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She liked to in-line skate in her free time, and was known occasionally to add gin to her Citrucel.
She’d never been a cuddly mother, but she’d always adored him, and what he’d lacked in hugs and snuggles, she’d made up for by being there for him every time he turned to her for help. When Julie died, Lulu had left a friend in charge of the B-and-B and come to stay with him for a month to help the girls and do all the paperwork chores, such as death certificates and insurance notifications, that he simply hadn’t had the heart for.
She’d cooked, too, though even Roxie had noticed that they ate a lot of egg dishes and fancy pancakes.
“Well, she has a bed-and-breakfast,” Vanessa had pointed out with surprising insight. “Breakfast is all she gets to cook.”
Lulu did seem worried as she hooked her arm in his now and led him into the dining room. Several guests occupied the living room and were in cheerful conversation about their respective vacations.
“I want to do this with a minimum of fuss,” she said quietly, smiling as one of the guests waved at her. “Miss Browning didn’t come down to breakfast and she was really under the weather yesterday.”
Ben nodded. “I understand that, Mom. I just don’t know why you think I’m the one to handle this.”
“Because you’re my troubleshooter. You fix everything around here.”
“But this is a person. Not a pipe or an electrical connection.”
“You were very good with Julie, and she was a complex, sometimes volatile woman.”
“I was married to Julie.”
“You’re good with everyone.” Lulu physically turned him toward the hallway and the stairs. “Just please make sure she’s okay, then explain that she has to leave. She’s in the Woodsy Cabin Room on the third floor. All the other guests on that floor are out. Her name’s Natalie!” she whispered after him.
Right. The Woodsy Cabin Room was the one with pine tree motif paper at the top, brown bears gamboling over the paper on the bottom, and the whole of it brought together by green border paper patterned with moose.
He had to be insane, Ben thought as he climbed two flights of stairs, to let his mom bully him into this. What did a man say to a strange woman clearly on a lost weekend?
He drew a breath, prayed that he would create as small a scene as possible, and knocked on the door.
He was surprised when it opened immediately. And he was quite literally rendered speechless by the woman who stood there. She wore only a red-and-black flannel shirt and red-toed boot socks. She was fairly tall, five-foot-nine or -ten, and her legs from the tail of her shirt to her ankles were something to behold—shapely, milky white and very, very long.
He dragged his eyes away abruptly, concentrating on his mission. But gazing into her face wasn’t easy on him, either. She had wide gray eyes that appeared a little vague, but were filled with an expression that mingled pain and sadness—two things with which he was very familiar. Her nose was small and came to a delicate—if red—point, her lips were nicely shaped but pale, her chin was gently rounded and her face was a perfect oval.
A short, unruly mop of golden-blond hair stood up in disarray. She peered at him with unfocused eyes. In the hand that held the door open was a small, flat box.
She looked like a cross between Michelle Pfeiffer and Jenna Elfman. Ben found himself touched by the look in her eyes. He couldn’t even think about her legs.
He forced himself to remember why he was here, and opened his mouth to speak.
But she asked abruptly, “Are you…the one?” She weaved a little as she peered at him more closely.
“Uh…the one?”
“The one,” she repeated, making a wide gesture with the box. It was apparently empty. “The one who’s going to finally get me pregnant.”
He completely lost his train of thought. He stared at her.
“’Cause Dori told me…” She leaned against the door and winced, rubbing her head. “But I thought it was a dream.” She spoke slowly, her voice slurred. “I just woke up. But I feel so…” She dropped the box and seemed to sink, about to fall.
He reached for the box instinctively and caught it, then grabbed for her and pushed her gently back toward the bed. Her hands clasped his arms and held on.
Her eyes looked into his, their gray depths almost lucid. He felt her tension in the grip of her fingers.
“You are him,” she whispered.
She looked so grave. What was she talking about? “Who?” he asked, lowering his voice unconsciously.
“The father of my baby,” she replied.
“I’m…Lulu’s son,” he said, pulling the edge of the coverlet over her knees.
“Lulu?”
“She owns this place.”
The woman looked around the room. “The…clinic?”
“No, this isn’t a clinic. You’re staying at a bed-and-breakfast.”
