The Beauty, the Beast and the Baby (Man of the Month)

by Dixie Browning

  The baby clamped her four teeth together, openly delighting in the game. Mariah had learned two things about her niece in the short time they’d been together, the first being that whatever came within reach of Jessie’s pudgy little fists ended up in Jessie’s mouth.

  The second being that babies were slippery when wet. Which was far more often than one would imagine.

  Over the noise of the radio, Mariah didn’t hear the sound of the truck pulling up in her front yard. Not until Jessie glanced over her shoulder and beamed that wet, snaggle-toothed smile of hers did she even glance around.

  Her eyes widened. “Oh, my…Gus? What on earth are you doing here? I’ve got the check a ll ready to mail to your home address as soon as I can get to the post office for a stamp.”

  “Is it supposed to be eating string?”

  “Is what supposed to be—” Tearing her eyes away from the last man she’d ever expected to see again, Mariah turned back to Jessie. “Honey, spit it out. Come on now, give the string to Aunt Ri.”

  Clasping her by the shoulders, Gus shifted Mariah to one side and took over as if he’d been dealing with such crises forever. “You heard the lady, spit it out, kid. You get that thing tangled around those pearly nubs of yours and you’re going to be gumming your grits and greens from now on.” Deftly, he removed the soggy bit of frayed plastic tape from Jessie’s mouth and handed it to Mariah.

  “It must have come off her playpen pad. She eats everything she gets her hands on. Right now, she’s real partial to chair rungs, but I thought she was safe in her pen.” Mariah tried to force her heart to slow down. He was back! She’d told herself she had seen the last of him, and almost succeeded in convincing herself that she didn’t care. “Gus, what on earth are you doing here? I thought you were headed for the beach.”

  What he was doing was rubbing noses with Jessie, to the baby’s noisy delight. “You mean, what am I doing besides falling in love?”

  Mariah felt as if she’d just stepped off the edge of the earth.“ In…love?” she whispered. It was too soon. He couldn’t…

  “What’s her name? Does she always take to strangers this way?”

  Jessie, in pink corduroy overalls, with a pink ribbon dangling from her few stands of sandy hair, was beaming at Gus. Gus was beaming right back. Mariah’s heart settled back into place with a dull thud.“ Her name is Jessica Brady, and no, she doesn’t always take to strangers right off. Maybe you remind her of Butch.”

  “Butch?”

  “Myrtiss’s Yorkshire terrier.” It was a snide remark, but she made it anyway. She owed him some thing for showing up this way, just when she was planning to start putting him out of her mind any day now.

  “Can I—I mean, what if I tried to pick her up? Would she let me? Is there a special way to do it?”

  “Oh, Jessie’ll let anyone pick her up. The trouble comes when you try to put her down again.”

  Gus obviously wasn’t worrying about the future. “What do I do first?”

  Mariah closed her eyes and tried to ignore the warm, melting feeling spreading rapidly inside her. Drat the man! Why did he have to look so tough on the outside when he was nothing but a marshmallow on the inside? How could a woman fight against a man like that? “Stand up and hold out both hands.” She showed him how. “She’ll do the rest.”

  Gus had taken one’ look at the blue-eyed, fat-cheeked, bow-legged mite in baggy pink overalls, and turned to mush. “She sure puts a hell of a…a heck of a lot of body English into that smile of hers, doesn’t she?” Maybe this uncle business wasn’t going to so bad after all, if Alex and Angel had something like this.

  He held out his hands and waited, and sure enough, Jessie did her part. Turning loose the railing, she stood for an instant on chubby, wobbly feet—one sock on, one off—and lifted her hands.

  “Tay, tay,” she chortled.

  Worried, Gus glanced at Mariah. “What’s she saying?”

  “Take, take. Lift her up under her arms and then hang on—she wiggles like an earthworm. If she takes a notion she wants to come to Aunt Ri—that’s me,” Mariah said self-consciously, “she’ll lunge, ready or not.”

  Gus’s big hands encompassed the small torso. Cautiously he lifted the beaming baby and settled her in his arms. She was sort of like a puppy, only she smelled sweeter. And no pup ever had a smile like that!

