Baby for Keeps Read online

  “Follow me.” Dylan led her across the restaurant floor to a hallway at the back of the building. The steep, narrow staircase at the end was dimly lit.

  He insisted on taking the diaper bag and would have taken Cora as well, but Mia clutched her tightly. “I can carry her.” She trailed in his wake as they ascended, trying not to ogle his tight butt packaged nicely in well-washed jeans.

  She knew the man in front of her was a millionaire several times over. Yet somehow, he had the knack of appearing to be just one of the guys. It was a talent she had envied in high school. Mia hadn’t fit in with any crowd or clique. Shy and serious, she had been all but ostracized by her classmates who were two years or more ahead of her in adolescence.

  On the landing, Dylan paused, giving her a chance to catch up. “The area to our left is storage. As I said, this apartment up here was my bookkeeper’s. But she got engaged and moved across the country. You can imagine what a mess I’ve made of things. I need to hire somebody soon or I’ll have the IRS on my back for not paying my quarterly taxes.”

  He opened the nearest door and ushered her inside. Mia looked around with interest. They stood in a good-size living area furnished with a sofa, loveseat and two chairs upholstered in a navy-and-taupe print. The neutral rug was clean but unexceptional. Faded patches on the walls indicated where pictures had hung. “How long was she with you?”

  Dylan dropped the diaper bag on a chair. “Nearly since the beginning. Her first husband died and left her with almost nothing. So this job was a godsend both for her and for me. But a couple of months ago, she met a trucker downstairs, and the rest is history.”

  Mia sank onto the sofa with a sigh and laid Cora beside her. The baby didn’t stir. “Life is full of surprises.”

  He sprawled in a chair at her elbow. “It sure as hell is. You remember my brother Liam?”

  “Of course I do. He always scared me a little bit. So serious and intimidating.”

  “He’s loosened up a lot since he met Zoe. She’s his new wife. You should meet her. The two of you would probably get along.”

  “Really? Why?”

  Obviously his throwaway statement was meant to be rhetorical, because he hesitated. “Oh, you know. Girl stuff...”

  Her face flushed. This was always her problem. She had never mastered the art of careless chitchat. Fussing with Cora’s blanket for a moment gave her a chance to look away. She should probably go. But she’d made such a complete and total mess of her life, she was deeply grateful to have an excuse to focus on someone other than herself for a moment. Gathering her composure, she leaned back and gave Dylan a pleasant smile. “Well, other than your brother’s marriage, what’s been going on in Silver Glen since I’ve been gone?”

  * * *

  Dylan propped an ankle on the other knee and tucked his hands behind his head. “Have you had dinner?” It wasn’t an answer to Mia’s question, but he was starving.

  “No. Not really. But you don’t have to feed me.”

  “It’s on the house. For old time’s sake.” He pulled out his cell phone and sent a text to the kitchen. “They’ll bring something up as soon as they can.”

  “Sounds good.” Mia’s smile was shy. He remembered the slight duck of her head and the curve of soft pink lips when something pleased her. Not that pleasing Mia had been Dylan’s forte. He’d resented like hell the fact that he had to take help from a fifteen-year-old kid. And truth be told, he had probably made Mia’s life a misery more often than not.

  “Why did you do it?” he asked. The question tumbled out. He hadn’t even known he was going to ask it.

  A slight frown creased her forehead. “Do what?”

  “Tutor me.” His face was somber.

  “Wow, Dylan. It’s taken you this long to ask that question?”

  He shrugged, making her more aware than ever of the breadth of his shoulders. “I was busy before.”

  “You were, at that,” she agreed. “Football, basketball, dating hot girls.”

  “You noticed?”

  “I noticed everything,” she said flatly. “I had the worst crush on you.”

  He blanched, remembering all his careless cruelties to her. Even though in private he’d been pathetically grateful when she helped him make sense of a Shakespeare play, in public he had shunned her...or made jokes about her. Even at the time, with all the cluelessness of an adolescent boy, he’d known he was hurting her.

  But maintaining his image as a badass had been his one and only goal. While some of his classmates were getting scholarship offers from Duke or the University of North Carolina, Dylan had struggled to pretend he didn’t care. College was stupid and unnecessary. He’d said it enough times that he almost believed it. But when he slunk off to community college and couldn’t even make passing grades there, his humiliation was complete.

  “I owe you about a million apologies,” he said, his mouth twisting in a grimace of regret. “You tried so hard to help me.”

  “I might point out that you did pass senior English.”

  “True. And without cheating, if you remember.”

  “You wrote an essay about why Romeo and Juliet was such an unbelievable story.”

  “Well, it was,” he protested. “What kind of idiot takes poison when he could have kidnapped the girl and run away to Vegas?”

  Mia chuckled, the laughter erasing her air of exhaustion and making her look more like the girl he’d known in high school. “It wasn’t your fault, Dylan. The problems you had. Someone should have diagnosed you in elementary school, and your educational career would have been entirely different.”

