An Unexpected Christmas Baby

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  She’s searching for the man defrauding her father.

  Not for the love of her life.

  It’s not such a merry Christmas for Tamara Owens, tapped to discover who’s been stealing from her family business. Suspect number one: tantalizing top trader Flint Collins, who’s suddenly thrust into fatherhood when his orphaned baby sister arrives. Tamara’s sworn off babies forever, but she has the magic touch with infant Diamond. And Flint, too, is soon under her spell...at least until he finds out the truth.

  “It’s not going to work, is it?” he asked her, not ready to give up, but not willing to hurt her. “This really is just too hard for you.”

  She shook her head, and in a season filled with hope, he felt his dwindling once again. No matter how many times it happened, he never got used to it. It never got easier.

  “I’m the one who needs to apologize,” she told him, turning so that she was looking him in the eye. “I just need to try harder, Flint.”

  Heartache wasn’t something that could be brushed off.

  “You’re doing great, sweetie. I just...” What? He just what? He’d just called her sweetie. Like they were a couple.

  She was looking at him, all wide-eyed and filled with emotion. So close. He leaned. She did, too. And their lips touched.

  Maybe he’d meant it to be a light touch. A sweet goodbye to go with the endearment.

  Maybe he hadn’t been thinking at all.

  What Flint knew was that he couldn’t let go. Her lips on his... His world changed again and he couldn’t let go of them. He moved his lips over hers. Exploring. Discovering. Exploding...

  * * *

  THE DAYCARE CHRONICLES:

  Bouncing babies and open hearts

  Dear Reader,

  Sometimes we can plan and do and create what we want out of life, and then, in an instant, completely outside our control, things change. We knew who we were, and who we expected to be. And then...we’re somebody completely different. To me, the true test of ourselves is who we become after such a change. How much of who we thought we were stays with us?

  Flint had his entire future mapped out. He’d not only survived but thrived through a difficult childhood. He’d become a member of the elite, wealthy, respected. And then his past pulls him back in the form of a brand-new baby sister who’s been orphaned by his convict mother. So is Flint the respectable guy he’s designed himself to be? Or just someone who had to get out of the world in which he’d grown up?

  And Tamara—bless her heart—tried and tried to have the life she’d designed for herself. Being a mother had been something she’d taken for granted. Her body just wouldn’t go along with the plan and so...she became someone else. She made a great life for herself on purpose, with purpose. And then Flint’s baby sister threatened to crumble her.

  I hope you’ll continue reading, that you’ll not only thoroughly enjoy the romance, but that you’ll find an extra dab of hope to carry with you into your days.

  I love to connect with my readers. Please find me at www.tarataylorquinn.com, www.Facebook.com/tarataylorquinnauthor, on Twitter, @tarataylorquinn, or join my open friendship board at www.Pinterest.com/tarataylorquinn/friendship.

  All the best,

  Tara

  An Unexpected Christmas Baby

  Tara Taylor Quinn

  Having written over eighty-five novels, Tara Taylor Quinn is a USA TODAY bestselling author with more than seven million copies sold. She is known for delivering intense, emotional fiction. Tara is a past president of Romance Writers of America. She has won a Readers’ Choice Award and is a seven-time finalist for an RWA RITA® Award. She has also appeared on TV across the country, including CBS Sunday Morning. She supports the National Domestic Violence Hotline. If you or someone you know might be a victim of domestic violence in the United States, please contact 1-800-799-7233.

  Books by Tara Taylor Quinn

  Harlequin Special Edition

  The Daycare Chronicles

  Her Lost and Found Baby

  Harlequin Superromance

  Where Secrets are Safe

  Her Secret Life

  The Fireman’s Son

  For Joy’s Sake

  A Family for Christmas

  Falling for the Brother

  Harlequin Heartwarming

  Family Secrets

  For Love or Money

  Her Soldier’s Baby

  The Cowboy’s Twins

  Visit the Author Profile page at www.Harlequin.com for more titles.

  Join Harlequin My Rewards today and earn a FREE ebook!

  Click here to Join Harlequin My Rewards

  http://www.harlequin.com/myrewards.html?mt=loyalty&cmpid=EBOOBPBPA201602010002

  For my mom, Penny Gumser, who is

  still showing me the meaning of the word mother.

  And who still reads every word I publish. I love you!

  Contents

  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

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Excerpt from Wyoming Christmas Surprise by Melissa Senate

  Chapter One

  “Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here today—”

  The ceremony had been a dumb idea.

  “—Alana Gold Collins to rest. The Father tells us—”

  Hands together at his belt buckle, Flint Collins stared down past the crease in his black pants to the tips of his shiny black shoes. Alana Gold. Such a lofty name. Like a movie star or something.

  Alana Gold. Not much about his mother’s life had been golden. Except her hair, he supposed. Back when she’d been young and pretty. Before the hard life, the drugs and prison had had their way with her.

