With Courage And Commitment

On a sudden surge of irritation, he unsnapped his bike helmet, rolled his bike out of sight behind some bushes near the back door, then took the sack from her arms. “You go sit somewhere. I’ll bring in the groceries.”

“Oh, for pity sake! I’m not disabled.”

“Sit,” he ordered and marched inside, as familiar with the Gray’s house as he was with his own. Not much had changed since he’d been here as an adolescent—Harlan Gray as close to a father as he’d had in those days, Mrs. Gray like a doting aunt. And Stephanie a pesky little sister.

Naturally Stephanie hadn’t listened to him any more today than she had when she’d been younger. Instead she’d picked up another bag of groceries and followed him inside. She gave a little toss of her hair that set the waves bouncing and put the groceries on the counter. “There are two more bags in the car,” she said with false sweetness. “If you really think poor little me can’t handle it.”

He glowered at her. “I’ll get ’em.”

“Oh, my, such a big, brave man,” she crooned.

On the way past her, he almost gave her a friendly little swat on her backside as he might have when she was a kid. But she wasn’t a kid anymore. She was a woman. A pregnant woman wearing a bright red oversize T-shirt with a yellow target in the middle. Suddenly he didn’t know what to do with his hands except stick them into his pockets. Except his bicycle shorts didn’t have pockets.

He grimaced as he walked back to the car to get the last of the groceries. He never should have stopped to help her. He’d known that. Perversely he hadn’t been able to stop himself.

STEPHANIE SQUEEZED HER EYES shut and took a deep breath. If she’d thought Danny was overwhelmingly masculine in his bunker pants and turnout coat, she was blown away by him in a skintight riding shirt and thigh-hugging shorts. Every muscle from shoulder to calves was well defined. A classic sculpture created in the flesh. No doubt warm flesh.

None of which gave him the right to boss her around. She’d had enough of that with Edgar, both at the office and in their relationship. Served her right for getting involved with her employer. But he’d been so smooth, so sophisticated—

So uninterested in becoming a father until the twenty-second century.

“Where do you want this stuff?”

She whirled toward him. “Anywhere. I can handle it from here on my own.” Because that’s how she was going to be from now on—on her own with a baby to raise.

And no one to tell her what to wear to the opening night of the San Francisco opera or what she should prepare for a dinner party for seventeen of his closest friends, all of whom were big clients of his advertising agency, not friends at all.

“Great. I’ll be on my way then. I’ve gotta workout for a big race.”

“I know. A triathlon.” She plucked a gallon of nonfat milk from the first sack and put it in the refrigerator. Danny lingered by the back door. Maybe if she got out the fly swatter—

“When did you get back in town?”

“About a week ago. Alice needed a part-time teacher. All things considered, it seemed like a good time to come home.” There hadn’t been any point in remaining in San Francisco longer. Edgar wasn’t going to change his mind about the baby. After the way he’d acted these past few months, she didn’t even want him to.

Danny’s gaze slid to her belly. “So you’re going to be staying a while in Paseo?”

She refused to flinch. “Indefinitely.”

“That’s great. Uh, I’m sure your dad’s happy to have you home.” He made a show of glancing around the room as though her pregnancy made him uncomfortable, which it probably did. “The place looks pretty much the same as when I was here last. I remember when your mom framed that painting.”

Involuntary Stephanie glanced at the wall above the kitchen sink that displayed her blue-ribbon high school painting—a helter-skelter modern cubist affair of reds and blues with streaks of virtually every color to be found in a box of crayons. It was awful.

“Mom thought I was going to be the next Rembrandt.”

“You got a scholarship. How wrong could she have been?”

In spite of herself, Stephanie smiled. It had been nice to have parents who believed in her, and she still missed her mother, who had died four years ago during Stephanie’s senior year in college. “Commercial art was the best I could do.”

He leaned against the doorjamb as though he had nowhere else to go. “I’m pretty good with stick figures if you need some help with any of your projects.”

