Their Instant Baby

Chapter Two

Amy was holding Dexter when Nick made his suggestion, and now she stared at Nick, her pulse taking on a rapid jumping beat. “You’re joking, right?” He looked so handsome and self-assured, lounging against the back of the sofa with his jacket off, his tie loosened and his shirtsleeves rolled up to just beneath the elbow. So big and strong and undeniably sexy that all sorts of romantic thoughts and fantasies came to mind. Fantasies Amy knew she should not be having!

Nick shook his head, managing to look even more at home at his sister’s small country cottage. “Dexter is used to being fed at Lola’s breast.”

Heat began to center in Amy’s chest and move outward in mesmerizing waves. “Well, I can’t breast-feed him!” Amy glared at Nick. “I’m not pregnant or nursing. I don’t have any milk!”

Nick gave Amy an exceedingly patient look, apparently oblivious to the havoc he was causing in her. “I know that,” he said as he gave her an affable smile and somehow avoided looking at her breasts. “But I was thinking about something that was on a television show I produce—Nature’s Kingdom. Have you seen it?”

“Yes,” Amy said cautiously, aware that being closed in with Nick and the baby this way was putting all her senses in overdrive. Making her wonder what it would be like to have a husband and an infant in her life. She frowned and continued walking Dexter back and forth. “It’s wonderful.”

“Thanks.” His eyes lit with pleasure. “Anyway, they did a show on puppies who’d been separated from their mother. The new owners comforted the puppies by putting a hot-water bottle covered with a towel with the mother’s scent on it next to the puppies. They all snuggled up to it instinctively and it worked to comfort them. So,” Nick continued, still approaching the problem logically, “I suggest we try to mimic Dexter’s usual mealtime experience as best we can. Therefore—” Nick’s glance slid over her body, head to toe, warming Amy even further “—since your skin is obviously a lot smoother and silkier and your body a lot, uh, curvier than mine, I suggest you do the actual feeding, at least this first time, as we try to help him with the transition from his mom’s breast-feeding.” Nick eased Dexter from Amy’s arms and cuddled the squalling infant close. “Lola left a robe in the bathroom on a hook on the door.”

Aware her knees suddenly were as wobbly and uncertain as the rest of her, Amy eased past Nick and Dexter. “You really think this will work?”

Nick shrugged and continued holding Dexter awkwardly against his hard-muscled chest. “I wouldn’t have suggested it if I didn’t.”

Had they been anywhere else, doing anything else, Amy would have told Nick Everton exactly what he could do with his suggestion that she appear in a state of undress in his presence. But unable to bear Dexter’s hiccupy sobs a second longer, Amy slipped into the bathroom and did as Nick proposed, pulling off her lemon-yellow shirt and donning the robe. When she came back out, Nick was standing next to the rocking chair, Dexter in his arms. His eyes seemed to darken at the sight of her, and he motioned her to sit.

Her mouth dry, Amy did.

Nick leaned down and put Dexter in Amy’s arms. With fingers that trembled, Amy tried to discreetly open her robe. Given the way Dexter was still flailing his little limbs and crying, it was impossible to hold on to him and do that simultaneously.

Realizing she was attempting an impossible task, Nick rushed to the rescue. “Hang on. I’ll help you,” he said, regarding her matter-of-factly. He parted the terry-cloth lapels, revealing Amy’s throat and neck, and the uppermost curves of her breasts above the lacy transparent demi-bra. There was a moment of awareness between Nick and Amy as she noted he had just seen everything there was to see. Flushing, Amy turned her attention away from her tautening nipples and the rapacious gleam in Nick’s eyes, and back to the baby. Still attempting to soothe Dexter, she used both her hands to cuddle the infant close to her and settle his head against her chest.

Amy saw immediately that Nick had been right about one thing. As soon as Dexter’s head contacted the soft upper swell of Amy’s breast and the feel of her bare skin, he paused, blinking, his tears soaking through to her bra. And although he had stopped crying uncontrollably, Dexter still seemed confused.

