“Babe,” Keaton said, crouching down in front of her. He rubbed his hands over her thighs. “You remember Jake, my—my brother?”
“No,” Lark said. But it didn’t sound as if she was answering Keaton’s question.
“Lark,” Jake said, trying to be polite about it.
The baby cried even more. Jake wouldn’t have thought that was possible, but it was. This morning, he hadn’t been a father. Now he was faced with a wailing infant.
Skye wasn’t supposed to have any shocks to her system. He wished someone had given the same orders for him because he wasn’t sure how much more he could take.
“Where have you been?” Lark snapped. Her eyes filled with tears, and Jake noticed the dark circles underneath.
“Babe...” Keaton said, touching her face. It was a tender gesture.
Jake wasn’t sure what part of this scene made the least amount of sense. Keaton had always said Lark Taylor was a stuck-up bookworm who thought she was better than everyone else—and Jake had never argued that point much. Lark hadn’t liked Jake. The feeling had been mutual.
“I was in Bahrain. I came back for Skye and for our daughter.” The words were coming easier now. But he stared at the little baby still crying in Lark’s arms and the room began to feel smaller.
“Oh,” Lark said. “So glad to see that you’ve decided to acknowledge her. Where have you been since she was born? Do you even know how old she is? Do you know anything about her?”
Before Jake could reply, Keaton spoke. “Lark,” he said in a soft voice, trying to draw her attention back to him. “We talked about this.”
“But you know him, Keaton. You know he’s going to take Grace and disappear. Just like he always does.”
Yeah, that stung. “I promise, I’m not going to walk off with that baby.”
“Because you keep your promises, right?” Lark shot back at him. The baby was really letting loose now. “I wouldn’t trust you farther than I can throw you.”
Okay, that stung more. Jake nervously eyed the baby—his daughter—and fought the urge to cover his ears. Unfamiliar panic began to build in his chest. “I don’t know where you think I’m going to go with an infant, not when Skye’s doctor insists she needs to stay local. Despite what you assume about me and Skye, I do not disappear. I had a job in Bahrain, but it’s over now. I’m going to take care of my family.”
Keaton and Lark exchanged a look. Jake couldn’t take his eyes off the baby. She was small and bald and an interesting shade of red—although he hoped that was from all the screaming and not her natural color. “How old is she?”
“Three months.” Lark began rocking and patting the baby on the back. She wasn’t looking at Jake, but that was okay. At least she was telling him what he needed to know. “She was eleven weeks premature—that’s their best guess. She was in the NICU for two months. And since Skye was still under when Grace was ready to leave the hospital, she was turned over to her next of kin.” She looked at Keaton. The anger she’d directed at Jake was gone from her eyes; now he saw something else there. “That’s us.”
Jake recognized the emotion. Lark looked at Keaton the way Skye used to look at him. It’d been a while, though.
He sat in a nearby recliner and dropped his head into his hands, trying to keep his emotions in check. When had Skye stopped looking at him like that? And why hadn’t he noticed when she did?
“Since she was so early,” Lark went on, “she’s got a bunch of health risks that full-term babies don’t have to worry about. She shouldn’t be outside in this weather and she shouldn’t be around strangers. If she got sick, she could wind up back in the hospital. Or worse. She’s a full-time job right now.”
Jake knew that shaking his head wasn’t going to help a damn thing but he did it anyway. He had jobs waiting now—Bahrain had been very good for him. He couldn’t take an infant with health risks out of the country. Hell, he couldn’t even take Skye to Houston.
Trapped. He was trapped in this town.
“Keaton said he told you about the blood tests,” Lark said into the silence.
“He did.”
“He said you didn’t know about Grace.”
“I thought...” He didn’t know what to do. His entire world—everything he thought he knew—had been turned inside out in the space of about four hours.
He didn’t trust his brother and he didn’t trust the Taylors—with the exception of Skye.
He thought that his brother would never trust a Taylor either. Yet here Jake sat, in Lark Taylor’s house, watching her and Keaton cuddle and soothe a fussy baby. Together.
“What did you think?” For the first time since Jake had walked into this house, he heard the attitude in Keaton’s voice.
He didn’t want to tell them this. But his back was against a wall—a wall covered in four-inch spikes. As much as he hated it, he needed both Lark and Keaton right now. He had a bunch of questions and they had the closest thing to answers.
“Skye and I...” He absolutely could not tell them about the divorce papers. “I had that big job in Bahrain coming up. It was a yearlong contract and she decided she didn’t want to spend that much time in a foreign country. Bahrain may be richer than sin, but it’s not exactly a progressive state.”
All of that was true enough. She hadn’t wanted to go to Bahrain and she hadn’t wanted to stay home alone. She’d wanted him to stay with her. And he’d picked the job over her. That had been the proverbial straw that had broken the camel’s back.
“Is that it?” Keaton said with a snort.
“Yes.” And since Skye might never remember the fight, there was no one to contradict Jake’s lie.
Lark looked victorious, but strangely, it didn’t make her seem any happier. “Were you married? Skye said you were but she didn’t have her ring on and who knows, with that memory of hers.” She looked at Jake’s hand.
Jake spun the plain gold band around his finger. It’d been the only ring they’d been able to afford when they slipped off into the night together four years ago.
“Yes. We got married three days after we left.”
Silence followed this statement. He and Skye had driven to Houston and found a preacher who would marry them. He’d been wearing his old boots and a pair of jeans, but Skye had been in a simple white skirt and a bright blue top. She’d been so beautiful that day...
“So what are you going to do now?” Keaton finally asked. “Because Lark is right. We’re not going to stand aside and let you disappear off into the night with this baby. We’re not going to let you do anything that would put her at risk.”
Jake gritted his teeth. He had no choice but to stay here. He looked at the baby girl. She was still crying—but at least now the decibel level wouldn’t shatter glass. Jake tried to smile at the baby, but the terror the tiny baby—his daughter, for crying out loud!—was sparking in his chest was making breathing difficult.
He’d never held a baby before. He didn’t have the first idea how to do any of the basics—bottles and diapers and everything else. He and Skye had wanted to wait.
That wasn’t true. Skye had wanted a baby from the very beginning. But Jake had looked at the reality of being a young couple barely scraping by and he’d convinced her that they needed to wait until their financial situation was more