The Baby Notion

by Dixie Browning

  But dammit, sex was something else again, especially where a woman’s virginity was concerned. She couldn’t have thought he would marry her, because he’d made that plain right from the first. They had come together because they both wanted it, pure and simple. And because they were both free. And there wasn’t a single reason under the sun why they shouldn’t.

  Slowly, Jake got dressed, wondering how he’d have felt if one of the hands had ridden out to see what all the ruckus was about, with crows cutting up at having their watering hole taken over.

  He whistled up Odd Job, wishing he’d had the good sense to ride the roan stud. Before he saw Priss again, he had some serious thinking to do, and he always thought better after a good hard workout.

  All the way back to the house, Priss went over in her mind the words that had been said. Not what had been done, because she would never forget that, but it was what had been said she needed to remember now. Somewhere buried in the few words they’d spoken, there had to be a clue.

  Pete had returned from wherever he’d gone that morning. He greeted her from the kitchen door when she tried to sneak past and go upstairs. “Shoulda wore a hat. Ladies’ skin is delicate.” He was drying a cast-iron frying pan on a towel that looked less than pristine.

  “I never wear hats,” she said, trying to dredge up a smile for the old man who had treated her like a cross between a favorite niece and an apprentice housekeeper.

  “Might ought to. Keeps the grass out’n yer hair.”

  “I’ve got to go—to go upstairs and pack,” she said quickly.

  Pete came out into the hall and watched her as she clumped up the bare painted steps. “Look like you’ve been rode—”

  Priss could feel herself blushing. She said without turning around, “I know, I know. Like I’ve been rode hard and put away wet.”

  And then she blushed even harder.

  Ten

  Shutting the bedroom door behind her, Priss closed her eyes and leaned against the cool painted surface. For one long moment she allowed herself to think about what had happened. She’d always wondered what it would be like. What woman in her circumstances wouldn’t? She had been tempted once or twice, but never tempted quite enough to forget all her parents’ strictures.

  So now it had finally happened. Now she knew. It had been—

  She dismissed the word fate, but the word inevitable occurred to her. Wildly exciting, of course. Also uncomfortable. Maybe even embarrassing, if she’d had time to think about it. All in all, it had been…almost wonderful, she decided. Until Jake had said those awful things, and she’d said things right back at him.

  It occurred to her that the last time she’d climbed this far out on a limb, she had fallen and broken her arm.

  This time, she was afraid it might be more than an arm that had been broken. But then, if there was one thing she was good at—had learned to be good at over a lot of years—it was hiding her feelings and going on as if nothing had happened.

  Dragging out her luggage, Priss plopped it on the bed, then began emptying drawers and dragging things out of the chiffonier. It was amazing how deeply she had settled in after no more than a few days. No wonder Jake thought she was trying to squeeze herself a place in his life.

  Wheeling around, she marched to the head of the stairs and yelled downstairs. “Pete, can you drive me to town this afternoon?”

  The old man emerged from the kitchen. He was still drying the frying pan. Priss suspected he’d been watching television and used the frying pan and towel so that he’d look busy in case anyone came in. “Can’t Jake drive you in?”

  “He’s busy. He said so.” He’d said that and a whole lot more.

  A hard lump formed in her throat. Ignoring it, she went back to her packing. She thought about calling the super out at Willow Creek Arms to be sure her apartment was ready for occupancy and decided against it. No matter what anyone said, she was moving in. If he tried to stall her again, why then, she would just use it as a lever to break her lease and find herself a house. Something small. With a yard big enough for a garden and maybe some play equipment. Something near a school.

  Phooey on Jake Spencer. Who needed him?

  Booted feet ringing out on the bare painted floor, she marched back and forth between chiffonier and bed until all her bags were packed. Just as she snapped the last one shut, she heard Jake come in and head up the stairs. There was no mistaking that purposeful tread.

