“They will,” Sebastian assured her. “Anybody for coffee? We have leaded and unleaded around here these days, so we can handle your new regime with no problem, Gwen.”
“Thanks, but as soon as Matty gets off the phone, Travis and I need to get home. We have a ton of chores waiting, and besides, Luann counts the minutes until she sees Elizabeth again.”
“I can relate to that,” Sebastian said. “I—”
“Sebastian?” Matty hurried back in, a smile on her face. “You’ll never guess. It’s Nat! He’s in New York!”
“He’s back?”
Matty nodded.
“Hallelujah,” Travis murmured.
“About time,” Sebastian said. “This is turning out to be a real red-letter day.” Relief and happiness washed through him as he started toward the kitchen. Nat’s decision to help war orphans made some kind of crazy sense, given his background, but Sebastian had worried about his safety. They all had. Nat pretended to be so together, but inside he was one of the walking wounded. As a result, he took chances he shouldn’t take, and it would be just like him to get himself killed doing something stupid and heroic. Apparently he’d escaped that fate…again.
“Tell him to get his sorry ass back to Colorado,” Travis called after him. “I want the sheepskin vest I loaned him, and I want it before the snow flies.”
“I’ll tell him,” Sebastian said. He was grinning as he picked up the receiver and put it to his ear. “Hey, you crazy son of a gun. What the hell do you mean staying over there so long? We thought you’d gone native!”
“Hey, Sebastian.” Nat’s voice was thick with emotion. “It’s good to hear your voice again.”
“I’m glad, because I plan to run up your long-distance bill while I chew on your ear for being gone so damn long on that extended vacation of yours. When you finally show up at the Rocking D, I suggest you bring some identification. We’ve all forgotten what you look like.”
“Yeah, I know I was gone too long.” Nat sighed.
Sebastian’s grin faded. He’d expected at least a chuckle out of Nat. A chilly finger of anxiety ran down his backbone. “Are you okay? Don’t tell me you got shot up over—”
“No, no. I’m fine. But…look, Jess is here with me.”
Sebastian almost dropped the phone. “She is?” He felt as if somebody had short-circuited his brain. “You mean our Jessica?” he repeated, his mind still not operating on all cylinders.
“Yeah. And that baby of hers you’re watching is…mine.”
“Yours?” Sebastian roared. “What the hell do you mean, yours? You weren’t even there.”
Matty hurried into the kitchen followed closely by Gwen and Travis, holding the baby. They all stared at Sebastian, and Elizabeth started to fuss.
“Yeah, I was there, the night before you arrived,” Nat said. “Is that her?”
The night before. Sebastian couldn’t figure how Nat had been there and nobody had known about it. “Is what her?”
“I hear a baby. Is that her?”
Sebastian felt shell-shocked. And absolutely sure that Nat Grady was not Elizabeth’s father. He couldn’t be. “Yeah, that’s her. But I don’t know why you think—”
“I don’t think. I know. After the avalanche I started seeing Jess. We had a…relationship…for almost a year, and—”
Pain sliced through Sebastian. “You were seeing Jessica for an entire year and you didn’t tell me? I thought we were friends!”
“I’m sorry. I should have trusted you more. Should have trusted all of you more. But I was afraid you’d be after me to make a commitment, and I didn’t think that was going to happen, so I asked Jess to keep it between the two of us.”
Anger followed on the heels of Sebastian’s sense of betrayal. Matty came forward, as if to offer her support, and he waved her off. Later he’d cling to Matty like there was no tomorrow, but at the moment he needed to concentrate on this conversation and make sure he understood what Nat was telling him. “Go on,” he said to Nat in a tight voice.
“The week before the avalanche reunion party I went up to Aspen to spend some time with Jess before the rest of you arrived. The night before you guys came up, Jess and I had a big fight. She wanted to end the secrecy.”
“Imagine that.”
Nat sounded desperate. “She wanted marriage and a family, Sebastian! I knew I couldn’t do that.”
