“How old was your mother?”
She glanced at Nick, giving all the screws, nuts and bolts one last check in preparation for setting the crib upright and in its place. She was anxious for that moment, she realized. That one small piece of furniture would truly, finally, transform the room from just another bedroom into a nursery. It brought home how close her time was, how few empty nights remained. “She was sixteen.”
“Jeez, she was just a baby herself.”
“She was old enough to have a boyfriend, old enough to go out on dates alone with him. She was old enough to have sex with him.” There was a weary tone to her words, and a familiarity that brought Lydia, in all her self-righteousness, vividly to mind. They were her words, and she had believed them with a ferocity. Once Faith had timidly tried to dispute them, but her great-aunt had shown such disbelief and offense that she had never tried again.
“Hell, I had sex with my girlfriend when I was sixteen, but that didn’t mean either of us was ready to become a parent.”
Faith felt a faint twinge of jealousy at his comment. She wondered which lucky girl had caught his attention eighteen years ago. In a moment of weakness last spring, she had gone to the library and looked up his high school yearbooks. He had been cute, cocky, a so-so student and an outstanding athlete. He had been starting quarterback, played basketball and been the school’s fastest miler before trading track to become the championship-winning baseball team’s pitcher. He had escorted the homecoming queen and been elected junior class vice president. No doubt his girlfriend had been the prettiest girl in school, a cheerleader, probably, or that homecoming queen. The closest Faith had come to cheerleader or queen of anything had been passing them in the hall.
“Some people are never ready to become parents,” she said softly. That was another understanding her mother had helped her reach.
Nick took the remark personally. “I was surprised,” he said impatiently. “You had nine months to get used to the idea. I had a couple of hours.”
“There’s nothing wrong with not wanting children.”
Carefully he turned the crib over, then moved it to the place she’d chosen. There were other suitable locations in the room. She wondered how he’d known that was where it belonged, then warned herself that it didn’t matter. He’d made a lucky guess. Considering the way things had gone for him since his arrival in town yesterday afternoon, he was entitled to a little bit of luck.
Once it was in place, he came back, stopping in front of her, extending his hand. She didn’t mind that she needed help to get up from the floor. It was a temporary condition. A few more-weeks and she would be in as good shape as ever. She did mind, though, that he was the one offering the help. She had always known that simple touching could be a powerful thing. She’d heard of the studies showing that babies deprived of human touch suffered for it in the long run, and she knew from her own experience how empty and unloved a person could feel when there was no one to offer a hug or a kiss or even a casual touch of a hand. She knew what it was like to crave that contact, to feel as if you just might shrivel up and die without it.
But not from Nick. It was his touch—just a casual brush at first that had ignited instantly into something more, something raw, something incredibly breath-stealing—that had tumbled her into bed with him. She had believed at the time that it was magic. She knew now that it had been weakness—and she was already feeling pretty vulnerable this afternoon.
Moment followed moment, until finally he withdrew his offer of help and turned away to study the books on the shelf beneath the carousel horses. He didn’t turn quickly enough, though, to hide the grimace that tightened his jaw.
“You’re right,” he agreed, a sharp, angry sound to his voice that hadn’t been there earlier. “There’s nothing wrong with not wanting children, as long as you make that decision before you have the kids.”
She moved onto her knees, took a breath, then used the chaise and every muscle in her body to lumber slowly to her feet, like some great bear coming out of hibernation. “And when did you make that decision?” she asked, only slightly winded from her exertion.
“Back before I started sleeping with my girlfriend when I was sixteen.”
“So you’re free and clear.”
He faced her, the anger audible in his voice now apparent also on his face. “No, Faith, I’m not. If you don’t want kids, then you have to be careful, and obviously I wasn’t careful enough.”
Pushing her hair back from her face, she found a wide window ledge to lean against. “Answer one question for me honestly. Do you want this baby? Do you want to be a father, to make the changes having a child entails? Do you want that kind of responsibility in your life? Before you do anything you used to do—go to work, go out on a date, plan a trip—do you want to stop and think how it might affect your daughter?”
He looked at her with such dismay, such incredible regret, that it broke her heart. He wanted to say yes. She knew it as surely as she knew that, for her, the answer was and always had been yes. But he couldn’t, not honestly. He couldn’t say that he wanted this child he had helped create, but his sense of honor wouldn’t let him admit that he didn’t.
“Thank you for your help, Nick,” she said softly. “Thank you for your concern. Now please just do one thing for us. Stay out of our lives. Forget about us, and we’ll forget about you.”
Nick had been given a gift that most men in his situation would treasure: absolution. All he had to do was go home and keep his mouth shut, and no one would ever know the difference. Even if Amelia Rose looked exactly like him, no one would make the connection between them. No one would look at Faith and see the sort of woman he’d always preferred. No one would look at him and think that she might possibly give him the time of day. He would be—as she had put it—free and clear.
So, if he’d been given such a great gift, he wondered morosely as he closed Faith’s door behind him, why didn’t he feel better about it?
