Kitabı oku: «His Best Friend's Baby»

Molly O’Keefe is thrilled to add Superromance author to her résumé. And even more excited to add her new role as mother. She lives in Toronto, Ontario, with her husband and son. She loves hearing from readers, so drop her a line at www.molly-okeefe.com.

Dear Reader,

My husband and I welcomed our son into the world in February 2006 and soon after I was right back to work on the rewrites of this book. I had no idea when I got the idea for His Best Friend’s Baby (months before even getting pregnant!) how one of its themes would resonate in my life – the need for a support system.

After giving birth (my water broke at a book signing – how about that for dramatic?) I found myself with an infant who didn’t care much for naps and some serious work to do. As much help as my husband was, I needed more. I needed support. And I found it in spades. Writing, like motherhood, can be lonely at times and I am blessed with friends, a mother-in-law and my own mother who provided me with baked goods, laughs and a couple of hours every day to get the work done.

I felt as though I belonged to a tribe. Sleeplessness, worry and a joy I’d never experienced before were my entry into that circle of mothers.

It made me feel even more for Julia, the single-mother heroine in this book. She came to life for me during these rewrites in a way I never would have dreamed. I hope you enjoy her path to happily ever after as much I enjoyed discovering it.

Happy reading!

Molly O’Keefe

His Best
Friend’s Baby

MOLLY O’KEEFE

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For all the Mothers in my life:

Tracey Fader and JK, who kept me laughing.

Leslie Millan and Sarah Drynan, who kept

me sane. Cindy and Carole Mernick,

who made the revisions of this book possible.

And especially

to Mum, who made all of this possible.

You left me very big shoes to fill in the

motherhood department – I love you.

CHAPTER ONE

JESSE FILMORE lifted his fingers from the bar, signaling for another drink.

“Liquid lunch, huh?” the bartender asked with a nervous laugh as he poured Jesse another cup of coffee. Black.

“What time is it?” Jesse’s voice sounded like something that had been dragged behind a horse. His whole body felt that way—sore and beat up.

“Twelve-thirty.” The bartender leaned against the polished wood bar. “We don’t get a lot of coffee drinkers in here. You want a beer or a sandwich or something? We’ve got—”

“What’s your name?” Jesse asked. He didn’t lift his head, just stared at the bartender from under his eyebrows. His neck was killing him. Moving it would send an electric shock through his body.

“My name? Billy. This is my—”

“Billy? I’d like to drink in quiet.”

Billy looked stunned, no doubt used to a friendlier sort of drinker in this crappy sports bar. “Yeah, ah, sure. I’ll be down here if you need me.” Billy backed toward the other end of the bar where two guys shared a pitcher of beer and a plate of nachos while they watched yesterday’s sports recap on the screen in the corner.

When Jesse was a kid, this bar used to be a serious drinking place. No music. No darts. No pool tables. No damn ESPN. It had been a bar where men swaggered in after work and stumbled home at midnight, then fell into bed and slept without dreams.

Jesse wasn’t doing any drinking. The pain meds the docs had him on were bad enough, he didn’t need to let go of any more reality.

But a little peace and quiet wasn’t too much to ask for.

He’d come here to get out of the sun, stall for time before going to see what was left of the old house.

He’d come in here because he was a little bit scared.

He blocked out the noise of the television and the buzzing neon lights and drained half of his coffee mug before setting it down precisely on the damp circle that stained the napkin.

“Holy shit. Jesse Filmore!”

Jesse turned his head as much as he comfortably could and saw Patrick Sanderson barreling down on him. In high school, Patrick had tried, briefly, to keep up with Jesse and his best friend, Mitch Adams. But the kind of trouble Jesse and Mitch had gotten into wasn’t for the faint of heart and Patrick had definitely been faint of heart.

It was probably for the best. Jesse recalled the night that Patrick had gone out with them. We got arrested for stealing that car.

