The Baby Bargain. Peggy Nicholson
Zoe. Tell her the best place to go.” She laid the towel over her shoulder, moved Petra to burping position and stood. Patting the baby’s back, she walked slowly back and forth. Rafe shifted to watch, and she felt herself drawn irresistibly closer with each turn, till she stood above him, staring out over her land. She glanced down, and their eyes linked. His were the dark, high-altitude blue of the mountaintop skies, direct as a bolt of summer lightning. Her heart bumped in her breast half a dozen times before his eyes released her and shifted to her baby.
The straight line of his mouth softened. “But I suppose you don’t believe in abortions.”
“I believe in choice, Mr. Montana.”
“Rafe.”
“But choice cuts both ways, doesn’t it…Rafe? What does Zoe choose? It’s her life, her body, her baby.”
All restless energy, he surged to his feet. “She’s in no emotional shape to choose wisely!” He took all the steps in a stride and stopped on the last one, which put them on a level—too close. So close Dana could see the pale line of a scar drawn across the carved fullness of his bottom lip.
She rocked back on her heels, but held her ground. “Whether she is or not, you can’t take that choice from her.” Or can you? He was so clearly used to having his way.
The muscles along his angular jaw fluttered and stilled. “Someone should have taken that choice from Zoe’s mother.”
Dana blinked. Blunt words, indeed. “Oh?”
“Pilar was eighteen when we…found out. And—” His jaw clenched again and his gaze swung off to the east, to the mountain that walled off that side of the valley. “And it ruined her life.”
But she got you. He had a profile like the head on a Roman coin—harsh, emphatic, all jutting lines and angles, with not a softening curve except for that bottom lip. Zoe’s mother had gotten herself a harsh and beautiful man. Was that the choice that wrecked her life? Eyes wide, Dana rested her cheek against Petra’s dark curls and waited.
“It’s like…” His shoulders jerked, then squared and went taut. “Like history repeating itself. Some kind of enormous, ugly joke. Pilar had already been accepted into Harvard when we…Full scholarship—she was from a poor family. Would have been the first of her family ever to go to college. She was brilliant—that’s where Zoe gets her brains. Meant to be a doctor, too. Instead she—” He shook his head. “It was a criminal waste.”
“Or maybe she…chose what she wanted.”
One bark of savage laughter—it was instantly stifled. “You think so? No, it was a waste of her talents, her hard work, her dreams, her family’s hopes. Just when Pilar’s life was about to open out, to expand—she’d never even been out of Colorado before—we made one stupid mistake. I made one. And her life contracted to a crummy one-room trailer, a baby with colic, a nineteen-year-old husband who could barely keep himself in boot leather, much less support a family. Yeah, she made one hell of a choice.”
“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