The Texan's Surprise Baby

by Gina Wilkins

  She stopped in the store to speak with her mother on the way out. Her dark hair hardly touched with gray, fifty-three-year-old Linda Bell handled the register in the bustling convenience store with an ease Hannah had always admired. Her mom might have married into the resort business, having grown up the daughter of a physician and a school principal, but she’d taken to it with the same enthusiasm as the rest of the extended family, making the store her own realm while her husband ruled over the grounds outside.

  Leaving her mother-in-law to run the register for a few minutes, Linda walked to the end of the sales counter to give Hannah a hug. “You’re leaving for the doctor now?”

  Hannah nodded. “I’ll let you know as soon as I’m back.” She knew her family would be anxious to hear the results of the test.

  Her mom looked a bit wistful. “You’re sure you don’t need me to come with you? I’m sure Mimi could handle things here for a little while,” she added though she didn’t sound entirely confident as she glanced at the customers filling plastic handbaskets with supplies from the shelves.

  “I’ll be fine. The appointment won’t even take very long,” Hannah assured her. “Afterward, I’ll pick up my car and come straight back to the resort. You’re needed much more here.”

  Her mom nodded to concede the point. “Still, I’m glad you aren’t going alone. I’m sure that tire-slashing incident was just random yesterday, but it still made me nervous.”

  Hannah shook her head indulgently. “I’m not going to stop running errands just because some punk flattened my tires. If my car hadn’t been ready to pick up this afternoon, I’d have just borrowed someone else’s and driven myself to the doctor.”

  “Yes, I know you would,” her mom said wryly. “But I’m glad Andrew is going with you today. Thank you for volunteering, Andrew. Someone else would have taken her if you weren’t here, of course, but I have to admit it’s a big help to us that you’re available.”

  Andrew drew his attention away from a couple of young boys nearby to smile at Hannah’s mother. “It’s my pleasure. I’ve never been very good at doing nothing. I prefer making myself useful.”

  Before she could reply, Andrew moved to block the doorway as the two boys tried to exit. “Maybe you’d better pay for that candy before you leave,” he suggested to them, nodding toward the pockets of their colorful board shorts.

  One of the boys started to bluster a denial, but a look from Andrew had him falling sullenly silent.

  “Empty your pockets,” Andrew suggested while Hannah’s mother joined them, hands on her hips in a sternly maternal posture.

  Red-faced, the boys turned over the candy they’d tried to smuggle out. Hannah knew they’d never have gotten even that far had her eagle-eyed mother not been distracted; fortunately, Andrew had been alert. No surprise.

  “Dustin, your parents have been camping here since before you were born,” Linda scolded as she set the candy on the counter. “Having a friend with you this weekend does not give you permission to break the rules of the resort.”

  Teary-eyed, young Dustin gave his scowling friend—the one who’d been most resistant—a look that made Hannah suspect who’d been the instigator of the would-be crime. “You aren’t going to tell my parents, are you, Mrs. Bell? I won’t do it again, I promise.”

  “I should tell them,” Linda answered sternly. “I’ve know them long enough to be certain that they would want to know about this. This isn’t the way you’ve been raised, young man.”

  A tear trickled down one freckled, sun-burned cheek. “No, ma’am. I’m sorry,” he muttered.

  Andrew narrowed his eyes at the other boy, who still looked a bit too defiant. “I haven’t heard an apology from you.”

  The boy lifted his chin, mouth stubbornly closed.

  Dustin elbowed his companion sharply. “Tell them you’re sorry, Quentin. Geez, you don’t want them to tell my dad.”

  “Sorry,” Quentin mumbled, his voice barely audible, his eyes half-hidden beneath his mop of sandy hair.

  “Run along now,” Linda told them. “I’ll have to think about this. I expect you to behave during the remainder of your visit with us.”

  The boys surged toward the door. Andrew took his time moving out of their way.

  “You’re really going to let them get away with that without telling their parents?” Hannah asked her mom, a bit surprised.

