Baby Steps

MILLS & BOON

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To Gail

for giving this couple another chance

to finally get together

(and for unfailingly knowing when I most

need a word of encouragement)

and to Charles

for loving this book

and wanting it to be the best it could be.

How blessed can a girl get?

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Epilogue

Coming Next Month

Chapter One

“You get back here, Cass Carter!”

Dana Malone zipped across the sales floor after her rapidly retreating partner, nearly landing on her butt when a crawling baby shot out in front of her from behind a St. Bernard-sized Elmo. Half a wobble and a shuffle later, she was back on track. “What do you mean, I have to do it—ouch!”

“Watch out for the new high chair,” the long-legged, denim-skirted blonde tossed back, cradling the tiny head jutting out from a Snugli strapped to her chest.

“Thanks,” Dana grumbled, rubbing her hip as she snaked her way through cribs and playpens, Little Tikes’ playhouses and far too many racks of gently used baby clothes. Her two partners—and their skinny little fannies—could navigate the jumbled sales floor with ease. For Dana, the space was a minefield. As was Cass’s request. “Have you lost your mind? I can’t pick the store’s new location by myself, Cass! What on earth do I know about real estate?”

“This is Albuquerque, for heaven’s sake,” Cass said as she slipped into the store’s pea-sized office. “Not Manhattan.” She shimmied past her desk, heaped with paperwork and piles of newly consigned clothes, then swiped a trio of original Cabbage Patch Kids dolls in mint condition from the rocker wedged into one corner. “How difficult can it be to choose one strip mall storefront over another? Here, take Jason for a moment, would you?”

The weight of the month-old infant—and the ache—barely had a chance to register before Cass, now settled into the rocker, reached again for the softly fussing infant. Dana allowed herself an extra second of stolen new-baby scent before relinquishing her charge, watching Cass attach baby to breast with a neutral expression. The baby now contentedly slurping away, her partner lifted amused blue green eyes to her. “C.J.’s already got several potential locations lined up. All you have to do is weed out the ones that won’t work.”

A trickle of perspiration made a run for it down Dana’s sternum, seeking haven in her cleavage. “I’d just assumed we’d all do this together.”

“I know, sweetie. But I’m pooped. And Blake’s on my case as it is about coming back to work so soon. Besides, between our lease being up next month and the store about to burst at the seams—”

“What about Mercy? Why can’t she do it?”

“Why can’t I do what?”

The third side of the Great Expectations triangle stood in the office doorway, sports car-red fingernails sparkling against a frilly little skirt Dana wouldn’t have been able to wear when she was twelve.

“Go property scouting,” Dana said. “You’d be much better at it than me.”

Meredes Zamora swiped a dark curl out of her face as she squeezed into the office. “I’m also much better at juggling five customers at a time. You get rattled with two.”

“I do not!”

Both ladies laughed.

“Okay, so maybe I do get a little flustered.”

“Honey,” Mercy said, not unkindly, “you start stuttering.”

“And dropping things,” Cass added.

“And—”

“Okay, okay! I get your point!”

It was true. Even after nearly five years, even though wallpaper books and Excel spreadsheets held no terror for her, Dana still tended to lose her composure under duress. Especially about making business decisions on her own—

“He’s expecting your call,” Cass said.

Dana suddenly felt like a bird being eyed by a pair of hungry cats. “Who is?”

“C.J.”

She sighed in tandem with the soft jangle of the bell over the front door. In a flounce of curls and a swish of that miniskirted fanny that had, Dana was sure, never felt the pinch of a girdle, Mercy pivoted back out to the sales floor, leaving Dana with the Duchess of Determination. She decided to ignore the feeling of dread curdling in her stomach as a slow, sly grin stretched across Cass’s naturally glossed mouth. “You’ve never seen C.J., have you?”

Curdled dread never lied. Especially when it came to Cass, who, now that her own love life was copacetic, had made fixing Dana’s woeful lack in that department her personal crusade.

