Mummy in the Making

Had she sounded unduly eager and available? Or worse yet, a little desperate?

She wasn’t. She wasn’t at all desperate. Not for company. Not for a man. Not for anything. Except for that composure she’d been hoping to find when she’d come out of the bathroom.

But then she started to think of Hutch Kincaid being in town in the early June heat, meeting people on the street, in the hardware store. Talking to them. She thought of the chance that he might tell her secret. And composure slipped further out of her reach.

“You won’t forget not to say anything to anyone, though, right?”

Having given up trying to fix the door handle, he’d removed it along with the built-in lock and was gathering up the pieces when she said that. He cast her a confused look that told her he didn’t know what she was referring to.

“About… You know… Earlier… The pamphlets…” She just couldn’t bring herself to say it outright again.

“Oh, yeah,” he said when what she was talking about finally seemed to dawn on him. Then he smiled slightly and added, “See, forgotten already. No, I won’t say a thing to anyone. It’s your business.”

“And maybe I’ll have cookies when you get back,” she said too jovially, overcompensating and once more proving how clumsy she could be.

“I yice cookies,” Ash Kincaid contributed.

“Don’t go out of your way—you don’t have to do that,” her landlord assured her.

“Well, we’ll see,” Issa said.

Hutch Kincaid glanced down at his son then. “Come on, buddy, time to go. Give me the pliers and screwdriver.”

The little boy stood from his squat on the floor. Rather than handing his father the tools, he pulled up his striped T-shirt—exposing his entire tummy—twisted as far around as he could and put them into the back pockets of his own jeans, obviously mimicking his father.

But Hutch Kincaid reached down and took them out again. “We don’t need you falling back on those,” he explained as he did.

Then he tugged the toddler’s shirt down, and held out one long index finger. Without prompting, the toddler took it in one chubby fist.

“Say goodbye to Issa,” Hutch instructed.

“‘Bye, Itta.”

“‘Bye, Ash,” Issa answered.

“We’ll be back around seven,” Hutch Kincaid said.

“Okay.”

“And your secret is safe with me, so don’t worry about it,” he said in a softer voice.

Issa looked squarely at him, searching for signs of disapproval or judgment. But there seemed to be only kindness and understanding in his remarkable blue eyes.

“Thanks,” she said, not only sounding relieved but actually feeling it.

He nodded at the hole in the door where the handle and lock had been. “You can still close the door. It won’t be any worse than it was with the bad hardware. I’ll lock the main door downstairs and we’ll be gone, so you’ll have the place to yourself until I come back with the new stuff—no more surprise visitors.”

“Sure. Okay,” Issa muttered as he took his son and left her to do as he’d suggested, shutting her door as securely as she could.

And then she found herself doing the oddest thing.

She bent over and peeked through the hole where the handle had been to watch her landlord go down the stairs that led to his own half of the house.

At least until she realized what she was doing and how silly it was.

Then she shot upright and reminded herself that no matter how big and strapping and hubba-hubba-handsome someone was, so much as noticing a man at this point was beyond absurd. She was pregnant. With another man’s baby. And that was more than enough of a catastrophe. She didn’t need to add insult to injury.

But Hutch Kincaid was big, strapping and hubba-hubba-handsome.

And nice, too, it seemed.

It just didn’t change anything.

Chapter Two

“One more bite, Ash, then we’ll go upstairs and fix Issa’s door.”

“Itta,” Ash parroted his father before dragging a French fry through a puddle of ketchup and putting it haphazardly into his mouth. Then, mid-chew, the two-and-a-half-year-old announced for the third time, “Done.”

The toddler had eaten about half of his dinner and Hutch had been urging him to eat more for at least fifteen minutes. One bite at a time. He decided to finally accept the done decree. What he wasn’t sure of was whether Ash was too young yet for etiquette lessons, but he decided to err on the side of caution and said, “Don’t talk with your mouth full, big guy.”

“‘Kay,” Ash agreed, giving Hutch his second view of the partially chewed fry.

So much for that.

