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  “Hey, he doesn’t need a woman to help him buy for this kid,” Clint protested.

  Lilah laughed. “I wasn’t being sexist, just practical. I heard that Abbie’s been helping out in the church’s daycare since she was twelve and was everybody’s favorite babysitter. She probably knows a few things about babies.” She looked pointedly at Jake. “Do you?”

  Jake knew Lilah had him. He looked at Rafe, his friend with the most knowledge of children. Rafe had been a foster parent to dozens of children over the years.

  Before he could even start to ask for help, Rafe laughed. “No way. I’ve got patients three deep at the vet clinic and two house calls to make.”

  “I hate to bother Abbie again,” Jake said. “She’s already taken on too much since Barney’s attack.”

  “Maybe you should pay her,” Clint muttered.

  “I am paying her. You think I’d ask her to work for free?”

  “No, pay her for helping with Lucas. You know, like a nanny.”

  “That’s a separate topic,” Jake said. “We were talking about baby equipment.”

  “Just looking ahead,” Clint said. “You’re going to need help.”

  “Ask her,” Lilah said. “She might say no, but you can always ask.”

  “I’ll ask her if she’ll help me shop, but I’m not going to ask her to be a nanny.”

  At the very moment he needed Rafe’s mediation tactics, Rafe was digging through the toys, frowning when he found one that had a lot of small pieces.

  Clint shrugged and started going through a box of books. He held up one of them. “While you’re shopping, get the kid some books besides leather-bound gift sets of Kidnapped and Treasure Island.”

  “And clothes,” Lilah called out from Jake’s bedroom, where she’d gone to change Lucas.

  “You brought up four boxes of clothes last night,” Jake protested.

  “Right, and most of them have to be ironed. Or dry-cleaned.” She emerged from the bedroom with Lucas, whom she’d changed into navy pants and a sweater.

  Jake blew out a sigh. He needed help. A lot of it. So maybe asking Abbie to go shopping with him was an imposition, but it would be just one afternoon. “Okay, I’ll ask her,” he said, more to himself than to anyone else in the room.

  “Of course you will.” Clint stood up and started down the stairs.

  Jake frowned. Was Clint going to ask her himself? Or bring her up here?

  Lilah handed Lucas back to Jake. “I have to go, and so does Rafe. But we’re as close as the phone if you have an emergency.”

  What was she talking about? His whole life was an emergency.

  “I appreciate what you’ve already done,” he said, leaning his head away from Lucas, who’d latched on to his earlobes, “more than I can tell you.” Good thing the kid was so cute.

  Clint shoved open the front door. “Here she is.”

  An obviously confused Abbie followed him into the small living room. Her gaze landed on Jake and Lucas.

  “Clint said you needed to talk to me immediately.” Jake shot Clint a frown, which his friend ignored, then looked back at Abbie. “Um… I was wondering…if you wouldn’t mind…could you—”

  “The man needs a nanny,” Clint said bluntly. “He wants you. He’ll pay big bucks. Okay?”

  “Clint!”

  Clint just shrugged at the chorus of voices. “Needs to be said.”

  “I was only going to ask her to go shopping,” Jake said, really irritated at Clint. But at the same time, he suddenly saw himself in the kitchen without Lucas on his left hip, saw himself cooking with both hands while Lucas was up here in the apartment, happily playing with Abbie. The thought was nearly irresistible.

  He looked back at her. She’d gone completely still, her eyes round and unfocused. He felt an edge of anger, not at her because she was going to say no, but at himself for wishing she’d say yes.

  The voice in Abbie’s head was her mother’s. “Abbie, you’ll get attached to that baby and you won’t want to go back to school.” Realizing everyone was staring at her, she finally found her own voice.

  “You can’t imagine how much I’d like to take care of Lucas,” she said slowly. Her eyes dropped to the floor. She couldn’t look at any of them, especially Jake. “But I’ll only be here until January, and I’m supposed to be doing whatever it takes to decide on a new course of education.”

