Victoria Pade - Maybe My Baby

Moonlight reflected on the undisturbed, glassy surface of the water to cast the only light as Aiden took her bags onto the front porch. He bypassed the door to the lower level and instead went around to the right side of the building.

Emmy followed, finding a wooden staircase there.

“Let’s get your things upstairs and turn on the space heater to warm the place while we have a little something to eat.”

Emmy was all for warmth, because he hadn’t been exaggerating about the cold that was even more noticeable here than it had been in Fairbanks.

The second floor was one large room except for the bathroom. One large room with a brass bed, an overstuffed chair, a reading lamp and a very old armoire. And nothing else.

Emmy thought that cozy was stretching the truth a bit, but she didn’t say that.

“The bed has a feather mattress,” Aiden informed her as he set her suitcases on the wooden floor that hadn’t seen stain or varnish in several decades. “I hope you aren’t allergic.”

“I’m not,” she said as she poked her head into the bathroom, where she found toilet, sink and a claw-footed bathtub with a very dated showerhead dropping down from directly over the middle of the tub.

Aiden had turned on the space heater by the time she returned from inspecting the bathroom.

“I wouldn’t recommend using the heater all night long. It can get pretty hot if it’s on for hours at a time. And there’s an electric blanket on the bed, under the quilt, so you’ll be warm enough while you sleep. Getting out of bed in the morning is just sort of a shock to the system.”

“I can imagine.”

“Wakes you up, though.”

“Mmm.”

“Come on, let’s go downstairs. I have some sandwiches made up since we didn’t have any in-flight food service.”

He held the door open for her, and Emmy went out into the cold again.

At the bottom of the steps Aiden went ahead of her to the main door. As he did, her gaze dropped inadvertently to the jeans-clad derriere that was visible below his jacket.

Like the rest of him it was something to behold, and Emmy silently chastised herself for looking, snapping her eyes up to a safer view.

But the view wasn’t actually much safer when she took in the expanse of his back and broad, broad shoulders, or the sexy way his hair waved against his thick, strong neck.

“Ladies first,” he said then, and she noticed belatedly that he was waiting for her to go in ahead of him.

Emmy stepped into the cabin, glad for the warmth coming from the old radiator against one wall.

The place seemed about double the size of the attic room but it still wasn’t large. Or luxurious. Living room, dining room and kitchen were all one open space, with a mud room off the kitchen in the rear and a single bedroom and another bath on the other side of a log-framed archway to the left of the living room.

The furnishings were as inelegant as the cabin itself. There was a brown plaid sofa and matching easy chair at a ninety-degree angle to each other, with a wagon wheel coffee table in front of them and a moderately sized television and VCR across from them.

Aiden’s stereo equipment was on an arrangement of stacked cinder blocks against one wall, there was a fairly nice desk taking up another, and a scarred oak kitchen table and four ladder-backed chairs stood in what passed as a dining room only because the table and chairs were near the bar that separated the kitchen from the rest of the cabin.

“I know it’s nothing fancy,” Aiden said in response to Emmy’s glance around. “But Boonesbury provides the cabin and most of the furniture for the local doctor, and I’m usually not here enough for it to matter that it isn’t too aesthetically pleasing.”

“But it is cozy,” she said, mimicking him to tease him a little.

He laughed and she liked the sound of it. Along with the fact that he’d caught the joke.

He hadn’t been kidding about already having sandwiches made. There was a covered plate of them in the refrigerator. He brought that and a bowl of potato salad along with two glasses of water to the kitchen table where they shared the light repast while Aiden filled her in on the quirks of the plumbing system and the party-line inconveniences she would encounter if she used any telephone in Boonesbury.

They’d finished eating and Aiden was on his way back to the fridge with the remaining sandwiches when there was a firm knock on the front door.

By then it was after ten o’clock and a drop-in visitor struck Emmy as strange.

But Aiden took it in stride and said over his shoulder, “Get that, will you?”

She’d already figured out that he was a very laid-back guy and that there weren’t going to be any formalities even for the director of the Bernsdorf Foundation. So, in an attempt to adjust to the casual attitudes, she went to the door and opened it.

There was no one at eye level, but down below, on the porch floor, there was a baby carrier and a duffle bag.

Thinking that this couldn’t possibly be what it looked like, Emmy stepped out into the cold to investigate.

But it was exactly what it looked like.

Amidst a nest of blankets and a hooded snowsuit there was a baby bundled into the car seat. A baby with two great big brown eyes staring up at her from over the pacifier that was keeping it quiet.

“I think you better come see this,” she called to Aiden as she glanced all around and found no signs of anyone else.

But about the time Aiden came out onto the porch there was the sound of a vehicle racing away in the distance.

“What’s going on?” Aiden asked.

“Good question. All I know is when I opened the door this was what I found—a duffle bag and a baby in a car seat. And I just heard a car or truck drive off.”

“Oh-oh,” Aiden said. But he didn’t sound as unnerved as Emmy felt.

He went down off the porch, searching both sides of the cabin. But after only a minute or so he rejoined her, shrugging those mountain-man shoulders of his as he did.

“There’s nobody out there anymore. But we’d better get this little guy—or girl—in out of the cold.”

He picked up the carrier and the duffle bag and took them inside.

Emmy followed him all the way to the kitchen table, where he deposited everything, unbundled the baby and lifted it out.

“Hello, there.” He greeted the child in a soothing voice he probably used with his youngest patients.

Then, to Emmy, he said, “Check the bag, see if there’s a note or something that tells us who this is.”

Emmy did as she was told, wondering if her predecessor had ever had a trip quite like this one was already turning out to be.

Along with baby clothes, diapers and food, she did find a note, albeit not much of one. Written on it was only one word: Mickey.

“Mickey, huh? Well, let’s check you out a little, shall we, Mickey?” Aiden said when Emmy let him know what she’d found.

She watched as he took the baby to the sofa and laid it down there to unfasten the snowsuit. Then he removed the pajamas that were underneath it, and then the diaper.

“Looks like Mickey is a boy,” Aiden announced unnecessarily, replacing the diaper in a hurry and with more expertise than Emmy would have had. “Don’t let him roll off the sofa,” he instructed, going for his medical bag where he’d left it on a table near the front door.

Bringing it back with him, he went on to examine the child who was still watching everything with wide eyes and sucking on the pacifier, only protesting when Aiden used the stethoscope to listen to his heart and lungs.

“I’d say Mickey, here, is about seven months old, well fed and taken care of and as healthy as they come,” was the final diagnosis.