4. Jonah #2
“Of course he is.” Maggie’s eyes came back to Pepper, then Jonah. “My grandson is an excellent judge of character, so I assume you must be a suitable person to be in charge of Atlas.”
“I guess you’ll be the judge of that, Mrs. Lawson.”
Jonah choked softly just as Jo Ellen fluttered into the kitchen wearing a multi-colored dress and her usual smile.
“Oh, honey, don’t pay her any mind. She’d grill the postman.” She bustled around Maggie and took Pepper’s free hand in both of her own. “Aren’t you a pretty thing? Did someone offer you wine?”
“Wine?” Maggie croaked.
“Not while I’m taking care of Atlas, but thank you.”
Jonah watched his grandmother’s eyes track Pepper, stay there, assess, and pass judgment all in the time it would take another woman to blink.
Then she gave him the tiniest, almost imperceptible nod.
Did that mean Pepper already passed the Maggie Test?
“All right,” Maggie said, mostly to herself. “Let’s go, Jo. We’re shopping, remember?”
“Oh, yes, Maggie has a da—”
Maggie slammed her hand over Jo Ellen’s mouth. “Have you ever, in your life, understood the concept of privacy?”
They left on a cloud of laughter and something called Estée Lauder Youth Dew, a bottle he’d seen on his grandmother’s dresser since he was a child.
“So,” Jonah said carefully, “that actually went very well.”
“Did it?”
“I have known my grandmother my entire life. She just blessed you. I’m not joking. That was a benediction.”
Pepper laughed just as Atlas burped warm and happy onto her shoulder, and she shifted him expertly without missing a beat.
He took her through the bottle process, talked briefly about Atlas’s interest in “solid foods” which were really “mush in a glass jar,” all of which was met with a fearless attitude that gave him a shocking amount of confidence.
“Lastly, let me take you down to his domain,” Jonah said, checking the time.
“The rest of the main floor is just dining, my dad’s office down the hall, another guest suite, and the big deck.
We mostly live out there.” He nodded toward the sliding doors.
“Family dinners on the long table. Good sunset hangs in the seating area.”
“Who cooks?”
“Me, mostly. Everyone else when I’m gone, which, I’m told, is not pretty, ’cept for Kate, who’s a good home chef.”
“I can cook,” she offered. At his look, she trilled a laugh. “I’m a chef’s daughter.”
“I’m an architect’s son and can’t draw a stick figure.”
“Well, I don’t have his knife skills—”
“Who does?” he volleyed.
“I’m happy to cook if Atlas is comfy and fed.”
He regarded her a little more closely, then sighed as they headed downstairs.
He had not asked for any of this. He had asked for a nanny. The universe had sent him his mentor’s daughter, who could soothe his baby in three seconds and make Maggie nod and already fit into this place like she was born here.
The universe was, frankly, taking liberties and flirting with perfection.
“Is that a problem, Jonah?” she asked, clearly not following his thoughts. Or maybe she was.
He shook his head. “You keep surprising me, is all.”
“Just keeping you on your toes,” she quipped.
“Well, you are a ballerina.”
She laughed as they made it to the lower level and stepped into the great room, with its high wood-beamed ceiling and electric fireplace and two comfy couches. The floor was cluttered with toys and a baby play mat, a playpen and stuffed animals and two bouncy seats.
“Welcome to the frat house,” he joked, gesturing to the toys. “Alpha Omega Baby. This is likely where you’ll spend most of your time.”
“It’s wonderful.” She said it like she meant it.
“I wasn’t lying when I said I live in my dad’s basement,” he said. “Normally, there’s a great view and it’s sunny, but we installed the hurricane shutters down here yesterday since my dad is, like, off the charts worried about the storm.”
“It’s really perfect,” she said.
“It beats the van I lived in before,” he muttered, before he could stop himself.
He said it half under his breath because he didn’t actually want to explain the van, but Pepper’s eyes lit up at him like a person who’d just been handed an interesting clue and was filing it for later.
“That is my room.” He waved at his under-furnished bedroom. “And across the hall, where Atlas sleeps, when he sleeps.”
