The Baby Deal Read online

  “Mike disappointed his mother by not becoming some big-deal businessman or something. He's a writer. A good one, but still he's doing the starving artist thing. So we share my place. Hanson Media Group pays the rent and all the utilities and insurances and whatnot—which means Mike doesn't need to contribute anything to that—and his being there gives me someone to take care of whatever comes up when I'm traveling. It works out for us both.”

  Delia imagined a fraternity house, but she didn't say anything about that. Instead she addressed something else she was wondering about.

  “So was Hanson Media Group paying for everything even before Monday?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Andrew responded, as if he didn't quite get the question.

  “It's just that you said Monday was your first day on the job,” she explained.

  “Right,” he confirmed after washing down a bite of burger with one of the sodas he'd brought. “But before Monday Hanson Media Group—or at least the Hanson fortunes—paid for everything without my working for the company.”

  “Did you work somewhere else?”

  “Nope. Not a day in my life,” he said, clearly having no clue how that unsettled her.

  Then she recalled something else he'd said. “Last night you mentioned a lot of shocks and changes—I'm assuming the baby is one of the shocks…”

  “That's an understatement.”

  “But it seemed as if there were other shocks and changes, too,” Delia said in a quest to learn what was going on with him. “Was one of the others that you needed to go to work?”

  “That was definitely another shock and change. I was told on Monday that if I want to keep the money coming in, keep the apartment and the rest of the perks I've enjoyed, I now have to work for the family business—hence my new job as advertising salesman. That was a substantial shock and change.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  He grinned at her. “Doesn't seem like as much fun as snorkeling in Tahiti.”

  In other words, he wasn't enthusiastic about the idea. Any more enthusiastic than he was about the idea of the baby.

  “You have had some shocks and changes,” Delia remarked.

  He merely smiled at that, giving no clue as to what else he might be thinking or feeling in regards to the severely altered course he'd encountered.

  He had given some indication of his feelings about his stepmother, though, and so it was that that Delia returned to.

  “You said something about thinking Mike was lucky that he had a real mother rather than a stepmother. Were your parents divorced?”

  “My father was widowed. My mother died when I was fifteen and the next thing we knew—”

  “We?”

  “My brothers and I. Besides Jack, there's my brother Evan, the middle son,” Andrew explained. “The next thing we knew, my father had gone out and married Helen. Without any fanfare, he just sprung her on us one day, announced that they'd gotten married. He was fifty-eight, she was thirty-one. His trophy wife.”

  “And she was an evil stepmother?” Delia guessed.

  “No, she wasn't evil. She certainly tried with us. But…I don't know, we just never liked her. We resented her. She was… Well, she was his trophy. He dressed her, jeweled her, gave her elaborate gifts to make sure everyone knew how successful he was, but when it came to Helen, Jack, Evan and me? We just never connected.”

  “Not even now? As adults?”

  “'Fraid not. I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I hated that my mother had just died and here was this other woman as some kind of replacement part plugged into the slot. Even if that worked for my father, it didn't work for me. So right out of the gate I didn't like the idea of Helen. From there, no matter what she did, I just didn't have it in me to play son to her. I pretty much dismissed her as a nonentity. She was nothing more to me than someone who coexisted in my house. And as soon as I could get out of that house—or what I felt was left of our home after my mother's death—I got out and away from Helen. I went to college.”

  He said that as if there were something amusing about it.

  “So you did go to college?” Delia said to urge him to explain himself.

  “Two years' worth. Not enough to get a degree even if I had passed everything. But the truth is, I spent more time partying than studying, so I barely got by before I dropped out. I was hardly what you'd call a serious student. But at least by then I was old enough to be on my own, to get the apartment. Which kept me far away from Helen, and that was what I wanted.”

  “Do you speak to her or see her now at all?”

  “Unfortunately. I'm civil to her, but that's about it. I definitely don't have any soft family feelings for her. But then I don't think we Hansons are really what anyone would consider a particularly close family—not the way yours is. It isn't as if you'd ever find the four of us vacationing together in Tahiti,” he said with a wry chuckle.

  “Not even you and your brothers?”

  “We go our separate ways. In fact, old Jack is beating his head against a brick wall right now trying to get Evan to come back and help out with Hanson Media Group, too, and apparently isn't having much luck.

  And he and my uncle—David—are both up in arms about it.”

  “So not even your father's death has brought you all closer?” Delia asked.

  “It's brought me back to Chicago and in close proximity, and it will probably eventually bring Evan back, too, but beyond the fact that we'll all be here again? I don't know that we'll end up the way you seem to be with Kyle and Marta.”

  “That's sad,” Delia said.

  Andrew merely shrugged as if it didn't affect him that way.

  Delia had all she wanted to eat and apparently he had, too, because he pushed away the wrapper he'd been using as a plate and said, “So why don't you show me around this dungeon and tell me what you have planned for it?”

  Delia assumed the question was a hint that he wanted to change the subject.