Wiping her palms on the front of her skirt, Dana pivoted toward the door. “Mercy probably needs me out front—”

“No, she doesn’t. Sit.” Cass nodded toward the pile of clothes on her desk. “Those things need to be tagged anyway.”

Scowling, Dana plopped behind the desk, snatching a tiny pink jumper off the pile. “Twelve bucks?”

“Fifteen. Macy’s has them new for forty.” Cass shifted in her chair, making Jason’s hand fly about for a moment until his tiny fingers grasped her bunched up blouse. Envy pricked at Dana’s heart as Cass continued, more to the baby than to Dana, “C.J. is…mmm, how shall I put this…?” Zing went those eyes. “Magnificent.”

So she’d heard. Dana phh’d at her.

“As if it would kill you to spend the afternoon with the man with the bedroom, blue eyes.” Cass tugged her skirt back over her knee. “Butt’s not bad, either.”

Just what Dana needed in her life. Lethal eyes and taut buns. She scribbled the price on the tag, then jabbed the point of the ticket gun into the jumper, entertaining vaguely voodooesque thoughts. “I think that’s called sexual objectification.”

“Yeah. So?”

She grabbed the next item off the pile, a fuchsia jumpsuit with enormous purple flowers. “Twenty?”

“Sure. Sweetie, I nearly drooled over the guy myself when he helped me sell the house a few months ago. And don’t you dare tell Blake.”

Dana’s head snapped up. “Excuse me? You were seven months pregnant, recently widowed—”

Never mind that Cass’s second husband had been a dirtwad of the first order, but a friend has a duty to point out these things.

“—your ex-husband was hot to get back together, and you were salivating all over your Realtor?”

“Yeah, well, it was like having a close encounter with a chocolate marble cheesecake after a ten-year diet. Fortunately, since I’m not all that crazy about chocolate marble cheesecake, the temptation passed.”

Unfortunately, Dana had a real thing for chocolate marble cheesecake. Which Cass knew full well. As did Dana’s hips.

“This wouldn’t be you trying to fix me up, by any chance?”

“Perish the thought.”

Dana sighed, wrote out another price tag. “You forget. I had inside information.” She plopped the last garment on the “done” pile, then folded her hands in front of her on the desk. “C. J. Turner’s idea of intimacy is cozying up to his cell phone on his way to one appointment, making follow-up calls from another. The man is married to his business. Period.”

A moment of skeptical silence followed. “You got this from Trish, I take it?”

“Not that I know any details,” Dana said with a shrug. Her much younger cousin and she had never been close, despite Trish’s having lived with Dana’s parents for several years. She’d worked for C. J. Turner for six months before vanishing from the face of the earth, more than a year ago. Before the alien abduction, however, she had talked quite a bit about the apparently calendar-worthy Realtor. Professionally, she’d sung his praises, which was why Dana had recommended him to Cass when she’d needed an agent’s services. Personally, however, was something else again. “But I gathered the man hasn’t exactly listed himself on the Marriage Exchange.”

Cass gave her a pointed look from underneath feathery bangs. “So maybe he hasn’t met the right woman yet.”

“Boy, you are sleep-deprived.”

“Well, you never know. It could happen.”

“Yeah, and someday I might lose this extra thirty pounds I’ve been lugging around since junior high, but I’m not holdin’ my breath on that one, either.”

“You know, sweetie, just because Gil—”

“And you can stop right there,” Dana said softly before her partner could dredge up past history. She rose, grabbing the pile of newly marked clothes to cart out front. “I’ve already got one mother, Cass.”

“Sorry,” Cass said over the baby’s noisy suckling at her breast. “It’s just—”

“I am happy,” Dana said, cutting her off. “Most of the time, anyway. I’ve got a good life, great friends and I actually look forward to coming to work every day, which is a lot more than most people can say. But trust me, the minute I start buyin’ into all the ‘maybes’ and ‘it could happens,’ I’m screwed.”

Silence hovered between them for a few seconds, until, on a sigh that said far more than Dana wanted to know, Cass said, “C.J.’s card’s in my Rolodex.”

“Great,” Dana said, thinking, Why me, God? Why?

