Dirty: The Complete Series (Secret Baby Romance Love Story) (52 page)

“How’d you meet?”

I blushed; at least, I thought, my parents
and siblings wouldn’t have much of a clue about the fact that my relationship
with Patrick was not exactly appropriate. “He’s the father of one of my
patients,” I said. Charlotte climbed into my lap and leaned against me.

“So his little boy got hurt?” …her
understanding of my job wasn’t very deep.

“He did,” I told her. “He was playing
soccer and moved wrong on the field, and broke his leg.”

“Ouch!” Charlotte’s face twisted into a
sympathetic grimace. “You’re helping him get better?”

“I am!” I gave Charlotte a little squeeze.
“He has to get strong so he won’t keep limping.”

“What does he look like?”

“Yeah, and tell us about the dad—if you’re
dating him, he must be interesting.” I blushed and focused on answering
Charlotte’s question.

“Landon’s about a year or so younger than
you are,” I told my little niece. “He’s like your brother Cary—always moving
around, even though he was still on crutches when he started coming to see me.”

“Is his dad handsome?”

I glanced at Evie and my other siblings
and smiled in spite of myself. “He is very handsome,” I admitted. “I like him a
lot.”

“One of the girls in my class is going to
get a new mom,” Charlotte told me. “Her dad asked his girlfriend to marry him.
Lisa said that she was going to be the flower girl in the wedding, and that she
was going to get a new sister or brother, too. Are you going to be Landon’s new
mom?” My cheeks burned, the blood rushed into them so fast. All the rest of the
adults in the room laughed, and Charlotte had no idea why; I didn’t want her to
feel bad.

“I don’t know if I’m going to be Landon’s
new mom,” I told her. “I’ve only known his dad for a little while. It takes a
long time to know if you want to spend the rest of your life with someone.”

“Lisa said her daddy’s been dating her new
mom for a whole year!” Charlotte looked shocked by that timeframe and I heard
more laughter from the other adults in the room. “That’s a really long time,
isn’t it?”

“It is,” I said, though it didn’t seem all
that long to me; for Charlotte, at age six, it was a chunk of her lifetime.

“Do you want to become Landon’s new mom?
If you’re still with his dad?”

“A lot of things can happen from now till
then,” I pointed out. “But Landon is a nice boy. He deserves a good mom.”

“You would be a good mom,” Charlotte said,
nodding seriously. “I hope that you can be Landon’s mom someday.” She scurried
off of my lap then, tired of her own questions, her curiosity satisfied;
fortunately the rest of my family seemed to have gotten what they wanted out of
the exchange too, and everyone settled in to play with their new toys or admire
their other presents.

Mom slipped into the kitchen unannounced
to start working on Christmas breakfast, and I chatted with my siblings and
in-laws, telling them about some of the funnier moments, and talking about the
holiday party at the clinic, where Amie had—in spite of her injuries—managed to
get just drunk enough to kiss every member of the staff under the mistletoe and
photocopy her bare ass five times.

The conversation turned back onto Patrick,
but I managed to bear up and keep a straight face. I didn’t want to tell anyone
that I was pretty sure things wouldn’t work out between us because they were
already starting to become a little strained; I didn’t want to have to deal
with their commiseration or their questions about what I’d done to “drive
another man away.”

I told them about the first date, and
about going ice-skating, and how Landon was one of the most cheerful, upbeat
kids I worked with. I told them about the mental struggle of deciding whether
or not I should even get Patrick a present, and my sisters nodded at the wisdom
of me buying a present for Landon and Patrick to essentially share. “Are you sure
you want to get involved with a guy who already has a kid? That seems like a
lot of baggage,” Evie pointed out as everyone started to wander into the
kitchen to start filling their plates with breakfast.

“Well, he’s not divorced; his wife passed
away shortly after Landon’s birth.”

“Still, though,” Evie leaned in a little
closer. “That can almost be worse; what if he’s comparing you to her?”

