Baby Under The Mistletoe

CHAPTER THREE

SOLEIL FELT as if the words were lodged in her throat, refusing to exit. A wave of nausea the likes of which she hadn’t felt in weeks hit her, and her face broke out in a cold sweat.

West was not a man she wanted to raise a child with. She’d yet to meet anyone she wanted to raise a child with, but especially not a trained killer, whose politics and values were as opposite hers as they could possibly be.

Despite that, he deserved the truth.

“Yes,” she said, her mouth too dry.

No sooner did she speak than the nausea turned into a very real need to throw up. This wasn’t morning sickness-that had gone away around the twelve-week mark-it was a full-blown case of nerves.

Covering her mouth, she darted across the kitchen and down the hallway to the bathroom, and bent over the toilet just in time to lose it.

West followed her. She felt his hand on her back then, and he was holding her pigtails away from her face as she vomited.

When she was finished, he said, “That was pretty spectacular.”

“Shut up,” she mumbled.

She went to the sink and rinsed her mouth, then wiped her face.

She took a few deep, steadying breaths, then turned to face West again. But she couldn’t quite meet his gaze in this small, claustrophobic space. Instead, she edged past him and went into the living room, where she dropped to the couch and put her face in her hands.

West followed, and she could feel the couch sag as he sat next to her.

She could feel the tension in the air so thick it was hard to breathe, and she had to break it now before she suffocated. He was a good man, regardless of their differences. He didn’t deserve this.

She looked him in the eyes again.

“It’s your baby,” she said quietly.

Worry transformed into understanding, and he exhaled loudly, leaning back against the couch as he did so. But his hands, one on each thigh, remained tense.

“You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure,” she said.

“You’re sure.” This time, a statement instead of a question.

Soleil watched the storm of emotions in his gaze, and she grew more terrified by the second. Before she could come up with any lame excuses for not having told him sooner, he stood and looked as if he might explode.

“What the hell, Soleil? What the hell? You didn’t tell me? You were just going to go on your merry way without letting the other parent in the situation know this key piece of information? It didn’t freaking occur to you that the father might like to know he’s the father?”

“I-I-”

“You thought maybe you could slip this one by me?”

His voice was too loud now, nearly a shout, and Soleil was painfully aware of all the adolescent ears nearby that could be hearing the argument.

“Could you please lower your voice? The kids-”

“Oh, what, now you’re worried about being a good role model?”

“That’s not fair.”

“You don’t need your baby daddy? Is that it? Is that what you tell the kids here?”

She winced at his bad imitation of a street accent. Any other time, she’d have given him an earful for that kind of comment, but now she didn’t have any room to talk-not literally or figuratively.

“West-” she said as calmly as she could, but he was closing the distance between them now, and panic rose in her chest.

“It’s crap!” he said, in her face now, close enough that she could inhale his woodsy scent. “You don’t do this to people. This is utter crap!”

She didn’t have any right to lose her temper now. It was his turn, and she had to take whatever he doled out. She owed him that. So she bit her tongue.

“You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

Her apology seemed to take the wind out of his sails. His shoulders slumped, and he retreated a step.

Shaking his head, he said, “How could you? How could you do this? How could you keep this from me?”

“I wanted to tell you in person. I’m sorry it’s taken so long.”

“You wanted to tell me in person,” he repeated numbly. “All this time, you didn’t even call me.”

“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

“I think this warranted a phone call before now,” he said.

He didn’t sound calm so much as he sounded defeated. West Morgan, in the time she’d known him, had never sounded defeated. In fact, part of what had made her so willing to spar with him was that he’d seemed undefeatable.

“You’re right. I kept putting off deciding how to tell you, another day, then another and another until all of a sudden there you were driving down the road toward my goat.”

His expression turned wounded. “Did you really plan to tell me?”

Busted.

Her mouth went dry, and she worked to find the ability to speak again.

“Honestly, I wasn’t sure what to do. I knew it would be wrong to keep it from you, but I…I put off deciding. That’s the truth.”

“Okay.”

She could see him processing the information, trying to decide on his next course of action, which was what she feared most.

