The Baby Deal

by Pade, Victoria

  “Andrew? What's wrong?”

  Of course she would think he was calling with bad news of some kind. It wasn't like him to call her at all, let alone at this hour.

  “Nothing's wrong,” he assured quickly to allay her fears. “I apologize for waking you but I need something, I need it in a hurry—an incredible hurry—and you know the people and have the connections to help me make it happen.”

  “I'm sorry, Andrew, I'm groggy. You're sure nothing has happened?”

  She seemed to have stalled on that.

  “No, honestly, nothing has happened,” he assured, feeling slightly guilty when it occurred to him that this call might be bringing up some sort of flashback for her. He wasn't exactly sure of the details of how Helen had been told of his father's death, but his father had had a heart attack at night, at his office, and Helen had been the first one notified.

  “I would have waited for a more decent hour if I could have,” he said. “I know this must seem insane to you—calling you at five in the morning—but it's important to me and to Hanson Media Group, and in order to do what I want to do, every minute of today will count.”

  “It's okay,” Helen said, beginning to sound more alert. “I'm always here for you. For you and Jack and Evan. Whenever, wherever, whatever.”

  She was trying. Just as she always had. Trying to help. To be agreeable. To be a parent. A friend. He had to give her points for that. Even if it didn't change his feelings about her.

  And in this instance her desire to play a role in his life that neither he nor his brothers had ever accepted her in was going to work to his advantage, so he appreciated it.

  “Are you thinking clearly yet?” he asked.

  “Better. My eyes are open, anyway,” she said with a light laugh. “I'm glad to hear from you at any time. I learned through the grapevine that you'd come back to Chicago. And about the baby…” She faltered over that, as if she might have had second thoughts about saying it once she had. “Can I… Should I congratulate you? Or is it a sore subject? I know Jack has pushed you to marry the woman and you weren't altogether happy about that, but maybe that's changed? Maybe it will all work out?”

  She was rambling without so much as taking a breath, and Andrew forced patience he didn't genuinely feel. But then, he'd never felt comfortable with his stepmother, and the harder she tried to connect with him, the more uncomfortable he was.

  However, he reminded himself that she could do what no one else he knew could, and so he said, “Helping me meet Jack's requirements is sort of what I wanted to talk to you about. It's what I'm attempting to do. And that's where you come in. Today, at least. And why I'm rousting you out of bed.”

  Andrew heard what seemed to indicate that she was sitting up and possibly turning on her own lamp.

  Then she said, “Okay, what can I do for you?”

  Eager. She was so damn eager to please when it came to him or either of his brothers. It was kind of a shame that she hadn't learned yet that things between them all weren't likely to change. That neither he nor his brothers would ever embrace her as a part of their family.

  But again, he needed her.

  So he jammed his fingers through his hair, sat up straighter and kept his tone level as he laid out his plan.

  When he'd finished and Helen had promised to put him in touch with everyone she could to make sure he accomplished what he'd set out to do today, he said, “I'll let you go so you can make those calls for me. I have to get hold of Jack, too.”

  “If I were you I'd wait until he's been up a while and had his coffee,” Helen cautioned. “I stopped by the office yesterday and he wasn't too happy that you hadn't come in. David was complaining that Evan still hasn't responded to any of their messages, and Jack was saying that if Evan was anything like you, it didn't matter because all they got out of you was three days work and then you'd disappeared.”

  “In the first place, you know as well as I do that they don't just need Evan in Chicago for manpower, we can't have the reading of Dad's will until he gets here with the rest of us. And in the second place, I didn't disappear,” Andrew said, taking issue. “I called in. And being with Delia is what he told me to do—both for her business and to do the right thing.”

  “Oh, I didn't mean to make you angry,” Helen said in a hurry. “I'm just saying not to call him right now.”

  “Yeah, okay, I suppose I can wait until office hours,” Andrew conceded, knowing that his brother wasn't going to be any too happy to find out that he wouldn't be in today, either….