  “You can’t blame them too much. I did a damned good job of pretending that I was lazy and unmotivated.”

  “You may have fooled a lot of people, but you never fooled me.”

  Two

  Dylan’s wry smile and self-deprecating assessment made Mia’s heart hurt. Dyslexia was no minor roadblock. Mia knew that Dylan had scored above average on intelligence tests. When it came to creating ideas and working with people, he far outstripped her in ability. Dylan was smart and gifted. Unfortunately, his talents didn’t align with the way traditional education evaluated achievement.

  She circled back to his earlier question. “You asked me why I tutored you.”

  “Well, why did you?”

  “I suppose it was for lots of reasons. For one thing, the teacher asked me to. And for another, I was no different than any other girl at Silver Glen High. I wanted to spend time with you.”

  He rubbed his jaw. “Is that all?”

  “No.” Time for brutal honesty. “I wanted you to succeed. And I thought I could help. No matter how hard you tried to pretend differently, I knew you hated feeling—”

  “Stupid,” he interjected with some heat. “The word you’re looking for is stupid.”

  She stared at him, taken aback that his intelligence still seemed to be a sore spot for him. “Good grief, Dylan. You’re a successful, respected businessman. You work for a living even though you don’t have to. You’ve made the Silver Dollar Saloon into something special. Why does it matter now that you struggled in school? We’re not kids anymore. You’ve more than proven your capabilities.”

  His jaw clenched, his eyes stormy, though somehow she knew his agitation was not directed at her. “And what about you, Mia? What do you do?”

  “I’m a medical researcher. Over in the Raleigh/Durham area. My team has been working to prove that the standard series of childhood vaccines is safe for everyone.”

  “And I sell beer for a living.”

  “Don’t be flip,” she said, her temper starting to rise. “It’s not a competition.”

  “Of course not. I was never competition for you. How many languages do you speak?”

  His sarcasm nicked her in way
s she couldn’t explain. She hadn’t asked to be smart. In fact, there had been many days in her life when she would have given almost anything to be the epitome of a dumb blonde joke. She glanced at Cora, who was still sleeping peacefully.

  “I should go,” she said quietly. “I didn’t mean to stir up the past. It was nice seeing you again.” A chill of disappointment clenched her heart and brought back unpleasant memories of being out of step with the world.

  She and Dylan stood at the same moment.

  His face registered consternation and shame. “Don’t leave. I’m being an ass. It’s not your fault you’re a genius.”

  “I’m a woman,” she said flatly. “And will it make you feel better to know that I’ve made an absolute mess of my life?” Her voice broke on the last word. Tears she had worked so hard to keep at bay for the past several hours burst forth in an unattractive sobbing mess.

  Inside her chest, a great gaping hole filled with uncertainty and fear made it hard to breathe. She didn’t feel smart at all. What she really felt was panicked and desperate.

  She put her hands over her face, mortified that Dylan was here to witness her inevitable meltdown.

  Without warning, she felt his warm hands on her shoulders. “Sit down, Mia. Everything’s going to be all right.”

  “You don’t know that,” she said, sniffling and, as usual, without a tissue.

  “Here. Take this.” The pristine square of white cotton he pulled from his back pocket was still warm from his body. She blew her nose and wiped her eyes, feeling hollow and shaky.

  Dylan tugged her down beside him on the sofa, both of them glancing at Cora automatically to make sure she was in no danger. The baby was oblivious. “Don’t worry,” she said, trying to laugh. “I’m not going to have a nervous breakdown.”

  He grinned, revealing the slightest hint of a dimple. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I’ve got all night.”

  The genuine concern in his eyes disarmed her, despite her embarrassment. It couldn’t hurt to have an impartial opinion. She was at a crossroads, and perhaps she was too close to the situation and too sleep-deprived to make a rational decision.

  “Okay,” she said. “You asked for it.”

  “Start at the beginning.” He stretched a muscular arm along the back of the sofa, making her uncomfortably aware of his masculine scent and closeness. His khaki slacks and navy knit polo shirt with the bar’s name embroidered on the chest fit him in a way that emphasized everything about him that was male.

  Her hands shook, so she clasped them in her lap. “After I turned twenty-nine, I realized that I wanted a baby. A cliché, I know, but my biological clock was ticking so loudly, I couldn’t ignore it.”

  “Did the man in your life agree?”

  “There was no man at that moment. Well, there was one. For about fifteen minutes. But we were a terrible match, and thankfully we both recognized it before we did anything irrevocable.”

  “So who did you have in mind for a daddy?”

  “Nobody,” she said simply. “I was well educated and financially secure. I decided that I could raise a child on my own.” She couldn’t fault the skepticism she saw on his face. In retrospect, she had been both naive and overly confident in her abilities.

  “There’s still the matter of sperm.”

  His droll comment made her cheeks heat again. “Well, of course, but I had that all figured out. As part of the scientific community in Raleigh, I possessed a working knowledge of what was going on in most of our experimental labs. And of course, fertility research was and still is a majorly funded arm of study.”

