Читать книгу Beginning With Baby - Christie Ridgway - Страница 12

Jackson was out of his boots and into his breakfast the next morning when he heard a knock at his door.

He knew who it was, which was why he took another swig of cola instead of going to answer it. Through the walls Rex cried again—the baby had sounded unhappy ever since Jackson had returned from work. And even though it was just after six, he suspected the baby had been awake for some time. The knock came again, percussion to Rex’s noisy discontent.

It was Phoebe Finley and the baby at his door, of course, and he planned on ignoring them until they went away. He didn’t want to encourage any neighborly tête-à-têtes, any more than he wanted to find himself close to that baby again.

Once was enough.

Becoming acquainted with Phoebe and the child who wasn’t hers—but that she obviously cared so much for—was a scenario much too close for comfort. He’d been in her size sixes before, desperately wanting to hold on to someone—in his case, someones—who could be wrenched away.

Jackson wasn’t stupid enough to get entangled, even peripherally, in that kind of setup again.

The baby must have paused to take in a breath, because in the momentary quiet, Phoebe’s voice sounded through his hollow-core front door.

“Jackson! Jackson! Please answer. I’m in dire need of a good neighbor.”

That left him out, Jackson thought smugly, but then her voice pleaded again. “Help,” she said.

God, even if his brain wasn’t stupid, his feet sure were. The two of them pushed against the floor to get him standing and even walked him to the door. His hand didn’t hesitate to open it, though his good sense limited it to only a couple of inches.

Dark hair tumbling, blue-gray eyes pleading, two even, white teeth doing a number on her full lower lip. “My hero,” Phoebe said.

“I’m not.” He glanced at Rex, whose head had jerked toward Jackson at the sound of his voice. “What’s the problem?”

She bit her lip again. “Our landlady, Mrs. Bee, and about two-thirds of our fellow tenants. Rex has been awake and unhappy since 4:00 a.m., and I’ve received complaints. Mrs. Bee is starting to make odd threats.”

Jackson grimaced. While their elderly landlady looked like something off a bakery box, he knew she was better suited to selling nails, as in “tough as.” But he turned his grimace into a forbidding frown. “So?”

She swallowed. “So I thought maybe you could do your magic on Rex and get him to sleep again. He must be exhausted, and it didn’t take you but a couple of minutes yesterday.”

It was Phoebe who looked exhausted. Shadows circled her eyes, making them that much bluer, and her appearance that much more fragile. But Jackson ignored the observation. “No,” he said, swinging the door closed. “I’m in the middle of breakfast.”

The wooden door bounced off a small white sneaker. “Please. Couldn’t you eat and hold him at the same time?”

Years ago he’d been able to do that with both arms full of babies.

“Please,” she said again. “I wouldn’t ask, but I think I really need to appease Mrs. Bee right now.”

Telling himself he was making up some badly needed points in Heaven, Jackson reluctantly opened the door. She came right inside, smiling over her shoulder at him. “Once you sit down I’ll hand him to you.”

The smile died as she took in the Spartan bareness of his apartment—a threadbare couch, a couple of orange crates, a folding table and chairs that served as his dining room.

He found himself excusing his surroundings. “I’m only here temporarily,” he said, gesturing at the naked walls. “My job requires that I move from place to place.”

She didn’t say anything, but her eyes widened again as she looked at what was lying on his table. “That’s your ‘breakfast’? Beef jerky and a cola?”

“It’s turkey jerky,” he defended.

“Still.” She made a face.

As if he was tired of being ignored, Rex started fussing again. Jackson sighed. “Hand him over,” he said.

“Not until you’re seated in front of your…meal.”

He shot her a disgruntled look as he sat down. “Listen, I work nights and my stomach’s on a different time clock than yours, okay?”

“It’s on a different planet than mine,” she said mildly, but then walked toward him and handed over the still-mildly fussing Rex.

