Mummy in the Making

She was breathtakingly beautiful but still with a wholesomeness to her.

But stunning or not, it didn’t make any difference.

Hutch was not in the market for a woman. Sure, a year and a half of widowerhood might mean that he could be. But he wasn’t. He had Ash to think of. To focus on. He had to concentrate on being a single father. A father to his own kid. This was no time to get into anything with any woman, let alone with someone who had issues of her own to deal with—issues like a baby on the way without a dad.

But Issa McKendrick wasn’t going to be hard to look at while they both lived here, he thought as he lifted his son down from the booster seat.

He just wasn’t interested in anything more than looking. The way he might look at a painting or a sculpture or a photograph—purely as an appreciation for a thing of beauty. A woman of beauty.

But there was no doubt about it, Issa McKendrick was definitely that.

“Itta hep. I’ma eat cookies.”

“I think I’ve been had,” Issa observed.

Hutch Kincaid laughed. “I think you have.”

In anticipation of Hutch and his son coming to install her new door handle and lock, Issa had run to the store and bought cookies for the little boy. She’d set some of them out on a plate on the coffee table.

Hutch had made a great show of Ash being his assistant, enlisting his son to hand him the screwdriver when he asked for it.

“Then when you’re finished,” Issa had said, “there are cookies…”

That had drawn Ash’s attention to the dish on the coffee table. But a mere glance in that direction was the tot’s only immediate response.

What he had done was lure Issa into helping Hutch, too, handing the screwdriver to her so that she could hand it to Hutch.

Issa had thought it was cute that the toddler wanted to include her. And in an attempt to be more outgoing and friendly, she’d complied.

But once Ash had her at the door with Hutch, holding the screwdriver, the little boy made the announcement that she could play assistant while he went to have a cookie.

“How can a two-and-a-half-year-old be that tricky?” she asked.

“Hey, when cookies are involved, it’s every man for himself,” Hutch said with a laugh before he called after his son, “One, Ash. You can have one cookie.”

Then turning back to Issa, Hutch whispered, “Now watch, he’s going to take a bite out of one, say he doesn’t like it, choose another, take a bite, and do the same thing until he’s had a taste of every kind you have out there.”

“I shouldn’t have bought the assortment?”

“You can’t put that much temptation in front of him.”

“I don’t know anything about raising kids,” Issa confessed.

But apparently Hutch Kincaid did because Ash had done exactly what his father had predicted and was on to his second cookie.

“One, Ash,” Hutch warned.

“I doan yice this kind,” the toddler announced for the second time, choosing a third cookie.

“Better take the plate away,” Hutch advised Issa.

“It’s okay. I put them out for him. And there are only four kinds. Technically, if he has one bite of each kind, it’ll add up to only one cookie.”

“Great, you want to split hairs, too. The problem with that logic is that there are more than four cookies on that plate and he’ll go on taking one bite out of every cookie unless he’s stopped. Can you hold this like this?”

That last question drew Issa’s gaze from son back to father.

Hutch had been working at lining up the inside doorknob with the outside doorknob and—the same way he had earlier in the day when he’d inspired inappropriate ideas in her—he had a hand on each of them.

“If you don’t keep them where I’ve got them I’ll have to line them up all over again,” he explained when she was slow in responding to his question.

“Oh, sure,” she said, stepping to his side to replace him before her imagination went any further than it already had.

And if, in the transfer, his hands brushed hers and set off tiny sparks? She wrote that off to static electricity, even though that wasn’t what it had been.

Maintaining the position of the door handles, she looked on as Hutch crossed to the coffee table and picked up the plate as well as the cookies his son had discarded.

“No!” Ash rebelled.

“You can have one,” Hutch reminded reasonably, firmly, without any anger or aggravation.

“I wanna diff’ent one.”

“Nope, the one in your hand will have to do,” Hutch informed him, setting the plate on the top shelf of the nearby bookcase and stacking the already-bitten cookies beside it.

Ash studied the situation intently.

Issa couldn’t be sure, but she had the impression that the toddler was working on a plan to climb up to that plate.

But Hutch again seemed to read his son’s mind. “Don’t even try it,” he warned as he headed for the door again. “Just eat your cookie.”

Ash scowled at his father but proceeded to taste his final selection.

Issa couldn’t help laughing a little at it all as Hutch returned to the door, smiling as if he understood her amusement.

“Can you keep hanging on while I screw them in?” he said when he got to her.

“Sure,” she said a second time, at a loss for why so much about this man and even perfectly innocent things he said seemed suggestive to her.

Maybe it was hormones.

Or maybe she’d spent too much time teaching teenagers who could rarely think or talk about anything else.

One way or another, she really needed to curb it, she told herself.

There was silence for the first few minutes of their joint endeavor and during that time Issa couldn’t help looking at Hutch.

She was glad she hadn’t indulged her inclination to change clothes for tonight, that the only thing she’d done was brush her hair out and leave it down. She’d told herself that it would be too obvious if she put on a different outfit, that it would give away the fact that she’d been singularly—and strangely—focused on when she was going to get to be with him again. And now that she could see that he hadn’t been inclined to change his clothes for her, she thought it was a good thing she hadn’t changed hers for him.