Baby Before Business (Silhouette Romance)

by Susan Meier

  “Won’t be her worry if she actually gets Mr. Scrooge to use some of his moldy money to hire a nanny instead of tricking an employee into caring for his baby for nothing.”

  The way her dad said that caused a fission of alarm to skitter through Madelyn. Could Ty have tricked her out of getting him to call the nanny service the night before because he didn’t want to spend the money? It seemed so ridiculous that she refused to entertain it. But her dad’s comment did demonstrate how easily everything Ty did could be misinterpreted.

  “Anything else you need our help with?” her dad asked.

  Madelyn almost automatically said no, but she remembered that Ty hadn’t put together the high chair or baby swing, and she needed both of them. “Actually,” she said, directing her dad to follow her to the door, “There are some things we haven’t yet assembled.”

  “You mean the illustrious Mr. Bryant hasn’t assembled,” Ron said, following Maddy. When she cast him a curious look, he said, “You’re not exactly a pro with a screwdriver, so I knew you hadn’t volunteered.”

  Madelyn grimaced as she pushed open the swinging door and began walking down the hall to the foyer where the boxes still lay on the floor. “Come on, Dad. He’s a busy man and this baby was just sort of dropped in his lap yesterday. He didn’t have time to—”

  Seeing Ty sitting on the floor, among the boxes, with the high chair pieces neatly arranged for assembly, Madelyn stopped walking.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Gentry,” he greeted coolly, but politely, when he looked up from the parts he had sorted.

  “I was just bringing my dad in to put the high chair together.”

  “I can handle it,” Ty said and went back to work.

  Madelyn glanced at her dad and saw his look of puzzlement turn into a look of pleasure. Seeing Ty dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, with a screwdriver in his hand, looking like a common, ordinary guy, her dad seemed to have upped his impression of Porter’s most disliked citizen a million decimal places.

  “Are you sure you don’t want any help?” Ron said, using his guy-to-guy voice and Madelyn knew her conclusion was correct. Ty had scored big time. “I’m not busy today. I’d be glad to hang around a while.”

  “I’m fine,” Ty said, then he paused, glanced up at her dad and said, “But thanks.”

  Madelyn stared in amazement as a strange feeling billowed through her. The little bits of kindness she saw creep into Ty’s personality were so subtle she sometimes wondered if she imagined them, but she knew she hadn’t imagined that. Ty saying thanks to her dad caused her to remember how polite he had been to her dad the day before when she introduced them and also to realize that Ty had let her make the explanation to her father. He hadn’t interrupted her or even hurried her. He’d stood by politely and let her state her case. He wasn’t rude. He wasn’t abrupt.

  And now that she thought about it, he was also pulling his weight with Sabrina. He might have seemed unhappy to be forced to make breakfast, but though he burned the toast, he had made it.

  And at one point the night before, didn’t she have the feeling that he was deliberately baiting her, aggravating her, trying to make her mad?

  Yes, she had. She knew she had.

  Could it be that his scrooge, ogre, tyrant personality was an act? After all, he’d said he’d worked fifteen years to get his reputation.

  “You’re welcome,” Ron said cheerfully, bringing Madelyn out of her thoughts.

  She turned her parents around and directed them toward the kitchen. “You guys better go now.”

  “I could help,” Ron said one more time, as the kitchen door swung closed behind them.

  “He doesn’t really want help,” Madelyn reminded her dad as she guided him and her mother to the back door. “He wants to put the baby’s things together.”

  “Well, good,” Penney said. She stopped at the table to retrieve her sweater. “One of the most important things Mr. Bryant needs to understand is that he’s that baby’s family now. Even when he gets a nanny he has to be involved with Sabrina. It’s good to see he’s not passing off her care.”

  “Right,” Madelyn agreed, seeing her own image of Ty altering. Though he hadn’t yet changed a diaper, he was putting together the much-needed baby equipment. He wasn’t shirking his responsibility with the baby. He was simply doing the things he knew how to do and also fitting them into an already busy schedule. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, she said, “He isn’t passing off the baby’s care completely.”

