Baby for Keeps. Janice Maynard

      “That’s not what I meant,” she said quickly. “I’m sorry. I’m a little self-conscious about having a baby and not being married. My parents are adjusting, but they don’t like it.”

      “So where’s the kid’s dad?” Dylan seemed to have forgiven Mia for her awkward comment. His eyes registered more than a passing interest in the answer to his question as he waited.

      “I’m not really prepared to go into that.”

      The man on her right reared back in raucous laughter and jostled her roughly. Mia cuddled Cora more tightly, realizing that a bar was the last place in the world she should have brought her infant daughter.

      Dylan must have come to the same conclusion, because he put a hand on her arm and smiled persuasively. “We can’t talk here. Let’s go upstairs and get comfortable. It used to be my bookkeeper’s apartment, but she moved out last Tuesday.”

      Mia allowed him to help her to her feet. Grabbing the diaper bag she’d propped on the foot rail, she slung it over her shoulder. “That would be nice.” For a woman with a genius IQ, she probably should have been able to come up with a better adjective. But this encounter seemed surreal. Her social skills were rusty at best. Given the fact that she hadn’t slept a full night since Cora had been born, it was no wonder nice was the best she could do..

      “Follow me.” Dylan led her across the restaurant floor to a hallway at the back of the building. The steep, narrow staircase at the end was dimly lit.

      He insisted on taking the diaper bag and would have taken Cora as well, but Mia clutched her tightly. “I can carry her.” She trailed in his wake as they ascended, trying not to ogle his tight butt packaged nicely in well-washed jeans.

      She knew the man in front of her was a millionaire several times over. Yet somehow, he had the knack of appearing to be just one of the guys. It was a talent she had envied in high school. Mia hadn’t fit in with any crowd or clique. Shy and serious, she had been all but ostracized by her classmates who were two years or more ahead of her in adolescence.

      On the landing, Dylan paused, giving her a chance to catch up. “The area to our left is storage. As I said, this apartment up here was my bookkeeper’s. But she got engaged and moved across the country. You can imagine what a mess I’ve made of things. I need to hire somebody soon or I’ll have the IRS on my back for not paying my quarterly taxes.”

      He opened the nearest door and ushered her inside. Mia looked around with interest. They stood in a good-size living area furnished with a sofa, loveseat and two chairs upholstered in a navy-and-taupe print. The neutral rug was clean but unexceptional. Faded patches on the walls indicated where pictures had hung. “How long was she with you?”

      Dylan dropped the diaper bag on a chair. “Nearly since the beginning. Her first husband died and left her with almost nothing. So this job was a godsend both for her and for me. But a couple of months ago, she met a trucker downstairs, and the rest is history.”

      Mia sank onto the sofa with a sigh and laid Cora beside her. The baby didn’t stir. “Life is full of surprises.”

      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