“I don’t think he knows what to do,” Amy murmured.

“Then I’ll show him,” Nick said softly, gallantly ignoring the way Amy’s lacy demi-bra was now clinging wetly to her breast.

His touch both incredibly comforting and precise, Nick leaned down and guided the baby bottle to the infant’s mouth once again, murmuring soothingly all the while. Dexter blinked and looked up at Nick with his big, baby blues then sucked on the bottle half-heartedly, a suspicious look on his cherubic face. Nick backed away, still murmuring soothing words, and then three-month-old Dexter looked up at Amy again and began to drink from his bottle in earnest.

Amy, who’d been baby-sitting from the age of twelve, took it from there, while Nick grabbed his cell phone and laptop computer and stepped out to the screened-in porch to do a little business and check for messages. Not once did he turn back and look at Amy and Dexter, and for that, Amy was very glad. She was still unbearably aroused from the close, albeit meaningless contact with Nick, and she didn’t want to know if he felt the same potent physical attraction. Because Amy wasn’t looking for a fling. She was looking for a deeply satisfying relationship of the heart. One that led to marriage and children of her own. Lola had said little to Amy about her older brother except that she adored him and despaired that Nick’s future did not and never would include marriage and kids.

Which of course immediately struck him off Amy’s list, despite any attraction she felt for the sexy single man.

Twenty minutes later Dexter had finished the bottle of Lola’s breast milk and was sleeping soundly in Amy’s arms. Figuring she had better put him in his crib to finish out his nap while she could, Amy stood ever so slowly up with the baby in her arms and made her way cautiously to the nursery. She placed Dexter on his back in the crib, then went to change out of Lola’s robe and into the yellow shirt.

Apparently finished with his business calls and e-mail, Nick was waiting for her when she came back out to the living room, a worried look on his face. “What’s wrong?” Amy asked immediately, not really all that sure she wanted to hear the answer. She and Nick had been baby-sitting his nephew for only an hour or so, and already she was exhausted from simultaneously trying to do right by Dexter and fight her attraction to Nick. She couldn’t imagine how she would feel by the time Lola and Chuck returned, if this kind of emotional whirlwind kept up.

Nick inclined his head in the direction of the kitchen. “By my calculations, there’re only a few days’ worth of breast milk in Lola’s freezer.”

“We can buy formula at the grocery store and use that until Lola gets back.” Amy paused at the concern on his face. “You don’t think Dexter’s going to like it, do you.”

“Probably not, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. The more pressing question at the moment is—” he held her gaze “—how the three of us are going to manage in such tight quarters.”

Amy told herself it was tension causing her heart to pound and her mouth to go dry, not his proximity. “I think it’ll be okay,” she fibbed as she brushed past him and headed for the refrigerator. Ignoring his frank appraisal of her as they talked, Amy pulled out a cold can of vegetable juice and popped the top. Right about now, she could use a healthy pick-me-up. Anything to calm her nerves and make the overall situation seem more manageable. “After all—” Amy continued, trying not to feel self-conscious in her snug-fitting, long-sleeved yellow shirt with the Amy’s Complete Redecorating Service logo, khaki shorts, sneakers and socks “—it’s not like you and I are going to be with each other twenty-four hours a day.” She offered Nick a bracing smile. “I am still going to have to go to work.” Which would offer a lot of personal satisfaction, as well as distraction from Nick’s sexy presence. “And Lola said you are going to be conducting some business here in Charleston, too.”

Nick’s expression turned thoughtful as his gaze continued to drift over her hair, face and lips with disturbing thoroughness before returning to her eyes. “That’s right,” he said, moving closer, every inch of him the hard, indomitable male. “I have an idea for a new syndicated television show I want to pursue.”

