by Arlene James
“I guess that’s how it’s supposed to happen,” he said, “but I’ll admit, it takes some getting used to. It did me.”
She half turned and searched his eyes. “Are you sure about this, Edward? Really sure?”
He tilted her head with his hand in order to kiss the corner of her mouth, then planted a kiss on Barry’s forehead for good measure. “Very sure.”
He opened the door, and she walked through without a backward glance. Very sure, he told himself once more, so sure that he never intended for her to set foot in this place ever again.
He drove her first to the diner, at her insistence. There much was made about the condition of her face and Edward’s bravery. He felt like a fraud, but when he tried to explain, Laurel elbowed him neatly in the ribs and changed the subject.
“We’re going to be away for a few days,” Laurel told her friends and co-workers hesitantly. “Ed doesn’t think it’s safe for us to stay at the apartment, at least not until the restraining order comes through.”
“That’s right” he said, “at least.”
Fancy immediately offered her place. “You know you can always stay with me, sugar, and don’t worry about being safe. I keep a loaded gun in my bedside table.”
“I hope you have a permit for that,” Edward said.
Fancy grimaced. “Lawyers.”
Laurel changed the subject once again. “Ed has a spare room at his place, and, um, I guess we’ll be staying there since we’ll be working a lot on the case from now on.”
“A lot,” Edward echoed helpfully.
Fancy narrowed her eyes but kept silent. Shorty assured Laurel that they could get a substitute for a few days. It went without saying that after that, she’d have to rethink her options, which included taking an unpaid vacation, quitting or simply coming back to work. As far as Ed was concerned, she could quit now, but he couldn’t very well say that just then. So he simply put her and Barry back in the car and drove them home.
Home.
That’s exactly what he wanted it to be from then on—her home. Their home.
Chapter Thirteen
It was an interesting house, an old fire station converted with Parker’s talented guidance, and Edward seemed anxious for her to like it. The sturdy redbrick facade had been altered to include a covered front garden and a skylight that filtered sunshine into an otherwise dark entry complete with slide pole, around which a spiral staircase turned. The first floor consisted of garage, entry, dining area and kitchen, a dream of efficiency in cream and blue and containing the original cookstove. The furniture in the dining area was all wrong—too much chrome and black slate—and the entry, which would have made an excellent gallery, was virtually empty, save for some utilitarian hooks screwed directly into plain white walls.
The upstairs was more spacious, with living area, two bedrooms and the largest bath she’d ever seen. Indeed, the master suite was enormous, featured a lovely redbrick fireplace and was sparsely furnished. The huge walk-in closet was very nearly empty or looked it with only Edward’s clothing hanging on a single rod. Edward’s utilitarian decor left much to be desired, but the place had such wonderful possibilities that Laurel itched to start looking at fabric swatches and paint samples. She couldn’t help thinking what a wonderful studio and showroom this place would make, but she reminded herself that this was a temporary situation at best. This place was not hers and never would be. Nevertheless, certain realities had to be addressed.
The extra room was smallish, with a full-size bed and a mismatched dresser taking up most of the space. Laurel had Edward shove the bed into the corner and set up Barry’s crib at its foot It was cramped, but it would do. They had to share the bathroom with Ed, but space was no problem, and she figured they could keep out of each other’s way.
Keeping out of the way was exactly what she intended to do as long as she was there, while pulling her own weight as much as possible at the same time. She figured she could at least put together some meals and do some light cleaning. Other than that, it would be very nice just to spend some time with Barry. Maybe she’d have Edward take her to the library for some reading material. It had been a long time since she’d had the pleasure of reading at her leisure. Other than that, she didn’t know what she was going to do with herself for the next few days, or afterward for that matter, but she didn’t have to think of that this first night.
At any rate, she was too tired to think that night. The emotional and physical toll together had sapped her strength. At her insistence, she put together a light dinner from the few ingredients in Edward’s kitchen. Afterward, she and Barry retired to soak in a warm tub before bedding down in the same room.
