2. Grayson
CHAPTER 2
Grayson
Three weeks later…
“Yes, so push that meeting back to Thursday,” I tell Andrea, absently pouring creamer into my lukewarm coffee. I have a headache from lack of sleep and notifications from the office are pinging repeatedly from my phone in my ear.
“Grayson,” Rose says from behind me.
I wave her off to acknowledge I hear her but to give me a minute.
Ping, ping, ping.
“Grayson, you can’t reschedule that call. You’ve rescheduled it twice already in the last two weeks. You know Brandon doesn’t like to be put off like that.”
“Grayson,” Rose repeats.
Ping, ping.
“I don’t have a choice. I’m so fucking far behind,” I tell Andrea. “I haven’t even had a chance to look at the proposal.”
Ping, ping, ping, ping.
How many fucking emails are my co-workers sending? For fuck’s sake.
“Grayson,” she sighs.
“ Grayson ,” Rose says.
I can’t even think. Female voices are coming at me from all directions and I’m distracted and frustrated. It reminds me of a threesome I had a decade ago where both girls wanted my attention and I was forced to make a sex game out of gagging both of them so I could focus on fucking and not their competing demands.
“Can we just—” I start to say. To who, I’m not even sure.
A baby shriek cuts through my words. It’s loud. It’s shrill. It’s at decibels that could shatter glass. It’s incredible that so much volume can come from such a tiny, tiny human, but Evelyn has proven to be the most demanding female I’ve ever encountered in my entire life, and frankly, that is saying a lot.
It’s entirely possible my head is going to explode.
“I have to go. I’ll call you back,” I tell Andrea and end the call, her protests echoing in my ear.
I turn to Rose, who is holding the baby on her hip, jiggling her up and down.
“What?” I ask, trying not to sound impatient and failing miserably. I drop my phone on the kitchen counter and reach for my coffee.
“You put formula in your coffee, not creamer,” Rose says, gesturing to the mug in my hand.
I hear her words, but I don’t process them. “What?” I ask, running my hands through my hair.
I’m exhausted. The baby was up and down all night and only agreed to sleep if she was on my chest on the couch. My neck hurts. I haven’t taken a shower, and my coffee is officially cold. I take a sip, absently.
“That’s formula, not creamer.”
And…I’m drinking baby formula in my coffee. “I know that.” I didn’t know that. “I just don’t care.” I do care.
“Okay, I just didn’t think you knew.” Rose, who is probably around sixty-five, with a chic gray bob and crinkles around her warm brown eyes, thrusts the baby toward me.
I take Evelyn, awkwardly. I still haven’t gotten the baby transfer part down. The baby frowns up at me, her eyes wet with unshed tears. I settle her against my chest and run a hand over the wispy baby hair on her round head. Her tininess both amazes and terrifies me a thousand times a day.
“Grayson, I love you, but I quit.”
Those words I comprehend immediately. “ What ? Rose, no, no, no, please, you can’t quit. Why would you quit?”
“Because I’m old and you’re a terrible boss. Too demanding.”
The kitchen floor of my apartment feels like a black hole that is going to open up and swallow me. But there is nothing, and I mean absolutely fucking nothing, that money can’t solve. “I’ll double your salary.”
“No.” Rose picks her purse off of the counter and slides the strap onto her shoulder.
“Triple?” I sound as desperate as I feel. Maybe money can’t solve this. But it has to solve this. I can’t do this on my own.
She can’t leave. It’s noon. I have twelve hours of work ahead of me today and a baby who makes sounds I don’t understand and who refuses to sleep unless she’s draped on me like a weighted blanket.
“Grayson, I agreed to help you out short-term, but I’m retired. You need a young nanny. In fact, you need two, really. A day nanny and a night nanny.”
“They have night nannies?” That sounds…amazing. Like God’s gift to corporate single men who suddenly discover they have a child they didn’t know existed, foisted on them in the middle of a midtown high-rise.
“Yes, of course. For people who have demanding careers. A day nanny does eight to five and a night nanny does eleven to seven.”
“Who is supposed to watch Evelyn from five to eleven, then?” I’m joking. I know the answer. I’m just not thrilled with what it’s going to be.
I have serious doubts about my ability to parent in any sort of hands-on practical way.
Rose gives me a look. “You. Her father . That’s who.”
“We don’t know I’m her father,” I protest weakly. “We don’t have the DNA results back.”
Since the minute Lacey’s sister dropped Evelyn off at my office like a damn DoorDash lunch delivery, my focus has been on logistics. Securing baby gear, making a pediatrician’s appointment, filing for emergency custody, ordering a DNA test, finding a rental in my hometown of Honeysuckle Harbor, South Carolina and moving here.
I’ve barely had time to breathe between all of that and watching endless YouTube videos on what the hell I’m actually supposed to do with a seven-month-old baby. I haven’t processed how I actually feel about it.
