when someone pissed her off. No more smiling when she really felt like popping someone upside the head. No more Ms. Nice Lady. She was mad, dammit, and God help the next person who got in her way—
The doorbell rang.
She marshaled all her newfound fury into one hopefully emasculating glare and marched to the door.
The way her topknot hung by a thread over her right ear was C.J.’s first clue that something was very, very wrong.
The baby slung on her hip was the second.
Her voice mail had been short, and not exactly sweet. “Meet me at my place anytime after six,” she’d said, then left her address, finishing with, “And believe me, it’s not what you think.”
“You … wanted to see me?”
Wordlessly, Dana spun around and stomped back inside the apartment, which he cautiously took as permission to enter.
His first horrified thought, when he saw the room, was that she’d been burgled. After he swallowed his heart, however, he realized the damage seemed superficial. In fact, it was all baby stuff. A swing and playpen fought for space between a peach-colored armchair, a glass-topped coffee table; diapers—both clean and dirty, from what he could tell—littered the pastel, Southwest design sofa; an infant car seat took up half the blond dining table, the rest of which was covered by no less than a dozen open jars of baby food and a mountain of dirty napkins or paper towels or something.
She’d gone into the kitchenette, where she dampened a cloth to wipe off the squirming baby’s cheeks. Said child giggled, somehow snatched the wet rag out of Dana’s hand and tossed it with unerring accuracy smack into her face.
A finely honed survival instinct told C.J. to proceed with extreme caution.
“Babysitting?” he asked.
“Funny you should say that.” Dana caught the cloth as it fell, slapping it onto the counter. Hot little flames sparked in her eyes. “Trish breezed back into town today.”
C.J. literally felt the blood drain from his face.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. She brought me a present. Now, it’s a very nice present, to be sure, but heaven knows I wasn’t expecting anything like this. Nor did I realize I wasn’t going to be given any say in whether or not I even wanted this present.”
He looked at the baby, who flashed him a wide, gummy smile, then back at Dana. Somehow, even her hair seemed redder. Okay, Trish in town probably equaled Trish told Dana. But she’d have hardly asked him to come over about that, for crying out loud. And what did the baby have to do with anything?
“I’m sorry,” C.J. said, “but am I missing something?”
Her mouth set, she swept past him on her way from kitchen to living room, bending awkwardly with the child still balanced on her hip in order to pull something out of her handbag. Then she marched over to him and smacked a triple-folded sheet of paper into his palm.
Acid etched at the lining of his stomach as he unfolded the paper, burst into flame when he read it. The first word out of his mouth was particularly choice.
“Yeah. That was about my reaction, too,” Dana said. “Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Did you and my cousin …”
“You mean, she didn’t tell you?”
“She didn’t tell me squat.”
Still staring at the paper, C.J. pushed out a sigh. “Once, Dana. Right after she’d quit. And we both knew it was a mistake.”
He couldn’t quite tell if that was disappointment or flat-out, go-to-hell-and-don’t-come-back hatred that was making her eyes so dark. “And does the date correspond to that once?”
“Yes. But …” He shook his head, as if doing so would make it all go away. “This can’t be right.”
“Why not?”
He lifted his eyes to Dana’s. “Because I had a vasectomy. Five years ago.”
Silence stretched between them, painful and suffocating. Until, on a soft little “Oh,” Dana dropped onto the sofa with the baby on her lap.
The baby, C.J. thought, with eyes exactly like his.
But then, lots of babies had blue eyes. Tons of babies. Millions, even.
And somewhere, some deity or other was grinning his—or, more likely her—ass off.
“Wow,” Dana said. “You weren’t kidding about not seeing babies in your future.”
C.J.’s mouth pulled tight. “That had been the plan. But—”
“Oh, geez, sorry to have come down so hard on you. I should have realized … Especially knowing my cousin …” She frowned. “What?”
“I think I need to sit.”
“Uh … sure. Make yourself at home.”
C.J. shoehorned himself into a half-blocked club chair across from the sofa and stared again at the birth certificate. At the letters that formed, of all the crazy things, his name. Yeah, as screwups went, this one was in a league of its own.
He supposed Trish could have been lying, otherwise why wouldn’t she have surfaced sooner? Still, something deep in his gut told him she wasn’t.
“C.J.?”
He let out a humorless laugh, then collapsed back into the chair, meeting her gaze. “You really believe me, don’t you? About Ethan. Not being mine.”
“Um … yeah. Shouldn’t I?”
“No. I mean, yes, I’m telling you the truth. But for all you know, I could be some bastard who’d say anything just to get out of accepting responsibility.”
“Are you?”
“A bastard?” he said with a weak smile.
“Trying to duck responsibility.”
He shook his head.
“I didn’t think so,” she said, and he hauled in a huge breath.
“The thing is … I’ve been a bad boy.”
She smirked. “I don’t think you want to go there.”
“No, I mean …” He exhaled. “The procedure’s ninety-nine percent effective. About the same as the Pill. Which your cousin told me she was on, by the way. Why are you shaking your head?”
“Trish couldn’t take the Pill, she had bad reactions to the hormones.”
C.J. stared at Dana for a moment, then scrubbed
