Call Her Mine
Page 2
“How about cereal?” he asked with a wink. “I’ll make it.”
“Since when did you become so needy?”
A coy grin slid across his face. “I know that once you’re in my kitchen, there’s no holding back. You won’t let me eat crap when you can make something delicious.”
“Yeah, you should see me in the bedroom.” She felt her eyes bug out. She slammed her mouth closed, unable to believe what she’d said. She stormed through the hallway and out the door, followed by Ben’s laughter—and almost tripped over a basket. She leaned back, holding the door open, and hollered, “I think Willow left you muffins. There’s a basket on your porch.”
“Way to go, Willow,” he said as he strode down the hall. “Let’s see the goods.”
She realized she was staring at his bare chest again and snapped, “I’m taking the biggest muffin,” as if it was his fault he had great pecs and abs she wanted to lick, and bite, and—
Down, girl.
He cocked a grin and said, “Take as many as you’d like, but you’ll pay for them later.”
In my dreams.
Ben loved the playful look in Aurelia’s eyes as she tried to come up with a smart-ass response. Her hair was tousled, and her cheeks held the warm glow of sleep. He could tell the moment she gave up on a sassy response, because she raked a hand through her long dark hair, and her eyes drifted from him to the basket. She didn’t usually give up that easily, but hey, at least this gave him a few seconds to appreciate her fine ass as she bent over the basket.
“See? You don’t need me cooking you breakfast.” She gazed over her shoulder at him with a smile that lit up the sky as she lifted the top of the basket and said, “Willow’s got you covered.”
Ben’s heart nearly stopped at the sight of a tiny sleeping baby nestled among blankets in the basket. “Fuck. Me.”
“I . . . um . . . Wha—” She followed his gaze to the baby in the basket and gasped, dropping to her knees beside it. “Holy cow, Ben! It’s a baby!”
He took a step back, as if he couldn’t get away fast enough, and said, “Why is it on my porch?”
“I don’t know!”
“There’s a note. Grab it.” He pointed to an envelope tucked into the side of the blanket. “Whose kid is it?” He looked up and down the street. For what, he wasn’t sure, but he got a twisted, dark feeling in his gut as Aurelia rose to her feet, the color draining from her face.
She handed him the letter with a shaky hand and said, “She’s yours.”
“What? No, it’s not.” He snagged and scanned the typewritten letter. His heart pounded faster with every word. Dear Ben, I’m sorry to do this to you, but I didn’t know where else to turn. I’m not in a position to care for a baby. I hope you can make room in your life for your daughter.
“What the fuck?” He looked down at the baby. “I need to call my lawyer and the cops. This is bullshit. Some crazy bitch wants money or something.”
Aurelia looked at him like he was crazy.
“What?” he snapped.
“I . . .” She swallowed hard and looked down at the baby. “We should get her inside.”
“No, we shouldn’t. We should take it directly to the police station.”
She shook her head, her gaze moving between him and the baby in the basket. “Are you crazy? If she is your baby, do you really want her going into social services? Being cared for by strangers?”
“It’s not mine, Rels.” He grabbed the basket by the handles and said, “Grab the top of the fucking basket. Let’s take care of this.”
She picked up the top and followed him inside. “This is a baby, and pink blankets indicate a girl. She, not it. What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to get a shirt on, and then we’re going to the police station.” He set down the basket and took his phone from his pocket. “But first I’m calling my attorney.”
“Wait!” She grabbed his wrist, her brows imploring him to listen. “Don’t. Please. Let’s just think for a second.”
He scoffed. “Think? Aurelia, it isn’t mine. Seriously.”
“You can’t know that for sure. Even the best birth control is only ninety-nine percent effective.”
“Christ. Do you want this baby? Do you have some weird baby fetish that I don’t know about? Because you can have it and deal with the crazy bitch who’s going to report that her baby has been abducted. And then you’re looking at defending yourself instead of asking for help up front.”
