A Baby in the Bargain

by Victoria Pade

  That was what Gideon was thinking as he got behind the wheel of his car and started the engine.

  Two days with nothing but his own sad company. Or he could be going home, showering, taking Jani to dinner and spending from now until Monday morning with her.

  Hell, he could be going home to her right now....

  Except that she was a Camden.

  Who wanted kids.

  Which meant that having her had to include having kids. And having kids could put him in line for losing kids. Kids who would be half Camdens and would irrefutably connect him to the Camden clan for the rest of his life. Birthdays, holidays, parties, cookouts, celebrations, Sunday dinners—for every bit of it, he’d be with the Camdens...

  With the Camdens...

  He knew he was in a bad way when he couldn’t even muster up any old resentment at the thought of the entire Camden clan. When the thought of another Sunday dinner at Georgianna Camden’s house even had some appeal.

  Maybe he really was a traitor, he thought as he pulled into the parking garage below his apartment building and found his spot.

  Certainly at that moment loyalty was cold comfort...

  He got out of his car and trudged to the elevator, having the same ridiculous sense of hope that he’d had every time he’d made that walk since a week ago Thursday. The stupid, self-torturing hope that this time would be like that time—that he’d ride the elevator up to his floor, the doors would open, and there Jani would be again, waiting for him.

  But tonight—like every other night—the corridor was empty when he got there. Of course, he knew it would be.

  Still, though, disappointment fell over him like a deflated parachute as he unlocked the door to the loft.

  And Jack’s words seemed to echo from the sterile interior as he stepped inside.

  You did this to yourself....

  In order to avoid misery you walked headlong into it....

  Jack had also told him to take another look at his reasons for turning Jani down.

  He just didn’t want to. The more he thought about everything—and that was all he’d done the past eight days when he wasn’t biting somebody’s head off—the weaker his reasons seemed to get.

  He actually laughed mirthlessly at that thought when he threw his coat across a bar stool.

  “Don’t look at the justification for something because that justification can’t hold up?” he said out loud.

  But his reasons for turning Jani down did hold up. They were valid. They hadn’t gotten weaker.

  It was just that Jani had been added to the equation.

  His feelings for Jani had been added to the equation.

  And that had altered things.

  That had made his reasons seem weaker by comparison because his feelings for her were just bigger and stronger.

  Okay, he hadn’t admitted it to himself until that moment, but now, as he went into the bedroom to get out of his work clothes, he suddenly faced facts.

  The size and strength of what he felt for Jani made it impossible for him not to question himself—and this choice he’d made that was killing him.

  He yanked the knot out of his tie and pulled the strip of Italian silk from around his neck. As he went to the tie rack attached to the side of his dresser, he caught sight of a photograph he kept on the bureau.

  The picture was of his great-grandfather, his grandfather and his father at barely twenty-one, all of them standing on the sidewalk in front of the bar that had been the center of the Thatchers’ lives.

  He picked up the framed photograph and took it with him to sit on the edge of his bed and stare at it, remembering...

  In the picture his father and his work-worn grandfather smiled for the camera, but his great-grandfather was somber. Gideon knew that by the time the picture had been taken, Franklin Thatcher had lost all hope of ever reclaiming his reputation or any of the life he’d had taken away from him in the Lakeview debacle.

  “I’m doing what I can, Pops,” he said to that image of his great-grandfather. “I’m redeveloping Lakeview the way you wanted. There will be a community center in your honor—the Franklin Thatcher Community Center. And your name is being cleared in a newspaper article—I know you would have liked that.”

  He genuinely would have, Gideon thought. It might be decades late, but he knew that it would have been a huge deal to the old, old man he’d known when he was a child. It would have been a huge deal to have this kind of public acknowledgment.

  And even coming late, it was still something.

  But the question in Gideon’s mind was: Did all he’d done, all he was doing, earn him something in return?

  A pat on the back. His great-grandfather’s appreciation. Pride in him from his family—sure, it would have earned him those things.

  But a free path to the Camdens? A charge to go get her?

  Never. There wasn’t a doubt in Gideon’s mind about that—he’d heard enough from all three previous generations to know what they all thought of the Camdens. How they felt about them. To his great-grandfather, his grandfather, his father, the Camdens would have remained the dirty low-down dogs who destroyed the Thatchers.

  But thinking of Jani as a dirty low-down dog was just ridiculous.

  In fact, he even found it a little difficult to think of the rest of the Camdens he’d met as that.

  They just weren’t.

  But then, he wasn’t his father or his grandfather or his great-grandfather, either...

  Then it struck him.

  He was a different man than those who had come before him. He’d worked not to end up in that bar, to rise above what the past had left the Thatchers with. He’d learned from their mistakes. He was a new breed of Thatcher.

  And if he was a new breed of Thatcher, couldn’t he accept that Jani’s family was a new breed of Camdens? That they might all be like Jani—decent, honest, honorable people?