“How have you been, man?” Patrick slapped a clammy hand on Jesse’s back. Jesse fought the urge to shake it off. It wasn’t Patrick so much—though he had never liked the guy—as it was anyone and everyone getting too close. Even alone in a room he felt crowded. Too many ghosts.

Jesse shrugged and the gesture apparently satisfied Patrick. “We haven’t seen you in town since…?”

“My mother’s funeral,” Jesse said carefully, his throat a solid throb of pain.

“God, right, three years ago. I thought you were still over in Iraq.” Patrick slid onto the stool next to Jesse. “I heard about Mitch. Terrible news. Just terrible.” Patrick’s belly strained against his yellow golf shirt. He ran his hand over his thinning hair. “Agnes and Ron are all messed up over it.”

Jesse didn’t smile, didn’t in any way encourage this intrusion, but Patrick didn’t seem to need encouragement.

“I’d steer clear of that house if I was you. She’d probably skin you alive if she saw you.” He laughed, as though what he was saying wasn’t the heartbreaking reality of Jesse’s life. Luckily, Jesse had grown a thick skin, from years of letting the casually hurtful and completely stupid things people said roll off him.

Billy sauntered over and threw a cardboard coaster on the bar in front of Patrick.

“What can I get you, Pat?”

“Draft and whatever Jesse here is drinking—”

“No thanks,” Jesse declined. “I’m good.”

Billy shot Patrick a look indicating what he thought of Jesse’s manners, before walking away to get the beer.

“So are you on leave or something?” Patrick asked, turning back to Jesse.

“Something.” Jesse took a big gulp of his coffee, eager to get out of this place.

“I tell you, that war…” Patrick shook his head. “Lots of good boys dying over there. Mitch Adams, I still can’t believe it. He always seemed to have a horseshoe up his ass or something—luckiest damn guy. Did you ever see that girl he married?” Patrick whistled through his teeth and Jesse had the sudden and powerful urge to smash in those teeth.

“I heard she was gorgeous,” Patrick continued.

Time to leave.

Jesse shifted, digging into his back pocket for his wallet.

“Guess old Mitch’s luck ran out.” Patrick’s well of insight was seemingly bottomless. “The whole town thought it was nuts when he went into the military after you. He could have done anything, football scholarship, anything. His mother…” Patrick wrapped his fat fingers around the pint Billy slid over.

“Will never forgive me. I know.” Her name was at the top of a long list of such people.

I shouldn’t have come in here.

Jesse threw a few bucks on the bar, drained his mug then made an attempt to stand. But his bum knee buckled. Too many hours in the car.

“Whoa there.” Patrick laughed, putting up a hand to brace Jesse. “What’d you have in that mug?”

Jesse’s arm jerked instinctually. He stood frozen, knowing exactly how he could kill Patrick with an elbow to the windpipe or the heel of his hand to the nose.

Jesse didn’t do it, of course, but he was capable of it and that was somehow worse.

“Hey, man, sorry if talking about Mitch—” Patrick looked nervous but there was something else in his small eyes, a certain morbid curiosity. The rumors had made it home. “Terrible accident.”

If Jesse stood here long enough, maybe Patrick would just come right out and ask what he clearly wanted confirmed. But Jesse didn’t have time to pussyfoot, he had a house to get rid of and a life to get on with, so he took pity on Patrick.

“I killed him.” Jesse said. “I killed Artie McKinley and Dave Mancio. I put Caleb Gomez in the hospital. And I watched Mitch Adams burn up in his helicopter.” He patted Patrick on the back, like the good friend Patrick had always wished him to be, and limped away.

Mitch ghost dogged Jesse out the door.

The bright sunshine blinded him. Jesse blinked and gave himself a second to adjust before tackling the steps down to the asphalt parking lot.

A hot wind blew down from the mountains, carrying the smell of tar and sun-warmed grass. The scent of the southern California desert reminded him all too much of being a boy.

He’d grown up in this town on the edge of nowhere, and if it weren’t for the damn house his mother left to him in her will, he would never have returned. The war had kept him occupied for three years, but now, thanks to the discharge papers, he could no longer ignore this little obligation.