The baby immediately quieted, and Jackson shut his eyes for an instant, trying to shut out the sensation of baby again as well as the bittersweet memories the feeling evoked.

“What’s this about working nights?” Phoebe asked suddenly.

He started, and then took a sip of soda before answering. “I begin the job at 9:00 p.m.,” he said. “And I get off at five in the morning.”

She nodded. “So that’s where you go. When I noticed you keeping those kind of hours I just assumed you had something serious going on with someone.”

He laughed shortly. “Not my style. I spend my nights working.”

She came a little closer, the skirt of her flowery dress swishing around the smooth skin of her calves. A fragrance, feminine and creamy sweet, drifted over him.

Blood rushed to Jackson’s groin, and he stifled a groan.

She said something to him, but he didn’t absorb it, not with his eyes focused on her skin and his head dizzy with her scent. It looked as if it was time he did a little something more with his time off. Fostering relationships, even the casual kind that would ease a man who moved on regularly, required more effort than he’d been willing to make lately. But if the scent of a woman—a woman with a baby—and the sight of six inches of her legs could make him poker hard, then sex had made itself a priority.

He heard her voice again, and he forced his gaze away from her and to his soda can. “What?”

“I asked what kind of work you do.”

He didn’t dare look at her again. “I’m an engineer for a company that’s retrofitting overpasses—do you know what that is?”

“Making the overpasses earthquakeproof?”

He shook his head. “Not quite. But better able to handle the stress.” He told her a bit about his work and how he moved from one location to another.

She came closer, looking over his shoulder to check on the stubbornly alert Rex. “Well, California has oodles of overpasses,” she said.

Her female-scent was that much closer, too. “That’s why I’m oodling all over the state,” he answered, keeping himself sternly focused on the conversation. “I’m only here for another month or so.”

She’d started to laugh at the “oodling” but quickly turned serious. “You like it, then? Working at night? Moving around?”

“I’m suited to it.”

She pulled out the only other chair he had, the one beside him, and sat down, the soft fabric of her dress drifting over her legs.

“What about you?” he found himself asking.

Her eyebrows came together. “What about me what?”

Jackson cursed himself silently. What the hell was he interrogating her for? He didn’t want her to get the idea he was interested. But she was looking at him expectantly. He shrugged. “Does your life suit you?”

“I suppose. I’ve been slowly working my way through college, and my business keeps me hopping.” She shifted in her seat, crossing her legs so that more of the smooth skin of one calf was exposed. “Now that I have the baby—”

“What’s your boyfriend think of that, by the way?” Damn. Stupid question number two.

Her eyebrows rose. “I don’t have a boyfriend,” she said. “And I don’t expect to snag one anytime soon.”

Her answer provided an odd spurt of relief that Jackson wasn’t sure was bad or good.

She cast another glance at the baby, then suddenly popped up from her chair. “You did it. You got him to sleep again.”

He looked down. Sure enough, Rex was sleeping away, his mouth falling open and a drop of drool running out and toward Jackson’s forearm.

Phoebe smiled as she tenderly touched the sleeping baby’s cheek. “I thank you. Rex thanks you. Though they don’t know it, the tenants of 1006 Bartlett Street thank you.” She bent over to retrieve the baby, the rounded neckline of her dress falling forward to give Jackson an innocent peek at two perfectly fine breasts in a white lacy bra.

He bit back a second groan and looked away as she scooped the baby out of his arms. He breathed out, too, to keep her dangerous scent from reaching his lungs.

Then she turned away. At last. It was over. She was finally leaving, and there’d be no more contact between them, he promised.

At the door, though, she spun around, her dress floating out around her legs, the beginnings of a smile brightening her face and crinkling the corners of her morning eyes. He wanted to look away.

“Gee,” she said, her lush mouth curling up. “I just gotta ask. What are you doing at 6:30 a.m. for the rest of your life?”

Early the next morning Phoebe typed quietly at her computer. Rex was asleep—for what seemed like the first time in days—and she didn’t want to disturb the baby or her neighbor.

