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Nana had died a month after he’d left. He was glad he’d had the chance to meet her and quietly satisfied that he’d been able to contribute to an easy passing for her.
But as he took in the house, he couldn’t help but think that Kate inheriting it might not have been the blessing she’d deemed it.
Kate, Jamie on her shoulder, came to stand beside him.
“It used to be amazing,” she said softly.
He could see that. The wraparound porch, deep enough to shade rocking chairs; the strong Queen Anne lines; the turret on the right all gave the house character. Charm. Potential.
It also needed a new roof and new windows in the turret and a new railing on the porch. And that was just the work he could spy with a casual glance.
Well, the good news was that fixing this place would leave him so wiped there’d be no question of insomnia.
“Nana couldn’t keep up with it. She tried, but it was too much. We told her she should sell and move in with Mom, but she always said this was the house that welcomed her as a bride and gave her the happiest years of her life, and she had no intention of leaving until she had to be carried out. Which is exactly what happened.”
Boone, who had never lived more than six months in the same place until the end of high school, couldn’t begin to comprehend what it must have been like to spend almost an entire life in one house.
“Come on.” She headed for the steps. “Careful on the porch. The chairs are strategically placed to cover the spots where the boards need to be replaced.”
He did as instructed, trying not to wince at the number of chairs to be skirted, then followed her into the house, braced for water marks and sagging floors and God only knew what else. So it was a pleasant surprise to walk through the ornately carved front door, through the tiny, sunlight-filled vestibule, and into a cheery yellow room filled with the cushy furniture he recognized from her old place. Sun catchers in the bay window sent prisms dancing over every surface, adding to the feelings of warmth and welcome.
“This is better than I expected.” He kicked off his sneakers and flexed his toes. “Oh, man, that feels good. I’ve been wearing those shoes for about thirty-six hours.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, I can tell.”
Her grin told him she was teasing. Which shouldn’t have been as much of a relief as it was.
She nodded toward the doorway into the next room. “Come on. I’m going to see if I can get Jamie into his crib. Then I’ll give you the grand tour.”
He kept his eyes firmly glued on the walls and the ceiling as he followed her. For one thing, it gave him a chance to assess the structure. For another, it was safer than watching the sway of her hips as she padded in stocking feet across the plank floors. Or the brush of her hair against her neck. Or the curve of her shoulder where he used to bury his face and inhale her and...
The floors. Right. Think about the floors. They would need to be sanded and refinished before the place went on the market.
“You lived here for a while when you were a kid, right?”
“Right. Just long enough to make it the first home I can remember.”
As soon as they passed into the kitchen, his heart sank. Someone had obviously painted in here—the walls were a great shade of green, not too minty, just fresh and vibrant—but the cupboards needed a total face-lift, if not a complete gutting. The linoleum on the floor was cracked and peeling. And the window above the sink bore a long strip of...
“Duct tape?” He glanced from the glass to Kate.
She seemed embarrassed. “That just cracked last week,” she said. “We had a windstorm. A nasty one. We lost power overnight and had to stay with my mom. When I came back, I found that. I called the glass guys, but as you can imagine, they’ve been pretty busy. I’m on the list for next week.”
“Cancel them. I can have that fixed in a day or two.” He measured the window with his eyes. “Okay, maybe a little longer, depending on whether the glass is a standard size. But I can definitely do that.”
“Okay.” She lifted the lid on a slow cooker, releasing a rich aroma he hadn’t smelled in too long.
“Chili?” he asked.
“Mmm-hmm. I figured that would be a good one for tonight. If your flight was delayed, it would only get better.” She replaced the lid and kept moving.
Boone was getting a good hint about which one of them had given Jamie the gene that kept that foot swinging all the time.
He shook his head and followed her into the next room. It held only a rocking chair—strategically placed in front of a truly massive stone fireplace, complete with rock mantel—a computer desk, a bookshelf, and something that he was pretty sure was a changing table. At least, it looked like the pictures that had come up on the Google searches he’d conducted before Jamie’s birth, when Kate would talk to him about baby equipment. Changing tables and bassinets, bottle brushes and onesies, diaper pails and breast pumps.
He shuddered. Yeah. He’d probably spent a good ten minutes staring at the pump thing, trying to figure out how it worked and why it wasn’t prohibited as an instrument of torture.
“When I was little, Nana and Poppy used this as a dining room,” Kate said as she sailed through. “But I don’t have a big table, and it’s kind of silly to have a separate place to eat when it’s just me. So I turned it into a home office. I was going to move Jamie’s crib in here, but then he started cutting this tooth and waking up at night again, and it’s just easier to have him in with me.”
“Where’s that?”
She swayed ever so slightly, as if she’d thought about stopping and decided against it at the last second. Too late, he realized how his question could have come off.
Okay, maybe he shouldn’t have asked right away. But he would be here for six weeks. If he was going to spend time with his son, he needed to know where to find the crib. It was only logical.
