Doorstep Daddy

by Shirley Jump

  Balancing Bri on one hip, Ellie bent down, got the blanket, and unfurled it, the plaid catching the slight breeze and waving the cloth into a rectangle. But as Ellie tried to settle it onto the ground, the wind worked against her, folding the corners onto themselves. The baby squirmed in her arms, wanting to be down on the ground—now—only complicating matters.

  “Bri, I have to put you down, honey.” She moved toward the stroller again, but Sabrina figured out what was coming, and clutched at her mother’s shoulder. Nope. Not going there. No way, not now.

  Ellie tried the one-armed blanket move again, and got no further than she had the first time. She let out a gust, and wished she could grow a third arm. How did other moms make these jobs look so easy?

  “Here. Let me do that. You’re going to dislocate a shoulder or something.” Dalton took the end from her, and in one swift movement, had the blanket laid out, neat and smooth.

  Ellie smiled her gratitude. “Are you joining us now?”

  “It’s either you or the hordes of small and dangerous humans over there.” He thumbed toward the playground. “I’d rather take my chances with the stinky screamer.” He gestured toward Sabrina.

  “Bri’s not a stinky screamer. She’s a baby. All babies smell. And cry.”

  “I know babies. And yours smells the worst. Not to mention, cries the loudest. In fact, I’ve already scheduled a hearing test for next week.”

  She should have been offended, but his words had lost their bite, especially because a hint of a smile played around his lips when he said them. The scowl had left, and whatever storm had been brewing from before had passed. Perhaps Sabrina was growing on him. Or maybe Ellie had just gotten too tired to care. “So tell me, what’s so dangerous about a bunch of preschoolers?”

  “Let’s just say a grown man shouldn’t get anywhere near them and playground equipment. They’re all just the right height to inflict permanent damage.”

  “Do you ever look at your glass as half-full?”

  He cocked a grin at her. “Only when it’s half-full of whiskey.”

  She chuckled. “You are incorrigible.”

  “And you sound like my mother.”

  “If I was your mother, I’d be making sure you had healthier food in your fridge.” She pulled out the store-made potato salad, the bologna sandwiches they’d made earlier, along with a bag of chips and two cans of soda. Behind them, the high-pitched squeals of happy, playing children rose and fell. Birds fluttered from tree to tree and a soft breeze played with the leaves. The day couldn’t have been more perfect if it had been painted and hung in the Louvre. “How can you eat this stuff day after day?”

  “For your information, bologna is a meat. I think. Bread is from the bread group, and potato salad has some vegetables in it.” Dalton peered into the plastic container. “They’re just cut up so tiny you probably can’t see them.”

  “Next you’ll be trying to tell me the soda is a sports drink, filled with so many electrolytes and vitamins, they forgot to put them on the label.”

  “Hey, you never know what they put in that stuff. Read the can. Lots of mysterious ingredients in there.” He grinned.

  When Dalton Scott smiled, something zinged in Ellie’s chest. Something that hadn’t zinged in a really long time. Not since Cameron. The feeling was so foreign, so strange, she didn’t know how to handle it. How to react.

  It was almost as if she’d had a baby and then forgotten how to be a woman. How to date. How to flirt.

  Was this flirting? Or was she completely misreading every signal Dalton Scott was sending?

  Dalton was so different from Cameron, who’d been quieter, less unpredictable. And not a man filled with all these mysteries. Depths she couldn’t seem to plumb. And wasn’t so sure she wanted to.

  Either way, what she was going to do—what was smart to do—right now, was eat. Not think about getting involved with another man again, when she’d barely had time to take a breath after losing her husband.

  “Here’s some, uh, forks,” Ellie said, digging deeper into the cooler and pulling out a plastic zip-bag filled with paper plates, napkins, and utensils. Dalton hadn’t had any idea where those were in his house, and it had taken some digging on Ellie’s part to find what she considered picnic necessities. Clearly, the man wasn’t a picnic regular. As for her, it had been so long since she’d been on one, she’d nearly forgotten the sweet joy of being outside.

