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Devlin seemed to notice Mark for the first time. “And you are?”
“Hoping you’ll leave, Dr. Brennan,” Mark replied sarcastically.
“You’re keeping your sister and brother-in-law waiting.” Gillian heaved an impatient sigh. “And you’re keeping us from...from—”
“Listening to the score of ‘My Fair Lady,’” Carmen called. “So get lost, Devlin. Now!”
“Sorry for interrupting.” Devlin looked down at Gillian, who assiduously avoided his eyes. But the baby grinned at him and flexed her little fingers.
“Are you trying to wave goodbye, little lady?” Impulsively, Dev offered her his finger and she closed her small fist around it. “Can you say ‘bye-bye’?”
“Ashley makes lots of sounds and knows the meanings of some words but the only one she actually seems to say in context is Mama,” Mark said, sauntering over to join them at the door. “Not that she’s stupid or anything, but she’s not even a year old and you can’t expect her to recite the Gettysburg Address, now can you?” He subjected Devlin to a scorching once-over, his gaze lingering on certain strategic areas.
“No, indeed,” agreed Devlin hastily, his eyes widening. “Well, see you around, I guess.” He disengaged his finger from Ashley who was trying to carry it to her mouth to sample.
“Say bye-bye to your new neighbor, Ashley,” cooed Mark.
“Ba,” said Ashley.
“Not bad.” Devlin patted her tiny arm. “Close enough to ’bye. Keep practicing, Ashley, you’ll get it.”
He left, and Gillian quickly slammed the door shut. The sound reverberated throughout the hall
“I think Dreamy Doctor Devlin was afraid I had designs on him.” Mark was scornful. “He is hot, I’ll grant you that, but I would never fall for the rat who abandoned my pregnant sister!”
“He didn’t abandon me,” Gillian came immediately to Dev’s defense. “He didn’t even know I was pregnant.”
“And now he’s living right across the hall from his own secret child!” Carmen moaned. “I can’t believe it. It’s a coincidence that only happens in a soap opera, but somehow it’s happened to you, Gilly.”
“And after all you did to keep Ashley a secret from him, it’s a coincidence that strikes me as a particularly unfair twist of fate,” said Mark.
“Nothing new there,” Carmen said trenchantly. “Since when has fate been anything but unfair to the likes of us?”
“I think we’ve been incredibly lucky,” Gillian countered, carrying Ashley to the toy-filled playpen by the window. She set the baby in it, handing her a bright scarlet teddy bear. “We all ended up at the Sinsel foster home, didn’t we? That was a fantastic stroke of luck. We found each other there and became like a real family—probably better than a real family because they can’t choose their relatives, but we did when we chose each other.”
“Oh, no! Not her Pollyanna routine again.” Mark groaned. “Carmen, stop her, please, I’m starting to feel queasy.”
Gillian smiled at his dramatics. “You know I’m right.”
“I know you’re optimistic to the point of dementia at times,” Mark retorted. “Is it any wonder why we got a divorce?”
The three of them laughed, and little Ashley watched them, chiming in with her own merry squeal.
“We’re lucky to have each other,” Carmen conceded. “But having Devlin Brennan living so close to Ashley is like that fairy tale where the uninvited wicked fairy crashes the party. Something bad is sure to result. That brother-in-law of his already has me spooked. The way he was staring at the baby, the way he asked if you needed anything...” Her voice trailed off. “It was like he was ready to accept you as a family responsibility. As if he knows the truth about Devlin and Ashley, Gilly.”
“There is no way he could know a thing,” Gillian insisted, refusing to listen to her own anxiety expressed aloud.
“Unless he’s psychic.” Carmen’s dark eyes grew round. “What if he is?”
“What if he isn’t, but happens to be very familiar with Devlin Brennan’s past history?” Mark speculated. “Suppose Ashley isn’t the first little Brennan crawling around unacknowledged by her daddy? Maybe the handsome doctor is a walking sperm bank with kids by different women all over the place. Those children could be instantly recognizable to the brother-in-law because he knows to look for them.”
