Free A Baby in the Bargain by Victoria Pade Page B

said, thinking that if there was a chance she might be seeing Gideon again soon she might not want to part with them. But she could hardly say that!
    “We should take off or we’ll be late for the movie,” Livi said.
    “Let me get a bag to carry the soup cans,” Jani offered, and they all left her bedroom.
    “You look great, by the way,” Lindie said as they went to the kitchen. “Wear those new black heels you bought when we were shopping last Saturday... Oh, or is this guy short? You don’t want to tower above him, that’ll only make him more intimidated.”
    “He’s not short or intimidated, believe me,” Jani said of Gideon.
    “He’s not shortand has green eyes...” Livi said as if she’d heard something in Jani’s tone to provoke a return to the initial suspicion that tonight’s dinner was a date. “Is it possible that even though this guy is in the hate-the-Camdens camp, you aren’t so much in the hate-the-guy camp?”
    “I don’t hate him. Why would I hate him?” Jani said, hearing the overcompensation in her own tone.
    “Do you like him?” Lindie asked, suspicious again, too.
    “I don’t have any personal opinion about him one way or another. This is just my turn up to bat on one of these missions and I’m trying to get it over and done with so I can just concentrate on the baby. I’m not letting anything keep me from having a baby anymore—tall with green eyes or not,” she said firmly.
    “And you shouldn’t,” Livi agreed.
    “I can’t wait to be able to start buying baby clothes!” Lindie added, obviously trying to compensate for her earlier insensitivity.
    “And to decorate the nursery,” Livi put in.
    “What do we need men for?” Lindie again.
    “Yeah, they’re nice, but they’re like jewelry—accessories, not necessities,” Livi said.
    Jani put the soup cans in a sack and kept quiet, knowing that neither of her cousins actually believed what they were saying about men and that they were both just trying to put a good face on things for Jani’s sake.
    It wasn’t that she didn’t want a man in her life or that she thought they were nothing more than accessories. But she’d done everything she could with Reggie to stick it out, to make it work, so she could arrive at the point of having a baby with him. With a husband.
    But that had failed. And this was what she was left needing to do. Or risk never having a baby of her own.
    So no, no man.
    Sure, she preferred to have a family the old-fashioned way. The traditional way.
    And if Gideon Thatcher came to mind at that very moment?
    It wasn’t as if there was a connection.
    Regardless of what her traitorous brain might be throwing out at her, she was done fostering any kind of illusions.
    And that’s exactly what it would be to so much as entertain the idea that—even if she had the time to wait for something to develop between them—Gideon Thatcher would ever be inclined to father a Camden baby.
    * * *
    “Uh... Are they giving those away in there?”
    After eating their meal of luscious lasagna and going over paperwork, Jani had left Gideon to go to the ladies’ room. She’d gone in with only her purse, but now she emerged carrying a tiny, sleeping baby boy in her arms.
    Just then the baby’s mother came out of the ladies’ room holding a crying three-year-old, and Jani nodded in her direction. “I’m just helping out,” she said to Gideon, waiting for the woman to catch up to her so she could follow her to her table and hand the baby over to the father.
    When Jani was done, she sat back down, replaced her napkin in her lap and explained. “While Mom was changing the baby’s diaper the three-year-old tried to climb onto the sink to wash her hands and fell. The three-year-old insisted she was too hurt to walk and Mom couldn’t carry the baby and the three-year-old out at once. I was just helping, so no, unfortunately, they weren’t handing out babies in there. If they had been, I would have taken one. Or