Play For Me

by Tam DeRudder Jackson

  I sat back down on the couch in the opposite corner from him and laid Angel across my lap to massage her sides the way the pediatric nurse showed me. After a couple of minutes, her cries subsided into hiccups and then into cooing sounds that told me the pain had passed.

  “Does she scream like that in the middle of the night?”

  I laughed. “Not often. When she does, she certainly grabs your attention,” I said, smiling down at my daughter. “Fortunately, I finished my last makeup final last week, so I only have to worry about being awake for work.” Because I loved touching her, I continued to rub her sides. The baby noises she made told me she enjoyed the extra massage too. “Since I work mostly evenings and nights, her occasional evening attacks shouldn’t be a problem either. Unless I’m in the middle of someone else’s meltdown. Then things could become dicey.”

  “You work nights?” Jack growled. “Where?”

  Ignoring his tone, I said, “I’m a night desk clerk at the freshman dorm. It’s an easy gig, and I can have Angel with me, which is great. I’ll only have to leave her in daycare while I’m in classes this year.”

  His thunderous expression leveled me.

  “Don’t even start, Jack. You just walked back into my life, and you know nothing about what I’ve had to learn in the last year. I might have been a spoiled rich girl before, but I don’t have that luxury anymore.” He opened his mouth, but I plowed on. “And you know what? I’m glad. I’m proud of myself for finding a job and my own place and being able to stay in school while taking care of my daughter. You have no right to judge me.”

  “Whoa, Clio.” He gestured at me to hold it down. “I wasn’t judging you. I think we have some things to work out is all.”

  We? We have some things to work out? What the hell?

  Chapter Thirteen

  Jack

  Holy shit. I was a father. My girl had given birth to an Angel. And I was her dad. The whole situation probably should have terrified me. Truthfully, it did a little. But this was Clio, the only woman I’d ever loved. And this was Angel—my beautiful daughter with my eyes and her mom’s face. We had so much shit to work out, but one thing was sure—our baby meant we were always going to be in each other’s lives.

  Angel was my daughter. I had a daughter, a precious little girl to love and take care of. The idea of Clio leaving my daughter in a daycare didn’t sit well. Not even a little bit. Even if she could ignore it, I couldn’t ignore who her parents were, who I was now. Being related to well-known people, celebrities, would make Angel an enticing target for some enterprising lowlife when Clio had to leave her in the care of others. The idea drove me crazy already, and I’d only known about her for a minute.

  “Talk to me about this daycare.”

  “It’s on campus. It’s a drop-in service for nontraditional students. Early childhood development majors run it. It serves as a kind of field station for experiments in early childhood education,” she said like it was no big deal.

  “Sorry I can’t share your enthusiasm for other people experimenting on my kid.”

  Clio slanted me a look. “It’s a great facility with a top-notch reputation. The work they do there is cutting-edge. People outside the university are on a waiting list to put their kids in the center whenever there’s an opening,” she said, her tone defensive. “I toured it as part of my nursing program before I became pregnant, and the place impressed the hell out of me.”

  I put up my hands to slow her roll. “I wasn’t criticizing your judgment. I only want Angel to be safe.”

  Those clear gray eyes stared at me for a long time before she said softly, “Me too.”

  “She better? May I hold her again?”

  She handed our baby back to me. Our baby. Wow. As I stared into the mirror of my eyes, I couldn’t believe it. Yet it felt exactly right. Angel was so tiny, but I could feel strength in her. She also liked my voice. I could tell by the way she tracked me when I spoke. I stroked the pad of my finger over her features. Like her mom, she had the softest skin. Like her mom, she also smelled so damn good. In another life, like yesterday, sitting on the couch in Clio’s shoebox of an apartment and holding a baby would have sounded about as appealing as watching grass grow. Normally, I needed to keep moving, maintain a rhythm.

