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“Where have you been?” Lark snapped. Her eyes filled with tears, and Jake noticed the dark circles underneath.
“Babe...” Keaton said, touching her face. It was a tender gesture.
Jake wasn’t sure what part of this scene made the least amount of sense. Keaton had always said Lark Taylor was a stuck-up bookworm who thought she was better than everyone else—and Jake had never argued that point much. Lark hadn’t liked Jake. The feeling had been mutual.
“I was in Bahrain. I came back for Skye and for our daughter.” The words were coming easier now. But he stared at the little baby still crying in Lark’s arms and the room began to feel smaller.
“Oh,” Lark said. “So glad to see that you’ve decided to acknowledge her. Where have you been since she was born? Do you even know how old she is? Do you know anything about her?”
Before Jake could reply, Keaton spoke. “Lark,” he said in a soft voice, trying to draw her attention back to him. “We talked about this.”
“But you know him, Keaton. You know he’s going to take Grace and disappear. Just like he always does.”
Yeah, that stung. “I promise, I’m not going to walk off with that baby.”
“Because you keep your promises, right?” Lark shot back at him. The baby was really letting loose now. “I wouldn’t trust you farther than I can throw you.”
Okay, that stung more. Jake nervously eyed the baby—his daughter—and fought the urge to cover his ears. Unfamiliar panic began to build in his chest. “I don’t know where you think I’m going to go with an infant, not when Skye’s doctor insists she needs to stay local. Despite what you assume about me and Skye, I do not disappear. I had a job in Bahrain, but it’s over now. I’m going to take care of my family.”
Keaton and Lark exchanged a look. Jake couldn’t take his eyes off the baby. She was small and bald and an interesting shade of red—although he hoped that was from all the screaming and not her natural color. “How old is she?”
“Three months.” Lark began rocking and patting the baby on the back. She wasn’t looking at Jake, but that was okay. At least she was telling him what he needed to know. “She was eleven weeks premature—that’s their best guess. She was in the NICU for two months. And since Skye was still under when Grace was ready to leave the hospital, she was turned over to her next of kin.” She looked at Keaton. The anger she’d directed at Jake was gone from her eyes; now he saw something else there. “That’s us.”
Jake recognized the emotion. Lark looked at Keaton the way Skye used to look at him. It’d been a while, though.
He sat in a nearby recliner and dropped his head into his hands, trying to keep his emotions in check. When had Skye stopped looking at him like that? And why hadn’t he noticed when she did?
“Since she was so early,” Lark went on, “she’s got a bunch of health risks that full-term babies don’t have to worry about. She shouldn’t be outside in this weather and she shouldn’t be around strangers. If she got sick, she could wind up back in the hospital. Or worse. She’s a full-time job right now.”
Jake knew that shaking his head wasn’t going to help a damn thing but he did it anyway. He had jobs waiting now—Bahrain had been very good for him. He couldn’t take an infant with health risks out of the country. Hell, he couldn’t even take Skye to Houston.
Trapped. He was trapped in this town.
“Keaton said he told you about the blood tests,” Lark said into the silence.
“He did.”
“He said you didn’t know about Grace.”
“I thought...” He didn’t know what to do. His entire world—everything he thought he knew—had been turned inside out in the space of about four hours.
He didn’t trust his brother and he didn’t trust the Taylors—with the exception of Skye.
He thought that his brother would never trust a Taylor either. Yet here Jake sat, in Lark Taylor’s house, watching her and Keaton cuddle and soothe a fussy baby. Together.
“What did you think?” For the first time since Jake had walked into this house, he heard the attitude in Keaton’s voice.
He didn’t want to tell them this. But his back was against a wall—a wall covered in four-inch spikes. As much as he hated it, he needed both Lark and Keaton right now. He had a bunch of questions and they had the closest thing to answers.
“Skye and I...” He absolutely could not tell them about the divorce papers. “I had that big job in Bahrain coming up. It was a yearlong contract and she decided she didn’t want to spend that much time in a foreign country. Bahrain may be richer than sin, but it’s not exactly a progressive state.”
All of that was true enough. She hadn’t wanted to go to Bahrain and she hadn’t wanted to stay home alone. She’d wanted him to stay with her. And he’d picked the job over her. That had been the proverbial straw that had broken the camel’s back.
“Is that it?” Keaton said with a snort.
“Yes.” And since Skye might never remember the fight, there was no one to contradict Jake’s lie.
Lark looked victorious, but strangely, it didn’t make her seem any happier. “Were you married? Skye said you were but she didn’t have her ring on and who knows, with that memory of hers.” She looked at Jake’s hand.