He pushed open the nursery door to show the buttery yellow walls, natural wood crib, and some baby-appropriate animal art that had Vivien’s fingerprints all over it.
“Oh.” Her voice hitched as she looked around, oddly more affected by this room than any other. “It’s sweet.”
“What’s sweet is when he sleeps here and not the old bassinet that’s still next to my bed.” He leaned down. “Spoiler alert—he snores like a stuffed pig.”
She chuckled and stroked Atlas’s bald and oh-so-lucky head. “I love that about him.”
“He’s already had a nap today,” he said, fast and matter-of-fact, because he could not allow himself to look at Pepper pouring affection on his son and not…fall. Hard. Fast. Somewhere he’d been told by her father not to fall.
“I bet we can sneak another nap out of him, huh, Atlas?” she cooed.
“You’re really good at this, you know that?” He knew it was stating the obvious, but it had to be said. “There must have been a lot of little Broussards running around.”
She kept her gaze on Atlas. “Actually, I was an only child of two only children. No sibs, no cousins, just one cocker spaniel who hated all people. I’ve been waiting my whole life to have something small to hold.”
And the admission was just one more thing about her to surprise him. And make him want to wrap her in his arms for reasons he didn’t—well, he understood them. He just didn’t want them.
She looked up and he realized he had drifted closer, and they were close enough that he could see the amber glints in her eyes and a smattering of freckles that might be how she got her name.
“You better get to work,” she said, her raspy voice like a siren’s call to him. “You don’t want to get fired the first day for being late.”
“You sure you’re good and ready?” he asked, inching toward the hall.
“Please. By the time you get home tonight, you’ll call me Mrs. Doubtfire.”
He laughed. “Not likely, but okay. You want to…” He pointed to the stairs.
“We’ll stay down here and play for a while,” she said. “Go wow Chef Vega. And remember, if you think my dad is tough, she makes him look like Jell-O.”
He cringed. “Thanks for the warning.”
He hesitated a second, then leaned in closer to Atlas, who almost looked terrified that someone would take him from his new favorite place on earth—Pepper’s arms.
“Be good, buddy. Be charming and sweet and don’t make scary things in your diaper. She might never come back. And then where would we be? Lost and…lost.”
He rushed out, grabbed his knife bag, and started up the ol’ rust bucket to go to work. As he waited for the Honda’s engine to decide whether or not today was the day it would die, he glanced at the house and imagined her first day on the job.
Pepper, floating through the rooms with happy Atlas on her hip. Pepper, making dinner for the family and worming her way into their hearts. Pepper, leaving her scent and her pheromones and her spicy sweetness to linger in his space so he’d think about her all night long.
“Okay,” he said out loud, to himself, to the dashboard, to Atlas’s empty car seat in the rearview, to the man he was going to need to be on the line tonight in front of Isobel Vega. “Okay. Let’s talk this through.”
All he could hear was Marcel Broussard’s voice in his head.
My daughter moved here because she’s been hurt. Badly. She came to Destin, at my urging, to start over. Not to complicate her life.
And then—worse—a follow-up Jonah could not forget.
You do want that internship, don’t you?
Driftwood. Isobel. The line. The one shot. The internship that, if he didn’t blow it, became a job. The job that became a paycheck. The paycheck that became a future for Atlas that didn’t involve crashing on his father’s ground floor but maybe getting a place of their own.
Marcel Broussard held that power, and the man had drawn a line. Jonah had said, “Heard, Chef.”
And then he walked out and a week later hired Broussard’s daughter as his nanny because there was no one else and she was magic with the baby and he genuinely needed help.
“Here’s the rule,” he told the windshield.
“She is the nanny. She is brilliant with my son. She is making my life functional. That is the entire transaction. I am going to be polite. I am going to be friendly. I am going to be appropriate. I am going to keep my eyes on the Driftwood cook line and Marcel’s syllabus and Atlas’s pediatrician’s instructions, and I am not going to be the guy who lets a beautiful woman in khaki shorts and sneakers blow up the only good shot at a career he’s ever had. ”
Pep talk complete, he rolled out onto Gulf Shore Drive to start the new life he so desperately needed.