Captain West Morgan would have a very narrow idea of the right way to handle this situation. Get married. Settle down. Make the best of it. She’d become the target of his next mission: Operation Family.

With the echoes of their last argument and his 1950s clichés ringing in her head, she had no interest in becoming a cozy family of three. She had no interest in any of the things that would entail-the compromises, the subjugation, the loss of freedom.

“I decided on my own to have the baby, and I don’t expect anything from you. Just so you know.” Though she knew these words were wasted and unnecessary.

“Of course I’m going to be involved,” he said.

“Of course,” she echoed weakly.

“I’m the father. I won’t let my own child grow up without a father.”

He looked stunned but determined, and Soleil knew she wasn’t going to convince him of anything now. But she couldn’t help standing her ground-she was just as unyielding as he when it came to her ideals.

“You live in Colorado, and I live in California. So what? You’re going to commute here to do diaper duty and midnight feedings?”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do. You’ve had months to think about this, and I’ve had a couple of minutes.”

Right. It wasn’t fair of her to be sticking it to him now.

“Maybe I should skip lunch and go,” he continued. “We’ve both got a lot to think about.”

She cast a glance at him, so much larger than her, so much more male. So foreign, so other…

He both intrigued and repelled her, even now. She wanted to run away from him, and she wanted to reach out and knead the tension from his shoulders.

“I’ll be around. You’ve got my number,” she said. “Feel free to call if you want to discuss this further.”

His posture, beneath the gray wool fisherman’s sweater he wore, remained slumped. She hated to acknowledge that she’d been the one to take that toll on him. Even at her best, she’d never felt as if she’d beaten him. Until now. It was a bitter win, if it could even be called that.

He turned to go, and as she watched him walk toward the door, she had a bewildering urge to grab hold of him and beg him not to leave. But she didn’t.

Of course not.

It wasn’t in her vocabulary to ask for help.

Except now, walking out the door was the man she had a sneaking sense of dread she might need, whether she wanted to need him or not.

JULIA MORGAN had never set out to try online dating.

And as she sat in the Guerneville coffee shop, nervously scanning the passersby outside the window for a familiar face, she could hardly recall why it had ever seemed like a good idea.

It had all sort of, well…happened. First came the laptop computer her three sons had given her for her birthday. She’d never been a computer person, and she didn’t really see the need for it since she’d managed to teach for thirty years without one.

Then came her newfound love of e-mail. Who knew it could be so much fun. Instant communication with her friends, children and grandchildren. It was almost too good to be true. She could even get pictures of them on the computer, just like in all those commercials.

And, she’d figured out how to upload the pictures to the Internet and order prints from a Web site.

Amazing.

But that was what had led to the whole online-dating embarrassment. She didn’t dare tell anyone, because who would approve? Certainly not her friends, most of whom were either married, or if they were divorced like her, they were content or resigned to being alone. And she couldn’t tell her kids, who’d likely worry about her or decide it was time she move in with one of them for closer supervision.

Really, it had started so innocently. She’d accidentally clicked on an online-dating ad a few weeks ago, and before she knew it, she was putting in her zip code and looking through a list of single men her age. Then a little box had popped up telling her that all she had to do was upload her own photo, fill out a profile form, and she’d be able to contact any man she wanted.

She’d immediately turned off the whole computer and went to do some gardening, horrified at herself for even considering such a thing.

But there was one man she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about.

His screen name, letsbefrank, had made her smile for no particular reason, and she’d very much liked his eyes-kind and brown, the sort of eyes that looked right at you, in, well…a frank expression.

Turns out, his real name was actually Frank Fiorelli, and he was now late for the meet-for-coffee date they’d scheduled after exchanging e-mails.

Okay, maybe he wasn’t actually late. Julia couldn’t remember if she’d set her silver watch five minutes fast the way she did the clocks in her house, and being the perpetually early person she was, she’d gotten to the coffee shop a full half hour before the date. So, she’d been waiting a while, growing more and more anxious as each second ticked by.

Her green-tea latte, neglected on the table, was still full. She took a sip and discovered it had cooled to room temperature.

Then a buzzing sound came from her purse-the cell phone set to vibrate so as not to interrupt her coffee date-and she let out a sigh of relief, thinking it must be Frank calling to cancel.

