The Black Sheep’s Baby Page 10

  She caught a quick breath and went on before he had to. “Doesn’t matter, really. If Eric says she is, that’s good enough for me.”

  She turned the baby this way and that, studying the way her eyes changed in the light. “I think her eyes are going to stay blue.”

  Mike cleared his throat in a relieved sort of way. “Could be green, like her mother’s.”

  Lucy gave him a look. “How do you know her mother’s eyes were green?”

  “Devon’s are.”

  “Oh, you noticed that, did you?” She slyly teased him just so she could enjoy the fluster in his mutter of response. After a moment, though, because it had been on her mind, she said slowly, “Mike, tell me really. What do you think of her?”

  “Devon?” His eyes flicked toward Lucy, then away. “She’s pretty,” he said cautiously, making her smile. “Seems smart.”

  “But, what?” Lucy knew the nuances in her husband’s voice.

  He came to sit beside her, tickling the baby’s cheek with one long forefinger to stall for time while he thought.

  “Just…something about her,” he said, “reminds me of Chris.”

  “Chris! Our Chris?”

  “The first time Wood brought her here for a visit-remember? We were all sitting around the table having lunch, and Gwen remembered she’d known Chris as a child. Turned out she’d grown up around here, gone to school with Wood. She hadn’t told him.”

  “Hmm…and she had good reasons not to, as it turned out.” Lucy frowned at the baby, whose eyelids were growing heavy.

  “Yeah, well, the point is, you know how she always seemed so cool and calm, her face was like a beautiful porcelain mask. And all the time there was so much going on inside her…so many secrets she was hiding behind that mask.”

  “And you think Devon…”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Like I said, there’s just something about her that makes me think of Chris, that’s all.”

  “Well,” Lucy said darkly, “she’s sure not hiding the fact that she means to take Emily away from us-from Eric, I mean.”

  “Yeah, and right at Christmastime, too.” Mike’s tone was somber, but when he looked at her Lucy could see the teasing twinkle in his eyes. “Sure doesn’t seem right, after you wished, and then it looked like you had your wish granted.”

  “Sometimes Providence works in mysterious ways,” she reminded him. “You, of all people, should know that, Cage.” Lucy nudged against him and shared with him their secret smile. “Just think-all those years ago-if those hoodlums hadn’t tried to kill you, firebombing your town house-”

  “And if my girlfriend hadn’t picked that night to break up with me, and I hadn’t been out walking off my grief, they’d have succeeded.”

  “Right. And if you hadn’t run from them and gotten off the interstate in that thunderstorm and wound up lost and run your car into a ditch and holed up in my barn on the very same day my hired hand quit-oh, Mike…”

  “I’d never have met you,” he huskily finished for her when her voice choked and he saw that her eyes were filling up.

  She was glad when he slipped an arm around her, and the storm-ripples of awe and fear that always came with that terrible thought died peacefully in the sunshine of long-established love. “Anyway,” she said on a quick, restorative breath, smiling down at the now-sleeping baby, “it’s not over yet. I have a plan…”

  “Shush!” And Mike silenced her with a squeeze a half second before Eric and Devon walked into the room.

  They look guilty as hell, Eric thought. Like a couple of kids caught necking in the hayloft. And he almost smiled.

  “How’s she doing?” Eric gave the baby a nod as he eased into the room, keeping all the awkwardness he felt inside. “I thought I heard her fussing.”

  “Nope,” said his mother serenely, “not a peep. I think she wore herself out making faces at me-she dropped off a minute ago. We were just going to put her down.” She stood up with Emily in her arms, putting action to the words.

  “Here-I’ll take her.” He plucked the baby from his mother’s arms more abruptly than he meant to, a fact of which he was acutely aware and instantly regretted. He was aware, too, of his father’s eyes…calm, quiet, more appraising than accusing.

  Uncomfortable, he picked up the formula bottle from the nightstand and frowned at it. “She didn’t take all her bottle? She’ll probably just catnap, then wake up in a few minutes and want the rest. I can take it from here, if you, uh, if you want to…” Get lost? He stopped, frustrated. How did one tactfully dismiss one’s parents?