  Her mother beamed. “That’s so good to hear.”

  Her parents stepped out into the early-afternoon sunshine and Madelyn closed the door behind them, feeling victorious. Maybe mending Ty’s image wouldn’t be so bad after all? Merely seeing him with a screwdriver had sold her dad. And all her mom had to do was hear that Ty was involved with the baby, and her disposition shifted, too. Of course, Madelyn had sort of lied about Ty being involved with the baby. But she would fix that this afternoon.

  Reminded that she needed to awaken the baby, Madelyn ran up the back stairs and into the temporary nursery.

  “Sabrina,” she called, gently lifting the little girl from her crib. “Sabrina, honey, you’ve got to wake up.”

  Sabrina rubbed her nose on Madelyn’s shoulder, found a comfortable spot and went back to sleep and Madelyn didn’t have the heart to wake her.

  “Okay. All right,” Madelyn said, laying her down again. Sabrina had lost both of her parents the week before. She’d had enough traumas to last her a while.

  “We’ll let you sleep now, but tonight your Uncle Ty is playing with you so you can’t fall asleep until you’re good and darned tired.”

  Having Ty directly care for Sabrina that night would solve both the baby sleeping problem and the little white lie she’d told her mother.

  She returned to the computer at the kitchen table and began detailing the new ideas she had gotten for making Ty seem more like a normal guy from her father’s reaction to seeing him put together a high chair. When she ran out of steam, she considered going into the foyer to check on Ty’s progress with the baby things, but decided against it. He had accused her of flirting, and though she hadn’t flirted, she probably had been staring at him, so it was best for her to keep her distance. Besides, having formula ready when the baby woke was a better use of her time.

  A half hour later when she heard the baby cry, she got Sabrina out of bed, fed her a little of the cereal from the box Pete had sent in the diaper bag, and then went in search of Ty. Though he wasn’t in the foyer, the high chair was assembled. So was the swing. But all the other boxes were intact.

  Not sure where he was, but knowing he had probably given her all the free time he could spare for one day, Madelyn headed down the hall to his den.

  “There’s your Uncle Ty,” Madelyn said talking to the baby as she entered the room.

  Ty slowly looked up from his work. “I told you I have things I have to accomplish today.”

  “Yes, but this is your child now, and I’m not your wife,” she said, then batted down an odd reaction that shivered through her at the thought of getting his sizzling kisses regularly. There was no way in hell she would marry a grouch, and besides, this particular grouch wasn’t interested in her.

  “Which means I’m really not her permanent care-giver. After losing her parents and being shifted away from her grandparents, you don’t want her to get attached to me and lose me, too.”

  Ty tossed his pencil to his desk. “No, I suppose I don’t.” Madelyn almost cheered, until he added, “But right now I’m swamped. In February, Seth lost a contract for a twenty-million-dollar mansion in Florida. The owner, foreign royalty, paid us for all the work we did, but he never gave us a reason for firing us and he also didn’t pay us the amount in the termination clause. The way he handled this, it was as if we’d quit on him, he hadn’t fired us.”

  “Oh,” Madelyn said, taking a seat on the chair in front of his desk and arranging Sabrina on her lap.

  “
So, we sued this king.”

  “You sued a king?”

  “He didn’t keep to the terms of our agreement.”

  “You’re not afraid of repercussions?”

  “That’s just it. There weren’t any. After one preliminary hearing the king buckled under and agreed to pay us the amount in the termination clause of the contract.”

  Madelyn nodded.

  “Problem is,” Ty said softly, almost contritely, “he sent a twenty-page agreement for us to sign to settle the suit. I have to read it today so that if I make any changes the legal department has time to insert them and we can present our version to our former client.”

  Madelyn was nearly speechless at Ty’s humble, apologetic tone until she remembered this was how he got her to agree to be his temporary nanny in the first place. She almost argued that he couldn’t put his business before the baby, but she remembered it was more important for him to care for the baby that night. And if she won this battle with him right now, she would actually lose the help she needed from him that evening.

