If this was real, if she was able to keep the child, she would have to get over that. Keeping him too close would be just as damaging as abandoning him. By keeping him too close, she’d teach him dependency instead of independence. No. She needed to get a grip.
First of all, Bobby wasn’t her son.
Secondly, babies weren’t things you could just give to someone else.
Thirdly, people didn’t get second chances unless they stole them, and she wasn’t that kind of person. There might be someone out there who had really been close to Heather, someone Paige didn’t know because she hadn’t been part of her life in almost half a decade. She couldn’t hope that this was real. Something would come up. Someone would take him away from her.
Her arms…ached.
Breathing…hurt.
She couldn’t trick herself into thinking she’d ever be anything to another child, not like a mother. It would never happen. Rachel had taken one child away from her when everyone had said she couldn’t.
But Bobby was in danger. Someone—angels, the side Rachel fought with—was trying to kill this baby. He needed her.
She couldn’t even keep a job.
She couldn’t even protect herself. She’d allowed herself to be kidnapped, to have a spell cast upon her.
You have me. Though, really, you don’t need me. Not for this. Cawli practically purred through Paige’s mind. You are up to the task.
Gentle fingertips touched Paige’s elbow. Leslie. She smiled and shoved a plate in Paige’s hand, pushing her to the stove. “Eat. Feed your brain.”
Paige followed Leslie’s orders. “Is this real?” she whispered.
“It’s real,” Leslie said, dishing up her own plate beside Paige. “And you’re in the awe stage of things, but that’s because you’ve forgotten all the not-so-great parts of babies.”
Pausing with the sauce spoon, Paige tipped her head to the side, remembering. “That would be because I was sleep deprived.”
“Yes,” Leslie said, her tone filled with mock-excitement. “And that’s what you get to look forward to. Congratulations. How many personal days does the new job come with?”
She had no idea, but it was probably standard. And no maternity leave, though she could really use it. But this was the United States of America where women were shunned from the workforce after having a baby and accosted for working for a living at the same time.
Everyone else was already at the table. Tyler and Mandy sat on opposite sides, which was good because they were shooting daggers and other non-verbals across the space as it was. Paige couldn’t imagine what it would be like if they sat together.
Alma sat at the end, her back to the kitchen.
Ethel sat next to her, talking animatedly about something, her black-nailed hands flying with the telling.
Dexx had his cheeks full, but he listened to Mandy tell him something.
“Where’s Tru?” Paige asked her sister.
“He’s off installing servers for some big wig in Kansas.”
“But you just had a baby.”
“And he was there for that. He’s not much good for just about anything else and, besides, we could really use the money.”
Paige took one of the two empty chairs.
“So, what’s our story going to be?” Leslie asked under the other conversations. The trick for having conversation at a large gathering was to read lips and concentrate on the sound of the one voice you were paying attention to.
“I don’t know,” Paige said, cutting up her spaghetti into a cross board. She didn’t like swirling it onto her fork. She always ended up wearing more of it than she ate. Well, not really, but it sometimes felt that way. “But I’ve been saying that a lot today. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know where I’m going to stay. I don’t know a lot of things.”
“Okay.” Leslie grabbed the parmesan cheese. “What do you need to figure it out?”
“Uh.”
“Come on. You’re the one I go to when I don’t know what to do. What would you tell me to do?”
That was a true statement. “Make a list.”
“Okay. So, make your list.”
What lists would she need?
“Pretend you’re talking me through what you’re going through.”
Easier said than done. “I need a list of wants.” Bloody hell. Were wants even something she had the luxury to think about? No. “I need to make a list of problems we need to protect against.
“No. No. Let’s go back. What do you want?”
“Leah.” The word burst from her before she could think to keep it back. “But we should keep this realistic.”
“No.” Leslie dropped her fork and balled up her other hand, her expression folded in frustrated anger. “No. You make your wants list, and then we go through and we figure out how to make them happen. We just might not be able to make them all happen at once.”
A weight lifted from Paige’s chest. This. This was what she missed. This was what she didn’t have when she lived on her own. Yes. She had one hundred percent control of the remote and could eat straight out of the ice cream tub, but she didn’t have this.
“What else?”
She had to be honest with herself. “I don’t want to live in Texas.”
“Why not?” Leslie asked, though with a lot less surprise than Paige had suspected.
“I don’t know why. All I know is I don’t want to be here.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“Oregon. Portland area.”
“Whoa,” Leslie said, her eyebrows high. “That’s a risk.”
Could be. “I can’t plan for ‘if Merry finds out’. I can’t stay here dreading the day Merry sees Dexx and I in the grocery store. Or if Merry happens to see the shifters walking up to our door.”
“But if she comes here, she’s on our turf.”
“Les,” Paige said with a sigh. “I heard you and Grandma. People are starting to treat you different.”
Leslie shoved a large forkful of spaghetti in her mouth.
“And I have been paying attention to the politics lately. It’s hard not to when everyone’s talking about it. Hate crime is building.”
“From the people who ‘love’ the most.”
“Don’t be an ass.”