She frowned, apparently trying to absorb that. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “You’ve been sick.” He held up the box and saw that it contained extra-strength cold medication. “I think you’ve had a cold.” He tossed the box at the bedside table and noted the empty toddy mug there. The brandy bottle stood beside it.
She fell back onto the mattress, then put a finger to her lips. “Sick. But…shh! Or they’ll report that I’m dying!”
He didn’t even try to understand what that meant. He reached for the bottle and held it up to the light. It was still mostly full, though he guessed even a small amount of brandy with strong cold medication could reduce someone to such a state.
“How many pills have you had?” he asked.
She put a hand to her head. “Um…five…eight. Not sure.”
“You should eat something,” he suggested. “Maybe drink some coffee.” He pulled the coverlet all the way over her. “I’ll go get—”
She caught his shirtsleeve with surprising strength, preventing him from straightening up. “I just want the baby,” she said. “Now. Before I…”
He guessed she’d been about to say, “Before I pass out,” because then she did just that.
“Oh boy,” Ben grumbled to himself as he placed a pillow under her head. She was crackers, but he probably was, too. After a year and a half of celibacy, making a baby with a gorgeous blonde didn’t sound half-bad.
But he preferred his women conscious.
His women, he thought with dry amusement. As though he’d had any. It had been him and Julie since high school. He’d never had another lover. And he didn’t want another one now. He fully intended to live out his life in quiet frustration, because there couldn’t be another woman with whom he fit so perfectly in every way. Like the damned wallpaper.
“Oh, my God,” his mother said, coming to lean beside him as he tried to assess the woman’s condition. “What did you do?”
He turned to her impatiently. “I didn’t do anything. She passed out, thanks to your heavy-handed toddy and a box of cold pills.”
“Did you tell her she has to be out tonight?”
“I didn’t get a chance to tell her much of anything. She mistook me for someone who’s supposed to get her pregnant.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. At one point she thought she was dreaming. What are you doing?”
His mother was walking around the room, putting the few things left out into the open suitcase on the luggage rack.
“I’ve got to move her so I can prepare this room,” she said. She took a cosmetics bag off the dresser and tossed it in.
“Where are you going to put her?”
His mother gasped in reply, her eyes widening as she stared at a newspaper she’d picked up with the cosmetics bag.
He went to read over her shoulder.
News Anchor Scammed by Casanova of Sperm Lab. The headline was two inches high, in bold print. The subhead read, Newswoman Courageously Turns Table on Sperm Lab Doctor Filling Orders with his Own Sperm.
“Poor thing!” his mother exclaimed as Ben scanned the story. “She goes to a sperm lab for help getting pregnant and learns that she’s been defrauded. But she had the courage to play out the story and bring the man to trial. Fortunately for her, the procedure didn’t work.”
It was a sad story. He suddenly understood her insistence about getting pregnant.
“And knowing that,” Ben said, “you can throw her out in the cold?”
“No,” Lulu said, dropping the paper into a pretty trash basket. “I can let you take her home with you.”
Ben glared at her. “Mom…”
“What else am I going to do? I have guests arriving in less than two hours.”
“You can find her a room at another—”
“The Buckley Arms is full—the crafters convention. And I’m it for B-and-Bs.”
He struggled to hold on to his good humor. “I’m not a B-and-B, Mom. I’m a working man with two little—”
“I know, I know,” she said, patting his cheek. “But she’s clearly in a state that requires she be looked after, and I can’t do that with an inn filled with guests. You, on the other hand, always manage to look after everyone in your life very well.”
“But she’s not in my life,” he insisted, “she’s in yours.”
“But I’m in yours, sweetie. See? It’s logical. Scientific, even. Mathematical, sort of. She’s in mine and I’m in yours, therefore she’s in yours, too.”
“God.”
Chapter Two
Vanessa and Roxie skipped after him as he carried a still-sleeping Natalie Browning, wrapped in a blanket, out to the van. His mother followed with the suitcase.
“She’s so pretty!” Vanessa exclaimed as he placed Natalie on the front passenger seat, tilting it back to help keep her in place.
“Like Sleeping Beauty!” Roxie said.
His mother slid the side door open and put the suitcase into the back seat.
Vanessa tucked Natalie’s feet in.
“If you kiss her, Daddy, she’ll wake up!” Roxie added.