  “Okay,” she said, rising. “I’ll care for Sabrina this afternoon, and you get her tonight.”

  He considered that, then said, “Okay.”

  “You also need to call a nanny service.”

  “Okay,” he agreed amicably.

  Madelyn left Ty’s office and walking through the foyer, she saw the newly assembled high chair and baby swing and realized she needed one in the kitchen and the other in the TV room. Juggling Sabrina from one arm to the other, Madelyn concluded she couldn’t carry either the swing or the high chair while she held the baby. So she set the baby in the swing and carried the high chair to the kitchen, then put Sabrina in the high chair while she carried the swing to the TV room.

  The entire time that she carried baby items, ordered another pizza for a midafternoon snack since they’d missed lunch, and amused the little girl who was raring to go, Madelyn didn’t hear a sound from Ty. But because he had agreed to care for the baby that night, Madelyn didn’t bother him. At six o’clock when he emerged from his den, looking for “anything” to eat, Madelyn was incredibly happy to see him.

  “Thank God!” she said, pulling Sabrina out of the high chair and handing her to Ty. “Do you realize I haven’t even showered today?”

  “You should get up earlier,” Ty said, shifting away as if he didn’t see her handing him the baby.

  Madelyn frowned. “You can’t get up much earlier than two in the morning.”

  He took a piece of pizza and sat at the table. “Why the hell would you get up at two?”

  She stared at him. “Because your baby,” she said, accenting those words because she was starting to worry she had given him too much benefit of the doubt. “Got up at two and stayed up until right after I came back from the convenience store.”

  He said, “Hum,” and reached for the morning paper again.

  “Ty,” she said, using his first name to snag his attention. When he looked up, she said, “I’m getting the impression you’re missing the big picture.”

  “And what would that picture be?”

  His voice dripped with strained patience and she almost laughed. If he thought his nerves were strained, he should get a look at hers!

  “That you are this baby’s guardian.”

  “That’s not something I’ll easily forget.”

  “Maybe you won’t forget it, but you’re not acting like a guardian.”

  “I see. You don’t want to do the nanny work, so you’re dumping it off on me.”

  “I stayed up all night with this baby while you slept. I took her to the store while you slept…”

  “I wasn’t sleeping. I was up at six. Working.”

  “You were up at six yet you never volunteered to help me?”

  “You’re the nanny!”

  “You’re the baby’s guardian! Dear God, Ty, are you going to make her live like a pet? No, I take that back, most people’s pets get more attention. You’ve all but ignored this little girl.”

  For a few seconds Ty just stared at her, then he quietly said, “In order to be able to support that little girl, I have work to do. That’s why we made this arrangement. If you don’t like it, there’s the door. But, remember, if you leave, you don’t do the PR.”

  At that moment, walking out the door and never looking back sounded like a fine deal to Madelyn. But in twenty-four hours of caring for the baby, remembering Sabrina had lost both of her parents, remembering she’d been taken away from everybody and everything familiar, Madelyn had grown to love her and couldn’t desert her to a man who didn’t even acknowledge her existence.

  She didn’t know how she would do it, but somehow, some way, she would get this stubborn, self-centered, self-oriented, tunnel-visioned, chauvinistic, completely-incapable-of-affection man to love this baby.

  “I’ll stay.”

  He smiled triumphantly and turned his gaze to the newspaper again. “I thought so.”

  Righteous indignation thundered through Madelyn. Before he’d said that she was miffed. Now she was mad. He was in for trouble the likes of which he’d never seen before.

  Chapter Four

  Monday morning as Ty stepped into his charcoal-gray trousers, he heard the baby crying. He zipped and buttoned quickly, then walked to the bedroom where he’d set up Sabrina’s crib.

  He wasn’t a complete idiot. He knew what Madelyn had been telling him Saturday evening. Caring for a baby was hard and she wasn’t a professional. She was simply somebody who knew enough to help him get over the rough spots. She couldn’t handle being up all night and caring for the baby all day and still do the PR work she wanted to do.

