Grant managed to nod. “Well. I guess I gave myself away.” But he didn’t care as a flood tide of relief washed over his heart. The baby wasn’t hers. Not that it was any of his business. Not that he had any right to—Oh, hell, Grant, get over it. “Are you married?”
“No. Are you?”
“No.” That exchange took about one nanosecond to complete. Then Grant stared at her staring at him. And in his mind’s eye, he saw them again, back in college, all naked and tangled in his sheets, saw them all sweaty and—“So. Laura,” he said desperately, his throat all but closing. When had it gotten so damned hot in here? “We’re back to square one. Where did you get him?”
She blinked. “Who?”
And then it was funny. Thankfully funny. She was just as undone as he was. Good. He chuckled and pointed to the child riding her hip. “The baby, silly. Where’d you get the baby?”
“Oh. Him.” She shrugged, sending her straight, strawberry-blond, blunt-cut hair cascading over her shoulders. “That is today’s sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. Apparently, he just dropped out of the sky.”
“Wow. Good catch,” Grant teased. “I mean, what are we…about fifteen floors up?”
A bubble of laughter slipped past Laura’s obvious attempts to squelch her humor. “Ha, ha. It won’t be so funny when you realize that you’re partially liable for him.”
She was right He didn’t think it was funny. Grant cooled, right along with the room. He straightened. “Me? How?”
“Because he was left here sometime today in all the madness with your photo shoot And now he’s an abandoned baby. On your time.”
“Ouch. Not good.”
“No. Not good at all. But beyond that, I have no idea what to do here. And everyone seems to think I should automatically know because I’m female.”
“Nice of them to notice, huh?” he said, as he raked his appreciative gaze up and down her shapely length. Anyone who wasn’t very well aware of that fact was either blind or dead. Or both. But the baby…Hmm, perhaps he had dropped out of the sky. Maybe to help Grant earn a second chance with Laura, something he just now realized he really wanted. Not that he’d orchestrated this. But she’d said it herself—he was as liable for the baby’s welfare as she was. His shoot, her firm. The two of them. Together.
Okay, two birds with one stone—take care of the munchkin until he was reunited with his parents, and at the same time use this opportunity to get close to Laura. It might not work, but he certainly had nothing to lose in trying, did he? The more he thought about it, wasn’t Cupid portrayed as a little boy in diapers? And who was he to thumb his nose at a heaven-sent opportunity? The room began to warm again.
Laura nodded distractedly, bringing him back to the moment. “You never did say what you want here.”
Now he laughed at himself. “That’s another sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. One my father would like for me to answer. And quickly.”
With her free hand, Laura waved away his answer. “I didn’t mean in the larger Maguire bazillion-dollar sense. I meant right now. What do you want?” She hefted the baby on her hip, pointing to the little guy. “I don’t mean to be rude, but as you can see, I’m a little busy right now.”
“I do see. But I just stopped by to—well, it doesn’t matter.” I just stopped by hoping to see you because I can’t help myself. How do you say that after ten years? Ten years after you walked out? Grant poked his hands into his overcoat pockets and focused on the dark pool adorning her skirt. “You might want to change him.”
Completely deadpan, she drawled, “I wish to God I knew with what. You have any ideas?”
Grant grinned, pointing to himself. “You’re asking me for help? After avoiding me for a whole month? You must be desperate.”
She nodded, grimacing. “Pretend I am. And I haven’t been avoiding you. But you’re here now. So what would you suggest?”
Grant grinned. Well, well, well. Let the games begin. “Something dry?”
Laura’s eyebrows slowly raised. “You think?”
Vintage Laura. God, how he’d missed that Grant chuckled as he shrugged out of his overcoat, tossed it over a chair and then…stood there, looking around the cluttered office. Mostly he hoped to spot a fully accessorized nanny, one who might be lurking in a corner and would step forward to rescue all three of them. But when one stubbornly didn’t, he finally settled his gaze on Laura. “All I’ve got is a handkerchief. It’s big and clean, if not absorbent. It might work for a while.”
“A handkerchief? That’s it?”
“Yeah. That and a safety pin, maybe. Or paper clips.”
