LEVI LAMBERT HAD piloted many birds during his service in the United States Air Force. He’d gone on missions he still regretted and some he never would. Made plenty of mistakes in his twenty-nine years. Some of them irreparable.
But this. Well. This might just kill him.
“Please. Please go to sleep.” Levi gently rubbed his six-month-old daughter’s back.
Moonlight spilled through the cracked blinds in Grace’s bedroom. It was two o’clock in the morning, and she wasn’t interested in sleeping. She didn’t need her diaper changed, had just had a bottle of formula—warm...he’d checked—and he’d located her pacifier under the blanket and stuck it in her mouth. She spit it out with a face that said, “Nice try, sucker.”
Levi was no stranger to zero dark thirty, but this was plain cruel. No sooner had he calmed her down and gently set her in her crib than she screamed bloody murder again. A few nights of that would have been fine, but after six straight weeks of it, he was beginning to feel the strain. Strange, but the only thing that kept her quiet was being held. Held and walked around the house, as if it were the middle of the day.
Weren’t babies supposed to sleep 24/7? What was wrong with his baby? She didn’t seem to like him very much. Still, he’d known she was his the minute he’d seen her blue eyes, so much like his own. Just for kicks he’d asked for a DNA test. Yep. His. No doubt, even if he’d had the pleasure of being with Grace’s mother, Sandy, only once. Only one night of mutual, temporary pleasure during a two-week leave in Atlanta, Georgia, he’d now officially never forget.
When he’d received the news of Sandy’s accidental death, it had taken Levi a minute to remember her. Talk about life changing and rearranging. He’d assumed he would die in the air force. His plan was to stay until he retired or was killed in action. It wasn’t like he didn’t have friends who’d left earlier than planned, among them his two best friends in the world, Stone and Matt. But Levi was a lifer. Supposed to be, anyway. He’d been raised for service. Until Grace had come along and changed all that. It would have been too much of a hardship as a single father piloting long missions. At the time he’d been located and informed of Grace, he’d been flying the U-2 spy plane and gone for months at a stretch.
She’d quieted down again with his swaying and rocking, so Levi tried to lay her down in her crib. Grace scrunched up her little pixie face and wailed, as if the very idea that she would go to sleep was an insult to her intelligence. He picked her up again. Definitely not suited for this, although some people had thought it would happen to him eventually if he didn’t settle down and stop sowing his wild oats.
The first thing his mother, Gemma Lambert, had said upon hearing that Levi had become a father was “Bless your heart. I told you so.” His father, retired General Lambert, had decided to address the situation in his usual way: he ignored it. Easy to do, since both of his parents were on their latest mission trip to save the children of the world. Didn’t matter, though, because Levi could do this on his own. Like he’d done so much else in his life.
Grace was now his responsibility, and he never shirked his duty. He’d followed the work, and one of his friends, Stone Mcallister, had a charter flight business and aviation school in Fortune, California. So he’d wound up in this little Podunk, bedroom community deep in the bowels of Silicon Valley. Everyone here gave him a patient look the minute he opened his mouth and out came the Texan drawl he’d grown up with.
Levi took a seat on the rocking chair he’d purchased from Buy, Baby, Buy—bye, wallet, bye, it should be called—and tried again. He’d been given most of Grace’s baby stuff by Sandy’s father, Frank, and stepmother, Irene, in a tearful exchange at the airport in Atlanta. It had helped, since he didn’t actually know a stroller from a wheelbarrow. A rookie, he’d basically had a crash course in all things baby related for the past few weeks. He realized he’d never be father-of-the-year material, but still, this shouldn’t be so hard.
“Is this personal?” he now asked Grace.
She had no response other than to blink twice and gurgle. Yeah, just his luck. She was wide-awake. At least it was better than all the screaming. Levi rocked because he didn’t know what else to do. He’d never thought of himself as a daddy. When he’d first told Stone and Matt about his situation, you would have thought he’d dropped a missile on them for the absolute silence in the room.
Levi was grateful that Sandy had trusted him. Or maybe she’d just done the right thing. Either way, he’d been named the father on the birth certificate. He had a daughter, and he couldn’t regret it. At least, not since the moment the social worker placed Grace in his arms, and she focused her wide, blue eyes on him. He was determined to raise her as a single father, even if Sandy’s parents had other ideas.
He stifled a yawn. The rocking chair was damned well about to put him to sleep. He’d have to get up in a few hours and Grace looked no closer to closing her eyes than she had an hour ago.
“I’m just going to close my eyes for a minute.” He snuggled Grace closer to his chest and leaned his head back.
* * *
LEVI WOKE WITH a start. It was morning, the first rays of early autumn sunlight flooding throughout Grace’s bedroom. She was fast asleep. He’d fallen asleep with her in his arms and by some miracle she hadn’t slipped out and landed on the floor.
“Are you a vampire?” he whispered, laying her in the crib. “Please don’t be a baby vampire.”
This time, of course, she stayed asleep. But Levi would still be late if he didn’t kick it into high gear. He took an enlisted man’s shower and dressed in the Mcallister Charters uniform of a white button-up and black cargoes within minutes. He hurried through his usual morning routine, prepping formula bottles like a pro and swallowing a Pop-Tart practically whole. He inhaled his morning coffee and glanced at the digital kitchen clock. Oh seven hundred and Annie wasn’t here. He hated being late and people