It was the least she could do, now that she knew Jackson Abbott worked nights. Before meeting him, she’d always assumed the hours her mystery neighbor kept were due to some hot-and-heavy romance he had going. And after meeting him…

Well, if he hadn’t denied it himself, she would still think he had some hot-and-heavy romance going. He was the type of man who found women easily. He was big, solidly big, with wide shoulders, narrow hips and strong, thick thighs. Like a pirate, she’d thought nervously, the first time she’d seen him. There was even a small gold earring that winked at her from the rumpled tangle of his coffee-dark hair.

His eyes were dark, too, and heavily lashed, and the first time they’d looked at her they’d seemed to swallow her up.

She shivered now, remembering it.

To top it off, inside that dark and dangerous exterior was an awesome daddy technique that was downright magic. At first, Phoebe figured Rex responded to him because the baby was used to her stepbrother, but nothing about Jackson’s deep voice or muscled chest was anything like Teddy.

It was a puzzle. Jackson was a puzzle.

She tried to put it from her mind, but as her fingers flew over the keys, she kept coming back to him. To the familiar way he held the baby and the undefinable expression that entered his eyes when he did.

To his denial of a woman in his life and the frisson of feminine response she’d felt when sitting across from him in his apartment yesterday.

To the bleakness on his face when she’d joked about what he was doing the rest of the mornings of his life.

Another delicious shiver rolled down Phoebe’s spine. Dark and mysterious men were lethal. But a dark and mysterious man who held a baby as tenderly as he might hold a woman’s heart…

She pulled herself short of going down that path. Her focus was on being Rex’s mommy. He was the only man in her life that mattered, and it didn’t take a genius to realize that Jackson wasn’t exactly welcoming a relationship with Rex and her, anyway.

Jackson was merely her neighbor.

Just then she heard the sound of booted footsteps in the hall and the telltale jingle and click of keys in the lock next door. Her mere neighbor was home.

Phoebe was glad Rex was quiet because Jackson was probably tired and hungry and ready to settle in for sleep right after another epicurean’s delight of dried meat and sugary soda.

Ick.

It was a short leap to the thought of the zucchini nut muffins she’d made the night before. Big fat ones, bursting with raisins, walnuts and cinnamon. Much better than beef jerky. Excuse me, turkey jerky.

Couldn’t she just pop over with two or three? A kind gesture, wasn’t it, that would keep her focus on him as her neighbor rather than anything more dangerous.

Because anything more was impossible.

She was a woman with a new baby. He was a man moving on, in a very short while.

So bringing over a little thank-you gift of home cooking would put her in the right frame of mind to put him out of her mind.

There. That made sense.

With Rex still snoozing away, she carefully locked her door, secure in the knowledge that the slightest peep from her baby would carry right through the wall between her place and Jackson’s.

Still, outside his front door, with a plate of her famous muffins in hand, she hesitated. If she returned to her apartment—

Today would be a rerun of the day before. She’d be squirming on her seat, thinking of him sleeping just a wall way. Oh, yes. Definitely best to force the focus onto that neighbor idea.

Unlike yesterday morning he answered her knock right away. Wearing heavy construction boots, jeans and an unbuttoned shirt, he looked both weary and wary. He blinked at her slowly, for a moment hiding the bittersweet chocolate color of his eyes. “Another problem?” he asked gruffly.

Only if you didn’t like looking at swoonworthy inches of hard, golden chest. Phoebe swallowed. “N-no. I…” Why had she come?

His gaze flicked down toward her hands and she followed it.

The muffins. Right. She’d brought muffins. “Here,” she said, holding out the plate.

He didn’t take it immediately, instead eyeing the gift as if it might be poison. “What’s this?”

A lock of dark hair fell over his forehead. It brought his unapproachability down a notch, which for some weird reason made her babble. “A thank-you. A neighbor—no, zucchini nut—” She broke off, perplexed by her tongue, which kept getting tangled.

