The Baby Surprise

“What if I want to change that?”

She shook her head again. “I don't think that would be a good idea.”

He took a step closer. “Well, apparently we have a difference of opinion.”

She lifted a hand to ward him off, and sucked in a breath when her palm came into contact with his bare, heated flesh. He was every bit as solid and warm as he looked, and she wanted—more than anything—to lean closer, to press herself against him, to feel the hard length of his body against hers.

“Zach.” She'd meant to speak his name as a warning; instead it sounded like a plea.

“I just want to kiss you,” he said, and brushed his thumb over the curve of her bottom lip, slowly, sensuously.

“Definitely not a good idea,” she said, all too aware that the breathless tone of her voice contradicted her words.

“Another difference of opinion,” he said easily, and lowered his mouth to hers.

Dear Reader,

“Write what you know” is advice frequently given to writers. So maybe it's not surprising, considering my legal background, that several of the characters I've written have been lawyers.

Paige Wilder, the heroine of
The Baby Surprise,
is one of those characters. In this story, she is trying to balance the demands of her career with the needs of the baby in her custody. It isn't a unique struggle and many women juggle not just these conflicting responsibilities but various other duties and obligations every single day.

It's hard to keep all those balls in the air and, when faced with a similar dilemma, I chose to give up the practice of law and stay home with my kids. Luckily for me, I also found a new career path—writing stories with happy endings!

I hope you enjoy this one.

Best,

Brenda Harlen

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Epilogue

P
aige Wilder had less than zero experience with kids, but when Olivia Lowell, a friend and coworker at Wainwright, Witmer & Wynne, asked if she would be her birthing coach, she didn't know how to say no to the single-mother-to-be. And despite her initial apprehension, the event of Emma's birth was the singular most amazing experience of Paige's entire life.

So when, several months later, Olivia asked her to watch the baby overnight, Paige had agreed. With both Ashley and Megan—her cousins and two best friends—now in the early stages of pregnancy, she figured it was a good time to get some babysitting experience and that she was up for the challenge.

A decision she was fervently regretting by 5:00 a.m. when she laid Emma in her crib and fell facedown on the narrow bed in Olivia's guest room. Around midnight, she'd finally set aside the pretrial memorandum she'd been working on
and decided to go to sleep. About the same time, the usually-charming infant woke up screaming like a banshee, and she'd repeated the performance almost every hour on the hour since then.

If nothing else, the experience reminded Paige why she'd never thought about having a child of her own. She was simply in awe of any parent who could deal with a crying child through all hours and still manage to get up and go to work the next morning.

As she finally drifted to sleep, she sent up a weary prayer of thanks that this babysitting assignment was only for one night.

 

Three days later, she found out otherwise.

Owen Wynne, the senior partner who had hired her to work at the firm almost six years earlier, set aside the pages from which he'd finished reading and looked across the desk at her.

Paige, still reeling from the shock that her friend had been killed in a car accident, struggled to comprehend the words he had spoken. “But what does that mean?”

“It means that you are now Emma Jane Lowell's legal guardian,” he said patiently.

“That can't be right,” she said, her tone tinged with equal parts desperation and disbelief.

Owen frowned. “I'd assumed, when Olivia came to me about drafting her will, that she'd already discussed this with you.”

She could only shake her head.

“Well, then, you're certainly entitled to deny her request,” he assured her.

And Paige knew what would happen if she did—nine-month-old Emma would end up in the system. It was possible that the baby would be adopted by a wonderful couple and loved as if she was their own. Or she might bounce from one
foster home to another until she'd reached an age where the state was no longer concerned with her care.

Either way, Olivia's daughter would never know anything about her mother; she would never know how much she had been loved.

But still Paige hesitated. “I don't know anything about kids.”

“Neither did I, when I first became a father,” Owen admitted.

“What about Emma's father?” she asked, clearly grasping. “Are you sure Olivia never mentioned his name?”

“Not to me.”

