The Baby Notion

“Thanks. I’ll remember that. Beth’ll be in school then, so I probably could use some help.”

Guilt was eating on him. He hadn’t come in here to eavesdrop on a private conversation. A simple pick-up, that was all he’d had in mind. He ought to get the hell out of here, only his boots didn’t seem to want to move in the direction of the door.

“And, Prissy—don’t take this the wrong way—but Miss Agnes is right. Taking a course in landscaping is one thing—I think you’re real smart to do it—but having a baby is something else again.”

“Oh, for mercy’s sake, Faith, I thought you, at least, would understand.”

“Priss, I do understand, but—”

“No, you don’t! You’re just like everybody else in this stinky old town! You think I can’t do anything! You think just because Daddy owned—”

Breaking off, she stood, and Jake got his first close-up, head-on look at her face. It was gorgeous. It was also red. Even as he watched, a freshet of tears spilled over her thick, dark lashes, leaving a faint trail of navy blue down her soft, freckled cheek.

Jake wanted in the worst kind of way to offer her the comfort of his arms, his lips, and any other body part she might possibly make use of. He was heartily ashamed of having listened in on a private conversation just so he could find a way to get into a woman’s jeans. That was a new low, even for him. But then, he’d never pretended to be a gentleman.

In Jake’s haste to get out of the Baby Boutique without embarrassing either himself or the two women, one of his big, booted feet shot out in the aisle just as the haystack blonde rushed past, and she tripped over it.

With a little deft footwork, he caught her before she could fall, but in the process, his hat was knocked to the back of his head, his knees bumped against hers, and he couldn’t help himself. Right there beside a herd of woolly white polar bears, Jake squashed her up against him, belt buckle to belt buckle, and looked smack-dab into the biggest, shimmeriest pair of whiskey-brown eyes he’d ever seen on any woman.

“I do beg your pardon, ma’am…Miss Priss,” he said, feeling like he’d been caught peeping in a window. Inhaling a powdery scent that smelled like ripening corn only sweeter, he involuntarily tightened his arms, pressing every soft curve as close as he dared considering they were in a public place in broad daylight

Faith came rushing up, all breathless and flustered. “Priss, are you all right?”

“Hmm?”

“This is—I mean, have you two met? Priss? Jake?”

A slow grin kindled in Jake’s gray eyes. “I reck’n you might say we’ve run into each other a time or two.”

Miss Pricilla Jones, who lived out on Willow Creek and was studying to be a landscaper, was blinking real hard when Jake turned his attention back to her. He promptly lost his train of thought, if he’d ever had one, as he watched her mascara melt and trickle down her velvety cheek.

“I got mascara on your hat brim,” she said in a breathless little burst of apology. “I’m sorry. I hope it’s not an expensive one. I’ll buy you a new one if you’ll tell me what size you wear. Or maybe I could just give you the money?”

It was Jake’s favorite hat. He’d bought it after his first big commission, paying a hundred and fifty bucks for it. It had taken him all these years to get it broken in. “What, this old wreck?” he heard himself scoffing. “Heck, I only wear it to muck out the stalls.”

She drew in a deep, shuddering breath and Jake stepped back, reluctantly putting enough space between them so that she wouldn’t realize how she was affecting him. It was downright embarrassing for a man his age not to have any more control over his body.

While her friend looked on, her expression one of concern mixed with just a tad of speculation, Priss blinked away the excess moisture. “Yes, well…if you’re sure.” She wiped a bangle-laden arm across her face, smearing her eye makeup even more, then she reached up with two frosted-pink-tipped fingers and rubbed the stain deeper into the beaver felt that he’d been so careful all these years not to bruise. “I heard somewhere that ginger ale was good foror maybe it was seltzer…”

Ginger ale? Seltzer?

The lady didn’t make a whole lot of sense to Jake, but who was keeping score? With her haystack hair tumbling down around her neck, a few strands tangling in her gaudy silver and turquoise earrings, she was sort of a mess, but she was just the kind of mess he liked. He’d have offered her five thousand bucks on the spot to go home with him and let him help her celebrate her birthday, only he didn’t know how to bring up the subject without letting on he’d been eavesdropping.

