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

by Dixie Browning

  Gus had far too much respect for Mariah to take what he wanted and then walk away. It wasn’t that he was afraid she wouldn’t enjoy it every bit as much as he did…well, almost as much, anyway. He wasexperienced enough to know that pleasing a woman only intensified his own pleasure.

  But he had every intention of leaving. Come morning, he would be long gone. In a few more days he would be down on the Outer Banks, wrapped up in another building project, hassling red tape, material deliveries, the weather and probably the mosquitoes. By then he would have forgotten all about a woman and a baby down in some little nowhere town in east Georgia.

  Yeah. Sure you will!

  Seven

  After a series of dreams that left him aching, empty and unsatisfied, Gus wakened to the smell of burning bacon, the sound of a crying baby. If he’d needed a sharp dose of reality, that served well enough.

  By the time he appeared in the kitchen doorway, his shirt still not yet buttoned and his hair damp from two minutes under a shower that spat and dribbled lukewarm water, Mariah was bouncing a fussing Jessie on her left hip and turning bacon with a fork held awkwardly in two fingers and the thumb of her right hand.

  “Oh, sorry if we woke you,” she murmured.

  “S’all right.” Gus had his own morning routine. It had occasionally included a woman, but never a baby. “Can I help?”

  “Want to feed Jessie? It’s all fixed. I was trying to have something ready in case you were in a hurry to leave, but things got a bit confused.” She smiled, and Gus thought it was damned unfair for any woman to look so enticing unde r the circumstances. Her bathrobe had seen better days. Her hair was in a shaggy braid down her back and her face was shiny, completely innocent of any hint of makeup.

  She looked good enough to eat.

  His stomach growled suddenly, and he scowled, as if scowling could deny his salacious thoughts. “Come on, possum, let Uncle Gus give you your breakfast.”

  “Possum?”

  “She likes it. We understand each other, don’t we, possum?” Jessie was no problem. Jessie he could handle. What had him worried was what had happened last night.

  And, dammit, it was happening all over again!

  The woman was a witch. He was hungry as a bear. He hadn’t had his morning coffee, yet all it had taken was one look at the way her bathrobe slid over her hips when she moved and he started figuring out ways to get her out of it.

  Only by turning his attention to the baby did he manage to rein in his baser appetites. “Okay, possum, let’s try some of this yellow stuff. Open wide and give me a big target, will you? Attagirl!”

  While Mariah scrambled eggs, Gus poked strained apricots into Jessie’s hungry maw, grinning at the eager way she leaned into every spoonful. Between spoonfuls, she grinned right back at him.

  “Amazing,” he muttered.

  “What’s amazing?” Mariah brushed against his shoulder as she leaned over to place a bowl of what looked like wet plaster beside him. “This is some kind of baby cereal,” she said. “She gets that next—or maybe it was supposed to be before. Basil explained but I might have got the order wrong.”

  “Don’t sweat it, it’s all headed in the same direction.” Scraping the jar, Gus prided himself that he was beginning to get the hang of this baby business. “We’ll manage just fine, won’t we, Jess?” Momentarily dis tracted by the mixed essence of fried bacon, lilac-scented soap and warm woman, Gus scraped the last spoonful from the jar and h eld it out. “You know, I’ve never been around many babies before, but I’m pretty sure Jessie’s smarter than your average kid. Watch how she looks right into my eyes and smiles, like she’s sharing a joke or something. There…y’see that? She likes me!”

  Leaning her elbows on the table, Mariah used the bib to wipe a smear of apricots from Jessie’s tiny chin. “Amazing,” she teased. “And you think that makes her smart?”

  Gus yanked her braid, and laughing softly, Mariah removed the empty apricot jar and shoved the bowl of cereal closer. She was using her hand a little more each day, but it was still sore and badly discolored.

