“Okay. Fine. I get the warning. Cut to the chase, Sarah. What is it that you want to say?”
She held his gaze for a long moment, then nodded. “Okay.” She stood. “Come with me, Boone. It’s time you met this child.”
He shoved to his feet, reached for his wallet, and began tossing bills onto the table. “Let’s do it. Where do we go?”
“They’re on the patio.”
Boone froze with a twenty-dollar bill in his hand. “Here? He’s here? Now?”
Sarah reached out and touched his arm. “Boone. There is one important thing for you to keep in mind. Think before you react. Everything is riding on it. More than you know.”
“But he’s here.”
Sarah encouraged him with a smile. “The foster parents are Jared and Katie Devlin. They’re waiting for you on the patio with the baby.”
The twenty slipped from his fingers and floated to the table. “Now? Right now?”
“Right now.”
He grabbed for Hannah’s hand and held it in a grip so hard, she winced. Sarah led them toward a door Hannah had not previously noticed. They stepped onto a patio where large fans and misting machines worked to offset the heat of the evening. Boone didn’t appear to notice the heat. He focused on the infant seat placed atop a table next to a burbling fountain. A man and a woman were seated on either side of the carrier.
His viselike grip on Hannah’s hand tightened even more.
He took three steps toward the table before he abruptly stopped. His head jerked to one side and then moved slowly to the other as he scanned the patio. He muttered, “What the heck?”
“What’s wrong?” Hannah whispered.
“Trace is wearing a hair bow.”
Abruptly, Hannah understood. The pink blanket. Pink bow. Pink dress and booties.
Either the foster parents were attempting to make a political point, or Boone McBride’s little boy was actually a girl.
Chapter Eleven
Boone had experience with being blindsided.
After intercepting a pass and running it back for the winning touchdown in the semifinal round of the state high school football championships, he’d been tackled from behind by the losing quarterback and gotten his bell rung. Once when Boone was at his grandparents’ lake house, a rattlesnake wrapped around a bicycle’s handlebars had surprised him. The viper sank its fangs into Boone’s forearm and necessitated an emergency life-flight trip to a hospital with antivenin in stock. Add in Mary’s suicide and discovering how Ashleigh had betrayed him, and that just about made him a blindsiding expert.
This experience gave him professional status.
He swallowed hard and stepped forward, his gaze shifting between the man and the woman for the scant seconds he was able to keep his eyes off the baby. “Mr. and Ms. Devlin?”
“Mr. McBride?”
“Yes. I’m Boone McBride.” For the next few moments, anyway. Until he stroked out or his heart blew up. Could his pulse pound any harder and faster?
The man stood. “I’m pleased to meet you, Boone. I’m Jared. This is my wife, Katie. We’ve been honored to take care of this little one for the past month. She’s such a good baby. Just a little doll.”
“A little doll,” Boone repeated. It was true. She was tiny, with a heart-shaped mouth and smushy little nose and a round head full of dark hair that definitely had a reddish gleam to it. Red! “I’ve always been partial to redheads.”
He took two steps closer. A little doll. Not Trace. She has an innie rather than an outie. Then, as if she sensed him, her eyes blinked once. Twice. And opened.
Boone gazed into those dark-blue eyes, and he promptly tumbled head over heels into love.
He cleared his throat. “May I hold her?”
“Of course.” Katie Devlin rose and picked the baby up from her carrier, taking care to support her head. “She’s just finished a bottle, so she should be content for a bit. She might even stay awake for a few minutes. Do you want to sit down before I give her to you?”
“I probably should,” Boone murmured, pulling a chair out from the table and taking a seat without tugging his gaze away from the baby.
She was skinny, he thought, surveying the bare legs extending from the pastel-pink onesie with a white heart on the front. Was that normal for a newborn? Beyond welcoming new children of his friends and neighbors in Eternity Springs, he had little experience with newborns. He didn’t have a ton of experience with babies either, for that matter.
As the thought occurred, he finally glanced away from the infant toward Hannah. She was standing back, not quite part of the tableau. When their gazes met, she gave him an encouraging smile and nod.
Boone turned his attention back to the baby, made a cradle of his arms, and Katie Devlin handed her over. With the baby’s head nestled in the crook of his left elbow, Boone stared down into the little face, emotion clogging his throat. The handful of other times he’d held a newborn baby, he’d surveyed the face with the usual “Whose nose/eyes/mouth does he have?” exploration. This was a different experience entirely.
Despite the fact that she weighed little more than a minute, the weight in his arms was heavier than anything he’d ever known. This was responsibility. This was commitment. Nothing else in his life had ever come close.
Rather than the round, chubby Gerber baby look of older children, she had a little old woman’s face with puffy eyes, a brow that furrowed, and a mouth that frowned as she squinted and grunted and snorted. And yet Boone thought she was the prettiest baby he’d ever seen. Look at that mouth—the very definition of bow-shaped. And her little ears. She had dainty ears. And those eyelashes—how could they be so long already? They twitched. Her lids opened. Her eyes were a little crossed until she focused on his mouth.
Reacting, Boone smiled. “Hello, gorgeous.”
Her eyes were the blue of the mid-Atlantic on a cloudy day. He fell into them, drowned in them, until they drifted shut. Her body relaxed in sleep.
Keeping her supported and held securely against his chest, he brushed his thumb across her cheek. Soft. So soft. The most delicate skin he’d ever touched. With his index finger, he gently traced her almost nonexistent eyebrows and then the curious pattern of her hair—thick in places, but thinner in others.
“Aren’t you the sweetest thing?” he murmured. He lifted her hand, studied her long fingers and tiny fingernails. “Sweet as spun sugar, like my grandmother used to say.”
He couldn’t say how long he sat holding her, staring at her, but eventually he realized someone was speaking his name. He glanced up. Sarah was standing in front of him, her hands clasped, her spine just a little stiff. He gathered that she’d just asked him a question. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”
“I asked if you still want the baby.”
“What? Why? I’m here, aren’t I?”
“She’s a girl, not a boy.”
“Yeah, that is a little detail I’m surprised you got wrong.”
“But how do you feel about it? About having a daughter instead of a son?”
Boone scowled at Sarah, then looked down at the baby. “Well, I’m not going to name her Trace. And the whole nursery theme will need to be redone. I’m modern enough not to push a girl toward pink and purple, but a moose head on the wall and a bear rug on the floor doesn’t fit this little angel.”