  He grinned proudly as Jessie discovered his bea rd and began tugging with both hands.

  “She’s playing horsey,” Mariah said dryly.

  “Glad she’s not wearing spurs.” He enclosed one tiny foot in his hand, a look of sheer enchantment on his face.

  A few hours later Gus sat at the kitchen table watching Jessie shovel food into her mouth with both hands. “You know, you were right—she’s eaten everything on her plate,” he said proudly.

  “Except for what’s on the floor, the tray and her clothes, not to mention yours.”

  “When’s she going to get some hair?”

  “She has hair, it’s just sort of transparent. That’s why I tied a ribbon on the few strands she has. They’re brown, by the way.”

  “Oh. I thought that brown stuff was food. How about teeth? Will she get any more?”

  “She’s working on it. Gus, don’t you know anything at all about babies?”

  “Nope. Know something about kids—boys, that is. Couple of men in my construction crew have boys old enough to want to hang around the site, but nobody I know ever had a baby.”

  Mariah felt herself sinking deeper. No man could be all that guileless.“ I expect even boys are babies at one stage in their lives.”

  “I never thought much about it. Hey, look at that, she’s doing it again! Do all babies smile this way?”

  “What way?” Mariah was busy putting the finishing touches on supper. Gus had made a run on the grocery store, bringing back T-bone steaks, ice cream, cookies, store-bought cake and pounds of bananas. Jessie loved bananas.

  “Like, all the time?”

  The steaks were done to perfection. Mariah didn’t like any pink showing. “She’s a particularly happy baby. She’s always been that way. Not all of them are.” Rosemary had been colicky. Mariah barely remembered Alethia, Burdy and Basil as babies, she’d been so young at the time, but she didn’t recall a whole lot of smiling. Mostly she remembered hanging endless diapers on the line, hearing Daddy fuss about money and Mama’s “sickness,” and being told to keep those young’uns quiet or he’d go cut a switch and do the job himself.

  “Here, I hope you like your steak well done,” she said. She’d cooked rice because she had some in the pantry, but there hadn’t been time to cook collards, which was all that was left of her garden.“ Sorry about the lack of vegetables. I haven’t had a chance to go shopping because Basil went off with Jessie’s car seat.”

  “No problem. Rice is a vegetable, isn’t it?”

  Gus made a mental note to go buy a baby seat for her car before he left. He didn’t want to go off and leave her here with no way to get around. “By the way, have you done anything about replacing your driver’s license?”

  “I’ve hardly had time yet.’’

  “How are you going to haul Jessie around without a basket or something? You don’t want to break too many laws at once.”

  “I’ll deal with it,” she said sharply, and Gus lifted his eyebrows. The lady was touchy. Her hand must be hurting her more than she wanted to admit.

  Refusing his offer of help, she plopped his plate down in front of him with her left hand. He noted the curling edges of his T-bone and sighed. She did know how to ruin a perfectly good piece of beef, he thought with a sigh. But at least she tried. Lisa couldn’t boil water and was proud of the fact. Actually, the rice looked pretty good. If you liked rice. He didn’t.

  Gus insisted on washing dishes. The place didn’t run to a dishwasher. From what he’d seen so far, it didn’t run to much else except termites, damp rot and old age. Even the plumbing had emphysema. It was big. Fifty years ago it m
ight have been a decent house, but about all it was good for now was dozer fodder. The floor sloped. The roof sagged like a hammock. There wasn’t a pl umb line in the entire house, what with the foundation, such as it was, having settled into the ground over the last half century.

  The inside was marginally better. The walls were painted yellow. There were curtains at the windows, but they were tied up out of reach of small hands. The furniture with its cheerful, faded slipcovers, looked comfortable, if well used. There was a lineup of framed photos on the wall, and Gus had already been introduced to Rosemary, who proudly wore a student nurse’s cap, to Alethia, who had her sister’s cheekbones, to Burdina, who hadn’t, and to Basil, who looked like a nerd. An earnest one, but still a nerd.