  “Still no sperm.”

  “I’m getting there. Once I found a doctor and a facility that I trusted, I had all the initial tests to see if I was healthy and ovulating well.”

  “And were you?”

  “Definitely. So I knew the timing was right. Then all I had to do was visit a sperm bank and select the proper donor.”

  “Who, I’m assuming, would be a doctoral student with intellectual capabilities matching your own.”

  He was entirely serious.

  She shook her head vehemently. “No. Not even close. I would never do that to a child of mine. I wanted a normal baby.”

  “Good Lord, Mia. You mean to tell me you deliberately tried to make little Cora less smart than her mother?” The baffled shock on his face gave her a moment’s pause.

  “I wouldn’t say that.” She heard the defensiveness in her words and winced inwardly. “But I selected a candidate who was a blue-collar worker with average intelligence.”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted her to have a happy life.”

  * * *

  Dylan honestly didn’t know what to say. I wanted her to have a happy life. Those eight words, quietly spoken, told him more about Mia than if he’d had her résumé in front of him. For the first time, he understood that even if his school career had been painful and difficult, Mia’s had also, but in an entirely different way.

  The knock on the door saved him from having to respond to that last, heart-wrenching statement. Soon he and Mia were enjoying appetizers and burgers. Based on the drinks she had ordered downstairs, he avoided anything alcoholic and instead opted for Cokes to accompany their meal.

  Mia ate like she hadn’t eaten in a week. “This food is amazing,” she said. “Thank you so much. I’ve been living off frozen dinners and frozen pizza for days. My mom helped out for the first week and a half, but the baby exhausted her, so I finally encouraged her to go home.”

  He lifted an eyebrow, helping himself to another handful of French fries. “You’ve left me hanging,” he said. “Finish your story, please.”

  “I was hoping you’d lost interest. The whole sorry tale doesn’t put me in a very good light.”

  When she wiped a dab of ketchup from her lower lip, to his surprise, he felt a little zing that was a lot like sexual interest. Squashing that thought, he leaned back in his chair. “I’m all ears.”

  Mia was slender and graceful. Though she wore neither makeup nor jewelry, she carried herself with an inherent femininity. Back in high school, he had kissed her once upon a time, more out of curiosity than anything else. The heat had surprised and alarmed him. He needed Mia’s help with schoolwork. He couldn’t afford to alienate her, just because his teenage libido was revving on all cylinders.

  Now, thinking back to how he had perceived the fifteen-year-old Mia, he wondered what had attracted him. She’d been quiet and timid, although she had managed to stand up to him on more than one occasion when he tried to blow off a project or an assignment.

  Her looks and figure had been nothing spectacular in the eyes of a teenage boy. Mia had been on the cusp of womanhood, with no breasts to speak of, and a body that was still girlish despite her maturity in other ways. Yet something about her had appealed to him. In all of their interactions, she had never once made fun of his ineptitude, nor had she patronized him.

  Now, from the vantage point of adulthood, he marveled that she had put up with his arrogance and antagonism. Though eventually they had become friends, for weeks at the beginning of their relationship he had acted like a total jerk. And an ungrateful jerk at that.

  He kept silent, counting on the fact that she would eventually talk to him if he didn’t push.

  Mia finished the last swallow of her drink, stacked her dishes neatly and curled her legs beneath her. “The thing is,” she said, wrinkling her nose as if about to confess to a crime, “artificial insemination is expensive. I assumed, quite erroneously, that since I was young and healthy I would get pregnant the first time.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No. And every month when I got my period, I cried.”

  “Why was it
so important to you?”

  She blinked, her expression one of shock, as though no one had ever dared ask her that question. “I wanted someone of my own to love. You may not remember, but my folks were older parents. They had me when my mom was forty-three. So though I love them very much, I understood why they wanted to retire and move south. Even when we lived in the same state, we didn’t see that much of each other.”

  “Why not?”

  She hesitated. “They were proud because I was smart, but they had no idea what to do with me. Once I was out on my own, the gulf widened. I’m sure part of it was my fault. I never quite understood how to talk to them about my work. And besides...”

  “Go on.”

  “I found out when I was a teenager that my parents had never really wanted children. It was a Pandora’s box kind of thing. I read one of my mom’s journals. Turns out that when I was conceived, my mother was going through menopause and thought she couldn’t get pregnant. So I was an unwelcome surprise in more ways than one. They did the best they could. I’m grateful for that.”

  Dylan thought of his big, close-knit, sometimes rowdy family. And of the way his mother cherished and coddled each of her sons though they were now grown men. They all had their moments of discord, of course. What family didn’t? But he couldn’t imagine a life where his brothers and his mom weren’t an integral part of who he was. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “That must have hurt.”

  Mia shrugged. “Anyway, you asked why the baby was so important. The truth is, I wanted someone to love who would love me back. I wanted a family of my own.” She laid a hand gently on the baby’s blanket. “It took eight tries, but when the doctor told me I was pregnant, it was the most wonderful day of my life.”