Marie Ferrarella - Your Baby or Mine?

Good, he had her attention. Alec didn’t let the opportunity slip away. “Anyway, I really don’t have the time to go through the process again. I’m in the middle of marketing this new software I developed and the thought of sitting and listening to the peccadilloes of a squadron of women while I try to separate fact from fiction to find a woman who has enough love, patience and enthusiasm to handle my daughter is particularly daunting right now.” He gave it his best shot. “Especially when I’ve found a woman who would be perfect for the job.”

Marissa sighed. He was giving her an awful lot of credit. Either that, or he really was serious about dreading the thought of conducting interviews. Either way, she couldn’t help him.

“Well, I thank you for that, but speaking of jobs…” She glanced over her shoulder at the group. Mrs. Stewart had been inordinately patient. She had to answer the woman’s question and start the new game portion of the class. “I should be getting back to mine.”

He had thought that he was winning her over. “What about my offer?”

“It’s a very flattering one, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to pass.” She was walking backward, away from him, and managed, somehow, to avoid colliding with anyone or stepping on any of the toddlers that were almost everywhere he looked. The woman was uncanny. “But I’ll let you know if I find someone who can live up to your specifications.”

“Outside of Mother Teresa, Mary Poppins and you,” he murmured to himself, “I don’t know of anyone.” Temporarily deflated, Alec looked at his daughter. He had to be in the office tomorrow. This wasn’t going to go over well with his mother. “Do you think your grandmother is up to taking you for another day?”

Andrea screwed up her face and made a familiar sound. Alec looked around for someplace where he could change his daughter. There was a change table against the far wall and he headed toward it just as Marissa called for attention.

“Don’t tell Roberta I called her that,” he whispered to Andrea. “Or she’ll really walk out on us.”

Andrea grunted again. Alec walked faster.

Roberta Beckett smoothed back her carefully styled auburn hair with a perfectly manicured hand. Two-inch-long fingernails flickered in the air like mauve butterflies searching for a place to alight. Through a meticulous regime that she adhered to religiously, Roberta managed to look years younger than the age written on the birth certificate tucked away in her safe-deposit box. Alec knew it was one of her greatest sources of pride that most people, upon seeing her with him, mistook them for brother and sister.

“It’s not that I don’t love her, Alec. I do. I truly do.” Roberta spared a smile for the child, who was holding on to the webbed siding of the portable crib and bouncing up and down in place. “But this rocking, feeding, diapering…” Her deep, husky voice dropped an octave lower as she said the last distasteful word. “It just isn’t me.”

Who knew that better than he? Still, his back was against the wall; he wouldn’t have asked her any other way. Besides, he knew for a fact that the housekeeper performed the actual dirty work. All Roberta did was add her stamp of approval.

“I know, Roberta, and I appreciate you putting yourself out like this, but—”

She didn’t want his gratitude, she wanted results. “Haven’t you found anyone yet?”

He hadn’t even had time to call the agency. He supposed he should have begun interviews yesterday instead of going to class with Andrea, but when he’d signed up, he hadn’t planned on the nanny quitting.

Mentally, he took inventory to make sure he’d brought everything that Dorothy, his mother’s housekeeper, would need to take care of Andrea. “Ellen only quit a little more than twenty-four hours ago.”

The argument obviously carried no weight with Roberta. “God created the world in six days.”

His mother had her own brand of logic. He had ceased to try to make sense of it a long time ago. “He left Adam and Eve for last. That was the hardest part.”

Roberta sniffed. Andrea squealed with glee, then landed on a well-padded bottom and a stuffed rabbit. “You don’t have to create a nanny, just hire one.”

He had to get going. Rex, one of the two owners of the company, was his best friend and incredibly understanding, but there were limits. “Almost as difficult.”

Roberta gave him a reproving look. “I never had difficulties finding one for you.”

Alec thought of the women who had paraded through his life, the ones who had been there to substitute for the genuine article. The very memory was enough to make him not want to hire anyone. He’d had a disjointed, unstable childhood at best. He hadn’t wanted that for Andrea. But he obviously had no choice. Alec sincerely hoped she wouldn’t remember any of this.

Because he needed help, he threw the ball into Roberta’s court. “All right, then you do it. You find a nanny.”

“Me? I should think that would be something you would want to handle on your own.” Roberta pursed her lips in a disapproving pout. “Really, Alec, I thought I raised you more independently than that.”

She was unorthodox, but he loved her. That still didn’t make him incline to let her delude herself.

“No, Roberta, you didn’t raise me at all. Estelle and Elizabeth and Suzanne and Joan and several other women whose names and faces begin to escape me, they raised me."

She distanced herself the way she always did when faced with something she didn’t want to deal with. A frown brought with it several wrinkles that refused to be smoothed, creamed or coaxed away. “What is your point?”

There was a vague discomfort in her eyes. Any moment now she’d announce that she was going off on a junket somewhere, leaving him completely adrift. He had to do something before that happened.

Alec looked at his mother ruefully. “The point is that I’m a little stressed out right now and I guess I’m being rude.”

Roberta smiled, graciously accepting the apology. “Yes, you are. But I forgive you because, after all, I am your mother even if I don’t look it.”

She walked Alec to the front door. “I’ll watch her today but remember, this can’t go on forever. I want you to find a nanny quickly.”

“No more than me, Roberta,” he assured her. “No more than me.”

“By tomorrow,” she called after him.

With any luck, tomorrow could be one of the days he worked out of the office he had set up in his den. That would give him the opportunity to conduct a few interviews. If conducting interviews for a nanny could be referred to as an opportunity.

He fervently hoped it would be the last time he’d have to go through this.

“Thanks, Jane, you’re a lifesaver.” Marissa shed her sweater, draping it over the back of the kitchen chair. Class had run over. Professor Johnston had gotten into a heated discussion with one of the students over the administration of corporal punishment and the class, divided, had taken sides. She was more than half an hour late. She’d called Jane from the campus, but that hadn’t changed the fact that it was way past the time she’d promised to be back.

Jane gathered her books together, depositing them into her backpack. She grinned. “Hey, no problem. Think of it as payback time. I remember when you used to baby-sit me.” The young girl got up. “You made things so much fun.”

The Sergeant had been stationed here for a while when Marissa was in her mid-teens. She’d always liked babysitting at the Hendersons. Their house always seemed to be so comfortably disorganized. Not the pristine living quarters that the Sergeant insisted on. “I liked you, it was easy.”

Jane nodded over her shoulder toward the tiny alcove off the living room. “Christopher is in bed.”