by Ruby Laska
“Neither do I,” Junior piped up, but Griff held up a hand.
“Let me finish. I’m sorry about your, you know, situation, but I never, ever would have signed on to be a, a stud service—”
Seeing the look of hurt flood her blue eyes, Griff paused. Tried to back up.
“I mean, I can see where you would want to find a guy to help you have…”
A baby. Make a baby, that’s what she wanted to do—with him!—but Griff couldn’t quite get the words out.
“…to get you pregnant,” he finished up hastily. “I’m not that guy. Not father material. Not in the cards. So I’m sorry if I seemed a little shocked.”
“Nobody asked you to be a father,” Junior spat out, and then, to Griff’s horror, her eyes began to well up with fat tears, which she ignored. “I just wanted your sperm. You got plenty, right? And I’m sorry if I inconvenienced you or—or—if it was really an awful experience for you but last night you seemed—”
He knew he should do something. You don’t just watch a woman cry and not do something about it. But he was paralyzed, watching the tears streak down her freckled cheeks and splash on her crazy shirt, while she looped a finger through her hair and twirled it around and around in a dizzy arc.
“It was fine,” he said hurriedly. “I mean great, or whatever. Though maybe if you’d been, you know, getting something out of it—but that doesn’t have a thing to do with the fact that it shouldn’t have happened.”
Yeah. Right, that was it. “It shouldn’t have happened,” he said, warming to his topic. “And now we need to talk about what’s next.”
The twirling stopped. Her hand slowly lowered, her curls springing back into the uncontrolled mass.
“What’s next?” she said quietly. “Nothing’s next. I mean, you have my everlasting gratitude, and you’re welcome to sit here and drink coffee all morning, and then I’m sure you have to get back to your research and your book and all.”
Griff was silent for a long moment. With all that hair in her face, he couldn’t see her expression, but he noticed that her shoulders were quaking slightly.
“Uh uh,” he finally said. “No dice. Not until we find out if you’re, you know.” Pregnant. With his child.
“Hey, if you think I’m going to come after you with child support demands or something, you can forget about that right now. I’ll even sign something, if you want. You don’t owe me anything. Really.” Junior met his eyes and forced her lips into a smile, but it wasn’t much of one. Griff sank back down into his chair, and glared at her.
So she wasn’t planning on coming after him. Fine, he supposed that made it all okay for her; she could go ahead and raise her child and pretend she’d found it in the cabbage patch. She could forget all about Griff and get on with her life.
But if she thought he’d walk away without a care in the world, then she was seriously deranged. Griff had no intention of fathering children. Ever. He knew what they were like—pure hell, if his parents’ attitudes were any reflection. It was no wonder he was an only child. He’d been too rambunctious, too noisy, too demanding, too dirty, and his parents never let him forget it. Having a son had given his mother migraines and his father indigestion.
Only Ruby ever seemed to really enjoy his company, but she left every day once dinner was in the oven. In fact, Griff charted his childhood days by Ruby. When five o’clock came, she gathered up her old shiny leather purse and left, and the big house was unbearable empty for Griff until she came back.
And that’s just what Junior wanted him to do—leave. Leave without even knowing if he was ducking out of some kid’s life. Anger simmered in his gut. Griff had never shirked an obligation. And he never would.
“It’s not that,” he said, “though you can be damn sure I would pay what I owe. I don’t take my responsibilities lightly. Even when I don’t have any choice in the matter.”
He regretted his bitter words immediately. She looked like he’d struck her, her body stiffening and her shoulders sagging. Not all of it was her fault. She wasn’t the one who’d taken his childhood and made him vow never to do that to anyone else.
“What I mean is that I intend to know if I have fathered a child,” he said. “After that, we can deal with whatever happens.”
Junior sighed. “If you really feel you have to know, okay,” she said. “I’ll call you.”
The way he said child, you’d think he was talking about a natural disaster. Yes, he was shocked—Junior supposed any guy would be. But it was clear how he felt about the situation.