“I don’t think he is,” I said quickly. “I
mean, it’s been years since she passed away, and after all…she barely had an
opportunity to be Landon’s mom.” But Evie had hit on a question that had been
running around in the back of my mind for days: what if the reason that Patrick
was starting to cool off was because he didn’t think I’d be a good co-parent to
Landon?

I could understand why that would be a
worry for him; after all, if he got serious about someone he was dating, he
would have to make sure that whoever it was would be a good influence on his
son. But he’d pointed out so many times that I was good with the kids I worked
with, so I couldn’t think of a way that he might think that I would be bad for
Landon. I went into breakfast with my family and tried to push aside any
thought of Patrick at all; I could only hope that with their curiosity mostly
satisfied, my parents and siblings would leave me alone about the man I was
dating, at least for the rest of the day. There were way more exciting things
to think about, including the presents everyone had gotten; I just hoped that
I’d have some kind of answer from Patrick himself, whether it was that he
didn’t want to see me anymore or that he did, within a few days.

Chapter Eight - Patrick

I watched Landon scurry into his bedroom
with a big armful of toys and chuckled, moving to throw myself onto the couch.
Christmas Day had been busy for both of us—but Landon had reserves of energy
that I’d lost when I got out of college. “You got a good haul this year, bud!”

“Yeah!” Landon’s voice came to me muffled
from the distance between the couch and his bedroom.

“Which presents did you like the best?” I
heard a thump—and for a fraction of a second, I was concerned that Landon might
have fallen in his headlong rush. The next instant though, I heard the sound of
his feet on the floor and he ran out of his bedroom with about three of the new
toys he’d gotten.

One of them had come from Joanne’s
parents: an eBook reader pre-loaded with about a dozen books on it, with
software that would help Landon learn new words and quiz him about the concepts
in the stories. “That’s one of your favorites?” I asked, pointing it out.

“Yeah! It has games, too,” Landon
explained.
 
He put it down on the coffee
table and showed me the next toy; it was a new action figure for his Skylander
collection, one that Landon had been wanting for weeks—it had come from Santa.
I smiled as he exclaimed over how cool it was and how much more he was going to
be able to play.

“Did you put your new toys away nicely?” I
asked him. I noticed that the third toy he’d brought out was the make-your-own
kite that Mack had gotten him.

“Yes,” Landon said; he looked away.

“If I go in there and look, is that what
I’m going to see?” Landon looked down at his feet. I sighed, fighting the urge
to laugh at the fact that my son was incapable of lying believably. “Come on,
kiddo. Let’s get your toys straightened up and start putting together what
you’re going to donate, and then we’ll have some time to play before we eat
dinner. How’s that sound?”

“Okay!” Landon grabbed up the toys he had
brought into the living room with him and hurried back towards his bedroom. I
followed, hating to get off the couch but telling myself that time with my son
was time with my son—I got little enough of it as it was.

His room wasn’t a total wreck, but I
helped him as he went about straightening it; putting his dirty clothes from
the holidays in the hamper, putting his new toys in the trunk and on the
shelves where he could play with them, plugging in his eBook reader so it would
be ready for him later. I helped him gather up the toys that he wanted to
donate to the shelters, too; it was something that I’d done with Landon every
Christmas since he was one year old. The idea had been Joanne’s, and it was a
small way of keeping her memory alive.

She had said, while she was pregnant with
Landon, that she never wanted our son to become spoiled. “I see so many kids
who have more toys than they ever play with, and then other kids go
without—it’s a travesty.” Joanne’s idea had been that every year at Christmas,
we’d go through our child’s things with him, and pick out some toys that were
still in perfectly good shape, but that he didn’t play with regularly, and
donate those to children living in shelters or orphanages. I’d tried to set a
good example by letting Landon help me pick out clothes and other items of my
own to donate—including donating old but still working electronics whenever I
bought a new one.

