Substitute Daddy

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Brett walked to a pile of tools and pulled a book from under them. He handed her the thick how-to volume. “There’s very little we can’t learn from books.”

Melissa glanced down at the hardback and thought of all the life lessons she and Leigh had learned from their parents and later Aunt Dora and Uncle Ed. Thinking of their conversation about life and happiness she thought Brett had a lot to learn and she didn’t see him learning those lessons from books. But it wasn’t her place to tell him so.

Casting about for something to fill the silence, she glanced toward a silver Range Rover he’d parked in the drive. “You traded in your sports car?”

He looked at her as if she’d lost her mind—a mixture of horror and disbelief. “Give up my Beemer? No way. I only rented that for the weekend because I needed to haul the wood.”

Melissa couldn’t help it. She laughed. Uncle Ed’s pickup was still rusting away in the barn over yonder and Izaak still used his father’s old wagon to haul wood. Only a Costain and people of their ilk would rent a Range Rover to haul lumber.

“You going to let me in on the joke?” he asked.

Melissa shook her head. It wasn’t her job to teach him about the real world even if the hair that fell across his forehead lent him an air of innocence rivaling even the most naive babe in the woods. “I doubt you’d understand,” she told him.

“Try me,” he dared her, his beard-shadowed chin raised in a challenge. At least this way he didn’t looked like a guileless ten-year-old.

What is wrong with your thinking, woman? This is a mover and shaker. A powerful international attorney. He works for heads of multinational, billion-dollar companies. He does not have a slingshot in his back pocket or posies hidden behind his back!

Melissa forced her thoughts to the subject at hand. “How many Beemers and Range Rovers have you seen on these back roads? And how many plain old pickup trucks have you seen?” she challenged.

“Rovers are sturdy,” he argued.

The man was completely dense! “At fifty or sixty thousand dollars a pop, they’d better be.”

He squinted in the glare of the late-afternoon sunlight and looked up at her, scrubbing back his dripping hair. She could almost see him struggling to understand her point. “Come on. Are you trying to say if I show up with a high-end car when the baby is old enough to understand the difference between a BMW and Chevy it could do some sort of damage to his psyche?”

She sighed. “No, I’m trying to say you don’t have a clue how the other ninety percent live. And it’s that attitude that could cause a problem for me later. Do you think Gary would ever have spent his hard-earned money on that kind of luxury?”

Brett glanced at the Rover then back at her and smiled. “Next time I’ll rent a Chevy but I’m not selling my Beemer.”

Melissa nodded, staggered by the smile and a sudden realization. When Brett didn’t try to be charming his charm was all the more dangerous. She’d never expected that. The man was positively lethal. All little-boy inquisitive one minute and sexy as all get-out the next.

How was she supposed to talk to him and guard her heart? There had to be some safe subject for them! She looked down at the work he’d done. “It looks nice. Thank you. I admit every once in a while the boards would moan and I’d begin to wonder if they were going to hold my weight. You got a lot done. I’d like to pay for the wood.”

Brett shook his head and his hair fell across his forehead again. “Consider it a baby gift. I’ve actually enjoyed the physical work. I don’t get a lot of time in the fresh air.”

After all his work, Melissa knew she couldn’t send him off without at least feeding him. Aunt Dora would haunt her sleep more than Brett already did if she even tried it. In the interest of a good night’s rest, she asked, “Would you like to stay for dinner?”

“That’d be great.” He smiled and for the second time in less than a minute there was no hidden agenda lurking in his eyes. And for the second time in as many minutes Melissa had to hold on to her heart and soul for dear life.

Before today he’d always been angling for something. A concession. Sex. Something. But when he smiled for real, it lit his pale-gray eyes and told of a greater depth to him than she’d thought possible. Maybe he was more like Gary than she’d thought.

“You’re welcome to use the shower,” she told him, trying not to attach too much meaning to what she thought she saw. His fixing her porch might still have a hidden agenda. Mightn’t it?

