It was blatant. It was obvious. He was full of it.
She folded her arms across her chest. She should be insulted, but the truth was she wasn’t really. She was a tiny bit flattered.
She shook her head. ‘You were the college playboy, weren’t you?’
He leaned against the doorjamb. ‘What if I was?’
‘Then you should be used to women thinking you’re too big for your boots.’
The tension in the air was killing her. If this were a movie she would just walk over, wink and lead him into the bedroom.
He sighed and looked skyward. ‘I love it when you talk dirty to me. It’s the accent. It’s killing me. Every time you talk I just—’
There was a little grunt from the corner of the room and they both leaped about a foot in the air.
Every other thought was pushed out of the window.
In the blink of an eye they were both at the side of the crib, leaning overtop the still-sleeping baby.
‘Did that mean something?’ asked Dan.
‘How am I supposed to know?’ she whispered back.
She watched Abraham’s little chest rise and fall, rise and fall. It was soothing. It was calming.
‘Did we decide on who was doing the night shift?’
She wanted to say no. She wanted to say she couldn’t do it and retreat back upstairs to the safety of her silent apartment.
She wanted to put the random flirtations out of her head.
But there was so much churning around in her mind.
This baby. Abraham.
He didn’t have a mother to comfort him right now. Being around him was hard. Being around him was torture.
But what if this was something she had to do? What if this was something she had to get past?
Sure, she’d grieved for her daughter. She’d wept a bucketload of tears and spent weeks thinking ‘what if?’ She’d watched her relationship slowly but surely disintegrate around her and Mark. They’d both known it was inevitable, but that hadn’t made the parting any easier.
So she’d been bereft. She’d been empty.
But had she allowed herself to heal?
And Dan wasn’t anything like Mark. Mark hadn’t walked from their relationship—he’d practically run.
And here was Dan stepping in, and taking responsibility—albeit temporarily—for an unknown baby on their doorstep. Maybe for five minutes she should stop judging all men by Mark’s standard. Maybe she should take a little time to get to know someone like Dan. Someone who might restore her faith in humanity again.
And did she even know how to do that?
She straightened up, pushing her hands into her back and cricking her spine. Dan was at her back again. ‘Carrie, are you okay? Is there something you want to tell me?’
This was it. This was her opportunity to tell him why she was acting so strangely around him and this baby. This was a chance for her to be honest.
This was a chance to clear the air between them.
But she was torn. There was a buzz between them.
They were both feeling it. She liked the flirtation. It made her feel good. It made her feel normal again. Even though there was nothing about this situation that was normal.
She barely knew Dan, but just being in his company made her feel safe. The way he’d reacted to the abandoned baby. The way he’d immediately gone out into the snowstorm to look for the mother, even if he really didn’t want to. The way he wasn’t afraid to roll up his sleeves and help take care of a baby, even with no experience.
But what would happen right now if she told him?
She could almost get out a huge crystal ball and predict it. The moment she said the words, ‘I had a stillbirth last year. My daughter died,’ it would kill anything between them stone dead. It would destroy this buzz in the air.
It would destroy the first feel-good feelings she’d felt in over a year.
So, no matter how hard this was, and for what were totally selfish reasons, she wanted to stay. She might feel a sense of duty, a sense of responsibility towards Abraham, but that wasn’t all she was feeling.
And right now she wanted to do something for herself.
For Carrie.
Was that really so selfish?
She took a deep breath and turned around to face him.
It would be so easy. It would be so easy to lean forward just a little and see what might happen.
To see if this buzz in the air could amount to anything.
To hold her breath and see if he was sensing what she was feeling—or to see that it had been so long that her reactions were completely off. Completely wrong.
He reached up and touched her cheek. ‘Carrie?’
She swallowed, biting back the words she really wanted to say and containing the actions she really wanted to take.
She didn’t want anything to destroy that tiny little buzz that was currently in her stomach. It felt precious to her. As if it was finally the start of something new.
‘How about I take the first shift? I’ll sleep on the sofa next to the crib and do the first feed and change at night. You can take over after that.’
She kept her voice steady and her words firm.
She could see something flicker behind his eyes. The questions that he really wanted to ask. He nodded and gave her a little smile.
‘Welcome to your first night shift, Carrie McKenzie.’
She watched his retreating back as she sat down on the sofa.
Was she wrong about all this?
Only time, and a whole heap of snow, would tell.
CARRIE STRETCHED ON the sofa and groaned. The early morning sun was trying to creep through the blinds. It was brighter than normal, which probably meant it was reflecting off the newly laid white snow. All thoughts of everything returning to normal today vanished in the drop of a snowflake.
There was no getting away from it—Baby Abraham was hard work.
She hadn’t had time last night to feel sorry for herself and neither had Dan—because Abraham had screamed for three hours solid. She certainly hadn’t had time for any romantic dreams. It seemed neither of them had the knack for feeding and burping a new baby.
‘Carrie?’ Dan came stumbling through the doorway, bleary-eyed, his hair all rumpled and his low-slung jeans skimming his hips.
She screwed up her eyes. Bare-chested. He was bare-chested again. Did the guy always walk about like this? Her brain couldn’t cope with a cute naked guy this early in the morning, especially when she was sleep-deprived.
She pointed her finger at him. ‘If you wake him, I swear, Dan Cooper, I’ll come over there and—’
‘Cook me pancakes?’
She sighed and sagged back down onto the sofa, landing on another uncomfortable lump. ‘You have the worst sofa known to man.’ She twisted on her side and thumped at the lump. ‘Oh, it’s deceptive. It looks comfortable.