  He’d mentioned the fact that all the end tables and coffee tables were bare. There was a box of books still waiting to be unpacked. Lamps, vases and other odds and ends were piled on every surface above waist high, which seemed a bit peculiar—he’d wondered out loud if the nearby river rose all that high.

  “It’s Jessie. She eats everything she gets her hands on, and she can get her hands on more than you’d ever believe.”

  Gus thought now about the house. He thought about the baby. He thought about his own building projects. What he tried hard not to think about was Mariah. Walking in and seeing her like that, bending over that baby coop thing with her yellow sweats clinging to her hips and her hair slipping in wisps from under the scarf she’d tied around her head—it had hit him even harder than the flu bug had.

  Ever since he’d driven off and left her at that dinky little convenience store, the taste of her still on his tongue, the smell of lilac lingering in his memory like the promise of spring, he’d done his best to convince himself that she was just one more attractive woman in a world full of attractive women. Most of ‘em had enough going for them to keep a man interested for a few days—at most, a few months. Few of them, how-ever, had that certain something that reached right inside a man and got him so snarled up he lost sight of all common sense.

  Gus told himself it was time to move on. No way was he going to get involved with the hard-luck queen of nowheresville, just because she happened to be the kind of a woman who could drape herself in a plastic drop cloth and outclass every other woman in the state of Georgia.

  A couple more hours. A couple more hours, he promised himself, and he’d hit the road. There was plenty of light left, even after the last dish was washed. Not quite the end of February, but already the days were getting longer.

  Rack up another winter, Gus thought, feeling oddly restless. While Mariah finished putting away the dishes, he entertained the baby, who showed no signs of being sleepy. “She hates to give up,” said Mariah.“ Don’t you, puss? So much to chew, so little time.”

  Raking back his kitchen chair, Gus suggested they go outside for a breather. “Jessie wants to work a few kinks out, she’s been penned up too long, haven’t you, possum?”

  Mariah glanced at him, and then glanced quickly at the red teapot-shaped clock. was that some subtle hint, as if she was afraid he might try to move in on her? “Don’t worry, I’ll be hitting the road in a few minutes,” he reassured her. “I just thought as long as I was in the neighborhood, I might as well stop off and see that you made it home all right.’’

  Jessie started bouncing her padded little bottom on his arm, and he secured her so that she could bounce and not fall. Amazing, how fast a guy picked up these things. Apparently he had talents he hadn’t even discovered yet.

  “You didn’t have to stop, Gus, but thanks. It was right thoughtful of you.” Mariah switched off the light over the sink and headed for the back door, and Gus followed with Jessie, his gaze on the woman in the yellow sweats. She hadn’t taken time to change for dinner…but then, neither h ad he.

  Thoughtful of him? Sure it was. Just like he didn’t have a thought in his head that wasn’t pure as driven snow. Wydowski, you’re a real bastard, you know that?

  He liked the way she moved. Sort of stiff-legged, awkward and graceful all at the same time. He wondered what she would look like without those baggy sweats. without anything at all.

  Jessie was babbling something as she tugged on his beard, so he missed most of what Mariah was saying as she plucked a leaf and crumbled it in her left hand. “Didn’t bloom last year, so I moved them to where they’d get a little more sunlight. But even so…”

  He was picturing her in a low-cut, slinky gown with rhinestone straps. Something short. With mile-high heels and stockings with those webby little things embroidered all over them. He could see her sipping champagne and laughing at some guy in a tux. A good-looking, clean-shaven guy who— “Whoa. You don’t want to eat that, honey,” he said as Jessie leaned in and took a bite of his beard.

  “Let me take her. You’re bound to be tired after driving all day.” Mariah brushed the crumbled leaves off her shirt and held out her arms. Gus found him self wishing with all his heart she would holdout her arms to him.

  Down boy. “She’s okay, just still hungry, I guess. Better let me hang on to her, she’s feeling frisky and you’ve still got that bum hand.”

  Besides, as long as he had an armful of Jessie, he couldn’t get into too much trouble with her Aunt Ri.

  Mariah felt as if she’d had too much wine, too fast, on an empty stomach. She wanted him to go, but she wanted even more for him to stay. She couldn’t look at him without remembering the way they’d parted.

