the road you’re on. Not so easy when you’re looking ahead.”
Frowning, Connor grumbled, “You can spin this any way you want. Fact is, I screwed up.”
And nothing his family said could change that. Turning his face back into the wind, gaze fixed on the frothing ocean, memories rose up and nearly choked him.
“Connor, we want to have a baby.”
He laughed, dropped one arm around Jackie’s shoulder and said, “Congratulations! So it’s a trip to the sperm bank for you guys! See? I always told you that you’d need a man eventually.”
Jackie grinned and shook her head. “Funny guy.”
“I try. Which one of you’s getting pregnant?”
She leaned into him and shrugged. “Elena’s going to do the heavy lifting. I’m her support system.”
“You’ll be great parents,” he assured her and steered her toward the bar in the corner of his living room. Once there, he dug a couple of beers out of the minifridge and opened them. Handing one to Jackie, he tapped the neck of his bottle against hers. Then, frowning a little, he asked, “How does that work, though? What does the kid call you? Are you both Mommy? Mommy One and Mommy Two?”
“Yeah, I don’t know. We’ll figure that out when we get there.” Jackie took a sip of her beer and said, “There’s a lot to take care of before we get to the kid talking. And part of that is, Elena and I, we wanted to ask you something important.”
“Okay...” Connor picked up on her sudden nervousness, and it was so unlike Jackie, he was concerned. “What’s going on?”
Rather than answer right away, she took another sip of beer, chewed at her bottom lip and then blew out a long breath. “See, this is why Elena will carry the baby. I don’t think I could give up beer for nine months.”
“Uh-huh,” Connor said with a frown. “Quit stalling. What is it you’re trying to say?”
They’d spent the day together, catching a movie, going to check out the Porsche Connor was thinking of buying and ending up back at his house for a quick one-on-one game of basketball. She hadn’t said a word about any of this. Suddenly, though, she wasn’t being herself, and that was starting to worry him.
“Okay,” she repeated, then took a deep breath. Lifting her gaze to his, she said, “The thing is, Elena and I have been talking about this for a long time.”
“Yeah? Not surprising. You’re both all about hearth and home—”
She snorted. “Yeah, we’re practically a ’50’s sitcom. Anyway, you know how you just said we’d have to head for the sperm bank because, you know, obviously we need a donor, and—” She paused for another sip of beer as if her throat was too dry for her to force the words out. “Okay, I’m just gonna put it out there. We don’t want to go with some stranger we picked out of a catalog. We’d like you to be the baby daddy.”
Surprise slapped at him. For a second or two, he could only stare at his best friend. Jackie’s gaze was sure and steady, but there was also a flicker of understanding there, too, as if she knew exactly what he was feeling. Well, hell. He hadn’t really thought about who might be the father of the child his friend wanted so badly—he’d assumed that she and Elena would go to a sperm bank and pick out some genius donor.
But now that she’d asked him, Connor realized it made sense. He and Jackie were practically family. Who the hell else would she ask?
“Elena wants this, too?”
“Completely,” Jackie assured him, and now that everything was out in the open, she was clearly more relaxed. “Con, there’s no pressure on you, okay? Feel free to say no, with no hard feelings between us, I swear. Just...don’t say no right away. Think about it, all right?”
Connor reached out, grabbed her and pulled her in for a tight hug. She sighed, wrapped her arms around his middle and held on. “I know this is big, Con. Seriously big. And I know it’s kind of weird, me asking you for your baby stuff. But—” she tipped her head back and looked at him “—we really want this and we want that...connection to the baby’s father, you know? You mean a lot to us. Not just me.”
He gave her a squeeze. “Yeah, I know. I love you, too.”
“God, we’re mushy all of a sudden.”
“Babies’ll do that to you, I hear,” Con said.
Her eyes went misty. “A baby. Hard to imagine me a mom.”
“No, it’s not,” he assured her. And seeing that dreamy, wistful look on her face would have decided him even if he hadn’t already made the choice. They’d been friends so long, how could he not help her when she needed it? “I’d have a condition, Jack...”
She sucked in a breath and held it. “What?”
“I can’t just father a kid and walk away. I’ll have to be a part of my child’s life.”
Part-time father, he told himself. All of the fun and little of the hassles.
“Absolutely, Con. Agreed.”
“All right then.” Connor swung her in a circle and Jackie shrieked with laughter. When he set her on her feet again, he gave her a fast, hard kiss and said, “Let’s make a baby.”
They’d tried.
But Jackie told him the insemination hadn’t taken. When he’d offered to help them try again, she’d turned him down. Said that she and Elena were moving to Northern California to get a fresh start. Then she’d sort of disappeared from his life. No phone calls. No nothing.
He’d allowed it to happen, too, so he couldn’t throw all the blame on Jackie for that. “I should have checked,” he said again, hating that he hadn’t.
“Yeah, well—” Colt leaned back against the low stone wall separating the patio from a wide swath of manicured lawn “—who would have expected Jackie to lie to you?”
That was the hardest part to swallow, Connor admitted silently. He’d always trusted her. Had never doubted what she told him. And all this time, she’d hidden his children from him.
Con shook his head and squinted into the wind. His heartbeat raced and the ice in his stomach was colder, deeper somehow than it had been only an hour before. And after all the lies, he couldn’t even yell at her. Because she and Elena were dead. He hadn’t been able to cut through most of the legalese in the damn letter from the lawyer, but that much he’d caught. Dina Cortez, the babies’ guardian, named by the late Jackie and Elena Francis, was the one suing him.
How the hell could he mourn his friend when he was so furious with her all