“A shower sounds terrific just about now,” Brett said. “I have a change of clothes in the Rover. I didn’t stop at the motel this morning. I drove straight to the lumberyard when I got down here. I wanted to get an early start since there was so much to do. Sorry I woke you.”

Melissa banged around the kitchen minutes later, thinking he hadn’t looked the least bit sorry when he’d been ogling her at practically dawn. She threw a slap-dash dinner together and half an hour later Brett joined her in the kitchen. As she finished putting the meal on the table, Melissa ordered her pounding heart to behave. It didn’t listen.

“This looks wonderful,” he said, sitting where she indicated.

So do you, Melissa thought before taking one last glance at the table. There was leftover roast beef, oven-browned potatoes, a colorful bowl of mixed vegetables and Margaret Abramson’s home-baked bread and fresh-churned butter. Most of it was courtesy of his little shopping excursion, but still, she somehow doubted he ever ate this way at the gourmet restaurants he probably frequented.

Deciding she didn’t care if he felt the dinner lacked sophistication, she sat across from him and tried not to stare. He was so handsome and self-assured. And he was once again the picture of his aristocratic upbringing in designer clothes and Italian shoes.

So why couldn’t her more-than-adequate brain manage to make her unruly heart behave? “I never thanked you for the food you left,” she said, knowing nothing separated them so much as the disparity of the classes they belonged to.

“No thanks necessary,” he said.

His refusal of her gratitude made him seem superior and arrogant. She hated that he thought he was better than her. If only she hadn’t offered him a simple dinner in her simple kitchen.

“Brett, I’m really not as bad off financially as you seem to think. I’d been putting money aside for some time to convert the barn and I have a lot of inventory lined up for the shop already. In fact, it’s all around us. I had to put my plans for the shop on hold when Uncle Ed started failing. When he died and Leigh and Gary came down for the funeral, they asked me about the baby. The timing couldn’t have been better since I’d pretty much suspended my business so I could take care of Uncle Ed in those final months.”

“That’s why he left the farm to you alone, isn’t it? Because you gave up everything you’d built for him. I’d wondered about that. Do you ever stop giving? The timing when Leigh and Gary asked you about the baby might have been good, but it must’ve been a difficult decision. You were going to be giving away your first-born child. They asked too much.”

Melissa felt her cheeks heat. “Leigh would have done the same for me. I know she would. And I’m not pretending it would have been easy to watch them raising her but—”

“Her?” Brett arched one dark raven’s wing of an eyebrow. “Is that a guess? Wishful thinking?”

Still excited over the ultrasound picture that had been done yesterday, Melissa jumped up. She was eager to change the subject and even more anxious to share the first picture of her child, even if it was only a shadowy black-and-white image that a technician had needed to explain.

She handed Brett the picture. “They do these routinely now. And I got lucky. At sixteen weeks they can tell the sex if the baby’s in the right position and she was. That’s my baby girl.” Melissa’s voice broke and tears she tried to blink back welled up in her eyes.

Leigh had so wanted a little girl.

Not wanting to cry in front of Brett, Melissa quickly excused herself and fled the room. On the way to her grandparents’ bath just outside the downstairs bedroom, she caught sight of Leigh staring back at her from the hall mirror and froze in place. The incredible loss of her twin slammed into her once again with a two-ton force.

It was a bittersweet pain that would have taken her to her knees were she not held in place by the sight before her. Leigh but not Leigh. Gone but never farther away than a mirror. Leigh would never age and yet she would. Her own reflection would forever remind Melissa of the incredible bond she and Leigh had shared and the void her loss left.

Melissa didn’t know how long she stood there with her fingertips touching the flat cold face on the other side of the glass. She and that other part of her cried silently for both of them. The one lost and the one left behind. Only half of who she was but two people as well.

Was she forever doomed to lose those she loved and relied upon?

Chapter Five

Brett wished Melissa would come back so she could explain what he was supposed to be seeing in the ultrasound print. He stared down at the confusing black-and-white photo trying to see a tiny human form. He felt ignorant and out of touch, sure there was some well-known trick to deciphering the picture.