  That was what they were known for now, despite some of the stigma that remained from their past.

  So should they be held responsible for what was done by earlier generations?

  He didn’t feel responsible for anything done by the generations before him, he realized. And like what he was doing in Lakeview, the Camdens were trying to make up for the past despite the fact that they’d had no hand in it.

  In one way or another, weren’t they all pretty much working for the same thing? he asked himself. To set old wrongs right?

  They were.

  And maybe it was part of making things right again to do what Jani had suggested he do—put the past behind him. Certainly it didn’t seem fair to him, at that moment, to be forever tied to those old wrongs.

  But there was still the kid issue.

  Jani thought that he would eventually get over his problems with that. That time would heal the wound of losing Jillie and he’d want kids again.

  It wasn’t something he’d let himself think about since deciding to take a no-kids route. But difficult as it was, he forced himself to consider her perspective as he went on sitting on the edge of his bed.

  Okay, yeah, he really had loved being a dad.

  And yes, he really did like kids.

  And a kid with Jani?

  He closed his eyes. He took a deep breath.

  Yeah, he could see himself wanting a kid with Jani.

  God help him, he could actually see himself wanting that a lot.

  Suddenly the feeling was much bigger and stronger than the suffering he’d gone through over losing Jillie...

  He hadn’t thought that anything could ever diminish that pain.

  But at that moment he knew that not only did he want Jani with every fiber of his being, in every way, every minute of every day and night, he also knew that he didn’t want her to ha
ve a baby the way she planned to. Or worse yet, with another man. He didn’t want her to have a baby without him....

  It terrified him. But yes, deep down there was the desire to be the father of her baby.

  A Camden baby.

  One who could bring a wall of Camden power between him and that child if things ever ended with Jani...

  He wavered.

  But some people do stay together...

  The thought came out of nowhere and he didn’t shoo it away. He felt as if his life was hanging in the balance and he needed to entertain it to survive.

  But it was true—some people did stay together. They had kids and raised them together. They actually did what Jani had said she wanted—they had an entire future together, they grew old together, they enjoyed their grown kids and their grandkids and their great-grandkids. Together.

  And if he could have that?

  It wasn’t a big leap to knowing that yes, if he could have Jani, if he could have a family with her that he never, ever lost, then that was exactly what he wanted.

  Even if she was a Camden.

  He wanted it so much—he wanted her so much—that he knew he had to give in.

  Because regardless of who she was, regardless of what he’d thought since Shelly had left him, when it came to Jani, when it meant not having her, he just couldn’t keep an old grudge alive another day, and he couldn’t play it safe.

  He sat up straight and took the photograph from where he’d set it on the mattress beside him, looking at it again.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to the men in the picture, to the family that had come before him and suffered because of Jani’s ancestors. “But I have to have her.” He shook his head again, resolved. “I have to have her...”

  * * *

  “Just dinner, Jani. Lindie and I will pick you up, we’ll go somewhere quiet and nice, we can talk about him or not talk about him, we can do anything you want...”

  Jani appreciated what her cousins were offering but it had been a long and awful week after a long and awful weekend last weekend. She’d spent most of the past eight days talking about Gideon. She knew that all of her family had to be sick of hearing about him. She was actually sick of talking about him.

  “Thanks, but I’ve already showered and washed my hair,” she told Livi. “I’m in pajama pants and a T-shirt and slippers, I’m just going to go to bed early and try to catch up on some sleep.” Which she’d lost a lot of...

  “You’re not going to sleep at seven o’clock,” her cousin insisted. “What if we come there, order in, maybe watch some tear-jerker movie—”

  She didn’t think she could stand to cry more tears.

  “—or a comedy,” Livi amended, realizing her mistake.

  But there was nothing that could make her laugh, either.

  “No, really Liv, it’s okay,” Jani said wearily. “Shoe shopping with you guys tomorrow will be good—maybe we can have dinner after that. But for tonight I’m just going to fix myself a sandwich and go to bed early.”

  “How about a sleepover?” her cousin said as if she’d just had a brainstorm.

  “Liv! No! Really, I’m okay. But I have to go—somebody is at my door.”

  “Keep me on the line while you see who it is, just in case,” Livi ordered.

  “Okay.” Jani understood that her family worried about her after what had happened over Reggie. She took the phone with her as she went to peer through the peephole of her front door.

  “It’s him!” she whispered when she saw Gideon standing in the light of her front porch.

  “Him Gideon? Or him someone scary?” Livi asked, on the verge of alarm.

  “It’s Gideon.”

  “Do you want to see him?”

  More than she wanted air to breathe.

  But what she said was, “I guess. Maybe he’s here about something to do with the community center or that article or something.” She didn’t want to get her hopes up that he was there for a better reason.

  “Do you want me to come over so you don’t have to be alone with him?”