  Today, holding my daughter, I discovered I wanted to do nothing more than to live in the stillness. Sit quietly and look at her. She was the most incredible person on the planet, and I’d helped to make her. I found myself checking out of the conversation because I was too busy staring at Angel. Then I’d look up and catch Clio smiling at me, and I thought maybe we had a chance.

  After what seemed only a few minutes but had actually been an hour, Angel decided she wanted to eat. When she started making noise, Clio took her from me and disappeared into her bedroom to change Angel’s diaper. Without invitation, I followed, curious about my daughter—and her mother.

  Clio placed Angel on a pad on top of her double bed. As I stared at the bed, I wondered how the two of us were going to sleep in it together. Slow down, Cowboy. She’s not there yet. Besides, for what you have in mind, a single bed would get the job done.

  She looked up, caught me grinning, and shot me a perplexed look. When she returned her attention to grabbing a diaper from the box beside a bassinet, I reached down discreetly to adjust myself. Thoughts of what the two of us could get up to in that bed wouldn’t leave me alone, though.

  “I’m not sure what I have in the fridge that you’d like. At home, we had a chef. At the sorority, we had a chef. Cooking is a new experience for me, and I’m not very good at it yet. But if you see something you think you’d like, I can try to make it after I feed Angel.”

  “Or I can go out and grab us something. How ’bout that?”

  “That sounds great, actually.”

  The way Clio said that had me looking more carefully at her. Her being my girl and me being a guy, the size of her breasts had drawn most of my attention. Now that I looked at her closely as she bent over Angel on the bed, I noticed she seemed thinner than when I’d seen her, held her last summer.

  “All right. I’ll go pick up some grub and be back in a few minutes. Any preferences?”

  “Nothing spicy. Angel doesn’t like it.”

  What?

  “Um, I didn’t think she ate anything but mama’s milk.”

  “Exactly. Whatever I eat, she eats, and she doesn’t like spicy,” Clio said with a grin.

  “Got it. My girls don’t do spicy. See you in a few.”

  Out of curiosity, I took a little tour of Clio’s fridge before I headed out the door. From what I could see, she was living on fruit, vegetables, milk, and eggs. There wasn’t any meat in sight, though there was a bowl of something that looked vaguely like pasta, but the lumps could have been potatoes or dumplings or congealed soup. In any case, it didn’t look edible.

  As I headed out the door, I pulled out my phone and programmed a grocery list into my notes. Then I pulled up a list of restaurants that also provided takeout and made a call.

  By the time I returned to her place with real food to keep in her fridge and a delicious chicken parmesan from a local restaurant, Clio had fed Angel and put her back to bed. I found Clio sitting on the couch staring at her laptop.

  “What are you doing?” I asked as I unloaded the takeout onto her island.

  “Watching Netflix. Need some help?” she asked, putting down her computer to stand and stretch beside the couch.

  As she unconsciously showed off that gorgeous body, I forgot for a second what I was supposed to be doing.

  “Jack?” she asked, her eyes dancing as she looked at me.

  “Oh, yeah. How ’bout you find us some plates or something while I make another trip out to my truck for the rest.”

  “How much food do you eat?” she demanded with a laugh.

  Grinning back at her, I said, “I picked up some stuff we can cook with that garden you’re keeping in your fridge.”

  “What stuff
?”

  “Meat. Be right back.”

  Before she could put up a fuss, I was out the door. When I returned to her apartment with my bags of groceries, Clio was making a salad across the island from where she’d set out plates and utensils for dinner.

  When I walked back through the door, she eyed my cargo and said, “Looks like you’re planning to eat here more than tonight.”

  “That’s exactly my plan. For the record, it was already my plan before I knew about Angel. Discovering her cemented it.”

  A frown furrowed her lovely forehead. “Jack, what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that I had a plan to date you, show you that we were always meant to be together. I still have that plan even after the stars aligned and proved it for me with us making Angel on our first try.”

  As I talked, I stowed food in Clio’s fridge before joining her at the island. From the look on her face, wheels were spinning at lightning speed in her head, but I needed more time before answering the questions I knew she wanted to ask.

