The Baby Chronicles

He leaned forward, his eyebrows raised high. “Which part don’t you understand? Joe gave me permission to go on location to Sun Mountain for a long weekend. I want to take pictures of the babies outside with Mount Bachelor in the background.”

Her stomach clenched. “No way,” she intoned, shaking her head. She absolutely, positively did not want to go anywhere with Aiden. Being around him had always threatened her vow to stay unengaged, to keep her heart safe. She knew from past experience that Aiden was as far from safe as she could get.

He unfolded his big body and stood, towering over her. She slowly looked up at him and fought to keep her jaw from falling at his imposing, utterly masculine presence. Her heart expanded in her chest, bringing forth the absurd desire to stand up and walk over and bury herself in his warm, comforting embrace, to soak up all the love he’d been so willing to shower on her.

The love she’d had to walk away from.

Sadness weighing her down, she saw the new lines in the skin around his eyes, the shadows under his eyes and the slight hollows in his cheeks she’d noticed earlier. His face reflected a hardness she’d never seen before, a weariness that seemed to go bone deep, as if he’d gone through hell. What had happened during his years overseas to cause those changes?

She shook off her curiosity, determined not to get caught up in Aiden again. Nothing had changed; she still wouldn’t know how to love him. Not that he’d ever want her again.

He leaned down and placed his hands on her desk. “Yup, pack your bags, sweetheart. We’re going on a trip together.” His eyes glinted with cold, hard determination. “Soon.”

She sagged back in her chair and an absurd kind of panic rose in her, almost choking her. She’d spent years recovering after walking away from a wonderful man like Aiden. She was finally in a place where she was fairly happy, a place where she’d accepted that she was destined to be alone.

Now she felt as if she was in a frightening time warp, starring Aiden. In the last fifteen minutes, he’d marched back into her life and turned her stable, carefully crafted world upside down and made her feel things she didn’t want to deal with.

To make matters worse, he hadn’t just stepped back into her existence for an afternoon. Oh, no. She had to go away with him for a whole darn weekend.

Damn fate, anyway.

Chapter Two

Aiden tried not to stare at Colleen’s pink, open mouth, tried not to let her wide-eyed, horrified expression cut too deep. Obviously she thought going away with him was akin to taking a vacation with Charles Manson. Searching for levity to break the thick tension that had sprung up between them and calm the dull pain knifing in his gut, he said, “A fly will get in if you leave your mouth hanging open like that.”

She clamped her mouth closed and glowered, drawing her perfectly arched, dark blond eyebrows together, presumably to look stern. “Very funny.” Obviously she didn’t appreciate his attempt at humor.

“Hey, whatever works,” he said with forced lightness, determined not to dwell on the fact that he had to work with the woman who’d crept under his skin eight years ago and dismantled his heart like a one-woman wrecking crew.

“You think this is amusing?” She began to quickly shuffle through the masses of papers covering every square inch of her desk, nervously jumping from pile to pile. Odd, she’d never been the twitchy sort before.

He let out a heavy breath. “No, not amusing. But not the end of the world, either. C’mon, Colleen, lighten up.” If he could deal with this after she’d cut a hole in his heart she damn well could, too.

She yanked out a sheaf of papers and began to thumb through the stack. “I wish that were possible.”

“Why isn’t it?”

Her worry-studded gaze flicked up and held on him for a long moment, then darted back down to peruse the papers in her hands. “I told you. I don’t want this assignment.”

“Why not?” he asked before he could call the words back, irritated that he cared about her reactions at all. Nothing but trouble there.

“I just don’t.” She shot to her feet, turned away and opened a file cabinet, ignoring him again.

He stood in silence, staring at her narrow back and blond, curly hair. A memory of her on the beach, smiling at him, the blue sky behind her, her hair blowing in the ocean breeze, popped into his brain—

He stopped the image in its tracks. Those were the memories of Colleen that had tortured him while he huddled against bombed-out buildings in the dark during cold, endless nights. Funny how those memories had also kept him warm deep inside, encouraging him to go on when scenes of death and starving children and leveled villages had cut across his heart and soul and branded themselves in his brain forever.

Fortunately he didn’t need memories of Colleen to get him through anymore, to keep him warm. His new, life-affirming job taking pictures of babies would do that.

Dragging his gaze away, he fisted his hands at his sides. He had to concentrate on his work, not how his memories of her had helped him through the darkest hours of his life.

