by Leigh Riker
Molly, on the other hand, fit right in. She handed the boy and girl a bowl of potato salad and a relish tray from the fridge. “Set these in the dining room, please.”
When the giggling pair vanished, she waved Brig toward a chair.
“Sit. You look like you need to.”
Brig put down the diaper bag but stayed on his feet, gently rocking Laila in his arms. His head ached.
All he wanted was sleep. All Molly wanted, he guessed, was to avoid him. She hadn’t taken one real good look at the baby, either, and like a cat, Molly maintained a deliberate space between herself and him. Obviously, she hadn’t forgiven him for breaking their engagement years ago. Not that she should. Not that he expected her to.
At the same time he couldn’t seem to stop staring at her. The instant he’d seen her, his memories and his guilt had overwhelmed him. His gaze traveled now from her blunt-cut brown hair—shorter than he remembered—to her trim sweater, her fitted jeans and her feet in scarlet socks. But the red heart by her mouth was what kept his eyes riveted. Thick honey seemed to flow through him. And what kind of jerk am I? Molly, with her warmth and openness, had always deserved more.
“Do you have formula?” she asked, still keeping her distance.
It took Brig forever to find a can in the overloaded bag, a clean plastic liner for the bottle and one fresh nipple. Juggling Laila, he managed to put the whole contraption together. Then, Molly eyeing him with obvious suspicion as he walked past her, he opened the microwave and stuck it inside. One minute should do it. He hoped.
Right behind him, Molly almost stepped on his heel.
“You can’t warm a baby’s milk in there.”
“Why not?”
“The bottle might feel cool to the touch, but the milk could be too hot in spots and burn a baby’s mouth and throat.” With an efficiency he could only admire, she took the bottle to the sink and held it under the water. When she seemed satisfied with the temperature, Molly thrust the bottle at Brig. “Shake some on your inner wrist before you give it to her—to make sure.”
He sat down at the table, tried to nestle Laila into a good position, then watched her latch on to the nipple. He could hear the party noise swell from the living room, and the teenagers in the dining room were still giggling. When he glanced up, Molly was all but tapping her foot at his incompetence.
He knew she adored children, but how did she know about babies?
Brig guessed it was time to explain what he was doing with one. Or try to.
“This is Laila,” he began. “She’s two months old.” He smiled down at the baby’s intent expression as she drank, her dark eyes fixed on his face. He cleared his throat. “She isn’t mine, in case you’re wondering....” He trailed off, reluctant to call up the painful memories.
Molly waited for him to go on.
After a long moment Brig tried again. “I was on duty overseas. Hush-hush stuff, flying under the radar, the kind of thing we always do.” It was one reason he’d left Molly. He hadn’t wanted to worry about her worrying about him. At least, that was what he’d told himself then. “Long story short, Laila’s dad was one of my men, one of the team. Sean...fell in love there with a local woman.”
“And they had Laila,” Molly guessed.
Brig nodded, still gazing down at the baby. Her tiny hand closed around his little finger, and his heart melted, which happened about ten times a day.
“They had Laila,” he echoed, his tone husky. “Then, while she was still in the hospital with her mother after the birth, a bunch of insurgents hit the place. Boom. In the bombing, Laila’s mom died instantly.” He paused. “Her name was Zada. You know what that means?”
“No.”
“The lucky one. But that day she wasn’t so lucky...and Sean lived just long enough to make sure Laila was okay.”
Molly’s eyes had softened. “This must be hard to talk about. You don’t have to go on, Brig.”
Why was he surprised at her words? Molly had always been sensitive to other people. Once, she’d even been sensitive to him. Now he swallowed the pain that sometimes threatened to consume him. His anger over Sean and Zada was easier to feel and just as hard to forget.
“But I ask you, Molly—what kind of thing was that? A man goes to see his wife, his new daughter, the happiest kind of day for a young couple in love—a family for the first time—and he ends up dead. They do,” he added.