“A multitude of Brennan spawns! Sounds like something out of that movie Village of the Damned, where all the kids looked alike.” Carmen shuddered. “Of course, they were aliens, but still!”
“I can see it’s time for me to reel you both back from the tangents you’ve gone off on.” Gillian rolled her eyes heavenward. “I’m absolutely certain that Cade Austin is not psychic and I’m equally sure that Devlin Brennan hasn’t populated the world with his look-alike offspring. In fact, nobody suspects anything except you two, whose imaginations have always been way too active.”
“You hope,” Mark said darkly.
Gillian shot him a quelling glance. “I’m going to move out of here as soon as I can find another place. But while I’m in this apartment, I refuse to live in a state of panic wondering what Devlin Brennan or his brother-in-law might or might not know. The truth is, neither of them know or care anything about Ashley or me.”
“Dadadadada,” Ashley sang as she tossed her toys around the playpen.
“She said ‘Dada,’” Carmen gasped. “It’s like she knows we’re talking about her father!”
“Carmen, if you say Ashley is psychic I’ll confiscate your deck of tarot cards and your palm-reading instruction book.” Gillian was stern “You’re starting to take that paranormal stuff way too seriously.”
“I’m sure the baby is just babbling,” Mark said tactfully. “It’s not as if she knows any word for daddy. Or what a daddy is, let alone who he is.”
“Join the club, Ashley. Daddies fall into the category of unsolved mysteries for all of us.” Carmen looked glum.
Ashley pulled herself to her feet by hanging on to the bars of the playpen and threw the red bear over the side. “Dada,” she pronounced forcefully.
“Bear,” Gillian corrected, handing her the toy
“Gilly, you said you haven’t seen Devlin since you broke up with him.” A worried-looking Carmen was unable to let the topic drop. “Suppose seeing you again starts him thinking and he starts counting backward. Suppose he notices that Ashley looks just like his sister, not to mention himself. I bet our little Ash is a dead ringer for their baby pictures.”
“I honestly think the brother-in-law has already realized that,” added Mark.
“I honestly don’t,” Gillian was quick to refute. “Anyway, Devlin Brennan is too interested in having a good time with all his friends and admirers to give Ashley or me a single thought”
“You hope again,” Mark muttered under his breath.
Gillian heard him. “I know he won’t,” she said firmly.
Two
Gillian was wrong.
Devlin did think about her, especially when he was alone in his apartment, right across the hall from hers. His mind would drift from the plot of “I Dream of Jeannie” or “Three’s Company” or whatever rerun was airing on TV to ponder why Gillian had ended their relationship so abruptly, so irrevocably, all those months ago.
He acknowledged that he had done his part to keep the split irrevocable. After Gillian told him it was all over between them—offering only a maddeningly ambiguous “this isn’t working out” as the reason why—he hadn’t said a word or done a thing to make her change her mind. He hadn’t called her or attempted to see her.
Was that what she’d expected him to do? To go crawling to her, begging to be allowed back in her life? The prospect appalled him, and he rejected it now as he had then. But suppose he had made one phone call to her in the days following their breakup? Just one. A single phone call hardly constituted crawling or begging. Twenty months later, Devlin finally conceded that point.
He frowned, remembering the night she’d called it quits. After dropping her bombshell, Gillian had gone home, leaving him alone to absorb the shock. And what a shock it was... For the first time in his charmed, blessed, golden life he’d been dumped!
Compounding his woe was his lack of anyone to share it He didn’t consider confiding anything about the breakup to any member of his social circle. Why bother when he could easily predict their responses?
The attitude of the jaundiced nonromantics in the group would be a cavalier “so what?” The others would proclaim that it was about time he felt the sting of rejection, that everybody else in the world had been dumped at one time or another and now, finally, it was Devlin Brennan’s turn.
