Somebody's Baby

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“January.”

“What?”

“He was conceived in January, one year, eight months and two weeks ago.” She faced him, her mouth set in grim accusation. “Don’t tell me that doesn’t even ring a bell. Maybe you’ve just been with so many women that it’s all a blur.”

“Oh, it’s a blur all right, but not for the reasons you think.” He scratched at his cheek while his mind struggled to force all the pieces together. “Maybe you don’t recall this, but…”

Adam faced a choice. Speak the truth and risk having it sound like a plea for pity or at least leniency for his behavior or skim over it. He could stand here and own up to that bad behavior without any preface or attempt to put it in context.

His mother had died. He felt he had not only lost the only one who’d seen him truly as her own but that he had also lost his place in his family. When his suggestions to take the Carolina Crumble Pattie to a wider market had been ridiculed by his father and brothers, Adam felt he had lost his reason for staying in Mt. Knott as well. By the time he met Ophelia, a beautiful woman who shared his disdain for the small town, he had not been thinking about right and wrong.

He had been in pain. He needed to feel he wasn’t a lost cause, just a stray that nobody wanted. He felt worthless and figured he didn’t matter to anyone, not even God. It became easier to fall into sin, he had learned, when you take your eyes off the Lord and start looking at the mess you have made of your life and the mess life has made of the world around you.

He had long prided himself on being a man who told the truth. It was one of the things, he felt, which set him apart from his father.

While Conner Burdett was not a dishonest man, he had built his business on the belief that knowledge was power. And Conner protected his own power by controlling what knowledge he allowed others to have.

On the other hand, telling her about all the years of pain and loneliness that led up to those few wild nights that January would probably just sound like an excuse.

Adam didn’t like people who made excuses. Besides, he had no way of knowing if he could trust Josie with an emotional truth that could cut him to his core. She may yet prove herself the enemy in a bitter custody case. He decided to tell the truth, but not all of it. It twisted low in his gut that he would follow his father’s path but if she listened, really listened, she would hear the message beneath the words and have an inkling of what had fueled his angry rebellion.

“If you recall, I came into my inheritance in January.” I lost my mom. My only ally.

Her determined jawline eased a bit.

“I found myself with a totally new status.” Finally, officially, on my own. Alone.

Her gaze dipped downward.

“I didn’t handle it particularly well.” I’m not making any excuses.

She nodded, her brow furrowed. “I’m sorry about the loss of your mother.”

“Thanks.” He’d struck a chord, he supposed.

“She was a remarkable lady. A real force in the community. A good Christian who supported so many social causes and cared about people. She really put her faith in action.”

“More than you probably know.” He thought not only of how his mother had taken him in as a child and raised him as her very own, but also of the ways she devoted her own inherited fortune to help those in need. It tugged at Adam’s heart to realize that back then he’d been so fixated on striking back at his father and brothers that he had done nothing to honor his mother and the things she had taught him. That did not alter his plan for revenge, however.

He was a Christian. He just wasn’t that kind of Christian. He fought back a twinge of shame over having even thought that, much less allowed it to stand as his justification. “If it helps, I am not proud of what I did.”

“I’m not the one you owe an apology to.” Josie poked her chin up, fidgeted with the folds of the blanket that still concealed his son from him.

“An apology? I wasn’t aware I owed an apology to anyone.” It was what it was. He felt bad that it had gone so wrong. Felt some shame that his grief and resentment had uncovered his weaknesses instead of revealed his inner strength. But getting all touchy-feely about it now wouldn’t change the past or set things right today.

He had come to town with only two indisputable responsibilities, to claim his son and ruin his so-called family. Neither Josie nor Ophelia Redmond figured prominently in his designs. “Your sister was a willing partner in what happened between us. Don’t forget that she was the one who failed to notify me about the baby. It’s not as if I haven’t paid a price for my poor choices.”

“I don’t doubt that.” She gave him a look of sympathy that did not sink to the level of pity.