  “—all will be changed at the last sounding of the bell...”

  The Father might have imparted that message. The Bible surely did, according to the preacher he’d hired to give his mother a funeral. Dearly Beloved, he’d said. That would be Flint. The dearly beloved. All one of him.

  He’d never known any other family. Didn’t even know who his father was.

  Footsteps sounded behind him and he stiffened. He’d asked her to come—the caseworker he’d only met two days before. To do the...exchange.

  Dearly Beloved. In her own way Alana had loved Flint deeply. Just as, he was absolutely certain, she’d loved the “inheritance” she’d left him. One he hadn’t known about. One he hadn’t yet seen. One that had arrived behind him.

  “So take comfort...” That was the preacher again. For the life of him, Flint drew a blank on his name as he glanced up and met the older man’s compassionate gaze.

  He almost burst out with a humorless chuckle. Comfort? Was the man serious? Flint’s whole life had imploded in the space of a week. Would never, ever, be the same or be what he’d planned it to be. Comfort was a pipe dream at best.

  As the footsteps in the grass behind him slowed, as he felt the warmth of a body close to him, Flint stood still. Respectful.

  He’d lost his business befor
e it had even opened. He’d lost the woman he’d expected to marry, to grow old beside.

  Alana Gold had lost her life.

  And in her death had taken part of his.

  The preacher spoke about angels of mercy. The woman half a step behind him rocked slightly, not announcing herself in any way other than her quiet presence. Flint fought to contain his grief. And his anger.

  His entire life he’d had to work longer, fight harder. At first to avoid getting beaten up. And then to make a place for himself in the various families with whom he’d been temporarily settled. He’d had a paper route at twelve and delivered weekly grocery ads to neighborhoods for pennies, just to keep food on the table during the times he’d been with Alana.

  The preacher spoke of heaven.

  Flint remembered when he’d been a junior in high school, studying for finals, and had had to spend the night before his test getting his mother out of jail. She’d been prostituting that time. Those were the charges. She’d claimed differently.

  But then, Alana’s troubles had always been someone else’s fault.

  In the beginning they probably had been. She’d once claimed that she’d gotten on the wrong track because she’d been looking for a way to escape an abusive father. That was the one part of her story Flint fully believed. He’d met the guy once. Had opted, when given the chance in court, to never have to see him again. Sometimes it worked in a guy’s favor to have a caseworker.

  After Alana’s prostitution arrest during his finals week, he’d expected to be seeing his caseworker again, to have her come to pick him up and take him back to foster care. Instead his mother had been sitting in the living room when he’d gotten home from school the next day, completely sober, her fingernails bitten to the quick, with a plate of homemade chocolate-chip cookies on her lap, worried sick that she’d made him fail his exam.

  Tears had dripped down her face as he’d told her of course not, he’d aced it. Because he’d skipped lunch to cram. She’d apologized. Again and again. She’d always said he was the only good thing about her. That he was going to grow up to be something great, for both of them. She’d waited on him hand and foot for a few weeks. Had stayed sober and made it to work at the hair salon—where she’d qualified for men’s basic cuts only—for most of that summer.

  Until one of her clients had talked her into going out for a good time...

  “Let us pray.”

  Flint’s head was already bowed. The brief ceremony was almost over. The closed casket holding his mother’s body would remain on the stand, waiting over the hole in the ground until after Flint was gone and the groundskeeper came to lower her to her final rest.

  Moisture pricked the backs of his eyelids. For a second, he started to panic like he had the first day he’d gone out to catch the bus for school—a puny five-year-old in a trailer park filled with older kids—and been shoved to the back of the line by every one of them. He could have turned and run home. No one would have stopped him. Alana hadn’t been sober enough to know, or care, whether he’d made it to his first day of school. But he hadn’t run. He’d faced that open bus door, climbed those steps that had seemed like mountains to him and walked halfway to the back of the bus before sitting.

  He was Alana Gold’s precious baby boy and he was going to be someone.

  “Amen.” The preacher laid a Bible on top of the coffin.

  Amen to that. He was Alana’s son and he was going to be someone all right.

  “Mr. Collins?”

  The voice, a woman’s voice, was close to him.

  “Mr. Collins? I’ve got her things in the car, as you asked.”

  Her things. Things for the inheritance Alana had left him. More scared than he could ever remember being, Flint raised his head and turned it to see the brunette standing behind him, a concerned look on her face. A pink bundle in her arms.

  Staring at that bundle, he swallowed the lump in his throat. He wasn’t prepared. No way could he pass this test. In her death, Alana had finally set him up for failure. She’d unintentionally done it in the past but had never succeeded. This time, though...

  He reminded himself that he had to be someone.

  Brother? Father? Neither fit. He’d never had either.

  A breeze blew across the San Diego cemetery. The cemetery close to where he’d grown up, where he’d once seen his mother score dope. And now he was putting her here permanently. Nothing about this day was right.

