Baby, I'll Find You

by Jennifer Skully

  Leo owed her an explanation. He had to look her in the eye and tell her why he’d stalled all those years, then planted his seed in someone else’s garden. If she didn’t force him to own up to it, she’d never put it behind her. Just as Cole had never laid his guilt to rest. They were two of kind. She no longer believed she could help him, but she would help herself. Even if in the end, she had to leave Cole behind.

  Betty was right. The universe laid out the game board and the playing pieces. But it was up to you to make the rules. Or not to play by them at all.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  It was the moment she’d been dreading. You knew you had to accomplish a painful task, no two ways about it, but you still felt sick about it.

  Jami pulled into Easy Cheesy’s parking lot at ten thirty the next morning. The lot was only half full, as were the tables outside. A father and his kids were in shirtsleeves rather than jackets. It was past mid-October and though the nights had certainly cooled down in the mountains, the day was bright and cheerfully warm. Snow at the higher elevations, however, was just around the corner. She realized she’d envisioned being here when the first snow came.

  Andrea refilled a napkin dispenser, Kelly perched tiptoe on a stool to pour syrup into the soda machine, and, oddly, Gary was working the grill alone. Where was Cole? Her pulse beat louder at her temples. Had he actually taken a day off? Had the sun suddenly fallen out of the sky?

  What if he wasn’t here for to say her good-byes? The thought put her off kilter. She couldn’t...well, she couldn’t bear it if she didn’t see him one more time.

  “Hey”—she leaned into the counter window—“I wasn’t sure you’d be here today after everything with your parents.”

  Andrea smiled shyly and tucked back a lock of hair that had fallen from her net. “I’m putting away money for art college so I need all the hours I can get.”

  “Art college?” Jami’s heart beat a little faster.

  “Yeah. My dad says if I work really hard, and we apply for scholarships, and I promise to take some classes, like graphic design or whatever, that can be career builders, he’ll help me.”

  Jami squeezed Andrea’s hand, her heart about to burst wide open. “He listened.”

  “Me and him and Mom had a long talk after you dropped me off last night. My mom said that maybe because of Darryl and all, they were expecting too much from me.”

  Behind her, a car pulled up to the curb near the order window, and Jami knew she didn’t have much time before Andrea’s attention was needed. “What did they say about how you handled the disagreement in the first place?” Which was a nice euphemism for running away.

  Andrea dipped her head. “You know how they felt.” Then she gave Jami a rare moment of eye contact. “It was wrong and dangerous, and I was pretty stupid.”

  “Stupid is a harsh word.”

  “Now you’re going to make excuses for me?”

  Jami laughed. “No excuses. You scared the crap out of your parents, not to mention me, Frank, and Cole. I’m very glad you know that.” Behind her, the car door slammed. “Where’s Frank, by the way? I need to talk to him.” She’d say good-bye to Andrea after she told Frank she had to quit the job as bookkeeper. She felt scummy leaving him in the lurch, and the truth was, she didn’t want to go. Yet she had to get her life in order. She couldn’t keep running away, lesson learned from a sixteen-year-old girl.

  “He’s not here,” Andrea said, her eyes wide as if such a thing had never happened before in the history of Easy Cheesy, at least since she’d been working here. “He and Cole took off half an hour ago and said they’d be back this afternoon.”

  What? That was the weirdest thing. “Where’d they go?”

  “Frank said something about needing to take his truck to Cole’s house.”

  Jami didn’t like it. In fact, it scared the bejesus out of her.

  “I have some customers,” Andrea whispered. “Can you wait a minute and let me take care of them?”

  “Sure.” The news that both Cole and Frank were gone rocked her world. It was like saying they’d left the planet. Oh no, something wasn’t wrong with Ruby, was it?

  She pivoted out of the way—

  “Hello, Jami.”

  —and tripped over a crack in the sidewalk just as Leo reached out to grab her arm.

  She felt as if her world had tilted, and she would have fallen, but still she jerked away. “What are you doing here?”