By the time we finished, about thirty
minutes later, there was a nice-sized box of toys to go to the shelter, and I
hunkered down with my son to play with him. One of the gifts he’d gotten—not
one of his favorites, but one that was a useful thing nonetheless—was a board
game, and I suggested that there was no better way for Landon to learn how to play
it than to go through a round of it right away.

We opened up the box and laid everything
out, and in minutes Landon was wrapped up in the game; all I had to do was make
sure I was paying attention to him and not dawdling when it was my turn to roll
the dice or do one of the challenges that came up. “I wonder what Mack is doing
right now,” Landon said, letting the dice fall onto the cardboard.

“What makes you think about that?”

Landon shrugged. “I really liked the kite
she got me,” he explained, “and I want to thank her.”

“That would be a nice thing to do,” I told
him. “Maybe you could make her a card to show her how grateful you are.”

“I will!” Landon picked up a challenge
card. “Spin in a circle five times,” he read.

“Well, get to it or miss your move,” I
said, grinning. Landon scrambled up and stepped back from the board game on the
floor, and spun in a circle while I counted out how many revolutions he made.
He tumbled effortlessly back onto the floor giggling.

We talked about how much fun the game would
be with some of his friends, but Landon’s comment had brought Mack up in my
mind again. I wished I knew how her holidays had gone—she had mentioned
something about meddling relatives, her parents and siblings wanting to know
everything about her love life. I’d hoped that she’d managed to get through it
without feeling weird about our relationship, but I didn’t quite have the
courage to call and ask her about how it had been. I’d already decided I was
going to wait another day to give her a call, to try and make another effort at
mending our relationship.

“Hey Dad,” Landon said, when I started
warming up leftovers that we’d brought home from the family get-together for
dinner, “we should wait for after the new year to give my toys to the shelter.”

“Why’s that, buddy?”

I looked up from the microwave to look at
Landon at the breakfast bar, coloring. “You’re going to be buying me a lot more
presents in a couple of weeks,” he pointed out. “When you lose the bet.”

“When I lose the bet, eh?” I grinned. “I
wasn’t sure you were keeping track of that.”

“Yep!” Landon paused in the midst of his
coloring and hopped down from the bar stool, hurrying into his bedroom. I
shrugged off his behavior and checked on the heating food, trying to make sure
I didn’t start a fire in the microwave or melt anything. “See?” I turned around
again and saw that my son was holding up a calendar. I frowned for a second,
confused—and then realized that every day since he’d made the bet with me to
the current day was marked with a big X.

“You’ve been keeping track!”

I turned away from the stove and microwave
to examine the calendar in a little more detail. Sure enough, I had a little
less than a week until New Year’s Day, which was when Landon had wanted me to
find him a new mother by.

“Yep. And I don’t think you are going to
win,” Landon told me. “You have six and a half days to find me a new mom, Dad.”

“I know, I know.”

I smiled but I felt a little crushed at
the reminder. The one real shot I’d made at winning the bet had been with Mack—and
I had no idea where we stood. It was stupid of me to have given into Landon’s
wager; it would have been impossible to know that I would want someone in my
life—and Landon’s—for the rest of it after only knowing her for less than a
month.

“You kept my list, right Dad?” Landon’s
eyes looked eager for the toys that he knew he would be getting in a few weeks’
time. I laughed again and the microwave beeped to let me know that the food was
heated up.

“I did. So if and when you win our bet, I
will be able to get you your list all over again.”

“I’m gonna win,” Landon said with
confidence in his voice. “Are you going to ask Mack out again?”

I turned away so that Landon wouldn’t see
me cringe. “I don’t know, buddy. She’s pretty busy, and I don’t know what her plans
are for New Years. We’ll see how things go in a week or so.” Just saying it
made me feel down; I wasn’t sure whether I was more upset at the fact that I
had been dumb enough to put a couple hundred dollars on the line in a wager
with my five-year-old son, or if I was more disappointed that I hadn’t been
able to prove him wrong and give him the mom I knew he was craving—or at least
a woman in his life who might eventually fulfill that role.