Jacqueline Diamond - The Baby Scheme

“Great.”

Kevin exited through the kitchen and across the back patio. Since the house dated from the 1930s, the two-car garage faced a rear alley, following the style of old carriage houses.

Inside, he set to work moving boxes so he could reach his spare laptop. Once he found it, he realized he needed to dig out the sleeping bag as well. That required shifting yet another set of containers, and then using his Shop-Vac to suction out the accumulation of spiderwebs and grime that he uncovered.

By the time he finished restoring order, he’d been absent nearly twenty minutes. How much trouble could a woman create in that time? Kevin wondered as he hauled his gear indoors.

Emerging into the entertainment area, he broke stride. What had happened to his beautifully arranged home?

In the center of the living room his swivel chairs served as tent poles for a quilt and an assemblage of blankets and sheets that formed a complete, if ragged-looking, enclosure. The tall, multishelved entertainment center against the wall had almost disappeared beneath an assortment of female garments arranged like a shop-window display. Make that a lingerie shop-window display. Alli hadn’t only hung her blouses and skirts in full view, she’d dangled frilly under-things, as well.

“Oh, good, you brought the sleeping bag!” His guest, who’d been lurking to one side observing his reaction, darted forward to lift the bedroll from his arms. “I needed this to finish it off.” She hauled it into the impromptu yurt through a flap.

Kevin couldn’t believe she’d transformed his well-ordered home into chaos. He hated to think how his mother and sisters would react. “Your clothes,” he said.

“Excuse me?” Through the flap, her face popped into view, strands of hair drifting across her nose.

“Put the clothes in the hall closet,” Kevin instructed.

Emerging, Alli plucked some lint from her sweater and dropped it on the carpet. “You have to admit, this place needed livening up.”

He would admit no such thing. “I liked it the way it was.”

“It’s as if nobody really lives here,” she protested. “It isn’t civilized to be that tidy.”

Kevin considered himself distinctly civilized. Well, maybe not at this moment, because he had a strong desire to rip down the mess in his living room and evict his guest, underwear and all. “You can’t leave this—”

The doorbell rang. “I’ll answer it!” Alli sang out.

“Stop right there!”

Alarm flashed across her face. “You think the bodyguards found us?”

“If they had, I doubt they’d be polite enough to ring the bell.” It was far more likely that his mother, Betsy or Barbara had dropped by.

Kevin didn’t require another look to know how his living room must appear, but he couldn’t help it. The place exerted a kind of horrifying fascination, like the scene of a crime. Especially the crimson panties and bra trimmed with black lace that occupied the center of Alli’s fashion monstrosity.

The doorbell rang again. He couldn’t pretend he wasn’t home, since he’d made the mistake of leaving his car in front.

“I’ll handle it,” he said.

He took the precaution of glancing through the window, but the figure on the porch remained out of view. His mother and sisters had perfected the art of avoiding surveillance.

There was no point in delaying. That could only make it appear that Alli had been detaining him—perhaps by doing a striptease to remove all that lingerie.

Gritting his teeth, Kevin opened the door.

“Is, um, Alli here?” she heard a young man ask, and knew immediately who it was, mainly because she’d invited him.

“Larry! That was quick.” Alli squeezed into the doorway next to Kevin, who showed no inclination to move.

The photographer glanced between the two of them. With his round, freckled face and Harry Potter glasses, he made an amusing contrast to the hard-bodied detective.

“I thought you were staying with a girlfriend.”

“I said a friend,” she corrected, and introduced the two men. They shook hands, which seemed to calm Larry somewhat. He apparently found Kevin intimidating, perhaps because he was scowling.

Okay, she should have asked his permission before inviting someone to his house, Alli mused as she escorted her visitor inside, but he’d been in the garage when Larry called.

“Let’s see what you found.” She slipped a file folder from the photographer’s grasp. He’d offered on the phone to e-mail the document until she’d reminded him that Payne might have managed to access her account.

Inside lay several photocopied pages of a news story carrying Madge Leeky’s byline. It was dated three years earlier.

“It’s about the adoption counselor those two doctors hired,” Larry explained. “It’s all I could find.”

Kevin’s frown eased. “You’re helping with her research?”

“Uh, yeah,” he said.

“Did she explain what the story’s about?” he asked.

“Not exactly,” Larry said. “I don’t care as long as she makes a splash. We all want her back at the paper, except for a few idiots. Like maybe two with the same last name.”

Kevin nodded. “Care for a beer?”

The offer apparently indicated Larry had passed muster. “Say yes,” Alli prompted.

“Okay.”

“Alli?” Kevin asked.

“Sure.” She liked being treated as one of the guys. Well, sometimes.

A pucker formed between the photographer’s eyes as he stared past her at the entertainment center. “What hit your clothes, a hurricane?”

Alli gave a little cough, wishing he could have avoided the touchy subject. She hadn’t missed Kevin’s dismayed reaction earlier to her attempt at livening up his decor.

Her true motive had been more self-defense than aesthetics. Despite the spotlessness of the house, the man’s essence infused the place with he-man hormones. As she’d started to hang her things in the hall closet next to a leather jacket, she’d realized that his pheromones were likely to pervade her clothes forever.

That was all she needed: to carry Kevin’s scent around with her, arousing images of the two of them dancing cheek to cheek and thigh to thigh. Mr. Law-and-Way-Too-Much-Order was not even remotely the kind of guy she wanted imprinted on her psyche.

“I threw them up in the air and that’s where they stuck,” she improvised for Larry’s benefit.

“Unfortunately, I wasn’t around when it happened,” Kevin said. “Do you think it looks too revealing?”

Larry cleared his throat. “I guess you’d know more about that than I would. Right?”

He was trying to figure out the relationship between the two of them, Alli thought, and tried to figure out how to describe it. Reluctant colleagues? Victims of circumstance? People who bucked a trend by moving in together before their first date?

“I think we should have it shellacked and preserved for posterity,” Kevin replied, and headed for the kitchen.

Alli rattled the article in her hand. “I appreciate this. Did you have any trouble checking it out of the library?”

“I didn’t take it from the library. They make you fill out a form to say what you’re working on,” Larry said. “I got paranoid that the editors might start asking questions, since photographers don’t usually research stories. So I tried another route.”

“What route is that?”

Kevin returned with three beers. “I could pour these into glasses if you prefer, but that takes half the fizz out.”

“I like my beer out of the can,” Alli said.

Larry accepted his with thanks. There was nowhere to sit without knocking down her tent, so they stood there sipping while he continued.