Baby for Keeps

by Janice Maynard

  Seeing Dylan every day in a business setting, even if it was a bar, would have been far less personal than staying in his house tucked away in the woods. Despite her silly fantasy of seducing him, she knew in her heart that the best course of action would be to keep her distance for however long she chose to stay in Silver Glen.

  It was easy to imagine using him for a sexual fling, but she wasn’t really that kind of woman. No matter how much she told herself she had come out of her shell, she wasn’t in the category of females who took relationships in stride...who used sex as a game.

  Case in point, her love life was so sterile, she’d chosen to conceive a baby with the help of an anonymous donor. That said louder than words she wasn’t good at connecting with the opposite sex.

  Sitting down and propping her feet on an ottoman, she settled Cora at her breast and gazed out over Dylan’s backyard. It was a veritable Garden of Eden, filled with trees perfect for climbing. Why had he built such a house for himself? Did he plan to get married one day? Or had his aborted engagement soured him on the idea of wedded bliss?

  It didn’t really matter. The only thing Mia needed to know was that he was willing to play host to her and her baby until his building was repaired. At the rate of most home improvement projects, that could be well after Mia was gone.

  Cora ate hungrily, her quiet slurping sounds making Mia smile. Even in the darkest moments when she had lost her job and her roommate had moved out and Cora had been wide-awake at three o’clock in the morning, Mia had not regretted getting pregnant, not at all. Being a mom was hard. But she had done a lot of difficult things in her life. Starting school at age four. Skipping two grades. Entering college at sixteen. Tutoring a moody boy with enough anger and testosterone to make a girl feel faint.

  He had tried so hard to pretend that he didn’t care. But Mia had known. Dylan hated feeling stupid. He resented needing her help as much as he’d been relieved to have it.

  Maybe this arrangement would give him some kind of closure. Seeing Mia’s predicament should reassure him that intelligence was no buffer against the difficulties of life. No matter his challenges as a youth, he had far surpassed what many people had thought him capable of accomplishing. Even without the backing of his wealthy family, Mia was convinced that Dylan would have been just as successful. It might have taken him longer, but he would have gotten there eventually.

  He had drive and determination and the kind of creativity that saw ideas and possibilities. Mia envied his fearlessness. It had taken her years to escape the prison of feeling socially inept and painfully shy.

  Cora pulled away and looked up at her with bright eyes. Carefully balancing the baby on her knees, Mia buttoned her shirt and wondered whether to stay put or to seek out her host. “We’re in uncharted waters, my little beauty.”

  Cora gurgled what might have been agreement. Mia put the baby on her shoulder and patted her back until a definite burp emanated from the tiny body. “Let’s go find Dylan.”

  Five

  Dylan gave the bed a shake to make sure it was steady. No squeaks. No wobbles. He plopped the mattress into place and stepped back to admire his handiwork. Printed instructions were often useless to him. Fortunately, he had a knack for three-dimensional reasoning that allowed him to construct almost anything that required wood and screws and nails.

  “Wow, that was fast.”

  He turned and saw Mia and Cora staring at him with identical wide-eyed expressions. “It’s not too complicated. But I didn’t know where you’d packed the crib sheet. I put your three suitcases in the next room. I’m assuming the boxes can wait until morning?” He glanced at his watch. “I hate to be a poor host, but the fire marshal called to say I can come downtown now and go inside to assess the damage. And I promised some friends of mine we’d play pool at a buddy’s house tonight. I can cancel, though....”

  Mia straightened her spine, her arms wrapped protectively around Cora. “We don’t need you to look after us. We’ll be fine. Go. Do whatever you have to do.”

  As he drove away from the house a few minutes later, he told himself that the weird feeling in the pit of his stomach wasn’t disappointment. Of course Mia didn’t need him. This whole setup was for his benefit...so he could assuage some lingering guilt from high school. He was giving her a place to stay, sure. But she would more than earn her keep when she combed through the mess that was his bookkeeping system.

