First Came Baby

He wasn’t sure what kind of welcome he had expected. A hug? Maybe. A kiss? No. Kate had made things very clear when they’d last talked. Their marriage was over, exactly as they’d planned. No hard feelings. They were both adults. They both knew this had been only temporary, and now that her grandmother was dead, well... But since they weren’t planning a future together, she felt it was best if they kept things platonic while he was in town. Easier on everybody, she had said. And since the one thing Boone wanted most in this visit was to give Kate what she needed, he had agreed. He understood.

That didn’t mean he liked it.

Whatever reunion he might have hoped for, it was washed away by Jamie’s cries, which were becoming both stronger and more panicked. Kate hurried toward him and stopped a few inches away.

“Hey.” Her smile was tired and strained, but he caught a hint of the glow that had first washed over him all those months ago. She raised a hand, and for a second he let himself think it was the prelude to an awkward hug, a quick brush of her lips to his cheek or mouth, but no. She simply cupped his cheek and patted it. The way she would one of the kids in the day care she would return to directing once her maternity leave ended.

He hadn’t realized how much he’d been hoping she didn’t mean the whole platonic thing until that moment.

“Hi.” His voice sounded rough and strained to his own ears. Probably because he hadn’t said anything more than, “Coffee, please,” to anyone since leaving Ollanta yesterday. His hand hovered near the kicking, squirming pile of frantic that was Jamie. Would it make things worse if Boone touched him? All the books he’d read about babies assured him that they needed and were soothed by touch, but there was a hell of a difference between theory and practice.

“Sorry about the warm greeting.” Kate rolled her eyes. “We had a bad night. I think he’s cutting his first tooth.”

A memory surfaced from when he’d lived with... Was it his aunt Carol? No, it might have been one of his foster mothers. Gayle? She had been one of the younger ones. There had been a baby. There had been teething. There had been cold canned spaghetti and meatballs for dinner and lunch.

He had thought he couldn’t admire Kate more than he already did. He’d been wrong.

“Let’s get your bags before he breaks everyone’s eardrums,” she said, and headed for the escalator. Boone hurried behind her, glad to be upright and stretching his legs again. Once they reached the main floor, he aimed for the baggage carousel but stopped when he felt a tug on his sleeve.

“You get your things,” she said over the baby’s cries. “I’ll take him outside. The change of scenery might calm him down a bit. I’ll meet you right by the door.”

Before he could answer, she zipped away. The usual airport cacophony sounded almost peaceful once the doors slid closed behind her.

He’d spent much of his travel time assuring himself that he was ready for this. He felt like every moment of the last few months that hadn’t been devoted to work had been spent teaching himself how to be a father. He’d read everything about childcare that he could get his hands on. He’d played with the kids who came to the Project Sonqo office with their parents, perfecting his peekaboo skills. He’d even worked up the nerve to visit some websites for people who had grown up the way he had but who wanted to break that cycle with their own kids.

It had all seemed so possible when he was in Peru. So manageable. Now, with the echo of Jamie’s cries rattling inside him, he had to work hard to convince himself this was a good idea.

Ten minutes later, his ancient suitcase rolling crookedly behind him, Boone exited the terminal into the welcome coolness of early spring. Not that Ollanta had been hot. In the mountains, it rarely grew more than pleasantly warm. But after four flights’ worth of stale air, it felt good to breathe deep and not get a lungful of other people.

Kate waited by a bench. She was doing that bouncing jiggly thing again. Jamie had stopped crying, at least loudly, but as Boone approached he could see that the wriggling hadn’t slowed.

“Is he really chewing on his hand?” he asked.

“Yep. He’s hungry.” She set off across the parking lot at such a brisk speed that he was glad his legs were long enough to keep up. No cramped-plane stiffness for her. They hustled in silence—well, silent other than the snuffling noises coming from the baby—until they reached the little red Mazda he recognized.

Kate hit the button to unlock the doors and pop the trunk, then handed the keys to Boone. “Go ahead and stow your stuff. Then maybe you could start the car so it can warm up a bit? I need to hang out in the back seat with little Mr. Piggy for a few minutes.”