It doesn’t matter now either, because I have yet another pressing logistical problem. Rose is leaving me alone with this baby and it will be a miracle if somehow we survive.
Rose scoffs. “Have you looked at this child? She looks exactly like you. Same eyes, same nose, same chin.”
“How can you tell? She just looks like any other baby to me.” I’m not just saying that. I can’t tell if she looks like me or not. I’ve ruthlessly scoured her features multiple times, and she just looks like a baby. A perfect, beautiful, adorable as fuck little baby. I lift Evelyn up so I can check her out again, waiting for some moment of genetic recognition. My heart does a weird flip in my chest like it does every time I just pause and take a breath and look at her.
As far as babies go, I haven’t studied them much as a whole or individually. I was never interested in the whole create-your-own-mini-me trend. At thirty-three, I’ve yet to feel any sort of tug to start a family. I haven’t even felt any real urge to get married. That doesn’t mean I don’t get the appeal of having kids—I just never saw it as part of my future.
I like my life. I work hard. I play hard. I’m busy, but I also have reached the point in my career where if I want to take a spontaneous trip to Vegas with friends I can. If I want to romance a hot supermodel and jet her off to Paris for a weekend of sex and good food, I do. I have a killer apartment in TriBeCa, a closet filled with designer suits, and arrangements with the finest restaurants in New York to always have a table available to me.
It’s tidy, it’s fulfilling, it’s very controlled.
Or it was.
Nothing has been in my control since little Miss Hates Sleep showed up in my life.
Evelyn frowns at me. I frown back. She wrinkles her nose. I wrinkle mine back. “What?” I ask her, gruffly.
She lets out another shriek that sounds angry.
Maybe she doesn’t like being dangled mid-air and scrutinized. I probably wouldn’t either. I lower her against my chest again.
Rose eyes us in amusement. “That right there…same furrow between her brows and same skeptical little frown. She’s a dead ringer for you, Grayson. I haven’t seen a baby this naturally cynical since, oh, let me think, you were a baby.”
I feel a grudging sense of kinship toward Evelyn. “Not cynical. Intelligent. Highly intelligent.”
“Or just crabby, one of the two.” But Rose pats my cheek to let me know she’s teasing.
“That’s why I was your favorite.” Rose was a nanny for my sister and me for a decade. She was a second mother to both of us and is still a huge part of our family. After we were too old to need her care, she moved on to our neighbors, the Andersons, who had a son and triplet girls. She then went on to one other family with an only child before she retired ten years ago.
This isn’t fair to her. I recognize that. “How do I get a nanny? I don’t want just some random person. No one will be as good as you, anyway.”
“Don’t try to butter me up. I’m not staying. I’m exhausted from these last two weeks. A good agency can find you some wonderful candidates to interview in the next week or so. I’ll send you the name of the best agency around. They service the upper echelon in Charleston.”
“An upper echelon nanny sounds good to me. Let’s Mary Poppins this shit. But what am I supposed to do in the meantime?”
“You’ll figure it out.” Rose gives me a smile.
Panic starts to set in. “Oh, come on. You can’t just roll out of here. I don’t know what I’m doing!”
“You know exactly what you’re doing. Just feed her, change her, keep her from putting anything in her mouth.”
“You say that like it’s easy.” To prove my point, I stride into my living room where there is a playmat on the floor for Evelyn. I set her down on it. She looks stunned, tries to reach for me, falls over, and starts crying. “She won’t let me put her down. My kitchen is filled with dirty dishes and bottles. My trash is overfilled with shit-filled diapers that I can’t even take to the trash chute in the hallway because she won’t let me put her down and I’m afraid I’ll accidentally drop her down the chute.”
Rose laughs.
I don’t. “I’m fucking serious. I had a nightmare last night that I did that. I woke up in a cold sweat.”
“Don’t swear in front of Evelyn.”
“See? I swear too much. I can’t do this.” My chest feels tight. Evelyn is on her side like a potato, crying.
I’m still in my pajamas and I haven’t showered. My arms are killing me from holding her half the night and I work out all the time. They shouldn’t be this damn sore. Then again, I haven’t made it to the gym in three weeks. I haven’t had sex in four weeks. If I had known my life was about to take a serious left turn, I would have fucked my way across Manhattan in the weeks before Evelyn appeared.
But I didn’t, because I thought I could have sex whenever I wanted because my life was my own, and now I’m wound tight, reduced to frantic jerk-offs in the shower while Rose is in my apartment tending Evelyn. It’s hard to enjoy an orgasm with your old nanny and your baby (or not my baby) fifteen feet away, but if I don’t jerk off, I’ll crawl out of my skin.
While I’m having a damn existential crisis, the baby is still crying.
I bend down and wince at the ache in my lower back as I pick up Evelyn. She immediately stops crying.
“Grayson,” Rose says, gently.