“Then you should have been a wee bit more careful, shouldn’t you?” All the muscles in Sebastian’s body clenched in denial. Shifting Elizabeth around every week wasn’t a great solution, but at least he hadn’t lost her completely. Now he might. He couldn’t bear to look at Matty, and especially not at Elizabeth, so he stared down at the worn linoleum.
“Yes,” Nat said quietly. “I should have been more careful.”
“So now what?” Sebastian asked dully. “Are you coming back to pick her up? Is that what you called to tell me?”
“No. I’m still not sure what to do about the baby. I’ll provide all the financial support Jess needs, of course, but I’m not a fit person to take on a little kid, as we all know.”
“Why not? You’ve been over there taking care of nobody but little kids!”
“They had nothing. No one. And there were plenty of other people around, so I never worried that I’d do the wrong thing. But put me in a house with my own kid, and I don’t trust myself.”
“That’s pure, unadulterated bullsh—” Sebastian caught himself as he remembered that Elizabeth was in the room. He’d vowed not to use those words around her, because in another seven or eight months she might start talking, and he didn’t want…. Then he realized that in another seven or eight months Elizabeth could be gone.
“Call it what you want,” Nat said. “It’s the truth as I see it. I’m bringing Jess back to her baby, and we’ll take it from there.”
Sebastian fought so many conflicting emotions he couldn’t think straight. He couldn’t imagine a man turning away from Elizabeth, and he took it as a personal affront. Yet he wouldn’t want a man to claim her if he wasn’t planning to be an A-number-one dad. “When will you be here?”
“That’s just it. I’m not sure. We might have to take a roundabout route. Jess has someone on her trail, somebody who’s apparently trying to kidnap her. That’s why she left the baby with you.”
“Good God. Why would they want to kidnap Jessica?”
“Ever hear of a guy named Russell P. Franklin?”
“Why, sure I—” Then it all clicked into place. “Well, damn.” He’d always suspected Jessica had come from money. Maybe it was the way she held a fork, or her posture, or her choice of words. Sebastian hadn’t dreamed how much money, though.
He glanced over at Elizabeth in sudden fear. The child he loved so fiercely was an heiress, and that was potentially life-threatening. “Is the baby in danger?”
Travis frowned and wrapped his arms tighter around Elizabeth.
“Apparently the kidnapper doesn’t know about the baby,” Nat said. “Neither do Jess’s parents. Now that Jess has been separated from Elizabeth for six months, she thinks it’s safe to come back and see her.” Nat lowered his voice. “She needs to, Sebastian. This has been really tough on her.”
It’s been tough on all of us, Sebastian thought. And it doesn’t promise to get any easier. But complaining wouldn’t get them anywhere. “Has she notified the police about this?”
“No. That would bring her parents into it. According to her, they’d swoop in and bring the baby back to New York to live on their estate. They could probably swing it, too, considering the legal firepower they have. Jess doesn’t want that.”
“I wouldn’t want that, either,” Sebastian said. “Unless it’s our only choice to keep Elizabeth safe.”
“I’d rather catch the bastard and not have to worry about him,” Nat said.
Sebastian heaved a sigh. “Finally we have an area of agreement.” Then he paused to think. “It’s mighty strange that he’s been followi
ng her all this time and hasn’t snatched her yet.”
“I’ve thought about that, too. Either he’s crazy or inept.”
“Let’s hope he’s inept. I don’t suppose you have a weapon on you.”
“You know I hate guns,” Nat said.
“Yeah, I know. Listen, get here as best you can and as soon as you can. Be careful. Once you arrive, we’ll find a way through this.”
Nat didn’t respond for a moment. Then he cleared his throat. “You’re a better friend to me than I deserve.”
Still smarting from Nat’s betrayal, Sebastian was tempted to agree, but then he remembered the stories Nat had told of his childhood. Thinking of the cruelty Nat had endured made compassion easier to find. “You’ve always been too hard on yourself, buddy,” he said. “Come on home and we’ll straighten everything out.”
