His Baby Surprise Read online

  “You’re calling me irresponsible, too?” he asked, recognizing her words as an insult. She hadn’t written the note he’d found in the diaper bag, but she shared its sentiment.

  She gestured toward his jacket. “Bringing that baby here has proved it. You should have let the social worker find her a suitable foster home if you can’t take care of her yourself.”

  Brooks gritted his teeth again to hold back another curse. “You had no reason to call social services on us.”

  “Someone abandoned a baby on your doorstep. Authorities needed to be notified.”

  “My dad is the sheriff,” he reminded her. But he couldn’t blame her for not trusting Rex to do the right thing after the strings he’d pulled with the job.

  “Would he have called the social worker?” she asked.

  “About his own grandchild?”

  “You don’t know that yet. It’ll take a while for the DNA results to come back.”

  A lot longer than portrayed on all the popular television programs. Weeks, maybe. But he wouldn’t admit that to Priscilla. Instead he glanced down at the squirming baby. “She’s my daughter.”

  “Even if that’s proved to be true, it doesn’t mean you’re the best person to take care of her,” she said.

  “So just like you don’t think I’m qualified for coaching, you don’t think I’m qualified for fatherhood, either?”

  She held his gaze, hers steady and almost sympathetic. “Do you?”

  No. He was pretty damn certain he wasn’t cut out for either position. At least, the old Brooks wouldn’t have been. But thanks to the concussion, the old Brooks might be gone. He had no idea who or what the new version would be—if he was forced to sit out more than one season.

  “I’ll figure it out,” he assured her—and himself.

  “Since you’re so convinced she’s yours, what’s her name?” she asked.

  “I wish I knew,” he admitted, shifting the baby so she pressed against his heart.

  “You really need to give her one.”

  “I’m sure she has one. And when her mom comes back—” or his father tracked her down “—I’ll find out what it is.”

  “What if she doesn’t come back?”

  His heart kicked against his ribs. Then he’d be solely responsible for this child. He wouldn’t just be babysitting until her mother was found. “I don’t know. I don’t want to give her a name she’ll grow up hating me for.”

  “Will she grow up with you hating her?”

  Brooks gently tightened his hold on the baby. “What do you mean?”

  “If you’re her father…will you grow to resent her?” He noted the doubt in her voice.

  “Of course not. Why would I do that?”

  “Because she’ll change your life.”

  The concussion that had knocked him off the ice and back to Trout Creek had made the biggest difference. Having a baby left on his doorstep had only changed his life a little more. Okay, maybe a lot more.

  “Hey, Coach,” Ryan called out with a snarky chuckle. “You’re wasting your time with Miss Pr—Miss Andrews. The assistant principal isn’t your type.”

  “Yeah, I’m not easy,” Priscilla murmured, so quietly that Brooks barely heard her.

  “You’re too uptight to ever be considered easy,” he agreed, earning himself a glare from her green eyes.

  The kids were all staring up at them. Ryan pulled off his helmet. “Damn it, Brooks. We need your help down here. We suck!”

  He couldn’t argue about that, but he warned his brother, “Watch your mouth!”

  “They need you down there,” Priscilla said. “You can’t coach and take care of an infant.” Her voice was soft, almost as if she had an ounce of compassion for him. Or maybe she just felt sorry for the baby, since she didn’t think he could care for her on his own.

  “So you’ll look after her until tryouts are over?” he asked, as if he’d mistaken her remark as an offer to help.

  “I—I can’t watch her,” she said, her voice rising with panic.

  “It’s Saturday,” he reminded her, “so it’s not like you need to be at school. And you don’t need to be here. What made you come?” In addition to the heavy jacket, she wore gloves and earmuffs; she had dressed more for the Icehouse than the warm autumn weather. “You were checking up on me?”

  She nodded. “It’s my job to make sure you’re doing yours. Even though it wasn’t my idea to hire you, I’m responsible for you and for the safety of the kids on your team.”

