Baby for Keeps

He sprawled in a chair at her elbow. “It sure as hell is. You remember my brother Liam?”

“Of course I do. He always scared me a little bit. So serious and intimidating.”

“He’s loosened up a lot since he met Zoe. She’s his new wife. You should meet her. The two of you would probably get along.”

“Really? Why?”

Obviously his throwaway statement was meant to be rhetorical, because he hesitated. “Oh, you know. Girl stuff...”

Her face flushed. This was always her problem. She had never mastered the art of careless chitchat. Fussing with Cora’s blanket for a moment gave her a chance to look away. She should probably go. But she’d made such a complete and total mess of her life, she was deeply grateful to have an excuse to focus on someone other than herself for a moment. Gathering her composure, she leaned back and gave Dylan a pleasant smile. “Well, other than your brother’s marriage, what’s been going on in Silver Glen since I’ve been gone?”

* * *

Dylan propped an ankle on the other knee and tucked his hands behind his head. “Have you had dinner?” It wasn’t an answer to Mia’s question, but he was starving.

“No. Not really. But you don’t have to feed me.”

“It’s on the house. For old time’s sake.” He pulled out his cell phone and sent a text to the kitchen. “They’ll bring something up as soon as they can.”

“Sounds good.” Mia’s smile was shy. He remembered the slight duck of her head and the curve of soft pink lips when something pleased her. Not that pleasing Mia had been Dylan’s forte. He’d resented like hell the fact that he had to take help from a fifteen-year-old kid. And truth be told, he had probably made Mia’s life a misery more often than not.

“Why did you do it?” he asked. The question tumbled out. He hadn’t even known he was going to ask it.

A slight frown creased her forehead. “Do what?”

“Tutor me.” His face was somber.

“Wow, Dylan. It’s taken you this long to ask that question?”

He shrugged, making her more aware than ever of the breadth of his shoulders. “I was busy before.”

“You were, at that,” she agreed. “Football, basketball, dating hot girls.”

“You noticed?”

“I noticed everything,” she said flatly. “I had the worst crush on you.”

He blanched, remembering all his careless cruelties to her. Even though in private he’d been pathetically grateful when she helped him make sense of a Shakespeare play, in public he had shunned her...or made jokes about her. Even at the time, with all the cluelessness of an adolescent boy, he’d known he was hurting her.

But maintaining his image as a badass had been his one and only goal. While some of his classmates were getting scholarship offers from Duke or the University of North Carolina, Dylan had struggled to pretend he didn’t care. College was stupid and unnecessary. He’d said it enough times that he almost believed it. But when he slunk off to community college and couldn’t even make passing grades there, his humiliation was complete.

“I owe you about a million apologies,” he said, his mouth twisting in a grimace of regret. “You tried so hard to help me.”

“I might point out that you did pass senior English.”

“True. And without cheating, if you remember.”

“You wrote an essay about why Romeo and Juliet was such an unbelievable story.”

“Well, it was,” he protested. “What kind of idiot takes poison when he could have kidnapped the girl and run away to Vegas?”

Mia chuckled, the laughter erasing her air of exhaustion and making her look more like the girl he’d known in high school. “It wasn’t your fault, Dylan. The problems you had. Someone should have diagnosed you in elementary school, and your educational career would have been entirely different.”

“You can’t blame them too much. I did a damned good job of pretending that I was lazy and unmotivated.”

“You may have fooled a lot of people, but you never fooled me.”

Two

Dylan’s wry smile and self-deprecating assessment made Mia’s heart hurt. Dyslexia was no minor roadblock. Mia knew that Dylan had scored above average on intelligence tests. When it came to creating ideas and working with people, he far outstripped her in ability. Dylan was smart and gifted. Unfortunately, his talents didn’t align with the way traditional education evaluated achievement.

She circled back to his earlier question. “You asked me why I tutored you.”

“Well, why did you?”

“I suppose it was for lots of reasons. For one thing, the teacher asked me to. And for another, I was no different than any other girl at Silver Glen High. I wanted to spend time with you.”

He rubbed his jaw. “Is that all?”

“No.” Time for brutal honesty. “I wanted you to succeed. And I thought I could help. No matter how hard you tried to pretend differently, I knew you hated feeling—”

“Stupid,” he interjected with some heat. “The word you’re looking for is stupid.”

She stared at him, taken aback that his intelligence still seemed to be a sore spot for him. “Good grief, Dylan. You’re a successful, respected businessman. You work for a living even though you don’t have to. You’ve made the Silver Dollar Saloon into something special. Why does it matter now that you struggled in school? We’re not kids anymore. You’ve more than proven your capabilities.”

His jaw clenched, his eyes stormy, though somehow she knew his agitation was not directed at her. “And what about you, Mia? What do you do?”

“I’m a medical researcher. Over in the Raleigh/Durham area. My team has been working to prove that the standard series of childhood vaccines is safe for everyone.”

“And I sell beer for a living.”

“Don’t be flip,” she said, her temper starting to rise. “It’s not a competition.”

“Of course not. I was never competition for you. How many languages do you speak?”

His sarcasm nicked her in ways she couldn’t explain. She hadn’t asked to be smart. In fact, there had been many days in her life when she would have given almost anything to be the epitome of a dumb blonde joke. She glanced at Cora, who was still sleeping peacefully.

“I should go,” she said quietly. “I didn’t mean to stir up the past. It was nice seeing you again.” A chill of disappointment clenched her heart and brought back unpleasant memories of being out of step with the world.

She and Dylan stood at the same moment.

His face registered consternation and shame. “Don’t leave. I’m being an ass. It’s not your fault you’re a genius.”

“I’m a woman,” she said flatly. “And will it make you feel better to know that I’ve made an absolute mess of my life?” Her voice broke on the last word. Tears she had worked so hard to keep at bay for the past several hours burst forth in an unattractive sobbing mess.

Inside her chest, a great gaping hole filled with uncertainty and fear made it hard to breathe. She didn’t feel smart at all. What she really felt was panicked and desperate.

She put her hands over her face, mortified that Dylan was here to witness her inevitable meltdown.