Chapter 6
She’d had a plan. It was a good plan. She’d cleared a spot on the floor of her office with a play mat and a protective nest of cushions, along with a small arsenal of objects designed to be gummed.
She’d sat down at her desk to reconcile Green Mountain Landscaping’s quarterly, with a baby contentedly occupied three feet to her left. For a full nine minutes it had worked.
Nine minutes.
“You,” she said, “are not being supportive of the local small business economy.”
Charlie, who had abandoned the play mat entirely and was now attempting to eat the corner of a blanket with the single-minded focus of a woman with a mission, disagreed.
Nora got her a teething ring. Charlie regarded it with contempt and returned to the blanket.
She took the blanket corner away. Charlie’s face gathered itself into the expression Nora was already learning to fear, like a cloud coming in over the sea.
And Nora, who did not negotiate and who had opinions about parents who negotiated, said, “Okay, okay, no, don’t, here, look, look at this, look how interesting this is,” and picked her up.
That was the end of Green Mountain Landscaping’s quarterly.
Because it turned out that a six-month-old on your hip was a full-time commitment of one arm, one shoulder, and most of your attention.
The part she hadn’t anticipated was how much she liked it.
Charlie settled against her like she belonged there.
Then Charlie got a fistful of her hair and pulled it into her mouth.
Nora extracted it and Charlie went for her glasses instead, and Nora extracted those and Charlie made a sound of pure outrage.
Then, two seconds later, having forgotten the entire injustice, Charlie tipped her head back and gave her a smile so enormous and so uncomplicated that her chest actually ached. It was the same feeling that had lost her the argument on the doorstep at six that morning.
“That,” Nora informed her, “is a cheap trick. It worked on your father but it’s not going to work on—”
Charlie did it again, and she sighed.
“Apparently it is going to work on me. God, you’re your father’s daughter, aren’t you? You’re a menace.”
She got about forty minutes of work done, in fragments, one-handed.
She typed with Charlie propped in the crook of her arm, narrating debit and credit entries out loud in the calm sing-song she’d discovered kept the cloud offshore.
She fed her a bottle at 8:15 and got half of it down her sleeve.
She changed a diaper on the office floor with a concentration she hadn’t used since a college anatomy exam.
And somewhere in there, between the ruined quarterly and the ruined sleeve, she stopped resenting the interruption.
The dangerous part, the part she was going to have to lie to her therapist about, was that she started looking forward to it.
To the little grabbing hands, and the weight against her arm, and the way Charlie watched her mouth when she talked, like Nora was saying something that mattered.
She was full-on rocking her, standing at the office window, humming something tuneless, when the truck pulled into the driveway next door.
9:26. He was four minutes early.
She watched him climb out of the truck, still in team warmups with his hair coming loose from its bun.
He jogged across the strip of lawn with the haste of a male who’d broken several traffic laws getting there.
She barely had time to arrange her face into its usual composed expression before he knocked.
“She alive?” he said, when she opened it.
“Barely. I nearly worked her to death. She’s a terrible employee.
No focus, poor time management, and she ate part of a blanket.
” She handed Charlie over. Charlie went to him with a happy shriek and both fists grabbing for his beard.
Nora ignored, entirely, what that did to her. “How was your little skating?”
“Humiliating and instructive.” He already had Charlie tucked expertly against his shoulder, one enormous hand spread over her back.
He did it without thinking about it now, which she noticed, because noticing things was a compulsion she couldn’t switch off.
“I fell over during a drill I’ve run ten thousand times because I fell asleep standing up.
Coach made me sit out the second half. He was actually fine about it, weirdly. He has kids. He gets it.”
“And the rest of it?” She leaned against her doorframe, arms crossed. “You said you’d figure the rest out yourself. I’d like to see the homework, because I did not sign up for Tuesday-forever, and I am watching for the exact moment you attempt to make this Tuesday-forever.”
“You want the report?”
“I want the report.”
“Fine.” He rearranged Charlie and delivered it over the top of her head.