“I’m not.” She swallowed. “You haven’t been here, Pea. You don’t know what it’s been like bearing the brunt of their ‘caring’ spirits. How many times I’ve been told I’m a demon worshipper.”
“Told. Who cares?”
“It goes past that, Pea. They write shit on my car. They call me Satan’s whore in front of my daughter. They tell her she’s a whore.”
Paige wasn’t surprised. She’d been raised knowing what a “whore” she was, too. Not because she slept around. She was a damned prude. Just because she had boobs. In the Bible Belt. What a sin.
“How safe is my daughter at school? On the walk from school? It starts out as the boys calling her a whore. The next, they’re making her one. In the school bathroom.”
It was one thing to read the headlines in the news. Totally different when you applied them to those you knew and loved.
“I’m not scared of the shifters, Pea. I’m not. I’m not even really scared of Merry fucking Eastwood.”
That was good because Paige was terrified.
“My neighbors scare the shit out of me. The way they look at me. When I garden. Now, weeding the garden is something to fear?”
They wouldn’t have witch trials. Not for real. Would they?
“And every day, it’s something else. Did you know that someone shot at my car the other day?”
“Could have been a random shooting.” Which happened.
“After some dude harassed me in the grocery store? Told me the best thing I could do for my baby was to die?”
Paige didn’t understand people.
“Fear and ignorance. How do you fight that? When it’s fear spread through purposeful ignorance on a
wide level?”
Paige didn’t have an answer.
“So, yeah. Bring on the witches. I got power, too. And I’ve got you. Bring on the shifters, though I seriously doubt they’re much trouble for us. But I want out. I want my kids out. I want me out. I want my husband out.”
“Grandma?”
“She has a mind of her own. She can do as she wills. I want out.”
“Would you be willing to go to Portland?”
Leslie blinked. “Well, I wouldn’t have to worry about the humans there.”
“They do seem to be a bit more open-minded.” Well, they’d legalized marijuana.
“If we sided with the shifters,” Leslie said carefully, pushing her food around on her plate. “Then, yes. Otherwise, no. We’d be too outnumbered.”
Dexx needed a pack and Cawli pulled her toward the shifters, too, letting her heart know they were safe.
And there was the thing Cawli had said. “My animal spirit thinks you would be a good choice.”
Leslie jerked back, shaking her head. “Left field. What?”
She probably should have kept her mouth shut. “It was just something he said when he met you. You’d be a good choice for an animal spirit.”
Frowning, Leslie tipped her head at Paige, her expression thoughtful. “Now, that would be a thought. Has your animal spirit helped you?”
That was one way of putting it. “Aside from closing the door to Hell and helping me control it? Yeah. I’m much more powerful now. Though, to be honest, I was a lot more powerful after my gifts were unlocked anyway. It was as if they’d been building while they’d been capped.”
“Hmm.” Leslie raked her teeth along her bottom lip. “What would that be like? Is there a ceremony?”
“You’re really serious?”
“We have demons, angels, witches, and who knows what else coming to rain down on us. Yes, Pea. I’m serious. My daughter is stronger than I am as a witch. My son, who’s a bard, by the way, is more powerful than I am. Yes. I’m very, very serious.”
Cawli stirred in the back of her mind, but said nothing.
“I’ll ask.”
Leslie nodded. “Well, if we’re going to go, I want the shifters at our back and I’ll entertain teaming up with a spirit animal.”
Paige could feel Cawli’s interest ping like a sonar sound against her mind, but he offered nothing more.
“We could protect Bobby better up there,” Leslie offered.
“How so?”
“If our story is good enough, they’ll keep looking for him here.”
“Okay.” Could be true. “What kind of story?”
Leslie pondered that as she ate.
Ethel had stopped her story a while ago without them even noticing. She grinned and leaned forward. “I’ve got it.”
Paige looked around the table to see how many others had been listening into their conversation. Alma. Ethel. Dexx.
Awesome.
“You gave birth to that baby,” Ethel said.
“I did?”
“Yeah.” She chuckled and bit her lip. “Home birth. I can get the paper trail going. A few bread crumbs.”
“There was the fact that I was on a plane just a few days ago.”
“He was a small baby and you carried him low. You didn’t look like you were nine months pregnant. It doesn’t matter. I’ll make it real.”
“You’ll have to keep it realistic,” Paige warned. “We don’t want people asking questions.”
“We don’t want people looking closely.” Ethel looked toward the ceiling, a slight smile on her face. “Yeah. I can do this.”
Well, that was one problem solved.
Worrying would only get Paige so far, and it had already been a long day. She took Bobby up to the second floor and the far end of the hall. The house was less of a house and more of a small hotel, as Paige discovered upon moving to Denver. In Denver, you had to sell a child, one foot, and part of one hand to get a small one-bedroom apartment. Alma’s house—Whoops. Leslie’s house—had eight bedrooms and six bathrooms. It was practically a bed and breakfast.
