“They were having a Mother’s Day sale.”
Uh-uh. Don’t let him foot the bill. “It’s February. What do I owe you?”
“Nothing.”
“Hunter, I’m not your charity case.” She’d already started a list of what she owed him, based on the receipt she’d found in the Target bag, but now numbers rushed through her mind as she arrived at a new total.
“Stop.” He sat on the floor with his back propped against the couch and gave her a hard stare—no trace of the cocky grin. “I don’t want your money, and accepting a few necessities hardly makes you a charity case.”
“These aren’t necessities.” She held up a bottle of lavender bubble bath. “They’re frivolities, and I don’t have time for them.”
“Joy’s health and happiness rely in large part on yours, so you need to take care of yourself. That’s rule number one. Taking care of yourself means eating smart”—he held up a bag of trail mix—“staying hydrated”—he picked up the water bottle—“and learning how to relax and unwind”—he pointed to the bubble bath she still held. “I don’t care if it feels frivolous. It’s not. These things are important, and doing them benefits both of you.”
He had a way of pulling her arguments right out from under her, and making her feel foolish in the process. How could she pit her pride against what was best for the baby? She picked Joy up and hugged the infant’s warm little body against her chest. “It was kind of you—”
“I don’t feel kind. I feel like I just kicked a kitten.”
For some perverse reason, the frustration in his voice had her fighting back a smile. “When I was very young, my grandma used to say my pride would be the death of me, but around the time I became a teenager, she changed her tune and predicted my pride would aggravate everyone else to death.”
“You’re grandma might have been onto something.” The words held no malice, and his lips twitched as he stared her down. “You know, Joy and I could have a few beers and watch porn if you wanted to take a bath or”—he pointed to the bag on her lap—“whatever. Afterwards, there’s pizza.”
A bath and whatever sounded like heaven. “The doctor said no screen time for the first twenty-four months.”
“Damn. They’re strict nowadays.” He stood and then extended a hand and hauled her up as well. “I guess we’ll play poker instead. Hang on, I’ll be right back.”
He disappeared down the hall. She folded joy’s blanket then tossed it, plus the shopping bags, into the guestroom. Then she tidied the sofa cushions. Finally, she walked Joy over to one of the front windows and looked at the glowing porch light of the house across the street. “Okay, baby, listen up. Two pair beats one pair. Three of a kind beats two pair. A straight beats three of a kind, and then…shoot, I can’t remember if a full house beats a straight or if a flush beats a straight and a full house beats a flush.”
“Flush beats a straight. Full house beats a flush.”
She turned and watched Hunter walk back into the room. How the man filled out a simple pair of jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt did unspeakable things to her insides.
He stopped several steps short of her and looked around. “Did you…clean up in here?”
“I put a few things away.”
“Don’t trouble yourself. This is a house, not a showroom.” He extended an arm for the baby. “Trade you.”
She tucked Joy into the cradle of his arm and took the bundle he held in his other hand. The bundle separated into a large, dark blue bath towel, a matching hand towel, and a washcloth.
“These might come in handy.”
“Oh. Thanks.” Jeez, someone had given the man guest towels, and he was busting them out for her.
“You’re welcome. Yell if you need anything.”
“I’m sure I’ll be fine.” She grabbed the bag of “necessities” and started toward the hall, but the compulsion to give him something more gracious than the reluctant thanks she’d offered earlier brought her to a halt. She looked over her shoulder at him, framed by the window, holding the baby against his shoulder. “We…” No, not we. Don’t water it down. “I mean I…” Better. “I’m glad we’re here.”
“I’m glad you’re here, too.”
Chapter Seven
Hunter walked around the impound lot, cradling an increasingly cranky Joy against his shoulder and patting her back while Madison exchanged paperwork with a stone-faced dude behind bulletproof glass. Hunter wasn’t close enough to overhear the conversation, but he saw the guy present her with a sheet of paper and use the end of a pen to point to something at the bottom. Madison covered her mouth with her hand and turned as white as the invoice. She leaned in and started talking fast. The man behind the glass crossed his arms over his barrel of a chest and shook his head.