Despite that one and only benefit of his past relationship with her, he couldn’t ever let himself forget that she’d coldheartedly eviscerated him. End of story. He refused to let himself care about her beyond working on this article together.

“Dammit, Colleen.” He reached out and tugged on her elbow. Her soft, peachy scent assaulted his senses. “We have to work together.”

She spun around and the papers in her hands fluttered to the floor. She jerked away. “Do you mind?”

He dropped his hand. She was right. He shouldn’t be touching her. “All I want to do is talk—”

“We’ll talk about the story, nothing more.”

“Hey. Cool. That’s exactly what I was going to say. So you’re going to find a way to work with me so we can collaborate on a quality piece?”

She froze, staring, and a whisper of naked vulnerability flashed in her eyes. She looked down and slowly turned back to the file cabinet, shutting him out again.

He opened and closed his fists, determined not to let himself wonder or care about her vulnerability—or anything else about her. “I’m not going to let you ruin the spread. This is too important to me to let you do that.”

She twisted back around and met his gaze, then opened her mouth to speak, but clamped it tightly shut. She closed her eyes briefly, and when she opened them, a studied blankness assailed him.

To his irritation, right on cue, as if he’d been plunked down in the past, his chest pulled tight. He ignored the tugging sensation, determined not to give a rip about Colleen again. He’d seen that expression before, more times than he could count. Thankfully her utter blankness, so familiar, so damn steadfast, didn’t matter anymore.

He wouldn’t let it.

“I…uh, I need to get something. I’ll be right back.” She walked from behind her desk and left him standing alone in her cube.

He swore under his breath, looked at the ceiling and rubbed the back of his neck. Casting a glance around her tiny cubicle, he again noticed the mounds of paper covering every inch of her desk and most of the floor. A yellowing, half-dead plant swimming in water sat in one corner, and its brown, dried-up twin sat on the corner of her desk. Stacks of file folders and empty office-supply boxes crowded the top of the file cabinets. The place was an absolute mess.

He frowned. He remembered Colleen as being pretty neat and well organized, and her appearance today was polished and put-together. Why was her office so filled with clutter? Was she just too busy to straighten up once in a while? And why was she so damn fidgety?

He shook his head. He had to admit, she seemed different. The glimpse of vulnerability he’d seen in her eyes earlier was totally unexpected and so unlike what he remembered about the confident, wisecracking Colleen he’d fallen in love with.

And why was she so bothered to be working with him? She’d seemed to escape absolutely unscathed by their breakup. He’d seen her in a bar the night before he’d left for Afghanistan, happily dancing up a storm with every guy in the place. Stuff like this didn’t usually bother her.

Yeah, Colleen had changed. Despite that observation, she was as much a mystery as she’d always been, a mystery he would solve only for the sake of “The Baby Chronicles” and his career as a baby photographer.

As much as he hated it, to build the new life he wanted, he had to discover a way to work with her effectively.

Taking a deep, shaky breath, Colleen dropped into a chair in the small room that served as the break/lunch area for the employees of the Beacon, thankful lunchtime was over. She needed a few minutes alone to get a hold of herself.

To find a way to keep Aiden from getting to her.

She plopped her chin in her upturned palm and looked around the room. The light blue walls were adorned with gold-framed copies of old issues of the Beacon. One wall held a new white refrigerator, shiny black dishwasher, gleaming chrome sink, speckled blue counters and white wood cabinets. Newspapers and magazines covered the surfaces of the three small, round metal tables, and unwashed coffee cups sat on the counter between the sink and microwave oven, along with an assortment of plates, empty junk-food containers and pop cans. The place was a disaster.

Kind of like her. Looked good on the outside, a mess on the inside. Mercy, she was such a product of her loveless childhood, spent first with her neglectful, flaky parents, and later, in a verbally abusive foster-care home. She shuddered, remembering the terrible, lonely place where her only purpose had been to act as a live-in baby-sitter for the rest of the younger kids and as a verbal punching bag for her alcoholic foster mother.

She shook her head, recoiling from those terrible memories, focusing on the here and now, which, unfortunately, was inevitably intertwined with her past.

Was that why Aiden had thrown her into such a tizzy? She frowned and pinched the bridge of her nose, taking control of her spiraling, disconcerting emotions. Tizzies, she’d discovered at an early age, were useless and only brought on someone else’s anger, targeted at her. She always made sure that she managed herself well enough to avoid them. But not today.