Hutch got up from the table, slid Ash’s sippy cup to the little boy and said, “Finish your milk,” as he gathered the remnants of their burgers and fries to put into the trash.

Teaching table manners—Iris would approve of that even if he had failed at it.

Burgers and fries for Sunday dinner—his late wife would have frowned on that.

Still, it was a meal, they’d sat at the kitchen table together to eat it and Hutch had attempted to give the etiquette lesson—that was all something. Something better than the way things had been right after Iris had died. Because while he might not be a candidate for Father of the Year, he was giving Ash his all now.

And in that vein, he made a mental note to look in the child-development books for information on when and how to begin teaching table manners, and when to reasonably expect a kid to understand and be able to incorporate them into his routine.

As for the fast food that he tried to keep to a minimum, they had just arrived home from a seven-day trip to Denver where Hutch had closed on the sale of his and Iris’s house. Plus he’d come home to details that needed to be attended to with the new store, and an upstairs tenant who had arrived during his absence and needed him to take care of the broken lock on the apartment door—sometimes fast food was just a necessity.

As it was, he was still five minutes late for getting upstairs to the apartment.

He glanced over his shoulder as he did the dishes. Ash’s sippy cup was right where he’d left it.

“Finish your milk, Ash,” he repeated. “It’ll make you big and strong.”

“Lise you,” Ash said.

“Yep, like me,” Hutch confirmed, feeling that twinge of delight that his son’s current hero worship gave him. The books said things like that came and went with the different stages kids passed through, but Hutch was enjoying it while it lasted. “Let’s see your muscles.”

Ash raised his arms in flexing He-Man fashion, fists pointed toward his tiny shoulders.

“They’re lookin’ good, but I think they need some more milk. Drink up.”

The tiny tot took the sippy cup and finally drank from it.

Hutch wasn’t sure whether encouragement along those lines translated into the kind of pressure his own father had put on him and Ian to be athletes—actually, to be football stars to equal Morgan Kincaid’s own accomplishments as a former NFL player. Hutch hoped not. Pressuring Ash was definitely not something he wanted to do. The be-like-Dad, muscle-building angle just seemed to be one that worked, so Hutch was using it. He’d stop if it ever started to become anything more than a ploy.

He just wanted to be a good dad. He wanted to incorporate the parts of his own father that he’d liked and appreciated, and leave out the parts that hadn’t been great. And he wanted to do the kind of job his late wife would have expected of him, the kind of job Iris would be counting on him to do.

“Yook now,” Ash demanded.

Hutch glanced over his shoulder once more. The sippy cup was drained and Ash was again flexing.

“Yep, I can see those muscles growing already. Good job!”

Dishes finally in the dishwasher, Hutch rinsed the sink, then dampened a paper towel and returned to the kitchen table where Ash sat in a booster seat propped on one of the chairs.

“Cleanup,” he announced.

“No!” Ash protested the way he always did when it came to washing his face.

“Come on, Issa is expecting us and we can’t visit a lady with ketchup all over your face and hands.”

“Itta’s pit-tee,” Ash said, seeming more inclined toward cooperation with the mention of Issa.

“Yes, she is,” Hutch confirmed as he applied the damp cloth to the toddler.

Thoughts of Issa, images of her, hadn’t been far from Hutch’s mind since he’d first set eyes on her this afternoon. Mentioning her name to his son, Ash’s comment about her, were all it took to bring her to the forefront yet again.

Sleeping Beauty, that had been Hutch’s first impression.

The incredible beauty sleeping on the couch in the apartment upstairs.

When her brother Dag had rented the apartment for her, he’d told Hutch that his sister was quiet and the shiest of all the McKendricks. That she was meticulous and tidy so she would be a good tenant. Dag hadn’t said anything about the fact that Issa was a head turner.

Not that that was at all relevant to renting her a temporary place to live.

It was just that, to Hutch, Issa McKendrick was something to behold and he sort of wished he’d known that in advance so he hadn’t been so dumbstruck at first.

She was a vision that made him not quite believe his own eyes.

Flaxen hair and skin like porcelain—those had been the first two things to strike him.

