WHOSE CHILD?

by Susan Gable

  David laughed. "Quite an imagination. But it's true. I'm your father."

  "No!" Sarah wiggled in Lexie's embrace, shoving at her chest. "Momma said it don't work that way. And it's not my birfday yet!"

  David looked at Lexie. She shook her head, not wanting to explain the whole birthday-wish conversation. He reached out toward Sarah's hair.

  "No!"

  The next thing Lexie knew, Sarah was leaning in David's direction. He yelped and yanked his hand back in a hurry, shaking it.

  "What?"

  "She bit me."

  "She what?" Lexie released her. "Sarah! You don't bite people. What were you thinking?"

  "I'm not Sarah, I'm a dog. Woof, woof."

  David arched an eyebrow at her.

  "Well, you're a bad dog, and you're going to your bed. We don't tolerate biting around here from anyone." Lexie stood, picked up Sarah and headed for the foyer, ignoring the child's protests.

  Halfway up the staircase, she realized David was practically stepping on her heels. She stopped on the landing and glared at him over her shoulder.

  "What? I want to see my daughter's room. Is that some kind of a crime?" He lifted his hand, showing her the row of tiny teeth marks. "Not to mention I'd better wash this."

  "I'm sorry about that," Lexie said as she started to climb again. "Although she pretends to be a dog a lot, she's never bitten anyone before." But it served him right.

  He grunted. "Just my luck. Miss out on plenty of my kid's firsts, but manage to make first bite. Great fun. So far, fatherhood exceeds my expectations."

  About twenty minutes later—he'd wanted to give them all, himself included, a little time to calm down—David propped his shoulder on the doorjamb of his daughter's room. Lexie sat at Sarah's side on a white twin canopy bed, stroking the little girl's arm. She raised her other hand and lifted her index finger to her mouth.

  He nodded. To his right, a door opened onto another bedroom—Lexie's, he presumed.

  Sunshine streamed in from the windows on either side of the bed. A low bookshelf, filled to nearly overflowing, dominated the left wall of the bedroom. A tall chest of drawers, painted white with emerald-green pulls stood beside it. A mural decorated the hallway wall. Dorothy, the Tinman, Scarecrow and Cowardly Lion stood on the Yellow Brick Road

  , which rose into the background, then circled the room just below the ceiling, serving as a vibrant border on the light green walls.

  He remembered the summer he and Marc had been … thirteen? Which would have made Lexie nine. And she'd read volume after volume of the Oz books, driving them crazy with nonsense about the magical kingdom.

  Then she'd moved on to the Narnia books, and in typical big-brother fashion, Marc had locked Lexie in a closet one Saturday afternoon. Armed with a flashlight and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, she hadn't even made a peep, until her frantic parents had proclaimed her missing and run about the house, calling for her.

  If only she'd been as easy to find this time, he wouldn't have lost so many years with his daughter.

  "David."

  He glanced back at Lexie. She crooked her finger at him. He crossed the wooden floor to stand on the braided-rag rug alongside the bed.

  Lexie smoothed back Sarah's hair. "I want you to take a good long look at her," she whispered. "Now, while she's napping." Her fingertips brushed lightly over the birthmark and the child's breathing shifted, then eased into the relaxed pattern of sleep. "Look your fill of this now, when she doesn't know you're staring." Lexie turned to him, a challenge in her eyes. "What do you think?"

  "I think she's beautiful," he murmured. He reached out to complete the caress she'd denied him while awake, stroking the brown curls, delighted to discover the same reddish-blond highlights he had.

  His daughter.

  The corners of his mouth pulled upward. His baby girl. He turned back to Lexie, whose expression had softened. "She's wonderful. Amazing."

  "She is that," Lexie said. Then she sighed. "But what is your wife going to think about having a child who—" her fingers fluttered over the birthmark again "—who, uh, isn't exactly what she expected?"

  David knew what she meant. Wasn't perfect. Damaged. Lexie's eyes grew large and panic filled them. He swore silently. He hadn't wanted to tell her about Angela right away, but she'd run once to protect the child from Angela, and the fear on her face said she'd do it again.

