Baby, I'm Yours

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” He sucked in a breath, then slipped his hands underneath Pippa’s back and head, scooping the surprisingly solid little girl out of the crib to nestle against his chest. A whole mess of emotions slammed through him as she skootched around, her peach-fuzz head tickling his chin. But definitely topping the list was a gut-wrenching sensation of connection, that she was his, and he was hers, and nothing could alter that simple fact.

“You’ve done this before,” Julianne said.

“I’m the youngest of six. Lots of nieces and nephews.” Kevin shifted Pippa so her diapered tush rested in the crook of his arm. She started to fuss. Nothing major, just a few little eh-eh-ehs. Kevin gently jiggled her in his arms and she stopped.

“Is your family close?”

There it was, that same wistfulness he’d hear in Robyn’s voice in those rare, unguarded moments when she slipped on her rebellious streak. “Closer than some of us might like,” Kevin said, his lips twitching. “My three oldest brothers and their families all live within a cuppla blocks of my parents.”

“And where is that?”

“Springfield, Mass.”

“Ah. That accounts for the accent, I suppose.”

“What accent?” he said, and she almost smiled.

“And your other siblings?”

She was avoiding the issue. The “what comes next?” part of the conversation. And thank God for that.

“My sister Mia’s about to marry one of those hedge-fund dudes in Connecticut, over the July Fourth weekend. And my next oldest brother, Rudy, and his wife, Violet, just started runnin’ an inn in New Hampshire.”

Then there’s me, he thought. The caboose running his ass off to catch up.

“Are they all happy?” Julianne asked.

“Sure, I guess. In an Everybody Loves Raymond kinda way. We yell, we fight, we screw up. Obviously,” he said, with a self-deprecating half shrug. “Some of us’ve put our folks through the ringer more’n others. And my dad was a cop. It musta killed him sometimes, watching us learn things the hard way. But we’re there for each other. Can’t ask for more than that, I s’pose.”

She watched him for a moment, expressionless, before walking over to dump out a laundry basket, full of tiny-footed sleepers and those one-piece undershirt things that snapped at the crotch, on top of the changing table.

“So what about you?” he asked, feeling the baby slump against his collarbone, drifting back to sleep. When Julianne glanced over at him, her brow pinched, he added, “What’s your story?”

“My…story?”

“Yeah. You’ve been here for, what? A year, at least. But you’re wearing a wedding ring. Does your husband live here, too?”

She pulled out a sleeper, quickly folded it. “Robyn never talked about me, then?”

“Not much, no.”

“I’m a widow,” she said quietly, not looking at him as she continued folding. Embarrassment cringed in the pit of Kevin’s stomach.

“Oh. Hello. I’m sorry.” Shrugging, Julianne opened the drawer to a plastic bin on the changing table’s second shelf, sticking in clothes as she folded them. “Was he sick? Unless you don’t wanna talk about it—”

“My husband was killed by a drunk driver, Kevin,” she said, the words oddly stripped of emotion. Kevin closed his eyes, bile surging in his throat.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, lamely.

“Yeah. Me, too.” Now bitterness trickled in to fill the void. “Gil and I had gone out to dinner. To celebrate my getting pregnant. It was pouring rain. Per usual for Seattle in the fall. We never even saw the oncoming car.” Finally she looked at him, dry eyes screaming with unhealed grief. “So, actually, I know exactly what it’s like to have my life turned upside down.”

A silent, but potent, four-letter word exploded in his brain. “I can’t believe Robyn didn’t tell me.”

“Clearly the two of you didn’t have that kind of relationship,” Julianne said, shoving more folded clothes into a second drawer. “And anyway, she and I weren’t close. She…she wouldn’t let anybody get close.”

“You got that right,” Kevin muttered, even as he caught the frustration, the disappointment in her voice. “But you didn’t come out here right after, then?”

“Dad wanted me to. Well, after I got out of the hospital. There was a month of hell,” she said dryly. “But I was determined to pick up the pieces of my life where I’d last seen them. It wasn’t working, but I was being too stubborn to admit it. Then Dad discovered Robyn was pregnant, and it was obvious he’d never manage with her by himself, and I thought, okay, a diversion. Something to take my mind off…things.”

