Читать книгу The Bachelor's Baby - Mia Ross - Страница 16

Chapter Four

“That’s what you’re wearing?” Lindsay demanded when she met Brian in the office the morning of their all-important inspection.

“You’ve been working for me less than a week,” he reminded her with a grin. “If you wanna critique my wardrobe, you’ve gotta stick it out for a whole year.”

He did notice, however, that she was wearing a pretty maternity dress that tied in the back and polished black shoes instead of the tired ones she’d had on yesterday. She’d confessed that she didn’t have much in the way of mom-to-be clothing, and he’d already seen the extent of it. Or so he thought.

“That’s pretty,” he complimented her as she handed him a mug of what smelled like hazelnut coffee. “Is it new?”

“To me it is.” She gave him a long, suspicious look. “Someone told your sister-in-law, Holly, that I needed maternity clothes, and she dropped off four bags of them at Ellie’s house last night.”

“I didn’t say anything, so don’t look at me like that. Must’ve been Gran.”

“Well, whoever it was, I appreciate it,” she commented, smiling as she ran a hand over a long sleeve. “This is a lot warmer than anything I had before, and Holly has excellent taste. I haven’t had anything this nice in years.”

The wistful tone did something wonky to his stomach, and Brian caught himself wishing there was something he could do to erase those bad times from her memory. Then he heard his father’s wise advice.

If you’re not the problem, you can’t be the solution.

Simple but true, those words echoed in his mind even as he worked his way back to what had started the conversation. “Speaking of nice, what’s wrong with what I’m wearing?”

“You’re meeting with the environmental inspector today, remember?”

“No, that’s on Thursday.”

Lindsay gave him a quizzical look, then shook her head with an irritating smirk. “Today is Thursday.”

“Seriously?” When she nodded, he checked his wrist, which was empty because he’d never worn a watch in his life. “Huh. How ’bout that? Guess it’s a good thing I hired you to keep me up to date on stuff like that.”

“I’d say so,” she agreed. “Now, march back over and put on your Sunday best. He’s due here at nine.”

“It’s only eight.”

“You need to crank up the heat in the shop and fire up the forge to show him that the air scrubbers are working properly. While you’re doing that, I’ll make a carafe of coffee and set these out,” she added, patting the top of a pink bakery box imprinted with Ellie’s Bakery and Bike Rentals in burgundy script. “He’s already on the road, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s hungry when he gets here.”

“Man, you think of everything,” he said as he headed for the door.

“Isn’t that why you hired me?”

Pausing, he turned and noticed the hesitant look on her face. After all she’d been through, it wasn’t a surprise to him that her confidence had taken a knock. Sure, she’d left him hanging and basically run away rather than work things out with him. It had taken him a while to get over her, but in the end, he’d accepted that things had turned out the way they were meant to be.

Until the morning she showed up at the forge, out of options and hoping for a job. He hadn’t recognized it until now, but that day had changed everything. For both of them.

He wasn’t interested in a relationship right now, especially not with someone toting around as much baggage as Lindsay Holland. Fortunately, his own personal baggage was pretty light these days. Based on their experience so far, he thought it was possible that he could be the friend she so clearly needed. “It sure is. Now that you mention cold, it’s not exactly warm in here, either. Did that space heater conk out on you?”

“No, I like it this way,” she replied in a thoughtful tone as her eyes drifted toward the mullioned window that looked out on the side yard covered in snow. “I love winter.”

He remembered that about her. How she adored ice-skating and was always game for a snowball fight or an afternoon at the community sledding hill just outside of town. The first real snowfall was her favorite, and he recalled her insisting that those snowflakes were the most delicious ones of the season because they were fresh.

“Brian?”

Dragged back to grown-up reality, he met her stare with what he hoped came across as casual interest. “Yeah?”

In answer, she tapped the antique watch on her wrist. Brian recognized it immediately, and an emotion he didn’t recognize flooded his chest. “You still have that?”

“Of course, I do,” she replied with a shadow of the beautiful smile he still remembered. “The antique show we went to on my birthday that year was one of the best afternoons of my whole life. No one had ever gone to so much trouble to make sure I had a good time. That you bought me such a gorgeous present was just icing on the cake.”

“I just thought that since you were so strapped for cash, you would’ve sold it by now.”

“Not a chance,” she assured him, tilting her chin in a defiant gesture that hinted at the spirit that had once enchanted and aggravated him. “I sold off everything I had, which wasn’t much, but I’d never give this up. It’s really special, because you gave it to me without expecting anything from me in return.”

Knowing that the watch he’d given her was the only jewelry she still owned emphasized the sobering fact that if he failed this environmental inspection and his business faltered, this vulnerable woman and her child would be in major trouble. Prodded into action, he hurried back to his house to change.

He really had to get a grip where Lindsay was concerned, he warned himself while he shrugged on his nicest shirt and quickly did the buttons. If he wasn’t careful, the blue-eyed gypsy who’d broken his heart all those years ago was going to get under his skin and cause him all kinds of problems.

Again.

Shrugging away the past, he went through the side door of the forge and cranked the old heating furnace to full power. Then he snapped on all the lights and scaled the narrow metal steps that led to the catwalk running along the west end of the shop to ensure that everything was in place. The crucial piece of equipment that would—hopefully—allow him to operate his dinosaur of a forge in the modern world was as he’d left it early this morning. From its size and basic-looking construction, you’d never have guessed that the metal box and the pipes leading to it were going to make or break the future of his business.

Pass the inspection, it was full-steam ahead. Fail...

He wasn’t going to think about that, he decided firmly, batting the very real possibility aside. He was taking his shot at the moon, and fly or crash, he knew he’d done everything in his power to make it work. Well, almost.