  "I don't want to talk about it in front of Sarah, even if she is asleep," he said quietly. "Can we go someplace else?"

  She nodded. "Just let me turn this on." She leaned over the night table and switched on a baby monitor. Then she brushed a tender kiss across Sarah's forehead and rose from the bed.

  He lingered a moment longer, letting his own fingers stroke the side of his little girl's face. Lexie's instincts were right. Angela would have turned her back on this child in a heartbeat.

  Much as it galled him to admit it, the surrogate mother had saved his child's life by running away.

  David followed her down the long upstairs hallway toward the back of the house. Just before the final bedroom, they turned to the right and descended a narrow staircase, emerging in the large kitchen.

  He nudged the door closed, noting how it vanished into the white paneling along the wall.

  "I could use a drink," Lexie muttered, turning on the monitor's counterpart on the windowsill. "But since it's only—" she glanced at the large black-rimmed clock over the sink "—11:32, and since I don't drink anyway, I think I'll have some herbal tea." She gave a sharp laugh. "Caffeine is the last thing my body needs right now." She took a yellow teapot from the stove, filled it with water and replaced it. "What about you?"

  "You know I'm a caffeine junkie. If you've got coffee, I'll take it."

  "I've got all kinds of coffee. Do you still take it black?" She opened a cupboard to the left of the sink.

  "Yeah, straight up. The stronger, the better."

  She flitted about the kitchen like a hummingbird, hands in constant motion. The scent of fresh-ground coffee beans filled the air, then she set the pot to brew. "There. That'll take a few minutes."

  "Good. Why don't we sit down then." He motioned at the table. "This time, in a chair?" He pulled two back, dropped into the one on the end.

  "I can listen and work at the same time." She pointed at some cookie trays in the double sink. "I need to—"

  "You need to sit down." He patted the table near the chair he'd drawn out for her. "Come on."

  She draped a towel over her shoulder and hesitantly approached him. She sank into the chair, propped her chin in one palm, and the fingers on her other hand began to drum on the oak surface.

  If she were wound any tighter, she'd give the Energizer Bunny a run for his money. He reached out, covered her tapping fingers with his hand. "Relax, Lexie."

  "Easy for you to say."

  "Not really. I'm just as apprehensive about all this as you. Maybe more. So far, my daughter doesn't seem to even like me."

  "What did you expect, David? Surely you didn't think you'd walk in here and have her rush into your open arms?" She stared at him for a moment, peeling away his layers of defense until he shifted uncomfortably in the chair, letting go of her hand. "Oh, David. You did. She's shy and you're a stranger to her."

  "And whose fault is that? Not mine."

  Her mouth tightened into a thin line. "I ran to keep her safe. You know that."

  He cleared his throat. "Yeah, well, you don't have to worry about Angela anymore."

  "I don't?" Her eyes had matured since the last time he'd seen her. Though still sparkling with an innocence he found appealing, they were older somehow. Like she'd aged more than four and a half years since she'd come to him with her fears about his wife.

  "No, you don't."

  "How can you guarantee it? You didn't believe me back then, wouldn't even listen to the possibility—"

  "Angela is dead." He pushed his chair from the table and rose, walking to the window that looked
out onto the back porch.

  "Oh." Silence ruled the kitchen for several long seconds, broken only by the hum of the refrigerator.

  Then her chair scraped on the floor. "I'd say I'm sorry, but … I'm not. For Sarah's sake."

  "Yeah, well…" A tentative touch on his shoulder triggered a surge of warmth in his chest to go with the ache deep in his stomach, the acid pain brought on by thinking about Angela and how everything had unraveled in their lives like a computer program with a bad line of code.

  "I guess I am sorry for you, though," Lexie said softly. "It's not easy to lose someone you care about."

  He tried to control the dismissive noise that rumbled deep in his throat. Once upon a time, he'd cared for Angela, loved her more than he'd ever thought possible. What a fool he'd been. But then, love was for fools.

  Angela, on the other hand, had loved only herself. And he'd been too blind to see it. But she'd seemed normal then. Fun-loving, if a little high-maintenance. It had been the pressure of his wanting children, of Lexie's pregnancy, that started the messy, downward spiral that ended with Angela's death. A death he didn't want to talk about.

