Maybe Baby by Lani Diane Rich Read Free Book Online Page A

uncomfortable, and Babs’s finances, such as they were, would never make the cut.
    After tossing and turning for hours, the solution had finally struck her. She went into the office to see if it might work.
    She clicked on a search page and typed in Kakapo. She leaned forward, her face closer and closer to the screen as she clicked on the links before her.
    There were only eighty-six Kakapos known to be in existence, making them extremely rare.
    They were illegal to keep outside of the conservation habitats in New Zealand.
    Her heartbeat quickened. She went back to the search engine and typed in bird black market. That wasn’t nearly as helpful, mostly articles written about the black market. Perhaps the Internet wasn’t the place to find out how much she could get for the bird.
    But it was a plan. She could call Nick tomorrow and have him drop off the bird (it would only be a few days, and what the board didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them), then connect with this black market (and really, she was in Manhattan, markets were everywhere, how hard could it be to find a black one?) and locate a buyer.
    Easy as pie.
    She smiled, turned off the computer, and went back to bed, where she fell quickly into a deep sleep.
     

Six
     
    Dana pulled her robe on over her T-shirt and trudged into the kitchen. She’d given up the ghost of getting any sleep hours ago, but now that the sun was starting to come up, she figured she could get away with making the morning coffee and starting the day.
    After finishing the drink with Babs, Dana had made her excuses and gone to bed. Before letting her go, Babs had wrestled a promise from Dana that they’d talk more about the winery in the morning, after they’d each had a good night’s sleep.
    Unfortunately, there’d been no good night’s sleep for Dana. She tossed and turned in the guest room, unable to get Nick out of her head. Every thought she had—of the winery, of Babs—brought her back to Nick, and the hollowness in her chest expanded with every breath she took. By the time the sun started changing the blackness of night into the blue shadows of morning, she thought there’d be nothing of her left.
    How could one man affect me like that? she wondered as she padded into the kitchen. It was just rude, is what it was. The one night in years when she was at Babs’s, and he had to barge in unannounced. Dana didn’t care what kind of freelance charity work they were doing—and since when is volunteer work considered freelancing?—it simply wasn’t right.
    At the same time, she knew it wasn’t his fault. He would have had no way of knowing she’d be there. She rarely was. And, based on the look on his face, she’d taken just as large a chunk out of him as he had out of her. She knew she didn’t have any right to be angry with him.
    Not that a little thing like reason was going to stop her from doing just that.
    She opened the freezer and smiled as she pulled out the pound of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. No matter that Babs could probably afford to buy her own personal coffee plantation, she still knew there was only one acceptable brand of coffee for the discriminating palate. Dana spooned the beans into the grinder, pushed the button down, and inhaled the magnificent smell. She stopped grinding and perked her ears up for sounds of Babs stirring. On a typical morning, it would take a nuclear bomb to wake Babs before ten, so Dana doubted the coffee grinder, loud as it was, would do it. When she heard nothing, she poured the grinds into the filtered basket and turned the machine on.
    “Dana.”
    She screamed and spun around. She knew the voice, of course, but the unexpectedness of hearing it from behind her sent her heart careening around in her chest, bouncing around her rib cage like a gerbil on amphetamines.
    “Jesus!” she yelled, her hand on her chest. “Don’t you ever call first?”
    Nick glanced down at an envelope he had in his hand. “I didn’t think you would be awake