He held on to that determination—right until he got to the bottom of the stairs twenty minutes later and found Gigi with her bags walking out the door, with an anxious Annie trying to convince her not to leave while she held and gave Teddy his bottle.
“She can’t go,” West muttered. If she went, how was he going to resist Annie? “This cannot be happening.”
“But it is,” Annie snapped in a soft voice, remembering the baby in her arms. “Gigi doesn’t seem to believe we need her here.”
“Even after that commotion this morning, you can’t tell?” West asked Gigi.
“Tell that you are no more interested in Annie than she ees in you?” Gigi waved her arms. “Tell that Annie ees as safe here with you as she would be in my very own home?” She shook her head in disgust. “Children, please. I have better things to do than babee-sit two grown people who know exactly what they want—and eet isn’t each other.”
“Well, as long as we have that straight,” Annie said firmly, looking at West.
West looked back, and then he turned to Gigi. Fully dressed, the older woman was staring at him with heavily made-up eyes she hadn’t had twenty minutes ago. How had she done all that to herself so fast? He rubbed his chin wearily, feeling the stubble of a second day of beard. He hadn’t even had the time to shave. “I think I’m getting a little tired of you two telling me what I want—”
Gigi blinked her long, black, fake eyelashes at him. “Are you saying you do want my Annee?”
“No!” he said quickly. Gigi shot him a knowing look, and he scowled. “I’m not saying anything—that’s the problem. If I’d said more since this began, maybe I wouldn’t have lost all control in my own home.”
“So what ees it you want to control anyway?” Gigi asked him. “If it ees Annee, then you must want her around.”
In total frustration, West turned to Annie. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”
Annie shook her head so that her honey-gold hair fell around her shoulders in waves. “You’re getting in enough trouble all by yourself. Besides, aren’t you the one who’s in to mind control seminars?” She waved her hand at Gigi. “Have at it. Make me a believer. Get her to stay.”
“Gigi, we need you here,” he said, meaning it. Standing next to Annie, smelling roses wafting from her, seeing her in a fresh T-shirt and jeans that skimmed her lean curves and had him remembering that she’d slept in his bed last night, alone—well, all that made him want her aunt in his house to keep him on the straight and narrow.
Because if he didn’t stay on the straight and narrow and if he started letting himself remember that he almost enjoyed having Annie around, he might start envisioning all sorts of stupid things like maybe trying to make this arrangement permanent—which, of course, it could never be. Any fool could tell Annie was meant to have children, and he wasn’t cut out for permanent fatherhood.
Gigi reached up and patted his cheek. “You don’t have the problem with Annie you think you do, Monsoor West Gallagher, if you would only settle down and realize it.” She wiggled her fingers in the air. “Anyway, to be a singer, that ees my dream, and I need to be out pursuing it. Isn’t that what you tell everyone, West?”
Frowning, Annie hoisted Teddy up in her arms. “Aunt Gigi, you weren’t saying any of this last night.”
“Ah! But last night, I had not read West’s book. It ees an eye-opener.”
“Where did you get his book?” Annie asked, eyeing West suspiciously.
“Don’t look at me,” West said. “I make people buy copies at the stores.”
“From his study.” Gigi grinned. “I will check in, children, and give you a progress report on how I make out becoming a singer. Do not fight too much.” Blowing them a kiss, she picked up her bag, paused without turning, and kicked the door shut behind her.
“Gallagher,” Annie said immediately, turning to him. “This is all your fault!”
“Now how do you figure that?”
“Aunt Gigi has never in her whole life bailed out on me when I needed her. She reads your book and just like that—” Annie snapped her fingers “—she’s gone. For the life of me I can’t understand what it is in those pages that makes people go off chasing pots of gold! First Marcia and now my aunt. I just can’t see it!”
From what he’d seen of Gigi thus far, West had the feeling this wasn’t the first time the woman had chased rainbows, but he was gentleman enough not to point that out to Annie. “Is this going to be an argument?” he asked. “Because if it is, I haven’t had my coffee yet.” Passing her, he headed toward the kitchen, confident she would follow.