  “Kyle? It's me. Did you give up hope that I'd ever call you back today?” Delia greeted her younger brother on her cell phone.

  “Just about,” he responded. “I'm in my car, on my way home from work.”

  “Me, too.”

  “You, too? It must be, what? Eight o'clock there?”

  “My dashboard says eight-o-seven,” she informed him.

  “What are you doing working so late? Especially on a Friday night? And in your condition?” Kyle reprimanded.

  “My condition?” she repeated with a laugh. “I played hooky yesterday so I had the stuff I didn't do then and today's work to do today, too—that's why I had to stay so late.”

  “Um-hmm,” Kyle said knowingly. “I heard you actually missed yesterday.”

  “Marta said she'd talked to you.”

  “About a lot of things. I understand our boy Andrew appeared from out of nowhere.”

  “He appeared from Tahiti, where we left him three months ago,” Delia said.

  “Long vacation.”

  “Apparently until this week he was living the lush life of a trust-fund baby and a three-month vacation wasn't unusual,” Delia informed her brother, going on to explain Andrew's job and family situation to Kyle as she drove.

  “He honestly never worked before this week?” Kyle marveled.

  Kyle had begun delivering newspapers from his bicycle when he was barely ten years old and hadn't had a gap in his employment history since. It was no wonder it was difficult for him to believe Andrew had never had a job.

  “Honestly,” Delia confirmed.

  “But he's selling advertising for his family's company now?” Kyle asked as if that redeemed the other man. To some extent, at any rate.

  “Well, that's what he was doing the first three days this week. Yesterday he was with me and I don't know about today. He could be back in Tahiti by now,” Delia said wryly.

  “Except that I thought he was hanging around, trying to persuade you to marry him.”

  “Ah, you and Marta really did talk about a lot of things.”

  Kyle didn't bother denying it. The siblings had never been secretive with each other. Instead he said, “She told me he's my age and that pushed your negative buttons.”

  “Because I'm not your age,” Delia pointed out unnecessarily.

  “And because you aren't Peaches,” Kyle guessed.

  “This would definitely be right up her alley.”

  “Andrew's a good guy, though. We all liked him in Tahiti.”

  “I'm not disputing that he's a good guy,” Delia agreed, trying not to think too much about just how much of a good guy Andrew seemed to be. Or how much of a good time she had when she was with him. Or how good he made her feel. Or how good he kissed…

  “Seems like his being a good guy should carry more weight than his age,” Kyle said.

  “You're on his side?”

  “I'm not on anybody's side. I'm just saying that he isn't a creep, it's his baby you're having, and he wants in on the whole thing. Maybe you should cut him some slack.”

  “He's twenty-eight. He's only held a job for a few days in his entire life. He has a roommate because he travels so much he needs someone else to watch his place. What about that shouts 'ability to make a long term commitment to you'?”

  “K.C. did it for me.”

  K.C. was Kyle's and his wife Janine's five-and-a- half-year-old son. The baby Janine had been pregnant with before s
he and Kyle had gotten married. The reason Janine and Kyle had gotten married.

  “You know I didn't think I was ready to get married when Janine turned up pregnant,” Kyle continued. “But it was just what I needed to make me grow up.”

  “Who are you kidding?” Delia said with another laugh. “You wanted to go to the first day of kindergarten in a suit and tie. You were born with an old soul. You were always grown up.”

  “Andrew didn't strike me as a big baby,” Kyle observed.

  “Maybe not a big one…”

  “Come on, he's not a kid.”

  “But just how much of an adult is he?”

  “Adult enough to want to be a husband and a father to his child. That makes him more adult than any of our fathers or any of Peaches's other boy toys.”

  “In theory Andrew wants to be a husband and a father, but I'm not so sure he's thought about the reality of it. Or the fact that it doesn't end. Or at least isn't supposed to.”

  “But you aren't even letting it begin.”

