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It took one extra baby rotation before the seat was secure, but after Abby’s more practiced hands took over the chore, Wyatt was in the seat with a pacifier and she was heading back across the parking lot toward her parents.
Jack frowned as he sat in his car and watched her go. Her purposeful walk belied the reluctance she must have felt, and he knew she had to be upset.
He wished he could think of a better way. He glanced down at Wyatt, whose eyelids were droopy by now, and back out the window at Abby.
Her stride hadn’t faltered, but somehow, in a morning of mixed-up feelings, her walk made him smile. It wasn’t her speed or the lack of artificial sway, so much as the perfection of well-used legs and a sweet round bottom that couldn’t help but wiggle. That no-nonsense walk was as entrancing as any he’d seen.
That walk, and his reaction to seeing it, were the only right things about the morning. He kept grinning as he started his car. Quite unintentionally, Abby had graced him with a moment of pure delight.
“ABBY? IT’S ME,” Jack said, pleased that she had answered her phone. During the last call she had definitely sounded riled. He’d been afraid she would take the phone off the hook, and he needed her advice.
“Yes, Jack. What do you need?”
“I finally got this formula mixed and heated, and then the phone rang and I didn’t get Wyatt fed for thirty minutes. Do I have to start over completely?”
“Hang on,” she said with a long sigh. She spoke to someone in the background. The string of babbling that followed must be Rosie, playing. In his five hours with Wyatt, Jack had heard nothing but wailing.
“He’s been waiting for his bottle for thirty minutes?” Abby asked abruptly. She sounded as if she was right there beside him. He could picture her with her hands on her hips and that preachy look on her face. “What’s he doing?”
“Lying on the floor, sucking on a pacifier.”
“For thirty minutes? What did you do with the bottle?”
She made a tsk-ing sound, which was totally unnecessary.
There was no possible way for Jack to feel any more inept than he already did.
“It’s on the counter, in the kitchenette.”
“For Pete’s sake, feed the kid. Why didn’t you do it while you were talking on the phone?”
“Sometimes I need to get on my laptop to figure out how to solve a client’s problem. I needed my hands free.”
“Jack, wake up. You’re a parent now,” she said, her tone implying exactly how dim she thought he was.
“You may have to call a client back now and then.”
After hanging up, Jack retrieved the bottle from the kitchen and settled down with Wyatt on the hotel sofa. He popped the pacifier out of the baby’s mouth and watched in horror as the tiny back stiffened and the tinier mouth opened wide to shriek.
Frantically, he stuck the bottle in. And relaxed. Once that first taste of formula hit Wyatt’s tongue, he quieted quickly. “That’s my boy,” Jack said, feeling as if he’d conquered a major obstacle.
He was going to get this baby business down and get back to Kansas City. Back to his life. Things would go much better there—he’d have his speakerphone, his main computer and his girlfriends to ask for advice. They might not know as much as Abby, but they’d never make him feel unfit, either.
Under the circumstances, Abby’s snappy attitude made sense, but he was certainly not dim. He loved a challenge. He could make this work.
Wasn’t he the same guy who’d managed to finish high school a full year early? In spite of having little help from a mother who was busy running through boyfriends.
Jack had to keep Brian occupied and fed on many nights, and he’d still been able to attend college, keep a string of girlfriends happy and start his own business. He could learn to care for a person too young to walk or talk.
Besides, for all practical purposes he’d already raised a boy. Although Brian had been older by the time he had taken over the chore, Jack knew that if he could just persevere until Wyatt was about school age, the job would be old hat.
The most important thing, he thought, was a desire to do the job well. Motivation was half the battle with anything.
He could always deal with the guilt later.
But a few minutes after Wyatt finished the bottle, he started fussing again. Jack changed a diaper that was only slightly wet, but the baby kept screaming. Jack couldn’t figure out why. He’d have to call Abby again.
“Hullo?”
“Abby, he’s been crying for fifteen minutes straight,” he hollered above the noise.
“Did you feed him?”
“Yes,” he said in horror, thinking there must have been something terribly wrong with the formula. “He drank the whole bottle.”
“Did you burp him?”
