The Baby Gamble

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  Blake had already figured out that the question was coming. As soon as he’d let it be known that he knew Annie was trying to start a family.

  “If she’s pregnant, I’m the father.”

  The words sent a curious chill through him. Not altogether an unpleasant sensation.

  But not a great one, either. Had he been a whole man, he’d have been overjoyed. As it was…

  He held the elevator door long enough to tell Annie’s mother that he was on his way over. One way or the other, he had to know what they were facing.

  As the potential father of the child, he had a right to know.

  June didn’t try to dissuade him.

  “And Blake?” she asked as he was hanging up.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Welcome back to the family.”

  Afraid that he’d just triggered an avalanche that was going to have far-reaching effects, Blake nevertheless didn’t have the heart at the moment to correct his ex-mother-in-law’s misinterpretation.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “I CAN’T STAY HERE, Mom. I can’t see him.” Standing at her mother’s back door, ready to jump on her bike, Annie gave her a big hug. “Thank you for today.”

  “Of course,” June said, tears in her eyes as she glanced at her daughter. “I’m always here. Always.”“I know that now.” Annie teared up again, too. “I’m so sorry, Mom. So, so sorry. I…”

  “Shh.” June’s finger on Annie’s lips silenced her. “I made a lot of mistakes, too, Annie. None of this was your fault. You were just a child, and I expected so much of you….”

  “You did your best, Mom.” Annie’s heart filled with love as she realized the truth in those words. “And no one can expect any more of you than that.”

  “Keep that in mind, sweetie.” June’s words, the slightly teasing smile on her face, startled Annie. It was going to take her awhile to fully grasp that, almost overnight, her mother had regained a significant position in her life.

  In her reality. Everywhere else, she’d had one all along.

  Annie nodded, appreciating her mom’s advice. She could only do her best. That’s all she could expect of herself.

  Seeing the clock on the wall behind June’s head, Annie said, “I gotta go. He’s going to be here soon.”

  “I wish you’d stay….”

  “I can’t. I just—”

  “He told me that he’s your donor, Annie.”

  Oh. Well. For a noncommunicative man, Blake had sure chosen an inconvenient time to get chatty.

  “He has a right to know.”

  He did. Her mother was right. Annie just wasn’t in any state to see Blake. She’d spent the afternoon crying all over her mom’s shoulder. And felt as if she’d been run over by a truck.

  “I have to go.”

  “Ride carefully.”

  “I will.”

  “You’re going straight home?”

  June’s glance was pointed. Unable to look away, like a deer in headlights, Annie stared for several seconds. And then gave a stiff nod.

  “I’ll tell him where to find you.”

  She’d been afraid of that.

  BLAKE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO expect when he knocked on Annie’s door just before eight that evening. Was he going to be a father?

  Had it all been for naught?Would Annie want to try again?

  Would he?

  The fact that she hadn’t called weighed heavily on him. Perhaps now that she knew he was no healthier than her father, who’d committed suicide, she’d decided he wasn’t acceptable as the father of her child.

  If she asked him to bow out, to have nothing to do with the baby, to not be acknowledged as his father, would he?

  Could he?

  When she opened her door, every preconceived thought he’d had fled.

  “You’re crying.” Without hesitation, he opened the screen door, let himself in, taking Annie’s shoulders in his hands and rubbing them as he peered into her eyes.

  “What’s wrong, honey? If it didn’t take, that’s no big deal. It just means we get to enjoy trying again.”

  And as he said the words, he knew they were true. If Annie wanted a child, if she still wanted him to father it, he would not say no.

  Rather than comforting her, consoling her, his words made her cry harder. He wasn’t good with tears. Didn’t know how to make them go away.

  And so he pulled her into his arms and just let her cry, holding on, with the hope that somehow he was helping.

  And when her legs started to wobble, he lifted her, carrying her into the living room, where he sat with her on one of the large pillows on the floor. Leaning against a wall, he cradled her until he thought she’d fallen asleep.

  “I’m scared, Blake.”

  She hadn’t moved, and still had her head lying against his chest.

  “Of what?”

  “Ohhh…” The drawn-out word ended in a long sigh. “I…Everything,” she finally said. “Absolutely everything.”

  “Why, Annie?”

  “Because nothing makes sense, you know?” Her words were slightly muffled against his chest, thick with held-back tears, but he understood her completely.

  “I’ve spent my whole life with preconceived notions of how things were, thinking that they matched society’s dictates about what was acceptable. When, in truth, my notions were little more than the protective, desperate understandings of a thirteen-year-old girl.”

  Ah. Annie was finally waking completely up. He used to wonder if there would be a day when she’d be able to face her deepest self. Had hoped to be there when and if that time came.

  And it put her leagues ahead of him, now.

  “Change is always scary.” He quoted from one of his pamphlets. “Even good change.”

  “It’s not just about the change. I’ve had enough of that in that past six years to know that anything can become routine with the passage of time.”

  There was real truth to that. Even lying naked on a floor started to feel normal, if one did it long enough. If there was never anything else.

