A Forever Kind of Family

by Brenda Harlen

  “There’s nothing to decide.”

  “Melissa and Darren named us guardians of their son and his property—jointly,” she reminded him in what she thought was a very reasonable tone. “Which is why I’m trying to discuss this with you.”

  He set his jaw, an obvious sign that he was determined to be unreasonable. “No discussion necessary. We’re not moving.”

  She sighed. “I just thought we should talk about the possibility.”

  “We just did,” he said.

  Chapter Six

  Harper knew Ryan was right.

  She also realized that she should have waited to introduce a discussion about the house until after they’d made a decision about day care for Oliver, because Ryan’s refusal to move ahead on that issue was a clear indication of his unwillingness to upset the new status quo.

  And it probably was too soon to be thinking about making any other major changes in Oliver’s life, and moving was undoubtedly a major change. She didn’t even mind admitting that Ryan was right in this instance—or she wouldn’t have if he didn’t act so authoritative and self-righteous.

  Even so, she should have contacted Simon and told him not to come. But because she was mad at Ryan—or maybe just mad that he was right—she went through the motions with the real estate agent anyway.

  Having sold the house to Melissa and Darren, Simon was familiar with the property and only wanted to do a quick walk-through. They finished up in the kitchen, where she offered him a cup of the coffee she’d made before he arrived. He accepted and they sat side by side at the island, drinking coffee and going over the sales reports on similar neighborhood properties that he’d generated for her.

  “Thanks for this,” she said, tapping a finger on top of the reports. “But I don’t think we’re ready to put the house on the market just yet.”

  “It’s too soon,” Simon guessed.

  She nodded.

  “I thought it probably was,” he said. “But I didn’t want you to miss out on the opportunity to list while the market was hot, as it is right now.”

  “We’ll let you know if we change our minds,” she assured him, grateful for his understanding.

  “I’d appreciate it,” he said, zipping up his portfolio. “So now that our business is concluded, how are you holding up?”

  “Me?”

  He smiled. “Yes, you.”

  “Oh, I’m doing okay.” She sipped her coffee. “At least, I pretend that I am.”

  “You’ve been busy,” he noted, and she knew he was referring to the pile of boxes in the master bedroom, designated for donation to Goodwill.

  “It’s hard to sit around surrounded by the memories. I find it helps to keep busy. Or if it doesn’t help, it gives me a sense of accomplishment.”

  “You need a break,” Simon told her.

  “Maybe,” she acknowledged, although she couldn’t see one anywhere on the horizon.

  “Why don’t you let me take you out tonight?”

  “Oh...um...” Through their tour of the house and conversation, she’d found him sincere and easy to talk to—but she honestly hadn’t perceived any signs of personal interest and wasn’t sure how to reply now.

  “We’ll go somewhere with soft lighting and quiet music,” he suggested. “Share some food and wine and get to know one another better.”

  “That’s...tempting,” she told him.

  He smiled. “I’ll pick you up at seven.”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I appreciate the invitation, but I can’t.”

  “Can’t tonight or can’t at all?”

  “At all,” she admitted. “Not right now, anyway.”

  He nodded and dropped a business card on top of the paperwork. “Call me if you change your mind.”

  “About selling, you mean?”

  He smiled again and held her gaze. “About anything.”

  * * *

  Ryan waited until she’d closed the door behind the real estate agent before he stepped into the kitchen to refill his own mug of coffee.

  “You could have said yes,” he told her. And then, in case she thought he meant about selling, he clarified, “About dinner, I mean.”

  She shook her head.

  “Not your type?”

  “I don’t have a type. I also don’t have a lot of free time, so the free time I do have I’d rather not waste making small talk with a guy who’s silently assessing whether sex with me would be worth the effort of dinner and conversation.”

  “I don’t have a high opinion of your real estate agent,” he said. “But even I don’t think his invitation warrants such a harsh indictment of the whole gender.”

  “My conclusion isn’t without foundation,” she assured him.

  “Give me one example,” he said.

  Unfortunately, his request wasn’t even a challenge. “Last summer I let my assistant talk me into going out with her, her boyfriend and his brother. It was a disaster from the first. Tim—the brother—insisted on selecting the restaurant. He chose a new sushi restaurant downtown—and I don’t like sushi.

  “But Tim promised that I would like this sushi. And then he insisted on ordering for the whole group, bypassing the tamer options in favor of octopus, sea urchin and eel.

  “Diya, obviously not having realized that her boyfriend’s brother was such a Neanderthal, insisted that we stop at The Corner Deli on the way back because she knew I hadn’t eaten anything. By that point, I wanted to go home more than I wanted food, but I went along so that she would stop fussing. And while I was waiting at the counter to place my order, Tim made a point of saying that he’d already forked over the cash for one meal and wasn’t going to pay for my chicken wrap.”

  “Charming,” Ryan noted drily.

  She nodded. “And then, after we parted ways with Diya and her boyfriend, Tim actually thought I would invite him up to my condo for a drink.

  “I said I was sorry—although the only thing I was sorry about was ever agreeing to meet the guy—but I didn’t have anything to offer him to drink.”