  “Of course,” Jake said swiftly. “You can’t take on a full-time job, especially one that…that…”

  “That takes so much emotional energy,” Lilah said quietly. “I’m sorry. We weren’t thinking.”

  Now Abbie could face Jake. “I hope you can understand. Maybe I could help in some other ways, like keeping him out of the way in the restaurant, and I know a lot about babies from all those years of taking care of them at church, so I could offer you advice…” She trailed off. Jake was giving her an embarrassed smile.

  “All advice welcomed,” he said.

  To Abbie’s relief, the room came to life again, with everyone talking about Barney and hiring more help, Lilah making funny faces at Lucas and saying, “We could easily keep him for you from five to ten, Jake…”

  Abbie felt tears welling up. “I’m sorry,” she said one more time. “I guess I’d better get back to work.” And she fled down the stairs.

  She felt horrible, but she’d done what she had to do. “You’ll settle right back into the valley,” her mother had said. “You’ll be a waitress for the rest of your life.”

  Or a nanny for the next twelve years. She knew herself too well. If she established an emotional attachment to Lucas, she’d never leave.

  At the foot of the stairs, she paused. The restaurant wasn’t all that busy. They didn’t really need her.

  She went back up the stairs, where Jake looked surprised to see her. “I could help for a few minutes right now,” she told him. “I could take Lucas for a walk.”

  “He doesn’t walk yet,” Jake said.

  Abbie gave him a “how dumb can you get” look. “In a stroller,” she said.

  Jake looked at Lilah. “He doesn’t have a stroller.” The way the whole crew fell silent and began to stare at her made Abbie nervous. After a long moment, Lilah said, “If you wouldn’t mind going with Jake to Baby Heaven in Amarillo this afternoon, he could outfit Lucas a lot faster.”

  “Lilah…” Jake said in a warning tone.

  “Sure.” Abbie smiled, feeling much better. “I’d be happy to do that. What about two o’clock, when Jake’s Place quiets down? You’d be back in time for dinner.”

  “I can’t,” Jake protested. “I have to get ready for the dinner crowd.”

  “No, what you have to do is buy a stroller,” Clint said. “And a high chair, so Lucas can watch you shave.”

  “For a man who was scared to hold a baby, you’re all of a sudden an expert?”

  “Time out,” Rafe said. “If you don’t get the stuff you need, the next few days will be a nightmare. So figure out something simple for dinner, and then go shopping.”

  Abbie waited for the verdict, not sure if they were going shopping or not.

  “Okay,” Jake said, looking like a man sentenced to death. “I guess that’s what I have to do. After I check in on Barney.”

  “How does he look today?” Abbie asked Jake when he joined her in the hospital lobby after he’d spent a few minutes with Barney.

  Jake sighed, worry etched on his face. “Better. More color in his face. He just needs to take it easy for a while. Which isn’t what he wants to do. Hey, Lucas, did you shake up the place while I was gone?” He held out his arms for the baby.

  “He was an angel,” Abbie said. “He smiled and waved at everybody who walked by. He’s a real charmer.” He was charming and warm and soft while she’d held him in her arms. She steeled herself against falling in love with him.

  “This was Barney’s wakeup call,” she told Jake. “He’ll have to change his lifestyle, get some exercise…”

&nbs
p; Jake simply nodded as they went to the car. Agreeing with her? Or not interested in what she had to say? And why should she even care? At the moment, she was along for the ride, a bizarre ride with an unprepared father to a baby warehouse. It was so unreal that she didn’t dare analyze it. Best just to do it and examine her motives later.

  On the drive to Amarillo, Jake’s cell phone rang. “Steve,” he shouted at the dashboard. “Speak of the devil. I was going to call you tomorrow.” Steve headed the Dallas Culinary School.

  “Hey, I heard you were short on staff.”

  “Am I ever.”

  “We need spots for a couple of second-year students to get hands-on experience. Could you use them?”

  “Well, yes. The sooner, the better. They can room in Mrs. Hartley’s boarding house. You’ve saved me. You couldn’t have asked at a better time. Send them right away, the sooner the better.”

  He ended the call with a big whoosh of relief and glanced at Abbie. “I might actually get through this.”

