Her Baby and Her Beau

by Victoria Pade

  She couldn’t tell if he’d reacted. His expression was always so emotionless that it was indecipherable.

  So she merely continued. “And if there’s anything I can do around here to earn my keep, I’d like to do it. Like if you want a woman’s touch decorating, or maybe you have some family photos I could help you hang, or maybe there’s a box of knickknacks you’re just waiting to find a place for to add some personal touches—”

  “You don’t like the house.”

  “It’s a beautiful house. But you just moved in, right? You’re only starting to decorate and put your own stamp on it.” That seemed like the most diplomatic way to address it. “The guest room and Immy’s room are warm and homey—maybe you’re just waiting for whoever decorated those to do the rest?”

  “I didn’t have any plans for that, no.”

  “Then maybe when Immy is napping this morning and this afternoon, we could do a little of it ourselves to make the place feel like your own, if you want. Or if there’s something else I can do...” Though she didn’t know what because it wasn’t as if there was a speck of dust or a crumb on a counter or a single thing out of place. And she did only have the use of one hand, to make matters worse—giving advice was close to the extent of what she was capable of.

  He stared at her for a while, his expression still showing nothing. She hoped he was considering her offer and not that she’d offended him, but she did some damage control anyway. “I’m just trying to find a way to be useful. Maybe your decorating style is just the clean and spare look...”

  “I’m pretty sure I don’t have a decorating style,” he admitted, two slight lines pulling his brows together to let her know that in this—if not in much else—he wasn’t so sure of himself and the way everything should be done. “Jani and my cousins keep telling me I have to do something—get a decorator or let them do it. They say the place doesn’t look like anybody really lives here. They’ve brought stuff—for the walls, stuff I guess you’d call knickknacks. I don’t know what to do with them—if things don’t have a useful purpose, I don’t really see the point. But everything is in one of the rooms upstairs. I guess, if you want to take a look—”

  “And you know there are ways to arrange furniture that aren’t just lining everything up along a wall like it’s all at attention,” she ventured since she thought she might be on a roll. At least he seemed open to the suggestion.

  “Yeah, I don’t get that, either. But hey, have at it—if you’re sure you’re up to it and you let me do the work and you tell me when you need a rest.”

  More rules that put him in command again. He just couldn’t stop.

  And she couldn’t resist a flippant salute.

  “Oh, that is all wrong,” he said and this time it was the fact that just one side of his mouth quirked up in a slight smile that gave her a sign that somewhere behind all the muscle and marine might be a flicker of the guy she used to know.

  “I will rest if I need to,” she assured him. But to prove her point about his needing to be more flexible she nodded toward Immy who was now sound asleep in her chair. “But your schedule is already going to be off because she isn’t supposed to be doing that yet, right?”

  He glanced at the sleeping infant, then raised perplexed eyebrows at her and said, “Now what? Do we put her in bed and risk that she wakes up? Or let her sleep in that thing and risk that she won’t nap long enough because she isn’t in her bed?”

  Kyla laughed, more happy than she should have been just to see some emotion on his face. “Oh, come on, Answer Man, you mean you don’t know?”

  “Do you?” he challenged.

  “No,” she admitted with another laugh.

  And just like that Kyla thought she could feel the air around them change. The air that had been so tense it had felt heavy between them since he’d shown up at the motel.

  Maybe she was closer to letting go of the past than she’d realized, and without the old baggage things could lighten up between them.

  “Shall we flip a coin?” Beau suggested.

  “That seems like as good a way to decide as any,” she agreed.

  He dug a quarter out of his jeans pocket. “Heads we leave her. Tails I put her in her crib.”

  “Okay.”

  He flipped the coin, but Kyla’s eyes followed his big, capable hands rather than it.

  “Tails,” he announced. “Guess she goes upstairs.”

  “I’ll clear this while you do that,” Kyla said. “And before you say it—” because she saw it coming “—I can take two bowls and two spoons to the sink, rinse them and put them in the dishwasher without falling down dead from overexertion. Then I’ll meet you upstairs to have a look at your secret stash of knickknacks.”

  * * *

  “Okay, whatever you say,” Beau said as he sat down with Kyla at the dining room table to wait for the attorney. The two of them had spent the day working on the house. But despite his efforts to keep his tone agreeable, he seemed no more convinced now than he had been before that it was necessary. “I’m just not sure what the point is—a table is for eating at or putting your feet up on or holding a glass while you watch TV. Sticking one somewhere just for the look of it doesn’t make sense to me.”

  Kyla had found a wealth of treasures in the unoccupied bedroom upstairs that he was temporarily using for storage. Apparently his sister and female cousins had been trying to move him in the direction of decorating since he’d purchased the house.

  Kyla felt as if she’d succeeded where they’d failed because while Beau remained skeptical, he had accepted all of her suggestions that he use everything. As well as those about rearranging the furniture.

  In the process Kyla had learned two things about him—that he took orders well even from her, and that he also had an amazing amount of pure brute strength and stamina.