  Dylan had tried to make sense of the various computer files. But in the end, he’d been nothing but frustrated. He suspected that he’d done more harm than good when he’d tried to enter recent debits and credits. Though he had learned to read for pleasure, it was a slow process. Numbers were a nightmare.

  When he pulled up in front of the bar, the fire marshal waved him forward. “The upstairs is not safe to access, but you’re welcome to take anything you need from the main level.”

  Dylan wrinkled his nose at the acrid odor of burnt wood. “My insurance company is in Asheville. They’re sending someone out tomorrow.”

  “The numbers will add up. You’d be amazed at how much it costs to recover from water damage alone, much less the smoke.”

  “Yeah. But I’m more worried about the time. I’d like to reopen in a month. You think that’s possible?”

  The other man shook his head. “I don’t know, Mr. Kavanagh. Money can grease a lot of wheels. But it’s still a cumbersome process. Be careful in there. The floors are slick.”

  Dylan walked through the door of the Silver Dollar and groaned inwardly. The place over which he had labored so hard and so long was a wreck. He didn’t have to worry about vandals. There was nothing much left worth stealing at this point.

  His main objective was to recover anything Mia might need from his office. The small space smelled as bad as the rest of the building, but it wasn’t as wet. Fortunately, he had a remote server at home that served as a backup for all his work files. His computer now stood in a puddle of water, so he didn’t have much faith that it would reboot.

  He found a cardboard carton that was mostly intact and scooped all the papers off the top of his desk. They could be dried out, and if worst came to worst, he’d ask vendors to resend their invoices.

  This wasn’t how he had anticipated getting reacquainted with Mia. He wanted to give her the impression that he was a solid businessman with an enthusiastic clientele. Instead, he was left with a smelly, sodden mess.

  All in all, it could have been worse. At least the outer structure was intact. Since there was no rain in the forecast, he loaded everything into the back of his truck. He definitely didn’t want that smell in the cab.

  Over beer and burgers, his friends grilled him about the fire. They were equal parts sympathetic to his predicament and bummed out that their favorite watering hole was closed down indefinitely. Dylan managed to change the subject eventually, uncomfortably aware that several of these men barely managed to make ends meet from paycheck to paycheck. He didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for him when all he had to do was throw money at his problem, and eventually it would resolve itself.

  If the men sitting around the table ever resented the fact that his bank account ran to seven figures, they never showed it. But he had to wonder if his connection to the Kavanagh fortune at times made them uncomfortable.

  Shaking off the odd sense that he didn’t belong, he finished off his drink and stood. “Who’s gonna be first in line for an ass-kicking at eight ball?”

  * * *

  When Cora went down for an early-evening nap, Mia snooped unashamedly. She’d put the baby monitor beside Cora’s bed and carried the receiver in her pocket. That left her free to roam Dylan’s gorgeous house at will. She started with the upstairs bedrooms. They were immaculately decorated and looked ready to welcome guests at any moment.

  Despite that, they had an air of emptiness about them. Ex
actly how often did Dylan actually have overnight company?

  His kitchen was a dream, especially the fancy appliances. Mia knew how to nuke anything, but the largesse in Dylan’s refrigerator made her stomach growl. He’d told her his housekeeper kept him well stocked with food, but that was somewhat of an understatement. Mia found a freezer full of packages labeled with names like chicken parmesan, vegetable soup, whole-wheat bread. Added to what was in the fridge itself, she surmised that Dylan could easily hole up here and not go hungry for a month or more.

  Since he had enjoined her to make herself at home and help herself to anything she wanted for dinner, she wasted no time in picking out what looked to be an individual serving of chicken potpie. While it thawed in the microwave, she glanced at the monitor, making sure Cora was still asleep. The little girl was in her favorite position, with her butt lifted in the air and her knees pulled beneath her.