His mother smiled at him and said under her breath, “And maybe you will, too, Ben.”
He sent her a dark look. “You’re already on dangerous ground, Mom. She can stay on the sofa tonight, but first thing in the morning she’s on her own.”
“Of course.” She reached up to kiss his cheek as he closed the door on his unexpected houseguest. Lulu blew kisses to the girls and hurried back inside.
Roxie stood between the two front seats when he climbed in behind the wheel. She looked down at the young woman, patting the disheveled blond hair with a pudgy little hand.
“I wish my hair was this color,” she said.
Vanessa, leaning over the back of the front seat, handed the seat belt to Roxie, who clicked it into place.
“Yeah, me too,” Vanessa replied. “I’d wear it long with lots of curls.”
“Can we keep her, Daddy?” Roxie asked promptly.
“She’s not a puppy, Rox,” he said patiently. “When she wakes up, I’m sure she’s going to want to go home.”
Actually, she might not, he thought as he backed the van out onto the street. Judging by the newspaper article, things must have been difficult for her there. The article had included a rude comment from an old boyfriend of hers and his suggestion that she wasn’t the beautiful, sweet woman she appeared to be on television.
“Can we keep her till she wakes up?”
“She’ll be awake in the morning,” Ben assured his daughter.
“If you don’t kiss her, she won’t.”
“She’s not Sleeping Beauty,” Vanessa told Roxie. “She’s just a lady that’s asleep. Grandma said she’s on television.”
“Right.” Ben took the turn that would lead them home. “She does the news at night. Like Peter Jennings.”
In the rearview mirror he saw Roxie wrinkle her nose. “The news!”
“It’s an important job,” Vanessa informed her. “Daddy watches it all the time. That’s how you learn what’s going on in other places.”
To Roxie, who cared mostly about her room, her house and Marianne’s Day Care, that seemed irrelevant.
“She can sleep in the other twin bed in my room, Daddy,” Vanessa offered. “So she isn’t afraid when she wakes up.”
He’d told his mother that he intended to put Natalie on the sofa, but he’d just repainted the fourth bedroom upstairs and put the futon from the family room in it. She’d be comfortable there, and he’d be more likely to hear her if she woke up in the middle of the night, wondering what had happened and where she was.
He turned into their driveway, which was lit by floodlights at the front of the house. He hit the garage door opener and pulled into the dimly lit interior.
The girls scrambled out and went ahead of him to open doors.
He scooped Natalie Browning out of the front seat and into his arms. She lay limply against him, the scent of gardenias intermingled with the smell of a mentholated rub.
He remembered her looking into his eyes and telling him that he was “the one.” The one her dream had sent to give her a baby.
He walked into the house with her, as Vanessa held the kitchen door open. He couldn’t help wondering why a beautiful young woman would have gone to a sperm bank in the first place. Unless the boyfriend quoted in the article was right and she was cold and forbidding.
It was hard to tell when he’d spoken to her only while she’d been incoherent. But she didn’t look like a cold-hearted woman.
Roxie held open the door to the fourth bedroom upstairs. Vanessa, running along behind him, asked him to wait while she got a sheet and blankets out of the linen closet.
She and Roxie spread a flannel sheet over the plain red futon.
“I’ll get one of my pillows,” Vanessa said, and ran off.
“She should have something to sleep with,” Roxie said. She took Betsy out of her pocket, studied the doll with a worried frown, then placed it beside Natalie. But before she could even remove her hands from it, she reconsidered and pressed Betsy to her chest.
“I’ll get Starla for her!” Roxie said, clearly pleased to have come up with a solution that did not involve parting with Betsy. Starla was a large stuffed bear who’d lost his right button eye. Julie had covered the large hole with a star-shaped piece of yellow felt stitched into place. Roxie loved the bear’s new personality and had even renamed it appropriately.
When Ben had suggested that the name was feminine and not masculine, Vanessa had taken her sister’s side. “Only girls have stars in their eyes, Daddy, so she must be a girl.”
Well, he’d learned something new.
He lay Natalie down on the flannel sheet and the blanket she’d been wrapped in. Vanessa arrived just in time to put a pillow under her head. Roxie put Starla beside Natalie and made sure that Ben covered her, too, when he opened out the top sheet, then a pink thermal blanket and spread them over the bed. Not certain one blanket would keep her warm enough, he sent Vanessa to the linen closet for another.
