Secret Baby Santos Read Free Page A

brushed her father’s whisker-rough cheek with her lips. He’d retired only six months ago from his foreman construction job and he’d had way too much time on his hands. Even after thirty-six years of marriage, her mother, who had the patience of a saint, was ready to murder the man. And if he’d been a pain-in-the-behind before, since his surgery, he’d been twice as gruff. As far as patients went, he was somewhere between Oscar the Grouch and Attila the Hun. “Can I get you anything, Daddy?”
    â€œSneak me a shot of whisky and a cigar,” he said in his deep gravelly voice without looking up from his paper. “There’s cash in it for you.”
    â€œMoney won’t do me any good if I’m dead. Mom says no alcohol or tobacco while you’re recuperating, and if she so much as catches a whiff of either on your breath, she’ll bruise both our behinds.”
    His response was something between a growl and a grunt. He simply snapped his paper and mumbled
something about overbearing wives and ungrateful children.
    At the sound of the doorbell, she straightened.
    â€œWould you get that for me, Maggie?” her mother called from the kitchen. “Jim Becker’s stopping by with a set of crutches for your father. He’s supposed to be up walking by the end of the week.”
    Maggie smiled when her father only buried his head deeper into his paper. Getting a six-foot, two-hundredpound, stubborn man walking was no stroll in the park, but if anyone could do it, Maggie knew her mother could.
    Other than running into Nick at the market, it felt good to be home. The scent of a roast baking, the sound of her mother’s humming from the kitchen, even her father with his nose in the paper. She missed all that. Life had gotten too crazy these past few years. She hadn’t even realized it until this minute just how crazy.
    She was going to enjoy her time here, she resolved. Enjoy her time with Drew and her parents. She’d put the past behind her a long time ago; it no longer existed. There was only here and now.
    The doorbell rang again and when she opened the door the past she’d put behind her stood on her parents’ doorstep, staring back at her with eyes as black and deep as a forest at midnight.

Two
    N ick couldn’t remember when he’d ever seen eyes so deep green before. Eyes so big and wide and... nervous?
    So she was still shy, he thought, and realized that he found it charming. Most of the women he knew always seemed so sure of themselves, confident almost to the point of intimidating. He liked a little hesitation in a woman, a little uncertainty. He especially liked the fact that he was the cause of it.
    Smiling, he pulled her credit card out of his pocket. “You lost this at the market. I thought you wouldn’t mind, so I booked us a Jamaican cruise. We leave next week.”
    She stared at him, then blinked and snatched the card out of his hand. “Thank you.”
    Then she slammed the door in his face.
    This wasn’t going exactly as he’d planned.

    Nick raised his brows and stared at the closed door. The Maggie Smith he remembered might have been shy, but she’d also been sweet.
    But then, the Maggie Smith he remembered had also been skinny and drab.
    Damn if he wasn’t intrigued.
    He noticed Mrs. Potts, the Smiths’ next door neighbor, watering the bushes that separated their properties. She’d been the dean’s secretary the six months he’d spent in Wolf River County Home for Boys, and she’d been old then. When he nodded at her, the frail woman quickly looked away, pretended she hadn’t seen that Maggie had just slammed a door in his face.
    Maybe Maggie still thought of him as some kind of convict, even though his “visit” at the county boys’ home had been twenty years ago. His “offense,” a short joy ride with Linda Lansky on her older brother’s new scooter,