  Right now, though, with Dalton so close to her on the blanket, a little leaning one way or another would cause her to touch him. Heat emanated from his skin, and electricity hummed between them. Try as she might not to be aware, Ellie was. Very much aware. Of everything. The woodsy scent of his cologne. The deep blue of his eyes. The way his dark hair curled over the collar of his shirt, making her ache to run her fingers through those longish ends. To feel the strength of a man against her body, to be held again.

  Specifically to be held by him. His lean, muscular frame.

  She cleared her throat and reached inside the cooler. “Here’s um, a plate, napkin—” she handed each thing to him “—paper cup…Do you need anything else?”

  He put the towering stack onto the blanket. “Do I make you nervous?”

  “No, of course not. Why would you say that?”

  “Because you just called the paper cup a napkin. And the napkin a paper plate.” That grin again, only this time it teased her.

  “The baby distracted me.” Yeah, blame it on the baby. Ellie shifted Sabrina to her lap. “Would you like some…some potato salad?”

  The grin widened. “Sure. Let me get it. Seems you have your hands full.”

  That and her brain. The man had read her like a phone book. Ellie concentrated on smoothing her napkin across her lap, wishing she could make her thoughts as blank as the white paper.

  Dalton dished up the food, giving each of them generous portions. Ellie dug in, thinking she wasn’t that hungry—since Sabrina had been born, she’d barely had time to sleep, never mind eat—but as soon as the food hit her palate, her hunger awakened, and she had cleaned her plate in record time, even working one-handed, and having to avoid a curious baby with waving fists.

  “Your mother would be proud,” Dalton said, giving her another of his teasing glances. “Not a bite left.”

  Heat filled her cheeks. Geez, she’d eaten even faster than Dalton had. “Half the time, I’m too busy to eat or too tired to cook anything. And when I do get a chance to eat, it’s very rarely junk food.”

  “Well then, welcome to my world. It’s all junk food, all the time.”

  “That explains it,” she said quietly, nuzzling Sabrina’s fuzz of hair.

  “Explains what?”

  “Why your happiness quotient is near zero. You’re probably deficient in every major vitamin and mineral.”

  He pressed a hand to his chest, mocking a swoon. “Oh, Ellie. I didn’t know you cared.”

  “I just don’t want you having a heart attack in the middle of a diaper change.”

  He grinned.

  She hadn’t started to care about him, not even after he’d opened that little mysterious window this afternoon, she told herself. He was still, for all intents and purposes, a stranger. Granted, a stranger who had awakened a growing attraction inside her, but a man she barely knew all the same.

  Either way, Dalton represented a complication and Ellie definitely didn’t need one of those.

  Sabrina started to squirm and fuss, so Ellie put her down on the blanket. Bri popped her head up, studying Dalton with wide eyes and a drooly, happy mouth. She had her little fists propped beneath her chest, as if she were to crawl away at any second. “Ba-ba-ba.”

  “Don’t be thinking I’m going to share,” Dalton said, glancing down at her and wagging his sandwich in the baby’s direction.

  She gasped. “You wouldn’t honestly feed her a sandwich, would you?”

  “Even I know babies don’t eat sandwiches.” He rolled his eyes. “Until they’re at le
ast a year old, right, kid?”

  Ellie gasped.

  “Kidding, kidding.”

  “Not so funny.”

  “You need to lighten up a bit, Ellie. Get some stress off.”

  “Easy for you to say. You work at home.”

  “Yeah, well, my job is not as unstressful as it looks.” He took another bite of sandwich, effectively ending the subject. Dalton rested one arm across his knee and watched the kids playing for a moment. “So what made you go into this TV thing? You don’t seem to like it much. I mean, I know you got promoted and all that. But what made you choose that field?”

  “Why are you so interested? Last I checked you were pretty busy putting up those personal No Trespassing signs.” Earlier today, she’d been glad for those. Staying impersonal kept the two of them from getting any closer—the best choice for her for now, and for the foreseeable future.

