A Baby for the Bachelor

by Victoria Pade

  Chapter Seven

  “M an, you were on fire tonight!” Ad Walker said to Noah, handing him the beer that kicked off the last-basketball-game-of-the-season party Wednesday evening.

  Noah merely smiled at the comment and the pat on the back he received from the owner of Adz, the popular local hangout.

  Noah had had a good game, but he thought there was another reason for the fire in him tonight. And her name was Marti Grayson.

  Taking the single beer he was in the mood for tonight, Noah made his way through the crowded establishment to reach the prime spot for watching the door. He’d already checked out the whole place to make sure Marti hadn’t arrived ahead of him, and since she hadn’t, he wanted to be able to see her the minute she came in.

  If she came.

  He thought she’d just been giving him a hard time this afternoon by not committing to tonight, but he didn’t know her well enough to be sure. Still, his hopes were high as he propped himself on a barstool in the corner nearest the dartboard and took a drink of his beer.

  The door opened then and his hopes got even higher. Only to deflate a moment later when the wives of three of his teammates filed through and still there was no Marti.

  Damn.

  What if she didn’t come? Maybe he should call her. Maybe he should go to the house. Maybe he should just accept that she might blow tonight off and be cool about it…

  He didn’t know. Hell, he didn’t know what he was doing all the way around when it came to Marti.

  He was supposed to be just getting to know her. He was supposed to be just letting her get to know him. But he was having a tough time leaving it at that. He’d been attracted to Marti in Denver and that attraction was springing back to life with a vengeance. What was he supposed to do about that? Give in to it or fight it?

  Under other circumstances being attracted to the mother of his child wouldn’t have a downside. But under these circumstances he wasn’t so sure. Under these circumstances it seemed that a calm, rational handling of everything, a friendly but middle-of-the-road connection, was the safest way for him to go.

  The trouble was, he wasn’t doing so well at reining in his attraction to Marti, and there was nothing calm or rational or middle-of-the-road about it. The attraction was stronger willed than Dilly. And like his donkey, it had a mind of its own. Which was why kissing had come into the picture last night and again this afternoon.

  And maybe because of the kissing, Marti wasn’t showing up now, he thought. Maybe the thought that he might kiss her again tonight was keeping her away. Maybe she wasn’t attracted to him. Or maybe a connection with him just wasn’t what she wanted and if he pushed her, if he made her uncomfortable, she wouldn’t want anything to do with him. And that could get him cut off from the baby…

  He took a long drink of his beer and tried to get a grip on himself.

  He had to be careful about what he was doing when it came to Marti and the baby. He knew it. He tried not to lose sight of that. It was just that every minute he was with Marti, every glimpse of her as he worked at her grandmother’s house, every sound of her voice, made it worse for him. And if there wasn’t a baby and the risk of that baby being kept from him, nothing would be holding him back.

  But there was a baby and that meant that he couldn’t just let his attraction run rampant. He had to make sure he didn’t somehow alienate her.

  So if she didn’t show up tonight he wasn’t calling, he told himself. He wasn’t going by her house. He wouldn’t say a word about it when he saw her at work tomorrow.

  But come on, show up…

  More people filed into the restaurant and each time the door opened, his high hopes got a little lower.

  Had those stupid little kisses put her off? He hadn’t thought so at the time.

  She’d seemed surprised by them—hell, he’d been surprised by them. They certainly hadn’t been planned. He simply hadn’t been able to resist the urge that had come with looking into her beautiful face. With wanting to touch that silky, sun-kissed hair. With catching that sparkle of mischief in those silver-blue eyes.

  She hadn’t balked, though. Or gotten mad at him. She’d just teased him about the kisses not being great—that didn’t seem like he’d done any harm. It seemed as if it had just brought out more of the mischief in her.

  Which he’d liked. He liked that she could hold her own, give as good as she got, that she wasn’t the kind of woman who pretended to be whatever she thought someone wanted her to be.

  Who was he kidding? He liked everything about her. And yes, that meant he wanted to kiss her again, and if she walked through that door right now and he got to spend the next few hours with her, he couldn’t say he wouldn’t kiss her again…

  So what was he going to do?

  He drank more beer.

  And then he made his decision.

  If Marti showed up tonight, in spite of this desire for her, he’d take it as a sign that he hadn’t already alienated her.

  But if she didn’t show, he’d take that as a sign that he’d better find a way to control himself and keep things between them calm and rational and middle-of-the-road. He’d better find a way never to kiss her again. To just be friends.

  He took another slug of beer and trained his eyes on that door, willing it to open, willing Marti to walk through it.

  Then the door did open again.

  Someone moved into his line of vision and blocked his view. He craned his neck to see around them, feeling slightly frantic.

  The door closed before he could see who had come in so he did a quick scan of everyone anywhere near the entrance.

  And that was when he got his sign.

  Standing in the midst of his friends and neighbors and family was Marti.

  Marti didn’t understand why, but when she spotted Noah it was as if every other person in the place faded into a blur and all she could see clearly was him.

