Anne Winston - The Baby Consultant

“Do you mean you’re keeping her?” She hated to keep asking intrusive questions, but her conscience would not, absolutely could not, let her walk away from this place until she was sure the infant was being properly cared for.

Jack sat down opposite her on a wide hassock. “Yes. I’m her legal guardian, and her only living relative.” His elbows rested on his knees, and his big hands dangled between them. He dropped his head.

This puzzle didn’t have enough pieces for her to even frame it up with all the straight edges. “Is she...are you the father?”

Jack’s head shot up. “Of course not!” He glared at her.

She shrugged. “It was a logical question.” The baby was growing angry again, and she stood and rocked her. “Maybe we’d better change her and feed her.”

“Right.” He stood, too, and looked around for the diaper bag. Then he hesitated, turning back to her. “Miss Brooks—”

“Frannie.” She smiled. “Miss Brooks is too formal for someone who’s about to get spit up on.”

“You’ll stay for a while?” His face lit up so pathetically she would have laughed if the whole situation wasn’t so sad. “I don’t want to intrude if you have plans, but I need a crash course in baby care. Just the basics, until I can take her to a doctor and figure out this whole deal.”

She wanted to tell him “the basics” were a major part of a young baby’s life, but she sensed he was about at the end of his rope. “Sure. I can stay for a while.”

He was a very different man from the self-confident flirt she’d met in his office last month. While she changed the baby—whose name, Jack said, was Alexa—he brought in the rest of the things he’d stashed in the car. Then he hovered, uncertainty radiating from him like a bad sunburn, watching her mix formula, test the temperature of the liquid on her wrist and settle down on the sofa to feed Alexa.

She realized he’d gotten a yellow legal pad at some point. “Are you going to try to work tonight? Because you really need to understand that babies—”

“I’m not working.” Wearily, he plopped down beside her. “I’m taking notes on everything you did so I don’t forget it when I’m on my own.”

“There are books that can tell you this stuff,” she said gently.

He’d let his head drop back against the couch and the notes lay half-finished on his lap. “How did you learn so much about babies?”

“I have three younger brothers,” she said. “And two of them have children that I’ve helped to raise.”

His eyes were closed and she risked staring for a moment, taking in the details of his profile, the enormous hands spread over thighs that looked heavily muscled even when disguised by his khaki pants. His jaw was heavy with stubble several shades darker than his hair, as if he hadn’t shaved in a few days. It only emphasized how very masculine he was, as if she wasn’t already aware of that.

As she shifted the baby to her shoulder to burp her, her arm brushed against his. It was like brushing concrete. No, that was wrong. Concrete didn’t exude heat; concrete didn’t tempt her to touch. His arms were as toasty as if he had a furnace inside, packed in solid muscle.

He turned toward her then, and she forgot all about her speculations. He was closer than their limited acquaintance dictated, and as he put one hand against Alexa’s back, he leaned even closer. “Thank you,” he said, and she watched his lips form the words with a fascinated detachment. How would those lips feel against hers? Would his kisses be tentative, persuasive? Or was he as sure of his kissing as he was of his flirting? If so, he would be a very dangerous man.

And this was a dangerous line of thinking. One she had no intention of pursuing.

“You realize a child is going to change your life completely,” she said to him. “Are you sure there’s no one more—no one else to take her?”

“I’m sure,” he said. Although he still was turned toward her, his eyes were looking into a memory she couldn’t share, and the sudden grief in his face unnerved her.

Without thinking, she put her free hand to the side of his cheek.

Immediately he covered it with his own, closing his eyes as if to savor the contact. “Alexa is my niece,” he said. He released the pressure holding her hand in place, but turned his own and carried hers to his lap, where he played absently with her fingers. “My brother and his wife were killed in an accident.”

Frannie could see the naked sense of loss on his face. “So your brother is—was her father?” It took a determined effort of will to ignore the gentle rub of his fingers over her knuckles.

“Yeah. Randy and Gloria had been trying for a long time to start a family. They were pretty thrilled when Alexa was born.” He squeezed his eyes closed, as if to deny reality. “A tractor-trailer jackknifed and slid into them on a highway two weeks after she was born. Alexa wasn’t injured because her car seat sat so low in the back seat—the whole top half of the car was sheared off.”

Frannie stifled a small cry. Cold prickles of goose bumps spread down her arms and she shivered involuntarily. She turned her palm up and linked her fingers through his, gripping tightly. “Oh, Jack, I am so sorry. What a terrible tragedy.” The full impact of the story sank in on her as the baby on her shoulder made a funny little lip-smacking sound and she realized this child would never know her mother or father, that her uncle Jack was the only family she had.

He sighed heavily. “I’ve been stuck in Florida for almost a month, disposing of their estate and straightening out the custody arrangements for Alexa.” The small messy details of the coffee and newspaper she’d glimpsed in his kitchen through the back door made sense now. Those would have been the last things on his mind when he got that phone call.

Well, Alexa certainly could have fared worse. “She’s a lucky little girl,” she said. “I don’t know a lot of men who would willingly take on a twenty-year commitment without some serious reservations.”

“Oh,I have reservations,” Jack assured her. “You’ve seen the extent of my child-rearing skills. Alexa might not think she’s so lucky after a couple of days with me.” A trace of humor surfaced in his eyes and then he grinned. “And I don’t know the first thing about how to handle puberty and dating.”

Frannie’s opinion of Jack Ferris had risen significantly in the past hour; now it rose even more. “I was thinking more along the lines of how a baby is going to torpedo your social life. Not to mention your romantic interests.”

“Yeah, I can foresee some serious changes in my future. I may have to get married just to get some help with this.” He indicated the child, now dozing on Frannie’s shoulder.

He might have been joking, but his words struck a nerve she thought had been buried. “Why?” Her voice was crisp, reflecting the resentment that gripped her. “Women aren’t automatically programmed to be the family caretakers.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I have to be going.” With the ease of experience, she shifted the sleeping baby into Jack’s arms and set the bottle down on the coffee table. “I don’t think she’ll eat any more right now. She’s exhausted. You’d better put her down and get some sleep yourself. She’ll be hungry again in a few hours.”

“Frannie, wait.”

But she didn’t want to hear any more. Whether or not he’d meant it, she couldn’t pretend to be amused by his comment. Not when she had a vivid image of herself almost having been stuck in a loveless marriage solely for that very reason. “Relax. You’ll be fine. You wrote down everything you need to survive tonight. Tomorrow you should call the pediatrician’s office. They can recommend some parenting classes and books to help you.”