  Priss didn’t want to talk to him. Not now. Probably not ever. He could take his blasted long-term deals and go straight to blue blazes, because she wouldn’t marry him now if he went down on bended knee and begged her.

  If he could even bend one. Having seen the scars on his body, including one on his left leg where the bone had evidently been badly broken, she wondered that he got around as well as he did.

  Not that he hadn’t managed beautifully down beside the creek…

  He was coming upstairs. Well, damn.

  Acting on impulse, Priss dashed across the hall to the bathroom and slammed the door behind her.

  Jake’s firm, gritty footsteps paused outside the bathroom door. “Pricilla? We need to talk.”

  She turned the old-fashioned door latch and then opened both faucets in the tub.

  “Priss? Open the door. Please?”

  The heavy lump in her throat slipped down into her chest, where it began to ache. “I’m busy,” she growled. For good measure, she flushed the commode.

  “Dammit, woman, we need to talk!”

  “Then talk.” She sniffled and wiped an arm across her eyes. She wouldn’t cry, she would not. What was done was done, and crying wasn’t going to change anything.

  For one split second she thought he was going to break in the door. She watched the old porcelain knob twist and rattle. It was probably a hundred years old, and about as secure as a paperclip.

  “Judas priest,” she heard him mutter, and then she heard him stomp off down the hallway. Burying her face in her hands, she sat down on the commode and bawled, which eased the ache in her chest, but didn’t do much for her heart.

  She couldn’t even blame Jake, not really. Mostly it was her own fault. Every time he kissed her, she kissed him right back. He had to know how she felt—she hadn’t even tried to hide it, she’d been so sure he felt the same way.

  Well, starting right now, that was going to change. If she could love a man, she could darn well unlove him.

  He had his long-term plans? So did she, and they didn’t include any busted-up ex-rodeo cowboy who called every woman he met “honey” and “sugar” and “darling.”

  And sweetheart. Oh, she’d really fallen for that one.

  Right now he was probably waiting at the bottom of the stairs to get her signature on a release form, absolving him of any responsibility for deflowering her.

  Deflowering. What a silly, stupid term. Priss didn’t know where it had come from—Rosalie, probably. She was pretty sure it hadn’t come from Cosmopolitan.

  Anyway, at her age, virginity was a joke. Jake hadn’t taken anything from her. She had given it of her own free will, but he could roast on a spit in hell before she would let him deflower her again.

  He wasn’t waiting at the bottom of the steps, after all. By the time Priss had lugged all her cases down to the front door, there was still no sign of him. Uncertain whether to be relieved or disappointed, she went through the kitchen and poked her head in the office. “Pete? I’m ready. If you’ll pull your truck around front, I’ll lug this stuff outside.”

  The old man stalked past her and grabbed up the heaviest suitcase. “Take that there tinsiest one, I’ll fetch the rest. Jake gimme the keys to his truck so them fancy bags o’ yourn wouldn’t git ruint slippey-slidin’ around in the back o’ my ole rust bucket.”

  * * *

  Three days later, on Thursday, Rosalie came back from Dallas, full of snapshots, pickled okra and thank-you notes from her family. She wasted no time in fussing over the shadows unde
r Priss’s eyes and the wan look on her face. “You ain’t been eatin’ right.”

  Priss assured her it was merely the remnants of a bug she’d picked up at the hospital the last time she’d gone out to read to the children.

  Six days after that, when the super chased her out of the entrance shrubbery where she’d been planting a simple border of dusty miller, Priss made up her mind to look for a small house with a moderate price tag and a generoussize yard.

  Fortunately, her car was back from the shop, as good as new. She drove in to New Hope General three times in a single week to read to the children, although sometimes they wanted to talk, so she just listened to them while they tried to outdo each other telling tall tales. She even told a few of her own, which they all seemed to enjoy.

