by Jane Toombs
“Hey, Tiger,” Zed said softly. “I may not be your daddy, but you’re safe with me.”
Danny blinked teary eyes, then gazed around, obviously searching for Karen. At that moment she reentered the kitchen, water droplets clinging to her hair and bedewing her face. Despite his mistrust of her, Zed couldn’t help but note how enchanting she looked. She set a large canvas bag on the table, brushed wetness from her shoulders and reached for Danny, who held out his arms to her.
“He’s hungry,” she said. “I need to feed him.”
Zed surprised himself by saying, “I’ll help if you’ll tell me what to do.”
She took him at his word, involving him in warming small jars of baby food and then a bottle of milk. He watched her feed Danny with a little spoon—a messy business that had him smiling at the way the kid managed to get as much food on her as in his mouth.
Come to think of it, he was hungry. Glancing at the clock, he saw it was nearly two. He’d missed lunch. No wonder. He’d be willing to bet Karen hadn’t had anything to eat either.
If he asked her she’d probably refuse, so he wouldn’t ask. “There’s some of my sister’s homemade lasagna in the freezer,” he said. “I’ll warm it up while you finish feeding little Tiger there.” Without waiting for an answer he crossed to the refrigerator.’
Karen opened her mouth to tell him not to bother, then closed it without speaking. She’d had nothing but an apple for breakfast and she was starved. Sharing lasagna with him didn’t commit her to anything, and she really didn’t want to leave until they settled what he planned to do about Danny. She hoped they could discuss the situation in a calm, rational manner. Maybe food would mellow him a trifle.
While he was fixing lunch, she finished feeding Danny and changed him. Apparently Zed noticed how he drooped against her shoulder, half-asleep, because he said, “Jade’s old cradle is in one of the bedrooms, if you’d like to lay him down.”
“Jade being your sister?” At his nod, she said, “Could you bring the cradle in here? Danny might be afraid in a strange room by himself.”
Zed fetched the cradle. Danny settled into it as though it had been made for him and promptly fell asleep. She tucked his favorite stuffed toy, a blue horse, in beside him.
“Rather ratty, isn’t it?” Zed commented. “The horse, I mean.”
“He sucks on the ears,” she said defensively. “I tried a pacifier but he wouldn’t have anything to do with it. He wants the horse and throws a fit if he doesn’t have it. The pediatrician said the material isn’t toxic and I checked the ears—they’re sewn on tight, so he won’t choke.”
“He’s obviously strong-minded.”
“You can say that again. But he’s really sweet tempered if he gets his way.” She half smiled. “Like a lot of males.”
He acknowledged the gibe with raised eyebrows before removing a dish from the microwave. “Lunch is served,” he told her. “Nothing but garlic bread and lasagna, but lots of both. What would you like to drink?”
“Hot tea, please, if you have it.”
“Coming up.”
For a long time they ate in silence, until Karen finally said, “Your sister makes delicious lasagna.”
“I’ll tell her you said so. She’s going to be shocked about the blood match.”
Karen eyed him warily. Did that comment mean he’d decided to take the reports at face value and drop his accusation about her falsifying them? “I take it you’ve discussed this with your sister,” she said.
He nodded. “Jade and I don’t have any other relatives, so we’re pretty close.” He set down his fork and gazed directly into her eyes. She was struck by how dark his were, a deep brown that seemed to verge into black.
“How old is Danny?” he asked.
“He was born May first,” she said. “Several weeks premature.”
“He’s seven months old, then.” Zed glanced over at the cradle. “The report says Danny Henderson, so evidently your cousin’s name was the same as yours.”
“Yes. Erin is—was—my father’s brother’s daughter.”
“Did she tell you the man in that picture was Danny’s father?”
Karen nodded.
“Did you always believe her?”
Not always, but she wasn’t going to say so. Nor did she intend to repeat her unwise comment about Erin’s many lovers. “In this case, I did believe her. Being pregnant made her so sick she wasn’t interested in men. The pregnancy, in fact, led to her death, because she got eclampsia. That’s a dangerous complication of pregnancy.”
