Free Baby Benefits by Emily McKay Page A

personal time. She’d defended him when others called him a tyrant and an unfeeling bastard. And she’d done it all because she’d believed she saw things in him no one else did. Because she believed they shared something he had with no one else. Even if he didn’t love her—and she’d never had any illusions he did—she believed that he at least trusted and confided in her.
    But it turned out, he was just clueless. He’d unwittingly broken her heart and she was just not ready to forgive him for that. Frankly, she wasn’t even willing to let her stir-fry get cold.
    “I should have done that years ago,” she muttered as she pushed open the kitchen door, working hard to bury a twinge of guilt.
    An hour later, as she was finishing up the dishes, she still wasn’t entirely successful. She leaned toward Lavender, who was drying while she washed, and opened her mouth to speak.
    “Stop obsessing.”
    Raina snapped her mouth closed. Then said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “You’re still worried that something is really wrong with Isabella. Just remember Derek is a competent adult. He’ll figure it out. He’s got to—”
    Before Lavender could even finish her thought, the doorbell rang. A sinking feeling settled into her stomach. Lavender shot her an exasperated look.
    “That better not—”
    “Raina,” Cassidy called from the living room. “It’s for you.”
    Kendrick, without looking up from his homework, mimicked the heavy breathing of Darth Vader before giving in to a chuckle at his own joke.
    Raina dried her hands and shot looks at both Lavender and Kendrick. “You two stay here.”
    Stifling her growing annoyance, she pushed through to the living room to find—just as she expected—Derek standing just inside the front door, a crying Isabella in his arms.
    It was so disconcerting to see him standing there in her living room, for a moment she couldn’t even speak. He was dressed much as he’d been earlier—the same dress pants and shirt, but he’d lost the jacket. The sleeves of his shirt had been rolled up. She’d seen him dressed just so many times, but always at the office, after hours. And he’d never before looked quite so…disheveled.
    His hair was mussed as if he’d repeatedly run his fingers through it and something mysterious and beige stained his shirt.
    Kendrick and Lavender hovered in the door behind her. Cassidy sat on the sofa beside their mother’s wheelchair, watching a sitcom on TV. Acid poured into her stomach at the sight of their curious, appraising gazes. Given their playful—but genuine—animosity toward him, this had the potential to go very badly.
    “You shouldn’t have come,” she told him.
    He held Isabella out toward her. “I couldn’t find the thermometer,” he said accusingly, as if it were somehow her fault. “Then when I put her in the car to drive to the pharmacy to buy one, she started crying.” He pulled an ear thermometer out of his pants pocket. “I bought this at the pharmacy, but every time I use it, I get a different reading. And she just keeps crying.”
    Lavender stepped around Raina and crossed the room. “That kind of thermometer is notoriously unreliable on infants,” she said reassuringly as she held out her hands. “Here, let me take her.”
    Derek eyed her suspiciously.
    “Derek, this is my sister, Lavender. She works part-time at a pediatrician’s office.”
    “And I’m quite the expert temperature taker. We’ll get this sorted out.”
    Reluctantly he released the crying Isabella into her arms. She quieted down almost instantly in Lavender’s gentle touch. The two of them disappeared down the hall. The concern lining Derek’s face didn’t disappear so quickly.
    She’d never seen him like this. He wasn’t a man easily worried. If a problem arose, he fixed it. Simple as that.
    But Raina knew all too well that the health of a loved one wasn’t something you could fix. There were problems no amount of