Somebody's Baby. Annie Jones
left him undermined and exposed. He wondered if Josie would finally be the exception.
“However…”
“I should have known,” he muttered under his breath.
“Hmm?” she asked over the wriggling and almost inaudible fussing of the baby in her arm.
“Give with one hand, take with two,” was all he felt compelled to say.
“However…” She patted the blanket and adjusted the form beneath it, raising it higher against her own small frame. The legs kicked and a tiny hand flailed out to grab a strand of her hair. She ignored it and forged on. “Your choices have resulted in this small life. And whether you have suffered enough or who is to blame for how the two of us arrived in this situation no longer matters. When you are a parent, it’s not about you and your feelings anymore, it’s about what’s best for your child.”
“My child,” he echoed softly. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” She batted her eyes in a show of seeming disbelief, then leaned back to look under the blanket and the wriggling infant in her arms. “I don’t usually yell at strangers like that, but…”
“I’m not thanking you for yelling at me.” He chuckled at the very notion. He could go just about anywhere in this town and get yelled at, and by people a lot more experienced and colorful at it than Miss Josie Redmond.
“Then, I don’t—” She hook her head.
“When,” he explained as softly as the baby’s gentle stirring.
“What?”
“You said when you are a parent. Not if. Your intention with that little speech was to put me in my place. And with that small distinction, you did.” He reached out and brushed the blanket from atop the child’s head.
The baby squirmed and made a sound that went something like “ya-ya-ya,” then laughed.
Neither music nor birds nor even the grandest of majestic choirs could ever sound as sweet as the sound of his baby laughing.
“Anyway,” he explained, knowing he’d have to appease Josie in some way before she’d even think of allowing him to hold his son, “I admit to my part, my shortcomings in all of this. I did spend time with your sister, obviously, and—”
“And it didn’t mean a thing to you.”
He lowered his head and his tone and took one step toward the woman holding his son. “You will never understand what it meant to me, lady.”
She cupped the baby’s head and took a step back from him. “Then why didn’t you call her? Why didn’t you try to find out what happened to her?”
“Because…” Again a choice loomed before him. Tell the whole truth and risk losing some of his power in the situation or say just enough to get what he wanted now. He looked long and deep into Josie’s defiant yet anxious eyes and knew he only had one real course of action. The truth. “Because I was only thinking of myself. I acted like a wounded dog, snarling and mean and willing to do anything to protect myself. I spent a night with your sister, drunk most of the time but aware of what I was doing, and then I walked away and never looked back. Because that’s what suited me.”
There he’d said it. He’d given her plenty of ammunition to take a potshot at him and do some emotional damage. He did not deserve this child. But, as he hoped both his words and tone made quite clear, he would do whatever it took to be a part of young Nathan’s life. Because it suited him.
“Oh.” Clearly she did not know what to make of that. But she did not seem even remotely willing to use his confession against him. “Are you saying that if you had known sooner, you’d have returned sooner?”
“No.” Again he spit the hard truth out. He had worked diligently this past year and a half to put himself in a position to do the most damage to…or good for, depending on one’s vantage point, the Carolina Crumble Pattie Factory. If he had learned about his son sooner, he would have come for the child, but not until the time was right. “No, I can’t say I’d have come back sooner. But I can say I am here now and that’s what we have to deal with.”
They stood in silence for a long, anxious moment.
Adam could practically see the thought process playing out over Josie’s features. He wanted to say something to tip her confidence in his favor, but in the end he could only say straight-out what was on his mind. “You asked me earlier tonight not to take your son away, Josie, and I agreed. I won’t. I can’t do that to him—or to you.”
He focused on her, standing in the shaft of light from the open door.
She seemed so small and alone in the otherwise dark room, that he felt drawn to her and the child cradled against her body.
He moved in, so near that he could see the fearful questioning in her eyes. He knew how it felt to wonder if anyone was on your side. To pray not to lose the person you loved most in the world and wonder how you would survive if the worst came to pass. He had prayed that prayer the night his mom died. But he had not come to destroy this little family. He had it within his power to prevent his son from losing the only mother he had ever known. He would not fail little Nathan in that regard.
Because, even though he had only known about him for a short while and had yet to even properly see him, Adam already loved the little guy. He supposed that among all his many faults and flaws, this redeemed him just a little. That in this feeling he knew a small taste of the greatest love of all, the love of God.
He placed one hand upon his baby’s head and one protectively on Josie’s tense shoulder. “Since you know I’m not going to take the boy, Josie. Why don’t you just let me…hold him?”
She wet her lips. Hesitated.
“Please.”
In one fluid movement Josie swept her hand beneath the child legs and then carefully laid him in his father’s arms.
His son. Adam caught his breath. For all his good intentions and promises, holding his child for the very first time made him wonder if he’d spoken too soon. He did not want to tear this baby from the only mother it had ever known, but this was his son. His flesh and blood. And Adam would not settle for weekends and every other Christmas, just experiencing bits and pieces of his childhood.
He felt Josie tense at his side, but he didn’t focus on her discomfort. Adam had always made his own rules in life—or figured a way around the ones he didn’t like. That’s exactly what he was going to do now.
He gazed into the baby’s bright blue eyes and found just enough voice to whisper, “Hello, son. Daddy’s here now. Daddy’s here—and nothing is going to come between us ever again.”
Chapter Four
“Nothing’s going to come between us again.”
Adam’s words to Nathan still rang in Josie’s ears twelve hours later as she rushed about the diner trying to get ready for the morning coffee crowd.
Yes, crowd.
Large cities and fancy coffee shops and cafés with big noisy machines were not the only places that people liked to gather to chat on their way to work in the mornings. There had always been the usual fellows, the retirees who liked to do a little of what locals lovingly called, “pickin’ and grinnin’, laughin’ and scratchin’.’’ They met every day but Sunday, of course, to solve the problems of the world, tell jokes and stories they had all heard a hundred times, and reward their long-suffering wives with a little bit of “me” time.
Then there were the commuters. Ever since the layoffs had started at the Crumble, more and more folks began their drives to workplaces in other nearby towns with what Josie had listed on tent cards on the tabletops as “Cup O’Joe To Go.” It wasn’t the kind of thing you could get at those fancy places. No grande or venti size disposable cups with insulated