Look What the Stork Brought (Man of the Month)

by Dixie Browning

  Sophie said, “Oh, blast.”

  Joe jumped up and held out a staying hand. “I’ll get ’em in, you take care of Miss Iris. She might be scared of the noise.”

  He jogged outside and started snatching wet clothes off the line while rain beat down on his bare head. He might not be certifiable, but he’d be the first to admit he was well on the way.

  On the other hand, he had her right where he wanted her now. On the defensive.

  Right. Then, how come he felt like a lousy dog? How come he made one excuse after another not to cut through the crap, grab what he’d come for and leave? There was still enough left to make a fair showing. As for whatever pieces she’d already sold, it had made the difference between being homeless and out of work, or having a decent home to bring her baby to. Miss Emma, if she was inclined to get tough, might want to stack that up against one more boring exhibit in a dusty, hole-in-the-wall museum.

  Five

  Miss Iris loved the thunder. She didn’t like Joe’s attempts at singing—he’d only tried it twice, when Sophie was in another room, and she’d puckered up both times. But thunder, she liked. Her eyes would get big, and she’d turn her fuzzy gaze in his general direction, as if she thought the whole thing had been arranged for her entertainment. He could’ve sworn she smiled a time or two, but Sophie said it was just gas.

  “I thought babies were supposed to be afraid of loud noises.”

  “People have to be taught to be afraid. I’m not going to teach her that.”

  “Sophie, use your brain,” Joe said patiently. They were seated in the nursery—Joe had dragged a chair in there from the living room. It was either that or sit by himself, because Sophie had taken up more or less permanent residence in her baby’s bedroom. By silent, mutual consent they had postponed discussion of the jade. “There’s a lot of real scary stuff out there. Any kid who doesn’t know that doesn’t stand much of a chance.”

  “How many people get killed by lightning every year?”

  He wrinkled his brow. “I give up—how many?”

  “Not many. And most of them are playing golf. So I’ll teach her not to play golf, and she’ll be okay.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I read up on these things. Natural hazards. Do you know how many snakebite deaths there are each year?”

  “So you’re not going to tell her about snakes?”

  “Of course I’m going to tell her about snakes. And dogs, and cats and birds and raccoons and—”

  “Lady, you take the cake.”

  “That reminds me, isn’t it about time for lunch?”

  “We just had breakfast.” His second of the day.

  “Well, I’m starving.”

  All this intimacy was beginning to get under his skin. The smell of women and babies could undermine any man’s defensive mechanism. First thing you know, he’d start looking around for a woman of his own. Next thing, he’d be building a nest for her to lay her eggs in. And it wasn’t going to happen.

  No way.

  It wasn’t in the books, or in the stars, or even a remote possibility.

  They had tomato sandwiches, two apiece, and Joe caught himself enjoying the way she waded into hers. The lady knew what she wanted. He wondered what she’d seen in Davis. Didn’t have to wonder what he’d seen in her. It was right there for all the world to see. A big, blond, slow-talking, sweet-smiling woman with openness and integrity shining out of her eyes—which was pretty damned ironic, under the circumstances.

  Not to mention a body that made a man think of long nights and short fuses.

  Even when she’d been twelve months pregnant, the thought had crossed his mind. Now, he had to remind himself at least a couple of times a day that he wasn’t in the market for a woman, not on a temporary basis. Not on any basis.

  It was raining hard. Too much lightning to call Miss Emma. Besides, the last few times he’d phoned, she’d sounded so damned despondent it had depressed even him, and he didn’t depress easily.

  Not that he was any hard-core optimist. He’d simply learned over a lot of years to hold it between the lines. Donna called it a defensive mechanism.

  He called it nobody’s damned business.

  They sat in the nursery while the rain droned on and little Iris slept the afternoon away. Sophie wanted to wake her up to be sure she was all right, but Joe talked her out of it. He found a deck of cards in a kitchen drawer along with a tangle of jar rings, paraffin and rotten rubber bands and used them to lure her into the living room.