Jake spun the plain gold band around his finger. It’d been the only ring they’d been able to afford when they slipped off into the night together four years ago.
“Yes. We got married three days after we left.”
Silence followed this statement. He and Skye had driven to Houston and found a preacher who would marry them. He’d been wearing his old boots and a pair of jeans, but Skye had been in a simple white skirt and a bright blue top. She’d been so beautiful that day...
“So what are you going to do now?” Keaton finally asked. “Because Lark is right. We’re not going to stand aside and let you disappear off into the night with this baby. We’re not going to let you do anything that would put her at risk.”
Jake gritted his teeth. He had no choice but to stay here. He looked at the baby girl. She was still crying—but at least now the decibel level wouldn’t shatter glass. Jake tried to smile at the baby, but the terror the tiny baby—his daughter, for crying out loud!—was sparking in his chest was making breathing difficult.
He’d never held a baby before. He didn’t have the first idea how to do any of the basics—bottles and diapers and everything else. He and Skye had wanted to wait.
That wasn’t true. Skye had wanted a baby from the very beginning. But Jake had looked at the reality of being a young couple barely scraping by and he’d convinced her that they needed to wait until their financial situation was more secure.
That was another thing she’d thrown back in his face during the fight, another ultimatum she’d issued. Have a baby or it’s over.
He’d said after the Bahrain job. He was going to make a fortune in Bahrain. Another year, and they’d be set.
“Skye is going to be released to my care, maybe tomorrow.”
“Are you going to be able to take care of her?”
Jake would have normally taken umbrage at his brother’s attitude, but right now? Yeah, it was a danged good question.
“I don’t know.”
Near silence descended upon the room. “We could keep her,” Lark finally said, looking at the baby.
“What?”
“We could keep Grace—just until Skye gets settled. Keaton and I know her schedule. We know how to take care of her. She shouldn’t be out in this weather, anyway, not until she’s stronger. That way, you can focus on getting Skye back into shape. You can bring Skye over here to visit the baby, but she won’t have to get up in the middle of the night.”
Could he do that? This was his daughter. A daughter he’d only known about for...five hours, but still—his flesh and blood.
He didn’t want to be a monster about this. This wasn’t him abandoning the baby. This was him getting Skye to the point where she could take over, right?
Plus, if he left Grace here, that would prove that he wasn’t going to skip town again. “Would that be okay? I don’t want to impose, but the sooner we can get Skye back to full strength, the better.”
Lark sighed as she looked at Grace. “Keaton and I already have it all worked out and, really, she’s an angel.”
“I’ll need to get a house of my own. The whole point of you keeping the baby here is to give Skye room to recover at her own pace.” To put it less tactfully, he didn’t want to sleep under the same roof as Keaton and Lark—even if they were being really good to Grace.
“You’re actually going to stay?” Keaton sounded doubtful.
Jake let the comment slide. “Skye’s doctors are here and I’m not going to do a damn thing that might set her back. I know you don’t believe this, but I didn’t know about the tornado until this morning. Hell, I don’t even know if Mom and Dad came through all right.” If he’d known...
“Mom and Dad are okay,” Keaton said in a quiet voice. “Some property damage. The ranch house is being rebuilt, but they were in Florida and Alabama, checking out some retirement properties, so they weren’t in the line of the storm. We’ve had them over a few times.”
“Good. I’m glad.” Strangely, he was. He’d spent the last four years pointedly not caring about what his family was doing. They’d wanted him to put the family above Skye. Nothing was more important to him than Skye.
“They adore Grace,” Lark said in a way that made it pretty clear that this absolved most of their sins in her eyes.
“And they’ve come to see that Lark is nothing like her parents,” Keaton went on. “I think they’re realizing that not all Taylors are lying, cheating dogs.”
Bitterness rose up in the back of Jake’s throat. Oh, sure—now his parents were going to open their arms and welcome a Taylor into the family. But not for Jake and Skye when he had needed them to.
“What about your parents?” he asked Lark.
She dropped her eyes. “They’re...okay. Fine.”
“Whit Daltry’s got some houses for rent in Pine Valley,” Keaton said, changing the subject. “I think a couple of them are furnished—not too far from here. I’ll call him.”
“Thanks. That’d be great.” He was not buying a house. He was not staying in Royal long. Just long enough to get Skye back on her feet and figure out where they stood.
Just then, the baby made a little hiccup-sigh noise that pulled at his heartstrings.
