The Baby Surprise

by Brenda Harlen

  She worried over that as she carefully laid Emma on her back in the crib and bent to touch her lips to the baby’s soft cheek. She inhaled the scent of baby shampoo and felt tears sting her eyes. She’d started to take this nightly ritual for granted, and now the appearance of a stranger at her door threatened not just this special time she shared with the little girl, but also the whole future she’d envisioned for them together.

  She’d never thought about having a child of her own. Even when it was all her friends and family had been talking about, she’d been too busy with her career to spare a single thought to motherhood. But then Emma had come into her life, and suddenly stepping into the role wasn’t a choice but a necessity.

  She’d had to make a lot of adjustments when she learned that Olivia had named her as Emma’s guardian, and not with out resistance, at least in the beginning. But it hadn’t taken Paige long to realize that Emma hadn’t just changed her life, she’d enriched it. The little girl’s presence made her think about things she hadn’t thought about before. Playing the part of her guardian made her appreciate what it meant to be a mother when that wasn’t something Paige had ever considered.

  But through all of the transitions and adjustments, Paige had never imagined that someday someone might turn up in her life and lay claim to the child, as Zach Crawford had just done.

  Olivia had always been stubbornly closemouthed about the man who had fathered her child. It was the only topic about which Paige had ever really argued with her friend. She didn’t care about the identity of the man except insofar as she believed he should bear some responsibility for the child he’d helped create.

  She’d been frustrated by Olivia’s stoic determination, but her friend had always maintained that she could do it alone—and she wanted to. She knew that there were people who whispered about her situation—not because she was an unwed mother-to-be but because they knew that having to shoulder the responsibility on her own would limit the professional opportunities available to her. She would no longer be able to schedule late-night meetings or quick out-of-town trips for the convenience of a client, and at Wainwright, Witmer & Wynne, imposing such limitations was akin to career suicide.

  The few female partners at the firm had done everything but handstands to prove they deserved to be there. And any woman who happened to be a mother and a lawyer was even more suspect because—God forbid—she might put her family responsibilities ahead of her obligations to the firm. Karen Rosario had waited until she’d made partner to start a family and gave birth to her first baby at age forty-two. And then she hired a live-in nanny to raise the child she’d supposedly wanted so much.

  When Paige decided to go into law, she hadn’t considered how difficult it might be to someday balance her career with a family. But she’d thought about it a lot after Olivia told her she was pregnant, and the more she’d thought about it, the angrier she’d become thinking that Olivia was making all of the sacrifices while the man who’d gotten her pregnant—whoever he might be—had simply walked away from his responsibilities.

  Maybe it was the lawyer in her, but Paige had wanted to track him down and slap him with a paternity suit to ensure that he at least shared financial responsibility for the baby he’d helped make.

  “It’s a lot of responsibility to handle on your own,” Paige said to her friend, cautiously broaching the topic she’d avoided for the past several months because she’d been certain Olivia would tell her about the baby’s father when she was ready. But so far, she’d volunteered nothing. “I know.”

  “Are you sure you have to do it alone? Maybe the father—”

  “No,” Olivia interrupted quickly. “This has nothing to do with him.”

  “You’re an attorney—you know better than that. Whether you like it or not, it’s his baby, too, and that means he has both legal rights and responsibilities.”

  “He has enough responsibilities without adding a child—especially one that neither of us planned—into the mix.”

  The comment gave her pause, but Paige finally asked, “Is he married?”

  She was relieved when Olivia laughed at the question.

  “Married? No, he’s not married. And he’s not the kind of guy who would cheat on his wife if he was.”

  “But he’s the kind of guy who would abandon the woman who’s pregnant with his child?” she challenged.

  Her friend looked away. “Drop it, Paige. Please.”

  Because she could tell that Olivia was still hurting, and because she knew better than anyone that a man couldn’t be forced to feel something for a child he didn’t want, she’d dropped it.

  And Olivia had never told her anything else about her baby’s father, not even his name, which meant that Paige had a lot of questions for Lieutenant Colonel Zach Crawford.

  She headed back downstairs now, determined to get some answers.

  Zach was still standing in the hallway where she’d left him, his feet shoulder-width apart, his hands clasped behind his back. Paige recognized the military stance but, in conjunction with the uniform, it left her feeling anything but “at ease.”

  She moved toward the kitchen, and he fell into step behind her. She’d spent countless hours in this room, usually with Ashley or Megan or both, and she’d never felt as if the space was small. But something about Zach’s presence made her feel…crowded. She was far too aware of him—his impressive height, his obvious strength, his overwhelming masculinity.

  She glanced at him as she reached for the empty carafe from the coffeemaker, and she swallowed hard when she found those intense and stunningly blue eyes on her. The tug of attraction came again, and she found herself as annoyed as she was baffled by it.

