My Best Friend's Baby

by Lisa Plumley

  He blinked. They were all still there. Only Chloe would think to walk her hamster.

  They turned the corner and disappeared from sight. He really ought to take advantage of her absence and get some work done, Nick told himself. Somehow, his feet started down the sidewalk anyway.

  “Hiya, Nick!” Chloe yelled to him over her shoulder as he approached, almost as though she’d sensed him coming up behind her—or known he’d follow. Her breath panted out in measured whooshes, keeping pace with her strides. “Whatsa matter? Can’t keep up with a girl with a bun in the oven?”

  She didn’t even slow down. In fact, she sped up a little, making her behind wiggle enticingly. Nick doubted she realized it.

  And wished he hadn’t. What was the matter with him? He was ogling his best friend like one of her hapless lust-crazed Brunos.

  Lucky lust-crazed Brunos was more like it, some aching part of him whispered. Shut up, Nick told himself, putting thoughts of Chloe’s wiggle firmly out of his mind. It wasn’t easy. Somehow, ever since he’d learned about her pregnancy, those… fantasy episodes … about Chloe had become more and more frequent. It was becoming impossible to see his pal as just a pal, when every glance at her gently curved belly reminded him she was a sensual woman, too.

  Frowning, Nick clamped the lid on his libido and caught up with her in few jogged steps—it wasn’t for nothing he ran five miles around the Saguaro Vista High track every morning—and matched her pace.

  “I can keep up with you,” he said, grinning at the exaggerated way she pumped her arms at Rock-Em-Sock-Em Robot angles. “It’s Larry I’m worried about. He looks ready for a milkbone and a doggie Gatorade.”

  She stopped and wiped a trickle of gleaming perspiration from her neck. “Do you think so? It is pretty hot out here.”

  Giving Larry a worried frown, Chloe crouched beside him and stroked between his ears, working one-handed at the plastic squeeze bottle strapped to her waist. “I didn’t mean to wear you out, boy. Maybe you do need a sports drink to keep up your strength, if we’re going to keep up this exercise routine.”

  She aimed a squirt of bottled water between Larry’s sharp canine teeth, then straightened while he licked his muzzle. “Doggie Gatorade is a good idea,” she told Nick. “It would be better than plain water, at least for long walks. For replacing electrolytes and things.”

  “And you’d be just crazy enough to try it.”

  She frowned and stuck out her tongue at him.

  Larry, apparently feeling refreshed, wagged and walked circles around Chloe as they talked. The auto-wind leash spun out more and more line, creating a frayed purple web around her white pom-pommed sweat socks and sneakers.

  “Crazy in a good way,” Nick elaborated with a grin as she raised the bottle to her mouth and sucked down some water for herself. He watched her lips pucker around the bottle top, and then made himself look away. He’d never envied a hunk of plastic before.

  “I think you’d do almost anything to take care of your menagerie here,” he said when she’d finished, mostly to distract himself from the surprisingly erotic sight of her tongue depressing the bottle’s snap top. “Even tote along Gatorade for Larry.”

  “But a dog’s physiology is completely different than a person’s, Nick,” Chloe said, stepping out of the middle of Larry’s twisted leash with a grace that bespoke frequent practice. She straightened her flowery baseball cap, lassoed the dog, and started walking again. “I’m afraid a sports drink formulated for people wouldn’t be good for him. Too bad, though.”

  Too bad he’d brought it up, that is. He hadn’t expected a twenty-minute heart-to-heart about something that didn’t even exist. “Actually,” Nick said, “I was only kidding.”

  She blushed and darted a glance at him—

  “Oh. Oh—oh—oh!”

  —and stumbled as Larry yapped and took off at a barking run more befitting a greyhound than a low-rider beagle, dragging Chloe behind him.

  “Chloe!” Nick chased after her, cursing the stupid leash that kept her attached to her maniac dog. She yanked on it, fighting for control, but Larry just kept on running, tail low and claws clicking sharply on the sidewalk as he gained ground. The object of his frenzy was in sight, and he scampered hard on his stubby legs to reach it.

  The postal worker walking blithely toward them didn’t know what was about to hit him—but Chloe did.

  “Look out!” she screamed, pulling harder.