  “What—you thought I’d have them drinking and smoking already, me being such a bad influence and all?” He glanced down at her empty hands. “You forgot your camera. You should have brought one to collect evidence to get me fired.”

  Her lips tightened into their characteristic line of disapproval. But instead of amusing him the way it had at his job interview, it challenged him. Could he get that mouth to relax into a smile? Or to kiss him back?

  Where the hell had that thought come from? That concussion had done more damage than he wanted to admit.

  “I also came by to inform you that this is not the official tryout. We need to pick another date and start figuring out the practice schedule. Some of these kids—including your brothers—are on the football team, so they can’t have conflicting practices. And they have to have time to study.”

  He hadn’t considered that. “Okay, we can talk about scheduling this stuff.”

  “Not now.” She shook her head. “You can’t keep her here. If she gets too cold, she’ll get sick and…” The faint color in Priscilla’s face faded, and her eyes widened with concern.

  “She’s fine,” he assured her. The tiny body was surprisingly warm and cuddly. “Hell, she’s keeping me warm.”

  “She can’t stay here.”

  “I know. And I won’t bring her again. I thought Buzz would have the heaters on, but he said he only runs the blowers during games.” He wouldn’t be able to bring her to a game, either. “I need to find someone to babysit.”

  She shook her head. “Not me. You should just go home.”

  “And leave those guys alone?” he asked, shaking his own head. The way they kept shoving each other around, someone was going to get hurt.

  “Then send them home, too.”

  “I can’t do that,” he said, then pitched his voice lower. “I need to work with them every minute I can.” He had to build a good team, a strong team—a winning team. He couldn’t step in for his childhood idol and fail. “If you watch her this one time,” he coaxed, “I promise I’ll find a babysitter. It’ll just be for an hour or so. I’ll pick her up at your house.”

  She shook her head fiercely. “Really. I can’t.”

  “I wasn’t ready for this,” he admitted, his pride be damned. “I had no idea I had a child. But just because I don’t know how to be a father yet doesn’t mean I’m going to be a bad one. I just need time. And a little bit of help.” He pulled the baby from the warmth of his flannel-lined jacket and held her out to Priscilla.

  She stared down at the child with that mixture of dread, fear and longing. The baby met her gaze with round, unblinking eyes. “You—you don’t want me to watch her,” she stammered.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “But she’s so tiny. So fragile.”

  “You’ll do fine.” Hell, she couldn’t do any worse than he was. His room was trashed—full of baby stuff, the sheets stripped off his mattress. He hadn’t been able to find clean ones to replace them. Not that he would have gotten any sleep, anyway. Nothing he’d tried—rocking, walking, even singing—had soothed the baby. Of course, he sang so badly it had probably only made her cry harder.

  He watched Priscilla’s delicate throat as she swallowed hard. Her eyes stayed wide, though, full of that fear he was dying to ask about. But he held back his questions—and his breath—until she slid her hands around the infant and clasped her close to her body.

  “Just for a little while,” she specified.

 
“I’m not going to leave her with you,” he assured her. The child had already been abandoned once. No matter how scared Brooks was that he knew nothing about being a good father, he could learn.

  Would Priscilla give him enough time before she called the social worker again? Or would she pick up her cell the minute she left and report him for bringing the baby to the arena?

  He opened his mouth to call her back, but the shouts on the ice would have drowned out his voice.

  “Coach!”

  “Coach!”

  All morning his brothers had been calling him that, too, even though he had yet to earn the title.

  “I’m coming down,” he assured them. Not that it would do any good. He had been a team captain in high school, college and the NHL. But he had never been a coach. Priscilla was right; he wasn’t qualified for the job.

  “You coming out on the ice with us?” one of the boys asked, his eyes wide with awe.

  Brooks shook his head. It still pounded with a dull ache. “I didn’t bring my skates.”

  “He brought a baby instead,” another boy griped with a snort of disgust. “My dad’s right. Hoover’s a has-been—” The words barely left his lips before Ryan slammed him down on the ice.

  “Take it back!” the teenager warned his teammate.