“Sure.” Good God. People always talked about culture shock when traveling from one country to another. No one had ever warned him that parenthood was the biggest culture shock he would ever know, but so far that was the case.

And he’d been here only fifteen minutes.

Once he’d deposited his things and got the car started, he screwed up his courage and twisted in the driver’s seat to take in the scene behind him. Kate had tossed her coat across the car seat. He had a great view of her pink sweater and the snorting, squirming baby in her arms.

“Doesn’t he ever stop moving?” Even as Boone spoke, that hypnotic foot started thrusting rhythmically once more.

“Sure. When he’s asleep.”

Jamie made a strange sound, like a cry mixed with a snort, then seemed to attack. Kate winced.

“Whoa. Are you okay?” Boone hadn’t expected that. Kate had nursed the baby many times when they were Skyping, but again, yeah. Different continent, whole different experience.

“Like I said, he’s cutting a tooth. His mouth hurts. When he nurses, that increases the pressure, so it hurts him more. So he stops earlier, but then he’s still hungry, so he has to eat again sooner than he usually would.” She brushed Jamie’s cheek with her finger. “Plus he’s kind of stuffed up, which often happens when they’re teething, so it’s hard for him to breathe and eat at the same time.”

How the hell did anyone ever make it past infancy?

“So.” She smiled, though with a little more force than he had ever seen before. “How were your flights?”

“I survived.”

“I see that.” The corners of her mouth twitched. Some of the stiffness seemed to be fading. “What do you need most? Shower, food or sleep?”

You.

He pushed the thought away before it could show in his face. Platonic. Separate bedrooms. All for the best.

He got it. He really did. But it had been a lot easier to agree when she wasn’t sitting a few inches away from him with Jamie weaving tiny fingers through her hair and her sweater hiked up so that everything essential was hidden from his eyes but most definitely not from his memory.

He stared down at his fingers, pretending he was inspecting them for grime. “A shower would probably be a good idea. It would help me stay awake, too.” He smiled and risked a glance her way. “But after that, yeah. Something other than airline food would be great.”

“Good. We can take care of all of that once Little Mister here decides he’s done.” As she spoke, she did a complicated maneuver with her hand and the baby’s face that looked as smooth and practiced as a magician’s performance. He wasn’t sure precisely what was happening. One minute everyone was happy. The next, Jamie was crying and she was tugging her sweater down, and he was pretty sure he’d glimpsed something he shouldn’t be glimpsing if he wanted to get through these next weeks with any semblance of sanity.

“Burp time,” she sang out, undoubtedly for his benefit. She glanced from Jamie to him. “You want to try?”

He froze. “That... I mean, uh...”

“Don’t freak, Boone.” Another hint of the laughing woman he remembered peeked around the fatigue. “I’m just messing with you. No one’s first time holding their baby should involve gas and spit-up.”

Part of him tried to absorb her words, but he was distracted by the bright, trusting eyes of his son soaking in the world around him. It was a good thing he was going to be around for only a few weeks. Because while Kate made this all look so possible, he knew it was anything but. Knew, too, that no matter how much he read or practiced, the odds were high that he could never be the kind of father he wanted to be.

CHAPTER TWO

BOONE HOPPED OUT OF the car as soon as it came to a halt, eager to be vertical once again. The drive from the airport to Kate’s little hometown on the Saint Lawrence River might have been the most comfortable hour of his journey, but it had been the one that most sent him out of whack. He needed to enjoy some sunshine and refresh himself and then get busy. Once his hands and his brain were occupied, he would be more grounded. More confident.

More able to stop thinking about all the ways he wasn’t anywhere near as ready to be a father as he’d convinced himself he was.

The trunk was already popped. He grabbed his bags, slung his backpack over his shoulder, and, while Kate was freeing Jamie from his restraints, let himself take in the house.

Boone had never been here. Kate had been living and working in Ottawa when they met. In their few months together last year, he had made only one trip to Comeback Cove with her, and that had been when they’d driven down to get married in her mother’s living room. That was as far as her grandmother had been able to travel by that point. They had offered to hold the ceremony by her bedside, but she’d been a tough old bugger who’d insisted that she was not going to sit in bed wearing her nightgown as she watched her oldest granddaughter get married. She had made it to the ceremony in full wedding regalia—flowered dress, floppy hat and all. She had been the happiest person in the room.