And she had the most delicate features—a straight, unmarred forehead; a gently sloping nose; a slightly rounded chin; full, petal pink lips; rosy, high cheekbones; and when she’d smiled slightly in her sleep, there had been dimples. Deep, deep dimples in both cheeks.

And then she’d opened her eyes. And even from across the room he’d been able to see how blue they were. Dark, sapphire blue—they stood out strikingly amidst that light skin and hair. Sparkling dark sapphires…

She was breathtakingly beautiful but still with a wholesomeness to her.

But stunning or not, it didn’t make any difference.

Hutch was not in the market for a woman. Sure, a year and a half of widowerhood might mean that he could be. But he wasn’t. He had Ash to think of. To focus on. He had to concentrate on being a single father. A father to his own kid. This was no time to get into anything with any woman, let alone with someone who had issues of her own to deal with—issues like a baby on the way without a dad.

But Issa McKendrick wasn’t going to be hard to look at while they both lived here, he thought as he lifted his son down from the booster seat.

He just wasn’t interested in anything more than looking. The way he might look at a painting or a sculpture or a photograph—purely as an appreciation for a thing of beauty. A woman of beauty.

But there was no doubt about it, Issa McKendrick was definitely that.

“Itta hep. I’ma eat cookies.”

“I think I’ve been had,” Issa observed.

Hutch Kincaid laughed. “I think you have.”

In anticipation of Hutch and his son coming to install her new door handle and lock, Issa had run to the store and bought cookies for the little boy. She’d set some of them out on a plate on the coffee table.

Hutch had made a great show of Ash being his assistant, enlisting his son to hand him the screwdriver when he asked for it.

“Then when you’re finished,” Issa had said, “there are cookies…”

That had drawn Ash’s attention to the dish on the coffee table. But a mere glance in that direction was the tot’s only immediate response.

What he had done was lure Issa into helping Hutch, too, handing the screwdriver to her so that she could hand it to Hutch.

Issa had thought it was cute that the toddler wanted to include her. And in an attempt to be more outgoing and friendly, she’d complied.

But once Ash had her at the door with Hutch, holding the screwdriver, the little boy made the announcement that she could play assistant while he went to have a cookie.

“How can a two-and-a-half-year-old be that tricky?” she asked.

“Hey, when cookies are involved, it’s every man for himself,” Hutch said with a laugh before he called after his son, “One, Ash. You can have one cookie.”

Then turning back to Issa, Hutch whispered, “Now watch, he’s going to take a bite out of one, say he doesn’t like it, choose another, take a bite, and do the same thing until he’s had a taste of every kind you have out there.”

“I shouldn’t have bought the assortment?”

“You can’t put that much temptation in front of him.”

“I don’t know anything about raising kids,” Issa confessed.

But apparently Hutch Kincaid did because Ash had done exactly what his father had predicted and was on to his second cookie.

“One, Ash,” Hutch warned.

“I doan yice this kind,” the toddler announced for the second time, choosing a third cookie.

“Better take the plate away,” Hutch advised Issa.

“It’s okay. I put them out for him. And there are only four kinds. Technically, if he has one bite of each kind, it’ll add up to only one cookie.”

“Great, you want to split hairs, too. The problem with that logic is that there are more than four cookies on that plate and he’ll go on taking one bite out of every cookie unless he’s stopped. Can you hold this like this?”

That last question drew Issa’s gaze from son back to father.

Hutch had been working at lining up the inside doorknob with the outside doorknob and—the same way he had earlier in the day when he’d inspired inappropriate ideas in her—he had a hand on each of them.

“If you don’t keep them where I’ve got them I’ll have to line them up all over again,” he explained when she was slow in responding to his question.

“Oh, sure,” she said, stepping to his side to replace him before her imagination went any further than it already had.

And if, in the transfer, his hands brushed hers and set off tiny sparks? She wrote that off to static electricity, even though that wasn’t what it had been.

Maintaining the position of the door handles, she looked on as Hutch crossed to the coffee table and picked up the plate as well as the cookies his son had discarded.

“No!” Ash rebelled.

