Or that I’m the father?”
She owed him an explanation. She’d come here to tell him everything. And though the thought of rehashing it, reliving it for the telling made her feel sick to her stomach, she had to do it.
She could still remember the first time she’d seen Nick, her surprise that someone from Blue Gulch was standing on the porch of her condo in Houston, the immediate pull of attraction to him on all levels, the inability to look away from his face.
Oh, how the sight of him had comforted her. He was from home. He was the police. But she’d been too afraid to tell him anything—about why her sister Annabel had clearly felt the need to have a policeman check up on her. Why Georgia hadn’t come home to Blue Gulch when her gram fell ill and Hurley’s Homestyle Kitchen was failing. Why the “fancy city businesswoman” had let down her family and stayed put in Houston. Why she hadn’t simply sent home a check to pull Hurley’s from the brink of bankruptcy.
She’d invited Nick in and they’d talked about Blue Gulch. They’d talked a little about their families—but Georgia realized she’d done most of the talking, needing to feel connected to the Hurleys even if she couldn’t be with them. And a glass of wine had led to another, and a kiss had led to Georgia allowing herself the evening with this man. Knowing there wouldn’t be a next day or a next time. She’d given herself to the fantasy of it, of him, of what her life might be like if only—
She pushed the thought away. She wouldn’t, couldn’t think of the past anymore. It was over, finally over. She was safe. She was free. And she was finally home. She’d bring it up only to explain herself to Nick and her grandmother and her sisters. Then she’d lock it up tight. She was going to be a mother and had to focus on that. Not on mistakes, on regrets, on what had been out of her control.
Easier said than done, but Georgia was going to try.
“I’m sure,” she said. “I’m pregnant with your child, Nick. Listen, I—”
“I need to get some air,” he interrupted, taking the baby back from her.
She nodded. He’d been streamrolled twice in the same half hour.
He closed his eyes for a moment, then started pacing, the baby seeming to like the quick movements. “I need to get some things for Timmy. I’ll be taking the rest of the day off.”
“Did you hear what I said?” she whispered.
“I heard you. I’ll be in touch.”
Dismissed, she thought.
She watched him settle Timothy into the baby carrier, taking a frustrated few moments to figure out the five-point harness straps. Then he picked up the carrier and walked out of the station and down the steps without looking back.
Timmy was fast asleep in the little bassinet Nick had bought at Baby Center. Nick watched the baby’s chest rise and fall, rise and fall, and then he tiptoed out of his bedroom, keeping the door just ajar. Timmy had been sleeping for a good forty-five minutes now. Nick had looked in on him eleven times. Still breathing: check.
There at all and not a figment of his imagination or some crazy dream: check.
Keeping him too occupied to fully process that Georgia was pregnant with his child: check.
The moment he stepped back into the living room, the uneasy feeling hit him in the chest, in his throat, in his head. Again. There was a baby in his bedroom, a tiny human he was responsible for. Every time he sat down and tried to focus on how to go about finding Timmy’s mother, he would hear a cry or a sound and leap up like a lunatic and rush into the bedroom and find Timmy exactly as he’d been four minutes ago and four minutes before that: sleeping peacefully.
Everything inside him was on red alert for the baby to start crying or fussing. According to the salesclerk at Baby Center, if Timmy cried, Nick should eye or feel the diaper. Check for diaper rash. Calculate last feeding time and decide if the baby is hungry. If the baby is fed, changed, rash-free and still fussing, pick him up for a burp. If he’s still fussy, cradle him upright against you and hum softly.
Nick wasn’t a hummer. He did not hum.
After he’d left the station, left Georgia just standing there like a jerk, he had buckled Timmy in the backseat of his car, driven over to the Blue Gulch Clinic and had Timmy checked over. Perfectly healthy and deemed to be five weeks old. Since Nick wasn’t the baby’s legal guardian, he couldn’t authorize a DNA sample. He’d been hoping he could in order to check that database to possibly find a biological match between the baby and someone he’d arrested—even just as a start. But he’d have to dig through his records and try to figure out some connection between a recently pregnant woman and a case he’d worked. He’d do some investigating, find out someone had a baby five weeks ago named Timothy, and voilà.
Between now and voilà, he had a baby to take care of. He’d barely made it through the past few hours. How would he get through an entire seven days?
I’ll take care of him for the week. I could use the on-the-job training.
He really was almost grateful that he had a very immediate problem on his hands—finding out who Timmy’s mother was—so that he couldn’t focus on Georgia and her bombshell. Or her job request.
After the clinic he’d driven over to the Baby Center two towns over and asked that helpful clerk for the essentials. A few hundred dollars later, Nick had a few footed onesies, burp cloths, a couple of extra blankets, a big pack of diapers, two huge containers of baby wipes, a baby monitor, a baby swing and a tiny lullaby player that hooked over the side of the basinet. When he found Timmy’s mother, he’d let her keep all the stuff if she needed it, or donate it if she didn’t. And he would find her—well before the seven-day deadline. He had to reunite mother and child, for both their own good. And for his.
He sat back down at his dining room table with five boxes of case files, representing the past two years as a detective on the Blue Gulch police force, in front of him. Chief McTiernan was way behind the times in shifting to digital records. So somewhere in these files—police reports, notes and documents from various agencies—was the key to Timmy’s mother. Nick had made a good impression on someone, someone who’d entrusted him with a five-week-old baby. Someone related to a suspect? A perp? A witness? Someone who was a suspect, a perp, a witness?
He finished reading through his last case file—solved a few days ago in less than two hours, almost a record. Bentley, the miniature greyhound that Harriet Culver had adopted from the animal shelter last week, had been dognapped from where she’d left him tied to a pole near Hurley’s Homestyle Kitchen while she ran in to pick up a to-go order. An hour later, his investigation led him to the dugout at the middle school baseball field, where eleven-year-old Jason Pullman was hiding with Bentley and teaching him how to play fetch. Apparently, his parents wouldn’t let him have a dog, and the greyhound had been sitting there all alone, so... Harriet had settled on the tearful, remorseful Jason doing two weeks of community service by walking Bentley every day after school, if he wanted. He wanted. Case closed.
Nick liked cases like that. Cases with happy endings. Cases without bodies. Without hospital records.
Okay, so someone on the Culver case liked how he’d handled the dognapping and thought he’d be a good babysitter for a week? He looked through the list of witnesses. He’d spoken to the owners of businesses near where Harriet had tied up Bentley. Clyde Heff of Clyde’s Burgertopia. Sau Lan of Sau Lan’s Noodle Shop. The manager of the general store. The yoga studio. Then he’d forced himself into Hurley’s Homestyle Kitchen to talk to Essie Hurley.
If only he’d spoken to Essie first. She’d been in the kitchen making biscuits and had actually seen the boy take the dog and walk off, but hadn’t thought anything of it until Nick came by. He’d been avoiding Hurley’s these past few months. Even when he’d craved baby back ribs for dinner or those flaky biscuits