She paced, crossing and uncrossing her arms. “Ben,” she said pleadingly, “you have to find out if she’s yours for sure before you give her up.”
“Fuck that.” Now he was pacing. “I’d know if I had a baby.”
“How? By osmosis? You travel all the time. God only knows how many women you’ve screwed.”
“I’m careful, Rels. So fucking careful.” Because the last thing he wanted was a baby by some random hookup.
“But what if she’s yours? Take it from a girl who would do anything to know who her father was. Knowing is everything.”
He closed his eyes, his heart breaking for Aurelia. Her mother had hemorrhaged and died when Aurelia was born and had never revealed the identity of Aurelia’s father to anyone. She’d only said that he wanted nothing to do with her or a baby. Aurelia had confided in Ben about how hard that was for her, and she’d been brought to tears a number of times with a longing so deep he’d felt her emptiness as his own.
He looked at the baby again. Its lower lip was quivering, but all he saw was Aurelia as a baby, orphaned at birth. Damn it.
The baby started crying, and he said, “You’ve got to pick it up.”
“I don’t know anything about babies! I’ve never even babysat. You have a nephew. You pick her up.” Aurelia crossed her arms, watching him expectantly. His nephew, Louie, was his younger sister Bridgette’s adorable six-year-old son.
Ben might be able to take command in any boardroom, but babies terrified him. They were too fragile, too dependent. He held his hands up in surrender as the baby began wailing. Loud. “I never touched Louie until he couldn’t break. That baby is breakable. She’s smaller than a loaf of bread.”
“Ugh!” She knelt beside the basket and picked up the wailing baby, cradling it against her stomach.
“Don’t drop it!”
She gave him a deadpan stare, then turned a worried gaze to the baby. “She won’t stop crying.”
“Bounce it.” He tried to remember anything he might have heard Bridgette say when Louie was little, but blood rushed through his ears, and his only thought was, Holy fuck. It can’t be mine!
She bounced the baby in her arms, and the baby’s eyes slammed shut, her cries escalating into shaky, shrill sounds that tore at his gut. Ben dropped to his knees beside Aurelia and said, “Do the shoulder thing!”
“Shoulder thing?”
“Put it on your shoulder. Burp it!”
“Burp it?” Aurelia scowled. “You’re an idiot. There are diapers in the basket. Look for a bottle.”
He dug around beneath the tiny diapers and found a bottle. He must have been looking at it like it was a foreign object, because Aurelia gave an exasperated sigh and snapped, “Shake it!”
He shook the hell out of the bottle as the shrill cries vibrated into long, shaky, gut-wrenching sounds—and then fell silent, like the baby couldn’t breathe at all. “She’s not breathing! Do something! CPR? What if she’s sick? Oh God, Rels! Did we do th—” His words were drowned out by another piercing wail.
“Give me that!” Aurelia snatched the bottle, shifting positions, sitting cross-legged and cradling the baby against her belly. She put the bottle to the baby’s lips, and it panted, gulped—wailed—and then the tiniest pink lips he’d ever seen wrapped around the nipple. He held his breath as the baby gasped again, whimpered, then suckled the nipple. It kept up the agonizing suck-gasp-whimper-suck pattern so long Ben thought he was going to pass out, before he remembered he wasn’t breathing.
“To see if you’re the father?”
“To make sure she’s not sick, and yeah, that other thing.”
“You can’t drive her without a car seat.”
“Then we’ll walk, because it’ll take too long to go shopping and she could stop breathing again. We know nothing about this kid.” Suddenly hit with the realization that this wasn’t Aurelia’s problem, he said, “You’ll come with me, right, Rels?”
“What?” she said absently, staring at the baby with a dreamy expression.
Seeing her look at the baby like that made his gut twist in a different way. The image didn’t fit. Aurelia was his good-times girl, the only woman with whom he could talk about anything. She starred in all his darkest fantasies, which was torture since he couldn’t have her, but she made one hell of a hot fantasy, and he wasn’t nearly ready to give that up. His mind shouted, No! Stop looking at her like that!