  Shadows fell as Mia ended her meal. She would have to wake the baby up soon or Cora would never sleep tonight. Although Mia was not particularly anxious about staying alone, the house did seem bigger and emptier with dark on the way. She wondered how long Dylan would stay out.

  None of her business, she reminded herself. If the original plan had worked out, she and Cora would be alone in the apartment over the bar. But at least the people and the noise would have kept her company until closing time.

  Cora was in her usual sunny mood when Mia got her up. Somewhere in the car there was a plastic storage box with the baby’s bathtub and other important items, but Mia decided to do without them tonight. She put Cora in the sink and managed to bathe her quickly before the odd circumstances could unsettle the infant.

  Smelling like lotion and clean baby, Cora wriggled as her mother tucked her into pajamas. For an hour, they played on the king-size bed that was to be Mia’s for the next several weeks. If Mia listened occasionally for the sound of a vehicle coming up the road, it was only because she was a little nervous about being so far out in the woods all alone.

  It certainly wasn’t because she was hoping to see Dylan again before she went to sleep.

  Cora, for once, was cooperative when it came to bedtime. Her little eyelids drooped as Mia stood rocking her back and forth and singing one of the songs that was part of their bedtime ritual. When Mia laid Cora carefully in the bed, the baby wiggled for a moment and then curled her arms on either side of her head.

  Turning out the light, Mia tiptoed backward out of the room and eased the door shut. Her heart jumped in her chest when she bumped into something big and warm. A hand came over her mouth, muffling her shriek.

  “Easy, Mia. It’s just me.”

  She struggled until he freed her. “You scared the heck out of me,” she cried, glaring at Dylan as she tried to breathe normally.

  “Sorry.” He didn’t seem overly penitent. “I thought you would hear me come in the front door, but you must have been busy with the baby. You want some ice cream?”

  His prosaic question was at odds with the way his gaze roved over her body. She had changed into thin knit sleep pants and a spaghetti strap tank top. It was a perfectly respectable outfit for a hot summer night, even if it did reveal her nipples a tad too much.

  “Ice cream would be nice,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “Let me put a robe on.”

  His half smile made her knees quake. “Not on my account,” he said. “I like you just the way you are. Follow me.”

  The house didn’t seem nearly as big and threatening with the owner in residence. Mia sat down at the small table in the breakfast nook and watched as Dylan dished up enormous servings of praline pecan for each of them. Judging from the condition of his body, he clearly expended calories somehow, because there wasn’t an ounce of fat on him anywhere.

  He was lean and muscular. Physical power was on display, but restrained. Dylan was the kind of man a woman would want at her side if she were lost in the wilderness.

  Joining her at the table, he offered her a bowl. “Dig in.”

  After four bites, she put down her spoon. “You’re staring at me.”

  “Sorry.” He leaned forward and wiped a smudge of caramel off her chin. “I’m still trying to match the grown-up Mia to my memories of a young girl.”

  His touch rattled her. “I’m surprised you remember anything at all about me. You were a senior, an exalted star, and I wasn’t even in the same orbit.”

  “You were a senior, too,” he pointed out, studying her as he licked his dessert off the back of his spoon.

  She had never before seen anything sexy about eating ice cream, but Dylan was in a class by himself.

  “I wasn’t a real senior,” she said, remembering the taunts and ostracism. The pecking order in high school was rigid and unbending. The fact that she was only fifteen years old and about to get her diploma was a sore spot for many of her classmates struggling to pass required courses.

  “You had a hard time, didn’t you?” In his eyes she saw dawning adult comprehension of what her life must have been like. “I’m sorry, Mia.”

  She shrugged. “I was used to it. And besides, I was neither the first nor the last high-school kid to be bullied. It could have been a lot worse. I always wondered if you had something to do with the fact that after Christmas, a lot of the kids suddenly changed toward me. They weren’t exactly nice, but they weren’t outright hostile anymore. Did you say something?”