“The nanny agency called back. Two candidates cleared the background check. I’ve got interviews this afternoon at four and four-forty-five, back to back, at the coffee place on Main so it’s neutral ground.
The daycare can start Thursday, which buys me some time, but I really want somebody in the house, because we travel and daycares don’t do 11 p.m. flights back from Montreal.
Deb, of the personal brand, called me personally. We’re circling.”
He shot her a grin that she almost returned.
“Mildred Prescott is coming Thursday to look at the house, and there's another visit on the calendar three weeks after that. I put them both on the calendar. Twice. I found a pediatrician. Apparently you have to check whether they take half-orc kids, which I didn’t know. First appointment’s Friday morning.
I called the attorney back about the paternity test, which they’ll also do at the doctor’s appointment.
And I spent forty minutes on hold with the insurance company and got her added to my policy, which was its own hell because they didn’t have a box to check for daughter I learned about yesterday, so. ”
Nora looked at him. She looked at him for slightly too long, and she knew it was slightly too long, and she couldn’t stop, because this was not the report she’d expected.
She’d expected I meant to call the daycare, but and I figured I’d sort it out later.
She’d expected a male who arranged his life the way her mother did—in bright improvised bursts that somebody else had to manage.
She had a whole speech ready for that male. She’d been sharpening it since he left.
Instead he’d made a list. He’d found the doctor who took half-orc kids. He’d thought about the eleven p.m. flights from Montreal.
“That’s—” She reset. “That’s actually organized.”
“You sound betrayed.”
“I feel a little betrayed, yes.”
“Sorry, not sorry.” He grinned, and it was the real one, a little tired at the edges. “Thank you, Nora. Genuinely. You saved me this morning. Three hours, one time, like I said. I mean it, you’re off the hook. Deb’s got a whole system, apparently. And there’s an app—”
“There’s an app?”
“There’s an app.” He was already backing towards his door, Charlie’s fists still in his beard, and the diaper bag hooked over one massive shoulder like it had always been part of his kit. “Go do your books. Bill me for the blanket.”
She shut the door behind him and stood in the hall.
Her house was exactly as it always was except the cushions were still in their nest on the office floor.
The bottle was still on the dish rack. The place was quiet in the way she’d spent four years and a considerable amount of effort creating, but this morning the quiet was louder than usual.
Then she went and reconciled the Broken Stick’s account, which had a discrepancy of eleven dollars and forty cents. She found it in under an hour. And that should have been that.
It was the burp cloth’s fault.
She found it at 6:40 that evening, wedged half under her office armchair, a small pink square with cartoon rabbits on it.
She stood there holding it in the doorway of the room where she’d spent the whole afternoon not getting Green Mountain Landscaping’s quarterly done.
She kept thinking about the interviews at four and four-forty-five.
She kept wondering whether he’d picked the right one and whether it was any of her business, even though she knew it wasn’t.
That was, more or less, the point of the life she’d built.
She could keep the burp cloth until tomorrow. That was the sane move. It was a burp cloth. It was not an emergency. She could put it on her desk and give it back at the next handoff, if there even was a next handoff, which there wasn’t going to be, because she was off the hook.
She was walking across the lawn before she’d finished the argument.
His porch light was on. The front window looked straight through the entry hall into the open living area at the back of the house.
Even though the room was cluttered with half-opened boxes, it looked warm and comfortable, glowing gold in the lamplight.
She wasn’t spying. The curtains were open, so this was simply information the universe was offering.
She raised her hand to knock and then didn’t, because of what she was looking at.
Rognar was cooking.
He’d found the kitchen, apparently, in the twenty-four hours since Charlie had rearranged his life.
He was standing at the stove in a soft grey T-shirt with the sleeves straining across his massive biceps, stirring something that steamed.
His hair was all the way down now, dark and loose past his shoulders, and Charlie was tucked against his chest in some kind of wrap contraption.
She was fast asleep with just her head visible and one tiny green fist curled under her chin.
