Once a Father

by Marie Ferrarella

  She found it tucked under the kitchen table.

  Tracy crossed back into the living room, kneeling down beside the pig.

  “I don’t mind telling you, because I know you won’t let this go any further, but part of me kind of wished Collins’d kept on kissing me and maybe even—well, you know.” Incredible though it was, she felt a blush creeping up her cheek when she thought of the two of them making love together. “I don’t have to explain the birds and the bees to you, do I?”

  Petunia looked up at her with soft brown eyes as she hooked the leash onto her collar.

  “Maybe I do at that. Haven’t seen many boyfriends coming by, ringing the bell for you, either.” On her feet again, Tracy checked her pockets for her house keys before going to the front door. “Maybe I’ll ask him if he has a friend for you next time.”

  Tracy shook her head and laughed to herself. “Maybe Maureen is right. I don’t get out enough. And neither do you.”

  Maybe that explained it. Explained why she’d been so bowled over when Adam had kissed her. The last time she’d been kissed, someone had planted a quick one on her lips the December before last because she’d inadvertently walked under a sprig of mistletoe while writing notes into a patient’s folder. Dr. O’Malley had smelled of hot chili peppers thanks to the dip one of the nurses had brought. It had been enough to make a person contemplate everlasting celibacy.

  She did need to get out more.

  As Tracy opened the door, an idea came to her. Petunia might be just what the doctor ordered. She was gentle, sweet-tempered and infinitely adorable.

  “Tell you what, I can’t do it tomorrow, but I’m off the next day, too. Why don’t I take you with me then and you can meet Adam yourself? Tell me what you think. If nothing else, I know Jake’d love to meet you.” She bit her lower lip. “At least, I hope so. I need a way to get to him, to make him talk. Maybe I’ll show him how we play hide and seek.” Infinitely trainable, the pig had learned how to track her if she kept Petunia’s favorite food, truffles, in her pocket.

  Tracy began to walk out. “You know, you’re really easy to talk to, Petunia, but I wish you had a few more opinions of your own.”

  The pig squealed slightly, as if in response. “You’re right. We’ve got a good thing going here. I talk, you listen. Why mess it up?”

  Tracy took the pig’s silence as an agreement.

  Chapter 9

  After giving it some thought, Adam decided to ignore it.

  Ignore the kiss, ignore what had prompted it and the avalanche of feelings that had quickly risen up in its wake. Feelings he wasn’t up to dealing with.

  It was simpler this way and a lot less uncomfortable if he just pretended that the kiss had never happened. Otherwise, it and what it had consequently generated would be there between them, making things awkward for them. For him.

  For the duration that he and Tracy had to interact, he wanted to keep things moving smoothly.

  Besides, other than today and tomorrow, he reasoned in the wee hours of the night, the extent of their interaction might be exchanging a few words as he came in or went out while she was there to stay with Jake. Since he’d been inundated with offers of help by a family that was relieved to see him finally functioning among the living, he might take Tina or one of the others up on their offers to stay with Jake while he worked. That would do away with the need for Tracy altogether.

  The need for Tracy.

  The words shimmered in his head, teasing him. He had a need all right, and he wasn’t happy about it.

  All this was temporary, anyway, he told himself as he lay in bed, watching the shadows of passing cars chase one another along his ceiling. Certainly there was nothing permanent in the offing. Jake would be gone soon and with him, Tracy.

  There was no need to give the incident any more weight than it deserved. He’d acted like a man, reacted to outside stimulus. After all, the woman was far from ugly.

  Very far from ugly.

  As a matter of fact, he felt that the term “drop-dead gorgeous” might have been coined with someone like her in mind.

  He punched his pillow, trying to find a place for himself. Failing.

  Didn’t matter.

  All this would be behind him in a little while. And all that actually did matter was the boy, not some dormant hormones that had chosen the wrong time to wake up.

  Silence on the subject was the best route, Adam insisted. A woman like Dr. Tracy Walker was probably kissed a great deal on a regular basis, as well as wined and dined often. In all likelihood, she’d probably forgotten all about it.

  Unlike him.

  But that was because all of his thoughts were centered around this latest upheaval in his life and unfortunately all things that concerned the boy brought the woman to mind as well.

  He was going to have to work on that.

  Starting now.

  It was a promise he made to himself several times during the night, each and every time he woke up, which was frequently.

  He was a light sleeper. Being on alert at the fire station had done that to him. So now, with this new person he was responsible for sleeping in a room only a few feet away from his, and a woman he had no business thinking about preying wantonly on his mind, he wasn’t exactly the perfect candidate for a good night’s sleep. Or much rest at all.

  He should have never kissed her, Adam upbraided himself more than once during the course of the restless night.

  And maybe he shouldn’t have volunteered so quickly to be there for the boy, either. The thought snuck in somewhere before dawn. After all, there was family services waiting to take over. The people in that department were far better suited to dealing with this situation. And, on top of that, he’d discovered that there was a family lawyer out there somewhere overseeing the Andersons’ estate. He could find some kind of guardian for the boy.

  Trouble was, the lawyer was out of the country on vacation.

