Janice Kay - The Baby He Wanted

“No.” A man she suspected was rarely hesitant, Bran lingered, looking down at her. “You’re likely to have nightmares, Lina.”

“I didn’t this afternoon when I napped.”

“It’ll all catch up with you.” On that cheerful note, he nodded. “I’ll call in the morning. Lock up after me.”

She followed him to the door. He hovered momentarily just outside as if he wanted to say something else, but finally dipped his head again and walked away without looking back.

Lina closed the door and locked it, then sagged against it, the painted steel cool beneath her forehead. Thoughts and images tumbled in her head like clothes in the dryer.

Maya staring at her. Her head... The monster seeing her. Tearing across the street, expecting a bullet to strike her any moment.

And then the shock of having Bran walk in.

At least she’d gotten the dreaded meeting over with, but...

From here on out, we’re tied together.

Lina moaned and bumped her head repeatedly against the door.

CHAPTER FOUR

BRAN SHOULD HAVE gone straight home, but his car seemed to steer itself across town to his brother’s house. Christmas lights glittered like icicles around the eaves, and a warm glow from the windows told him Zach and Tess were still up. He glanced at his watch: 7:34. Of course they hadn’t gone to bed. Bran realized how unbalanced he felt. With a snort, he thought, Unbalanced? How about stupefied? His damn head was spinning. The day felt as if it had already lasted twenty-four hours at least.

He turned off the engine but hesitated. He should have called first. And...was he really ready to tell anyone else?

Bran guessed he must be, or he wouldn’t be here.

With a sigh, he got out and crossed the lawn, bounding up the steps to the porch. He rang the bell and waited. No surprise, Zach had put in a new front door with a peephole. He worried about Tess, and for good reason. After the two of them witnessed an ugly crime committed by another sheriff’s deputy, she had been terrorized. Even though Andrew Hayes, the deputy, had been convicted of attempted first degree murder for trying to kill Tess, Zach hadn’t let down his guard. Bran didn’t blame him.

Zach opened the door. If he was surprised, it didn’t show. There was still tension between the two of them—reconnecting after twenty-five years wasn’t easy—but tonight Bran saw only welcome.

“Hey, come in. I hear you had an exciting day.”

He didn’t know the half of it.

“It was a little out of the ordinary,” Bran agreed. “I was heading home, but somehow I ended up here.”

“Have you eaten? We have leftovers.”

“Thanks, but I had a good dinner. I’d sent Lina—uh, our principal witness—to a friend’s house, and when I went to get her, they fed us. Best Mexican food I’ve eaten in years, if ever.”

A slightly raised eyebrow told him he hadn’t distracted Zach from his slip. But it didn’t matter—wasn’t he here to spill his guts?

“Bran!” Tess had popped out of the kitchen and, smiling, came toward the two men. She rose on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek, something she’d taken to doing lately. No, not lately—since her wedding day. She’d apparently decided Bran was her brother-in-law, so by God she’d treat him like family whether he liked it or not.

The odd thing was, he did like it, even if he hadn’t said so. He liked Tess. She was a gutsy woman. He liked that she was making his brother happy. Their screwed up childhoods had left Zach determined never to marry or have a family, a resolve that crashed and burned when he couldn’t run from Tess. Keeping her safe had meant keeping her close.

“If this is a bad time...”

She frowned. “Don’t be silly. Do you want a beer?”

“Uh...thanks. Sure.”

“Zach?”

“Yeah, I’ll take one, too.”

They got comfortable in the living room, which was one of the first rooms they had finished remodeling. The day Bran came to help replace the roof, the wood floors in the whole house were worn, and there had been holes in the walls in here. Zach had applied a thin coat of plaster over the new wallboard, and now they were a creamy white while the hardwood floor gleamed. The star on the Christmas tree in front of the window almost touched the ceiling.

This house looked like a home now. Disquieted, Bran realized it had come to feel more like home to him than his own apartment did. He had dinner here at least a couple times a week, and often spent one of his days off helping Zach work on the place.

Tess reappeared with two bottles of a dark German beer, smiled and said, “I’ll leave you two to talk.”

“No, you can hear this unless there’s something you want to get back to,” he heard himself say.

“Of course I want to hear.” She plopped down on the sofa next to Zach, who wrapped an arm around her.

At first sight, anyone would have been able to tell the two men were brothers. Both were an inch or two above six feet, athletic. Zach’s features were cleaner cut, making him handsome and Bran...not. At least in his opinion. Zach had dark hair, Bran a deep auburn darkened from the carrot-red he’d been born with. Both had blue eyes the same color as their mother’s, a fact that disconcerted Bran when he thought about it. He’d turned his back on her a lot of years ago and still wasn’t happy to have been forced to accept her in his life. Again, because of Zach.

Tess was a cross between sex goddess and girl-next-door with her scattering of freckles. She was tall enough to have modeled, had thick, glossy, maple-brown hair and green-gold eyes. Bran wasn’t oblivious to her sexual appeal, but hadn’t been slammed with it at first sight the way his brother was. Good thing, as it turned out.

Now Lina, she’d hit him hard. If he’d had her number, he’d have called her within twenty-four hours. Truth was, he hadn’t so much as touched another woman since the night with Lina. He had convinced himself it was because of Paige and the last-minute cancellation of their wedding, but he knew better now. He hadn’t been able to get Lina out of his head.

Nobody said a word. Their expectant expressions spoke for them.

He groaned and tugged at his hair, which was more characteristic of Zach than him. Getting started wasn’t easy. “The night before my wedding—what should have been my wedding—I got drunk.”

Zach nodded, even though he, like Bran, wasn’t much of a drinker.

“I should have gone home, but I didn’t. I went to a tavern, and I met a woman. We spent the night together, but I didn’t know anything but her first name. When I got out of the shower in the morning, she had taken off.”

“With your wallet?” his brother, the cop, asked.

“No. She hadn’t touched anything. I made some attempt to find her, but with only a first name, I struck out.” He hesitated, suddenly wishing he hadn’t invited Tess to sit in on this confession. “I didn’t use a condom.”

“Oh, dear,” she said.

He grimaced. “The one solid witness to today’s bank robbery? It’s her. Lina. Lina Jurick. And she’s six months pregnant.”

Zach swore.

“She didn’t know how to find you, either?”

That was Tess, optimistic about human nature.

“She knew,” he said grimly. “Turns out, I’d had the damn wedding invitation with me. While I was in the shower, she saw it. That’s why she took off.”

“O-oh,” Tess breathed.

“She swears she was going to tell me before the baby was born. It’s a girl,” he added. “What it comes down to is, I’m going to be a father.”

“Shouldn’t you insist on some testing?” his brother asked. “To be sure you are the father?”

Bran shook his head, sure at least about this much. “Lina isn’t like that. She teaches at the middle school. She’s a thoroughly nice woman.”