  He’d moved massive pieces of furniture on his own and could hold the heaviest objects on a wall longer than anyone she’d ever seen. And he did it without complaint. So apparently not all of the leftovers of his military service were bad.

  He also had finely tuned hearing because he heard the lawyer’s car pull into the driveway when Kyla hadn’t registered anything at all. He got up to answer the door before the bell had even rung, leaving Kyla and Immy behind.

  Immy was contentedly sucking on her fist in her bouncy chair on the floor, and after a glance at her, Kyla looked up into the mirror she’d had Beau hang on the wall across from the table.

  She was feeling more worn out than she’d been willing to admit to Beau, and she was wondering if there were visible signs of it.

  There were—not even the blush she’d applied that morning was concealing her renewed pallor.

  But there was nothing she could do about it now. Pale and dressed in a filmy white V-neck T-shirt over a white tank top and a pair of black knit workout pants was what the lawyer was getting because she’d also been too weary to change clothes.

  Still, when Beau ushered the business-suit-clad David Cannary into the dining room, the attorney said, “You’re looking better than when I saw you at the hospital.”

  She knew that, at least, was true, so she thanked him and assured him she was feeling better.

  Beau offered him the seat at the head of the table and asked if he could bring him something to drink.

  The lawyer declined and got right to business, explaining that he had papers Kyla needed to sign accepting guardianship of Immy.

  Of course she’d known it was coming. But the formality of that rocked her. Especially when he went on to tell her that she might want to consider going through adoption proceedings in order to become Immy’s mother rather than merely her guardian.

  Kyla just kept thinking, But Rachel is Immy’s mother, not me...

  Except that Kyla was Immy’s mother now.

  And the weight of that sat heavily on her all over again.

  “Are you okay?”

  It was Beau’s deep voice that cut through her thoughts
.

  She caught sight of herself in the mirror and saw what Beau had apparently seen—she was even more pale than she had been and she had the look of a deer caught in headlights.

  But it wasn’t as if she wasn’t going to accept guardianship or possibly adopting Immy in time, so to Beau—as if she hadn’t just been struck by it all over again—she said, “I’m just a little tired.”

  Then she signed where David Cannary told her on the guardianship papers and told him that she’d think about adoption.

  From there he moved on to telling her that he’d succeeded in getting funds released from Rachel and Eddie’s estate and explained how Kyla could go about accessing them.

  Then he told her that an offer to buy the truck stops had come in from a national chain of similar travel centers.

  “The memorial service isn’t even until tomorrow,” Kyla said in surprise and with a hint of outrage. “And someone is already—”

  “The truck stops are very successful—Eddie even bought additional land and had plans underway to build two more in the next three years. It’s not uncommon for feelers to be put out right away if something happens and it seems that a business like this might come up for grabs,” the lawyer said in a mollifying way before he went on to outline the offer.

  And not only did Kyla find herself buried under the emotional impact of formally accepting responsibility for Immy, she got lost listening to things she didn’t understand for the second time today—these things far more important than Beau’s scheduling suggestions.

  “Okay...just—wait!” she said when she felt a little like she was drowning. “I know about hand puppets and the cleanup song and how to recognize the first signs of attention deficit disorder in five-year-olds. But none of this makes any sense to me. Between military time this morning and this now—”

  “Do you mind if I ask a few things?” Beau asked her.

  He was rescuing her. She could see it. Feel it. And even though it irked her to admit she might need it, she said, “Be my guest.”

  From then until early into the evening, she tried to ride along on Beau’s coattails as he explored details of both the business and the buyout offer. There wasn’t a lick of it that she understood and the longer it went on, the dumber she felt.

  So she was glad when David Cannary summed up and spoke more directly to her again. “That’s all I can tell you for now. And I can’t advise you one way or another, to sell or not to, but like I said, this is a lowball offer. So at the very least I would recommend some negotiation on Immy’s behalf to raise the price.”

  And then do what with so much money? Kyla thought.

  But she didn’t say that. Between being completely overwhelmed again and already having admitted that her business knowledge was lacking, she wasn’t about to bring up a third thing that she felt ill-equipped to deal with—a vast sum of money that would need to be protected and invested.

  So she merely said, “I guess I’ll have to think a lot of things over...”

  “There’s no rush,” the lawyer assured her. “And if you have any questions about anything, I’m always just a phone call away.”

  Kyla thanked him for that and said goodbye before Beau showed him out, leaving her alone with enormous feelings of inadequacy.

  She was holding Immy—halfway through the meeting the baby had gotten fussy, and Kyla had taken her so Beau could concentrate on the business meeting without the distraction. Now she glanced down at the infant who was sucking wildly on a pacifier and shook her head. “I really, really hope I don’t screw things up for you,” she said to her new charge.

  “You won’t,” came a deep-voiced reassurance from the dining room’s doorway before Kyla had realized Beau was back.

  “Ah, you’re stealthy, too,” she said, sounding as defeated as she felt and also adding yet another thing to what she was learning about him.

  “Training,” he said.