  Of all the times for her body to suddenly decide it had been in stasis for too long, now was not a good one. And even if it had been a good time, Zach Crawford was definitely not a man she should ever find herself attracted to. Not just because of the uniform, but because he had once been intimately involved with one of her best friends.

  It occurred to her that the uniform might have been why her friend had never told her about the man who had fathered her child. Because Olivia knew something of Paige’s history with her father, she knew Paige would question her decision to get involved with a man who could never make her or their daughter a priority in his life.

  She was considering this as she turned on the tap to fill the carafe. “Do you want coffee?” she asked Zach.

  “I’ve been on the go since oh-five-hundred,” he told her. “I would love coffee.”

  She’d been up since oh-five-hundred herself—5:00 a.m. to nonmilitary people—and she would have preferred to skip the coffee and sink into her mattress and into the oblivion of sleep as peacefully as Emma had finally done.

  But she knew she wouldn’t get any sleep tonight—not until she had some answers to the questions that had been swirling through her brain since Lieutenant Colonel Zach Crawford had spoken the two words that continued to echo in her mind.

  Emma’s father.

  If it was true, if Lieutenant Colonel Zach Crawford really was the father of Olivia’s baby, that simple fact would change everything.

  Paige worried over the possibility as she put a filter in the basket and measured out the grounds.

  It was easy to see how Olivia might have been attracted to the man. Over and above the fact that he was six feet three inches of mouth-watering masculinity, he moved with a sense of purpose and carried himself with an aura of command that were as much a part of who he was as those blue, blue eyes.

  She reached into the cupboard for two mugs and filled them from the carafe.

  “Cream? Sugar?” she asked him.

  “Just black, thanks.”

  She handed him one of the mugs and added a splash of milk to the other.

  He waited until she’d taken a seat at the pub-style table in the dining room, then sat down across from her.

  “I understand you worked at Wainwright, Witmer & Wynne with Olivia?�
�� She nodded.

  “You were good friends?”

  “Since our first year at law school together,” she told him.

  “She never mentioned you to me.”

  “She never mentioned you to me, either,” she told him. “In fact, she never said anything about Emma’s father.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Nothing at all?”

  “The only thing she ever told me, and only when I asked where the baby’s father fit into the picture, was that he wasn’t interested in playing any role in his child’s life.”

  He scowled at that. “I might not have been thrilled by the news of her pregnancy, if she’d ever bothered to tell me, but she had to know there was no way in hell I would abandon my child.”

  “If Olivia never told you she was pregnant, how did you find out? And how do you know that you are Emma’s father?”

  “Well, at this point, I’m not one-hundred-percent certain,” he admitted. “But I have a letter from Olivia that says I am, and I have no reason to disbelieve it.”

  “You just said Olivia lied.”

  “She lied to you,” he clarified, “if she told you that I didn’t want to know my child. Because the truth is, I didn’t know about the baby. Not until I got home from Afghanistan and found the letter she’d left for me.”

  “Olivia died five-and-a-half months ago,” Paige told him, with an ache in her heart that was more for the child who would never know her mother than for the premature end of her friend’s life.

  A shadow—grief? regret?—momentarily clouded those stunning blue eyes, but then it passed and he nodded. “I found that out when I went to your law firm to find her. The receptionist told me about the accident.”

  “No one knows why she was in New Jersey,” Paige admitted.

  He sipped his coffee, then set the mug down again. “I live in Trenton,” he told her. “Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that I have an apartment about five minutes from the base, which is where I sleep when I’m in town.”

  “She went…to see you?”

  He nodded, confirming another fact that seemed to give credence to his claim of paternity. Of course, Paige wasn’t going to take his word for it, nor was she simply going to hand over a child on the basis of his say-so.

  “My landlord told me a young woman stopped by looking for me early in the new year. When he told her I was overseas, she left a letter for me.”

  “Do you have the letter?”

  He took it out of the inside pocket of his jacket and passed it across the table to her.

  Apprehension whispered through her as she picked up the envelope. Her fingers trembled as she lifted the flap and pulled out the single page.

  Zach,

  I’m sure you’re wondering why you’re hearing from me now, after so much time has passed, especially since I was the one who asked you not to contact me, so I’ll get straight to the point. You have a daughter…

  Chapter Two

  Paige sucked in a breath, startled to see the words clearly written there, supporting this stranger’s claim to the little girl in her care. She wanted to crumple the letter in her fist, to stuff the paper back in the envelope and tell Zach to take it away, to tell him to go away—far away from Emma. But she forced herself to read on.

  When she was done, she refolded the letter and tucked it in the envelope again, then slid it across the table to him. She picked up her half-empty coffee cup then set it down without drinking, her stomach churning.

  “With all due respect, I have no intention of giving up custody of Emma just because you showed up on my doorstep with a letter that claims you’re her father.”

  “A letter written by her mother,” he pointed out.

