Not Quite Married Page 7

  “Cankles. I have cankles.” She leaned forward to smooth the hem of her blue dress over her knees. “You’ve never heard of cankles?”

  “Never.”

  “That’s when your calf hooks to your foot with no discernible thinning of the leg where the ankle should be. Calf-ankle. Cankle.”

  He had no idea what she was babbling about, and he supposed that fact must have shown on his face, because she finally explained in plain English, “My ankles are swollen.”

  Which provided him an opportunity to pleasantly remind her, “Another reason to stay off your feet.”

  She groaned and flopped back against the cushions again. “You’ve been great, Dalton, and I really appreciate all you’ve done—and shouldn’t you be going?”

  No, I shouldn’t. “Later. After you get settled in.”

  “But I am settled in.”

  Pretending she hadn’t spoken, he stood. “I’ll leave you alone to make your call.” And then he turned and got the hell out of there before she could tell him again to go. Behind him, she made an exasperated sound—but she didn’t call him back to insist that he leave.

  He slipped out the door and shut it silently behind him.

  And then, shamelessly, he went about checking out the house.

  It was charming, really. Well laid out, furnished in a simple, inviting style, and well maintained. She was young to have both a nice place like this and that successful café. She’d either worked her sweet ass off all her adult life, or she had an inheritance, or some combination of the two. Judging by all the loyal relatives who’d shown up at the hospital yesterday, she did have people to look after her.

  So. Comfortably self-supporting, with a family who cared. Good for her.

  Not so good for him, however. It would be much better if she needed—really needed—the father of her unborn child.

  But a man had to play with the hand he was dealt.

  He made a quick circuit of the downstairs, moving through the great room, past the breakfast nook, into the kitchen and through the archway to the dining room. Another wide arch took him into the foyer. He went up the stairs and came out on a balcony with a carved rail that was open to the great room below and a nice view of the handsome fireplace flanked by half-bow windows.

  He kept going, making another circuit of the upper floor, which had three bedrooms and one large bath.

  The baby’s room, all done up in pink, green, yellow and white, with a mural of butterflies and cartoon animals on one wall, overlooked the backyard. Baby clothes and tiny blankets, all neatly folded and stacked, filled the white shelves. In the corner on the floor, he found a pile of books on pregnancy, childbirth and how to care for a newborn. He bent and scooped them up. They would make good nighttime reading. By the time she went into labor, he intended to be well informed on how to help get her through that, not to mention how to care for their little girl.

  Another rocker, similar to the one downstairs, waited by the window. He found the room charming—and Clara all the more admirable to have pulled it together on her own while working long hours at her restaurant. No wonder she’d collapsed.

  The woman didn’t know when to take a break.

  She would be taking a break now, whether she liked it or not. He would see to that.

  Carrying the stack of baby books, he left the nursery and checked out the other two rooms up there: a spare bedroom and a sort of makeshift office/storage room, with a long folding table and an office chair, a laptop, stacks of file boxes. Deep shelves lined one wall and held rows of large plastic storage bins.

  All good. The spare bedroom and the office/storage room would do for his purposes.

  He left the baby books on the folding table, went back downstairs, grabbed a seat at the breakfast table, took out his phone and checked his messages and alerts. After dealing with the ones that couldn’t wait, he brought up the memo app and began listing what he would need to get himself set up for the next several weeks.

  Two hours later, he still hadn’t heard so much as a peep from Clara’s bedroom. During that time, the house phone had rung two separate times. He assumed she’d picked up from the bedroom as both times, the phone had rung only twice.

  It was almost noon. He stared at Clara’s refrigerator for several seconds, calculating the risk in making himself at home in her kitchen.

  No. He had to be careful at this point, to presume nothing, to do nothing that could be construed as commandeering her space. He needed to respect all her boundaries—at least until he had her agreement as to how it was going to be.

  He called his driver, Earl, who was waiting in the limo out at the curb, and asked him to go and dig up some lunch. Twenty minutes later, Earl stood at the door, arms full of to-go bags. Earl—who dressed like Johnny Cash, called Dalton “boss” and wore a black cowboy hat—was a prize.

  Dalton accepted the bags and told Earl to take some time for himself. “Be back by three.”

  “Will do, boss.”

  Dalton shut the door, turned for the kitchen—and spotted Clara, wearing pink workout pants and a huge purple T-shirt with Does This Baby Make Me Look Fat? printed across the front. She was standing in the arch opposite the dining room.

  Her face looked soft and slightly flushed, her eyes heavy-lidded. Her hair was flat on one side. “I had a shower.”

  “Great.”

  “After I talked to Renée, I got a couple of calls. And then I guess I fell asleep.”

  “Even better. Things okay at the restaurant?”

  “I can’t believe it. They seem to be managing without me—and something smells amazing. What’s in the bags?”

  “Lunch. Hungry?”

  “Starved. Please don’t tell me I have to eat my lunch in bed.”

  “How about the sofa? You can put your feet up.”

  “Were you a nurse in your last life?”

  “Are you saying you think I missed my calling?”

