Mary McBride – Baby, Baby, Baby (страница 6)

Obviously she’d been wrong about that. Sonny hadn’t changed a bit. He never would. He’d always be his spur-of-the-moment, let-the-devil-take-tomorrow, what-me-worry, haphazard self. And she’d always be the worrier, the list maker, the Queen of Post-It notes and the planner.

The twain would never meet.

And one of the twain, dammit, would have to go.

Melanie squeezed her eyes closed, determined to wrench at least a few hours sleep from the chaos that suddenly surrounded her.

Next door, at that precise moment, Sonny took a swig from his bottle of beer and a long drag on his cigarette, then leaned back his head and closed his eyes. He’d kept a couple candles burning to ward off any lowlife who might be looking for an unoccupied place to crash for the night. If that warning didn’t prove successful, he was still wearing his shoulder holster with his service pistol snug under his arm.

He was almost hoping some coked-up derelict did stumble in, thus offering him a legitimate excuse to shove somebody up against a wall and work off some of the foul mood he was in.

Cop on the Block at your service, ma’am. What was that? You say you want a baby?

Every time he thought about what Melanie planned to do, his gut churned, tying itself into a thousand tight little knots, and his heart surged with a sort of primitive rage. It made him nuts to think of his wife getting pregnant by another man, artificially or otherwise. If otherwise, at least he’d have the pleasure of killing the guy. What could he do about the artificial deal—stomp a little vial and grind it into the floor?

He’d found out about her cockamamie plan last week, the same afternoon he’d gone through the plate-glass window. That revelation, coupled with the one he’d had from the .44 Magnum, had finally propelled him into action. Waiting for Mel to change her mind obviously wasn’t working, and merely telling her that he’d changed wasn’t good enough or fast enough in light of this baby deal.

The Cop on the Block notion had seemed inspired at the time. He filled out the paperwork, sat on his captain’s desk until he signed it, then personally walked it through the approval process at the Third Street Bank. If the nerdy little vice president in charge of loans filed a complaint, Sonny was fully prepared to say that he’d simply drawn his gun to make certain the safety was on.

So far, so good. The house was his. He was sitting here, a mere twenty feet from Melanie’s place. Of course, he was sitting in the dark and his toilet was outside and Mel was barricaded behind locked doors, but—by God—he was here. Now he just had to convince her that he was capable of change.

As for Mel, she didn’t have to change even so much as a hair for him. He’d probably fallen for her the first time he’d seen her up on the stage at that awards ceremony exerting nearly superhuman effort to keep her knees together in that tiny little gray skirt while two hundred pairs of eyes were zeroing in on them and two hundred good but lecherous souls were silently pleading for just one little peek.

Okay. Maybe at first it was just the challenge of those lovely, super-glued knees. But after an hour of being with her that night, Sonny had quickly forgotten about the knees in order to focus on her quick, bright, and almost comically organized mind. And though he might have teased her about the lists and date books she produced from her handbag like a succession of clowns from a midget car, a part of him—an important, bone-deep part—truly envied the order and apparent certainty in her life.

Until Mel, the women he’d been with had lives as erratic as his own. Sheila, the flight attendant. Tammy, the traveling sales rep. Barb and Cathy and the other Cathy, all cops, all the time. Maybe the haphazard attitude was a habit with him, acquired from too many moves as a kid from one foster home to another. Maybe it was a defense. If he didn’t make plans, they couldn’t go wrong. Who knew?

But Sonny knew that from the minute he’d met Melanie Sears, he’d felt as if he’d found a permanent home. Then, because he continued to be an erratic, undependable, insensitive jerk, he’d promptly lost her.

He would’ve cut off his right arm for a second chance. Or quit smoking. Really quit this time. Whatever Mel wanted. Anything.

All she had to do was ask.

Assuming she ever spoke to him again.