Which would be great, since she now understood from her terrible case of nerves that she wasn’t cut out for this Internet-dating stuff after all.

But the name on the cell phone’s little screen was West, her middle son.

She answered with a tense-sounding hello.

“Hey, Mom,” he said.

Was it her imagination, or did he sound a little distressed, too?

“Oh, West, honey, how are you?”

“I just got into town, actually.”

“What?” Julia blinked in surprise. “Today? I thought you weren’t arriving for two more weeks.”

A pause, during which she wondered if he’d somehow discovered her Internet dallying.

“It’s Dad,” he finally said, his voice tight.

Julia had been divorced from the General long enough that mention of his name didn’t evoke any particular emotion, but she certainly didn’t wish him any harm, and her stomach flip-flopped at West’s tone.

“What is it? Is he okay?”

“He’s having some problems I need to deal with in person,” he answered vaguely. Julia knew for sure something was wrong, but she decided it was better not to push.

West would tell her the whole story when he was ready. But her mother radar was picking up signals. Something was definitely wrong, with the General, or West, or both.

“Will you be staying with me? Can you come for dinner tonight?”

Her gaze fell on a tall, well-built man with close-cropped gray hair and kind brown eyes, headed toward her, and she barely heard what her son said next.

“I need to stay with Dad for now, but I may want to move to your guest room once I’ve got him squared away. And I’d love to have dinner with you, but I’ll have to let you know later, if that’s okay.”

“Sure, dear,” she said hurriedly. “I have to go now. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.”

She hung up on the sound of her son’s befuddled “Oh, okay, talk to you la-”

Then Julia tucked the phone in her bag and took a deep breath in a failed effort to soothe her jangled nerves.

Frank Fiorelli was standing inside the doorway of the coffee shop now, looking around for her. His gaze swept in her direction, and she smiled tentatively at him.

She hadn’t felt this keyed up, frantic and nervous since her early twenties-the last time she’d been on the dating scene, she realized with some chagrin.

Dear Lord.

He was walking toward her now, his confident stride a stark contrast to the shaky feeling that had overtaken her.

First impression-she liked him. The lines on his face were all smile lines, as if he’d spent a lifetime in a good mood, and it had the effect of making him seem as though he was smiling even when he wasn’t.

She stood when he reached her table.

“Frank?” she said, feeling like a ridiculous schoolgirl.

He smiled broadly, revealing a set of white, healthy teeth that looked real. Never a thing to take for granted in the over-fifty crowd.

“You must be Julia.”

She was about to extend her hand for a handshake when he leaned in and gave her a brief, friendly hug. This could have been awkward or even creepy, but he managed to make it feel utterly natural, and Julia found herself charmed already.

“I’m going to grab a cup of coffee. Can I get you anything while I’m at the counter?” he asked.

“Oh, no.” She cast a glance at her now-cold cup of tea. “I’m fine.”

He grinned again, and she thought she detected the slightest hint of nervousness, which made her feel a little more at ease. He was human, like her.

She sat and took advantage of the chance to stare at Frank as he waited to place his order, his back to her. He wore a sage-green T-shirt tucked into a pair of worn khaki pants, a small braided leather belt that also seemed to have lived a long and well-loved life. On his feet were a pair of brown leather thong sandals, revealing tanned skin and well-shaped toes.

The whole effect was casual, relaxed, unpretentious…

Nice.

Her gaze returned to his broad shoulders, solid and strong, tapering to a narrow waist. He looked like a man who stayed in shape, and she remembered his online profile, which had read like an itinerary at an outdoor-adventure resort-kayaking, hiking, surfing, biking…

Could Julia keep up? She managed to stay fit between her daily yoga practice, a pilates class twice a week, long walks and hikes and religiously working in her garden, but she was no extreme-sports person. Not by a long shot.

Heck, she wasn’t even sure what extreme sports meant.

Oh, well, at the age of fifty-eight, she was as happy as she could be with her body, and she wasn’t about to worry for more than a moment about how Frank Fiorelli would feel about her physique. She was strong and healthy and still looked nice in a pair of jeans, and if he wasn’t happy with that, he could keep right on looking.

