right, your daughter,” Kevin said from the doorway. “And what are you going to do about it?”
Okay, understanding the anger was one thing; putting up with it was another. Jeff turned on him. “Well, hell, why don’t you give me more than ten seconds to get used to the idea, huh?”
“What’s to get used to,” the other man argued. “You have a child. Unless you’re going to try to deny her.”
“Damn it, Kevin,” Kelly said, and rushed at her mountain of a brother. Planting both hands on his broad chest, she shoved for all she was worth and actually succeeded in backing him up a step or two before he dug in his heels and held his ground.
“This is family business,” one of the other brothers said, keeping his voice carefully neutral. “We have the right to hear what he has to say.”
When she would have argued that point, Jeff said, “He has a point. They do have the right to talk to me about this.”
Surprise flashed across Kevin’s face, but he nodded, clearly pleased. Until Jeff continued.
“But first, Kelly and I are going to talk. Alone.”
“Exactly,” she said, and waved both hands at her brothers, herding them toward the door. “You guys get lost so Jeff and I can settle this between us.”
One of the triplets spoke up then. “Fine. We’ll go. But this isn’t over.”
Now, that, Jeff thought, was putting it mildly. But as he turned back to face the crib, he pushed Kelly’s brothers out of his mind and tried to focus on the shift his life had just taken.
He had a daughter.
It never occurred to him to doubt Kelly’s word on this. She wasn’t the kind of woman to lie about something this huge. If she said he was the father, then that’s just what he was.
But how had this happened?
When he and Kelly were together, they’d been careful. They’d used protection. Hell, he’d gone through enough condoms in that two-week period to justify buying stock in the company. So how did they manage to create a baby? This kind of thing didn’t happen to responsible adults. Surprise babies happened to high-school kids with more hormones than sense.
Swiveling his head, he stared hard at Kelly for a long moment, looking for some sign that she was somehow kidding. Maybe she was baby-sitting, a small, hopeful voice inside him said, completely discounting the fact that the room was a magazine version of a perfect nursery. One last chance here, he told himself. It was a joke. A bad one. But there was no laughter in her eyes. Only the same tension he’d noted earlier.
So much for a last-minute reprieve.
The baby gurgled again, and Jeff forced leaden feet to carry him farther into the room. Pale yellow walls glimmered in the afternoon sunshine streaming through the windows. Teddy bears and baby dolls littered the floor, and a mobile of sea horses dangled over the crib, dancing weirdly to the tinny tune he’d heard earlier.
Dread crashed down around him. A baby. In Kelly’s house. A baby with black hair and blue eyes. A baby that looked—except for the lack of a five-o’clock shadow—too much like Jeff for comfort.
He stood in front of the crib, gripped the top rail in two tight fists and stared down at the baby through eyes glazed with confusion and just a hint of panic. The tiny girl kicked both legs, lifted her arms toward him and gave him a smile that both terrified and touched him more deeply than he would have thought possible.
A child.
He had a child.
God help the poor little thing.
With her brothers gone, Kelly drew her first easy breath all evening. It was hard enough telling Jeff about the baby without the added factor of four men ready and willing to beat him into the ground.
But now that it was just her and Jeff, a wave of discomfort rippled through her. This was so much more difficult than she’d thought it would be. He looked, she thought, like a man who’d been hit over the head with a two-by-four. And she couldn’t blame him.
“I’m sorry this is such a shock,” she said, and winced at the inadequacy of the words.
“Shock?” he muttered, shaking his head. “Good word for this.”
“I would have told you sooner,” Kelly went on, walking across the room to stand beside him, “but I had no way to get in touch with you.”
She looked down at her daughter and felt her heart melt as it always did with one look at Emily.
Amazing how such a tiny person could engender such great amounts of love.
From the moment she’d discovered she was pregnant, Kelly had loved her child with a fierceness she hadn’t thought she was capable of. And she’d wanted to tell Jeff about the baby. But he’d told her in the beginning of their relationship that he was in the Marine Force Recon. Always on the move. Always involved in some covert action, stealing in and out of hostile situations.
She had every postcard he’d sent her over the past year and a half. But there’d been no return address. No way to reach him. And when she’d contacted the base, trying to get in touch with him, she’d been told simply that he was in the field.
“But I called you—” he said, glancing at her briefly. “six months ago, I telephoned you from Guam.”
“A five-minute phone call, Jeff,” she said in her own defense. “Five minutes on a static-filled line.”
She remembered that phone call all too clearly. The sound of his voice, so faraway, so faint. The bursts of white noise that slashed at their tenuous link. She’d wanted to tell him so badly. Wanted him to know about Emily. But how could she have done that to him when he was so far away, going into who knew what kind of danger?
She hadn’t wanted to distract him. Hadn’t wanted to be the cause of his getting hurt or killed on some mission or other because his mind was on something other than the job.
His hands tightened on the crib rail until his knuckles went white. “How long does it take to say, ‘We have a baby girl’?”
A flush of anger swept through her. “Longer than five minutes,” she said. “I couldn’t just announce Emily’s existence and then not be able to talk to you about it.”
“Damn it, Kelly, I had the right to know.” “Yeah, you did. But how was I supposed to track you down to tell you?”
He pulled in a long, deep breath and slanted her a look. “Okay, fine. Maybe there was no way to tell me before. But tell me now. How did this happen?”
She drew her head back and looked at him. “How? For heaven’s sake Jeff, we made love nearly every day for two solid weeks.” “And used condoms,” he pointed out. “Apparently, one of them didn’t work.” “Didn’t work?” he demanded. “How could they not work? That’s their only job!”
Kelly laughed shortly. Hadn’t she asked herself those very questions when she did that first pregnancy test? But asking how wasn’t
