Somebody's Baby by Annie Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

Burdett boy might have done better using money for hankies. It might have got it soggy but at least he’d have some of it left.” Elvie whirled her spoon through her coffee.
    “How do you know he doesn’t?” Jed asked.
    Elvie tapped the spoon on the edge of her cup, making everybody look her way. “Because he was at that conference working for somebody else. If I had millions, the last thing I’d want to do is work in a snack-cake factory all week and go to conferences on snack cakes on the weekend. Real suspicious if you ask me.”
    “Suspicious don’t begin to tell it when you’re talking about that one.” A man wedging himself between two other people at the coffee bar snatched up a decaf pot and poured two cups worth into a thermal travel mug as he called out. “He’s a wild one.”
    “The smart one, you mean,” someone else at a nearby table chimed in. “Got out while the getting was good.”
    “Really?” Josie tried to fit the pieces of information together. That wasn’t as easy as it seemed. While she sincerely wanted to believe the best of the man, she didn’t dare allow herself to dismiss words like suspicious, cut and run, gambling …and women. As in multiples. Many.
    The man who wanted to claim his place as her son’s father had been up to something since he’d left town, and Josie needed to know what. And why he had come back, if it wasn’t for Nathan’s sake alone. She stole a peek at her boy and exhaled in relief to see him happily laughing over a game of peekaboo with Jed. She’d done the right thing by bringing Nathan with her today. She simply could not risk letting that wild one, that stray, that Adam Burdett get his hands on her son.
    Not until she knew more about the man.
    She set the pie down, wiped a blob of cherry filling on her starched white apron and asked, as she headed back toward the kitchen, “Is that when things soured at the factory? When Adam left?”
    “Die was cast long before that.” Jed paused with his red bandanna kerchief held up between him and Nathan.
    “Oh?” Josie tried to sound as if she didn’t care, but deep down it gave her some solace to know Adam hadn’t been involved in the downward spiral of her beloved Mt. Knott. “I worked there for years, part-time most of it, but still, I never once saw any signs of the place heading for disaster.”
    “What’s the Bible say? Pride goes before the fall? I reckon that place ran on pride, mostly, the last few years. When the mama died, that really tore things, though.” Jed made a show of inhaling the scent of pie, sighed then jerked the kerchief back down and made a face at the baby, much to Nathan’s delight. “Can’t say how many times my wife came home after a quarterly meeting worried for her job. Hear her tell it, the son that took off was the only one bold enough to stand up to his daddy and say things had to change or they’d go under.”
    Josie’s heart swelled a little at that. It warmed her to know her son’s father had once shown true concern about the business that supported so much of her hometown.
    She took up another pie, using only the dish towel as a hot pad and whirled around to peer into the front room from the kitchen. “So then, Adam Burdett is basically a good guy?”
    “Yes he is,” came the whispered response from behind her. “And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk about me behind my back.”
    Splat.
    “Awww.” Came the collective groan from the patrons.
    The damp smell of pie, apple this time, rose around her. The heat from a stray piece of fruit burned Josie’s toe through her discount-store tennis shoe. Bits of crust lay smashed to smithereens all over the brown-red tile.
    “Can you salvage any of it, honey?” either Jed or Warren asked.
    She didn’t try to distinguish between them as the other one quickly followed up with, “I had my mouth all set for a slice of that.”
    Josie walked farther back into the kitchen, shut out all the comments from her