Anne McAllister - Fletcher's Baby!

Josie called it self-preservation.

What else would you call facing a man with the news that he was going to be a father when he was obviously unhappy about facing her at all?

Their night of intimacy had been “the whiskey talking.” Hadn’t he just said so? Of course he had. She’d known it at the time. She’d just been powerless to resist.

Josie Nolan had loved Sam Fletcher unrequitedly and hopelessly since she was fifteen years old.

A realist, Josie had never expected a drop-dead gorgeous millionaire jet-setter to fall madly in love with the foster-daughter of his aunt’s next door neighbor. She might now be Hattie’s protégée and innkeeper, but she’d started out as her cleaning girl. Josie had read Cinderella, but that didn’t mean she was a fool.

But something must have.

Because when Sam Fletcher had appeared at her door the night of her twenty-fifth birthday, all misery, commiseration and gentleness, she’d been powerless to shut it in his face.

And so she’d spent the last six months trying to figure out how to tell him about the results of that night.

There had seemed no good way. Only ways that would have him think of her as a scheming hussy out to trap him into a marriage he didn’t want.

At times—in the dead of night, for example, when she was remembering the tenderness of his touch, the urgency of his need, the firm persuasiveness of his lips—she tried to delude herself that there really had been something between them, that he’d welcome the news, that when he’d gone back to New York he’d missed her as much as she missed him.

In the clear light of day she knew that was so much hogwash.

But as long as he didn’t show up and say it had been a mistake, she’d dared to hold on to a tiny ray of hope.

Not any longer.

“I never meant for what happened to...to happen,” he’d said.

Neither had she.

But it had. And now they were going to have a child.

She stood now, waiting for him to ring a peal over her. To yell at her as Kurt had done. To turn bright red and point his finger at her, as Kurt had done. To say, “Well, what are you going to do about it?” in a hard, cold voice as Kurt had done.

“Mine?” Sam echoed. He wasn’t red. He was dead white under his jet-setter tan. And his voice wasn’t cold. It was hollow.

Still, he wasn’t yelling. His tone was quiet The quietness was momentarily reassuring. But looking at him wasn’t. He just stood there, looking as if a bomb had gone off at his feet.

Josie supposed, to his way of thinking, it had. He’d come prepared to deal with the inn and the animals, not this.

“Yes,” she said.

“You’re sure?”

Her spine stiffened again, and the pang of concern she’d felt for him vanished in a flash. Color burned in her cheeks. “Yes, I’m sure. Despite the impression I may have given, I do not ordinarily sleep around!”

“I didn’t mean—” he began quickly, then stopped, looked dismayed, then sighed and rubbed a hand over his short sun-bleached hair. “Oh, hell, maybe I did. But just because it was a shock. Sorry.” This last was muttered.

He didn’t look her in the eye. He couldn’t seem to stop slanting glances in the direction of her belly.

Josie took the apology in the spirit in which it had been muttered—grudgingly. She picked up two more vases and turned toward the cart. She wasn’t just going to stand there and let him gawk! And she didn’t want to watch the wheels turn in his head.

She would have liked to turn tail and run, but she was damned if she was going to do that, either.

So she stayed, aware of the silence, aware of the foot-shifting, aware of the eventual clearing of his throat.

“So...were you ever going to tell me?” His tone was conversational now, almost casual, but she could hear the strain in it and knew what control he was exerting.

She ran her tongue over her lips and shrugged in her own attempt at casual control. “Eventually I imagine I’d have had to.”

“You’d have had to?” So much for casual. “You don’t think maybe I’d have wanted to know?”

“To be honest, no.”

He stared at her, jaw slack. Then, as if he realized it, he snapped it shut. His eyes never left hers.

Defiantly Josie stared back. “Well, under the circumstances, this isn’t exactly a Hallmark moment, is it?”

A muscle in Sam’s jaw worked. “Are you saying you don’t want it?”

Josie pressed her hands protectively against her abdomen. “No, I am damned well not saying that! I want this child.”

That was the one thing she was sure of. The daughter of indifferent, incompetent parents, she’d been abandoned, then passed from foster home to foster home since she was six. She wasn’t having any such thing happen to her child. She was keeping it and taking care of it and loving it—and that was that.

“But I hardly imagine you do,” she said frankly. “Do you?” she asked him, with the same bluntness he’d inflicted on her earlier.

He didn’t answer for a moment.

She gave a satisfied nod, then turned on her heel and, pushing the cart toward the dining room, walked out the door.

Very little rattled Sam Fletcher.

Was he not a world-traveling entrepreneur of the highest caliber? Had he not negotiated with the pasha of a tiny west Asian kingdom with armed guards all around for the exclusive rights to a line of furnishings that his competitors would give their eye teeth for? Did he not routinely cope with multi-million dollar decisions upon which the fate of many peoples’ livelihoods—not the least his own—depended? Had he not kept a calm demeanor when his fiancée was throwing him over for another man?

Yes, yes, yes, and yes again.

But being told you were the father of a woman’s child when you could barely remember bedding her—well, that might ruffle the calmest of men.

Sam was beyond ruffled. He was moulting.

He stifled his first inclination, which was to tell Josie Nolan that she had rocks in her head, that there was no way he would be so irresponsible as to father a child on a woman he wasn’t married to! He knew his lack of memory of what precisely had happened that evening proved just how irresponsible he had been.

His second inclination was to run. To turn tail, head out the door and never come back.

But Sam Fletcher did not run. He’d never run in his life.

From the time he was a boy he’d been groomed to face his responsibilities, to take charge, to exert leadership, to do what was right.

He’d come to Dubuque today expecting to do what was right. He’d expected to have to cope with the mare’s nest that usually comprised Hattie’s affairs. He’d expected to have to find a buyer for the inn and even—because Hattie wished it—to find homes for three cats, a dog and a bird.

He’d envisioned showing up and, once the awkwardness of his apology was out of the way, laughing with Josie about Hattie’s having left him a woman.

It didn’t seem funny at all now.

He hadn’t expected a child.

The will had clearly been Hattie’s way of doing what Josie had not done—of bringing him back and making him aware of the facts.

He supposed he ought to thank her for that. He would, if he weren’t so rattled.

He was going to be a father?

That was rattling enough. What was worse was the idea that, without Hattie’s will, he might never have known.

It was like waiting for the other shoe to drop.

All the while Josie was putting flowers in the rooms, checking in the guests, delivering champagne to the newlyweds, making dinner reservations and answering questions about local attractions, she was looking over her shoulder, expecting Sam to appear.

He hadn’t been in the kitchen when she got back.