at Brian, and then he looked at Allie. A flash of all the confusion and stress he must be feeling flitted across his face, only to disappear and be replaced by his usual smile.
“I think he just wants to see better.”
“Sure,” Allie said, and then, when Brian immediately started grabbing at all those colors, added, “Hmm. Maybe you’re right.”
Two aisles over, they found the strollers. Allie suggested one. Mike pushed it back and forth a few times and said, “Fine.”
Next they went to the crib-bedding shelves. Allie stood back and let the guys handle this one on their own. She couldn’t remember ever seeing anything as interesting as Mike and Brian picking out crib sheets.She didn’t bother to point out to Mike that Brian was too young to understand what they were doing.
The pair gave their choices thorough consideration. When Mike held up sheets covered with fast racing cars, Brian giggled and bounced with great excitement. Allie realized the baby was reacting to the excitement in Mike’s voice and the vivid primary colors of the cars, but still, you could imagine the two of them were having a conversation.
“Yeah? These?” Mike studied the sheets, then pronounced, “Good choice, buddy.” He walked over to Allie and tossed the package of sheets into the cart. “He likes cars.”
She bit back a smile. “Was there ever a man who didn’t?”
As Mike and Brian headed down the next aisle toward bouncing, rocking baby chairs, something Mike seemed fixed on, she spied a display of stuffed animals and spent a few minutes squishing them before she picked out a rabbit she couldn’t resist and tossed it into the cart.
When she caught up with Mike and Brian, she paused just to look at them for a minute. Watching Mike with Brian was really getting to her. He was kind and patient with the baby, and she admired the way he’d taken on this responsibility.
If she wasn’t careful, Brian wasn’t the only one she was going to fall for.
Chapter Six
Brian snoozed happily in his crib, but Mike felt unsettled. Restlessly he paced the apartment, always pausing at Brian’s open door to listen to his breathing.
He knew a glass of good wine or a simple over-the-counter pain reliever would help him relax enough to sleep, but he didn’t know if a new father was allowed to drink even one glass of wine or take even one pain reliever until his child was old enough to scream, “I have pneumonia!”
In the path of his pacing, he saw a purple folder buried in a towering stack of papers. They had once been in his office-now-Brian’s-bedroom and Allie had moved them onto a bookshelf in order to make space on his desk for the equipment Brian would need.
He pulled out the folder. It was his Abernathy file. He’d almost forgotten about his trip to New York. How could he honor the commitment he’d made to Richard Stein?
His first thought was the money Abernathy had spent in order to get him to New York: drivers, plane tickets, hotel and more. So he had to go.
His next thought was what to do about Brian. There he drew a blank.
If he called Daniel, he’d get the full You-can’t-goroutine. So he called Ian, who stayed up late, and not because he had a baby whose breathing had to be monitored.
He reached a wide-awake Ian and explained the situation. Ian’s analysis, because Ian was the analytical one of the three of them, shocked him.
“He just lost his parents—and his nanny. You’re all he has. You can’t leave him this soon.”
“He gets along great with Allie. Maybe she’d keep him—just this one time, of course.”
“You and he need to bond.”
Bond? Where had Ian learned about bonding? And what exactly did it mean?
“So to bond with him, you’d have to take him to New York,” Ian went on, “You’ve just moved him to a new place. If you take him to New York, you’re taking him to another new place, also the wrong thing to do.”
Mike was suddenly irritated, depressed, he didn’t know which.
Robert Asprin, Linda Evans
Chris Walley
R.P. Dahlke
Cheryl Holt
Andersen Prunty
Alex Flinn
Paul Harrison
Unknown, Nell Henderson
Diane Henders
Susan Gandar