All he had to do was get rid of the house and he could leave. Chris Barnhardt, a buddy from before the war, waited for him in San Diego with more construction work than he could handle and an interesting proposition that included the word partner.

If Jesse were a smart man, something he’d never claimed to be—he’d be halfway down Highway 101 on his way to the rest of his life. A life he could taste like clean, cold water after years choking on dust in the desert.

Instead he was in New Springs. Just him, more dust, the dumb dog he couldn’t get rid of and the ghosts.

The bright spot of reflection bounced off his Jeep’s windshield sitting the corner of the parking lot. A small woman stood next to the vehicle. Her brown hair blew out behind her like a flag. Like a warning.

He lurched to a stop.

Not this, Jesse thought, panic kick-starting his heart. Not her.

She pushed away from the Jeep and Jesse forced one foot in front of the other, inching his way toward his sister.

She had a lot of nerve. A lot of goddamned nerve tracking him down this way, ambushing him when he hadn’t been in town long enough to get his bearings.

“Hello, Jesse.” Rachel took a few steps closer. He tried not to notice the chin she thrust out as though she were ready for whatever he might throw at her.

It was exactly the way he remembered her. Even at thirty-four, she still looked like that eighteen-year-old girl who’d been so damn fired up to take on the world.

“How’d you know I was here?”

“You know small-town gossip. Mac and I got word the second you drove into town.” She tried to laugh, but it came out all wrong. Broken in all the important places.

She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and he was struck by how short she was. How fragile she appeared. He almost laughed as he thought it. Fragile? Rachel? As a boy he’d believed she was the biggest, tallest, strongest thing on earth.

But now she didn’t even come up to his shoulder and he could easily snap her in two.

He never figured his perspective would change.

He opened the driver door only to have Rachel slam it out of his hand. She slid along the side of the vehicle until she was right in his face. “You’re not going to run from me like you did at Mom’s funeral.”

“Get out of the way, Rachel,” he growled, not necessarily on purpose, but the effect was good.

“No.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Please just listen to what I have to say.”

He didn’t care what Rachel had to say, so he turned and started walking back to the bar. He’d take Patrick and his barely veiled insinuations over his sister any day.

She darted around him and Jesse stopped, attracted

and repelled by his sister’s magnetic force. “Why didn’t she leave you the damn house?” he demanded.

“Jesse,” she whispered. He kept his eyes locked on the y in the Billy’s Final Score sign over the door of the bar rather than succumb to Rachel’s plan. Her voice was thick with emotion and he was not going to stand here and watch her fight tears. “Before Mom died I wrote you letters, Jesse. Didn’t you get the letters I sent?”

“I got them.”

She had written almost every week since the day she’d left after her high school graduation. Once he turned eighteen and joined the army, he’d finally written her back and told her to stop. And for a year, she respected his request. Then the letters had started arriving again—with a vengeance. He now knew that was about the time she and Mac Edwards had finally gotten together.

There had been cards from Mac, boxes of cookies from Rachel and funny pictures from Amanda—Jesse’s new niece thanks to Rachel’s marriage to Mac.

He’d opened all letters that weren’t addressed in Rachel’s handwriting. The rest he sent back or burned. Except the cookies—a man could only be so mad.

But he’d never responded to Mac’s letters, and only once to Amanda’s. There was never a reason for them to continue sending him stuff. But they had.

The whole family was just so stubborn.

“We’re hoping you might come up to the farm. Amanda is dying to see you again and Mac can’t wait.” She smiled again, all the hope in the world rolling off her.

“I didn’t read your letters, Rachel.”

“Jesse.” She reached out to him as though to touch his arm, and he stepped out of the way. His eyes met hers and he saw what his rejection did to her, the light that it killed in her eyes.

Let it go, Rachel, he urged silently. You keep coming at me like this and you’re only going to get hurt.