  “I might have. A bunch of us went on a ski trip over New Year’s weekend. A couple of the jocks were talking about getting you in bed to prove that they could. I shut them down. That’s all.”

  She paused, her spoon halfway to her mouth. “Why, Dylan Kavanagh...you were looking out for me.” The knowledge gave her a warm fuzzy feeling.

  His quick grin made him look more like the kid from high school. “Don’t make me out to be a hero. I’m well aware that I gave you plenty of grief.”

  “And yet you kissed me once.”

  The words tumbled out of her mouth uncensored. She froze, aghast that she had dropped a conversational bomb.

  * * *

  Dylan was shocked that she had brought it up. And vaguely uncomfortable. He’d wondered if she even remembered the spring night right before they graduated.

  “I never should have done that,” he muttered, taking another bite of ice cream and hoping she didn’t notice that his face had flushed. Even now, he could remember the taste of her lips.

  But she had been fifteen, her sixteenth birthday still two months away, and he had been a man of eighteen by that time. His awkward embrace and quick, furtive kiss had felt both deliciously sweet and at the same time terribly wrong.

  Mia set her spoon in her empty bowl and propped her chin on her hand. “I always wondered why you kissed me. Was it a dare?”

  “No. Hell, no.” The idea was insulting. That would have made it even worse. “I had the urge, that’s all. We’d been together all year, more hours than I cared to admit, and we were getting ready to graduate. Probably never going to see each other again, since you were headed off to school at some brainiac university.”

  “You can’t tell me the Dylan Kavanagh I knew back then was sentimental. Try again.”

  “You were pretty in the moonlight,” he said flatly. “I went to get something from the concession stand and there you were.” They’d both, separately, been at Silver Glen’s one and only drive-in theater. The place was in business even today. The owners were careful to keep it in good shape and to hire off-duty police officers for the premises so parents would still let their kids go there.

  “You were with a date, weren’t you?”

  How could big dark eyes make him feel like such a heel? “Yes.”

  “So again...I have to ask. Why?”

  “Damn it, Mia, I don’t know.” He stood and took his bowl to the sink, dropping it w
ith a clatter. “You fascinated me. And intimidated me.”

  Her jaw dropped. “That’s the most outrageous thing I’ve ever heard you say. You hated me for a long time. And after that you barely tolerated me.”

  “Not true.” He leaned against the counter, his hands propped behind him on the sink. “I never hated you. It may have seemed that way in the beginning, but it was really myself I hated. You just caught the fallout. I may have acted like the biggest horse’s ass ever, but I thought you were sweet and impossibly complicated.”

  She looked at him as if he had grown horns and a tail. “Why won’t you tell me the real reason you kissed me, Dylan?”

  Fed up with her stubbornness and her utter lack of faith in her appeal, he strode to the table and grabbed her wrist, pulling her to her feet. “I kissed you because you made me hard and I dreamed about you most nights.” Without thinking about the ramifications or the consequences, he lowered his head, muttering softly as he brought his lips close to hers. “You were an angel to me, the one and only person who could rescue me from the mess that was my life.”

  He came so close to kissing her, he could taste it. But Mia was rigid in his embrace. For about thirty seconds. Then something unexpected struck him in the chest and spread throughout his body. It was a feeling like being caught in a summer rain, drenched to the skin and laughing because it felt so good.

  She hugged him. Her technique was awkward and tentative. The very lack of confidence in the way she responded stole beneath his defenses and swamped him with tenderness. She was not a young girl anymore. She was a grown woman with a soft body and full breasts and curvy hips that begged for a man’s touch.

  Much longer, and he’d be tempted to take her standing up. Bad idea, Dylan. He backed away reluctantly, breaking the physical connection though he couldn’t deny a less tangible link that bound them together.

  Mia stared up at him with an expression that was impossible to define. “You almost kissed me,” she said.