The Baby Arrangement Read online

  Yet she’d jumped at the chance to join him. All weekend long she’d been reeling with the facts. He’d called once, asked her to lunch to discuss business, but she’d made an excuse, and he hadn’t pushed.

  Was he having second thoughts, too?

  Were they back to him going and her being no part of his new life?

  That thought brought back the incredible sadness she had felt at the mention of his moving.

  The thought of opening a second daycare that far away brought panic. And no less desire to have her baby and get on with her life, either.

  So what gave?

  What was driving her?

  Years of counseling and taking accountability for her own emotional health made her seek out the elusive answers.

  Was she really in love with Braden still, as Tamara had said?

  She had to ask.

  And the answer was still the same. There was a bond there, of course. They’d been in love, had a child together and lost that child. But she didn’t think she was in love with him. Anytime she tried to get there she arrived right where they’d ended—at complete odds with each other, letting each other down emotionally.

  She still felt ashamed at how wild she’d been in his arms at the same time her son had died.

  Still hated that she’d been away from home.

  After four years it was a pretty good bet that those feelings weren’t going to go away.

  As night gave way to day, she got up, showered, got herself to work and greeted her children. Her days were about them, fully and completely. And yet, on Monday she was stopped in her tracks by an expression on the precious face of one of her four-year-olds. Liam was precocious and about as happy as a little boy could be. He’d come up and offered her a picture he’d drawn of a heart and told her he loved her.

  She could barely hold back her tears but she pulled it off for Liam. She hid her emotion in the hug she gave him, telling him she loved him, too, and escaped as quickly as she could.

  Did Braden ever think about what Tucker would be like if he’d lived? Did he ever see a four-year-old boy and wonder if Tucker would have been like him?

  Her thoughts from the night before were there again, in the middle of her day. She had to tell Braden she couldn’t accept his L.A. offer. She had to let him go.

  She took a couple of minutes locked in her private bathroom to let the tears flow.

  * * *

  After having a weekend to think about it, Braden was looking forward to the idea of Mallory’s daycare in L.A. He couldn’t envision how it would work exactly, but he had a few ideas to run by her, ways she could manage her business, expand her business and have the life she wanted, as well. By Monday he was congratulating himself on coming up with the idea. The Bouncing Ball supported her comfortably, but with a baby to raise, the added security of a second business would further cultivate her emotional health.

  Though there might be more on her plate on a day-to-day basis, at least at first, she’d have less to worry about in the big picture.

  Mal had always been a big-picture girl. He’d been all about making the moment count. She’d been on the forever plan.

  She didn’t have time to meet him for lunch on Monday, either, and because he was leaving Tuesday morning to head back to L.A., he waited for her after work. Nothing overt; he just watched from his window for her to be heading out to her car and then called her and asked her to wait a second.

  She said she had to get home to return calls she’d promised would be made that day, but when he pushed, telling her he was heading out in the morning, she relented.

  If he didn’t know better, he’d think she was avoiding him.

  He shook his head at the thought. That was his sister’s way of thinking, not his. She built a mountain of drama out of putting imaginary negative thoughts about herself in other people’s heads. Mallory had no reason to avoid him. They’d established that neither of them had to worry about speaking with the other ever again.

  No more hurt feelings or tense silences between them.

  They weren’t married anymore. They couldn’t disapprove of each other’s plans, thoughts, wants or desires. It had been established the day they’d divorced. Right along with the fact that they’d always be friends and have each other’s backs. Or some such thing. He couldn’t remember the exact words that had been said, but the understanding had been there. They had three years of proof to substantiate it.

  She was sitting in her car when he got downstairs.

  “Follow me home,” he suggested. His place, a luxurious high-rise condo, was only a few blocks away.

  When she looked ready to argue, he said, “I’ll order dinner delivered and you can be home making your calls within the hour.”

  He was pushing too hard. But they were building their future here—futures apart from each other, while still offering friendship and support. He needed every detail laid out.

  He needed this to work.

  He’d been living in limbo too long and was beginning to feel like he was wasting his life.

  If it was just a feeling, he’d move on. Braden tried never to build plans on something as unreliable as feelings. But when it was feeling and fact combined, he knew to push.

  In her jeans and polo shirt, with her dark hair swirling around her face and shoulders, Mallory looked tired as she preceded him through his front door. And hot as hell, too. Braden liked women and got turned on as easily as the next guy. But Mallory pushed a button in him no other woman seemed to know how to push.

  Probably because he had to get her out of the way before another woman could find her way in.

  You’d think her continued physical rejections during the last year of their marriage, including a show of out-and-out aversion to him touching her, would have done it.

  You’d think. But it hadn’t.