  Everyone who had any connection to the boy seemed to be out of the country, Adam had thought angrily. Except for him.

  And Tracy.

  Unable to sleep, Adam got out of bed a total of four times to check on Jake. Moving as quietly as he could, Adam eased open the door to the boy’s room and peered in. Each time, he saw that the boy was asleep.

  And each time he looked at Jake, Adam felt guilty for thinking about pushing the “problem” on to someone else. Jake wasn’t a “problem,” he was a little boy who had gone through a traumatic experience. He had no business thinking about deserting him, because that was what it was, pure and simple. Desertion.

  It was the woman who had scrambled his thinking process, Adam thought as he wearily made his way back to bed a fourth time. And he had let her.

  Well, no more.

  The self-issued warning was hovering somewhere in his hazy brain when Adam heard a ringing noise. More exhausted now than he had been when he’d first gone to bed, it took him a second to come to and identify the source of the sound.

  The second ring had him sitting bolt upright in bed, thinking emergency.

  That faded as orientation set in. He wasn’t at the fire station, he was home. Home, but not alone. It wasn’t an alarm, the ringing he heard was a doorbell. His doorbell.

  Muttering under his breath, Adam reached for the jeans he’d discarded the previous evening and pulled them on over the briefs he slept in. As an afterthought, he tossed off the football jersey he’d worn last night and picked up an undershirt from the floor he mistook for a shirt as he made his way to the front door.

  Clouds of sleep were just beginning to evaporate from his brain and his vision was attempting to focus as he pulled open the door.

  “Yeah?”

  The greeting on Tracy’s lips disappeared the moment her eyes swept over the man in the doorway who was sleepily leaning against the front door. Her throat went dry.

  He was bare-chested, with snug denim jeans hanging off his lean hips. The top button on his jeans had been left undone. Ther
e were wall-to-wall muscles residing beneath a smooth, hard chest and above a waist that was taut and flat enough to lick a serving of ice cream off of.

  It took Tracy a second to work up enough moisture in her mouth to reform the word she’d originally intended to say.

  “Hi.”

  Even though it took effort as she pushed it up along an incredibly parched throat. The word was breathless, as if she’d run up two flights of stairs at break-neck speed to deliver it.

  She looked like sunshine in a fringed, brown leather jacket. She had on jeans that appeared to have been painted on and black boots that looked as if they’d long since been broken in. Sleepy though he was, he could appreciate what he saw. Adam struggled not to allow fantasy to take over.

  One last yawn broke its way out. “What are you doing here?”

  “Do the words ‘amusement park’ ring a bell?” she asked, searching his face for some kind of sign that a light was going on in his head.

  Damn, but a man shouldn’t look this good getting out of bed, where he had obviously been a few seconds before she’d arrived. The state of his mussed-up hair, his almost unfocused eyes and the light stubble on his chiseled face told her that he’d been warming his sheets as she’d been pulling into the parking spot.

  Warming the sheets.

  Maureen’s term.

  Tracy tried not to think about the rest of what Maureen had said last night, but it wasn’t easy, given the state the man before her was in. It reminded her that it had been a very long time since a man had touched her as if she were anything other than a physician who was there to perform miracles on call.

  Wow, was all she could think. Why hadn’t someone snatched up this man? What sort of baggage was he carrying around that would ward women away from him?

  “Amusement park,” Adam repeated, mumbling the words as he waited for them to make some kind of sense to him. She’d mentioned something about that last night, right? “That was today.”

  She didn’t know if he was asking her a question, or just saying the words to have them register in his head. In either case, Tracy provided reinforcement. “That was today.”

  Stretching taut, stiff muscles, he looked at his watch, trying to make out the numbers. What time was it anyway? “But not at dawn.”

  “It’s not dawn,” she informed him cheerfully. “It’s almost nine. Half the day is gone.”

  He snorted in disdain. “For who? The people in Australia?”

  “You need coffee,” she told him. Maybe a whole gallon of it, she added silently as she bent over to pick up the box at her feet. A rather large, unwieldy cardboard box.

  “I need sleep,” he countered. “Give me that,” Adam ordered. He didn’t wait for her to comply but took the box out of her hands. It wasn’t heavy, but its size made it bulky and awkward. Just the way he felt around her right now. “What is this, anyway?”

  “Clothes from one of the nurses.” She led the way back into his apartment. It didn’t get the morning sun, she noticed, looking at the darkened living room. “She has a son a little older than Jake and he’s outgrown a lot of his clothes. I thought these might come in handy,” she placed a hand flat against the box he was carrying, “until we can get some of his own for him—whenever his lawyer gets back.”

  He didn’t have a lawyer, it felt strange to think of Jake as having one of his own. Adam deposited the box on the coffee table.

  “Did you know that there’s a woman in the apartment across from yours who sits at her window, watching every move I make?”

  He nodded. “Mrs. Wells. She watches every move everyone makes. It’s her hobby.”

  Tracy looked over her shoulder, although there was now a door in her way, obscuring her line of vision. “Poor thing, doesn’t she have any friends?”

  Even sleepy, he could tell where this was going. “Why don’t you just concentrate on Jake for the time being, all right?”

