Daddy on Demand / Déjà You: Daddy on Demand / Déjà You

“Pearls of wisdom coming from—” Collin’s heart did another debilitating plunge and he stepped back against the entryway table pressing his right hand to his chest. “No. Oh, no. I know what I promised, but that was when you were delirious in labor—or I was delirious with fear? At any rate, I can’t keep the girls while you’re gone. You’re looking at a man who has never remotely craved an opportunity to change diapers “

“Then you’re in luck. Genie and Addie are well past the diaper stage. They’re in fast-track preschool.”

“Next stop MIT?” As she lasered him with the infamous Masters’s matriarchal look, he held up both hands and rethought his defense. “What was I thinking with a military mom who names her daughters versions of general and admiral?” He had teased her from day one about Gena and Addison’s names, which he’d turned into those nicknames. But he had little doubt that her three-year-olds were mavericks in the making, the next evolution of all that their gutsy mother was striving to be. That made what she was asking of him all the more insane.

“Look at you,” he tried to explain with unabashed awe. “You’re a pilot. You navigate thousands of pounds of metal through the air. You’re a walking hero 365 days a year even if you never left the country.” Dropping his hands at his sides, he looked at her helplessly. “What do I have to offer your babies, Cass? On weekends, when there is such a thing on my calendar as downtime, I’ve been known to sleep fourteen hours and wake up in the same position when I first crashed onto the bed.”

“You’ll adapt. Learn to do what I do. Juggle. Manage. The difference is you’ll be doing it with a seven-figure income.”

He bent at the waist and lifted his left knee as though she’d thrown him a sucker punch—or kick. “Ouch, girl.”

Cassidy grimaced. “Sorry. Doesn’t it help that even if you weren’t the next in line to be the kids’ legal guardian that you are the one and only man I adore and trust?”

“Give me your commanding officer’s phone number.” Collin snatched up his cell phone stationed on the kitchen bar. “There are issues about your judgment he needs to know about.”

Unperturbed, Cass stood her ground. “If I didn’t think you could rise to this occasion, I would take the offer of one of my fellow pilots’ wives and leave the girls on base with them. I even asked the kids what they would prefer and do you know what they said?”

“Buy us a suite at Disneyland and sign our guardianship over to the Jonas Brothers?”

“They want ‘Unca Colon.’ Declared in unison might I add.”

Collin almost choked. “Please tell me that you’re talking to an orthodontist about that speech impediment?”

Secretly, however he dealt with a new guilt surge knowing how he’d dropped the ball as “Unca” last Christmas. Instead of spending it with them and Cassie, he’d flown to Tahiti with a redhead whose name he could no longer recall. “Tell them they’ll hate it here. No presents and nothing but oatmeal and algebra. By a tutor who can barely speak English,” he added seeing nothing but advantage in heaping on negatives.

Nonplussed, Cassie replied, “I was thinking more like this could be an opportunity to show them the museums and galleries in the areas. Take them to the botanical gardens over in Fort Worth plus the Dallas arboretum and zoo. Focus on something else besides the corporate bottom line for a change.”

“Forgive my arrogance, but that bottom line is why you get to poke fun at my salary, kiddo.”

“It’s the detriment to you having a life. It’s going to blow up in your face one day. I don’t want you to vanish like our parents did when their balloon suddenly burst due to Dad’s bad business deals.”

Since he had a better memory of those shadow people that continued to haunt their past, Collin stiffened. The last thing he wanted to be accused of was emulating their parents in any variation.

“Give me a second…or a week,” he replied. “I’m sure I can think of a better solution for you. One you’ll end up thanking me for.”

That had Cassidy sucking in her cheeks and enunciating her words with particular care. “There is no one else, Collin. And should worse come to worst, at least this way they would already be used to being around you 24/7.”

Her innuendo had him dropping his head on his chest. “I beg you—do not go there.” The prospect of losing her shook him to his core and he quickly tried to hide his fear in humor. “Let’s focus again on my day job that—to paraphrase you—overpays me. What happens to the girls while I’m at the office? Do you realize I could quickly screw up that ‘Road to MIT’ plan of yours?”

