Merry Christmas, Babies

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He made it to the hallway before she did and had already figured out which of the two extra bedrooms he’d use. The largest had four sandalwood cribs and two white, pink and blue dressers. Darin was sleeping on top of one of the dressers. Samantha was nowhere in sight.

“I’ll switch with you,” Elise blurted, coming into the smaller room behind him. “Once the babies come, if you’re still here, I’ll need to be next to them.”

He looked as if he was going to argue that, too.

“Plus, I’ll be closer to the bathroom.”

One of the few downsides to owning the older home. She and Joe were going to be sharing the one bathroom.

And, she was afraid, much, much more than that.

CHAPTER FIVE

JOE INTENDED TO BRING one suitcase—a couple of changes of clothes, some toiletries, shorts to sleep in. It wasn’t as if he was leaving town or wouldn’t have access to his condo every single day. The cell phone charger on his nightstand reminded him that he’d need it to charge the technological wonder every night while he slept so it would be up and running by morning. And there was the book next to it, the one he’d been reading each night for the past week. He was almost through with it and so added it, along with the next in the stack, to the to-go pile on his bed.

Back and forth to the bathroom a time or two and he’d collected various other necessities such as aspirin and mentholyptic muscle rub for the occasional aches and pains during the night. He wasn’t going to use Elise’s personal care items and there was no reason to buy a second set of everything when he had a perfectly good set of his own.

And for that matter, he replaced the travel-size shampoo and shaving-cream containers with the full-size ones in his shower. No point in purchasing more of them, either.

His miniature DVD player landed on the bed—never knew when he’d feel a hankering for a shoot ’em up action movie. He tossed a couple of his favorites on top of the stack. Grabbed a lint brush to deal with her cats’ hair. And headed out to the garage for a bigger bag. Or two.

ELISE WENT ABOUT the rest of her day the same as usual. By the time she was showered—having taken extra minutes to remove the decorative towels on the second rack in the big bathroom and replace them with a usable set for Joe, scrub the toilet and the tub, throw the rug in the wash, scour the sink and put all her essentials away in drawers and cabinets—both the crib sheets and the changing table had arrived as promised and were waiting in brown-paper-wrapped packages on the small porch connected to her side door.