Must Like Kids

Julia’s raised brows, he added, “The relationship simply ran its course.”

Julia nodded. But did she believe him? And why did he care if she did?

“Are you seeing anyone now?” she surprised him by asking.

“That’s a little personal, don’t you think?”

“Personal, but relevant. So, are you?”

“No. I’m between relationships.” He waited a beat, then asked, “What about you?”

“That’s both personal and irrelevant.”

Alec ground his molars together. God, the woman was exasperating. And he had to work with her for who knew how long. It was just his luck.

“Let’s get back to your friend Karen. As I said, she seems nice enough, but I’m not interested. Attraction is hard to quantify.” His instantaneous attraction to the prickly woman seated beside him being a case in point. “I date women I find engaging, exciting.”

“And deep, no doubt.”

Julia’s lips twitched, leaving him with the impression she was laughing at him.

“You think I’m shallow?”

She sobered at that and glanced away. “I’m sorry. That was rude. I’m not being paid to pass judgments.”

Her answer was hardly reassuring. She pointed in the direction her friend had gone.

“For the record, Karen’s ex is a total deadbeat.

Gordie hasn’t seen Logan or their girls in more than a year, nor has he paid child support. If not for Karen’s parents, Logan wouldn’t have a roof over his head, much less be playing T-ball. So, she tends to come on a little strong when she realizes a man is both unmarried and gainfully employed.”

Bitterness welled in Alec’s throat as he recalled his own childhood. Even parents who stayed married could be deadbeats, he thought.

“You’ll have to work on that,” Julia remarked. Her tone was clipped.

“What?”

“That look of supreme distaste. She’s not a gold digger. She’s just looking for companionship and a father figure for her kids.”

He didn’t bother trying to correct Julia’s assumption that he’d been thinking about Karen. The last thing he wanted to talk about was his parents. Instead, he decided to shift the focus of their conversation. “What about you? You’re a single mom, too. Are you looking for those things?”

She shook her head. Despite the heat, her tone was pure frost when she replied, “My kids and I are fine on our own.”

THREE

The game ended. The crowd dispersed. Alec helped Julia take down the canopy and carry it back to her car.

“I’ll be in touch,” she said.

He nodded. “Nice meeting you,” he said to her kids, adding, “Good game,” for Colin’s benefit.

“We got creamed.”

Alec frowned. “I thought you said no one keeps score.”

“The coaches don’t, but Noah Wilson’s dad does. He said it was a massacre, and we need to work on our catching.”

“Oh.”

“There’s one of those dads on every team,” Julia muttered.

“Do you know much about baseball?” Colin asked. “Maybe we could play catch some time.”

“Um...” Alec’s gaze cut to her.

Julia knew panic when she saw it. “Mr. McAvoy is a busy man, Colin.”

Colin nodded at the explanation. “Oh. Okay.” To Alec he said, “That’s too bad. Everybody should have enough time to play catch once in awhile.”

They went their separate ways after that, but Alec remained on Julia’s mind for the rest of the evening.

She considered herself a good judge of character. As such, she’d thought she’d had Alec pegged after their meeting in her office, her opinion reinforced by the fact that he’d arrived late and had come across as both obstinate and arrogant.

Then, at the baseball diamond, he’d showed up in his snazzy two-seater, wearing a tailored suit and silk tie, and looking as out of place as a car salesman at a cyclist convention. Her initial opinion had seemed on target, especially after their conversation about his dating habits. She’d probed a bit more than usual—all of it work-related, she assured herself.

But then, once the game got under way, he’d surprised her.

Julia wouldn’t say he’d ever managed to look comfortable sitting with her in the manufactured shade of the canopy. Or that he’d understood the point of a ball game in which no one kept score and even the parents on the opposing team clapped for all the little sluggers as they took their turn at the tee to bat. But he’d appeared so intrigued by it.

“Didn’t you play baseball when you were a kid?” she’d asked him at one point.

His tone had been an odd combination of wistfulness and resignation when he’d replied, “Not really. Not like this.”

Julia was the one intrigued then.

So, that night, after her kids went to bed, she stayed up not only to pour over her plans for his public reincarnation, but also to read his biography, both what his company had provided and what she could glean on her own from the internet.

By all accounts, Alec McAvoy had grown up in privilege—attending a couple of East Coast boarding schools before moving on to an Ivy League education with a stint abroad between his undergraduate degree in finance and his MBA in business. His paternal grandparents were old money and owned a summer home on Nantucket. From the photographs, it was far grander than the cozy beach house Julia and Scott had once dreamed about buying on Lake Michigan.

Alec’s parents, meanwhile, were fixtures at parties thrown by Hollywood A-listers, socialites and European high rollers. At one point, rumors had swirled about Peter and Brooke McAvoy’s finances running low, but it hadn’t seemed to slow them down. On the internet, Julia ran across a picture of them snapped just six months earlier in which they were sunbathing on the deck of a yacht anchored off Corfu. The yacht belonged to a Greek shipping magnate. She also ran across photograph after photograph of the elder

McAvoys among the glitterati. The pictures stretched back well over a decade. If they were broke, they were doing a poor imitation of it.

Alec, of course, was wealthy in his own right. As the CEO of Best For Baby, he earned seven figures, and then there was the not so small matter of the fortune he’d inherited from his grandfather after the man’s death half a decade earlier. The silver spoon he’d been born with had never had a chance to tarnish, much less be removed.

She stared at his photo on her computer screen. Alec McAvoy had it all: wealth, good looks, lofty connections and power. He also had a PR problem the size of the Titanic. And that was why the Best For Baby board had hired her, Julia reminded herself as she switched off the computer just after midnight and stumbled off to bed, taking with her a printout of the damning article that had started the current controversy. She practically knew it by heart, but she wanted to be sure she hadn’t missed any subtext that could be used in the rebuttal articles she planned to plant in various media outlets starting Monday.

She nodded off one paragraph in and then dreamed about him...in a not-so-professional way.