  While Mariah poured coffee, Gus loaded a spoon with the wet plaster, grinning when Jessie leaned for ward eagerly. “Hey, slow down, small stuff. Uncle Gus can’t shovel any faster.” As Mariah moved back to the counter, he glanced after her and was struck by the way the shaft of sunshine slanting through the kitchen window highlighted her profile. Beauty might be only skin deep, but that didn’t make it any less beautiful, which, he told himself, was a pretty profound thought for seven twenty-two in the morning.

  Jessie didn’t care for wet plaster. She pushed it out with her tongue, a look of such patent disgust on her small face that Gus could only marvel at the range of her emotions. “Ri?”

  “Hmm?” Mariah was getting out the cream. It was canned.

  “I don’t think she likes this stuff.”

  “Oh? Then don’t eat it, dumpling.”

  “Is that okay?” Gus was worried. “Maybe if you put more sugar in it?”

  Mariah shot him a withering look. “Is that your answer to everything? More sugar?” Their eyes caught and held, and Gus was amazed to see a flush of warm color stain her cheeks. Was she thinking what he was? That some things were sweeter than any amount of sugar?

  “Just trying to be helpful,” he said with a sh rug.

  Still trying to be helpful, Gus found himself a few hours later sizing up the job of repairing her front step, having discovered a shed in the backyard filled with odds and ends of usable lumber. All it took was the thought of Mariah, with Jessie in her arms, stepping on that rotten plank and having it give way under their combined weight, to keep him from hitting the road right away.

  He figured the job would take about an hour—two hours, tops. Then, too, there was the commode. He might as well fix that before he left. And the sink drain. And the door that wouldn’t latch because the frame had sagged out of alignment.

  He flat-out refused to think about all those stains on the ceiling. Damned if he was going to hang around long enough to reroof her house!

  “Gus, I feel awful about this,” Mariah protested, watching him carry an array of small tools from the locker in his truck bed, and then proceed to drag out scraps of building materials from the shed that had been on the verge of collapse for years.

  Gus wondered if she had any idea what a distraction she was in a pair of baggy shorts and a man’s shirt. If she didn’t get out of his line of sight pretty soon, he couldn’t guarantee his good behavior—es pecially when good behavior was the last thing on his mind.

  She left, and he breathed a sigh of relief. He unfolded his six-foot ruler and measured the length of a cypress board.

  “Here, I brought you some iced tea.”

  He dropped the rule, grappled for it on the ground, and slowly straightened, deliberately not letting his gaze stray to her long, bare legs. “Hmm…yeah. Thanks. Is it, umn, sweetened?”

  “Practically preserved. I know your tastes by now.” Her smile shorted out a few more circuits in his brain, and for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why. Her teeth were good, but they weren’t perfect. One of the two front ones lapped slightly over the other. Gus fou nd the small flaw irresistible.

  “Where’s Jessie?” he asked gruffly.

  “She fell asleep in her high chair. I mopped her off and put her down for a nap. Basil says she doesn’t always take them, but to take advantage of it when it happens.”

  She dropped down onto the back stoop, and Gus slanted a quick look at the way she sat: back curved, head tilted to one side, arms wrapped around her long, graceful legs. With any other woman—with Lisa, for instance—it would be deliberate. Lisa was a great one for striking a pose. He’d told her about Lisa over supper last night after she’d confided a few details of her great romance with a tractor salesman who was looking for a live-in baby-sitter. Actually, he’d sort of made a joke of it.

  “Believe it or not, I actually bought her a ring. Trouble was, while I
was working up my nerve to pop the question, Lisa was busy arranging a modeling career in New York. Pretty funny, huh?”

  “She’s a model?” Mariah had asked. “Which agency?”

  He’d shrugged. “If she ever said, I forgot. Models and I don’t mix.” She’d given him an odd look, then served the dessert.

  That had been last night. Now, rising, he ambled over to the shed and beamed his flashlight into the cluttered interior. “Hey, you sure it’s okay to use this stuff?”

  “Nobody else ever will. Basil lives in an apartment, and none of my sisters is interested in building anything more than a career. And by the way, while you’re dragging stuff out of the shed, if you see any garden tools, how about setting them outside. I’m missing a mattock.”

