The Daddy Project: A Single Dad Romance

“You were wearing garden gloves when you answered the door and your T-shirt—” She glanced at his chest and away again. “So…”

He liked that she was still blushing.

“It’s the equation for photosynthesis,” he said. “I got this at a conference I attended last year.”

“I thought so. I mean, that’s what it says on the back. So, about the mop…” She hiked her thumb toward the house. “I need to clean up the water I spilled and finish looking through the other rooms.”

He also liked that she was outwardly more flustered than he felt on the inside. “I’ll clean it up. It’s my fault for leaving Gemmy’s bowl in front of the door.”

He set the calipers beside the next plant he needed to measure, saved the spreadsheet and closed his laptop. “Molly? Martha? I’m going inside for a couple of minutes.”

“We’re playing school,” Molly yelled back. “An’ I’m the teacher.”

“Good for you. I’ll be right back. Gemmy, stay,” he said, giving the dog the palm-out signal for “stay.” She rolled onto her side with her back firmly pressed against the playhouse door and her eyelids slowly slid shut. She wasn’t going anywhere and neither were the girls.

“I take it Gemmy is a girl,” Kristi said as they circled the pool together and walked toward the house.

“She is. It’s short for Hegemone.”

“That’s an unusual name. I’ve never heard it before.”

“Hegemone is the Greek goddess of plants. The botany connection seemed like a good idea when I got her. Then the girls came along and they couldn’t pronounce it so they shortened it to Gemmy. She also responds to Gem. And Milk-Bone treats.”

“My dog’s name is Hercules. That’s a Greek god, too. I think.”

“Roman, actually. Borrowed from the Greek Heracles, son of Zeus. He was half mortal and half god.”

“Oh. We thought he was the god of strength or something.”

She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring so he’d assumed she was single. The “we” implied otherwise.

“He was, among other things,” Nate said. He resisted the urge to elaborate. She probably already thought he was a complete nerd. No point sounding like a walking encyclopedia and removing any doubt. “What kind of dog is Hercules?”

“A Yorkshire terrier.”

He laughed. “Good name. Does he live up to it?”

He slid the patio door open for her and waited for her to go inside.

“Only in that he has me and my daughter completely wrapped around one of his tiny little paws.”

“But not your husband?”

She met his gaze head-on. “I don’t have a husband.”

“I see.” He had wanted it to sound like an innocent question. It was anything but, and they both knew it. For a few seconds they stared awkwardly at one another, then she looked away.

“So…I’ll just grab the mop.”

He left her waiting in the family room and sidestepped the massive puddle on the kitchen floor. He looked in several places before he located the mop in the mudroom and the bucket in the garage.

In the kitchen, Kristi stood at the end of the peninsula that separated the kitchen from the eating area. She had set her enormous cupcake bag on the counter next to her and was looking at the monitor of the camera in her hands. The bag was a light purple color and printed with wildly colorful cupcakes, which the girls had gushed over. It was also large and completely stuffed. He’d heard all the jokes about the contents of a woman’s handbag, but this was over-the-top. How much stuff did one woman need to carry around with her?

“You have a great house,” she said, without looking up from the camera.

“Thanks.” You have great legs, he thought as he quickly looked down and up again, past the purple skirt and short, matching jacket with the big black buttons, relieved she wasn’t watching him.

He set the bucket on the floor, and Kristi reached for the mop.

He shook his head. “I’ll look after it. It was my fault anyway. I keep the door closed, so I put the water there because it was out of the way.”

As he ran the mop over the floor, he kept a surreptitious eye on Kristi. She wasn’t paying any attention to him. Instead something on the fridge door had caught her attention. The latest strip of pictures of him and the girls from the photo booth at the mall.

“Cute photographs,” she said.

“Thanks. We started taking them when their—” When their mother was dying. Daily visits to the hospital had become too much of a strain for her and too stressful for the girls, so he’d started taking the photographs to her instead. He couldn’t tell that to a stranger. “We started taking them a couple of years ago. It’s sort of become a tradition.”

“I think it’s lovely,” she said.

He worked the mop across the floor, keeping what seemed like a safe distance from her. Safe, that is, until his gaze sought out the shapely curve of her calves, the slender ankles....

The mop handle connected with something.

He whipped around in time to see her enormous cupcake bag slide off the counter, but he was too slow to catch it. Like a slice of buttered toast, it flipped and hit the floor upside down, and then there was no need to wonder what was in the bag because its contents were strewn across the damp kitchen floor. “Dammit.”

Kristi set her camera on the counter, laughed and knelt at the same time he did, the tip of her blond ponytail brushing the side of his face as she tossed it over her shoulder. She smelled like springtime and lilacs.

She started cramming her possessions back into the bag.

He gathered as many things as he could and handed them to her. A notebook, several pens, an empty Tic Tac box, a hairbrush, two tampons and…oh, geez…a condom? The warmth of a flush crept up his neck, but he was sure his red face was no match for hers. She held the bag open and he dropped everything inside, avoiding eye contact.

“Thanks.” She stuffed a bunch of receipts and a wallet into the bag. “I think we got everything.”

He stood up, and she stood up, wobbling a little on account of her heels. He grasped her arm to steady her, reminded of how she’d nearly tripped on Martha’s boot. She smiled up at him, and when he looked into the depths of her green eyes he felt like a cliff diver plunging headfirst into an unfamiliar sea.

“So…” she said, then stopped as though she wasn’t sure what else to say. A lot of her sentences started that way.

“I should get back outside. The girls are out there, and I still have work to do.”

“Me, too.” She flung the overstuffed bag over her shoulder. “Inside, not outside. It won’t take me long to finish up, then I was thinking I could just let myself out. Would it be okay if I come back tomorrow? In the morning, maybe, say around nine, if you’re not too busy. That’ll give me a chance to look through the photos I’ve taken, talk to my partners.” She stopped, drew a long breath.

She was embarrassed, probably in a hurry to get out of here, and it was his fault. If he’d been paying attention to what he was doing instead of admiring her legs, he wouldn’t have knocked her bag off the counter. And then, if he’d been paying attention, he would have left the little plastic packet for her to pick up and pretended not to see it.

Now the stupid condom had become the elephant in the room—

The bad analogy practically had him groaning out loud.

“Tomorrow morning’s good,” he said. “Nine o’clock. I was planning to work at home anyway.”