Baby Before Business

“No, I’m good. And if it makes you feel any better, Mr. Bryant assured me he’s not interested. I’m too nice for him.”

Preoccupied with brushing the flour out of her hair, Penney absently said, “He only dates nasty women?”

“I asked him the very same question.” She kissed her mom’s cheek. “Go back to church and finish the pies. I’ll be home Monday or Tuesday night. I promised I would stay until he found a nanny, but I figured out in the car on the way over that he can probably hire someone from a reputable agency temporarily. We may not be able to get someone over a weekend, but Monday or Tuesday isn’t unrealistic. As soon as we get to his house I’ll have him call a service.”

“Okay,” her mom said with a smile. “I’ll handle your dad.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

When Madelyn came running down the walk, duffel bag over her shoulder, overnight case bobbing at her side and her face bright with the emotion of her parental confrontations, a weird sensation enveloped Ty. The way the scene was set, they could have been eloping.

He kicked that thought right out of his mind. But it ran back in and wouldn’t budge. And he knew why. Madelyn Gentry was a very sexy, very attractive woman, and though he might be discriminating he wasn’t dead. He found her as attractive as any man would find her. And now that he’d seen three rows of neatly folded pink, red and black panties, he could form those pictures and images that wouldn’t initially appear in his brain and she wasn’t as safe with him as he’d thought.

So he reminded himself that he wasn’t interested. First, she was too darned young for him. But, second, most women who pursued him only wanted his money. Madelyn, with dreams of establishing her own business, would be no exception. In fact, now that he thought about it, her financial situation was a lot like his former fiancée Anita’s had been when he met her. Wrestling with a failing business, Anita had impressed him as being tough and determined, so he’d happily lent her money….

He groaned, his hands forming fists on the steering wheel. That situation had ended abysmally. Anita hadn’t merely made him a laughingstock by taking him to the cleaners financially. She’d cheated on him the whole time they dated. Worse, she’d also cost Ty a brother. When Cooper discovered Anita was cheating, he’d warned Ty, but Ty had accused Cooper of using the information to manipulate him. By the time the truth came out that Anita was the one manipulating him and Cooper had been right about her cheating, Cooper was long gone. He’d packed his bags and moved to parts unknown and they hadn’t seen him since.

Ty ran his hand down his face. That was a point in his life that he didn’t care to revisit, though he was glad he had. The fact that Madelyn was more than ten years his junior might not cool his libido, but her being totally broke like his former fiancée certainly did. And that knowledge would keep him the hell away from her.

Madelyn opened the passenger side door of the SUV. “All set.”

He didn’t say anything. Not a word. He and Madelyn had only gotten chummy out of necessity. He’d had to talk to her to form this alliance and figure out the nuances of the deal. But now that he had accepted the fact he had a baby, and had a solid idea of Madelyn’s personality from her dealings with her dad, he knew how to handle both the baby and the new nanny.

So the conversation ended here. He had work to do when they got home tonight. Then there were telephone calls to occupy him tomorrow and file folders that would keep him amused on Sunday.

And Madelyn had a baby to care for. As far as Ty was concerned, they really were “all set.”

Ty Bryant hadn’t said a word to her during the drive to his house, but when they arrived at his understated Cape Cod and found the entire porch littered with boxes, he was suddenly talkative again.

“I don’t suppose you know how to assemble a crib?”

Madelyn gaped at him. “Even if I could, am I supposed to balance Sabrina on my hip while I screw in the bolts?”

“I’m sure women in primitive cultures do it.”

“And I’m sure men in primitive cultures build their own cribs. They don’t order them from a department store.”

“I didn’t order this stuff from a department store. I have a friend whose wife has connections at…”

“Whatever! Just put the crib together while I go look for something to make for dinner.”

She left him standing amid the baby things and, with Sabrina on her hip, went in search of supper. Unfortunately, she didn’t even find a box of macaroni in his cupboards. Though she had to admit his house was interesting. Not what she’d expected. The cherrywood cabinets in the kitchen gleamed. The sitting room she stumbled upon as she tried to find her way back to the foyer had a neat yellow contemporary sofa and chair with heavy-wood end tables and a wall-sized entertainment unit that probably cost a bundle. The dining room housed a light oak table and hutch filled with sparkly stemware that looked like it was never used.

When she returned to the foyer, Ty was nowhere in sight, but she saw he had hauled everything in from the porch. The boxes and bags were scattered atop the sand-colored ceramic tile. But she was more interested in the foyer’s newly painted white walls that were decorated with what appeared to be antique mirrors. She couldn’t deny that Ty Bryant owned a nice house, but it wasn’t as grand as she expected for a guy who ran a multimillion dollar business.

Because Ty was gone and so was the crib box, she assumed he was in the room he intended to use as a nursery, assembling the baby’s bed. She climbed the stairs and walked toward the only open door. From the hall she could see the room already had a single bed and maple dresser. Thick gray carpeting covered the floor. It made sense to assume he was making a nursery from one of his guest rooms, which was good, but that didn’t put food in the cupboards and she was hungry.

She entered talking. “Are you on some kind of starvation diet?”