  “How did he respond to that?” he asked.

  “He shrugged and said, ‘I don’t mind skipping the drink and moving straight to the bedroom.’”

  “You’re kidding.”

  She shook her head. “I wish I was. And when I managed to overcome my bafflement and ask if he honestly expected me to sleep with him, he responded with, ‘Why would you agree to go out with me if you didn’t plan on having sex with me?’

  “I explained that I thought the date was an opportunity for us to get to know one another, to decide if we wanted to go on a second date, and he said he was ‘too busy to play those kind of games’ and if I wasn’t interested, I should say so.”

  “I hope you told him you weren’t interested.”

  “Very bluntly and succinctly.”

  “Never to see him again?”

  “Never to see him again,” she confirmed.

  “We’re not all like that,” Ryan felt compelled to point out to her.

  “I know. But the reality is that I don’t have the time or energy for any romantic BS right now.”

  Her tone so perfectly matched her words, he couldn’t help but smile. “That’s no reason not to let a guy buy you dinner.”

  “You think I should have accepted Simon’s invitation?”

  “No,” he admitted. “Because I think he’s a weasel for trying to pick up a commission at a funeral. But if you’d said yes and left me on my own with Oliver tonight, then I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about abandoning you when I go to the baseball game in Durham with my brother tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Why should you feel guilty?”

  “Truthfully, I don’t—because they’re playing Charlotte and nothing could entice me to give those tickets away. But I feel like I should feel guilty.”

  She shook her head at that, but she was smiling. “No need,” she assured him. “I think I can handle Oliver on my own for a few hours.”

 
* * *

  She was wrong.

  Oliver was great when Ryan left—he stood at the door happily waving bye-bye and then toddled into the living room to play with his blocks. So Harper settled on the sofa with her tablet to review the schedule for the upcoming week. And as soon as Oliver saw that she was doing something other than paying attention to him, he abandoned his blocks in pursuit of her tablet.

  She set her work aside and pulled him onto her lap to read him a book. He grew bored with that halfway through and wriggled away to return to his toys. She reached for the tablet again and was starting to get engrossed in the biography of Monday’s feature guest—a psychiatrist who had written a book about the correlation between color and mood—when she caught movement out of the corner of her eye as Oliver slipped through the doorway.

  She snagged him around the belly, making him giggle, and hauled him back into the living room. This time, she put him in his playpen—which was apparently his signal to scream as if he was being tortured.

  “Just for an hour,” she said, trying to bargain with the baby. “Just give me an hour to finish my prep and then we can go for a walk to the park.”

  Oliver refused to be bargained with. He didn’t understand about future gratification—he wanted out of his playpen now. She put his blocks in the enclosure; he threw them out again. She gave him Woof, a plush beanbag puppy and his absolute favorite toy; he threw that, too.

  Harper tried to ignore him. Some of the childcare guides advocated that strategy, but she quickly decided that the writers of those books must have had much quieter babies than Oliver. Of course, other books had said that a mother should never ignore a crying child. She’d read so many conflicting pieces of advice that she honestly wasn’t sure what to believe, but she figured that ignoring his obviously temper-induced cries was okay because he could see that she was right there beside him.

  Except that ignoring had absolutely no impact on his temper or his tears, and after half an hour of rereading the same paragraph more times than she could count, she finally gave up, locked the screen of her tablet and lifted him into her arms.

  Which was, of course, exactly what he wanted. And though she knew she wasn’t supposed to let him “win,” she didn’t have the energy to battle with him. Instead she got him ready for a trip to the park. She wrestled the baby’s feet into his athletic shoes, dabbed sunscreen on his face and neck and settled a baseball cap over his curls. It was only when she picked him up to put him in his stroller that she realized his diaper needed to be changed.

  She sighed, tears of frustration burning behind her eyes. “Your mom made this all look so effortless.”

  He looked up at her with those heartbreakingly beautiful blue eyes that reminded her so much of her best friend. “Ma-ma?”

  “Yes, I’m talking about your mama,” she said as she pulled the change pad out of his diaper bag and settled him on it. “Your mama is no doubt looking down on us from heaven—and wondering how she ever thought I could handle the responsibility of her child.”

  The child, of course, had no reply to that.

  She unsnapped his overalls and folded them out of the way, then unfastened the tabs of his diaper and pulled it away. As she was sliding the clean diaper under his bottom, a stream of something warm and wet hit her in the chest.

  She swore—loudly.

  But only inside her head.

  Aloud she merely sighed.

  “You’d think by now I would have learned.”

  Oliver babbled happily. Innocently.

  She sighed again and finished securing the clean diaper, then carried the baby upstairs with her so that she could change her clothes.

  Half an hour after she’d decided to take him to the park, they were finally walking out the door.

  She was both surprised and pleased when Kenna and Jacob showed up at the park a short while later.

  “I hoped we would see you here,” Kenna said. “Daniel’s in Talladega this weekend and I’m finding myself in desperate need of adult conversation.”

  “Ryan’s in Durham,” Harper told her.

  “Baseball game?”

  She nodded. “I’m on my own with him for at least four hours every day, with—aside from one trip to the ER—no major difficulties. But today has been nothing but difficulties.”