“You can have one,” Hutch reminded reasonably, firmly, without any anger or aggravation.

“I wanna diff’ent one.”

“Nope, the one in your hand will have to do,” Hutch informed him, setting the plate on the top shelf of the nearby bookcase and stacking the already-bitten cookies beside it.

Ash studied the situation intently.

Issa couldn’t be sure, but she had the impression that the toddler was working on a plan to climb up to that plate.

But Hutch again seemed to read his son’s mind. “Don’t even try it,” he warned as he headed for the door again. “Just eat your cookie.”

Ash scowled at his father but proceeded to taste his final selection.

Issa couldn’t help laughing a little at it all as Hutch returned to the door, smiling as if he understood her amusement.

“Can you keep hanging on while I screw them in?” he said when he got to her.

“Sure,” she said a second time, at a loss for why so much about this man and even perfectly innocent things he said seemed suggestive to her.

Maybe it was hormones.

Or maybe she’d spent too much time teaching teenagers who could rarely think or talk about anything else.

One way or another, she really needed to curb it, she told herself.

There was silence for the first few minutes of their joint endeavor and during that time Issa couldn’t help looking at Hutch.

She was glad she hadn’t indulged her inclination to change clothes for tonight, that the only thing she’d done was brush her hair out and leave it down. She’d told herself that it would be too obvious if she put on a different outfit, that it would give away the fact that she’d been singularly—and strangely—focused on when she was going to get to be with him again. And now that she could see that he hadn’t been inclined to change his clothes for her, she thought it was a good thing she hadn’t changed hers for him.

Not that he didn’t look just as stare-worthy tonight as he had earlier, because he did. And she was never more aware of that fact than when he had leaned over to pick up those cookies.

But she’d lectured herself about not paying any attention to things like that and so she was trying not to.

Of course, it might help to do something besides ogling him while he worked close enough for her to catch the scent of a cologne that smelled like a cool, clear summer day at the beach. She just couldn’t think of anything to say to distract herself.

Then, as Hutch began to apply screwdriver to the second screw to fasten the inside and outside knobs together, he offered her that distraction by making conversation.

“Issa—that’s not an ordinary name,” he said then.

“It’s short for Isadora.”

“Still not ordinary. And there’s Dag, and some others I’ve heard…”

“There’s my sister Tessa—Tessa is short for Theodora. And my sister Zeli, but she’s just Zeli. Our mother thought our names sounded European and that anything European was sophisticated. And unfortunately she was all about putting on airs. But it isn’t as if Hutch is a common name. Or Ash, either,” Issa pointed out.

“Hutch is short for Hutchenson. It was on the birth certificate and because my birth parents weren’t around to explain it, I can’t tell you where it came from. I can tell you that Asher was a family name on Ash’s mom’s side—her grandfather.”

“I see,” Issa said, panicking slightly because he’d initiated this subject and she couldn’t think of what to come back with now that it seemed to be her turn.

But again Hutch Kincaid made it easy on her by not expecting her to take a turn. “So you’re a teacher, I think Dag said…”

“High school freshman chemistry. Or at least I was a teacher. In Seattle. But a little more than a year ago I sort of accidentally invented something and that allowed me to… Oh, it’s complicated,” she concluded when she was afraid she might bore him.

“What did you invent?” he asked, not letting her off the hook so easily.

“Well, in its toy version, it’s called Gob-o-Goo—”

“I’ve seen that at the toy store! It’s sort of like putty?”

“Right, except that it doesn’t ever dry out, it will hold whatever shape it’s put into, but then can be remolded whenever anyone wants to. Plus it’s not harmful if kids eat it—not that it’s food, but it just won’t hurt anything if kids put it in their mouth.”

“And you accidentally invented it?”

“It really was an accident. I was working at home on an experiment for the Reactions in the Kitchen lesson, trying to jazz it up a little to make it more exciting—it isn’t easy to keep ninth graders’ interest—” Because they were so often thinking about whoever was in front of them the way she was thinking about Hutch at that moment, about the way his hair curled just the slightest bit at his nape…

Issa again reined in her wandering thoughts to continue what she was saying.