  Brooks flinched, remembering his last fight and the repercussions from it. He’d ended up losing what had mattered most to him. He rushed down to the boards. “Break it up, guys! Ryan, help him up.”

  While Ryan dragged the smaller kid to his feet, Brad skated up to defend his oldest brother. “Wes, your dad’s a worthless drunk who’s never left Trout Creek except to go to the county lockup. He’s a never been.”

  The kid broke free of Ryan’s grasp and shoved his gloves into Brad’s chest, knocking him on his butt. Brad’s breath escaped in a loud curse.

  “C’mon, guys,” Brooks said. “Quit the fighting. You have got to learn to work together, not against each other. What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  “We suck!” Ryan wailed.

  Brooks nodded. “Yeah, you do.” He knew from having coffee at the Trout Creek Inn the other day that the school hadn’t had a winning team in a while, but the players couldn’t have been this bad. “We don’t have enough kids yet. Did you lose a bunch of seniors?”

  “We lost our goalie and a defenseman,” Brad said.

  “They graduated?” That explained the holes in the team. His father had picked a great time to talk him into coaching—during a restructuring year.

  Ryan shook his head. “They didn’t graduate. Miss Priss suspended them.”

  “Why did she suspend them? If it was over drinking, I support her decision. And I’ll do the same thing,” he warned them. “We’re going to follow Coach Cook’s rules.”

  “What are your rules?” Wes asked. “Do as I say, not as I do?”

  The kid was a jerk, but his remark was fair. “I’ve done some stupid things off the ice,” Brooks admitted. Like some of the print ads and commercials his sports agent had talked him into, back when he’d been the fresh new star of the NHL. Right now, being back in the first arena he’d ever played in, that life felt like a dream—both good and bad. “But when I play, I’m serious. Focused. I want you all to do the same.”

  “Those players wouldn’t have broken Coach Cook’s rules.” Brad was defending them even though he hadn’t been on the team at the time.

  “Then why were they suspended?”

  Ryan snorted. “Grades, which is total crap. Miss Priss is just looking for reasons to bust up every sports team. She hates athletes.”

  “Is that what she was doing here?” Brad asked. “Getting ready to suspend more players? Or was she…Did she tell you about something else?” The fourteen-year-old glanced toward Ryan with the same guilty expression he’d worn the night before.

  “What did you guys do to Miss Andrews?” Brooks asked. “And don’t BS me. I can tell you pulled something.”

  Wes ratted them out with a vengeful smirk. “They TP’d her place.”

  “Hey, you helped,” Ryan reminded him.

  Brooks sighed. “Why?”

  “We didn’t think she hired you,” Brad admitted. “It’s like she’s out to get us—suspending players, not hiring a coach.”

  “You have a coach—me.” Such as he was.

  “But she told me on the bus back from the football game that she didn’t hire you,” Brad protested.

  “It doesn’t matter who hired me,” Brooks hedged, even though he knew it mattered to Priscilla.

  “Yeah, it does,” Brad argued. “She’s out to get us.”

  “I doubt that’s true,” Brooks reasoned, though he wasn’t so sure himself. “You said the players were suspended for bad grades.”

  Brad snorted. “Debbie? I doubt it.”

  “Who’s Debbie?”

  “Our goalie,” Ryan said.

  Brooks wasn’t a chauvinist, but he had definitely played with and for a bunch. “You had a female goalie?”

  “Hey, she didn’t play like a girl,” Ryan said in her defense. He jerked a glove toward the current goalie. “Adam’s the one who plays like a girl.”

  Brooks couldn’t argue that, and neither did the standin goalie. “Coach Cook let a girl play? Really?” The old man must have mellowed after Brooks had graduated.

  “Debbie’s his granddaughter,” Brad explained. “So you don’t know why Miss Andrews suspended her from the team? She probably did it just to get Adam off the bench.”

  “Adam?” Brooks glanced at the goalie again.

  “She’s my aunt,” he explained. “But, hey, I don’t want to be in the net. I’m better out on the ice.”

