by Anne Conley
He watched as she continued to stir, checking the temperature on a candy thermometer clipped to the side of the pan. Finally, she nodded to herself, picked up the sauce pan and poured it over a cookie sheet already coated with melted chocolate. Dumping the pan in a sink full of hot, soapy water, she wiped out the inside, rinsed it, and set it on a drying rack next to her. He noticed the liquor was gone from the counter top and thought to himself, “good.” It reminded him why he was here. He studied her as she sprinkled sliced almonds and sea salt over the toffee, his mouth watering in spite of himself. Wait. She wasn’t going to eat all that, was she? He’d read horrible things about gestational diabetes.
When she sat at the table next to him, he pushed back a little, not wanting to fall under the spell of her scent.
Wanting the inevitable confrontation over with, he started. “I’m still pissed at you.”
“I figured,” she sighed, apparently dreading it as much as he was.
“But I don’t want to miss any more of this than I already have. I’m really busy with the shop and Dad and don’t have much time to come by and visit. So I’m just going to stay here over the holidays. Maybe even until Dad’s finished with his rehab after surgery.”
She’d been looking at her feet, but when he said that, her eyes snapped to his, and he was pleased to see they finally looked alive.
“What?”
“I’m staying here with you. I’ll help you. Make sure you’re eating right, doing what you need to be doing to take care of the baby. I’ve missed too much already, thank you very much. I want to be around when the baby starts moving. I want to see it grow inside you.” He waited for her response, and she didn’t disappoint.
Her hand came down on the table so hard that the tree shook and ornaments waggled precariously. “You haven’t spoken to me in three weeks, and all of a sudden you show up and tell me you’re moving in? I don’t think so. I have a daughter here, in case you haven’t noticed. I’m not about to let her think we’re shacking up.” Renae’s voice was a hiss that would have burned him alive if he hadn’t been so determined.
“I’ll explain to her that since her mother, the mother of my child hasn’t clued me in on the details of her pregnancy, I’m taking the bull by the horns. In fact, I’ll tell her now. Kelly!” Righteous indignation flowed through his veins.
Mini-Renae appeared, looking excited for some reason, and stood by the table waiting.
Jason forced a calm into his voice he didn’t feel. “I’ll be staying here for a while, to make sure your mother and the baby are taken care of. We won’t be sleeping together, but I’ll be around, cooking, helping her take care of the house, making sure she doesn’t over do anything. I’m not telling you this to make sure it’s alright with you, although I hope it is. I just want you to understand that I’m taking care of your mother and my baby. Nothing more.”
To his utter surprise, she beamed at him, clapping her hands together. “That is awesome! She hasn’t been sleeping, and I was worried about what would happen when I went back to school. I’ve got to leave after Christmas for my job and didn’t want her to do too much. As it is…” Her voice trailed off as she motioned around the kitchen at the piles of cookies and bread on the countertops.
“I can take care of myself!” Renae seemed to hitting a point of no return, but Jason didn’t care. Before he could even open his mouth to form a sarcastic retort, Kelly had her arms around her mother.
“Of course you can, Mom. You can take care of yourself, and me, and your own mother, and Dalton’s family, and all your friends… Won’t it be nice to have some help for a change?”
Jason was impressed with the role-reversal he was witnessing. Renae seemed to shrink in her daughter’s arms, and the rare glimpse of weakness in her touched something deep within him.
Defeated, Renae’s shoulders slumped. “I just wanted a normal Christmas before the baby came. After this it’ll be different.”
Kelly squeezed her mother again. “Of course it will be, Mom. That’s what having a baby is all about, but you can’t be a super hero all the time. I love you, and I’m super glad that Jason will be here to make sure you don’t go crazy.”
“He’ll make me crazy,” Renae muttered under her breath. Kelly squeezed her shoulders once before standing.
“Is it okay if I run over to Uncle Dobby’s for a little while? I wanted to take them some of the rosemary sourdough.” She turned to Jason. “It’s his favorite.”