  Since she thought that it might be better if they did before she learned more about him that made him seem young and at a very unstable time of his life, she said, “Okay.”

  She gathered all their used wrappers, containers and plastic utensils into the empty sacks and took them to the trash under the kitchen sink. Along the way, she said, “That was the first thing I thought about the house, too—that all the dreary paneling down here makes it seem dungeonish. But wait till you see the orange bathroom upstairs and the candy-cane pink bedroom. They'll make you wish there was paneling hiding it.”

  “Was the person who lived here before color-blind?” he asked with a laugh.

  “I don't think so, but to tell you the truth, I don't know,” Delia said. “I don't know anything about her.”

  Turning back to the table, Delia realized that there was still a lot of food left in the remaining bags there.

  “We'd better put the rest of this stuff in the fridge until you go home or your friend will end up with food poisoning,” she suggested.

  “I'll do it,” Andrew volunteered, taking it all to the short, chubby refrigerator.

  He dwarfed the antiquated appliance and Delia was again struck by both the glory of the big, strapping man and how ill-suited he was to these surroundings.

  And to her, too, she thought, telling herself that that was something she needed to keep in mind.

  But all she was really thinking about at that moment was that the evening wasn't ending yet.

  And that she was unreasonably happy about that fact.

  Chapter Seven

  Once the leftovers were stored, Delia led Andrew out of the kitchen and began the tour, first of the downstairs and then of the second level where there were four bedrooms and a single—orange—bathroom.

  “It's easier downstairs to add on along with using the mudroom in back to expand the kitchen and add the dining room, family room and half bath. But up here it would be more complicated, so I'll combine the two smallest bedrooms into a master su
ite with its own bath and much better closet space than I have now.”

  Andrew poked his nose into the bathroom and then into the bright pink room. “Color-blind. I'm convinced,” he joked.

  “I'm using the pink room as my own now,” Delia continued. “The other two smallest rooms are what will be combined for the new master suite and bath. When that's finished, I'll move in there and the pink room's closet will be broken down to make it a decent-sized guest room that will also be connected to the main bath. The nursery will go in the original master bedroom, which is a fairly decent size already and only needs paint and carpeting to be ready to go. That makes it the easiest to redo, so I can be sure it's finished in case the addition and remodel takes longer than planned,” she explained, feeling strange talking about the baby with him. So strange she wasn't even sure she should have.

  “Quite a project,” Andrew commented.

  The fact that he hadn't responded in any way to her mention of the baby or the nursery made her wonder if he might rather she not mention the little souvenir she was carrying at all.

  “It's a huge project,” Delia agreed, trying to ignore his omission. “But at least the basic electrical wiring and the pipes are okay. If that had had to be redone, too, it would have been even worse.”

  Andrew moved to the guest room to glance into it, too, but he never went anywhere near the room that would be the nursery.

  Delia had the feeling that he not only didn't want to see it, he wasn't even ready to acknowledge the need for it. And she thought that was something to take as seriously as she took their age difference.

  “It should be nice when it's finished,” he said then. “It's a great old house. Solid. Interesting.”

  “I think so, too,” Delia said, fighting the sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach. Even as she told herself that Andrew's lack of interest in her nursery plans shouldn't matter.

  She headed downstairs again with Andrew following behind.

  “I can make coffee,” she offered then, sounding more chipper than she felt.

  “Not for me, thanks.”

  “Tea?”

  “No, I'm fine,” he said as they reached the entryway once more.

  This is where he runs again, she thought. Where the pregnancy and the baby have become real enough to scare him away.

  Well, fine, she told herself in her internal dialogue. Go! And don't come back. Don't drag this game out any longer than necessary. Get out and leave me alone and let me do this the way I planned to do it before Monday night. It's better like that anyhow….

  She was so certain that running out was exactly what Andrew was going to do, that she actually headed for the front door to open it for him.

  And then he surprised her once more.

  Rather than running out on Delia the way she'd convinced herself Andrew would after she'd shown him her house and he'd shied away from every reference she'd made to the baby and the nursery, Andrew nodded toward the living room from the entryway and said, “How about if we sit in there?”

  “Oh. Okay,” Delia agreed, barely concealing her shock.

  Then, correcting the few steps she'd taken toward her front door to let him out, she made a quick—and she hoped subtle—detour to go into the living room ahead of him.

  She turned on the lamps on each of the end tables that bracketed the sofa as Andrew sat in the center of it and patted the spot beside him in invitation to her.

  Delia didn't want to appear rude by going to the overstuffed chair positioned to one side of the couch, so she accepted the invitation. But not without getting as far away from him as she could, sitting with her back pressed tightly to the arm of the sofa and angling to face him with one leg upraised in front of her as a barricade. Just in case.

  “Did you say you inherited this house?” he asked then, turning slightly in her direction so he could look at her and settling one long arm on the top of the sofa-back.