Joy whined, hiccupped, and then spit up all over the side of his neck. Awesome. He switched her to the other arm and used the baby blanket he’d tossed over his shoulder to wipe up the mess. The baby quieted now that she’d popped the cork on the pressure in her stomach. He looked back at Madison in time to see her peel bills off a thin stack and give them to the man behind the glass. He handed her a set of keys and a receipt.
She took both and then walked toward him on unsteady legs. On the drive over, he’d tried to warn her about tow fees, daily storage costs, and processing fees, but obviously his warning had fallen on deaf ears.
“Everything okay?” Clearly no, but he didn’t think leading off with, “How completely fucked are you?” would do anything to level her out.
“I…um”—she scrubbed a hand over her forehead—“I got my keys.”
“Good job. I think this pretty girl is about to conk out. Let’s caravan back to my place, and put her down for an hour or so.” And then have the come-to-Jesus chat he’d put off yesterday.
“All right.” She looked around slowly, but behind her shell-shocked expression he could practically see her mind whirling, and he had to assume the answer to his unasked question was Fucking fucked.
He reached out and took her hand, gave those ice-cold fingers a squeeze. “See you at home.”
She tailed him back to the house and parked the battered maroon Outback at the curb. He met them at the front walkway. Her face no longer looked pale. Red eyes and tear-stained cheeks added color. She cuddled the snoozing baby and shook her head when he held out his hands in a silent offer to take her, so he took the diaper bag from her shoulder and ushered her toward the front door. Instinct told him to start simple. Ask a question she could answer—something that would slowly but surely lead the conversation around to the difficult questions.
“What part of ’Bama are you from?”
“Sorry, what?”
He opened the door for them and repeated his question.
“A little place called Shallow Pond, in the northern part of the state.”
“Nice place to grow up?” He led her into the living room, set the diaper bag next to her purse on the end table, and watched as Madison slipped Joy into the baby bed parked on the coffee table. Then she sagged down onto the sofa as if the weight of the world rested on her narrow shoulders.
“Small. Quiet. Kind of lonely after high school because most of my friends went away to college or joined the Army. The rest moved to bigger places with better jobs.”
He sat down beside her. “You stuck around?”
She nodded and looked at her hands. “My grandma got sick. She needed help.”
“Not many teenagers would take on the duty of a sick grandparent.”
“It wasn’t a duty. I loved her. Grandma raised me. There’s a big question mark on my birth certificate under father, and my mama liked to move fast. Much faster than she could with a baby clinging to her.” She absently attacked the cuticle of her thumb with her fingernail. “Too fast, as it turned out, because she died before I turned two.”
His so-called rough start paled next to hers. He laid a hand over hers to still her restless fingers. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re sweet. But Grandma pretty much took responsibility for me from the start, so honestly, I barely noticed the loss.”
She might tell herself that, but in his observations of life, a person could miss something she’d never had. He threaded his fingers through hers. “So what’s a nice girl from Shallow Pond doing in big bad Atlanta?”
“Screwing up. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed?”
He gave her hand a tug. “The little person right over there says different. Try again.”
She inhaled deeply and let the breath out on a sigh. “Grandma died just after Thanksgiving last year.” Another less deep, less steady breath followed the statement. “God, I can’t believe it’s already been a year. Then again, sometimes it feels like she’s been gone forever.”
“I’m sorry.”
She blinked rapidly, and he mentally kicked himself for not fetching a box of tissues before he’d led her into this emotional minefield. Lack of preparation on his part. He’d known damn well this wasn’t going to be a happy story.
“Me, too.” Tears welled in her eyes, but she wiped them away with the heel of her hand. “At first I distracted myself from how sorry I was with the busy work of planning the funeral and settling her affairs, but eventually I couldn’t outrun all the sorry and lonely stored up inside me. And then this sweet, cute guy hit town and aimed his shy smile my way. I fell like a late August peach.”
