Right by Her Side

by Christie Ridgway

  Just as he’d begun to despise himself since he’d been on the run from the FBI.

  But Nancy loves me.

  He had to hold on to that. He’d already told Portland General Hospital’s nurse Nancy Allen about the things he’d done, yet miraculously, she still loved him. She still believed in him.

  He had to prove to her that her faith in him wasn’t groundless. That there was a reason to love him. So leaving town was no longer an option. He had to own up to his crimes.

  Though confident that no one would recognize the well-pressed bean-counter he’d been in his new grunge-guise, Everett walked behind the facades of the booths set up for the fair, where no one could see him. Even before the FBI had begun looking for him, that was how he’d lived most of his life—behind a facade, and distant from other people. Most of the time he blamed himself for that distance, it was his fault he was so shy, his fault he couldn’t reach out and let people see who he really was.

  Other times he realized that his childhood had forced that role and those ways upon him.

  “Daddy!” Through the plywood barriers he could hear a young boy’s voice. “Can we go to the park now? You promised we’d play ball today.”

  Play ball.

  A familiar scene fluttered through his mind. He used to think it was a fantasy, or something from an old movie or television program that he couldn’t remember watching. But now he knew it for what it was—a memory. A box with crinkly silver paper. More paper inside. And inside that, smelling almost as good as his mother’s flowery perfume, a beautiful leather baseball mitt, just his size.

  Can we play ball now, Dad? Can we? Can we?

  He’d loved that mitt. He’d loved baseball.

  But his father had changed. His father had gone from fun and loving to foul-mouthed and stinking of booze. His mother had changed, too. And his home had never been the same.

  He had never been the same. Not anything about him.

  Now he found himself standing next to a payphone tucked beside one of the seldom-used side exits of Portland General. Digging through his pockets, he found some change, and without giving himself time to think about it, dialed the number. He’d memorized it from the card the detective had given him when he’d accompanied Nancy to the police station a few weeks before. Then, he’d tried to deflect her warnings about the possibility of a kidnapping ring by telling Detective Levine that the nurse was tired and overworked. He’d tried to give the police officer the impression that she was imagining things.

  Now he was determined to confirm the truth of what Nancy had said. With the ringleader of their group, Charlie Prescott, found by the FBI and shot dead, Everett thought it was finally safe to do so.

  “Detective Levine,” a voice said over the phone.

  He thought of all the people he’d hurt. He thought of all he had to regret.

  “Hello? Is anyone there?” The detective sounded impatient.

  He thought of Nancy. Nancy and his mother and father—the way they’d been at first. “Hello, Detective,” he said. “We’ve spoken before. About a possible kidnapping ring.”

  “Who is this?” the detective barked out.

  “This is—” He hesitated, then forced out the words. “This is Everett Baker. I know you and the FBI have been looking for me and I’d like to come in. I have information that you need to hear.”

  The evening of the children’s fair, when Rebecca opened her front door to Trent, she knew he must have been kidding when he’d said “Maybe we should get married.” Despite the three large, but otherwise very ordinary bags of Chinese takeout in his arms, he was too…too for a woman such as herself. Too rich, too good-looking, too attractive to settle for a marriage of convenience based upon unforeseen circumstances.

  “Aren’t you going to invite me in?” he asked.

  “Oh! Oh, yes.” Oh, God. She’d been standing in the doorway just staring at him. After making such a fool of herself at the fair, the last thing she wanted was to look ridiculous in his eyes again. She stepped aside and gestured him inside. “Let me take the food. I’ll put it on plates and we can eat in the living room, okay?”

  “Sure.” He leaned down to transfer the bags.

  She circled her arms to take them from him. It should have been simple. But in the middle of the process, they both hesitated, and Rebecca felt paralyzed by the complexity of the task. Should she grab them, or should he drop them? It was like a first kiss, she thought, all those awkward questions. Where to put the noses? Which way to turn your head?