“You keep staring out the door like that, your eyeballs are gonna fall right outta your head.”

C.J. smiled, relishing the blast from the lobby’s overzealous air conditioner through his dress shirt, fresh out of the cleaner’s plastic this morning. “Haven’t you got phones to answer or something, Val?”

“You hear any ringing? I don’t hear any ringing, so I guess there aren’t any phones to answer.” The trim, fiftysomething platinum blonde waltzed from behind the granite reception desk to peer through silver-framed glasses out the double glass door at the gathering clouds. “You giving that cloud the evil eye so it’ll go away, or so it’ll come here?”

One hand stashed in his pants pocket, C.J. allowed a grin for both the storm outside and the Texas tempest beside him. Out over the West Mesa, lightning periodically forked in the ominous sky; in the past ten minutes, the thunder had gone from hesitant rumbling to something with a real kick to it. If it weren’t for this appointment, he’d be outside, arms raised to the sky, like some crazed prehistoric man communing with the gods. Ozone had an almost sexual effect on him, truth be told. Not that he was about to let Val in on that fact.

“Ah, c’mon, Val—can’t you feel the energy humming in the air?”

“Oh, Lord. Next thing I know, you’re gonna tell me you’re seeing auras around people’s heads—”

The phone rang, piercing the almost eerie hush cloaking the small office. Already cavelike with its thick, stone-colored carpeting and matching walls, the serene gray décor was relieved only by a series of vivid seriographs, the work of a local artist whose career C.J. had been following for years. Normally the place was hopping, especially when the three other agents he’d brought on board were around. But not only were they all out, even C.J.’s cell phone had been uncharacteristically silent for the past hour or so.

Unnerving, to say the least.

“I hear you, I hear you,” Val muttered, sweeping back around the desk, assuming her sweetness-and-light voice the instant she picked up the receiver. A wave of thunder tumbled across the city, accompanied by a lightning flash bright enough to make C.J. blink. Behind him, he heard a little shriek and the clatter of plastic as Val dropped the receiver into the cradle. Some twenty-odd years ago, an uncle or somebody had apparently been struck by lightning through the phone; nobody in her family had touched a telephone during an electrical storm since. Still, the quirk was a small enough price to pay for unflagging loyalty, mind-boggling efficiency and the occasional, well-deserved kick in the butt.

She was standing beside him again, her arms crossed over a sleeveless white blouse mercilessly tucked into navy pants, warily eyeing the blackening sky.

“Looks like you’re about to get your wish…oh, Lordy!” Another crack of thunder nearly sent her into the potted cactus by the door, just as a white VW Jetta with a few years on it pulled into the nearly empty lot. His three o’clock, no doubt, he thought with a tight grin.

Not that Cass Carter hadn’t given it the old college try, with her enthusiastic recital of Dana Malone’s virtues. Nor could he deny a certain idle curiosity about the person belonging to the warm Southern drawl on the other end of the line, when Dana herself had called to make an appointment. Still, if it hadn’t been for all the business Cass and Blake Carter had brought to the agency over the past few months, he would have gladly handed off this particular transaction to one of the other agents. He rarely handled rental deals these days, for one thing. And for another, God save him from well-intentioned women trying to fix him up.

His last…whatever…had been well over a year ago, a one-night stand that should have never happened. And he shouldered the blame for the whole fiasco, for a momentary, but monumental, lapse of good judgment that—thank God!—hadn’t turned out any worse than it had. By the skin of his teeth didn’t even begin to cover it. But the affair had brought into startlingly sharp focus exactly how pointless his standard operating procedure with women had become.

It would be disingenuous to pretend that female companionship had ever been a problem, even if C.J. hadn’t taken advantage of every opportunity that presented itself. At twenty, he’d considered it a gift; by thirty, somewhat of an embarrassment, albeit one he could definitely live with. Long-term relationships, however, had never been on the table. Not a problem with the career-focused women who were no more interested in marriage and family than he was, liaisons that inevitably self-destructed. But it was the gals for whom becoming a trophy wife was a career goal—the ones who saw his determination to remain single as a challenge, yes, but hardly an insurmountable one—that were beginning to get to him.