  “Never said I wouldn’t tell them,” Mimi piped up from behind the register, frowning with disapproval.

  Hannah’s mom shook her head. “I’ll handle it. I’ll make sure Kelly knows that they need to keep an eye on their son’s new friend.”

  She looked then at the other customers, several of whom had been watching with various degrees of subtlety. A small group of teenagers in the back of the store were nervously eyeing Andrew, keeping the sodas they’d taken out of the cooler in clear view to make sure he knew they weren’t planning to steal them. “Can I help anyone?” Linda offered cheerily, causing the teens to rush toward the front with their drinks.

  Waving goodbye to her mother and grandmother, Hannah rushed Andrew out of the store. They still had plenty of time to get to the doctor’s office, but she preferred being early to taking the risk of running late.

  “Those kids were kind of young to be running around the resort unsupervised, weren’t they?” Andrew commented once they were on the road, Hannah giving directions from the passenger seat of his car.

  “Dustin’s ten or eleven, I think, and I assume his friend is the same age. We do prefer preteens to be supervised on the resort, but I guess his parents thought it was safe to let them come to the store for candy—though I’m sure they were expected to pay for their treats.”

  “For security and safety purposes, maybe you should make an official rule about unsupervised kids in the park.”

  She smiled. “Always on the job, aren’t you, Andrew? Through the years, we’ve had problems with especially wild or unsupervised kids, but it usually only takes a few words with the parents from Dad or Uncle C.J. to settle the issue. On the rare occasions when situations got out of hand and the parents caused as much trouble as the kids, they were asked to leave—occasionally with an official escort from local authorities. We hate to resort to that—no pun intended—but when it’s necessary, we do.”

  “My parents would have wanted to know if Aaron or I were ever caught trying to steal something from a store,” Andrew commented. “We might have broken a few rules in our time, but neither of us ever tested that particular one. Mom would have dragged us by the ears to apologize to the owners, and Dad would have made very sure we never even thought of pulling that stunt again. He never laid a hand on us in anger, but he had his ways of getting his point across—mostly involving chores, bedtimes and video game privileges.”

  Hannah thought of her grandmother’s comment that she could tell the twins had been raised right. “Whatever they did, it worked out well.”

  He shot her a smile. “Why, thank you. I believe that was a compliment.”

  She laughed softly. “It was.”

  His smile faded. “I’ve always hoped if the time came, I’d be as great a dad as my own. That my kid would feel about me the way I do about him.”

  She bit her lower lip. He’d probably also hoped he’d be able to raise his child full-time, rather than on custody visits she assumed would be their eventual arrangement. As much as she hated the thought of all those future goodbyes, she wanted her child to know a father’s love and guidance, just as she had been fortunate enough to have all her life. She had no doubt that Andrew would be a wonderful father. He seemed to excel in everything he did, which she had to admit was more than a little daunting to someone who’d made so many mistakes in her own life.

  She looked out the passenger side window as Andrew stopped at a red light. She groaned when she saw the man in the pickup beside them glaring back at her.

  “Problem?” Andrew asked.

  “Ex-father-in-law.” Of course she�
��d seen Chuck today. It just seemed inevitable, for some reason.

  Andrew looked at the truck with narrowed eyes. “Interesting that he just happens to be at the same intersection today.”

  Hannah shrugged. It was not so unusual really that she occasionally ran into Chuck, considering he lived less than ten miles from the resort, but she figured it was going to be awkward every time, no matter how many years passed.

  The light changed and Chuck peeled away with a squeal of rubber on pavement.

  Andrew accelerated at a more reasonable pace. “I think I need to look a bit more closely at Chuck Cavender,” he murmured. “I don’t like that he showed up today right after your tires were flattened yesterday.”

  She was still reluctant to consider the possibility that her former father-in-law had taken such petty revenge against her. “Chuck’s not stalking me, Andrew,” she said, hoping very much that she was right. “He lives nearby. It’s just coincidence that we were at the same intersection at the same time.”