  He looked gorgeous, as usual. Low-slung jeans. A white T-shirt with short sleeves stretched tight over bulging biceps. His hair was freshly washed and carelessly combed. His jaw was clean shaven. There was a wide smile on that face that packed a wallop and set her stomach fluttering.

  “You made it,” he said when he reached her side, sounding more pleased than she’d expected.

  “After taking a bad beating at Scrabble I needed a breather,” she responded, shouting to be heard over the noise in the place.

  “Let’s go somewhere quieter and get you something to drink,” Noah suggested, wrapping a protective arm around her shoulders to help her weave through tables and all of the people sitting and standing at them.

  His arm around her was nothing, Marti told herself. Nothing more than anyone might do in a place that full. But somehow she was ultra-aware of every point of contact—of his hand on her left arm where the short sleeve of her own T-shirt stopped, and her bare skin drank in the feel of his callused palm and long fingers; of his strong arm pressed across her back, of her right shoulder tucked so perfectly into his side.

  It’s nothing…

  And yet it was enough to send more than her stomach twittering. Enough for her to be barely aware of the accolades for Noah’s basketball playing that followed them, barely aware of anything but him.

  He guided her into an adjoining room with a pool table at its center and a few small booths outlining the walls. While this room was hardly unoccupied—there was a game going on and a group gathered around to watch—it wasn’t as crowded, and that removed the need for Noah’s arm around her. So he let go. And Marti felt distinct and unmistakable disappointment when he did.

  She only hoped it didn’t show.

  Noah pointed to a tiny corner booth that was the only one free. “We’ll have to sit on top of each other but at least we can sit,” he said.

  He waited for Marti to precede him to the corner and slide in before he slid in with her. And while they didn’t have to literally sit on top of each other, they did end up so near that his thigh ran the l
ength of hers—something not quite as titillating as his arm around her, but close.

  A waitress appeared almost instantly, showering Noah with more praise for the game Marti hadn’t seen, then taking Marti’s order of a lemonade.

  When the waitress left, Noah stretched an arm along the back of the booth and although it wasn’t exactly touching her, between the feel of having it nearby and the press of his thigh to hers under the table, that twittering sensation began all over again.

  Nervous excitement—that’s all it was, Marti told herself. It didn’t have anything to do with being so near to him that she was almost cocooned by his big body, or the fact that she was still thinking about those kisses this afternoon, or his playful threat of more to come…

  “I was beginning to wonder if you were going to stand me up tonight,” Noah said then.

  “Worried?” she joked.

  “I was,” he said as if he hadn’t been at all.

  The waitress returned with Marti’s drink. Marti waited for the woman to leave again and then said, “I think if I hadn’t come tonight you could probably an have still found some company.” She nodded in the direction of the waitress who was smiling flirtatiously at Noah as she headed to another table.

  Noah barely spared the other woman a glance before resettling his gaze on Marti and smiling audaciously. “Does that mean I’m going home with you tonight?”

  Marti laughed but didn’t take the bait. “Nice try,” she said. Then she changed the subject because it was bad enough to be constantly thinking about Noah kissing her, she didn’t need to add the idea of taking him home. “So, your game went well tonight?” she asked.

  Noah shrugged as if it were no big deal. “I was the high scorer. I’m sure it couldn’t compare to playing Scrabble with Theresa and Mary Pat, though,” he teased.

  “Well, no, but then what could?” Marti countered after tasting her lemonade. Then she said, “Funny, but I didn’t hear anything about you being on the high school basketball team in that story you told me today about your misspent youth. You wouldn’t have been making some of that up, would you? When the truth is you were really just a quiet, unassuming jock who had a mishap or two like every kid does?”

  Noah grinned, looked away from her and called to a man talking to a group at another table. “Hey, Ad! You ever play basketball—or any other sport with me—in high school?”

  “Are you having a blackout or something? The only thing you did with a basketball in high school was put it through a window in the gym. You spent a month in detention for that. Wasn’t that your extracurricular activity—detention?”

  Everyone laughed, including Noah who then looked back at Marti with an I-told-you-so expression. “Need to hear more?”

  “Okay, so you really were a badass. And if that’s the case then part of why I came here tonight was to hear what finally happened to make you clean up your act.”

  He was in no hurry to answer her. She watched him take a drink of the beer he was slowly nursing, oddly aware of his hand around the bottle, of the flex of the muscles of his forearm as he gripped it, the tendons in his sculpted jaw as his head tipped back, of his lips pressed to the mouth of the bottleneck…

  What was going on with her tonight? She sipped her own beverage in an attempt to refocus.

  Then, thinking that she was going to win this tug-of-war with him if it was the last thing she did, she said, “Let’s have it, Perry, or I’m out of here.”

  But still he stalled, taking yet another swig of beer, and Marti had the distinct impression that he really didn’t want to talk about this.

  She merely waited.

  Then, with his eyes on the beer bottle and his thumb fiddling with a loose edge of the label, he said, “I told you there was a point where I discovered that girls were more fun than wreaking havoc. Well, there was one girl in particular. Sandy Huff.” He paused again, clearly not eager to go on. But he shrugged and sighed and did anyway. “I got her pregnant when she was sixteen and I was seventeen.”