She was even more exhausted than she thought, for she woke in the middle of the night to find Edward standing over Barry’s crib in nothing more than pajama bottoms, Barry fussing against his bare chest. She tossed back the covers and reached for her robe, slinging it on over her cotton shorty.
“I’m sorry he woke you,” she said, coming to stand beside them. “He’s teething.”
Edward juggled him up and down and patted his back to no avail. “Yeah, I know. Parker explained it to me. But he didn’t wake me. I was working on a brief.”
“Well, I’m sorry he disturbed you, anyway,” she said, gingerly lifting him from Edward’s arms. She was acutely aware of the feel of his skin and the silky crispness of the hair that covered him in a triangle drawn from chest to navel. “I’ll give him his medicine and get him back to sleep.”
“I could do it,” he said. “You’re tired.”
She shook her head. “No, I can’t let you do that. Besides, I want to do it. I’m just so glad to have him with me.”
Edward nodded. “Okay. Where is it? I’ll get it.”
“The medicine? On the dresser.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed with Barry, who continued to fuss, and tried to calm him. Edward brought over the medicine and the measuring tube with its spoonlike extension. He poured the dose and handed her the tube. She got the dose down Barry but only with great effort and some spillage.
“Maybe he’s hungry,” Edward suggested helpfully.
“Maybe.”
“I’ll get a bottle out of the fridge while you change him.”
“You don’t have to do that,” she protested, but he just shook his head and left the room, returning moments later with a bottle in hand.
“Do I have to heat it?” he asked uncertainly.
“No, the cold helps his gums,” Laurel said, struggling to get Barry into a fresh sleeper while he squirmed around and reached for the bottle. She thought he was reaching for the bottle, but when he had the nipple clamped firmly between his front teeth, he surprised her by reaching up again—for Edward.
Edward scooped him up and cradled him against his chest. Barry lay along Edward’s arm, one leg crossed nonchalantly over the other, the bottle held securely between both hands while he drank from it. He looked like a miniature couch potato kicking back in his favorite recliner.
“There, see,” Edward said proudly. “He was hungry.” He tickled Barry on the chin. Barry stopped sucking up milk long enough to grin around the nipple, then went right back to filling his belly. “A growing boy needs more for supper than some mashed peas and a few noodles, doesn’t he? Yeah, tomorrow we’re going grocery shopping, fill up our cart with…” He looked at Laurel. “What’s he eat anyway?”
“Baby food mostly,” she told him, straight-faced.
His own expression said, “Duh.” He grinned at Barry and teased, “This ain’t no baby. Uh-uh, this here is a boy, and boys need junk food, don’t they? Lots and lots of junk food.” He poked Barry in the belly with his finger and got a giggle for it.
Laurel rolled her eyes. She could see a case of hero worship developing—or the infant version of such—and she wasn’t sure that she liked it. She was, in fact, just a little jealous. Barry had never preferred anyone to her. She started to reach for him, only to draw back wh
en Edward frowned and said, “You know, Parker said that a bottle might not be good for him at this age if he’s prone to ear infections. He said we might need to go to a cup with handles pretty quick.”
We? Laurel thought. Who did he think he was? Never mind that David had said the very same thing to her. She got up in something of a huff, plucked Barry out of his arms and climbed back onto the bed, folding her legs beneath her. Barry was looking at her as if to ask what bug had bitten her, and she made an effort to put on a normal, adoring mommy face. Apparently satisfied that it had been a momentary aberration, he turned his attention to sucking vigorously on the bottle, getting as much of it down as he could before sleep pulled him under. Greedy little love. She almost forgot about Edward standing there. Almost
She looked up to find him leaning one shoulder against the door frame, arms folded across his broad chest, one ankle crossed over the other. He had a sappy, kind of secretive smile on his face, and he had filled his gaze with her and only her. She felt it head to toe, and it was the most unsettling feeling she’d had yet. He looked so male standing there, so proprietary. It fairly took her breath away. She swallowed with a dry throat and softly said, “He’ll be asleep again soon. You can go on back to what you were doing.”