Not difficult, since he and Kate had both still been in shock, and her mother and sister had spent the whole ceremony giving him the evil eye.

Nana had died a month after he’d left. He was glad he’d had the chance to meet her and quietly satisfied that he’d been able to contribute to an easy passing for her.

But as he took in the house, he couldn’t help but think that Kate inheriting it might not have been the blessing she’d deemed it.

Kate, Jamie on her shoulder, came to stand beside him.

“It used to be amazing,” she said softly.

He could see that. The wraparound porch, deep enough to shade rocking chairs; the strong Queen Anne lines; the turret on the right all gave the house character. Charm. Potential.

It also needed a new roof and new windows in the turret and a new railing on the porch. And that was just the work he could spy with a casual glance.

Well, the good news was that fixing this place would leave him so wiped there’d be no question of insomnia.

“Nana couldn’t keep up with it. She tried, but it was too much. We told her she should sell and move in with Mom, but she always said this was the house that welcomed her as a bride and gave her the happiest years of her life, and she had no intention of leaving until she had to be carried out. Which is exactly what happened.”

Boone, who had never lived more than six months in the same place until the end of high school, couldn’t begin to comprehend what it must have been like to spend almost an entire life in one house.

“Come on.” She headed for the steps. “Careful on the porch. The chairs are strategically placed to cover the spots where the boards need to be replaced.”

He did as instructed, trying not to wince at the number of chairs to be skirted, then followed her into the house, braced for water marks and sagging floors and God only knew what else. So it was a pleasant surprise to walk through the ornately carved front door, through the tiny, sunlight-filled vestibule, and into a cheery yellow room filled with the cushy furniture he recognized from her old place. Sun catchers in the bay window sent prisms dancing over every surface, adding to the feelings of warmth and welcome.

“This is better than I expected.” He kicked off his sneakers and flexed his toes. “Oh, man, that feels good. I’ve been wearing those shoes for about thirty-six hours.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, I can tell.”

Her grin told him she was teasing. Which shouldn’t have been as much of a relief as it was.

She nodded toward the doorway into the next room. “Come on. I’m going to see if I can get Jamie into his crib. Then I’ll give you the grand tour.”

He kept his eyes firmly glued on the walls and the ceiling as he followed her. For one thing, it gave him a chance to assess the structure. For another, it was safer than watching the sway of her hips as she padded in stocking feet across the plank floors. Or the brush of her hair against her neck. Or the curve of her shoulder where he used to bury his face and inhale her and...

The floors. Right. Think about the floors. They would need to be sanded and refinished before the place went on the market.

“You lived here for a while when you were a kid, right?”

“Right. Just long enough to make it the first home I can remember.”

As soon as they passed into the kitchen, his heart sank. Someone had obviously painted in here—the walls were a great shade of green, not too minty, just fresh and vibrant—but the cupboards needed a total face-lift, if not a complete gutting. The linoleum on the floor was cracked and peeling. And the window above the sink bore a long strip of...

“Duct tape?” He glanced from the glass to Kate.

She seemed embarrassed. “That just cracked last week,” she said. “We had a windstorm. A nasty one. We lost power overnight and had to stay with my mom. When I came back, I found that. I called the glass guys, but as you can imagine, they’ve been pretty busy. I’m on the list for next week.”

“Cancel them. I can have that fixed in a day or two.” He measured the window with his eyes. “Okay, maybe a little longer, depending on whether the glass is a standard size. But I can definitely do that.”

“Okay.” She lifted the lid on a slow cooker, releasing a rich aroma he hadn’t smelled in too long.

“Chili?” he asked.

“Mmm-hmm. I figured that would be a good one for tonight. If your flight was delayed, it would only get better.” She replaced the lid and kept moving.

Boone was getting a good hint about which one of them had given Jamie the gene that kept that foot swinging all the time.

