Courtney's Baby Plan Read online

  “And?”

  “She didn’t survive.” She blew out a long breath. “The husband’s been charged, and the baby got carted away by social services.”

  “No other family to take the kid?”

  “No. How old were you when you lost your parents?”

  “Four.”

  Her heart ached a little more. “What happened?”

  “At the time, the story was a car accident.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He caught her cheating on him and shot her.” His voice was matter-of-fact. “I looked into their deaths when I was an adult.”

  “Good Lord, Mason.” Appalled, she sat up, curling her feet underneath her. “I’m so sorry.”

  He lifted a shoulder. “I don’t remember them.”

  “You still haven’t said who took care of you.”

  “There’s nothing to say. I was in foster care. Too many homes to even remember. Some good. Some not so good. By the time I was fifteen, I was living on my own.”

  She frowned. “How does a fifteen-year-old boy support himself?”

  His lips twisted. “Not very well. But I was a big kid and I lied well. People believed that I was older. I worked odd jobs when I could.”

  “And school?”

  “That didn’t put bread in my mouth. Why are we talking about this? It’s old news.” He jerked his chin toward the pillows and swung his crutches away from the bedside. “Lie down again. Go to sleep.”

  “It’s not old news to me,” she said quietly. “And I’m interested, okay? Maybe I want to know that the little toddler from this morning—who has essentially lost both of his parents—has a chance in life that’s better than the doom and gloom of the statistics. You’re an honest-to-goodness hero, Mason. You grew up with no parents of your own to become a man who goes out and saves other people’s lives. You’ve battled an addiction and won.”

  He grimaced. “I’m no hero.”

  She unwound her legs and climbed off the bed. “Donovan McDougal and his family wouldn’t agree. And neither would I.”

  “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “I know Axel trusts you, or you wouldn’t be staying under my roof.”

  “We’ve worked together.”

  “I know you put your life in danger to save someone’s child.” She gestured at him. “And I’ll say it again—or you wouldn’t be staying under my roof.” Before he could counter with another denial, she stepped closer. “I know you’ve overcome a lot, not just from your childhood, but as an adult.” She touched the scar running down his face. “And I know that, even though you try to hide it, you have a great gentleness in you.”

  He grabbed her hand and pulled it away from his face. But he didn’t let go. “I finished school from jail.” His voice was hard. “After being picked up for breaking and entering. Not so heroic.”

  He had a firm grip on her hand, but far from punishing.

  “Breaking and entering what?”

  His brows pulled together. “What the hell difference does it make?”

  “I’m just…inquisitive.”

  “I’m beginning to feel like I’m in the inquisition.” He set her hand away from him. “There’s nothing admirable about my life. All I’ve done is survive. I broke into the store one of my former foster parents owned so I could steal the till before it was deposited in the bank. Obviously, I wasn’t a very good thief, because I spent a few years behind bars, as a result. I ended up working for Cole soon after, because he’s always hunting the dregs of society for…creative souls. I was good at reading people. Good at manipulating situations to my advantage. But not good enough, because the people I was supposed to be protecting nearly ended up dead, and I ended up with this.” He waved at his scarred face. “After that, I let myself get hooked on painkillers for too damn long. I lost my wife and I nearly lost my job.”

  He’d been married? She didn’t know why that stunned her, but it did. “What, uh, what did you need the money for?”

  “God in heaven, woman! Aren’t you listening to anything I’m saying?”

  “I’m listening,” she returned tartly. “But what I’m trying to do is understand.”

  “I wanted to buy a bus ticket for the foster kid living with that old family of mine so he could get the hell away from them. God knows nobody in charge of the system believed that the churchgoing souls were abusive freaks.”

  “Oh, Mason.”

  “Don’t get sympathetic. I was a thief. A bad one.”

  “What happened to the other foster child?”

  “How the hell should I know? I was in jail.”

  “You never tried to find out?”

  His lips thinned. “He aged out,” he finally said. “Graduated high school and disappeared.” He gave her a narrow-eyed stare. “Don’t try to understand me anymore. There’s no point. Where you’re concerned, the only reason I’m here is so you can afford your baby plans. Where I’m concerned, the only reason I’m here is so that Cole doesn’t fire my ass.”

  Her head snapped back. She blinked, almost swaying from the sting. “I, um…right. You’re right. This is just a simple business deal.” Why couldn’t she remember that? She cleared her throat and forced a wry smile that she didn’t feel at all. “Blame it on lack of sleep.” She snatched up the band that he’d pulled off her ponytail and yanked her hair back once more. She would not think about the feel of his fingers moving through her hair. She would not think about a fifteen-year-old boy who’d been desperate enough to break and enter in order to try to help someone else.

  She waved her hand toward the door. “Don’t close the door all the way. I want to be able to hear if you need something.”

  He looked at her as if she’d grown a second head. “You’re serious.”

  She was exhausted. She was still saddened about the events at the hospital. And logical or not, she was stinging from his unsubtle reminder that her only purpose for him was born of necessity. Not choice. “Yes.” Her voice was flat, and she turned back toward her bed. “That’s my job.”