  “You didn’t answer my e-mails or my voice mails.”

  “There was only one e-mail and voice mail.” She was going to confront him, but she’d intended to use the drive home to figure out what to say.

  “Can I help you, sir?” Andrea said, a trace of nervousness threading through her voice as she shot Jami a glance.

  “No, thanks, I came to talk to her.” He pointed at Jami and took a step away from the window, a step closer to Jami.

  Who backed up two steps of her own. “How did you find me?”

  “Your mom had your landlady’s address.”

  “My mother?” That traitor.

  “And your landlady sent us here,” he finished with beaming smile.

  “Us?” she whispered.

  Her mother and sisters piled out of Leo’s Lexus.

  Oh my God.

  “Sweetheart, we’re here to bring you to your senses.” Dressed in sky blue polyester top and pants, her mother put her hand on a cocked hip. “There’s something not quite right with that landlady of yours.”

  Denise shuddered. “All that purple.” For some odd reason, purple was Denise’s least favorite color.

  “And did you see all the Tom Jones artifacts?” Nanette grimaced. “Isn’t he dead or something?”

  “No, he’s not dead,” Cathy answered, punctuating with a snort.

  “There’s nothing wrong with Isadora,” Jami said. “She’s just...unique.”

  “You had to think a long time to come up with that word, didn’t you?” Denise quipped.

  “Not really.” She went on the offensive. “Where’s Emily?”

  Denise sniffed primly. “The three of us”—Nanette, Denise, and Cathy—“were squished in Leo’s backseat. Where were we supposed to put Emily?”

  “She actually got Emily a sitter so she could come all the way out here to the wilderness to save you.” Mom shifted, cocking her other hip, and Jami knew she was supposed to be grateful.

  Maybe the fact that Denise refused to leave baby Emily was part of the problem she had with Truman. A wife and husband needed some alone time even when they were parents.

  “Jami, could I talk to you?” Leo whispered at her ear. She wondered how he’d survived a car full of Baylor women?

  Her mom glanced at Leo, then perfected an already perfect curl in her silver hair. “We want you to come home, Jami.”

  They needed Leo to help with that? Leo, of all people?

  “You should listen to what Leo has to say.” Denise scuffed her sandal on the sidewalk.

  “But you were the one who said you saw him—”

  Denise coughed. Loudly.

  “She misunderstood what she saw, Jami.” Leo glared at her sister. “Right, Denise?”

  She scuffed the other toe and spoke to her sandal. “I might be reversing my opinion on what I thought I saw that day.”

  They all stared at Jami; Mom, Nanette, Denise, even Cathy, as if they expected some monumental reaction.

  “How can you misinterpret seeing Leo buy an engagement ring for a pregnant woman?” She didn’t even look at Leo. She’d wanted to confront him, needed to know why he’d lied to her all those months, even years, yet suddenly faced with her family, she was more concerned about why they were here. Contemplating what her mom and sisters wanted was infinitely more frightening than considering what Leo hoped to gain.

  Denise, however, let Leo do the talking. “That’s why I left at the crack of dawn, Jami. And the traffic was terrible getting out of the Bay Area. It took twice as long as it should
have. But I wanted to explain.”

  Well, whoop-de-doo, he got up at the crack of dawn and had to brave bad traffic. How bad could it be on a Saturday morning? She put her hand over her mouth in case the sarcasm slipped out.

  “Just listen to him,” her mom urged. Denise and Nanette nodded their heads in unison. Cathy simply grimaced.

  Leo glanced at Jami’s family, then Andrea, and finally Kelly and Gary who were way too close to the front window to be getting any work done. “Could we go somewhere and talk?” he asked, voice low.

  Her stomach suddenly sank. I’m not ready. Certainly not with her mother and sisters hanging on Leo’s every word.

  She shuddered at the voice in her head. Her own pathetic voice. How long was it going to take to work up her courage this time? Maybe she needed another grab bag with a whole new set of CDs in it made by some other man she could chase after and throw herself at and use as an excuse to...