“Sure.” Renae sighed, resigned to her fate.
Jason followed Kelly to the door where he’d left his bags, and she turned to him when she reached the door.
“I’m really glad to finally meet you. Mom’ll be okay. She just never has adapted well to change. And this is a big one.” She threw her arms around Jason in a hug, catching him off guard. By the time he’d regained his equilibrium to hug her back, she was gone.
Jason had brought his sax, a duffel filled with clothes, and a backpack full of library books. He rummaged through his things to find the book he was looking for and then went to lecture Renae about proper nutrition and the importance of folic acid while trying not to look at her. He was feeling triumphant with his victory, cocky even, but a niggling doubt of unease that he might be handling this all wrong was tickling the base of his skull. Nevertheless, excitement at finally being a part of her pregnancy, the prenatal development of his child, overshadowed everything else.
Chapter 24
Kelly must have told Dalton and Alyssa about Jason when she took over the bread, because Renae’s phone started ringing thirty minutes after her daughter left the house and didn’t stop for two days. First her mother, then Jessie, then every other one of her girlfriends called to say how wonderful it was the baby’s father was back in the picture. Renae hadn’t even known all of them knew she was pregnant. When Les called to make sure she was okay with Jason there, she’d lied and told him everything was fine, although things were far from fine
The first morning after he’d stayed in the guest room, Renae had awoken to find Jason in her kitchen making breakfast. She gawked at his appearance: sleep-tousled hair, flannel pajama bottoms, oversized t-shirt, glasses? Jason was sporting a pair of dark-framed glasses that were surprisingly super sexy. They framed his determined, blue eyes as he poured her a cup of coffee and put it on the table in front of her.
“You get one cup of coffee a day. It’s half-caf.”
She grunted and took a sip of the brew, deemed it sub-par in her hazy state and added two spoonfuls of sugar and a dollop of cream. She did her best to ignore the sleepy sex god in front of her. He saw her with the sugar spoon and continued.
“And you need to watch your sugar intake. Gestational diabetes is a bitch.” He motioned to all the cookies on the countertop. “You can’t eat all this.”
Nobody talked to her this early in the morning. Kelly knew better. Certainly nobody talked to her like this. “They’re gifts. Don’t be an asshole, Jason. I’m a grown up and perfectly capable of taking care of myself.” She took another sip of her coffee. “This sucks.”
He grinned at her widely, obviously a morning person. “It just takes some getting used to. It’s better for the baby.”
She could tell that all this better for the baby stuff was going to get old real quick. “You can’t come in here and dictate my life like this.”
“Oh, but I can. As soon as you decided I didn’t need to know about my baby, you dictated my life for me. This is how I can make it up to you both.” He set a plate in front of her, and she looked at it warily. “A two egg-white omelet with spinach and Canadian bacon, and here…” he set a bowl of fruit next to the plate. “Blueberries and strawberries and a glass of milk.”
Despite her anger at his suddenly controlling demeanor, the breakfast looked delicious. Her morning sickness had faded away in the last two weeks, and she suddenly found herself ravenous. Renae ate, begrudgingly offering murmurs of appreciation, to which Jason’s ever-present smirk anno
yed her to no end. This was going to be a long holiday.
That was four days ago, and the mornings hadn’t gotten any easier. She had cut her coffee intake back, but that half-caf stuff was crap, and she wasn’t getting used to it.
Now it was Christmas Eve, and she was trying to get everything ready for dinner with her family. It was a tradition. Dalton came over with Alyssa and their children, their mother, and Kelly. Jason had made himself scarce during the day while Renae had been at work, but today she was off, and getting ready for dinner. Jason had spent the morning at the hospital with his dad but had been around all day long. Totally up her butt.
His sudden controlling behavior reeked of Cody, although Jason seemed to be more concerned about the baby and its safety. The control didn’t extend to his own self-gratification. But control was control, and Renae was having a hard time giving it up.
