Read Having Jay's Baby (Having His Baby #2) Online
Authors: Fran Louise
Having Jay's Baby (Having His Baby #2) (15 page)
“I’m not leaving,” he reiterated.
I cracked one eye open and regarded him. “You’ll have all day tomorrow with Nina, if that’s what you want,” I said groggily. “I’ll pick her up at four to go to the airport.”
“We need to talk,” he said, and I could feel the provocation in his voice like a blunt instrument poking into my side.
“You told me to go to bed,” I said. I shifted, unable to get comfortable. “You said we could talk in the morning, so let’s talk in the morning. Or next week.”
“We need to talk before you leave.”
I sighed, a heady mixture of impatience and anger causing me to yank the covers back. Only Nina’s presence stopped me from raising my voice. “It doesn’t suit me to talk right now,” I hissed, “the same way it didn’t suit you to talk all this week, even though that’s what we’d agreed.”
I glared at him, incensed by the cool indifference in his maddeningly attractive face. “I don’t have time for this crap, Jay. I’ll be lucky to get four hours sleep tonight. I have to finish up my interviews tomorrow, and then I have to get back to New York so that we can handover the keys to the SoHo apartment. I have a busy life, and I don’t have time to play second fiddle to yours.” I pulled the covers back again and shut my eyes. “Your daughter shouldn’t have to play second fiddle to anyone, now that we’re on the subject.”
It was silent for a long time. My whole being prickled with awareness. The breath seemed to accumulate in my lungs, my windpipe suddenly too tight to permit normal passage of air. I shifted, turning my back to him and glaring at the cot in an effort to calm myself.
Was he really just going to sit there all night?
His gall was unbelievable, turning up out of the blue like this—no call, no warning—and just expecting me to fall into line with his plans. The truth was that I’d been booked to go back to New York on Sunday, and hand over the keys to the apartment on Monday evening, but I’d pushed up my schedule this week after it had become clear that Jay was officially AWOL. I wasn’t going to change everything back now that he’d deigned to grace us with his presence, no matter how bad it made me feel to take Nina away from him.
After a very long while, the sound of fabric brushing eased into the silence. His scent, that taunting cologne, disturbed the air. He moved into my view and I shut my eyes like a mischievous child. He was at the cot. I counted ten seconds, twenty, thirty seconds … what was he doing? I was just about to open my eyes, unable to stand it, when the fabric of his suit bristled again. He shut the door over carefully without another word.
Childishly, my eyes crowded with indignant tears in the ensuing silence.
#
I’d just reached the fifth floor again and was considering the humongous cases when I heard the front door slam far down below. The sound of Nina’s gurgling filtered upstairs. I leaned over the banister. “Sorry, Mon,” I shouted, “this is taking forever, but I’ll be done in another fifteen, I promise. Are you okay?”
Nina hollered with random enthusiasm. I laughed despite myself, then frowned as I bumped the case down two or three steps, both the case and me coming to an unstable and abrupt halt. Footsteps rounded the fourth landing.
I stared in abject surprise when Jay appeared.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, the case almost sliding from my grip.
He didn’t respond to the belligerent question. All six feet and three gilded inches of him seemed to resonate in the dank hallway like a deity. Nina was in his arms, beaming at me in delight.
“Where’s Monica?” I asked, dousing them with my pedestrian whine.
His dark eyes swept over me, the case, and seemed to sum up the general situation as one he didn’t approve of. “I sent her home,” he said.
Annoyance flared in my chest. “Why?” The case wobbled again and I grasped at it.
He sighed and strode towards me. “Let go of that.” To my utter chagrin, he picked up the case as though it were filled with shredded paper, carrying it efficiently down to the fourth floor and setting it down. Nina remained contented and entertained in his other arm, clapping her hands at me as if to illustrate how clever her daddy was. “Take Nina and I’ll get the rest of the cases,” he said dispassionately. “You can start packing the smaller stuff in your car. I’ll be ten minutes.”
It took him eight. I caught him jogging up the stairs on his third pass, and stared up at him in amazement. Had he flown up this morning for
this
? We’d barely even exchanged more than two words yesterday when I’d left; I hadn’t expected to see him until next weekend.
After completely abandoning us with no explanation last week, suddenly he was father of the year? I should have been grateful but I was too busy trying to hold my head above water in a sea of swirling resentment. I’d expected a whole week to get some perspective back before facing him again.
He arrived at the side of my double-parked Prius as I was squeezing in the pram.
“No, that’s not going to work,” he said. I watched, miffed, as he began rearranging the contents of the trunk, transferring items to the back seat. It became obvious very quickly to both of us that there was no way the cases and the bags and the pram and car seat were making it in together on the same trip.
“How did you get it all here?” he asked.
I glanced at him. “Brian and Monica helped me,” I said, awkward.
His mouth tightened. “Have you taken the lease already? Your friend mentioned it’s in Harlem.”
“No.” I kept my response short. I knew it wasn’t the safest, most salubrious area in the city, but it was cheap and the square-footage was impressive. It was also closer to day care and the office than Brooklyn, my next choice if this apartment didn’t work out.
He exhaled firmly. I could see all kinds of trouble brewing behind his eyes. They shifted and bubbled like caramel cooking in the bright morning sunlight. Eyeing the cases, he nodded towards a black town car parked at the other side of the tree-lined street.
