With a smile creasing his handsome face, Jeb threw the covers back, displaying even more of his masculine form. “Let’s go.”
Bubbling with joy, Cady hurried to get ready, too. In ten minutes, they were out the front door. Thirty minutes after that, they were at the hospital, anxiously pacing the maternity ward lounge with the other extended families, awaiting word.
Finally, at shortly after seven, the nurse appeared. She had the relaxed, genial body language of someone who had assisted in a birth where all had gone well.
“Cady Keilor? Jeb McCabe? Tina Matthews and baby Zoe are ready to see you now.”
Cady’s heart pounded. With a smile on his face, Jeb took her hand, engulfing it in his warm grasp.
The nurse led them back to the birthing room.
As they entered, Mr. and Mrs. Matthews departed. Cady noted the teen’s parents did not make eye contact with her or Jeb. She tried not to make too much of it as she neared Tina’s bedside. This must be hard on them, she thought, losing their first biological grandchild to adoption.
The seventeen-year-old looked remarkably composed, and as she turned her glance to Cady, she looked sad, too. But not for herself.
Cady’s heart began to sink.
Cradling her sleeping infant protectively to her chest, Tina swallowed. Her face was pale, her gaze determined. And Cady knew in an instant the news was not good.
“The counselor from the Stork Agency said I didn’t have to talk to you if I didn’t want to, but I told her that I wanted to explain to you myself….”
Disappointment roared through Cady as she interjected, “That you’ve decided to keep your baby?”
Tears trembled on Tina’s lashes. “I’m so sorry to disappoint you,” she said, with obvious regret, “but everything is different now. My parents aren’t mad at me anymore. They want me to keep Zoe, and they said they’d help me. I’ve given this a lot of thought…and I know it’s the right thing to do.”
Cady pulled up a chair beside the bed. Her heart broke as she smiled at the teenager. “I understand,” she said softly, forcing herself to rise above her own selfish concerns and think about what was best for everyone in this situation. And that started with being painfully honest.
“If I were in your place…” Cady felt herself begin to tear up, too. Determinedly, she blinked back the moisture and swallowed around the lump in her throat. “I’d want to keep my baby.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jeb, his jaw so taut his cheek muscles could have been carved in stone.
“The agency said they would reimburse all your fees,” Tina continued. “My mom and dad are going to pay them.”
The money was the least of Cady’s concern. “Sounds like everything is settled, then.” Feeling numb and bereft, she stood.
In addition to losing the baby, she had lost part of her future connection to Jeb.
All at once, Cady felt the happiness—the hope—of the last few weeks slipping away.
Tina searched her eyes, not about to change her mind, but obviously wondering how to help. “Did you want to hold Zoe before you leave?” she asked softly.
Cady looked down at the sweetly sleeping infant who had once been a cherished part of her and Jeb’s future. “Yes.” She held out her arms, for an even more moving goodbye. “I would.”
JEB HAD NEVER CONSIDERED himself a particularly emotional person, but seeing Cady take the infant into her arms and hold her tenderly against her chest damn near broke his heart. The poignant scene made him want to burst into tears.
“She’s beautiful,” Cady whispered, giving the tiny infant one long last, loving look. “And very much like you…”
“Thank you,” Tina murmured, overcome with joy. She looked at Jeb. “Do you want to hold her, too?”
The funny thing was, he did.
Not trusting himself to speak, he nodded.
Cady gently made the transfer to his arms.
It wasn’t the first time Jeb had held a newborn infant. But it was the first time cradling one felt like an arrow to his heart.
He hadn’t realized until now how much he had wanted a baby in his life. How much he wanted to share this experience with Cady. Her grace and unyielding empathy in this heart-rending situation only proved how much love and understanding she had to give, not to just her own child, but to all those around her.
Aware that he had never respected Cady more, he handed the newborn infant back to her momma. “Zoe is one sweet baby,” he told Tina gruffly.
Tears misting her eyes, Cady murmured, “We wish you all the happiness in the world.”
“Thank you,” Tina whispered back, as she cuddled her baby once again.
Jeb and Cady slipped out.
Tina’s parents were waiting anxiously in the hall. They glanced at Cady and Jeb. There wasn’t much for anyone to say; the situation was what it was. Nods of mutual empathy and understanding were exchanged. Tina’s parents looked relieved that there was to be no ugly scene or recriminations.
Wordlessly, Cady and Jeb continued on down the hall. He took her hand in the elevator.
She clasped his tightly and kept gripping it all the way to his pickup truck.
Jeb had an idea how much Cady was hurting, how difficult it was for her to keep it together. Figuring the least he could give her was the space she apparently needed, he asked quietly, “Where to?”
She looked out the window, her composure intact, her demeanor more distant than he had ever seen it. “Home, please.”
Jeb turned on the stereo. The soothing sounds of Alan Jackson’s voice accompanied them on the drive.
Cady still looked as numb as Jeb felt as they took the elevator to her loft.
She walked inside, dropped her bag on the table.
Spread out on the coffee table were the going home from the hospital outfits her sister and brother-in-law had given her. Next to that, the ultrasound photo of Zoe, taken a week before she was born.
