Baby Before Business

Ty ran his hand down his face. That was a point in his life that he didn’t care to revisit, though he was glad he had. The fact that Madelyn was more than ten years his junior might not cool his libido, but her being totally broke like his former fiancée certainly did. And that knowledge would keep him the hell away from her.

Madelyn opened the passenger side door of the SUV. “All set.”

He didn’t say anything. Not a word. He and Madelyn had only gotten chummy out of necessity. He’d had to talk to her to form this alliance and figure out the nuances of the deal. But now that he had accepted the fact he had a baby, and had a solid idea of Madelyn’s personality from her dealings with her dad, he knew how to handle both the baby and the new nanny.

So the conversation ended here. He had work to do when they got home tonight. Then there were telephone calls to occupy him tomorrow and file folders that would keep him amused on Sunday.

And Madelyn had a baby to care for. As far as Ty was concerned, they really were “all set.”

Ty Bryant hadn’t said a word to her during the drive to his house, but when they arrived at his understated Cape Cod and found the entire porch littered with boxes, he was suddenly talkative again.

“I don’t suppose you know how to assemble a crib?”

Madelyn gaped at him. “Even if I could, am I supposed to balance Sabrina on my hip while I screw in the bolts?”

“I’m sure women in primitive cultures do it.”

“And I’m sure men in primitive cultures build their own cribs. They don’t order them from a department store.”

“I didn’t order this stuff from a department store. I have a friend whose wife has connections at…”

“Whatever! Just put the crib together while I go look for something to make for dinner.”

She left him standing amid the baby things and, with Sabrina on her hip, went in search of supper. Unfortunately, she didn’t even find a box of macaroni in his cupboards. Though she had to admit his house was interesting. Not what she’d expected. The cherrywood cabinets in the kitchen gleamed. The sitting room she stumbled upon as she tried to find her way back to the foyer had a neat yellow contemporary sofa and chair with heavy-wood end tables and a wall-sized entertainment unit that probably cost a bundle. The dining room housed a light oak table and hutch filled with sparkly stemware that looked like it was never used.

When she returned to the foyer, Ty was nowhere in sight, but she saw he had hauled everything in from the porch. The boxes and bags were scattered atop the sand-colored ceramic tile. But she was more interested in the foyer’s newly painted white walls that were decorated with what appeared to be antique mirrors. She couldn’t deny that Ty Bryant owned a nice house, but it wasn’t as grand as she expected for a guy who ran a multimillion dollar business.

Because Ty was gone and so was the crib box, she assumed he was in the room he intended to use as a nursery, assembling the baby’s bed. She climbed the stairs and walked toward the only open door. From the hall she could see the room already had a single bed and maple dresser. Thick gray carpeting covered the floor. It made sense to assume he was making a nursery from one of his guest rooms, which was good, but that didn’t put food in the cupboards and she was hungry.

She entered talking. “Are you on some kind of starvation diet?”

Seeing him sitting on the floor, with his black jacket and tie removed and the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up to reveal muscular forearms, Madelyn stopped dead in her tracks. His very neat hair had become tousled and he looked so darned sexily rumpled that she lost her breath.

“No. If you didn’t find any food to cook, it’s because I usually eat out.”

Juggling Sabrina on her hip, Madelyn considered it very lucky that he didn’t glance up as he spoke because she wasn’t sure she could take her eyes off him. He was just plain yummy-looking.

When several seconds lapsed without her reply, he peered up at her. “What? No smart remark about my always eating out?”

She swallowed and quickly looked away, as if inspecting what he had done with the crib. “I’m ordering pizza.”

He pretended to shudder. “Oh, that was scathing.”

“I mean it.”

He shrugged and went back to work, fitting the metal springs into the wooden sides of the crib.

“And you’re paying.”

“Fine,” he said, as if he were doing her a huge favor.

