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“How about your baby. Boy or girl?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I haven’t asked.”
He looked over at her, puzzled. “You don’t want to know?”
“I’ll know soon enough.”
He grimaced, his eyes back on the road. “You’re keeping your distance, aren’t you? Trying not to get attached.”
She turned away. She wasn’t going to get into this with him, especially knowing how he felt about it.
“How about you?” she asked instead. “Have any children?”
He didn’t answer right away and she looked at him, surprised.
“I’ve never been married,” he said at last.
She shrugged. “Neither have I.”
Turning the car off Main Street, he headed toward the side of town she’d told him to aim for. Chivaree had changed a lot over the last few years. Used to be the place had a lonely, wind-swept look that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in an old-fashioned Western. But lately the population had surged and new subdivisions were going up on the hills around the town. Chain stores and restaurants were opening up near the highway. Growth was good but it carried with it the inevitable costs.
“Turn left at the next stop sign,” she told him.
He nodded, then frowned as he made the turn. He didn’t much like the look of the neighborhood. He hadn’t been on this seedy side of town for a while. Things had gotten worse in this crime-infested area.
“You living with somebody?” he asked hopefully. He didn’t want to face the possibility that she hung around here alone.
“No.”
“You’re all on your own?”
“Yes.”
“You should have someone else with you.”
She gave him what sounded almost like a snort. “That’s a nice theory. But the fact is, I don’t have anybody. I’m fine on my own.”
Fine on her own, huh? Then why did she sound so defensive?
She glanced at him sideways. He couldn’t help admiring that flash of her dark eyes and the way her thick, chocolate-colored hair swirled around her face.
“Here it is. Pull over behind that red car.”
He pulled over and turned off the engine, grimacing as he looked at the grungy building she had indicated.
“Thanks for everything,” she said with a breezy tone he knew she was forcing. “I’ll see you at Allman Industries in the morning.”
“Wait a second. I’ll walk you to the door.”
She flinched as though that startled her.
“No,” she said quickly, that wary look on her pretty face again. “Don’t.”
He frowned at her. “Why not?”
She ran her tongue across her lower lip nervously. “The neighbors will see you.”
“The neighbors?” He stared at her incredulously. “So what?”
“They’ll talk.”
“They’ll talk? Just because I act like a gentleman and—”
“They don’t know from gentlemen around here.” She pulled her things together and released her seat belt, ready to fly. “The men they see around here are no gentlemen.”
His eyes narrowed. “Are you telling me—?”
She glanced at him. “Yes. They’ll think—” She shrugged and looked away. “Just let me go alone. I don’t need to be fodder for gossip.”
He bit down on his tongue. Anger was threatening to take over if he didn’t smother it fast. Taking a deep breath, he turned and challenged her.
“Annie, what the hell are you doing living in this kind of neighborhood?”
She lifted her chin defiantly. “The rent’s cheap.”
“Sometimes cheap is the most expensive of all.”
“Listen, Matt. I don’t come from money. I was raised by a single mother who did what she could, but couldn’t do much. I’ve lived in places like this lots of times in my life. I can handle it.”
Giving him a reassuring look, she slipped out of the car and walked quickly toward the entrance to her building.
He sat where he was, staring after her. He didn’t like it. This was no kind of neighborhood to bring a newborn baby back to. He shrugged away the fact that she was considering putting her baby up for adoption.
Assuming, for the sake of this argument, she would be bringing a baby home from the hospital, how was she going to cope in a place like this?
Well, maybe she had some friends.
No. She’d only been in town a month, so she couldn’t possibly have built up the sort of friendships that went with providing for a baby’s needs.
He thought of her, of her pretty face and those dark, beautiful eyes. She didn’t belong here. He wanted to throw caution to the wind and stomp in after her, grab her and—
Yeah, then what? He didn’t know anything about housing here in Chivaree. For all he knew, she was right and this was all that was available. On the other hand, once he got her installed at his office in the Allman building, once he started paying her a decent wage, maybe she would be able to afford a better place. He knew that was a better course. If he tried to go in and force her into doing things the way he thought they should be done, he was going to put her back up permanently.
He almost grinned, thinking of how fierce her pretty face would get, how her perfect little chin would jut out as she defied him. She was a charmer in her own way. Funny how hard she tried to resist that.
Still, the more he thought about it, the more he knew this was just an unacceptable place for her to live. No employee of his should live like this.
He grimaced. Who was he trying to kid? Annie wasn’t going to be just any employee. That baby she was carrying was taking on larger than life proportions in his mind—and it was no mystery to him why that was.
It had only been a few weeks since he’d found out he had a child himself. Out there in the world somewhere was a baby he’d never known about. That was a completely mind-blowing concept and he still wasn’t used to it. So many questions remained unanswered.
It made him sick to think that Penny, the ex-girlfriend who’d had his child and never told him, might have had to live in places like this dump where Annie was staying. But from what he’d learned so far, she’d СКАЧАТЬ