His lips twitched. “A nutty neighbor?” he asked innocently.

She laughed for him, and her tongue unknotted. “Zucchini nut muffins.”

He still didn’t take them. “What for?”

“For you. For helping me out. In appreciation.”

Rising up on his toes, he peered over her shoulder as if she might be hiding something behind her. “Where is your midget sidekick, anyway? Signed up for Little League already?”

She shook her head in amusement. “You’ve been hiding your funny side, haven’t you? He’s asleep, believe it or not.” She nudged Jackson’s midsection teasingly with the plate, her gaze suddenly coming to rest on his very male, very naked and very rippling ab muscles.

God. A strange flush of heat washed over her cheeks.

His long fingers grabbed the edge of the plate. “Hey,” he said. “I could be ticklish.”

Phoebe didn’t let go, and sizzling bursts of feminine reaction pinged from place to place in her belly. “Well,” she said, her mouth going dry around the near-flirtatious sound of her voice. “Are you?”

When he didn’t answer, her gaze slowly crawled up his bare, heavily muscled chest, over his throat and the five-o’clock shadow on his chin. Past his chiseled mouth, his strong nose, to meet his dark, dark eyes.

She had no idea what was lurking in their depths.

Her hand loosened from her side of the plate, one finger at a time: thumb, forefinger, middle finger, ring finger, pinkie. In all the long moments that it took, neither one of them blinked.

Phoebe swallowed and finally let her hand fall. “I should be going.”

“Yes.”

Neither one of them moved.

“I have a baby…” she said lamely.

“Yes,” he agreed, seeming to understand what she meant.

“So…” Her feet didn’t obey.

“Give the little guy my best.”

“I will.” The little guy. He was her concern now. But she was going to have to initiate a serious discussion with him. And soon. When it was Rex and Phoebe against the world, Rex was going to have to come through for her sometimes. If he insisted on waking up at 2:00 a.m., a few tears to save her at a crucial moment like this would be a nice payback.

“His father phoned last night,” Phoebe suddenly heard herself saying. She didn’t know why she was telling Jackson. Maybe because there was nobody else to tell.

His expression went even more unreadable. “Rex’s father?”

She nodded. “We talked about the baby. I told him how I felt about Rex. That from the first moment I saw him, it was, well…I can’t explain it.”

He shrugged. “Nature made babies to appeal to us.”

“It was more than that.” It had just felt right, from the very beginning. “He still wants some time he said, but I’m not going to worry.” She brightened now, just thinking about the possibilities. “Things have a way of working out, don’t you think?”

“You are young,” he murmured under his breath.

“I’m hopeful.” She smiled at him. “And a good cook. Enjoy.” With a nod at the muffins, she made herself turn back toward home.

Hopeful, good cook and hopeless romantic, she thought, as she heard his door click firmly and without hesitation behind her. But that last minor problem was solved. In the course of a few pulse beats, her silly little heart had thrown out a few questions that had been quite simply—and sensibly—answered by the hard man with the daddy’s touch.

“I should be going,” she’d said.

And he’d replied, “Yes.”

After returning to her apartment, Phoebe went through the motions of her normal day. Midmornings she had started taking Rex out for a bit of fresh air. After Teddy’s first phone call, she’d realized that if Rex was going to be around for a while, she’d have to come up with some sort of routine for herself and the baby. So at about ten each day, she put him in the stroller she’d bought and rolled the baby down the block to the small and shady city park.

Serendipitously, that first morning, she’d run into an acquaintance from one of her college classes, Lisa. The other woman had a baby a few months older than Rex, and she’d organized a neighborhood play group that had a daily meeting time of ten, and a designated meeting location of the sandbox to the left of the swings. Mothers and their children made it to the play group the days they could, and all had immediately welcomed Phoebe and Rex.

One of the last to arrive today, Phoebe found an open spot among the mothers and children, then spread out the little quilt she’d carried under her arm. Next she set down Rex and his diaper bag. His eyes wide, he stared at her, seemingly mesmerized by her hair stirring in the breeze.