Yet another glorious thing about aging-the loss of the crippling self-consciousness of youth.

Frank returned to the table with coffee in hand, sat across from Julia and grinned again. “So,” he said. “You’re even prettier than your photo. Too bad you can’t say the same about me.”

She laughed, grateful for the joke to break the ice.

“You’re the first person I’ve met online,” she confessed.

“Really?”

She nodded. “It’s even stranger than I thought it would be.”

“Can I make a confession, too?”

Oh, dear. “Sure.”

“My daughter signed me up on the site without my knowing it.”

“No!”

He shook his head, smiling ruefully. “She told me about it afterward, said I might start getting e-mail from ladies interested in going on dates with me.”

“And?”

“I thought, am I so pathetic my daughter needs to intervene in my personal life?”

“I wouldn’t say that’s pathetic. It’s kind of sweet, actually. Like an older version of Sleepless in Seattle.”

“Anyway, I figured I’d better log onto the Web site and see what the heck she’d gotten me into, and before I could stop myself I was looking at your profile and e-mailing you.”

“Wow. I’m the first person you contacted?”

“The only one. When I saw that self-deprecating smile of yours, I knew there had to be something special about you. Not many people could communicate so much with one facial expression. But you…it’s all written right there on your face.”

Julia blushed. She’d been told before that she wore her emotions on her sleeve, but she’d never quite gotten used to the fact that she could be so easily read.

“Self-deprecation is underrated,” Frank said. “A person who knows how to laugh at herself is a person I want to call my friend.”

“I’m glad you e-mailed me,” Julia said. “I heard from a bunch of men. It was kind of bewildering to get all that e-mail once I signed up on the site.”

“What made you join?”

She laughed. “Foolishness, mostly. I clicked on one of those ads by accident, and next thing I knew, I was looking at your profile.”

“It wasn’t foolishness-it was fate.”

“That sounds far more romantic than my version of it.”

He sipped his coffee. They’d already done a lot of the getting-to-know-you conversation via e-mail and phone, which, Julia realized now, was probably a mistake. It left them with less to talk about face-to-face.

“I was thinking, maybe you’d like to take a walk after this?” Frank said finally.

“Where to?”

“I do a little sculpting. I have a studio down the street. I don’t normally bring people to it, so it’s a mess, but something tells me you might enjoy it. Also, my wily daughter will be there, so you can meet the person responsible for our having met.”

“Sure, that sounds lovely. Why don’t we go now. These are portable,” she said, nodding at the paper cups.

“Great. Let’s go.”

They left the coffee shop, then headed north along a side street. The day was sunnier here than it had been in Promise, and Julia breathed in the fresh, crisp air, enjoying looking at the funky shops they passed along the way.

Frank’s gait was casual and not too hurried. He made a point of keeping the conversation rolling along, telling her anecdotes about the town of Guerneville, and Julia was grateful since she still felt too nervous to think straight.

A few minutes later, they were standing in front of a brown-shingled building with large windows and a sharply pitched roof. The first floor of the building was a business called the Green Gallery.

“This is my place. My daughter runs the gallery, and I work upstairs in the loft.”

“Oh.” Julia blinked at the news, as she quickly reformed her mental picture of Frank as retired engineer and all-around outdoorsman to…sculptor and art-gallery owner? He had a few surprises up his sleeve. She hoped his artwork wasn’t awful, so she could find something nice to say about it without lying.

“Come on in and meet Chloe.”

Julia followed him into the light, clean space of the gallery. Polished bamboo floors gleamed, and the white walls bounced light around so much that overhead lights were barely necessary.

“Hey, Pop,” said a slender, pretty, dark-haired woman who looked to be in her late twenties.

She glanced curiously from Frank to Julia, smiling warmly.

“Chloe, this is my friend Julia Morgan. She lives over at Promise Lake. I thought I’d show her around the gallery and studio.”

“Great. I just finished putting up the new stuff.”

“Chloe was an art history major in college. Poor girl can’t get a real job so she has to work for me.”

Chloe rolled her eyes at this. “Don’t believe a word he says.”