  “Yeah, well, he’d better stay far away from you in the future.” The words were as close to a threat as she’d ever heard usually easygoing Andrew utter.

  * * *

  At the office of her obstetrician, Dr. Lena Power, Hannah checked in at the desk and was instructed to have a seat in the waiting area. Except for one other very pregnant woman accompanied by a man and a sleepy toddler, the tidy peach-and-green-decorated waiting room was empty and quiet. Tuned into a home decorating network, a television set played in one corner of the room. Stacks of parenting magazines were spread on tables near the seats. Andrew flipped through the pages of one that looked fairly recent, though he didn’t stop to read any articles.

  Hannah shifted nervously in her seat. She had suggested to Andrew that he could drop her off and entertain himself elsewhere until she called him to pick her up, but he’d said only that he had nothing better to do. He’d be fine in the waiting room, he’d assured her. He had a couple of books he’d been meaning to read stored on his phone.

  “Hannah Bell?”

  She looked up to see Dr. Power’s nurse, Dana, standing in the doorway that led back to the exam rooms. Rising, she nodded. “I’m here.”

  Dressed in bright purple scrubs, Dana smiled and backed against the door to hold it open, Hannah’s file tucked into the crook of one of her arms. “Come on back, we’re ready for you. Is this the dad?” she asked, nodding brightly toward Andrew.

  Hannah cleared her throat. “Um, yes,” she said without meeting Andrew’s eyes. She might as well get used to saying it. It wasn’t as if Dana or the doctor would be seeing her family before she broke the news to them.

  “You’re both welcome to come back, if you’d like.”

  Hannah glanced automatically at Andrew then. He sat without moving, giving her the option, but she knew what he wanted her to say. “Would you like to see the ultrasound?”

  He was on his feet almost before she finished the question, his dark eyes searching her face. “If you don’t mind.”

  She didn’t know quite how she felt about it actually, but this wasn’t the time to analyze her emotions. She knew only that she wouldn’t have felt right denying him this opportunity. She gestured to him to follow her as she turned to enter the exam area.

  Ten minutes later, she lay on her back on the narrow, paper-covered exam table, her blouse raised to just below her breasts, the waistband of her pants lowered to below her navel, exposing her midsection. Andrew sat in a chair on her left side, while the sonographer, a stocky redhead who’d introduced herself as Melinda, stood at the right side of the table with the ultrasound wand in hand. After squirting a slimy—and cold—gel on Hannah’s tummy, Melinda pressed the wand against her skin. All eyes were fixed on the monitor above Hannah’s feet.

  Andrew surged to his feet to lean closer when the gray-scale images began to appear on the monitor. He made a low, strangled sound in response to his first sight of his baby’s face. Eyes, nose, mouth, ears. Hannah blinked rapidly against a surge of tears as she mentally cataloged all the features.

  “Look at the little hands,” she whispered to Andrew, watching the tiny fingers open and close, almost as if waving hello.

  Andrew’s hand closed over hers, their fingers intertwining. He seemed to be at a loss for words, a sentiment Hannah could certainly understand. After all, she’d had longer than he had to get used to this idea, had even seen an ultrasound before, though the baby had been just a little peanut with nubs for limbs then.

  The wand continued to scan, displaying the umbilical cord, little legs pedaling lazily, miniscule nubbins of toes. Positioning the wand just so, Melinda smiled warmly. “She’s being very cooperative. Almost as if she’s posing for us.”

  Andrew’s fingers tightened spasmodically around Hannah’s. “She?” he repeated huskily.

  “She.” Melinda pointed to the screen, showing them the proof. “It’s a girl.”

  Andrew sat down abruptly in his chair, as if his knees had given out on him. Because he was still holding her left hand, Hannah swiped at her eyes with her right, her gaze locked on the monitor. Her daughter. Their daughter, she corrected herself with a hard swallow, glancing sideways at Andrew.

  He looked a little pale. He tugged at the collar of his shirt with his right hand, as if it felt a little tight despite the top two buttons being unfastened. And then he drew his gaze from the screen, met her eyes and smiled. “She’s beautiful.”

