"I only got a few minutes before the next rush," the brunette said, out of breath and thrusting a piece of paper at Dawn with a number written on it. "It's Brody's social security number. You sure this is enough? To find him?"
"Unless he's gone into the witness protection program, probably so." Dawn took the number from Charmaine, who spun around and headed right back for the door.
"Why?" Dawn said to her back.
Charmaine turned around, her mouth pulled into a grimace of pure exasperation. "'Cause the school said Adam's gonna need glasses an' the stove's broke and all the boys need new shoes and my car's on its last legs. And even with food stamps, there's only so far the money goes, you know? And Ruby and Luralene've been bugging the living daylights out of me, sayin' just what you did, about how it's dumb to let either my pride or my personal feelings about you stand in the way of helping my kids. Because you're right. This is something Brody owes them. An' it's way past time I went after his sorry-assed hide."
"Good for you, Charmaine—"
"No, wait, there's more. A lot of folks've been talking, about what all you're doing for Jacob and Eli Burke. About how instead of sittin' around waiting to see how things'll turn out, you take action to make 'em turn out." She glanced down at her white athletic shoes, then back up at Dawn. "So I'm thinkin' maybe I could learn a thing or two from you."
"Oh, God, Char! I'm the last person to use as an example right now!"
The brunette's mouth pulled into a wry smile. "Yeah, well, this is one of those 'make do' situations, y'know?"
Dawn burst out laughing. "This mean maybe you and I could be friends?"
"Don't push it," Charmaine said.
But damned if she wasn't smiling.
* * *
"You should feel good about her comin' around at last," Cal said, rhythmically stroking Dawn's naked belly underneath the down comforter, her tight, smooth skin like silk against his roughened fingertips.
She rolled over to lie on her side—it was getting so she couldn't breathe if she lay on her back too long, she said—her hands tucked underneath her cheek. In the light from that puny little lamp on her old dresser, those big brown eyes looked bottomless. "Yeah, but am I feeling good for Charmaine? Or me?"
"Honest to Pete, woman," he said, smiling into her eyes as he moved his hand to her hip, "only you could get so balled up about this. Nothing says you can't both get something out of it, you know."
"I suppose," she said.
Cal leaned his head in his hand, his other one back on her tummy. "One of these days, we've really got to think about naming this critter."
"I know," she said, then fell silent.
Sometimes the silences were okay. Comfortable. Like maybe she was finally getting used to the idea of them being together. Other times, like tonight, he knew she was quiet because she was thinking. And when Dawn thought for more than three or four seconds at a stretch, Cal worried.
It had been her idea, him coming over tonight while Ivy was out of town. And she'd been as eager to get down to things as him, no more timid about going after what she wanted in bed than she was about anything else. Still, no matter how often he told her he was okay with their arrangement, he knew she wasn't. In fact, it was almost like the more often they made love, the more scared she got. And it was killing him, not knowing what to do to erase that fear in her eyes, what to say that wouldn't make things worse than they already were.
"Hey…" He reached over to sweep her hair back from her face. "Guess what? I sold two of the weanlings today."
"You did?" she said, her eyes lighting up.
"Yep. Some guy looking for a good young horse he could train from the get-go."
"But I thought you said you sold two?"
Cal chuckled. "Guess he couldn't resist my powers of persuasion."
She laughed, then palmed his cheek, her eyes locked with his. "You know something?" she whispered, her fingers rasping across his cheek. "I am so proud of you, I could just about pop. And I bet your father would be, too."
Emotion clogging his throat, Cal pulled her close and kissed her for a long, long time, showing her what he didn't dare say. When he stopped, though, he noticed her cheeks were wet.
"Hey, darlin'," he whispered, brushing away the moisture with the pad of his thumb. "What is it?"
"Nothing," she said. "Just me being…whatever it is I am these days."
"You want me to go home?"
She shook her head.