What he had here was a mondo case of bachelor burnout, a startling revelation if ever there was one. But far easier to avoid the mess to begin with than suffer through cleaning it up later—

The phone rang again; Val didn’t move. “What do you suppose is taking her so long to get out of her car?” she said, her voice knifing through his thoughts.

Twenty feet away, the car door finally opened, and out swung a pair of beautifully arched feet in a pair of strappy high-heeled sandals. C.J. watched with almost academic interest as the woman attached to the feet pulled herself out of the car, the wind catching her soft, billowing white skirt, teasing the hem up to mid-thigh. Her little shriek of alarm carried clear across the parking lot.

In spite of himself, C.J. smiled: he now knew she wore garterless stockings with white lace tops.

“Val? Would you mind checking to be sure all those property printouts for Great Expectations are on my desk?”

“Since I put them there, there’s no need to check. Cute little thing, isn’t she?”

She was that.

Assorted debris and crispy, yellowing cottonwood leaves whirlwinded through the parking lot, whipping at long, tea-colored hair swept up into a topknot, at long bangs softly framing a round face. He could see her grimace as she tried to yank the hair out of her eyes and mouth, hang on to her shoulder bag and hold down the recalcitrant skirt all at once. Huddled against the onslaught, she made a dash for the front door, the weightless fabric of her two-piece dress outlining a pleasant assortment of curves. She hit the sidewalk the precise moment the first fat raindrops splatted to earth; C.J. pushed open the door, only to have a gust of wind shove an armful of fragrant, soft female against his chest. His arms wrapped around her. So they wouldn’t fall over.

“Oh!”

Wide gray-green eyes met his, her skin flushed underneath that unruly mass of shiny hair, now adorned with several leaves and a Doublemint gum wrapper. Inexplicably, he thought of freshly laundered linens and gardens and cool evening breezes at the end of a hot, sultry day.

And, because some habits are simply harder to break than others, he also thought of the pleasant things one could do on freshly laundered linens with a woman who smelled like sunshine and fresh breezes and exotic flowers—

She shot backward as if stung, a full lower lip hanging slightly slack, glistening with some natural-colored lip goo that suited her fair skin to a tee.

C.J. smiled. “Dana Malone, I presume?”

“Oh!” she said a second time, then started madly plucking things out of her hair. Her hands full, she looked frantically around, as if trying to find someplace to stash the evidence before anyone noticed. Always the gracious hostess, Val brought her a small wastebasket. Dana gave a nervous little smile, wiggling her fingers for a second until the disintegrating leaves drifted into their plastic grave. “The wind…” she began as she dusted off her hands, tugged at the hem of her tunic. “A storm’s comin’…you were closer than I expected…oh.”

Her blush heightened, as did her Southern drawl. Mississippi, he guessed. Maybe Alabama. Someplace that brought to mind verandas and Spanish moss and ladies who still wore white gloves to church during the summer. She wiped her hand on her hip, those glistening lips twitching around a nervous smile. “I don’t usually make such spectacular entrances.”

“And it’s not every day lovely women throw themselves into my arms.”

“Oh, brother,” Val muttered behind him as a slightly indignant, “I did not throw myself anywhere, I was blown,” popped out of Dana’s mouth.

Val cackled. C.J. turned his gaze on his office manager.

“Don’t you have someplace to be, Val?”

“Probably,” the blonde said, her reply swallowed by a flash of lightning and a window-rattling clap of thunder, as the sky let loose with torrents of rain and marble-sized hail that bounced a foot off the ground.

Dana whipped around to face outside, her palms skimming her upper arms. “Oh, my goodness,” she breathed, radiating what C.J. could only describe as pure delight. “I sometimes forget how much I miss the rain!”

Don’t stare at the client, don’t stare at the— “So you’re not from New Mexico, either?”

She shook her head, her attention fixed on the horizon. “Alabama. But I’ve lived here since I was fourteen.” Now her eyes cut to his. “Did you say ‘either’?”