  “It’s more that I don’t trust me.”

  Blake frowned at this unexpected turn in the conversation. Annie was one of the most confident people he’d ever known. So sure of herself. Always.

  “I’ve lived so rigidly, Blake, following all of my own rules, expecting those in my life to follow them, as well.”

  But it wasn’t a bad thing. Annie knew what she wanted and wouldn’t settle for less.

  “And now I find that the basis for my rules doesn’t exist. I’ve built my entire life on quicksand.”

  “No, Annie, you haven’t. You’ve lived by your heart, and the life you’ve built is on solid ground.” A man like him, someone without that stability, could easily recognize what she had. “You’ve got work you love and are great at. Do you know how many people go their whole lives without that? They get up every day and go to a job because it pays the bills, not because they enjoy what they’re doing. They spend more waking hours at something they don’t like than anything else, and then they go home tired, do a few chores, go to bed and get up to start the whole thing over again.

  “But not you, Annie. You give your whole self to your day, even to the point of riding a bike to the paper so that the mundane experience of traveling to the job becomes an additional joy to you.”

  “You like your job.” Her voice was weaker than normal, vulnerable sounding.

  “Yes, I do.” And he was grateful for it—every single day. “You also have relationships that you’ve cultivated day after day, year after year,” he told her. “Those are the most solid foundation life has to offer.”

  “Becky and Cole, you mean?”

  “And your mother.”

  “I didn’t cultivate that.”

  “Yes, you did. You stepped up to the plate for her when she could not, Annie. You helped her keep her family together, caring for Cole and the house when she wasn’t around. And even after you didn’t have to ever se
e her again, you kept in touch, spent every holiday with her. You might not have enjoyed those things. You might have resented her for making you do them—as you saw it—but the doing is what mattered. You planted a seed, watered it. And while you’ve been busy elsewhere, it’s grown and matured into something that will never die.”

  She pushed away from him, sat up and stared.

  “What?”

  “Where’d all that come from?” Her mouth was open.

  Put on the spot like that, Blake drew a blank.

  “Do you realize that is the longest speech you’ve ever made to me?” Her eyes held amazement. “Maybe the only speech?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, letting go of her. “I didn’t mean to lecture.”

  “Don’t apologize! I spent all the years of our marriage yearning for you to open up and talk to me. I’d gladly hear lectures every single day, if they came from you.”

  Seeming to realize what she’d just said, Annie quickly shut her mouth.

  But she didn’t take back the words.

  SHE HAD TO TELL HIM. Had to talk about it. But she just wasn’t ready. Couldn’t find the language. Or even land on solid thoughts.

  “Everything just keeps drifting away,” she said, too worn-out to find it odd that here she was, at nine o’clock at night, leaning against the chest of the ex-husband she’d said she could never be with again.The one who wouldn’t let himself be with her.

  “Where yesterday I had a plan, a value system, a firm understanding of right and wrong, justice and injustice, smart living and poor choices, today I’m not sure of anything.”

  “Sure you are.” Blake’s voice was soft, reassuring, and so confident that she wished she could climb right inside him and simply hold on. “You value love,” he said. “Which means you value the people you love.”

  Yeah. He was right about that.

  “And injustice is when someone is hurt, most particularly when that someone seems the least deserving of pain.”

  Okay.

  “Right is being kind. Thinking of others. Wrong is thinking only of your own interests at the risk of taking from or hurting other people.”

  Yes.

  “Smart living is caring for the people you love, which includes you. Tending to them physically, emotionally and mentally.”

  Right.

  “And poor choices are any that take you away from that.”

  Lying there against Blake, hearing his voice reverberate in his chest, she couldn’t help wondering where this man had come from.

  Not because of the things he said, but because he was saying them. And she told him so.

  “A man tends to change some when he’s stripped of everything, when he’s lying on rock bottom and has no way to get up.”

  She’d always felt Blake was deep, had loved that sense about him, had drawn great security from knowing that there was so much to him.

  “I spent four years locked away by myself, Annie. I learned to value conversation.”

  “You’re still quiet a lot.”

  “I’m naturally reticent, you know that,” he admitted. “I like to listen. To assess. Makes me more comfortable. But at the same time, I’ve grown to value the ability to express my thoughts where I think they might be useful.”

  “You’ve always done that in business.”

  “Yes.”

  “So tell me about it, Blake. Tell me about those years.”

  He was quiet for a while and Annie hoped he was collecting his thoughts, determining how best to give her the information she sought.

  “I can’t, honey.” His reply disappointed her, more now because of the changes in him.

  “Maybe someday I will, but for now…”

  She sat up. “It’s okay, Blake, I understand.”

  “No, Annie, I don’t think you do.”

  The sad tone in his voice got her attention. His gaze mirrored the tone. “It’s not that I’m choosing not to tell you, exactly. It’s that I know if I do, I risk another episode like the one you witnessed on Friday. Becky told you that I know the signs—that I can tell when one is coming.”