In the meantime, he’d made his own list. After “Get Melanie Back” came “Fix up this freaking dump.” He drained the last of his beer, dropped his cigarette into the wet remnants in the bottle, then prayed he could slide into a few hours of dreamless sleep.

Chapter 3

There was no wake-up call in the world quite like the squeal of the hydraulic lift on a big flatbed as it prepared to slide a boxcar-size Dumpster onto a concrete pad.

Melanie groaned her way out of bed, snarled through her shower, and then got dressed and stomped downstairs to fix breakfast. She was starving after eating just a skimpy bowl of cereal the night before.

Sometime during the course of the night—sometime between the raucous hooting and door slamming of the party and the ground-shaking thud of the Dumpster bin shortly after dawn—she had decided to not let Sonny Randle ruin her life. Twice. If he couldn’t accept the fact that their marriage was over, that was his problem. Not hers. If he wanted to waste his time trying to convince her otherwise, it wasn’t going to work.

She had plans, and she was going to follow through with them no matter who moved in next door. Anyway, dammit, she was here first.

Muttering to herself, she pulled a box of eggs and a carton of orange juice from the refrigerator. She wasn’t going to quit eating right just because Sonny was here. Of all the times in her life that good nutrition was important, it was now, prior to her pregnancy. She wasn’t going to alter a lifetime’s worth of good habits just because the King of Chaos had moved into the neighborhood.

As if to emphasize her steely resolve, she cracked an egg so hard against the edge of the bowl that it splattered across the shiny white tile counter and dribbled down the front of the oak cabinet. She didn’t feel the least bit guilty blaming that on Sonny, too, as she grabbed a paper towel to clean it up. In fact, whatever went wrong from here on out would clearly be his fault if for no other reason than sheer proximity.

While she ate her scrambled egg with neat little bites of whole wheat toast, Melanie did what she did best. She made a list. Even if she decided to postpone Monday’s appointment until next month, there were a million things that needed to be done. These weren’t tasks she’d overlooked, but ones she’d saved for this special time. It was how she’d planned to spend her pregnancy, indulging herself in getting ready for the birth.

The nursery, on the second floor adjacent to her room, needed everything. She couldn’t wait to shop for the crib and the dresser and the sweet little night-light that would adorn it, but those would only come after she painted the walls the perfect shade of yellow that she had yet to find. Not daffodil. And it wasn’t quite pale lemon sherbet, either. The best way she could describe the color in her head was baby-duck yellow. Melanie wrote that at the top of her list. Surely someone at the paint store would know exactly what she meant and be able to mix up a batch with ease.

She wrote down brushes, rollers, and paint tray, then decided that was probably enough for one day’s To Do list. After all, she didn’t want to finish everything in the first month and then have nothing to do for the next eight.

After she rinsed her breakfast dishes, she peeked out the window to see if the coast was clear enough to sneak out and get the morning paper. The big red sandstone house next door looked just as deserted as it ever had. The Cop on the Block, she supposed, was somewhere in the debris, sleeping off the effects of his orgy last night.

Melanie opened her front door and stood on her front steps a moment, stretching her arms toward the cloudless azure sky, then gazing at the pink-and-white blossoms of the dogwood trees in Channing Park. Next April on a lovely morning just like this one, she couldn’t help but think, she’d be bundling the baby in a stroller and heading off for a lovely turn around the park. One more reason, she thought, to not cancel Monday’s procedure.

There were always joggers and power walkers and just plain amblers moving at their individual paces around the park. Right now Melanie could see the Wrenn sisters coming down Kassing at a pretty good clip. She waved, hoping if they paused to chat, she didn’t mix up their names the way she usually did. One was Susan and the other Sandy, but she was never quite sure which. There was only a year between them but they looked like identical twenty-something twins, both tall and terribly blond, and tended to dress that way, no doubt thoroughly enjoying the confusion they created. This morning they were wearing jiggly little T-shirts and a thin coating of hot-pink Spandex on their long legs.