Chapter Nine
Magnolia
We woke up Rosalie when we tried to put the car seat in the back of the Range Rover.
She screamed for a solid five minutes while we drove around trying to find the big box store packed to the rafters with baby stuff.
I'd probably passed it a thousand times and never even noticed it was there.
I had a feeling I'd be visiting it often.
By the time we got Rosalie back out of the car, her carrier strapped into a shopping cart made to hold it, we both felt like bumbling idiots.
A family of five passed us in the parking lot, their infant twins cozily arranged in their shopping cart with a toddler walking beside them, all smiling and laughing as if they hadn't a care in the world. Clearly, they'd figured this out.
"She's screaming," Vance said, watching Rosalie, his vivid blue eyes a little panicked. "What are we supposed to do?"
I looked down at Vance's daughter, her sweet little face bright red, eyes squeezed shut, rosebud mouth wide open and screeching her rage at the world.
Or, possibly, rage at her incompetent caretakers. What Vance and I knew about babies wouldn't fill a postcard, and Stephanie had taken off the second she had her check in hand.
"Okay so she's not tired," I said, basing that assumption on the hours she'd napped. "So I'd guess that leaves hungry or she needs a diaper change."
I eyed Rosalie doubtfully, hoping it was option number one. I'd never changed a diaper in my entire life, and I wasn't quite ready to start.
Not in a parking lot.
Vance opened the back of the Range Rover and set the baby carrier inside, the diaper bag beside it.
Fortunately, Stephanie had left an already mixed bottle of formula in the bag, along with a canister of the weird smelling powder she'd used to mix it up.
She'd mentioned that Amy had been nursing, and the formula was a new addition to Rosalie's life. She also mentioned that it was causing some stomach distress.
I did not want to know what that meant. I had a bad feeling stomach distress in a four-month-old was not good.
For a guy who didn't know what he was doing, Vance figured out the bottle pretty quickly. He got the seal off and the nipple screwed on, handing it to me to hold while he carefully unbuckled Rosalie and picked her up for the first time.
His eyes soft with wonder, Vance tucked her into his arm like a football, cradling her against his chest, her head propped up on his bicep, and held his other hand out for the bottle. Wordless, I handed it to him.
As if he'd been doing it forever, he popped the nipple into her screaming mouth. At the first touch, she tried to turn her face away, too furious to realize what was going on.
Vance gave the bottle a little shake, and a drop of formula hit Rosie's tongue. That was all it took. Her mouth closed around it, and she began to suck with a vigor that was both reassuring and alarming.
"Hey, there," Vance said as his daughter's eyes focused on his face. "You were just hungry. It's okay, Rosie. I get cranky when I'm hungry too."
There was a good chance my ovaries were about to explode. Vance was hot enough on his own. He would've been hot wearing a trash bag. In faded jeans, a T-shirt stretched tight around his biceps, and Rosalie's little baby head resting against the dark lines of his tattoos, he was too much.
When you added in the look on his face, he brought tears to my eyes—tears and a raging case of panty-melting lust.
This was going to be a nightmare.
Vance was even more off-limits than ever. Since the day we'd met, up until a month before, I'd been with Brayden. Vance had been eye candy, then a close friend, and always my employer.
He was not a romantic prospect. Ever. Not even now that I was single. The kiss I refused to discuss was proof enough that I was vulnerable to him. It didn't matter how swoon-worthy he was.
I tore my eyes away from the sight of Vance adoring his daughter and rummaged through the diaper bag, pulling out a plastic lined pad, a package of baby wipes, and a diaper.
I had no idea when Stephanie had last changed Rosalie, but I knew we hadn't dared to see what was underneath her pink onesie.
Rosalie drained the bottle, and Vance tried to burp her by leaning her against his shoulder and patting her back. Nothing happened. Hmm. We could figure out burping later.
First, we had to get her changed. Together, we lay her on the changing pad and confronted the dreaded diaper.
I don't want to talk about it. Let's just say that Rosie was capable of creating a mess that smelled like it had died a week ago. Yuck.
It's safe to say we used way too many baby wipes and complained excessively. I found a diaper disposal bag, sealed away the toxic waste bomb, and threw it out on our way into the store.
By that time, Rosie was fussing again, and we had no clue what to do about it. She'd been fed, she'd been changed, and she wasn't tired. I was out of options, and so was Vance.
We pushed the cart down the aisles of the store, trying to ignore Rosie screaming inside her carrier. We had no idea exactly what we needed. Vance's answer to that problem was to buy everything.
I mean everything.
A nursing pillow—to hold her on while we bottle-fed her—and bottles, nipples, formula, diaper cream, diapers, wipes, a baby bathtub, baby bath gel, and lotion. We pretty much cleaned out the first-aid aisle, Rosalie wailing all the while.
That was only the first third of the store.
By the time we hit the back of the store, I'd gone in search of a second cart. I returned to find Vance standing in front of the baby carriers.
Was he going to wear the baby?