Trying to think of something clever to say that would impress her with what an honorable, upstanding guy he was, he followed her outside to her peach-colored Caddy convertible, tipped his ruined hat and reluctantly opened her door.

She smiled. She had the kind of smile that would derail a locomotive, even with the little smudge of frosty pink lipstick on her left incisor.

A customer approached, and Faith, who’d been hovering in the doorway of the shop, turned, took one last worried look over her shoulder, and reluctantly went inside. Jake tried to think of some way to prolong the moment, and then decided maybe it was just as well he couldn’t. Priss was evidently into babies and stuff like that, whereas Jake was a man who valued his freedom more than just about anything else. And men who valued their freedom learned pretty fast to steer clear of broody women.

Regretfully, he watched as she slid her shapely rear end across the sun-baked leather seat. Wincing, she gave him another trembly little smile and wiggled her fingers at him. He noticed that she wore three rings, but none on her third finger, left hand.

And Eddie, whoever he was, had run off to marry another woman. Jake figured the jerk must’ve been neutered before puberty, else he’d never have let this one get away.

He watched the Caddy roar off down Main Street and thought about what he’d learned. For all the good it was ever going to do him. Her name was Pricilla Jones. She had an expensive address. She was studying to be a landscaper. She liked stuffed animals, but she didn’t have kids.

And she was thinking of going to a damned sperm bank!

Leave her be, Jake told himself, knowing there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of that. The lady was just a mite weird, but it was a classy kind of weird. He had a feeling she might be one of those high-maintenance women. He’d had himself one of those once. It had taken him years to recover. Some lessons a man learned the hard way.

And some he never learned at all.

Feeling frustrated and slightly depressed, which was a lousy combination, he headed for the parking lot behind the hardware store where he’d left his truck. A few minutes later he was headed north, certain of only three things. Number one, that women were nuts—the haystack blonde a little more so than most.

Number two, a man was plumb out of his natural element in any store that called itself a boutique.

And number three—no matter how risky it was, sooner or later the lady in the tight jeans and the pink plastic sandals was going to wind up in his bed—bangles, mascara and all.

At age thirty-five, Jake Spencer knew himself pretty well, both shortcomings and “longcomings.” He had no illusions left, and damned few ideals. What he did have was a good, solid reputation as an honest horse broker, a modest spread a few miles north of New Hope, and a powerful allergy to rich, society types.

He had both a short-term goal and a long-term goal. His short-term goal concerned the haystack blonde, and he figured he’d made a pretty good beginning. They were now on speaking terms.

As for his long-term goal, that was easy. By the time he reached forty, which was how old his old man had been when Jake was sired, he was going to be richer, meaner and one hell of a lot tougher than the old bastard had ever been.

So far, he was right on schedule on all three counts.

It was the same man. Priss had seen him around town several times, but never close enough to get a real good look. He was the kind of man a woman couldn’t help but notice. Lean, lanky, with shoulders wide enough to fill a door frame and a way of walking that set loose all kinds of wicked ideas. Before she’d even met him, she’d had this tingly, excited feeling whenever she happened to see him.

Of course, he was only a wrangler. Her father would roll over in his grave if he knew she was even thinking thoughts like that about any man, much less a wrangler.

But mercy, it had certainly been a learning experience. She knew now why she’d never been able to get real steamed up over Eddie Turner, even though they’d gone together for months and she had let him kiss her with his mouth open and even unbutton her blouse.

Tripping over the wrangler’s feet had been the high point in an otherwise dismal birthday. At least this time, she thought with amusement, nobody could accuse her of trying to buy friends the way they had when she’d thrown that birthday barbecue in the park last year and invited the whole town. Nobody but Faith and her mother had come until Sue Ellen had brought a handful of men over from the café, which was real sweet of her, since Sue Ellen was in the food business herself.

Priss had ended up donating the cake and barbecue to the volunteer fire department, but evidently the barbecue had sat out too long in the hot July sun. Five of the firemen had gotten sick. The whole thing had been written up in the paper, with a picture of her wearing that wretched white dress she’d worn to the debutante ball in Dallas when she was eighteen.