“Oh…uh, no. I didn’t. Hang on, I’m picking him up. Talk me through it,” he implored. “Talk loud.”
He held Wyatt out in front of him, hoping against hope the child simply needed burping. The baby howled as if a pin was sticking in his belly, but these diapers had Velcro. That formula must have been spoiled.
Next time, his client would wait.
Abby described the burping position she found most effective, and several others to try if that one didn’t work. Within a few minutes, the tiny boy had produced three burps that could vie for a record with Jack’s beer guzzling buddies. All of the sudden, Wyatt was gurgling and waving his fists in the air contentedly.
Once again Jack thanked Abby for her help and hung up.
After that, the Kimball men had a fairly decent evening. Jack found a soft blue blanket in the diaper bag and spread it on the floor. He let the baby kick around on that while he ate a room service dinner.
Later, they took in the end of a baseball game together. Wyatt hadn’t actually developed a fondness for sports yet, but if Jack sat on the floor beside him and spoke animatedly about the wisdom or folly of each play, the baby seemed happy to respond to the conversation.
When Wyatt started sobbing again after the game, Jack fed him—brilliantly, this time. He had the baby fed and burped within a half hour, without a single snag. Then he changed a dirty diaper, congratulating himself on that, too. It had been his first poopy diaper, and he managed it without needing a bit of advice.
He called Abby only one more time that night.
“Hullo, Jack. What is it?” she asked tiredly, after just one ring.
“How’d you know it was me?”
“Are you kidding? You’ve called at least once every hour for the past six. I was wondering where you’d gone.”
“Oh.”
“Well, what is it?”
Abby had worked her magic again: he felt foolish. He considered hanging up, but he still needed to know the answer to his question. “How do I take a shower?”
She giggled. “Now you’re kidding, right?”
“No, I’m not,” he said. “What do I do with Wyatt?”
“It’s eleven o’clock. He’s not asleep yet?”
“No.”
After another exaggerated sigh, she said, “Is there a separate place in your hotel room for him to sleep?”
“Yes, we’re in a suite.”
“Go pull a mattress off the bed and put Wyatt in the middle of it on his back. Stack pillows on every side. Then—and this is the most important part—leave the room.”
It sounded too easy. “Won’t he cry?”
“For a while, but if he’s quiet within a few minutes, you’ve made it,” she said in a whisper-soft voice that sounded sweet for the first time today. “Then you can go take a shower.”
“Good,” he said, grateful for her kindness. He’d been through enough already.
“And Jack?”
“Yes?”
“I’m going to bed. Babies wake up at night. You check their diaper, see if they’re hungry. You can do that. Don’t call me again unless it’s an emergency.”
SEVEN HOURS LATER, Jack stirred from a light snooze when Wyatt starting moving around. The arm of the hotel room sofa was rock hard, making deep sleep out of the question. But Wyatt had been quiet and comfortable, belly down against his uncle’s chest, with a blanket tucked snugly around him.
Jack had tried Abby’s suggestion. He had tried hard. But it had been impossible to listen to Wyatt shriek for longer than a minute or two. For all he knew, the child had fallen off the mattress and rolled across the floor. Or maybe the little guy missed his family. Jack couldn’t discount that possibility.
Besides, he had the other hotel guests to consider.
So he’d slept on the sofa with Wyatt nestled on his chest. The arrangement had worked wonders for the baby.
Jack himself hadn’t slept more than an hour or two.
All those wakeful hours had afforded him plenty of thinking time, and he’d started to come to some conclusions. For one thing, taking care of an infant was a laborious chore— Wyatt seemed to need constant attention.
Where had Jack gotten the impression that babies slept most of the time? So far, Wyatt had cried more than he’d slept. Or so it seemed.
If he took the baby back to Kansas City, he could try working from home so he could tend to Wyatt. He imagined a day broken into scattered segments of trying to feed, change and pacify a baby, while his clients cooled their heels on the other end of the phone line. And Jack had no idea what he’d do when he had to go on a business trip.
In any case, his company would probably fail.
If he hired round-the-clock care, he could spend time with his nephew whenever he wasn’t working. Then he’d have a definite hand in the boy’s upbringing.