He hadn’t known anyone who had ever managed that with him and appreciated it in a way he could not for the world have articulated. His whole life, people had given with one hand and taken away with two. Encounters with even the most sincerely empathetic often left him undermined and exposed. He wondered if Josie would finally be the exception.

“However…”

“I should have known,” he muttered under his breath.

“Hmm?” she asked over the wriggling and almost inaudible fussing of the baby in her arm.

“Give with one hand, take with two,” was all he felt compelled to say.

“However…” She patted the blanket and adjusted the form beneath it, raising it higher against her own small frame. The legs kicked and a tiny hand flailed out to grab a strand of her hair. She ignored it and forged on. “Your choices have resulted in this small life. And whether you have suffered enough or who is to blame for how the two of us arrived in this situation no longer matters. When you are a parent, it’s not about you and your feelings anymore, it’s about what’s best for your child.”

“My child,” he echoed softly. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” She batted her eyes in a show of seeming disbelief, then leaned back to look under the blanket and the wriggling infant in her arms. “I don’t usually yell at strangers like that, but…”

“I’m not thanking you for yelling at me.” He chuckled at the very notion. He could go just about anywhere in this town and get yelled at, and by people a lot more experienced and colorful at it than Miss Josie Redmond.

“Then, I don’t—” She hook her head.

“When,” he explained as softly as the baby’s gentle stirring.

“What?”

“You said when you are a parent. Not if. Your intention with that little speech was to put me in my place. And with that small distinction, you did.” He reached out and brushed the blanket from atop the child’s head.

The baby squirmed and made a sound that went something like “ya-ya-ya,” then laughed.

Neither music nor birds nor even the grandest of majestic choirs could ever sound as sweet as the sound of his baby laughing.

“Anyway,” he explained, knowing he’d have to appease Josie in some way before she’d even think of allowing him to hold his son, “I admit to my part, my shortcomings in all of this. I did spend time with your sister, obviously, and—”

“And it didn’t mean a thing to you.”

He lowered his head and his tone and took one step toward the woman holding his son. “You will never understand what it meant to me, lady.”

She cupped the baby’s head and took a step back from him. “Then why didn’t you call her? Why didn’t you try to find out what happened to her?”

“Because…” Again a choice loomed before him. Tell the whole truth and risk losing some of his power in the situation or say just enough to get what he wanted now. He looked long and deep into Josie’s defiant yet anxious eyes and knew he only had one real course of action. The truth. “Because I was only thinking of myself. I acted like a wounded dog, snarling and mean and willing to do anything to protect myself. I spent a night with your sister, drunk most of the time but aware of what I was doing, and then I walked away and never looked back. Because that’s what suited me.”

There he’d said it. He’d given her plenty of ammunition to take a potshot at him and do some emotional damage. He did not deserve this child. But, as he hoped both his words and tone made quite clear, he would do whatever it took to be a part of young Nathan’s life. Because it suited him.

“Oh.” Clearly she did not know what to make of that. But she did not seem even remotely willing to use his confession against him. “Are you saying that if you had known sooner, you’d have returned sooner?”

“No.” Again he spit the hard truth out. He had worked diligently this past year and a half to put himself in a position to do the most damage to…or good for, depending on one’s vantage point, the Carolina Crumble Pattie Factory. If he had learned about his son sooner, he would have come for the child, but not until the time was right. “No, I can’t say I’d have come back sooner. But I can say I am here now and that’s what we have to deal with.”

They stood in silence for a long, anxious moment.

Adam could practically see the thought process playing out over Josie’s features. He wanted to say something to tip her confidence in his favor, but in the end he could only say straight-out what was on his mind. “You asked me earlier tonight not to take your son away, Josie, and I agreed. I won’t. I can’t do that to him—or to you.”

He focused on her, standing in the shaft of light from the open door.

She seemed so small and alone in the otherwise dark room, that he felt drawn to her and the child cradled against her body.