There’s a stuffed bear on the floor and I step on it, my ankle rolling. I don’t really lose my footing—it just pisses me off.
Now I’m just grumpy.
So I kick the stuffed bear. Seeing it go flying across the living room is stupidly satisfying. “Fine. Just go. It’s fine. We’ll be fine.”
And the second Rose leaves, I’m calling my sister and my mom. One of them will help me. I think. Hell, I’m not above begging.
“Give her a bottle, put her down in her crib, and take a shower.”
“You say that like it’s easy.” There is a spit bubble on Evelyn’s tiny little rosebud lips and damp tears running down her cheeks. I use my shirt to wipe them up. It doesn’t matter. I’m a disgusting mess right now anyway and I’m pretty sure I smell like formula and diapers. The entire apartment does. Why would I be any different?
Meanwhile, a glance down at my phone showed I have fourteen notifications and three missed calls from Andrea. I have a Zoom meeting in forty-five minutes with our West Coast team.
“It is easy. Just relax. Your stress is giving her stress.”
“I actually think it’s the other way around but whatever.”
“Don’t you whatever me. You may be a big shot in New York, but here you don’t speak to me like that, young man.”
Shit. “Yes, ma’am.” I take a deep breath. “Thank you for helping me.”
Rose laughs. “That killed you, didn’t it?”
“Little bit,” I admit. “But I do mean it. I couldn’t have done this without you. I can’t do this without you.”
Rose gives Evelyn a kiss on the top of her head. Then she firms up her purse strap on her shoulder and stares up at me. “Man up, Grayson. You want to play, sometimes you have to pay.”
I almost launch into a defensive explanation of how I wasn’t irresponsible with any of my many one-night stands, but I stop myself in the nick of time. It’s a losing argument.
“This could be life-changing for you in the best way possible.”
Except that I liked my life exactly the way it was. When I could shower whenever I wanted and fuck whoever I wanted and sleep whenever I wanted.
“We still don’t know if she’s even my kid.”
Rose rolls her eyes. “Keep telling yourself that.”
I walk with her to the door and open it for her. I give her a hug and kiss the top of her head. Rose still smells like childhood to me, with her floral perfume and obsessive use of hand lotion. “Thank you. I mean it. I appreciate all the help.”
She gives me a wave. “You’ll be fine.”
When the elevator opens for her at the end of the hall, I lift Evelyn’s little hand and give her a wave. “Bye, Rose. We’re probably going to die without you, but bye.”
She snorts.
Then I momentarily forget about my problems when a woman steps off of the elevator and smiles at Rose, who eases past her.
She’s gorgeous.
Late twenties, thick wavy reddish-brown hair. Sharp cheekbones and plump pink lips. I can’t see her eye color from where I am, but they’re warm and friendly.
She has long legs encased in leggings that show off her shape and outline her pussy in a way that makes my mouth water. She has on a crop top T-shirt with a knot at the hem so that I see a smooth expanse of skin above her waistband. She has big breasts. High, full, sensual breasts that I could bury my face in and…
Her eyes widen.
I realize I’m staring at her like a lust-crazed lunatic.
I clear my throat. “Hi.”
“Hi.” Her voice is low, very blues and jazz. Sexy. “Cute baby.” She smiles at Evelyn.
“I know.”
Why the fuck did I say that? I mean, Evelyn is a cute baby. She’s a really fucking cute baby. But it sounds arrogant to admit that. I’m supposed to just say thank you, like a normal human being.
Not “I know” like a total prick.
The woman laughs lightly. She leans in and tickles Evelyn’s arm. “You have a very proud papa. Lucky little girl.”
She’s too close to me.
I can smell her shampoo and see straight down her T-shirt, which has fallen forward with her lean. That’s a lot of flesh spilling out of a bra that seems too small.
My sleep deprived brain can’t figure out if she’s somehow miraculously here to help me with Evelyn or to help with the raging erection I suddenly have.
But then she stands up and finger waves at Evelyn. “Bye, cutie.”
And she sashays right on past me.
Oh my God, I really need a nap. She’s not an angel of mercy, she’s just there to visit another tenant.
She stops at the door next to my apartment. I call out after her, “Are you here to see James and Cas?”
I’ve barely had a chance to meet the two guys who live next door, but they seem cool. They have a baby as well—a little boy. Or is it a girl? I can’t remember because the last few weeks are a fucking blur.
And of course she’s there to see James and Cas. She’s knocking on their damn door.
“Yes.” That’s all she says, but she does give me a friendly smile.
I retreat back into my own apartment and look down at Evelyn. “That was not smooth,” I tell her. “That was embarrassing.”
Evelyn gives me a gummy grin and bounces up and down on my hip. She sticks her wet fingers into my mouth.
“We’re calling Auntie Annabelle,” I mumble from around her fingers. “We need help. So. Much. Help.”