Molly seemed to be holding her breath. “What about the baby? How did Laila survive that ghastly explosion?”
“The nurses claimed they wanted to give Sean and Zada some time together. They took the baby back to the nursery at the other end of the building minutes before the device went off. She didn’t get a scratch, which is a miracle in itself. I spent the past two months entangled in red tape before I got permission to bring Laila to the States.”
Molly’s gaze brightened, as if a light had been turned on. “Your friend...asked you to keep her. If anything happened to him.”
Brig nodded again. “We all make wills,” he said, “before we deploy. Kind of a downer, wouldn’t you say? But necessary when you think about it. I’m officially Laila’s guardian now. Not the best choice of ‘parent’ for her in my opinion, but, yes, I promised Sean. Who would have guessed that he and Zada would both...that Laila...” How was Brig going to care for the little girl, though? She could stay with his folks when he was in the field, as they’d already agreed, but that arrangement would be temporary, and now he had to find them first.
Molly briefly touched his arm. “You’ve had a really bad time.”
“Not just me,” he said, wanting to change the subject before he totally fell apart. “I’m sorry about your husband. Mom told me.”
There was another long silence while Molly appeared to gather herself, and Brig wondered if she felt as uneasy talking about this as he had about Sean and Zada.
“Thank you,” she said at last, her voice husky. “Andrew was a great guy.”
And I wasn’t. She had a point, even unspoken. Brig couldn’t fault her for not wanting to dredge up her sorrow. But still he went on.
“I remember Andrew Darling from school,” Brig said, “but I didn’t know him very well. He was a couple of years ahead of me. Two, I think. He always seemed quiet, but he was friendly. A serious kind of guy.”
“He had this laugh, though,” she said. “It always surprised me—when he wasn’t the type for surprises. We were a lot alike, really, I guess. He was so steady, settled...”
Not like me.
The next words almost stuck in his throat. “Were you happy, Molly?”
He needed to hear her say yes, so he wouldn’t continue to feel guilty for leaving. Yet he dreaded hearing her say just that.
“We were,” she said at last, “but not nearly long enough. While we were together, yes, we were happy. Can we stop talking about this now?”
She fell silent, as if lost in her memories, and Brig knew again that the topic would have been better left alone. Like Sean and Zada. Still, this was his and Molly’s starting point. A crazy sort of catching up.
In the next second Brig stiffened. Warmth had spread through his sleeve. But not from the touch of Molly’s hand, which had dropped from his arm. He held out Laila and saw a widening stain on the fabric.
“She’s wet,” Molly noted with that little frown he remembered so well. “When was her diaper changed?”
Already feeling guilty, Brig checked his watch. “About five hours ago.”
“Five hours?”
“On the hard floor in the customs area at JFK while we waited for our bags. I never had time between planes to buy more diapers, and at Frankfurt we ran low. I’ve been rationing Laila’s changes.”
Molly’s soft eyes had turned steely, and her face appeared pale under the festive red heart
stuck to her face.
Both he and the baby must look like dirty laundry, wrinkled and thrown together. Now they were both damp and not getting any drier. To Brig, that meant he was losing his grip on the situation—which had happened the first time Laila had screamed on the military cargo plane out of Bagram airfield near Kabul.
“Overseas,” he said, “a local woman took care of Laila while I took care of business. Guess I’m not doing so well now.”
Molly raised an eyebrow. Her expression challenged every one of his insecurities.
“You can use the spare room upstairs to change her.”
Brig could hear the doubt in her tone, and his male pride kicked in. Their brief rapport—if it had even been that—was over. And here he’d thought he and Molly were doing okay as long as they avoided any mention of his betrayal of her.
“You think I can’t change a diaper?” he asked icily.
That was pretty close to the truth.
Not waiting for her answer, he took Laila, the half-finished bottle, and stalked out of the room.