So he wrapped himself around them both, the woman he loved and the child they'd made, holding them as close as he could. As close as she'd let him. The baby kicked him, and his heart bled. "Everything's gonna be okay, honey," he said, because at least one of them had to believe it. And it looked like the honor had fallen to him.
* * *
By the first week of March, Dawn was convinced she'd been consigned to limbo. The winter, her unresolved relationship with Cal, the pregnancy—all seemed to trudge on, relentless and interminable and seriously undermining her determination not to be a pain in the butt.
Not that there weren't bright spots. For one, she'd hunted Charmaine's ex down in Reno and sicced the appropriate authorities on him, who were now extracting child support out of the creep's sorry hide. And the family court judge had, as Dawn had hoped, taken Jacob's parenting classes and Eli's working with Cal as positive signs that the pair were making strides toward repairing the cracks in their family life, and had thus decided there was no need to remove Eli from his father's care.
Fixing other people's problems? Piece of cake. Her own, however…
"Whatever you're thinkin' about," Ivy said beside her, frowning at the blood pressure valve as Dawn lay on the bed for her now weekly prenatal exam, "cut it out. I am not liking these numbers, young lady."
One order of men in white jackets to go, please.
After all—she hiked up her sweatshirt so Ivy could measure the beachball where her flat tummy had once been—only someone with a seriously diminished mental capacity would be running from a man whose face lit up the way Cal's did whenever he saw her. A man who gave the best foot rubs in the world. A man who didn't think a burp was effective unless it could be heard three counties over. A man who put the toilet seat down, for the love of Mike.
A man whose worries and joys and triumphs had become hers. But for all that Dawn loved Cal, worried about him, wanted him—and as much as she really would like to believe they could have a future—what she couldn't give him back was his own certainty that they could.
Could her life get any more complicated?
"Except for that blood pressure," Ivy said, bracing an arm behind Dawn's shoulders to heave her to a sitting position, "everything's lookin' good. Head's down, baby's nice and big, heartbeat's strong…." She grinned, packing her stethoscope and tape measure back into her bag. "Only four weeks to go."
"Only, she says," Dawn muttered, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and glaring at her frighteningly huge middle. At least she could see progress in her life on this front. Literally. "You're sure there's only one kid in here?"
"Honey, you'd have to go back a whole bunch of generations to find anybody petite on either side of this baby's family. Frankly, I'd be worried if I thought you were carrying a five-pounder."
Dawn looked at the cradle beside her bed, already outfitted and waiting for its newest inhabitant. "At this rate," she pushed through her tight throat, "I just hope the kid fits."
Following Dawn's gaze, Ivy said, "That's a Logan cradle. The baby'll fit, don't you worry."
"Which has nothing to do—" Dawn pushed herself to her feet "—with the eighteen appendages beating the tar out of my kidneys. And quit laughing, dammit. Look at me!" She pulled a face at her reflection in the mirror over the dresser. "I'm morphing into the Pillsbury Dough Boy!"
"Yeah, you're retaining a bit more water than I'd like—"
"A bit? I slosh when I walk!"
"—but nothing to worry about yet. Why don't you go see i
f anybody left a message while I finish updating your chart?"
The phone had rung during the exam; since Ivy's patients generally only used her pager, they'd let the machine pick up. Grumbling, Dawn twisted her belly around until she found her slippers, took it on faith she was putting them on the right feet and went shuffling down the hall.
"This is Kyle Fischer, looking for Dawn Gardner?" spewed forth from the machine. "Gloria Menendez gave me your name…"
She listened numbly to the message, her mouth falling farther open with each sentence.
Oh, boy. About that question as to whether her life could get any more complicated?
Guess what?
* * *
"Don't let him get away with it, Eli," Cal said over the stall gate when the weanling shied away from the boy's attempts to rub him with the saddle blanket. "Get right back in there and do it again, that's right, like that. And keep on talkin' to him, just like you've been doing. Show him he's got nothing to be afraid of, that he can trust you."