  Being alone with Gideon was something else she wanted desperately. She just wasn’t sure she could bear it if he was only there about business.

  But he was there. And there was nothing that could keep her from finding out why, even if it meant it was strictly business and hurt her all over again the way his rejection had hurt her last week.

  “No, don’t come over. There’s nothing to be afraid of—he’s not one of Reggie’s bookie’s thugs.”

  “Call me when he leaves, then,” Livi commanded.

  Jani hung up and set the phone on the entry table. As she opened the door, her heart beat so hard and fast she wondered if it was going to beat right out of her chest.

  But she put some effort into only showing a questioning surprise at the fact that Gideon was her visitor.

  “Hi,” he said as if he knew that sounded feeble.

  “Hi,” she parroted.

  “Are you busy? Going out? Do you have company?”

  “No, none of the above,” she said simply.

  “Then can we talk?”

  She considered asking what he wanted to talk about so she had some idea of what to expect. But it wasn’t as if she was going to turn him away regardless, so she merely stepped back and said, “Sure. Come in.”

  He did, looking ragged around the edges despite the fact that he was clean-shaven and smelled of soap and cologne, telling her that he was fresh from a shower, too. And though he showed signs that he’d had a week as difficult as Jani’s, he still looked bad-boy delicious in jeans and a black turtleneck sweater with his hair combed carelessly and the collar of his coat turned up to his chiseled jawline.

  But Jani tried not to revel in the sight of him too much.

  She also tried not to let her hopes get too high that he was there for a reason better than business...

  Closing the door behind him once he was in her entryway, she said, “Would you like to sit down?”

  He didn’t answer, he merely went into the living room. And he didn’t sit. He stood in the center of the room, his hands in the pockets of the long overcoat that flapped open down the front.

  Jani joined him but she didn’t sit, either. She just propped one shin on the arm of the first easy chair she came to, keeping her distance.

  “Am I too late?” he asked out of the blue.

  Jani’s head had been so muddled since she’d left his loft over a week ago that for a moment she thought she might have missed something—an invitation, maybe? She just wasn’t sure what he was talking about. “Are you too late for what?”

  “You know—the baby-making. Have you gone through with the artificial insemination?”

  For some reason that seemed too personal to talk about to him now so her voice was quiet when she said a simple, “No, not yet.”

  What she didn’t tell him was that she could have begun the process but had been so upset about him that she’d opted to let another month go by, even though she knew she shouldn’t waste more of her dwindling time. But she just hadn’t been able to choose someone other than Gideon to be the father of her baby. And she definitely hadn’t thought it was time to attempt to conceive when she was so horribly, hideously unhappy.

  “Then you’re not pregnant—great!” he said on a sigh of what sounded like relief.

  He was so glad about that that it almost made her cry—for the millionth time since she’d last seen him. Was fate just having a laugh at her expense by making her fall as hard as she had for someone that anti-baby? And now what? Had he decided he could overlook her being a Camden if only she could give up having kids?

  Don’t ask me to make that choice....

  “No, I’m not pregnant,” she confirmed cautiously.
<
br />   “Then I’m not too late.”

  “Because you came to stop me?” she asked, still fearing the worst.

  “I came to tell you that I don’t want to spend another week—another minute—like the last week. Without you...” he said.

  He went on to tell her how bad the week had actually been for him—reflecting back to her the same kind of gloom and despair and awful mood she’d suffered.

  Then he talked about today, tonight, and how he’d finally sorted through the things that were keeping them apart.

  “It’s complicated, Jani,” he said. “But you were right about a lot of things and I realized that if I let myself be tied forever to the past I’d be robbing myself of having the future that I want with you—”

  “A future with a Camden? Didn’t you say that would mean crossing over to the dark side?”

  “Yeah, a little,” he said without hesitation. “I can’t say that I don’t feel some guilt for aligning myself with a Camden. Some disloyalty. I can’t say that there might not be times when I look around at all your family has and think that some of it came at the expense of my family. But what’s between you and me...” He shook his head in awe. “It is too good to let anything stand in our way. No matter what happened before between H.J. and my great-grandfather, no matter how that rippled through the other generations, right now, today, I’m in love with you, Jani. I’m more in love with you than I’ve ever been with anyone. And I can’t go through another day of my life without you.”

  Jani studied him, touched and overjoyed and thrilled because yes, those were some of the words she’d wanted desperately to hear.

  But there was still the baby issue and she was also afraid of what might come next. Did he hope she would trade her goal of having a baby for the love he was offering her?

  “I want kids...” she whispered, opening that door with dread.

  Gideon came to stand in front of her, taking her upper arms in his strong hands and bringing her to her feet so he could pull her closer.

  “I know,” he said. “And I also can’t tell you that that doesn’t scare me. But I love you,” he said again. “I love you so much it hurts. And when I think about you having a kid, I can’t stand the thought of it being any kid but mine.”