Table of Contents
Cover Page
Excerpt
Dearreader
Title Page
A funny thing happened…
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Copyright
“What’s wrong with him?” Laura shouted.
“I don’t know,” Grant answered, obviously agitated. “Maybe he just woke up to find himself lying in a drawer with a couple of giant strangers standing over him. Hell, I’d scream.”
Laura wrung her hands. “Oh my God, what are we going to do?”
“Panic’s good,” Grant complained, still holding the child out in front of him as if the baby were a live hand grenade…with the pin already pulled. “Here—” He transferred Tucker to Laura’s arms. “You try. Maybe he wants his mother.”
Laura jostled and rocked the little boy, but Tucker only screamed louder and pushed against her. “Take him. He hates me,” she cried frantically as she juggled struggling baby limbs.
Grant swiftly drew the screaming little boy into his arms, then held him to his heart, rocking him. And this time…it worked. The baby instantly quieted.
“It’s true. He does hate—”
“Shhh!” Grant warned, waving a hand at her from under the baby’s bottom. “Look—” He pointed with that same hand. “He’s almost asleep.”
Darned if he wasn’t right. The baby actually seemed to like Grant. So where did that leave her?
Dear Reader,
I have some very exciting news! In May of this year, we are launching a great new series called Harlequin Duets.
Harlequin Duets will offer two brand-new novels in one book for one low price. You will continue enjoying wonderful romantic comedy-type stories from more of the authors you’ve come to love! The two Harlequin Duets novels to be published every month will each contain two stories, creating four wonderful reading experiences each month. We’re bringing you twice as much fun and romance with Harlequin Duets!
This month Cheryl Anne Porter delights us with FROM HERE TO MATERNITY, part of our Right Stork, Wrong Address miniseries. Up-and-coming ad exec Laura Sloan is in over her head when she finds an abandoned baby in her office, and her first love on her doorstep. Suddenly she’s got two males to contend with—and she hasn’t got a clue what to do with either one of them! Also out this month is Lois Greiman’s dangerously funny HIS BODYGUARD. It’s not very often a macho hero is forced to hire a female bodyguard. Watch the fireworks as Nathan Fox is charmed and captivated by petite, curvaceous Brittany O’Shay—and deeply chagrined when she does, in fact, save his life.
Once again, I hope you enjoy Love & Laughter. And don’t forget to look for Harlequin Duets, on sale in April!
Humorously yours,
Malle Vallik
Associate Senior Editor
From Here to Maternity
Cheryl Anne Porter
A funny thing happened…
Harlequin could not have picked a better time to ask me to write a story with a baby in it. My precious baby grandson, T.J., had just participated as a model in a photo shoot for a nationwide ad campaign. And, as the star-in-training’s grandmother, I tagged along. As I watched T.J. and all the other babies being…well, babies, and the adults being…well, completely unstrung as the day wore on, an idea came to me. A really funny idea—especially since my friend was the VP ad exec in charge of the shoot. A single, childless VP ad exec, I might add, who ended up offering the tiny tots large sums of money and fancy cars to cooperate.
They say that truth is stranger than fiction, and with children involved, it can get pretty strange. And funny. I hope this story makes you chuckle (but not too loudly, you’ll wake the baby).
Cheryl Anne Porter
To T.J. Porter, my little star baby.
And to all the fun people at Curtin and Pease.
You know who you are!
1
“YOU’RE NOT going to like this, boss. We have a problem.”
Laura tensed, her insides curdling with dread. She looked up from the clutter on her desk to see David, her hotshot, five-years-younger-than-her creative director, standing in the doorway…and grinning. Never a good sign. She sighed and stood up. “Is it a Grant Maguire problem?”
“No.” He followed this with a frown and added, “Well, not exactly…” Laura started to bolt. “Wait! He’s not here,” David promised, his hand raised. Laura flopped onto her seat and sent David her best baleful expression. His grin returned. “Come on, Laura, what gives? You’ve had Maguire’s account for a month. And you’ve avoided him from day one. I mean, he is the new marketing director for Tucker the Bear. How long do you think you can keep dodging him?”