  Delia groaned. “Come on, be on my side.”

  “How about if I'm on the baby's side?”

  Delia had feared that was the route her brother's opinion would take. “I know what you're thinking.”

  “I'm thinking that I wanted a father,” he said decisively and without shame.

  “I know, Kyle,” Delia muttered compassionately.

  “I'm thinking that in one way or another, we all did—even if you hid it better than Marta or I, and even if it didn't come out in you until later in the game,” Kyle said, obviously running along the same lines Marta had voiced when she and Delia had discussed this earlier in the week. “And I'm thinking that the father—the real, genuine, father of your baby wants you and wants to be a father to your baby, and that you shouldn't blow that off so cavalierly.”

  Had she blown it off cavalierly? Delia asked herself, feeling guilty suddenly to think that might be the case. To think that her baby might grow up and think and feel the way her brother did and decide she had blown off the baby's chance to have a father without giving it serious consideration.

  “Come on,” she repeated, beseeching her brother's understanding. “Don't be so hard on a pregnant woman.”

  “Maybe somebody has to be,” her brother said gently. “It sounds to me like Andrew is trying, Dealie. Yes, I agree that unplanned pregnancies—especially with somebody you just met for one day on a vacation—aren't the best foundations for marriages. But an honest desire to try to make things work out goes a long way in having it happen. Look at Janine and me. We're happy. We may not have come to our marriage without complications, but we did come to it willing to give it our all, and that's been just as good—if not better—than getting married in some unrealistic haze of hormones.”

  Wasn't that similar to what Andrew had said the night before? That he'd give it everything he had if she would marry him?

  “I don't know, Kyle….” Delia hedged.

  “Maybe not, but maybe you should do some more thinking about it. Considering it. And Andrew. Rather than just writing him off,” Kyle concluded, again making it clear he and Marta were of a similar mind on the issue.

  “You're really being mean to me tonight,” Delia complained.

  “Not really. I just don't want you to make a mistake that you and the baby might regret forever. The baby—and you—deserve at least the possibility of having a second parent in the picture.”

  “Hmm… I just turned onto my street and it looks like the man in question's car is parked at my curb. He's not in his car but there are lights on inside the house,” Delia said, seizing the discovery as a method of not answering her brother's pressure on her to change her decision.

  “Does he have a key?” Kyle asked.

  “No, he doesn't. Apparently he knows a little something about breaking and entering.”

  “See? He does have a skill,” her brother joked.

  “Gr-reat,” Delia said facetiously.

  “Since you're home and have company, I'll let you go. But think about what I said.”

  As if she was going to be able not to.

  “I'll talk to you soon,” she countered before they said goodbye and she turned off her phone.

  But as she pulled into her driveway wondering what Andrew had up his sleeve tonight, she realized that her brother's words might have had a stronger impact at that moment, because she was already coming to feel more and more torn.

  Torn between what her head was telling her to do—or not to do—and the direction she was worried her heart might be beginning to lean.

  “But for some reason he did break into my house,” she told herself out loud just to help keep even a semblance of balance before her heart—and her brother's and sister's opinions—swayed her too much.

  Chapter Eleven

  As Delia climbed the steps to her porch after having talked to her brother on the drive home from work her emotions seesawed.

  On the one hand she wasn't exactly thrilled that Andrew had taken the liberty of getting into her house when she wasn't there. Why would he do such a thing? she wondered, unable not to feel a bit intruded upon as she mentally catalogued if she'd left her bra hanging to dry in the bathroom, if that laundry basket of underwear waiting on the dryer to be folded could be easily seen from the kitchen, if there were dishes in the sink or mail scattered on the countertops or if her unsightly old bedroom slippers were in the living room by some chance.

  But on the other hand, she also couldn't help imagining an entirely different scenario from the one in which Andrew discovered she owned a few pairs of granny-pants underwear and wore slippers that should have been thrown away years ago. She couldn't help imagining that he'd found his way into her house when she wasn't there to set up some romantic welcome-home for her tonight. A candlelit dinner, maybe?

