“I can do that. I can make the hot chocolate, too, if you’ll show me the kitchen. And I can cook dinner. Karen brought up a frozen casserole and some other stuff. While you look after Jane.”
“Whatever.” He shrugged.
Back to that again. She really didn’t want to be with Jane, he could tell. He was aware of a disappointment nagging at his guts like stomach acid, and he took a few moments to analyze it.
Until recently he hadn’t been in one place long enough to get serious about marriage to any woman, and he wasn’t sure, at the moment, if he was going to be in one place for much longer. He’d been feeling a little restless lately, not totally sure that he’d made the right decision to hook up with his two brothers in their software company. There was still something missing. Something important. Maybe an intuitive voice inside him was telling him, once more, to move on.
Yet he was a family man, at heart. He had loving parents. He had seven brothers he was close to, two of whom had made happy marriages over the past couple of years. He had three little nieces of his own now. He liked extended families, loved his nieces. Deep down, he knew that his sense of family was the best medicine for the times when he had questions about himself and his life that he couldn’t answer, and he didn’t have any qualms about prescribing that same medicine for others.
An outwardly healthy, capable, in-control woman like this should at least like her own sister’s child, he considered. No one was asking her to adopt the kid! What was her problem?
Fortunately, Allie hadn’t noticed his look of disapproval. She was over at the window, staring out at the gathering darkness, and she didn’t seem to notice his curiosity, either. How long was she going to stand there like that?
Minutes, apparently.
Jane was on her tummy on a receiving blanket spread out on the floor at a safe distance from the fire. The central heating had warmed the place up fast, as had the roaring fire in the fireplace. Jane was cooing at the leaping brightness and banging a toy. Needs fully taken care of, but utterly ignored. Allie just kept staring out the window. For some reason it seemed incredibly sad.
Instinctively, he went up to her, needing to understand her. He liked Karen a lot. She was warm, enthusiastic, full of energy and optimism…except when panicking about a jammed camera. Why was her sister so different and difficult?
He’d almost reached Allie when she turned from the window at last. “Those clouds are coming over pretty fast. Is it going to snow?”
“It’s starting to look like it,” he agreed. “I warned Karen about the forecast, but even half an hour ago it looked like it’d probably hold off, and she was desperate about that camera.”
“She’ll make it back, though, won’t she? They won’t close the roads. She guaranteed me she’d make it back tonight!”
The appeal and fear in her face hit him like an electric shock. “Then she’ll do her best, I guess,” was all he could say. It sounded lame in the face of her need.
Something about this situation had her completely terrified. Was it him? He didn’t think so, but there was something. Karen’s appeal to him to “look after” her suddenly made a whole lot more sense. Karen had known Allie would feel this way. How? Why?
And why did he have such a clear, powerful intuition that the answers were going to matter to him?
Chapter Two
“Right.” Allie pulled her mouth into a bright smile. “I guess you should show me my bedroom, then. It looks like there are plenty of them.”
“Five,” Connor said. “Six at a pinch.”
“Upstairs?”
“Upstairs. You can unpack while Jane’s still happy on the floor. Karen’ll want the Portacrib in her room, I assume.”
“I expect so.”
“I’ll put you in the adjoining room. Then if the storm does hit and stops Karen from getting back, you can keep the connecting door open so you’ll hear Jane if she wakes in the night.”
“Yes, that’s the most sensible idea, isn’t it?” Allie agreed, outwardly calm.
“Let’s go, then.”
He placed some cushions around Jane’s receiving blanket, casually betraying his experience with babies. Jane wasn’t officially mobile yet, according to Karen, but she could shuffle herself backward along the floor on her tummy for quite a distance if she kept at it long enough.
“These’ll keep her safely corralled while we’re upstairs,” Connor said.
Allie ached with envying him. Just the way he moved around the baby. Just the way he could reach down to ruffle the fuzzy, dark-gold hair on her little head without even thinking about it. Some day, with the right woman, he’d make a great dad. But for Allie, the idea of herself as a mom had become so complicated—
She snapped that compartment of her mind shut like a jailhouse gate.
Now he’d picked up the crib, the diaper bag and the soft suitcase that contained Karen’s and Jane’s things. Allie grabbed her overnight bag and followed him up the wide stone staircase. This was a great house, only a few years old and full of gorgeous hardwood and stone. In any other situation, she’d feel like she was on vacation here and would look forward to exploring. The house, the island, the surrounding mountains, the nearby towns.
But with Karen temporarily gone and herself and Connor and Jane trapped here by the gathering night and the prospect of a snowstorm, it felt…Well, exactly like that, as if the house were a prison, an emotional hell that wasn’t her fault.
Trapped for how long? she wondered miserably. Would anything ever be truly right in her life again?
“Here you go,” Connor said, opening the door of a pretty little room high in one corner of the house. It had its own bathroom and an antique Amish quilt on the bed, a connecting door to a similar room where Allie would sleep, and a little window peeping out to a white view of flat ice and snow-covered pines…and freshly falling flakes, Allie saw, already coming down thickly. Karen would be over halfway to Albany by now. Had the storm hit down that way yet?
“Any idea how to set this thing up?” Connor indicated the Portacrib in its blue nylon cover.
“No. Sorry.”
She took her bag through to the connecting room, then came back and watched him helplessly as he unzipped the cover and rattled around with the legs and sides of the crib. He discovered some instructions printed on it and started muttering to himself.
Since she didn’t want to think too hard about having Jane so close to her during the night and what that would mean, she watched his body instead. It wasn’t a punishing activity. Even without the bulk of the coat he’d been wearing outside, he looked incredibly solid and strong in his dark sweater and pants, yet he moved very easily.
Or most of him did. For the first time, she noticed that he had a slight limp and it drew her attention to the lines of his thighs and hips, defined by the dark clothing he wore. Had he hurt himself recently? Or was it something permanent, dating from long ago?
And how come it didn’t detract from his masculine grace but only added to it? The limp hinted at a whole, complex range of possibilities about his past, suggesting there was a lot more to Connor Callahan than met the eye. And what met the eye was impressive enough to begin with. It was a long time since she’d met a man who wore his strength and good looks so casually, and with so little arrogance.
“Karen says you’re in the computer-software business,” she said, needing to know more about him. Karen had said she could trust him. That didn’t mean she felt comfortable with their situation.
“Yeah.” He nodded