Somebody's Baby Read Online Free PDF Page B

on the surface, let it go. “So, he’s not hungry?”
    “No. I don’t think he’s hungry.” She kept swaying back and forth and jiggling the baby, who had begun to fret and grunt quietly beneath the blanket. “He’s been sleeping through the night for a couple of months now.”
    “He has?” Adam was rocking now, too. He couldn’t seem to help himself. Though he wasn’t sure, he figured this was how it felt to carry on a conversation on a boat. “Well, maybe he’s sick, or needs some—”
    “Maybe…” she interrupted in the same soothing murmur she used with the baby “…he just had a bad dream.”
    “Dream?” He stopped rocking long enough to consider that. “What on earth does an itty-bitty baby like that have to dream about?”
    “He’s not so itty-bitty. He’s got plenty of things to dream about, a whole lifetime of experiences. His lifetime.” She shot him a look that even in the dim light Adam interpreted as a challenge. I have been this child’s mother for his entire life. Where have you been? “He’ll have his first birthday in two weeks, won’t you, tiger?”
    “He will?” Adam stretched out his fingers, needing a kind of visual cue to help him do some lightning-fast math. “That means he was born in September, so August, July, June—”
    “January.”
    “What?”
    “He was conceived in January, one year, eight months and two weeks ago.” She faced him, her mouth set in grim accusation. “Don’t tell me that doesn’t even ring a bell. Maybe you’ve just been with so many women that it’s all a blur.”
    “Oh, it’s a blur all right, but not for the reasons you think.” He scratched at his cheek while his mind struggled to force all the pieces together. “Maybe you don’t recall this, but…”
    Adam faced a choice. Speak the truth and risk having it sound like a plea for pity or at least leniency for his behavior or skim over it. He could stand here and own up to that bad behavior without any preface or attempt to put it in context.
    His mother had died. He felt he had not only lost the only one who’d seen him truly as her own but that he had also lost his place in his family. When his suggestions to take the Carolina Crumble Pattie to a wider market had been ridiculed by his father and brothers, Adam felt he had lost his reason for staying in Mt. Knott as well. By the time he met Ophelia, a beautiful woman who shared his disdain for the small town, he had not been thinking about right and wrong.
    He had been in pain. He needed to feel he wasn’t a lost cause, just a stray that nobody wanted. He felt worthless and figured he didn’t matter to anyone, not even God. It became easier to fall into sin, he had learned, when you take your eyes off the Lord and start looking at the mess you have made of your life and the mess life has made of the world around you.
    He had long prided himself on being a man who told the truth. It was one of the things, he felt, which set him apart from his father.
    While Conner Burdett was not a dishonest man, he had built his business on the belief that knowledge was power. And Conner protected his own power by controlling what knowledge he allowed others to have.
    On the other hand, telling her about all the years of pain and loneliness that led up to those few wild nights that January would probably just sound like an excuse.
    Adam didn’t like people who made excuses. Besides, he had no way of knowing if he could trust Josie with an emotional truth that could cut him to his core. She may yet prove herself the enemy in a bitter custody case. He decided to tell the truth, but not all of it. It twisted low in his gut that he would follow his father’s path but if she listened, really listened, she would hear the message beneath the words and have an inkling of what had fueled his angry rebellion.
    “If you recall, I came into my inheritance in January.” I lost my mom. My only ally.
    Her determined jawline eased a bit.
    “I found