Rex cried louder, and Phoebe brought him up against her shoulder. “No, Natalie,” she said patiently. “I’m asking if you’ve seen Teddy.”
The voice became somewhat more alert. “He’s boogied out of town? He really did it and stuck you with the kid?”
Something about Natalie’s near-instant grasp of the situation made Phoebe nervous. “Did he talk to you about this?”
“Uh-huh,” she grunted affirmatively. “Said he could count on you to take the baby in. Even thought about giving you the baby for good.”
As if he could hear the conversation himself, Rex really started to cry in earnest. Phoebe rubbed his back and squeezed shut her eyes again. “Anything else, Natalie? Did Teddy say anything else or do you know where he might be?”
Over Rex’s unhappiness, Phoebe could barely make out Natalie’s sleepy “Uh-uh.”
Knowing the apartment walls were paper-thin, and pretty sure the other woman didn’t have any additional information, Phoebe said a quick goodbye in order to turn all her attention to the baby. She held him against her and started pacing, after two weeks sure that he wouldn’t be comforted until she’d racked up a couple of miles of hardwood floor.
Even thought about giving you the baby for good.
With Rex calming down, Natalie’s words finally had a chance to sink in.
Did Teddy really mean it?
And what would Phoebe do if it were so?
Taking a breath, she reined in her galloping pulse. “We need to discuss this rationally,” she told Rex, who blinked at her owlishly as she rounded the corner of the living room for another lap. His mind was easy to read.
“I know, I know. I’ve always been more emotional than rational, it’s true.”
And idealistic and romantic and eager to give her heart.
She licked her dry lips. “But we could do this, Rex, we could make it happen. My work is already flexible, and I could get it done around your schedule.”
There was school, too, of course, but she could postpone completing her degree if she had to, or look into day care on campus. She only had classes scheduled two days a week anyhow. And with her landlady and some of her fellow tenants less than enthusiastic about how easily the sounds of a baby carried through their thin walls day and night, it might be prudent to leave her apartment a couple of times a week.
“See, Rex? School and work taken care of.”
He didn’t appear totally convinced, instead he narrowed his eyes speculatively, as if he still had one important question to pose.
“Well, there is that.” Really and truly bringing a child into her life probably meant—at the very least—postponing romance. And she harbored some very old-fashioned, and very specific dreams on that subject.
She’d been waiting all her life for the man who “clicked”—her code for the man she believed would come along and be recognized by her heart and soul. No doubt having Rex permanently with her would affect that plan.
“But I’m twenty-four and I’ve not caught a glimpse of him yet, Rex.” Oh, there’d been dates and all, but she was determined to find the kind of love her mother had found with her stepfather. So far that had remained elusive. And Rex was right here, right now, needing her.
As if the baby was satisfied with her answer, his eyes finally drifted shut, his incredibly miraculous lashes resting against his soft, plump cheeks.
Unwilling to let go of him just yet, Phoebe sat carefully on the flowered love seat. Despite her tiredness, she just looked at him, marveling at every tiny perfection, and that oh-so-dangerous emotion she’d felt before flooded back into her heart and expanded it with equal parts pain and pleasure.
The click. She would be saying goodbye to that notion if she committed herself to Rex. But she had just as many strong and good reasons—reasons also rooted in her past—to want to provide the baby with a loving home.
It was Rex who was clicking now.
He whimpered a little in his sleep, and she snuggled him closer. “I love you,” she said, letting the words out freely this time. “I’m here.”
Then she allowed herself to say something else, something big and something important, though between the sentiment and the reality stood a whole laundry list of problems: absent fathers, acute-eared neighbors, landladies with a thing about single mothers. She said it, anyway, because it just seemed right. “Mommy’s here.”
Next door that baby was crying again. Jackson Abbott tried to ignore the plaintive sound and fall back asleep.
It wasn’t working.
Nearly every noise penetrated the thin wall between his apartment and the one next door. Either it was the baby crying or the disturbingly soft voice of his neighbor patiently placating it.
A warm, afternoon breeze filled the coarse muslin curtains in his bedroom and then disappeared, snapping the thick material against the sill. It wasn’t soothing, either.
Another infant cry drilled through the drywall. Whoever had divided the old three-story Victorian house into separate apartments had spared the expenses wherever possible. Though the month-to-month agreement he had with the landlady-owner suited his purposes for the moment, this place wasn’t constructed for the long-term comfort of a man whose work required him to sleep while the rest of the world went about their business.
The baby cried again, and Jackson sighed. The thing was, that baby was hard to ignore. Not only its often-dissatisfied wailing and the murmur of his neighbor’s patient and sweet voice trying to calm it, but the existence of the child itself.
Babies had a way of getting to him.
This one unwillingly piqued his curiosity, too. He’d been here in Strawberry Bay a month, and was due to stay five weeks more. The first part of his stay, his neighbor had been blissfully quiet. She did something on a computer most of the day—the clickety-clack of keys was a dead giveaway—with only a phone call or two as punctuation.
Then, something like fourteen days ago, the baby had entered her life.
Their lives.
He punched his pillow, trying to soften the damn thing as he listened to the baby cry some more. Where had it come from? He’d caught a glimpse or two of the woman next door, and she hadn’t looked pregnant. Furthermore, unless the HMOs had that drive-through baby delivery thing really in place, the woman hadn’t been away from her apartment long enough to produce an infant in the usual way.
Jackson groaned through his teeth. What did it matter? He shouldn’t be caring about neighbors or their babies. For years he’d made it his practice to avoid such entanglements. What he cared about was sleep. God knew he’d need it on the job tonight.
The night shift was hell, but he’d been at it for more than two years and would be at it for an indefinite number more. Between 9:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m. was the only possible time to shut down even the least-crowded of California’s highways. Then he and his crew could go about the work of