He could have told his sister. Kylie definitely would’ve provided sympathy, but she might have expected him to cry on her shoulder while she offered words of solace and advice. That was too ghastly to contemplate. He was the big brother, ever cool, ever confident, and he wasn’t about to relinquish his own image of himself.
So he’d opted for silence, answering the occasional question about Gillian Bailey with a nonchalant, “Haven’t seen her for a while.” Everybody who knew Devlin Brennan knew what that meant—he had moved on to another woman. Details weren’t requested or supplied.
“For every man who breaks hearts, there is a woman who is his match,” declared Holly Casale, his friend since their early med school days, who was currently completing her residency in psychiatry here at the hospital. Devlin did not appreciate her diagnosis or prophecy or whatever that cryptic observation of hers was supposed to be.
He didn’t consider himself a heartbreaker; he simply wasn’t ready to settle down, a point he made to any woman who tried to assume otherwise. He was honest and up-front about his commitment to staying uncommitted, which was hardly characteristic of those deceptive smoothies who deserved the title of heartbreaker.
As for Gillian breaking his heart, that premise was laughable. His heart hadn’t even been bruised by her rejection, Dev assured himself. He’d set out to prove that being dumped wasn’t the trauma all those sad songs and movies and books proclaimed it to be.
He forgot all about Gillian Bailey. He continued with his life, which was full and busy with his fourth-year residency in orthopedics, a specialty that continually fascinated him, with his many friends and with various women who provided him with sex whenever he wanted it
Funny how he hadn’t wanted it lately.
That was because he was taking a hiatus from sex, Devlin reminded himself. He’d seen some therapist-guru on a talk show who extolled periods of chastity as time to recharge energy and creativity. Dev didn’t run that particular theory by Holly, but decided that his body had chosen to be chaste for a while.
Didn’t he feel more energetic and creative?
Seated in front of his television set, Devlin proceeded to channel-surf through eighty-six channels, pointing his remote like a divining rod. Nothing caught his interest, and his thoughts drifted back to Gillian.
He allowed himself to admit that in spite of his busy, full life he hadn’t completely forgotten about her. He’d given her an occasional thought during the past twenty months When he had learned about Gillian’s marriage, only a couple weeks after their breakup, he had been stunned. It stood to reason that she must have been dating her future husband all the while she’d been with him. Or maybe her three-month fling with him had been a rebound romance for her, something to pass the time until the groom-elect came through with a wedding ring.
Either notion rankled.
Dev vaguely recalled getting drunk with some of his buddies around that time and referring to Gillian as a “two-timing slut.” The memory, dim as it was, now made him cringe because it implied that her quickie marriage bothered him, and of course, it had not. He’d had a good laugh when Holly Casale told him that he was “in denial” and ought to acknowledge his repressed feelings.
Repressed? Him? Devlin had found the “shrink jargon” hilarious and told Holly so. As a would-be Freudian, she’d shaken her head silently and tried to look inscrutable.
His thoughts circled back to Gillian. Who was now divorced. Obviously she’d shed her husband with the same hasty ease she had acquired him. And now she was a single mother with a baby girl.
The baby, little Ashley. He wasn’t the type to go ga-ga over babies, but she was very cute. Cade, his brother-in-law, had certainly been captivated by that baby. He’d mentioned her several times over their weekend visit and yesterday, too, when Kylie had called to get an old friend’s address.
Dev had kidded Kylie that Cade’s interest in the baby across the hall was indicative of his desire to become a daddy, that she was going to find herself pregnant sooner rather than later. Kylie countered that Cade’s interest in the neighbor child stemmed from his concern for his younger sister, currently in the middle of a bitter divorce and solely responsible for her baby. According to Kylie, Cade possessed a kind of global sense of elder brother responsibility for the children of struggling single mothers.
Devlin guessed it made sense, Cade being Cade and all.