He answered that question pretty quickly, opening a box with an olive-green baby carrier. Of course, he chose the most expensive one there, though I have to admit it looked pretty comfortable, though a little more hippie than Vance's usual style.
I checked the directions while he unpacked it. Between the two of us, we got it strapped around his waist and over one shoulder. Carefully, I unsnapped Rosalie from the car seat and picked her up.
She immediately stopped crying, blinking up at me with blue eyes identical to her father's.
"Oh," I said. "Hi."
She smiled at me. I've heard people say babies can't smile, but they were wrong because Rosie smiled at me. "She just wanted someone to pick her up," I said.
"Hand over my kid," Vance said, and I turned to tuck her against his chest, pulling the other shoulder strap of the carrier into place and securing it behind Vance's back.
Rosalie squirmed against his chest, gave him a long, measuring look, then settled her head against his T-shirt and promptly fell asleep.
"I feel like we just brokered world peace," Vance whispered. "Did we get to the book section yet? We need books about babies."
"We're getting there," I said. "But at least we figured out the formula, the diapers, and one way to make her stop crying."
Vance cradled her bottom in his strong hand, holding her secure even though the carrier was more than enough to keep her safe.
I have to admit, I was surprised at how well he was taking all of this.
Vance was a good man. I knew that already, despite some of his earlier behavior. Still, I would've expected a bit more resistance to having a baby suddenly disrupt his life.
Maybe, once the shock had worn off, he'd be resentful. Watching him walk through each aisle of the baby store, his daughter nestled against his chest, I doubted it.
He couldn't stop touching her. Stroking a finger down her soft cheek, pink and flushed with sleep and the warmth of his body. Tucking her wisps of black hair, so like her mother's, behind her shell of an ear.
He evaluated each purchase seriously. It took us thirty minutes to choose a baby monitor before he ended up just grabbing the top-of-the-line video option, muttering under his breath, “This is just for now. I'll get Evers to wire everything up. One monitor isn't enough."
I shook my head. I was going to have to keep an eye on him. At the rate we were going, Vance was going to buy the whole city for his daughter, and she couldn't even sit up by herself. I didn't think.
By the time we read all the books we'd thrown in the cart, I was sure I'd know exactly what stage of development she was supposed to be in.
I didn't miss the glances Vance got from the other women in the store.
I couldn't help the stab of jealousy. It was ridiculous.
He was my boss, not my boyfriend. But I knew what he looked like; tall, broad-shouldered, his Viking's face, the roguish blond ponytail, the muscles and tattoos, tenderly cradling an infant.
I would've bet every pair of panties in the store was wet at the sight.
By the time we were done, we had two associates trailing us and six shopping carts.
There was no way we could fit all of that in the Range Rover, but for an absurd additional fee, the store was willing to deliver on the spot.
It took almost two hours to drop half of our loot off at the loft and then the other half at my house.
A part of me was deeply uneasy at playing house with Vance and the baby in my own home. Logistically, it made sense.
If I was going to help Vance with Rosalie twenty-four seven, the loft would not work. We needed privacy. I needed privacy, and the loft was too open. Not only was my house huge, but I had the perfect setup to handle both Vance and Rosalie.
My bedroom, the bedroom I'd claimed as an eight-year-old on summer vacation from my English boarding school, was tucked in the back of the house, over the kitchen.
I'd stayed there after my grandmother died, unable to face changing bedrooms, despite Brayden's complaints that we were wasting a perfectly good master suite.
A few months before, I'd finally cleaned out my grandmother's bedroom, donating what I didn't want to keep and packing away what I did. It had been painful, and I'd resented every second of it.
I was still angry that she'd died on me. Sometimes, I think grief is the least rational emotion. Now, with Vance and Rosie moving in, I was grateful the task was behind me.
The master suite consisted of six rooms in total—separate his and hers bedrooms, a connecting sitting room with a fireplace, a couch, and an enormous bay window that looked out over the gardens, plus a dressing room-slash-closet for each bedroom and an expansive shared bathroom.
The two deliverymen from the baby store set up the crib in the sitting room while I moved my things from my bedroom to my grandmother's.
It was easier than I expected. When I'd cleaned out her room, I'd redecorated. Not enough to erase her presence—her favorite quilt was still on the bed, family pictures on the dresser—but I'd switched out one of the armchairs and some of the paintings.
Just enough so that I didn't expect my grandmother to come walking back in.
I finished up and entered the sitting room to see the crib fully assembled, the mattress covered with a pink sheet, and a mobile with dancing teddy bears spinning cheerfully overhead.
Vance and Rosalie were nowhere to be seen. I found them in the bedroom that had been my grandfather’s, Vance stretched out on the king-size bed, Rosie tucked in beside him, her head resting on his chest as he read to her from What to Expect the First Year.
At the sight of me, she squirmed restlessly, her rosebud of a mouth working, lips pursing and falling open.
She was hungry. I thought that was it. It had been a while since we'd fed her, and her little mouth was making the exact motions as when she had her bottle earlier.
"I think she's hungry," I said. "I'm going to go try to figure out the bottle thing. I'll be back."