An Unexpected Christmas Baby

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  That thought was total bunk and she knew it. She didn’t have the flu. Hadn’t had it the week before, either. The man was attractive. She noticed. Not a big deal.

  “I want you to go get her, please,” she said as he cued up the movie. “Please.”

  She wouldn’t be able to focus on her real reason for being there if she was busy feeling bad about being the reason that baby was in the other room all alone. She was a grown woman who could take accountability for her issues, her problems. Diamond Rose was a helpless newborn who had to rely on everyone around her to fill every single one of her needs.

  Besides, Tamara needed Flint relaxed if she hoped to get information that could help her father one way or the other. She’d spent most of Saturday going through files and meeting with employees who’d come in on their own time to see her, in addition to the hours with Maria in and out of the office. Her father had told her someone was trading on various computers. He knew which ones, so now she did, too. She’d wanted to find out when they were in use most often, as part of her efficiency check, so she could give her father an idea of when or why they might have been freed up for other uses. She had dates now. Other specifics.

  And she was slowly making her way through expense reports and comparing them to the provided receipts, examining dates, times, employee credit card numbers, clients. Looking for...anything in the past year. Flint’s records had come first. She’d finished them very late Friday night.

  He’d had a lot of fancy dinners, gone to shows, on cruises, to games, with a lot of important and wealthy people. And every single dime he’d claimed checked out to the penny.

  She’d told herself not to let hope grow. She’d learned the hard way that hoping led to greater heartache. Still, she’d wished she could call and tell her father that things were looking good. So far.

  But, of course, she couldn’t.

  * * *

  Just when Tamara was hooked to the point of forgetting almost everything else, a little cough jarred her. Then a tiny wail, followed by another.

  She looked at Flint, who was already headed over to the playpen. “She’s got another hour and a half,” he said as though babies watched the clock and knew they were supposed to be hungry at certain times. Focusing on the movie, which he’d paused on the screen—about the young man learning the Wall Street ropes from someone who was at the top of his game, but had gotten there by unethical means—she waited.

  “What’s the matter, Little One?” Flint crooned softly. The wails grew louder. He rubbed her arm. Felt her cheek. Continued to talk. Tried to get her to take a pacifier. She continued to cry.

  Pick her up. Pick her up.

  After a few more tries with the pacifier, he picked her up.

  The crying didn’t stop.

  For another ten minutes.

  He walked with her. Talked to her about her eating schedule, explaining that it wasn’t time yet. He changed her, which only made her angrier.

  He left the room, taking her somewhere in another part of the house. Probably to give Tamara space. She could still hear the crying.

  She couldn’t just sit there, doing nothing. Poor Flint had to be getting tense. Frustrated. Especially with her there. Maybe she should leave and watch the movie another day. It wasn’t as if her father had to have his answers within the next few hours.

  Or that she was going to find them there that day.

  The crying went on. She paced the room. Looking at bookshelves. Reading titles of DVDs. Noticing the lack of any family photos. Or personal mementoes.

  Diamond Rose finally stopped crying and Tamara’s entire torso seemed to settle. Until then she hadn’t realized that her breathing was becoming shallow, the way it did at the onset of a panic attack. Hadn’t felt herself tense.

  And almost immediately the crying started again. She grabbed her purse. Had her keys and was at the door before she remembered she had to tell Flint she’d take a rain check on the movie. She couldn’t just him let come out and find her gone.

  Following the sounds of the baby in distress, she traveled a hallway he hadn’t showed her yet, passing two rooms—a bathroom, the master suite—and eventually found him in a small back bedroom with a Jack and Jill bathroom leading into one of the rooms she’d passed.

  Opening her mouth to tell him she was leaving, she caught sight of his face. He looked scared. Honest-to-goodness scared.

  “I’m sorry,” he told her. “Nothing’s working. She doesn’t feel feverish, but maybe I should take her in.”

  His gaze moving from the purse on her shoulder to the keys in her hand, he nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said, giving her a smile that seemed all for her, in spite of his crying infant, and went back to trying to comfort the child in his arms.

  “Put her up on your shoulder,” she said. “Pat her back. She might have gas.”

  He tried. It didn’t work.

  Tamara felt like crying herself. “Try rubbing her back.”

  That didn’t work, either. Tamara had to get out of there. But she couldn’t just leave him. His problems weren’t hers, but he was trying so hard and she couldn’t simply walk out.

  “Do you have a rocking chair?”

  He nodded, left the room, and she followed him. Into another room filled with baby furniture and paraphernalia. There was a mobile over the crib, but nothing on the walls. No color. No stimulation. Just...stuff.

  A massive amount of stuff to have collected in less than a week.

  Sitting in the rocker, he held the baby to his chest and rocked. Cradled her in his arms and rocked. She’d settle for a second or two and then start right back up again.

  “Lay her on your lap,” Tamara said. “On her stomach.” Her purse was still on her shoulder. Her hand hurt, and looking down, she saw imprints of her keys in the flesh of her palm.