She’d been embarrassed to show her face around town for weeks.

But even that wasn’t as bad as the party her mother had given her when she was twelve. Nora Barrington had invited six girls and six boys—sons and daughters of the town’s most prominent citizens. Four had shown up. The two girls had huddled together the whole time and whispered, ignoring Priss, while the boys had tossed food and paper hats into the swimming pool and made nasty remarks about her bosoms, which had just started to grow.

But the crowning blow had come when she’d overheard Rosalie, their housekeeper, telling the cook that the beautiful Cartier watch her parents had given her for her birthday had been selected, ordered and gift-wrapped by her mother’s social secretary. “Miz B., she didn’t even take the time to look at the thing,” the housekeeper had confided. “I’ll tell you the God’s honest truth, Ethel. That poor little young’un puts me in mind of them puppies folks are always dumpin’ out on the side of the road, hopin’ somebody’ll come along and adopt ’em. Lord help the poor baby the first time some no-good man comes along and offers her a pat on the head. She’ll be a-lickin’ his boots from then on.”

Furious and embarrassed, Priss had flushed her new watch down the toilet, which had ruined the watch and stopped up the plumbing. As punishment, she’d been left behind when her parents went to Europe three days later.

Not that they had ever taken her on any of their other trips, but this time they had promised.

Well, she was twenty-nine years old now, not twelve. She still had Rosalie, even if both her parents were gone. As she’d never really known them, she’d never really been able to mourn them. She was old enough now to stop wishing for the moon. She was who she was, and if people didn’t like her, that was just too bad, because she certainly tried her best to be friendly to everyone she ever met.

Including the man she’d nearly mowed down in Faith’s place. My mercy, Priss thought, he was really something. Even better up close than he was from a distance. And the way he had looked at her—as if she were a great big bowl of Heavenly Hash ice cream…

The sky had turned dark and threatening. Lightning flashed west of town. Priss tried to remember whether or not she’d left anything out on the balcony that rain would hurt, but she couldn’t concentrate. She was too busy thinking about the way Jake Spencer had made her feel. He’d been so handsome…

Well, no, he hadn’t. Not really. He was too hard, too weathered, to be truly handsome. He had smelled of horse, hay, hair tonic and sweat, and as Priss pulled over to the curb to run into the drugstore for some fingernail adhesive, she had to smile, wondering if he knew how much more appealing the smell of honest sweat was than the overpowering colognes some men wore.

She was in the drugstore almost fifteen minutes—Miss Ethel was looking for denture cleanser and Priss helped her compare prices. Finally back in the car and heading south on Oak Street, she switched on the radio, which was set to her favorite country music station. Clint Black was singing about his last broken heart and it occurred to her that the cowboy in the Baby Boutique sort of looked like an older, taller, tougher version of Clint Black. He had the same kind of crinkly-eyed smile.

She wondered if the cowboy could sing. Wondered, too, if he’d felt the same jolt of static electricity she had felt when he caught her. Mercy, it had been powerful, but it was probably due to the storm.

Still, she wouldn’t mind getting to know him better. Not that there was much chance of that. He looked like a wrangler, and wranglers usually hung out at Sue Ellen’s Diner or Little Joe’s Café, which was actually more of a saloon. Sue Ellen had better food, except for the chili, but Joe had a pool table in the back room.

Priss ate at Antonio’s, when she ate out at all, which meant she probably wouldn’t run into the wrangler again, because wranglers didn’t patronize Antonio’s.

Before heading home, Pnss stopped by the hospital to drop off the toys she’d purchased at Faith’s boutique, in case any of the children were asleep when she came back after supper to read bedtime stories. Toys and stories would probably be too much all at once. She had learned a lot about children in the year and a half she’d been volunteering in the children’s ward.

Next, she went by the supermarket to pick up some frozen dinners she could microwave while Rosalie was away visiting her sister.

Finally turning off onto Willow Creek Road, she sniffed the air and decided someone must be burning stumps. Probably taking advantage of the rain that was about to come pouring down, if the sky was anything to go by. The lightning and thunder was almost constant now. Wouldn’t you just know? Priss thought. It was the crowning touch for a birthday that had gone wrong from the moment she had lost a fingernail trying to get a new tube of toothpaste out of the box.

