Finally, when he was about to lose it, the kitchen door swung open and Darryl came back alone. He held out a piece of paper.
“Here’s her address.” He positioned himself so he was in Mike’s face, literally and figuratively. “You do anything to hurt her again and you’ll deal with me. Is that understood?”
“Understood,” Mike agreed, then moved around the man. When he was at the door, he glanced back. “I’m glad she’s had you in her corner all this time,” he said with absolute sincerity.
“Should have been you.”
Mike sighed heavily. He could see Darryl’s point. “Yes,” he agreed without reservation, without even knowing what it was Jane had been left to face alone. “It should have been me.”
CHAPTER 5
Jane had baked ten dozen batches of Christmas cookies since dawn. She’d only burned the first three dozen, trying to get the timing down in the ancient oven in the tiny furnished apartment she’d rented until the baby was born. The apartment itself wasn’t bad, with its huge windows overlooking the river and its bright curtains and overstuffed furniture. The appliances, however, were a very different story. The stove was turning her holiday baking into an adventure.
She’d taken a leave of absence for an entire school year, rather than battle the board of education over her suitability to teach. She had enough money left from her mother’s insurance policy to cover her expenses, including this apartment in a town just far enough from home to protect her reputation. Maybe it was a foolish, old-fashioned ruse, but she had to try to give her child a start that didn’t include speculation about his or her paternity.
She had debated just staying in her own house and weathering the gossip, but in the end she’d concluded she and the baby would both be better off if they just turned up again in the spring. Maybe she was only postponing the in-evitable questions, but she’d felt she would be better able to cope with them after she’d gotten through the pregnancy and had a healthy baby.
There was an ironic twist to her decision, of course. In the end, she’d done exactly what she’d refused to do for Mike. She had left the hometown she loved.
But it wasn’t as if it was going to be forever, as it would have been if she’d married Mike. And she was still close enough to have lunch every couple of weeks with her friends. They met at a restaurant midway between the two towns, caught her up on all the news and brought her anything she needed from her house. They were scheduled to get together again on Saturday and she intended to have her usual packages of Christmas cookies ready for them since it was likely to be the last time she saw them before the holiday.
The apartment smelled of cinnamon and sugar and ginger and echoed with the sound of Christmas carols being played at full volume. In fact, the CD player was so loud, she barely heard the knock at the door. She turned the sound down, then listened just to be sure.
“Who on earth…?” she murmured, wiping her hands on a paper towel and grabbing the last batch of cookies from the oven before going to the door. It was probably a neighbor complaining about the volume of the music or her landlord coming to beg a couple of cookies. The man had an insatiable appetite for sweets and a constantly—and futilely—dieting wife who refused to bake them for him.
With her cheeks flushed from the heat of the oven and probably streaked with flour, Jane suspected she was quite a sight. Judging from the impatient pounding on the door, though, she didn’t dare pause to make any improvements in her appearance.
“Okay, okay,” she muttered under her breath, throwing open the door. Her mouth gaped. “Mike? How on earth did you find me?”
He shook his head, still staring. “Doesn’t matter.”
No, she supposed it didn’t. The point was, he was here. She wasn’t sure which of them was the most stunned. His gaze went from her face to her unmistakably huge belly in the blink of an eye, then remained there as all the color drained out of his face.
“You…you’re…”
“I’m going to have a baby,” she said, supplying the words that eluded him. She regarded him intently. For a rugged man, he looked awfully shaken. “You aren’t going to faint, are you?”
“Of course not,” he said at once. “But—”
“I think you’d better come in and sit down,” she said, though that was the last thing she wanted. For months she’d dreamed of finding Mike on her doorstep, but the dream had eventually died. Now her own reaction was nothing like what she’d anticipated. She felt nothing, or so she swore to herself. She was just surprised, that explained the sudden racing of her pulse, the lurch of her heart.
To give herself a little time to gather her composure, she left Mike in the living room and went into the kitchen to pour him a cup of coffee and herself a glass of milk. She added a handful of cookies to the tray and carried it back into the living room. Mike still looked dazed.
“What? When?” he asked, apparently incapable of forming a coherent sentence.
If she’d imagined him sweeping her up and dancing around at the sight of her body swollen with his child, this stunned reaction would have been a serious letdown, but she’d stopped counting on anything from Mike Marshall. Still, she had no intention of lying to him.
“The baby’s due in three weeks, right after New Year’s. I got pregnant in April.”
“April,” he repeated, then his gaze shot to hers. “You mean?”
She tried not to be hurt that he hadn’t guessed it at once. “Yes, the baby’s yours, Mike.”
The confirmation snapped him out of his daze. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” he demanded angrily.
So much for the joy she’d hoped for. Jane stared him
