Stroke of Fortune

Flynt swore under his breath. He’d been vowing for nearly a year that he’d stop thinking about her. Still, her name always found some way to come creeping into his mind.

“What did you say?” Michael O’Day pulled their cart to a stop on the trail right behind Spence and Tyler. “I think I caught the meaning, but I missed the exact words.” He slanted Flynt a knowing grin.

Flynt ordered his mind to get back where it belonged—on his game. “Just shaking my head over that last hole. If I’d come out of the sand a little better, I could have parred it. No doubt about it, my sand wedge needs work.”

Michael chuckled. “Hey, at least you—”

And right then, Flynt heard the kind of sound a man shouldn’t hear on the golf course. He put up a hand, though Michael had already fallen silent.

The two in the front cart must have heard it, too. They were turning to look for the source as it came again: a fussy little cry.

“Over there,” Spence said. He pointed toward the thick hedge that partially masked a groundskeeper’s shed about thirty yards from them.

A frown etched a crease between Michael’s black eyebrows. “Sounds like a—”

Spence was already out of the lead cart. “Damn it, I don’t believe it.”

Neither did Flynt. He blinked. And he looked again.

But it was still there: a baby carrier, the kind that doubles as a car seat, tucked in close to the hedge. And in the car seat—wrapped in a fluffy pink blanket, waving tiny fists and starting to wail—was a baby.

A baby. A baby alone. On the ninth tee of the Lone Star Country Club’s Ben Hogan-designed golf course.

“What the hell kind of idiot would leave a baby on the golf course?” Tyler Murdoch asked the question of no one in particular. He took off after Spence. Flynt and Michael fell in right behind.

Midway between the carts and the squalling infant, all four men slowed. The baby cried louder and those tiny fists flailed.

The men—Texans all, tall, narrow-hipped, broad-shouldered and proud—stopped dead, two in front, two right behind, about fifteen feet from the yowling child. Three of those men had served in the Gulf War together. Each of those three had earned the Silver Star for gallantry in action. The fourth, Michael O’Day, was perhaps the finest cardiac surgeon in the Lone Star State. He spent his working life fighting to save lives in the operating room—and most of the time, he won. Flynt’s own father, Ford Carson, was a living testament to the skill and steely nerves of Dr. O’Day.

Not a coward in the bunch.

But that howling baby stopped them cold. To the world, they might be heroes, but they were also, all four, single men. And childless. Not a one knew what the hell to do with a crying infant.

So they hung back. And the baby cried louder.

Flynt and Michael moved up on the other two, so that all four of them stood shoulder to shoulder. The men exchanged the kinds of looks bachelors are likely to share when a baby is wailing and there’s no female around to take charge and defuse the situation.

“Maybe the mother’s nearby,” Spence suggested hopefully.

“Where?” demanded Tyler, scowling. “Crouched in the bushes? Hiding in the shed?”

“Hey. It’s a thought.”

Another several edgy seconds passed, with the poor kid getting more worked up, those little arms pumping wildly, the fat little face crumpled in misery, getting very red.

Then Tyler said, “Spence.” He gestured with a tight nod to the left. “I’ll go right. We’ll circle the shed and rendezvous around the back. Then we’ll check out the interior.”

“Gotcha.” The two started off, Tyler pausing after a few steps to advise over his shoulder, “Better see to that kid.”

Flynt resisted the urge to argue, No way. You deal with the baby. We’ll reconnoiter the shed. But he’d missed his chance and he knew it. He and Michael were stuck with the kid.

Michael looked grim. Flynt was certain his own expression mirrored the doctor’s. But what damn choice did they have? Someone had to take care of the baby.

“Let’s do it,” he said bleakly, already on his way again toward the car seat and its unhappy occupant.

As his shadow fell across the child, the wailing stopped. The silence, to Flynt, seemed huge. And wonderful, after all that screaming.

The baby blinked up at him. A girl, Flynt guessed—the blanket, after all, was pink. Her bright blue eyes seemed to be seeking, straining to see him looming above her. And then she gave up. She shut those eyes and opened that tiny mouth and let out another long, angry wail.

Flynt dropped to a crouch. “Hey, hey. Come on. It’s okay. It’s all right….”

She might be hungry, or need a diaper change. She definitely needed comforting—and he was going to have to provide it. There was a note, a plain white square of paper scribbled with blue ink, pinned to the blanket. He went for that first.

It was damp. Water had dripped on it from the sprinkler-wet leaves of the hedge. The first part of whatever had been written was smeared beyond recognition.

But it did give him a name. Lena. “Hey, Lena. How are you?” The baby stopped in midwail, hiccupped—and wailed some more.

“Let’s see that note,” Michael said from right behind him.

Flynt pulled it free of the pin and handed it over. Then, while Lena howled and kicked her legs and waved those tiny fists, he went to work getting her out of the car seat.

The blanket had fallen away enough to reveal the seat belt apparatus, which didn’t look all that complicated: a shoulder harness that veed to a single strap over the tiny torso and hooked to the seat via a button latch between the legs. She went on flailing as he popped the latch and, gently as possible, lifted the strap to free her from the restraint.

He talked to her the whole time, trying to sound soothing, probably not succeeding. “Hey, Lena. We’ll get you out of here. It’s going to be all right. Hey, now. Hey…”

Damn, she was so tiny. Small as Wild Willie, the runt barn cat he’d been fond of as a kid—and a hell of a lot more defenseless. He slid one hand behind the downy black curls to support her head. He’d done a little studying on the subject of baby care a couple of years ago. That was back before the accident, when Monica was finally pregnant and he’d thought he would be a father, even dared to imagine he might learn to be a decent one, the kind his own father had been. He’d remembered reading that you had to support a baby’s head. A baby didn’t have much control of it, couldn’t hold it up by herself.

Lena quit flailing as he lifted her. She was blinking again, zeroing in on his face. Hadn’t he read that, too—that they could only see close up, that they bonded, by sight, with the faces of the adults who held them?

She was looking at him. She really was. “Lena…” He breathed the word softly, liking the sound of it. Then she burped—a big one—and made a funny, scrunched-up face.

Carefully he raised her to his shoulder. She moved against him, getting comfortable. She was so warm and small and soft. She felt good, her tiny body curled into his chest. And she was blessedly quiet. For the moment, anyway.

He stood from his crouch and turned to Michael, who said, “I think you’ve got a knack with babies, Flynt.”

Flynt didn’t reply. What was there to say?

The other half of their foursome emerged from the bushes. “Nothing,” said Spencer. “If the mother was here, she’s not now.”

Tyler frowned. “Wasn’t there a note on the blanket?”

Michael held it out. “Right here.”

Tyler took it and read it aloud. “‘I’m your baby girl. My name is Lena…”’ He passed the note to Spence. “Well, great. Whose baby girl?”

Spence studied the square of paper. “Looks like there was some kind of salutation, somebody’s name. But now it’s water-smeared to nothing but a blotch.”

Tyler shook his head. “So. Great. We’ve got no idea who left her here—let alone who was supposed to find her.”