He shook his head and followed her into the next room. It held only a rocking chair—strategically placed in front of a truly massive stone fireplace, complete with rock mantel—a computer desk, a bookshelf, and something that he was pretty sure was a changing table. At least, it looked like the pictures that had come up on the Google searches he’d conducted before Jamie’s birth, when Kate would talk to him about baby equipment. Changing tables and bassinets, bottle brushes and onesies, diaper pails and breast pumps.

He shuddered. Yeah. He’d probably spent a good ten minutes staring at the pump thing, trying to figure out how it worked and why it wasn’t prohibited as an instrument of torture.

“When I was little, Nana and Poppy used this as a dining room,” Kate said as she sailed through. “But I don’t have a big table, and it’s kind of silly to have a separate place to eat when it’s just me. So I turned it into a home office. I was going to move Jamie’s crib in here, but then he started cutting this tooth and waking up at night again, and it’s just easier to have him in with me.”

“Where’s that?”

She swayed ever so slightly, as if she’d thought about stopping and decided against it at the last second. Too late, he realized how his question could have come off.

Okay, maybe he shouldn’t have asked right away. But he would be here for six weeks. If he was going to spend time with his son, he needed to know where to find the crib. It was only logical.

Yeah, you can talk circles around anybody you want, whispered his mother’s voice in the back of his head. But since when did that do anybody any good?

Kate smiled brightly. “This way,” she said, and led him through a small hallway that held a dresser against one wall, past a door that she said led to the basement, and into a tiny room that was almost completely filled with the bed he remembered so well.

Now he was the one swaying.

“It’s small, I know,” she said, gently laying Jamie on the bed and working the zippers on his coat while he made noises that had Boone suspecting the nap was over. “I had to take the doors off the closet to make enough room for the crib. That’s another reason I have to move it. If I wait much longer, he’s going to figure out he’s sleeping in a closet and then he’s going to develop claustrophobia or something.”

She spoke so casually that Boone would have thought she wasn’t remotely affected by the fact that he was in her room and they were standing mere breaths apart in front of the bed where they had most likely made Jamie.

Then he caught the pinkness in her cheeks and the way she kept her focus firmly on the zippers. On their squirming, protesting son.

Probably an excellent strategy.

* * *

KATE GAVE THANKS that Jamie seemed happier when he woke up. She doubted the tooth had come through yet, but it seemed things had subsided, at least for the moment. And this way she didn’t have to sit down and nurse him again right away.

It wasn’t that she was shy about feeding the baby in front of Boone. She’d had plenty of practice during their Skype calls, though that had mostly been in the early days, when Jamie’s schedule could best be described as All Chaos, All The Time. Now things were far more settled, which was just the way she liked it. Easier to predict. Easier to work around.

But it had felt different when they were in the car. The confined space had made her far too aware of Boone’s presence, his blue eyes darting everywhere, his shoulders filling her little front seat, his breath apparently stealing all the oxygen.

It hadn’t been the breath itself that got to her, though. More like the way it had hitched a little when she’d adjusted her clothing. And, undoubtedly, flashed him the tiniest bit.

With Jamie on her hip, she led the way to the stairs. Boone had been very understanding when she’d said there would be separate bedrooms on this visit, but even though she didn’t know him as well as a so-called wife should know her husband, there were some areas in which they were oh-so-intimately acquainted. Boone was no monk. And before he returned to Peru, he had told her that even though their marriage wasn’t what anyone would call typical, he planned to honor his vows while they were separated. There would be no other women while he was gone.

Since one of the other things she knew about him was that he was a man of his word, she’d had no cause to doubt him. Which meant that she would spend the next six weeks with a very deprived man who was probably feeling the memories as much as she was.

“Grab your things,” she said when they reached the front door again. “I’ll show you where to drop them.”

Because yeah. Boone wasn’t the only one who had been deprived. Somehow, when she’d told him to stay here, she had assumed that fatigue and common sense would be enough to guard herself against wayward thoughts and urges.

Wrong.

“This banister needs work.” Boone gave it a wiggle.

“I know. It’s on the list.”

