minimum.”
“God never gives us burdens we can’t handle,” she said self-righteously.
She cast another look toward the baby and, for just an instant, something in her eyes softened. “She’s a pretty one, isn’t she?” she asked and this time there was nothing cagey in her voice.
“She’s beautiful,” Sharon Lynn agreed fervently. “She’s a wonderful baby. She deserves the best possible future.”
Hazel Murdock’s gaze narrowed. “Are you saying I wouldn’t do right by my own blood?”
“Of course not,” Cord soothed. “It’s just that it’s a lot of responsibility to take on.”
“Who’ll do it, if I don’t?”
“She could stay with me,” Sharon Lynn blurted, before Cord could warn her not to.
“You’ve fallen for her, haven’t you?” the old woman said. Despite Sharon Lynn’s silence, she reached her own conclusion and nodded. “Yes, I can see that you have. Maybe we could come to some sort of an arrangement, just between the two of us.”
Before Sharon Lynn could speak, Cord asked, “What kind of an arrangement, Mrs. Murdock?”
Her gaze darted nervously from him to Sharon Lynn and back again.
“A little money, maybe, just to help out with my expenses,” she said at last. “Like you said, I’m getting up in years. My pension won’t be much.”
“You would sell your granddaughter?” Cord asked, his tone deadly. Even though Justin had warned him to anticipate something exactly like this, he was appalled.
She clearly heard the disgust in his voice and backpedaled. “Sell her? I never said such a thing.”
“That’s what it sounded like to me. What did it sound like to you, Sharon Lynn?”
Sharon Lynn was too near tears to answer.
“I don’t think we have anything more to discuss, Mrs. Murdock,” Cord said emphatically, propelling her toward the door. “If you want your granddaughter, file the appropriate papers with the court.”
“I don’t have money to hire a fancy lawyer,” she whined. “You know that, too, don’t you? I’ll go to a reporter. I’ll tell him you’re trying to take away an old lady’s only blood relation. You’ll regret this. I’ll see to it.”
Cord let her rant, then said quietly, “You’ll take Ashley over my dead body, Mrs. Murdock.”
He gave her a curt nod, then shut the door and locked it behind her. He flipped the sign on the door to Closed and went back to Sharon Lynn, who was trembling so badly he took the whimpering baby from her, then circled an arm around her waist and drew her in tight, too.
“I can’t give her up to a woman like that,” Sharon Lynn whispered. “I just can’t. Cord, she was drunk. She was here to see her grandbaby for the first time and she was so drunk she could hardly stand up. What if she took the baby in a car with her like that?”
He heard the horror in her voice and knew that it was her two greatest fears all wrapped up into one terrifying threat. “She won’t take the baby,” he insisted. “No matter what, she won’t take Ashley away from us.”
“How can we be sure?”
Here it was then, the moment he’d been waiting for. A part of him hated having to resort to using her quiet desperation to get what he wanted most in this world. Only the firm belief that she needed a family—needed him—every bit as much as he needed her permitted him to go through with the plan already supported by her grandfather.
“Come over here and sit down,” he urged. “I have an idea.”
* * *
Sharon Lynn was dazed. The whole time that horrible woman had been there, she had felt as if all the life were being sucked out of her. Only the weight of the baby in her arms had felt real. That and Cord’s unwavering presence. He had been so angry, so fiercely furious she had been astonished that Hazel Murdock hadn’t understood that and kept that awful offer to sell the baby to herself.
His anger had died now, but it had been replaced by a firm resolve. Gazing into his eyes in the gathering darkness, she saw that resolve, and her own fears were quieted. It no longer seemed to matter that she couldn’t imagine what they could possibly do to guarantee that Ashley would remain safely with them. It was enough that Cord seemed convinced that there was something that would give them a chance.
“Do you think she’ll go to court?” she asked, voicing her most immediate fear.
“I doubt it, not unless there’s money in it for her,” he said scathingly.
“But what if she does?”
“Then