Of course, Jack would have to slow down his social life to a snail’s pace. The ladies would have to visit him at home, or see him a lot less often.
But when it came right down to it, he didn’t have many options. His working hours were unpredictable, and he didn’t have a kindly old aunt nearby to help when he needed it.
Although there were three women he dated regularly, none seemed as if they would want to take on the chore.
He knew for certain that Paula, the woman he’d known the longest, would revolt at being asked to help with an infant.
She might close her eyes to his playboy ways, but she wouldn’t tolerate a child. She often said that having children was what other women did when they didn’t have the imagination to create an exciting life for themselves.
There was something else that was bothering him, too, and it was the most important aspect of his dilemma. The twins were all that was left of the family Brian had loved. Jack shouldn’t tear them apart, especially not after they’d just lost their parents. They deserved to grow up knowing one another. At the very least, they deserved to spend time together as siblings. He shouldn’t take that away from them.
But he couldn’t just give the boy up, either. That would be letting himself down, as well as Brian.
Jack needed to talk to Abby.
ONE OF THE BABIES was crying.
Abby woke up, stumbled off the couch and headed for the bedroom to see which one needed her. By the time she’d crossed the threshold, she remembered. Jack had taken Wyatt.
It had required all the self-control she could muster to help that man through his troubles yesterday, when all she’d wanted was to go over there and bring Wyatt home.
Lifting Rosie off the mattress, she hummed softly. The baby began to quiet immediately, but Abby knew she was probably hungry. It was six o’clock, about the time the babies usually woke up.
Trudging into the kitchen to pull a bottle from the refrigerator, Abby warmed it, then wandered back to her rocker with both baby and bottle. She settled in for a while, watching Rosie drink.
Yesterday’s events kept replaying in her head like a nightmare. Jack had really taken Wyatt. And then he had called her all day long, reminding her constantly that his knowledge of babies could fit on the wing of an aphid.
She wondered how Wyatt had slept last night, or whether he had slept at all. A brutal stab of longing pierced through her heart, starting her tears falling again.
She let them flow, reassuring Rosie that crying was healthy and healing. The sweet girl looked at Abby as if she understood the pain, seeming oddly wise—until she reached up with chubby fingers and clenched Abby’s nose.
Abby’s responding chuckle caused Rosie to smile back and kick her feet in happiness. And for all her innocence, she provided a wealth of comfort.
After Rosie had been fed, burped, bathed and dressed, Abby let her play on the floor with a bowl of plastic fish while she gathered some things in a diaper bag.
Yesterday had proved that she couldn’t wait for serendipity to solve her problems. Jack had no business trying to fit a sweet little boy into his self-absorbed lifestyle. Paige wouldn’t have wanted that, no matter what the will said, and now it was up to Abby to make sure it didn’t happen. Somehow.
She wanted nothing more than to raise both twins together, on the farm in the country. After all, that was a modified version of her lifelong dream.
Ever since she was a young girl, a country life was what she had envisioned for herself. She’d wanted to marry some dark-haired, faceless man, raise a yardful of kids and animals, and grow flowers.
Many of the childhood games of “let’s pretend” she had played with her sister had revolved around that theme.
After her divorce, Abby realized her fairy tale would never include the dark-haired man. She’d made a foolish choice once, and she didn’t trust herself to try again. But she’d never forgotten the rest of the fantasy.
Her sister had been more successful in starting down all the right paths, but she was gone now. It was only fitting that Abby should carry on pursuing their shared hopes.
If only she could convince Jack to give up Wyatt.
A few minutes later, she drove down the long dirt lane to the eighty-year-old-house she’d loved most of her life. Jack’s silver two-seater sports car was parked haphazardly in the drive, with his familiar blue cap resting on its hood. He’d beaten her here.
She parked behind him and hopped out to pull Rosie from the back seat. A whistle sounded, and she whirled around to find Jack watching from beside a massive white column of the wraparound wooden porch.
His hair was as unruly as ever, and he looked as if he hadn’t shaved today. The dark stubble turned his eyes impossibly blue, and a loden-green sport shirt showed off his wide chest. He looked handsome in a homey sort of way. In fact, his relaxed approach to grooming only sparked her interest more.