Laura’s shrug accentuated her determination—okay, irrational stubbornness—on the Grant Maguire issue. “How long is eternity?”
David chuckled. “Eternity. Wow. You really don’t want to see him.”
“No. And I really don’t want to talk about him, either.” Laura realized she was sulking, a very unadvertising-executive thing to do. She sucked her bottom lip in and tried to look suitably threatening.
It was lost on David. He raised his hands in an I-give-you-win gesture, then laughed. “Fine. You’re the boss. It’s refreshing to see at least one female around here who isn’t praying to catch just one more glimpse of him.”
Laura tried to act flippant. “Yeah, well, give him his due. Not every guy makes the cover of Celebrity magazine as the world’s most eligible bachelor.”
“And here you can’t get away from him fast enough.”
A grin—Laura feared a sickly one—reflected her somersaulting emotions. “Call me crazy.”
David shook his head. “I don’t think so. You can cause my checks not to be signed.”
Laura couldn’t help chuckling at that. “So, David, what is this ‘not exactly a Grant Maguire problem’? And by the way, whatever it is, I already hate him—it. The problem.”
“Not as much as you’re going to,” David assured her as he crossed her office and slouched comfortably on one of the leather-upholstered chairs facing her desk. Apparently he hadn’t caught her him-it slip. She knew the turkey would’ve called her on it. “So. Are you busy?”
“Are you kidding?” Laura stared at him and then dramatically slumped over her desk. With her cheek pressed against her work and her hair covering her face, her words were muffled. “Ad proofs. Media schedules. Marketing plans. Client files. Art boards. All needing approval yesterday, David. But no, I’m not busy. And it is only six o’clock.”
“All right. I get it.”
“Good. So, how big is this problem?”
“Baby size.”
Laura lay there a second, thinking and blinking, and then sat up, shoving her hair back and staring at David. “Baby size…as in it’s a little problem, not a giant problem? Or baby size as in a problem with a baby?”
“B. A problem with a baby.”
Laura stiffened, gripping the edge of her desk, again ready to jump up and jet out the door. “Why are we sitting here discussing Grant Maguire if something’s wrong with one of the models? Talk to me. Problem how? Problem hurt? Problem missing?” Like neon signs, her thoughts flashed, Lawsuit, lawsuit.
“Relax. Not hurt. Not missing,” David answered.
She relaxed…some. “Okay. Good. But I thought all the babies and their parents went home.” When David didn’t answer, dread filled Laura. “David, tell me they all went home.”
He shrugged. “Can’t. There’s still one here. No mama. No papa. No note. The tale
nt agency says he’s not theirs. We have no release on him. Steve doesn’t remember taking shots of him. No one saw him come in. Or get carried in, I guess, since he doesn’t look to be more than eight or nine months old. Anyway, he’s just here. Him and his infant carrier. And we don’t know why.”
Frozen in place, Laura gripped the armrests of her chair and stared at David as long and wordless moments passed. “My stomach hurts.”
“It’s supposed to,” David assured her. “It comes with the title on your door.” He pointed to the Vice President etched into the brass plate there.
Laura ignored him. “Just how did this baby thing happen?”
“Beats me. I guess in all the craziness, with eight babies and their mothers here all day for the Tucker the Bear photo shoot, someone just slipped in with him…and then left. Pretty cold, huh?”
“Yeah. I’d say. David, this is awful.”
“I know. Who’d do something like this?”
“Somebody desperate, no doubt Where is he now? The baby, I mean.”
“With Michelle. In her office. But she has to go, so she sent me to get you. Something about her wedding dress or the cake. It doesn’t fit or doesn’t taste good. Who knows? Anyway, she’s in a full-blown bride tizzy.”
Laura grimaced. “Great. Anything else I should know?”