Feeling a little bit sad, a little bit let down, Priss told herself that her birthday wasn’t over yet. She still had this evening and the children. Maybe next year she’d be reading stories to her own baby.

Seeing a fire engine coming toward her, she pulled over, even though the siren wasn’t sounding. Stump burning. She’d been right, then. Probably got out of bounds and started a grass fire.

Jake was halfway home, his mind partly on the upcoming sale in Dallas, partly on the haystack blonde, when a dispatcher’s voice on the scanner snagged his attention.

“Fire out at Willow Creek Arms is under control.”

Willow Creek?

“New Hope, head on over to a house fire at the corner of Matlock and Guntrum. Billy, stay there with the pumper truck to wet down any hot spots. South Fork’s sending—”

There was a burst of static and a few more remarks, but Jake had stopped listening. Pulling a U-turn in the middle of a two-lane highway, he downshifted and roared back toward town without giving a second thought to Petemoss and the rest of the crew, who were waiting for the concrete, re-bar and forming plywood in the back of the truck to get started on the foundation of the barn extension.

Two

Priss was going a few rounds with a fireman when Jake arrived on the scene. Hair in ruins, her hands black with soot, she was gesturing wildly while the tired-looking volunteer fireman shook his head. “Ma’am, I sure wish I could, but I just cain’t.”

Thunder rolled overhead. The air had an eerie greenish look. “But it’s safe,” she argued. “You said yourself the roof wasn’t going to fall in. Most of the damage to my apartment is smoke and water.”

“Ma’am, rules is rules, and I’ve already done bent ’em right bad.”

Jake noticed she was holding on to what looked like a small wooden chest, a leather case and several plastic bags bulging with various lumpy articles. “Where do you expect me to sleep? On the sidewalk?”

“I reck’n if I was you, I’d start callin’ round to family. That, or get me a room at the hotel before they’re all booked up. Most folks are already gone.”

“But I just got home! How was I to know—” It was then that she noticed Jake. “What are you doing here, did you get smoked out, too?”

Jake shook his head, surveying the ruin all around him. Structurally, it didn’t look too bad, but it was going to take considerable cleaning before it was fit to live in.

Even so, it was pretty swank. Definitely a cut or two above Shacktown. “Heard the fire call, came to see if I could help out.”

“Miz Barrington,” the young fireman said earnestly, “I just cain’t let you go back inside again. Goin’ in for valuables, medicine and important papers—that’s one thing, but I cain’t let you haul out everything—if I was to let you do it, everybody else would be wanting to do it, too. Chief Clancy would be all over me like flies on a roadkill.”

Barrington? As in old man Horace T. Barrington, king of the bigtime swindlers? Holy hell!

“Ma’am, maybe you’d better start callin’ around for somewheres to stay tonight, else you might have to drive near ’bout to Dallas. Like I said, most folks have already gone, and there ain’t that many places to stay around New Hope.”

Priss swallowed hard. She was beginning to feel sick in her stomach, as if her body had been violated instead of her home. “Um, what about the bathroom? Couldn’t I just go inside long enough to use the bathroom?”

“I reckon you could use the one out there by the pool. Fire didn’t reach that far.”

With a doleful glance over her shoulder at what used to be her home, Priss picked her way through puddles of filthy water, coiled firehoses and a few pieces of splintered furniture someone had tossed off a balcony.

Evidently she wasn’t the only one who had sought refuge in the pool’s dressing room. The once-white plumbing was smeared with sooty handprints, and there wasn’t a clean towel to be found anywhere.

Nevertheless, several minutes later, after splashing her face and throat, she felt marginally better. At least she wasn’t shaking quite so hard. Taking a deep breath, she faced herself in the mirror and groaned. Her lipstick was gone. Whatever blush remained was buried under layers of soot and streaked mascara. She looked like a speckled raccoon after a three-day binge, and as for her hair…

She groaned again. Priss had never been vain. Her mother had seen to that, constantly harping on the fact that she must take after her father’s side of the family, because no one on her side had ever had freckles and such common, peasant-type bone structure.

