Heatherly Bell - This Baby Business

Grace rolled over, squealed and kicked her legs out, reminding him that a kid was now on his agenda, like it or not. Then she went knees up and elbows out again and did her rocking thing. She squealed her delight at having managed to roll over to her back again, bringing an end of the blanket with her in her chubby little fist. The corner of the blanket was now in her mouth.

Levi pulled the blanket closer to him, taking the edge of it out of her mouth. He handed her a pair of plastic keys to chew on. He’d try keeping her up late tonight, then maybe she’d be too tired to wake up much during the night. Logically, it should work.

It was the way he liked to tackle any problem in his life. Logic always won over emotion, hands down. He’d been taught to never make knee-jerk decisions. Emotions tended to cloud good decision making. Contrary to what some of his friends believed, he hadn’t chosen to raise Grace out of emotion. Out of overwhelming love and devotion. No, that had come a little later. His had been a logical decision, based on responsibility and doing the right thing. Not abandoning his child, the way his parents had abandoned him. Sure, they’d done it for the greater good. But it had still left him feeling unwanted. Expendable. They could go ahead and save the world’s children. He would start with his child.

Of course, it was always better to make life-changing decisions on your own. He hadn’t had that luxury.

Still, Sandy’s parents clearly didn’t see Levi as a shining example of a father, saying they’d never even heard of him. At first they’d tried to claim that Grace’s father was Sandy’s boyfriend, a man who had died in the same car accident. But thankfully the birth certificate stated Levi Lambert as the father. The DNA test had confirmed it.

He assumed Frank and Irene were grieving, and he got that. He understood the grieving process. But he wasn’t the enemy. If they had been logical about it, he would have agreed that, of course, they could be involved in Grace’s life. Instead, they’d come out guns blazing and demanded that he give her back to them. Even tried to file a motion in family court to bar him from leaving the state of Georgia. Hadn’t worked. They continued to insist that Sandy had meant to leave them in charge, but she’d died suddenly and without a will. Frank, who loved to hurl insults via email, had once referred to him as “the sperm donor.”

Levi could take a lot of shit and not blink, but when they insulted him, they were insulting Grace’s father, too, so he got a little more sensitive. To his mind, how she’d been conceived was nobody’s business. The way he raised his daughter would be his business and his alone. He’d be there for her—present, not absent like his own parents had been, although the distance his parents had created wasn’t one he or anyone else could blame them for. They’d been concerned for the poverty-stricken people of the world, and Levi wasn’t one of them. As a child, he’d had the added weight of guilt for missing his parents. They were off saving the world. And him? At least he’d had his grandfather.

But something had gone right for him today when he’d knocked on Carly’s door. He’d found himself an expert. If nothing else, maybe her heart was in the right place. Not to mention her legs. Her ass. Okay, he was going to try not to notice that again.

She’d offered to babysit nights, which meant he could have a social life again.

He hadn’t seriously dated anyone in years. Grace had reformed him overnight, but the stiff boots still didn’t quite fit. He’d need to stretch them out, wear them in. Carly was just the kind of girl he never would have approached in the past. Nice girl. Good girl. Pretty and sweet, but wouldn’t want to get too dirty or anything.

* * *

LEVI WOKE WITH a start. The midafternoon Saturday sun slid through the cracked blinds of his bedroom, almost blinding him. It was official. Grace had turned him into a vampire. He’d fallen asleep with the baby monitor in his hands when he’d only meant to close his eyes for a second.

Since he was off the clock, he’d fallen asleep when Grace went down for her nap. And dreamed of sweet Carly, which made no sense when he could dream about a Playboy centerfold, Katy Perry or anyone else in his wild fantasy life. But the girl next door was kind of smoking hot up close. Unapologetically curvy, with legs that went on for a country mile. Sensual, full lips. He’d been dreaming about licking those kissable lips of hers and more. Much more.

The doorbell rang and Levi groaned, rolling out of bed. He rubbed his eyes and quickly looked in on Grace to see that she was still sleeping in her crib—it was daytime, after all, what else would she be doing—then went to open the front door.

Carly stood there smiling until her eyes locked in somewhere around his pecs. As if she could see right through him again. She wasn’t smiling any longer but seemed something more like transfixed. He checked to see if Grace had spit up on him again, and that was when he realized he wasn’t wearing a shirt.

“Crap. Come on in.”

Levi dipped into his bedroom to grab a T-shirt and pulled it over his head, meeting Carly in the foyer. “Sorry about that. I fell asleep.”

A smile had become frozen on her face. “Am I interrupting...anything?”

It took him a minute, because sue him if he was beginning to forget what a sex life resembled. Lately when he took off his shirt in the middle of the day, it was because there was regurgitated baby food on it. But Carly had just reminded him of how much he missed sex. This was not helpful.

He rubbed his prickly chin. Hadn’t bothered to shave this morning, when the only girl he had to impress didn’t have any of her own teeth. “Nah, I was sleeping when Grace sleeps.”

Smile back full force. “That’s smart.”

“You doing okay?” He felt a smile coming on. She seemed so...enthusiastic.

“I could use some help if you have a little time. No worries if you don’t.”

“What’s up?”

“A manufacturer sent me a crib to review that’s supposed to be the easiest to assemble, and I thought I’d put it together and test that out.” Her hands were in the air, as if trying to reenact the process. “And then if you decide I can babysit her, she can take naps at my place, instead of in the car seat. But—”

“Too many moving parts?”

She sank her teeth into her lower lip. “The diagram makes no sense to me.”

“That’s okay. I put together Grace’s crib in a few minutes. It’s not a problem.” He went to his bedroom to grab the baby monitor handset, then followed Carly to her house.

Carly led him to the spare bedroom, where he set the handset on a nearby dresser. The room had a sewing machine in one corner, piles of fabric on the chair and a dummy wearing half a dress. In the middle of the room stood random parts to the crib. The rails, headboard, baseboard and screws and nuts were scattered all over the floor. A screwdriver lay near the diagram and instructions wrinkled enough to appear as though they’d been through someone’s fist. So it looked like she’d tried, really tried, to understand the instructions. Made him smile. She was winging it. In many ways, he could relate. Oh, hell, who was he kidding? Lately, in all ways.

And for someone who had gone through his life with a plan set in stone, sue him if he felt like the ground underneath him was constantly shifting these days. But this, assembling a crib, he could do. It was mechanical. The parts fit together and made sense. What’s more, they’d stay together after he was done.

He went to his knees and took a quick look at the instructions. Simple. But when he grabbed the screwdriver, Carly stopped him.

“You should teach me how. Let me do it.”