Cute guy better pray they never crossed paths. He wouldn’t walk away so cute once Hunter finished with him.
“A few months later, he told me a friend had set him up with a job in Atlanta, and he asked me to come with him. I couldn’t say yes fast enough. I didn’t even realize I was pregnant at that point. Things had gotten so out of whack with me, and I wasn’t paying any attention.” She gave a hollow laugh. “No proposal. No ring. Grandma would not have approved.” A strangled sob hijacked the next laugh. “She’d be so d-d-disappointed in me.”
The tears flowed faster than she could staunch them. He grabbed the baby blanket from the diaper bag and handed it to her, clean end first. “Here.”
She buried her face in it. He waited her out, slowly smoothing back her dark curtain of hair. Eventually she straightened and mopped her cheeks.
“Bet she’d love her great-granddaughter.”
Madison wiped her nose and gave her daughter a watery smile. “She’d adore her. She just wouldn’t think much of the circumstances.”
“Maybe. Or maybe she’d cut you some slack. You didn’t get pregnant all by yourself. Where’s ‘cute guy’ now?”
“Out of my life, which is exactly where he needs to stay.” She folded the baby blanket into a compact rectangle.
“Sweetheart, he’s got obligations to Joy—”
“Uh-uh.” She shook her head. “He denies he’s the father, but even if he owned up, he’s never going to be able to meet his obligations. He takes. He doesn’t give, and the path he’s on leads to an ugly end in an early grave. I can’t put Joy anywhere near that path.”
Shit. “Drugs?”
“A grab bag of addictions, and a place like Atlanta feeds every single one of them, but the gambling is what’s going to take him all the way down. The debts he owes, and the people he owes them to”—she shivered—“he gets desperate and nothing’s off limits. I gave him money until I flat out couldn’t afford to help him anymore, and then he waited until I went to work, broke into my apartment, and took everything he could carry. Some cash and all the baby supplies I’d just bought.”
A hot surge of completely useless temper burned through him. “You called the police?”
“I did. They took a report. They asked around the complex, but nobody knew anything.”
“Did they dust for prints? Pick up the asshole and question him? You need to keep on them, Madison.” He knew he sounded terse and critical. He couldn’t help it. A whole host of unpleasant “what ifs” where working their way through his mind. What if she’d come home in the middle of the break-in? What if “cute guy” brought friends to help?
“I can’t keep on them, Hunter,” she replied in a similarly terse tone. “Because in the midst of transferring to a new job and moving my shit across town to someplace he wouldn’t look for me, I went into labor. I had a baby three weeks early. I’ve been kind of busy.”
And this was where letting his temper off the leash landed him. Barking at the person he was trying to help. He waited until he was sure he had himself under control then looked up and gave her what he hoped was an apologetic smile. “You have a job?”
She drew herself up. “I do. I’m a shift manager for The Daily Grind & Unwind, it’s a coffee chain—”
“I know it well. I usually hit one in the morning on my way to work.”
“It’s a really good job. They’re a large organization, so they pay well and offer big company benefits, like maternity leave and special, negotiated rates for child care. I worked at a store downtown, but when I told my manager about the break-in and my ex, she transferred me to a new store at the GWCCA campus. I was supposed to start New Year’s Day. I figured if I stayed at a cheap hotel and saved up my tips and next paycheck, I’d be able to rent an apartment just in time for the baby’s arrival. But now…” She closed her eyes and rubbed the center of her forehead.
“Now what?”
“The company does everything by the book.” A frustrated groan punctuated the statement. “I can’t return from leave until I get a note from my doctor stating I’m fit to resume work, and she wants me to give it six weeks.”
At a minimum. But he kept the comment to himself.
She let her hand drop to her lap. “Even if I could talk my doctor into fast tracking my return to work—and after what happened yesterday, I can’t—I’d still have a problem because the child care facility closest to work doesn’t accept infants younger than six weeks.”