  Mason bit back an oath. In her place, he’d be telling himself to go to hell. That’s what he deserved.

  Feeling like the proverbial bull in a china shop, he managed to work his way out of her pretty, unabashedly feminine bedroom without doing any physical damage to her things.

  The only damage he’d caused had been emotional.

  He turned to look back at her when he reached the doorway.

  She was lying on her side, facing away from him. She’d ruthlessly pulled her shining hair into another ponytail, and she’d hooked her arm around a pillow.

  “I told you that I’m no hero,” he said.

  “I believe I was listening when you said it.” Her voice was muffled but clear.

  He’d wanted to put some distance back between them.

  Well. He’d succeeded.

  He exhaled and pulled the door all the way closed. He’d already been the cause of one day with hardly any sleep for her. He wasn’t going to add to it, even if he had to sit on his thumbs for the next eight hours to make sure she had some peace and quiet.

  He crutched back to his bedroom. But the books there held no interest for him. As stealthily as he could, he went out to the living area.

  He sat at the computer for a while, feeling only a little guilty for browsing all of the sites she’d left open on her screen.

  Every single one of them was baby related.

  The cryobank site, of course.

  But then there was the all-about-baby site that seemed to have information on everything from the moment after birth to preparing your kid for kindergarten.

  And then the home-and-garden site with every decorating and safety tip known to man for making your house baby ready.

  She’d even looked at a baby boutique site and added an expensive, engravable silver rattle to something called her “wish list.”

  He scrubbed his hand down his face and turned off the computer screen.


  “Remember what you’re doing here, Hyde,” he muttered to himself. It wasn’t supposed to have anything to do with getting involved in Courtney Clay’s life, and it would be better for both of them if he could manage to remember that fact.

  He laboriously managed to get onto his feet again and limped his way back to his bedroom.

  Before he turned into the room, though, he noticed that Courtney’s bedroom door—which he had quietly shut—was ajar.

  So she could hear him if he needed her.

  He eyed that wedge of open space for a long while.

  Then he went into his bedroom and closed the door.

  It was the smart thing to do. He knew it.

  He still felt like hell.

  It was the sound of running water that woke her.

  Courtney rolled onto her back and rubbed her eyes. The clock on her nightstand told her she’d slept a solid eight hours, and the late-afternoon sun streaming across her bed confirmed it.

  She might have slept, but she didn’t feel particularly rested. Not considering the way things had ended with Mason.

  Water was still running.

  Frowning, she sat up and listened harder.

  And then she realized what she was hearing, and she bounded off the bed and out into the hallway. The door to Mason’s bathroom was shut, but a very fine wisp of steam was coming out from beneath it.

  She knocked on the door. “Mason? What are you doing?”

  He didn’t answer.

  She knew he was chomping at the bit for a shower. But surely he wouldn’t have attempted such a thing with his casts. Would he?

  It was much too easy to believe that he would.

  She knocked on the door again. Harder this time. “Mason!”

  Still no answer.

  Visions of him knocking himself out on the cast-iron tub quickly filled her mind, and she turned the knob. The door swung open, and a thick waft of steam rolled out.

  It also rolled above and around the edges of the shower curtain that was pulled around the deep, old-fashioned tub that she’d bought at an auction and had refinished at a restoration place in Cheyenne.

  She grabbed the edge of the curtain, her worry far exceeding her discretion, and she pulled it back.

  She got a glimpse of tight, male backside, a scarred back and slick water-darkened hair as the man—half covered in plastic bags, she realized—jerked around to face her, swearing vividly. “Dammit, Court!” He grabbed the shower curtain with almost amusing modesty and pulled it against him. “What the hell?”

  She was a nurse, for pity’s sake. She was not going to blush over the sight of a plastic-wrapped, casted-up naked man.

  Even this naked man.

  “That should be my line,” she said tartly and reached around him to shut off the water, unintentionally brushing her arm against a warm, wet thigh in her way. They both seemed to jump a little, though Mason couldn’t do much, considering he was standing one-footed in the tub while his garbage-bag-shrouded leg was propped on the opposite side of the tub. “If you get either one of those casts wet, you’ll be spending even more time at the hospital.”

  She snatched a thick brown towel off the towel rack. “You’re worse than a child,” she muttered. “Turn my back for a minute and look what you get up to.” She ran the towel over his chest and shoulder, down to the edge of the plastic that he’d taped—with duct tape, yet—around his arm, above the edge of the fiberglass cast. She dried the plastic, hoping furiously that water hadn’t leaked beneath it.

  “I’m not a freaking child,” he snapped and grabbed the towel with his free hand.

  Considering that she was facing down all six-five of his bare flesh, she was reminded with excruciating clarity of that particular fact.

  And even though they’d slept together, the sight of him took her breath away. Not just because of the mass of perfectly formed sinew and muscle or the remains of bruising that outlined his ribs and extended all the way over his corrugated abdomen, but because of the network of faint scars that webbed across his shoulders and back.

  She hadn’t seen them before.