She gazed up at him through those long lashes that drove him crazy and whispered, “She didn’t stop breathing. She was just hungry.” She looked down at the baby and said, “We suck at babies, Ben, but at least we didn’t break her.”
CHAPTER TWO
“LET’S GO,” BEN said as he came downstairs wearing a tight black T-shirt with the jeans he’d worn last night, looking just as harried as he had when he’d taken the stairs two at a time on the way up. His feet were still bare, his five-o’clock shadow was dark as night, and his thick dark hair looked like he’d pulled a sexy all-nighter, though Aurelia knew better.
It was the morning delivery that had him chasing his tail around his massive house, grabbing his keys, walking back and forth from the kitchen to the living room, and doing everything he could to avoid looking at the sweet little girl in the basket.
“Go where?” Aurelia asked softly so as not to wake the baby. She couldn’t wrap her head around the idea that the baby might actually be Ben’s. Other than in his work, which he nurtured and cared for like it was a living, breathing thing, he avoided anything remotely close to commitment.
His dark brows slanted in annoyance. “The doctor’s. I said that already. I called Vic and he said to bring her by whenever we could. Let’s go.”
“Right, with no shoes and no car seat. Ben, she’s sleeping. Haven’t you ever heard the old saying Let sleeping babies lie?”
“I think that’s dogs, and what does it mean, anyway? Don’t wake up a dog? Why not?”
“I don’t freaking know,” she whispered, glancing at the baby in the basket. “But she’s finally quiet and I’m not upsetting her again.”
“So, what . . . ? We’re supposed to sit around with this kid until it wakes up? It could sleep for hours.” He paced like a caged tiger. “We’ve got to figure this shit out. Who would leave a kid on a doorstep? We need to find the mother. This is bullshit. I have an important meeting next week I need to prepare for, and I need a fucking shower. And now I’ve got a baby who could stop breathing at any second . . .”
She’d never seen Ben frazzled, and he was talking so fast Aurelia couldn’t get a word in edgewise. She went to him, but he continued ranting about laws of abandonment and not being the father.
She grabbed his arms and said, “Benjamin!” in a harsh whisper.
He blinked several times, as if he’d only just realized she was there.
“Take a deep breath, and don’t say another word until I get some coffee in you.” She picked up the basket.
“Where are you taking that?”
“I’m taking her into the kitchen. Let’s go.” Jesus, she was freaking out inside, and he was freaking out outside. They were quite a pair. She set the basket on the floor by the kitchen table, and then she pointed to the chair nearest the basket and said, “Sit.”
She was surprised when he complied. She began making coffee and said, “While she’s sleeping, we need to figure out who the mother is. Then we’ll get her checked out by Vic.”
His eyes widened. “So you think it’s sick, too?”
She rolled her eyes. “Stop calling her it.” She grasped for a name and went with the first thing that came to mind. “She’s Baby B for now.”
“Baby B? Who’s Baby A?”
“There is no Baby A. Baby Ben, just until—”
“She’s not my kid, Aurelia,” he said through gritted teeth, but his gaze fell to the baby, and though his jaw clenched tight, Aurelia swore his eyes softened a little.
Was he thinking about the possible mothers? Remembering the women he’d slept with? Or was he accepting that he might in fact be a father? She didn’t want to think about two of those questions as she handed him a mug of coffee.
“We don’t know that, and she can’t be it, so she’s Baby B. Or just B for now.” She poured herself a cup of coffee, grabbed a notepad and a pen from the drawer where he kept them, and sat at the table. “Okay, focus, Ben. Let’s figure this out. How old do you think she is?”
Ben looked like he’d swallowed a frog. “How the hell would I know?”
“Never mind. I’ll google it. Geez, when it comes to business you plan and strategize until you’re blue in the face. Just try to help me out here, please. She can’t be very old; she can’t hold her head up or anything.” She whipped out her phone and searched how to tell how old a baby is. Finding only baby-age calculators, she said, “Shit. This doesn’t help at all.”