“Actually, I’m lucky to have her,” he confessed. “She had a choice between working at a prestigious gallery in San Francisco, or staying here in backwater Guerneville to help out her old pa.”

“It wasn’t such a hard choice. Dad lets me do whatever I want with this place, so I get to display the work of environmentally conscious artists. Most of the works here are made entirely with recycled materials.”

“That’s wonderful,” Julia said as her gaze landed on a dazzling installation of brightly colored smashed aluminum cans.

At first the piece looked to be made out of something else entirely, and Julia wouldn’t have guessed about the cans until she heard the words recycled materials.

“And she tells me what I’m doing wrong with my works in progress,” Frank added in a teasing tone. “She’s a brutal critic.”

“Dad’s ridiculously modest,” Chloe said. “He’ll never tell you that he’s one of the pioneers of green art.”

“Oh?”

“He started working with recycled materials in the early seventies, when green was still just a color.”

“He never mentioned…” Julia said.

“He’s pretty good.” Chloe smiled. “You’ll see.”

“Remember, she’s trying to get me a date. C’mon,” Frank said, nodding toward a door in the back of the room. “I’ll show you my studio.”

Julia followed him up a flight of stairs. The second floor was a wide-open space filled with soft light from the wall of windows on one side of the room. The other walls were wood, giving the place a warm glow. A large table was littered with various tools and pieces of odd materials. In the center of the room stood a metal sculpture-a meticulously crafted globe that, upon closer inspection, Julia could see was a representation of the earth.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“I’m afraid it’s a bit too masculine. Nature and earth should feel more feminine, don’t you think?”

Julia gave the matter some thought. “Maybe you’re right.”

“Perhaps you can help me figure out how to fix it.”

She laughed. “I’m a retired elementary school teacher. Most of my art expertise involves pasting macaroni to construction paper.”

“You’re being modest.”

She turned her attention to a finished sculpture in the corner, a piece that looked a bit like a bird in flight. It was both stark and stunning.

“That’s my raven,” Frank said. “What do you think?”

“Very striking. What’s it made of?”

“Old bicycle tires, meticulously cut into tiny pieces.”

And as she got closer, she could see it was true. The tread patterns had the effect of looking like the texture of feathers.

“I used to sculpt with traditional materials, but one day I looked around and thought, ‘Why am I putting more garbage out there in the world, when there’s already so much discarded stuff the planet’s nearly drowning in it?’”

Julia looked at him, impressed that a man of their generation could be so aware of his own environmental impact. Every other man she’d known over fifty was too busy driving his giant SUV to the golf course or jetting off on vacation, to worry about such things.

Heck, she hardly worried about such things, comfortable as she was in her safe middle-class life. Here was a man who devoted his art to making important political statements. Was she political enough for him, or would he ultimately decide she was bourgeois and dull?

This was ridiculous. She was too old to be so worried about impressing a man.

She looked at Frank and realized he’d been watching her brood. “I know this isn’t the cheeriest stuff. What do you say we get out of here and take a stroll downtown?”

“Oh, thank you, but I should probably be getting home soon.”

The wind had been taken out of her sails. She suddenly had the feeling something was very wrong, and she was wasting her time here with this Frank person. Feeling self-conscious again, she took a sip of tea to have something to do with her mouth.

“I know how you feel, Julia-like we’re too old for this online-dating stuff. Maybe too old for dating at all, right?”

She smiled, feeling her cheeks redden that he’d managed to read her mind so easily.

“Maybe we are,” he continued. “But what if we aren’t? What if we miss out on something wonderful by thinking like that?”

She looked at him again, at the way his eyes crinkled at the corners, and she remembered why she’d wanted to meet him in the first place-because he seemed like a good man. Because he seemed like someone she might be able to care about.

He still did. He had a daughter who clearly liked him, and he had what looked so far like a vibrant, interesting life.

“What do you say we meet for dinner later this week?” she blurted before she could lose her nerve.

“I’d like that.”

“I’ll call you to make plans?”

“I’ll look forward to it,” he said.

Whatever else was wrong-with West, or her ex-husband or her own ability to seize the day-she couldn’t let it ruin this one little grasp she’d made at trying to find happiness a second time around.