The Baby Notion

by Dixie Browning

  But “Darlin’” drawled in that soft, raspy baritone of Jake’s, made her insides shiver. “What…what am I supposed to remember?”

  “About wantin’ a baby?” Jake prompted.

  She yanked her seat belt away from her neck again. “That was a private conversation,” she said stiffly.

  “In a public place,” he reminded her. “But, honey, Miss Agnes was right. Maybe you’re not quite ready to take on a baby.”

  She looked so hurt he started to take back his words, but dammit, it was the truth. She was useless. Pretty as a picture—about the sexiest female who ever filled out a pair of jeans—but totally useless. “Now, look—don’t take this the wrong way, but maybe you ought to look around for a husband before you start making any babies.”

  At least, he thought, a husband would see to it that she didn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater—or toss it in the dryer when it got wet. That any woman her age could be so flat-out helpless amazed him, it surely did. By the time she was Priss’s age, his mama had been holding down a job, growing her own tomatoes, chilies and onions in a two-by-four plot behind the trailer and trying to raise a kid who was hellbent on kicking over the traces.

  “That’s a rotten thing to say. Just because I didn’t dry your clothes—”

  “Honey, I’m only trying to do you a favor. This Rosalie of yours—did you ever think she might not want to take on the raising of a youngun at her age? You said she was getting on in years.”

  “You think I can’t do it by myself? You think just because I have a housekeeper—just because my mother and father sent me east to school—that I’m spoiled and useless and—” Her voice faltered. “Is it because of the sausage?” A look of horror dawned on her face. “It is! You think just because—”

  “Now, honey, calm down. It’s not the sausage, and I never said you were useless. All I said was—”

  “You didn’t have to say it. You think I couldn’t pour myself a glass of water if I was dying of thirst. You’re just like everyone else, you think that just because Daddy had money, just because I’ve always had Rosalie, I can’t do a blessed thing for myself!”

  “No, I don’t. I didn’t say anything about—”

  “Well, let me tell you something. I don’t have all that much money anymore. I have to watch what I spend just like everyone else, and I’m even studying—”

  “So how come you can afford to hand out two hundred and seventy bucks, times a whole bunch, on a whim?”

  “It wasn’t a whim, it was my birthday present to myself. I saved up for it, and it’s none of your business. And besides—what were we talking about?”

  With a reluctant grin, Jake told her. “Money. Babies. Rosalie.”

  “Yes, well, how do you think she’d feel—Rosalie, that is—if I took over all her work? She’d be the one to feel useless, and let me tell you, there’s nothing worse than feeling useless!” Her indignation would have been funny if her eyes hadn’t been blinking so hard he could feel the breeze all the way across the seat.

  Turning in at the showy entrance to the Willow Creek Arms, Jake did his best to ignore those flapping, inch-long, navy blue lashes that should’ve looked all wrong with her whiskey-brown eyes, but didn’t.

  After wheeling into an empty slot beside a heating contractor’s van, he cut the ignition, turned to face her, and gathered both her hands in one of his, trying not to notice the contrast between his scars and calluses and her soft, perfectly manicured fingers. “Now listen here, you want to calm yourself down before you blow a gasket. Chances are, you’re not going to be able to do more than go inside and grab a change of clothes—and maybe a decent pair of shoes.”

  “I’m staying.”

  “Mmm-hmm. But just in case, don’t you think—”

  “It’s my apartment. I pay the rent. If I want to stay, then nobody’s going to keep me out.”

  Jake couldn’t figure out whether she really believed it or was just trying to crank up enough courage to storm the fort. At that moment, he could well believe she was her father’s daughter, and he’d never even met H. T. Barrington.

  He knew the type, though. He dealt with them all the time, buying and selling their horses. Some of them were real fine folks. Some weren’t worth cow flop, but he went on buying and selling their horses because he was good at it, and because he could make more in commission on a few good sales than he’d made in all his wrangling and rodeoing years put together.