Because there was no freedom from his own conscience, no clearance from his sense of right and wrong. Doing what Faith was asking would be wrong, and even if no one else ever knew it, he would know. Walking away would cost him more than he could bear to lose—things like honor, self-respect, dignity, pride. But staying would cost his freedom. He would have to give up his job, his home, his friends. He would have to return to New Hope, right back into the center of his family. He would have to somehow manage marriage to a woman he hardly knew, a woman who clearly didn’t want to marry him. He would have to fulfill the two roles he’d hoped never to experience—husband and father—and he would have to do it under the watchful eye of his family and the entire town.
He could learn the father part. God knew, he had the best example in the world in his own father. He could approach it as he did his covert police assignments, as a challenge of successfully pretending to be something he wasn’t. The stakes wouldn’t be as high, not life or death, but close. And who knew? Maybe a few years down the line, he might start to enjoy the pretense. He might even actually become what he was pretending to be.
The marriage part, though.... Faith was pretty. Under better circumstances, she was no doubt a real sweetheart, as his sister had described her. She was bright and obviously capable. Her shop seemed prosperous, and everything was in order at her house. For someone who wanted to settle down, get married and raise a family in a place like New Hope, she would be perfect. There were just a few small problems. He was as settled as he wanted to get. He didn’t want to get married. He didn’t want to raise a family. And he didn’t want to live in New Hope.
But, courtesy of one forgotten night’s overindulgence, those choices might be lost to him forever. He might not—probably didn’t—have any other options that he could live with.
Walking to the porch railing, he rested his hands on it and sighed. He should head home. He’d been gone from his parents’ house for nearly two hours. Someone had surely missed him by now. He didn’t move, though. He
simply stood where he was, his gaze directed to the lawn in front of him, his thoughts still on the woman in the house behind him.
It was a great house, much too big for Faith and Amelia Rose, to say nothing of Faith alone. He wondered if it had been her great-aunt’s house. It looked like the sort of place where someone named Lydia Harper might live. What had the old woman been like? Motherly, he hoped, for Faith’s sake. Generous, apparently, taking in an infant at an age when most women were slowing down and taking it easy.
No matter how motherly and generous Lydia might have been, it couldn’t have been easy for Faith, abandoned by her father, given up by her mother, evidently rejected by her grandparents. While Nick, as a kid, had sometimes wished there were fewer Russos around, Faith must have been wondering where her family was and why none of them wanted her. It was easy enough to understand why her mother had left her with Lydia in the first place—at sixteen, she’d probably had all she could handle taking care of herself—but why hadn’t she reclaimed her? Why hadn’t she gotten herself straightened out, then come back for the daughter she’d left behind?
Maybe Faith had been right. Maybe her mother had been no more thrilled by the prospect of parenthood than her father was. Than Nick himself was.
But he wasn’t like them, either of them. He might not have chosen to become a father, but once the decision had been made, he would certainly never turn his back on his child.
Would he?
The breeze that had been pleasantly cool on his walk over rustled along the veranda, colder now, penetrating his sweater and chilling his skin. He liked days like this, liked the evenings they turned into, and missed them in the warmer climate of Houston. Back in school, he and Dan had often taken the Harland twins out to the lake five miles out of town on nights like this one promised to be. There they’d built campfires, drunk the beer Dan had smuggled from his folks’ refrigerator and...well, done what kids did. He had been young and foolish — but always prepared. Theresa Harland hadn’t trapped him the way Tammy had caught Dan. The way fate had caught him now.
Who had Faith Harper been young and foolish with? Back when she was sixteen—and possibly not much more innocent than she was now—which teenage boy had tempted her at Hardison Lake? Had she gone skinny-dipping when it was warm enough or cuddled in a sleeping bag when it was cold?
The unlikely image made him grin at the same time it sparked a little discomfort. What Faith had done before last February—and especially with whom she had done it—was none of his business. Technically, he supposed, neither was what she did now, except for one small matter: Amelia Rose. The baby made her mother’s life and everything in it his concern.
He walked down the steps, got to the bottom and paused between two brick-bordered shrub beds. He should go on home, he counseled himself, and spend what was left of the holiday with his family. Wasn’t family the reason he’d come here?
And wasn’t it possible—likely—that, in the future, “family” would include Faith?
Wishing that he wasn’t doing this, that somewhere inside he didn’t feel obligated to do this, he pivoted around, climbed the stairs once more and, for the third time in two days, found himself ringing the doorbell. When she opened the door, he didn’t give her a chance to speak or react in any way. He simply, quickly asked, “Want to get some dinner?”
Her gaze was steady and patient. “There’s no place to get dinner in New Hope on Thanksgiving evening.”
“We could go to Dallas. Plenty of places will be open there.” And the chances of being seen by anyone either of them knew were nil. That seemed fair payment for a sixty-mile round trip.
“Look, Nick...” It wasn’t the first time she’d used his name, but somehow it felt like it. It felt different. Softer. Less hostile. “It’s been a long day, and I—”
“Don’t feel much like cooking. You’ve both got to eat.” He tried a smile and was surprised to find that it felt almost natural. “We’ll drive into the city, find a place to eat, and then I’ll bring you home.”
