he eyed the sign swaying in the wind. Bookkeeping & Tax Service. Dana had established the business five years ago, right after college. She’d needed a job where she could work from home and still care for her arthritic mother. Since not everyone needed the services of a full-fledged certified public accountant, she’d developed a modest clientele quickly, leaving her with plenty of time to devote to her increasingly incapacitated parent.
After her mother’s death and his subsequent marriage, John had heard that Dana had taken on even more accounts. That could create a problem, he thought, shutting off the truck’s engine.
“Well, first let’s see what kind of reception we get,” he said, releasing the safety belt from around the box. Deciding the baby was better off left inside it, John picked up the box like a hamper of clothes and climbed out of his truck. Then he negotiated the puddles and mounted the front steps.
As he rang the doorbell, he noticed his hand was steadier than ever. Odd, he thought, since he suddenly felt more anxious than any time previously in his life. What if she slammed the door in his face? What if she looked through the peephole and refused to even acknowledge his presence?
He stared into it, willing her not to resist him. The maneuver must have worked because seconds later the door swung open.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Carl, I was on the—” The apology and the smile of welcome on her face were both cut off abruptly as she saw he wasn’t the person she’d been expecting. The folder she’d begun to pass to him trembled in her hand. Quickly she drew it against her chest like a shield.
“Hello, Dana,” he offered gruffly.
Her stunned gaze went from him to the box, then back up to him, finally turning steely. “You bastard,” she whispered.
It wasn’t, he concluded, the most reassuring of starts.
Chapter Two
Slam the door, Dana told herself. Shut it now, before it’s too late.
She didn’t want to see how awful he looked. She didn’t want to pay attention to what he held in his arms. She didn’t want to let him slip under her defenses again, or make the mistake of letting him know how much the mere sight of him affected her.
“You have your nerve” was all that she could manage.
The comment left him looking even more haunted, more miserable. “I know,” he replied gruffly. “But could I come in and talk to you for a minute?”
Her front stoop offered no protection from the weather, and as furious as she was with John Paladin, Dana knew it would take a heart much harder than hers to keep a newborn infant out in the rain. She wasn’t, however, thrilled with being put in this predicament. Her look mutinous, she stepped back to admit them.
Actually she felt like the weather, gray and dreary. Since she hadn’t been expecting any clients, except Carl Hyatt, who was supposed to pick up his reconciled bank statement, she’d put on the drab, pumice gray tunic and leggings for comfort and warmth, not appearance. On the other hand, she supposed she looked ten times better than the giant dripping all over her entry rug.
Despite the shadow caused by his Stetson and the perpetual tan from endless days in the sun and wind, his strong-featured, wide-planed face was more gaunt than she’d ever seen it. Those dark brown eyes that had troubled more than a few of her dreams now possessed an almost sunken quality, and even his full beard and mustache couldn’t hide the deep lines that bracketed his hard mouth. This wasn’t the face of a thirty-year-old man. What’s more, she was shocked to see the changes in the six-foot-three-inch body that had once made high school and college football coaches rub their hands with glee. In the months since she’d last seen him, he’d turned into a shadow of his former self.
“You look good, Dana.”
“You look like hell,” she muttered, not caring if it did make her sound ungracious. Blast the man, regardless of his reasons for coming here.
“Yeah, well, it’s turning out to be a rough day. A rough year.”
She lifted an eyebrow, determined to retain her dignity, no matter what. “Don’t tell me the honeymoon’s over already?”
“You know there wasn’t any honeymoon.”
“Of course. What could I have been thinking?” she declared, touching her palm to her forehead. “You two had yours before the wedding.”
“There wasn’t any wedding. There was a ceremony to take care of legalities. And to set the record straight once and for all, there wasn’t any love in our marriage, either,” he added, his features resembling a volcano ready to explode. “I told you—”
“Yes, you told me,” Dana said quickly, more concerned with avoiding another barrage of excuses than worrying about his temper. “And I told you when you came over the day you got back from Abilene that I wanted nothing more to do with you. That means you have no business being here now.”
She thought it was a pretty fair declaration of independence under the circumstances…until he shifted his hold on the in his arms and she was forced to take a closer look at what he was carrying his baby in. Suddenly she forgot everything she’d said. “Are you out of your mind? You can’t carry around a child in that thing!”
He shifted, looking decidedly uncomfortable. “Believe me, that’s been pointed out to me already, but it was all I had at the moment. Would you like to meet my son?”
“No.” She backed away a step and clasped her hands behind her. Getting up close and personal with his flesh and blood was the last thing she needed to do. Bad enough her curiosity threatened to drive her crazy.
“Okay, but I need to give him a bit of air.” He looked around as though trying to decide where to put down the box. “Do you mind if I, er…?”
Dana wanted to resist helping him. Unfortunately, this being her house, she didn’t exercise that option. “The couch is fine,” she finally told him.
She couldn’t help feeling resentful. Set up. As far as she was concerned, they’d finished with each other the day before he’d left for Abilene. But when he cast a dubious look at his soggy, muddy boots and then at her rose-colored carpet, she grew even more agitated. “For heaven’s sake, it’s a little late to worry about dirt. Just do it.”
As he crossed over to the green-and-rose print couch by the wall, Dana wrapped her arms around her waist. She wasn’t surprised at having to fight a feeling of emptiness. Since the day she’d heard he’d married, and why, she’d been dreading this moment. Now that it was here, she didn’t know if she could handle it.
His child…She’d known John Paladin from the time she’d been an inexperienced, shy sixteen and he a larger-than-life twenty. Despite efforts to ignore her contradictory feelings for him during a goodly portion of that time, she’d succumbed to more than a few fantasies. Fantasies such as imagining what it would be like to be possessed by him…to conceive a baby with him and carry his child…to share a life with him.
She’d blamed those daydreams—disaster dreams she called them now—along with her tendency toward melancholia on her Irish genes, the same excuse her mother had ascribed to her father’s drinking and temper. These days she knew better; she’d merely been a fool. But she was trying to change! Surprise visits made