  Jami sucked in a breath. She would not think about Cole. She would not wonder how she would stop his voice serenading her to sleep at night. She was not going to let herself be a pathetic loser.

  Her mother’s words rang in her head. Jami never has anything to say for herself. She’s just not as together as the rest of you. It was enough to galvanize her.

  Raising her hand, she crooked a finger at Leo and led him down to the end of the sidewalk, away from the tables and the Cheesy front windows. And her eavesdropping family.

  She stopped in a patch of sunlight. “We can talk here.”

  “I meant we should go for breakfast or coffee or something.”

  She planted her feet apart. “We can talk here.”

  “Jami,” he cajoled—or was that whining? “We need privacy, somewhere we can discuss this without interruption.” He glanced over his shoulder. “You don’t want your mom and sisters listening, do you?”

  He’d always known what buttons to push to get her to do what he wanted, but what he really meant was, be a good girl, be reasonable, don’t make trouble, everything will work out. Jami, the woman who was terrified of being classified as a drama queen like the rest of her family, was always reasonable. He still had that thinning spot on the back of his head, a small gut hanging over his pants, and a know-it-all smile. She’d never realized it was know-it-all, but now, matched with that slight lift of one eyebrow two shades lighter than his blond hair, it definitely qualified as pompous.

  “Here.” She pointed at the ground, right where they were standing. “Or not at all.”

  “Jami.”

  If he said her name one more time with that tone, she’d have to smack him. “Go ahead and explain about your pregnant girlfriend.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “You got a woman pregnant who isn’t your girlfriend?” She wrestled away any emotion. Gosh, the fight wasn’t all that hard. Maybe she really didn’t have that much emotion left where Leo was concerned. She’d given it all to Cole. “This may take more explaining than you thought.”

  He sighed. “She isn’t my girlfriend. I’m not the father of her child. She’s an assistant at the firm, and I felt sorry for her. I was just trying to help. That’s all your sister saw.”

  “Right,” she said. “And you’ve got some ocean front property in Wyoming you want to sell me, too.”

  “It’s true.”

  She crossed her arms beneath her breasts, pursed her lips, and tapped her shoe on the concrete. “So that’s why you were picking out a ring at Dell’s Jewelry.”

  “The ring wasn’t for her.”

  Jami stared him down.

  “You don’t believe me? Ask your sister.” He pointed down the sidewalk at Denise. “She’s willing to admit she jumped to the wrong conclusion about what she saw.”

  Spots suddenly flashed in front of her eyes. Ask her sister? As if she, Jami, couldn’t make up her own mind? Her blood, which had been on slow simmer in her veins, suddenly hit boil. “To tell you the truth, I just don’t care.” And she didn’t. Somewhere in all the rehashing, she had lost the emotion about it. It honestly didn’t matter whether he was lying now or not. “I was actually going to drive home today so I could ask why you’d cheated on me and why you kept me hanging on for seven years without making a decision about marrying and having children when you knew that’s what I wanted.”

  “Jami, I swear, that’s what I want to talk about. Marriage and babies. That’s why I left at the crack of dawn to see you.”

  She huffed out an I-don’t-care breath. The crack of dawn didn’t cut ice with her. “You did what you did for whatever reason. What matters is why I”—she stabbed a finger to her chest—“let you do it.” What mattered was knowing she’d been afraid of the alternative, that he’d reject her. Which he had.

  And so what? Losing Cole after one night was infinitely worse, because...oh God. She really couldn’t think about him now. Cole threw her off balance, and she needed all her sanity to deal with Leo.

  “I’m trying to tell you that I made a mistake.”

  She ignored him. “You know why I hung around waiting? Because I was scared I wouldn’t find someone else. Or that it would take too long. Or that whoever it was wouldn’t like the same movies or I wouldn’t feel comfortable with his family or”—searching, she waved her hands—“or whatever. I was just plain scared of making a mistake that I couldn’t even make a decision.”

