Baby for Keeps

Dylan had the good sense to look abashed. “Sorry. I didn’t see you standing there. Did you sleep well?”

The expression of every woman in earshot was the same. Shock. Dismay. Vested calculation.

Mia wanted to tell them not to worry, but it didn’t seem the time. She held out her arms for Cora. “I’ll take her. Thanks for dinner.”

As Dylan wiggled his way out of the booth, his entourage melted away. He moved closer to Mia, forcing the two of them into an intimate circle. “Don’t be in such a damned hurry.”

She put her hands over Cora’s ears, scowling. “Watch your mouth. I’m surprised to see you looking so comfortable and domesticated with Cora. Or was that nothing but an act for your groupies?”

His eyebrows rose to his hairline, but still he didn’t surrender the baby. “The little Mia I knew was never sarcastic.”

“The little Mia you knew wouldn’t say boo to a goose. I’m not a child anymore.”

He stared at her. Hard. The way a man stares at a woman. “No, you definitely are not.”

It appeared that the man flirted indiscriminately, because she knew for a fact that he had no interest in her. “Give me my child.”

Holding Cora even more tightly, he nodded his head toward the back. “I’ve got a closet-size office back there. Give me fifteen minutes. Then if you want to go, I won’t stop you.”

She was confused and tired and more than a little depressed. But short of wrestling him to the ground and making a scene, it appeared she had no choice. “Fine. Fifteen minutes.”

Dylan’s office was a wreck. He must have been telling the truth about his bookkeeper, because there was easily a week’s worth of receipts and purchase orders stacked haphazardly across the surface of the scarred oak table he used as a desk. Still holding Cora, he motioned Mia into one of two chairs in the small space. “I have a proposition for you.”

“You must be hard up if you’re propositioning a nursing mom with a bad haircut and legs that haven’t been shaved in two weeks.”

This time she definitely saw him wince. “You used to be a lot sweeter, Mia Larin.”

“I’m a mom now. I can’t be a pushover. Are you ever going to give her back to me?”

He kissed the top of Cora’s downy head. “You forget that I have five brothers younger than me. I’ve changed more than my share of diapers over the years.”

“But not recently.”

“No. Not recently.”

If he had an agenda for this awkward meeting, he was taking his good easy time getting to the point. “What do you want from me, Dylan?”

His smile could have charmed the bloomers off an old-maid schoolteacher. “I want to offer you a job.”

“Doing what?”

He waved a hand at the mess. “Being my new bookkeeper.”

“That’s absurd. I’m not an accountant.”

He propped a hip against the table, forcing her to look at all the places his jeans were soft and worn. “You’re a genius,” he said, the words oddly inflected. “Keeping the books for the Silver Dollar Saloon isn’t exactly rocket science.”

“I don’t need you to bail me out, Dylan. But thanks for the offer.” Watching him absently stroke her daughter’s hair undermined her hurry to leave. Dylan was big and strong and unabashedly masculine. But his hands held Cora gently.

“We’d be helping each other,” he insisted. “The job comes with room and board. Or at least until you get tired of the food downstairs. I live five miles away, so you don’t have to worry about me getting underfoot. There’s an alarm system. You would be perfectly safe alone here when we’re closed. I know the bar gets pretty noisy at times, but a fan or a sound machine would probably do the trick. The insulation between the floors is actually pretty good.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“You need some time to regroup. I need a bookkeeper. You won’t have to worry about day care. Cora is welcome here always. And with a salary coming in—though I’m sure it’s not even in the ballpark of what you were making in your field— you’ll be comfortable and settled while you look for a new position.”

It was a testament to her desperation that she considered it. Her résumé would have to be updated before she could job hunt. And the thought of spending more time with Cora was irresistible. Doing Dylan’s books could be handled while Cora napped. But still she wasn’t satisfied.

Shaking her head, she studied his face. “You can’t tell me that you offer jobs to every hard-luck case who walks through the door. Why me? Why now?”

“I think you know why,” he said quietly, meeting her gaze squarely. “I owe you more than I can ever repay. I’m sorry that I was a stupid teenage boy too proud to acknowledge what you were doing for me. But I’m saying it now. Thank you, Mia. For everything. The job is real. Please let me do this for you. It would mean a lot to me.”

