LITMIR.BIZ

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as bugs in a basket.”

      Addie stopped stock-still beside the ancient portable TV on its rickety stand. She sucked air like a bull about to charge. “I can’t talk to you. I want to kill you.” She planted her fists on her hips and commanded, “Untie James right this minute.”

      Levi didn’t budge. “Now, Addie honey, don’t get yourself all worked up. James has told me the truth, accepted his responsibility to you and the baby and promised to do the right thing.”

      Addie gasped in outrage and whipped her head around to glare at James. “You told him what?”

      Oh, great. As if all this was his fault? He suggested mildly, “Given the situation, arguing with your grandfather didn’t seem like a good idea.”

      “I don’t... I can’t...” Addie sputtered, furious, glancing back and forth between him and the old man. And then she pinned her grandfather with another baleful glare. “Of course James confessed. What choice did he have? You held a shotgun to his head.”

      Levi blustered, “He confessed because it’s true and we both know that it is.”

      “No. No, it is not true. James is not my baby’s daddy. How many ways can I say it? How in the hell am I going to get through to you?”

      Levi made a humphing sound and flung out an arm in James’s direction. “If not him, then who?”

      By then, Addie’s plump cheeks were beet red with fury and frustration. She drew in a slow, hard breath. “Fine. All right. It is none of your business until I’m ready to tell you and you ought to know that. But if you just have to know, it’s Brandon. Brandon is my baby’s father.”

      Levi blinked three times in rapid succession. And then he let out a mocking cackle of a laugh. “Brandon Hall?”

      James fully understood Levi’s disbelief. A local poor boy made good who’d designed supersuccessful video games for a living, Brandon Hall was never all that hale and hearty. Recently, he’d died of cancer, having been bedridden for months before he passed on. It seemed pretty unlikely that Brandon had been in any condition to father a child—not in the last few months, anyway. And Addie’s stomach was still flat. She couldn’t be that far along. Uh-uh. James didn’t buy Addie’s story any more than Levi did.

      “Yes,” Addie insisted tightly. “Brandon is the dad.”

      “I may be old, but I’m not senile,” Levi reminded her. “There is no way that Brandon Hall could’ve done what needed doing to put you in this predicament, Addison Anne, and you know that as well as I do.”

      Addie fumed some more. “You are so thickheaded. Honestly, I cannot talk to you...” She turned to James and spoke softly, gently. Soothingly, even. “I am so sorry, James, for what my grandpa has done.” She gave him the big eyes. God, she was cute. “Are you hurt?”

      He nodded, wincing. “He got the jump on me, whacked me on the back of the head, hard, out at my new place. Knocked me out cold. I’m not sure how long I was unconscious, but when I woke up, I was here.”

      She hissed in a breath and whirled to pin her grandfather with another accusing glare.

      Levi played it off. “He’s fine. Hardheaded. All the Bravos are. Everybody knows that.”

      “You hit him, Grandpa.” She threw out a hand in James’s direction. “You hurt him. And you have restrained him against his will.” Levi started to speak. “Shush,” she commanded. “Do not say another word to me. I can’t even look at you right now.” She turned back to James. “I really am so, so sorry...” James sat very still and tried his best to look appropriately noble and wounded. She came closer. “Can I...take a peek, see how bad it is?”

      “Sure.” He turned his head so she could see.

      And then she was right there, bending over him, smelling of sunshine and clean hay and something else, something purely womanly, wonderfully sweet. “Oh!” she cried. “It’s a big bump. And you’re bleeding...”

      “I’m all right,” he said. It was the truth. The pain and the pounding had lessened in the past few minutes. And the closer Addie got, the better he felt. “And there’s not that much blood—is there?”

      “No, just a dribble of it. But blood is blood and that’s not good.”

      He turned and met her enormous eyes. “I’ll be all right. I’m sure I will.”

      She drew back. He wished she wouldn’t. It was harder to smell her now she’d moved away. “I don’t know what to say, James. I feel horrible about this. We need to patch you up immediately...”

      “Don’t untie him!” shouted Levi.

      Addie just waved a hand in the old guy’s direction and kept those big eyes on James. “Of course I will untie you.”

      “No!” Levi hollered.

      She ignored him and spoke directly to James. “I will untie you right now if you’ll only promise me not to call the police on my crazy old granddad.”

      “I’m not crazy!” Levi huffed. “I’m not crazy and he’s the dad—and you are not, under any circumstances, to untie him yet.”

      “Grandpa, he is not the dad. Brandon’s the dad.”

      “No.”

      “Yeah—and if you just have to have all the gory details, Brandon was my lifelong friend.” She choked a little then, emotion welling.

      Levi only groaned in impatient disgust. “I know he was your friend. I also know that’s all he was to you—nothing like you and lover boy here. Come on, Addie honey. I wasn’t born yesterday. I’ve seen the way this man looks at you, the way he’s been chasin’ after you—and though I know you’ve been trying to pretend nothing’s going on, it’s plain as the nose on my face that you are just as gone on him as he is on you.”

      “She is?” James barely kept himself from grinning like a fool.

      But no one was looking at him anyway. Levi kept arguing, “James is the daddy, no doubt about it. And, Addie girl, you need to quit telling your old PawPaw lies and admit the truth so that we can move on and fix what doesn’t need to be broken.”

      “I am not lying,” she cried. “Brandon was my best friend in the whole world and he grew up in foster care, with no family, with nothing.”

      “Stop tellin’ me things I already know.”

      “What I am telling you is that he wanted a child, someone to carry on a little piece of him when he was gone. Before he got too sick, he took steps. He had his sperm frozen...” Addie sniffed. Her big eyes brimmed. She blinked furiously, but it was no good. She couldn’t hold back her tears. They overflowed and ran down her cheeks. “And then he asked me if just maybe I would do that for him, if I would have his child so that something would be left of him in this world when he was nothing but ashes scattered on the cold ground...”

      By then James was so caught up in the story he’d pretty much forgotten his own predicament. Everyone in Justice Creek knew that Addie Kenwright and Brandon Hall had been best friends from childhood. People said that, near the end, she’d spent every spare moment at Brandon’s bedside. As the dead man had no one else, Addie had been the one to arrange the funeral service. She and Levi and her sister, Carmen, and Carmen’s husband, Devin, had sat together in the front pew, all the family that Brandon had.

      James asked her gently, “So, then, it was artificial insemination?”

      Addie sniffed, swiped the tears with the back of her hand and nodded. “We tried three times. What’s that they say? The third time’s the charm? Well, it was. But Brandon died the day after the third time. He died not even knowing that he was going to be a dad.”

      James realized he was in awe of Addie Kenwright and her willingness to have a baby for her dying friend.

      Levi,

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