* * *
“WONDERFUL,” MOLLY MUTTERED. “Why not just give a lecture or four or five to a man who’s already half dead on his feet?”
And clearly hurting. The loss of his teammate and the orphaned child had shaken Brig. Just as Brig’s questions about Andrew and Molly’s marriage had shaken her.
She had noted the weary slump of his broad shoulders, and how he held the baby to him like a security blanket.
But Molly pushed aside the observations. There was a party going on, and for the next few hours she had to play hostess. With the rain still falling, she supervised the younger children’s game of indoor tag. She refereed a fight over a TV basketball game. Pop should have known better than to get involved. She comforted her teenage cousin’s angst and soothed toddler tears.
She taught four-year-old Ernie Barlow how to play pin the tail on the donkey—or, rather, on a SpongeBob SquarePants poster—then pretended not to see how her sister, Ann, ignored Ernie’s dad, a new local sheriff’s deputy who seemed to have a thing for her.
And Molly tried not to notice that Brig never came back downstairs to eat or to show off the baby.
By evening, when the festivities wound down, the house resembled a giant trash basket filled with broken toys and exploded balloons. As her guests prepared to leave, every child under the age of five was crying—a sure sign in Molly’s experience of too much stimulation and total but happy exhaustion. For everyone but Molly, the party had been a huge success.
After all the guests left, she hurried upstairs. She found Brig in the spare room, where her offer to heat a late supper for him died on her lips. Brig lay sprawled on the double bed, sound asleep. Clearly he was down for the count. His face told her nothing, which was probably what he wanted after Molly’s earlier criticism. Lying beside him, with Brig’s arm over her like an anchor, the baby stared wide-eyed at the overhead light, flinching each time thunder rumbled in the night sky.
Now at last Molly gave in to the urge churning inside her during the party and slipped to her knees next to the bed. Brig must have dozed off in the midst of dressing Laila for the night. Her right arm was in one sleeve of an aquamarine sleeper, the other, still bare, waved in the air. Half the snaps on the sleeper were undone.
“You giving your old man a hard time?” Molly whispered.
At the sound of her voice, Laila turned her head as if searching for her. Molly reached out, brushing Brig’s arm without meaning to, and quickly touched the baby’s silky hair. Laila’s gaze, dark as a midnight sea, met hers.
Molly’s breath caught. She was a beautiful baby, another victim of the senseless violence that had taken both her parents. “Oh, sweetie,” Molly murmured.
Blinking, she eased Brig’s arm aside and heard him grunt in his sleep. She could hardly wake him and make them leave. Where would they go? A glance out the window told her Brig’s parents were still gone. Not a single light glowed in the house next door. She tucked Laila into her sleeper, then snapped the garment all the way. The little girl’s skin felt like velvet, and she smelled, as only a baby could, of sheer innocence. A baby like the one Molly had always yearned for, and lost.
Children were the best, yet the hardest, part of her job. She got to spend so much time with them, yet they were other people’s, not her own.
On impulse she peeled the red heart from her face and leaned closer to stick it on Laila’s chest, then nuzzled the infant’s small belly.
And, against every instinct to protect her heart, Molly fell in love.
Like the rain that pounded against the windows and the thunder that still grumbled overhead, the feeling seemed to Molly another omen.
CHAPTER TWO
BRIG AWOKE THE next morning fully clothed with no memory of having gone to bed—and no knowledge of where he was. Disoriented, he checked his watch, then made a quick calculation. It was six-thirty in the evening in Kabul, but eleven in the morning was late enough here. He’d overslept.
For another moment, he lay yawning in the sun-splattered bedroom—then recognition dawned. Ah, right. He was in Molly’s house. Almost immediately, he heard a snuffle. Brig shot upright and spotted the baby nearby in a portable crib. Laila! Some guardian he made.
“Hungry, cupcake?”