  “Yesterday when you said you liked gardening, I sort of pictured you wearing one of those big hats ladies wear and maybe a long, wispy dress, wandering through a bunch of flowers with a basket and a pair of shears in your hand.”

  When she threw back her head and laughed, Gus felt a powe rful urge to laugh with her. “I didn’t know you read fairy tales,” she teased. “Which reminds me, while Jessie’s asleep, this would be a good time to unpack my books.”

  Gus watched her go out of sight, then mopped the perspiration from his face with the back of his forearm. If he was smart—and the jury was still out on that one—he’d mend her steps, fix her plumbing and head for the hills before he got in any deeper. Before he wasted any more time thinking about things he’d sworn off thinking about.

  On the other hand, he couldn’t start hammering until Jessie woke up. Might as well check out the plumbing while he waited.

  “Oh, good,” Mariah said when he told her. “I’ve got a wrench in the lower right kitchen cabinet drawer, and as long as you’re going to be inside anyway, could you listen out for Jessie for me? I need to run downtown for a few minutes.”

  Gus said sure, although the nearest thing to a downtown he’d seen was roughly forty-five miles away. Watching her back out the pinestraw-covered driveway, he thought about her bald tires and wondered if she could afford to replace them. Just how bad was she hurting for money, anyway? She’d said she was between jobs.

  How many job opportunities could there be in a village that consisted, as far as he could tell, of a dozen or so frame houses, a general store, her hardware store, a garage, a couple of churches and a few ram shackle piers jutting out into a river he could spit across on a windless day?

  While Mariah was gone, Gus shut off the water and traced the lines to a well pump that looked even older than the house. He usually subcontracted plumbing, but it didn’t take an expert to tell him her pipes were shot, the foot valve in her pump was waterlogged, and she needed a new float valve in her commode tank.

  He wondered if her famous Feed, Seed and Hardware Emporium boasted a plumbing department.

  The lady’s probl ems are none of your business, man. You’re out of here, remember?

  The trouble was, she puzzled him, and Gus had never been able to resist a puzzle. A woman with her kind of thoroughbred looks could easily make it as a model. Hell, if she could read a cue card, she might even wind up with her own TV show.

  So what was she doing wasting her life in a no where place like Muddy Landing, looking after nieces and nephews and slaving away at some two-bit country store?

  Late that afternoon Gus was still working on the front steps. Mariah had had mixed feelings when he’d declared that as long as he was at it, he might as well do the job right. There was lumber enough in the shed, left over from one of her father’s old projects that had never got off the ground. Con Brady had been a great one when it came to starting things—including a family. Not so great when it came to following through.

  She though about that now, about how it had been having her father at home. The good and the bad. About how it had been later on, after he’d gone and her mother had disappeared into the bottle and never really surfaced again.

  She thought about that stolen moment in the darkness with Gus, and told herself it had been a fluke, an accident. Because she hadn’t been kissed in such a long time, and never like that, she’d simply overreacted.

  A woman, after all, had certain needs.

  She thought about Vance Brubaker and the dreams she had briefly harbored. Thank goodness she was wise enough now to realize that dreams were too fragile to survive the light of day.

  No doubt a man like Gus had needs, too, she mused. He’d probably known so many women he would need a directory to sort them out. Not long ago, according to his own admission, he’d been on the verge of getting himself engaged. Whatever else his Lisa was, she was a fool.

  “I’ll cook you a good supper,” she promised while she held one end of a board for him to saw. It was the least she could do. She certainly couldn’t afford to pay him, not until she found another job.

  They talked about that over fried chicken, grits, and collards from her garden, stir-fried with cracklings, and then smothered and steamed to bring out the sweetness.

  “While I was in town this morning, I stopped by Grover’s—the hardware store? I hadn’t expected to get my own job back, but I thought maybe he might need a clerk. But he said the rumors are true. They’reclosing down now that that new hardware chain is building a place in Darien.”

  “So what’ll you do?”