  She propped a shoulder on the archway, rested her arms on her belly and tipped her head to the side, studying him. “You’re being absolutely wonderful.”

  “Thank you. The sofa?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  * * *

  Clara did it the way he wanted it. It wasn’t so hard.

  She sat on the sofa, propped up on several pillows, with her legs stretched out across the cushions. He tore open the bags and set the food on the coffee table, then took one of the wing chairs.

  They had pastrami on rye and chicken noodle soup from that great deli on Elk Street. She gobbled down several amazing bites before demanding, “How’d you know to go to David’s?”

  “I didn’t. I have Earl.”

  “Earl. The Man in Black driver, right?”

  “Earl always knows where to get the best lunch. Or dinner, for that matter. Denver. Boulder. Colorado Springs. Aspen. And Justice Creek. Wherever Earl drives me, he always knows where to eat.”

  She couldn’t resist teasing him. “David’s is terrific. But my café is the best.”

  “I told him not to go there. You eat there all the time. Variety never hurts.”

  He was right. “It’s delicious,” she said. “Thank you.”

  He nodded. They ate in silence for a minute or two as she tried to decide how to approach the subject he kept evading.

  Finally, she just asked him, “Are you ever planning to go back to Denver?”

  Deli paper crackled as he set down the remains of his sandwich. “I have something to confess.”

  “Great. But you haven’t answered my question. And I’ve asked it more than once today.”

  “I went upstairs. I looked around. The baby’s room is beautiful.”

  “I’m glad you approve. But when are you leav—?”

  He put up a hand. “Hear me out?”

  She picked up her soup and slurped down a big spoonful. “Talk.”

  “I want to move in here, with you.”

  She barely kept herself from choking on a noodle. “What? Wh
oa, Dalton. Not a good idea.”

  He chided, “You said you’d listen.” And then he waited. So she made a big show of pressing her lips together and widening her eyes to let him know she was listening. “I can take the spare bedroom, and set up a rudimentary office in that room with the folding desk and the storage bins. I would go back and forth to the Denver office one or two times a week. And there’s a branch here in town I might make use of if I want a bigger space or need my assistant with me. I’ll look into that, see if that’s workable. And I’ll be cutting back my hours anyway, for now. Even the president is entitled to a little family leave at crucial times. So I’ll work a shortened, flexible workweek. And then I’ll be here to help out, to take care of you until the baby’s born.”

  “Wow,” Clara said weakly. She had no idea what to say. It made her feel a lot better about the future, about what kind of father he would be to their child, that he would offer to turn his life upside down to take care of her until their daughter came.

  But then...no. Just, no.

  She had to remember that she really hardly knew this man—and that he’d rejected her without even thinking twice last August. She couldn’t afford to become too dependent on him, couldn’t afford to let herself start trusting him in intimate ways.

  He spoke again. “Your due date’s three weeks away.”

  “I’m very well aware of when my due date is.”

  Patiently, he continued. “I haven’t been here, to help you, up till now, and I regret that. If you think back on it honestly, I think you’ll see that I had no chance to help you, until now.”

  “Because you turned me down, on the island.” She tried to keep her voice even and reasonable. It was only a fact, not the end of the world. But still, she couldn’t completely keep the hurt from showing.

  “I was wrong.”

  “Too late now.”

  “That’s not fair, Clara.”

  Carefully, she set her half-full container of soup back on the coffee table. “All I wanted then, with you, was a chance. To get together in our real lives, to see how it might go, to take it one day at a time. I made that very clear to you. But you wouldn’t even consider it, you didn’t even take a few minutes to think it over. And that really hurt me. It hurt me bad. I...I’d never felt about anyone the way I felt about you. I had this ridiculous idea that I’d finally found the guy for me. I really thought we had something special.”

  “We did,” he put in gruffly. “And I didn’t want to ruin it.”

  She scoffed. She couldn’t help it. “You didn’t want to ruin it—so you crapped all over it?”

  He was silent. His face had that carved-from-stone look it got now and then. But then, finally, he started to talk, to actually explain himself a little. He said, “My marriage had failed. My divorce was barely final. I’d decided I was just not cut out for...I don’t know, romance, whatever you want to call it. I’d told myself I wasn’t ever going there again. And then, there you were, on the island, with your big smile and your beautiful, honest eyes, offering me something I thought maybe I could handle. Just a couple of weeks, magic time, an escape. Away from everything that makes me who I am. With you, for those two weeks, I gave myself permission to be...what I never am. It wasn’t meant to last and when you wanted to take it further... Look. I blew it. That’s all. And when I went looking for you, I thought you were taken.”

  Okay, he was kind of getting to her. She was weakening, softening toward him. How could she help it when he said she had beautiful, honest eyes, when he told her how it had been for him, and said it all so simply and directly?

  She could kind of see his side of it now.

  Damn it.

  The baby kicked. She put her hand to the spot and rubbed at it absently as she tried to get him to see how it was for her. “It’s a scary time for me, okay? There’s been so much stress and confusion. I don’t know what I want or what to do, anymore. I’m just trying to get through this, you know?”