  Though that was the job she’d agreed to.

  Still, he’d heard her walking the floor with the baby in the hours before anybody’s alarm was scheduled to ring, and he understood that nobody could function without sleep three days in a row. So, in order to have at least a semipleasant person running his house while he went to work, he would handle some of the morning baby things and let her sleep in.

  Standing over the crib, he said, “Hey, kid. You want to keep the noise down?”

  Sabrina stopped crying and Ty smiled. There. That wasn’t so hard. He sometimes believed women made caring for babies much more complicated than it needed to be. He reached in to pull Sabrina out, but as he did, she started to cry again.

  “Oh, come on!” he said, bringing her nose almost to his nose. She angled her pajama-covered feet on his white undershirt. “You don’t have two skilled professionals here,” he told the baby who again stopped crying and only looked at him. “You’ve got to cut us a break.”

  Sabrina slapped his face. Twice. Then two more times before Ty realized she wasn’t hitting him as much as his face was in the way of her getting out some pent-up energy. He couldn’t believe she had any energy left after being up all night—especially considering that her “nanny” was a lifeless lump under the covers on the bed—and he decided he had made the right decision by handling some of the morning duties so Madelyn could sleep.

  He went downstairs to get a bottle out of the refrigerator. Having seen Madelyn feed Sabrina, he knew at least the basics. After warming it, he laid the baby in the crook of his elbow and popped the nipple into her mouth as he headed upstairs again. He might want to give Madelyn a few extra minutes of sleep, but feeling a damp spot forming on his undershirt from Sabrina’s soggy diaper, he realized that wasn’t practical.

  He walked over to Madelyn’s bed and stared down at her. She was sleeping so soundly and he was so well aware that she hadn’t gotten any rest again the night before that he didn’t have the heart to wake her.

  The weakness made him mad. Damn it! This was her job! He didn’t have time for this and he most certainly wasn’t dressed for it. If he didn’t do something soon his Armani trousers would be the next victim of Sabrina’s leaky diaper.

  He leaned over and whispered, “Madelyn?” as if waking her with a soft voice somehow made i
t okay. But, bent close to her face, he could see the perfection of her pale complexion, her pert little nose and her full lips.

  He swallowed, remembering what it felt like to kiss those lips. He’d intended to prove a point to her, but ended up proving a point to both of them. They had chemistry. Wonderful chemistry for two people who could become lovers, but wickedly bad chemistry for an old man with a young woman who had to live together in his house for God knew how long. Particularly since said woman had a suspicious dad who’d already come over on Saturday, probably to check up on Ty.

  Remembering punch-first-ask-questions-later Ron Gentry, Ty pulled back from the bed and decided to finish feeding the baby before he woke Madelyn. He didn’t want to get on the bad side of her dad, but also, making the proactive choice to feed the baby as opposed to the negative choice of not waking the nanny wasn’t so much a weakness as a matter of practicality. Madelyn needed sleep and Ty had more or less created a deadline. When the kid was fed, Madelyn would be awakened. As for the wetness currently seeping downward toward…He’d burn the trousers.

  Sabrina gulped down her bottle in what Ty considered record time. After he set the empty on a nightstand, Ty and his damp trousers turned to the bed where Madeline slept. Again, regret for having to wake her swamped him, but when that guilt nearly had him turning away, he stopped himself.

  He decided to look at this from Madelyn’s point of view. She behaved like someone who really wanted to succeed, and as someone who had struggled from a position at the bottom himself, Ty knew that anybody seeking true success had to work harder than most people were willing to work and do things most people weren’t willing to do. If this PR “kid” wanted to reach the top, there were dues to pay. And this was where she paid them. If Ty didn’t wake her, he would be cheating her out of an opportunity to prove herself.

  That was much better.

  Properly motivated to wake her, Ty moved to the bed, leaned down and accidentally sniffed the scent of something floral as he again noticed how soft she looked. And peaceful. So needy of the rest she was getting that his compassion took over again and he could not wake her.