Dr. Daddy

Although the realization almost made Zoey want to cry. She’d had no idea Dr. Tate was married with children. She didn’t think anyone at the hospital knew. Too many nurses and other doctors were lusting after him, something that wouldn’t be quite so prevalent if the women in question knew he was already attached. Until now, Zoey would have sworn she was one of the minority who couldn’t care less if the man had a dozen women stowed away. But faced now with the unequivocal evidence of his tie to at least one, she felt a funny little hole open up in her heart.

“I’m not Juliana’s father,” he said. “I’m her uncle.” He sighed wearily and scrubbed his hands over his face as if feeling utterly defeated. “And frankly, you’re right,” he continued softly as he dropped his hands back to his sides, “I make her cry. For some reason, the kid hates me. And I have no idea what I’m supposed to do about it.”

Zoey studied Jonas for a long time before responding. He looked like a man who was at the end of his rope, a man who was two steps away from throwing himself off the Ben Franklin Bridge. His eyes were shadowed and exhausted looking, his mouth bracketed by white lines of strain. When he reached up to run a big hand anxiously through his hair, he closed his eyes and sighed deeply again, and she could see that he felt completely hopeless.

“Where are her parents?” Zoey asked quietly, softening at this vulnerable side of Jonas Tate she’d never seen before.

“Dead,” he replied bluntly.

Her heart turned over that the child in her arms had suffered such an enormous loss at such an early age. “I’m sorry,” she said softly.

Jonas shrugged off her condolences. “I didn’t really know them. Her father was my brother, but I hadn’t seen or spoken to Alex for more than thirty years.”

Which would mean the two men were separated when they were children, Zoey thought, unable to deny her curiosity about how such a separation might have occurred. She wasn’t about to pry into the man’s personal history by asking him about it, but Jonas must have picked up on her thoughts, because he sighed again.

“It’s a long story, Zoey,” he said softly, his gaze falling to the baby in her arms. “Why don’t you take off your coat while I put on a pot of coffee?”

* * *

Actually Jonas did more than put on a pot of coffee. At Zoey’s insistence, he readied himself for work while she kept an eye on Juliana. For the first time in months, he took his time in the shower, managed to shave himself without a single nick and not only matched up his clothes—opting for a gray dress shirt, plum patterned tie and charcoal trousers—but ironed them, as well. By the time he exited his bedroom, he was in a better mood than any he could remember for the past two months. And oddly enough, he owed it all to Zoey’s appearance at his front door that morning.

He bumped into her—literally—as she was coming out of Juliana’s room. He grabbed her shoulders to steady her, and she pressed her palms flat against his chest to regain her balance. For a moment, neither moved from the position, but their gazes remained locked, as if each was awaiting the other’s move. Finally they sprang apart at the same time, mumbling excuses and apologies. Jonas swept his arm forward, indicating Zoey should precede him down the stairs, and she pulled the nursery door closed silently behind her before doing so.

Only when they were well away from Juliana’s room, safely ensconced in his kitchen with the baby monitor turned on, did Jonas trust himself to speak. Yet he still kept his voice down, certain the slightest disturbance would have the baby screaming again.

“She ate a bit more while you were getting dressed,” Zoey said, as if reading his thoughts. “I think she’ll sleep for a while.”

He nodded, but wasn’t completely convinced. “Coffee?” he asked.

“Please.”

He brought two generous mugs steaming with the strong brew to the table, then went back for sugar and cream. “Are you hungry?” he asked her. “I could fix you some scrambled eggs and bacon.”

She shook her head. “Thanks, but that’s all right. I’ll have something at home later.”

He nodded again, and suddenly had no idea what to say. So he sipped his coffee and stared at Zoey and wondered how she could look so beautiful after coming off the graveyard shift.

“You were going to tell me about Juliana’s parents,” she said after a sip of her own coffee.

That’s right, Jonas remembered. He knew there was another reason for her having remained at his house after completing the duty assigned her. Other than the simple fact that he wanted her there, of course.

“But if you’d rather not,” she added.

“No,” he quickly assured her. “It’s not that.”

“Then what?”

He shook his head. “It’s nothing. Forgive my frequent bouts of miscommunication. I just haven’t been getting much sleep since Juliana’s arrival.”

“How long ago was that?” Zoey asked.

