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Though what if Mel cut her own vacation short? She needed it.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Dannie asked, frowning.
He pulled himself together, vowed he was not going back to the memory of holding his baby. He could not revisit the pain of letting that little guy go and survive. He couldn’t.
He was going to focus totally and intensely on this moment.
He said, with forced cheer, “As all right as a guy can be whose been beaten at noughts and crosses by a four-year-old, thirty-three times in a row.”
Because of his vow to focus on the moment, he became acutely aware of what it held. Dannie. Her hair was curling from the moistness, her cheeks were on fire, her blouse was sticking to her in all the right places.
He glanced at Susie, who was drawing a picture on the back of a used piece of paper, bored with the lack of competition.
Her picture showed a mommy, a daddy, a child suspended between their stick arms, big smiles on their oversize heads.
Despite his vow, the thought hit him like a slug. The world he had walked away from.
His son would have been three years older than his niece. Did he look like Susie? Worse, did he look like him?
He swore under his breath, running a hand through his hair.
“Mr. Cole!”
Susie snickered, delighted at the tone of voice he’d earned from her nanny.
“Sorry,” he muttered, “Let’s go get something to eat.” His mind wandered to the thought of Danielle eating spaghetti. “There’s a great Italian restaurant around the corner. Five-star.”
Dannie rolled her eyes. “Have you ever taken a baby and a four-year-old to a restaurant?”
No, he wanted to scream at her, because I walked away from that life.
“So, we’ll order pizza,” he snapped.
“Pizza,” Susie breathed, “my favorite.”
“Pizza, small children and white leather. Hmm,” Dannie said.
“I don’t care about the goddamned leather!” he said.
He expected another reprimand, but she was looking at him closely, way too closely. Just as he had seen things about her that she might have been unaware of, he got the same feeling she saw things like that about him.
“Pizza sounds great,” she said soothingly.
Glad to be able to move away from her, to take charge, even of something so simple, he went and got a menu out of the drawer by the phone.
“What kind?” he asked.
“Cheese,” Susie told him.
“Just cheese?”
“I hate everything else.”
“And what about you, Miss Pringy? Can we order an adult pizza for us? The works?”
“Does that include anchovies?”
“It does.”
“I think I’m in heaven,” she said.
He looked at her wet shirt, the beautiful swelling roundness of a real woman. He thought maybe he could be in heaven, too, if he let himself go there. But he wasn’t going to.
She glanced down at where he was looking and turned bright, bright red. She waltzed across the space between them, and placed the towel-wrapped baby in his arms.
“I need to go put on something dry.”
The baby was warm, the towel slightly damp. A smell tickled his nostrils: something so pure it stung his eyes.
He realized he’d had no idea what heaven was until that moment. He realized the survival of his world probably depended on getting these children, and her, back out of his life.
She wanted to go. He wanted her to go.
So what was the problem?
The problem was, he suspected, both of them knew what they wanted, and neither of them knew what they needed.
Dannie reemerged just as the pizza was brought to the front desk. She was dressed casually, in black yoga pants and a matching hoodie, which, he suspected, was intended to hide her assets, and which did nothing of the sort. Her figure, minus the ugly black skirt, was amazing, lush.
Her complexion was still rosy from the bath. Or she was blushing under his frank look.
He had to remember she was not the kind of woman he’d become accustomed to. Sophisticated. Experienced. Expecting male admiration.
“I’ll just run down to the lobby and pick up the pizzas,” he said. He glanced at her feet. They were bare, each toenail painted hot, exotic pink.
He turned away quickly. College professor, indeed! He’d known that’s what she was hiding. What he hadn’t known was how he, a man who spent time with women who were quite comfortable sunbathing topless, would find her naked toes so appealing.
Would have a sudden vision of chasing her through this apartment until she was breathless with laughter.
What would he do with her when he caught her?
He almost said the swear word out loud again. Instead he spun on his heel and took the elevator down to the lobby. He took his time getting back, cooling down, trying to talk sense to himself.
He might as well not have bothered. When he returned to the apartment, she was in the kitchen, scowling at his fridge.
“This is pathetic,” she told him.
“I know.” He brushed by her and set the pizza down. He tried not to look at her feet, snuck a peek, felt a funny rush, the kind he used to feel a long time ago, in high school, when Mary Beth McKay, two grades older than him, had smiled at him.
It was obviously a lust for the unobtainable.
She was studying his fridge. “No milk. No juice. No ketchup.”
“Ketchup on pizza?” he asked.
“I’m just making a point.”
“Which is?”
“Your fridge is empty.” But it sounded more like she had said his life was empty.
Ridiculous. His life was full to overflowing. He worked twelve-hour days regularly and sixteen-hour days often. His life was filled with constant meetings, international travel, thousands of decisions that could be made only by him.