  He’d called in an order of lasagna and salad from the wine bar on the bottom floor of his building and it arrived right behind them. Mallory was looking around the condo as though something might have changed since she’d last been there three years ago, shortly after he’d moved in. She should know him better than that. She was the one into aesthetics. He liked his surroundings nice and clean, and then he just lived in them—used them for their purpose, took them for granted.

  With Mallory, her surroundings were almost like a living entity, a partner in her life. She tended to them on a regular basis, changing things up, adding stuff.

  He used to look around when he got home from a trip, testing himself to see if he could figure out what she’d changed while he’d been gone.

  She’d challenge him and if he could work out whatever it was, he’d get sex before dinner rather than afterward.

  He’d almost always had the appetizer sex.

  “You want a glass of wine?” he asked, pulling the bottle he’d ordered out of the bag. He had to get his head in the game.

  And get her out of his head.

  “Tea’s good, if you have some.”

  Of course he had tea. It had always been a staple for both of them. He poured a glass for her, added ice, then opened the wine for himself.

  She found plates and silverware, took them to the table in the dining room, in front of French doors that led out to a balcony facing the ocean in the distance.

  She’d loved the view the moment she’d seen the place. He’d known she would.

  “We could have just gone to a restaurant,” she said as they sat down. She hadn’t looked at him since they’d been inside.

  “It would have taken twice as long and you’re in a hurry. Besides, we can get through more business if we aren’t constantly being interrupted by wait staff.”

  He’d wanted their talk to be private. What they were doing, her having a baby with his sperm, that was about as private as it could get. And now, they were about to enter into
a second business agreement.

  “I thought maybe you wanted to show me things,” she said. “You know, where things were in case you needed me to tend to them in your absence.”

  That was logical, he thought, since he’d given her the key.

  “Like maybe how the thermostat works or where the water shut-off valve is,” she continued.

  Good points, both of them. “I’ll do both before you leave,” he said, digging into his lasagna. She’d served herself a big bowl of salad with a small slice of the lasagna, forgoing the garlic bread.

  “We should have been doing this all along,” he told her, at ease with her in a way he hadn’t been sitting across from her at their various restaurant haunts.

  At least, he felt at ease until he met her gaze across the table and all the blood in his body surged to his penis.

  For a second there he froze. Did she know? What was she thinking?

  No, she couldn’t possibly know. His pelvis was under the table, out of her view. And far hungrier than his stomach. Lasagna wasn’t what he wanted.

  “I wanted to talk to you about the daycare in L.A.” Mallory stabbed the lettuce delicately, chewed, then took a sip of tea.

  The daycare. It was what he’d been trying to talk to her about.

  It was the purpose of the meeting, he reminded himself. Not taking her to bed.

  Restaurants didn’t have his bed just down the hall.

  Was that why they met in them?

  “You know, in your new complex,” she said, fork suspended as she frowned at him.

  He nodded and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “That’s the purpose of this meeting,” he said, attacking his lasagna with a vengeance. “I have several ideas that I think might give you a lot of added security for your future, you know, with a child, and yet wouldn’t run you ragged, trying to keep up with it all.”

  Barely giving himself time to chew and swallow, he suggested that they use The Bouncing Ball name, set it up with the same room configurations and colors, use all of the same philosophies and paperwork, apply one accounting system that would be run online to keep both facilities connected in real time, but hire a manager to run the L.A. branch.

  “You could install cameras, like the ones people put in their homes to be able to see what’s going on inside when they aren’t home,” he continued while she silently ate her salad and then finished her piece of lasagna—all four bites of it.

  “That way you can monitor what’s going on in every room, all day if you want to, to make certain that the children are being treated with the loving discipline that has earned you so much respect.”

  She wasn’t really nodding, but he could tell by the expression on her face that she was interested.

  “And to make certain that the philosophy stays solid, you could offer the management position to Julia, maybe. You said since John died she’s been fading. Maybe a change would be good for her.”

  Julia, Mallory’s second-in-command, had lost her husband to a motorcycle crash the year before. They were in their forties and had never been able to conceive children. Rather than adopting, Julia had chosen to work in the childcare field. She’d applied to work with Mallory before The Bouncing Ball had even opened.

  “She’s actually just started seeing someone,” Mallory told him. “A single dad with two kids, a boy and a girl, both under ten.”

  “Someone from The Bouncing Ball?”

  “No. She met him through a friend of a friend. He’s an engineer.”

  He should have known that. Why hadn’t he known that? It wasn’t like he and Mal didn’t talk regularly.

  With a shrug, he took another bite of food. And then said, “So maybe Donna or someone else would be up for the move,” he said, making a mental run-through of her remaining eight employees and what he knew about their qualifications and living situations.

  Mallory reached her fork over toward his lasagna and they both stopped moving, staring at each other.