Well, what had she expected? And why should she care? Either she’d discover she was pregnant in a few weeks, or not, but either way, Griff Ross was on his way out of her life as quickly as he’d found his way in.
“Not good enough.” Griff was shaking his head at her, his jaw set. “I want to be sure. Not that I don’t trust you, but, it’s clear, I don’t really know you.”
“What, you want to watch me take a pregnancy test? Come on, Griff.” Just her luck to get stuck with the only man she’d ever met who seemed not only to have values but to insist on conforming to them. “Even if I just told you what you want to hear, would that be so bad? I already said I don’t want anything from you. Think of it as just a few minutes of your time, doing a good deed, like helping an old lady across the street.”
When she saw the thunderclouds gathering in his eyes, she knew she’d only made things worse.
“Don’t make this into nothing,” Griff said quietly. “Maybe you didn’t mean to. Maybe this was just a big misunderstanding between us. But you can’t change the fact that you—you took something from me, and I’m having a real problem getting used to the idea.
“Junior,” he added, his voice quiet but full of steel, “I do not ever want to be a father.”
The force of his words caught her off guard. There was a bitterness about him that she hadn’t sensed until now, and she didn’t like it. Wanted, in fact, to smooth it away with a gesture, a caress.
But she had no right to that comfort. Funny, she thought bitterly, how many men she’d slept with who hadn’t given the results a second thought. And now here she was, stuck with the very first one who ever had.
And she was shoving him as hard as she could out of her life. The thought made her unexpectedly sad.
“Look,” she said. “I’m tired. You’re tired. I don’t want to argue about this. You want the truth, I’ll give you the truth. If I could undo last night, I would, but I can’t. So why don’t you leave me your number, your email, whatever. And we’ll see.”
“How long?”
He didn’t look like a man who intended to drop it. Griff had his jaw set, his eyebrows drawn down. She knew that look, knew it well. Had seen it on every single man in the Atkinson family.
“How long? You mean until…well.” Junior did a quick calculation. “About three weeks. Don’t worry, I’m regular. I’ll know right away.”
“Okay.” Griff sighed heavily. “Three weeks. Well, I guess I can work down at the Sunrise Motel. Think they have wireless?”
“What?”
“You know, in the rooms, over at the motel. It doesn’t have to be fast or anything, because I have all my research with me. I just need to be online with my editor.”
“You’re serious. You want to stay here? In Poplar Bluff? That’s ridiculous.”
Mistake. She knew it as soon as the words were out of her mouth. You don’t tell a stubborn man no. They just dig their heels in further and won’t budge.
“It’s not ridiculous. I never work at home, anyway. I do all my best work in hotels.”
“Don’t be sarcastic.”
“No, I’m serious. Whenever I’m working on a book, I go away to do the writing. No interruptions, no distractions. The only person I give my phone number to is my editor. Course, I usually pick somewhere a little less, uh, rustic than this.”
His words stung. She hadn’t asked him to stay. It was pointless. And she sure didn’t wa
nt to have him around as a daily reminder that she’d screwed up again in the man department. A world-class screw-up this time.
“Look, don’t do me any favors,” Junior said. “Go on up to the Ritz or something. Get busy on your book and don’t worry about me. I’ll even email you the news so I don’t disturb you.”
“Look, somehow I keep saying things all wrong and hurting your feelings. That’s not my intention. I’m not angry, exactly, at you. This is just a problem we’ve got to face, and I’m not leaving until it’s resolved.”
“You’re not hurting my feelings! You’re the one who’s gone all weird about this. It’s a simple enough transaction, okay, and you’re making it into something more than it is.”
“Simple, huh? I’d say a child is a pretty big thing.”
He’d caught her off guard again. Child. It was a big word, too big to think about, and she’d been trying hard not to. That was for later, when she found out if it was going to happen or not. A child brought a thousand new details, things she’d only barely considered and others she probably didn’t even know about. She loved her nieces and nephews, but they came over with their homework done and their lunchboxes packed and showered her with love and enthusiasm, and all she had to do was keep Oreos in the cookie jar. She had no idea how to do the other stuff. The hard stuff—actually raising the child.