Amy took another swallow of chilled vegetable juice. “And I have a decorating job that has to be done right away for my aunt Winnifred.” Amy was embarrassed to feel a little excess juice on the corners of her lips. She paused to wipe it off with her fingertips, damning the fact that Nick had noticed—and tracked—that movement, too. “So most likely, you’ll be here with Dexter while I’m off doing my thing,” Amy continued with an airy confidence she didn’t begin to feel, “and then I’ll be here with him while you’re off doing your thing.” During the day, they could rarely, if ever, cross paths, Amy reassured herself optimistically, as she took another long, bracing swallow of juice. If she was lucky, she continued bolstering herself firmly, and Nick’s work included some evening jaunts, the same would be true of the majority of their nights, as well.

“Actually, speaking of work…there’s something you could help me with,” Nick said, a hopeful expression on his face.

Amy’s brow furrowed at the abrupt change in Nick’s mood. She didn’t know anything about producing television shows. “What?” she asked him curiously, as she glanced into the utility area on the back porch to see if a load of wash was done. It wasn’t.

Nick flashed her a winning smile and focused on her flushed face and tousled hair. “Like getting me an introduction to your mother right away.”

NICK SAW AMY’S SMILE fade and her eyes go dark almost instantaneously. Then and there he knew he’d made a mistake. “My mother has an agent who handles queries,” Amy said.

“Her agent isn’t returning any calls about any opportunities right now,” Nick said.

Hectic color filled Amy’s cheeks as she folded her arms defiantly. “That’s because my mother doesn’t want to work right now,” Amy explained with exaggerated patience.

Nick moved closer, ignoring the apple-blossom fragrance clinging to Amy’s dark, tousled hair and golden skin. This was no time to be noticing how sexy her slim legs were, or how bare, or wondering how they would feel wrapped around his waist. Amy was his sister’s best friend, Dexter’s other godparent, for heaven’s sake. Not to mention the daughter of a television superstar he would very much like to do business with. He couldn’t afford to get sidetracked by a lust that was likely to be as short-lived as his time in South Carolina. He didn’t need to be recalling how beautiful and full and enticing her breasts were beneath the transparent lace of her low-cut bra, not unless he wanted to forget everything important and concentrate on getting her into his arms and into his bed.

“Which is why,” Amy continued with a haughty toss of her hair, exasperation tinging her low voice, “my mother came home to Charleston. She doesn’t want to be bothered by you and every other relentless television executive, bent on getting her to listen to his or her pitch of what she should do next. She wants to take her time, relax first, recuperate from her years and years of getting up every morning at 3:00 a.m., before moving on to the next phase of her life.”

Nick could imagine there were other reasons Grace Deveraux had gone into seclusion. Grace’s being fired from one of the network morning news and entertainment programs in New York City had been both humiliating and unexpected—at least as far as the viewing public was concerned. Grace had been a fixture in homes across America for the past fifteen years. People had watched her as they drank their morning coffee, dressed for work and got their kids ready for school. Finding out the network had given Grace and her equally popular male cohost at Rise and Shine, America! the ax had infuriated the duo’s many fans.

What Grace obviously hadn’t realized, however, was that this was no time for her to go into hiding. With sentiment so strong, now was the time for her to move on. And Nick knew this with every ounce of business acumen he possessed. “All I want is a few moments of your mother’s time,” he persisted, as aware that he was further infuriating and disappointing Grace’s daughter as he was that business was the one pleasure left in his life.

Amy glared at him. “So, call her agent again.”

Nick studied her. Was it his imagination, or did Amy have the ripest, most kissable lips he had ever seen? The softest, most feminine hands? “You resent me for even asking you to do this, don’t you?”

Amy’s expression turned fiercely independent and protective once again as she set her empty can aside, leaned back against the kitchen counter and braced her hands on either side of her. “What do you think?”

Nick shrugged and moved a bit closer. A little show of temper was not going to deter him. Ignoring the feelings of desire generated by her proximity, he continued his honest appraisal of her actions in an effort to bring her around to what was best here, not just for him, but for all concerned. “I think,” he told her calmly, ignoring the flash of resentment in those turquoise eyes, “that you don’t have your mother’s best interests at heart.”