“South Carolina, here. Charleston.”

“Oh, I love Charleston! I haven’t been back in a while, but I remember it being such a pretty city—”

Val cleared her throat. They both turned to her.

“Those printouts are right where I said they were,” she said. “On your desk. For your appointment.” She paused, looking from one to the other. “Today.”

“Oh! Yes! I, um…” Dana lifted a hand to her hair, her face reddening again. “Do y’all have someplace I can pull myself back together?”

“Ladies’ is right around the corner,” Val supplied.

C.J. watched Dana glide away, her fanny twitching ever so slightly. Then he glanced over to catch Val squinting at him.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said, her backless shoes slapping against her heels as she finally returned to her station. But when he passed her on the way back to his office to get the printouts, he thought he heard her mumble something about there being hope for him yet, and he almost laughed.

But not because he found her comment amusing in the slightest.

Dana squelched a yelp when she flipped on the light in the mushroom-colored restroom and caught a load of her reflection. Not that her heart rate could possibly go any higher than it already was after catching her first glance of C.J.

Those eyes…

That mouth…

Wow.

“Cass Carter,” Dana muttered, sinking onto a stool in front of the mirror, “you are so dead.” She shook her head, which sent the last few hairpins pinging off the marble countertop, her tangled hair whooshing to her shoulders. Then, with a small, pitiful moan, she dropped her head into her hands.

The man went way beyond chocolate marble cheesecake. Heck, he went way beyond any dessert yet known to man. Or woman. He was…was…

In a class all to himself, is what. Who knew people could actually look that good without airbrushing?

Well, this musing was fun and all, but it wasn’t getting her fixed up. She plucked out another leaf and a crumpled straw wrapper, then dug her brush out of her purse to beat it all back into submission again. Dana stood and bent over at the waist, brushing the dust and grit out of her hair. Maybe the blood would rush back to her head, reestablish some semblance of intelligent thought processes. Grabbing the slippery mass with both hands, she twisted it into a rope, then coiled it on top of her head, standing back up so quickly she got dizzy.

So she sat down again, clamping the coiled hair on top of her head while she rummaged through her bag for the loose hairpins she was forever finding and dropping into the leather abyss.

Wow.

So much for the blood to the head theory.

After the kind of sigh she hadn’t let out since Davey Luken’s clumsy kiss in the seventh grade, she jammed a half-dozen pins into the base of the topknot, finger-fluffed her bangs. Yeah, well, Dana hadn’t dated as much she had, as long as she had, not to gain an insight or two along the way. Because for all C. J. Turner’s Southern charm and suaveness and brain-fritzing masculinity, he also positively buzzed with I-am-so-not-into-commitment vibes. Must’ve driven Trish right around the bend.

Only then did Dana burst out laughing as she realized what she’d felt, on her hip, a split second before she pulled out of C.J.’s arms. Heeheehee…she’d bet her entire collection of Victoria’s Secret knickers the man had not been amused by that little reflex reaction.

Although, come to think about it, it hadn’t been all that little.

Still chuckling, Dana stood again, tugging and hitching and flicking leaf pyuck off her bazooms, only to take a long, hard, honest gander at herself in the mirror. Generally speaking, she was okay with her body. For the most part, things curved in and out where they should, even if a few of the outs were a little farther “out” than average. But she’d long since learned to work with what she had, to spend a few extra bucks to have highlights put in her hair, to use makeup to emphasize her large gray green eyes, to wear clothes that made her feel feminine and good about herself. Dowdy, she didn’t do.

However, that didn’t mean she wasn’t a realist, or that while she knew any number of full-figured women—her mother included—in very happy relationships, neither did her father look anything like C. J. Turner. Nor had any of her former boyfriends. The odds of C.J. being interested in her in that way, even as a passing fancy, were slim.

Well, that certainly takes the pressure off, doesn’t it? she thought, giving those bodacious bazooms a quick, appreciative pat. If nothing else, they’d always have Paris. Or something.

She flicked off the light to the ladies’ room and walked out into the hall, chin up, chest out, feeling pretty and confident and…