“So you were with her?”
Karen shook her head. “No. She went on this cruise and then remained down in the islands with an older woman she’d met on the ship. You see, Erin’s grand-mother left her a trust fund, so she could afford to indulge herself. Her mother is dead and she was more or less estranged from her father because he didn’t approve of her life-style. She trusted me as much as she did anyone.”
“When did you learn she was pregnant?”
Karen reminded herself that, as Danny’s father, he had a right to have his questions answered, no matter whether she resented his asking or not. “Erin wrote me from the Virgin Islands shortly before she went into the hospital, sending me a legal form that made me the baby’s guardian if anything happened to her. Naturally that alarmed me and I called her. By then she was in the hospital, on sedatives for the eclampsia, and I couldn’t get her to make sense. I asked who the father was and she told me the man on the sailboat in the photos she’d given me.”
“No name?”
“She either couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me. I flew to Bermuda a week later but it was too late—Erin was dead. The woman she’d been staying with had no idea who Danny’s father was and had put ‘unknown’ on the birth certificate. I flew home to San Diego with Danny.” Karen smiled slightly. “Believe me, I was scared to death at the thought of caring for a newborn baby.”
“Okay,” he said, sighing. “I may be playing the fool, but you’ve convinced me Erin existed and that Danny is her son. Not so much by the story you’ve told me—rather, I feel you’re honest. Will you give me the benefit of the doubt about my honesty? Because, matching blood tests or not, there is no way I can be Danny’s father.”
He’d almost lulled her into accepting him, but his last words brought her back to her senses. “I suppose you’re going to tell me you were out of the country at the time of conception.” Sarcasm lent an edge to her voice.
Zed blinked. “I’ll be damned,” he muttered after a moment or two of silence. “It had to be a year ago in August, right? I wasn’t exactly out of the country, but you’re close. Last year Jade and I were in Alaska for the entire month of August.”
“Sure you were.”
“Jade will verify we were there.”
“And I’m supposed to believe your sister?”
“It’s the truth, damn it!” he bellowed. Almost immediately he turned to glance apprehensively at Danny, obviously worried that his raised voice might have disturbed Danny’s sleep.
Disarmed by his show of concern—he did have a few redeeming qualities, after all—Karen abandoned her sarcasm. “I have trouble believing you,” she told him frankly. “You’ve told me you and your sister are close, and relatives do tend to stick together. How can I accept her word as proof?”
“If you can’t accept my word or hers, how about a videotape?” His voice had dropped back to its normal range, she noted. “We put one together in Alaska—or rather, Jade did—about well drilling in permafrost. I posed as a driller for the tape. The TV station in Anchorage aired our footage and interviewed both of us. I can’t tell you the dates offhand, but Jade will have them. We visited Native American villages as well as the offshore islands and took innumerable pictures. As I recall, Jade also has a videotape of us salmon fishing.”
Karen bit her thumbnail as she digested this information. It did seem he’d actually been to Alaska with his, sister during that crucial August. No
t that there weren’t daily flights between Alaska and California. Still, Erin had called her interlude with Danny’s father an idyll, which implied a leisurely affair, not a fly-in-and-out one. Karen frowned, wondering why she’d thought of Erin’s lover as Danny’s father rather than Zed Adams. Because they were one and the same. Weren’t they? For the first time a faint doubt crept into her mind and settled there.
He had to be Danny’s father. Didn’t the blood match prove it?
When she’d come back in with the baby bag she’d noticed how tenderly he was cuddling Danny. He might actually make a good father if he wasn’t so stubborn about denying paternity. She loved Danny so much that she’d even be willing to help Zed raise him if no intimacy was involved. She definitely wanted no part of any involvement with Zed. With her cousin’s lover.
But had he been? Despite the photos, somehow she couldn’t imagine Erin and Zed together. Hey, she reminded herself, isn’t Danny enough proof?