  Which was one thing his plans for drawing Devon out of her shell hadn’t taken into account. Those plans were going to require a considerable amount of privacy, and that was a commodity it had just occurred to him might be in short supply to him, living under his parents’ roof.

  “Well, all right, if you’re sure…” His mother’s eyes wavered, then slid past him to pounce on Devon, who was trying hard to look at ease and succeeding about as well as he was. “Have you had breakfast? There’s French toast and bacon in the oven-did you find everything okay?”

  Devon had been concentrating with all her might on becoming invisible. Now, brought so abruptly into the conversation, she did something she almost never did. She floundered. “I’m not-that is, I don’t normally-uh, I had some toast earlier. I’m sorry-you shouldn’t have gone to so much…” And appealing for salvation to the only person available, she threw Eric a look of desperate entreaty.

  He gave his mother a pained look. “We’ll grab a bite later, Ma, okay? Quit worrying about feeding us-we’re not kids.”

  It was impatient, though not at all rude, which Devon thought might be about normal for grown-up offspring when speaking to their parents. And it struck her how different it was from the way she customarily spoke to her own parents-always with polite reserve, more as she might a client or a stranger.

  “Well,” said Lucy briskly, unperturbed by her son’s bluntness, “I guess you know where to find the food when you get hungry. I know I’ve got plenty of things I should be doing.” She paused to give Devon a smile. “Just let me know if you need anything, okay? Mike?”

  Devon caught the look she exchanged with her husband as she bustled him out of the room. They left the door wide-open as they went, she noted with amusement. She glanced at Eric to see if he’d noticed, and saw that his expression had gone from pained to sardonic. He tilted his head toward the open door and muttered under his breath, “Jeez, you’d think I was twelve.”

  Discovering that she was smiling, Devon ducked her head in an unsuccessful attempt to hide it.

  “What,” Eric demanded, “you think it’s funny that they still treat me like a kid?”

  “No,” she said, “but I think it’s probably normal.”

  He paused in his slow, rocking pacing to look at her. “Oh, yeah? Did your parents do that when you were a teenager? Make you leave your door open when you had a boy in your room?” And there was something about the way he watched her, all of a sudden, something almost…crafty. Something that set off her lawyer’s radar.

  “Oh, I’m sure they must have,” she said lightly, walking away from him to avoid his eyes.

  “What do you mean, ‘they must have’? Don’t you remember?”

  “No, actually, I don’t.” She said it absently as she paused, pretending to study the revolving rack of tapes and CDs on the battered wooden desktop. But she was too aware of her own heartbeat. She felt a curious sense of uneasiness, and wondered if this was what animals felt when they caught the distant odor of fire.

  “You have an interesting assortment of musical tastes,” she remarked as a means of changing the subject. Though not only for that reason. It was interesting to her, what kind of music he liked. At the very least, she reasoned, it was a way to learn more about the man who was to be her adversary. A way of finding out what made him tick. CDs-rock bands and country music stars from roughly ten years ago-took up most of the space in
the carousel, but there were also some older tapes, folk and gospel music, mainly. And one cluster of CDs from the Vietnam era that particularly intrigued her.

  “Had, you mean.” Eric was leaning sideways to look over her shoulder. “Those are at least ten years old. And some of ’em aren’t even mine.”

  She hadn’t realized how close to her he’d come with his relaxed, baby-rocking stroll. Now she inhaled his scent with every breath, and it flooded her system like high-test fuel, kicking her pulse into a new and faster rhythm. It struck her first how clean he smelled-not just freshly showered, but wholesome, without any hint of either nervous sweat or cologne, cigarette smoke or booze or artery-clogging fast foods-compared to the people who inhabited the courtrooms and law offices and jail meeting rooms she was accustomed to.

  And that wasn’t all. There was something else, too, something unfamiliar to her, something warm and sweet and faintly earthy that could only be coming from the sleeping baby.

  “Those are Mom’s-the gospel stuff,” Eric was saying. “And the Parish Family tapes, too-that’s Dixie’s family, you know? The folk singers?” He made a disgusted sound when Devon only looked blankly at him. “Jeez, I thought everybody knew them. Their stuff is in the Smithsonian.”

