Читать книгу This Baby Business - Heatherly Bell - Страница 13

CHAPTER FIVE

THAT EVENING LEVI fed Grace dinner, cleaned up her mashed potatoes and high chair mess, bathed and powder-puffed her, dressed her in one of those so-called sleepers with a bazillion snaps, then laid her on a baby blanket in the living room. It was eight o’clock and he had no delusions Grace would be ready for bedtime, but at least she wasn’t wailing.

He took a seat on the floor near Grace and pulled out his laptop. He was about eighty percent sure he would take Carly up on her offer to babysit, because he had no other choice. She seemed determined to look after Grace until they could find someone else and it made sense. But this time he hadn’t wanted to jump as quickly, because he’d been in reactive mode since he arrived in Fortune. And frankly, he’d been a little too intrigued by Carly to just accept outright. More curious and drawn to her than felt comfortable despite her being single.

If she ever got it in her head that she wanted a date with him, it wouldn’t be as easy to turn her away. And it probably wasn’t a good idea to date his babysitter, anyway, whether under twenty or someone like Carly, who definitely appeared to be his age. While he couldn’t put his finger on what it was about her, she drew him in with those soulful hazel eyes. And they had something in common, too.

They were both desperate.

He did a Google search for Carly Gilmore and came up with a Facebook profile, mostly filled with photos of her with friends. She was linked to a business page and the RockYourBaby website. He clicked on the link and a busy website came up with the slogan The Place Where Babies Come First. A buddy of his had started a paddleboard business a while back, and Levi had firsthand knowledge of the cost of a professional-looking website. Carly’s looked like a top tier–priced website, and he noticed several popular baby product companies advertised prominently on the landing page. There were several photos of Pearl Gilmore, obviously the image behind the company. A grandma type if there ever was one, she had short salt-and-pepper hair, a wide and toothy smile, and a regal and distinguished air about her that said, “You can trust me with your baby.”

And he would trust this grandma type. Carly, he wasn’t so sure about. She had the baby company, so he didn’t understand why she’d take on Grace, too. He wanted to believe she was simply being kind and neighborly, but that didn’t ring true on some level. She wanted something from him.

There were a few photos of Carly on the website, and a clear indication that she had taken over in Pearl’s place. What would it feel like to be called a baby expert and have no children of your own? His guess was that she might feel like a bit of a fraud.

It takes one to know one.

He’d been the only child of parents who were overachievers and had instilled the same values in him. Study hard, work hard and give back. He’d spent summers at his grandfather’s ranch in Texas because Levi’s own parents didn’t seem to have time for him if it didn’t involve quizzing him on his studies. He’d had to make the honor roll every semester or suffer a long sermon about wasted opportunities. Pop’s ranch had been the only place Levi could be himself and unwind. Have fun for a change.

He’d gone straight to the Air Force Academy after high school and received his degree, going into the service as an officer. His good friends, his AF brothers, were the only ones who understood Levi Lambert could be impulsive at times. Wild. He’d carefully compartmentalized his life to be two people: the officer and the playboy. A bit of a cliché, but hey, he’d paid his dues.

Then Grace had come along. She had brought out the very best in him, but he’d had such a wild past that anyone who could see him now would be stunned. Spending nights alone with his daughter, looking forward to nothing more than a full night’s sleep. If he got lucky. There again, getting lucky had taken on a whole new meaning. It used to mean a night of uninhibited, balls-to-the-wall sex with a woman who didn’t want much in return other than a couple of orgasms. He could give her that but not a whole lot more. The whole love, marriage and kid thing had never been on the agenda.

Grace rolled over, squealed and kicked her legs out, reminding him that a kid was now on his agenda, like it or not. Then she went knees up and elbows out again and did her rocking thing. She squealed her delight at having managed to roll over to her back again, bringing an end of the blanket with her in her chubby little fist. The corner of the blanket was now in her mouth.

Levi pulled the blanket closer to him, taking the edge of it out of her mouth. He handed her a pair of plastic keys to chew on. He’d try keeping her up late tonight, then maybe she’d be too tired to wake up much during the night. Logically, it should work.

