LITMIR.BIZ

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wanted to be. She played queen to his king. Looking back, something he rarely did, what they had called love seemed ridiculously superficial.

      And in the end it had been. It had not stood up to the test life had thrown at it. Despite the fact they had taken every precaution, Sarah was pregnant.

      Funny how, when he’d found out, he’d felt a rush, not of fear, but of excitement. He’d been willing to do whatever it took to give his baby a family, a good life.

      Sarah had been stunned by his enthusiasm. “I’m not keeping it.”

      To this day, he could feel the bitterness, a force so real and so strong, he could nearly taste it on his tongue, when he remembered those words and the look on her face when she’d said them. “It.”

      He’d actually, briefly and desperately, considered keeping the baby himself. But reality had set in, and reluctantly he had gone along with Sarah. He’d stuck with her through the pregnancy and the birth.

      It was a boy.

      And then he’d made the mistake.

      He’d held his son in his arms. He had felt the incredible surge of love and protectiveness. He had felt that moment of connection so intense that it seemed nothing else in his life but that moment had ever mattered.

      He had known, I was born to do this.

      But it was too late. He’d held his baby, his son, his light, for about five minutes. And then he’d let go. He had not met the adoptive parents.

      Every other reality had faded after that. Nothing mattered to him, not school, not life, not anything at all. His grief was real and debilitating.

      Sarah, on the other hand, had chosen not to see the baby, and she moved on eagerly, as if nothing had happened. He was part of what she left behind, but really, he had continued with her throughout the pregnancy out of a sense of honor and decency. But he had never forgiven her the “it.”

      He dropped out of college a month before he was supposed to graduate, packed a backpack, bought a ticket to anywhere. He’d traveled. Over time, he had come to dislike going to places with children. The sound of their laughter, their energy, reminded him of what he was supposed to be and was not.

      When he’d come across Sarah’s obituary a few years ago, killed in a ski accident in Switzerland, he had taken his lack of emotion as a sign he’d been a man unworthy of raising that child, anyway.

      “Are you all right?”

      He hadn’t seen her come down the hallway, but now Dannie was standing in the doorway, Jake wrapped up in a pure white towel, only his round, rosy face peeking out, and a few spikes of dark hair.

      Her blouse was soaked, showing off full, lush curves, and she looked as rosy as the baby.

      Dannie looked at home with Jake, comfortable with her life. Why was she content to raise other people’s children, when she looked as if she’d been born to hold freshly bathed babies of her own?

      “All right?” he stammered, getting up from the couch. “Yeah. Of course.”

      But he wasn’t. He was acutely aware that being around these kids, around Dannie, was making him feel things he had been content not to feel, revisit places he had been relieved to leave behind.

      All he had to do was get through the rest of tonight. Tomorrow he’d figure out how to get rid of them, or maybe she would decide to go.

      That would be best for everyone involved, and to hell with his sister’s disapproval.

      Though what if Mel cut her own vacation short? She needed it.

      “Are you sure you’re all right?” Dannie asked, frowning.

      He pulled himself together, vowed he was not going back to the memory of holding his baby. He could not revisit the pain of letting that little guy go and survive. He couldn’t.

      He was going to focus totally and intensely on this moment.

      He said, with forced cheer, “As all right as a guy can be whose been beaten at noughts and crosses by a four-year-old, thirty-three times in a row.”

      Because of his vow to focus on the moment, he became acutely aware of what it held. Dannie. Her hair was curling from the moistness, her cheeks were on fire, her blouse was sticking to her in all the right places.

      He glanced at Susie, who was drawing a picture on the back of a used piece of paper, bored with the lack of competition.

      Her picture showed a mommy, a daddy, a child suspended between their stick arms, big smiles on their oversize heads.

      Despite his vow, the thought hit him like a slug. The world he had walked away from.

      His son would have been three years older than his niece. Did he look like Susie? Worse, did he look like him?

      He swore under his breath, running a hand through his hair.

      “Mr. Cole!”

      Susie snickered, delighted at the tone of voice he’d earned from her nanny.

      “Sorry,” he muttered, “Let’s go get something to eat.” His mind wandered to the thought of Danielle eating spaghetti. “There’s a great Italian restaurant around the corner. Five-star.”

      Dannie rolled her eyes. “Have you ever taken a baby and a four-year-old to a restaurant?”

      No, he wanted to scream at her, because I walked away from that life.

      “So, we’ll order pizza,” he snapped.

      “Pizza,” Susie breathed, “my favorite.”

      “Pizza, small children and white leather. Hmm,” Dannie said.

      “I don’t care about the goddamned leather!” he said.

      He expected another reprimand, but she was looking at him closely, way too closely. Just as he had seen things about her that she might have been unaware of, he got the same feeling she saw things like that about him.

      “Pizza sounds great,” she said soothingly.

      Glad to be able to move away from her, to take charge, even of something so simple, he went and got a menu out of the drawer by the phone.

      “What kind?” he asked.

      “Cheese,” Susie told him.

      “Just cheese?”

      “I hate everything else.”

      “And what about you, Miss Pringy? Can we order an adult pizza for us? The works?”

      “Does that include anchovies?”

      “It does.”

      “I think I’m in heaven,” she said.

      He looked at her wet shirt, the beautiful swelling roundness of a real woman. He thought maybe he could be in heaven, too, if he let himself go there. But he wasn’t going to.

      She glanced down at where he was looking and turned bright, bright red. She waltzed across the space between them, and placed the towel-wrapped baby in his arms.

      “I need to go put on something dry.”

      The baby was warm, the towel slightly damp. A smell tickled his nostrils: something so pure it stung his eyes.

      He realized he’d had no idea what heaven was until that moment. He realized the survival of his world probably depended on getting these children, and her, back out of his life.

      She wanted to go. He wanted her to go.

      So what was the problem?

      The problem was, he suspected, both of them knew what they wanted, and neither of them knew what they needed.

      Dannie reemerged just as the pizza was brought to the front desk. She was dressed casually, in black

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