“I have to work tomorrow.”
“The shop doesn’t open until ten.” He wasn’t sure where he’d picked up that little bit of information. The hours posted on the door must have stuck in his subconscious. “It’s not even five yet. You’ll be home in plenty of time.” When she still hesitated, he tried once more. “Don’t you know you can’t spend the entire Thanksgiving Day alone in your house? It’s un-American.”
She stood there a moment longer, one hand clasping the cut-glass doorknob, one socked foot braced atop the other. Finally she sighed. “Is this how you catch crooks down there in Houston? You badger them until they say whatever you want just to get rid of you?”
“I take it that’s a yes?”
Reluctantly she nodded. “I need to change.”
“While you’re doing that, I’ll go home and get my truck.”
Her gaze slipped past him to the empty driveway and the street beyond. “Give me five minutes, and I’ll walk with you.” As soon as the last words were out, a look of discomfort stole across her face. “That is, unless you don’t want... your parents...”
Did he mind his family knowing that he was taking her to dinner? He was ashamed to admit that some part of him did. They would be so damned curious. They would realize that he hadn’t known Faith when he lived at home—she’d been probably about eight or ten years old when he’d left for college. They would wonder when he’d met her. They would want to know what interest he had in a sweet, innocent, unmarried, pregnant woman. They would remind him that she wasn’t his type, that he certainly wasn’t her type. They would probably even warn him away from her.
When he didn’t speak, she gave him a thin, faintly sour smile. “I wasn’t thinking. Go on. I’ll be ready when you get back.”
“Listen, it’s not—”
She cut him off with a wave of her hand. “I’m already the subject of gossip in most households. I’d prefer not to give your family any further reason to talk about me.” With that, she closed the door in his face with a quiet click.
It seemed he’d taken one step forward—and two steps back. He had convinced her to go to dinner with him, only to insult her by silently admitting that he didn’t want his family to see him with her. He would have to be more careful than that in the future, or Amelia Rose would be graduating from high school before he and Faith ever resolved their problem of what to do about her.
It was a quick walk back to his folks’ house, where he had to go inside to retrieve his jacket from the coat tree in the hall. It took a few minutes to say goodbye to everyone, to explain to his mother that he was having dinner with a friend. It wasn’t a lie, he reminded himself as he headed out the door. If she chose to assume that it was an old friend—probably an old male friend—that was her problem, not his.
Less than five minutes after that, he was pulling into Faith’s driveway. She was ready, as she had promised, and sitting in a wicker rocker on the porch. She still wore jeans, but had changed from the big chambray shirt into a white, pleated and tucked tuxedo-style shirt tied at the neck with a narrow black ribbon. The oversize shirts were necessary, of course, to fit over her swollen stomach, but instead of accentuating her size, they downplayed it. They made her look small and delicate.
As he pulled to a stop, she rose from the chair, picked up a jacket and her handbag from the matching footstool and carefully made her way down the steps. He knew he should be polite and get out, go around the truck and help her with the tall step up. He also knew that she would be no more willing to accept his help now than she had been upstairs in the nursery. He just wished he knew why.
It took her a moment to climb in, another moment to settle back and adjust the seat belt. He took advantage of her preoccupation to study her, to notice that her hair shone from a recent brushing, that large sections were drawn back from each side and tied in back with another black velvet ribbon. She’d added simple black hoop earrings and a spritz of floral-scented fragrance. A bla
ck-banded wristwatch circled her left wrist, and around her neck, only a few links visible underneath the shirt collar, was a thin silver chain. He remembered catching a glimpse of it earlier, and he thought,but wasn’t sure, that she’d worn it yesterday, too. He wondered idly if it was simply a chain or if held a pendant, maybe something of sentimental value—a gift from her absent mother, a piece inherited from her great-aunt Lydia.
At last he realized that she was settled and waiting, and he straightened in his seat, shifted into gear and pulled onto the street. “Do you have any preferences on restaurants?”
“I hardly ever go to Dallas. I’m not familiar with many of its restaurants.”
He gave her a sidelong look. “You live thirty miles from one of the biggest cities in the country, and you hardly ever go there?”
“I rarely need anything that I can’t find with a lot less hassle right here in New Hope.”
“So you’re not a big-city person.”
“No.” She glanced his way. “I guess you are, since Houston is... what? Twice the size of Dallas?”
“Not quite, but we’re working on it. Yeah, I like the city. There’s always something going on. You never get bored.”
“I like being bored. I like quiet times. I like knowing all my neighbors and my customers. I can’t imagine any place I’d rather live than New Hope.”
That confirmed one of his earlier thoughts. If he handled this situation the way his family would want, the way his father’s teachings decreed, he would have to give up his job. He liked the city, but he could live in a town, while giving up New Hope for the city apparently wasn’t even open for Faith’s consideration. With his experience, he could probably get a job with the New Hope Police Department, and he might even someday learn to enjoy it. But he would miss the excitement, the varied cases, the complex investigations. He would especially miss the people he worked with. In the twelve years that he’d been in Houston, they had become his family.
Discovered: Daddy Page 7
