The Baby Bargain

“I see…”

“I hope to God you do.” Rafe shrugged, setting aside any personal connection to the picture he’d just painted. “So, a wise man learns from his mistakes. And if he loves his daughter, he damn sure stops her from making the same mistakes.”

Do we ever get to shield the ones we love from their mistakes? She’d tried to stop Peter from crossing that south-facing slope, nervously citing what she’d read about alpine snow conditions, but he’d teased her about learning cross-country skiing from a book and had pushed on. They’d both been cold and tired at the end of the day, eager to reach their lodge…Wouldn’t have needed to cross that hill at all if I hadn’t read the map wrong, taken us down the wrong fork in the trail. She hadn’t even been able to shield Peter from her mistakes, much less his own.

“Hey.” A warm, rough hand cupped her cheek. “Are you okay?”

“I…” She blinked back the tears, took a step backward. Slipped a hand down to Petra’s bottom. “Oops!” She managed a trembly smile. “Flood tide. If you’d excuse us a minute?”

SHE TOOK CLOSER TO TWENTY, stopping to wash her face after she’d put Petra down in her crib. What’s gotten into you? she scolded the damp face with its shadowy eyes, which gazed back at her from her mirror. After months of gray, steely calm, suddenly she felt raw and ragged, her emotions swinging wildly from elation to despair. Like a compass needle following a prowling magnet.

Not enough sleep, she answered herself, heading downstairs. Forgot lunch. She pushed through the dining room door—and stopped short. Rafe Montana in my kitchen.

Peeking under the towel that covered a bowl of her rising dough. He whipped around, as guilty as a boy caught scooping a fingerful of icing off a cake. “You were so long, I wondered if something was wrong.”

I’m fine. Dana didn’t want to acknowledge his concern. “She took a while falling back to sleep.”

He grimaced. “At least she sleeps. Zoe worked a double shift from the word go. Started climbing out of her crib at nine months. I’d wake up at 3:00 a.m. and she’d be bumping around the trailer like a raccoon on the hunt, turning out cupboards. Pulled the phone down on her head one night—Lord, what a racket.”

“A handful.” She could imagine him at nineteen, working a man’s job all day, still needing the sleep of a boy at night. It must have been desperately hard for you and Pilar, both. But watching his face, she could see his memories of Zoe’s baby years were rueful, not grudging.

His expression hardened. “A handful still. Which brings me back to my problem…”

“Yes?” But problems or not, she had an evening meal to prepare. She dusted flour over her marble pastry slab and turned out the first ball of risen dough. Dug the heel of her right hand into its spongy softness, folded its far edge back toward the center, turned the dough, then shoved again, settling into her rhythm—knead, fold, rotate a quarter turn. Knead again…

Rafe drifted closer and stared down at her hands. “You’ve got to help me, Dana.”

An order, not a request, she noted wryly. Knead, fold, turn, knead…She sprinkled more flour on the marble. “Help you how?”

“Zoe got her brains from Pilar, but she got her stubbornness from me.” He gripped the edge of the table and leaned closer. “I’m not getting through to her, what a disaster this baby would be. I thought maybe a woman…somebody who’s gone through it recently and who’s going it alone…”

She looked up at him with something like hatred. “You’d use me—me and my baby—as an object lesson? How handy that my husband died. It makes us seem more pathetic!”

He jerked upright. “I didn’t mean it like—”

“Oh, I’m sure you didn’t think at all.” She brushed the hair away from her eyes with the back of her hand.

“I didn’t think of it like that, dammit. You’re anything but pathetic.” His scowl softened. The corner of his mouth slowly tilted. “Though, with flour all over your face…”

I look like a clown? So much for indignation. She swiped the back of a hand across her nose, and he burst into laughter.

“Here—” He tucked three fingers under her chin to support it.

If her hands hadn’t been full of dough, she would have edged out of reach. Instead, she stood paralyzed, her lashes falling to shut him out—to shut out this fragile, disturbing moment—while he cleaned her off, his fingers brushing across the bridge of her nose, the tops of her cheeks, her shivering lashes.

“Better,” he observed huskily.

Was it? Was it really? A wave of black dismay—of echoing loss—washed over her. “Thanks,” she whispered, staring down at her dough. After a moment her hands moved again—knead, fold, turn…

“Will you help me persuade her, Dana?”

Give a little to get what you wanted, she thought, loss turning to disgust. He thought he could buy her cooperation that easily, with one gesture of tossed-off tenderness? “No, Rafe, I won’t. Zoe doesn’t need some stranger telling her what to do.” Nor, for that matter, a parent trying to shape her life according to his own lights. “What about getting her some professional counseling? I’m sure that Dr. Hancock—”

“I’m the only counselor Zoe needs, dammit! A baby will wreck her life!”

“Then if you’re all she needs,” Dana said coolly, “she doesn’t need me.”

“But, dammit—” He saw her chin tip up in warning and he shut his mouth with an effort, locked his jaw over his words. Stood rocking on his boot heels and scowling, while she patted the first ball of dough into a loaf, settled it into its greased pan and placed it on the warming shelf. She turned out another ball of risen dough, pressed out the yeasty gas, commenced kneading.

“All right,” he said grimly, “then look at it this way. You owe me this help.”

Her hands paused as she looked up. “Excuse me?”

“Your son knocked up my daughter. If you’d ridden herd on him, hadn’t let him run wild, had taught him a proper respect for girls—”

Dana threw up a floury hand. “Now, wait a minute. Your daughter is—what—two years older than Sean? And everyone knows girls are years more mature than boys. So just who seduced whom? And who should have known better?”

“At fourteen, he’s old enough to know right from wrong! Or at least, old enough to know how not to get caught. Didn’t you tell him about condoms?”

“Didn’t you tell your brilliant daughter?” she shot back.

“She knew,” he said with dangerous calm.

“Then—”

“Condoms do fail.” His gaze turned distant and bleak.

“Is that what—”

He shrugged and spun on his heel, surveyed her kitchen, swung back again. “She’s not giving me any of the gory details, and frankly—” His shrug was more of a shudder. “Frankly, I don’t want to know. Every time I think about it, I get this urge to hammer your kid into the ground like a cedar fence post.”

Dana dusted her hands and came carefully around the table. “If you ever lay so much as a finger on Sean again—” She prodded his chest with a fingertip “—I’ll have you in jail for assault, Rafe Montana. See if I don’t!”

“Assault?” He caught her wrist, trapping her hand in that gesture of threat, forefinger touching his breast. “Last night, he swung on me.”

“Yes, but who finished it?” She yanked backward, but he held her easily.

“That was a lesson he needed to learn. You don’t take on someone you can’t handle.”

“I’ll thank you not to give my son lessons!”

“Then who will?” He brought her hand down to his side, then drew it slightly behind him, a subtle tug that swayed her closer. She flattened her other hand on his chest to catch her balance—could feel his heart thudding against her palm. “You’ll teach him how to grow up a man? Not your strong point, I’d say.” His eyes roved down her face to her mouth. He smiled slowly and shook his head. “Not your strong point at all, thank God.”

She shoved his chest hard, and he let her go. “Nobody asked you for lessons, and I’m telling you again, don’t you dare—” She cut herself short as the screen door to the deck creaked.

Sean stood there, gaping at them both.

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