He moved in, so near that he could see the fearful questioning in her eyes. He knew how it felt to wonder if anyone was on your side. To pray not to lose the person you loved most in the world and wonder how you would survive if the worst came to pass. He had prayed that prayer the night his mom died. But he had not come to destroy this little family. He had it within his power to prevent his son from losing the only mother he had ever known. He would not fail little Nathan in that regard.

Because, even though he had only known about him for a short while and had yet to even properly see him, Adam already loved the little guy. He supposed that among all his many faults and flaws, this redeemed him just a little. That in this feeling he knew a small taste of the greatest love of all, the love of God.

He placed one hand upon his baby’s head and one protectively on Josie’s tense shoulder. “Since you know I’m not going to take the boy, Josie. Why don’t you just let me…hold him?”

She wet her lips. Hesitated.

“Please.”

In one fluid movement Josie swept her hand beneath the child legs and then carefully laid him in his father’s arms.

His son. Adam caught his breath. For all his good intentions and promises, holding his child for the very first time made him wonder if he’d spoken too soon. He did not want to tear this baby from the only mother it had ever known, but this was his son. His flesh and blood. And Adam would not settle for weekends and every other Christmas, just experiencing bits and pieces of his childhood.

He felt Josie tense at his side, but he didn’t focus on her discomfort. Adam had always made his own rules in life—or figured a way around the ones he didn’t like. That’s exactly what he was going to do now.

He gazed into the baby’s bright blue eyes and found just enough voice to whisper, “Hello, son. Daddy’s here now. Daddy’s here—and nothing is going to come between us ever again.”

Chapter Four

“Nothing’s going to come between us again.”

Adam’s words to Nathan still rang in Josie’s ears twelve hours later as she rushed about the diner trying to get ready for the morning coffee crowd.

Yes, crowd.

Large cities and fancy coffee shops and cafés with big noisy machines were not the only places that people liked to gather to chat on their way to work in the mornings. There had always been the usual fellows, the retirees who liked to do a little of what locals lovingly called, “pickin’ and grinnin’, laughin’ and scratchin’.’’ They met every day but Sunday, of course, to solve the problems of the world, tell jokes and stories they had all heard a hundred times, and reward their long-suffering wives with a little bit of “me” time.

Then there were the commuters. Ever since the layoffs had started at the Crumble, more and more folks began their drives to workplaces in other nearby towns with what Josie had listed on tent cards on the tabletops as “Cup O’Joe To Go.” It wasn’t the kind of thing you could get at those fancy places. No grande or venti size disposable cups with insulated wrappers to keep the drinker from burning his or her hands or fancy tops that looked like Nathan’s sippy cup. No, this was a bank of coffeepots, sweetener options and creamers where people walked in, filled up the coffee conveyance brought from home, dropped a dollar or two in an old pickle jar and headed off to face the day.

Often stopping to share a word of encouragement with one another or to check the chalkboard for messages or new prayer requests. Always with a sense of community that one couldn’t find anywhere else.

This was, to Josie, the essence of why she lived in Mt. Knott. It was also one of the reasons she had brought Nathan to work with her this morning. She felt safe here and felt her son would be safe here, as well.

Not that she thought Adam would do any harm to Nathan or even break his word about taking the child but…

But in her whole life she could not recall ever having felt so vulnerable.

A product, she suspected, of more than just Adam’s introduction into Nathan’s life. This emotion was also a byproduct of her realization that the man would be a presence in her life for a long time to come, as well.

She went up on tiptoe to peer over the cash register at the baby playing quietly in the bright blue portable playpen in the corner of the café.

She had promised herself she wouldn’t make a habit of bringing Nathan to work. Maybe when he was older, she had thought, she would have him come by after school. He could do his homework in one of the booths and she would serve him a snack and whatever advice she could spare until he got into calculus or something else she knew nothing about. But until then she had determined she would have him at work as little as possible.