Her hand curled into a fist and fell to her side. “I know you’re mad. But I tried—”

“Stop it.” Jesse struggled to find that cold dark center of himself, that place where simplicity reigned. “I was a kid when you left. You don’t know me and I don’t want to know you. Just leave it alone.” He watched all that hope crumple in her, like wadded-up paper.

Good. Now, stay away.

He moved past her to his beat-up Jeep and she didn’t try to stop him.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“San Diego,” he told her. He winced as he swung his aching leg into the vehicle. Damn bum knee. “After I take care of Mom’s house.”

“So you’re just gonna run again?”

Everything in him went still.

“Running’s your deal, not mine. I stayed until the old man died. What did you do?”

They both knew the answer all too well—she’d left, when he’d needed her most.

She was a little late if she expected forgiveness now.

Wainwright, the ancient black Lab he’d somehow inherited in the last two weeks, lifted his head from the duffel bag he’d been using as a bed.

Take the dog, Artie McKinley’s folks had said. He’s old and we’re moving to an apartment in Nogales. We can’t have pets. Artie had been their only son, so there had been no one else to take care of Wainwright and they refused to put him down.

What could Jesse do?

So he’d taken the aging dog and now, every time he looked at the animal, he remembered why Artie hadn’t come back to claim his dog.

Wainwright spied Rachel and barked. She flinched.

“I hear you, boy,” Jesse muttered. He turned over the engine and peeled out of the parking lot without once looking back.

DAMN IT.

Jesse braked at the deserted intersection of Goleta Road and Foothill after having driven around aimlessly for an hour. He leaned forward in the driver’s seat and looked right down the long stretch of road that would lead him down to the coast and Highway 101.

He could drive to San Diego, be there by tonight.

He turned and looked left down the length of asphalt that would lead him back to New Springs.

“What do you think, Wain?” The dog struggled to his feet and climbed over the console to sit in the passenger seat. He barked once at a passing bird. “That’s not much help, buddy.”

Jesse’s knee throbbed from all the walking and driving he had been doing the past week and even though he was steering clear of the pain meds in his bag, the relief they offered seemed pretty good right now.

Jesse eyed the waves of heat rising off the blacktop and Wain nudged his thigh with his snout. Jesse patted the dog’s head and wished again, as he had a million times in the past, that his genetic makeup was different.

It would be so damn easy if he was the kind to run away like his sister.

But no, Jesse took after his mother. He had Eva’s black eyes, dark hair and the same stubborn chin. Despite heavy drinking and hard living, his father had looked like a young man when he died, but Eva had looked every one of her fifty-six years, as if all her disappointments and heartaches had been pressed into the lines on her face.

Jesse wondered briefly what was written across his face. What details of his past were visible?

He and Eva were the same beasts of burden, carrying everyone’s troubles and responsibilities like stones around their necks. When everyone else had deserted they had both stayed—in that house, in this town—long after the time they should have left.

Just do what you are supposed to do, he told himself. You’re in this little shithole for a reason.

He pulled his cell phone out of the faded green duffel and dialed Chris’s number.

“Inglewood Construction,” Chris answered after two rings and Jesse’s dark mood lifted at the sound of his friend’s voice.

“Hey, Chris. It’s Jesse.”

“Jesse, when the hell are you going to get down here? I am up to my pits in work.” A saw buzzed to life on Chris’s side of the line. “Watch the damn floors!” Chris yelled and Jesse could practically smell the sawdust; he could almost taste it. “Seriously, man,” Chris said. “I need you here, like, yesterday.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry, Chris, but it looks like I’m stuck in New Springs for a few days.”

“Well, the sooner you get here the faster we can drink some cold beers and start making some money.”

“Sounds good,” Jesse said. It sounded like heaven, like the furthest possible thing from the life he’d lived for the past three years. “Sounds real good.”

“Keep me posted,” Chris said. “I gotta run. The guys are pouring the basement floor and I swear if someone doesn’t watch them, they’ll make a swimming pool out of it.”

“See ya, Chris.” Jesse hung up and threw the phone back in his duffel.