Not to Paige, either, other than to insist that she'd had no contact with him since she'd told him she was pregnant. Her friend had always been a private person, but Paige had worried that, in this instance, she'd been so tight-lipped because the man already had a family.

“You don't have to make a final decision today,” Owen told her.

Except that the decision had been made for her when Olivia named Paige as her daughter's legal guardian. Why Olivia had chosen her would probably always be a mystery, but she couldn't disregard her friend's final wishes.

“Yes, I do,” she said. “I want this settled, for Emma's sake.”

Paige wanted to ensure that Olivia's baby had the kind of stable childhood that she herself had never known.

But when the papers were signed and she walked out of Owen's office with Emma in her arms, she felt anything but settled. And she couldn't shake the feeling that even the best-laid plans could go awry.

Five months later

A
s a little girl, Paige had never really felt as if she had a home, as if there was anywhere she truly belonged. Growing up as the only child of a divorced Army colonel, she'd left too many homes and too many friends to count, an experience that had taught her early on not to get too attached to anyplace or anyone.

When she was fifteen, her father had decided that Paige was too much trouble to keep with him and had sent her to live with his sister and her family. Even then, Paige had mostly kept to herself. In fact, for the first six months she'd refused to put her clothes in the dresser of the room she'd been told was her own, certain she would need to pack up and leave again as soon as she felt settled.

But six months had turned into a year and then two, and
Paige found herself growing close to Ashley and Megan, the two sisters who were her cousins and now also her best friends.

Still, her aunt's residence had never felt like home so much as a house that she was visiting. Even when Paige moved into her own condo in Syracuse, it was little more than a place to store her belongings and lay her head. But there was a house on Chetwood Street in Pinehurst, New York, that Ashley and Megan had purchased a few years earlier, and Paige felt more at home there than anywhere else she'd ever lived. So maybe it wasn't surprising that it was where she went when her life fell apart.

She had called both of her cousins to let them know that she wanted to come home for a while and to make sure they didn't mind if she stayed at the currently empty house. Megan had been the first to move out, when she'd married Gage Richmond the previous year, followed by Ashley, who had vacated the premises only a month ago, after her wedding to Cameron Turcotte. The sisters had decided to list the house for sale but hadn't yet taken any steps in that direction, so Paige had proposed that she rent the property for the summer.

She really wasn't sure how long she intended to stay. Her career as a family-law attorney usually kept her too busy to allow for anything more than a long weekend, and even then she usually worked extra hours both before and after in order to make up for the time away from her office. As for an actual vacation, she honestly couldn't remember the last time she'd taken one, although she had taken more than the occasional day here and there over the past five months—a fact that had not gone unnoticed by the partners who were now concerned about her apparent lack of commitment to her clients and the firm.

It was the reason for this hiatus, which came with the recommendation that she take the time to think about what
she wanted for her future. As if having full-time care of a fourteen-month-old baby allowed one time to think.

At first she'd been so shocked by the suggestion that she hadn't known what to say or do. Her immediate instinct had been to insist that she wanted what she'd always wanted—a partnership at the firm. It was what she'd been working toward for the past half-dozen years. But when she'd picked Emma up from the sitter after work, she'd accepted that a lot had changed in the past five months, that taking care of Emma had changed her.

And if it really came down to a choice between having her name stenciled on the wall behind the reception desk at Wainwright, Witmer & Wynne or providing an orphaned little girl with some semblance of family, well, there really wasn't a choice to be made. Because she loved that little girl with her whole heart.

That realization had been a simple one, but it was followed by some tough questions. Most notably, if she chose at this point in her life to walk away from the career she had only recently started to build, where would she go? What would she do?

It was these concerns that had directed her toward Pinehurst, New York.

Unfortunately, almost a week later, she still wasn't any closer to figuring out if she could balance her professional obligations and personal responsibilities, or even if she wanted to.

It was difficult enough to accept that Emma would never know her mother or father, but the demands of Paige's career required that she leave the child with a babysitter for ten hours a day. Of course, Annabelle was a wonderful caregiver who had been chosen by Olivia to take care of her daughter, but that knowledge did little to alleviate Paige's feelings of guilt.