Her bedroom hadn’t changed since she’d left it five years prior. Her queen bed dominated the room. A fairly good-sized dresser claimed the wall to the right of the door and a wardrobe took up the one next to it. The house might have eight bedrooms, but they weren’t huge.
Dexx set her backpack and her computer bag on the bed, his bags still slung over his shoulder. He looked beat. “Are we dancing over where I sleep?”
She was too tired for it. “Just sleep here.”
“The spare room’s right down the hall.”
“It is, but I could use someone to snuggle with.”
“I could use someone to snog.” Dexx put his bags next to the wardrobe. “Boob time. Could use that, too.” His expression said all he was interested in was a good, long nap.
She chuckled.
Bobby made suckling noises in her arms but remained calm.
“Maybe he’ll sleep through the night.” Dexx shrugged, tipping his head to the side with a hopeful expression.
“How many babies do you know come straight from the hospital able to sleep through the night?”
“I don’t know. I’ve only been around Tyler as a baby and I wasn’t there to help.”
“Oh, you’re going to help with this one, are you?”
“How hard can it be?” He gave her a cheeky, tired grin. “He’s a tiny snot. A little crying. A little drinking. A little pooping. A lot of sleeping? Yeah. I think I got this.”
Paige snorted. “Leah was a baby a long time ago, so I might have forgotten about a lot of things, but I do definitely remember being sleep deprived. Working and taking care of a baby? Yeah. Not easy.”
“Well, then, there’s two of us.”
Paige narrowed her eyes at him as he moved her bags to the floor next to his. “Do you have any idea of the commitment this brings?”
“I’ve been around, Paige.”
“Been around?”
He quirked his lips. “Not like that. I mean, I wasn’t born yesterday. I watch TV. I know that having a baby takes a lot of time.”
Chuckling, Paige searched for a place to put him down. He wasn’t sleeping in bed with her. She wasn’t giving up such treasured space. Even though her arms felt full, and by “full” she meant complete. She’d only felt this happen one other time. When she’d held Leah.
She shook herself. She couldn’t let herself get attached to this baby. He wasn’t really hers. He belonged to Heather.
Who was dead.
If she did fall in love with this baby, something was going to come up. The angels were going to realize they’d chosen the wrong family with whom to entrust their prophet. He was going to be taken away. Somehow.
Unless she stopped it from happening.
How many times was she going to make this circuit in her head?
Until her heart bought off on the viability of a solution.
Warm hands settled on her arms.
She looked up into Dexx’s face, unsure what to expect, what she wanted, what to ask for.
He pressed a kiss onto her forehead. “Come on. Let’s go to bed. You can put Little Tike into the clothes basket for the night.”
“That’s not the worst idea.”
He raised one corner of his lips and nodded, stepping back. He pulled the clothes basket out of the corner and rearranged the towels laying in the bottom. “It’s already for him.”
“Are those clean or dirty?”
He picked up a handful and put them to his nose. “Freshly laundered. Or at least washed in the last few weeks. Or at least since the last time they were used.”
Paige sighed and laid Bobby in the basket.
He moved his head from side to side, his eyes remaining closed.
“Leslie uses your room as the clean laundry room,” Dexx said. “Usually when I’m here, you can’t even see the bed.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, well,
see what you do when you breed a zoo.”
Family life. For the last five years, she hadn’t even thought of it. Her mind had fled from the idea of it.
And now the idea terrified her.
Dexx pulled off his socks and shucked his pants. “Lay down, turn off the light, and let’s talk.”
She needed that. She dug out her toiletries and took them across the hall. With her teeth brushed, her mascara removed, and her hair brushed out, she returned back to her bedroom. A very full room.
Dexx smiled at her and headed for the bathroom, closing the door behind him.
Thank goodness. That whole peeing with the door open thing he did at Paige’s apartment was weird.
She took off her clothes, changing into a chemise. She stared at the scar on her chest that was partially hidden beneath the pale pink cloth. For all that pink was her least favorite color, she sure seemed to have an awful lot of it.
The scar, though. For as much trouble as that thing had brought to her life, she had a lot to thank Sven for. He’d given her her memories back. He’d given her her gifts back. He’d brought her back into her own life again.
So, what was she going to do with that life?
Dexx came out of the bathroom, closing the bedroom door behind him. “Are you going to stand there staring at the bed all day or are you going to get in?”
Paige gave him a tight smile. “Lost in thought.”
He turned off the light. Some light filtered through the thin curtains of the medium-sized window beside the bed. He turned down the covers on the far side and climbed in.
She followed suit and just lay there, staring up at the ceiling.
“I thought you said you wanted to snuggle,” he said.
“I thought you said you wanted to snog. Though, when you turned British is beyond me.”
“I watch Doctor Who.”
“They snog on Doctor Who?”
“You’d just have to watch it.”
“Meh. This new doctor is a turn-off for me.”
“Because he’s old?”
“I’ve seen him in other shows. He’s an amazing actor. There’s just something off about him as the Doctor, though.”
“So, you do watch it.” He grinned at her.
A Barrel of Whiskey - (An Urban Fantasy Whiskey Witches Novel) Page 9