  The carrier looked. His eyes bulged. His legs—bared and extra vulnerable in his summertime uniform of jacket and dark shorts—churned to get him onto the nearest front porch. He scrambled onto the porch rail, leaving his legs to dangle like two enormous doggie treats, and dug into his mail bag for something.

  No letter delivery was that urgent. A sick feeling in Nick’s stomach made him run faster, just as the mail carrier pulled a long slender canister from his bag.

  “Nooo!” Chloe screamed, recognizing what it was.

  Nick recognized it, too. Pepper spray. He’d seen it used once before, on a stray pit bull that had gone after the newspaper deliverer. The ferocious dog had run off whimpering with its tail between its legs after just one squirt. There was no telling what the stuff would do to poor runty Larry.

  “Nick, help!” Chloe yelled. She turned her head to look back at him, both hands pulling her rasping, choking dog away from the postman’s perch. Larry might have been a two-foot beagle, but he had the heart and soul of a Doberman pincer.

  Nick left the sidewalk and headed for the house’s walk where Chloe struggled with her dog. Landscape gravel crunched beneath his feet, and at the same time a curious whine reached him. It sounded like . . the ping of a tuneless guitar string pulled and released, or a tight-stretched clothesline about to break.

  Or a dog’s leash about to snap.

  A glance at Larry’s frayed leash confirmed his guess. Another few seconds, and he’d be free to commit a doggie death leap. Chloe wouldn’t be able to do a thing to stop him.

  She screamed, staring with horror at something just behind Nick. “No, wait!” she yelled, pointing. “Get Curly!”

  Nick looked where she pointed. Curly’s ball-shaped exerciser plunked off the sloped sidewalk onto the street, spinning like mad. Inside, the hamster’s furry shape was just distinguishable. Deprived of his focus on Chloe’s heels, he’d steered himself right off their route—and straight into the path of an oncoming pickup truck.

  Larry barked. Nick glanced his way and saw the beagle lunge forward. His leash, still intact, slithered through Chloe’s hands. She jerked forward like a puppet, held by the leash holder attached to her waist.

  The pickup truck revved closer, gaining ground on Curly’s hot pink exercise ball.

  Nick lunged sideways. Gravel spewed beneath his feet, then the world jogged up and down as he left the smooth sidewalk for the street below. Hot asphalt rose to meet him, smelling of tar and engine oil. A flash of pink rolled just past his fingertips—Curly’s exercise ball. He’d be damned if the stupid hamster wasn’t trying to get himself squished on purpose, just to avoid walking the equivalent of a million more hamster miles with Chloe.

  “Niiiiiick,” she cried. “Hurry!”

  He scooped up the ball, cradling it like a running back going for the game-ending touchdown. The pickup truck rumbled past in a blast of hot air and exhaust fumes, then kept on down the road, its driver plainly oblivious to the man and hamster he’d almost flattened.

  Heart pounding, Nick straightened. “Good thing I got you,” he told Curly between breaths. “Next time you want to go AWOL, just roll into the bushes and hide, okay?”

  Curly stuck his furry hamster snout up to the air vents carved into his exercise ball and sniffed. Nick could almost understand the little runt’s appeal … until Curly bit him.

  “Ouch!”

  “Niiiiick! I can’t hold on much longer!”

  He turned. Chloe sprawled facedown, half across their neighbor’s sidewalk and half across the a
rtfully-graveled yard. Her arm stretched forward, her hand maintaining a desperate, wobbly clench on Larry’s leash as she tried to pull him back. The mail carrier squinted down at them both, pepper spray at the ready, poised to shoot from his porch railing if need be. It looked like a stand-off—unless Larry managed to break his leash.

  And all of it with Chloe in the middle.

  Nick didn’t remember getting there, but the next thing he knew, he was hunkered down beside Larry’s growling, stiff-spined body, trying to talk him down. Paying no heed, the dog went on staring down his postal quarry, his white and black spotted fur bristling straight up. It was enough to make the hair stand up at the nape of Nick’s neck, too. Stark, unreasoning terror made his gut clench. It didn’t take a veterinary genius to spot the signs of a pissed-off, territorial doggie defender.