  Flint pulled a blanket off the arm of the chair and did as Tamara said, settling Diamond Rose across his lap, continuing to rock gently.

  “Rub her back,” she suggested again.

  The crying calmed for a second. Then another second. The baby burped, formula pooled on the blanket, and all was quiet.

  Shaking, Tamara started to cry.

  She had to get out of there.

  * * *

  In spite of the warmth seeping through the right leg of his jeans, Flint rocked gently, rubbing Diamond’s back, while he wiped her mouth and pulled the soiled part of the blanket away from her. Her eyes closed, she sighed deeply and his entire being changed.

  Irrevocably.

  Almost weak with the infusion of love that swamped him, he knew he was never going to be the same. She was his.

  He was hers.

  Watching her breathe, he loved her more fiercely than he’d known it was possible to love.

  And somehow Tamara Frost was connected to it all.

  * * *

  Tamara was gone when he finally made it back out to the great room. He’d known she would be. Putting Diamond in her Pack ’n Play, he flipped off the television still paused on a close-up of Michael Douglas with his mouth open, caught in midword. Then he gathered up the glasses of leftover iced tea, the half-eaten bag of popcorn and took them to the kitchen. Upon his return, he grabbed his laptop.

  Settling back on the sofa, wanting to stay close to the baby, he did a search on medical degrees. They took an average of eight years to earn and then an average of four years of residency before a graduate could begin practice. A list of medical schools came next. He wanted the best. Decided on three and searched tuitions. Then he researched the average cost of living for a medical resident, did a calculation based on average cost of living increase each year, multiplying that by twenty-six, because, based on schooling, she’d be at least that before beginning a residency, and added the figure to his list.

  His eventual total was about what he’d estimated when he’d
been rocking his baby sister. But it was good to have solid facts.

  He knew how much extra money he had to earn to fund Diamond’s college account. She could be whatever she wanted. He was prepared for the most expensive, which was why he’d looked into medical schools. He checked the market next—something he did all day every day, using his cell phone when he didn’t have access to his computer. Searching now for his own personal investments. There was always more money to be made.

  And finding it was his talent.

  He had all of half an hour before Diamond was crying again. Deciding it was about time, he tried to feed her. She drank for a couple of minutes and then turned her head. And kept turning it away whenever he tried to guide the nipple into her mouth.

  So he rocked her. Laid her on her belly and rubbed her back. Walked with her out by the pool. Talked to her. Loved her.

  And thought about Tamara. She’d fought her own demons that afternoon to help Diamond Rose. He couldn’t remember a time other people had put themselves out on his behalf.

  Except Howard Owens. He’d risked his own reputation to take Flint on eight years before. Flint hated that the man thought he’d been planning to stab him in the back.

  Hated it, but wasn’t surprised. That was the way his life worked. With his background, he was always suspect.

  It was something he’d always known, even as a little kid.

  And something he swore Diamond would never face.

  Tamara had fought her own demons to hang around.

  As he finally set Diamond down in a clean sleeper and with a full feeding of warm formula in her belly sometime after seven that evening, he pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. He’d changed into sweats and a long sleeved T-shirt and was sitting by the pool with a bottle of beer.

  Tamara picked up on the second ring.

  “I just wanted to apologize for this afternoon,” he said as soon as she said hello.

  “No apology necessary,” she told him. “Seriously. I think what you’re doing... Anyway, don’t apologize.”

  There was no missing the wealth of emotion in her tone. He’d had a tough day with a cranky newborn, but he had a feeling Tamara’s day had been immeasurably worse.

  He did need to apologize. He’d been so certain he could help her—that somehow Diamond Rose would be the baby who’d help her heal from her loss, ease her pain—and with no real knowledge of the subject, he’d invited her into a hellhole.

  He should just let her go.

  He’d thought about it on and off all afternoon. And as he’d eaten his single serving of reheated lasagna for dinner.

  He’d argued with himself and called her anyway.

  There had to be something he and Diamond Rose could do for her.

  “Maybe we should stick to having lunch for now,” he offered, still at a loss.

  If she even wanted to see him again. He wouldn’t blame her if she thought he was too much trouble. He’d probably think so, too, if he were in her shoes.

  Except he was beginning to understand that he had no idea how it felt to be in her shoes. Having children was a natural progression in life. Something most people took for granted. To be married and ready to start a family, to know you were pregnant, to be buying things for a nursery, making plans, and then to lose that child—he had no idea how any of that would feel.

  And times four.

  “Lunch would be good,” she said, sounding a little less tense. “But dinner on Friday was good, too.”

  “Today wasn’t.”

  “No.”

  “What did you do when you left?” Had she called a friend? How did she cope?

  “I went to work.” That he could completely relate to.

  “Owens is closed on weekends.”

  “I have temporary clearance with security.”

  “Are you at the office now?”

  “Yes.”