Natalie stirred restlessly as Ben spread the second blanket. Her brow furrowed and she moaned as though something hurt.
“What’s the matter with her?” Vanessa asked worriedly.
Instinctively, Ben put a hand to Natalie’s cheek. “Probably just a bad dream,” he guessed. He noticed with a start that her skin was like satin to the touch.
She smiled, just a very small curve of her lips. Then she reached out, as though groping for something, her fingers spread wide.
Again, instinctively, he caught them in his. Her hand tightened around his with a strength that demonstrated how desperate she’d been for that contact. At least in her sleep. Loneliness, he knew, was a powerful enemy.
“She likes you, Daddy!” Roxie whispered loudly.
Vanessa looked at him a little worriedly, and he was just wondering himself if he was going to have to lean over this bed for the rest of the night when Natalie made a contented little sound, freed his hand and rolled onto her side.
He felt enormous relief as he readjusted her blankets.
He ushered the girls out into the hallway and pulled the door halfway closed.
“Can we have our ice cream now?” Roxie asked.
“We had ice cream at Grandma’s,” Vanessa ratted, to Roxie’s chagrin. “And cookies, too.”
“Then I think we’re finished for tonight.” Ben picked up Roxie under one arm and Vanessa under the other, to their squealing delight. He had to keep reminding himself to play with them more often, to remember that they needed him to be cheerful and hopeful.
He tended to get bogged down in work and memories and forget that a child learned a lot by having fun.
He dropped Roxie onto her bed and, with Vanessa still tucked under his arm, leaned over her to kiss her good-night. The girls collided and giggled hysterically.
He carried Vanessa out with him across the hall to her room and dropped her in her bed.
“Can she stay for dinner tomorrow?” she asked, sitting up in bed.
“Roxie?” he asked, fluffing the one pillow Van had left. “Yes, we have to let her stay for dinner. It’s part of the family deal. You have to feed the kids.”
“Daddy!” Vanessa slapped his arm. “I mean the lady. Can she stay for dinner? If she isn’t awake when I go to school, I won’t even hear her talk or anything.”
That confused him for a moment. “Hear her talk?”
She hunched a shoulder. “Yeah. You know. I bet she has a pretty voice, ’specially if she’s on television. And I miss Mom’s voice.” She looked at him from under thick dark lashes. “Is it okay to say that?”
He sat down on the edge of her bed, anguished by that question. “Van, it’s okay for you to say whatever you’re feeling. I asked you to tell me when you miss her and feel lonely.”
She nodded quickly. “I know. And I do. But I had just turned six then. Now I’ve been seven for a while and it doesn’t make me cry anymore when I miss her, and I know I have to make believe everything’s okay.” She gave him a look that told him she understood far more than he realized. “That’s what you do, ’cause you’re the dad. So, I do it, too, ’cause I’m the big sister. But it would be nice to hear the lady’s voice, if we can’t ever hear Mom’s again.”
Her perception always amazed him. He didn’t know why he was surprised that she’d understood he pretended cheer and hope when he didn’t feel it.
“Sometimes,” he said, ruffling her short, shaggy hair, “if you pretend something awful is really okay, it eventually makes it okay. Or at least makes it hurt less.” He pinched her chin. “But you don’t ever have to pretend what you don’t feel, Vannie. You can always tell me what you’re thinking, even if you’re afraid I won’t like it.”
“I know.” She lay back against her pillows and smiled up at him. “I’m not afraid to tell you anything. I just don’t want to make you sad if you’re not by talking about me being sad.”
He drew her blankets up and leaned down to kiss her cheek. “But I’d be really sad if you were sad and didn’t tell me.”
She smiled. “I’m not sad right now. I’m anxious to wake up in the morning and see what the lady’s like. Promise if she isn’t awake when I go to school, you’ll ask her to stay for dinner so I can talk to her.”
That didn’t sound like a good idea, but he couldn’t deny her. “I promise.”
“Okay. Good night, Daddy.”
“Good night, baby.”
“I’m not a baby.”
“You’ll be my baby until you’re ninety.”
Vanessa smiled tolerantly, appreciating her precious status, though still offended by the name. “Roxie’s the baby.”