  She couldn’t be one-hundred-percent sure that Olivia had actually written the letter. In an age of computers and e-mail and text messaging, she honestly didn’t recognize the handwriting as her friend’s. However, why would this man be here now if he didn’t believe it was true?

  “Even so, Olivia never identified you as the father on Emma’s birth certificate,” she reminded him.

  “Did she name anyone else?”

  She ignored his question. “I was Olivia’s birthing coach—I went to prenatal classes with her and I was in the delivery room when Emma was born. And through it all, Olivia never once mentioned your name. And, contrary to what is in that letter, she claimed that Emma’s father knew of the pregnancy but wanted no part of his child.”

  “That was the lie,” he said again.

  And the contents of the letter he carried certainly bore that out. But she wasn’t ready to give up, she wasn’t ready to have her heart torn out of her chest, and she knew that was what would happen if he took Emma away.

  “Still, I think the best course of action right now would be to have a paternity test.”

  He frowned into his empty mug, then pushed back his chair to refill it. “Fine,” he said. “How soon can we get that done?”

  “I can make some calls tomorrow,” she told him. “But probably not until sometime next week.”

  His scowl deepened.

  “And you’re going to need a lawyer,” she told him.

  “Aren’t you a lawyer?”

  “Yes, but I’m not going to represent you.”

  “Why in hell do I need representation?”

  “Because…” She hesitated, not wanting to give him any ideas about seeking custody if that wasn’t a course of action he’d already considered. Maybe he didn’t want Emma with him—maybe he just wanted to meet the little girl he believed was his daughter. So all she said was, “Because you should make sure you understand all of your rights and responsibilities.”

  “I’m aware of my rights and responsibilities,” he assured her. “And I intend to be a father to my daughter.”

  Which still didn’t tell her whether he was looking for full custody or standard every-other-weekend noncustodial parent access or occasional visits during his periods of leave.

  “For how long?” she asked.

  He frowned at the question. “What do you mean?”

  “When do you have to report back for duty?”

  “July seventh.”

  Which was actually longer than she’d expected and still not nearly long enough if he was serious about building a relationship with Emma. “So why are you even here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, why did you bother to come all this way, feign an interest in being a father to the child you claim is your own, if you’re going to go wheels up again in a few weeks?”

  “I’m not feigning an interest,” he said. “And I’ll go wheels up again because that’s my job.”

  “And if Emma is your daughter, who will take care of her while you’re doing your job?”

  Zach was taken aback, not just by Paige’s question—which demonstrated the glaringly obvious fact that he hadn’t thought very far ahead when he’d embarked on this journey—but by the disapproval in her tone.

  Okay, so maybe he didn’t have all of the answers. Maybe he didn’t have any of the answers. But he was determined to do the right thing and, as far as he could tell, being a father to his daughter was the right thing.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But I’ll make arrangements.”

  “You mean day care,” she guessed.

  “Didn’t you have her in day care?”

  “Olivia had found a babysitter who lives close to the office. It’s a more personal environment than a day care and Emma’s happy there.”

  “That’s great,” Zach said. “Except that I live in New Jersey.”

  Paige dipped her head, her coppery hair falling forward to hide her face, but not before he saw the tears that filled her eyes.

  He silently cursed himself for his insensitivity. Because he knew that as much as he’d been completely blindsided by the news that he had fathered a child, this woman had been just as shocked to find him standing at her door. For the past five-and-a-half months she’d been ra
ising Emma. She’d been responsible for the day-to-day care of his child and, with a few simple words, he’d threatened to destroy the foundation of that relationship.

  He impulsively reached across the table and touched a hand to her arm.

  She jolted at the unexpected contact. Or maybe she’d been startled by the electricity that suddenly crackled in the air. It had sure as hell startled him.

  She looked at him now, and he saw both wariness and awareness in the depths of her dark brown eyes. He’d expected her to have green eyes to go with the red hair. Instead, they were the color of rich, dark chocolate and sinfully tempting. His gaze dipped to her mouth, to lips that were naturally pink and sweetly curved, and he found himself wondering if they would taste as good as they looked.

  Whoa—totally inappropriate thought there.

  This woman was the legal guardian of his daughter, and it was unlikely he would gain either her trust or sympathy by making a move on her within two hours of meeting her. But he couldn’t deny he was tempted.

  Of course, he’d been overseas for the past year and a half and hadn’t been with a woman for even longer than that. In fact, he hadn’t been with anyone since the last weekend he’d spent with Olivia…likely the weekend their daughter had been conceived.

  Thinking of Emma reminded him why he was there, and he dropped his hand from Paige’s arm. But the air continued to crackle, the tension continued to build.

  “I don’t want us to be adversaries,” he said at last.

  “I don’t see how we can be anything else, not if it’s your intention to disrupt Emma’s life.”

  “I want to get to know my daughter. How is that disruptive?”

  “The disruption will come when you disappear from her life as abruptly as you appeared in it.”