He was right. He heard her gentle sigh behind him as he regarded the coffeepot, plugged in and brewing, with relief and reached for a mug. “All I ever tell people,” he explained, “is that they can have their dreams if they want them badly enough.”
“Then you are telling them a lie, Gallagher,” she said softly.
There was a dispirited tone in her voice that made West turn to her. As Teddy played with her hair, she looked back at West with her beautiful hazel eyes so full of hurt that West almost couldn’t stand it. “Why do you think it’s a lie, Annie?” he asked quietly.
“You can want something with all your heart, but some dreams are not meant to happen.”
“You’re wrong,” West told her. The coffee whooshed through the filter and the baby gurgled as West and Annie held a standoff with their eyes. “I made my dreams come true, and I started with nothing. No money, no family—” He paused solemnly. “And no hope.”
Annie broke their deadlocked gaze to stare down at Teddy, and West thought she might be close to tears. But then she blinked and furiously shook her head, sending hair into Teddy’s grasp, much to the baby’s delight. “Nothing in the world will make me believe in the panacea you’re pushing, West, or that people are better off seeking it.”
“Nothing?” he asked. Taking a few seconds to pour himself a cup of coffee and think, he turned back to her. “Why, Annie.” he said, mug in hand, his lips twisting as he bit back a smile. “Are you handing me another challenge?”
Annie’s heart leapt and turned over. She wasn’t. She was. She wanted to run out of West’s house before he invaded her private world and tore apart her carefully schooled emotions, but if she did, she wouldn’t get Teddy, wouldn’t help Marcia, and she’d also lose her chance to prove to West how wrong he was for making people believe in magic. She gave him a slow nod. “I am definitely throwing down the glove.”
“Then I accept,” he said, his fingers reaching out and stroking Teddy’s head, brushing at the same time against strands of her hair and her collarbone. Annie’s insides began a slow meltdown.
“By the time I’m done helping you,” West said, “I promise you your dream is going to come true—as long as you promise me you want it more than anything.”
“Oh, I do,” she said. If he only knew. “Not that it will help.”
With all his heart, West believed in hopes and dreams and in the strength of character of people to achieve what they wanted. He wanted to make Annie believe what he did, because her eyes and her voice told him she had pain deep inside her, and he hoped if he helped her get her dream, her ensuing happiness would force that pain out of her heart. If the world had one more happy person in it, so much the better. That was his philosophy, and that was why he held his seminars.
His helping Annie had nothing to do with the fact that he wanted her in his bed, he swore.
“So, Annie,” he said with a smile that had been proven to please, “tell me your dream.”
Cuddling Teddy, Annie, still filled with doubts, took a minute to reconsider. Sharing her dream with West meant baring her soul, and she didn’t want to get that close to him. Why bother, when it was so obvious how different they were and that they had no future together? Besides, if there was a way for her to have what she wanted, she would have found it by now. West couldn’t achieve the impossible.
“I don’t think this is a g
ood idea,” she told him.
“C’mon,” he cajoled. “You can’t throw anything at me that I haven’t already heard in my seminars or been through in life. So tell me your dream, Annie. There isn’t anything I can’t personally help you get.”
Annie sputtered and began to laugh, which made Teddy grin, too, but bewildered West. She shook her head. “Oh, West, I’m sorry, but I can’t let this one slip by. You really should have shut up while you were ahead and I was trying to be fair to you.”
Just like the night before, another sense of impending doom fell over West. “Was it something I said?”
“About helping me get my dream yourself?” She waited until he nodded. “Okay, West. My dream—the one thing I want most in the world—is to have my very own baby.”
His mouth dropped open.
She grinned. “Handle that one all by yourself. I dare you.”