Cassidy spread her arms wide. “You can’t delegate even an iota or work from home? Then ask someone in this granite fortress who they would recommend as a nanny.”

“There are—let me count.” He did the math. “Four children in this building. ‘Children’ being a euphemism, since one is in college. In fact she confided to me in the elevator last week that she is taking pole dancing as a college elective.”

“Oh, she was just flirting with you. The ninety-year-olds want to fatten you up and the little girls hear that voice and they want you to be their knight in shining armor.”

He wasn’t knight material, but it was a waste of time to argue with his sister. “The point being that the other three are products of split-custody agreements and only visit on odd weekends, and increasingly only on holidays.”

“Ask at the office.”

“You think I would hand over the care of your precious darlings to total strangers?”

Cassidy crossed her arms over her chest. “Faster than your brain registers eye candy. Look, I know you have to work, but surely somewhere in your vast circle of acquaintances and associates there’s someone who can refer a person good with kids, who can keep them growing while they’re away from their lessons and friends in San Antonio.” Suddenly her eyes widened and she snapped her fingers. “I’ve got it! Your ex. I think she’d be perfect.”

Ex? “I don’t have an ex,” he grumbled. “You know I never date anyone long enough to call her ‘girlfriend,’ just to avoid the unpleasantness of said nomenclatures.”

“I mean your ex-employee. The assistant you fired.”

“Sabrina.” Her name came off his tongue as quickly as her image flashed before his eyes, but his physical response to that was like getting a puncture wound in his lungs. The coughing fit that followed soon had Collin bending at the waist. “I did not fire her,” he wheezed.

“Right, that would have been the compassionate thing to do. Or to tell her the truth—that you were hot for her. But, no, you exiled her to the basement of your building to be a secretary to—who is that fossil down there?”

“Norbit, the head of Reference and Research.”

“Yeah, yeah, the glorified file clerk. Bet he cuts his own hair and wears thick glasses with black plastic frames and carries his meals to work in a construction-worker type lunch box.”

It annoyed him to no end that she could deduce character types so well. “Star Trek, to be factually correct, and he can do the Spock finger greeting on command.”

“Be still my heart.”

“He’s also phenomenal at Trivial Pursuit.”

“Stop gushing or I’ll have to change my daughters’ names to something other than Masters.”

Tempted to laugh, Collin instead muttered, “See if I ever confide in you again. You’re not supposed to use confidences against a person.”

This entire conversation was the reason why he’d begun to put longer breaks between their phone calls and limited most of their communication to text messaging once a week. It was easier to hide from her probes into his personal life—in other words his happiness—even if it risked losing what was left of his family.

“I’m so worried,” she drawled. “How much does she love her new job?”

He almost tried countering with “She who?” but knew it would make him look more foolish, so he simply confessed. “She quit.”

“Smart woman.” Shoving her dropped flight bag out of her way with her foot, Cassie strolled into the living room. “I grew fond of chatting with her when I would call your office and you were tied up with some so-called meeting or presentation.”

Collin’s gaze drilled into her back. “There’s nothing so-called about my appointments.”

“You just pray that Donald Trump hasn’t gotten wind that she’s on the market and goes groveling after her. I could cope better being overseas knowing she was watching my girls.”

“Excuse me, a minute ago I was the hero. Now everything hinges on her?”

Cassie shot him an unrepentant grin. “Remember Gran’s favorite quote? ‘Don’t ask a question that you don’t want an answer to.’”

Sabrina Sinclair stood before the door of the apartment she shared with her latest roommate, Jeri Swanson, and frowned at the key that no longer fit in the dead bolt. She might be in dire need of getting off her feet after having completed a twelve-hour shift at work, but this was the door to Apartment 314 and the lock had worked fine when she left here at six this morning. Hoping that her airhead roomie hadn’t already taken off with her latest boyfriend for another night of clubbing, she knocked on the door.

“Jeri? It’s me. Are you in there?”

“No, she is not, and you might as well get going, too.”

The voice calling up to her from the bottom of the stairwell had Sabrina backtracking to look over the shaky wooden railing, down at the elderly woman below. “Mrs. Finch? Is something wrong?”