A Baby in the Bargain Read Online Free PDF

rebuttal.
    “So now is the best time for you to do this. Maybe the only time you’ll be able to do it,” GiGi concluded.
    Jani had to laugh a little at her own defeat. Her grandmother was right—once she was pregnant and had a baby, she wasn’t going to be in any position to do something like this. So rather than continue to fight it, she supposed she might as well concede.
    At least, she told herself, GiGi wasn’t trying to talk her out of having a baby on her own anymore, even if the elderly woman didn’t like the idea.
    Jani just hoped her grandmother didn’t think that this project with Gideon Thatcher would keep her from pursuing the baby issue. Because she wouldn’t let that—or anything else—get in her way. She would just schedule her appointments with the infertility doctor around whatever she had to do with the oh-so-good-looking man who saw her as the enemy. She wasn’t going to cancel or postpone anything.
    “Okay, you win,” Jani said over a spoonful of the soup. “But this Thatcher guy isn’t going to settle for only a park in his great-grandfather’s name. He threw that back in my face. If he agrees to let us do something, it’s going to have to be bigger. Probably a lot bigger.”
    GiGi shrugged. “Fine. Do whatever it takes to find out how much damage H.J. did, and if we can do more for the Thatchers themselves to make it up to them. Whatever he wants.”
    “What he wants is a Camden head on a platter.”
    GiGi slid out of the breakfast nook with her empty water glass in one hand. As she passed by the side of the nook where Jani was sitting, she took Jani’s chin in her free hand, and tipped Jani’s face upward for close scrutiny the way she had when Jani was just a little girl.
    “I don’t believe any man would want to take you apart, my darling. You make an old woman jealous.”
    Jani laughed. “GiGi,” she chastised when her grandmother released her face and went to the refrigerator, “you’ve always said you were perfectly content with the way you are—that you’d rather be happy than hungry or all dolled up. Now you’ve changed your mind? Maybe because of your new old boyfriend?”
    During the first of these projects to make amends, Jani’s brother Cade had put GiGi back into contact with GiGi’s first love, Jonah Morrison. GiGi and Jonah had been high school sweethearts in Northbridge, Montana, where they’d both been raised. The young couple had split up after graduation, and GiGi had subsequently met and married Hank Camden.
    But now that both GiGi and Jonah were widowed and coincidentally living in Colorado, they’d reconnected, and they were seeing each other again. Dating—although GiGi complained that she was too old to call it that.
    GiGi laughed as she refilled her water glass. “My new old boyfriend,” she repeated. “Is that what you’re all calling Jonah?”
    “That’s what he is, isn’t he?”
    “I don’t think a man Jonah’s age can be called a ‘boyfriend.’”
    “Your new old suitor? Is that better?”
    “You just tend to the man you’re supposed to be tending to and don’t worry about what to call Jonah,” GiGi advised.
    “You might be tending to Jonah, but I’m not tending to any man anymore, let alone the angry Gideon Thatcher,” Jani corrected. “I’m just doing what you want me to do—trying to get close enough, often enough, to find some things out about him and his family. I’m not doing anything that might qualify as tending to him,” she insisted.
    “Does he look as good in person as he did in that newspaper picture?” GiGi asked as she slid back into the nook with her refilled glass. “That hardhat he was wearing made it impossible to tell some things—like without it, is he bald and lumpy-headed?”
    “No... He has hair,” Jani said, instantly picturing Gideon Thatcher in her mind’s eye. It was something that had been happening incessantly since she’d left him on the street the evening before, dragging her