“If you like, I can call Jade and ask her to look up the dates and bring them to us, along with the videos and pictures,” Zed said.
For a moment she couldn’t grasp what he meant. Her thoughts had gone badly astray. Then she recalled they’d been speaking of the August dates when he claimed to have been in Alaska. “Please do,” she told him.
Zed pushed his empty plate aside and rose. As he crossed to the phone, he glanced out the window and paused, noticing for the first time that the rain had turned to icy snow, rapidly accumulating atop the evergreen branches. He shook his head. The roads would be a mess. That skateboard Karen was driving would be all over the road. Ten to one she’d have an accident if she tried to drive back to Carson City.
Why hadn’t he thought to check on the weather earlier? He could drive her, but in the ice and snow his pickup wouldn’t be a hell of a lot safer than her skateboard. He hated to think of risking Danny’s safety. In fact, he was damned if he meant to—even if Karen wasn’t happy with his conclusions.
He reached for the phone and punched in Jade’s number. “What’s it like up there?” he asked when she answered. Jade lived on the mountain near Tahoe.
“Remember,” she asked, “when we were kids and it snowed, how Grandma would tell us the angels were shaking the feathers out of their pillows? Well, it’s king-size feather bed shake-out time up here at the moment. I’m staying in till it eases off.”
“Don’t blame you. Listen up.” He told her about the blood match and what he needed from her. “Bring it down to me when you can, okay?”
“Will do,” she said. “But that blood match bothers me. How could it have happened? Are you sure someone didn’t make a mistake?”
“Anything’s possible. Except that I’m the kid’s father. No way.”
“See you when I can make it,” Jade told him, and hung up.
Zed turned to look at Karen, who was sipping her second cup of tea. She put down the cup when she caught his gaze. “Look out the window,” he said.
She got up and did so. “Damn,” she muttered.
“Exactly,” he agreed. “I’m afraid you and Danny are stuck here for the night. It’s too dangerous to try to make it into Carson City.”
Her face took on the mulish look that he’d learned preceded an argument, then her expression changed and she sighed resignedly. “You’re right. I can’t take a chance, not with Danny. Why didn’t you tell me it was going to snow?”
She could put his back up faster than any woman he’d ever met. “If I’d known, I certainly would have. They predicted rain on the morning report—no mention of ice or snow.”
“I’m sorry, that was uncalled for,” she said. “I can’t blame you for the weather.”
Much as she’d like to, he thought. But she had apologized.
“You provided lunch,” she added. “Why don’t you let me earn my keep by cooking the evening meal?”
Her proposal took him by surprise. “Sounds good to me,” he said. Inspiration struck him. “I’ll light a fire in the fireplace, make it nice and warm for Danny in there.”
She reacted with enthusiasm. “Oh, good. If you have an old quilt or something like that, I’ll put it on the floor so when he wakes up he can roll around and kick and hone his crawling skills. He’s been pretty well confined to the car seat and the motel crib, and that’s not good.”
“We can eat by the fire if you’d like,” he said. “To keep an eye on Tiger.”
She nodded. “If you could show me what room Danny and I will be sleeping in, I’ll move his stuff in there.”
He led her down the hall and into the larger of the two guest bedrooms. There were actually four, but he used one for his office and the other wasn’t completely furnished. “Jade stays over unexpectedly sometimes,” he said, gesturing toward a dresser. “She keeps extra clothes in one of the drawers. Feel free to borrow whatever you need. She won’t mind. She’ll be down when the snow lets up.”
“I hope that won’t be too long,” Karen said.
When Zed found himself wishing they were in for one of the Sierras’ three-day storms, he shook his head. The sooner he got rid of Karen, the better.
After leaving her in the room, he began laying a fire, smiling to himself as he lit it. He might not be Danny’s father and Karen sure as hell wasn’t his wife, but it was almost as though the three of them were a family. The strange thing was he kind of liked the feeling.