  They sat across from each other at the coffee table, Sophie cross-legged on the floor and Joe on the sofa. Gentlemanly or not, there were limits to the demands he could make on his body. This was one of the reasons he’d opted for early retirement and starting his own business instead of hanging on and nailing down a desk.

  “It’s called honeymoon bridge,” he told her as he shuffled and dealt.

  She wanted to know who had invented it, and why, and they played around with that for a few minutes. Laughing. Joking. Nothing crude, but just on the edge of suggestive, because she reminded him in a way of his grandmother. Miss Emma would have scoured his mouth if he’d told a blue joke in mixed company.

  With all the time in the world to talk, neither of them brought up the jade.

  It was a quarter of five, eastern time, when the phone rang. Joe had just checked his watch, thinking he’d wasted an entire day when he could at least have talked to his grandmother.

  “Let it ring. Your machine will pick it up.”

  “What machine?” She was already hurrying into the hall, where the phone was. Joe reminded himself that that was another thing he’d take care of before he left. She needed a phone beside her bed.

  “Oh,” he heard her say with a breathless catch in her voice. “The vase? No, I haven’t sold it yet.”

  Another blast of lightning crackled overhead. Joe moved in behind her and said, “Hang up.”

  “It’s...well, it’s sort of a cloudy emerald green, and—Yes, I have several other pieces you could look at... Yes, I could do that.”

  “Sophie, hang up the damned phone!” Joe hissed.

  “It’s out in the country just off 158. You go past Smith Grove community about—well, I’m not quite sure how many miles, but there’s a sign on the left that says—”

  Joe took the phone out of her hands and hung up for her. “Security lesson number one—don’t ever give out your address to a stranger. Hell, don’t even speak to a stranger! If it rings again, don’t touch it, understand? If he’s really interested, he’ll follow up.”

  And when he did, Joe would make a point of letting him know the thing wasn’t for sale.

  “You had no right to—!”

  “I have every right,” he said grimly. “In the first place, it’s dangerous to use a phone with lightning this close.”

  “I told you I’m not—”

  “Then you damned well ought to be! And in the second place, that thing’s not yours to sell.”

  She got all huffed up over that. Eyes snapping fire, or as much fire as Spanish-moss-gray eyes can generate. “It was given to me as an engagement present. Just because my fiancé was a creep—just because the wedding never took place, that doesn’t mean it’s not mine to keep.”

  “Oh, you wish you’d married him, huh?”

  “I never said that.”

  “Iris is his, isn’t she?”

  “I never said that, either!” She was angry and hurt and confused, and he told himself it damned well served her right. All the same, when the phone rang again and she reached for it, he took her by the wrists, and then he took her in his arms and held her while the thing rang seven more times and then quit.

  “Sophie, Sophie,” he murmured. “Give up.” She sagged against him as if she were defeated, but he suspected it would take more to defeat this woman than a missed phone call. “We need to talk about this some more.”

  The phone started in again. He let it ring. Six times. A
nd then he picked it up. Someone—a man’s voice—said, “I know where you live. Why don’t I just drive on out there tomorrow?”

  “And why don’t you just forget it. There’s nothing here that’s for sale.” He hung up the phone just as the power went off with a muffled explosion. “There goes a transformer,” he said.

  “I know that.” She sounded calm. He had to hand it to her.

  “Yeah, well, maybe you do, but you obviously don’t know any better than to give out directions to your house to a stranger who—”

  “You mean another stranger. I didn’t give you any directions, and you found me.”

  Joe rubbed the back of his neck. A part of him wished he’d never talked that deputy into telling him how to find Ms. Sophie Bayard. Another part couldn’t imagine not having found her.

  The storm moved off. Iris slept on. When the power came back on, Sophie went out to the garden to see what damage, if any, the hard rain had done. She came in muddy and discouraged, with scratches on her arms and only a few pods of okra and a scant handful of late blackberries to show for her troubles. After washing up, she waked the baby from a sound sleep just so she could rock her. Said it comforted her.