These thoughts were weighing on her mind Thursday night
when she was startled by a brisk knock on the door. A quick glance at the glowing numbers on the front of the DVD player revealed that it was 8:12 p.m., but because Emma had been fussing for so long and had only just fallen asleep, it felt much later.

She pushed herself up from the chair, careful not to jostle the baby, and hurried toward the door. She'd spoken to both Ashley and Megan earlier in the day and neither had made mention of any plan to stop by, and because both of them had keys to the house, it was safe to assume that someone else was knocking.

Shifting Emma to her other shoulder, she hastily tugged open the door before the uninvited guest could knock again.

She noticed his eyes first. Dark blue, intensely focused and strangely familiar. And when those eyes locked on her, she felt an unexpected surge of heat through her veins, an unwelcome sizzle in her blood.

Then she noticed the uniform, and everything inside of her went cold.

“Are you Paige Wilder?”

His voice was deep and sexy, and she felt that sizzle again. But ignored it.

“I am,” she admitted. “Though I don't know why my identity would be of any interest to a lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force.”

His brows lifted, as if he was surprised by her accurate reading of his uniform insignia, and she was struck again not just by the intensity of his gaze, but also the rugged handsomeness of the whole face. His skin was tanned and taut over his sharp cheekbones and strong jaw. His hair was dark and glossy and short. He was well over six feet—probably six-three, she guessed—and his shoulders were broad, his torso long and lean, his legs even longer.

The overall effect was one that any woman could
appreciate, and Paige was no exception. Apparently fifteen years as an army brat hadn't inoculated her against the effect of a handsome man in uniform, but five years as an attorney had taught her the wisdom of looking beneath the surface.

“I'm not here in an official capacity,” he assured her.

“Then why are you here?”

“I'm Zach Crawford—” his gaze shifted to the baby curled up against her chest, then back to her “—Emma's father.”

 

Emma's father.

The words echoed in Paige's mind, the implications sweeping through her with the chilling intensity of a bitter winter wind, numbing everything inside of her despite the warmth of the late-May evening. She instinctively tightened her hold on the baby in her arms and took a step back, away from this stranger's outrageous claim.

The man standing on the porch interpreted her action as an invitation and moved forward. She shook her head and stood rooted in his path.

“Emma doesn't have a father,” she told him.

Amusement glinted in those all-too-familiar eyes. Emma's eyes.

She desperately pushed that thought aside, trying to convince herself that his eyes were simply blue and any perceived resemblance was nothing more than that.

“Are you really that unfamiliar with basic biology, Ms. Wilder?” he asked.

She felt her cheeks heat in response to the unexpected teasing note in his deep voice. “Olivia told me that Emma's father wasn't interested in being a father,” she clarified.

“Then she lied,” he said bluntly.

Paige shook her head again. “She named me as Emma's guardian because she had no other family. Because Emma had no other family.”

“Except that's not exactly true, either.”

She couldn't believe it—didn't want to believe it. Why would Olivia have lied about something like that? And, more importantly, what did this man's presence here now mean for the little girl sleeping in her arms?

“Look, I can see that this has caught you off guard,” he said. “And I'm sure we both have a lot of questions that, if you let me come in, we could discuss without the neighbors watching.”

A quick glance across the street confirmed that Melanie Quinlan, an attractive young divorcée who made no secret of the fact that she was on the hunt for husband number two, was in her front yard, garden hose in hand to water the flowers she'd just finished planting. Except that her attention was on the uniformed stranger, so she was actually watering her porch rather than the colorful blossoms in the bed in front of it.

Paige lifted her free hand to wave, and the other woman smiled and waved back enthusiastically, not even trying to hide the fact that her attention was riveted to the scene playing out in front of her—or at least on the man who was part of that scene.

“If I said no, would you go away?” Paige asked Zach.

“No.”