  And every sale he made brought him that much closer to his long-term goal.

  Priss opened the door and slid out before Jake could stop her. Moving stiffly, thanks to the weather and too many years spent getting his carcass busted—getting thrown again this morning by that damned stud hadn’t helped, either—he eased out from behind the wheel, and caught up with her just as the super came out to meet them.

  “Miss Barrington, you can’t go inside yet. I’m real sorry, but the fire chief would have my scalp.”

  Priss pointed up to the second-floor balcony of her apartment. Through the sliding-glass door, a man on a ladder was clearly visible inside. “That’s my dining room chandelier he’s messing with! How dare you tell me I can’t go in when you let a stranger inside my apartment?”

  How dare you? Jake couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard that quaint expression. Just in case, he eased up beside her, ready to grab hold of her arms if she started swinging. “Come on, now, honey, be reasonable,” he placated.

  “Reasonable! People I don’t even know are free to mess with my chandelier and I’m not even allowed to go inside?”

  “Honey, you have to understand-—”

  “They’re bonded, Miss Barrington,” the super said anxiously.

  “I don’t care if they’re cast in bronze, I want them out of my house, and I want you out of my house, and I want—I want—”

  Her voice wavered dangerously, which was when Jake decided it was time to take a stand. He turned to the super. “Now, why don’t you just explain to the lady what’s going on in there, friend?” Priss moved closer and Jake wrapped an arm around her waist and hooked his thumb under her concho belt in case she tried to bolt. Times like this, a short rein was called for.

  The superintendent started gabbling like a turkey trying to outrun a coyote. He had more to say than Jake wanted to hear about leaks and cracked drywall, about ceiling fixtures that were full of water that had to be dried out and rewired, and walls that had to come down to give access to a whole bunch of stuff.

  By the time he got around to the problem with the vent pipes, Jake had stopped listening. Priss’s brows were down, her chin was poked out, and her mouth looked ready to start spitting bullets. Either she was about to blow, or she was about to cry, and Jake didn’t know which he’d rather deal with. All he knew was that all hell was fixing to bust loose unless he stepped in and cooled things down.

  He turned to the super. “I reckon we’re going to have to disoblige you, friend,” he said gently. “You’ve got my word that we don’t aim to cause any trouble, but the lady needs a few more of her personal belongings, and I’m here to see that she gets ’em.”

  Whatever protest the man was about to make died after one look into Jake’s level, steel-gray eyes. “Well…okay, but you’ll both have to wear hard hats,” he conceded grudgingly.

  “Fine. Bring ’em on.” Jake removed his Stetson and carefully walked back to place it on the front seat of his truck. Handed two construction hats, he settled one on his own head, then considered Priss’s shaggy, haystack hairdo. “Easy now—looks like we might have to squash your hair down a mite to get this thing on your head.”

  Enough was enough, as far as Priss was concerned. Snatching the bright blue hardhat out of his hands, she jammed it on her teased and spritzed hair without regard to the result, and said, “Come on, if you’re coming. I haven’t got all day!”

  It was more than two hours before they headed north again. The space behind the front seat was stacked high with lugg
age, tote sacks and half a dozen framed watercolors, which Priss had insisted on dropping off at a framer’s to be cleaned up, rematted and reframed.

  Jake waited, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel while she went inside, wondering just when his brain had started to mildew.

  A scrawny little chair had to be dropped off at a refinisher’s shop—he insisted on carrying it in himself, in spite of her insistence that she was perfectly capable of carrying a vanity chair.

  A vanity chair? What the hell did she do with that—sit down and practice being vain?

  The funny part was that in spite of her looks and her background, he didn’t think she was vain at all, which sort of surprised him, now that he thought about it.

  Back in the truck, she called her insurance agent, discussing at length the effects of water on feather cushions and linen draperies, which led Jake to share with her his philosophy about living close to the bone.