  Or maybe he was upstairs in her bedroom. His marble statue's body stretched out on her bed, wearing only that pair of blue jeans he'd had on the night he'd arrived in Tahiti that made his rear end look amazing; his broad, honed torso bare, braced on one arm, the biceps bulging mounds of muscle. She pictured that devil's own smile on a mouth that was just waiting to begin again what she'd had such trouble ending the night before….

  “Okay, but he broke in,” she told herself out loud as a reminder she hoped would cool down the internal heat that that vivid image had turned on.

  When she reached her front door she tried the handle before putting her key in the lock to see if it was open. It was, allowing her merely to turn it and push the door wide.

  “Andrew?” she called before stepping inside, suddenly considering the possibility that her burglar might just drive the same kind of car—as unlikely as it was that a burglar would drive a Jaguar.

  But it was Andrew's deep, distinctive voice that answered. From upstairs.

  “Follow your leaders.”

  Her leaders?

  Waging a second battle against the fantasy of him laid out on her bed, Delia stepped over the threshold and discovered tiny stuffed animals set one per step all the way up her stairs.

  “My leaders,” she repeated, assuming the toys were what he was referring to.

  She closed the door behind her and set her purse and briefcase on the entryway table. Then, she did as she'd been told, bypassing a bright yellow monkey, a pink bunny, a black-and-white loppy-eared dog, an elephant, a giraffe, a turtle, a dolphin, a camel, a lion and a floppy moose to reach the second floor landing.

  Her eyes went immediately to her own room. The door was open—the way she always left it—but there was no light flooding out. Instead a frog, a teddy bear, a fluffy kitten and a buffalo continued across the hardwood floor to the room she had designated as the future nursery.

  Light was shining from that open door and with her curiosity at peak capacity, she made her way to it.

  But it wasn't a semi-nude Andrew she discovered when she did. He was fully clothed—in those jeans she'd been fantasizing about and a plain white T-s
hirt with the long sleeves pushed to his elbows. And he was standing at the opposite end of a room that was no longer four scarred, lavender walls with uncurtained windows. A room that had been transformed as if by magic into the nursery of her dreams.

  “What's this?” she whispered, almost unable to believe what she was seeing.

  “What's it look like?” he asked with a quizzical arch of his eyebrows.

  Delia didn't rush to answer. Instead she stepped farther into the room and did a very slow pivot to take it all in.

  The awful lavender walls were now a soft, creamy color, divided at chair-rail height with a border of baby forest creatures frolicking merrily through trees and bushes and scampering across bubbling brooks. The floor was no longer covered with indoor-outdoor carpeting but now sported a thick shag that matched the color of the walls.

  And no longer was the room empty of furniture, either. Now, angled in one corner just to Andrew's left there was the very crib she'd seen in her decorator's catalog—a white crib with each end a high, graceful slatted arc that looked like white rainbows. Now there was a changing table, bureau and armoire that matched the crib. There were softly drawn-back curtains on both sets of windows. There was a toy box and a play table and toys on shelves that lined one wall. There was a rocking chair cushioned in a downy pad near the crib, and a table lamp to one side of it. There were even picture frames awaiting baby pictures.

  All together it was serene and beautiful and cute, too. It was whimsical and fun and still well-organized and user-friendly. And she loved it.

  Her gaze came full circle to that spot where Andrew stood waiting for her to answer his question.

  She wasn't sure if he was worried he might see disapproval of his efforts in her eyes and so couldn't meet them, or if he was simply afraid she'd missed the mobile of the same woodland creatures that frolicked on the wall border, but he glanced away and reached a long index finger to flick the bunny's tail and set the entire mobile into motion.

  “You've been busy,” Delia understated, finding her voice small and cracked with the same emotion that was flooding her eyes with tears.