Yeah, you can talk circles around anybody you want, whispered his mother’s voice in the back of his head. But since when did that do anybody any good?
Kate smiled brightly. “This way,” she said, and led him through a small hallway that held a dresser against one wall, past a door that she said led to the basement, and into a tiny room that was almost completely filled with the bed he remembered so well.
Now he was the one swaying.
“It’s small, I know,” she said, gently laying Jamie on the bed and working the zippers on his coat while he made noises that had Boone suspecting the nap was over. “I had to take the doors off the closet to make enough room for the crib. That’s another reason I have to move it. If I wait much longer, he’s going to figure out he’s sleeping in a closet and then he’s going to develop claustrophobia or something.”
She spoke so casually that Boone would have thought she wasn’t remotely affected by the fact that he was in her room and they were standing mere breaths apart in front of the bed where they had most likely made Jamie.
Then he caught the pinkness in her cheeks and the way she kept her focus firmly on the zippers. On their squirming, protesting son.
Probably an excellent strategy.
* * *
KATE GAVE THANKS that Jamie seemed happier when he woke up. She doubted the tooth had come through yet, but it seemed things had subsided, at least for the moment. And this way she didn’t have to sit down and nurse him again right away.
It wasn’t that she was shy about feeding the baby in front of Boone. She’d had plenty of practice during their Skype calls, though that had mostly been in the early days, when Jamie’s schedule could best be described as All Chaos, All The Time. Now things were far more settled, which was just the way she liked it. Easier to predict. Easier to work around.
But it had felt different when they were in the car. The confined space had made her far too aware of Boone’s presence, his blue eyes darting everywhere, his shoulders filling her little front seat, his breath apparently stealing all the oxygen.
It hadn’t been the breath itself that got to her, though. More like the way it had hitched a little when she’d adjusted her clothing. And, undoubtedly, flashed him the tiniest bit.
With Jamie on her hip, she led the way to the stairs. Boone had been very understanding when she’d said there would be separate bedrooms on this visit, but even though she didn’t know him as well as a so-called wife should know her husband, there were some areas in which they were oh-so-intimately acquainted. Boone was no monk. And before he returned to Peru, he had told her that even though their marriage wasn’t what anyone would call typical, he planned to honor his vows while they were separated. There would be no other women while he was gone.
Since one of the other things she knew about him was that he was a man of his word, she’d had no cause to doubt him. Which meant that she would spend the next six weeks with a very deprived man who was probably feeling the memories as much as she was.
“Grab your things,” she said when they reached the front door again. “I’ll show you where to drop them.”
Because yeah. Boone wasn’t the only one who had been deprived. Somehow, when she’d told him to stay here, she had assumed that fatigue and common sense would be enough to guard herself against wayward thoughts and urges.
Wrong.
“This banister needs work.” Boone gave it a wiggle.
“I know. It’s on the list.”
He made a sound that could have been a groan or a snort. “I’m starting to wonder if six weeks is going to be enough.”
“Whatever we can’t get done, I’ll hire someone to finish. Or if we even get to the point of the cosmetic stuff, painting and such, I’ll be good. Allie can help me.” She reached the landing and brushed her fingers across the chunk of driftwood nestled on the deep windowsill. “Cash is pretty handy, too. He might be able to tackle some odds and ends.”
“Cash? Who... Oh. Right. Allie’s new boyfriend.” Boone gave the upper banister a shake. “Guess those flights took more out of me than I thought. I forgot his name for a minute there.”
“Not to worry. Everything was such a whirlwind, with Allie getting engaged and then almost married...”
“Did the Mounties really storm the wedding and haul the groom away in handcuffs?”
Kate shuddered as she remembered how close her baby sister had come to marrying a man who had a thing for identity fraud. “Yep. Good thing, too. Otherwise, she might have gone through with it, and then she would be stuck with the wrong guy. Anyway, the fiancé is history. She realized that it was really Cash she wanted, and they are wandering around town like the two most dazed lovebirds you ever saw. So if you blanked on his name, don’t feel bad. There are times when I still have to stop and remind myself who’s in and who’s out.” She gestured to the open door. “Here you go.”
Boone brushed past her, suitcase hefted, into the room that had seemed so airy until he entered. What was it about him? No matter where he went, he seemed to fill the space. Not in a bad way. More like once he was there, the emptiness was gone. Like he wasn’t sucking up the space but was filling a hole.
She shook her head. Filling a hole? Good Lord, a teenager couldn’t have been more snigger worthy. Time to move on. Fast.
“There’s extra blankets in that closet.” She pointed from the doorway. No way was she going into the room with Boone. “And the bathroom is right down here.”
“Is that a water stain?” Boone’s voice pulled her around to where he stared up at the ceiling.
“I think so. It’s old, though. It was there before I moved in, and it hasn’t gotten any bigger.” She squinted. “At least, I don’t think it has. I, um, don’t come up here very much.”
The look he shot her was carefully blank.