  Eating off each other’s plates had been common once upon a time. Mostly him finishing up whatever she’d left. But not once in the last few years had either of them crossed that boundary.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, putting her empty fork down beside her plate.

  “No,” he pushed his plate toward her. “Please. I’m not going to finish.”

  She looked at him for a few seconds. He held her gaze. He kept telling himself he should look away, that staring into her eyes was only stirring his penis even further, but he couldn’t turn away. Eventually she picked up her fork and helped herself to a bite from his plate. Watching her put it into her mouth, he dropped his napkin in his lap.

  It was a good thing he was moving to L.A.

  A damned good thing.

  Chapter Ten

  She had to tell Braden that she wasn’t going to open a second daycare. All that week and into the next, Mallory told herself that she’d make the call tomorrow. Each day, it would happen tomorrow.

  She had to distance herself from him. They’d proven that they weren’t good for each other as more than friends. After Tucker’s death the ashes of their marriage had almost destroyed her.

  They were just too different in the basic way they approached life. They needed different things to make them happy.

  So why hadn’t she stopped his talk at his condo the week before? Told him that she’d changed her mind about joining his L.A. venture?

  She didn’t know, really.

  It wasn’t like he had to know right away, she’d told herself. He’d still do the daycare with or without her. Any work she’d need to be involved with wouldn’t come about for months.

  But he should know.

  Driving into Marie Cove for her appointment at the clinic, exactly one month after she’d made the same drive with Braden, she settled into the rhythm of the road, wrapped in the protective silence of her car, and let her mind relax. To relive recent business with Braden step by step. She thought back to the time he called her to ask her to wait for him. No, wait, she skipped backward to when she’d avoided his attempts to meet up.

  Because she’d known she needed to tell him.

  Then, that Monday night, a week and a half before, he’d asked her to his condo. She hadn’t even argued. Because it had made sense, with her watching over the place for him, she should probably acquaint herself with it, learn its unique foibles.

  She’d been planning to take the opportunity to tell him that he’d be doing the L.A. thing without her. She’d actually been ready to do so. Having played around with the idea, she knew that it wasn’t right for her.

  And then he’d sat down with her, the two of them alone at the table, with that view, in his place, and he’d started talking about the daycare. And she had kept quiet.

  He’d given it so much thought. Pointed out that the added security would give her extra peace of mind as she set out into single parenthood.

  He’d made sense.

  He’d been supporting her in her new life.

  And then he’d looked at her...more than once.

  Did he know that his blue eyes darkened when he was turned on? Had she ever told him?

  She’d seen that look from him thousands of times before. Had recognized it with a shock that sent ripples through her entire system.

  And for a second there, she’d received an answering call from places within her she’d thought dead and gone. At least where he was concerned.

  And that was why she hadn’t told him she’d changed her mind.

  Shaking with the truth, Mallory missed her turnoff.

  * * *

  Though he’d been in San Diego twice since he’d had Mallory in his condo, Braden hadn’t seen her. Purposely. He needed time to get himself under control, to be mentally prepared against flashbacks before he saw her again.

  He’d met a woman
in L.A., an architect colleague of Don Miller, who’d done the drawings for San Diego and was already modifying them to fit the L.A. property. Don had called Anna in for consultation on a couple of points having to do with building around the natural landscaping that they’d like to keep if they could. The three of them had had lunch.

  Braden had since had dinner with her. Twice.

  He liked her. A lot. More than any other woman he’d dated in the past three years.

  Business-minded like him, she lived alone, visited her family in San Francisco enough to be diligent and had a beautiful smile. She laughed often. And she didn’t appear to have a dramatic bone in her body. From the signals she was sending, he was pretty clear that she liked him a lot, too.

  He’d made a date to have lunch with her on Thursday, a week and a half after his dinner with Mallory, but had been toying with the idea of canceling all morning. When he’d spoken with his ex-wife the night before she’d mentioned her second clinic visit, scheduled for eleven that morning. She’d had a positive ovulation test.

  He’d yet to tell Anna about Mallory, other than to say he was divorced and he and his ex had remained friends. The rest was left to be shared with someone when he took their relationship to the next level.

  In his hotel “office,” going over the final drawings to be turned over that day to the contractor, he figured he and Anna might be headed to that next level in the very near future.

  But he still figured he should cancel lunch.

  Mallory would be in Marie Cove.

  He could text her to meet him for a quick bite by the clinic. She’d need to get back; she never liked to take time off during the day, though, as the boss, she was free to do so. Regardless, she’d need a meal.

  And he needed to tell her about Anna. He could be there and back before his next appointment.

  Picking up his phone, he sent the text.

  * * *

  Sitting alone on the table in a paper gown, with a blanket wrapped around her to ward off the chills she’d suddenly developed, Mallory waited for her doctor. Phone in hand, she tried to distract herself with one of her favorite puzzle games.