Tara Quinn - Cassidy's Kids

Ellie wasn’t as relieved as she might have been when, without another word, Sloan nodded, turned and left. His last discerning glance haunted her for the rest of the afternoon, and she had an awful feeling he would be back.

THOSE DAMN INCREDIBLY blue eyes tormented Sloan as he turned his pickup truck away from Austin toward the open road and the relative safety of his ranch. Ellie’s eyes were still as filled with determination as they’d been when he’d known her ten years ago. Still emanating an intelligence that was intimidating, or challenging, depending on how you chose to look at it. Sloan, fool that he was, had always been more prone to rising to a challenge than wisely giving in to intimidation.

Ellie—still as sexy as ever.

All they’d ever been was friends. Great friends. On his side, best friends. Ellie had never known how he’d lusted after her. He’d made certain she’d never known.

Swerving so hard his tires shot gravel up past the roof of the truck, Sloan came to a sudden stop in the parking lot of a tavern he hadn’t visited in years. Ariel and Alisha were safe with Charlie’s sister for the afternoon. Their father needed a drink.

Too bad his housekeeper’s sister had to go back home to Arizona at the end of the week. Too bad she was already married and seventy years old.

Up at the bar a few minutes later, a cold mug of beer clasped in his fist, Sloan amended that last thought about Charlie’s sister, Mary. Too bad she was married. Seventy years old wasn’t a problem.

Right. And maybe cow manure could fly.

WHY DIDN’T THE CRYING STOP?

Rolling over groggily, raising a hand to push the cropped strands of dark hair out of her face, Ellie groaned. The family mansion was just too small for both her and the mystery baby. Only two months old, he still wasn’t sleeping through the night.

Consequently, neither was Ellie.

It was hard to get used to having a baby in the house, but the tiny boy had been abandoned on the steps of the clinic with a note claiming he was a Maitland, too, and Megan’s heart had gone out to the infant. She’d been made his foster mother until the child’s real parents were found.

Ellie winced. Her brothers had become prime suspects as the baby’s father, though she couldn’t make herself believe any of them had really created the disruptive human being down the hall.

She rolled over again and tried to ignore the baby’s cries, but they grew louder, more urgent. And it suddenly dawned on Ellie why that was.

She was in charge.

Amy, the nurse her mother had hired to care for the baby, was out of town for a couple of days for a family emergency. And Beth and Megan were out, probably until dawn, at a high-profile fund-raiser Ellie had begged not to attend. With all of the negative publicity Maitland Maternity had suffered through in the past month, it was imperative that the family be represented. But not by Ellie. She was still under close scrutiny after her appointment as the clinic’s administrator, and with her lack of sophisticated wit, and no typical Maitland knock ’em dead looks to make up for the lack, she’d been afraid of doing more harm than good. Or at least, that had been her excuse. She’d really just wanted a quiet night at home to regroup after the day she’d had.

Ellie dragged herself out of bed and slogged down the hall to the nursery Megan had set up in the wing Beth and Ellie shared at Maitland Mansion. “I’m coming,” she called to the hostile baby, picking up her pace a bit. After all, it wasn’t the little guy’s fault he’d had such rotten luck in life.

Unless, of course, he’d carried on this way right from the start and his poor mother had been as hopeless as Ellie in knowing how to quiet him.

“Shh, Cody,” she demanded as she entered the nursery, the air warm on legs left bare by her cotton shorts and matching short sleeved pajama top. Heart picking up speed as she looked at the beet-red face of the baby, she softened her voice. “Hey, little man, what’s up?”

With arms trembling—from lack of sleep, she told herself—Ellie reached down to scoop up the hot bundle. He wasn’t only hot, he was soaked. And not just from sweat and tears, though there was plenty of both.

The initial bout of crying stopped the moment Ellie picked Cody up out of his crib. His tear-drenched eyelashes blinked as he stared up at her. As well he should. He’d have no idea who this stranger holding him might be.

In spite of his soggy state, Ellie stopped and stared right back at the miniature Maitland. She’d never been this close to him before.

From the moment he’d shown up on the doorstep of the clinic, and Megan had announced she would be taking temporary custody of him, Ellie had entered a new goal in the log book in her mind. She wasn’t going to hold him the way her sister Beth kept doing. She couldn’t. Ellie was much more intense than Beth. She’d never learned to live for the moment the way her more outgoing sister had done since birth. And it made no sense to grow attached to a child who was in their home only temporarily.

There was no point in torturing herself with something she knew she would never have. Which was also why she never visited the nursery at the clinic unless she was there on official business. She’d learned a long time ago that the way to be happy—or at least successful—was to avoid distractions.

It went without saying that in Ellie’s book a virgin with no prospects at the age of twenty-five would likely never have a baby.

Ellie stared, frozen. The baby’s warmth seeped through her pajamas, along with other things, until his little face screwed up with displeasure once again. “Okay, hold on,” she said urgently as she rushed him over to his new change table. “I’m fairly certain I can figure out how to change a diaper.”

Actually, she knew she could. She’d changed hundreds of them during her teens when she’d filled her dateless nights with baby-sitting jobs and dreams of having babies of her own. Babies that would love her in spite of her quiet personality and drab looks.

Amazingly enough, her voice seemed to have a calming effect on baby Cody. As long as she was speaking, his howls stopped, and he stared up at her. Ellie kept up a stream of senseless chatter while she went to work on the baby’s wet diaper.

“I don’t know which one of my brothers—or cousins, for that matter—is responsible for you, little man, but I can promise you that we’ll find out eventually, and when we do, I’m going to choke the life out of him with my bare hands.”

The wet sleeper and diaper came off effortlessly. Ellie reconsidered what she’d just said in lieu of the baby’s sensibilities and the frown on his scrunched up little face.

“Okay, we’ll let him live, but only because you need a daddy to teach you how to play baseball,” she amended. “But I get to at least yell at him first, okay?”

Cody’s legs flailed as Ellie cleaned and powdered him before expertly applying a dry diaper and sleeper.

There were bottles of formula already made up in the refrigerator in one corner of the nursery, and a bottle warmer on the counter beside it. With the baby lodged in one arm, Ellie used her free hand to prepare Cody’s late-night meal.

She hated to think of one of her beloved older brothers being guilty of fathering this abandoned child. Which was maybe another reason why she’d refused to acknowledge the baby’s presence in their lives as little more than an administrator’s public relations problem.

“The truth is, little guy, that when I think about it, almost any one of them could be responsible.”

After testing the warming formula on the inside of her wrist, Ellie settled into the rocker her mother had had brought down from the attic. Until that night, Ellie had been hoping Cody wasn’t really a Maitland at all, but rather a scam on the part of some sick woman to tap into the Maitland fortune.