Dr. Daddy (13 page)

F
riday morning couldn’t have arrived soon enough for Jonas. Not only was it the first opportunity he’d had in months to take a day off, but he’d made very big plans he was anxious to carry out. As he waited for Zoey’s knock at his front door, he checked for the third time to make sure he had everything they’d need for the romantic encounter he had spent the past two days planning.

It had been damned difficult yesterday to act as if there wasn’t a thing in the world wrong between them, but he’d taken Zoey’s lead in the matter. She had come into his house in the morning acting as if she hadn’t a care in the world, so he had, too. Today, however,
he
was going to set the tone.

“Picnic basket, check,” he noted. “Fresh flowers, check. Candles and matches, check. Lightly chilled chardonnay, check. Clean diapers, check. Favorite rattle, check. Formula, check.”

He turned to look at the baby sitting in her bouncer seat at the center of the kitchen table. Juliana gazed back at him with wide blue eyes.

“I think we have everything, don’t you, Jules?” he asked her.

She kicked her legs fiercely and set the chair to rocking, then smiled and gurgled at her success.

“You’re absolutely right. We
do
need to pack some tunes. How about a little Edith Piaf, hmm? And maybe some Tony Bennett? Oh, okay, and we’ll throw in Alvin and the Chipmunks for you.”

Juliana cooed her thanks.

“Don’t mention it.”

The doorbell rang at seven-thirty on the dot, and Jonas freed Juliana from her seat so that the two of them could answer the door together. They opened it to find a shivering, exhausted-looking Zoey on their doorstep, her hands shoved deep inside the pockets of her parka, her nose and eyes red from the cold. Which was odd, Jonas thought, because the temperature was well into the sixties.

“Good morning,” he said, hoping the greeting sounded easy and casual and completely free of expectations. He didn’t want her to be the slightest bit suspicious of his intentions.

“Borning,” she replied, pushing past him. “Sorry I’b lade. Der was a wreck on rude dirdy-aid dat backed up draffic from Cherry Hill all da way do Haddafeel.”

It
sounded
as if she was speaking English, he thought. Sort of. At any rate, he was pretty sure she was apologizing for an accident and the rush-hour traffic making her run late.

“That’s okay,” he told her. “Uh, are you all right?”

“I hab a bad code.” To punctuate the announcement, she sneezed. Loudly. Four times.

“Bless you,” Jonas said automatically.

“Danks.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I probably shuddin baby-sid wid Jules dooday. Bud if you’re pressed, I could wade undil you call someone else. Like Bizzus Standard or sombding.”

“Actually, I’m taking the day off today.”

Zoey exhaled a deep sigh of relief. “Grade. Dad’s grade. Den I’ll go hobe and go do bed.”

Jonas nodded. “Good idea. Just let Jules and me get our coats, and we’ll go with you.”

She held up her hand, palm out. “Nod necessary. I don wan do infec’ you guys. I’ll be okay.”

“Forget it,” he told her. “You look and sound awful. You shouldn’t be by yourself. Jules and I will take good care of you. You’ll see.”

She opened her mouth to object, but he halted her with a hastily uttered, “I’ll drive. You can get your car later.”

Before she could insist otherwise, Jonas spun around and returned to the kitchen to retrieve the props he had planned to use that day to bring Zoey around to his way of thinking. She couldn’t have timed her illness better, he thought. Naturally he didn’t like to see her with a bad cold, but he certainly wasn’t going to miss such a prime opportunity. She needed looking after while she was sick, and he was just the person to do it. He was, after all, a doctor. Better than that, he was a doctor in love.

Once and for all, he’d teach Zoey Holland a few lessons that she desperately needed to learn. He’d show her that he wasn’t the kind of man she insisted on thinking him. He’d show her that it was possible to go on living after suffering a tragedy like the one she’d suffered so many years ago. And most important of all, he’d show her that the two of them were perfectly suited to each other. Together, he’d prove to her, they could create a miracle. For all he knew, they already had.

“I don wan do expose Jules do my code,” she insisted when he returned to the living room.

“As long as you don’t pick her up, she’ll be fine,” he told her. “As you yourself pointed out to me not long ago, she’s perfectly healthy. And as members of the medical profession, you and I know that colds are spread through contact. Just don’t contact Jules. She’ll be fine.”