All those details could wait. For now, why invest her emotions in what might turn out to be yet another disappointment?
“We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” she said briskly. “The odds of me being…of this working are pretty darn slim. Most couples have to try for at least five or six months before conceiving, and that’s…trying.”
Her words hung heavily in the air between them. Her little euphemism—“trying”—rang shrill to her own ears. Most couples plan for a baby together, want the baby, make love with their hopes and dreams shared. At least, that’s how she’d always thought it would be. Even the surprise babies in her family, she was sure, had been not entirely unexpected by their delighted parents.
“Well.” Griff got to his feet. “Like you said, we’ll just wait and see. I’m heading back to the motel. I need some sleep.”
Junior jumped up too.
“You’ll…uh, call me?” There was no way he was going to stay. He’d come to his senses, probably three steps out her door, and soon he’d be on the highway again. Which was fine. It was exactly what she wanted. But he had wanted to know, so…
Griff raised an eyebrow at her. “So you can bite my head off again?”
“Uh, no.” Junior was suddenly embarrassed, didn’t know where to put her hands. She settled for crossing them across her chest.
“It’s okay. Yeah, I’ll call you. Let’s both get some rest.”
He closed the door carefully behind him. The sound of the latch was almost deafening in the empty house.
CHAPTER FIVE
He tried. He really did. For two hours Griff gritted his teeth and pulled his pillow over his head and counted backwards from a hundred, but he couldn’t get to sleep.
It was the damn kids.
There had to be a hundred of them, some sort of rural version of the urban kid gangs that bombed down his street on their bikes and skateboards, upending pedestrians and risking their necks in the uptown traffic.
Kind of like he used do twenty years ago down Astor Street.
But they were louder here. Yeah, maybe it had something to do with the fact that Poplar Bluff, Missouri didn’t have a whole lot going on during a long summer weekday morning, so the shouts and crashes were magnified in the silence.
Griff would give anything for a few sirens, even a motor vehicle accident—no doubt he’d be lulled to sleep like a baby.
Finally he gave up and yanked the twisted sheets off. The light in the motel room was filtered through the aquamarine curtains, giving the place a slightly underwater look. Still groggy from his lack of sleep, Griff stood and stretched and felt distinctly disoriented.
Griff was rarely disoriented.
He gave the curtain rod a vicious tug and glared out into the bright noon. Sure enough, a crew of boys who looked about eight or ten years old had rigged a makeshift skateboard jump out of some old plywood and a stack of cinderblocks, right in front of the motel, in the grassy median that separated it from the main road.
Griff stifled a grin. Nothing could stop a kid from building a ramp when they’re the age when they want to go flying off it. He had built his own using a roll of duct tape and a chaise lounge filched from winter storage in the basement—and paid for it with a week’s grounding.
He opened the door and was blinded by the sun, which sent a searing pain directly from his eyes to his brain.
“Hey!” He yelled, his voice croaking from disuse. “Keep it down out here!”
The boys, surprised, stopped and turned to look at him. There were, he was surprised to see, only about four or five of them, deeply tanned kids tough enough to be barefoot on the hot asphalt.
There was one kid with a shock of red hair and a grin that was just a little too familiar.
“Who are you?”
Griff forced himself to frown, and looked into all the expectant, wide eyes. The gazed back steadily, curious. With a start Griff realized that none of them were afraid of him, and had to remind himself that most kids didn’t get in trouble every time they went out to play, as he had.
“I’m a customer,” he said. “A paying customer of this hotel, who’s trying to get a little rest. And do you know why I’m not getting any rest?”
The kids shook their heads.
Griff pointed to them with exaggerated menace. “Because you all are creating an ungodly racket.”