  Joe wished she would rock him. God knows, he could do with some comforting.

  She wrote ad copy for a living. He’d figured that out from what was on her hard drive and then asked her about it. It wasn’t all that hard to get her started on a subject—he had a feeling she missed working with other people and living in town—but she clammed up whenever he tried to bring up the jade.

  Joe could even understand why she hated to admit to the truth. Once she did, she’d lose everything, because no way was writing ad copy for a couple of newspapers and half a dozen small businesses going to pay the bills. Wait’ll she got her first property tax bill. Wait’ll she got her car out of hock and it gave out on her again. Wait’ll she got an estimate on getting her roof repaired.

  There were a hundred and one things that could go wrong. While he rinsed their few supper dishes and stacked them in the drainer, Joe went over just a few. He didn’t see any way around it. He was going to have to kick the legs out from under her, and he’d sooner break both his arms than have to do it.

  But he couldn’t go back empty-handed and lie to Miss Emma. Nor could he tell her he’d found the stuff, but didn’t want to take it from the woman who had it, on account of she needed it to live on, while all his family wanted to do was stick it in a small museum that was open only three days a week and drew only a few thousand visitors a year.

  He went around the barn a time or two on that one. In the end, he set it aside to deal with tomorrow. Something would occur to him by then.

  The real mystery was why the jerk had left it behind in the first place.

  It had been a long day, what with the storm and the phone call and all. Iris was fussier than usual this evening. No matter what Sophie claimed, Joe figured all newborn creatures had to have been programmed to be afraid of a few basic threats, or else how had the species managed to survive?

  He dried his hands and went in to check on Sophie before he turned in. They were both there in the rocking chair. Sophie’s eyes were closed. She had tipped the chair back so that Iris couldn’t possibly fall out of her arms. Joe stood and watched from the doorway, thinking she looked tired. Maybe this childbirth thing had a delayed effect. She’d already lost most of that golden, sun-kissed look he’d noticed the day he’d first seen her. There were shadows under her eyes. And still, there was something about her that...

  Yeah. Well. Enough about that.

  “Sophie?” he said quietly from the doorway. Iris was making noises as if she was hungry. Joe was surprised she’d gone unfed this long. As a rule, her mama was quick off the mark at the first little whimper.

  She made a funny little puffing sound with her lips but didn’t wake up. Joe crossed to her side, his boots silent on a threadbare fake Oriental carpet. “Honey, wake up, feed the baby and go to bed,” he said. It struck him that for a single man who intended to stay that way, he was beginning to sound dangerously domestic. Downright paternal, in fact.

  And then he heard something else. Something that slammed him in the belly like an iron fist.

  Sophie whimpered in her sleep, and Joe groaned. He touched her lightly on the arm and then shook her gently, just enough to rouse her.

  Her eyes flew open, and in that split second before she came wide-awake, she was totally vulnerable.

  In that moment Joe knew that he could no more walk out and leave her—leave her and her baby, with or without the jade—than he could fly to the moon. That was bad enough. What was worse was having to admit that he could be turned on by a woman who had just given birth to another man’s baby. Either he was totally depraved, or the human instinct for survival and reproduction was a hell of a lot stronger than he’d suspected.

  Later that night, when he was lying awake under a leaky roof, in a bed that was obviously a relic of the ark and still damp, Joe tried to figure it out. The way Sophie affected him. If a woman could experience a delayed reaction after childbirth, couldn’t a man have a delayed reaction after being forced to resign from a career that had claimed his life from the time he’d graduated from college at the age of twenty-two? In both cases, there was a sudden drastic change in life-style and priorities.

  Joe had gone into police work full of enthusiasm, determination and idealism. Some sixteen years later, with a broken marriage behind him, having survived an explosion that had left his hearing impaired, two wrecks that hadn’t done his carcass any good, and a few doses of lead poisoning, he’d resigned. It was either that or hold down a desk job. He hadn’t left the force a broken man, nor even a bitter one. What he had been—still was—was a devout realist.