5
After all the seminars West had given and the impromptu questions he’d answered, he could only think of one thing to do now as he looked into Annie’s challenging, laughing eyes—bail out. Annie was right. That was one dream he wasn’t going anywhere near personally, and she’d definitely gotten the better of him in this battle of the wits. He ought to admit defeat and take his failure like a man. But, of course, his male pride wouldn’t let him do that.
“Well, this is a first,” he drawled slowly.
Annie’s bright grin hid years of loneliness and wanting. “I hate to say I told you so, West, but really.”
“It’s a first,” he repeated, “but that doesn’t mean your dream is impossible. I can still personally help you make your dream come true.”
To Annie’s eyes, West’s expression had turned almost devilish, and her heart skittered. To personally help her achieve her dream meant only one thing.
“It was a joke, West. A play on words.” She backed up.
“You don’t want me to personally help you get a baby?”
“Yes.” But they were all alone here—what was she saying? “I mean no!” She was in trouble. “The last I looked, West, my dream didn’t have you in it.”
He grinned more widely.
“Honestly. No offense to you. There aren’t any men in my dream, just a baby.”
“You’re going to require at least one man in your dream if you’re going to get that baby—or didn’t you know that?”
“Very funny.” Why had she even started this?
His eyes crinkled at the sides with amusement. “So are you going to let me help?”
“Why would you get involved?” she asked, her tone serious. “You said you don’t want children.”
“And I meant it.” Hearing in her voice how important this was to Annie, West didn’t have the heart to keep teasing her. “But I did say I would help you go after your dream. You still want me to, don’t you?”
Did she? If she believed in what he was doing, she might have said yes immediately, but as it was. “I think my dream is better off buried,” she told him quietly. “I examined every angle I could come up with, but affording a baby and continuing to do the work I’m doing is impossible.”
West missed nothing. “By work, you mean helping people like Marcia, don’t you? What do they call that—pro bono?”
She nodded slowly. Teddy erupted in a string of syllables that sounded like a protest.
“Are we that boring, sweet thing?” she asked Teddy, putting him down in his nearby basket and handing him a rattle. He lay on his back, kicked, and let loose with another stream of syllables. But for the first time since yesterday Annie’s mind wasn’t on Teddy—it was on the baby she might have.
Might have had, she corrected. West seemed so certain he could help her, but really, once he understood her situation, even he would see there was no chance of her ever achieving her dream.
“Really, West, if there was some way I could afford a child of my own and still help people—really help, like I’m going to return to doing once Teddy is situated, I would have found it by now,” she told him. “But things being as they are, surely even you can see that I can’t do both. So tell me, how are you going to personally help me make my dream come true?”
“Have some coffee,” he urged. “Sit down, and we’ll talk.”
The two of them got coffee and sat down at the kitchen table, Annie next to Teddy’s basket where she could watch the baby play. For a few seconds she did, wistfully, but then she looked at West.
Dare she hope for a miracle from the dream chaser that was within West? Could he help her make her dream come true without her losing herself in the bargain?
“Why a baby, Annie?” West asked. His dark eyes captivated her. Sometimes they were the gentle, hurt eyes of a lost, lonely boy, and sometimes, like now, they were the world-seasoned eyes of a weary old man.
“I was married once, several years ago—but not for long,” she said, and then lowered her gaze from his, not really comfortable exposing her soul to him. West reached over and touched her hand encouragingly. All he did was cover her fingers with his own, but there was something about his skin, the way the heat permeated the coolness of her hand, that made Annie feel comforted, as though he understood her hesitancy.
She slipped her hand away from his in a move of self-preservation. No sense in letting the dream chaser get under her skin. “Jean-Pierre had a three-year-old daughter by another marriage. After a year, he left me for someone else and took his daughter with him. I thought of Mariette as my own.” She lowered her eyes again. “Silly of me, of course.”
West’s gut clenched. Someone had walked away from Annie, and she wanted a baby to fill the emptiness left behind.