  "Don't sweat it," he said. "It was almost two years ago. And we were already divorced."

  Lexie struggled to make sense of it. His wife—no, his ex-wife—was dead. Had been dead for some time.

  The threat to Sarah was gone.

  And so was Lexie's reason for keeping her. But how could she ever give her up, after loving her, caring for her for all this time?

  She let her hand fall to her side. The refrigerator clicked off, leaving the kitchen silent.

  He turned around to face her. "Lexie?"

  "What?" She didn't look at him. Couldn't.

  "I want to make this as easy as possible on Sarah. I don't want to traumatize her any more than I already have."

  And what about me? she wanted to scream. But the whistle of the teakettle pierced the air, and she moved to get a mug, drop in a tea bag and fill the cup with water.

  "I shouldn't have rushed so fast to tell her who I am. I scared her, and that was stupid on my part. Lexie?"

  "What?" Her spoon tinged against the sides of the mug.

  "Will you help me get to know my daughter? Help me make this easier on her?"

  Why don't you ask me cut out my own heart? The tinging got louder, and the tea sloshed over the rim of the cup. "Yes. I will." For Sarah's sake. "I guess you'll be taking her back to Erie."

  "Eventually. Once she's comfortable with me."

  "How long do you intend to stay?" She gripped the hot beverage, but didn't trust herself to pick it up.

  "I'm not sure. However long it takes, I guess. That's sort of up to Sarah. A few days?"

  A few days.

  Lexie blinked back the moisture gathering in her eyes. She had a few days to come up with a way to stay part of Sarah's life.

  And what about Pappy? It wasn't as if Lexie could just go back to Erie herself and walk out on the old man who'd given her and Sarah a home and a family where they'd had none. He needed her.

  What was she going to do?

  * * *

  Chapter 3

  « ^ »

  John Nonnemacher rolled over and stared at the clock's big red numbers: 3:26 a.m. And the scent of fresh-baked bread was wafting from the kitchen. What in tarnation was that girl thinking?

  'Course, she'd been walking around the whole afternoon and evening like a cat with its fur rubbed the wrong way. All prickly and stiff. And Sarah. The little one had been pretending she was a dog again. Why, he'd even heard her growl at the new guest, and Lexie had said Sarah had bitten him. Something was going on. He wasn't sure he liked the way his old mind was putting one and one together and getting three.

  He rose from his bed, shrugged into the plaid bathrobe Sarah and Lexie had given him for Christmas the year before. His slippers scuffed against the floor as he shuffled out of his room and into the kitchen. The dim light over the sink showed Lexie turning out two loaves of bread onto wire cooling racks. Several dozen freshly baked German cookies also sat on the island, and numerous mixing bowls and measuring spoons littered the rest of the surfaces.

  "Can't sleep, huh?"

  She gasped and fumbled with the loaf of bread.

  "Jeez, Pappy, you scared me. What are you doing up at this hour?"

  "I asked you first." He trudged across the kitchen, snagging two of the little rolled pastries on the way. Sinking into a chair, he bit a cookie in half. "Mmm. Girl, you are a talent in the kitchen. No wonder these are Sarah's favorites."

  A tin clattered onto the floor. He glanced up to see Lexie just staring at it. "Missy? You gonna tell me what's wrong, or you gonna make me guess?"

  She bent down and picked up the metal container.

  "All right, lemme see. Everything seemed fine until lunchtime today. What was different about lunchtime today? Oh, I know. That's when that young man showed up. You know, he reminds me of someone, but I just can't quite figger it out."

  Lexie gathered all the utensils and dishes and placed them in the sink. Then, with a long exhale, she picked up a cup of tea along with a rack of the cookies and came to sit next to him. She pushed the nut-and-brown-sugar cookies in his direction.

  He accepted one and ate it in a single bite this time. She'd never been big on telling him the hard things. Stuff about her past. And he could tell, this was gonna be a doozy. He waited. After all, it wasn't like an eighty-two-year-old man had much else to do.