“I don’t want to go back to what I was doing,” he said.
She was momentarily at a loss. Surely he didn’t mean to just stand there and stare. Sit and talk? Play a game? Go out for coffee? She had to ask. “What do you want to do?”
His expression said, “You know.” He didn’t move a muscle, and yet suddenly he felt so close, imminent. He was swamping her, overwhelming her with his male presence. His voice thick and unusually deep. He said, “I want to crawl into that bed with you and stay the night—and I don’t mean to sleep.” Then he sighed and swung his big body away from the wall. A single, easy step brought him up to the bed. In one lithe, fluid, completely natural motion he bent and kissed her forehead, skimmed his fingers over Barry’s dimpled cheek, and then he turned and walked out of the room.
She sat there with her mouth open, feeling so much at one time that she couldn’t identify any of it. She held her baby in her arms and mentally counted the hard, erratic beats of her heart. She had suspected this was coming, and yet she hadn’t expected it to feel like this, part thrill, part sadness. She wouldn’t be stupid enough to think that it had anything to do with love. She had to accept that it didn’t. Anything else was a sure ticket to misery, not that she could escape that particular fate now. It was already too late for that. It was already love on her part. Whatever happened now, she was going to get her heart broken. That’s what always happened. That’s what always would happen until she learned to guard her needy heart. She looked down at the sleeping baby in her arms and told herself that this was enough. For the first time, she didn’t quite believe it. But it had to be enough. It just had to be. She couldn’t bear to think that even this might be taken from her.
Edward wouldn’t let it happen. That much she believed. She had to. She simply had to.
Despite a restless night, she got up early enough to make Edward’s breakfast. It was the least she could do. After all, he was her white knight, her help, protector. He was also better looking than he had any right to be in a crisp, closely tailored shirt of dazzling white with vertical mauve stripes a half-inch wide, and with a mauve tie with narrow white diagonals. His mauve slacks fit superbly, soft despite the small precise pleats at the waist, and broke at the instep with a generous flow of fabric. He was wearing his hair a little shorter on top than current fashion trends dictated, but on him it somehow looked right. Cleanly shaved, his mustache neatly clipped and combed, he had a dangerous look about him, a look that said, “Beware. I take care of my own.”
Barry kicked the overturned pot on which he was sitting and stuffed omelet into his mouth with his fist. She had tied him to the back of the chair with a dish towel, and he apparently thought it was all great fun. His eyes lit up when Edward came into the kitchen and sat down at the small table, smelling of something exotic that Laurel could only assume was in his after-shave. She had never smeiled it before. Her hands shook a little as she offered up French toast and wedges of cheese omelet, with hot coffee and milk.
Edward smiled. “Looks good.” His eyes were on her even as he picked up his knife and fork. “I think I could get used to this, but you don’t have to cook my breakfast. I’ve been living without such luxuries a long time.”
“No, I want to,” she insisted, sitting down in her own place.
He shrugged and tucked in, eating with flattering gusto and more than a little haste. Finished, he got up and carried his plate to the sink, where he scraped and rinsed it before stashing it in the dishwasher. Then he, fetched the coffeepot and carried it to the table, where he refilled Laurel’s cup and finally his own. He put the coffeepot back on the burner, and on his way to the table again took a legal pad and a pencil from a drawer. Laurel smiled at that little idiosyncrasy.
“Do all attorneys keep legal pads as kitchen equipment?”
“They do if they can’t remember what they need at the grocery store without writing it down first.”
“Ah.”
But a grocery list wasn’t on his mind. He sat down, wrote something at the top of the page and then targeted her with his gaze, saying, “Tell me everything you can think of about Avon Miller.”
Laurel cocked her head. “Why?”