Finally, Laura got on board. “Hey, good idea,” she blurted, brightening, much to Grant’s delight, as she awkwardly tugged the baby up and out in front of her…at arm’s length. Which apparently tickled the soaked little munchkin pink, judging by his outburst of chortling laughter. Laura looked past him to Grant and said, “I’ll hold him here. You look around for anything we can use. And hurry.”
“Sounds like we’re in a gangster movie. ‘I’ll hold him here, Bugsy. You look around for da goods’,” Grant mimicked, garnering for himself a will-you-hurry-it-up tsking sound from her. “All right, all right Where’s your sense of humor?”
“It fled with the wetness on my skirt, Bugsy. Just find something, please.”
“Yes, ma’am.” With that, Grant hurried around the room, opening drawers, sorting through contents, pushing aside papers, closing drawers, picking up the various tools of an art director’s trade, eyeing them for suitability and generally coming up empty-handed. Finally, he had to turn to Laura and ask, “What am I looking for, again?”
“Darn it, Grant.” She stalked over to him, thrusting the kid into his Armani-suited arms. “Here. See how you like being Mr. Potty Chair. I’ll look for the…stuff. You take his clothes off him before he gets a rash or something.”
“Whoa.” Grant held the sopping baby in front of him much like Laura had. The curly-haired waif eyed him with a disconcerting blue-eyed solemnity that sobered Grant. He said, “Hi, there. How ya doing, champ?”
The baby immediately gave him the Bronx cheer—a wet and resounding round of the raspberries. Startled, Grant looked past the kid to Laura, in time to see her handling the single biggest safety pin on the face of the Earth. “I don’t think he likes me,” he said.
Her attention riveted on the workings of the pin, Laura mumbled, “Yeah, well, I have my own problems with him. He thinks I’m his mother. That shows you what kind of a day we’ve both had.”
Grant raised an eyebrow at the thought of Laura being a mother and considered her slender profile. A renewed awareness of her body’s soft lines, her inviting femininity, so effectively hidden under her power-suit armor, assailed him. It was true. She was such a woman. She’d make a great mother. Suddenly realizing his own libido-warmed thoughts, Grant blinked. Don’t get carried away here. Go slow. Stick to the second-chance scenario, okay? Just remember what happens tomorrow.
Tomorrow. That did it. More than a little disconcerted, Grant sought neutral ground by shifting his attention to the baby. And got a big surprise. The little boy appeared to be—Grant would swear it—assessing him. As if he were waiting on Grant to catch a punch line. Not able to stop himself, Grant asked the tyke, “What?”
But the chubby child blinked his baby blues, and the look was gone, leaving Grant sure he’d imagined that adult awareness in the kid’s eyes. Surely he had. Surely.
“Okay,” Laura cheered, pulling Grant’s attention to her. He watched her walking toward him, her delicateboned movements all fluid grace. But he immediately got over it when his gaze lit on the way she brandished the pointy end of the giant safety pin.
He gave a low whistle, telling the baby, “I’m glad it’s you and not me she’s coming at with that thing. Here. Look for yourself.” As if the baby could understand, Grant turned him to face Laura. “See?” He shifted the boy’s wide-eyed attention back to himself. “Yeah, I know. Listen,
pal, unless she’s changed a lot in the last ten years, you’re in very real danger here. So my advice to you—and it’s totally free—is…call your doctor. And your lawyer.”
“THAT’S REAL FUNNY, Grant,” Laura snapped at the exlove of her life as she tried—again—not to laugh at him. Wasn’t it enough that he exuded sexuality like a cologne? Did he have to be so fun and cooperative, too? Darn it, he’d always gotten around her defenses by being so sensible and by making her laugh. Well, not this time. Instead, she busied herself with gathering up all the clutter from Michelle’s tilted drafting table.
With her urge to chuckle at Grant and thereby warm up to him firmly under control, she directed him, with a pointing gesture, to lay the baby atop the cleared space. Not able to leave well enough alone, she remarked, “And you’re just saying that, about doctors and lawyers, because my mother told you I’m not good with kids.”
