“Nate, I’m really too tired to discuss this right now,” she said, yawning. “All I want is to get home and go to bed.”
“At least take a nap before you start back to Waco,” he stalled. If he could get her to stay for a while, it would give him time to come to grips with the unbelievable fact that he was going to be a daddy. At the moment he was completely numb. But he needed to pull it together so he could think. He had to come up with a better argument for her staying, at least for the party. Now that he knew she was carrying his baby, it was even more important that they work things out. And damned quick.
“Maybe just a short power nap would help,” she conceded.
Without hesitation, he put his arm around her shoulders to guide her out into the foyer and up the stairs. He wasn’t going to give her time to change her mind.
When he walked her down the upstairs hall, Nate opened the door to the bedroom across from his. “Will this room be all right?”
“I’m leaving as soon as I wake up,” she warned.
“Just get some sleep now,” he said, leading her over to the bed. Pulling back the colorful quilt, he waited until she kicked off her tennis shoes and got into bed before he bent down to kiss her forehead. “If you need anything, I’ll be in my office.”
She had already fallen asleep.
Standing beside the bed, he stared down at the only woman he hadn’t been able to stay away from. Jessie was smart, funny and as sweet as she was pretty. So why hadn’t he been able to commit to her?
Nate knew his foster brother Lane Donaldson would probably have a field day using his master’s degree in psychology to analyze Nate’s motives. But Nate didn’t want to delve too deeply into his reasons for avoiding commitments. It all tied into his past and it wasn’t something he could change, nor was he eager to think about that dark time in his life.
The only thing he could do now was what his foster father Hank Calvert would expect of any of the boys he finished raising. Hank had preached to them over and over that when a man makes the decision to sleep with a woman, he’d better be ready to accept his responsibilities if he made her pregnant. And that was just what Nate intended to do.
His aversion to commitment was about to undergo a dramatic change. Jessie had shown up to tell him he was going to be a daddy and he fully intended to do right by her and his kid. Sometime within the next week, he was going to kiss his blissful bachelorhood goodbye and make her his wife.
* * *
When Jessie woke up, bright sunlight peeked through a part in the yellow calico curtains and it took a moment for her to realize where she was.
After working all night in the traumatic brain injury ICU, she had called Nate’s brother Sam to ask where she could find Nate. She hated having to involve Sam in her quest to get hold of Nate, but Nate had moved recently. The last time he had broken things off between them, she had deleted his number from her cell. Sam had been very nice and given her directions to the Twin Oaks Ranch. She supposed she could have asked for Nate’s number and called, but news like hers was something that needed to be delivered in person.
After going to her prenatal checkup, she had driven directly to the ranch to tell Nate he was the father of her baby. In hindsight, she probably should have gotten some sleep before she confronted him with the news. But if she had put it off any longer, she couldn’t be certain she wouldn’t have talked herself out of telling him at all.
For the past few months, she’d been torn over what to do and she still wasn’t certain she had made the right choice in telling him about the baby. For one thing, she was beyond tired of being Nate’s puppet. In the past, he would give her a call and talk her into rekindling their relationship, then when everything seemed to be going great between them, he’d find a reason they should stop seeing each other for a while. And for another, she wasn’t sure he deserved to have equal custody of the baby. How good of a father would he be, given his inclination for coming and going the way he’d done in the past?
The last time he decided to pull his vanishing act, she’d told him not to bother getting in touch with her again. It had broken her heart, but she refused to allow him to control the course of their relationship any longer. Shortly after that she had discovered she was pregnant. And even though she felt it was only right to let a man know he had fathered a child, her main concern was whether or not Nate would always be there for the baby. It was one thing to disappoint her. It was something else entirely if he disappointed their child.
Unsettled by the thought, she threw back the covers to sit up on the side of the bed. That’s when she realized just how exhausted she’d been. She had not only slept the rest of yesterday and last night, she was still fully dressed.
Jessie quickly made the bed and headed downstairs. She had the next two nights off and she needed to get home. There were several things she needed to get done this weekend and she still had an hour’s drive just to get back to Waco.
As she reached the bottom of the stairs, she sighed heavily when Nate came out of the office. So much for avoiding him on her way out.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” he said cheerfully.
Why did the man have to look so darned good to her? She didn’t want to notice how his straight light brown hair stylishly brushed the collar of his chambray shirt or the way his blue eyes twinkled when he smiled at her. She was still angry with him and resented the way he thought he could come and go in her life without a second thought to the effect it had on her—how much it hurt her emotionally.
“You should have awakened me,” she said, noticing the grandfather clock in the foyer indicated it was already midmorning.
“You were tired.” His smile turned to a grin. “Besides, I thought you’d probably want to be fully rested for the party tonight.”
“I’m not attending your party,” she said, stepping down onto the cream-colored marble tile floor of the foyer. “I told you that yesterday.”
He shook his head as he walked over to her. “No, you didn’t.”
“It was implied and you know it,” she stated. “When you insisted that I had to get some sleep before I drove home, I told you I intended to leave as soon as I woke up from a nap. That was a strong indication that I had no intention of attending your family gathering.”
He reached out to lightly run his finger along her jaw, causing her skin to tingle where he touched her. “Now that you’ve had some rest, would you like a cup of coffee or something to eat?” he asked, ignoring her argument against staying for his party. “I don’t know all that much about pregnancy, but when they were expecting, all of my sisters-in-law ate like ranch hands once they got past being sick.”
“I cut out caffeine when I discovered I was pregnant, but a muffin or bagel and a glass of milk would be appreciated,” she answered, knowing just what the women had gone through.
In the early weeks of her pregnancy, just the thought of food was enough to make her sick. But now that the morning sickness had cleared up, it seemed she was hungry all of the time.
“Why don’t you have a seat in my office and I’ll go tell my housekeeper to fix a tray for you,” he said, placing his hand to her back to guide her toward the doorway.
“Why don’t I eat in the kitchen and then just go out the back door to my car when I’m done?” she countered, starting to turn in the opposite direction of the office.
“We have to talk,” he insisted, bringing his arm up to wrap around her shoulders and steer her back toward his office.
“Nate, it would be better to let the lawyers—”
“Do you really want strangers calling the shots on how we go about raising our kid?” he interrupted.
Jessie stared at him as she tried to decide what to do. He had a point about attorneys sitting across a conference table making the important