Free His Best Friend's Baby by Janice Kay Johnson - His Best Friend's Baby Page B

up the car at your office. This afternoon? Good. Sure.”
    By the time he slid behind the wheel of the Camaro late that afternoon, anger had taken the place of the shock. Mindy might dislike him, but she sure hadn’t hesitated to use him. Funny thing, but she hadn’t told him to get lost until Dean’s affairs were pretty well wrapped up and she knew she’d have enough money to get by.
    Well, he’d done as much as he had for Dean’s sake, not hers; she was right about that.
    “I tried,” he said aloud, figuring he was as close to Dean here in the car he’d loved as he’d get anywhere. When Quinn turned the key in the ignition, the engine started with a throaty purr. Accelerating out of the parking lot in the candy-apple-red Camaro, he remembered how much Dean had enjoyed the way heads turned when he drove this car. Quinn did like the power, the sense that he had only to ask and the car would surge forward like a thoroughbred out of the gate at Emerald Downs. The bright red, though, made him feel conspicuous. But the car would stay red. He wouldn’t give Mindy the satisfaction of finding out she was right.
    His jaw flexed. No! The Camaro would stay red because Dean had liked it that way. The car was a memento, a reminder of Dean’s boyish delight in expensive toys, starting with the mountain bike the Howies had bought him that first Christmas in their home. He’d grinned and cried at the same time.
    “You mean, it’s mine?” the gawky kid had asked in wonder. “I can take it, even if my mom comes for me?”
    Quinn had considered his matching bike a loaner. The only gifts he’d ever had were from men sniffing after his mother back before she got so strung out. Those hadn’t really been for him; even as a little kid, he’d known that. Gifts came with strings attached. He’d hated the knowledge he’d seen in his mother’s eyes.
    He hadn’t known what the Howies thought he’d give in return for that bike or the other Christmas and birthday gifts that followed, and they never had explicitly asked for anything. Even so, he’d continued for his own self-defense to think of everything they’d given him as borrowed, like the bedroom and his place at the dinner table. When he’d graduated from high school and left the Howies’, he hadn’t taken much: a few clothes, the clunker of a car he’d bought with his meager income from bagging groceries, and that was about it.
    Dean had thought he was an idiot. He reveled in owning nice stuff.
    “I miss my mom,” he’d confided once. “But she never had any money. Sometimes she bought me clothes at the thrift store, but mostly they came from school. You know how they have that room where you can pick out what you need?”
    Quinn, to his eternal shame, had known. He’d been ashamed of taking clothes from the Howies, too, but that was a different kind of humiliation. At least now he didn’t have to walk down the hall at school wondering if some other kid was going to recognize his discarded shirt.
    “When Mom comes to get me, I won’t mind being poor again,” Dean had added hastily. “And the Howies said I could take everything.”
    His attitude was probably more natural than Quinn’s. Having grown up without giant piles of presents under the Christmas tree, Dean had apparently saved up all that wanting. Quinn had always watched him indulgently, even when he’d become a man who could fulfill his own wishes. He hadn’t been surprised when Dean had gone into business for himself so he could have more than a basic paycheck. Quinn was satisfied with a house and car, bought and paid for with his own money. Dean had seemed to have an empty place inside he never could fill. He’d developed cravings: for a bigger, fancier house, a flashy car, then a boat. His excitement had always been high when he first bought the new thing, whatever that was. But pretty soon, he’d start dreaming about something else.
    Quinn had been surprised when he’d married Mindy. Dean