“Not good with them?” Grant placed the baby vertically on the table. The tilted table. “That’s like saying Godzilla’s just a big lizard. I think her exact words were—Oops!”
Laura screeched and Grant grabbed for Tucker as he slid into a wet heap at the bottom of the table. Plucking the stiff-limbed baby from the brink of disaster, Grant repeated, “I think her exact words were—” He lay the boy horizontally, only to have him again slide. “Dammit!”
“So far, Grant,” Laura drawled, loving the hard time he was having, “you have my mother saying oops and dammit when talking about me as a mother. While it does sound like her—”
“Meanwhile, Laura, back at the ranch,” Grant interrupted, his eyebrows veeing down over his straight patrician nose, “we need to focus. We’re about to kill this kid. I’ll put him on the carpet, and you can change him there.”
“Me? As if. You’re changing him.”
“No, I’m not. You are. You’re the female, remember.”
Laura brandished the mother of all safety pins at him. “All right, that’s it. That’s three times in less than thirty minutes someone has felt the need to point that out to me. But nice try. And no, I’m not.”
Grinning, Grant raised an eyebrow. “You’re not what? A woman? I think I know differently.”
Heat burst upon Laura’s cheeks. She found she had to look down a moment before meeting his teasing expression. “I meant I’m not going to change him. You are.”
Grant’s eyes widened. “No, I’m not. He’s not my baby.”
“Or mine.”
“Well, you found him. I’m not—”
“Wait a minute,” Laura ordered. “Do you hear us, Grant? Do you? We’re intelligent Ivy Leaguers with university degrees coming out the ying-yang. We run entire companies. And yet we can’t even work together to dry one wet baby bottom. What is wrong with us?”
Grant quirked his mouth, looking so very handsome and boyish as he winked at the frowning baby he held. Then he turned to Laura and said, “I believe your mother said it best. Astonishing ineptitude. Genes didn’t imprint parenthood. Vivian used phrases like that ten years ago when she tried to talk us out of getting married.”
And why did we listen to her? Laura thought. “Imagine my mother counseling anyone not to marry. Mrs. Five Times Down the Aisle.” Then a sudden shyness—all this talk about marriage, she guessed—overtook Laura, surprising her and again warming her cheeks. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d blushed this much. Exasperated, she forced herself to don her “all-business” demeanor and said, “So…you want to try again? Use a little teamwork? I mean, you make baby products, and I advertise them for you. Surely we can figure this out.”
Grant’s tawny eyes warmed. He smiled, first at her and then at the still dangling, incredibly good-natured baby. “Sure,” he told the little boy, then looked to Laura as if to get her second. “Once more with feeling?”
Laura nodded, certain on some level that she was agreeing to much more than a diaper change. “Once more with feeling,” she murmured.
From there, it got easy, if you don’t count a mad dash for dry paper towels…another mad dash for more paper towels…safety-pin-poked fingers…an unfortunate geyser incident that had Tucker chortling at his own tinkling antics…a crawling chase after the bare-bottomed, scooting-away baby…and two totally unsuited-to-thetask adults, who were left sweaty and undone at the end of their ordeal. And with one baby wearing an expensive, monogrammed handkerchief—tissue-paper-stuffed for added absorbency—and secured with a sideshowsize safety pin. But…whew! Mission accomplished.
With a satisfied exhalation, Laura sat on her haunches. Grant followed suit. Hands to their respective knees, they stared at the blue-eyed baby lying on his back in front of them…and staring back at them. “So,” Laura said. “What do you think he’s thinking?”
“Well,” Grant countered, “probably that he wishes someone on another floor—someone with a box of disposable diapers in their desk drawer—would’ve caught him when he fell from the sky.” Then he looked at her and asked, “What do we do now?”
We. Laura liked the sound of that. She always had, when Grant was the he in the we. Getting back to the task at hand, she said, “Well, given the wet state of his clothes and the cold outside, we need to…” She thought Then it came to her. “We need to rinse his outfit in the washroom sink and dry it with that airblower thingie. I’m going to do the same for this spot on my skirt. And then I guess I need to—”
“There’s no I to it. It’s we,” Grant countered. “We need to. I’m in this with you, Laura. Remember the liability thing?”
