he might just flat out refuse and turn his back on Amy completely. She didn’t think that needed to be said, so she only relayed her other two scenarios.
“If Amy proves not to be yours, I wouldn’t expect or ask anything else of you, and I’ll take her. Happily. Or maybe you’ll find out she is yours but decide you don’t want her because of Lea or because you don’t want to be a single father, or whatever. Again, if I’m up and running again, I’ll gladly take her to live with me and raise her and never ask another thing of you again because no matter who her father is, I love her and I want her with me and I certainly don’t want Amy to ever be with anyone who—”
There were those damn tears again, filling her eyes, cracking her voice, reducing her to something she didn’t want to be reduced to in front of this guy.
“Forget it,” she said, not certain where that had come from. Maybe from the last shred of dignity she had left.
She bent over to retrieve the baby, glad that somehow, even in the midst of the tension hanging thick in the air, Amy had fallen asleep and wasn’t witness to this.
“Hold on,” Luke Walker said then, sounding angry, annoyed and resentful, as if his back had been pushed to the wall.
Karis stopped short of picking up the car seat and straightened a second time, managing to blink away the tears once more, before they’d fallen. She raised a stubborn chin to Luke Walker and again met him eye to eye.
He didn’t expand immediately on his order for her to hold on, though. Instead, he continued to stare at her, studying her, taking her measure, maybe considering what to do next.
Karis endured the silence and the scrutiny, but if he was waiting for her to beg, he had a long wait.
Then, after she’d seen his jaw clench and unclench repeatedly, he finally said, “I’ll have the DNA tests done so I know once and for all if she’s mine, even though I don’t think she is.”
“And you’ll keep her in the meantime?”
There was another long silence before he shook his head. “Not without you here, too.”
Karis didn’t understand the edict, but rather than question it, she said, “I’m not leaving Northbridge for a few days. I have other business here.”
“If it’s with the rest of the Pratts, I’d tread carefully,” he warned in a way that held a bit of authoritative threat to it. “But just telling me you’ll be around town and only for a few days isn’t enough. If I let you out of my sight you could do what, for all I know, you planned to do all along—disappear and stick me with a baby you know isn’t mine.”
“Amy isn’t something to stick anyone with,” Karis said angrily. “You’d be lucky to have her. Lucky if she is yours. Amy is the only right thing my sister ever did. And as for my disappearing, I’m not Lea, and leaving Amy with you in no way washes my hands of her. Even if she is yours and you keep her I have every intention of finding work and someplace to live that’s as near to here as possible so that I can—”
Luke Walker cut her off as if nothing she said carried any weight. “There’s a room with its own bath in the attic. You can use it and put Amy in her old room—the crib is still there.”
“I can’t do that. I have to get a job. If I stay here, too, it defeats the whole purpose—”
“I’m not keeping her without you being right here until I sort out who she belongs to. If she isn’t mine—”
“Fine,” Karis said before he could say more, recognizing an ultimatum when she was given one.
His eyes narrowed. “That was quick. Did I just play into your hand?”
“Are you always this suspicious of everything and everyone?” she shot back.
“Of everything and everyone who has to do with Lea,” he answered without missing a beat. “I learned it the hard way.”
Karis swallowed her own anger. She’d known she wouldn’t be going into an ideal situation. In Lea’s wake, she never did.
“My résumé is out, I’ll do follow-ups on the phone from here and try to do any interviews that way, too, if I can. I can check want ads for jobs in Billings or some of the other towns or cities I saw on the road signs I passed getting here. It isn’t what I had planned, but I’ll make it work,” she said, thinking out loud.
To give him the entire picture of why she hadn’t put up more of a fight, she said, “Am I thrilled with staying in a house with a man I don’t even know? No. But I need a place for Amy and if that’s the only way you’ll keep her, it’s the only choice I have. And if you want to know the whole truth, staying here is better than sleeping in my car, which was what I was going to do because I can’t afford a hotel room. Plus, at least if I’m here, I’ll still be with Amy. I can still watch over her and go on taking care of her, and she won’t wake up tomorrow morning in a strange place with only an unfamiliar face to greet her. If you call your invitation playing into my hand, then even though the thought of my staying here never occurred to me, yes, I guess you did. Want to change your mind?”
Again he didn’t hurry to answer, pinning her with his gaze.
Then, with resignation, he said, “No. But I’ll be watching you.” He held out his hand, palm upward. “And I’ll take your car keys so you can’t sneak out in the middle of the night.”
“How do I know you’re not some kind of maniac who’s going to keep me prisoner or something?” she said, reluctant to concede.
“You don’t. I guess we’re both having to act on some blind trust.”
“You don’t trust me at all,” Karis countered.
“No, I don’t.”
He had the advantage and he knew it. And since she’d never thought he was some kind of maniac or she wouldn’t have let him anywhere near Amy, she knew his motives really were what he’d claimed—not to allow her the opportunity to take off and stick him with a baby that might not be his.
But that didn’t mean giving him her keys wasn’t galling.
“I need things from the car and the trunk and then you can have them,” she said.
“Give me the keys and I’ll go out with you.”
Karis sighed, rolled her eyes to let him know she thought he was being ridiculous, and dropped her keys into the large hand waiting for them.
He closed his fist around them and motioned toward the door. “Ladies first.”
Karis opened the door and went outside to her car. She gave Luke Walker plenty of room to unlock the driver’s side door. She took Amy’s diaper bag and her own purse from behind the front seat, slinging both straps over her shoulder before popping the trunk with the lever beside the seat.
Luke Walker had returned to the curb, where he watched as she took her suitcase and the cardboard box that held the remainder of Amy’s things from the rear of the vehicle.
“Is that it?” he asked.
“Yes.”
