An Unexpected Christmas Baby (The Daycare Chronicles 2)

Get away from the baby.

“Your mother had a baby?” she heard herself ask, sounding only a little squeaky.

He nodded.

“I thought she was in prison...” She suddenly realized she might have revealed too much. She was being too invasive for a first business meeting. “Um, Bill told me. He said you’d overcome a...difficult past.”

He nodded. “She was. And the fact that she was a convict makes the question about Diamond’s father that much harder to answer. Who’s going to admit to fathering a child illegally?”

Her nerves were quaking. “She gave birth in prison?”

“Three days ago.”

She’d been right. The child was only days old...

Days older than any of hers had lived to be.

“And she gave her to you?” She wasn’t going to be able to keep it together much longer.

He’d agreed to take a baby. That said something about him. He needed to take her from Tamara.

He’d taken on a child. But then, his mother, a criminal, had agreed to take him on, too. By birthing him. Keeping him.

“My mother died in childbirth.”

Flint’s shocking words hit her harder than they would have if she’d been on the other side of the room. Or in another room. Speaking to him on the phone.

Knees starting to feel weak, she knew she was out of time. “And just like that, you become a father?”

“Just like that.”

There were things she should say. More questions to ask. But Tamara simply stood there, staring at him.

Unable to move.

To speak.

She was shaking visibly.

And had to get rid of the bundle she held.

Pronto.

Chapter Five

“Here, you need to take her.”

As the pink-wrapped bundle came toward him with more speed than he would’ve expected, Flint reached out automatically, allowing the baby’s head to glide up to his elbow, her body settling on his lower arm. While holding a baby was still foreign to him, he was beginning to notice a rhythm, a sense of having done it before.

“She needs to bond with you.” The woman was a stranger to him and yet she was sharing one of the most intimate experiences in his life. His coming to grips with a reality he had little idea how to deal with and a role he was unsure of. Burying his mother. Meeting his sister. Becoming for all intents and purposes, a father. All happening in one day. He’d been about to lose it—and she’d saved him.

Just like she’d saved him from almost certain job loss earlier.

Could she really be, somehow, heaven-sent? By his mother, not any divine source watching out for him. He’d long ago ceased hoping for that one.

Did he dare even think of his mother making it to an afterlife that would allow her to help her baby girl?

Was he losing his damned mind?