  “Of course you will,” Abbie said. “You and the restaurant both will get through it with five stars.”

  He fell silent for a while. Abbie considered drawing him out but decided it was best to leave him alone. The man had been through so much in the past few days. He’d lost his father, brought home a baby, and had his right-hand man felled by a heart attack. That kind of stress would get to anyone.

  10

  Baby Heaven was a huge warehouse-type store that was guaranteed to carry everything any child could need. Jake looked shell-shocked when they got inside.

  “Where do we start?” he asked.

  “Clothes. What’s our budget?”

  “Nearly infinite,” Jake said. “If I run out of money, this kid’s rich. My father left him a ton of money in trust. I can draw on it if I need to, but I’m planning not to need to.”

  “Your father must have been very successful.”

  He gave her a blank look. It only lasted a second or two before he said, “Yeah, I guess he was. I don’t know anything about him, or at least, anything about him these past fifteen years. We haven’t spoken.”

  Before she could respond, he said, “Okay, let’s get going. This store is a madhouse.”

  Abbie wanted to say something comforting to him about his father, but what could she say? What sort of father simply abandoned his child?

  Forcing herself to stay focused, she nodded toward the right. “Baby clothes,” she said.

  The clothing aisles were splashed with color. She and Jake wandered around for some time before she found what they needed.

  She selected a few outfits, then Jake added a few more. “More?”

  He shrugged. “He’s been changed twice today already. No matter how much we buy, it won’t be enough.”

  When Abbie laughed, Lucas joined in, smiling and bouncing in the shopping-cart seat. He looked at Jake, then raised his arms, the universal sign that he wanted to be held, and Jake complied, picking up Lucas and settling him on his hip.

  “You know, I think Lucas loves you already,” she said.

  Jake stopped in his tracks. For a moment, he looked down at Lucas, and then he looked at Abbie. A flash of all the confusion and stress he must be feeling flitted across his face, only to disappear and be replaced by his usual smile.

  “I think he just wants to see better,” Jake said.

  “Sure,” Abbie said, and then, when Lucas immediately started grabbing at all the brightly colored clothes, added, “Hmm. Maybe you’re right.”

  Two aisles over, they found the strollers. Abbie suggested one. Jake pushed it back and forth a few times and said, “Fine.”

  Next they went to the crib-bedding shelves. Abbie stood back and let Jake and Lucas handle this one on their own. She couldn’t remember ever seeing anything as interesting as the two of them picking out crib sheets.

  She didn’t bother to point out to Jake that Lucas was too young to understand what they were doing. Watching them was simply too cute.

  The pair gave their choices thorough consideration. When Jake held up sheets covered with race cars, Lucas giggled and bounced with great excitement. Abbie realized the baby was reacting to the excitement in Jake’s voice and the vivid primary colors of the cars, but still, you could imagine the two of them were having a conversation.

  “Yeah? These?” Jake studied the sheets, then pronounced, “Good choice, buddy.” He walked over to Abbie and tossed the package of sheets into the cart. “He likes cars.”

  She bit back a smile. “Was there ever a man who didn’t?” She tossed two more into the cart.

  As Jake and Lucas headed down the next aisle toward the high chairs, something Jake seemed fixed on, she spied a display of stuffed animals and spent a few minutes squishing them before she picked out a rabbit she couldn’t resist and tossed it into the cart.

  When she caught up with Jake and Lucas, she paused just to look at them for a minute. Watching Jake with Lucas was really getting to her. He was kind and patient with the baby, and she admired the way he’d taken on this responsibility.

  If she wasn’t careful, Lucas wasn’t the only one she was going to fall for.

  Lucas snoozed happily in his crib, but Jake felt unsettled. Restlessly, he paced the apartment, always pausing at Lucas’ open door to listen to his breathing.

  He knew a glass of good wine or a simple over-the-counter pain reliever would help him relax enough to sleep, but he didn’t know if a new father was allowed to drink even one glass of wine or take even one pain reliever until his child was old enough to scream, “I have pneumonia!”