The baby in his arms smiled and cooed her agreement.

“See there?” Jonas said. “She wouldn’t think of letting you go home alone.”

“Danks, Jules,” Zoey muttered dryly. “Bud I hobe you know wad you’re gedding yourself indo.” Then she noted the picnic basket in Jonas’s free hand and the diaper bag that dangled from his shoulder. “Wad’s all dat?”

“A sure cure,” he told her. “For a lot of things.”

“Bud—”

“Now let’s go, before you faint from exhaustion.”

“I’b nod exhausded, I’b—”

“See there? You’re so sick, you’re starting to blather incoherently.”

“I’b nod bladdering. I’b—”

He cupped his free hand over her forehead. “You feel like you have a slight fever, too,” he finished for her. “The sooner we get you to bed, the better.”

Zoey eyed him warily and decided not to pursue the obvious double entendre. Maybe Jonas had intended his statement to be suggestive, maybe not. There was no way she could tell, because he was looking at her so blandly—as if nothing in the world had changed about their relationship. As if there wasn’t a mountain of muddled emotions messing up everything between them. As if they hadn’t spent last Friday night doing all sorts of incredibly arousing things together and had risked the possibility of her becoming pregnant.

As if he had no idea she was fast falling in love with him.

She pushed the thought away. It wasn’t love she was feeling for Jonas. It was just some mixed-up, misguided, mistaken sense of yearning, compounded by the bad cold with which she had awakened the night before. Some sappy desire she knew better than to feel, a longing for something she’d had ages ago but would never experience again—the longing for a family.

Spending time with Jonas and Juliana had stirred things in Zoey she hadn’t felt since she was a teenager. She should have seen it coming, she told herself now, should have anticipated from the beginning that devoting her time to Jonas and his niece would arouse feelings in her she had thought long dead. How could she have opened herself up to something like this? she asked herself. How could she have let herself become so involved with the two of them?

That had always been the beauty of her job, she reminded herself, the ability to not get so involved. Working as a nurse in the hospital nursery had always been perfect. She’d been able to spend time with infants, but not so much time that she ever grew attached to them. Babies came and went in a matter of days in the maternity ward. They were cute and cuddly, and they needed her up to a point, and she could give them whatever they commanded.

It had always managed to give her some small degree of comfort, knowing she could care for those little ones without losing them. Maybe Jonas had been right about that, she thought now. There had been nothing she could do for her son except sit by and watch him succumb to the illness that gradually overtook him. But there was plenty she could do for the babies at Seton General.

She just never had time to fall in love with them.

Even Livy’s and Sylvie’s babies hadn’t roused the deep-seated anxiety she had feared her friends’ children would stir in her. And Zoey had ultimately concluded that was because she wasn’t the one taking care of them. Simon and Gennie were great kids, and she enjoyed being around them. But they weren’t hers. She didn’t take care of them. She wasn’t responsible for them. Her affection for them didn’t extend beyond anything she felt for a number of other people in her life.

That wasn’t the case with Juliana. Zoey had gotten to know the little baby too well over the past week and a half and loved her too much as a result. Even though Jules belonged to Jonas, Zoey had come to feel a real love, a real sense of responsibility, for the infant. Something warm and painful tore at her heart at the realization that she had succumbed so easily to the baby. And now, looking at the man who cradled her in his arms, Zoey knew she had also succumbed to him. Just as easily. Just as painfully. And she had no idea what she was going to do.

“Well?” Jonas asked as he moved toward her.

Juliana smiled when Zoey came into her line of vision, reaching her chubby little hands out toward her. The baby was wearing a pink sweater and white knit cap that set off her clear blue eyes beautifully, and her gummy, toothless smile was almost Zoey’s undoing. She, too, extended a hand toward Juliana, then dropped it when she realized she shouldn’t touch the baby lest she give her a cold. She didn’t want to make Juliana sick. So she dropped her hand back to her side and felt the hole in her heart open a little wider.

“I...” she began. But her voice trailed off, and she forgot what she was going to say.

“You need to be in bed,” Jonas finished for her. “You need for someone to take care of you.”