  Hanging on to the words he was giving her, Annie nodded.

  “It’s all part of something they call management,” he continued. “You learn how to manage yourself, your very life, rather than simply ‘live’ it. Because only then can you hope to function in society.”

  It broke her heart to hear him say that. And yet, she knew instantly that he was telling her the truth.

  “Then I’ll wait,” she said, vowing that there would be a day, someday, when Blake would be able to tell her everything. Just one friend talking to another.

  HE HAD TO GO. Ten o’clock was rolling around, and Annie needed to get some rest. And he had a long drive back to San Antonio.

  But he couldn’t leave yet. Not without hearing what had happened that day. He’d pretty much figured out she wasn’t pregnant. He just wasn’t sure where she was going next with that part of her life.And whether or not he was still part of the plan.

  He didn’t know how to broach the subject. Didn’t want to upset her again.

  “Talk to me, sweetie.”

  Her fingers curled around the edges of his shirt. “Do you think I’m wrong, Blake? To want a child, even though I have no intention of getting married?”

  That’s what this was all about?

  “Of course not. I wouldn’t have agreed to help you if I thought that. The world has changed so much since we were kids,” he said. “With the Internet making the planet so much smaller, more accessible, people are moving around more, leaving very few of us with lives like you find here in River Bluff—lives where folks live in the same houses for decades, and where they end up married to their neighbor. Their kids go to the same schools they went to, and their first-grade teacher becomes the older lady sitting next to them in the church choir.”

  Another one of his fantasies during his time away—one of his favorites—had been to imagine growing up in such a town. Being a hometown boy, with roots that reached back generations. In those dreams, he’d even gone as far as to build and furnish the house that he’d always lived in.

  And moved Annie in with him.

  They’d had four kids. One child to hold with each hand.

  “Women have careers now. A good many mothers aren’t at home, waiting for their kids with cookies and milk, when school gets out. And with all the changes comes a higher divorce rate, too, which means more single-parent homes. It’s more the norm than not, I sometimes think.”

  Annie hadn’t moved. She finally murmured, “Becky’s on the brink of having real problems with her son, and she’s feeling completely ineffective. She can see that he’s headed for trouble, and can’t seem to do, or threaten to do, anything that will turn him around. He needs a father figure.”

  “I thought she lived with her dad.”

  “He’s a retired sheriff. A real stickler. And far too strict. He always was, which is why the Wild Bunch dared Luke Chisum to ask her out, even though Hub Parker threatened to kill him if he ever caught Luke, his next-door neighbor, around his daughter.”

  “You think she dated Luke to get back at her father? Not because she really liked him?”

  “Oh, don’t get me wrong.” Annie’s voice was growing stronger. “Becky loved Luke with all her heart—a heart that man broke when he left town and joined the army.”

  There was no doubt what Annie thought of Luke’s choice. But Blake wondered if she liked the man himself.

  He certainly did.

  “Some boys get into trouble whether they’re with two parents or one, a mother or a father,” he said. “Maybe it’s something in the hormones, that drive to get out there and see for yourself. To be in control of one’s own destiny, even when, in fact, he’s too young to have any idea what that might be.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Becky’s done a great job with Shane, though. She’s done her best. But she didn’t choose single parenthood. It was thrust upon her. Any fa
ilures aren’t her fault.”

  Blake didn’t miss the innuendo, pointing right back at herself, and he hated to hear so much self-doubt from someone who knew her own mind so well. Blake had to go, but he couldn’t leave things like this.

  “In the first place, if and when you do have a baby, you’re going to be a great mother, Annie. Failure isn’t something you need to worry about.”

  And—he wanted to add—if our deal is still on, you aren’t going to be doing this alone. That child will have a father figure.

  Just not one who slept with his mom.

  “If and when?” Annie asked, sitting up, her hand still on his chest, almost as if she’d forgotten it was there. “Didn’t Mom tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “I’m pregnant, Blake. The test was positive.”

  He was going to be a daddy.

  It was Blake’s turn to have eyes filled with tears.

  “WE HAVE TO DISCUSS logistics,” Annie said just before eleven that night. She’d changed, since she’d found out he hadn’t known about the baby. Grown more distant.

  And less vulnerable.Suspecting her show of strength was mostly an act to convince herself, Blake nonetheless let it stand at face value.

  He’d been thinking a lot about the practical reality of sharing a child with his ex-wife. And had, several times, come to the same conclusion. He knew it was the right decision. Now to convince Annie of that.

  “I need to know what you expect in terms of shared parenting,” she said. “We really should have ironed all of this out before we ever…”

  He wondered what thought she hadn’t completed. Before they had sex? Or before they made love.

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” he told her, wondering how best to approach her with his plan. How to present it without giving her the wrong idea. “Did you mean it when you said you never intend to marry again?”

  “Completely. I’ve had the love of my life, and I’ve had security, and neither worked. I can’t take the chance on having my heart broken a third time. I can’t trust that a marriage would ever work.”

  “You’re sure about that?”