Truth to tell, it was something of a relief to know that his brother-in-law was hyperresponsible. That was exactly the kind of husband every brother wanted for his kid sister. If Kylie were pregnant, there was no question that Cade would take care of her, would stick with her and their child. Unlike Gillian’s husband, who’d been quick to split after the baby was born.
Undoubtedly that creep hadn’t been much help during her pregnancy, either, Devlin concluded, and remembered the one and only time he had seen Gillian pregnant.
He’d spotted her during a rare chance encounter in the hospital cafeteria. It had been late in her pregnancy and her tiny frame seemed ready to topple forward from the bulk of her swollen abdomen. Dev had cracked to the gang at his lunch table that she looked like an overinflated balloon and probably would’ve made another witticism or two except he caught Holly Casale observing him with her most annoying psychoanalytic stare. So he’d lapsed into silence and purposefully directed his gaze away from the very pregnant Gillian.
Had it been Holly or someone else who’d informed him when Gillian had given birth? He had merely shrugged his indifference. What was he supposed to do, go visit her on the maternity floor with a bunch of mylar balloons? He hadn’t, of course. She was married and a mother and lived her life in another universe from his.
And now it seemed their separate worlds had intersected, thanks to the random assignments made by the housing department. It was weird but entirely coincidental, a bit of computer-generated idiocy. He and Gillian could‘ve—should’ve—shared a laugh about it except she had been inexplicably hostile upon learning they were neighbors.
And they hadn’t seen each other since that day. Out of sight, out of mind, Dev reminded himself. It was more than a cliché, it was downright good advice.
He turned his attention back to the TV set, bypassing all the current reality based dramas and sitcoms for a black and white rerun from the early sixties. “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” Relaxing, he settled back to enjoy a half hour of vicarious living in a far more simple era.
In the apartment across the hall from him, Ashley Joy Morrow wouldn’t stop crying. Gillian knew the baby was teething, and she had done everything recommended in the infant and child care manual to soothe her. But nothing had worked and finally, m desperation, she called her foster mother, Dolly Sinsel, in Detroit.
“Do you think there could be something really wrong with her, Mom?” Gillian asked anxiously. “Should I take her to the emergency room?”
“She’s not hot, not cold, not wet, not pulling at her ear, not throwing up, her nose isn’t stuffy, her stomach isn’t hard, her muscles aren’t rigid,” Dolly Sinsel recited the lack of non-symptoms that Gillian had relayed to her. “That baby isn’t sick, Gillian. Sounds to me like she’s just overexcited or overtired. Put her in her crib with a bottle of juice, close the bedroom door, and then you sit down and turn on some music or the TV.”
“You mean, just ignore her? Keep her in there alone and crying?” Gillian shivered, remembering how it felt to be small and scared and all alone. “Ashley has never cried much and never like this. She—”
“She is exerting her independence. Babies need to cry to exercise their lungs,” Dolly said calmly. “Now put Ashley in the crib and make yourself a nice cup of tea, honey. You two need to unwind away from each.”
Gillian attempted to follow the advice. After all, who knew kids better than Dolly Sinsel, who’d raised four children of her own and taken in hundreds of foster children down through the years? Gillian had lived with the Sinsels from the age of twelve until her graduation from high school and had never seen her foster parents fazed by anything. Or anyone Not even the most hardcore adolescent veterans of the foster care system.
Gillian still marveled at Mom and Dad Sinsel’s unshakable aplomb as they dealt again and again with the young fire-setters, the kid thieves and liars, the screamers and marauders who’d been placed under their roof by the State of Michigan. The Sinsels were impervious to upset and insult, and while Gillian was able to emulate their attitude in her career as a medical social worker, she couldn’t muster such calm in dealing with Ashley. When Ashley was upset, so was her mother; when Ashley was happy or excited or fearful, her mommy was, too.
“Grandma Dolly says you’d rather be alone,” Gillian told Ashley as she carried the howling baby into the small bedroom filled with toys and baby furniture and bright posters of cartoon figures on the wall.