Lark shifted Grace off of her shoulder. Keaton picked the baby up so smoothly that Jake was jealous. “Grace, honey—this is your daddy,” Keaton said as he rubbed her on her back. Then, to Jake, he added, “You ready?”
Not really—but Jake wasn’t going to admit that to Keaton. He tried to cradle his arms in the right way. Then Keaton laid the baby out in them.
The world seemed to tilt off its axis as Jake looked down into his daughter’s eyes. They were a pale blue—just like her mother’s. Up close now, he could see that Grace had wispy hairs on her head that were so white and fine they were almost see-through.
She didn’t start bawling, which he took as a good sign. Instead, she waved her tiny hands around, so of course he had to offer her one of his fingers. When she latched on to it, he felt lost and yet not lost at the same time.
He was responsible for this little girl from this moment until the day he drew his last breath. The weight of it hit him so hard that, if he hadn’t already been sitting, his knees would have buckled.
This was his daughter. He and Skye had created this little person.
God, he wished she were here with him. That they could have done this together. That things between them had been different. That he’d been different.
But he couldn’t change the past, not when his present—and his future—was gripping his little finger with surprising strength.
“Hi, Grace,” he whispered. He shook his hand a little, raising her fist with his pinkie finger. “It’s so good to meet you.”
The baby smiled, which made Jake feel ten feet tall. “Hey, she’s smiling at—”
Then a horrible noise—and an even more horrible smell—cut him off.
Keaton began to laugh. The dog whined and put its paws over its nose.
“Sorry,” Lark said, rising quickly. “She’s about due for another bottle, too.”
“Time for your first lesson—diapers,” Keaton said as he clapped Jake on the back. “Welcome to fatherhood.”
Three (#ulink_d01fa836-c544-5dac-9c6e-4f52c9d0c3c4)
“Grace is with Lark, right?” Skye asked. She knew Jake had answered that question at least three times already, but she wanted to see her daughter.
“Are you asking because you don’t remember the answer or because you don’t trust me?” Jake grinned at her from the driver’s seat. It was an easy grin that warmed her from the inside out—but there was something underneath it that had an edge.
She was going home. With Jake. The past few days had been the longest of her waking life. Skye had been ready and willing to leave that hospital far behind and get back to making new memories with Jake.
“I just...I just want to see her again. I remember you already said yes,” she hurried to add. “I feel like I’ve missed so much.” She laughed. “Probably because I have.”
The process of being released from the hospital had taken most of the day. Late winter twilight settled over the landscape as Jake drove toward their new home. “And...we’re not going back to our apartment, right?”
“That’s right,” he said gently. “The doctor wants you to stay close to the hospital. I rented a house. It’s close to Lark and the baby and not too far from the hospital.”
“I wish I remembered Grace,” she said, an impotent frustration bubbling up. “Why is Lark keeping her?”
“Because Lark is a nurse and you need to recover,” he answered smoothly. “We’ll go over and visit, I promise. And I always keep my promises, don’t I?”
“Yes...” She tried to make sense of that hidden edge to his words It was almost as if he was mad at her. But did that make any sense?
No, it didn’t. He was probably just upset that she’d been hurt so badly. Jake had never been the best at expressing his feelings. She knew there were holes in her memory and she didn’t know if those holes would ever get filled.
But she was still here and she was getting better. She’d just have to make some new memories with Jake. And with Grace.
She looked around and was surprised to see that she recognized the road they were on. “Stop!” she cried, feeling hopeful. Now was as good a time as any to start making some of those new memories.
“What?” Jake asked in alarm as he slammed on the brakes. His right arm flew across her chest to keep her from lurching forward.
“We used to park here, remember?” She undid her seat belt and slid over to him. “We used to stop here on the way home.”
She grinned nervously at him. Yes, she wanted to get home, but she’d been in a bed—by herself—for the last four months. Four months without Jake. It was time to fix that starting right now.
Jake did not bend much in her arms. She ran her fingers through his hair and pulled him down to her. “We did stop here, didn’t we? I didn’t get that wrong, did I?”
“We did,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Are you going to kiss me, Jake Holt?” she whispered against his lips.
He turned his head. “The doctor said—he said we shouldn’t stress you out too much. Physically.”
Skye sighed in disappointment. “Not even if I want to be stressed? Just a little? Not even a kiss?”
Jake didn’t reply for a moment. Then he sort of chuckled and said, “When we used to stop here, I don’t remember it ever being just a kiss.”
Skye leaned into him, feeling his warmth. The hospital had been cold. But Jake had always run hot. She’d loved curling up against him in the middle of winter, letting his body warm hers until things started to get downright steamy.
