Chapter One #3
“I did,” his brother confirmed. “And then I came back.”
“Why?”
“Because I thought you might want to talk to someone who’s been where you are.”
On another day, Wilder might have made a snarky comment about not remembering when a baby had been left on Hunter’s doorstep, but right now, he was too grateful for his presence to risk saying anything that might prompt him to leave again.
“I think I need a manual more than a sounding board,” he confided.
“A manual would be useless,” Hunter said. “Because every baby is different.”
“So how am I supposed to know what’s wrong with this one?”
“He’s probably out of sorts because he doesn’t know where his mama is.”
“That makes two of us,” Wilder said.
“And when babies are out of sorts, they need to be comforted.”
He gestured to the infant in his carrier. “Feel free.”
But his brother shook his head. “You need to step up.”
“I would have stepped up months ago if Leighton had told me she was pregnant,” he said in his defense.
“So why are you hesitating now?” his brother challenged.
“Because I don’t have the first clue what to do with a baby.”
“No first-time parent has a clue in the beginning.”
His brother’s matter-of-fact statement was hardly reassuring.
And while they were talking, the baby was growing more distressed.
With a sigh of resignation, Wilder unhooked the strap and lifted him out of the seat.
The baby stopped fussing for a moment to stare at him, as if waiting for something else.
Something more.
Wilder looked at his brother. “I’m doing this wrong, aren’t I?”
“Babies generally like to be held closer than arm’s length,” Hunter told him.
Wilder pulled his arms toward his chest, so that he was almost nose-to-nose with the kid.
Hunter started to chuckle, but quickly covered it with a cough when Wilder glared at him.
“Closer,” he urged. “But to the side, with his head about level with your shoulder so he can see behind you. With newborns, you need to keep one hand on the bottom and the other on the head and neck, for support, but he’s obviously strong enough to hold his head up just fine.”
Wilder did his best to follow his brother’s instructions.
“That’s it,” Hunter assured him.
“He feels so tiny.” His whispered remark was filled with awe and wonder—and just a hint of the nerves that were tangled up inside him. “So fragile.”
“It’s normal to be scared. I was terrified the first time I held Wren in my arms,” his brother confided. “And she was a lot smaller than Cody is.”
“But you had nine months to prepare yourself for her arrival,” Wilder pointed out, though he wasn’t sure anything could have prepared him for this moment.
Hunter nodded. “True.”
Wilder patted the baby’s back gently, as he’d watched Sarah do, and was rewarded with a shockingly loud belch.
“Gas might have been another cause of his distress,” Hunter noted then.
“You think?” Wilder asked dryly.
“And now that it’s out of his system, you can try the cradle hold,” he said, and talked him through shifting the baby’s position so that he was tucked in the crook of Wilder’s arm. “Now sit down and relax.”
Relax? He wasn’t sure he’d be able to relax so long as there was a baby under his roof.
And though Leighton’s note had given no indication that she was planning to come back for the little guy, he had to believe that she would. After all, what kind of mom just left her kid?
Mine, he thought, then shoved the unpleasant twinge from his mind.
Hunter took another seat at the table, leaning back in the chair and stretching his legs out in front.
Obviously relaxing wasn’t a problem for him.
“Where’d Dad go?” he asked.
“To pick up a crib,” Wilder told him.
“Ah, right. He said he was going to try to rustle up some of the stuff you’d need from local relatives,” his brother recalled.
“Unfortunately, I don’t think one of those things is a nanny.”
Hunter chuckled. “No, he’s been pretty clear that your baby is your responsibility.”
“But we don’t even know for sure that he is my baby,” Wilder felt compelled to point out again.
“Obviously his mom is sure. Though I have to wonder, if you haven’t kept in touch with her, how did she know where to find you?”
“I’ve been wondering the same thing. My best guess is Malcolm,” Wilder said, naming a close buddy from Dallas.
“When I talked to him a few weeks back, he’d mentioned that one of the girls we’d met at the holiday party before Christmas last year had shown up at his office to ask about me.
But he told me that before Thanksgiving, and since nothing came of it. ..”
“Until now,” Hunter remarked.
“Until now,” he agreed.
“So the who and the how have been answered,” his brother noted. “But we still don’t know the why—beyond the obvious, of course.”
“What’s the obvious?” Wilder wondered.
“What ‘L’ wrote in her note—a boy needs a dad.”
“Which proves she doesn’t know me at all, or she’d know I’m not dad material.”
“Or maybe she knows you better than you know yourself,” Hunter suggested. “But since I’m not completely without sympathy, I’ll give you a crash course in diapering and feeding.”
“I can hardly wait,” he said dryly.
“Or I can let you figure it out on your own,” his brother suggested as an alternative.
“Please don’t,” he said, immediately remorseful. “I need all the help I can get.”
“You’re doing okay so far,” Hunter assured him.
“Because I’m not doing anything.”
“You’ve managed to relax,” his brother pointed out. “And that’s allowed Cody to relax, too.”
Wilder looked down at the little guy tucked in the crook of his arm, close to his body.
He did look relaxed. Content even, his eyelids heavy, as if he might—fingers crossed—drift off to sleep again.
And Wilder felt a small measure of satisfaction that he’d been the one to put that look on his face, though the satisfaction wasn’t nearly strong enough to quell the rising tide of panic within him.
“I’m not ready for this,” he confided. “I figured I had another ten years of footloose and fancy-free living before I even thought about getting serious with a woman—and then a few more after that before I had to worry about becoming a dad.”
“There’s nothing more serious than parenthood, or more amazing and awe-inspiring,” Hunter told him.
The baby turned his head then, rubbing his cheek against the soft plaid of Wilder’s shirt, just about where he felt his heart swell inside his chest.
And Wilder knew that whatever happened next, he and the kid were in this together.