When several minutes had gone by and Melissa didn’t return, he began wondering where she’d gone so suddenly. And why. She’d looked a little upset, he acknowledged. Worried, but feeling like an intruder, Brett cautiously followed and found her in a darkened hall staring at herself in a mirror and crying silent tears. He stepped behind her, very much aware that she didn’t realize he was there.

“Melissa? Hey, Melissa,” he whispered.

Her eyes shifted a bit and she focused on his reflection. “It’s like looking at a pastel version of her, isn’t it?” she asked, tears choking her voice. “She was so alive and vivid. How can she be gone?” Her eyes slid back to her image again. “And yet never gone. Always staring back at me, taunting me because it isn’t her I see.

“She wanted a girl,” Melissa whispered, her voice as broken as her heart apparently was. Her lower lip quivered and her face started to crumple. “She wanted that so badly. And now—Oh, God. Leigh!”

To Brett there was nothing scarier in the world than a crying woman, except maybe a crying baby. He had no clue what to do. What was he even doing here? He desperately wanted to run from the intimacy of Melissa’s tears and grief. But then he glanced down at the picture he still held.

This scrap of humanity he couldn’t even correctly discern had been his brother’s fondest wish, as well as Leigh’s. Gary had wanted a daughter to cuddle and protect and love just the way he did her mother. And now he would never get to hold her, hear her first cry or later her childish laughter.

“Think of how happy you made the last two weeks of their lives,” Brett told her, then found himself biting his lip and fighting tears as well.

He hadn’t allowed himself to cry for Gary, not even once. He didn’t know why for sure. Maybe because there was no one in his life to hold him while he did. Or maybe because he’d been afraid that if he gave in and let himself cry, he’d never stop. Suddenly sharing this crushing grief with the only person in the world who actually shared it and fully understood it was all that mattered to him.

He turned her away from the mirror and into his arms, holding her close. Brett didn’t know how long they stood that way just clutching each other and crying silently. But after a while she wrapped her arms around his waist and something shifted in him.

The feel of her in his arms suddenly registered. He felt as if he’d taken a one-hundred-fifty-volt charge to his heart. And he felt like a heel for noticing how perfectly she fitted against him. But, dammit, he wasn’t made of stone and had never claimed to be a saint. When he’d had her in his arms that night they’d met, her body had promised ecstasy. She was an unfulfilled promise that he’d never quite gotten out of his system.

Brett swallowed. This was dangerous. She wasn’t the kind of woman he got involved with. Ever. And this woman above all others had to stay off-limits.

“Come on,” he whispered against her hair. “Let’s go sit on that nice safe porch I almost finished for you today.” In the shelter of his arms he guided her the few feet down the hall to the dimly lit living room.

Melissa looked up then and the tears in her eyes seemed to be magnifying their clear blue-green color and gave them all the sparkle of precious gems. Her gaze caught his and one of them turned toward the other. He didn’t know which one. It didn’t seem to matter once their lips met in a charged union he’d always sworn could not have felt the way it had. But once again it did.

Brett cupped her face, his fingers threading in her soft hair, and deepened the kiss. He tasted her tears and probably his. Then Melissa moaned in the back of her throat and Brett broke the kiss, afraid it was a protest—terrified it wasn’t.

“We have to stop this. Forget it too. You were right earlier when you pointed out that we come from different worlds.” He took her hand and put the ultrasound photo into it, but not before the image before him exploded to life in his mind. Fighting to maintain his resolve, he continued, “But our worlds have crossed into each other’s because of her and there’s no way to change that.”

Her expression changed from dreamy to one he’d have to analyze later. Then she raised her chin and he knew she meant to challenge him. “You could just go back to your world and leave me alone to raise her in mine.”

He lifted the hand holding the photo and kissed her fingers, shaking his head. “I’ll be back,” he said, and melted back into the deeply shadowed hall.

His whispered promise barely stirred the air.

As he drove north, Brett came to the conclusion that he’d never get the picture of Melissa’s face when he’d turned away from her out of his head. The hurt and the fear he’d seen written on her lovely features had nearly brought him to his knees.