“I’ll add it to the list.”
She pulled Jamie’s hand from the neckline of her sweater, which he seemed determined to yank down. “I’d better warn you that this entire bathroom is on the list, too.”
She opened the door to the room in question and braced herself. Boone’s long, low whistle only confirmed her fears.
“What color is that?” he asked.
She didn’t need to look over his shoulder to remember the hideous greenish-brown shade that covered the walls. “I think it’s something Nana got on sale. Or maybe she had a couple of half cans that she combined.”
Boone shook his head. “Did you ever see American Graffiti? There’s a part when Harrison Ford’s character says the other guy’s car is a cross between piss yellow and puke green.” He tapped the wall. “I think this might come under that banner.”
“Nana was more into frugality than style. At least everything still works.” She knocked on the door frame for luck. “Though you do have to jiggle the handle on the toilet sometimes.” She thought for a moment. “And the pipes bang when you first get in the shower, but that passes quickly. Other than that, you’re golden. If the fixtures looked as good as they work, it’d be great, but...”
He walked into the room, hands on hips, taking it all in. “I’ve seen worse.”
Oh, that was reassuring, considering he spent a good chunk of his time in villages without indoor plumbing.
“This will be the rainy-day project, I think.” He pointed from one element to the next. “New toilet. New vanity and sink. The tub...” He pulled back the shower curtain. “Oh, yeah. This is one of those old-fashioned ones. People love those. It can probably stay.” He moved in a slow circle. “It’s a nice room. Plenty of space. We’ll take down those god-awful shutters, put up some curtains, new fixtures, a coat of paint, and it’ll be—”
He came to a standstill, his gaze frozen on Jamie and his mouth gaping slightly.
She glanced down. At Jamie’s hand, curled around the neckline of her sweater. Which he had dragged halfway down her chest, revealing a whole lot of skin and a whole lot of bra. And even though no one in their right mind would ever describe a nursing bra as seductive, from the way Boone seemed to have been turned to stone, she was pretty sure he thought it was the best bit of satin he’d seen in ages.
Almost a year, to be exact.
“Oops.” She disengaged Jamie’s fingers and tugged, but the fabric was bunched beneath his wriggling little body. “Here.” And without thinking, she pulled the baby off her and held him out to Boone.
The expression on Boone’s face shifted from naked lust to stark terror in the space of a heartbeat.
“I...” His gaze bounced from her face, to her chest, to Jamie, then back to her face. “How do I...?”
Whoa. He had told her he didn’t have a lot of experience with babies, but given the tight lines in his face, she had a strong suspicion that he’d been underreporting.
“Have you never held a baby?”
His eyes closed. His lips thinned, like he was trying to hold in a grimace. “I have,” he said slowly. “But it’s been a long time.”
Time alone couldn’t account for the way his hands suddenly seemed plastered to his thighs.
Something inside Kate contracted in empathy.
Boone had never given her more than the basics about his childhood. She knew that the only thing his father had given him was twenty-three chromosomes and that it probably would have been better if his mother’s role had stopped about there, as well. She knew that there had been indifferent relatives and foster care and periodic reunions with his mother that seemed to always stop just short of physical abuse. She knew that as far as Boone was concerned, his life hadn’t really begun until he’d met up with the MacPhersons and gone to Peru.
None of that explained why the mention of holding a baby—holding their baby—left him looking like he’d been dropped into a pit of snakes.
Kate closed her eyes and concentrated on breathing for a second. Then she put Jamie on her hip, pulled her sweater into position—no point in adding another level of challenge to the situation—and marched over to Boone. “Stick out your arms.”
“Here?” He looked around, his gaze lingering once more on the tub, the sink, the tile floor. “Everything is solid. Hard. What if I drop him?”
“You won’t. I won’t let you,” she added when panic filled his eyes. She switched to teacher mode. “Come on. Arms out. That’s right, bent at the elbows. Now, I’m going to put him up against your shoulder. You’re going to put your left hand under his little bum. Your right hand goes across his back. Got it?”
He took a step back.
Oh, no. No way was she letting him run away from this.
“Boone. Whatever has you worried, you can forget about it. I’m right here. Don’t you want to hold your son?”
His nod was slow in coming, but at least he was affirming.
“He moves a lot, so you’ll need to keep your grip secure. But not too tight.”
“Are you sure this is a good—”
She pushed the baby toward him before he could get any more freaked out. As she’d expected, his arms closed around Jamie—tentatively at first, then tight enough that she felt good about letting go and stepping back.
“There,” she said softly. “Jameson Boone, meet Jackson Boone. But he thinks Jackson is a preppy name, so don’t call him that. Which you won’t anyway, because he’s your father.”
Jamie leaned back and stared at Boone. Boone stared rigidly back.
Too late, she wished she had her phone or a camera nearby. But since she didn’t—and there was no way she was going to ruin the moment by running off—she focused instead on soaking up every possible detail so she could carry them in her memory.