Inside Kevin’s brain, two and two slammed together hard enough to make his ears ring. “Even though…”

“Yes, even though I’d just lost my own baby a few months before. But Dad needed me. Robyn needed me. And God knows, later on, Pippa needed me. What can I tell you? It felt good.” She paused. “It still does.”

Pippa was down for the count. Kevin turned to lay her back in the crib, for the first time noticing the pale lavender walls, the border of carousel horses prancing underneath the ceiling. As if reading his mind, Julianne said, “Robyn decorated the room all by herself.”

“So she—”

“Wanted the baby? I’m not sure she knew what she wanted, to tell you the truth. She liked the idea of having a little girl to dress up. Being a mother, though…not so much.” Julianne hesitated. “Dad and I have no idea where she got the stuff. In Mexico, I mean. Or when. But—” her lips flattened “—but there’s a reason why Dad didn’t want to tell you about Pippa.”

“He can’t possibly blame me for Robyn’s habit.”

“No, but you didn’t exactly help things, did you?”

“I tried, Julianne,” he said, hating, even as he weirdly understood, how he’d ended up the logical target for Julianne’s and Victor’s frustration and grief. “Believe me, I tried. But you gotta understand, every time I suggested maybe she go into rehab or get counseling or something, she went ballistic on me. Like you said, she wouldn’t let anybody get close. Including me. And I finally realized I was having enough trouble keeping my own head above water at that point. So I ran. Except…” He streaked a hand through his hair. “The longer I was straight, the more I kept feeling like…I don’t know. That I gave up on her too easily or something. Like maybe I shoulda pushed harder for her to get help.”

“Even though you didn’t love her?”

“Just because I wasn’t in love with your sister didn’t mean I didn’t care about her, for cryin’ out loud. When I started to get my act together, I really did want to help her go straight, too. Only she wasn’t gonna go without a fight, and I just didn’t have enough fight in me for both of us. Not then.”

Her steady gaze felt like it was gonna prick his skull. “The success rate for addicts—”

“Is, like, twenty percent, I know. Believe me, you can’t throw a statistic at me I haven’t heard a thousand times already. But what can I tell ya? You’re lookin’at one of those twenty percent, okay?”

Her face colored. An improvement, frankly, over the ghost look. “Dad will still fight you for custody.”

“Yeah, like that’s a news flash. Well, here’s another one—I may have made a crapload of mistakes in my life, but walking out on my own kid ain’t gonna be one of them. No matter what I’ve gotta do to prove myself worthy of being part of her life.”

After another long glance at his daughter, Kevin pulled out his wallet, extracting a plain white business card with his name and cell number. “I need some time to think, to figure out what the next step is. But I’ll be back. And tell your father to not even think about taking my daughter away so I can’t find her.”

Julianne’s mouth fell open. “He wouldn’t do that!”

“Yeah, well, he already tried to keep us apart, so let’s just say I’m not exactly feelin’ the love here.” He handed her the card. “You can reach me at that number. Anytime, day or night. And you can tell your father…” He hauled in a quick breath. “The pain I saw in his eyes, when he told me about Robyn? Why would he think I’d feel any different about Pippa?”

Then he walked away before the pain in Julianne’s could fully register.

Chapter Two

“It’s the best solution, Dad. And you know it.”

From across the tempered-glass table on the flagstone patio, Julianne’s father shot her an irritated look. “For whom?”

“All of us,” she said, slipping Gus a piece of deli ham from her salad. Wide-eyed and very awake in one of her many baby seats, a just-fed Pippa babbled at the bouncing shadows cast by the thousand-fingered wisteria strangling the redwood trellis overhead. From the nearby pool, a chlorine-scented breeze danced around them like an attention-seeking child, as though trying to wick away at least part of the morning’s turmoil. Fat chance of that.

“Bull,” her father said. “And stop feeding the dog.”

Her father had insisted on making lunch, despite it taking him three times longer than usual. Stubborn old fart. “It was one bite. And I’m eating. See?” Julianne shoved a forkful of red leaf lettuce into her mouth. It tasted, as everything had in the last eighteen months, like paper. Limp, oily paper. Blech.

“You haven’t touched your bread, either,” he said. “And it’s the good stuff, from the bakery. With the chewy crust.”

Julianne stared at the thick slice of bread her father had laboriously cut for her, fast morphing into a slab of concrete in the humidity-starved air. The bread stared back, baleful and unwanted. “I’m not that hungry.” She twiddled her fork amongst the leaves, feeling petulant and out of sorts. More out of sorts. The sort of out of sorts that makes people say things they shouldn’t. “I’m also not five.”