As annoyed as she made him, he admired Karen’s determination to find a father for Danny. Her devotion to the boy warmed his heart. He’d told himself earlier that the poor kid didn’t have a mother, but the truth was Danny did. Karen was as loving a mother as if she’d borne him. Her tenderness when she’d laid him in the cradle had touched a part of him he hadn’t realized existed.
The bottom line was another matter altogether. No man could be around Karen for long and not be seriously attracted to her. He’d seen her blue eyes stormy one moment, pensive the next. How would they look once her passion was aroused?
The fire caught, flaring up very much as he was beginning to do. Cool it, Adams, he told himself. So she was a cute blonde who’d fit into a man’s arms just right, but if there ever was a woman who didn’t want to be in his arms, Karen was the one.
Karen washed her hands and face in the bathroom off the bedroom. Finding the brush in her bag, she ran it through her hair, curlier than usual from the rain. Examining herself in the mirror, she decided she looked washed out. She’d brought lipstick with her but no other makeup. Not that it mattered, since she wasn’t trying to impress Zed.
Although she no longer hated, loathed and detested him the way she had when she arrived, she certainly could never be interested in him, attractive as he was. When he gazed at her with those dark, dark eyes, she had difficulty keeping her mind focused on the matter at hand.
His consideration for Danny had surprised her—he actually seemed to like the boy, despite his refusal to admit he was the father. He didn’t ignore him as so many men did. She smiled, remembering the nickname he’d bestowed on Danny. Tiger, he called him.
He hadn’t tried to touch her. It hadn’t even occurred accidentally. Maybe he didn’t like her. Given the circumstances, she could understand why. What perplexed her was why it should bother her. You don’t expect every man you meet to find you attractive, she chided herself, and he’s one man you don’t want. You should be glad he pays more attention to Danny than he does to you. But she wasn’t.
Maybe the problem was she’d seen too much of him at their first meeting. Literally. He’d worn nothing but those about-to-fall-off sweatpants. All that well-put-together male flesh must have gotten to her core, which might explain why she was looking forward to this evening instead of resenting being forced to stay here.
When she came into the living room he was sitting on the couch in front of the fireplace staring into the flames licking at the logs. Before she realized what she meant to do, she eased down beside him. He glanced at her and smiled, the first genuine smile he’d given
her.
“There’s something about a fire,” he said.
“Um,” she agreed. “Cozy.”
“Primitive,” he said, his gaze holding hers. She felt herself falling into the dark pools of his eyes, where she might well drown. That wouldn’t do. Making an intense effort, she looked away.
“Yes,” she said in her best teacher voice. “Primitive man feared the darkness and knew fire was his friend and ally against the dangers of the night.”
“Do you fear the night?” he asked, his voice low and soft.
“Sometimes,” she admitted.
He moved his hand and she held her breath, waiting for his touch, wanting it. At that moment Danny made an inquiring sound from his cradle in the kitchen, his way of summoning her.
Karen jumped to her feet and the moment was over. But, she realized with mixed anticipation and apprehension, the evening was not over, much less the night.
Chapter Three
In Zed’s fireplace lazy flames flickered between the glowing logs. On the floor, at a safe distance away from the fire, Danny lay on one of Grandma Adams’s old quilts, amusing himself by getting up onto all fours and rocking back and forth. Almost as if he couldn’t quite get his motor started, Zed thought with amusement.
He and Karen sat side by side on the couch to the left of the fireplace, sipping the remainder of the wine he’d found to serve with the tasty beef stew she’d cooked.
He couldn’t recall feeling this content in a long time. Must be the result of a good meal and good wine because, as things stood, he sure as hell didn’t have any reason to be content. Was he wrong to trust Karen? He glanced at her, no more than an arm’s reach away from him, and found her looking at him, firelight mirrored in her eyes.
“I wish I could trust you,” she said, and then blinked as though her own words had surprised her.
“Yeah,” he said, “I know what you mean.” He waved a hand to include the fire, the baby and the room in general. “This is great, but maybe it could be something more if we weren’t at swords’ points.”