It was the way he liked to tackle any problem in his life. Logic always won over emotion, hands down. He’d been taught to never make knee-jerk decisions. Emotions tended to cloud good decision making. Contrary to what some of his friends believed, he hadn’t chosen to raise Grace out of emotion. Out of overwhelming love and devotion. No, that had come a little later. His had been a logical decision, based on responsibility and doing the right thing. Not abandoning his child, the way his parents had abandoned him. Sure, they’d done it for the greater good. But it had still left him feeling unwanted. Expendable. They could go ahead and save the world’s children. He would start with his child.

Of course, it was always better to make life-changing decisions on your own. He hadn’t had that luxury.

Still, Sandy’s parents clearly didn’t see Levi as a shining example of a father, saying they’d never even heard of him. At first they’d tried to claim that Grace’s father was Sandy’s boyfriend, a man who had died in the same car accident. But thankfully the birth certificate stated Levi Lambert as the father. The DNA test had confirmed it.

He assumed Frank and Irene were grieving, and he got that. He understood the grieving process. But he wasn’t the enemy. If they had been logical about it, he would have agreed that, of course, they could be involved in Grace’s life. Instead, they’d come out guns blazing and demanded that he give her back to them. Even tried to file a motion in family court to bar him from leaving the state of Georgia. Hadn’t worked. They continued to insist that Sandy had meant to leave them in charge, but she’d died suddenly and without a will. Frank, who loved to hurl insults via email, had once referred to him as “the sperm donor.”

Levi could take a lot of shit and not blink, but when they insulted him, they were insulting Grace’s father, too, so he got a little more sensitive. To his mind, how she’d been conceived was nobody’s business. The way he raised his daughter would be his business and his alone. He’d be there for her—present, not absent like his own parents had been, although the distance his parents had created wasn’t one he or anyone else could blame them for. They’d been concerned for the poverty-stricken people of the world, and Levi wasn’t one of them. As a child, he’d had the added weight of guilt for missing his parents. They were off saving the world. And him? At least he’d had his grandfather.

But something had gone right for him today when he’d knocked on Carly’s door. He’d found himself an expert. If nothing else, maybe her heart was in the right place. Not to mention her legs. Her ass. Okay, he was going to try not to notice that again.

She’d offered to babysit nights, which meant he could have a social life again.

He hadn’t seriously dated anyone in years. Grace had reformed him overnight, but the stiff boots still didn’t quite fit. He’d need to stretch them out, wear them in. Carly was just the kind of girl he never would have approached in the past. Nice girl. Good girl. Pretty and sweet, but wouldn’t want to get too dirty or anything.

* * *

LEVI WOKE WITH a start. The midafternoon Saturday sun slid through the cracked blinds of his bedroom, almost blinding him. It was official. Grace had turned him into a vampire. He’d fallen asleep with the baby monitor in his hands when he’d only meant to close his eyes for a second.

Since he was off the clock, he’d fallen asleep when Grace went down for her nap. And dreamed of sweet Carly, which made no sense when he could dream about a Playboy centerfold, Katy Perry or anyone else in his wild fantasy life. But the girl next door was kind of smoking hot up close. Unapologetically curvy, with legs that went on for a country mile. Sensual, full lips. He’d been dreaming about licking those kissable lips of hers and more. Much more.

The doorbell rang and Levi groaned, rolling out of bed. He rubbed his eyes and quickly looked in on Grace to see that she was still sleeping in her crib—it was daytime, after all, what else would she be doing—then went to open the front door.

Carly stood there smiling until her eyes locked in somewhere around his pecs. As if she could see right through him again. She wasn’t smiling any longer but seemed something more like transfixed. He checked to see if Grace had spit up on him again, and that was when he realized he wasn’t wearing a shirt.

“Crap. Come on in.”

Levi dipped into his bedroom to grab a T-shirt and pulled it over his head, meeting Carly in the foyer. “Sorry about that. I fell asleep.”

A smile had become frozen on her face. “Am I interrupting...anything?”

It took him a minute, because sue him if he was beginning to forget what a sex life resembled. Lately when he took off his shirt in the middle of the day, it was because there was regurgitated baby food on it. But Carly had just reminded him of how much he missed sex. This was not helpful.

He rubbed his prickly chin. Hadn’t bothered to shave this morning, when the only girl he had to impress didn’t have any of her own teeth. “Nah, I was sleeping when Grace sleeps.”