  “Babies seem to instinctively know when you’ve been pushed to your limit—and then they push just a little bit further,” Kenna agreed.

  “I’m hoping to tire him out here so that when I put him down for his nap, he’ll sleep until Ryan gets home.”

  “Good luck with that—Jacob naps on and off throughout the day, but never for more than half an hour at a time.”

  “How do you manage to get anything done?”

  “It’s a challenge,” Kenna acknowledged. Then she shifted topic to ask, “Have you made any progress about day care for Oliver?”

  “We’re still evaluating options.”

  “Is that code for Ryan’s still dragging his heels?”

  “It is and he is,” Harper confirmed. “Which I don’t understand, because I know he’s got to be as exhausted as I am.”

  She shook her head. “I honestly don’t know how I’d manage to get out of bed in the morning if Ryan didn’t handle the night shift.”

  “He gets up with Oliver every night?”

  “Yes, he does.”

  “And I thought I was lucky that Daniel was willing to do every other night,” Kenna said. “Of course, I still woke up when it was his turn, as I’m sure you do when Ryan gets up.”

  “No, I don’t even hear him.”

  “Really? I wake up every time Daniel rolls over,” Kenna admitted.

  Harper felt her cheeks flush. “You think Ryan and I are sleeping together?”

  “You’re not?”

  “No!”

  “Whoops,” Kenna said. “Sorry about that.”

  Harper’s cheeks continued to burn, not just because of the assumption her friend had made but because she’d spent too much time alone in her bed dreaming about that exact scenario.

  Kenna caught Jacob at the bottom of the toddler slide, then glanced over at her. “So now I’m wondering—why not?”

  “Why not what?” she asked, desperately hoping that she’d missed a shift in the topic of conversation.

  “Why aren’t you letting Ryan keep you warm at night?”

  “Because...” She wasn’t entirely sure how to answer that question.

  “Because?” the other woman prompted.

  “Because that would be a really bad idea.”

  “Or a really good one,” Kenna countered with a grin.

  Harper just shook her head.

  “You can’t tell me you’re not tempted,” her new friend protested.

  Unfortunately, Kenna was right—Harper couldn’t say that she wasn’t tempted, because it would be a lie. “I’m female and I’m breathing—of course I’m tempted,” she admitted. “But we’re both focused on doing what’s best for Oliver.”

  The other woman offered Jacob a sippy cup when she saw him trying to get into the diaper bag. “Somehow I don’t think ‘what’s best for Oliver’ is the reason your cheeks are red.”

  “I’m not holding out on you,” Harper insisted. “I just don’t think it really meant anything.”

  “What ‘it’?”

  “He kissed me.”

  “Well, that’s a start.”

  “And the finish,” Harper insisted. “That was more than a week ago, and since then, nothing.”

  “Hmm,” Kenna said. “Maybe he doesn’t want to be perceived as taking advantage of the situation.”

  “And he probably realizes it would be awkward for Oliver to be caught in the middle when the relationship ends.”

  “Why are you assuming it would end?”

  “Because that’s what happens with relationships.”

  Kenna frowned. “After living with Ryan for more than a month, you should realize that he’s not nearly as shal
low as he lets people believe.”

  Harper had come to the same conclusion herself over the past several weeks. And the realization that he had more character and depth than she wanted to believe had unnerved her. It would be easier to fight her growing feelings if she could believe that he wasn’t worth her time and attention.

  Before she could respond, her cell phone started to ring. She pulled it out of an outside pocket of the diaper bag and looked at the screen.

  “Excuse me,” she said, “but I better take this.”

  “Of course,” Kenna agreed, walking around to the other side of the climber to give her some privacy.

  Harper connected the call, keeping an eye on Oliver as she talked. The conversation was brief and to the point, as were most of her conversations with Gayle Everton-Ross. Yes, she’d read the press release that had been emailed to her the day before; yes, she would look at the Coffee Time schedule and fit him in; yes, she would try to do it before Monday so that Gayle could schedule his other appearances.

  “Sorry,” Harper apologized to Kenna again when she tucked the phone away.

  “You get business calls on Sundays, even?”

  “Seven days a week,” she confirmed. “But actually, that was my mother.”

  “And I thought I had an awkward relationship with mine,” Kenna mused, making Harper laugh.

  “My mother is also my dad’s agent. He just got signed for a guest spot on NCIS, so she wants me to get him on Coffee Time before that.”

  “Ohmygod—I think I just put the pieces together,” Kenna said. “Your father is Peter Ross?”

  Harper nodded.

  “He was my first crush,” the other woman confided. “Not your father, really, but Brock Lawrie—his character on The Light of Dawn. When I was in ninth grade, some of the girls would sneak into the drama room where there was a TV so that we could watch during our lunch hour. When Brock first confessed his love for Lorelei...it was so...perfect.”

  Harper couldn’t help but chuckle in response to Kenna’s dramatic sigh.

  “Sorry—I’m having a total fan-girl moment here,” the other woman admitted.

  “No need to apologize,” Harper assured her. “The girls I went to high school with all watched it, too.”