Madelyn stared at him, not understanding how he could think he was doing her a favor, when this entire job was nothing but a favor from her to him. But she wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of letting him see he annoyed her. Rather than storm out as she might have done, she very casually walked out. Downstairs, she grabbed the wall phone in the kitchen and dialed the number for pizza delivery from memory, ordered what she wanted—to hell with his choice—and then rummaged through Sabrina’s diaper bag so she could feed the baby first.

If he wanted to aggravate her day and night for the next three days, he had better be ready for the consequences. She had enough experience with her dad that she could take on any chauvinist, and in a perverse way she might even enjoy it. God knew, Ty’s attitude helped her to forget how good-looking he was.

When the pizza arrived, Madelyn was bathing Sabrina for bed so she let Ty answer the front door. She took her time washing, drying and dressing the baby. Then, because Ty had assembled the crib, she set Sabrina in a safety seat while she snapped new sheets on the mattress, wondering how Ty knew what to get his friend’s wife to order for the baby. But she stopped that thought. She’d bet her bottom dollar he called his friend and simply told him to tell his wife to order everything needed for a baby.

It must be nice.

By the time she had Sabrina tucked into bed, Madelyn had herself worked into a sufficient low-level anger from the day’s events. She was sure her mood would keep her on her toes with her sarcastic boss so she would stop noticing he was too damned sexy for a grouch. But when she entered the kitchen and found him eating pizza at the round wooden table while he skimmed the newspaper, the whole scene felt so “normal” and so “right” that she was bombarded by images of them as a happy couple.

Sitting, she cursed her thoughts. Really. Because they came out of nowhere and they weren’t welcome. She wasn’t a teenager, envisioning herself with the town hunk. She was living with her boss to help him. And if the constant reminder that she was this man’s employee didn’t stop her fantasies, the man himself should. He had no place in a domestic daydream because he wasn’t domesticated. Plus, men who liked sophisticated women really only wanted no-strings-attached sex. He was not her type. He wasn’t anybody’s type.

“Are you going to eat that pizza, or are you just going to sit there with your mouth open, staring at me?”

Great! Now he was noticing her staring at him. Somehow she had to get accustomed to him so she could keep herself in line. No, that wasn’t it. What she had to do was get herself accustomed to the fact that she was living with a man who could be described as one of the sexiest guys on the face of the earth. Then she would be able to keep herself in line.

She tried to think of other sexy men she had spent time with and four names came to mind. Unfortunately, she’d dated one of them, only worked occasionally with the other two and nursed an awful crush on the fourth. But it had been okay to like those guys because none of them were arrogant. She couldn’t deal with Ty the same way that she’d dealt with the others because Ty Bryant wasn’t like anybody she knew.

Actually, that was both the truth and the real dilemma. Ty Bryant really was unlike anybody she’d ever met. He was handsome. He was smart. He was clearly clever to have built an empire singlehandedly. And he’d taken in a child. No matter how much Madelyn tried to downplay his caring for Sabrina by reminding herself that he was more or less forced to take the baby, she also knew he could have sent Sabrina to foster care. Of course, that really would make him an ogre—and he wasn’t.

That was it!

That was the problem! Ty Bryant really wasn’t an ogre as his employees thought. No matter how much he tormented her or made her mad, brief revelations of his nice side kept causing her to forget his bad side. So all she had to do was remember his bad side and she would be okay.

Just when she drew the conclusion that she could stop her pounding heart, daydreaming and inappropriate staring simply by reminding herself of all the impolite, self-centered, arrogant things she’d seen and heard Ty Bryant do in the past few hours, he rose from his seat.

From the way he swiped a napkin across his mouth, it appeared that he was done eating and leaving the kitchen. But when he stopped by her chair, Madelyn got her first tremor of unease. He caught her arm, hauled her up, spun her around and pressed his mouth to hers.

Madelyn knew that if she were ever going to faint in her life, this would be the minute. His mouth attacked hers, completely disarming her. She couldn’t stop her arms from reaching up to encircle his shoulders. The sexual chemistry between them was so strong it led her, guided her, pulled her to do things without her conscious thought. But she didn’t care. The kiss was so darned good she was more than happy to let it take her anywhere it wanted to go.