  She shrugged. “I’ll find something.” She would have to. She simply couldn’t go back to Vic. No matter how good the money was, she would never really be able to fit into that kind of fast, glitzy life.

  Another few months and she wouldn’t have been able to fit in anywhere. Not here in Muddy Landing, not after having lived in a place where the plumbing always worked. Where she could pick up a phone and order out when she was too tired to cook. Not after having a doorman open the door when she came home loaded with all her bags and parcels, and certainly not after receiving flowers and candy and exciting invitations from well-dressed men who drove big, fancy cars.

  But she could never be happy living in New York or Palm Beach, either. Not when she was judged solely by her looks and by whose designs she wore, as if Sara Mariah Brady was solely the creation of Vic Chin, master manipulator. Not when the flattering invita tions to dinner came with a price she was unwilling to pay.

  “What were you doing down in Florida, anyway? You mentioned a job.”

  Gus’s question startled her. It was as if he’d read her thoughts. If Gus liked her—and it was becoming more and more obvious to her that he did—she wanted it to be for who she was, not what she looked like. “I worked down there for almost a year. Actually, my work included some traveling, but I won’t be going back. I don’t particularly like to fly, and I’m not all that comfortable in big cities. I guess that sounds silly in this day and age, doesn’t it?”

  Gus reached across the table for the bowl and helped himself to the last of the collards. “Not especially. I don’t like being herded onto a small range with a lot of strangers, either. Depends on what you’re used to, I guess. I grew up in Durham, but now even Durham’s about to outgrow me.”

  Again, Gus insisted on washing the dishes. Jessie was playing quietly in her playpen, fascinated by the . set of keys Gus had given her after washing them off first, to Mariah’s amusement.

  “It’s not as if she hasn’t sampled everything in my house she could get her hands on, including the floor.”

  “Yeah, well, never let it be said that Gus Wy-dowski poisoned a lady with dirty keys.” He grinned, and Mariah tried to store up the memory of how his eyes twinkled when he smiled, the way his teeth flashed white against his dark beard.

  She reached past him to get what was left of the cake he’d bought, and Gus made the tactical mistake of reaching up and catching her around the wrist. Slowly, he stood and raked back his chair. By the sharp intake of her breath, he knew she was remembering the same thing he was.

  Last night. The two of them together. Both catching fire, both so damned needy they cou
ld hardly stand up.

  Abruptly he backed away. Raking a hand through his hair, he blew out his breath and said, “Sorry. I guess I don’t want any cake after all.”

  “Gus, don’t be embarrassed,” Mariah said gently, but firmly enough so he would know she had her emotions under control. “We happen to…well, to affect each other that way. It’s nothing that couldn’t happen to anyone, given the right circumstances. It certainly doesn’t mean anything.”

  “You know I wouldn’t hurt you for the world, Mariah.”

  “I know that. Gus, you’re a real nice man and a good friend. It would be a shame to let a little thing like…like physical attraction ruin our friendship. Who knows, you might just pass this way again and need a place to lay over. I wouldn’t want you to be embarrassed to stop by.”

  “Yeah, well…” He stroked the back of his neck, kneading away the sudden tension that had gathered there. “It always pays to keep your options open, I guess,” he said, while his eyes said something altogether different. Something that made Mariah’s heart trip into double time.

  But then, Jessie lost the keys through the slats of the playpen and asked for help in the only way she knew.

  Gus reached for them at the same time that Mariah did. Their hands touched, and once again the sparks flew. She caught her breath sharply.“ You said some thing about trying to get as far north as Savannah?”

  “That was yesterday. What about Jessie? Are you up to lugging her around with one hand? What if you have to go somewhere? You don’t even have a car seat yet.” He’d meant to call, but never got around to it.

  “I drove all the way home without a driver’s license, remember? I think I can explain the lack of a car seat if I have to.”

  Gus tossed the keys into the pen and turned to her, an excess of emotion translating to anger. “Dammit, woman, we’re not just talking about a ticket, we’re talking about Jessie! Just because you’re too pigheaded to admit you still need help—”