“I am not!” The protest came indignantly from across the hall. “I’ve five! And I’m gonna get pierced ears!”
Vanessa sat up, competitive edge honed. “She is?” she demanded of Ben. “When?”
Ben shouted across the hall. “When, Roxie?”
There was silence for several seconds, then Roxie replied grudgingly. “When I’m grown up. But I’m gonna get three in each ear!”
Pleased that she hadn’t missed a rite of passage, Vanessa fell back on her pillow. “She’s such a fibber!” she said.
“I am not!”
“She was just anticipating,” Ben said. “You know what that is?”
“It’s like thinking about it, only before it happens.”
“Very good.”
Ben covered her again, kissed her cheek and turned off her bedside lamp. “Good night, woman of great wisdom,” he said grandly.
She giggled. “That’s better, Daddy.”
He kissed her again and went across the hall to where Roxie sat up in bed, her expression pugnacious, her arms folded. “I’m not a baby,” she declared clearly. “I’m the littlest, but I’m not a baby.”
“You’re absolutely right,” he said, gently pushing her back and pulling up her covers.
“I can pour my own milk if you don’t buy the really big bottle with the handle, and I know about looking both ways to cross the street, and I don’t cry when I fall down.”
“Yes, I know.”
“At Marianne’s I can swing higher than Austin O’Brian, and he’s six!”
She was the most adventurous child at the day care center—Marianne had told him that several times. Ben liked knowing she wasn’t afraid but hoped she’d acquire her sister’s sense of self-preservation before she did herself any real harm.
“I know you act like a big girl,” he praised her, taking her rag doll from the coverlet and putting it in her hands. “But you and Vanessa were such pretty babies that I still think of you that way sometimes.”
Roxie was a pushover for flattery. She smiled benevolently. “That’s okay, Daddy. What time is the lady going to wake up?”
“I don’t know, Rox. We’ll let tomorrow take care of itself, okay?”
Her pristine little brow puckered. “What does that mean?”
“It means we won’t worry about what happens tomorrow until it’s tomorrow.”
“Oh. Am I going to Marianne’s right after breakfast?”
“Yes. I have to put a new water heater in the building tomorrow and I’d like to get an early start. Is that okay with you?”
“Yeah. We’re going to make turkeys tomorrow by drawing our hands. That’s going to be fun.”
He tried to imagine how that would work and couldn’t. “Good.” He leaned down to hug her and got a big hug in return. “See you in the morning.”
“’Night, Daddy.”
“’Night, ba—” He caught himself just in time. “Good night, Roxie.”
“Wait!” She sat up again, and he swallowed frustration and a desperate need for a gin and tonic.
“Yeah?”
“You called Vannie a woman of…what was it?”
“Wisdom,” he replied.
“Yeah.” She grinned eagerly. “You have to call me something grown-up, too.”
He wasn’t sure he had a creative thought left in his head tonight.
“Ah…lady of adventure?”
She drew the blankets up to her chin and fell back giggling. “Now say good-night to me again.”
He leaned down, a hand on either side of her, and said, “Good night, oh lady of adventure.”
She looked pleased. “Good night, Daddy.”
He flipped off her light and pulled her door halfway closed. Then he backtracked to peer inside the guest room and found Natalie Browning still fast asleep, Starla clutched in her arms.
Her left leg, though, had kicked free of the blankets and now dangled over the side, covered in goose bumps from the cold. Ben groaned and went to his room for a pair of thermal underwear bottoms he wore when he worked outdoors in winter.
He carried them back to her room, wondering if he had the courage to put them on her. She was huddled under the covers as though cold, and he decided that he could be clinical about this in the interest of her welfare.
With swift but careful movements, he slipped the left leg of the longies over her foot, pushed the blankets aside to find her other foot and pulled the other leg on.
He almost hesitated when it came to slipping them over her hips but knew the less he thought about it, the better. He simply leaned over her with an arm under her waist, held her to him for the time it took to pull them over her bottom, then almost gasped with relief when he could lay her down again. He covered her quickly and left the room.
He went downstairs feeling as though the day had been thirty hours long. He mixed a gin and tonic, sat down on a bright red sofa he’d bought because the girls loved it, and propped his feet up on an old wooden garden bench he’d cleaned up and brought inside.