As quickly as he grabbed her, Ty let her loose and stepped back. Madelyn gazed up at him, too startled by the kiss to breathe, let alone speak.

But Ty didn’t seem to have the same problem. “Watch yourself, Miss Maddy,” he warned. “I’m a man who sees what he wants and takes it. If you’re going to work for me, you either have to be able to accept the consequences of your subtle flirting, or you have to stop flirting.”

“Flirting,” Madelyn sputtered, confused, aroused, angry and unable to separate her emotions long enough to know which one she should trust.

“Yeah. Flirting. I kissed you so you would respond and wouldn’t be able to deny you’re attracted to me, so we could get this darned thing out in the open. Deal with it. If you want to play sex games, I’ll be more than happy to oblige. But I met your dad and I don’t think he’d be too happy with that. I also met your mom, and I realized you’re a lot like her. She’s got a home, a family and a very steady man for a husband. Those are probably the things you want, too. And that means I’m not the guy you should be messing with.”

With that he left the room, and Madelyn fell to her chair again, so embarrassed her face burned.

Chapter Three

The next morning, Madelyn wanted to punch something. Awake most of the night with a confused baby who sobbed nonstop because she missed her parents and didn’t understand what was happening to her, Ty’s temporary nanny wasn’t in the mood to have to dress Sabrina and leave the house for bread, milk, eggs and coffee to make breakfast. She also needed to buy formula because Sabrina had only one bottle left of the batch Pete Hauser had provided. But Madelyn had to consult her mother before she made the formula purchase. Still her “boss” wasn’t answering any of her knocks on his bedroom door and, as she had discovered the night before, his kitchen was bare.

Knowing her only recourse was to go in and physically wake him, she put her hand on the knob and almost twisted, but she suddenly realized it was very possible that he was as bare as his cupboards, sprawled across his bed like a naked Greek god.

Her chest tightened at the thought, and memories of the way he had kissed her the night before caused heat to flood through her. But so did her acute humiliation afterward. His kiss might have been so seductive it made her forget her own name, but he hadn’t kissed her because he was attracted to her. He’d kissed her to make a point.

There was no way in hell she was going into his room to wake him. If he as much as insinuated she’d approached him for anything other than his help with the baby, she knew she couldn’t be responsible for her actions. She’d absolutely deck him.

Sabrina squealed.

“Yeah, honey, we have to go out,” she told the little girl who should have been as tired as Madelyn, but seemed to have the stamina of a navy SEAL. The baby gurgled a response and Madelyn turned away from Ty’s bedroom door, determined she would never again let her attraction for that man show.

He was soooo safe with her, Madelyn thought, dressing the baby for the trip outside. After his arrogance the night before, she doubted she was even attracted to him anymore. She didn’t like arrogant men. No smart woman did. She would happily stay so far away from him he wouldn’t even have to worry about talking to her.

Madelyn found a spare set of keys for the SUV hanging on a bulletin board in the mudroom and twenty-three dollars casually strewn on a coffee table, probably money he’d taken from his pocket the night before. She didn’t feel she was stealing. She was stocking his damned cupboards. She certainly wasn’t using her own money. In fact, if she ever did have to spend her own money on things for the house or the baby, she was expensing it!

After buckling Sabrina in the car seat, Madelyn drove to a nearby convenience store. She purchased the items she needed, holding Sabrina on her hip because if there was a stroller in the stack of baby items that still littered the foyer, Ty hadn’t yet put it together. She juggled the milk, eggs, bread, coffee and baby on the way to the checkout counter and had only a little more success carrying everything after the clerk put her purchases into bags. Maneuvering the baby and the bags on her left hand and arm, she opened the SUV door, then dumped the groceries on the passenger-side seat and fastened Sabrina in again.

By the time she returned to Ty Bryant’s kitchen, she was exhausted, frazzled and not a woman to be trifled with. So, when she found Ty sitting at the kitchen table as if life were good and easy, and he said, “There you are,” as if she’d stolen his SUV, it took every ounce of her control not to throttle him.

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