and wrong.

He had been in pain. He needed to feel he wasn’t a lost cause, just a stray that nobody wanted. He felt worthless and figured he didn’t matter to anyone, not even God. It became easier to fall into sin, he had learned, when you take your eyes off the Lord and start looking at the mess you have made of your life and the mess life has made of the world around you.

He had long prided himself on being a man who told the truth. It was one of the things, he felt, which set him apart from his father.

While Conner Burdett was not a dishonest man, he had built his business on the belief that knowledge was power. And Conner protected his own power by controlling what knowledge he allowed others to have.

On the other hand, telling her about all the years of pain and loneliness that led up to those few wild nights that January would probably just sound like an excuse.

Adam didn’t like people who made excuses. Besides, he had no way of knowing if he could trust Josie with an emotional truth that could cut him to his core. She may yet prove herself the enemy in a bitter custody case. He decided to tell the truth, but not all of it. It twisted low in his gut that he would follow his father’s path but if she listened, really listened, she would hear the message beneath the words and have an inkling of what had fueled his angry rebellion.

“If you recall, I came into my inheritance in January.”
I lost my mom. My only ally.

Her determined jawline eased a bit.

“I found myself with a totally new status.”
Finally, officially, on my own. Alone.

Her gaze dipped downward.

“I didn’t handle it particularly well.”
I’m not making any excuses.

She nodded, her brow furrowed. “I’m sorry about the loss of your mother.”

“Thanks.” He’d struck a chord, he supposed.

“She was a remarkable lady. A real force in the community. A good Christian who supported so many social causes and cared about people. She really put her faith in action.”

“More than you probably know.” He thought not only of how his mother had taken him in as a child and raised him as her very own, but also of the ways she devoted her own inherited fortune to help those in need. It tugged at Adam’s heart to realize that back then he’d been so fixated on striking back at his father and brothers that he had done nothing to honor his mother and the things she had taught him. That did not alter his plan for revenge, however.

He was a Christian. He just wasn’t
that
kind of Christian. He fought back a twinge of shame over having even thought that, much less allowed it to stand as his justification. “If it helps, I am not proud of what I did.”

“I’m not the one you owe an apology to.” Josie poked her chin up, fidgeted with the folds of the blanket that still concealed his son from him.

“An apology? I wasn’t aware I owed an
apology
to anyone.” It was what it
was.
He felt bad that it had gone so wrong. Felt some shame that his grief and resentment had uncovered his weaknesses instead of revealed his inner strength. But getting all touchy-feely about it now wouldn’t change the past or set things right today.

He had come to town with only two indisputable responsibilities, to claim his son and ruin his so-called family. Neither Josie nor Ophelia Redmond figured prominently in his designs. “Your sister was a willing partner in what happened between us. Don’t forget that she was the one who failed to notify me about the baby. It’s not as if I haven’t paid a price for my poor choices.”

“I don’t doubt that.” She gave him a look of sympathy that did not sink to the level of pity.

He hadn’t known anyone who had ever managed that with him and appreciated it in a way he could not for the world have articulated. His whole life, people had given with one hand and taken away with two. Encounters with even the most sincerely empathetic often left him undermined and exposed. He wondered if Josie would finally be the exception.

“However…”

“I should have known,” he muttered under his breath.

“Hmm?” she asked over the wriggling and almost inaudible fussing of the baby in her arm.

“Give with one hand, take with two,” was all he felt compelled to say.

“However…”
She patted the blanket and adjusted the form beneath it, raising it higher against her own small frame. The legs kicked and a tiny hand flailed out to grab a strand of her hair. She ignored it and forged on. “Your
choices
have resulted in this small life. And whether you have suffered enough or who is to blame for how the two of us arrived in this situation no longer matters. When you are a parent, it’s not about you and your feelings anymore, it’s about what’s best for your child.”

“My child,” he echoed softly. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” She batted her eyes in a show of seeming disbelief, then leaned back to look under the blanket and the wriggling infant in her arms. “I don’t usually yell at strangers like that, but…”

“I’m not thanking you for yelling at me.” He chuckled at the very notion. He could go just about anywhere in this town and get yelled at, and by people a lot more experienced and colorful at it than Miss Josie Redmond.

“Then, I don’t—” She hook her head.

“When,” he explained as softly as the baby’s gentle stirring.

“What?”

“You said
when
you are a parent. Not
if.
Your intention with that little speech was to put me in my place. And with that small distinction, you did.” He reached out and brushed the blanket from atop the child’s head.

The baby squirmed and made a sound that went something like “ya-ya-ya,” then laughed.

Neither music nor birds nor even the grandest of majestic choirs could ever sound as sweet as the sound of his baby laughing.

“Anyway,” he explained, knowing he’d have to appease Josie in some way before she’d even think of allowing him to hold his son, “I admit to my part, my shortcomings in all of this. I did spend time with your sister, obviously, and—”

“And it didn’t mean a thing to you.”

He lowered his head and his tone and took one step toward the woman holding his son. “You will never understand what it meant to me, lady.”

She cupped the baby’s head and took a step back from him. “Then why didn’t you call her? Why didn’t you try to find out what happened to her?”

“Because…” Again a choice loomed before him. Tell the whole truth and risk losing some of his power in the situation or say just enough to get what he wanted now. He looked long and deep into Josie’s defiant yet anxious eyes and knew he only had one real course of action. The truth. “Because I was only thinking of myself. I acted like a wounded dog, snarling and mean and willing to do anything to protect myself. I spent a night with your sister, drunk most of the time but aware of what I was doing, and then I walked away and never looked back. Because that’s what suited me.”