  “How much longer will it take you to finish your degree?” I asked as I spooned chicken and pasta out of the container and onto her plate.

  “One more year for my undergrad. I had a plan to go on to graduate school to become a nurse practitioner, but now I’m thinking about putting off grad school until I repay the loan I took out to cover my living expenses and what my school insurance didn’t cover for Angel’s birth.”

  “Clio.” I covered her hand with mine. “I’m in the picture now. Tell me how much you need—”

  She interrupted me with a grimace, but I continued. “At least to cover the baby’s expenses. After all, I do have a financial obligation to her.”

  With a sigh, she said, “I’ll think about it.”

  We ate in silence for a few minutes while I tried not to get mad at how stubborn she was about me helping her. About her not trusting me. She changed the subject to the band, and I let her, telling her about how we were on vacation for a month before we returned to the studio to record the new material we’d worked on while we were on tour.

  Discovering that the band wrote music while we toured surprised her, and I asked if she’d heard one of our new songs, one we’d recorded on our last tour. When she hedged, I knew she’d heard it. More importantly, I wondered if she knew it was for her.

  “I wrote ‘Missing You’ right after Red Rocks. I’ve written a couple of other ones about you too. You’ll hear them on our new album.”

  Her brows shot to her forehead, but I pretended not to notice. “Balefire has a well-deserved party band reputation, but Blu, Dakota, and Tron are deadly serious about the music. It’s easy to write with them.”

  We moved back to the couch, and she finished her dessert in thoughtful silence, yet I noticed she nearly licked her dessert bowl clean of the chocolate mousse I’d ordered with dinner. Though she put on a brave face, Clio clearly missed the nice things she’d left behind when she decided to keep our baby and raise her alone. I already admired the hell out of her for her brains and her capacity to give, something I was pretty sure she didn’t even notice about herself. Now I added her willingness to put someone else’s happiness before her own to the list of her fine qualities. But dammit, she didn’t need to be so stubborn. Couldn’t she see I wanted to help her? Then she licked chocolate mousse off her plump pink lips, and I forgot our conversation.

  I wanted to spend a little time exploring our possibilities before I left her for the night. Taking the bowl from her hand, I said, “I think maybe you need another napkin. Here, let me help you.”

  Before she could protest, I leaned over and touched my tongue to the side of her mouth, tasting chocolate and Clio. An image of chocolate mousse spread over her gorgeous body and me slowly licking it off slipped into my head, and I grinned against her lips before I pressed a soft kiss to her mouth. She moaned in the back of her throat, and I put my hand on her neck to hold her while I deepened the kiss. Her sweet lips moved so perfectly beneath mine, and she opened them on a sigh when I slid my fingers into her mass of hair and cupped her jaw in my palms.

  When our tongues met and started dancing together, I had to shift my position. This woman’s kisses had been hardening my cock since the first time I took her mouth at a high school dance. While other women had turned me on occasionally, they always had to work at it. Clio did it with a touch, a sigh, the feel of her skin beneath my fingertips. Tonight, though, was all about seduction. There would be no main event no matter how badly I wanted it. I wasn’t so cocky as to believe Clio had let me in. She would be testing me for a while, and I deserved that. Especially since I had yet to tell her about the contract.

  As that thought intruded, I pulled away from her. “I want you to know I’m already in love with our daughter. But you’re right about keeping her existence quiet, at least for now.”

  She lifted a brow in question but said nothing.

  “I’ll be in town for the next month. Since you’re not currently taking classes, we can spend time together. What time does Angel usually wake you for the day?”

  With a groan, Clio threw herself back into the cushions. “Babies are early risers. Angel, unfortunately, is no exception. We’ll be up by six—or maybe sooner if she’s not a fan of chicken parm. Why?”

  “I was thinking about taking you for a drive up into the mountains, maybe have a picnic.”

  “That sounds nice.” The dreamy expression on her face told me it had been a while since she’d had any fun.