After an initial greeting, the conversations resumed around her. Older children rushed by with sand toys in their hands, and crawling babies explored the connected and multicolored worlds of the various quilts.

Lisa, baby Andrea on her hip, plunked herself down beside Phoebe. “How’s it going today?”

Phoebe smiled at her new friend. It still amazed her how even pseudo motherhood created such instant bonds. “So much better. I’m starting to get the hang of keeping him happy.”

Lisa nodded. “It takes a while.” She chucked the serious Rex under the chin, and the baby’s lips quirked in an automatic smile. “He looks great.”

Phoebe studied her little charge. Downy dark hair, silky eyebrows, eyes turning browner by the day.

“You know, I think he’s starting to look like you,” Lisa said.

“Worse.” Phoebe smiled, her heart aching a little. “He’s starting to feel like mine.”

As she’d tried to explain to both Teddy and Jackson, that had happened nearly instantly, too. She hadn’t anticipated it and couldn’t explain it, but something strange had occurred the moment she’d held him. Her heart had bloomed, and this tender, almost painful love had poured out. For a woman who had always wanted a family desperately and who had been lonely for too long, it was a feeling both unignorable and potentially dangerous.

“You hear from that stepbrother of yours again?”

Phoebe nodded. “Last night. But he’s still hard to pin down.” That was the danger. If Teddy did nothing about the situation, she might lose the baby. She took a calming breath. “And I’m hearing plenty from that landlady of mine. She’s making all sorts of unpleasant noises about a single woman raising a baby alone. She’s even talked about contacting Social Services.”

Lisa frowned. “Don’t let her do that! At the very worst, they could take Rex away from you. At the least, if you’re going for custody of Rex you don’t want even a hint of a problem.”

“I know you’re right, but…” She shrugged, tracing the tiny curve of Rex’s ear. “Though I think she’s self-righteous and interfering, at heart I’m sure she’s well meaning. I just don’t know what to say to satisfy her.”

“Tell her you’re not going to be single forever. Tell her…”

Another one of the nearby moms had been listening in. They had all been so supportive and friendly that Phoebe had shared her predicament with many of them. “Yeah, tell her you’re going to marry someone—” she broke off, her eyes widening and a mischievous grin appearing as she peered over Phoebe’s shoulder “—someone like that!”

Laughing, Phoebe threw a casual glance behind her. Then the laughter died. Jackson, looking rumpled and dangerous in jeans and another of his work shirts—half-unbuttoned—was stalking her way.

Oh, goodness.

A breathless panic made her look frantically around her for an instant, trying to figure out why an unattached man like Jackson Abbott would be striding across the grass in the direction of playground swings and shrieking children.

He was staring directly at her.

Something brought her to her feet. It was the width of his shoulders, maybe, or that glimpse of tanned skin in the vee of his shirt. Possibly the hard, chiseled planes of his face.

Earlier this morning his looks and manner had unleashed pinballs of reaction in her belly. Now his sensuality acted on her like a fishing line. One look and he reeled her right in.

He halted a couple steps from her. “Phoebe.”

She gulped for air like a landed sturgeon. Just her name on his lips gave her a rousing wave of shivers.

The other women around her had fallen silent. Out of the corner of her eye, Phoebe saw another female, this one a golden-haired mop top of a toddler with a lollipop in one hand, stop in her tracks to gape at him.

She swallowed. “You were looking for me, Jackson?” After their unstated conversation this morning, she’d doubted she would ever see him again. And she’d been glad of it.

Daddy’s touch or not, she’d been right about the hardness of the man. An attraction to one such as him was something she couldn’t afford right now. With Rex—and Teddy for that matter—occupying her life, she was exactly right in thinking the last thing she needed was another troublesome male.

Still, just looking at him made her cheeks heat.

His eyes narrowed. “You okay?”