Seeing him sitting on the floor, with his black jacket and tie removed and the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up to reveal muscular forearms, Madelyn stopped dead in her tracks. His very neat hair had become tousled and he looked so darned sexily rumpled that she lost her breath.

“No. If you didn’t find any food to cook, it’s because I usually eat out.”

Juggling Sabrina on her hip, Madelyn considered it very lucky that he didn’t glance up as he spoke because she wasn’t sure she could take her eyes off him. He was just plain yummy-looking.

When several seconds lapsed without her reply, he peered up at her. “What? No smart remark about my always eating out?”

She swallowed and quickly looked away, as if inspecting what he had done with the crib. “I’m ordering pizza.”

He pretended to shudder. “Oh, that was scathing.”

“I mean it.”

He shrugged and went back to work, fitting the metal springs into the wooden sides of the crib.

“And you’re paying.”

“Fine,” he said, as if he were doing her a huge favor.

Madelyn stared at him, not understanding how he could think he was doing her a favor, when this entire job was nothing but a favor from her to him. But she wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of letting him see he annoyed her. Rather than storm out as she might have done, she very casually walked out. Downstairs, she grabbed the wall phone in the kitchen and dialed the number for pizza delivery from memory, ordered what she wanted—to hell with his choice—and then rummaged through Sabrina’s diaper bag so she could feed the baby first.

If he wanted to aggravate her day and night for the next three days, he had better be ready for the consequences. She had enough experience with her dad that she could take on any chauvinist, and in a perverse way she might even enjoy it. God knew, Ty’s attitude helped her to forget how good-looking he was.

When the pizza arrived, Madelyn was bathing Sabrina for bed so she let Ty answer the front door. She took her time washing, drying and dressing the baby. Then, because Ty had assembled the crib, she set Sabrina in a safety seat while she snapped new sheets on the mattress, wondering how Ty knew what to get his friend’s wife to order for the baby. But she stopped that thought. She’d bet her bottom dollar he called his friend and simply told him to tell his wife to order everything needed for a baby.

It must be nice.

By the time she had Sabrina tucked into bed, Madelyn had herself worked into a sufficient low-level anger from the day’s events. She was sure her mood would keep her on her toes with her sarcastic boss so she would stop noticing he was too damned sexy for a grouch. But when she entered the kitchen and found him eating pizza at the round wooden table while he skimmed the newspaper, the whole scene felt so “normal” and so “right” that she was bombarded by images of them as a happy couple.

Sitting, she cursed her thoughts. Really. Because they came out of nowhere and they weren’t welcome. She wasn’t a teenager, envisioning herself with the town hunk. She was living with her boss to help him. And if the constant reminder that she was this man’s employee didn’t stop her fantasies, the man himself should. He had no place in a domestic daydream because he wasn’t domesticated. Plus, men who liked sophisticated women really only wanted no-strings-attached sex. He was not her type. He wasn’t anybody’s type.

“Are you going to eat that pizza, or are you just going to sit there with your mouth open, staring at me?”

Great! Now he was noticing her staring at him. Somehow she had to get accustomed to him so she could keep herself in line. No, that wasn’t it. What she had to do was get herself accustomed to the fact that she was living with a man who could be described as one of the sexiest guys on the face of the earth. Then she would be able to keep herself in line.

She tried to think of other sexy men she had spent time with and four names came to mind. Unfortunately, she’d dated one of them, only worked occasionally with the other two and nursed an awful crush on the fourth. But it had been okay to like those guys because none of them were arrogant. She couldn’t deal with Ty the same way that she’d dealt with the others because Ty Bryant wasn’t like anybody she knew.

Actually, that was both the truth and the real dilemma. Ty Bryant really was unlike anybody she’d ever met. He was handsome. He was smart. He was clearly clever to have built an empire singlehandedly. And he’d taken in a child. No matter how much Madelyn tried to downplay his caring for Sabrina by reminding herself that he was more or less forced to take the baby, she also knew he could have sent Sabrina to foster care. Of course, that really would make him an ogre—and he wasn’t.

That was it!

That was the problem! Ty Bryant really wasn’t an ogre as his employees thought. No matter how much he tormented her or made her mad, brief revelations of his nice side kept causing her to forget his bad side. So all she had to do was remember his bad side and she would be okay.

Just when she drew the conclusion that she could stop her pounding heart, daydreaming and inappropriate staring simply by reminding herself of all the impolite, self-centered, arrogant things she’d seen and heard Ty Bryant do in the past few hours, he rose from his seat.

From the way he swiped a napkin across his mouth, it appeared that he was done eating and leaving the kitchen. But when he stopped by her chair, Madelyn got her first tremor of unease. He caught her arm, hauled her up, spun her around and pressed his mouth to hers.

Madelyn knew that if she were ever going to faint in her life, this would be the minute. His mouth attacked hers, completely disarming her. She couldn’t stop her arms from reaching up to encircle his shoulders. The sexual chemistry between them was so strong it led her, guided her, pulled her to do things without her conscious thought. But she didn’t care. The kiss was so darned good she was more than happy to let it take her anywhere it wanted to go.