Chapter 2
Nora dropped the watering can. It hit the flagstone with a hollow clang and rolled into her hostas, and she didn’t go after it because she was staring at the baby.
The baby stared back.
She was a soft light green several shades paler than Rognar, with a shock of dark hair sticking almost straight up, and she was, without any possible argument, the most adorable thing Nora had ever seen in her life. Nora resented her for it immediately.
“You have a baby,” she said, still stunned.
“So it turns out.”
“Since when?”
“About four hours ago.”
“Four hours?”
“Give or take.” Rognar shifted the carrier against his enormous forearm. He looked tired, she realized. Not end-of-a-hard-practice tired. Not stayed-up-too-late-with-his-teammates tired. Something deeper. “There was a lawyer. There was a wall of nipples. I’m still processing several parts of it.”
She stared at him. “Rognar, do you even know how to take care of a baby?”
Something flickered in his eyes. It was there and gone so quickly she might have missed it if she hadn’t spent the past twelve months paying considerably more attention to Rognar Stonebreaker than she would ever admit.
For one second he didn’t look like the male who leaned against her fence and grinned while she complained about his recycling bin.
He looked like a person holding something breakable that he’d only just discovered was his.
Then the familiar grin came back, dimmed around the edges.
“Bold,” he said. “Four hours in and you’re already writing my reviews.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“You did.” He said it lightly, the way he said almost everything. “It’s okay. Everything’s upside down. Nice to know you still think I’m a disaster.”
“I don’t think you’re a disaster.”
One dark eyebrow went up.
“I think you’re…” She stopped, because none of the words currently presenting themselves would improve the situation. “How did this happen?”
“I’m pretty sure you know how babies happen, Bennett.”
She gave him a look.
“There she is.” His grin widened a fraction. “I was worried the shock had knocked the disapproval right out of you.”
“Rognar.”
“Her mother died,” he said quietly, and every clever thing she had lined up went straight out of her head.
“Oh.” Her gaze went instinctively to the baby. “Oh, God. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
“Car accident. Three weeks ago. I didn’t know.” His attention dropped to the carrier. “I didn’t know about Charlie either. I found out this afternoon in a lawyer’s office.”
Charlie. The name did something the word daughter hadn’t managed. It made the small green shape in the carrier into a person. A specific person with a specific name, and something squeezed unpleasantly beneath her ribs.
“This is Charlie,” he said, with a not particularly successful attempt at his usual ease. “Charlie, this is Nora. She’s going to complain about the noise.”
“That is a very unfair characterization.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You keep a log.”
“I keep a log because your defensemen sang in my driveway at one o’clock in the morning.”
“They were celebrating.”
“It was February.”
“We won in February.”
The grin he gave her hit somewhere low in her stomach, which was the problem and had been the problem for twelve months.
She had spent the past year trying not to look directly at him, and she had never once managed a full week of it.
Rognar was six and a half feet of shoulders and muscle, with medium green skin, pointed ears, and prominent lower tusks that curved past his lip and somehow made every smile look wicked.
His dark beard was neatly trimmed along a strong jaw, and his long black hair was pulled into a loose knot that had probably been tidy that morning and definitely wasn’t now.
He wore a soft grey henley with the sleeves shoved up, and the shirt did absolutely nothing to disguise the size of what was underneath it. He also had warm amber eyes and completely ridiculous eyelashes, which she considered an unnecessary flourish on the part of the universe.
She had a rule about not looking at him for longer than four seconds. She was at twelve and counting.
“Nora.”
“What?”
“You’ve gone a funny color.”
“It’s the light.”
“Sure.”
She bent to retrieve the watering can, mostly so she would have an excuse to stop looking at him. When she straightened, Charlie was watching her solemnly. Then she smiled, tusks and all, and waved one fist in Nora’s direction.
Oh, that was dirty.
“That is not going to work on me,” she informed her, and Charlie kicked both legs merrily.
Rognar laughed, and the sound was tired but real. “She’s had a big day. Don’t crush her confidence.”
She looked at him again. He was gazing down at his daughter with an expression she had never seen on his face.
It wasn’t the flirtatious grin or the teasing smirk or any of the other expressions he used when turning everything into a joke.