“Are you still in love with him?” he asked, needing to know at the same time he swore to himself he would not get emotionally involved with a woman whose fondest dream was to have a child.
“No!” she said, her eyelashes sweeping open in surprise. Just as swiftly, her face grew suspicious. “Do you ask everyone in your seminars questions like that?”
“Sure.” And he would—he just wouldn’t have cared so much about the answer.
That worried him. Was he just going through the motions of caring during his seminars? Or had he not known what caring was until now, here, with Annie?
“Have you been alone ever since your divorce?” he asked, preferring not to think about why he was asking.
“Not really.” She smiled wryly. “I’ve had Aunt Gigi.” She smiled at his look. “Lucky me, huh?”
West thought about how he’d spent all his years in foster care, yearning for someone who was really related to him to come into his life. “Yeah,” he nodded, sipping coffee. “You were lucky. Your parents passed on early?”
“Passed on me, more like it.”
That hurt-little-boy look West had came and went so suddenly Annie thought she’d imagined it. But then when West got up from the table and walked toward the sink with his coffee cup, she remembered the story of his beginnings in his book. He’d been abandoned, too—under different circumstances, perhaps, but no less left behind. When she’d read that, she’d passed it off as publicity hype, but now she knew she’d been mistaken-the pain she’d just seen on his face had been too real.
“What do you mean, passed on you?” he asked, his back to her as he topped off his coffee.
“I was a ‘love child’ of the late sixties—my parents never married. From what Aunt Gigi tells me, I’d just turned three and was starting to get a little hard to handle—”
He turned, grinning, once again the charismatic man as he leaned against the counter. “Nothing’s changed in twenty-some years, I see.”
“You’re no good at humor, West. Do you want to hear my life’s story or not?”
West nodded slowly, once more serious, so she shifted her position to talk to him comfortably. He had that intense, wise-old-man look back on his face. West could shift his moods faster than a crooked defendant.
“Where was I?” she wondered out loud. “So when Mother
decided she ‘wasn’t into parenting’ anymore, she hitchhiked off alone to the good life in California. My father was chanting one of his mantras when a higher power made him see the light and took himself home to South Carolina—alone.”
“He joined the ministry?”
She shook her head. “His higher power was money. His own parents promised him all the money he could ever want if he would just reform and enter the family business.”
Swearing under his breath, West threw the rest of his coffee into the sink. No amount of heated brew could warm the cold he felt inside at another child left behind, and this time for money. “Where did your aunt fit into this?”
“She’s Mother’s older sister. Believe it or not, when my parents split up, they agreed that Aunt Gigi was the only one they knew who could take me.”
“She did a great job,” West said. “You were lucky.”
Annie’s heart mourned for him, and she wished she’d never made any cracks earlier about her Aunt Gigi. He was right. She’d been so very lucky compared to him.
“So,” he said suddenly, “getting back to your dream—why not just get pregnant?”
“I have to be able to support the child, while I help the poor.” She brushed away something on the table, her eyes averted. She’d never forgive herself for worrying more about building her bank account than being there for Marcia. “But if I continue to work with very little income, I wind up unable to afford having a child.”
West didn’t know what to think. Annie had a heart, and unfortunately, so far, it was at the expense of her dream.
“Where does your altruistic streak come from?”
This time Annie did meet his eyes, to see if he was criticizing or making fun of her. There was only interest in them. Well, good, because he was about to get an earful.
“My husband cheated, left me, and then sued for alimony. Alimony! And since I’d been stupid enough to let him stay at home and pursue his dream—” she enunciated the word carefully to make sure West understood how she felt “—of becoming a famous painter, while I worked two jobs to support our family, he ended up getting alimony for six months so he had time to ‘get back on his feet.’“ The memory still burned, and she took a deep breath to calm down. “I ended up paying him because I didn’t have good legal help. After that, I swore no one was ever going to have to wind up paying for being a good, responsible person because they couldn’t afford the best help they could find.”
The One-Week Baby (Yours Truly) Page 6