  Except they’d already shared a first kiss and it hadn’t been awkward at all.

  Hoping he couldn’t read that latest thought on her face, she shuffled closer to him. He leaned farther forward. His forearms brushed against her breasts. Their bodies froze again.

  Goose bumps shot across her chest and down her belly. She should close her arms around the bags. She should take them, then move away as if no contact had ever occurred.

  Instead she held to that pose, her arms loosely circling his. His skin, bared to the elbow due to the sleeves of his rolled-up shirt, only a sweatshirt-thickness away from parts of her body that were growing heavier, achier by the heartbeat.

  He cleared his throat. “Maybe I should carry these to the kitchen myself,” he said and turned that way.

  Heat flooded Rebecca’s face. What was happening to her? The poor man probably thought she thought he’d been serious about that joking proposal and that she was now eager to cement the deal with sex. She hurried after him, determined to put his mind at ease. “Look, I…”

  In the kitchen, he was studying a framed photo collage of her family mounted on the wall beside the counter where he’d placed the bags. “Your people?” he asked, glancing over at her.

  “My people?” she echoed, drawing closer to stand alongside him and gaze at the montage of smiling faces. Her finger reached out to brush a speck of dust off the image of her mother. It had been the last Christmas she was alive. “Yes. My people.”

  “They live nearby?”

  She shook her head. “We’re scattered all over the country. I don’t think we’ve been all together for a holiday since these were taken. My mom had cancer and we wanted to make it one last memorable Christmas.” Grief tore a new hole in her heart.

  What I wouldn’t give to have my mom around right now. And to talk to her about the baby.

  “What would she say?”

  Rebecca started and jerked her gaze to Trent. “Did I speak out loud?”

  He half smiled and drew the back of his forefinger down her cheek. “Afraid so.”

  She frowned at him, hoping it would disguise the new heat on her face. “You make the oddest things to happen to me.”

  That finger made another slow meander down her skin. “Yeah? Well, I’m beginning to regret not being there when the oddest thing I did to you happened.”

  That took her a second to decipher. Once she did, she saw the spark of teasing in his eyes. “Oh, you!” She whacked his shoulder, just as if he was one of her hulking little brothers pictured inside the frame, and then bustled toward the counter to set out the food.

  She felt him watching her. “What would she say?” he asked again.

  “My mom?” With her attention focused on dishing out the chow mein, it wasn’t so hard to speak about it. “She’d be thrilled that I was pregnant. She always told me I’d make a great mother.”

  “What would she think of me as a father? As your husband?”

  Rebecca looked up and was struck by the serious expression on his face. “I—I don’t know.”

  “I was sincere about us getting married, Rebecca.”

  The serving spoon clattered onto the counter. “No, you weren’t.”

  “Oh, but I was.” He crossed over to her and she backed away. But instead of pressing forward, he took over the doling out of the food. “And here’s your fair warning—I always get what I want.”

  “You don’t want me!” How could he? How could this tall, go
rgeous man, who was so competently filling their plates—so calmly filling their plates—want to be her husband?

  He refolded the flaps of the last carton, then took both plates in hand and led the way back to the living room, where she’d set places on the narrow coffee table in front of the love seat. As she seated herself, he followed suit.

  Then he said, in that casual, calm way of his, “I want this baby.” With a practiced flip, he snapped open her folded cloth napkin and placed it in her lap. Then he put a fork into her nerveless fingers. “I won’t settle for anything less than being our baby’s father.”

  Our baby. That tore at her heart, too.

  “Eat up,” Trent admonished, then set to his own meal with relish.

  She could only stare at him. He thought he could say these things—marriage, our baby—without them affecting her appetite? He could say them, be thinking them, without them affecting his appetite?

  But then she noticed he was merely stirring around his food, not actually putting any of it in his mouth. She narrowed her gaze. This was how he operated in business, she’d bet. Calmly, coolly, telling you what he wanted, what he was going to do, and then going ahead and acting on it as if you were willing to follow right along. Well! Rebecca Holley wasn’t such an easy mark.