  “But Jami, don’t you understand what I’m trying to say?”

  “Don’t you understand that I don’t care what you’re trying to say/” She was too busy thinking about how much time she’d let slip through her fingers. How she’d let Cole slip through her fingers.

  “I want to get married,” he said.

  She cocked her head. “To your girlfriend?”

  “To you. And she’s not my girlfriend.”

  There was a roar in her ears, and she was sure she couldn’t possibly have heard. “Now you decide you want to marry me?”

  Pulling a ring box imprinted with Dell’s Jewelry from his shirt pocket—maybe he really hadn’t been picking out a ring for his pregnant girlfriend when Denise saw him—he went down on one knee. “I want to marry you and have two-point-five babies like you wanted and the white picket fence with the blue hydrangeas.”

  She couldn’t believe he remembered the blue hydrangeas. “You can’t have point-five babies.”

  He smiled. “Then we’ll make it a round number. Marry me, honey, and make me the happiest man in the world.” He held his arms wide as if she’d run into them.

  “Why didn’t you say this that night?” The night he’d let her walk out the door and move back into her mother’s house.

  “Because I was an idiot. I was nervous about taking that final step. But I’m ready now.”

  Nervous after being with her for seven years?

  She looked at him, his fair hair, blue eyes, and slightly crooked front tooth that most people wouldn’t notice. “No.”

  “What?” He went down on both knees as if that would make a difference.

  “Leo, I don’t mean to be cruel, but I’m only just starting to see that I wanted to marry you so I could have a family. I waited around because it was easier than making a drastic change in my life and starting over with someone else. Dating”—she shuddered—“and everything.” Tipping her chin down because he was still on his knees, she looked him square in the eye. “It was even hard to admit I’d made a mistake, that I’d moved in with a man who was never going to give me what I needed.”

  In seven years, he’d never given her the passion she’d felt with one night in Cole’s arms.

  “But Jami.”

  “Please get up.” She held her hand out. “This is embarrassing. I’m sorry you came all the way here for this.”

  He stood. “You’re punishing me.”

  Funnily enough, she didn’t need to punish him. She could tell him the truth, that she’d met someone else, but pouring salt in the wound was bitchy. Besides, even without Cole, marrying Leo would b
e a mistake. “I should have told you all this a long time ago.” For once, should wasn’t such a bad word. It was like finally owning up to a mistake. And moving on.

  He stared at her for the count of two, then turned to her family—“She said no”—a tinge of wonder in his voice.

  “I knew she was having a nervous breakdown,” her mother said. She pulled a handkerchief from her purse and blotted her upper lip. “Girls, talk some sense into her.” She fluttered the flowered linen in Jami’s direction.

  As her sisters flocked around her, Jami was amazed they’d actually stayed back as long as they had. Then Leo let them do his dirty work.

  “Don’t be an idiot, Jami.” Two inches shorter than Jami, Denise went up on her toes. “You can have a baby right away.”

  An inch taller, Nanette put her arm around Jami’s shoulder. “He’s paid off the condo and the Lexus.” She beamed.

  He’d fobbed her off with how he needed that next promotion before considering marriage, yet he’d hoarded enough to pay everything off? Right. Whatever. She wasn’t even mad.

  “I don’t want to marry a man just to have a baby.” She’d never thought of it like that, but it was honest.

  “But sweetheart,” her mother said, “decent, well-off, available men don’t grow on trees.”

  Jami chewed the inside of her cheek a moment before she spoke. “Men don’t grow on trees at all, Mom. And I’m not a cow. I don’t need Leo to have a child with me, and I don’t need him to take care of me either. I am not a loser, and I’m as together as any of you are.”

  Nanette coughed. “We know you can take care of yourself, honey, but a stable income is really important. And you don’t have a job.”

  Jami glanced at Cathy in time to see her mouth open. She shook her head. She would not let her sister defend her this time.

  “Actually, I do have a job.” She pointed at Easy Cheesy. “I work here as their full-charge bookkeeper.”

  Leo snorted.