  “Prison records show that your mother had already chosen a name for her. But as I told you, since she died giving birth, no official name has been given. You’re free to name her whatever you’d like...”

  Prison records and legal documents showed that his forty-five-year-old mother had appointed him, her thirty-year-old son, as guardian of her unborn child. A child Alana had conceived while serving year eight of her ten-year sentence for cooking and dealing methamphetamine in the trailer Flint had purchased for her.

  The child’s father was listed as “unknown.”

  He and the inherited baby had that in common. And the fact that their mother had stayed clean the entire time she’d carried them. Birthing them without addiction.

  “What did she call her?” he asked, unable to lift his gaze from the pink bundle or to peer further, to seek out the little human inside it.

  He’d been bequeathed a little human.

  After thirty years of having his mother as his only family, he had a sister.

  “Diamond Rose,” the caseworker said.

  Flint didn’t hear any derogatory tone in the voice.

  Alana had been gold. A softer metal. He was Flint, a hard rock. And this new member of the family was diamond. Strong enough to cut glass. Valuable and cherished. And Rose... Expensive, beautiful, sweet.

  He got Alana’s message, even if the world wouldn’t. “Then Diamond Rose it is,” he said, turning more fully to face the caseworker.

  The woman was on the job, had other duties to tend to. She’d already done a preliminary background check but, as family, he had a right to the child even if the woman didn’t want to give her to him. Unless the caseworker had found some reason that suggested the baby might be unsafe with him.

  Like the fact that he knew nothing whatsoever about infants? Had never changed a diaper in his life? At least not on a real baby. He’d put about thirty of them on a doll he’d purchased the day before—immediately after watching a load of new parenting videos.

  He reached for the bundle. Diamond Rose. She’d weighed six pounds, one ounce at birth, he’d been told. He’d put a pound of butter on a five-pound bag of flour the night before, wrapped it in one of the new blankets he’d purchased and walked around the house with it while going about his routine. Figured he could do pretty much anything he might want or need to do while holding it.

  Or wearing it. The body-pack sling thing had been a real find. Not that different from the backpacks he’d used all through school, although this one was meant to be worn in front. Put the baby in that, he’d be hands free.

  The caseworker, Ms. Bailey, rather than handing him Diamond Rose, took a step back. “Do you have the car seat?”

  “I have two,” he told her. “In case she has a babysitter and there’s an emergency and she needs to be transported when I’m not there.” He also had a crib set up in a room that used to be designated as a spare bedroom. Stella, his ex-fiancée, had eyed the unfurnished room as her temporary office until they purchased a home more in line with her wants and needs.

  In an even more upscale neighborhood, in other words.

  Ms. Bailey held the bundle against her. Flint didn’t take offense. Didn’t really blame the woman at all. If he were her, he wouldn’t want to hand a two-day-old baby over to him, either. But during her two days in the hospital the baby had been fully tested, examined and then released that morning. Released to him. Her family. Via Ms. B
ailey. At his request, because he had a funeral to attend. And had wanted Alana’s daughter there, too.

  “As I said earlier, I strongly recommend a Pack ’n Play. They’re less expensive than cribs, double as playpens with a changing table attachment and are easily portable.”

  Already had that, too. Although he hadn’t set it up in his bedroom as the videos he’d watched had recommended. No way was he having a baby sleep with him. Didn’t seem... He didn’t know what.

  He had the monitors. If she woke, he’d have to get up anyway. Walking across the hall only took a few more steps.

  “And the bottles and formula?”

  “Three scoops of the powder per six ounces of water, slightly warm.” He’d done a dozen run-throughs on that. And was opting for boiling all nipples in water just to be safe in his method of cleansing.

  He noticed the preacher hovering in the distance. The man of God probably needed to get on to other matters, as well. Flint nodded his thanks and received the older man’s nod in return. As he watched him walk away, he couldn’t help wondering if Alana Gold would be more than a momentary blip in his memory.

  She would be far more than that to her daughter.

  Ms. Bailey interrupted his thoughts. “What about child care? Have you made arrangements for when you go back to work?”

  Go back to work? As in, an hour from now? Taking Monday morning off had been difficult enough. With the market closed over the weekend, Mondays were always busy.

  And he had some serious backtracking to do at the firm.

  In the financial world, things had to be done discreetly and he’d been taking action—confidentially until he knew for sure it was a go—to move out on his own. Somehow his plans had become known and rumors had begun to spread with a bad spin. In the past week there’d been talk that he’d contacted his clients, trying to steal their business away from the firm. A person he trusted had heard something and confided that to him. And then he’d had an oddly formal exchange about the weather with Howard Owens, CEO and, prior to the past week, a man who’d seemed proud to have him around. A man who’d never wasted weather words on Flint. They talked business. All the time. Until the past week.