  Only a lunatic would get in Cujo’s way. Guess what that makes me? Nick thought as Larry’s rumbling growl got louder. The dog’s lip lifted to expose several pointy, vicious teeth. Nick’s gaze met Chloe’s; only briefly, but it was enough to tell him what he needed to know. She was depending on him.

  He put Curly down in the gravel, where he couldn’t roll far, and edged closer. “Don’t try anything stupid,” he warned Larry as he scooped up all fifty squirming pounds of him. “I’m way too tough to make a good doggie treat.”

  In his arms, Larry’s body vibrated with a fresh growl. Luckily, it was still aimed at the postman, not at him. “Go on,” Nick yelled to the mail carrier. Groaning beneath the dog’s weight, he stepped back to let some slack into the leash and looked Mr. Pepper Spray in the eye. “I’ve got him. You can put that stuff away now.”

  The postman eyed him suspiciously. As though egged on by the mail carrier’s blatant distrust, Larry morphed into Superdog in Nick’s arms, lurching hard to get free. Then the postman got wise and put away his pepper spray, Chloe got to her feet, and everything turned right with the world.

  “Oh, Nick!” She leapt toward him, enfolding both him and Larry in a bone-crushing hug. The dog squirmed, trying to lick her face. “Thank you! You saved us.”

  Her gaze shifted to Curly, rolling his exercise ball uselessly atop a patch of volcanic rock gravel, then upward again. “You saved us all.”

  Sure, Nick thought, gazing down into her shining eyes. The way she looked at him made him feel ten feet tall, like the greatest hero ever conceived of. And I saved myself right into your arms. What was he, nuts?

  Chloe’s flowered baseball cap was askew, her hair damp at the ends and clinging to her neck, her outrageous lipstick mostly melted away by the Arizona afternoon and her fluttery eyelashes devoid of mascara and whatever other girly gunk she usually used. She looked wrung out.

  She looked gorgeous.

  And he was a goner.

  Where the hell had that thought come from? Nick shook it out of his head. Clearly a case of testosterone talking. It had to be, because he was Chloe’s platonic male friend and nothing else. Nothing else, because her romantic side belonged to a mysterious marine named Bruno. The reminder snipped the last strand of his already wire-thin patience.

  “Well, you damn well needed saving,” Nick said, scowling. “What the hell were you thinking, anyway, taking your whole stupid menagerie out for a walk like that?”

  Chloe backed up. The sunlight left her eyes, but he couldn’t let that deter him. She’d get over being mad at him. She might not get over the next ditzy stunt she decided to pull.

  “You could’ve broken your neck!”

  “You’re right. Curly could’ve gotten—” Her voice broke, and she tried again. “Larry might have been hurt, or—”

  “You might have been hurt! What’s it going to take to knock some sense into you? Because, God knows, your baby hasn’t accomplished that miracle yet.”

  Her hands went to her belly, cradling the child within. He doubted she was even aware of it—or of the tears that shimmered in her elfin eyes. “That’s not fair, Nick. You don’t know—”

  “Don’t know what?” he interrupted. “Don’t know why you don’t get some help?”

  Larry wriggled in his arms. Frustrated, Nick scanned the neighborhood and saw that the postman had already gotten into his vehicle. Larry would be safe on his own—for the moment. He dumped his dog-breath burden onto the gravel and went on talking.

  “You’re right, Chloe. I don’t know why you insist on being so stubborn that you’d rather risk hurting yourself than ask for help.”

  “I don’t need help.”

  “Ha! That’s a laugh, after today. If I hadn’t—” He glimpsed Larry nudging sideways, casting longing looks toward the sidewalk. “Larry, stay.”

  The dog looked up and cocked his head, seeming at a loss to understand the command. Great, he thought as Larry gave him a tentative tail wag. Even her dog is featherbrained.

  “Stay,” Nick growled.

  “He responds better to kindness,” Chloe said quietly. And so do I, her expression said.

  “Chloe—”

  “Come on, Larry,” she said, her voice quavery. “We—we’ve got a walk to finish. Doctor’s orders.”

  The dog got up—Nick would’ve sworn the mutt rolled his eyes at his ignored ‘stay’ command—then sneezed and sauntered away with Chloe. A definite swagger propelled all four of his doggie legs.

