The Black Sheep’s Baby

clomped after him into the service room where he was already shucking off his ski hat and gloves. She stood unmoving, then, and watched him unzip his jacket, peel it off and hang it on one of a row of hooks on the wall, then pull off his boots one by one, hopping comically on one foot. When he turned to her and with a ghost of a smile on his face, reached up to touch her cheek, brush it with the backs of his cold fingers, she still didn’t move. Wrapped in a strange and unfamiliar lethargy, she stood and quietly watched him as he pulled her cap off, then her gloves, and finally unzipped even her jacket, as if she were a child.

No-not a child. There was nothing remotely childlike about the way her heart banged against her calm exterior shell, or the thirsty feeling at the back of her throat that wouldn’t go away when she swallowed. Next, she thought when he had tugged off her jacket and hung it beside his, he will put his arms around me…hold me.

There was nothing childlike, either, in the disappointment she felt when he didn’t.

“Come on in here-in the kitchen.” His voice bewildered her. There was so much tenderness in it. It felt like arms around her, yet, except for that one small caress on her cheek, and the pulling and tugging as he helped her out of her wet clothes, he didn’t touch her.

In the kitchen, he selected a chair and turned it half around, sideways to the table, then gruffly ordered her to sit. Incredibly, Devon did as she was told. Devon O’Rourke-who never took orders from any man-unless he happened to have the words The Honorable in front of his name.

Silently, she watched Eric pull out another chair and set it facing hers. Then he sat down and, one by one, tugged off her boots. Numbness of another kind held her motionless and barely breathing as he lifted her feet into his lap, peeled away her layers of socks and began gently to massage them.

Pain made her gasp; reflexively, she pulled away. Eric brought her feet back to his lap. “They’re gonna hurt a little.” His voice was a growl. “But I think we’ll let you keep ’em.”

Devon tore her mesmerized gaze from his gaunt, beard-stubbled face and blinked her feet into focus. They looked ugly to her-bluish-white with purple toes-and unbelievably vulnerable, half swallowed by those lean, long- boned hands. The image wavered. Her memory overlaid it with another-those same big hands cradling an infant’s tiny red-gold head.

Her stomach growled, and Eric chuckled-a sound like the one she’d heard his father make. “Should have listened to me,” he said. Her eyes flicked upward almost guiltily to collide with his. Warm as brandy, they seemed much nearer to hers than they ought to have been. “Should have eaten breakfast.”

Her lips parted to answer him, although she didn’t know with what words. His eyes seemed to shimmer and move closer.

“Eric Lanagan!”

Devon straightened with a start. Lucy came bustling into the kitchen in her energetic way, the baby’s head bobbing against her shoulder. She halted and glared over it at her son. “Did I just hear what I thought I heard? You’ve been out all morning without breakfast? Look at the both of you-soaking wet and half-frozen-it’ll be a miracle if you don’t catch pneumonia-and at Christmastime, too. I think the two of you lack good sense.”

Eric’s eyes found Devon’s. They gleamed with amusement as he mouthed the words, “Treats me like I’m five.”

“Well, sometimes you act like it,” Lucy snapped.

Devon gasped in amazement and Eric exclaimed with a pained grimace, “Ma, how do you do that?”

“You think I can’t read lips?” She gave her son a look of smugly maternal omniscience.

Devon’s chest hummed with a warm little burr of amusement. She was beginning to look forward to the casual, sometimes bantering interplay between Eric and his parents, so different from the way things were in her own family.

“I’m going to heat up some soup,” Lucy announced, expertly shifting Emily into the crook of one arm as she began to turn on burners and bang kettles. “Devon, you-” she paused to throw her a no-arguments look over one shoulder “-go upstairs and take a nice long hot shower and get into something warm. You- ” she transferred the glare to Eric “-just as well go upstairs, too, and put on some dry clothes. No sense in you taking your shower until you’ve pulled Devon’s car out of that ditch, which you’d better do today, before the snowplow comes by and buries it even deeper. But after you’ve got something hot in your stomach.”

“You want me to take the baby while you-”

“Hah-I’ve fixed many a meal one-handed with a baby on my hip, young man. Go on, now-get.” She jerked her head toward the door to the hallway and the stairs beyond, as a wing of nut-brown hair slid forward across her cheek to cover her smile.

Eric shot back a smart-mouthed “Yes, ma’am” as he placed Devon’s feet on the floor. They exchanged looks as they both rose. Devon opened her mouth, but it was Eric who spoke.

“Oh-Mom. Devon says she’d like to take you up on your invitation to spend Christmas with us-if that’s okay.” His voice was bland, so devoid of expression, in fact, that she threw him a questioning look. His profile gave her no reply.

“I’m glad you decided to stay was all,” Lucy said. Her smile was serene, as if, Devon thought, the decision had never been in doubt.

Chapter 11

“Y our parents are something else,” Devon said without turning from the window. She felt such a heaviness inside-strange that her voice should sound so light.

“Yeah, they are.” And even above the sound of water running in the kitchen sink, she couldn’t mistake the note of affection in Eric’s voice.

It was the next morning-December 23, two days before Christmas-and she was standing with her arms folded across her waist, watching Mike and Lucy’s early model four-wheel-drive SUV lumber down the lane, dragging a feathery plume of exhaust behind it. She watched it fishtail slightly-an almost jaunty little wiggle-as it turned onto the paved road. It was a beautiful, sparkly cold morning; the snowplow had been by earlier, and the sand truck after that. Mike and Lucy had gone shopping; the roads, they’d been told, were clear all the way to Sioux City.

Devon shifted her gaze to her rental car, which was parked in the driveway, still lumpy with snow and looking somehow forlorn, but otherwise none the worse for having spent a day and a half in a drift-filled ditch. Eric had checked it over and pronounced it driveable.

The roads are clear, she thought. I have my car. I can leave if I want to. Strangely, the realization failed to cheer her.

Yesterday afternoon while Eric was pulling the Town Car out of the snowdrifts, Devon had been on her cell phone to her office in sunny L.A., delegating and postponing meetings and other responsibilities-she was assured that her presence at her firm’s annual Christmas party had been missed-and to her parents in Canoga Park, explaining to them why she wouldn’t be spending Christmas Eve with them this year. They’d expressed regret, of course. Now, remembering her parents’ voices, subdued, emotionless, she felt this heaviness inside.

I love my parents. I do.

But she knew they were only words. And though she pressed them into her mind as hard as she could, like a tongue probing a sensitive tooth, no matter how hard she tried, Devon could not find the feelings that went with the words. She tried to remember hugging her parents, or them hugging her. She couldn’t. She couldn’t remember the feel of her mother’s arms around her. Couldn’t remember the sound of her voice, comforting her after a nightmare. Couldn’t remember cool hands stroking her forehead in a fever, or putting a bandage on her skinned knee. Couldn’t remember sitting on her father’s lap, having him read to her, or tuck her in at night.

Overcome with a terrible, panicky sadness, she turned from the window, already in full flight and thinking only of the stairs and the sanctuary of her room. Instead, she ran headlong into a solid object, one covered with a sweatshirt that was slightly damp. That smelled of baby powder, formula, dish soap and man.

“Hey,” Eric exclaimed as his hands closed on her upper arms.