“And you also don’t weigh much more than you did when you were five. So, eat, dammit, unless you want me to drag you to the doctor.”

Fine. So maybe she’d gone down a size—or two—since Gil’s death. But if she wasn’t hungry, she wasn’t hungry. And anyway, what was the point of eating when you just ended up dead, anyway?

Okay, even for her that was probably a tad too morose.

And her father had changed the subject. She speared another chunk of ham. At her knees, Gus—definitely not in danger of starving anytime soon—whined softly and licked his chops, hopeful. The ham suspended in midair, Julianne regarded the top of her father’s head, feeling, as usual, lost in the jungle of emotions being around him provoked. More often than not, though, once she’d machete’d her way through the frustration of living with the spokesperson for implacability, how could she not feel profound compassion for a man who’d never wanted anything more than for his children to be happy? That he’d been powerless to make that happen for either of his daughters…

Well. The least she could do was let the man make her lunch.

“It’s just as well that Kevin found out now and not later,” she finally said, steeling herself against the sting. “It would have only been worse for us—and Pippa—if he had. And now that he knows, he’s not going to go away. Or forget about his own daughter. And the sooner you accept that the easier it’s going to be.”

Her father’s fork clattered to his plate as his gaze slammed into hers. “And damned if I’m going to let some junkie take my granddaughter!”

At his sharp tone, Pippa began to whimper. Gus—who took his role as mother’s helper very seriously—thoroughly licked the baby’s blobby little feet, distracting her.

“He’s not a junkie, Dad,” Julianne said softly, helplessly smiling at her niece’s recently discovered belly laugh. “At least, not anymore. And anyway,” she added, returning her gaze to her father, “even Robyn said his major problem was alcohol, not drugs.”

“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“No, of course not. But if he’s been clean for a year—”

“We only have his word on that, you know.”

Julianne shakily set down her own fork, her half-eaten salad jeering her as she folded her arms across her stomach. She looked out over her father’s lawn and much-prized garden, scrupulously avoiding the pottery studio he’d had built for her shortly after her arrival. Screw water conservation, screamed the lush, bright green, weed-free grass, the dozens of rosebushes in copious bloom, the masses of deep purple clematis and azaleas and rhododendrons camouflaging the eight-foot-tall privacy fence. Dad spent hours out here during the long spring and summer, coaxing humidity-loving plants to grow in a high-desert climate. The same love-doesn’t-give-up mind-set, Julianne mused, that had made him the darling of the self-help circuit.

If you care enough, you can make it work, make it happen, make it bloom.

She returned her gaze to her father, thinking, It must be hell, living a lie.

Pippa started fussing again; Julianne slid out of her chair to heft the baby into her arms, Gus hovering to make sure she didn’t drop her. As she inhaled Pip’s sweet, baby-shampoo smell, she remembered Kevin’s awestruck expression when he held his daughter for the first time…the fierce look in his eyes when, after the initial shock wore off, he realized he was going to have a fight on his hands. That second look, especially, had pierced straight through the vast dead space inside her, rudely jolting her out of her nice, safe, bland cocoon.

Bastard.

“I know a year isn’t very long in the scheme of things,” Julianne said. “That Kevin could backslide. But he is Pippa’s father, Dad. He has the right to know his child. Which I’ve said all along.”

That merited far too many seconds of her father’s trenchant gaze. “You’re projecting,” he said gently.

“Because I lost my own baby, I’m empathizing with how he’d feel if he lost his? You betcha. But trust me, Kevin’s not going to simply take off with her.”

“You can’t be that naive.”

“I’m not. But you weren’t in the room with him. I was. And I promise you, that man is no more ready to be a full-time dad right now than Gus.” At the sound of his name, the dog waddled back to nuzzle aside Pippa’s thigh, laying his head on Julianne’s lap. She gave him another piece of ham, ignoring her father’s glare.

He stabbed at his salad, winced, then shoved the bite into his mouth. “Then why on earth would you want to encourage him to be ready?”

“Would you rather he show up with a court order and just take her away?”

Her father’s brows crashed together. “But you just said—”

“I didn’t say he didn’t want to be Pip’s father. I said he wasn’t ready. Once the dust settles, however, I have no doubt he’ll change his tune. And if he does press the issue, I can’t see where he wouldn’t be within his rights. Pip is his daughter, after all.”