  Devon muttered something vague. Her head was swimming; she couldn’t think. It had to be his nearness-something to do with his animal heat, his masculine scent, maybe even something to do with the baby in his arms. She snatched a CD from the carousel and thrust it at him. “What about these? You must not even have been born when they were popular.”

  He leaned closer, brushing her arm with his. “Creedence Clearwater Revival? Those are my dad’s.”

  Something in his voice made her risk a glance at him. And she wished she hadn’t. His brown eyes seemed to flare with a golden light, giving the gaunt features so close to her own a hawklike fierceness so unnerving she wished with all her heart she could tear her gaze away. But she couldn’t.

  “I bought him a bunch of those Vietnam-era CDs for Christmas one year. I was really into the period-because of my grandfather, you know?-and I knew Dad had lost all his stuff in a fire, way back before he met my mom.”

  “That was thoughtful.” Devon could barely hear herself. Her voice had gotten lost somewhere in the thundering pulses inside her own head. “I’ll bet he really liked it.”

  “Yeah, he did.” His eyes, gentle again, dropped to the baby in his arms. Released from that strange golden spell, Devon realized then that Emily had begun to squirm and scrunch her face into alarming expressions and make angry, snorting noises.

  “Ah…ready for the second course, are you?” Eric was speaking again in the crooning voice that reminded Devon of a tiger’s purr. It resonated under her breastbone, and she surprised herself with a nervous sound that was horrendously close to a giggle. He shot her a look. “You want to hold her?”

  “Oh-God,” she gasped, cringing away from him. “No-that’s okay, you go right ahead-”

  “Come on, she’s not going to bite you.”

  “Oh, but I-”

  “Here-hold out your arms.”

  “What? How-”

  “Just hold ’em out-you know, like somebody’s trying to hand you a load of laundry. A pile of legal briefs-I don’t know. Something. Hell, anything but a baby, I guess.”

  “Oh, God,” said Devon faintly. “I think I’d better sit down.” She backed up until she felt the bed come against her knees.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve never held a baby before,” Eric teased as he followed her. His smile was sardonic, though his eyes held a softer gleam.

  “As a matter of fact, I haven’t,” Devon bristled in her own defense, glaring at him. “I’m a lawyer, for God’s sake! I don’t think I’ve ever even touched a baby. When would I have?”

  He chuckled, in a way that made her think instantly and vividly of his father. “Don’t feel bad. Neither had I, until they put Emily, here, in my arms, right after she was born. You’d be surprised how easy it is. I know I was. Pure instinct. Here-let me show you.” He bent toward her with the pink and yellow bundle in his arms.

  Trembling, Devon tried to think of all the other times she’d been scared nearly out of her wits and somehow found the courage to hang on to them in spite of it-taking the bar exam, facing a judge and jury in open courtroom for the first time, interviewing a serial killer… She took a deep breath and forced herself to lift her arms.

  “No, no-the other way-the left one. They like to hear your heartbeat. That’s right. Now, you kind of make a cradle…yeah, that’s it. Hold her against you…not too tight.” He looked up at her from his half crouch and smiled. “See? What’d I tell you? Like rollin’ off a log.” He straightened up and folded his arms on his chest, looking as if he’d just won a case. “Instinct,” he said smugly.

  What instincts? I don’t think I have any-not the mothering kind, thought Devon wildly. She was too overwhelmed to speak. Emotions of so many different kinds and colors were careening around inside her, out of control and bumping into one another and creating unimaginable chaos and confusion.

  In all that confusion she was sure of one thing: the baby in her arms wasn’t any happier about the situation than she was.

  “I think you’d better take her,” she said in a choked voice, gazing in utter horror at the baby’s red, contorted face. “Here-quick! She’s going to cry.” She said that the same way she might have said, She’s going to explode.