  Rosalie, fresh from managing the lives of her greatnieces and nephews like a five-star general, was still in her fussing mode. Priss wasn’t getting enough sleep. She wasn’t eating enough to keep a fly alive. She was drooping like a rainy Monday. At breakfast on Friday morning, just two weeks after she’d met Jake, Priss claimed she wasn’t hungry, and the elderly woman accused her of moping over what she called that shameful baby notion.

  “Miss Agnes had the right of it. If your daddy was alive today, he’d whomp some sense into your head! Now you set down there and eat your breakfast and quit talkin’ all that crazy business ’bout babies!”

  Priss sat. She even ate a few bites of waffle, but it reminded her of the awful mess she had made of cooking a meal for Jake, which reminded her of too many other things, so she crumpled her napkin over her plate and escaped the minute Rosalie went back to watching “The Morning Show” and shelling peas.

  The baby notion. There were two things Priss regretted. One was getting mixed up with Jake Spencer in the first place. But as long as she had, her second regret was not discussing with him, in a calm and rational way, the possibility of his fathering her baby and then letting her raise it on her own. That would have been better than nothing.

  In fact, it would’ve been the perfect solution. As for marriage, they really didn’t have all that much in common, except for that infernal itch they had scratched in a weak moment.

  Oh, for a little while she had thought they were destined to be together. She’d thought about what fun they could have, making a real home out of that awful old house. For a little while she’d been sure she sensed a secret well of loneliness buried deep inside the man, and she’d responded to it instinctively.

  She’d been wrong, of course. Jake wasn’t lonely. He was too mule-headed ever to allow himself to need anyone except maybe Pete, and even that, she suspected, was because Pete needed to be needed.

  If he ever married anyone, it wouldn’t be a woman who couldn’t cook, couldn’t do his laundry without shrinking his pants and burning holes in his shirts, who couldn’t even ride a horse without flopping around in the saddle like a fifty-pound sack of meal.

  All the same, she wished she had asked him right upfront about the baby thing. If he ever found out—not that she was one hundred percent certain she was pregnant—but if she was, and if Jake ever did find out, he’d raise a ruckus that would be heard all the way to Montana.

  Well. Time would tell. In the meantime, just in case, she made another appointment at the sperm bank, and this time she was careful to make it on Miss Agnes’s day off.

  It was one of the hottest Julys on record. Priss went to Dallas, determined to make some serious changes in her life. She spent an entire afternoon at the Galleria, trying on neat little classics. She toyed with the idea of having her hair cut and done in one of those sleek, understated styles her mother had always favored. “In New Hope, Pricilla Joan, there are girls who wear big hair and girls who amount to something,” her mother had told her more than once.

  At twenty-nine, Priss finally knew who she was, and liked that person just fine, thank you.

  So she gave up on the classics and the new hair style and bought a handsome coral-and-turquoise squash blossom necklace instead. And a darling Guatemalan embroidered smock, just in case. And a precious pink straw hat covered with big silk cabbage roses for one of the little girls who was undergoing chemotherapy.

  It was two weeks later that she saw Jake again. Exactly six weeks past the day they had made love by the creek and she had packed her bags and left the Bar Nothing forever. In the back of her mind, she’d always known that sooner or later she would see him again. Sooner or later, everyone saw everyone in New Hope. It was that kind of a town.

  But of all the days for it to happen. Fate really had it in for her. She had just found out she was one hundred percent certain, and had raced down to the shop to tell Faith and compare a few notes on the early stages of pregnancy when there he came, striding through the door with that shoulder-swinging, hip-switching walk of his, like John Wayne in one of those old movies, accompanied by the tiny jingle of the bell over the door.

  Priss’s heart did a quiet little flipflop while she waited for him to greet Faith, who was finishing up with a couple of customers. She watched as he worked his way back to where she stood, trying desperately to look nonchalant.

  When he was halfway between the books and the Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls, she braced herself to greet him as she would any other casual acquaintance, never mind that he was the first—and so far, the only—man she had ever made love to.

  The only man she had ever fallen in love with enough to think about marriage, although she was working hard at getting over that.