  He pictured her there. The building was quiet after hours. Peaceful. He did some of his best work when he was the only one on the floor.

  Pictured himself there with her and actually got hard.

  Either he was heading into the rest of his life or screwing up. At the moment, he wasn’t sure which.

  “You didn’t get to finish your movie,” he told her.

  “You could tell me about it.”

  He heard invitation in her response and, settling back in his chair, beer in hand, he gave her a fairly detailed rundown of a movie he’d seen for the first time in junior high. He’d been in foster care, a six-month stint, and the family he’d been staying with had been watching old Charlie Sheen movies. The actor had just been hospitalized after having a stroke from a cocaine overdose. Flint’s mother had been in jail at the time for possession of crack. The movie had a profound effect on him—establishing for him, very clearly, that ethics were more important than money. But that money came a very close second. It had also given him his lifelong fascination with the unending opportunities provided by the stock market.

  Not that he told Tamara all of that. With her, he stuck to the plot.

  Until she asked him what it was that attracted him to the movie to the point of having watched it so many times. Then he told her about seeing it for the first time.

  “Wow, that seems a bit callous to me,” she said. “They knew why your mother was in jail, right?”

  “I was certainly under that impression.” He’d never asked.

  “Did you say anything to them?”

  “Nope.” He’d known from experience that any questions from him would just lead to more lectures that he’d neither needed nor wanted. Or, worse, more scorn.

  He was the bastard son of a drug user. Assumed to be like her, because how could he not be? He’d never experienced anything different. Not many good people were drawn to him.

  “Did you know from the first time you saw the movie that you wanted to be a stockbroker?”

  He sipped from his bottle. Chuckled. Pictured her in the converted closet they’d given her as an office and wished a glass of wine on her.

  “I wasn’t prone to lofty dreams,” he told her. “I was curious about the market, but it didn’t really occur to me that I’d have the opportunity to live in that world.” She was easy to talk to. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had been interested in him as a person.

  Maybe some of that was his fault. He hadn’t been all that open to sharing his life. Even with Stella. He’d shared his time. His plans. His future. But not himself.

  He’d only just realized that...

  “So when did you start believing in the opportunity?”

  It took him a second to realize they were still talking about the stock market. He picked up the baby monitor on the table. Made sure the volume was all the way up. Diamond, who was just inside the door in her carrier on the table, had been asleep for more than half an hour.

  “I had a minimum-wage job in high school, but I’d been earning extra money by going through trash, finding broken things, fixing them and then selling them. I’d made enough to buy a beater car and was saving for college. And I got to thinking I should look for things that were for sale cheap—you know, at garage sales—and then fix them up and resell them.

  “I had quite a gig going until my junior year, when my mother got arrested again. I had almost enough saved to pay the minimum bail and went to a bondsman for the rest. I gave him an accounting of the books I’d been keeping with my little enterprise as a way of proving that I was good for the money. It’s not like I had any real asset to use as collateral...”

  He rattled on, as if he shared his story on a regular basis. Flint hardly recognized himself but didn’t want to stop.

  Talking to Tamara felt good.

  “The guy was pretty decent. He paid the bond, without collateral, but told me he wanted me to check in with him every week, re
garding my business intake. He helped me do my tax reporting, too. Supposedly it was just until Mom showed up in court and he got his money back, but I kept stopping in now and then, even after she was sentenced to community service and in the clear. He’s actually the one who suggested I think about the stock market. He said I had a knack for making money. Turned out he was right.”

  He didn’t hesitate to tell her the whole truth about this aspect of his background, in spite of the fact he never did that. He guarded his private life so acutely.

  “Did you ever go back and see him? After you made it?”

  He hadn’t made it yet. He wasn’t even sure what “making it” consisted of these days. He’d thought that opening his own firm, having other brokers working for him, earning good money, would be making it.

  “He retired and moved to Florida when I was a freshman in college.”

  And although Flint had given the guy his email address, had emailed him a few times, he’d never heard from him again.

  “It was because of him that, years later, I started looking into offshore accounts,” he told her. “He fronted money, which meant that he had to make money. He used to do a bit of foreign investing. He’d tell me about foreign currencies and exchanges and the money he’d make. He also talked about security.

  “‘Diversification equals security,’ he’d say. If you keep all your assets in one place, and the place burns down, you’re left with nothing. We like to think that our banks, at least the federally insured ones, are completely safe, and I feel that generally they are. But it doesn’t hurt to have assets elsewhere, just in case of some major catastrophe—there can always be another crash like we had in 2008. It’s not like it hadn’t happened before that, too.”

  Okay, now he was reminding himself of Ross in an old Friends episode, going on and on about his field of paleontology and boring his friends to death.

  “Sorry,” he said, reining himself in. It felt as though a dam had burst inside him, which made him feel a bit awkward. But not sorry.

  “Actually, this is the kind of thing I was after,” Tamara said. “Greater understanding of how the investment world works. But...I thought offshore accounts were illegal.”