  “I’ll be by to pick you up around ten. Will that work with Angel’s schedule?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good night, Clio.” Because I couldn’t resist, I kissed her again before I stood and walked to the door. “If Angel doesn’t let you sleep much tonight, don’t worry. I’ll let you sleep in the truck tomorrow.”

  I smiled at her and let myself out of her apartment. Maybe she didn’t trust me quite yet, but she hadn’t kicked me out either. For the first time in nearly five years, my life was finally coming together.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Jack

  Over the next two weeks, I took my time and courted Clio properly. We drove up to the mountains and picnicked. I found some bikes and a covered baby car to pull Angel behind us as we rode through the residential areas where all the new homes were going up. With Angel riding in a front pack against my chest, the three of us walked all over Old Town where some enterprising group had set out pianos through the heart of the pedestrian area there. I surprised her by banging out some tunes but stopped horsing around on the pianos whenever other people came by to listen. After all, the point was to be together, not to be an item for social media or the tabloids.

  She took me on a campus tour, and we visited her sorority, where she introduced me to Fern, the housemother, who was the only person who lived in the house year-round. However, Clio’s friends Stacy and Annabelle were due in town again for some sorority shit Clio and Fern chattered on about that I couldn’t follow. Something about rushing around and parties and such. Knowing her friends were coming to town gave me ideas for how I could enlist them to help me with a project I had in mind to surprise Clio.

  During this time, I kept my distance physically, limiting myself to kissing her and casually touching her. All right, I couldn’t keep my hands off her most of the time, but I didn’t try to talk her out of her clothes. Which meant my cock became quite conversant with my right hand when I wasn’t spending time under the freezing cold water of the shower in my hotel suite.

  I could tell by some of the quizzical looks she threw my way every now and then that she wondered why I hadn’t made a move to get her into bed, but she didn’t ask. I wanted her to trust that I wasn’t ever walking out of her life again, and she wasn’t quite there yet.

  One day, I showed up a little earlier than usual and let myself into her place. She’d taken to leaving the door unlocked for me in the mornings. I didn’t think I was being all that quiet, but I guess I was when I
found her lying against the pillows on the bed, nursing our baby, her luscious body completely uncovered. For several minutes, I don’t think I even breathed. Never in my life had I witnessed a scene as beautiful as my girl nursing my baby.

  It took Clio a few minutes to notice me standing in the doorway staring. She glanced up and smiled a sleepy smile before returning her attention to Angel. Then she startled and reached for the covers to hide all that perfection from me.

  “Clio, please don’t do that.” In two strides, I stood beside her bed with my hand on the blankets to prevent her from covering up. “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful in all my life.”

  “You mean it?” she asked, her voice all quivery.

  “You have no idea what you’re doing to me at this minute.”

  Peeking up at me from beneath her brows, she patted the bed next to her. I toed off my shoes and joined her on the bed. Unable to help myself, I ran my fingers over the downy soft hair of Angel’s head as she nursed and laughed with Clio as our baby snorted and smacked her way through her breakfast.

  Clio shifted Angel to her shoulder and rubbed her little back until Baby Girl did me proud by letting loose with a belch that would have made my bandmates, especially Dakota, take notice. We laughed together at the very unladylike way our little lady showed appreciation for her meal.

  Clio closed one side of her nightshirt and opened the other, helping Angel to find her nipple before our baby latched on and went back to work. Until I watched her nurse, I had no idea what hard work it was for Angel to get some eats. By the time Clio burped her again, Angel’s sweaty baby hair clung to her head, a little red cap from the exertion she put out to nurse.

  “No wonder she needs a nap every after time after she eats. I didn’t realize sucking on you was such hard work,” I teased as Clio handed Angel to me so she could do up the buttons on her shirt.

  “When you did it, you weren’t trying to have breakfast,” Clio scolded as she slipped off the bed. Turning back, she reached for the baby, and reluctantly, I gave her up.