“Home,” Nat said, his voice husky. “That’s how I think of it, too. Listen, Jess wants to ask you about the baby. Here she is.”
Sebastian braced himself.
“Sebastian?” Jessica sounded very unsure of herself. “How…how is she?”
“Good.” Sebastian discovered that the lump in his throat made talking difficult. “Big. Growing. She has four teeth.”
“Four. Wow.”
Sebastian could hear her swallow. Her struggle to stay composed touched him. “This must have been a nightmare for you,” he said softly.
“Yeah,” she murmured. “I hope you can forgive me for all I’ve put you through, but I couldn’t think what else to do. And I didn’t realize Nat would be gone so long.”
“No kidding. None of us did.”
“Is she…what color are her eyes now?”
“Blue.” And now Sebastian could see it. They were Nat’s eyes. “She has a sock monkey named Bruce,” he added, not sure why he’d said it. “She dotes on that silly monkey.”
“She does? That’s…so cute. I wish—” Jessica broke off with a little sob. “Here’s—here’s Nat,” she choked out.
Nat’s voice was rough with emotion. “We’ll be there as soon as we possibly can. Goodbye, buddy.”
“Take care, Nat.” His heart heavy, Sebastian slowly hung up the phone and turned to the little cluster of people waiting in the kitchen doorway. They all looked anxious except for Elizabeth. She’d stopped fussing and was playing happily with the raccoon puppet Travis had brought her.
Sebastian’s chest grew tight as he looked at the baby. He’d known life couldn’t go on indefinitely like this. He’d told himself hundreds of times that someday Jessica would turn up. But the longer she’d stayed away, the more he’d built a case in his mind for challenging her right to Elizabeth. Now he could see that she’d stayed away for a good reason, an honorable reason. She’d tortured herself in order to protect her baby, and he wasn’t about to challenge her claim now. And that meant his days with Elizabeth were numbered.
“I think we’d better get Boone and Shelby over here,” he said.
JESSICA HUDDLED on the bed and tried not to cry. No matter how hard she worked at it, she couldn’t picture her little baby with four teeth. Four. And blue, blue eyes instead of the smoky gray-blue they’d been at two months.
Elizabeth was so different now, but all Jessica could imagine were tiny hands, impossibly tiny fingernails, a gummy smile. She didn’t look like that anymore. And she’d found a favorite toy, a monkey named Bruce. Jessica had missed it all.
Nat hung up the phone and put his arm around her. “It’ll be okay,” he said gently.
“Will it?” She looked at him through eyes blurred with tears. “She’s changed so much. If someone walked by me on the street holding Elizabeth, I probably wouldn’t recognize her!”
“Sure you would.” He gave her a comforting squeeze. “I’ll bet she hasn’t changed all that much.”
The knot of misery tightened in her stomach. “Maybe that’s true,” she said, pushing each word out as if it were made of lead, “but even if I didn’t know her right away, that’s not really what I’m afraid of.”
“Then what?”
She gulped back tears. “Oh, Nat, after all this time…she won’t recognize me!”
CHAPTER SEVEN
JESSICA LONGED to hop on a plane and be in Colorado by nightfall, but in order to do that she’d have to use her real identity at the ticket counter. She didn’t want to risk it.
“I think you’ll have to rent us a car,” she said as they ate a room-service breakfast, she wearing the hotel robe and Nat in jeans and a T-shirt. “I’ll be glad to pay for—”
“Don’t you dare start that.” He put down his coffee cup and glared at her.
“Start what?”
“Assuming all the responsibility.”
Even when he got gruff and bristly, she couldn’t stop the surge of lust she felt every time she looked at him. When he talked, the movement of his mouth reminded her of his kiss, and everything he touched reminded her of his caress. “But I’m the one who should have known about antibiotics and how they affected birth control pills,” she said. “If I’d been smarter, this wouldn’t have happened.”
“If you’d been smarter, you wouldn’t have been involved with me in the first place.” His tone was bitter. “I should have been proud to tell everyone that you…that you cared for me. Instead, I kept you hidden in the shadows.”