  "I'm going to lose her, Pap," she finally whispered.

  "Lose who? What are you talking about?"

  "Sarah. David's her father. And he's going to take her away, back home to Pennsylvania with him."

  He let loose with some well-chosen curses, words his wife, God rest her soul, woulda given him grief over. "What do you mean, he's going to take her away? The hell he is! We'll get us a lawyer, Missy, don't you worry. We'll just see about that. You're her mother."

  "But that's just it, Pap. I'm not."

  He grabbed her mug of tea and held it beneath his nose, inhaling deeply. "What kind of herbal crap are you drinking, girl? I told you this stuff would do weird things to your head. Of course you're her mother. I was there when you whelped the young'un. Not her mother." He hmmphed.

  Lexie accepted the cup he thrust back at her. The warmth from the mug soothed her fingers but did little to quell the cold that went right through her like a sharp Montana winter wind. "Pap, if I tell you something, promise not to tell anyone else? Not even your coffee buddies?"

  "You know better than to even ask."

  She nodded. Of all people in Mill Creek, Pappy was the one least likely to judge her, too. "I'm not sure where to start."

  "The beginning usually works best."

  "I just don't know where it began. Was it with David growing up like another big brother in my house?" Lexie chuckled. "Although he was a lot nicer to me than my real brothers. Guess he didn't think his status with the family extended to abusing the kid sister." She tapped her fingers on the rim of the cup. "Or did it start with our broken dreams?"

  "Yours or his?"

  "Both." She told Pappy about the night David had sought refuge in her parent's supposedly empty house, only to discover her there, mourning her own broken dreams: a severed relationship when she'd expected Andrew to propose, a lost job due to budget cuts at the library in Pittsburgh and having to come home and live with her parents again.

  Lexie's chest tightened. "But my wounds were nothing compared to his. For three years, his wife had managed to conceal from him the fact that she couldn't have children. And David really wanted children. He always said he'd have a family just like mine one day. He was devastated."

  His pain had touched her. David had always been her hero, from the time she was small and he'd buffered some of her brothers' actions, to the time he'd taken her to her junior prom when her klutzy, geeky date had broken his leg two days before the big event. David hadn't cared how uncool it was for a twenty-ye
ar-old college guy to escort a sixteen-year-old high schooler, and he'd suffered plenty of razzing about it from Marc and Kenny.

  She couldn't stand the empty ache in his eyes.

  "Late that night I heard him blowing his nose. The man who can't stand to see someone in tears was crying, Pappy," Lexie said. "After some thinking, I came up with the idea of carrying a child for them. I figured one of us might as well have our dreams."

  "Seems like quite a favor, Missy. Not something you do for just anybody."

  "No. But, for David…" She shrugged, not wanting to delve deeply into the emotions that had led her to act as his surrogate. "It took a while to get all the testing done. The first procedure didn't take. David was crushed. But the second time, I got pregnant with Sarah."

  "So, what happened? Why did you run away?"

  The mug had cooled in her hands and her voice faltered as Lexie continued. "Oh, Pap. I was about four months pregnant when we discovered Angela had been keeping more secrets. Turns out she had no uterus because she'd given birth at nineteen, and complications from the delivery forced her to have a partial hysterectomy."

  "That's tough. But that's not all, is it?"

  "Her first child—" the words caught in her throat "—died. SIDS, they claimed. But Angela's first husband went to David when he found out they had a surrogate carrying a child for them. He told David Angela had … murdered their baby."

  "She killed her first baby?" Pappy asked. "What kind of mother kills her own child?"

  Lexie shook her head. "I don't know, Pappy. Her ex said she went a little crazy after the surgery. But I was scared. She hadn't shown much interest in Sarah at that point. Only David came to the ultrasound appointments and talked to me about the pregnancy." Lexie shuddered. "The father of that baby came to me, Pappy, after David wouldn't believe him."

  "Didn't the police check it out?"

  "The coroner ruled it SIDs. They thought her ex was making up the accusation because their relationship was sometimes volatile. But he seemed honest and genuine to me. Frantically worried about the baby I carried."