Free Jake's child by Lindsay Longford Page A

she'd known. So sorry, of course, but facts were facts.
    "Nicholas and I are strangers to you. What else could we be?" Jake's sandpapery voice scraped the night.
    "I don't know. I can't think." She sighed. Her teeth chattered.
    "Listen, I've kissed a lot of women in my time, but I usually get a different reaction. What did I do wrong?" Jake shrugged when she only looked vacantly at him. "Sorry, stupid joke." He opened the screen door. "Let's go inside. Have some coffee? A beer?" He rubbed his head hard.
    Sarah saw the calculation in his eyes and wondered. Jake Donnelly was still playing games with her. She just hadn't learned the rules. Ever since Jake and Nicholas had come knocking on her door, her emotions had been yo-yoing to the pull of Jake's hand on the string, and the child had stirred up old grief. She'd drifted into make-believe with him and carried it into reality.
    "No. I'm going up to see Nicholas." Sarah snicked the screened door behind them.
    "No, you're not." Jake stepped between her and the front door. "I won't let you." Darkness underlay his casual tone.

    'There's no way on God's green earth you're going to stop me short of killing me," she said flatly. "And you're not a killer."
    "I might be." His voice was as flat as hers had been.
    Sarah looked him up and down, looked steadily in his uncompromising eyes while their colors shifted and changed. "Not in this life, you aren't." She pushed him aside. "I just want to see him, that's all." She was surprised by the ease with which she shifted his bulk. She would remember that later.
    She gazed into the dark second story where the faint glow of a night-light softened the void. Nicholas had pretended he didn't want the pink shell plugged into the socket. "Sissy stuff," he'd scowled, but he hadn't turned it off. Sarah's heart pounded as her bare foot touched the carpeted staircase. Nausea churned her stomach. What was she doing? She had to control her behavior. She knew she was on the edge, knew it and couldn't stop. She had to see the child.
    "By myself," she continued as Jake stayed close behind her.
    "If you think for one minute I'm letting you go into the kid's room to wake him up and scare the living daylights out of him, you're really out of your cotton-picking mind!" Anger roughened Jake's voice. "I've been real patient, but this is the limit. He's my responsibility and I won't have you disturbing him!"
    The protective passion behind Jake's anger startled her.
    "I'm not going to disturb him. Surely you must know that?" Sarah halted in amazement. "How could you think I'd do such a thing?"
    "How can I know what you'd do?" Jake countered, bitterness grooving lines around his mouth. "But I'm not letting you go up there by yourself."
    "I don't understand you, at all," Sarah murmured. "You confuse me."

    'That goes double, sweetheart, because you confuse the hell out of me." Jake shook his head. "Anyway, I know who Nicholas is and he's my business, not yours. No way am I turning you loose on him while you're in this state, so get that little notion out of your brain!"
    It was the longest speech Sarah had heard from Jake. "Don't worry," she said. "I won't wake him up."
    "Why do you want to see him, anyway? He's nothing to do with you! Nothing, that's what!" His furious whisper startled her as he pushed his face close to hers.
    "I don't know," she wailed. "I don't know anything any more. I just want to see him! Can't you get that through your thick head?" Sarah took his head, trying to shake sense into him. Like black satin the strands of his hair moved through her fingers.
    The air grew heavy between them. She could hear her breathing, his, the banging of the screen door. Jake moved a step closer, almost, she thought, against his will. Her fingers slipped out of his hair. "I'm sorry," she said. "I shouldn't have done that." She clasped her fingers together, still feeling the satin of Jake's hair between them.
    "Oh, go on," he said tiredly. "But I'm going with