  “All right,” Tracy agreed, though she made a mental note to wave at the woman the next time she saw her, perhaps even strike up a conversation if the woman opened her window.

  Adam didn’t think he won his point so easily, but he wasn’t about to press the point and question her. “Good idea,” he mumbled.

  “I have another one.” He turned to look at her, the wary look in his eyes telling her that he was bracing himself. The man had a long way to go before he became trusting, she thought. “Breakfast.” She held up the plastic supermarket bag that had been looped on her arm as she’d walked in. “I stopped at the market and picked up bread, eggs and orange juice. Milk for Jake. And I saw you didn’t have any coffee, so I brought instant.” She hadn’t noticed any coffee machine visible. “We’ll have your refrigerator looking like a normal one in no time,” she promised. “Jake up yet?”

  “No,” he said, following her into the kitchen. He didn’t like the way she was barging into his life, rearranging it on him. He scowled at her, picking apart what she’d said. “Aren’t eggs bad for you?”

  “Not really,” she assured him. She began opening cupboards, looking for the frying pan she’d used yesterday. “They’ve been much maligned. In moderation, eggs are good for you.” Success arrived in the third cupboard. She took out the frying pan, placing it on the stove’s burner. “That’s the key, moderation.” She looked at him an enigmatic smile on her lips. “But I guess I don’t have to tell you that.”

  Was that some sort of snide comment at his expense? “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She lined up six eggs one after another along the counter. “That you don’t strike me as someone who just jumps right into a situation without carefully examining and evaluating it.” She looked up at him for a second. “That’s what makes what you did so special.”

  She was talking about him kissing her, Adam thought, bracing himself.

  Well, maybe it was better out in the open. They’d talk about it, he’d deal with it, push it aside and forget about it.

  Just as soon as the erotic dreams about her faded.

  The thought descended on him like thunder. Until this moment, he hadn’t remembered that he’d had erotic dreams last night.

  He felt a fresh rush of discomfort assault him. “Look, about that—”

  She seemed not to hear him. “It isn’t every man who’d take in a child.”

  Adam was brought up short and he stopped dead in his tracks. She wasn’t talking about what had happened between them, she was talking about Jake.

  Chagrined, embarrassed at his narcissistic thoughts, Adam blew out a breath as he dragged a hand through his unruly hair. “Yeah, well, I don’t know if that’s such a great idea.”

  Her eyes narrowed as she tried to process what had just been said between them. Was he backing out? Had something happened last night after she’d left to make him change his mind?

  “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t already shared with her. It had just loomed a little larger, a little darker, during his almost-sleepless night.

  “I’m a stranger to him. Maybe Jake’d be better off in his own house, with some kindly neighbor staying with him, or—”

  She wasn’t going to let him build up a full head of steam. The locomotive wasn’t about to be allowed to leave the station. “You’re the best thing for him.”

  He wished he could believe that. It would make things easier. “What makes you think so?”

  “The way he looks at you. Like it or not, he’s made you his new father figure.”

  The thought brought a cold chill down his spine. He wasn’t a father figure. He wasn’t even a father anymore. If he’d been a decent one, then maybe Bobby would still be alive.

  “Hey, I’m not—”

  “Yes, you are,” Tracy said firmly, kindly, cutting through any protest he might have been about to make. “To him.”

  She bit her lip. Jake could walk in on them at any moment and she didn’t want this to be the topic of conversation the boy overheard. He migh
t misunderstand and think he wasn’t wanted. That wasn’t what he needed to hear at the moment.

  “How do you like your eggs?” she asked cheerfully as if the other topic had never been voiced.

  “In the carton.” Adam wasn’t hungry, he was in turmoil. About a lot of things. “I haven’t eaten eggs in years.”

  As always, she put only a positive spin on what he said. “So you won’t be bored with them.” Not to be dissuaded, she tried again. “When you did eat eggs, how did you have them prepared?”

  The woman was incorrigible. And the prettiest pit bull he had ever seen. “Sunny-side up. That’s—”

  “I know what sunny-side up means,” she told him, already beginning to crack eggs against the side of the frying pan. “That’s the way I like them, too.” She nodded toward the back. “Why don’t you go and wake Jake up while I get this going?”

  He decided that the minor errand would be safer than standing here, half-dressed, looking at her and entertaining thoughts that were light-years away from breakfast, amusement parks or orphaned little boys.

  But as he turned to go to Jake’s room, he abruptly stopped.

  “No need,” he told her. “Jake’s already up.”

  Tossing another empty shell aside, she looked over her shoulder. Her eyes smiled just as warmly as her lips as she looked at the boy standing in the doorway. He’d dressed himself, putting on the same clothes he’d worn yesterday. His shirt was misaligned.

  “Hi, Jake. Did I wake you?”

  He shook his head, walking into the room. Tracy spared Adam a glance before looking back at the boy. He might not be talking, but he was responding. Part of the wall that existed between him and the world was slowly coming down.

  “I’m making eggs for breakfast.” The last egg dropped out of the shell she’d cracked. Tracy tossed the shell away. “I took a guess that you might like them sunny-side up. That’s the way Adam takes them and I figured all he-men liked their eggs that way.”