Maverick Christmas Surprise. Brenda Harlen

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СКАЧАТЬ “But I’ve never seen the kid before. I’m as shocked by this as you are.”

      “But it’s yours,” his father remarked.

      It wasn’t a question.

      “That’s what the note says,” Wilder acknowledged.

      “You don’t believe it?” Max asked him.

      “I don’t know what to believe. What to think.” He scrubbed a hand over his face, sincerely baffled by this turn of events. He wanted to believe it was a joke, though he wasn’t the least bit amused. “Who would abandon their kid on somebody’s doorstep in the middle of winter?”

      “Not just somebody’s doorstep,” his father argued. “The baby’s father’s doorstep.”

      He shook his head. “It’s not possible.”

      “You’ve never been intimate with a woman?” Max challenged.

      It was, of course, a rhetorical question. Though Wilder didn’t share details of his romantic encounters, he’d been caught—more than once—sneaking into the house the morning after he’d spent the night in a woman’s bed.

      “I’m careful,” he assured his father. “Always.”

      “Accidents happen,” Max said matter-of-factly.

      It was a terrifying thought.

      “The note says he’s four months old,” his father continued. “Adding nine months to that is thirteen, which means the baby would have been conceived sometime around November last year.”

      “Okay,” Wilder said hesitantly.

      “So who were you with last November?” Max pressed.

      Last November? Seriously?

      He shrugged. “How am I supposed to remember something that happened that far back?”

      Which he immediately realized was not the right thing to say to his father under the circumstances.

      “You should darn well remember a woman who shared your bed,” Max said, the low tone of his voice doing nothing to disguise the underlying anger and disappointment. “I don’t expect you to be in love with every woman you sleep with, but you should know and respect her enough to remember her name.”

      “Give me a break,” Wilder pleaded. “My head’s spinning so fast, it’s a wonder I know my own name right now.”

      “Well, there’s no doubt the baby looks like a Crawford.”

      “The baby looks like a baby,” Wilder said. Because in his admittedly limited experience with infants, they all looked like bald, chubby-cheeked, squalling little monsters.

      As if on cue, the one buckled into the car seat started to squirm and squall.

      Wilder stepped back, an instinctive retreat.

      “Pick him up and bring him inside,” Max said.

      “Me?” Wilder was horrified by the very thought.

      With a sigh, his father reached down and grabbed the car seat with one hand and the enormous diaper bag with the other.

      “Hunter said there was a baby on the doorstep,” Avery said, entering the kitchen from the dining room at the same time that Wilder and Max came in from the porch.

      Then she spotted the carrier in Max’s hand and her expression softened. “Ohmygod—it is a baby.” Her gaze shifted to Wilder. “Why didn’t you tell anyone you’re a daddy?”

      “Because I’m not,” Wilder insisted. “There’s no way that kid’s mine.”

      “He’s in denial,” Genevieve, his brother Knox’s wife, said. Because apparently Hunter’s announcement had drawn everyone away from the table.

      “I think the baby’s hungry,” Lily said worriedly.

      “You just want to feed everyone,” her husband Xander teased.

      “He is gnawing on his fist,” Hunter noted. “And that’s a telltale sign of hunger.”

      As Hunter was the only one of his brothers with significant daddy experience, Wilder was willing to defer to his expertise. But having the problem identified didn’t give him the first clue about how to solve it.

      So when his brothers and their partners—and Wren—huddled around the baby, pushing Wilder and Max out of the way, Wilder didn’t object.

      “He’s definitely hungry,” Sarah said, as the baby’s unhappy cries turned to sobs.

      “Let’s see if there’s a bottle in the bag,” Merry suggested.

      There were, in fact, two bottles—one premixed and one empty, plus a can of powdered formula.

      Avery unbuckled the harness and lifted the infant out of his seat. His plaintive cries immediately ceased.

      Everyone seemed to be talking at once, speculating about the note as they fussed over the little guy. Wilder took advantage of their preoccupation to study the baby—who didn’t seem quite so intimidating now that he was quiet—and realized, a little uneasily, that the baby was staring back at him.

      Is it possible? he wondered. Can he be mine?

      “Where’d the baby come from?” Wren wanted to know.

      “Someone left him on the doorstep,” her dad explained.

      “Maybe he’s a gift from Santa,” she suggested.

      Hunter chuckled. “Unfortunately for Uncle Wilder, I don’t think the baby came with a gift receipt.”

      “He does look a lot like Wilder’s old baby photos,” Logan, the eldest Crawford brother, noted.

      “He does not,” Wilder denied, though without much conviction.

      But no one was paying any attention to him, anyway.

      Except his father, who sidled closer. “The note was signed with the letter ‘L,’” Max noted. “Does that jog your memory at all?”

      He automatically started to shake his head, because he didn’t want his memory jogged. And if he was in denial—well, he was quite happy to stay there. Because in denial, his life was easy and carefree and he didn’t have the responsibility of an infant who’d been dumped into his lap—or, to be more precise, on his doorstep.

      But somehow, in the midst of all the chaos going on around him, hazy memories slowly came into focus in Wilder’s mind. Memories of an early holiday party at Reunion Tower in Dallas, a few too many cocktails and a pretty—and very adventurous—blonde named Leighton Ames. And no, he wasn’t oblivious to the fact that her name started with the same letter that had been scrawled on the bottom of the note.

      They’d СКАЧАТЬ