She put Ashley into her crib with its cheery Winnie the Pooh sheets and handed her a bottle of apple juice. Shrieking her displeasure, Ashley pulled herself to her feet and threw the bottle out of the crib. Distressed, Gillian put it back in, then quickly left the room, closing the door behind her.
While Ashley’s roars of infantile fury echoed in her head, Gillian turned on her TV set. Nothing claimed her interest, not even the hurricane currently being tracked in the Caribbean by the Weather Channel. She decided to forego the suggested cup of tea. Her stomach was in knots and her throat felt too tight to swallow. The baby’s cries continued unabated, sounding less angry and more and more piteous.
Gillian looked bleakly at her watch. Only six and a half minutes had elasped but it felt like an eternity. Poor little Ashley, exiled to her crib. Gillian wondered if she felt unwanted, alone in the dark world without anyone who cared.
It was a horrible feeling that Gillian knew all too well. To imagine Ashley having to experience such despair was unbearable. She rose to her feet and fairly flew into the nursery. With all due respect to Dolly Sinsel, isolating the baby felt all wrong.
After all, it wasn’t as if Ashley had tried to burn down the house or stone a neighbor’s dog; she didn’t need a stint in solitary confinement as punishment. Ashley was cutting a tooth and she was uncomfortable. Why shouldn’t she cry?
Gillian arrived at the cribside just as Ashley succeeded in pulling the rubber nipple off the top of her bottle and turning it upside down, emptying the juice The baby was so shocked by her sudden soaking, she stopped crying and looked up at her mother with astonished blue eyes.
“Oh, Ashley, you’re all wet and so is the bed!” Gillian was dismayed.
Ashley was furious that she’d been doused. She began to howl again.
“It’s all right, sweetheart.” Gillian picked her up and cuddled her. “I’ll put you in nice dry jammies and then I’ll change the sheet.”
She sponged the sticky juice from the baby, then dried and dressed her in fresh, aqua cotton footed pajamas. And discovered that there were no more clean crib sheets. The other six were in the laundry basket waiting to be taken to the washer and dryer in the basement of the building.
“I’m sorry, Ash. I didn’t realize how low we were on crib sheets and we’ve been so busy after work, I haven’t gotten around to doing the laundry,” Gillian lamented aloud.
Ashley babbled a few syllables in response. Gillian was so relieved that the baby had stopped crying, she felt almost giddy. “We’ll go next door and ask Shelly or Heather if they’ll stay with you while I go downstairs to do a load of laundry now, okay? You like Shelly and Heather, they’re operating room nurses at the hospital, and they gave you some ice cream the other day, remember?”
She carried Ashley into the hall and walked to the apartment on their left, talking to her daughter all the while. Gillian knocked long and loud before she conceded that neither Shelly nor Heather was there.
Gillian sighed. She’d hoped to avoid having to tote Ashley and the laundry basket down to the basement laundry room but with no one to watch the baby, she had no other choice. She wasn’t about to leave Ashley alone in the apartment and she hadn’t met any other neighbors yet... Her eyes flicked to the apartment door across the hall from her own, Devlin Brennan’s door. Assistance from that quarter was not an option. She would never ask him to watch her baby, not even for a moment.
And then the door opened and Devlin stepped into the hall.
Gillian froze. It was as if her thoughts had conjured him up! She stood stock-still, clutching Ashley, and staring at him. He was wearing a faded Detroit Lions T-shirt and jeans, simple and common enough clothes but the way they showcased his male attributes—his muscular arms and broad chest, his long lean thighs and flat belly—evoked a reaction within Gillian that was neither simple nor common. His face was darkened by the shadow of a beard, reminding Gillian of how sexy he looked in the morning when he awakened, unshaven and aroused.
She scowled at the renegade memory. This was no time to recall anything about her three-month lapse of sanity that had characterized her affair with Devlin Brennan.
