This was one dyed-in-the-wool bachelor, Claire thought Pity filled her—not for Evan, but for the baby.
“Come with me,” she instructed. Still carrying the baby seat, Claire walked to the front door. The lack of movement behind her told her that he wasn’t following. She looked over her shoulder at Evan expectantly. “Well?”
This was a dream, he thought, a bad dream. Any second, he was going to wake up and find that he’d just fallen asleep over the report he’d been reading. It certainly had been boring enough to put him out.
But he didn’t wake up. This was miserably real.
Ten small fingers were wrapping themselves around his hand like miniature tentacles of an octopus. Libby pulled at him. “Mama says to come.”
What was he, a dog?
Grudgingly, Evan followed in Claire’s wake, noting, purely on a disinterested level, that her wake was quite an attractive one.
“I think I still have a box of Libby’s old diapers,” Claire was saying to him as she walked into her own living room.
Still holding on to his hand, Libby pouted. “I don’t wear diapers, Mama.”
, She’d embarrassed her, Claire thought, and delicately retraced her verbal steps. “Not anymore, but you did when you were Rachel’s age. Everybody did, honey.” She glanced at Evan. “Even Mr. Quartermain.”
The thought of the tall, serious-looking man beside her wearing diapers had Libby releasing his hand to cover her mouth as giggles pealed out. She nearly fell on the floor, laughing.
Satisfied, Claire set the baby seat down on the coffee table. Wide and square, it looked as if it were built to support an elephant.
“Actually, I never used the ones I’m going to lend you,” she told Evan. “They’re cloth diapers someone gave me at my shower. Disposable ones were the only kind I had time for back then.” She grinned, looking at her daughter. “You were quite a handful when you were a baby.”
In Evan’s opinion, her “handful” had only intensified with time.
“Why don’t you watch your—Rachel,” Claire amended for the sake of argument, “while I go see if I can dig up the box in the garage?”
He had to get going. “But I—” he began futilely, addressing the words to her back.
Evan didn’t get an opportunity to finish his protest before she disappeared. A snowball in hell had more of a chance of remaining intact than he had of finishing a sentence around these two, he thought grudgingly. Not that the woman would listen to anything he had to say, even if he had managed to complete it. Claire Walker had a mind all her own, just as her daughter did.
He didn’t know which one he found more annoying.
Evan wrinkled his nose as the air seemed to shift. She’d been right about Rachel being ripe. Wow.
He looked down at the baby in complete awe. How could anything so…? Well, all right, he supposed she was cute if you liked babies, but how could anything that looked so cute smell so bad?
As if in response to the silent criticism, Rachel began to cry. Really cry.
She looked as if she was in pain, he thought. Panic and frustration tore at him in equal portions. Now what did he do?
He was aware of a tugging on his arm. Libby again.
“Want me to hold her?” she asked brightly. “I’m real good at holding things. Even the cat when she wriggles.” Libby was fully prepared to give him an immediate demonstration.
“No, I don’t want you holding her.” For all of Libby’s energy, she didn’t look all that much bigger than the baby did. It didn’t take much imagination on his part to envision her dropping Rachel.
And then the rest of her statement registered. “You have a cat?”
He looked around for telltale signs. A scratching post, or, in lieu of that, scratched-up furniture. Cats always made him sneeze violently, yet there wasn’t even a tickle. Maybe there really was something wrong with his nose, he thought.
Libby’s wide smile drooped instantly. “We did. But she ran away.” Her sigh was so deep, Evan had the impression that she had let all the air out of her body. “Mama says sometimes things you love do that. They just go away.” Suddenly hopeful, she asked, “You haven’t seen her, have you? She’s white and pretty and really soft.”
“No, I haven’t seen her.” Although, at the moment he wished there was a cat around—getting a stuffed-up nose might be a good thing. Rachel’s aroma seemed to be deepening. “Go see what’s keeping your mother.”
But Libby stayed where she was, cocking her head as she looked up at him. He talked funny. “Nothing’s keeping her, silly. She’s free.”
“I mean—” Evan sighed, giving up. He had absolutely no idea how to talk to someone who came up to his belt buckle.
He would have to find Claire himself. For a moment, he debated leaving Rachel where she was and instructing Libby to watch her. After all, Rachel wasn’t about to execute a half gainer off the table. But Libby might. There was nothing to do but take the baby with him.
What the hell had he ever done to deserve this?
As he picked up the seat again, Rachel ceased fussing and stared at him with what looked like wonder in her eyes. Opened so wide, they looked as if they took up half her face. Her expression reminded him of one of his sisters. She looked like Paige, he realized suddenly, then dismissed the thought. All babies tended to look alike. It didn’t mean anything.
The burden in his arms began to feel progressively heavier to him as he walked in the general direction Claire had taken. She’d said something about the garage.
Pausing, he asked Libby, “Where’s your garage?”
Libby’s tolerant smile was reminiscent of her mother’s. “Outside.”
Strength, he needed strength. “I mean, how do I get to it from inside your house? Where did your mother go?” He enunciated each word slowly, clearly and sharply while trying not to lose his temper.
“I’m right here,” Claire announced, returning. “Did you miss me?” she couldn’t resist asking.
Evan looked like the poster child for the beleaguered and the befuddled. Not to mention the angry. She imagined that the latter emotion was directed at the world in general and probably at her specifically. His type always had to have someone to blame, which was a pity, she thought, because he was kind of cute.
Evan turned around at the sound of her voice. “Can you take her now?” It came out less of a question than a demand.
“Not yet,” she answered patiently. “My hands are full.”
“What is all that?” he asked. She had a blanket slung over her shoulder and a box tucked under her arm, and she was dragging something along that looked like netting strung over tubes.
“Your salvation,” she said glibly.
While searching for the box of cloth diapers she’d packed away, Claire had come across the Portacrib. She’d decided that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to bring it out, as well. After all, the baby was going to need someplace to sleep, and she knew without asking that Evan didn’t have anything. She could lend him a few things. Any furniture that Libby hadn’t managed to destroy in her exuberance, Claire had saved in hopes that someday another, possibly more quiet baby would make use of it. She wanted more children than just one. One, she had grown up feeling, was a very lonely number.
Claire leaned the collapsed crib against the side of the sofa. “I guess since time