  She felt one tear escape to trickle down her left cheek. “Yes, she is.”

  Still clasping her hand, he leaned over to brush his lips over hers. And Hannah could almost feel the crack widen in the emotional wall she’d tried so hard to maintain between them.

  Each clutching a still photo of their daughter, Hannah and Andrew met briefly with the obstetrician afterward. Hannah made the introductions. “Dr. Power, this is Andrew Walker. The, um, the father.”

  If she noted the hesitation before the acknowledgment, the tall, slender physician didn’t let it show in the warm smile that lit her face. Hannah had always thought her fortyish doctor had the world’s greatest cheekbones, high and pronounced in a tanned face framed by straight dark hair that strongly suggested a Native American heritage. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Walker.”

  Andrew shook her hand with his usual easy charm.

  The doctor visited with them for a few minutes, said that everything looked good so far for a mid-September arrival, and asked if either of them had any questions. Hannah glanced at Andrew, who shook his head.

  Afterward, Hannah checked out at the desk and scheduled her next appointment in four weeks—after which she would see the doctor every two weeks as the delivery date drew closer. She wondered if Andrew would be with her at the next appointment. She could tell he made a mental note of the date and time.

  She glanced at her watch as they left the doctor’s office. “We’ll have to go straight to the shop to pick up my car before they close.”

  Her car was obviously the last thing on Andrew’s mind, but she welcomed the errand. The past half hour had been so emotionally draining that she needed to focus on something as mundane as new tires and buffing compound. Fortunately, the tire and body shop was only a couple miles from the doctor’s office, so there was no time to talk on the way. She could see the frustration on Andrew’s face when he tried once or twice to discuss their situation and she responded only with directions to the shop.

  “Maybe we could stop somewhere for coffee before we go back to the resort? Or maybe a cup of green tea would be better for you?” he suggested as he turned into the shop parking lot.

  “I’d better head straight back,” she said, twisting the strap of her bag around her fingers. “Everyone is waiting to hear the baby’s sex.”

  He started to say something, then fell abruptly silent. She suspected he had remembered his promise that they would talk only when she was ready. He probably wished now that he hadn’t made that promise.

  Taking pity on him
, she sighed. “I know you think I’ve been procrastinating with you, and you’re right. I have. But it’s time for me to face the music. Why don’t you come by my place tonight and we’ll have a long talk. I know it’s past due.”

  Rather than looking gratified, Andrew frowned. “You don’t have to make it sound like you’re scheduling a root canal.”

  She winced. Had she really sounded so unenthusiastic? “Sorry.”

  He nodded in resignation. “I suppose you want me to slip over without anyone noticing?”

  Because that was exactly what she wanted, she merely shrugged lightly.

  Andrew nodded again. “Let’s get your car. I’ll follow you back to the resort.”

  She could have gotten back just fine on her own, of course, but she knew she’d be wasting her time to suggest he just drop her off and head back.

  She took a deep breath before reaching for the door handle. Even though it was late in the afternoon, she still had much to do before she could sleep that night. Not the least of which was that stressful, but inevitable, discussion with her daughter’s father.

  * * *

  Even though the promised rain had not yet developed by the time they returned to the resort, the clouds had continued to gather all day so that the sky was gray and low. An occasional rumble of thunder sounded in the far distance, warning of the rain on its way. The lake was beginning to empty, a bit earlier than usual at this time of year, in anticipation of potential lightning strikes. Andrew passed several vehicles pulling boat trailers leaving the resort as he drove through the gates behind Hannah. Still, the resort was so busy there wasn’t even an extra parking space in front of the main building. Andrew assumed business was always brisk on a summer Friday afternoon, even when bad weather threatened, but he knew the extra guests from the closed resort added to the crowds. He drove around to Steven’s mobile home to park in the drive there, seeing that Hannah had parked in front of her own.

  He climbed out of his car to be greeted by Steven’s big yellow dog. Andrew rubbed the lab’s ears. “Hey, Pax. How’s it going?”