  At least one of the males present had managed to stay in Chloe’s good graces. How could it not be Nick, when he’d done all he could to protect her? It didn’t make sense. Nothing drove him crazy like things not making sense. But it wasn’t illogic that made him call out to her. It was something far less defined and much more irresistible.

  It was the sudden, crazy need to take care of Chloe. To keep her safe and happy. Him. Not one of her Brunos or anybody else. Just him.

  If he’d stopped to think about it, the whole idea would’ve probably scared the hell out of him. But the sight of Chloe swaying down the street—leaving him behind—shook everything else from Nick’s mind.

  “Chloe, wait—”

  She turned. And waited, with a sad look in her eyes that hurt just to see it. It worried him, to see her fighting spirit dampened, even if only for a block or two. Even if only for as long as she needed to power walk out of his sight.

  Frowning, he reached her and, with one hand on her waist, drew her closer to him. She bumped along reluctantly, twisting Larry’s leash from its dispenser between them until they stood toe to toe.

  “Wait,” he whispered.

  She gazed up at him, all sweetness and seduction without even knowing it … and frowned in confusion. “Nick?”

  In her place, he’d be wondering what the hell was up, too. But the combination of her nearness and the realization that his hand fit perfectly into the delicate curve at the small of her back waylaid his explanation. It was as though he’d been born to hold her this way. Damp heat rose through her bright T-shirt to tease his palm, and Nick suddenly itched to slip his hand beneath the fabric and feel her bare skin on his instead. Why hadn’t he ever held her like this before? She felt better than he could’ve imagined.

  “That was a rotten thing I said back there,” Nick murmured, bending his head almost low enough to make their foreheads meet. The scent of her tropical perfume wafted between them, feminine and almost tantalizing enough to make him forget the woman in his arms was Chloe, his best friend. She needed him now—not as another one of her muscle-headed Brunos, but as the voice of reason.

  Damn, but it was hard to be reasonable when her softness surrounded him and the curve of her hip melted into his forearm like it was now. It made him wonder how soft she’d be everywhere else … without eye-popping clothes and a layer of anger between them.

  Only one of those barriers could be dealt with on a city sidewalk in broad daylight. “I’m sorry I said it.”

  “You meant it,” Chloe said matter-of-factly. Her spine straightened against his hand, and he felt her take in a deep breath. “Or else you wouldn’t have said it. I’m a big girl, Nick. I
can handle it.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah!”

  He tightened his hold on her waist. His other hand went to her front and captured the frayed line from Larry’s leash.

  “Well, you can’t handle this.” One sharp tug snapped the line in two.

  Chloe gasped. At her feet, Larry sat down and scratched his paw over his ear, not caring he was technically free to roam wild through the neighborhood. He looked bored with the whole thing.

  Chloe didn’t. She stepped out of his arms and propped her hands on her hips. The old Chloe was back, and she was mad.

  “What’s that supposed to prove? That you’re some big he-man who can snap a couple inches of leash line? Sorry, not impressed.”

  She wheeled around. Nick grabbed her elbow and yanked her back. “It proves you can’t handle things as well as you think you can,” he said, letting the remainder of the leash spool back into the holder. How could she be so stubborn, so blind to the facts?

  “It’s just a broken leash!” she said, waving her arm.

  “You’re right. And this—” He put his hand to the curve of her belly, felt the warmth and life within her. “—is just a baby. Your baby.”

  She went still, paled and pressed her hand over his. “Don’t do this, Nick. Please, I—”

  “You need help, Chloe. Have you told Brutus—”

  “Bruno.”

  “—about the baby yet? Because he has a responsibility to fulfill. He should take care of you, marry you, do whatever it takes.” At her mournful look, Nick rubbed his thumb gently over her belly and went on. “I’m warning you, Chloe. If you won’t make sure you’re taken care of … I will.”

  Chapter Six

  He’d take care of her? What in the world did he mean?

  Chloe bit her lip, trying to hold in the surge of joy she felt. Then her elation wavered. The last thing she wanted was for Nick to take care of her out of some antiquated sense of responsibility. Their baby deserved more, and so did she.

  Besides, if Nick really wanted her for himself, why did he have to keep bringing up Bruno? And why now, of all times? The two of them were near enough to tango, close enough to kiss. A million miles away from the love she’d touched so briefly.