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Dylan was looking at her intently, as if he had never seen her before. More absurdity: she might have dreamed such a look over wine and dinner, with her hair upswept, diamonds sparkling at her ears, lips painted a beguiling shade of red. Such a look should be reserved for a woman wearing the perfect little black dress. But over baby poop? In hideous daisy-printed culottes? Right after she had snorted? Welcome to your life, Katie Pritchard. She licked her lips uncomfortably.
“You should do that more often,” he decided, then looked away, as if he had said too much, revealed too much.
“What should I do more often?” she breathed, feeling her stomach drop out at the way his eyes had fastened, with searing heat, on her mouth. She might have dreamed such a look to be appropriate right before a man leaned forward to take his true love’s lips with his own.
“Laugh.”
Part of her had hoped he meant lick her lips!
“Okay, Mr. Daredevil,” she said, “I’m waiting for the plan.”
“You’re the one who knows how to keep plants alive!”
A nurse came by, gray haired, very efficient looking. “If you check at the reception desk before you leave, we can lend you a car seat to take the baby home.”
Dylan turned up the full wattage of his smile. Katie guessed he was going to put his charm to good use and get that diaper looked after for them.
Instead he surprised her by saying to the nurse, “Uh, we have two rank amateurs here who don’t know the first thing about a messy diaper. Or maybe I should say two messy amateurs who don’t know anything about a rank diaper. Could you find somebody to give us a quick lesson, before we take him home?”
The nurse smiled at him. Was nobody immune to this man’s charms? “I’d be happy to show you how to change a diaper.”
A few minutes later they were in a little room, the nurse not as charmed by Dylan as Katie had thought. She made him change the diaper!
Katie was not unaware, as she watched, that this was something she had thought she would be doing with her husband one day. She had looked forward to every little thing about that baby coming. Foolishly, the day she had found out she was pregnant, she had even begun to buy diapers, pajamas with feet in them, soothers, stuffed crib toys.
Now, in a room with reality, she wondered if Marcus ever would have tackled a mess like that! She had not allowed herself to think much about what if. But now she did wonder. What if they had stayed together? Would she have felt as alone with parenting as she had started to feel in their marriage?
Certainly, she could not imagine Marcus bending over such an arduous task with such a look of grim determination on his face.
Dylan shot a look at her. “I don’t have anything on me, do I?” he whispered.
“Such as?” she whispered back.
He glared at her, then at the baby. “Such as brown.”
“You look like you’re okay. So far.”
The baby gurgled happily and wagged his legs.
“I wish he wouldn’t do that,” Dylan said grimly.
“Me, too,” she admitted.
They both laughed, and the nurse joined in. The impromptu diaper changing class was a strangely intimate moment. A mommy-and-daddy kind of moment that made Katie feel that stab of longing for the life she did not have, a life that had been snatched from her by a cruel twist of fate.
That’s what she needed to remember as she was admiring the confidence with which Dylan was taking on this task. She need to remind herself that life had cruel twists and turns that she had no hope of controlling. That she had withdrawn from the race for a reason. It could hurt too much to run.
But standing in this little room, almost shoulder to shoulder with Dylan, the pain of not running the race could compete with the pain of running with all your heart.
“Just hold his feet in one hand, lift him up and swab,” the nurse suggested helpfully.
For a man who had made his living being a professional athlete, Dylan suddenly seemed hopelessly uncoordinated. But determined. “You take his feet,” he told Katie. A small thing, but it somehow solidified them as a team.
Gingerly she did. Jake tried to kick free.
Dylan scowled at the baby as if he were a puzzle that needed to be solved, then took a deep breath and did what needed to be done.
That, Katie thought, was the kind of man he was. He wanted people to believe it was all fun and frolic about him, but that was not the truth at all. She felt as if she could see the truth about Dylan.
“You don’t shirk from the hard stuff do you?” she said. That was why he was such a success at business
Dylan cast a glance at her.
“You just dig in and get the job done.”
“I don’t think dig in is exactly what I want to hear right now,” he said lightly, but rather than looking pleased at her assessment, Dylan looked pensive. “That’s not what my sister would tell you,” he said. “She thinks I shirk from the hard stuff.”