“Because it’s better to be safe than sorry,” he said succinctly. “I’ve already got an investigator on her trail, but he can use all the help he can get—and so can we.”
A small blot of panic burst in her chest “W-why do we need to find Avon?”
“So she can tell the court that she wants you, and not her nogood brother, to raise Barry, just in case the letter is not enough.”
“Oh.” That didn’t feel like much comfort somehow. Laurel tried to push away the fear that threatened to explode within her, but it was too strong. She gulped and leveled pleading eyes at Edward. “What if we find her and she’s changed her mind?”
Edward shook his head. “With a brother like Bryce Miller as the alternative? No, I don’t think so.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean, what if she changes her mind about not wanting to raise Barry herself?”
Edward put his pencil down. “I didn’t think of that. I mean, I just assumed…Is she likely to change her mind?”
Laurel ran a fingertip around the rim of her cup. “I don’t know. I don’t think so, but I keep imagining myself in her place, and I know that nothing and no one could keep me from my son, no matter how difficult it might be to raise him on my own.” She turned a bleak gaze on Barry who, sensing something afoot, had paused in the act of squishing syrupy French toast between his fingers and was dividing a stare between the two of them. “Do you think, if she sees him that she’ll want him with her?”
Edward’s big hand moved across the table and covered hers. “I don’t know, honey. I only know that if she was like you, she wouldn’t have left him in the first place, and since she had, we might have a good case to keep him even over her objections. But I won’t lie to you. It would be a hell of a fight.”
Laurel turned her hand in his and squeezed, grateful that he would go so far with it, but that didn’t really help. “I couldn’t do that,” she said shakily. “Avon’s the one person I couldn’t fight for him.”
“Because you can put yourself so easily in her place,” Edward surmised correctly, and she nodded. “I’ll call off the search,” he said. “It was just a fail-safe bid, anyway. We can make do with the letter.”
But Laurel heard a note of doubt in his voice. “Wouldn’t it be better to have Avon here to testify, though?”
Reluctantly he looked her squarely in the eye. “I told you that I wouldn’t lie to you. The answer is yes. But we’ll take our chances with the letter anyway. We may have to. We may not even find her.”
She leaned her bowed head against her free
hand, elbow against the table, and tried to think. “You can’t know how I’ve lived in fear that Avon would show up again one day and demand to have her son back, and yet, she’s my friend. I care about her. I want what’s best for her, too.”
Edward’s grip on her hand was so tight that it was almost painful, but hers was equally tight. “She left him, Laurel. She abandoned him. She doesn’t deserve—”
“Yes, she does,” Laurel interrupted firmly. “Don’t you see? No one’s ever loved her. She’s young, and she was scared that she didn’t know how to be a mother, but that might have changed by now. She might have come to understand that no one really knows how to be a mother. It’s a learn-as-you-go project. God knows I knew nothing about it when I began.”
“But you did it,” Edward argued.
“I didn’t have any choice.”
“Yes, you did. There are social agencies in place to—”
“I’d never just dump him—”
“I know that! That’s my point exactly.”
She looked down at their linked hands. “I was dumped,” she said softly, “in one boarding school after the other. That’s the way of it, you know. The wealthy dump their unwanted kids in boarding schools. The poor resort to social services.”
“Or friends they can trust,” Edward pointed out. “That’s what makes me think that Avon is more responsible than some. She chose you. She knows you have a heart full of love for that little boy. I’m convinced that she couldn’t have chosen a better mother for her son, and I’m going to convince a judge of that, too. All right?”
Laurel found herself able to smile, to hope. “All right.”
“Good. So it’s your call. Do we look for Avon Miller or not?”
Laurel bit her lip, thinking, and finally said, “Look for her. If she’s having second thoughts, better to know it now than later.”
He nodded, and gave her hand a final squeeze. “Wise choice. Now…” He released her hand and picked up the pencil again. “Tell me everything you know about Avon Miller.”
