An Unexpected Christmas Baby

He straightened. Stared at the baby in her arms, his brown eyes softening and yet giving away a hint of what looked like fear at the same time. In that second she wished like hell that her father was wrong and Collins wouldn’t turn out to be the one who was stealing from Owens Investments.

She didn’t move. Just stood frozen with her arms holding a baby against her.

“Her name’s Diamond Rose.” His tone soft, he continued to watch the baby, as though he couldn’t look away. But he had to get that seat dealt with. Fast. The lump in her throat grew.

“Whose is she?” She was going to have to put the baby down. Sooner rather than later. Her permanently broken heart couldn’t take much more. The tears were already starting to build. Dammit! She’d gone almost two months without them.

“Mine...sort of.”

Her head shot up. “Yours?” She glanced at the cell phone on his desk and then noticed the portable baby monitor. “You don’t have a baby crying ringtone?”

“No.”

“You have a baby?”

There’d been nothing in his file. According to her father, he’d only been dating his current girlfriend—some high-powered attorney—for the past six months. He’d brought her to a dinner Howard had hosted for top producers and their significant others. And had explained where and how they’d met. Which was pertinent because soon after he’d taken the first full vacation he’d had in eight years.

“She’s not mine,” he said then frowned, glancing at Tamara hesitantly before holding her gaze. “Legally, she is. But I’m not her father.”

“Who is?” His personnel records hadn’t listed any next of kin other than an incarcerated mother.

He shrugged. “That’s the six-million-dollar question. No idea. Biologically she’s my sister.”

Tamara flooded with emotion. She couldn’t swallow. Standing completely still, concentrating on distancing herself from the deluge, focusing on him, she waited for her skin to cool. With a warm baby snuggled against her chest.

She had to get rid of that warmth.

Get away from the baby.

“Your mother had a baby?” she heard herself ask, sounding only a little squeaky.

He nodded.

“I thought she was in prison...” She suddenly realized she might have revealed too much. She was being too invasive for a first business meeting. “Um, Bill told me. He said you’d overcome a...difficult past.”

He nodded. “She was. And the fact that she was a convict makes the question about Diamond’s father that much harder to answer. Who’s going to admit to fathering a child illegally?”

Her nerves were quaking. “She gave birth in prison?”

“Three days ago.”

She’d been right. The child was only days old...

Days older than any of hers had lived to be.

“And she gave her to you?” She wasn’t going to be able to keep it together much longer.

He’d agreed to take a baby. That said something about him. He needed to take her from Tamara.

He’d taken on a child. But then, his mother, a criminal, had agreed to take him on, too. By birthing him. Keeping him.

“My mother died in childbirth.”

Flint’s shocking words hit her harder than they would have if she’d been on the other side of the room. Or in another room. Speaking to him on the phone.

Knees starting to feel weak, she knew she was out of time. “And just like that, you become a father?”

“Just like that.”

There were things she should say. More questions to ask. But Tamara simply stood there, staring at him.

Unable to move.

To speak.

She was shaking visibly.

And had to get rid of the bundle she held.

Pronto.

Chapter Five (#u99e7ecb3-ada3-5b20-ba0d-9c5bf96e2100)

“Here, you need to take her.”

As the pink-wrapped bundle came toward him with more speed than he would’ve expected, Flint reached out automatically, allowing the baby’s head to glide up to his elbow, her body settling on his lower arm. While holding a baby was still foreign to him, he was beginning to notice a rhythm, a sense of having done it before.

“She needs to bond with you.” The woman was a stranger to him and yet she was sharing one of the most intimate experiences in his life. His coming to grips with a reality he had little idea how to deal with and a role he was unsure of. Burying his mother. Meeting his sister. Becoming for all intents and purposes, a father. All happening in one day. He’d been about to lose it—and she’d saved him.

Just like she’d saved him from almost certain job loss earlier.

Could she really be, somehow, heaven-sent? By his mother, not any divine source watching out for him. He’d long ago ceased hoping for that one.

Did he dare even think of his mother making it to an afterlife that would allow her to help her baby girl?

Was he losing his damned mind?

“Until two days ago, I didn’t know the first thing about children.” He hardly remembered being one. It seemed to him he’d grown up as an adult. “Babies in particular.”

“You’ve had her for two days?” The woman had backed up to the other side of the desk and was halfway to the door. A couple of times she’d rubbed her hands along shapely thighs covered by a deliciously short skirt and was now clasping them together as though, at any second, they might fly apart.

“I just got her today,” he said, calming a bit now as the baby settled against him as easily as she had with the efficiency expert. It was the first time he’d actually held the infant.

All he’d done so far was pick her up to lay her on a pad on the table. And to put her back in her carrier to feed her. That was it.

“So, how often does the holding thing need to happen?” How far behind was he?

“All the time.” She was nodding, as though following the beat of some song in her head. Rubbed her thighs again, then was wringing her hands. Then reached for the doorknob. “When you’re feeding her, certainly, and other times, too. Whenever you can. There are, um, books, classes and, you know, places you can go to learn everything...”