  He gave her a sidelong look. “You’re not going to buy right into this, are you?”

  That he so easily read her mind startled her into laughing. “No, I’m not.”

  He shrugged. “It was worth a try. It’s a business tactic that will work if the opposition already wants to give what I’m asking for. I get a better deal and they convince themselves later they were steamrollered into it.”

  “Well, you’re not going to steamroller me.” It wasn’t lost on her that the first tactic he’d chosen was the one he’d use on someone who already wanted to give what he was asking for. Apparently she had looked easy to him. She knew she had, darn it.

  Rebecca forked up a bite of orange chicken and popped it into her mouth. With a small smile, he turned his attention to his own plate and really started eating this time. Rebecca speared another bite of food and let her silence speak for itself.

  By the time this evening was over, Trent Crosby was going to find out that Rebecca Holley had a spine of steel, not to mention pride.

  He didn’t try any more maneuvers on her as they finished their meal and cleared away the dishes. Then she made two after-dinner cups of green tea and carried them out to the love seat. Trent was holding a fortune cookie in each hand. “You choose,” he said, as she settled down beside him again, bending one leg beneath her body.

  She took one, broke it open, read it aloud. “‘Help! I’m a prisoner in a fortune-cookie factory.’ I always get that one.”

  He laughed, then broke his. The little slip of paper fluttered to the ground between them. They both leaned forward, reached for it. Her hand found it first, his hand found hers.

  Rebecca heard herself gasp.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” He straightened up, frowning at her.

  “A…a charley horse.” She had to say something, didn’t she? It probably was some sort of cramp, something like that, anyway, that jolted through her at his touch.

  “Let me rub it for you.”

  “Oh, no, no!” But he was already tugging on that leg bent beneath her, and the sensation of his fingers on her again was sending her common sense skittering all over the galaxy. Before she could gather it back up, her calf was in his lap and his long fingers were massaging her leg over the thick material of her sweatpants. He tipped off the backless tennies she was wearing to cup her heel in his hand.

  “Your feet are cold.”

  “Really?” They should be hot with all the blood that was leaving her brain and heading to points south. When he rubbed his knuckles against the arch of her foot, her fingers curled. The crackle of paper reminded her she still held his fortune in her hand.

  Focusing on it instead of the seductive warmth of his touch, she read it aloud. “‘The truth will set you free.’”

  He grimaced. “There’s another original one.” His hands continued making their magic.

  Rebecca told herself that it was natural for a woman who took care of others all day long to want to moan when a man bothered to take care of her. When he lifted her other foot into his lap, she didn’t protest. She was getting used to his hands on her now, the electrical shock of it turning to a pleasant, almost drowsy buzz.

  “But maybe the truth will set me free,” she heard him muse aloud.

  “Hmm?” She looked at him through half-closed eyes. Her full cup of tea was on the table beside her, but it felt as if she’d already sipped it down, because her insides were warm and soft.

  “Maybe it would help persuade you if I tell you why our baby is so important to me.”

  Our baby. The words didn’t alarm her, didn’t tear at her heart as they had before. The busy day, his massaging fingers, the warm food in her belly were making her sleepy, that bone-deep sleepiness that she’d felt the other time he was here. “Why?” she almost whispered it. “Why is the baby so important to you?”

  “I can’t lose another child.”

  That cleared some of the cobwebs taking over her mind. “Another child? What do you mean, you can’t lose another child?”

  “Shh, shh.” He patted her knee with one hand, even as the other continued kneading the back of her calf. “It’s just that…I was the oldest, okay? And my mother…she relied on me for a lot. Frankly, she must have flunked Maternal Feelings 101, but that’s beside the point.”

  Rebecca relaxed against the arm of the love seat. “What is the point, Trent?”