“I’ll follow you. I’ve got plenty of space to take the rest of the bags,” he said. His voice was low enough to warn against any argument. “I’ll take care of Nina while you look around.”
I’d expected another officious complaint from him, possibly a thinly-disguised edict to organise my life better. My lips parted to contradict him until I realised he’d offered to help. No strings, no judgement, just exactly the same help that I’d been hoping to get from Monica. My lips clamped shut again. Damn.
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks, Jay.”
His brows lifted, but he stopped short of smiling. He picked up the two cases and walked across the street, leaving me free to get Nina strapped into her seat.
#
“It just needs a couple of coats of paint,” the man from the agency told me optimistically. “A little bit of TLC and this place could be amazing.”
I nodded, wondering if the sludge was toxic. Cutting the viewing short, I ran across the street, dodging taxis and horns blasting, some ten minutes later. Jay got out of his car to meet me. “That was quick,” he said. I could see by the tension in his jaw that he was only just keeping some kind of emphatic reaction to himself. I guessed it was probably horror, much like mine. “How was it?”
“I wouldn’t even take a dog into it,” I said, tiredly.
It was slight, but there was a mild release of tension from around his eyes. A breeze gusted, knocking the now dried blond tufts of hair across his brow. “Can we go, then?” he said. A trace of impatience roughened his tone. He brushed the hair back with a distracted hand.
“Go where?”
“My apartment,” he said, shutting the back door of his car with a thud.
Hesitating, I watched him stride towards the driver’s seat. The tension had eased, but a black cloud of frustration seemed to have descended in its place. It was so dense that it rendered me mute for a moment. He had Nina’s baby seat installed in his car now.
“Were you planning on discussing this with me?” I asked, putting my hands on my hips.
“Yes, I was,” he said. He got into the driver’s seat and eyed me expectantly. “In D.C.. Do you remember the address?”
“I have other apartments to see,” I said. I crossed by arms in front of my chest. “I’m going to Hell’s Kitchen.”
“I don’t know about the kitchen part,” he said, “but for the rest, you seem pretty determined to get there and take my daughter with you.”
I blanched. “I’m sorry—what?”
He gestured around at the desolate surroundings. “In what state of mind did you imagine that this was a safe place to live alone with a baby? For that matter, how can you be driving around New York with no place to stay and a baby strapped into the backseat of your car?” His brows lifted in astonishment. “Have you always been like this, or are you just trying to piss me off?”
My lips parted in wordless shock.
“You have a daughter,” he said, his voice grating against my growing indignation. His jaw was angled like a weapon. “You have a baby to take care of–”
“I do take care of her,” I said, breathless.
“And she needs a home,” he said. “Not some dive in the middle of Harlem. This isn’t about you or your bohemian ideas of how we’re all supposed to live our lives. We don’t live in a socialist utopia where it’s safe to being up a child in a place like this. Not my child, at any rate.” He flexed his jaw. “Until you’ve got a better plan that this, you’re coming to stay at mine, and don’t argue with me on this, Stella.”
“Who the hell do you think you are, speaking to me like that?”
“I’m Nina’s father,” he said. He leaned in so that the words grated against me. “I don’t want to make this any more complicated than it has to be, Stella, but I will get my lawyers involved if you don’t start making some effort to include me in Nina’s life. I’m trying to help you.”
It wasn’t just alarm—or indignation at his unfair assessment of my ideals—that coursed through me; it was fear. It plummeted like a stone dropped into deep water. In a blinding flash, I wondered how I’d gotten here, standing in the middle of a dusty, unfamiliar street, homeless and utterly without a plan for the future. I had no money. I had a job that sent me all around the country at short notice. I had no roots, and no family. I had none of the advantages parents wanted for their children.
I had nothing, I realised with terror, to fight Jay with if he decided he wanted to fight me.
CHAPTER NINE
Jay
I waited while Stella put Nina down for a nap. I stared out at the aerial view of Central Park from the kitchen for a couple of minutes. The city spread before me, calm at this safe distance, but my heart was still racing. Anger wasn’t quite the word to describe it. It had frightened me to see Nina anywhere near that rundown building. It was staggering how quickly her well-being had become so tantamount to mine. Not only that, it had horrified me to see Stella charging through that door—the paint blistering and the lock clearly broken—with that oblivious determination of hers.
Why—oh, why—was she so bloody-minded? She needed help. This propensity of hers to take off at the slightest suggestion of conflict went against all common sense. Even though I knew perfectly well that she’d survived fine without me until now … in all that was holy,
how
? I couldn’t understand how anyone got by like this. I couldn’t understand how Stella—an obviously successful and capable woman—could make such lousy choices about her life.
Even now, knowing that my daughter was safe inside my home, my hackles refused to die down. This had to stop. I rubbed my face. It was going to stop today. Stella was not leaving this house until she had a proper home to take Nina to. I’d buy her a fucking house if I had to, today. Her reaction to that would be off the charts, of course, but I didn’t care. I’d fight her on this for as long as it took to ensure my daughter was getting the care she needed. It was my job to provide for them, and I intended to.
“She’s down.”
I turned. Stella was leaning against the door frame with her arms crossed in front of her chest. Her tone was about as grim as her countenance. She was dishevelled—distracting in shorts and a tank top, if I was honest— and a little flushed from the heat outside, but otherwise she bristled with a white-hot current.