He was driving her crazy with his dictates and his smell. He was everywhere. She bent over to arrange the gifts under the tree and he was telling her how to squat so she didn’t pull a muscle. She put the roast in the oven and he was taking it out of her hands so she wasn’t lifting too much weight. When he followed her to the bathroom to make sure she was okay, she lost it.
“I can’t do this!” She shouted as she flushed the toilet.
“Do what?” The innocence in his voice really rankled her.
“I can’t have you following me all over the place, checking on me, correcting me, telling me how I should do things. I am forty-five years old, have managed a pregnancy already without you, and am perfectly capable of taking care of myself!”
“Prenatal medicine had come a long way in eighteen years, Renae. There are so many things you don’t know.”
“How do you know I don’t know?”
“Do you have a birthing plan written down?”
“A what?”
“See?” He raked his hands through his already disheveled hair, and Renae couldn’t help but want to smooth it out for him. She resisted the urge, gritting her teeth together.
“Look.” She was forcing a calm she didn’t feel. “This is Christmas, and I have a houseful of people coming over for dinner tonight. It is always stressful for me, trying to please my mother since my dad died. You can help me get ready for them, and we can try to pretend to be pleasant to each other, or you can fight with me about every little thing I do wrong. You choose.”
He expelled a whooshing breath, sending a minty stream of warmth across her face. “You’re right. I’m sorry. The stress can’t be good for the baby.”
Renae threw her hands in the air. The baby. At least he cared about the baby even though his manner of showing it was driving her crazy.
“So what’s next on your agenda? Give me something to do.”
“You can pull down the Christmas dishes and wash the dust off them.” She led him into the kitchen and pointed to the top shelf of her pantry where the box of dishes were.
Somehow, they managed to work together the rest of the day, Jason helping where Renae asked, visibly chewing on his lip when she purposely did something to annoy him. He was making an effort to not stress her further, and she appreciated it.
But he still smelled too damned good.
About an hour before everyone was due to arrive, Renae found Jason rearranging the packages under the tree.
“What are you doing?”
“We’re exchanging gifts tonight, right? I was adding some.”
“You brought presents for my family?”
He shrugged. “They’re mine now, too… by default, of course.”
Shaking her head, “I’m going to jump into the shower for a minute. Will you put the green bean casserole in the oven in thirty minutes and take out the roast?”
“Sure. Will there be time for me to shower too?”
The image of him naked and soapy floated through her mind, and she forced it back. “Sure.” It sounded choked, but that wasn’t anything new for her. Renae’s voice had been doing weird things around Jason since he’d showed up on her doorstep. She left him by the tree and went to her bathroom to shower.
When she was finished, she stood in front of her mirror in her underwear studying her body. She’d done this a lot lately, wondering what it would look like as her pregnancy progressed. Before she’d gotten pregnant, her body hadn’t been bad for a woman her age. In fact, compared to others she knew, it was pretty great. Just jiggly. Now, her waistline was disappearing, and her stomach had begun to swell a little.
When she’d been younger, her body had bounced back after giving birth to Kelly really quickly. Now she wasn’t sure what was going to happen to it. She wasn’t vain about her looks, but with Jason suddenly underfoot, she found herself trying to dress nicer, eschewing her sweats for jeans, and trying to keep her hair clean.
As she dressed carefully for the evening in a new dress she’d bought before Jason made his grand re-entrance back in her life, she continued studying her appearance, wondering what he would think.
Her legs were good, and she’d bought the dress to show off that particular feature. She knew her family would be looking at her waistline, and she honestly didn’t want her pregnancy to be the main topic of conversation at dinner. So she’d bought a dress with ruching at the waistline to disguise her bump and show off her cleavage.
She affixed a pair of pearl earrings and was struggling with the clasp of the matching necklace when a knock on her bedroom door startled her, and she dropped it.
“Come in.” She called as she got on her hands and knees to find the necklace.
