Peekaboo Baby

Her fingers were white-knuckled in their grip on her purse. “Could I please just see his picture? I might be able to save us both a lot of time.”

Well, the woman certainly knew how to captivate him. And no, it didn’t have anything to do with her vulnerability.

All right, maybe it did.

A little.

But it was a problem that he’d soon remedy. Feelings and emotions carried high price tags, and he didn’t intend to go there again. Ever. And even if he decided to ease up on that rule a bit, he wouldn’t have been looking in Delaney Nash’s direction.

“Please,” she said, her voice and bottom lip trembling again.

Ryan stared at her while he debated it. And what a debate it was. Why did she want to see a picture of Adam? Why the vague save-us-some-time excuse?

And why the heck was he even considering her bizarre request?

He didn’t owe her a damn thing. She and her father had done everything humanly possible to drag his name through the mud. And all because he’d bested Richard Nash in a business deal.

So what.

He’d bested a lot of people, and they hadn’t made death threats or tried to sue him. The old analogy of “if you can’t stand the heat” came to mind. Richard Nash obviously couldn’t, but instead of getting his wimpy butt out of the kitchen, he’d spent the past year and a half trying to get revenge.

Ryan mentally rehashed the past, and while he was at it, he took a few moments to reflect on the woman standing in front of him. And somewhere amid all of that soul-searching, he felt his hand move in the direction of his top right desk drawer.

He didn’t look at the object he extracted. He couldn’t. It might be acceptable for her to show her vulnerable side, but Ryan didn’t intend to reciprocate.

His heart would break all over again if he looked at that picture of his son. And this time, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to survive it.

Keeping his attention fastened to her eyes, Ryan handed her the photo encased in the gold-gilded frame. She didn’t look at the image, either. She kept her attention on him, shifted her purse beneath her arm and took the picture, her fingers closing around it as if it were made of delicate crystal that might shatter in her hand.

She mumbled something. A prayer, maybe, then looked down at the photo.

Her eyes widened, her breath stopped, and she brought the picture closer. Studying it. Really studying it. Mere inches from her face.

“Oh, God. Oh. God. He’s so small,” she said, her voice a breathy whisper. Her bottom lip didn’t quiver. It began to shake.

She began to shake.

And she adjusted her purse again so that it was in front of her chest.

“Yes.” Ryan had to swallow hard before he could continue. Not just because of her extreme reaction, but because he didn’t need the image in front of him to visualize his son’s face. It was there. Always there. Burned into his memory and his heart. “Adam was born ten weeks premature.”

We almost lost him, Ryan nearly added.

It was an automatic addendum he’d used often in those first days after Adam’s birth and his stay in the neonatal unit. Those words had proved to be all too prophetic.

Because they had lost him.

“When the accident happened,” Ryan added. He cleared his throat, but it didn’t help. “My son had only been out of the hospital a few days.”

And Ryan was suddenly so sorry he’d opened all of this again. Hoping to undo his mistake, he reached out, snatched the picture from her, put it back where it belonged and slammed the drawer.

“All right. Observation time’s over. Start talking. Why are you here, Ms. Nash?”

She shook her head in an almost frantic gesture. “It’s hard to tell from the picture. You’d think it’d be easy, but it isn’t. It isn’t easy at all.”

Because she looked and sounded on the verge of losing it, and because he wasn’t stupid, he stood and grabbed her purse. She made a sound of surprise, part gasp, part outrage, but Ryan didn’t let that stop him. He rifled through the leather bag to see if she’d indeed brought a gun with her.

No gun.

Just the normal things that might be found in a woman’s purse. A wallet, keys, comb, pen and some toiletry items. Oh, and a blue pacifier in a clear plastic case.

Hardly the tools of a would be killer.

She grabbed her bag from him and put it back as a shield in front of her. But not before he saw the circular wet splotch around her left breast. Specifically, the blotch centered around the somewhat prominent outline of her nipple. Her focus followed his to see what had captured his attention, and she actually blushed.

“I nurse my son,” she said, obviously not comfortable with the topic. “And I’m late for his feeding.”

Ryan wasn’t exactly comfortable with it either, but there wasn’t anything comfortable about this visit. “Then, maybe you should go to your baby instead of being here?”

“The sitter gave him a bottle. I called her on the drive over.”

And that brought the conversation to a temporary grinding halt. It took a moment for Ryan to ask what he knew he had to ask. “Why did you react that way to my son’s picture?”

She shrugged in a sort of dismissal that didn’t change anything. Every muscle in her face was tight and doing battle with each other. “It doesn’t matter. Dr. Keyes can’t be right.”

Ryan took a moment to try to process her mumblings and that name, but there was nothing in his memory to process. “Who the hell is Dr. Keyes?”

“The fertility specialist I used. I can’t have a child on my own. I had to use a donor embryo to become pregnant with my son.”

“So?” Ryan said, since he had no idea what else to say. This little talk had taken a bad turn somewhere, and he didn’t think it would get back on track anytime soon. Still, he wasn’t about to send her on her way until he learned what this visit was all about.

“So, Dr. Keyes…” She paused, and what little color she had drained from her face. She stared at him. Well, in his direction anyway. Long moments. But Ryan wasn’t sure she was seeing him at all. She seemed to be involved in her own private, intense debate that occupied all of her mental energy.

“I have to go,” she said.

She whirled around and had made it halfway to the door before Ryan could catch up with her. He stepped in front of her to block her path so she couldn’t leave.

“Finish that thought about Dr. Keyes,” he insisted.

He saw more of that intense debate, and she must not have cared much for the conclusion she silently drew. “There’s no reason to finish it. I’m sorry I bothered you. I’m sorry for everything.”

Again, she started for the door. Tried to step around him. But Ryan did some maneuvering of his own until they were face-to-face. Since she was easily five-nine and was wearing heels, they were practically eye-to-eye, as well.

He caught her scent. Not just her rain-soaked clothes, either. Her scent. Something rich and female. Like her tears and her trembling lip, it awakened responses inside him that he’d long since buried.

And he intended for them to stay buried, too.

It was a man-woman thing, he assured himself. And it felt more intense than it actually was because he’d gone so long without sex. His thirty-two-year-old body was simply urging him in a direction he had no intention of going.