Amy released a short, impatient breath and continued to hold his eyes like a warrior princess in battle. “Maybe it’s in my mother’s best interest not to talk to you,” Amy shot back fiercely, oblivious to how the way she was standing lifted her breasts and pulled her shirt even more tightly across her alluring curves.

Nick studied her upturned face. “You’re telling me Grace is happy, letting her television career end this way?”

“She hasn’t said it’s over,” Amy countered stiffly.

Deciding it was better to tell it like it was than spare Amy and her mother’s feelings at this point, he warned point-blank, “Your mother’s career will take yet another brutal blow if she doesn’t take advantage of the public sentiment in her favor right now. Sure, your mother can wait six months or a year, but the viewing public tends to have a very short attention span. In that amount of time, the momentum she has now will have faded. Her choices will be far fewer. I don’t want to see that happen to her.” Especially, Nick thought, given how hard Grace Deveraux had worked to get where she was today. “Do you?”

Finally Nick’d hit a nerve with Amy. She realized he was telling her the truth. She pressed her lips together. “Why do you care so much?”

Nick shrugged, the answer simple. “Because I’m in the business of producing television shows for syndication. And I want your mother to have the kind of recognition and opportunity she’s due.”

Amy sighed in exasperation and shook her head. She turned her glance away from Nick as the washer abruptly stopped running. “I thought my days of dealing with this were over.” Amy went out to the washer, which was located against the wall on the screened-in back porch, and lifted the lid.

Nick followed her. “What do you mean?”

Amy hooked a foot around a wicker basket on the floor and tugged it closer to the machine. She reached into the tub and began pulling out damp bed linens, pausing to grimace as the sheet got hopelessly wrapped around the agitator in the center, before asking rhetorically, “Do you have any idea what it was like for me growing up? I couldn’t go anywhere or do anything without someone asking me for a favor related to my mother!” New color—whether from anger or exertion, Nick couldn’t tell—flooded Amy’s cheeks as she flung the first handful of wet laundry into the basket on the floor. As she went back up on tiptoe and reached deep into the tub of the machine, Amy’s shorts rode higher, giving him a glimpse of her smooth, silky thighs.

Still unaware of the effect she was having on him, Amy drew a deep aggravated breath and continued enlightening Nick. “My Girl Scout leader wanted to know if our troop could get on the network news show to promote our annual cookie sale. The private high school I attended wanted to do a fund-raiser for a new gymnasium with my mother as the main draw. Even my first clients in the redecorating business called me only because they thought they might somehow get an in with my mother.”

Nick sympathized with Amy as he reached over to help her extract the wet tangled laundry. “I expect it is hard, having a famous parent.” Especially for someone who seemed to feel things as deeply as Amy did. Amy would not have simply been able to blow off being taken advantage of. No, she would have felt it deeply, and continued hurting over it, for years.

“But a lot of people would have given anything to be in your shoes,” Nick continued.

“The feeling was mutual, believe me,” Amy said as she plucked a mesh bag full of wooden clothespins from the shelf above the drier.

They regarded each other in tense silence. Then Amy picked up the basket and carried it toward the door that led to the backyard. His innate gallantry coming to the fore, Nick took the basket, leaving her with just the mesh bag of pins, and moved ahead to hold the door for her. “I don’t suppose your parents were famous,” Amy said.

Nick shook his head as he set the basket down on the grass and picked a pillowcase off the laundry pile. He shook it out, then handed it to Amy and watched as she pinned it to the clothesline. “They were—are—Gypsy souls who had no interest in settling down or sticking with anything for very long,” Nick said.

Amy accepted a second pillowcase from Nick. “Where are they now?”

Nick shrugged, his face becoming closed, unreadable. “Neither Lola nor I know,” he replied, trying not to feel embarrassed about that as he put the best spin he could on the untenable situation. “The last Lola and I heard, which was about two years ago, our folks were traveling around Europe, working whenever, wherever the spirit moved them.”

