The Christmas Baby Bonus. Yvonne Lindsay

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СКАЧАТЬ to his ungrateful audience, who’d had enough of waiting and screwed up his face again before letting out a massive wail.

      Piers frantically jiggled the baby while following the directions to warm the bottle. It was undoubtedly the longest four minutes of his life. The baby banged his forehead against Piers’s neck again. Oh, hell, he was hot. Did he have a fever? Piers felt the child’s forehead with one of his big hands. A bit too warm, yes, but not feverish. He hoped. Maybe he just needed to get out of that jacket. But how on earth was Piers going to manage that? Feeling about as clumsy as if attempting to disrobe the baby while wearing oven gloves, Piers carefully wrestled the baby out of the jacket.

      “There we go, buddy. Mission accomplished.”

      The baby rewarded him with a demanding bellow of frustration, reminding Piers that the time had to be up for warming the bottle. He lifted the bottle, gave it a good shake, tested it on his wrist and then offered it to the baby. Poor mite must have been starving; he took to the bottle as if his life depended on it. And it did, Piers realized. And right now this little life depended on him, too.

      So where on earth had he come from?

      Remembering the note Faye had left with him, Piers walked to the entrance of the house and shifted the blanket until he found the crumpled piece of paper. Carefully balancing the baby and bottle with one hand, he went to sit in the main room and read the note.

      Dear Mr. Luckman,

      It’s time you took responsibility for your actions. You’ve ignored all my attempts to contact you so far. Maybe this will make you sit up and take notice. His name is Casey, he was born on September 10 and he’s your son. I relinquish all rights to him. I never wanted him in the first place, but he deserves to know his father. Do not try to find me.

      There was an indecipherable signature scrawled along the bottom. Piers read the note again and flipped the single sheet over to see if the author had left a name on the other side. There was nothing.

      His son? Impossible. Well, perhaps not completely impossible, but about as highly unlikely as growing a market garden on the moon. He was meticulous about protection in all his relationships. Accidents like this did not happen to him. Or at least they hadn’t, until now.

      Piers did the mental math and figured, if he was the child’s father, he had to have met the baby’s mother around the New Year. He was always in Jackson Hole from before Christmas until early January and hosted his usual festivities around the twenty-fourth and on the thirty-first. But he’d been between girlfriends at the time and he certainly didn’t remember sleeping with anyone.

      The baby had slowed down on the bottle and he stared up at Piers with very solemn brown eyes. Eyes that were very much like Piers’s own. His son? Could it somehow be true? Even as he mentally rejected the idea, he began to feel a connection to the infant in his arms. A connection that was surely as unfeasible as the idea that he was responsible for this tiny life.

      The bottle was empty and Piers removed it from the baby’s mouth. So now what?

      Casey looked blissed out on the formula, the expression on his face making Piers smile as the baby blew a milky bubble. In seconds the infant was asleep. Piers laid the kid down on the couch and packed some pillows around him like a soft fortress. Then he got to his feet and reached for his phone. Someone in town had to know where the baby belonged. Because as cute as Casey was, he surely didn’t belong to him.

      He dialed the number for one of the café and bar joints in town, a place where the locals gathered to gossip by day and party and occasionally fight by night. If anyone knew anything about a new baby in town, it would be these guys. Except the call didn’t go through. He checked the screen—no reception. He reached for the landline only to discover it was out of action, too.

      “Damn,” Piers cursed on a heavy sigh.

      The storm had clearly grown a lot worse while he was occupied with his unexpected guest. Maybe he should go and check on the backup generator. He was just about to do so when he heard a knocking at the front door. Puzzled, as he wasn’t expecting any of his guests for a few more days yet, he went across to open it.

      “Faye? What happened to you?”

      His eyes roamed her face as he took her arm and led her inside toward the warmth of the fireplace. She was pale and she had a large red mark on her face, like a mild gravel rash or something, and she shivered uncontrollably. Her jacket, which was fine for show but obviously useless in actual snowy conditions, was sodden, as were the jeans she wore, and her sneakers made a squelching sound on the floor tiles.

      “A t-t-tree came d-d-down on the driveway,” she managed through chattering teeth.

      “You’re going to have to get out of these wet clothes before you get hypothermic,” he said.

      “T-too late,” she said with a wry grin. “I think I’m already th-there.”

      “Come on,” he said leading the way to a downstairs bathroom. “Get in a hot shower and I’ll get you something dry to put on. Where’s your suitcase?”

      “St-still in the b-b-back of the SUV,” she said through lips tinged with blue.

      “And the SUV?”

      “It’s stuck against the tree that came down across the drive about halfway down.”

      “Are you hurt anywhere other than your face?”

      “A f-few bruises, maybe, b-but mostly just c-cold.”

      No wonder she looked so shocky. A crash and then walking back up the drive in this weather? It was a miracle she’d made it.

      “Let’s get you out of these wet things.”

      He reached for her jacket and tugged the zipper down. Chilled fingers closed around his hands.

      “I-I can m-manage,” she said weakly.

      “You can barely speak,” he answered firmly, brushing her hands away and tugging the jacket off her. “I’ll help you get out of your clothes, that’s all. Okay?”

      Faye nodded, her hair dripping. Beneath her jacket, Faye’s fine wool sweater was also soaked through and her nipples peaked against the fabric through her bra. He bent to undo the laces on her sneakers and yanked them off, then peeled away her wet socks. She had pretty feet, even though they were currently blue with cold and, to his surprise, she had tiny daisies painted on each of her big toes. Cute and whimsical, he thought, and nothing like the automaton he was used to in the office. Near her ankle he caught sight of some scar tissue that appeared to be snaking out from beneath her sodden jeans.

      “We’ve got two options,” Piers said as he reached for the button fly of her jeans. “The best way to warm you up is skin-to-skin contact, or a nice hot shower.”

      “S-shower,” Faye said emphatically.

      Piers smiled a little. So, she wasn’t so far gone she couldn’t make a decision. For that he could be thankful, even if the prospect of skin-to-skin contact with her held greater appeal than it ought to. At least the under-floor heating would help to restore some warmth to her frigid feet. He peeled the wet denim down her legs. He always knew she was slightly built but there was lean muscle there, too. As if she did distance running or something like that.

      He’d СКАЧАТЬ