“Anyway, I reached for something, knocked a whole box of baking soda into what I already had in the bowl—”

“And ta-da?”

“Pretty much. After the mixture went kind of crazy, it stabilized and then ta-da. It looked like a soft, shiny cloud and I just couldn’t seem to resist touching it to see how it felt.”

Much the way she wanted to touch his hair and see how it felt….

Luckily her hands were occupied with doorknobs.

“It felt as good as it looked and it was fun to mess with.” The way she couldn’t mess with her landlord, she warned herself. “Long story short, it took some tweaking from there, but I kept going back to it, fiddling with it, and Gob-o-Goo was born. A friend worked for a toy company and she helped me patent it and sell it to them.”

“That’s not a story you hear every day,” he said.

“It really was just a fluke, though. I almost feel weird taking credit for it.”

“And what did you mean when you said in its toy version?” Hutch asked then.

He really paid attention….

“That was kind of a fluke, too. One day I was messing around with it when the phone rang. I sort of unconsciously kept squeezing it and squishing it while I talked. Then I had the idea of turning it into something therapeutic. A distant, aging relative years ago broke her arm and I remembered her squeezing a ball as part of her physical therapy to increase the strength in that hand when she was recovering. At first she was too weak to do it and I started to think that my stuff had just enough resistance that it might work better than the ball in the first stages of rehab therapy.”

Okay, now she was thinking about squeezing the biceps her gaze had somehow attached itself to. What was wrong with her?

Averting her eyes, she said, “Anyway—again—” Because she knew she’d already said anyway once before. “I went back to the patent attorney, told him my idea and second ta-da. It’s being used as a filler substance to manufacture a new therapeutic tool.”

“That’s impressive,” Hutch said.

“Not really. Not when you know that it was honestly all unintentional. Accidental.”

“Still, those are more fortunate accidents than I’ve ever had.”

“They did allow me to quit working for the time being so I could move back to Northbridge. That was the biggest benefit because I was at loose ends in Seattle and staying there would have been… I just didn’t want to do it,” she finished, deciding belatedly that she didn’t want to get into the subject of the bad turn of romantic events that had driven her home.

So she skirted that issue. “And I’ll be able to buy a house without having to worry about money for a while. So yeah, that all does make it a fortunate accident,” she conceded. “But I can’t pretend that Gob-o-Goo or the squishy ball were born from the grand design of some sort of brainiac, either, because they really just came from my being a klutz.”

“I think you’re being modest.”

“I’m really not,” she insisted.

And how had her eyes gotten back on him again? This time on his profile? His perfect profile…

“Okay, you can let go.”

She heard the words as if from a distance. But the message didn’t immediately sink in because she was adrift in studying the side view of his face.

Then, from right next to her, Ash echoed his father with a “Y’et go.”

Issa hadn’t been aware of the toddler rejoining them after apparently having given up trying to figure out a way to get to that plate of cookies. But his voice brought her to her senses. She took her hands from the door handles and stepped back as Hutch Kincaid tested them.

Moving farther into the room, she hoped distance might help cure the weird affliction she seemed to have when it came to this man. But even that didn’t keep her from being overly aware of every little detail as he closed the door to make sure it actually stayed closed. He did a few trial runs with the keys—with the door open and finally with it closed, ultimately locking himself out and then letting himself in again.

“Looks like we’re in business! Now you can lock your door and keep your nosy neighbors out.”

Too bad she couldn’t keep the unwelcome thoughts she kept having about him out of her head….

He had two sets of keys and he held one set out to her then. “Keys for you, keys for me just in case of emergency—but only if there’s an emergency or you lock yourself out or something.”

Issa held out her palm. Then she tried not to think about the fact that the keys were warm from his hand.

“I wan some,” Ash complained.

Hutch dug into his pocket and produced an entire ring full of keys. “Here you go, big guy, you can hang on to these, but don’t lose them.”

Ash accepted the keys and jammed them into his own jean pocket. And again Issa was reasonably certain that the child was mimicking what he’d seen his father do innumerable times.