  The night they’d spent together was indelibly etched in her mind. Also etched was the fact that they’d spent that night in her bedroom. Her darkened bedroom.

  She’d never turned on a light, and he hadn’t asked her to.

  Given the glare on his face, she had a suspicion that she now knew why.

  She forced herself to focus on the most immediate concern—that of his casts remaining dry. Her quickness kept him off guard and allowed her to grab the towel back from him and whip it around his hips. “Hold it there if you want to preserve your dignity.”

  He grabbed the towel at his hip. “What dignity?” His teeth snapped off the words.

  She didn’t look at him as she grabbed a second towel from the rack and ran it down the garbage bag taped around his thigh. “If you were so desperate for a shower, you could have asked me for help.”

  “I don’t want help,” he reminded.

  “Just mine, or anyone’s?” She didn’t wait for an answer as she leaned over the side of the deep tub to reach his plastic-encased foot. “How long have you been in here, anyway?” It had to have been a while to build up as much steam as there’d been. Steam that was now dissipating but had still managed to make her T-shirt feel like it was clinging moistly to her torso.

  It was also a miracle he hadn’t lost his balance, standing virtually one-footed the way he was.

  She straightened and managed by sheer grit not to let her gaze linger on him along the way. Instead, she focused on his face and the cool fury of his green eyes. “Since you managed to get yourself in there, I suppose you can manage to get yourself out.” She glanced at the pile of clothes heaped on the floor. He’d obviously been more successful at getting out of his jeans on his own than he’d been in getting into them.

  Without letting herself think about it, she scooped them up and carried them out of the bathroom. In his room—no, it was her future baby’s room, she reminded herself, only on loan to Mason for the moment—she dropped the clothes in the basket she’d placed in his closet to use as a hamper and then yanked open the dresser drawers and randomly snatched out a set of clean items. She laid them on the side of the bed and sat down beside them to wait.

  It took a solid ten minutes.

  Ten minutes that crept by with painful slowness while she fought the urge to go and offer him assistance. Her ears were attuned for the slightest sound that he was struggling.

  But all she heard was an occasional barely muffled oath, the closing of the bathroom door, which she’d left open, and the rush of water again. Not the shower, though. She could tell.

  So she waited. And waited some more.

  When he finally appeared, the towel was tucked tightly around his hips, though it separated over the bulge of his plastic-encased cast when he swung on his crutches through the doorway.

  His gaze went from her to the clothes and she could see his lips tighten.

  “I know you hate needing my help,” she said bluntly. “But for now, you’re just going to have to live with it.” She took a breath. “Or find someone else to help you with your care that you can tolerate.”

  His brows pulled together. “I never said I couldn’t tolerate you. Do you want me to leave? Money not worth the hassle, after all?”

  “No!” She cleared her throat and reminded herself to be calm. Patient. “I’m not saying that at all. Mason, it’s going to be a month before you’ll get that cast off your arm, and another few weeks after that before there’s even any hope for removing the one on your leg. If this is going to work, I need you to stop fighting me every step of the way, or that time is going to be a nightmare.” She rubbed her damp palms down the sides of her cotton pants and pushed to her feet. “It’s partly my fault, I know. Nobody likes people prying into their lives, and for that I’m sorry. Your business is your business, and from now on, you have my word that I’ll respect that. We need to w
ork together, and that’s just as much my responsibility as it is yours.”

  He exhaled noisily, raising his casted arm, which would have looked comical in its silver duct tape and dark green garbage bag, if she’d been feeling at all humorous. “Stop. Just stop.”

  Her lips pressed together.

  “I don’t need you apologizing because I’m a bastard.”

  “I never said that!”

  “I said it.” His voice was flat. “I need your help. I don’t want to need your help. Or anyone’s help. With you it’s a double-edged sword, though. And don’t bother pretending that you don’t understand why.”

  A wary nervousness jabbed through her insides. “Because we…slept together.”

  “We didn’t sleep.” His gaze flicked to the bed beside her. “We crawled inside each other’s skin that night.”

  The nervous jab turned warm and slippery.

  “I told you, I wasn’t going to be able to forget. To pretend it never happened. It did.”

  Her breath ran short. She felt as if he were pulling her into the intensity of his gaze.

  “The problem is…” His voice was low. Deep. “I can’t make myself stop wanting it to happen again.”

  Her knees actually felt wobbly.

  “But you have your future planned out—baby and all. And I’ve got a career to get back to. So you and I…we’re not going there again. It’s a bad idea, no matter which way you turn it.”

  “Oh?” She shook herself a little. “Right. You’re right. We’re not. Going there.” She moistened her lips. “Bad idea. Bad. Bad idea.”

  “Then let’s just stick to the necessities.” His lips twisted. “And I’ll try to be the least pain in your neck that I can be.”

  “You’re not a pain in the neck. Or,” she added swiftly when she saw his expression, “anywhere else. We’ll just agree to both remember what we’re doing this for.”

  He gave a short nod.

  She let out a quick breath. “Okay. So I have just one more question.”

  His brows pulled together. “What?”