“Like what?” Katie asked, incredulous.
But he was engrossed in his task, and didn’t answer. Several wrecked diapers later—the tabs would not stick once his hands were slippery with baby oil and powder—the job was done. Dylan, unaware he was dusted from head to toe with baby powder himself, looked very pleased as he lifted his nephew off the table.
“Next time, your turn.”
But it seemed to her maybe next time wasn’t such a good idea. She was looking for excuses to hang on to him, to hang on to the intimacy of this little mommy-daddy experience.
But really, if he could change a diaper, he was good to go.
Without her.
“My sister says that it’s different when it’s your own baby,” he said with an easy grin. “Not so nauseating.”
Your own baby.
“Are you planning your own baby?” she asked him. She said it ever so casually. Just conversation. Pathetic that she was holding her breath waiting for his answer.
“I thought that’s what I wanted once, but,” he suddenly looked uncomfortable, “lately I don’t seem to know what I want.”
There. His answer.
And yet, even though it was not what she wanted to hear, Katie appreciated Dylan was giving her something that he rarely gave. He presented himself to the world as an extremely confident man. A man who jumped out of airplanes, no hesitation. A daredevil.
And so, his showing her his doubt was a gift.
Seeing him with his nephew had brought her yearnings sharply to the surface, and sharply into focus. It had made her contemplate entering the race all over again, like a person drawn to the mystery of Everest, Mountain of Tragedy.
He didn’t know what he wanted. And she felt shadows of doubt on what she wanted. A month ago her flower shop, her quiet life had been enough. Now it wasn’t.
Like lightning, fear struck her. What if she lost another baby? Could she survive that kind of loss again?
Was it completely delusional to think being with a man like him would somehow make the burden of that loss a shared one?
She recognized the insanity of her own thoughts. She had never even had a cup of coffee with this man. Really, she knew less about him than what was printed on the back of his baseball cards. And here she was weaving a fantasy that he was at the center of! Her own baby. A home to call her own. A man like this one.
This was precisely why she had immersed herself in her business. This was why she had made a simple life for herself: reading, her cats, taking her mother on outings. This was precisely why she had done a voluntary exit from the whole man/woman game. She wasn’t strong enough to play again, to run the race again. Not yet, and maybe not ever. She reminded herself she liked her safe, predictable world.
Or had liked it. But maybe a small dissatisfaction had been stirring from the very moment she had given in to the temptation to watch a glorious man run.
She made the mistake of looking at the baby and his uncle.
Jake was nestled into Dylan’s chest, sucking sleepily on his thumb. The picture they made caused her heart to ache. Dylan’s strength and self-assurance in stark contrast to the baby’s helplessness and need. Dylan was all hard lines and taut muscle, a warrior, the baby was like a little puddle of warmth and softness, the one the warrior was sworn to protect.
And yet the tenderness that glowed in Dylan’s eyes when he looked at his nephew, that softened the masculine assuredness of his face, made him seem more attractive to Katie than he ever had.
And he had always seemed plenty attractive!
All her weeks of successfully resisting Dylan McKinnon were going straight down the tubes. Worse, at the moment she was feeling raw and vulnerable after the strange intimacy of the encounter in the bathroom, her confessions, his reassurances.
Katie recognized she was doing exactly what Dylan expected every single woman to do around him. She was capitulating to his charms!
It had to stop. There had to be one woman in the world who would not throw herself at his feet, and it had to be her!
And yet here she was, so taken with him she felt weak-kneed and dry-mouthed, and like she wanted to spend the rest of her life contemplating the sensual fullness of his bottom lip! Here she was, practically floating, feeling a strange and glorious little fire in her bosom because of the way Dylan’s eyes rested on her, for just a touch too long, when he looked over his nephew’s head.
Katie needed to remember that charm came as naturally to him as hunting came to the lion. And his charm probably fell in the same category—self-serving and predatory.
The thing to do before she was any more helplessly overwhelmed by his attractiveness, his playfulness, his allure, would be, obviously, to remove herself from this situation.
She knew she had to do it without it seeming as if she had to get away from him. There was nothing that would trigger a predator’s instincts like prey in full flight!