  Had he forgotten?

  Did he kiss all the women he spent the night with that way?

  Would he kiss her goodbye when he left this time, too?

  Lord ha’ mercy, she ho ped not! She’d probably lean just a moment too long against that strong, hard body and he’d get all sorts of wrong ideas, and…

  Embarrassed, Mariah concentrated on not looking at Gus. Instead she scowled at the house that was semisilhouetted against a coral sky. Along the long, potholed driveway, a handful of tall Georgia pines stood out like gaunt sentinels. Moss hung from a huge cypress tree just outside the property line—she’d always loved that tree. Basil said it was a good thing it was too big to dig up, else she’d have brought it home with her long before now.

  Gus stood beside her and looked at the house, too, trying to think of something tactful to say. It was a real mess. An unpainted, run-down house in the middle of the flattest, wettest, most dismal country he’d ever seen outside the Everglades. The only decent thing about it was the yard, and even that was…

  Well, it was weird, was what it was. Gus knew something about landscaping. His sister owned a landscape nursery in Durham. This place could serve as the before part of a before-and-after picture, with its concrete menagerie, its hanging gourds and half a dozen or so birdbaths, all chipped or jury-rigged in some fashion or another. There were plastic milk cartons suspended by a length of clothesline over a few of them, dripping water into the overflowing bowls.

  And then there was the shrubbery. He recognized a few specimens from being around Angel’s place. All be could say was whoever did this job must have had one hell of an astigmatism.

  “Is that thing supposed to be a deer or a horse?” he asked.

  “It’s mostly deer. Grover sold yard sculpture, and I got the seconds and broken pieces free for hauling them off. The kids put this one together from odd parts. His name is Eugene. He was their favorite,” Mariah said somewhat defensively.

  “What happened to this section of yard? It’s all chopped up, but nothing’s growing there. ”

  “I’m not finished yet. I’ve been away since last summer.”

  They were strolling around the house, Gus entertaining Jessie while Mariah commented idly about this plant and that one. Suddenly the whole scenario reminded him a little too much of couples he’d seen strolling around, admiring their houses while they were still under construction.

  Sweet salvation, he had to get out of here! “Hey, look, this is nice, but I’d better be hitting the road,” he said, pryi
ng Jessie’s fingers from his beard. In the shadowy light it was almost possible to convince him self that was disappointment he saw on her face.

  “So soon? But you just got here. I know you must be eager to get home, but, Gus, I’ve got plenty of room,” Mariah heard herself saying. “It’s getting late. You’d have to put up somewhere, anyway, unless you plan to drive on through tonight.”

  “I don’t mind a little night driving—less traffic. Anyway, you don’t need another houseguest, you’ve got both hands full with this little sky diver.” Gus made a swift correction in his grip as Jessie lunged unexpectedly. She was getting fretful. “On the other hand,” he suggested, “I could help you get her settled for the night. After that, I might enjoy one last cup of coffee before I hit the road.”

  “Fine,” Mariah said proudly. She refused to beg. If he couldn’t see how much she wanted him to stay, how much she needed him, then let him go. “I guess I could use some help with Jessie’s bath,” she said. “She really is slippery when she’s wet and soapy.”

  Six

  Every instinct told Gus to get out while he still could. The more he was around her, the more he was beginning to suspect that Mariah Brady was a permanent sort of woman. In which case, the last thing she needed was a temporary guy like him messing up her life.

  Sure, she turne d him on. When it came to class, she was in a class by herself, but that was only a part of the problem. Classy looks, a sense of humor-—add to that the fact that she was a real nice lady?

  Uh-uh. No way. It was too risky a proposition for any man whose immunity was showing cracks the size of the Grand Canyon.

  They stood in the doorway of the small bedroom, gazing at the clean, sleepy baby in the battered old crib Mariah had dragged down from the attic. Jessie offered them a wet smile and made baby noises.

  “What’s she saying?” Gus asked.

  “She’s saying, thanks for not dropping me while you were getting me ready for bed, Aunt Ri.”