  That brought his hand only a breath away from the knee over which she was peering at him. Close enough for her to see every well-tended nail, every knuckle, every inch of that hand that she suddenly recalled touching that same knee. Squeezing it before taking a slow slide up her thigh and around to the inside of it…

  “Delia?”

  She was still staring at his hand rather than answering him and he'd caught her at it. She altered her focus quickly and went just as quickly back through her memory, searching for what he'd asked her.

  She was grateful when it came to her.

  “I did say I inherited the house, yes,” she confirmed, hoping he hadn't asked her anything else after that that she'd missed.

  Apparently he hadn't because he went on naturally from there. “How did you inherit a house from someone you don't know or know anything about?”

  “How do you—”

  “You said it a little while ago, when I asked if the person who lived here before was color-blind. You told me you didn't know because you didn't know the person who lived here before.”

  Delia had forgotten.

  “That's right,” she mused, flattered that he'd been paying more attention than she had and appreciating the fact that he was trying to get to know her.

  “So how did that come about?” he prompted when her thoughts distracted her from answering immediately once again.

  “I inherited the house from my father's mother,” she informed him.

  “Your grandmother? And you didn't know her?”

  “We never met. I didn't know she even existed. Until she didn't anymore and the attorney who was handling her estate tracked me down in California to tell me she'd left me the house.”

  “Was your father on the outs with his family?”

  Delia wished a simple family feud was what she could tell him about, because even now it embarrassed her to reveal her background to anyone.

  But in the interest of her own child, she swallowed her embarrassment and plunged in. “I never met my father, either.”

  Andrew's eyebrows arched. “You never met your father?”

  “I wasn't raised…conventionally. None of us were—not me or Marta or Kyle. Our mother—who we were never to call Mom—”

  “What were you supposed to call her?”

  “Her name—Peaches.”

  “Peaches? You're kidding?”

  “No, that was her name, Peaches McCray. She was not what you'd call a traditional kind of mother. She was different. A lot different. A lot more…freewheeling, I suppose you could say.”

  “How could she be anything else when she'd been named Peaches?”

  “Oh, she named herself Peaches. She was born Beatrice McCray on a farm in Kansas. But the day she turned eighteen she went to court and changed her name legally to Peaches—because that was her favorite food. Then she got on a bus and left town.”

  Delia could see that Andrew didn't know whether to laugh or sympathize because his expression was a combination of both humor and astonishment. And she'd only begun.

  “Okay. Peaches,” he said. “Go on. I'm still waiting for the part about how you never met your father and inherited this house from his mother.”

  “Right. Well, Peaches wanted to be a movie star. Not an actress, there was no studying of a craft or anything. She wanted to be a star—with a capital S and an exclamation point. So she took the bus to Hollywood, where she was sure she would be discovered and never was. But she also never stopped thinking that it would happen and given that, it was important that she maintain the illusion of eternal youth.”

  “Are we talking past tense or present? Is she still living and wanting to be a movie star?”

  “No, she died nine years ago in a jet-skiing accident. But what was true of her when I was a kid was true of her until the day she died.”

  “Did she look anything like you?” Andrew asked as if that would have been a good thing.

  “Marta and Kyle think I'm the spitting image of her. For better or worse.”

  “For better,” Andrew judged. “
So appearing younger than she was must not have been too far out of her reach.”

  “No, it wasn't. But her own looks were not the only thing she used to keep up the illusion that she was perpetually twenty-five—”

  “She also didn't let her kids call her Mom,” Andrew said, proving he was listening now, too.

  “Right again. Having kids—three kids—aged her, so we were introduced as the younger siblings she was raising after a tragic tornado had killed our parents.”

  “And her parents…”

  “Were alive and well until not long ago. Living quietly on the farm in Kansas, not ever understanding what made their daughter tick.”

  Andrew's eyebrows arched even more. “Okay,” he said with an amazed sort of tilt to his head. “But we're still not up to the unmet-dad part.”

  “I'm getting there,” Delia assured. “It is kind of a long story, though. Maybe you don't want—”

  “No, I want to hear the whole thing.”

  “If you're sure.”

  “I am.”

  “All right then. Not only did Peaches use her looks and her story about Marta, Kyle and me as her siblings rather than her kids to keep up her eternal youth profile, she also absolutely refused to consort with men over a certain age. Your age, actually.”

  “Twenty-eight?”

  “Twenty-eight was the crest of the hill, anything past that was over it for Peaches, and she preferred her male friends much younger. She was convinced that being with very young men made her seem like she was that young, too. And, to be honest, that was just where her taste in men ran. My own father was twenty-three when I was born. Peaches was thirty. Marta's father was barely twenty. Kyle's father was twenty-one.”

  Delia tried not to show her own discomfort with that fact. Or how ashamed she'd felt of her mother's affairs growing up. “Three kids by three different fathers and all without the benefit of a marriage or even a long-term relationship in the bunch. The fathers—like the other men who came before, between and after—were all just her boy toys….”

  Delia stumbled over the term Peaches had reveled in. The term that had been used for Andrew this week, as well.