  “I’ve never set much store by fancy furniture and such. See, the way I figure it, it doesn’t make much sense to load yourself down with a lot of nonessentials. Anything you can own, you can just as easily lose, so if you don’t own too much, you can’t lose too much.”

  If Priss appreciated his words of wisdom, she didn’t say so.

  Jake shrugged. “Now, I’m not meaning to sound unhospitable or anything like that, but do you think you’re going to be staying long enough to use up three big suitcases full of clothes?”

  “Some of them are Rosalie’s things. She wouldn’t want me to leave them where strangers could paw through them. And if you don’t want me, just say so. I’m sure I can find a room at the hotel.”

  The finishing school accent was back on duty. He’d noticed that it came and went, depending on how comfortable she was feeling.

  “I’m sure things have thinned out by now,” she said.

  “Think so, huh? You know what day this is?”

  She blinked at him, and once more Jake felt the draw of whatever spell it was she’d cast on him with those whiskey-colored eyes of hers. “Friday?”

  “Friday the what of what?”

  “Friday the…second of July?”

  “Which means tomorrow’s the third, and Sunday’s the—”

  “I can count, for mercy’s sake!”

  “Okay. Then what happens every Fourth of July?”

  “The parade, the barbecue, and the square dance. Oh, shoot!”

  Priss had planned to be out of town over the Fourth because she always cried at parades and ruined her mascara—march music affected her that way. And barbecue reminded her of that awful mess last year on her birthday. And as for the dance, every time a man asked her to dance, and surprisingly enough, many did, she found herself wondering if he was only interested in the money he thought she still had, or if he was one of the boys who’d been scared off by her father years before and was wanting to try his hand at seducing her now that the old man was out of the picture.

  All things considered, Priss had never cared much for the Fourth of July celebrations in New Hope. At least in Dallas, whenever a man paid her any attention, she was reasonably sure he wasn’t thinking about who she was and the money H.T. was supposed to have hidden away where the IRS couldn’t find it until the statute of limitations had run out.

  She heaved an enormous sigh. What a miserable mess. Maybe she ought to move away and start all over somewhere else, where no one had ever heard of Horace Barrington and his Canadian mining operation and his fancy offshore investments and his trouble with the IRS.

  “Rainbow,” Jake said, breaking into her dreary train of thought.

  “Where?”

  He pulled the truck onto the shoulder and rolled down his window. Reaching across the seat, he drew her over until the brim of his hat nudged her hair, and pointed. “Right over yonder, see? One foot over by that grain elevator, the other over near Denton County.”

  Priss saw it and breathed softly in wonder, feeling a ticklish little flutter that might have been caused by such transient beauty or might have been caused by the scent of Jake’s skin, the laundry-soap-and-horse smell of his clothes. If he used a cologne, it was a subtle one.

  Or maybe he hadn’t felt the need to gussy up just for her.

  “Who’s Eddie?” Jake asked quietly, his breath stirring tendrils of hair against her throat.

  “What? Who?” She watched the rainbow shimmer and begin to fade as another layer of clouds moved in.

  “This Eddie guy who married Grace Something-orother. He a particular friend of yours?” New Hope was the kind of town that was small enough so that everybody knew everybody else by sight, but big enough so some of them never actually met.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Priss twisted around to glare at him and found herself entirely too close for comfort. Sliding back over to her side of the seat, she made a production of refastening her seat belt.

  “Were you engaged?”

  “No, we were not engaged! If you must know, I went out with him a few times—all right, more than a few times. But it was never serious.” She had only hoped it would be.

  “Uh-huh.”

  She sighed as he pulled back onto the highway and headed north. “He works at the bank. His daddy’s president, and Eddie’s working his way up from the bottom, trying out all the different positions.”

  Trying them out with every single teller, she thought bitterly. For a man who wasn’t particularly handsome, nor even all that intelligent, Eddie had a way of teasing that made a girl forget what a worm he really was.