Eli shot him a look. Cal chuckled. "I'm serious. Horses learn real fast if a certain action on their part gets a certain response on yours. And the last thing you want 'em to think is that if they aren't in the mood to be messed with, all they have to do is put up a fuss and you'll back off."
The boy huffed out a breath, set his mouth in a way Cal'd learned meant determination and took the blanket to the colt again. And for the next minute or so, demonstrating both the intuition and patience that had impressed Cal to no end these past six weeks, Eli and the horse did their little tango until eventually the colt gave up. Well, he kept giving Eli these wide-eyed glances over his shoulder, like he wasn't too sure about what was going on, but at least he stood still.
And the kid favored Cal with a grin of triumph that warmed him to the soles of his boots.
Boy'd taken to the horses like a retriever to water, and—for the most part—they to him. Hell, he'd even won Blaze over, right about the time Cal'd begun to think the mare was a lost cause. Oh, the kid griped about cleaning out the stalls, but Cal couldn't blame him for that, seeing as he didn't seem to remember being any too thrilled about that particular chore when he was Eli's age, either. But he showed up like clockwork every day after school—which he griped about, too, but between Cal and Dawn nagging him about it, he was doing okay in his classes—and on Saturdays. No more getting in trouble. And the only joyriding the boy did these days was when Cal let him ride one of the mares when the weather wasn't being a pain in the butt—
"Hey, you guys."
Speaking of pains in the butt. Cal whipped around to see the woman who was going to take him under for sure waddling down the center of the barn in what looked like layers of sacks, her hair loose and gleaming in the overhead lights, so full of herself and her womanhood it made his mouth dry.
While she stopped to chew the fat with Eli, Cal mused—for the umpteenth time—that this was, bar none, the craziest relationship he'd ever had. Not just with a woman, with another human being, period. But every time she came to him, made love with him, smiled for him, was a point on his scorecard. Now if only he had a clue how many points he needed in order to win, he'd be cookin' with gas.
"Is it my imagination," she said, scanning the full-up barn, "or have you still got a lot of horses?"
"It would look that way," he said mildly. Yeah, the idea was to sell off most of the weanlings before winter set in so he didn't have to feed 'em over the winter. But other than that double sale a bit ago, things hadn't gone as well as he might have liked. With a shrug he added, "No matter. They'll be even bigger and prettier come spring."
"Meanwhile," she said softly, "your bills are piling up."
Cal called to Eli to take the blanket to Abby, the filly in the next stall, then led Dawn back outside. "I don't want you worrying about this, okay? I'm getting some nibbles from a new round of ads I placed a couple weeks back. And once the stud fees for Twister start coming in, I should be okay."
"I'm not criticizing you, Cal, you know that." She dodged a patch of mud-streaked, slushy snow left over from the last storm. "I'm just concerned. For you."
He fished his gloves out of his coat pockets and shoved his hands into them. "Well, don't be. It's like you said—this is my life. I'll figure something out." He tried to smile away the worry in her eyes. "I always do."
"God, Cal…how do you do it? How do you stay so calm even when—"
"It looks like everything's fallin' apart? Because gettin' all worked up about what I can't fix tends to take the fun out of life. This is where I belong, what I do. If I have to scale back in order to survive, I will. If I have to go work at Wal-Mart in order to keep the farm," he added with a grin, "then that's what I'll do."
She actually laughed, but it quickly died out. And instead of looking at him, she wrapped her arms around herself inside the outermost sack and squinted out toward the pasture. "I'd kill to have your confidence, you know that? To be so sure about what you're supposed to be doing. Who you are."
"And who the hell do you think I learned that from?"
Her eyes flashed to his. Then she made a sound that was equal parts laugh and snort. "Yeah, I guess I used to be a little…dogged. When your priorities change, however—"
Jacob pulled up in the drive, cutting off her sentence.
"Afternoon," Eli's father called out from the window, his gaze settling on Dawn in that unnerving, intense way he had that made Cal's insides squirm, before it shifted to Cal. "I need to take the boy into Claremore, get him some new shoes, if that's okay with you."