  Even if he’d piqued her curiosity a minute ago. But she wasn’t going to go there. Wasn’t going to ask Dalton questions she couldn’t answer for herself.

  He quirked a half grin at her. “Sorry. Occupational hazard. Always trying to figure out what makes people tick.”

  She dug at her potato salad, picking at the remains on the plate, but finding nothing much to eat. “As clichéd as it sounds, I thought I could make a difference. That something I would produce would actually be important. I mean, it’s what I went to college for, when I got a journalism degree. I didn’t really envision going into television, but once I got there, I thought maybe I could produce a show that would…”

  “Change the world?”

  She shrugged. “Yeah. How naïve is that?” It had been a crazy dream. One of those college idealistic ones that everyone who graduates seems to have—and she’d been foolish enough to hold on to for way too long.

  “Not so naïve.” He shrugged. “I know the feeling.”

  “You mean you wanted to do the same with your books?”

  He got to his feet, crumpling his paper plate into a ball. “Thanks for bringing the food. Sometimes when I’m deep into the writing, I forget to eat, so that was a good idea.” He crossed to one of the trash cans and tossed the ball into the wooden rimmed barrel.

  Another avoidance of a topic. Ellie told herself she didn’t care. She wasn’t here to get to know him. She wasn’t, in fact, here for some extended vacation, either. She’d been at the park long enough, soaking up the sun, and allowing Sabrina to enjoy some time with her mother.

  Before she got back to work.

  While Bri rolled around on the blanket, and wriggled from one side to the other, cooing and gurgling while she moved, Ellie packed up the food. She replaced everything in the cooler, then loaded it into the stroller. Finally, she picked up Sabrina and strapped her into the seat, handing the baby a rattle as she did. The baby kicked happily, a wide grin on her face. “Enjoyed that, didn’t you?”

  Sabrina cooed.

  “Maybe I finally found the key to you and I getting along, huh? If that’s the case, we’ll have to come back,” Ellie said. Soon, she vowed. Soon.

  Somehow, she’d find the time to add more trips to the park. To add more sunshine. More picnics. She’d find a way to make this balance even out more in Sabrina’s favor. She had to.

  This afternoon’s temporary arrangement with Dalton, for all the complications it brought with Dalton himself, had had that added bonus of giving Ellie the gift of time with her daughter. She’d have to remember to thank him. When he was far away from her—so she wasn’t tempted to kiss him like she had been just a little while ago.

  Before she could reach for the blanket, Dalton was there, the folded cloth in his hands. He gave it to her, his larger palm brushing against hers as he did. A surge ran through her veins, telling herself distance was, indeed, the best choice all around. Except she’d had the brilliant idea of working inside his house, and distance wasn’t exactly easy to come by when she was sharing twenty-eight hundred square feet of space with the man.

  “Leaving already?” he asked.

  “I have to get back to your house and get some more work done.” She sighed. “As it is they’re probably sending out a search party, since my cell phone has been off for so long.”

  “Well, you did keep up your end of the bargain,” Dalton said. “Let me go back to watching the kid for a while, and you can come back out of hiding.” He put his hands on the stroller and started pushing. Bri kept on kicking and cooing, happy to be moving and walking.

  “Thank you.”

  He shrugged. “Just doing my job.”

  Every once in awhile, he did something like that and totally surprised her. She didn’t get it. Either he hated being a babysitter or not. Disliked being around kids or he didn’t. And what caused him to sometimes step in, without being asked, and just take over like that?

  Whatever it was, she shouldn’t question Dalton’s motives, Ellie decided, as she powered up her cell phone.

  Because there were eight messages waiting for her. Telling her she may have gotten a slight respite, but she was going to pay for those moments. And therefore find herself even further behind—and further away from Sabrina and her ultimate goal than ever before.

  What on earth possessed him to do these things?