She laughed. She couldn’t help herself. “The only art I’m doing these days is the four-year-old variety. Mostly finger painting and setting candle wax on fire.”

“Yeah, well, they tell me primitive styles are back in vogue.”

She lifted her brows. “What do you know about primitive art styles?”

“Hey, I watch a lot of PBS when I’m riding my stationary bike, okay? Broadens the mind.” He touched a two-finger salute to his forehead. “Unless you need some other heroic deed done, I gotta go. You know what they say about practice, practice, practice.”

She swallowed another smile. The last time she’d heard that remark she’d been sixteen years old and it had been a comment about sexual prowess. She hadn’t gotten the meaning then. She tried not to now, though the heat of a blush crept up her cheeks, and she became defensive. “I think I’ll be able to manage without you—barely. You might want to leave a couple of quarts of blood and your cell phone number just in case some grand catastrophe happens and you’re not here to rescue me.”

“I recommend you call 911.”

Now, that conjured an interesting image. Frustrated pregnant woman puts in an emergency call to the fire department to quench her hormonal upsurge—Daniel Sullivan specifically requested to fill the bill.

She couldn’t even begin to imagine what Chief Gray would do about that kind of call coming into dispatch. Although Emma Jean at the station would probably be able to handle it with considerable aplomb, her silver gypsy bracelets jingling as she did.

Sighing, Stephanie wondered what Emma Jean would see in her crystal ball about her future. Right now the best Stephanie could see was that the chocolate ice cream she’d purchased—purely for medicinal reasons, of course—was melting. She reminded herself to worry about only one thing at a time.

Instinctively she slid her hand across her belly. The future would take care of itself whether she wanted it to or not.

STEPHANIE POURED SMALL amounts of blue paint into four paper cups, setting them on the miniature easels in preparation for the children’s arrival at school.

“I don’t see why you had to make such a big deal out of Danny Sullivan rescuing the hamsters,” she complained to Alice, who was unstacking pint-size chairs from the play table. “It’s not like he did anything all that brave.”

“The children think he’s a hero. And you do have to give him some credit for kissing a hamster.”

“He did mouth-to—”

“Besides, I was talking to one of the other fireman after all the excitement was over. Turns out he’s single, and the way he was looking at you I got the distinct impression—”

“Aha! You are trying to do some matchmaking. For your information, Danny and I go back a long way and there hasn’t been a single ounce of chemistry between us.” Not on his part, at any rate. Her adolescent angsting didn’t count.

The angelic smile on Alice’s face didn’t quite match the devilment in her gray eyes. Happily married women with devoted husbands and the standard two-point-seven healthy children were the bane of all single women. Constitutionally unable to pass up an opportunity to matchmake.

“Well, you do need a daddy for your baby and if you two have a past—”

“No past, not like you mean. No future, either.” She dumped red powder into a clean cup and mixed in some water, stirring more vigorously than was wise. “I’m probably the last woman on earth he’d want to get involved with, even if I wasn’t pregnant. Which I am. So just cool it, okay?”

Alice’s retort was cut off by the arrival of the first two children of the day. She lifted her shoulders in an unconcerned shrug, then hurried to greet the preschoolers.

Stephanie frowned at the spatters of red across the newspaper she’d been using to protect the table—and at the matching spots on her blouse. Fortunately she liked wearing bright colors. The print on this particular maternity blouse was of a flower garden in full bloom with the words, “From little seeds grow the most beautiful things.”

She sighed. At least the paint was washable.

For the next hour, she supervised outdoor play, the February morning so mild the kids only needed a light sweater to keep them warm. Then she brought the youngsters inside for juice and show-and-tell. Jason Swift announced that he’d stuck an ant up his nose yesterday, and Tami Malone shared the news that when her daddy slept on top of her mommy, her mommy made funny noises, but it was all right because they loved each other.

Stephanie ruled out both topics from any further discussion.