  “The point is, when I was nine years old, my little brother Danny had a friend over. They were both six. We were playing outside. My mom didn’t like us spending too much time indoors. She was somewhere, on the phone or something, and Danny and his friend Robbie had a motorized airplane they were fooling around with. I was shooting hoops and my little sister Katie—”

  “She was playing with you?”

  He shook his head. “She was just a baby. I had her in the stroller outside with me.”

  So Trent was a built-in baby-sitter for Mama Crosby who didn’t like her kids indoors. Rebecca grimaced. She’d seen the type before. “And then what happened?”

  Trent looked over as if he’d forgotten she was there. “The airplane got stuck in a tree. Danny went inside to ask Mom for help. I kept playing basketball.”

  “With Katie there beside you.”

  “Yes, with Katie there beside me. And then…Robbie wandered into the front yard. From the house my brother saw him talking to a stranger, but by the time he alerted our mom, both the stranger and Robbie Logan were gone.”

  “The Logans.” A chill entered all that delicious warmth inside her. “I recall hearing something about their oldest son being kidnapped. But never found, right?”

  “That’s right.” Trent’s jaw hardened. “But his remains were found.”

  Rebecca’s stomach clenched. “But you know you weren’t responsible. You couldn’t have—”

  “I could have done something if I’d been watching them more closely. If I’d followed them into the front yard—”

  “But you were watching the baby! It wasn’t your fault, Trent.”

  He laughed, a short, cold sound. “I know. I think I even was able to forget about it for a little while until Danny’s little boy, my nephew, was kidnapped.”

  Rebecca stared. “No!”

  “Yes.” Trent’s expression grew remote. “Four years ago, when he was a year old. His mother, my sister-in-law, killed herself a year after that.”

  “Oh, God.” Now Rebecca could understand how loss like this had become such a monster in Trent’s eyes. In his heart. She curled her legs out of his lap and knelt on the cushions beside him. “I’m sorry, Trent.” Her hands grasped both of his. “I’m so sorry for your family’s pain.”

  Though his fingers laced with hers,
his expression remained distant. “I want to be in this baby’s life.” His voice wasn’t urgent or upset. It wasn’t cool and casual, either. It was plain certain. “Our baby’s life.”

  Oh, no. She felt her spine going soft. “Trent…”

  “I want an arrangement that won’t make it easy for you to take the baby from me.”

  “I wouldn’t—”

  “And I don’t want to be a part-time father either. I’ve had one of those, too.”

  Rebecca stilled. “I don’t want to be a part-time mother myself. That’s not what I went through this for.”

  “If we don’t get married, the fact is, Rebecca, we’ll both be part-time parents. I’ll make sure of that.”

  Jerking her hands from his, she drew away from him. “Are you threatening to take my baby from me?”

  “No. I’m telling you that I’m going to be in this child’s life. I’m telling you that if we share custody, then neither of us gets what we want. The only way for that to happen, for us both to be satisfied, is to get married.”

  She couldn’t… She wouldn’t…. But his determination to be a father to her baby made his offer just the teeniest bit tempting. Oh, Eisenhower, he must love you. He must already love you like I do. Then she remembered her steely spine. “Trent, no.”

  But he must have seen that sentimental yes on her face. “Don’t worry, Rebecca. I promise it won’t be a problem. You’ll have a say in everything, in every way we work it out.”

  “But how could it work out? What if one day you fall in love—”

  “Don’t make me laugh. We’re cynical on romance, remember? The fact is, we’ll do better creating a partnership on practical matters. You’re not counting on love to come your way, are you?”

  “Hah.” Then she collapsed against the back of the love seat, unable to believe what she couldn’t be seriously contemplating. “This is just a bad dream, right? Tell me that any minute I’m going to wake up.”

  “Shh, shh, shh.” He dragged her feet back into his lap and started that hypnotizing massage again. “Just relax.”

  She closed her eyes to give herself a barrier against his gorgeous face. “I haven’t agreed,” she reminded him.