The warm “we” fuzzy that was spreading through her heart fizzled out on the word “liability.” He was helping her for legal reasons. Of course. It made sense. But still, Laura felt the need to give him an out. She searched his face, looking for sincerity. “Are you sure, Grant? I didn’t really mean that. You don’t have to do this. He’s not your problem.”
“Sure he is. He’s a baby. You had a baby shoot today with my company’s name on it. And now you have a problem baby. So, it’s my problem, too. End of story. Now, tell me what it is that we’re doing, once you two are dry?”
Laura chuckled, hating that she was beginning to like him so much. Again. “Okay. I was thinking we need to take him to the police and file some kind of report. Or turn him over to them. Something like that.”
Grant pulled back and stared at her, then extended his hand to shake hers. “Laura Sloan, you are brilliant.”
Laura slipped her hand into his, feeling the strength and the warmth of his touch—so electric and yet so comforting—as his long fingers closed over hers. She’d almost forgotten how good he felt. How good he made her feel. But she masked her reaction with a light laugh and said, “Grant Maguire, I do thank you. But can you put that part about me being brilliant into our business contract?”
Still smiling—a teasing one, to be sure—Grant said, “Not on your life. Brilliant equates to more money. And the Tucker Company can barely afford you as it is. I can just see them telling me we have to give you up.” Then his eyes grew heated. His voice dropped to a husky, intimate drawl. “I’d hate to have to buy the whole damned company just to keep you on. And I would, too. Because I’m not willing to run the risk of losing you…again.”
Feeling very warm, almost liquid, Laura gulped and said, “You’re not?”
“No,” Grant quipped. “In the ad business, you’re the best there is. Everyone knows that.”
TWO TWILIGHT HOURS later, holding Tucker against her body, not at all sure where her arms needed to be to best support his sleeping weight, Laura cuddled the baby under her full-length, camel-colored winter coat And hoped she wasn’t smothering the kid. Or that she’d move her arm and he’d slide out from under her coat, hit the pavement, and she’d get stoned to death for child abuse.
As it was, only a tuft of his black baby curls gave him away to the casual passerby as Laura stood on the cold, wind-swirling, people-swarming street in front of the local police precinct At her side, Grant clutched the baby carrier
in one hand and worked on hailing a cab.
More than a few curious souls stared their way. The braver, nosier ones stopped momentarily. And Laura knew why. Even in celebrity-congested New York City, they wondered was this really Grant Maguire. Could it be, their excited stares seemed to ask. Yes. It could. It was. And she was with him. And drawing a lot of attention that she didn’t want. Nor did Grant, she suspected. Especially since they had a baby nestled between them. She could already see those cozy Former Lover, Secret Baby headlines. All they needed to make this a full-blown disaster was for the paparazzi to show up—
“So, who knew the police wouldn’t be able to help right away, huh?” Grant said, interrupting Laura’s dread-filled thoughts. “‘We’ll take your information and have an officer call you later.’ That’s what they said?”
Laura nodded. “Yes. I have to admit, I never saw that one coming. Just like I never expected to see you hailing a cab.”
Grant grinned. “Expected a waiting limo, did you?”
Despite the cold biting at her cheeks, Laura felt them heat up. “Well, yes. I could see why you wouldn’t want one in college. But I guess I supposed that as you…got older, you’d—”
“Give in to my father’s demands that I act like a Maguire?” The twinkle in his eye told Laura he was still giving the elder Maguire fits. And she liked him all the more for it. Then Grant added, “Not me. Limos are not my style. Damned things draw too much attention my way from every camera-carrying, money-hungry photographer out there. I’m worth five thousand dollars a picture, the last I heard. Makes me feel like there’s a bounty on my head. Who needs it? Hell, I prefer being the average Joe on the street.”
But you’re not. And you never will be. Poor Grant. He’d always hated his built-in notoriety. In spite of it, he’d managed to make it on his own, avoid letting his father or his money control his life. And Laura respected him for that. But had he really had to abandon her to achieve independence? She just wished he’d allowed her to—
From Here To Maternity Page 3