Smile back full force. “That’s smart.”

“You doing okay?” He felt a smile coming on. She seemed so...enthusiastic.

“I could use some help if you have a little time. No worries if you don’t.”

“What’s up?”

“A manufacturer sent me a crib to review that’s supposed to be the easiest to assemble, and I thought I’d put it together and test that out.” Her hands were in the air, as if trying to reenact the process. “And then if you decide I can babysit her, she can take naps at my place, instead of in the car seat. But—”

“Too many moving parts?”

She sank her teeth into her lower lip. “The diagram makes no sense to me.”

“That’s okay. I put together Grace’s crib in a few minutes. It’s not a problem.” He went to his bedroom to grab the baby monitor handset, then followed Carly to her house.

Carly led him to the spare bedroom, where he set the handset on a nearby dresser. The room had a sewing machine in one corner, piles of fabric on the chair and a dummy wearing half a dress. In the middle of the room stood random parts to the crib. The rails, headboard, baseboard and screws and nuts were scattered all over the floor. A screwdriver lay near the diagram and instructions wrinkled enough to appear as though they’d been through someone’s fist. So it looked like she’d tried, really tried, to understand the instructions. Made him smile. She was winging it. In many ways, he could relate. Oh, hell, who was he kidding? Lately, in all ways.

And for someone who had gone through his life with a plan set in stone, sue him if he felt like the ground underneath him was constantly shifting these days. But this, assembling a crib, he could do. It was mechanical. The parts fit together and made sense. What’s more, they’d stay together after he was done.

He went to his knees and took a quick look at the instructions. Simple. But when he grabbed the screwdriver, Carly stopped him.

“You should teach me how. Let me do it.”

“Seriously?”

“Sure. I mean, if I’m going to rate how easy or how not easy it is to assemble for moms, I think I should be the one to do it.” Her amber eyes fixated on his, hand held out for the screwdriver. Waiting.

He handed it over after a beat. Reluctantly. It was her house and her crib. Next door, he had a tool kit with power tools, including a screwdriver. But hey, this could be a lot more fun.

He did, in fact, enjoy working side by side with her for the next few minutes and surely could be excused for taking a whiff of her hair when she leaned close to grab a screw. Smelled like coconut.

“Here,” he said, handing her another screw and nut. “You’ll need this next.”

She took it from him, her hand bumping into his briefly. Her skin was silky soft. Smooth. And all this talk of screws and nuts had made him as horny as a bear after a long damn winter. It had been a while since he’d felt this attracted to or this pulled in by any woman. But why did it have to be this woman?

After a few more minutes, Carly successfully attached one side rail—while he held it up for her—and smiled at him with such obvious pride that his heart pinched.

“Hey, you’re pretty good at this,” he lied. He’d have been done with this crib twenty minutes ago, but maybe that part didn’t matter as much as the look on Carly’s face.

“Well, I don’t want to brag, but I know my way around a sewing machine. Mine breaks down a lot.” She nodded in the direction of the machine in the corner.

She leaned forward to reach in front of him and her low-riding jeans slid down just enough to reveal a beautifully curvy patch of smooth skin rounding out to a perfect ass. He swallowed hard, his mouth suddenly parched. If she kept this up, he would soon tease himself into oblivion.

Finally, after what seemed like an hour of torture, she’d put together the crib. She then checked the sturdiness by tugging on the rails several times, making him smile again.

“Hey, look, I did it.”

“You did.”

“With your help.”

She left the room and came back a few minutes later, a pad of paper and a pen in hand. “I need to write some thoughts down.”

“Is this for your blog? Because if it is, I agree with you that this diagram looks like someone on crack drew it.”

She laughed at that, scribbling something down. “So glad it’s not just me. Sorry, Cribs for Mommies, I’m going to say it’s a two-person job.”

“So does it work?” He stood up to stretch his legs. “Do they take your advice when they read your blog?”

“I don’t really know. They used to take my mom’s advice.”

“But not yours?”

She lifted a shoulder. “My mother was the real baby whisperer.”

“Baby whisperer. I could use me one of those.”

“I do have her baby bible. But it’s incredibly disorganized, and sometimes it’s hard for me to understand. Of course you need to put a baby on a schedule, but it doesn’t say what to do when your baby is too tired to stay awake because they’ve been up all night.”