“Yeah. But I can’t tell you. Because it’s one of those you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it things.”
Laura exhaled loudly. “David, you’ve heard about my family. My entire life has to be seen to be believed. So just tell me what it is.”
“Uh-uh. Nice try.” David chuckled. “Gotta see it to believe it, boss.”
Laura wrinkled her nose. “Fine. Then we’d better get down there.” She stood. David followed suit. Then, from out of nowhere—well, maybe from somewhere deep inside Laura’s secret self—came a wistful thought. “Michelle’s wedding. That poor kid. The whole thing is making her nuts. I’m just glad—for her—that it’s in a few weeks. I know if it was me, I’d elope and be done with it.”
I’d elope and be done with it? Me? Married? Ha! But an unguarded emotion accompanied Laura’s denial and clutched at her heart, forcing her to be honest with herself.. Lately—okay, Grant-back-in-her-professional-life lately—she’d found her thoughts…well, lingering on Michelle’s upcoming wedding. Did she, Laura Elizabeth Sloan, want all those things, too? The excitement. Grant. Love. Grant. A promise of fulfillment. Grant. Someone to share her life with. Grant. The prospect of a family. With Grant. Sex. With Grant.
Sighing, almost unaware that she had, Laura’s gaze drifted to the picture window behind David. He turned, too, apparently interpreting her flash of solemnity as weather worry. “Looks nasty, huh?”
“Yes. It does,” Laura murmured. And she was right. It did. Heavy gray clouds crept over Manhattan’s late Tuesday afternoon, jagged, building-punctured skyline. Then again, and unbidden, she returned to her thoughts of Grant. Of commitments. And forevers. And…every wonderful thing she could never have with him. That was the real reason she’d been avoiding the man. Why, after all, why should she subject herself to the torture of seeing him and of loving—Stop it, Laura.
Yes. Stop it. She stiffened, trying to put out of her mind how the thought that Grant was back in her life, even if only professionally, moved her soul, stirred her heart…and made her body ache for him. For his touch. In fact, if she sat back and relaxed a moment, if she thought back to her college days, ten years gone, she was almost sure she could feel his hands on her, stroking her skin, his mouth moving over her…Laura jerked to the moment. Her eyes widened. Her heart pounded. What was she doing?
Fearing her inner lustings may have shown on her face, Laura glanced at David. He stared at the approaching weather. Laura exhaled, relaxed and forced her Grant yearning to its tiny little pigeonhole in her mind. Filed it under Don’t Even Think About It. Then she directed her professional attention to David. “All right, down to business. We can’t keep a baby here. So, what do we do with it?”
David raised his eyebrows. “We? Oh, no. I’m not the VP ad exec. You are. Cohn and Draper pays you the big bucks. Not me. I’m just the messenger. So…see ya, hate to be ya.” He crossed her office with a stiff-legged, determined stride. He rounded the corner and made for the long hall that led to Nancy at the front desk and the bank of elevators across from her.
Only then did the fact that he was wearing his overcoat imprint itself on Laura’s consciousness. The man was bailing. Laura called out, “Oh, no, you don’t. Get back here.” But he didn’t. Already up and skirting her desk, Laura chased after him. “Don’t leave me here with a baby. They’re not safe around me. My own mother wouldn’t leave my brothers and sisters with me, David. Our baby-sitter used to be the people at nine-one-one. Wait!”
But he didn’t. He did, however, call over his shoulder, “Don’t worry about it. You’re a female. It should come naturally.”
“But it won’t,” Laura yelled, stopping outside her office, refusing to participate in an undignified chase down the hall. From the doorway, she insisted—rather loudly—“I hurt little kids.”
As if on cue, doors up and down the corridor opened. And out poured Cohn and Drapers’ finest. All homeward bound and downright shocked as they stopped and stared Laura’s Tucker the Bear baby-products account-executive way. A furious heat of embarrassment flushed Laura’s cheeks, made all the worse, she knew, by her fair Irish complexion.