  In the path of his pacing, he saw a purple folder buried in a towering stack of papers. They had once been in his office, now Lucas’ bedroom, and Abbie had moved them onto a bookshelf in order to make space on his desk for the equipment Lucas would need.

  He pulled out the folder. It was his Abernathy file. He’d almost forgotten about his trip to New York. How could he honor the commitment he’d made to Richard Stein?

  His first thought was the money Abernathy had spent in order to get him to New York: drivers, plane tickets, hotel, and more. He had to go.

  His next thought was what to do about Lucas. There he drew a blank.

  If he called Rafe, he’d get the full you-can’t-go routine. He called Clint, who stayed up late, and not because he had a baby whose breathing had to be monitored.

  He reached a wide-awake Clint and explained the situation. Clint’s analysis, because Clint was the analytical one of the three of them, shocked him.

  “He just lost his parents—and his nanny. You’re all he has. You can’t leave him this soon.”

  “He gets along great with Abbie. Maybe she’d keep him—just this one time, of course.”

  “You and he need to bond.”

  Bond? Where had Clint learned about bonding? And what exactly did it mean?

  “So to bond with him, you’d have to take him to New York,” Clint went on. “You’ve just moved him to a new place. If you take him to another new place, you’d better be there too.” He paused for a split second. “Look what happened to you and Rafe and me,” he snapped. “We were dumped. You can’t dump Lucas.”

  His words hit Jake right in the gut. He’d never felt close to his parents when he’d been young, and they really had dumped him when he became a troublesome teen. Rafe had felt only fear and loathing for his father. Clint’s mother had bonded with a liquor bottle, not with him.

  “I see your point.” He heard Clint’s whoosh of breath. “I’ll cancel the trip. And, Clint, thanks.”

  He left the folder on top of the stack to deal with first thing in the morning, then checked on Lucas again. He’d never go to sleep now. He gave up, turned on the new lamp in Lucas’ bedroom—its base was a bright-red Mini Cooper—and settled into the biggest rocking chair they’d had for sale at Baby Heaven.

  Lucas made him nervous. No, nervous was too mild a word. Lucas scared him to death. He knew nothing about babies. Heck, he di
dn’t really know much about kids. Sure, he hung around with Rafe’s foster kids, but those boys were older.

  Lucas couldn’t talk, couldn’t walk, and most importantly, couldn’t tell Jake when something was wrong or if he was in pain. Jake would have to figure it out all by himself.

  Fortunately, he had the information at hand. He opened the baby-care book Abbie had insisted he buy.

  “A user manual?” he’d quipped when she put it firmly into his shopping cart. In fact, it was just what he needed. The book was helping him understand more about Lucas.

  What stage he’d reached, what he needed from Jake, and what Jake could expect in the near future.

  The book had a short section on the fear new parents felt. Jake thought that part should have been much longer. He’d never been the type to give up on anything, but Lucas hadn’t been one of his goals. A baby had been thrust on him, a complete surprise, a global change in his life.

  He wondered again why his father had left Lucas to him. Lilah’s he-trusted-you theory was pure Lilah, kind and positive, but he didn’t believe it for a second.

  Jake would stick with his own hypothesis, that his father had thought this day would never come, that Lucas would be an adult before he died, that Celine would outlive him by thirty years, so he’d thought of it as a joke. A cruel joke.

  Well, the day had come. Lucas was entirely dependent on Jake. And Jake would not be like his father. But how? He had so much to learn.

  Lucas made a murmuring sound. Jake was on his feet in an instant, adrenaline racing through his body like fire. When he leaned over the crib, Lucas moaned. Jake reached out and touched his forehead.

  Hot. The baby felt hot.

  It was not the time to look up fever in the baby book. He had touched Lucas only a couple of hours ago, and he’d felt cool and normal.

  Now he was hot, and he was waking up.

  Forcing himself to stay calm, Jake went to the bathroom and got the basket of medical supplies Abbie had put together. Inside was a thermometer, the kind you stuck in the baby’s ear. He went back to the room, and now Lucas was whimpering.