  So why, he wondered now, staring up at the ceiling in the small hours of the morning, was this particular realist spending so much time devising ways to shore up the income of a woman he’d never even met until a few days ago? What difference did it make to him if her roof ever got patched? Or if she had her locks changed or not, and an extra phone installed, and maybe a dog? A bullmastiff, something that looked fierce, but wasn’t. Any kind of a dog would be more protection than a pop-eyed goldfish with an overgrown tail.

  Joe thought about all this before he fell asleep, but his last waking thought was about none of the above. A soft-focused image of Sophie formed in his mind. Sophie with her breasts bare, nursing her baby. Sophie smiling up at him, sharing the moment.

  Sophie, sharing all that warmth and sweetness with a beat-up ex-cop from Dallas. A man who’d tracked her down with the full intention of accusing her of a crime.

  It was 6:37 the following morning when the phone rang. Joe, groggy, but with a germ of an idea of how to solve both their problems, opened one eye and squinted at his wrist. His watch was on the dresser across the room, so he lay there and swore for a few minutes, and then he eased out of bed, favoring his stiff knee, pulled up a pair of jeans and headed for the phone.

  It stopped ringing before he got halfway down the stairs.

  Sophie poked her head out of her door and said, “Did you hear the phone ringing?”

  “Yeah. Probably a wrong number.” But he didn’t think so, not for a minute.

  “It might be that man about the ad.”

  “Nah—more like a wrong number. Go back to bed, if it rings again, I’ll get it.”

  She was wearing a nightgown, something loose and thick, with about as much style as your average feed sack. On her it looked good. She lingered in the doorway, and he waited for her to say what was on her mind. He had a feeling she still resented the way he’d handled the call last night.

  “Joe... would you come feel Iris’s skin?”

  Would he what?

  “She feels hot to me.”

  “Babies have a higher metabolism. I’m pretty sure I read that somewhere.”

  “But she’s been fussier than usual, too. Last night she slept in such teeny-weeny
little snatches. Just see what you think, will you? Maybe it’s all my imagination.”

  Joe had the same training all big-city cops had, plus a lot of experience. He’d delivered a few babies, driven more than a few to emergency rooms, but diagnosing baby ailments was a little out of his line. He was about to say so when he saw her lower lip tremble.

  Hell, he would’ve checked a shark for tonsillitis before he’d make her cry. “Yeah, sure,” he said gruffly, and followed her into the yellow nursery.

  The baby looked flushed to him, but then, she’d been born looking red enough to be purple. He laid a hand on her thigh, the width of his palm covering more than the distance to her fat little knee. And then he placed two fingers in the crease of her neck.

  “She’s warm, all right.”

  “She’s hot. She’s got a fever. I knew it, something’s wrong,” Sophie whispered. She was wringing her hands. Joe had been around her long enough by now to know she wasn’t a natural-born hand-wringer.

  “Calm down,” he said, his mind racing over the possibilities. They hadn’t been around anybody to catch anything, unless she’d picked up something in the hospital. That wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. There was no question of spoiled milk, because she took hers straight from the motherlode.

  “I’m going to call the doctor.”

  Iris was whimpering. Not howling, the way she would if a pin was sticking her. As far as Joe knew, babies didn’t even wear pins anymore. “Why don’t I drive you in and let someone take a look? That’ll be better than trying to diagnose over the phone.”

  “Oh, would you?” The relief in her eyes got to him. “Or maybe we should call an ambulance,” she said, clouding up again.

  “Two-way trip takes too long. I know the way now. This time of morning on a weekend there won’t be much traffic. We’ll call on the way and have someone standing by.”

  Joe laid the baby back in her crib. She was hot, all right. And listless. It didn’t look good, any way you sliced it. He raced upstairs and grabbed a shirt, ramming his arms into the sleeves while he hopped around, trying to step into his boots without taking time to put on socks.