“According to Robyn.”

“So we’ll do a DNA test. I doubt Kevin will object. But what did Robyn have to gain by telling us Kevin was Pippa’s father? Especially since she didn’t want him to know.” Julianne fiddled with her lettuce some more, then lifted her eyes to her father’s. “Be truthful—are you really up to a custody battle? Because I’m sure as hell not.”

“So we should just hand Pippa over without a fight?”

“I don’t want to lose her any more than you do. It’s the fighting part I’d just as soon avoid.”

Victor carefully leaned back in his padded chair; Gus the Fickle hobbled over to him, his long tail whapping Julianne’s bare knee. “What do we even know about this kid? Aside from his dragging your sister down into the pit with him, I mean. Is he working? Does he even have any way of taking care of Pip?”

Julianne pulled the baby closer as she worked to bring her breathing under control. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand where her father was coming from. Or why. Losing Robyn—first to drugs, then to death—had nearly wrecked him. And God knew how Julianne would have gotten through the last year and a half without his support. But while her dad might have been the go-to expert on mending other people’s family rifts, he could be spectacularly obtuse when it came to mending—or even acknowledging—his own.

“I’ll grant you, maybe his earlier behavior wasn’t the most mature in the world,” she said at last. “And maybe we don’t know what he’s really like now, or if he’s really changed. Or even if he is able to take care of a child. Even so, he didn’t have to come all the way out here, just to check up on Robyn. So I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, even if you’re not.”

She leaned forward. “But you have got to stop using Kevin as a scapegoat for what happened to Robyn. He said he tried every way he could think of to get her into rehab, but she refused. And yes, I believe him,” she said before her father could argue with her. “After all, she didn’t exactly go meekly for us, did she? And we weren’t trying to get our own heads straight at the same time. There was only so much he could do, Dad. Even you have to see that.”

A bruised shadow passed over her father’s features, followed by a sigh. Of acceptance? Resignation? Julianne had no idea.

“You always were the soft-hearted one, Julie-bird.”

“Because I don’t have it in me to keep a father and child apart? Then, yeah. Guilty as charged. In any case, the more obstacles we throw up between Kevin and Pippa, the worse it’s going to be for all of us. But if we let Kevin stay with us…” She shrugged. “It’s a win-win situation.”

“And how do you figure that?”

“Because if he’s here, we can keep an eye on him. Get to know him while he gets to know his daughter. But at the same time, maybe…”

“What?”

She turned Pippa around; pudgy, shapeless feet dug into her thighs as the baby pushed herself upright, Julianne’s hands firm on her waist. The baby had recently discovered the wonder of noses. Now, with a drooly squeal, she batted at Julianne’s, the little girl’s innocent joy jostling loose—even if only for a few precious moments—the solid, putrid ache of loss. “Maybe,” Julianne said softly, locking eyes with her niece, “if we don’t fight him, he’ll realize she’s better off with us, after all.”

Her father’s sharp silence finally brought her eyes to his. He slowly pushed himself to his feet, angrily grabbing for the cane. “I’ve already lost two people I didn’t fight for hard enough,” he said, leaning so hard on the cane Julianne worried he’d topple over. “Damned if I’m going to let the same thing happen to my granddaughter. Maybe I can’t stop Kevin from seeing Pip. But live in my house? No damn way.”

As her father lurched off, grumbling, the dog slogging beside him, Julianne found herself sorely tempted to chuck the slab of rock-hard bread at his head.

Blinking until his eyes adjusted to the dim light, Kevin stood inside Felix Padilla’s upholstery shop, thinking, Welcome to my brain.

Crammed into the narrow space like corralled sheep awaiting shearing, Victorian love seats in threadbare velvets mingled with Americana wing chairs, sets of Danish modern dining chairs with faded burnt-orange seats, camel-back sofas in worn brocades. Damn place looked like a 3-D encyclopedia of Ill-Advised Decorating Styles of the Twentieth Century. Just like it had the first time he’d seen it, more than a year ago. He followed the barely three-foot-wide walkway to Felix’s workshop in back, where the jumble disintegrated into flat-out chaos.