Cady stood, looking down at it all.
Jeb expected her to burst into tears, to let loose the flood of disappointment that had to be welling up inside her. Instead, he got…nothing.
Wishing like hell he could comfort her, he came up behind her. He placed gentle hands on her shoulders, wishing he knew how to reach her. “You can cry, you know,” he told her softly.
And I’ll cry right along with you….
Cady exhaled and shook her head in mute refusal. Her sadness palpable, she paced away from him to the windows overlooking the city of Houston. “You want to know what’s ironic about all this?”
Jeb nodded and took up a place opposite her.
Cady swallowed. “It’s that all along, I had a feeling in my gut that this adoption would be like everything else in my personal life I’ve ever wanted to work out.”
Her expression unbearably sad, she ran a finger down the metal frame edging the big panes of glass. Sighed again, then shook her head. “All those guys I brought home to meet the family, who promptly fell in love with my gorgeous older sister.”
Grimacing, she continued her recitation. “The other birth moms who chose anyone else but me to adopt their baby. And now…”
Moisture glimmered in her eyes.
“…when I was finally selected to be the adoptive mom…” she lifted her hands in disappointment “this…”
In all the time he had known her, Jeb had never seen Cady give up on anything she really wanted to achieve—until now. Aware she was about to throw in the towel on ever having a family, he counseled gently, “This doesn’t have to be the end of the road, Cady.”
She turned a disillusioned glance to his.
Jeb swallowed, aware he was about to make the kind of long-term commitment he’d never considered. And it was all because of Cady—because she had made him see there was more to life than just living with your humor intact and your guard up.
He edged close enough to inhale the lingering scent of her perfume. He touched the silky soft skin of her face. “There’s no physical rea
son you can’t have a baby on your own, a baby no one can take from you.”
Cady stepped back, resentment edging her low tone. “I’ve told you how I feel about artificial insemination.”
He could see she expected him to argue the point with her. Instead, he informed her calmly, “But you haven’t told me how you feel about having a baby with me.”
Silence fell as his words sank in.
Cady blinked in stunned amazement. “What are you talking about?”
What he hadn’t admitted to himself he could ever want again—until now.
Jeb drew a breath and looked her straight in the eye. “I’m talking about marriage. Between you and me.”
Cady inhaled sharply, all the color leaving her face, then returning in a riotous bloom of pink. She gasped again. “Jeb!”
He didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to see she was about to turn him down, right out of the gate.
Squaring his shoulders, he took her hand and determinedly listed the reasons why they should forgo convention and head down this road. “We’ve been friends for years. We know each other intimately. Sexually, we’re definitely on the same page. And we get along great. Plus we both want kids.”
Cady wrested her hand from his as if he had burned her. “Since when?” she demanded, with a stubborn tilt to her chin.
Jeb frowned, upset by her wariness. “Since I spent the last week with you and the boys, and agreed to be godfather to the baby you were hoping to adopt!”
Her expression gentled slightly.
Encouraged, Jeb continued, a lot less defensively, “I’ve never seen a future for myself that felt really right, Cady.” He took her hand again, tenderly this time. “But this one does.”
She stared down at their entwined fingers. Thinking, deliberating. “For now,” she murmured, the disillusionment edging back into her low tone. She shifted her glance and looked up at him. “What happens when time passes and you decide marriage to me, and kids, isn’t for you, after all?”
Okay. He was getting a little tired of being the suspect in all this. Cady knew he was one hell of a lot more gallant than his reputation, when it came to women.
Still, she had been through a lot, so he tried to rein in his hurt feelings and be patient. Still facing her, he braced a shoulder against the window and folded his arms in front of him. “What are you talking about?”
Cady shrugged, acting as if they had never really known each other at all. Or held each other through the night…
“Your history of falling into things because they’re convenient and seem to make you happy at the time,” she told him remotely.
She crossed her arms beneath her breasts. “It’s why you started doing rodeo. Why you bought your ranch and began boarding rodeo stock, and why you’re now contemplating getting rid of that business and going full time into breeding black baldie cattle.”
So he’d never settled down professionally, the way she had. So he liked to try out different ways of making a living, instead of being focused on one area, such as marketing. So what?
He grimaced. “That’s different.”
Cady lifted an eyebrow, all cool elegance now. “I wish it were,” she said quietly.
Moving away from him, she went back to the coffee table, picked up the ultrasound photo and the gifts, and shoved them in a drawer.
The offending items out of sight, she turned back to him, her countenance resolute. “But if we don’t want to get hurt again, we have to be honest here. We never would have been together this last week if you hadn’t been teasing me and we hadn’t made that stupid bet,” she told him with a practicality that stung. “We never would have made love, or gotten temporarily close.”
“Temporarily?” Jeb echoed unhappily. Was this all their time together had meant to her?
CADY BEGAN TO PACE, her long sexy legs catching his eye as she roamed from one side of her loft to the other. “I know this seems like the perfect solution to all our problems,” she told him. “We marry and I get the baby I want, the old-fashioned way.”
“The baby we both want,” Jeb corrected.