He swayed, the small automatic sway of a male who’d learned in a day and a night that if he stopped moving the cloud came in.
So he kept moving, stirring the pot and murmuring something down at the top of his daughter’s head.
The whole picture—the enormous male being quiet and careful, the sleeping baby, the steam, the soft golden light, the T-shirt—all of it did something to her hormones that she was going to have to have a serious talk with herself about.
Her response was hot and immediate and entirely without her permission.
Her practical, organized, four-clients-closing brain went briefly and completely offline.
She stood on his porch in the dark holding a square of rabbits and watched Rognar Stonebreaker being tender.
The argument she’d been having with herself for the past year, the one where he was charming and useless and exactly the kind of male she’d built a stable life specifically to avoid, suddenly developed a serious flaw.
This is a problem, she thought, clearly. This is a genuine problem.
That was when he looked up and caught her.
She saw the exact moment he registered not just that she was there, but how she was standing there and what she’d been looking at and what it had been doing to her.
The tiredness fell away from him, and something far more dangerous took its place.
He didn’t stop swaying. He didn’t stop stirring.
He just looked at her through the window with a knowledge that she would have given a great deal for him not to have.
Then he crossed to the door and opened it one-handed, the baby still asleep on his chest, and leaned against the frame.
“Evening, neighbor,” he said quietly, so as not to wake Charlie.
“You left a burp cloth.” She held it up. “Under the chair. It has rabbits on it. I’m returning it. That’s the reason I’m here.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It is.”
“Sure.” He took it from her, and his fingers were so warm where they brushed against hers that she jumped. He tucked the cloth into the waistband of his sweatpants without looking down, still watching her. “How long were you standing out there?”
“I wasn’t standing anywhere. I walked up, I knocked—”
“You didn’t knock.”
“—I was about to knock.”
“You were staring.” He said it gently, delightedly. “Nora Bennett. You were standing on my porch in the dark staring at me through my own window.”
“I was assessing whether you’d remembered to actually feed her or whether you were making a nice dinner for yourself while the baby went hungry, which is a legitimate—”
“She’s fed. She’s asleep. I’m making dinner for me, because I haven’t eaten since the coffee place, because I was interviewing nannies.
All of which you know, because I gave you the report this morning and you sounded betrayed.
” He shifted, and Charlie sighed against him and didn’t wake.
His hand came up automatically to cradle the small dark head, and she had to look at the doorframe instead.
“So that’s not what you were assessing.”
“You’re very sure of yourself for a male who fell over at practice.”
“I’m always sure of myself. You’ve complained about it at length.
” He was so close, in the warm bar of light from the doorway.
Whatever he was cooking mixed with his spicy scent and the sweet milky smell of the baby.
Her traitor brain noticed all of it and asked for more.
“But this is a new thing you’re doing. You want to know what I think you were assessing? ”
“I genuinely do not.”
“I think,” he said, “that you came over here to be annoyed at me, the way you like to be. The way you’ve been coming over the fence to be annoyed at me for a year because it’s the most fun you have all week.
Don’t argue, I’ve watched you enjoy it. And I think you looked in that window expecting to catch me being exactly the useless disaster you decided I was the day I moved in.
And I think you saw something else. And I think,” he finished, so softly it was barely audible, “that it’s bothering you a great deal. ”
The banter had the same rhythm, the same game they’d played across the fence a hundred times—his shameless serve, her dry return, and the little pleasure of it that she’d never once admitted to.
But the edge was completely different now.
It had gone from entertainment straight down to somewhere lower and warmer, and they both knew it.
He was standing there with his baby asleep on his chest and his sleeves straining and the burp cloth with rabbits tucked into his sweatpants.
He watched her over the top of a smile that had stopped being a joke, waiting to see what she’d do with it.
She opened her mouth.
And behind him, in the kitchen, the pot boiled over with a violent, hissing, spitting rush across the burner—and Charlie snapped awake against his chest and let out a shriek that could have peeled paint.