He made a sound that could have been a groan or a snort. “I’m starting to wonder if six weeks is going to be enough.”

“Whatever we can’t get done, I’ll hire someone to finish. Or if we even get to the point of the cosmetic stuff, painting and such, I’ll be good. Allie can help me.” She reached the landing and brushed her fingers across the chunk of driftwood nestled on the deep windowsill. “Cash is pretty handy, too. He might be able to tackle some odds and ends.”

“Cash? Who... Oh. Right. Allie’s new boyfriend.” Boone gave the upper banister a shake. “Guess those flights took more out of me than I thought. I forgot his name for a minute there.”

“Not to worry. Everything was such a whirlwind, with Allie getting engaged and then almost married...”

“Did the Mounties really storm the wedding and haul the groom away in handcuffs?”

Kate shuddered as she remembered how close her baby sister had come to marrying a man who had a thing for identity fraud. “Yep. Good thing, too. Otherwise, she might have gone through with it, and then she would be stuck with the wrong guy. Anyway, the fiancé is history. She realized that it was really Cash she wanted, and they are wandering around town like the two most dazed lovebirds you ever saw. So if you blanked on his name, don’t feel bad. There are times when I still have to stop and remind myself who’s in and who’s out.” She gestured to the open door. “Here you go.”

Boone brushed past her, suitcase hefted, into the room that had seemed so airy until he entered. What was it about him? No matter where he went, he seemed to fill the space. Not in a bad way. More like once he was there, the emptiness was gone. Like he wasn’t sucking up the space but was filling a hole.

She shook her head. Filling a hole? Good Lord, a teenager couldn’t have been more snigger worthy. Time to move on. Fast.

“There’s extra blankets in that closet.” She pointed from the doorway. No way was she going into the room with Boone. “And the bathroom is right down here.”

“Is that a water stain?” Boone’s voice pulled her around to where he stared up at the ceiling.

“I think so. It’s old, though. It was there before I moved in, and it hasn’t gotten any bigger.” She squinted. “At least, I don’t think it has. I, um, don’t come up here very much.”

The look he shot her was carefully blank.

“I’ll add it to the list.”

She pulled Jamie’s hand from the neckline of her sweater, which he seemed determined to yank down. “I’d better warn you that this entire bathroom is on the list, too.”

She opened the door to the room in question and braced herself. Boone’s long, low whistle only confirmed her fears.

“What color is that?” he asked.

She didn’t need to look over his shoulder to remember the hideous greenish-brown shade that covered the walls. “I think it’s something Nana got on sale. Or maybe she had a couple of half cans that she combined.”

Boone shook his head. “Did you ever see American Graffiti? There’s a part when Harrison Ford’s character says the other guy’s car is a cross between piss yellow and puke green.” He tapped the wall. “I think this might come under that banner.”

“Nana was more into frugality than style. At least everything still works.” She knocked on the door frame for luck. “Though you do have to jiggle the handle on the toilet sometimes.” She thought for a moment. “And the pipes bang when you first get in the shower, but that passes quickly. Other than that, you’re golden. If the fixtures looked as good as they work, it’d be great, but...”

He walked into the room, hands on hips, taking it all in. “I’ve seen worse.”

Oh, that was reassuring, considering he spent a good chunk of his time in villages without indoor plumbing.

“This will be the rainy-day project, I think.” He pointed from one element to the next. “New toilet. New vanity and sink. The tub...” He pulled back the shower curtain. “Oh, yeah. This is one of those old-fashioned ones. People love those. It can probably stay.” He moved in a slow circle. “It’s a nice room. Plenty of space. We’ll take down those god-awful shutters, put up some curtains, new fixtures, a coat of paint, and it’ll be—”

He came to a standstill, his gaze frozen on Jamie and his mouth gaping slightly.

She glanced down. At Jamie’s hand, curled around the neckline of her sweater. Which he had dragged halfway down her chest, revealing a whole lot of skin and a whole lot of bra. And even though no one in their right mind would ever describe a nursing bra as seductive, from the way Boone seemed to have been turned to stone, she was pretty sure he thought it was the best bit of satin he’d seen in ages.