She nodded, accepting that. “And in the process, you shock people so much they’d finally stop talking about your inability to commit long-term to Avalynne Stone…and they’d begin talking about how you fell hard enough to marry and have a baby with me.”
That was a low blow, Jeb thought.
“You’d finally get back your reputation as a stand-up guy,” she continued, oblivious to his mounting anger and dismay. “Which would definitely make your family very happy.” She sighed. “And Suki and Hermann and the boys would be over the moon if I had a family of my own, too.”
“That’s not the reason I am proposing this!” Jeb interrupted, with a building resentment of his own.
Once again she did not believe him.
She came closer, her hands outstretched, her expression compassionate. “Jeb, I know how gallant you are at heart,” she told him, with a patience he’d neither asked for nor needed.
He glared at her, too peeved to scrounge up an appropriate comeback.
“I know you want to rescue me and somehow make this all better.” She backed up. “But pretending we love each other enough to make a marriage work for the rest of our lives is not the way.”
Cady’s soft lips took on that stubborn pout he knew so well.
“And I’ll be damned if I ever pledge my heart in a stopgap way, only to end up facing divorce a few years down the road,” she finished firmly.
Jeb had heard a variation of this same speech years ago.
“Face it, Jeb,” Avalynne had said. “We don’t love each other and never will. We have to end this here and now if we ever want a chance to be happy….”
Only now it was Cady standing here, saying the same thing, asking for the same release.
Feeling as if his whole life had just been blown to smithereens, Jeb forced her to spell it out. “So you’re saying…?”
“Whatever this has been between us, is over,” she replied in a flat, irrevocable tone. A stranger to him once again, she insisted, “It has to be.”
Chapter Fourteen
Jeb walked into his parents’ ranch house, saw his three siblings, their spouses and his parents, and was tempted to walk right back out.
“What is this, an intervention?” he demanded gruffly, only half kidding. He had answered a summons to talk to his mom, not the whole tribe.
“How’d you guess?” Cutting off his exit, his mother took him by the elbow and guided him into the living room.
Jeb tried to be polite. “I know you-all mean well, but—”
“We’re talking to you,” his dad said, “whether you like it or not, so you may as well settle in for the long haul.”
Jeb could argue with one or two McCabes. But seven at once?
Grimacing, he sat down in the club chair they had apparently reserved for him. He exhaled dramatically. “Get it over with then.”
Emily spoke up first. “We want to know why you broke Cady Keilor’s heart.”
Jeb stared at his little sister. She had gotten far too romantic since her own marriage. But this was ridiculous! “I what?” It was more like the other way around! Cady had been the one who had been so blunt it hurt. Making love to him as if she meant it, only to tell him later she hadn’t!
“I heard you asked Cady to marry you, out of pity,” Hank remarked with a disapproving frown.
Holden, always the most serious, added in censure, “Not good, big brother. Not good at all. No woman wants to think of herself as a charity case!”
Jeb harrumphed. “First of all, I did not ask Cady out of pity.”
“But you did feel sorry for her?” Shane ascertained with the gruff honesty Jeb had come to expect from his dad.
Seeing no use in sugarcoating what had turned out to be an unmitigated disaster all around, Jeb shrugged. “Who wouldn’t have felt sorry for Cady? To go through the entire adoption process for four long years, and finally
get selected to be an adoptive parent, only to find out she was rejected—again—at the end? She was heart-broken. As anyone would have been in her place.” And so was I.
“And you care about her,” Greta guessed.
His mother’s gentle look had Jeb huffing cantankerously before he could stop himself, “For all the good it’s done me. Cady put me in the friend category years ago, and I’ve never really left it.”
Emily blinked. “She acted like you were a heck of a lot more than friends when I saw her talking to Avalynne at my café last week.”
“That’s because we…” Jeb stopped himself.
“Let things get a little romantic for a change?” She smiled impishly, helping him out.
Jeb nodded gratefully at his baby sister. “That’s right,” he answered prosaically. “And for the record…” he paused to look everyone in the family in the eye “…my marriage proposal to her was entirely serious.” Cady had been the one with cold feet.
Silence fell. No one seemed to be able to understand why she didn’t want to take their relationship to the next level, any more than he had. Cady had certainly acted as if she was crazy about him. She had seemed to want him in her life. First as her longtime friend and baby Zoe’s godfather, and then a whole lot more.
“Maybe she would have taken you more seriously if the whole thing with Avalynne hadn’t happened,” Holden theorized.
Hank nodded. “Once you change your mind at the last minute and leave a woman at the altar… Face it, no woman wants to think about the same thing happening to her, down the road. So if Cady shied away for that reason…” His brother shrugged.
Jeb’s anger built. “It wasn’t that.”
“Of course it was,” Greta said.
He glared at his mother and enunciated clearly, “No. It wasn’t.”
“How do you know?” Shane challenged.
“Because—” Jeb gave his father the same censuring look and blurted gruffly “—I told Cady the truth about what really happened that day. She knows—” Abruptly, he realized he had once again said too much.
Everyone in his family leaned forward eagerly. “Knows what?” Holden asked cautiously.
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