He was just a large, exhausted male staring at a tiny baby as if she were a puzzle he desperately wanted to solve.
She tightened her grip on the watering can and made herself take a step back.
“Well,” she said. “Congratulations. I’ll let you get her inside.”
“Thanks, Bennett.”
She made it halfway to her door before she stopped.
“Rognar.”
“Neighbor.”
“The baby goes in first. Before all that.” She gestured at the truck. “Everything else can wait.”
His expression changed again, just slightly.
“Yeah,” he said. “Thanks.”
She felt faintly foolish for saying it, but she gave him a clipped nod and went inside.
Her house was quiet. It was always quiet, which was one of the reasons she had bought it.
The small two-bedroom had needed a lot of work when she moved in.
She had painted every room herself and refinished the floors over two summers.
She had put up shelves, and they were level, because she had measured twice before drilling a single hole.
Her office occupied the front bedroom. Two monitors sat on a desk she had assembled herself, correctly, on the first attempt.
Neatly labeled files lined the shelves. Her clients included local shops, restaurants, contractors, and several seasonal businesses whose finances rose and fell with the tourist calendar.
She liked bookkeeping. Numbers were dependable.
If a column didn’t balance, there was a reason, and if she worked long enough she would find it.
She had never once in her life been let down by a spreadsheet.
She loved them the way other people loved dogs.
She sat down, put on her glasses, and pulled up the Hendricks account.
Rognar Stonebreaker has a baby.
She stared at the same number for thirty seconds before her phone buzzed beside her elbow.
Her mother’s face appeared on the screen, a selfie taken at a farmers market four years ago and slightly out of focus because Summer Bennett had never held a camera still in her life.
She had Nora’s dark hair, Nora’s eyes, and a scarf the color of a traffic cone that Nora would not have worn in a million years.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Sweetheart, quick question. Do you still have the blue casserole dish?”
“I have never had the blue casserole dish.”
“I feel very strongly that you have the blue casserole dish.”
“You lent it to Denise.”
A pause.
“In April,” she added. “For the church supper.”
“Denise,” her mother said with deep satisfaction, as though Nora had solved a mystery rather than merely remembered something her mother had forgotten. “Of course. That’s a relief. How are you, baby? You sound uptight.”
“I’m working.”
“You’re always working.”
“That’s how the work gets done, Mom.”
Her mother laughed, entirely unbothered.
Nora could hear something being stirred in the background and, farther away, music.
Her mother was forty-nine and lived in a rented cottage twenty minutes north of town with an alarming number of scarves and a cat that had apparently belonged to the previous tenant and simply declined to move out.
Her mother had never once in Nora’s memory arrived anywhere early.
She had also never once failed to notice when her daughter was upset.
“So what happened?”
“Nothing happened.”
Her mother didn’t say anything, but Nora knew she wasn’t going to give up.
“My neighbor has a baby,” she said finally.
“The enormous handsome one?”
“I never said he was handsome.”
“You’ve described him to me eleven times.”
“I’ve described the noise eleven times.”
“You described his shoulders, honey.”
She closed her eyes. “Once. In passing. As part of a larger complaint.”
Her mother made a sound Nora had been hearing since childhood and had yet to enjoy.
“A baby,” her mother added. “How lovely.”
“It isn’t lovely. Well, the baby is lovely. Obviously. But the situation is a catastrophe. He didn’t even know she existed until today.”
“Oh, the poor male.”
That stopped her.
“He came home with an entire truck full of baby equipment,” she said, because for some reason that seemed relevant.
“Then it sounds as though he’s figuring it out.”
“He’s a professional hockey player. He travels. He has practice. Games. A baby needs schedules and childcare and pediatricians and approximately nine thousand other things he probably hasn’t even thought of yet.”
“Neither have most parents when they get the baby,” her mother pointed out.
“That’s different.”
Her mother hummed, unconvinced.
“He came over last October to borrow an egg,” Nora added.
“And you gave him one.”
“I gave him three.”
“Why?”
“Because you can’t do anything with one egg.”
“Of course you did.” Her mother sounded fondly amused. “Well, it’ll all sort itself out.”