  Marti had not seen that one coming and she didn’t know what to say.

  Luckily Noah continued without any encouragement. “I know what you’re thinking—doesn’t this guy ever learn? But believe it or not—and unlike our drunken omission of a condom—I was using protection with Sandy. It just wasn’t foolproof and we were in trouble. I thought we should get married—”

  “At sixteen and seventeen?”

  “Teenage hormones and my big-man bravado and first love and then a baby? Sure, getting married seemed like exactly what we should do. It seemed like the right thing to do. So we got our parents together and I laid out the whole package—she was pregnant, we wanted to get married and keep the baby.”

  “How did that go over?”

  “My parents were just sort of shell-shocked. On top of everything else they’d had to deal with from me they just looked beaten. But Sandy’s parents went berserk.”

  Marti nodded, recalling her own panic at this pregnancy she was just now becoming accustomed to.

  “Sandy’s father had hated me from the start and forbidden her to hang out with me,” Noah went on. “So I was the no-good troublemaker his daughter had been sneaking behind his back to see. There was no way he was going for the marriage scenario.”

  “So you decided to straighten yourself out to make you more worthy of his daughter?” Marti guessed.

  Noah’s half smile was wry and humorless. “I wish I’d been that smart. No, actually, I played tough guy—I shot off my mouth, put a hole in the wall with my fist, basically proved her father right in believing I was no good. We were at Sandy’s house and her father kicked me and my family out, and threatened to shoot me on sight if I ever went near his daughter again.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I got to her through her best friend and tried to convince her to run away with me.”

  It was still difficult to believe that the man sitting beside her had begun as the boy he was describing, but Marti could also see how fiercely this had all affected him, how much he hated that that was the kid he’d been, and her heart went out to him.

  “Did you run away?” she asked.

  Noah shook his head. “Sandy started backing off. She was a scared kid, I was a hothead—I think my response to her father just freaked her out even more. I know it pushed her in the direction of her parents’ opinion about how things should go from there.”

  He paused and Marti had the impression he would have rather eaten nails than finish. But then he did anyway—in a voice that was quiet, defensive and full of regret.

  “She ended up having an abortion.”

  When he said that, his head tilted, his chin went up slightly with it and it was almost a flinch. And between that and the tone in which he’d confessed that last part, Marti thought that he needed a moment before she said, “Is that what you were afraid might influence me?”

  Noah shrugged with his eyebrows and finally looked from the beer bottle to her. “It was like a mule kick to me seventeen years ago. I didn’t want to plant any ideas—”

  “I already told you—”

  “I know, but it happened to me once and—”

  “How did an abortion happen to you?”

  “Yeah, that probably does sound weird, doesn’t it? But here’s the thing—it was still my baby. Not my body, but still my baby. Maybe that sounds crazy to you or seems like it shouldn’t matter—especially to a contrary seventeen-year-old kid. But the baby was real to me. And when Sandy’s parents talked her into having an abortion a big part of their argument was based on what a screwup I was. On what a mistake it would be all the way around to have my baby.”

  He paused, and Marti could see just how strong an impact that had had on him.

  “Of all the trouble I’d been in,” he said, “of all the consequences of my actions up to then, nothing had hit me as hard as the thought that if I had been the quiet, unassuming jock who everyone liked, our parents might have been more on our side. A
nd even if the whole marriage idea hadn’t played out, at least we might have been able to have the baby and make that work out somehow. And after that, proving that my grandfather didn’t have a hold over me, showing him I could do whatever I wanted, just didn’t seem as important as being someone whose kids were worth bringing into the world.”

  Marti honestly didn’t know what to say to that and was actually glad when just then Noah’s name was called from the main room and demands were shouted for him to join his teammates.

  “Don’t make us drag you in here!” came one threat that left no choice.

  “Sorry. Looks like we’re not going to be left to our corner,” Noah said, but Marti thought he was just as glad to escape their conversation.

  “I guess it’s the price to be paid for being here with the star player,” she teased him as he slid out of the booth and waited for her to go with him.

  Marti spent the rest of the evening by Noah’s side as he was teased and toasted, as the highlights of his game were relived. By all accounts he’d played better than anyone had ever seen anyone play in one of the local games. What impressed Marti was how humble Noah was in response to it all.

  He tried several times to put an end to the accolades, to make a getaway for them, but his friends wouldn’t have it and not until the place was finally closing did the celebration disband.

  Outside of Adz there was a succession of more pats on the back for Noah, then everyone went in separate directions and Marti had Noah’s undivided attention again—too late to do more with it than let him walk her to her car.

  “I talked to Emmalina,” he said along the way.

  “Emmalina?”

  “Emmalina Dewell—the wife of the minister who your grandmother would have gone to see when she was a girl. She said she’d be happy to talk to us tomorrow night at seven. Will that work?”

  “You already arranged for that? You’re fast,” Marti marveled.

  “It’s a small town, it doesn’t take a lot to get people together. So what do you say?” he asked as they passed the Groceries and Sundries and arrived at her brother’s SUV. “I thought we might be able to grab a bite to eat afterward?”