Josie didn’t need to bring him here, really. She had been blessed with a network of moms and grandmothers around town who had taken turns watching her son since Ophelia left him in her care. The original plan was to depend on this patchwork safety net just until the newborn was old enough for day care. Well, that had been the plan, but then when the jobs began to dry up, so had the town’s only day-care center.

She wondered if Adam Burdett would see that as unacceptable and use it as a wedge to take Nathan from her. He had promised he wouldn’t do that, but then, what did she really know about him?

“Adam Burdett?” The first person she had asked, not giving the particulars behind her sudden interest in the man, had pondered it a moment. “Oh, Stray Dawg! Yeah. Yeah, I know which one he was, uh, is. The one who cashed out. Cut and run.”

“Heard he went through that cash in nothing flat.” The woman at the cash register took her change from Josie and, as she dropped the quarters and nickels into her coin purse, she elaborated, “Gambling.” Clink. “Drinking.” Clink. “Women.” Clink. Clink.

“Gambling?” Josie shoved the cash drawer shut. “Drinking?”

“And women!” Warren and Jed confirmed in unison as they broke off from the morning gathering of curmudgeons to take their usual seats at the counter.

Of course Adam had women. A wealthy, handsome man like that probably had all kinds of girlfriends. She blushed at her own lack of sophistication and what many people would tsk-tsk as simple, out-of-date values. To hide her chagrin, she ducked back into the kitchen to check on the morning’s first offering of pies still cooling on the racks beside the oven. Girlfriends? She doubted very much that a man like that thought of his conquests as girlfriends.

The aroma of apple and cinnamon and other spices filled the air. The tart sweetness of cherries bubbling in deep-red juices stung her nose. All buffered by the homey smell of flaky crust and Josie’s specialty topping.

She went to the back door and cracked it open a tiny bit, to allow some fresh air into the hot, almost steamy kitchen. She paused only a moment, lifting her ponytail and turning her head to cool the back of her neck before hurrying back to her tasks, and to talk of Adam. She peered through the door and shut out the noise and views of the room around her.

“Ended up with a factory job, they say.” A man took a wad of bills from his wallet, showed them to some fellow coffee-bar patrons as if to say “this one’s on me” then stuffed them into the pickle jar. “Ironic, huh?”

“Reap what you sow.” One of his cohorts raised his mug in grateful salute for the freebie. “Bible says.”

Josie glanced around for one of the silicon gloves she used to handle hot pie plates and the like. When she didn’t find it immediately, she grabbed the nearest dish towel and used it to cover her hand as she picked up one of the cherry pies. She didn’t want to miss a word of the conversation in the dining room.

“I spotted that Adam at a hotel in Raleigh a year ago. Back when my husband went to that International Snack Cake Expo deal, remember?” spoke up Elvie Maloney, who had just started coming in after she went back to work when her husband lost his middle-management job at the Crumble. “Kept to the outskirts of the show. Didn’t interact with the old gang, not at all.”

“Well, can you blame him?” Micah Applebee scoffed. Micah had worked out at the Crumble for even longer than Elvie’s husband. “After the mean-spirited way the Burdetts treated him?”

“The way they treated him was to make him a millionaire,” Elvie shot back.

“Wish they’d up and treat me like that. I wouldn’t even care if it was mean-spirited,” Warren joked.

“You say that now but you’d come in here blubbering like a baby,” Jed teased.

“Yeah, and using hundred-dollar bills to dry my tears,” Warren said right back. They both laughed.

“Well, that Stray Dawg Burdett boy might have done better using money for hankies. It might have got it soggy but at least he’d have some of it left.” Elvie whirled her spoon through her coffee.

“How do you know he doesn’t?” Jed asked.

Elvie tapped the spoon on the edge of her cup, making everybody look her way. “Because he was at that conference working for somebody else. If I had millions, the last thing I’d want to do is work in a snack-cake factory all week and go to conferences on snack cakes on the weekend. Real suspicious if you ask me.”