His life was million-dollar resorts and grand openings. The livelihoods of hundreds of people depended on him doing his work well. His life was flashy cars and flashier women, good restaurants, the fast lane. So why was he taking her disapproving inventory of his fridge as an indictment?
“Do you have peanut butter?” she asked, closing the fridge and opening a cabinet.
“On pizza?” he asked, a bit defensively. “Or are you making a point again?”
“Just thinking ahead,” she said. “Breakfast, lunch.” She took a sudden interest in a sack of gourmet coffee, took it out and read the label. “Until you make arrangements for us to go. Which you probably will, immediately after you’ve seen the children eat pizza.”
“Give me some credit,” he said, though of course that was exactly what he wanted to do. Feed them pizza, talk to his assistant who made all his travel arrangements, get them gone. “Do you want wine? As you’ve seen, my beverage choices are limited.”
“No, thank you,” she said. Primly.
Good for her. A glass of wine would be the wrong thing to add to the mix. Especially for her. She’d probably get drunk on a whiff of the cork.
They had no high chair, so he held the baby on his lap and fed him tidbits of crust and cheese. She’d been right about the mess. Despite his efforts, Jake looked as if he’d been cooked inside the pizza.
His cell phone rang during dinner, Susie, her lips ringed in bright-red tomato sauce, scowled at him when he fished it out of his pocket.
“My Daddy doesn’t answer his phone when we eat,” she informed him.
“I’m not—” he swallowed your daddy at the warning look on Miss Pringy’s face and shut his phone off “—going to, either, then.”
When was the last time he’d done anything for approval? But there was something about the way those two females were beaming at him that made him think he’d better get back in the driver’s seat. Soon.
Maybe after supper.
Immediately, whoever had tried his cell phone tried his landline. The answering machine picked up.
“Mr. Cole, it’s Michael Baker. If you could get back to me as soon as—”
He practically tossed the tomato-sauce stained baby to Dannie. Susie, noticing the nanny’s hands were full, decided she had to have a pencil, right then. She jumped up from her seat.
“No,” Dannie called. “Susie, watch your hands.”
But it was too late. A pizza handprint decorated his white sofa.
“Michael,” he said to the owner of Moose Lake Lodge, “good to hear from you.”
Susie was staring at the pizza smudge on his couch. She picked up the hem of her shirt and tried to wipe it off. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Dannie moving toward her.
“I can fix it myself!” she screamed. “I didn’t mean to.”
“Just a sec,” he put the phone close to his chest. “It’s nothing,” he told the little girl. “Forget it.”
But Susie had decided it was something. Or something was something. She began to howl. Every time Dannie got near her, she darted away, screaming and spreading tomato sauce disaster. Dannie, encumbered by the baby, didn’t have a hope of catching her.
“Sorry,” he said into the phone. How could one little girl make it sound like World War III was occurring? How could one little girl be spreading a gallon of pizza sauce when he could have sworn the pizza contained a few tablespoons of it at the most? The baby, focused on his sister, started to cry, too. Loudly.
He was going to take the phone and disappear into his den with it, but somehow he couldn’t leave Dannie to deal with this mess. He sighed.
Regretfully he said, “I’ll have to call you back. A few minutes.”
He went and took the baby back from Dannie, and sat on the couch, never mind that the baby was like a pizza sauce squeeze bottle. His shirt was pretty much toast, anyway.
“I want my mommy,” Susie screamed. And then again, as if he might have missed the message the first time. “I want my mommy!”
He didn’t know where the words came from.
He said, “Of course you want your mommy, honey.” He probably spoke with such sincerity because he dearly wanted her mommy right now, too. Here, not soaking up the sun in Kona, but right here, guiding him through this sticky situation.
Something in his voice, probably the sincerity, stopped Susie midhowl. She stared at him, and then she came and sat on the couch beside him.
He held his breath. The baby took his cue from his sister, quieted, watched her intently, deciding what his next move would be.
Susie leaned her head on Joshua’s arm, sighed, popped her thumb in her mouth, and the room was suddenly silent except for the sound of her breathing, which became deeper and deeper. Her eyes fluttered, popped open and then fell shut again. This time they didn’t reopen.
The baby regarded his sleeping sister, sighed, burrowed into his uncle’s chest and slept, too.
“What was that?” Joshua whispered to Dannie.
“Two very tired kids,” she said. “Susie has been acting up a bit ever since she heard her parents were planning a vacation that did not include her.”
His fault. Sometimes even when a guy had the best of intentions, things went drastically wrong.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I actually think it’s good for them to experience a little separation now and then. It’ll help them figure out the world doesn’t end if Mel and Ryan go away.”
“What now?” he said.
“Well, if you don’t mind a few more pizza stains, I suggest we just pop them into their beds. I can clean them up in the morning.”
She held out her arms for the baby, who snored solidly through the transfer. Then he picked up his niece.
Who was just a little younger than his son would be.