  “Miss Priss is a bitch,” Ryan said, then spat on the ice. “She likes causing trouble.”

  “That’s the same thing she says about you.” Brooks grimaced as the dull pounding in his head intensified. “And unfortunately, you’ve proved her right.”

  “C’mon, Brooks—it’s just TPing,” Ryan said with a grimace. “You can’t say you’ve never done it.”

  No, he couldn’t say that—not without lying through his teeth. “Practice is over,” he said, clapping his cold hands together. “We’re going over to Miss Andrews’s house to clean up.”

  “Wh-what? All of us?” Wes asked.

  “You helped,” Brooks reminded him. “Everybody, go to the locker room and change back into your street clothes.”

  He couldn’t wait to get to Priscilla’s place—to make sure his child was still there and Priscilla was okay. When she’d stared down at his daughter, she’d looked nearly as scared as his dad had when Brooks had awakened from that coma.

  There’d been more to her look than just being nervous around babies. He’d seen pain as well as fear. And Brooks wanted to know why.

  Chapter Six

  “Did you hear that?” Priscilla asked as she pulled the phone away from the baby’s face and held it to her own ear again. “Can you hear her breathing? Does it sound like she’s breathing harder? Is there a rattle?”

  “She’s just sighing,” the school nurse responded. “She sounds content and healthy. But of course, I shouldn’t be making that evaluation over the phone.”

  “No,” Priscilla agreed. “You need to come over here.” She shouldn’t be alone with the baby; she never should have taken her in the first place. “I think she’s going to get a cold. She was in the arena for at least a half hour.” And that was the only reason Priscilla had kept the baby, to get her out of the Icehouse and warm her up. Because a cold could turn into something else, something dangerous.

  Priscilla’s breath caught in her lungs and an ache filled her. A cold could lead to loss. And so much pain.

  “Babies have a strong immune system. I’m sure she’s fine. Does she have a fever?”

  “I don’t have a thermometer,” Priscilla said. For her own sanity, she’d had to get rid of all the baby things. She’d brought only her own clothes and books with her to Trou
t Creek.

  “Just touch her. See if she feels hot.”

  Priscilla reached trembling fingers toward the baby, who was lying in the center of her queen-sized sleigh bed. The infant was too weak to roll over and fall off the side. But Priscilla still hadn’t dared leave her alone. She’d made that mistake once before.

  Brooks shouldn’t have trusted her with the child. Really, Priscilla should have called the social worker and reported him for bringing a baby to a cold arena. Instead, she’d called Trudy, the school nurse. She brushed her fingertips across the soft forehead of the sleeping child. “She doesn’t seem too warm.”

  But neither had her baby, until she’d started burning up. Then it had been too late, the meningitis too advanced for the antibiotics to work. And her eight-week-old baby girl had died.

  Tears stung her eyes, but Priscilla blinked them back. She’d been numb for so long, but touching this baby, Brooks’s baby, had thawed something inside her. She continued to stroke her fingers across the baby’s soft forehead and over the fuzz of dark hair. She was so beautiful, so perfect, just like Courtney had been, with her little bald head and bright blue eyes. Priscilla couldn’t fight the tears anymore as they began to stream down her face.

  “Miss Andrews, are you all right?” Trudy asked.

  She sucked in a deep, steadying breath. “Yes. Yes, I’m fine,” she lied. “I’m sorry for calling you.”

  “It’s all right,” Trudy assured her. “If Mr. Hoover needs anything, I’d be happy to help him out. Is it true that he doesn’t know who the mother is—that she just left the baby on his doorstep?”

  Unwilling to exchange gossip for medical advice, Priscilla lied again. “I don’t know, but thanks for your help.”

  She’d no more than clicked the off button than the phone rang again. “Trudy, sorry for hanging up on you,” she said. Her mother would have given her such a lecture for her lack of manners.

  “Trudy?” a woman asked. “This is Margaret Everly. Is this Priscilla Andrews?”

  “Yes, it is.”