Wishing was for fools, something he learned the day his sister walked away from him, so he stopped wasting his own precious time. He was who he was and he had to take care of his responsibilities.

He gave Wain a pat on the snout.

“See what you’re getting me into?”

Wain farted and sighed.

Jesse jerked the wheel to the left and kicked up a lot of dust heading toward New Springs. He took the winding mountain road too fast. Wainwright put his nose in the air and howled and Jesse knew exactly how he felt.

He drove through Old Town, past the Royal Theater and the Dairy Dream ice-cream shop. He took the left after the Vons grocery store, toward the south side. With every twist and turn through his old neighborhood, the pressure in his chest built.

There weren’t any railroad tracks in New Springs, but Jesse never questioned which side of the proverbial tracks he was from. There had been a grit and a filth that came from this part of town and sometimes he could still feel it.

When he was a kid, this particular street had been made up of single moms with kids they couldn’t control. Big, once-beautiful old homes—the first built in the town—had been falling to ruin or divided into apartments while people with money had chosen to live in the newer homes by the rec center on the other side of town.

He shifted gears as the pressure in his chest started to feel like panic.

The turning point of his life had come when Mitch and his family had moved into the neighborhood. Mitch’s mom liked old houses and apparently she’d never noticed the filth until her son had come home after school with Jesse in tow.

Then she’d noticed.

Since those days, however, the old neighborhood had clearly changed. The lawns were now green and nice, the tiled roofs repaired, the houses painted.

It freaked him out. He wiped one sweaty palm on his thigh. He felt like the boy in the fancy shop who security watched—a feeling he hadn’t had since he was a kid.

The old house must be the eyesore on this street.

Mom had died three years ago and the house had been a nightmare then. Jesse could only imagine the damage raccoons and high-school kids looking for a place to get drunk had done since then.

Truth be told, the idea appealed to him—the old homestead a broken-down disgrace among these refurbished houses. All the neighbors once again cursing the Filmore family over their repaired and whitewashed back fences.

Just like the good old days.

But at the corner of Wilson and Pine, where the ruins of his childhood home should have sat, was a house newly painted a creamy yellow color. There were red flowers in window boxes and a shiny white front porch.

“What the hell…?” His mouth fell open as he peered through the open passenger window at the vision.

His heart squeezed uncomfortably.

Man, I wish Mom could have seen it like this.

Jesse pulled up to the curb, and stared, stunned, at 314 Wilson.

That was his old house all right, but it looked nothing like it once had.

Years ago, he’d thrown a rock through the front picture window after a fight with his father. His mom had covered the hole with cardboard because they couldn’t afford a new piece of glass that size.

Now, the cardboard was gone, the replacement window surrounded by flowers nodding in the breeze.

The porch where his father used to sit many nights drinking Scotch and getting mean no longer sagged, threatening to fall away from the house. And the hole Jesse had used to crawl under the porch on nights when Dad kicked him out was covered over. He’d learned later that his mother had kept the back door open for him the way she had for Rachel, when his sister had been the one thrown out into the cold desert night.

All of his surprise and regret quickly boiled down to something much more familiar. Anger.

His mother had left him the damn place as some kind of chain, forcing him back here. Worse, Rachel had been repairing it and shining it up pretty.

Wonderful. A gold-plated chain.

If Rachel thought she could stop him from getting rid of it—tearing the damn thing down if he had to—she was wrong. Rachel could dress up the house all she wanted, repair it and cover up the ugly parts, but underneath it was still the violent and angry home of his youth. There was not enough paint in the world to cover that.

“Let’s go, Wain.” Jesse climbed gingerly out of the Jeep.

Wain barked with an enthusiasm Jesse was far from feeling and trotted ahead to sniff and urinate on a hydrangea bush.

Jesse pulled the key from around his neck, where it hung with his dog tags.

He bent and picked up one of the solid decorative rocks that lined the walkway. He tested its heft and then hurled it through the front window. The glass shattered and Jesse smiled.

Now, it looks like home.