“My uncle owns this motel,” one of the boys said, a hint of defiance in his young voice.
“What are you doing sleeping in the middle of the day anyway?” another demanded.
“None of your business,” Griff growled, and gave the door a harder than necessary shove to close it.
He’d been rude, he knew, and the kids would probably rat him out to the owner of the motel, but he couldn’t help it. He had to get some rest or he was going to lose his mind. How the hell did parents ever get any sleep, anyway?
None of his friends in the city had kids. Oh sure, sometimes a couple of them would get married, move to the suburbs, and then there’d be an announcement in the mail a little while later. Griff was pretty sure they all re-used the same photo of a red-faced, wrinkled newborn. After that he didn’t hear from the friends much.
His own parents had somehow skipped the part about moving to suburbia. Maybe things would have been better if they had. But his father liked being so close to his law office, so he could spend most of his time there, and his mother loved their ritzy address in the middle of the Chicago social whirl. She fielded visits from her rich friend. She shopped and hired decorators and threw parties, and it was Ruby who fixed his sandwiches and Ruby who kept his baby teeth in an old baby food jar.
Outside he heard an adult voice, low, chastising, and then he heard the distinct sounds of the troops packing up and leaving, the plywood being dragged away, a few desultory shouts of goodbyes.
Well. Maybe he’d been a jerk, but at least now he had silence. Blessed silence.
This time when Griff went back to bed, he fell asleep right away. But his dreams were filled with red-headed kids riding bicycles through the streets of Chicago.
Junior was stacking coffee cups in the sink when she heard the front door creak, and then thunderous footsteps in the front hall. She smiled to herself, despite the gloom that had settled on her after Griff left.
“Aunt Junior!”
Two boys skidded to a stop in the kitchen.
“Hi, Joe. Hi, Trevor.”
She automatically reached to run her fingers through her nephew Joey’s shock of red hair, but he ducked and held up a hand, grimacing at her.
“Oops, sorry,” she said. Nine was a sensitive age. If Trevor wasn’t
there, she probably could have gotten a hug out of him. Oh well, she’d wait.
“What have you all been up to?” she asked, as Joe went to her pantry and started poking around. Trevor flopped his lanky body into one of her chairs and leaned back in a position that looked terribly uncomfortable, but didn’t seem to bother him a bit.
“Well, we were just messing around down at the Sunrise Motel,” Trevor said. “Then Mr. Costello came out and yelled at us.”
“He wasn’t the only one,” Joe added, coming out of the pantry with a package of cookies and a box of kids’ cereal. He helped himself to a couple of bowls, while Junior got out the milk and spoons.
“Hey, get me a bowl too,” she said.
She kept the rainbow-hued cereal around for the kids, but once in a while it tasted pretty darn good. Today was a day, she decided, when she deserved a few treats.
“There was this guy?” Joe continued. In the way of kids his age, many of his statements came out like questions. “At the hotel? Well, he came out of there hollerin’ at us to shut up, said he was trying to sleep. In the middle of the day!” he added indignantly.
Junior straightened. She had a feeling she knew who that was. The Sunrise didn’t have all that many customers mid-week. Or on weekends, for that matter.
“What did he look like?” she asked.
“Weird,” Trevor grimaced. “He was wearing…man, I don’t believe this. He was wearing underwear with White Sox on it.”
Good heavens. Junior arched an eyebrow. So Griff didn’t even have the decency to be a Cub fan. Another strike against him, not to mention a possible genetic issue…she quickly banished that thought.
“White Sox, huh,” she said. “Oh, dear.”
“He was probably about as old as you,” Joe said, squinting at her. “Kind of tall. Medium tall I guess.”
“Ah.” Junior swallowed a satisfying spoonful of the cereal, which was turning the milk in her bowl bright pink. “So, what are you gentlemen doing the rest of the day?”
Trevor rolled his eyes at her. “Dad’s making me help set up for the party,” he said. “Hey, Joe, you want to come help me? I have to weed and mow.”