  Five minutes ago, he was hands-off, belly full, ready to head home, and avoid Ellie and this whole thing the rest of the day. Tell Ellie she could use his house as a home office, as long as she left him alone.

  But then she’d gone and become relatable for Pete’s sake, and something in his heart had cracked open.

  For a man who didn’t think his heart was capable of cracking open—at least not ever again—that was a new feeling. And not one he was sure he welcomed.

  So here he found himself doing, of all things, pushing a baby stroller down the street. If his mother could see him now, she’d probably break out the video camera and start filling the family photo album to mark the occasion.

  The kid kept looking up at him through the clear square peek-hole of the stroller’s sunshade, as if she wanted to keep making sure it was really Dalton behind the wheel. Her blue eyes looked like little saucers, accented by rosy apple cheeks. “What are you looking at?” he said, but his voice had lost its gruff edge.

  Must have been all that potato salad.

  Ellie had fallen a few steps behind, working her cell phone, her voice as busy as her fingers. That left him and the kid alone. Geez. All he needed now was a Golden Retriever and this would be the perfect family set-up.

  He cast a glance over his shoulder at Ellie and caught her watching the kid while she talked. Every time she looked at her baby, her face softened. Not like melting ice cream, Dalton thought, searching for the right description, but like—

  Like silk settling over diamonds. Every hard surface became smooth, everything about her—everything which was already beautiful—became even more beautiful.

  His pulse sputtered, his breath caught.

  He had the sudden urge to stop right there, right in the center of Elm Street, and start writing, to try to capture every word of the way she looked. The way her heart had been written across her features.

  But of course he couldn’t do that. For one, he had nothing with him to write with. And for another, Ellie—and all the neighbors who were out weeding their gardens or tending their lawns—would undoubtedly think the reclusive author was even more crazy than they’d already rumored him to be.

  So he spun back around and started pushing the stroller a little faster. Get back to his house, and get back to his office. Then he could try to capture those words—in private. Where he liked to be. All this being around people stuff was overrated.

  “Out for a power walk today, or what?” Ellie asked, catching up to him with a light jog.

  “Just thought it would be easier for you to work if we were back at my house.”

  “Actually…” Ellie gave him a hopeful smile. “It turns out my boss decided on a drinks meeting tonight with the head brass about
next week’s show, and he’s made it mandatory that I attend. Would you mind terribly watching Sabrina for a little while longer? I’ll pay you for the overtime.”

  On his own? With the kid again? Every time he seemed to come close of ridding himself of this kid, he got suckered into keeping her.

  But this time he was stronger. And Ellie wasn’t crying. He was putting his foot down, and saying no. “No can do. I don’t need the money. What I need is to work on my book.”

  Ellie thought a second. “What if I sweeten the pot?”

  They’d arrived at the front of his house. Dalton opened the door and stepped inside, helping her wrangle the stroller over the threshold, before speaking again. He had to take a second to absorb those words, because a whole lot of ideas about how exactly she could sweeten the pot were racing through his mind—and they were probably not at all what Ellie had in mind. It had to be all that sunshine, coupled with that insane moment back on the bench when he’d almost kissed her. “And how do you propose to do that?”

  “I stop for groceries on the way back and make you a proper dinner. I saw—and dined on—the contents of your refrigerator. That’s no way for a human to live. So I was thinking—” she clasped her hands together “—how does homemade spaghetti and meatballs sound?”

  Ellie here. In his kitchen, making him dinner. How did that sound?

  Like having heaven walk in his front door.

  “Depends,” he said. “What do you call homemade?”

  “Made from scratch. Everything.”

  His mouth began to water. When was the last time he’d had a homemade meal? Since he’d left home at nineteen…he could probably count on one hand the number of homemade meals he’d had that hadn’t come at his mother’s dining table during a holiday.

  “Is there a dessert involved in this offer?”

  “Are you accepting?”

  His stomach made the response before his better sense could. “As long as you don’t believe in parmesan cheese that comes out of a can, I’m all yours.”

  CHAPTER FIVE