And the come-to-Jesus ended here. He’d known as much yesterday. Now they both knew. “Good news. I’ve got a vacancy at 614 Sunrise Drive. Room, board, parking, and laundry facilities included.”
“Hunter, I can’t just move in.”
Correction. One of them knew. One of them was still in denial. “Sure you can. It’s easy. We walk out to your car, pop the trunk, and carry a few more bags inside. Boom. You’re moved in.”
What about the move out? When does it happen? Four weeks? Six? Not so easy to pin that part down, is it? Do not fuck up your second chance. Remember trying to explain to a professor why you missed a lecture because Natalie felt lightheaded, or when you failed a test because you’d spent all night in the emergency room while a doctor diagnosed her “premature labor” as an anxiety attack?
She sent him a sharp look. “Don’t joke.”
“Okay, fine.” He didn’t feel much like joking, either, but he also didn’t see any alternatives. “Let’s be serious. What other option do you have?”
“I don’t know, but it’s not your problem. We’re not your problem.”
She’s not your problem to solve.
He shook the echo of Beau’s warning out of his head. He was helping, that’s all. There was plenty of time to provide Madison with a safety net, let her get back on her feet, and then get on with his plans. “You and Joy staying here is not a problem. The only problem I have is when you suggest I should wave good-bye and wish you luck when I know damn well you have nowhere to go, no money to get there, and you’ve already pushed yourself to the breaking point once by trying to do everything on your own.” The temper was coming back, and he tried his best to bank it.
Slashes of red rode high on her cheekbones, giving her otherwise pale face a feverish look. “This isn’t who I am. My grandmother raised me to work hard and take care of what’s mine, not to expect handouts or—”
“I know she did.” He quieted his voice. “And I know you’re rusty with trust right now. But I’m not trying to back you into a corner or take advantage of you. I’m trying to help. When my plans fell through, I was lucky. I had
a safety net, thanks to my sister. For whatever reason, fate put you and Joy in front of me and offered me the chance to do the same. Let me be your safety net.” He stood and held out his hand for her car keys.
She stared at him for a long, indecisive moment and then got up, went to her purse, and dug for her keys. “Thank you,” she murmured as she handed them over. In the process, she accidentally knocked the diaper bag off the table.
“You’re welcome.”
When she turned away and bent down to retrieve the bag, her oversize chambray shirt rode up, and he got an eyeful of her heart-stopping backside in tight black leggings. Some less noble parts of him stood up and took notice. Want to win her trust? How ’bout you get your eyes off her ass? He jerked his gaze away and strode to the hall. Her voice followed, and he paused at the door.
“I promise we’ll be quiet and tidy, Hunter. You’ll barely know we’re here.”
…
“Shhh.” Madison gently bounced her crying baby in her arms and did another lap around the living room. Her two hundredth? Three hundredth? She’d lost count. Watery moonbeams filtered through the big windows, lighting her way. “C’mon baby girl, quiet down.” Hunter was one day into a 4x12 shift and had to wake up early tomorrow morning—she glanced at the clock on the cable box and winced at the numbers glowing back at her. Correction. He had to wake up in less than three hours. Joy, on the other hand, was four nights into a sleep boycott. She snoozed after her 9:00 p.m. feeding, like clockwork. The midnight feeding went off without a hitch. But for some reason, the 3:00 a.m. feeding kept spiraling into misery. Luckily, she’d been able to keep Joy quiet enough that they hadn’t disturbed Hunter, but…
The pop of a door opening notified her their luck just ran out. Seconds later, Hunter appeared on the other side of the living room. She almost tripped over her feet. He stood there, all rumpled and shirtless, with a pair of navy sweats riding low on his hips in the haphazard way of a half-awake guy who realized at the last minute he needed to pull something on to avoid stalking naked through his own house.
Emergency Delivery (Love Emergency) Page 7