She sighed and stepped away from the door. “Just let me put Emma down.”

She wasn't sure why she thought he might protest, why she thought he might want to hold the child he claimed was his own—or at least take a closer look at her—but she was undeniably relieved when he let her go without a word. She felt his gaze on her, though, the weight of that intense stare heavier than the child in her arms, and wondered why it made her feel all hot and tingly inside.

She worried over that as she carefully laid Emma on her back in the crib and bent to touch her lips to the baby's soft cheek. She inhaled the scent of baby shampoo and felt tears
sting her eyes. She'd started to take this nightly ritual for granted, and now the appearance of a stranger at her door threatened not just this special time she shared with the little girl, but also the whole future she'd envisioned for them together.

She'd never thought about having a child of her own. Even when it was all her friends and family had been talking about, she'd been too busy with her career to spare a single thought to motherhood. But then Emma had come into her life, and suddenly stepping into the role wasn't a choice but a necessity.

She'd had to make a lot of adjustments when she learned that Olivia had named her as Emma's guardian, and not with out resistance, at least in the beginning. But it hadn't taken Paige long to realize that Emma hadn't just changed her life, she'd enriched it. The little girl's presence made her think about things she hadn't thought about before. Playing the part of her guardian made her appreciate what it meant to be a mother when that wasn't something Paige had ever considered.

But through all of the transitions and adjustments, Paige had never imagined that someday someone might turn up in her life and lay claim to the child, as Zach Crawford had just done.

Olivia had always been stubbornly closemouthed about the man who had fathered her child. It was the only topic about which Paige had ever really argued with her friend. She didn't care about the identity of the man except insofar as she believed he should bear some responsibility for the child he'd helped create.

She'd been frustrated by Olivia's stoic determination, but her friend had always maintained that she could do it alone—and she wanted to. She knew that there were people who whispered about her situation—not because she was an unwed mother-to-be but because they knew that having to shoulder
the responsibility on her own would limit the professional opportunities available to her. She would no longer be able to schedule late-night meetings or quick out-of-town trips for the convenience of a client, and at Wainwright, Witmer & Wynne, imposing such limitations was akin to career suicide.

The few female partners at the firm had done everything but handstands to prove they deserved to be there. And any woman who happened to be a mother
and
a lawyer was even more suspect because—God forbid—she might put her family responsibilities ahead of her obligations to the firm. Karen Rosario had waited until she'd made partner to start a family and gave birth to her first baby at age forty-two. And then she hired a live-in nanny to raise the child she'd supposedly wanted so much.

When Paige decided to go into law, she hadn't considered how difficult it might be to someday balance her career with a family. But she'd thought about it a lot after Olivia told her she was pregnant, and the more she'd thought about it, the angrier she'd become thinking that Olivia was making all of the sacrifices while the man who'd gotten her pregnant—whoever he might be—had simply walked away from his responsibilities.

Maybe it was the lawyer in her, but Paige had wanted to track him down and slap him with a paternity suit to ensure that he at least shared financial responsibility for the baby he'd helped make.

“It's a lot of responsibility to handle on your own,” Paige said to her friend, cautiously broaching the topic she'd avoided for the past several months because she'd been certain Olivia would tell her about the baby's father when she was ready. But so far, she'd volunteered nothing. “I know.”

“Are you sure you have to do it alone? Maybe the father—”

“No,” Olivia interrupted quickly. “This has nothing to do with him.”

“You're an attorney—you know better than that. Whether you like it or not, it's his baby, too, and that means he has both legal rights and responsibilities.”

“He has enough responsibilities without adding a child—especially one that neither of us planned—into the mix.”

The comment gave her pause, but Paige finally asked, “Is he married?”

She was relieved when Olivia laughed at the question.

“Married? No, he's not married. And he's not the kind of guy who would cheat on his wife if he was.”

“But he's the kind of guy who would abandon the woman who's pregnant with his child?” she challenged.

Her friend looked away. “Drop it, Paige. Please.”