She swallowed again. “Sure. Fine.” Stop babbling, Phoebe. “Okeydokey.” Curses. The thing was, all the cautions and unstated rebuffs in the world didn’t make that deep aloneness she sensed in him any less compelling.

Her hand fluffed her bangs self-consciously. “Why, um, why are you here?” she asked, staring at his hair and the way the smooth and shiny stuff curved against his strong neck.

“A couriered package was left for you. They knocked on my door first, by mistake, and I signed for you, but then I got to worrying that it might be something…important.” He frowned darkly, as if worrying about her annoyed him. “Maybe it’s from Rex’s—from your brother. Mrs. Bee told me where I could find you.” He paused. “Phoebe?”

She started. Darn! She was as easily mesmerized as Rex. From Jackson’s hair her gaze had wandered to the dark stubble of beard along his jaw, and she’d heard, but not quite absorbed, his explanation.

“Say again?” she said.

Crossing his arms over his chest, he once more narrowed his gaze. “Package. For you. Might be important.”

She blinked, appreciating his succinctness. “Oh. Okay. Thank you.” Though she doubted Teddy would have made a decision so quickly—he wasn’t one to promptly respond to anything even slightly unpleasant—she’d better check it out.

Whirling around, she bent for the diaper bag, Rex, the quilt and the stroller.

“Let me.” Jackson reached for the baby.

Phoebe dumped the diaper bag in the seat of the stroller and folded the quilt then placed it atop the bag. Squashing a traitorous sense of feminine smugness over the man she was walking away with, Phoebe waved her fingers in a brief goodbye to the still-stunned play group.

The stroller wheels crunched over the dusting of sand on the park’s cement path. With Jackson leading and Phoebe slightly behind, they headed toward home. She gazed on the broad expanse of his back and tried not to be fascinated by the powerful muscles she saw playing beneath the worn fabric of his shirt.

Suddenly little footsteps pounded against the cement behind them. The three-year-old mop top caught up with them, her fat cheeks pink with exertion. Her mother was trailing behind her, a puzzled look on her pleasant face.

“Mister!” The toddler looked up at Jackson with the same kind of awe that Phoebe barely hid better.

Frowning, he looked down. A pained expression crossed swiftly over his face, but then was gone. “What?” he said harshly. Then he took a breath and seemed to deliberately soften his voice. “What is it?”

“You that baby’s daddy?” She pointed her sticky lollipop at Rex’s puffy, diapered bottom.

He shook his head, turning as if to move on.

The tot wasn’t going to let him go that easily. “Mister!”

Jackson froze, then shifted back. “Yes?” He raised an eyebrow and his lips tilted upward, his expression now half-amused and all masculine.

A totally foreign zing of heat sizzled through Phoebe’s bloodstream. She blinked.

The little blonde blinked.

The little blonde’s mother stumbled.

They all stared at Jackson, his face hard, but patient, and the picture he made in rough boots, soft jeans and chest-baring shirt, cuddling the tiny infant. Goose bumps prickled Phoebe’s scalp.

“Yes?” he prompted again.

“Well…” The little girl seemed to screw up all her courage. “If you’re not his, will you be my daddy?”

The toddler stared up at Jackson.

The toddler’s mother emitted a little squeak.

Phoebe briefly closed her eyes, without a clue as to how Jackson might react.

He shocked her. Hunkering down, Rex still cupped against his chest, he looked at the little girl eye-to-eye and smiled.

It was the first time Phoebe had seen him give one, and she almost keeled over in the sand. It softened the stark handsomeness of his face, changing it to something altogether devastating. White, warm, Jackson’s smile gave Phoebe another secret zing where a woman who’d made her kind of promise to herself had no business zinging.

The smile must have given the little girl confidence. “Well?” she demanded. “Will you be my daddy?”

He smiled once more, then tapped the little blonde on the nose with one long finger. “Thanks for the invite, pumpkin,” he said gently. “But I’m not cut out to be anybody’s anything.”