“You didn’t hold a gun to my head, Nat. I stuck around because I wanted to.” She’d noticed that they were both avoiding using the word love to describe their feelings for each other.
For her part, she hesitated because she didn’t want to saddle him with even more guilt. With Nat, it was probably a way to maintain some distance, despite their obvious sexual need for each other. He might figure that if he claimed to love her, she would expect certain things.
“Nevertheless,” he persisted, “if our relationship had been out in the open, you might have gotten some advice from a girlfriend about those antibiotics.”
“But then there would have been no Elizabeth.”
“My point exactly.”
Jessica could no longer contemplate a world without her baby in it, and the fact that Nat could imagine such a thing shocked her. She put down her fork and leaned toward him. “We need to get a few things straight. I don’t regret one single minute I spent with you. I had a fabulous time. And I especially don’t regret that I became pregnant with your child. But I assume you’re not happy about the baby.”
“You assume right.”
Although she’d been expecting him to agree with her, his statement still hurt. She hurried on, not wanting him to know it. “That’s why I want to take all the responsibility, as long as I can do it. I don’t want Elizabeth’s needs handled by a man who begrudges her existence.”
“I didn’t say that, damn it!”
She stood and tightened the belt on her robe. “Yes, you did. Do you want the shower first, or should I take it? We need to get on the road.”
“Not until we settle this we don’t.” He pushed back his chair and nearly upset the breakfast tray as he got to his feet. “When you say I begrudge her existence, you make it sound like I’m upset because of the inconvenience. I don’t give a damn about the inconvenience! What I regret more than I can say is bringing a child into the world by accident, when I have zero confidence in my abilities to be a father to that child.”
So they were back to that. But things had changed since the last time they’d had this argument. She played her trump card. “If that’s so, then what were you doing in some hellhole taking care of orphans?”
He flinched, and then his voice rose. “Maybe I was testing myself, okay? Maybe I wanted to see if I’d have the urge to get violent with those children.”
She thought there was a lot more to his work with the refugees than that, but she wasn’t going to question him on that point now. “And did you get violent?”
He looked away from her to gaze out the window. “No.”
“Then you must know you’ll be fine.”
He swung back to face her. “I don’t know that! You’d have to be a monster to lay a hand on those kids. They’d been through so much, patience was easy.” He ran a hand over his face. “Some of them, especially the boys, tried so hard to be tough, but you could see that inside they were terrified.”
Like you were as a child. Gazing at his anxious expression, she could picture the frightened little boy he must have been. She wanted to wrap her arms around him and let him know he’d never have to be that frightened again, but she didn’t dare trespass on that minefield-strewn land. “It must have been terrible,” she murmured.
“It was.” He stared into the distance.
She guessed he’d seen his own experience in every child’s face. Nat might as well have been orphaned, with no mother and totally at the mercy of a violent father who didn’t know how to love. Living with a father like Hank Grady might not have been so different from living in a war zone. “You wouldn’t have to worry about being violent around Elizabeth,” she said gently. “I’ll be there.”
He snapped out of his daze and glanced at her. He looked so heartbreakingly vulnerable. “I don’t know how to do this, Jess. With the orphans, it was easy. Get them clothes, get them food, find them a bed. Comb through the donations coming in and look for a stuffed animal they could hold.”
The picture of him doing that brought a lump to her throat. “And did you hug them when they got scared?”
“Well, sure, but—”
“And when they were sad, did you tell them funny stories to make them laugh?”
“Once I learned the language, but—”
“And if they did something wonderful, if they were kind or generous or brave or smart, did you tell them they were great?”
“Of course.”
“Nat, that’s all there is to it, whether you’re talking about a refugee child in a faraway country or Elizabeth. That’s all you have to do.”
“The hell it is! What if they do something stupid? How do you keep them from doing dumb things?”
She thought about her restrictive childhood in which she’d hardly been allowed to make a mistake. She’d broken free of that, and maybe she’d been stupid when she accidentally got pregnant. But as a result she had Elizabeth.
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