Nora Barrington, tall, reed-slender, with black hair and skin the color of a magnolia petal, had come from one of those Virginia families that was reputed to be older than God.

Priss had been a disappointment to her father because she wasn’t a son, and to her mother because she wasn’t a beauty. After she’d graduated from Mary Washington, in a deliberate attempt to prove she didn’t care, she had patterned herself after the most outrageously feminine country singer she could think of.

It had driven them both wild.

Jake was waiting outside the pool house door when she emerged, her face scrubbed right down to the freckles and her own straw-colored lashes. She felt as if someone had carved out a great big hollow place in her stomach, and it was going to take more than a fresh layer of makeup to fix it.

Priss tried and almost succeeded in ignoring the man. What she wanted to do was to run and hide, only there was no place to hide. She could barricade herself inside the bathroom again, but that wouldn’t solve anything. The best she could do was summon up the attitude her mother used to call presence.

She tried. It was simply too much trouble. Besides, as much as she would like to find a scapegoat to pin all her troubles on, Jake Spencer wasn’t it.

Her shoulders slumped. Jake stepped forward. She stepped back. If he touched her right now, she was going to come apart, and she knew as well as she knew her own name that once she did, not all the king’s horses nor all the king’s men would be able to put her together again.

Which reminded her of something else. She’d have to call the hospital to see if one of the other volunteers could read to the children—she’d never be able to make it now.

“Well? What are you hanging around for?” she snapped. “Aren’t you through gawking?”

He was just standing there, in his worn jeans, his sweat-stained work shirt and his pearl-gray Stetson with the mascara-stained brim, looking calm and tough and arrogant all at the same time. It was more than any woman could take under the circumstances. “Don’t you have anything better to do?”

Gratuitous rudeness had never been her style, but at this point, Priss was beyond caring.

“Honey, are you sure you’re all right?”

Her chin quivered. She tightened her grubby fists and tried to hang on to her attitude. “No, dammit, I am not all right! My apartment is ruined, and I’m late for an appointment, and…and I forgot to get my hair-dryer!”

Jake eyed the jumble of parcels she’d parked on the poolside chaise longue. “What’s all that stuff?”

“What it is, is none of your business,” she retorted.

What it was, was her mother’s second-best set of flatware—the best set, a complete service for twenty-four, had been sold at the auction three years ago. With the fireman hovering over her every step of the way, she had only had time to dump her makeup drawer into a plastic bag, snatch up her hair rollers and a change of underwear, and grab her new Clint Black CD. She’d clean forgotten about her jewelry case and her hair-dryer.

“Oh, for pity’s sake, it’s just some odds and ends I needed,” she muttered. “I asked you what you were doing here.”

“Like I said,” he explained patiently, “I heard the call on the fire channel and thought you could use a hand.”

Priss could have used more than a hand, she could have used a place to stay. She could have used her walk-in closet full of clothes, and she definitely could have used her best friend and housekeeper, Rosalie, who had practically raised her.

What was Rosalie going to think when she got back and the apartment was such a mess? Oh, my mercy, she would have to call and warn her.

Drawing in a deep breath, she willed herself to remain calm, but it wasn’t easy. One look at those steady, silver-gray eyes and it was all she could do not to throw herself into Jake’s arms and cry her eyes out. Which didn’t make sense, because in the first place, she didn’t even know the man, and in the second place, she never cried.

Well…hardly at all. Naturally she’d cried when her mother had died, but except for that she hadn’t shed a tear since she was eight years old and had fallen out of a tree and broken her arm. She’d been showing off for the gardener’s son, who’d been ten at the time but who couldn’t climb a step stool.

Actually, there had been one other time when she’d cried, the year she’d gone off to college. Priss had been barely seventeen when she’d overheard Mike Russo telling a visiting cousin that messing around with Prissy Barrington wasn’t worth the risk, because her old man had put out the word that any guy who did would wind up singing in the soprano section of the choir.

Embarrassed to tears and mad as a hornet, she had drunk up half a bottle of her father’s most expensive French wine and cried until she got sick and threw up, but that was absolutely the last time she’d ever shed a tear.