Baby, I'm Yours

“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?”