“What are you doing?” Jason’s voice poured over her with concern, and she looked up to find him staring at her, piercing blue eyes filled with desire and pasted to her breasts. Renae looked down at herself and realized she wasn’t leaving much to the imagination. She climbed up to her knees and adjusted the top of her dress as Jason walked over to where she was kneeling, his hand out to help her up.
She grabbed it and ignored the tingles, pulling herself up to her feet.
“I dropped my necklace down there when you knocked.”
He bent easily and picked it up. “This necklace?” She watched his Adam’s apple work as he swallowed and she nodded. “Turn around. I’ll put it on.”
She couldn’t ignore the electricity flowing between them as she turned and lifted her hair to expose her neck to him. She felt his knuckles graze the sensitive flesh there and closed her eyes to the sensation.
“What did you need?”
“Oh… Um, the Brussel sprouts. What were you planning to do with them?” His voice near her ear was low and tickled, sending a shiver up her spine.
“Sautee with cranberries and brown sugar, but that’s a last minute thing. I can do it in a minute.”
“Sounds good,” he whispered.
She turned to find his eyelids heavy, his pupils wide, the irises a deep cobalt color. The intensity of his stare made her knees weak and her tummy do strange things.
“You can shower now. I’ll take care of the rest.”
He shook his head slightly, as if to clear it, and Renae realized she wasn’t the only one having lusty thoughts tonight. She put her hand on his firm chest to push him back, but he covered it with his own.
“I-” Her heart dropped at the tender look on his face. She wanted this to be pleasant so badly, but getting her hopes up would be stupid.
She shook her head, “Let’s just get through this evening, okay?”
Finally, Jason took a step back. “Okay.” He firmed his face and turned. “See you in a minute.”
Ten minutes later, Renae was in the kitchen tossing the Brussel sprouts in a large sauté pan with the cranberries and brown sugar, coating them with the glaze the brown sugar was creating with the melted butter.
“Smells amazing in here…” Jason sniffed appreciatively as he sauntered into the kitchen, the citrusy smell of his cologne wafting around him.
“Thanks. You want to put the trivets on the table? Dalton
and Alyssa just called. They just picked Mom up and should be here soon. And we need some Christmas music on, too.”
Jason was messing with the remote to the TV, trying to find the station that played music when Dalton’s voice rang out. “Merry Christmas!”
Renae came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron as her family filed in. Alyssa’s children, Sierra and Cayden ran to the Christmas tree with a chorus of squeals and began shaking presents, making piles of whose belonged to whom. Dalton was carrying his toddler son, Milo, who was leaning against his dad’s shoulder, shucking on his middle two fingers.
“Children, stay out of there until after dinner.” Her mother admonished sternly.
“They’re fine as long as they don’t start opening them.” Renae corrected, gently, as she took Milo from Dalton. Her mother made a face like she’d sucked on a lemon and Renae stifled a sigh. She couldn’t get frustrated this early in the game. She still had lots of criticisms to get through before the night was over. She passed Jason getting the casserole out of the oven, and he was humming the Carpenter’s We’ve Only Just Begun under his breath. She smiled to herself. At least someone had a sense of humor.
Alyssa came up to her and gave her a big squeeze as Renae was taking off her apron. “You look fabulous in that dress, Renae. I love it.” Lowering her voice, she asked, “How are things? You don’t look like you’re sleeping any better.”
Renae shrugged. “Things are okay, I guess.” Turning, she saw Jason was putting food on the table. “He’s making me crazy with all this taking care of the baby stuff.”
“Dalton’s been insane about it too. I think that’s just a man thing.”
“Yeah, well, at least you have a relationship with Dalton.” The words made her sound like a petty, jealous woman, which she wasn’t. If Jason didn’t want a relationship with her, she didn’t want one either. She wasn’t going to pine after a man just because he’d fathered her child. She’d wasted too many years of her life doing that already. She wasn’t about to start over now and do it again.