Christie Ridgway - Beginning With Baby

He looked down. Sure enough, Rex was sleeping away, his mouth falling open and a drop of drool running out and toward Jackson’s forearm.

Phoebe smiled as she tenderly touched the sleeping baby’s cheek. “I thank you. Rex thanks you. Though they don’t know it, the tenants of 1006 Bartlett Street thank you.” She bent over to retrieve the baby, the rounded neckline of her dress falling forward to give Jackson an innocent peek at two perfectly fine breasts in a white lacy bra.

He bit back a second groan and looked away as she scooped the baby out of his arms. He breathed out, too, to keep her dangerous scent from reaching his lungs.

Then she turned away. At last. It was over. She was finally leaving, and there’d be no more contact between them, he promised.

At the door, though, she spun around, her dress floating out around her legs, the beginnings of a smile brightening her face and crinkling the corners of her morning eyes. He wanted to look away.

“Gee,” she said, her lush mouth curling up. “I just gotta ask. What are you doing at 6:30 a.m. for the rest of your life?”

Early the next morning Phoebe typed quietly at her computer. Rex was asleep—for what seemed like the first time in days—and she didn’t want to disturb the baby or her neighbor.

It was the least she could do, now that she knew Jackson Abbott worked nights. Before meeting him, she’d always assumed the hours her mystery neighbor kept were due to some hot-and-heavy romance he had going. And after meeting him…

Well, if he hadn’t denied it himself, she would still think he had some hot-and-heavy romance going. He was the type of man who found women easily. He was big, solidly big, with wide shoulders, narrow hips and strong, thick thighs. Like a pirate, she’d thought nervously, the first time she’d seen him. There was even a small gold earring that winked at her from the rumpled tangle of his coffee-dark hair.

His eyes were dark, too, and heavily lashed, and the first time they’d looked at her they’d seemed to swallow her up.

She shivered now, remembering it.

To top it off, inside that dark and dangerous exterior was an awesome daddy technique that was downright magic. At first, Phoebe figured Rex responded to him because the baby was used to her stepbrother, but nothing about Jackson’s deep voice or muscled chest was anything like Teddy.

It was a puzzle. Jackson was a puzzle.

She tried to put it from her mind, but as her fingers flew over the keys, she kept coming back to him. To the familiar way he held the baby and the undefinable expression that entered his eyes when he did.

To his denial of a woman in his life and the frisson of feminine response she’d felt when sitting across from him in his apartment yesterday.

To the bleakness on his face when she’d joked about what he was doing the rest of the mornings of his life.

Another delicious shiver rolled down Phoebe’s spine. Dark and mysterious men were lethal. But a dark and mysterious man who held a baby as tenderly as he might hold a woman’s heart…

She pulled herself short of going down that path. Her focus was on being Rex’s mommy. He was the only man in her life that mattered, and it didn’t take a genius to realize that Jackson wasn’t exactly welcoming a relationship with Rex and her, anyway.

Jackson was merely her neighbor.

Just then she heard the sound of booted footsteps in the hall and the telltale jingle and click of keys in the lock next door. Her mere neighbor was home.

Phoebe was glad Rex was quiet because Jackson was probably tired and hungry and ready to settle in for sleep right after another epicurean’s delight of dried meat and sugary soda.

Ick.

It was a short leap to the thought of the zucchini nut muffins she’d made the night before. Big fat ones, bursting with raisins, walnuts and cinnamon. Much better than beef jerky. Excuse me, turkey jerky.

Couldn’t she just pop over with two or three? A kind gesture, wasn’t it, that would keep her focus on him as her neighbor rather than anything more dangerous.

Because anything more was impossible.

She was a woman with a new baby. He was a man moving on, in a very short while.

So bringing over a little thank-you gift of home cooking would put her in the right frame of mind to put him out of her mind.

There. That made sense.

With Rex still snoozing away, she carefully locked her door, secure in the knowledge that the slightest peep from her baby would carry right through the wall between her place and Jackson’s.

Still, outside his front door, with a plate of her famous muffins in hand, she hesitated. If she returned to her apartment—

Today would be a rerun of the day before. She’d be squirming on her seat, thinking of him sleeping just a wall way. Oh, yes. Definitely best to force the focus onto that neighbor idea.

Unlike yesterday morning he answered her knock right away. Wearing heavy construction boots, jeans and an unbuttoned shirt, he looked both weary and wary. He blinked at her slowly, for a moment hiding the bittersweet chocolate color of his eyes. “Another problem?” he asked gruffly.

Only if you didn’t like looking at swoonworthy inches of hard, golden chest. Phoebe swallowed. “N-no. I…” Why had she come?

His gaze flicked down toward her hands and she followed it.

The muffins. Right. She’d brought muffins. “Here,” she said, holding out the plate.

He didn’t take it immediately, instead eyeing the gift as if it might be poison. “What’s this?”

A lock of dark hair fell over his forehead. It brought his unapproachability down a notch, which for some weird reason made her babble. “A thank-you. A neighbor—no, zucchini nut—” She broke off, perplexed by her tongue, which kept getting tangled.

His lips twitched. “A nutty neighbor?” he asked innocently.

She laughed for him, and her tongue unknotted. “Zucchini nut muffins.”

He still didn’t take them. “What for?”

“For you. For helping me out. In appreciation.”

Rising up on his toes, he peered over her shoulder as if she might be hiding something behind her. “Where is your midget sidekick, anyway? Signed up for Little League already?”

She shook her head in amusement. “You’ve been hiding your funny side, haven’t you? He’s asleep, believe it or not.” She nudged Jackson’s midsection teasingly with the plate, her gaze suddenly coming to rest on his very male, very naked and very rippling ab muscles.

God. A strange flush of heat washed over her cheeks.

His long fingers grabbed the edge of the plate. “Hey,” he said. “I could be ticklish.”

Phoebe didn’t let go, and sizzling bursts of feminine reaction pinged from place to place in her belly. “Well,” she said, her mouth going dry around the near-flirtatious sound of her voice. “Are you?”

When he didn’t answer, her gaze slowly crawled up his bare, heavily muscled chest, over his throat and the five-o’clock shadow on his chin. Past his chiseled mouth, his strong nose, to meet his dark, dark eyes.

She had no idea what was lurking in their depths.

Her hand loosened from her side of the plate, one finger at a time: thumb, forefinger, middle finger, ring finger, pinkie. In all the long moments that it took, neither one of them blinked.

Phoebe swallowed and finally let her hand fall. “I should be going.”

“Yes.”

Neither one of them moved.

“I have a baby…” she said lamely.

“Yes,” he agreed, seeming to understand what she meant.

“So…” Her feet didn’t obey.

“Give the little guy my best.”

“I will.” The little guy. He was her concern now. But she was going to have to initiate a serious discussion with him. And soon. When it was Rex and Phoebe against the world, Rex was going to have to come through for her sometimes. If he insisted on waking up at 2:00 a.m., a few tears to save her at a crucial moment like this would be a nice payback.