If it wasn’t for you sending me to your dad, I might have ended up with more than a few bruises.” As if she was embarrassed by her admission, she asked with a wink, “You been out on a date?”
Flustered, Jenna glanced at Blake. “Oh, no. No. Just business.”
“Uh-huh,” Ramona drawled with a wicked smile. “Looks to me, you know how to pick ’em.”
When Jenna turned beet red, Blake felt sorry for her. “Business” didn’t quite cover why he was here. Still, he rescued her. “Maybe we’d better see what your father wants.” He was curious about Jenna’s father and welcomed the opportunity to meet him.
Obviously relieved by his cue, Jenna said to her neighbor, “Give Trina a good-night kiss for me.”
“Will do.” Ramona was still smiling as she turned and went back into her apartment.
“She’s a friend of yours?” Blake asked, surprised.
“Ramona’s been terrific. I’ve had morning sickness on and off throughout the pregnancy. When she doesn’t hear me up and about, she knocks on the bathroom wall. It’s thin and we can talk through it. She can check on me that way.”
“Her husband was violent?”
“Joe was her boyfriend. Whenever he got drunk…” Jenna shook her head. “It was a bad situation. But after dad counseled her, she finally did what she had to do to protect her daughter.”
As Blake and Jenna stood outside her apartment door, he asked, “Why would your father be here?”
“He probably just wants to make sure I’m all right.”
Blake could certainly understand that feeling. He’d felt protective about Jenna as soon as he learned she was carrying his baby.
The table lamp beside the sofa was glowing when they stepped inside her apartment.
Jenna’s father eyed Blake suspiciously as he stood and approached her. “Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick.”
Glancing at Blake, she looked embarrassed. “I spent the afternoon with Mr. Winston.” She motioned toward him. “Blake, this is my father, Reverend Charles Seabring.”
Reverend Seabring looked Blake up and down again. “I’ve seen your picture in the paper, haven’t I? You own a security company and have very…” He hesitated, then continued, “Important clients.”
Unfortunately, Blake often did make the newspapers, usually coming away from a charity event with a tall blonde on his arm. He knew he had a reputation for being a jet-setting bachelor who never intended to settle down. That image hadn’t bothered him before. Now he knew the reverend would disapprove of any time his daughter might spend with Blake. “My company’s based in Sacramento and, yes, sometimes I am in the papers. I understand you’re a minister?”
“Yes, I am. I should be preparing my sermon for Sunday, but I was too distracted by visions of my daughter lying in a ditch somewhere. Why didn’t you answer your cell phone?”
Squaring her shoulders, she stood up to him. “Because I didn’t have it with me. I forgot to charge it last night and I was in a hurry when I left today.”
“I got that phone for you so you’d have it in an emergency. That means you have to keep it with you.”
Apparently Jenna had had enough of her father’s protective streak. Spots of color appeared on her cheeks. “I’m twenty-six, Dad. You told me that cell phone was a gift and that’s why I took it. But if it comes with strings, you can have it back. I’m not going to report in to you three times a day.”
Her father ran his hand through his thinning and graying brown hair and finally smiled. “I suppose once a day is too much to ask?”
Her expression softened. “Once a day is fine. I would have called you within the next half hour.”
Charles peered at Blake with a penetrating gaze that Blake recognized. Danielle Howard’s father had looked at him in just the same way with a mixture of fatherly disapproval and righteousness that still angered him.
“I suppose your evening with Mr. Winston isn’t over yet?” he asked Jenna.
“We have a few things to discuss,” she replied softly.
Blake could see Charles Seabring was dying to ask what, but he didn’t. Blake was sure if Jenna had been a few years younger, he would be the one who was leaving first.
“I see,” Seabring said. “Will you stop by the parsonage tomorrow?”
“I told you I would. Shirley’s going to go over everything with me so I’ll know what to do when she leaves. I’ll stop in for breakfast with you and Gary first. All right?”
Her father nodded. “I’ll tell Shirley to make those apple pancakes you like so much. Eight-thirty too early for you?”
“Eight-thirty’s fine.” Jenna walked her father to the door, and at the threshold she gave him a kiss on the cheek. When he didn’t hug her as most fathers would have, Blake decided that the minister wasn’t a demonstrative man.
Two minutes later, Jenna had closed the door and leaned against it, sighing heavily.
“Those apple pancakes come with a price, I bet,” Blake remarked. “Your father’s going to give you the third degree tomorrow, isn’t he?”
“Most likely.”
She looked so troubled, Blake wanted to take her hand. Vetoing that thought, he asked, “Does he know this baby isn’t your husband’s?” He didn’t like using that term, but he didn’t know what else to say.
“Not yet. I’m still trying to absorb it. Dad was so against the insemination in the first place. This is going to really throw him.” She shook her head. “I’m afraid it will put more distance between us.”
“Has the distance always been there?” Blake asked gently. He thought about his own father, the distance between them. After his mother’s death when Blake was twelve, his dad had pulled away from life and drowned his grief in a bottle of gin. Then, Blake hadn’t understood his father’s self-pity and sadness. He himself had dealt with the grief by playing sports harder, boxing a friend’s punching bag and studying late into the night. He and his dad had grown farther and farther apart. Everything had been unsaid for years…so much that should have been said before his father committed suicide. If they’d been able to talk…if Blake had stayed in Fawn Grove and made his father get help…or if he’d returned sooner…
“I can’t remember if Dad was different before my mother died,” Jenna answered, pulling Blake back to the here and now. “I seem to remember that he was warmer, not so serious. But afterward, it was as if he pulled the shutters closed and turned inward. And after we moved here…”
“Why did your dad move here?”
“He said he wanted Gary and me to grow up away from hustle and bustle of city life. He was pastor of a much larger congregation in Pasadena.”
When she came closer to Blake, she apologized, “I’m sorry if he was a bit rude to you. I didn’t know quite how to handle our being together today. He’s never seen me with any man but B.J. And it’s not as if we are together.”
She was enchantingly shy and altogether out of her depth. This time he did take her hand. “Jenna, I know we really haven’t worked out anything today. But I’d like you to think about joint custody.”
He saw the anguish on her face at the thought of not having her baby all the time, and he knew the same turmoil. If he was going to be a father, he really wanted to be a father twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. He’d never been committed to anything but his work, yet now he wanted to be committed to this baby. Everything he’d always worked for suddenly seemed to have a purpose.
“There isn’t going to be an