  “She just wants her bottle,” Eric said easily, reaching with one long arm to snag it from the nightstand. “Yeah…there you go.” He spoke in his ratchety croon as he popped the nipple into the baby’s already-open mouth. Instantly, the angry, alarming noises were replaced with greedy gulps, snorts and snuffles. Eyelids tipped with barely visible red-gold lashes drifted half-closed in blissful satisfaction. “What’d I tell you?” Eric said, smug again. And then added, “Here-take over.”

  And somehow or other she was holding the bottle and he was beaming down at her as if he’d just created a miracle, something on the scale of the discovery of fire. All she could do was glare up at him, first in panic, then confusion. Because, in some indefinable way the smile had blurred the sharpness and softened the shadows that made his face sometimes seem so forbidding…and in that same indefinable way she felt something soften and blur inside herself. In panic she tore her gaze from that disturbing, utterly mesmerizing face and fastened it instead on the tiny pink one nestled in the crook of her arm.

  “Hold her snug against you-they need the body contact while they’re nursing,” she heard Eric murmur.

  I can’t do this, she thought. I can’t. Oh, how she hated feeling soft and blurred. Vulnerable. She hated the quivery awe in her chest, the peppery sting of tenderness in her nose and eyes, the ache in her breasts. And most of all she hated the sudden and terrible longing…the inexplicable wish…that Eric would come to sit beside her on the bed, that he would put his arms around her and enfold her and the baby both in the warmth and safety of his masculine protection.

  Ridiculous! What was this? Hadn’t she spent her entire adult life making herself strong enough, powerful enough, and feared as any man, just so she wouldn’t ever have to feel like this-helpless, vulnerable, longing for a man’s protection? This isn’t supposed to happen!

  She rose abruptly, just as Eric was saying, “Probably ought to stop and burp her-she’s a real little pig-”

  “You take her,” she said in a tight, airless voice. With more deftness than she’d thought herself capable of, she thrust baby and bottle into Eric’s arms, turned and fled from the room.

  Chapter 8

  “I t was like…she couldn’t even stand to touch her,” Eric said. He was sitting at the kitchen table, watching his hands turn a coffee mug around and around on the red-and-green plaid tablecloth that had magically appeared there since breakfast. “Mom…you think it’s possible for a woman to have no maternal feelings whatsoever?” Or…feelings of any kind?

 
; “Devon? Oh, I can’t believe that.” Lucy threw him a smile over one shoulder. “She was probably just nervous. A lot of people are, around new babies.”

  “Yeah, well, I wish you could have seen her.” He pushed the mug away on an exasperated exhalation, then sat and bleakly gazed at his mother as she went back to rolling cookie dough into balls on the countertop.

  Which was when it occurred to him that the back of her green sweatshirt was adorned with the rear view of a very fat black-and-white cat wearing a Santa hat; he assumed the front view of the cat would be on the corresponding side of the sweatshirt. Since breakfast, it seemed, his mother had metamorphosed into a Christmas elf.

  Now that he thought about it, since this morning the whole house had broken out in Christmas. The sweatshirt, the tablecloth, Christmas songs drifting in from the CD player in the parlor, cookies baking in the oven, filling the air with the rich dark smell of cinnamon and cloves. Molasses Crinkles, he realized as he watched his mother’s hands deftly spoon gobs of thick brown dough, roll them into balls, dip them in sugar and then, the final touch, with a fingertip touch a single drop of water to the sugared top of each cookie, so they’d crack when they baked. What memories it all brought back. Those cookies had been his favorite, and he bet he hadn’t tasted them in almost ten years. She’d probably made them especially for him.

  At some point in the future he’d probably have to think about that, maybe even decide whether it touched or annoyed him-or both. But at the moment he had something else on his mind. Someone else. Devon. Naturally.

  What am I going to do, he thought gloomily, if she doesn’t have any feelings? About the little one, at least-he’d seen pretty convincing evidence of other kinds of feelings, down there in the barn this morning.

  The little one. He thought then about his own feelings, and the need he still had, after all these weeks, to hold a part of himself safely aloof from feeling too much for a child he knew he had no real claim to. Saying her name, even in his mind filled him with fear. Even the word “baby” made him feel vulnerable. “Little one”-that was better. Nothing to do with his heart, only a small person for whom he was responsible. A helpless being he’d sworn to protect.