“Felix!” Kevin called out, his pupils cringing again at the stark daylight lurking outside the open loading-dock door. Mind-numbing eighties rock blared from a dusty boombox on one corner of the massive cutting table; tools, swatch books, industrial sewing machines, bins of welting and studs and upholstery nails littered what little space wasn’t taken up by a dozen sofas and chairs in various stages of resurrection. This was seriously the lair of a madman. A half-deaf, insanely talented madman who hadn’t been without work since 1965.

“Felix!”

“Over here! Behin’ the settee!” A bald, caramel-colored head popped up over the love seat, upended like a dead animal in an advanced stage of rigor mortis. “So,” Felix shouted over the music. “You were gone a long time. What’d you find out? An’ don’t sit on that chair, it’s jus’ finished. The las’ thing I need is a dirty butt print on it.”

Kevin pointlessly turned down the radio: half-deaf men didn’t know how to whisper. He’d met Felix through AA; he’d never forget the pride shining in the old guy’s black eyes that night when he stood and announced—loud enough for God to hear—that he’d been sober for “seven t’ousand, two hundred an’ thirty-six days.” A week later, in a huge act of faith, he’d taken Kevin on as an apprentice, until they both realized heavier-duty intervention was called for. It was Felix who knew somebody who knew somebody else who got Kevin into the facility in Denver where the tide finally turned for good.

There were other people in Albuquerque Kevin could’ve hit up for a place to crash for a few days, but Felix was the only person he could trust. Who’d understand what he was going through.

The short, barrel-chested guy now cussing out his arthritic knees as he struggled to his feet had been uncle, confidant and rock-steady support to the messed-up hombre who’d finally swallowed his pride enough to admit he needed help. Felix had known all about Robyn. Had even suggested—sorrowfully, to be sure—that maybe Robyn was one of those people who’d have to hit rock bottom before she was ready to turn her life around.

Kevin leaned his backside against the cutting table, his palms braced on either side of his hips. After an hour of aimless driving around town, the double whammy had only begun to sink in, about Robyn, about Pippa. For the hundredth time, a white-hot jolt of adrenaline shot through him.

He met Felix’s eyes. “Robyn’s dead.”

The old man sucked in a breath. “Muerta? No! Dios mio— when?”

“Three months ago.”

“What happened?”

“Swimming accident. Down in Puerto Vallarta.” Kevin could tell by Felix’s eye roll that he’d mangled the pronunciation. “According to her sister, she’d been clean for months, but—”

“Her sister?”

“An older sister. She’s staying with their father.” His throat worked. “To help take care of the baby.”

“The baby? What baby?” Another sucked-in breath preceded, “You got a kid?”

Kevin had long since stopped being spooked by Felix’s Olympicesque knack for jumping to conclusions. Actually it took some of the pressure off, not having to spell everything out. “A little girl. Nearly five months old.” He screwed a palm into his eyelid, then let it drop. The sympathy in the dark eyes in front of him made his own burn.

“What’re you gonna do?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

The old man dragged a worn ottoman from underneath the cutting table, commanding, “Sit!” before waddling over to an ancient fridge and pulling out two Cokes. “You, my frien’,” he said, handing Kevin one of the cans, “need a plan.”

Kevin took a pull of his soda, nodding as the carbonation exploded against the roof of his mouth. “What I need is a job. And transport of some kind, since I hadn’t planned on keeping this rental for more than a few days. So I can hang around for a while until I figure out what comes next.”

“You got it,” Felix said, slapping Kevin’s knee. “Orlando, my assistant, he suddenly had to go back down to Juarez to look after his sick momma, I got work coming outta my ears. An’ I jus’ bought a new truck. You can use the old one if you want. She looks like crap, but she still runs, an’ that’s what counts, right?”

“That would be great, thanks,” Kevin said, relieved. Upholstery wasn’t his first love—he much preferred working on houses to recovering sofas—but he was good at it. And work was work. As wheels were wheels. He smiled. “Funny, you don’t look like an angel.”

A row of very bright, very straight teeth glinted from underneath a brush-roller mustache. “Are you kiddin’? You’re the one who’d be saving my ass. So maybe I see God’s hand in this, no? An’ you can stay with me an’ Lupe as long as you like. No, no, no,” he said, his head swinging as one hand shot up. “No arguments. Maybe our place is no five-star hotel, but it’s free. An’ the food is great, yes? As long as you don’ mind dodging Frannie’s little rug rats. Her husband’s done a runner on her again, the bastard.”