began to roll her cart away. Seemingly as an afterthought, she turned around to Cooper again.
“Thinking of having one of your own?” she asked with a smile.
He shook his head resolutely. “Nope. Just curious.”
She laughed again. “Better watch yourself. That’s what I used to say.” And with that, she turned around again and exited the supermarket.
Cooper watched her go, finding some solace in the fact that a person could have a child and still be interesting, attractive and happy, not to mention maintain a sense of humor. For some reason, he’d thought all that would dry up once a person became a parent. Wasn’t that how it usually worked? You had a kid, you bought a house in the ’burbs, and you started worrying about aphids and driving a minivan. You picked up weight and lost your hair, and you started saying things like, “Turn that music down” or “When I was your age” or “Finish your broccoli—children are starving in Europe.”
Yet there went a woman who, if she hadn’t been married, he probably would have asked out. She didn’t seem like a mom. She seemed like…fun. She was even kind of sexy. Go figure. Who knew?
It was a thought that came back to taunt him that evening when he answered the knock at his front door and opened it to find Katie Brennan standing on the other side.
Just like that.
For a moment, he could only stare at her, half convinced she was nothing more than a mirage, a simple refraction of light resulting from the bloodred sun that hung low in the sky behind her. Immediately, however, he realized she was not. Because if she was a mirage, he would be seeing her as he had the last time, and this Katie was entirely different from the one he had met two months ago.
For one thing, she was much thinner—too thin, really. And her hair was a bit longer, though it lacked the luster and softness that had been present before. Her face was paler now than it had been even in childbirth, the skin drawn tightly over high cheekbones and a narrow nose. And dark circles stained the undersides of her eyes, making them appear even larger and a stormier gray than they had before.
She looked more exhausted than she had the last time he’d seen her. More fragile. More frantic. And Cooper could scarcely believe his good fortune that she had come back to him.
For one long moment, he could only stand stock-still staring at her. Then a baby’s soft cooing punctured the silence, and Cooper dropped his gaze to the infant she clutched in her arms. Where Katie seemed to have deteriorated into almost nothing, Andrew was fat and pink and thriving. It was as if the baby had taken his vitality from Katie, as if she had literally given of herself to keep him hale. He gazed up at Cooper with a bland expression in his blue-gray eyes, then turned his attention back to his mother. Cooper didn’t know much about babies, but he could have sworn Andrew looked worried about his mom.
“Help me.”
They were the first words Katie had spoken to Cooper so long ago, on a cold, snowy night when her child’s welfare had so clearly superseded her own. Now it was springtime, a bright, balmy evening full of promise, and she repeated the words again with exactly the same intonation. She was asking for help for herself, but she was obviously demanding it for her son.
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