“Well…I don’t hurt them. Not on purpose…” She immediately began dissembling. “Hurt’s probably not the right word, anyway. Accident is. Yes. Accident. Things just happen with me and kids.” She began backing into her office. “Of course, that whole toilet thing with my sister was just that, an accident. And her foot healed. How she got it stuck in there, I don’t know. We were—Well, it’s not important Besides, you’d hardly notice her limp today.”
Safely over the threshold, Laura firmly closed the door in her own face. And then she stood there, staring at it. The way she saw it, she had two choices. Live out the remainder of her life behind this closed door. Or open it and face the world. Okay. Door number two. Taking a deep breath, she gripped the doorknob, turned it, opened the door and strode down the emptying hallway, executively in control and determined to get to the bottom of this.
“You’re a female. It should come naturally.” Ha. As if, she fumed as she wandered through the agency’s hallways until she arrived at Michelle’s office.
Blond, slender, softly feminine, Michelle sat with her back to the doorway, totally engrossed with an infant carrier, in which—Laura took two carpet-muffled steps to her right—resided an infant. A black-haired, blue-eyed bundle of…what had David said? A boy? Laura checked the baby’s outfit Yep, a boy, judging by its—his—blue sleeper with a…
Laura gasped. She knew what David’s “something you have to see to believe” was. Tucker the Bear. The baby had a Tucker the Bear logo on the front of his clothes. Grant Maguire’s new Tucker the Bear design. Not the old one. The new one that was still and only an artist’s rendering on her desk. One that hadn’t been perfected yet, much less approved. A prototype that wasn’t on clothing, in stores, at factories or adorning anything yet.
Except this baby’s sleeper. So here she was, staring at a virtual impossibility. Because she and her team had just come up with the design a week ago and were still in the process of checking it against all licenses. And she hadn’t even run it by the client—again, Grant Maguire—yet. So how’d—?
Wait a minute. Laura narrowed her eyes in a squint of confusion even as a chill ran over her skin. What was going on here? Was this someone’s idea of a joke? And who was this kid? Or better yet, whose kid was he? Laura lowered her hand, focusing her gaze on the child. The baby in question was grinning and chortling at Michelle. No wonder. She was cooing and tickling him and saying, “Hey, little sweetie. How are you, huh? Where’s your mommy?”
As luck or cruel fate would have it, at that instant the baby turned t
o Laura, waving a chubby fist in her direction…as if to name her as his parent. As yet unnoticed by Michelle, Laura flitted out of view and gave in to a weak and sweaty feeling. This is not happening, she firmly told herself. When I step back inside, that baby and his Tucker the Bear will be gone, and none of this will be happening.
Laura resolutely stepped back inside. Not only was the cherubic little boy still there, but he was again looking at her, his blue eyes clear and alert. He blinked and smiled and waved his arms animatedly. Apparently noticing the direction of the baby’s gaze, Michelle pivoted, saw Laura and smiled. “Hey, there you are.”
“No, I’m not,” Laura assured her…then heard herself. “Well, I mean, yes I am here. Only I’m not his mother.”
Michelle pulled back, chuckling, giving Laura a what’s-wrong-with-you look. “Well, who didn’t know that? We all know how much you like babies,” she teased.
Laura’s face heated with guilt. “I avoid them for their own safety, Michelle. They’re just better off not being anywhere in my vicinity, trust me.”
“Oh, please. I don’t believe all those wild stories you tell about growing up with all those brothers and sisters.” When Laura grinned and shrugged, Michelle rolled her eyes at her boss. Then she turned to the little boy in the carrier and pointed at him. “Isn’t he adorable? He’s the sweetest little guy. And look. He’s wearing the new Tucker the Bear design.”
Laura was frowning when Michelle turned her way. Her art director’s light brown eyes were questioning. “Did I miss a meeting, Laura? I mean, how did this logo get on here? The last I heard, we hadn’t even gotten client approval. And yet here it is.”
From Here To Maternity Page 1