“You’re serious? It was a long time ago, Dylan. And I liked tutoring you. You don’t owe me anything.”

“Then do it for Cora. Before you lost your job, you would have had to go back to work soon. Now you have a chance to spend several more weeks with her. Isn’t that enough to make you say yes?”

* * *

Forty-five minutes later, Mia found herself checking into a hot, musty, generic motel room out at the interstate. Dylan had tried hard to get her to spend the night upstairs above the bar. But she needed some space and distance to weigh the pros and cons of his unexpected offer. He had the uncanny ability to make people see things his way. She wanted to be sure she was considering all the aspects of his proposal before she gave him an answer.

The pluses were obvious. Time with her daughter. An immediate paycheck. No need to look for a new place to live when her lease ran out in a week. And it wasn’t as if she had a lot of other appealing choices. She would get a job in the Raleigh/Durham area eventually, once she found another lab looking for her set of skills. If she were lucky, the employer might even offer on-site, discounted day care. She knew of several companies that did so. But tracking down such a position would take time—time when she wasn’t bringing in money and didn’t have a place to live.

Or if she agreed to work for Dylan, she would have a roof over her head, food to eat and more time with Cora while she looked for employment in her field. Only a fool would say no—right?

Then why was she hesitating?

It all came down to Dylan. It was one thing for a young girl to have a crush on a popular senior jock. That was practically a rite of passage. But as Dylan had pointed out, Mia was all grown up. And her reactions to the equally grown-up Dylan were alarming.

The times she had tried dating in her adult life had been either disastrous or disappointing. Until she walked through the doors of the Silver Dollar Saloon, she had honestly thought she didn’t have much of an interest in sex or men. But coming face-to-face with Dylan exposed the lie she had told herself for years.

Dylan wasn’t a high school crush. He was the boy, now the man, who had made her aware of her sexual self. His masculine strength and power made her feel intensely female. In every other area of her life, people looked at her as a brain first and foremost.

She did valuable work. She knew that. Her intelligence had led her to projects and challenges that were exciting and fulfilling. But sometimes it felt that she could have just as easily been a robot. No one cared that she had emotions or, heaven forbid, needs.

That wasn’t entirely fair. Janette was a dear friend. And Janette was the one who’d introduced Mia to Howard, the botany professor who dated Mia for six months, courted her circumspectly and eventually shared her bed. Their relationship had been comfortable and undemanding, laden with pleasant conversation as well as shared interests and backgrounds.

But in the end, the absence of sparks between them meant a sad, inevitable breakup due to lack of sizzle.

With Dylan, there was plenty of sizzle—an entire forest fire of sizzle. Not necessarily on his part, but definitely on Mia’s. All she had to do was look at him and she remembered exactly how she had felt as a girl of fifteen. Perhaps the tutoring had erased some boundaries between them. Or maybe because they had kept their relationship secret, it had felt safe to her. But whatever the reason, Dylan was the only male to make her feel this way.

Discovering that truth was disheartening. If she had let a teenage crush spoil her for other men, she was doomed to a single, celibate life. On the other hand, maybe she could make her obsession work for her, not against her. A hefty dose of exposure to the mature Dylan could prove to her that the boy she had idolized was just a guy like any other. She could flirt with him, maybe even sleep with him, and then go on her way.

She tucked Cora into the portable crib and sighed with relief when the baby actually curled into a ball and went still. Cora had fallen asleep on the ride over, but Mia had anticipated another long night of being up and down with her. Maybe Dylan had worn her daughter out.

Showering and changing as quietly as she could, Mia crawled into bed and yawned. She had promised Dylan an answer tomorrow. He had given her both the bar’s number and his cell-phone number. But now she had more to think about. Her limbs felt restless and her body heavy. If she stayed in Silver Glen for six weeks, or maybe eight, however long it took to find another position suited to her skills and experience, would that be long enough to get Dylan out of her system?

Merely the thought of it made her breath catch and her thighs clench.

Janette hailed from Silver Glen as well. Though she was older than Mia, their hometown connection was what led them to become friends in Raleigh. Janette kept up with several family members in Silver Glen, and it had been a source of hot gossip when Dylan’s engagement to a young starlet ended abruptly a few years ago.