Page 197 of Secondhand Smoke

He realized he was looking for himself, in her tiny nose, in the smooth domes of her closed eyes, her pink cheeks. He felt suddenly floored by biology; the idea that he himself had created this life that he held in his hands. The weight of her head, the fragile line of her body against his arm: not just a baby, but a miniature human who needed him, belonged to him, shared his blood. It was staggering, too much to comprehend.

Sam’s arm settled across his shoulders. Her hair brushed his face as she rested her head against his. “Isn’t she perfect?” she murmured.

He blinked hard. “Yeah. She is.”

~*~

In the way of all newborns, Lainie was up every two hours during the night, and she had healthy lungs. The first time, just after they’d fallen into bed, Sam had rolled toward Aidan and prodded him gently. “Alright, Daddy,” she’d whispered, and his eyes had flown wide, curious and a little hurt. Sam had shaken her head. She loved him, she already loved Lainie, but he was her father, he was the one who’d chosen to act irresponsibly nine months before. It was for his sake that she’d stayed in bed while he scooped the baby from her bassinet and went to heat a bottle. It was part of his transformation, his final great growing up. Babies weren’t just women’s work. This was his child, and he had to bond with her, had to step up and be her daddy.

He didn’t have to be told after that. Every two hours like clockwork, he was up feeding her. In between, he moved her to the bed between them, so she could feel their heat, their breathing. She smelled of fresh baby, with an undernote of powder.

When she woke at five-thirty, Sam took pity on her husband. “I’ve got her,” she said, lifting Lainie up into her arms. “You go back to sleep.”

“Unph,” he mumbled, and rolled onto his back.

“Come on, sweetheart,” Sam murmured, rubbing the baby’s back as she left the bedroom and headed for the kitchen. “You hungry? Let’s fix that, hmm?”

Lainie’s fussing had progressed to full-on screaming by the time the bottle was in the microwave.

“Hush, baby, hush. You’re alright. It’s coming, it’s coming.”

She’d heard stories of babies who struggled to latch onto the bottle, but Lainie seemed to have no such trouble. The second the nipple entered her mouth, she stopped yowling and started sucking.

“There.” Sam eased down into the recliner and settled the baby in the crook of her arm. “That’s better, isn’t it?”

Lainie regarded her through uncomprehending newborn eyes, the lids open only slits as she concentrated fiercely on nursing.

Sam’s nipples contracted beneath her t-shirt. With a little gasp of shock, she recognized some phantom need, a dull ache in her breasts. Her body responding automatically to the baby she cradled.

Not her baby…

Except that she was. Aidan had called her “Mama” when he first passed Lainie to her. That’s who she was, and would always be to this tiny precious girl. Mama.

Her daughter. Lainie Teague was her daughter.

She’d known it before, in every logical sense, but it hit her hard just then, in the dark before dawn, the room filled with the soft sounds of the baby’s sucking.

She was a mother now.

Tears filled her eyes. “Yes,” she whispered. “I’m your mama.”

Forty-Five

Ghost walked into the clubhouse at eight a.m. on the nose. Walsh and Ratchet met him halfway across the common room.

Ratchet held out a steaming mug of black coffee toward him.

Walsh smiled smugly. “We found him.”

~*~

“How did you find him?”

Ghost cut into his steak and watched the juice begin to seep across the plate, red as blood. In their previous meetings, he hadn’t wanted to appear settled; hadn’t wanted to look as if he had time for this man’s bullshit theatrics. But he was feeling content, and he was hungry, so he’d accepted the seat at Shaman’s white-draped steakhouse table and ordered himself a ribeye.

“We started working on it the night we raided his properties,” Ghost said, swallowing. A waiter appeared as if by magic, offering him a fresh beer, and he nodded. When the man was gone again, he said, “We figured out Ellison was the retailer, and not the source for the coke, so my boys started tracing the product back to the sources. PD lab connections,” he said smugly. “Chemical ratios of the coke led back to product picked up off cartel mules coming in at the southern border.”

Shaman looked pleased. “So you put word out to the cartel.”

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