Somebody's Baby. Annie Jones
made Adam long to hear it again.
“Yeah, you know. Like a minijet with diapers?” He pressed his lips together and made the sound of a sputtering engine. “Or a rechargeable battery.”
“If they ever find a way to channel this kid’s energy into a battery or an engine, I’ll have to give up my job and chase him around full-time.”
“Yeah, you wouldn’t want that.”
“Are you kidding? I’d love to give up worrying about how I’m going to keep the Home Cookin’ Kitchen open and be a full-time mom to Nathan.” Her eyes grew wide suddenly. “Not that I want my business to fail. I love what I do. I love providing a service to Mt. Knott and seeing everyone, and I love cooking. Especially…well, my specialty is not important beyond, you know, being a mother being my specialty.”
She was babbling. Not in a ridiculous, silly way. She was just nervous. And relieved. Nervous and relieved all at once. He could sense that in the way her words all ran together, then stopped suddenly. He didn’t learn much from what she said, of course, but it did help him see her inner conflict over her roles as a woman business-owner and a mother to his son.
“But if I could somehow not have to keep the crazy hours at my Home Cookin’ Kitchen and could just spend all my time with Nathan, at least in these early years, I’d do it in a heartbeat. No regrets. No complaints.” She stopped abruptly again, and this time her eyes grew wide before she added, in a little slower and more pronounced voice, “Not that I’m hinting that’s what I expect you to provide.”
She’d babbled until she had spoken the truth. In doing so, she’d given Adam a glimpse into her desires and perhaps some future negotiating power. He filed the information away and, on the surface, let it go. “So, he’s not hungry?”
“No. I don’t think he’s hungry.” She kept swaying back and forth and jiggling the baby, who had begun to fret and grunt quietly beneath the blanket. “He’s been sleeping through the night for a couple of months now.”
“He has?” Adam was rocking now, too. He couldn’t seem to help himself. Though he wasn’t sure, he figured this was how it felt to carry on a conversation on a boat. “Well, maybe he’s sick, or needs some—”
“Maybe…” she interrupted in the same soothing murmur she used with the baby “…he just had a bad dream.”
“Dream?” He stopped rocking long enough to consider that. “What on earth does an itty-bitty baby like that have to dream about?”
“He’s not so itty-bitty. He’s got plenty of things to dream about, a whole lifetime of experiences. His lifetime.” She shot him a look that even in the dim light Adam interpreted as a challenge. I have been this child’s mother for his entire life. Where have you been? “He’ll have his first birthday in two weeks, won’t you, tiger?”
“He will?” Adam stretched out his fingers, needing a kind of visual cue to help him do some lightning-fast math. “That means he was born in September, so August, July, June—”
“January.”
“What?”
“He was conceived in January, one year, eight months and two weeks ago.” She faced him, her mouth set in grim accusation. “Don’t tell me that doesn’t even ring a bell. Maybe you’ve just been with so many women that it’s all a blur.”
“Oh, it’s a blur all right, but not for the reasons you think.” He scratched at his cheek while his mind struggled to force all the pieces together. “Maybe you don’t recall this, but…”
Adam faced a choice. Speak the truth and risk having it sound like a plea for pity or at least leniency for his behavior or skim over it. He could stand here and own up to that bad behavior without any preface or attempt to put it in context.
His mother had died. He felt he had not only lost the only one who’d seen him truly as her own but that he had also lost his place in his family. When his suggestions to take the Carolina Crumble Pattie to a wider market had been ridiculed by his father and brothers, Adam felt he had lost his reason for staying in Mt. Knott as well. By the time he met Ophelia, a beautiful woman who shared his disdain for the small town, he had not been thinking about right and wrong.
He had been in pain. He needed to feel he wasn’t a lost cause, just a stray that nobody wanted. He felt worthless and figured he didn’t matter to anyone, not even God. It became easier to fall into sin, he had learned, when you take your eyes off the Lord and start looking at the mess you have made of your life and the mess life has made of the world around you.
He had long prided himself on being a man who told the truth. It was one of the things, he felt, which set him apart from his father.
While Conner Burdett was not a dishonest man, he had built his business on the belief that knowledge was power. And Conner protected his own power by controlling what knowledge he allowed others to have.
On the other hand, telling her about all the years of pain and loneliness that led up to those few wild nights that January would probably just sound like an excuse.
Adam didn’t like people who made excuses. Besides, he had no way of knowing if he could trust Josie with an emotional truth that could cut him to his core. She may yet prove herself the enemy in a bitter custody case. He decided to tell the truth, but not all of it. It twisted low in his gut that he would follow his father’s path but if she listened, really listened, she would hear the message beneath the words and have an inkling of what had fueled his angry rebellion.
“If you recall, I came into my inheritance in January.” I lost my mom. My only ally.
Her determined jawline eased a bit.
“I found myself with a totally new status.” Finally, officially, on my own. Alone.
Her gaze dipped downward.
“I didn’t handle it particularly well.” I’m not making any excuses.
She nodded, her brow furrowed. “I’m sorry about the loss of your mother.”
“Thanks.” He’d struck a chord, he supposed.
“She was a remarkable lady. A real force in the community. A good Christian who supported so many social causes and cared about people. She really put her faith in action.”
“More than you probably know.” He thought not only of how his mother had taken him in as a child and raised him as her very own, but also of the ways she devoted her own inherited fortune to help those in need. It tugged at Adam’s heart to realize that back then he’d been so fixated on striking back at his father and brothers that he had done nothing to honor his mother and the things she had taught him. That did not alter his plan for revenge, however.
He was a Christian. He just wasn’t that kind of Christian. He fought back a twinge of shame over having even thought that, much less allowed it to stand as his justification. “If it helps, I am not proud of what I did.”
“I’m not the one you owe an apology to.” Josie poked her chin up, fidgeted with the folds of the blanket that still concealed his son from him.
“An apology? I wasn’t aware I owed an apology to anyone.” It was what it was. He felt bad that it had gone so wrong. Felt some shame that his grief and resentment had uncovered his weaknesses instead of revealed his inner strength. But getting all touchy-feely about it now wouldn’t change the past or set things right today.
He had come to town with only two indisputable responsibilities, to claim his son and ruin his so-called family. Neither Josie nor Ophelia Redmond figured prominently in his designs. “Your sister was a willing partner in what happened between us. Don’t forget that she was the one who failed to notify me about the baby. It’s not as if I haven’t paid a price for my poor choices.”
“I don’t doubt that.” She gave him a look of sympathy that did not sink to the level of pity.
He