baby—and when she should tell him the truth about little Joe.
“Wait, Sabrina.” He caught up with her, matching her stride. “Can I carry something for you? You look pretty loaded down.”
She had Joe’s diaper bag, her purse and Joe. “No, thanks. I carry this all the time by myself.”
“Well, it’s too much gear for a petite thing like you. Let me take the baby,” Jonas said, reaching for little Joe.
Sabrina gave him up reluctantly, watching Jonas’s expression as he held his son. Interested faces peered out of shop windows, and their friends and neighbors who were walking along Diablo’s sidewalks stopped to watch, even though they acted as if they weren’t. Sabrina felt like a fish in an aquarium. Still, she waited as Jonas carefully studied little Joe.
Finally, Jonas glanced at her. “Is this my son, Sabrina?”
So this was how it was going to be. She hadn’t planned to tell him on a beautiful, sunny May day in front of the hometown crowd, but he’d asked, and she wasn’t going to prevaricate. “Yes. Joe is your son.”
Jonas closed his eyes for a moment, pressed the baby close to his cheek. “What is his full name?”
“Jonas Cavanaugh McKinley. He was born on November 20.”
He studied the baby, and Joe seemed to study him in return. “I assume my name is listed as the father on the birth certificate?”
“Yes, it is. Of course it is.” Sabrina took Joe back, though Jonas seemed reluctant to part with his newfound son. “We have an appointment. I’m sorry.”
She started walking at a brisk pace. Jonas kept up with her.
“What kind of appointment?”
“Six month checkup and shots.” She didn’t mean to be curt, but this was so awkward, so unplanned, that Sabrina didn’t know how to do anything else but put up her defenses.
“I feel I should be there.”
She stopped and looked up at the tall, handsome man she’d once loved with all her heart. “Jonas, I appreciate that you’re going to want to be active in Joe’s life. But not today. I need…time.”
He glowered. “I’m not trying to butt into your life, Sabrina. When Joe sees the doctor, I want to be there. Every time.”
She sighed. “Fine. You can hold him when he cries.”
“He won’t cry,” Jonas said. “He’s a Callahan.”
“He’ll cry,” Sabrina said, “because he’s a baby. And it’ll be loud and unpleasant, and you’ll want to cry, too. But I can’t take care of both of you, so you’ll have to refrain.”
He touched her arm to stop her dash toward the doctor’s office door. “Sabrina, I can tell you’re upset. I’m sorry. This isn’t the way I wanted anything to turn out between us.”
She didn’t want pity. “Jonas, we never had a plan, so there’s nothing to apologize for.”
He nodded. “Still, I think you and I should talk.”
“We will one day. I just don’t know when.” She stepped inside the office, glad that Jonas would have to stop talking to her about Joe now. This was harder than she’d thought it would be. She’d never envisioned him marrying someone else.
Joe squirmed in her arms, getting restless, and Sabrina searched for a bottle.
“Want me to hold him?”
“Sure.” She handed Joe off to his father and kept rummaging until she found what she needed. “I suppose you’ll want to feed him, too?”
“Can I?” Jonas’s face lit up.
She sighed. “The nipple goes in his mouth.”
“Sabrina,” Jonas said, “I know how to feed an infant.”
“Good. Here’s the burp diaper.” She flung a beribboned cloth over his shoulder. The six other mothers in the waiting room smiled at Jonas as he held the baby. He didn’t notice the beams of approbation.
“Hi, Joe,” he said to his son.
“I’m going to check in.” Sabrina walked to the office window, signed in, then turned around, her heart catching as she looked across the room at Jonas.
This is what I came back to Diablo for.
Not that it was going to do her any good. “Jonas,” she said, walking back over to sit beside him, “where’s Chelsea?”
Jonas didn’t take his eyes off his son. “She said now that we aren’t getting married, she’s going to try to find a job in Diablo.”
“What?” Sabrina stared at him, astounded.
He shrugged. “She said she couldn’t marry me now. That it would be a dumb thing to do, because we’re just friends, anyway. She said I had a son I didn’t know about, and I needed to get things straight in my life. I agreed with her.”
Sabrina blinked. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to come between you.”
“You didn’t. There was nothing between Chelsea and me to start with.”
Sabrina thought that was unlikely, given Jonas’s sex appeal. But she didn’t ask any more questions, deciding that digging for more information wasn’t really her place. “Do you want me to feed Joe now?”
“I think I’ve got the hang of it, thanks.” Jonas stared down at his baby. “You just concentrate on picking out a date to marry me, Sabrina McKinley, because this boy’s name isn’t going to be Jonas Cavanaugh McKinley. It’s going to be Jonas Cavanaugh Callahan, so we might as well get that understood between us right now.”
Chapter Three
His brothers would probably say he was a dunderhead for blurting out his feelings—a bad proposal if there ever was one—in a pediatrician’s office. And they’d be right. But holding little Joe sent such emotions washing over Jonas that it was all he could do not to throw Sabrina in his truck and drive off with the both of them. He could convince her on the road—he did his best work on the road.
That was something his brothers had never understood about him. They thought he was just an old fuddy-duddy, steadfast and boring Jonas the heart surgeon. He was that, in some ways, because he was the eldest and he’d felt a strong sense of being a role model when they were growing up. But there was nothing he loved more than to cut loose from the office and hit the road, experiencing the variety life had to offer.
“I can’t marry you, Jonas,” Sabrina said, interrupting his scattered thoughts. He was nervous—nerves akin to waiting for a bull to leave the chute—as he waited for her answer to the proposition he’d blurted.
“Sabrina,” Jonas said, ignoring her statement. She was an adorably prickly little thing, but
