his assessment of the situation. “But…but…someone has to make it out here tonight,” she said, clearly anxious.
Nick shrugged noncommittally. “Yeah, well, I’ll give it my best shot, but don’t get your hopes up.”
“But someone has to.”
“Claire, I—”
“They have to, Nick,” she interrupted, her tone of voice bordering on panicked.
Nick grew puzzled at her reaction. Hey, he knew Claire was no fan of kids—of course, that was something he didn’t find out until the day she’d told him to take a hike—but her reaction now was still kind of surprising. It was just a baby, he thought. What was the big deal?
“I’ll make the call,” he assured her. “But in this weather, on New Year’s Eve, no less, I just wouldn’t count on seeing anybody anytime soon. It’d take a miracle to get someone out here tonight.”
“Then get me a miracle,” she insisted. “Now.”
“Why? What’s the big deal?”
She expelled one single, incredulous chuckle. “Because I can’t take care of this baby by myself,” she told him. “There’s no way.”
He smiled, feeling something warm and totally uncalled-for unwinding in his belly. “Hey, don’t sweat it. Even if we can’t get anybody from Social Services out here tonight, you won’t be by yourself.”
She eyed him curiously. “I won’t?”
“Nah,” he assured her. “I’ll be glad to stay here to help you out. Any way I can. All night long.”
Three
Just as Nick had suspected, no one answered the phone at Social Services. Nor was there anyone available at any of the other half-dozen numbers he called in an effort to get someone out to the house, to take the baby off Claire’s hands. The holiday and the snow had sent every available body out to see to situations that were infinitely more pressing than an abandoned baby who was, at the moment, safe and warm, and in the care of both a government official and a medical doctor.
A disenchanted government official and a very anxious medical doctor, yeah, but still…
Nick settled the cordless phone back into its resting place on the kitchen counter and turned to Claire with a shrug. “Sorry,” he said. For some reason, though, he didn’t exactly feel sorry. There was just something about this situation that prevented him from becoming too overwrought. “But that was the last person I knew to call. Looks like it’s going to be tomorrow afternoon at the earliest before anybody can take Sleeping Beauty off your hands.”
They’d moved both baby and basket into the kitchen with them, and now the infant was slumbering peacefully in the middle of the expansive kitchen table—which Nick couldn’t help but notice was quite a bit larger than one person could possibly need. By the soft, pink light of a small, terra-cotta lamp that burned atop the—really big—refrigerator, Claire had made a pot of coffee. While he was on the phone, she had filled a mug for each of them, and now she was clutching hers with a brutal grip, as if it were her last handhold on reality.
As if reading his mind, she muttered “This can’t be happening. This has got to be a dream. No, a nightmare,” she hastily corrected herself. “I can’t believe I’m going to be stuck here with you and a baby until tomorrow afternoon.”
Nick told himself not to take her sentiment to heart, that she was speaking out of panic and fear and nothing more. But it stung to realize that Claire considered spending any amount of time with him and a baby a nightmare. It wasn’t exactly surprising, but it did sting.
“Yeah, well, look at it this way,” he told her, biting back the bitterness that began to pool in his belly again. “Maybe it won’t be until tomorrow afternoon.”
She arched her eyebrows hopefully. “No?”
He shook his head slowly. Then, gritting his teeth mildly, he told her, “No. The way things are going, it might very well be the day after.”
This time her eyebrows shot down in an angry V. “That’s not funny.”
He bit back a disgruntled chuckle. “Tell me about it. If you think I’m any happier to be stranded in close quarters with you than you are to be here with me, think again. I’m the one who got dumped, in case you’ve forgotten.” The one who never stopped loving you, he added to himself, none too happy about that realization, either.
Why deny it, though? he asked himself. It had been more than a decade since he’d asked Claire to marry him. More than a decade for him to put his feelings for her in the past and move on with his life. And in that length of time, he’d done neither. He still loved her. His love for her had been what prevented him from marrying anyone else. He couldn’t, in good conscience, join himself to another woman and devote his life to her, when what he felt for her would only be shade of the love he still harbored for Claire.
And, simply put, he would never love another woman. Not completely. Not the way he had loved Claire. Not as long as Claire still walked the earth, anyway.
He wasn’t so bitter that he blamed her for the unhappiness he felt these days. Sure, he’d wanted to be married with kids by now, and his life would never feel complete without a family of his own. But it was his choice to remain single and childless. His choice not to get involved with other women beyond a superficial, physical relationship. His choice to look down the road at the future and see nothing but a solitary existence. He certainly didn’t blame Claire for those things. But he didn’t exactly forgive her, either.
She sighed fitfully, bringing his thoughts back to the present. “Let’s not start this again,” she said quietly. “It’s pointless. It’ll just make this situation that much more difficult to weather. We’re not going to learn anything more than we already know about each other.”
“Pointless,” he echoed hollowly. “Yeah, that’s a good word for it,” he concurred further. “We have a whole history that was pretty much pointless, don’t we?”
“Nick…” she said, her voice tinted with an unmistakable warning.
He lifted both hands and held them palm out, in a gesture of surrender. “Okay, okay,” he relented. “I promise to be a good boy. Really, I do.”
Claire rolled her eyes, but refrained from comment. Instead, she turned her attention to her new infant centerpiece. “She sure seems to be sleeping a lot. Is that safe? I mean, I thought babies slept really badly.”
Nick shrugged, gazing in that direction himself. “Depends on the baby,” he said. “A lot of them are lousy sleepers. But some of them sleep like rocks. Besides, this one’s gotta be at least six or seven months old. By now she should be sleeping fairly well at night. And, hey,” he added softly, “tonight hasn’t exactly been conducive to good sleep for her, has it?”
Claire turned and eyed him suspiciously through lowered lids. Very coolly, she remarked, “You seem to know an awful lot about babies. Do you…have one or two of your own?”
He couldn’t help noting that she glanced quickly down at his—ringless—left hand as she made the comment. Ooo, he thought. Touchy. Is that jealousy tinting Claire’s voice now?