Amy’s eyes widened as Nick handed her one end of a damp bottom sheet. “They don’t keep in touch?”

Nick shook his head as he and Amy shook out the wrinkles in the sheet and then hung it neatly on the clothesline. “They don’t even know Lola had a baby.” Which was, Nick ruminated, something that had hurt his younger sister tremendously. But he also knew that had he and Lola managed to track down their parents and tell them the news, and then the nomadic pair decided not to come to see the baby, just as they had earlier refused to return to the States and meet Lola’s husband-to-be or attend her wedding, his sister would have been hurt even more. So he and Lola had mutually agreed to leave well enough alone this time and just see their parents when—and if—their parents wanted to see them. You can’t get blood from a stone…and you couldn’t get familial love from parents who had none to give.

“But you and Lola are close,” Amy said as Nick handed her the final sheet.

Nick nodded, very glad about that. “We’ve always taken care of each other,” he said. It was through his relationship with his sister that he had learned how to love and nurture, and be loved and nurtured in return.

“She’s lucky she has you.”

“And I her,” Nick said. And he meant it.

“But back to your mother…” And that introduction he wanted.

“The answer is still no,” Amy said.

Nick shrugged, not really surprised, given Amy’s feelings about people using her familial connections as an in—to anyone. He smiled, not the least deterred. “Then I guess I’ll have to find another way to achieve what I want, won’t I?” he said.

Chapter Three

While Dexter napped and Nick worked out of his sister’s cottage, Amy headed for her afternoon appointment. As usual, her aunt’s handsome British butler, Harry Bowles, answered the door. Harry had been with Winnifred since shortly after Winnifred’s husband had been killed. He and Winnifred were so close they could read each other’s mind. In Amy’s estimation, only two things kept them apart. Harry’s age—he was five years younger than Winnifred—and Harry’s station in life. He had spent his entire adult life working for the wealthy. She was one of those to-the-manor-born. If the two did decide to run off together someday, as Amy suspected both Harry and her aunt Winnifred had at one time or another been tempted to do, the repercussions would continue for years. Because if there was one thing the residents of Charleston, South Carolina, loved, it was a good love story—or a scandal. As had been evidenced by the retelling of her long-lost great-aunt Eleanor’s romantic debacle, that had been fodder for the gossips for years. And thanks to the sudden reemergence of the long-presumed-dead Eleanor Deveraux just the week before, it still was.

Amy breezed through the portal of the historic mansion in time to see her beloved aunt emerge from the front parlor. Pretty and elegantly dressed as always, the social doyenne of Charleston glided toward Amy, her arms outstretched, as Harry excused himself wordlessly and disappeared.

Amy paused to hug the dark-haired woman. “Hi, Aunt Winnifred,” Amy said, aware that, as always, just being with her aunt made her happy.

“Amy, darling—” Winnifred squeezed her back affectionately “—I’m so glad you could fit us in this quickly.”

“Where’s Great-Aunt Eleanor?” Amy asked as she shifted her oversize canvas briefcase from her shoulder to her hands. Eleanor Deveraux was the reason for Amy’s visit. The elegant eighty-year-old woman had been found in the historic district, with a sprained ankle, delirium related confusion, brought on by her fever and illness, and the beginnings of pneumonia, and admitted to Charleston Hospital by Amy’s brother, Gabe, a critical-care doctor there. At the time, no one in the Deveraux family had any inkling that the genteel elderly Jane Doe was related to them. Nor had they known, until Eleanor’s identity was revealed by Charleston private investigator Harlan Decker, that Eleanor Deveraux was still alive—since everyone had been told Eleanor had died of a broken heart many years before. As Eleanor had recovered and begun to trust them, the mental confusion that they had first mistaken for amnesia had lifted, and Eleanor finally acknowledged her true identity, shocking everyone.