  He gazed at her, unwavering, so sure of himself and his plans. “I want to help you get through this. You only need to let me do that.”

  “But...to have you living in my house with me. Dalton, I just don’t think it’s a very good idea.”

  “Why not?” Patient. Reasonable. But so very determined, too.

  “Because you confuse me and I feel sometimes that I know you. But I don’t, not really. We had a two-week affair. That’s all it was. I can’t let myself start to count on you. It wouldn’t be right.”

  “Of course it would be right. You’re having my baby.”

  “Yes, I am. And I’m willing, to work through this whole coparenting thing with you, over time.”

  “Over time? What does that mean?”

  “It means we need to take it slowly, to figure out gradually how it’s going to work for us as two single parents.”

  Something flared in his eyes. “There’s nothing to figure out. I will be there for my daughter.” His voice left no room for argument.

  And the thing was, she liked it. A lot. Liked how sure he was, how he seemed to know what he wanted—and that was to take care of her and the baby they’d made.

  What woman wouldn’t want exactly what he was offering? To have the father of her child absolutely determined to do everything in his considerable power to make sure that she and her child were safe and well and taken care of?

  It was programmed in the DNA, for a woman to want a man who could stand up for her, stand beside her when she needed him—when their children needed him.

  It was too tempting, what he offered.

  This was dangerous ground.

  She said so—gently, “And that’s good. It’s as it should be, that you know what you want—and what you want is to be here for the baby. But I keep trying to make you see. I’m not so sure. I just don’t know if I could have you living in my house.” She paused. “Dalton, I can see how hard you’re trying. But I’m still not over what happened on the island. I’m just not. I...gave you up. Completely. I accepted that it was all just a fantasy, you and me. But now you’re here and you’re definitely real and, well, it has my head spinning. I can’t just snap my fingers and say it’s all worked out now, that of course you can help me and thank you so much.”

  “I don’t expect it to be suddenly all worked out.”

  “And yet, two days after I finally got up the courage to face you and tell you about the baby, you showed up on my doorstep with a big diamond ring. Like all you had to do was put a ring on it and everything would be all better. What was that about?”

  He leaned forward, elbows on his spread knees, and said in that take-no-prisoners, ruler-of-the-world deep voice of his, “Doing the right damn thing, that’s what.”

  Doing the right thing. “Dear God, if people would only stop saying that.”

  “You’re being unreasonable. People will say it. Because it’s a true thing. A man ought to step the hell up when he’s going to be a father.”

  “It’s not the answer, Dalton, just to go and get married and hope that somehow it will all work out. Most of the time in this world today, it doesn’t work out. And then it only brings more heartache when it all falls apart.”

  “Fine. Great. So you said no.”

  “Yes. And that was the right thing for me to do.”

  “I don’t agree. I’ll never agree.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “What?” He pinned her with those laser-blues. “That I’ll keep trying to do the right thing as I see it?”

  “Yes. That you’ll keep after me until I bend to your will.”

  “Not fair, Clara.”

  “Are you going to tell me that I’m wrong?”

  “The facts are simple. You turned me down and I have accepted it. And now I’m not asking you to marry me. I’m asking you to let me move in here and do what I can for you and our baby.”

  “It’s just...”

  “What?”

  “It’s too late. That ship has sailed.”<
br />
  He fisted one hand and wrapped the fingers of the other around it. “But I realized my mistake in letting you go and I did hire someone to find you. You were going to marry your good buddy, Ryan. I was told that the baby was his. I had no reason not to believe that. So I stayed away. But now I’m here. And you’ve pushed yourself so hard for so long, you collapsed. You need someone with you. And as I’m the baby’s father, why the hell shouldn’t that someone be me?”

  God. He was right. She really, really hated that he was right.

  And he wasn’t finished, either. “You do need me, Clara, whether you’re willing to admit it or not. You need me and the baby needs me. And I need to be here, damn it. I need to do what I can to make certain that both of you are all right.”

  “But I—”

  “Don’t give me any ‘buts,’ Clara. Just put your damn pride aside for once and say you’ll let me stay here and do what I can for you until our baby is born.”

  Chapter Five

  Dalton knew he’d convinced her when she said wistfully, “You were so easygoing on the island. You took things as they came. The man you were on the island was not a relentless man.”

  He gave her the truth. It seemed a good time for it. “Right now the last thing you need is the man I was on the island.”

  She looked at him, huge eyes full of hurt. “Given that that man didn’t really exist, it doesn’t matter if I needed him.”

  “That’s right.” He said it gently, firmly. Even though, in a certain sense, the man he’d been on the island was as much his real self as the one who sat in the chair beside her now. The man on the island was the man he might have been given different parents, a different childhood. But he had no intention of going into any of that now. Now he needed to get her agreement so he could move forward with his plans. He pushed to close the deal. “Tell me I can move in here.”

  “How long do you plan to stay?”

  “For as long as you and the baby need me.”

  “Who gets to decide that?”

  I do. And I’m not leaving. “We’ll know, I think, when it’s time for me to go.”

  “What if it just doesn’t work out for me?”