  It had certainly worked on her, even though Eddie had been one of the two boys who had shown up for her birthday party all those years ago, clogging the pool filter with birthday candles and crepe paper hats and teasing her unmercifully about her breasts, telling her she ought to try Band-Aids, as they’d fit better than the bra she was wearing.

  The creep had come within an inch of teasing her right into his bed! Fortunately, she had come to her senses at the last minute.

  At least, she thought it was fortunate. At the rate she was going, she might never know.

  “Rain’s all cleared up,” Jake observed. “Want to stop off at Buck’s and get some barbecue to take home for supper?”

  “You’re the host.” She had long since lost her appetite for barbecue.

  “You’re the guest.”

  Priss sighed heavily. “Maybe we could pick up a cookbook from somewhere? I do know how to read.”

  Jake shot her a quick look, which she met with a wry grin of her own. “I guess that wasn’t too tactful,” he said. “I, uh, heard about the thing with the barbecue a couple of years back.”

  Grimacing, Priss replied that everyone in Collins County had heard about the barbecue. “At least I learn from my mistakes. Last year I settled for committing a federal offense by stuffing things in mailboxes.”

  “And this year you’re planning to celebrate by getting yourself a, um—what you might call a personal donation.”

  “Oh, Lord. How much did you hear?”

  “Near about everything, I guess.”

  “Yes, well…sometimes I talk too much.”

  He chuckled. “You do have a way with words. Don’t worry about supper, honey—Petemoss’ll round us up something.”

  Petemoss did. The old man met them at the front door, a calico apron wrapped around his ample waist. “So ye brung ’er back. She the one got all the clothes wet an’ left ’em to rot?”

  Jake started handing luggage inside the door while Pricilla did her best not to slink away in shame. “I told you to hook up that dryer before we both ran plumb out of clean clothes. Maybe now you’ll get around to it.”

  “Humph! D’ye get eggs?”

  “No, I didn’t get eggs.”

  “I told ye we needed eggs! Sausage’s gone, too. Stole right out o’ the icebox.” The old man glared accusingly at Priss, who was beginning to come to a slow boil.

  “I used the egg and I ruined the sausage. If you’ll tell me how much
I owe you, I’ll pay you back right now.” She whipped open her purse and reached for her gold-bound, lizardskin wallet.

  “You want to try hitting the rodeo circuit again?” Jake asked, his tone of voice quietly lethal.

  The old man snapped back, “No more’n you do. Ain’t a-goin’ to, neither. If you don’t want me to cook and clean no more, I’ll jest find me a bed in the poorhouse. Be obliged if ye’d forward my mail.”

  Jake removed his hat and raked a hand through his hair, leaving it standing in three separate windrows. He sighed. “Priss, this is Mr. Peter J. Moss, from up Montana way. He’s a first-class rodeo clown and a third-rate cook, and he’s got the manners of a hungover grizzly bear.”

  Priss didn’t know whether to offer to shake hands or to run for her life.

  “Pete, this lady is Miss Pricilla Barrington.” The ex-rodeo clown’s shaggy white eyebrows pole-vaulted all the way up to his hairline. “She’s going to bunk here for a few more days until her place gets fixed up again. If it’s going to strain your goozle too much to keep a civil tongue in your head, then you can damn well sleep in the barn again.”

  “No, please—” Priss stepped forward and laid a hand on the old man’s arm. All three of them stared down at the inch-long, frosted-pink fingernails on Pete’s faded, nocolor shirtsleeve. “That is, I ought to thank you for the use of your underwear, Mr. Moss—”

  “Huh?” the man gawked.

  “Oh, hell,” Jake swore softly.

  “But I can leave right now,” Priss continued. “I really don’t want to be a nuisance. Jake insisted—that is, he didn’t actually insist, but I sort of—well, we…You see, my loaner wasn’t ready, so—”

  “Priss,” Jake said with exaggerated patience. “Kindly shut up and let’s start hauling your gear upstairs while Pete rustles up some supper. That okay with you, Pete?”