Zoey said nothing in reply, but, at his silent gesture that she should precede him, she exited through his front door with Jonas and Juliana bringing up the rear.

“I’ll dribe,” she said softly. “I don wan do leabe my car.”

“Fine,” Jonas relented, obviously exasperated.

Someone to take care of her, she repeated to herself. That was what he thought she needed. She wanted to tell him that couldn’t be further from the truth, wanted to assure him she had been getting along just fine on her own for more than fifteen years. But somehow, that argument suddenly seemed ridiculous. She wasn’t getting along just fine these days. Not if she spent them thinking about a life she could never have again.

It should all be over now, she told herself. She owed Jonas and the baby nothing beyond today. After today, with the constant reminder of Juliana gone, she could go back to storing memories of Eddie in that quiet part of her brain that normally lay locked up and forgotten. After today, with the constant lure of Jonas gone, she could put silly thoughts of having a family again well and truly behind her.

And after today, it
would
all be over, she told herself, and she
would
go back to getting along just fine. She only hoped “just fine” would be enough to see her through the next forty or fifty years.

* * *

Spending time with Jonas and Juliana at their house was one thing, Zoey decided sometime later. But having the two of them invading her own abode was something else entirely. Something more troubling, more confusing, more anxiety provoking and more threatening. As she stood at the doorway of her tiny kitchen, watching Jonas in his stocking feet, heating up a can of chicken-noodle soup for her, Zoey tamped down a tingle of delight.

Just because he looked truly scrumptious in his off-duty uniform of blue jeans and rumpled gray sweater, and just because he and Jules were caught up in a cooing match of unprecedented proportions, and just because the three of them together at her place among her things made Zoey feel all warm and gooey inside, and just because everything about the scene just felt too, too right...

It didn’t mean she was allowed to enjoy it, she concluded with a wistful sigh. This was only a temporary situation, she reminded herself. When the day drew to a close, Jonas and Juliana would return to their own home together, and Zoey would retreat to hers alone. She told herself she should take comfort in the knowledge. Instead, she found herself feeling almost bereft.

“Almost ready,” Jonas said over his shoulder as he rattled a spoon in the pan one final time.

Before Zoey could utter her thanks, Juliana expelled a long, low sputter of vowels mixed with saliva, and the two adults laughed.

“No,” Jonas replied to the baby as if shocked by her statement. “You don’t say.”

The baby’s little mouth rounded to an O, and she exhaled on another lengthy coo.

“No, I don’t believe a word of it,” he continued, still adopting that breathy voice of surprise that Juliana seemed to love. “It’s just too incredible.”

“Oooohhh,” Juliana assured him.

“She actually said that to you?” Jonas countered. “And what did you say in return?”

“Heeeeee,” the baby replied.

“Well, I don’t blame you. I would have said the same thing.”

“Nnnnnng.”

“I can imagine.”

“Skxxxx.”

“Well, I would have, too.”

It was then that Zoey knew she’d been lying to herself every time she’d told herself she wasn’t in love with Jonas Tate. She wasn’t sure how or when it had happened, but she couldn’t deny the fact any longer. She was in love with the man who, until recently, she had sworn was her most dire enemy. And if she thought back over the past several months, she had to concede that it had probably started a long time before he’d asked for her help with Juliana.

That was probably why she’d always felt uncomfortable around him, probably explained why her back had always gone up whenever he came within twenty-five feet of her. Because some part of her deep down had known how fast she was falling for him. And that part of her had been trying to make her beat a hasty retreat.

That part of her was pretty smart, Zoey acknowledged now. Because falling in love with Jonas was going to bring her nothing but trouble.

“Did you really tell Jules that you find me irresistible?” Jonas demanded, snapping her out of her reverie.

She glanced up to find him smiling at her, and Juliana bouncing in her baby seat with much vigor. She, too, was grinning, and Zoey could almost swear the two of them were sharing some private little secret.

“What?” she asked, still a bit too mystified by her newly discovered emotions to have heard him clearly. Or maybe it was just the antihistamines she’d taken upon her arrival home, she tried to reassure herself. Her stuffy nose was much cleared, but her brain was still a little fuzzy.