He tucked in the shirt he’d worn all night, fighting a growing sense of parental neglect, and picked up the baby, who was swaddled in a pastel-striped receiving blanket that smelled of fresh air. He didn’t recognize it as one he’d crammed into their suitcases, which he assumed were still on the porch next door. Molly must have donated the wrap. Wearing yesterday’s socks, he carried Laila downstairs. She needed more milk, and Brig needed coffee.
At the bottom of the steps in the front hall, as if running into an ambush, he met Molly’s father. Thomas Walker turned from the door with the newspaper in hand. He didn’t smile, and Brig remembered his stiff manner at the party. He imagined that Molly, not her dad, had let him stay the night—as if they’d had an option once he’d fallen asleep, one hundred ninety pounds of deadweight.
“The Reds are in trouble,” Thomas said, reading the headline on page one.
For a second Brig thought the Russians were stirring up trouble again.
The older man gave a snort of disgust. “Barely into spring training and already headed for the bottom of the standings. Would you believe? Just traded their best pitcher for some rookie.” He glanced out the front door’s side window. “Look at that,” he muttered.
Again, Brig missed the connection. “What?”
“Nosy woman across the street. Every time I get the paper, she’s peering out.” Without missing a beat, he said, “Doesn’t look to me like your folks are home yet. Didn’t see anyone next door. You get any rest, Brigham?”
Brig nodded his head. “Passed out as soon as I got horizontal.” He still felt drained and his eyes were grainy, but his stomach growled. Or was that Laila’s tummy? And where had his parents gone, if not out for the evening?
“Molly said you never ate dinner.”
“Wasn’t hungry.” And where was she now? “My stomach’s off schedule, still in central Asia.”
“Well, there’s coffee in the kitchen.”
But Thomas sounded begrudging.
Brig shifted Laila from one arm to the other. Dark haired, dark eyed and oblivious to the undercurrents between the two men, she sucked on a fist.
As if he couldn’t help himself, Thomas studied her. And Brig studied him. Molly’s dad was still a solid-looking man. Retirement had added a slight paunch to Thomas’s stomach, but even so, except for his brown hair with touches of gray at his temples, he didn’t look his age.
Thomas gestured at Laila. “Baby sleep okay?”
“I never heard her,” Brig confessed, knowing that
wouldn’t win him any points. “Thanks for finding her a crib.”
“Molly keeps one here,” he said in what sounded like a wistful tone. A condemnation of Brig for leaving Molly practically at the altar?
A dozen questions ran through his brain, but he didn’t ask them. They were for Molly to answer, although maybe he had no right to ask. After the loss of her husband, she should find another man and have the family she’d always wanted, the family she and Brig had planned until he’d thrown a wrench into things and hightailed it out of Liberty.
Better for her, he had tried to think.
And if he’d stayed...he wouldn’t have Laila now.
“And Molly must have dressed the baby for bed,” he said.
Thomas eyed him like a bug he wanted to squash.
“Must have.”
Which meant she’d seen Brig asleep, lying down on the job. He glanced toward the kitchen. Inhaled the lingering smells of bacon and toast, and that freshly brewed coffee.
“Molly’s not here,” Thomas said. “You can fix yourself anything you like. She was up at six cleaning the mess from yesterday, made me breakfast, then took her second cup of coffee to the office.” Thomas waved toward the backyard.
Office?
Thomas’s casual statement told Brig just how little he knew of Molly these days. All he remembered seeing was an old carriage barn at the rear of the property. His mother, the neat freak, had complained it was an eyesore.
Laila squirmed in his arms and Brig’s shaky parental confidence took another nosedive. Mano a mano with Thomas, he’d nearly forgotten his original mission in coming downstairs.
“I’d better grab some of that coffee, then get going. I heated the last of Laila’s formula yesterday. Hope I can find the same brand in Liberty. Fast.” If he bought the wrong stuff or used whole milk instead of the prepared infant kind and the baby got sick, Molly would likely be on him in a second. And how had Laila made it through the night without waking him to feed her?