"Sure, no problem. He's in the barn—you want me to get him for you?"
"No, no…" Moving with a freedom Cal knew was a direct result of his new, and less drug-dependent, treatment program for the bad back, Jacob climbed out of the truck, the icy breeze ruffling his now-shorter hair, a grin crawling across freshly shaved cheeks. "I'll get him myself," he said, plopping what looked like a new cowboy hat on his head. "And how are you this morning?" he said to Dawn.
"Still pregnant," she said with a grimace, and Jacob actually chuckled. But was there something…odd about his laugh? Or was Cal looking for ghosts where there weren't any?
"Won't be long now, though," Jacob said, then said, "By the way—I forgot to tell you…I signed up for a mail-order course to learn how to be an insurance claims adjuster." He grinned. "Figured that'd be something to bring in some extra cash and get me out of the house more at the same time."
"Jacob! Good for you!" Dawn swung an arm around his neck and gave him a quick peck on the cheek; the man blushed, then touched the brim of his hat and strode off toward the barn. Cal watched him, torn, as his suspicions refused to gel into conviction; as the justification for keeping those suspicions under wraps until he figured out what to do, and how to do it, crumbled more with each passing day. And God knows it had been shaky to begin with. Lord, Dawn would skin him alive if she thought he'd been trying to protect her.
But even though the nasty, embittered man Cal had wanted to shield Dawn from in the beginning no longer existed, he still had nothing to go on except a gut feeling. A gut feeling obviously not shared by the extremely pregnant woman at his side, who he figured wouldn't have the slightest compunction about saying, "Hey! You wouldn't happen to be my father, would you?"
"Can we go in the house?" she said. "I'm freezing."
He glanced over, frowning at the look in her eyes. And once inside, Cal didn't think the chill in his gut had anything to do with the temperature as he set about making Dawn a cup of tea—Ethel having gone off shopping—while she went to the bathroom. When she didn't return within a reasonable time, he went on a search mission, finding her in the living room, fingering the piano keys. She tapped a key, but not hard enough to make any sound. "Why do you hang on to this if you don't play?"
"Because it was my mother's," he said, handing her the tea.
"And because maybe one day it'll get played again. By a niece or nephew. Or my own kid."
S
ipping her tea, she scanned the room, that little crease settling between her brows. And something prompted him to say, "You know, I only kept everything the way it was because there didn't seem to be any reason to change. Not because I'm trying to keep a museum to my parents or anything. I mean, I always figured, if I ever got married, there'd be changes—"
"I got a job offer today," she said quietly, her gaze fixed on the keyboard again. "Back in New York."
"Oh," he said, but the word sounded like somebody else was saying it. "I didn't know you'd applied for anything."
"I hadn't. My old boss at the free clinic put in a good word and…things happened."
He watched her take another sip, noticed her hands were shaking. Not that that helped his own quaking, but still.
"This your dream job?" he said.
"Financially?" One side of her mouth tilted up. "It's to run a Legal Aid clinic in Brooklyn. So for most people, no. It wouldn't be."
"I'm not asking about other people, Dawn. I'm asking about you."
She set her cup on the windowsill, then pressed one of the keys, sending a sad, lonely note floating out into the room. "It comes damn close."
"So…you gonna take it?"
She lifted her eyes to his. "I can't make that decision by myself, Cal."
"Since when? You always said this is what you'd probably do, go back to New York if you could find a good job. Well, now you have. So I guess I just have to deal with it, don't I?"
"But the question is, could you? For real? Settle for being a part-time father, I mean."
He waited out the punch to his gut, then said, "I'll cope."
"But you wouldn't be happy about it."
"That's got nothing to do with it."
"Of course it has something to do with it! If you don't want me to take this job, just say so, dammit!"
"Oooh, no…you are not putting this on me—"
She slammed the keyboard cover back down over the keys, startling the old instrument into an off-pitch groan. "Do you care if I take the job or not?"
Staking His Claim Page 19