  He crossed to her and took Immy out of her arms. “You’ve had it today,” he decreed then. “Pick a spot to land while I give Immy her bath and feed her and get her to bed. GiGi came by this morning just after dawn with our dinner—I’ll put that in the oven to heat so it’ll be ready when I’m finished. But you’re done.”

  She was tempted to salute him again, but it had occurred to her since the last time that that might be offensive to someone like him who took everything—and certainly everything military—ultraseriously. So she resisted and just confessed, “I am sort of tired. Maybe I’ll just go upstairs and figure out what to wear to the memorial service tomorrow.”

  “Good idea. I’ll call you when it’s time to eat.”

  “You’re sure?” she asked with a glance at Immy.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Something about that made her laugh. “Isn’t that just the frosting on the cake of the last two hours—now I’m a ma’am.”

  “Well, you’re not a sir,” he said with another hint of that one-sided smile.

  And why that made her feel better, somehow, all on its own, she had no idea. But it did.

  She bent over and kissed Immy on the forehead, bidding her good-night before she headed out of the kitchen.

  Then she remembered that Beau had been worried about judging the water temperature for the baby’s bath the day before and she turned to address that.

  Catching him in the act of looking unmistakably at her rear end.

  With a very readable expression on his face that said he was appreciating the sight.

  Before he snapped his eyes up and the soldier stoicism replaced it.

  Kyla fought not to smile. Or to be flattered by his ogling and appreciation.

  She also opted not to say anything, instead addressing only what she’d turned to tell him in the first place.

  “When Eddie gave Immy a bath he tested the temperature of the water with his elbow because he said his hands were too tough, too.”

  “I’ll do that then,” Beau responded before she left.

  But nothing could take away the secret pleasure of knowing that she wasn’t the only one of them doing a little subtle rubbernecking today.

  Even if neither of them should have.

  * * *

  “Okay, the baby’s down for the count, we’ve had dinner, the kitchen is clean and here we are, finished with the decorating now, too,” Beau said to Kyla when all of that was indeed accomplished and they were in his den.

  Kyla hadn’t quite completed arranging things there that afternoon, so they’d returned to it after dinner. She was sitting in one of the two wingback chairs, testing the positioning after having him move them from across the room to face his desk. He was sitting on the desk, one leg hooked over a corner of it in front of her.

  “And you still seem a little dazed. Are you all right?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, as if it went without saying.

  “Are you feeling sicker again or is this fallout from today?”

  “Fallout,” she said emphatically. “I just can’t get a hold of all this—being a parent, and a figurehead truck-stop mogul, and a manager of big, big money... I don’t know if I’m up to any of it.”

  “You’re getting the hang of Immy.”

  “Barely. And don’t get me wrong, I love her and I promised my cousin I would do this and I will. But—”

  “I get it—just the thought that I might have a kid out in the world hit me like a grenade.”

  There was something about his understanding that opened the door to her unloading on him—her worries about how she was going to be able to juggle the job she loved and didn’t want to leave because of her sudden single parenthood. Her worries about how she could possibly do both of those things as well as run the truck stops. About how she didn’t know if she’d be making an enormous mistake to sell them or an even bigger mistake not to. About how she didn’t have the slightest idea how to manage either the business or the kind of money involved if she sold out.

  “After the way I grew up I just wanted a lit
tle structure. I wanted to make a home for myself—in one place—and stay there. I wanted to go to the same job every day in a workplace that was bright and cheery and fun and friendly. I wanted to see the same faces from one week to the next. To have friends. My parents wanted a big life that they never got. I wanted a small one. Small and plain and simple. And I did get it! That’s how it’s been since I moved to Northbridge. But now nothing is small or plain or simple!” she said as all of her fears rushed out.

  “No, it isn’t,” Beau confirmed.

  “My little savings account is the extent of me managing money,” Kyla went on. “Running a roadside vegetable stand or a booth at a flea market or peddling my parents’ recordings at music festivals is the closest I’ve ever been to business. What if I just wreck everything? What if Immy grows up a mess with nothing of what her parents wanted her to have waiting for her—all because of me?”

  Beau nodded. “I get that, too,” he said, as if he genuinely did. “My life has changed and it isn’t easy.”

  Kyla had only been thinking about herself, but she suddenly realized that yes, it was true for him, too. He was just out of the military after years and years. And she’d sort of made fun of those lingering military aspects of him rather than being sensitive to why he might cling to them. Plus she’d pushed him about the house when maybe he’d wanted the place to look like military living quarters because it made him feel better.

  “Do you want to put the knickknacks and useless tables and lamps and mirrors and things back in the room upstairs and push all the furniture against the walls where you had it?” she asked contritely.

  He laughed.

  It was such a good sound.

  And his gorgeous blue eyes lit up and crinkled slightly at the corners.

  And that lush mouth of his spread wide and gloriously and showed off perfect white teeth.

  And for no reason it made her warm all over just to see it, to hear it.

  “Why would I want to undecorate?” he asked.

  “I pushed you into it. You might have liked it better the other way because it was so...because it reminded you of where you’ve been for the last thirteen years.”