“Exactly.” Finally, someone got it. “I have it on good authority she’ll sleep through the night. When she’s a teenager.”

He wasn’t going to be one of those parents who wouldn’t let their teenager sleep till noon. Figured she’d have a lot of catching up to do.

Carly jotted something down on her pad while he checked the baby monitor. Grace slept peacefully. Still, he should get out of Carly’s house right now before he had any more random thoughts about kissing her. Because at the moment, it would be nice to find out if the rest of her was as soft as her rosy pink skin. Like her lips. For starters.

Carly met his gaze and caught him staring at her lips. He didn’t bother trying to hide it. She smiled and looked away first. Back to her notes.

He understood. That was a lot safer than dealing with...whatever this was. There was a definite pull between them, and he didn’t know what to do about that. Acting on it would probably be stupid. But face it, stupid was pretty much his calling card when it came to women. Still, the appeal didn’t make sense to him. She’d normally not be his type at all, but he felt a magnetism that had to do with a lot more than her looks. Even though she was incredibly pretty. Naturally beautiful. Yeah, that was the thing about it. She didn’t try very hard. It was just...there.

He took a step closer, telling himself he wanted to see what she’d written down about the crib. “What are you writing?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Why?”

But his height gave him an advantage. “Because from here it looks like a doodle.”

A floor-length dress, which had pretty much nothing to do with the efficacy of the directions to this crib. Unless he was missing something.

“It’s a sketch.” She pulled it away from him.

“Cool,” he said. “You don’t have to be shy about it.”

She blushed again and gnawed at her lower lip. “I’m not shy about it. It’s just not... Never mind.”

“Already forgot all about it.”

She folded up the piece of paper. “Let’s talk about you. Have you decided if you’re going to retain my services yet?”

He quirked an eyebrow. “Your services?”

“My baby help.” She put her hands on her hips. “I don’t offer any other...services.”

Shame. “You’ve got the job. You didn’t realize it, but this was your interview. And you passed.”

“I did?” She smiled, clutching the folded paper against her chest.

“I like to make sure that my nannies can put together a crib. Just because. I’m weird that way.”

“That is weird.”

“Yeah. You’ll do just fine.”

“You won’t be sorry.” She traced the edge of the crib rail with one finger. “I’ve got a lot of baby knowledge.”

He took a step closer, just to make sure he’d chosen the correct three-point level for the mattress rise, he told himself. “When they’re infants, you use the highest level. This adjusts for later, you know.”

She came up beside him. “Good to know.”

It occurred to him that he possibly stood a little closer than he should. Somehow that didn’t bother him at all as his eyes met hers. He was close enough to see every tiny speck of green. When his gaze slipped to her lickable lips, he knew he was in trouble here. She was sexy and pretty. Real. Not at all stuck-up as he’d previously assumed. And she was one hell of a complication in his already chaotic life.

But he’d be lying if he didn’t admit he wanted her.

He reached out to tug on a lock of her hair. Silky soft, too. Her eyes were shadowed with lust, making him feel like a superhero for the first time in a long while. He couldn’t actually remember the last time he’d seen a woman look at him that way. This was good, because damned if he didn’t want to be alone in this...whatever this was. With his hand on the nape of her neck, he pulled her close enough that they shared oxygen. Her eyes were warm and fluid, showing him all the things he wanted to see. An invitation. A welcome.

He kissed her, deep, long and lingering. When her tongue met his, soft and tentative, he tugged her closer still. Took the kiss deeper and wilder.

She pulled back, a bit out of breath. “What was that?”

“I kissed you. And I think you liked it.”

As if to acknowledge that, yes, she liked it, she kissed him this time. Her hands were on him, clutching his T-shirt, hanging on. He clung, too, one hand dropping to her hip, where he pulled her closer. The other he used to grab a handful of her wild hair in his fist.

From the monitor, Grace wailed. And every good part of him froze.

Carly tensed under his fingertips and he lowered his forehead to hers. “I should go.”

“Yeah. Y-you should.” She stepped away, an unreadable gaze in her eyes.

Relief?

Disappointment?

He didn’t know which one of them was more frustrated, but he’d lay bets in Vegas on himself.