“New Year’s Day,” he said, still marveling at the irony of the date. “My brother, Alex, and his wife were killed in a car accident in Portugal on Christmas Eve just a couple of weeks after Juliana was born. They left behind a will that donated everything they owned to charity and indicated that the care of their daughter should fall to me.”

“Yet you hadn’t seen your brother since you were a child,” Zoey said, sipping her coffee again.

She wasn’t nearly as unaffected by the story as she was letting on, Jonas thought. He could see in her eyes how deeply moved she was by Juliana’s situation.

He shook his head. “No, but we somehow kept up with each other so that we at least knew where the other was and what he was doing. My mother and father split up shortly after my fifth birthday. Alex was about two when it happened, I guess. By my parents’ mutual agreement, I went to live with my father in upstate New York, and Alex accompanied my mother back to Europe, where her family lived. My father remarried when I was about ten, and I’ve always thought of my stepmother as my mother. I can just barely remember the woman who gave birth to me.”

Zoey nodded. “I lost both my parents when I was three. I can’t remember much about them at all.”

For some reason, Jonas wasn’t surprised. He had detected something in her demeanor that seemed to sympathize immediately with Juliana. “Who took care of you after their deaths?” he asked.

“Two of my aunts raised me,” she said. “They were nice enough ladies, but they weren’t very realistic about the needs of a little girl growing up when I did. As a result, I was something of a...a difficult child.”

Jonas couldn’t help smiling. “That doesn’t surprise me. You’re a difficult adult, too.”

Zoey’s head snapped up and her eyes were ablaze when her gaze met his.

He chuckled. “Why is it so easy to get a rise out of you?”

She lifted her chin defensively. “Why do you get such a kick out of provoking me?”

He couldn’t deny her assertion, but he didn’t want to fight with her right now. So he went back to the original topic, picking up where he left off.

“All in all, my parents’ divorce was a surprisingly painless experience. Four people who split up and went their separate ways only to find happiness in other arenas. To this day, I can’t even form a mental picture of Alex as a two-year-old.”

“Then why did he leave his daughter in your care?” Zoey asked.

Jonas shrugged. “I’ve asked myself that question a hundred times since January. Our parents have both been dead for years. And from what the attorney said, Alex’s wife had estranged herself from her own family to the point of not seeing them at all. I suppose I am, in effect, Juliana’s closest living relative. And really, what couple in the prime of life draws up a will expecting their wishes to be fulfilled before their child reaches adulthood?”

Neither answered the question, because no response seemed necessary. They sipped their coffee in thoughtful silence for a moment until Zoey ended it with a quietly offered, seemingly benign observation.

“So now you’ve got a baby to raise, Dr. Tate,” she said with a smile.

Jonas wished he could embrace the same warm, positive attitude about it that she so obviously did. “Yes,” he replied.

And with that simple, one-word response, his first good mood in more than two months evaporated, and he felt the world drop out from beneath him. Everything he’d been refusing to think about since Juliana’s arrival exploded in his brain like a time bomb. He was solely responsible for another human being, a girl child he didn’t know the first thing about raising.

“Help me, Zoey,” he said suddenly, unable to stop the words that tumbled from his mouth without him even thinking about saying them. “Please. I can’t do this by myself.”

Three

Zoey stared at him in disbelief, her voice failing her completely. Help him? she thought incredulously. Help him? Help Jonas Tate? With a baby? What was he, nuts?

She continued to gaze at him in silence, and the coffee she had sipped as he’d uttered his request—his plea—sat in her mouth until it tasted like mud. Finally, she remembered to swallow, but when she did, she gagged and began to choke. The hacking that ensued brought Jonas around the table to pat her soundly on the back, an action that just made her cough harder because it was such an unexpectedly inflammatory gesture. Inflammatory because the feel of his palm pressing into her well-covered flesh, in a manner that was in no way seductive, somehow felt just that—seductive.

Alarmed, Zoey jerked away from him and leapt out of her chair, moving blindly toward the sink in an effort to escape. But Jonas followed her, seeming to pen her in where the countertops came together at a ninety-degree angle. Honestly, all he was doing was making sure she was okay, she told herself. But for some reason, he seemed to be much closer than he really needed to be, seemed to be intent on doing much more than helping to alleviate her cough.