A nurse came and set down a car seat beside them.
“Dylan,” Katie said firmly “you take the baby home. I’ll grab a cab.”
Dylan glanced from her to the baby. Then back at her. That adorable doubt was playing across his normally self-assured features. “I thought I couldn’t even be trusted with a houseplant,” he reminded her.
“Well, you can’t. But help is a phone call away, if you need it.”
“Yeah,” he muttered, “911.” He juggled the baby and picked up the car seat.
“Here. I’ll take one of those as far as your car.”
“Thanks.” He handed her Jake. She was glad. One more small chance to hold his warm little body, to smell the baby shampoo in his hair, to fill her senses with him.
Before she let go.
They crossed the parking lot, and she watched as Dylan struggled to fit the car seat into his nearly nonexistent back seat.
“Okay,” she said, “ready.” Ready to let go. Ready to go back to her old life. Ready to forget the smell of babies and the look in a man’s eyes.
Liar. Out loud she said, “You can call from your sister’s if you need anything else from me.”
There. Didn’t she sound cool and composed, totally collected? She felt she had very successfully disguised the fact that she was a woman who could be wooed into a helpless, spineless jellyfish by a man with a baby in his arms!
Dylan reached for the baby. Jake whimpered.
“Come on, little man, you’re coming with your favorite unkie.” Dylan glared at Katie. “Don’t ever tell a single soul about that.”
“What?”
“Unkie,” he whispered.
She juggled the baby, held up her two fingers, Scout’s honor style.
“Come on, Jake,” Dylan said.
The baby nestled in tight against her, sidled a look at his uncle. “NO!”
She tried to help by detaching him from her, but as Dylan reached around his tummy to take him, she found a chunky hand wrapped in her hair. Dylan’s hand was brushing her breast. She felt the burn of it. Her eyes met his. He jerked his hand away.
“NO YOU,” the baby informed him, taking a tighter wrap on her hair. “SHE.”
“Jake,” he said firmly, CEO of a million-dollar company, “You are coming with me. Let go.”
“NO, NO, NO,” little Jakie shrieked. A passerby gave them a curious look.
“Shhh, little man,” Dylan said. His voice, roughened with tenderness, sent shivers of new appreciation up and down Katie’s spine.
The baby, however, was unimpressed. He wrapped his free arm around her neck. When Dylan reached for him again, he loosed it just long enough to slug his unkie in the ear.
“Hey, Jakie, calm down.” Dylan enveloped the small fist in the strength of his own hand, and she felt another shiver of raw appreciation at how gently he leashed his strength to control the baby.
However, Jake could give her a lesson or two in being immune to the charm of Dylan McKinnon. The baby shrieked and pulled his solid little body in even closer to her. When Dylan tried one more time to pull him away, the baby busted him one in the chops.
“Here,” Katie said, her maternal instincts feeling nothing but sympathy for the poor distraught baby. “Give it up before you get seriously hurt.”
“If he’s going to hurt anyone it’s going to be me,” Dylan said with such furious protectiveness of her that her tummy did the roller-coaster ride down to the bottom of her stomach.
“Just see if he’ll calm down.”
Reluctantly Dylan moved back a step. The baby eyed him warily. Then he went limp, his fight over. Jake gave his uncle a baleful glare and settled himself against Katie’s chest. After a moment, he put one thumb back in his mouth, but kept the chubby fingers of his other hand curled possessively through her hair and closed his eyes. He hiccupped sadly.
“And you’ve never even snuck him chocolate or taken him to the park!” Dylan said wryly. And then with satisfaction, “He’s getting drool on your shirt.”
“A little drool never hurt—”
But Dylan had lifted the hem of his own shirt, reached up with it, giving her a glimpse of a belly so hard and muscled her fingers actually tingled from wanting to touch. He wiped Jake’s face and let the hem of his shirt drop back down.
Dangerous thoughts crowded her mind, at least partially triggered by that glimpse of Dylan’s gorgeous flat belly, the very kind of thoughts she had been trying so desperately to get away from. What if this could be her real life? Her real man? Babies and baby seats, and glimpses of things that made your heart race on an ordinary afternoon. It might even be worth the diaper part.