  The jingle of the bell announced that another man had entered the shop. Priss ignored him as she tried not to stare at Jake. Had she thought he was handsome? He wasn’t. Not really. He looked, she thought, her heart aching fit to bust, like a Clint Black who’d been rode hard and put away wet, only taller. Those same familiar faded jeans, the worn boots—that same weathered face with the sharp cheekbones, slashing black eyebrows and steely gray eyes.

  It all came rushing back, everything she had tried so hard to forget. The way he had nearly broken his neck trying to catch her when she tripped over his feet right here in the Baby Boutique that first day. The way he’d gone racing out to the apartments to help her the minute he heard about the fire.

  She thought of how he had tried to spare her feelings after their first disastrous meal together, and how sweet and stern he had looked concentrating on not trampling her feet when she’d been teaching him how to dance… although she rather thought he wasn’t quite as inexperienced as he pretended to be.

  Oh, he cared for her, all right, she knew he did. Only not enough.

  Jake dodged past a woman in a maternity smock and briefly Priss considered dashing into the stockroom and out the back door. As busy as the shop was today, she wasn’t going to get to share her big news with Faith anyway.

  But then Faith spotted the man who had entered the store right behind Jake and said, “Mitch? Mitch McCord, I haven’t seen you in ages!” As soon as she spoke, Jake swung around, said something about a small world and stuck out his hand, and the two men shook hands and slapped each other on the back a few times.

  Priss stood where she was, feeling left out, which wasn’t a particularly new feeling. She didn’t know Mitch McCord from Adam, but she resented his stealing Jake’s attention, even if she hadn’t wanted to see Jake, herself.

  Faith took care of the introductions. “Priss, meet Mitch McCord. Mitch, this is Priss Barrington. Mitch is rumored to have stolen almost as many hearts in his high school days as Jake here. You remember Jake, don’t you, Priss? You two met right here in my store on the Fourth of July?”

  “The first,” they both said together.

  Then Jake said, “Yeah, she remembers. Mitch, good to see you. Priss, you want to ride out to the park with me?”

  Before Priss could come up with an excuse or an answer, Faith turned to Mitch. “What on earth are you doing shopping in a baby store? Don’t tell me you’re thinking about getting married and starting a family? You and Jake here are the la
st of New Hope’s professional bachelors—although I guess, strictly speaking, Jake can’t be called a bachelor anymore.”

  He couldn’t? The old familiar lump settled in Priss’s chest, and she wondered what could have changed in the past six weeks.

  Surely he wasn’t married. There hadn’t been any mention of a wedding in the paper lately. Even if he’d married somewhere else, the local paper would have printed a few lines.

  Then Mitch spoke. “Look, I really need some help, Faith. Can you fix me up with whatever it takes to look after a baby?”

  “What baby? How old is it? Boy or girl? And for how long are you taking care of it? Mitch shopping for a baby isn’t exactly the same as shopping for a new set of tires.”

  Jake pursed his lips thoughtfully. “It’s a lot more expensive, for one thing.”

  Mitch McCord raked a hand through his hair. “All I know is that somebody left a baby—in a basket—on my doorstep—with a note saying to take care of my baby. My baby! Can you beat that?”

  Jake looked as if he were struggling to hold back a grin, which Priss considered downright insensitive since Mitch was obviously a friend of his, and the poor man seemed distraught.

  “Is it yours?” Faith asked.

  Mitch shrugged. “Could be. Might be. Yeah, I guess so. At least that’s what the note said.”

  “In that case, we’d better start putting together a layette.”

  “A what?”

  “Chickens finally coming home to roost, huh?” Jake said, his grin finally breaking through.

  Mitch glowered at him. “Just wait. Your turn’ll come one of these day, and then we’ll see who has the last laugh. Faith, what about one of those car basket gadgets? And maybe a book of instructions?”

  Priss handed over the book she’d been leafing through. “I guess it’s too late for this, huh?”