Somebody's Baby Read Free

only Burdett son to marry. It even clung to him when he became a minister.
    All three grown men now shared Conner’s lean build and eyes, which some called blue green, others green blue. They had straight noses and golden tan complexions.
    Adam glanced at his reflection in the Harley’s side mirror. Dark-brown, hooded eyes stared back from a face the color of baked red Georgia clay. He swiped a knuckle at the small bump on the bridge of his nose and sneered.
    If his looks didn’t give anyone doubts as to where Adam honestly fit into the Burdett family they would have only to hear his nickname to figure it all out. His mother said they’d tagged him with it young because they could never keep him in one place, that he shared her wanderlust. Her story rang true enough, he supposed, but that didn’t ease the twinge of pain he felt every time the man they all knew was not his father called him by his nickname—“Stray Dawg.”
    All the old feelings twisted in Adam’s gut. He refused to let a child of his become another stray, raised by someone who could never fully call the boy his own. No way. Not possible. And he’d do anything within his power to keep it from happening—even go crawling back to the scene of his greatest bravado and worst behavior. Back to Mt. Knott, if not back to his family.
    Not that they’d have him back.
    Adam had roared out of Mt. Knott a week after his mother’s funeral, with an inheritance in hand, all ties to the family business severed and a hangover that had all but erased the events of his last nights in town.
    He hadn’t heard from or seen his family now in a year and a half but they had surely heard of him. His new position with a competitor had all but run the Burdett boys out of business. Now in order to do the right thing by his baby, he’d had to come home to a place where he knew he would not be welcome. But he would do it. He’d do anything for this baby he had not yet seen.
    He scuffed his boot heel on the pocked driveway as he straightened away from his treasured Harley. He’d waited long enough. It was time to go and claim his heir.

     
    Josie hadn’t even bothered to lock up the diner. She had just tossed the keys to the young man who did the dishes and asked him to see to it. The message from the young girl who watched Nathan on Thursday evenings, when Josie stayed open until nine, had been muddled by panic. But two words stood out that had caused Josie to tear off her apron and all but run the two blocks from her business to her small rental house.
    “Baby’s father.”
    A shudder worked its way through her body. The man who had the power to grant her the one thing she wanted most in life—the chance to adopt the baby boy she’d loved as her own since his birth—was in her home.
    She drew in the smell of coffee and day-old pie clinging to her pale-blue T-shirt and the fluffy white scrunchie holding back her curly hair. She’d had to wait a week to get up the nerve and the funds to hire a private detective to contact the man on the birth certificate. Not that she couldn’t have tracked him down herself but, well, just looking at the name made her anxious. Adam Burdett!
    She hadn’t known him but she certainly knew of him. And in a funny way, what she knew had filled her with what now seemed false confidence.
    After all, he was the one who had turned his back on his own family and a whole town. How serious could he be about wanting to play a part in his son’s life when he had done that? He was Mr. One-Night Stand. According to her sister, he hadn’t even called the next day to say…whatever it is a guy says after an encounter like that.
    Josie wouldn’t know that kind of thing. She and her sister might be identical twins, but their lifestyles were as different as their personalities. Yin and yang. Their mother, a “free thinker” who couldn’t keep a job, didn’t want a marriage and seemed always in pursuit of the latest trend in spiritual enlightenment,