“Because you suck at research.” He grabbed her phone, thumbed out something, then said, “This site should help. They have milestones by month, starting with month zero. What milestone does a newborn have?”
They huddled over the phone, reading about feedings, baths, and sleep schedules, and agreed that the information didn’t help since they had no information on which to base the baby’s schedule or weight.
“She can’t be more than a month or so, right? She’s so tiny. Maybe we should estimate three to six weeks, just to be safe.” Aurelia navigated to the calendar on her phone and counted back to figure out when the baby was conceived. “I can’t believe I’m actually trying to figure out when you had sex. This is so messed up.”
Ben’s jaw clenched again, and his eyes turned apologetic. “What do you want me to say? Neither one of us is celibate.”
“You have no idea what I am,” she said sharply, keeping her eyes trained on the phone. She’d been with her share of men, but it had been forever since she’d had sex, which was only part of the problem with staying overnight at Ben’s. When he held her, which was every damn time she stayed over, he always ended up wrapped around her like a blanket—and she realized just how much she wanted more from him.
But now . . .
She eyed the baby. She might not be the only female who needed more than he was capable of giving.
Or wants to give?
She pushed that painful thought aside and said, “We need to figure out everyone you slept with from late May to early July, just to cover your bases.”
“You can’t be serious. How am I supposed to remember?”
Her jaw dropped. “Have there been that many women?”
He shrugged, flashing a cocky grin, which pissed her off.
She rolled her eyes and said, “Get out your calendar, gigolo.”
“My calendar? You think I take notes on who I sleep with?” He laughed. “Let me see your calendar.”
“I’m not the one who might be supporting a dependent for the next eighteen years. Get your frigging calendar out and see where you were last summer.” Her words flew fast and angry.
He navigated to the calendar on his phone, his eyes flicking from the screen to Aurelia every few seconds. “May and June?”
“Mm-hm.” She swallowed hard. What if he’d slept with a bunch of the single women she knew? What if he’d slept with a married woman? He’d never do that. But what if . . . ? Could she handle that?
“Zane was filming
that movie last summer with Remi Divine,” he said, and guilt rose in his eyes. Zane was Willow’s husband. He was an actor-turned-screenwriter, and he’d had the lead opposite actress Remi Divine in his last movie.
Aurelia’s heart sank. She and Remi had become close friends that summer. They texted often and got together whenever Remi’s schedule allowed. She was coming to Harmony Pointe to film another movie soon. How awkward would that be, knowing she’d slept with the one man Aurelia wanted but couldn’t have?
“Well, we know Remi isn’t pregnant,” she said without looking at him.
“I didn’t sleep with Remi. Not only is she my business partner’s sister, but she’s not my type.”
“A Natalie Portman lookalike isn’t your type?” Aurelia met his gaze, and boy did he look pissed. “How am I supposed to know your type?”
He looked like he was chewing on nails. “Her name was Payton.”
Bile rose in her throat. “You slept with that sweet redhead from craft services? Seriously? That’s your type?” She pressed the tip of the pen to the paper and wrote Payton, wondering what Payton had that she didn’t. “Last name?”
“No idea.”
“Payton One-Nighter. Got it.” She felt like she’d been stabbed in the gut. “Who else?”
He looked at his calendar. “I was in New York City for business . . .”
“Sex business?” she asked, feeling like she might puke.
“Jesus, I can’t do this.” He pushed to his feet. “I’m not telling you everyone I slept with.”
“Fine.” She slapped down the pen and stood up. “Do it yourself. It’s not exactly my idea of fun, either.” She stormed into the living room and grabbed her purse, tears and anger warring for dominance.
“Aurelia, wait.” He grabbed her arm, his eyes pleading for help—or understanding—or something.
She wrenched her arm free, glowering at him. “You might have a child, Ben!” she whispered harshly. “A living, breathing baby. Grow up and figure your shit out.”