Hush, Little Baby

by Judith Arnold

  She spotted Levi as soon as she entered the lobby. Given his height, he was hard to miss. He wore jeans that had been laundered a few times—not stiff but not faded, either—and a crisp white oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

  Her outfit was too dressy. He was probably planning to take her to a fast-food joint, where she’d look like a fool eating a cheeseburger in her silk blouse and diamond earrings.

  “I struck out with baby-sitters,” he said, although his grin told her he wasn’t terribly disappointed about this failure. “It’s a school night. They’re all doing homework.”

  “Then are we skipping dinner?”

  “I was hoping you wouldn’t mind coming to my house. I picked up some steaks and I can throw together a salad. Would you mind terribly?”

  She wasn’t sure. Going to his house for dinner as if they were friends didn’t seem appropriate. But she wanted to resolve the situation with Gerald’s house, and if they didn’t get together this evening, who knew what Levi’s baby-sitter problems would be tomorrow?

  Unsure how much she ought to trust him, she peered into his eyes. They were so dark, she saw her reflection in them. Trying to avoid mirrors, she’d found something far more dangerous: Levi Holt’s eyes.

  “All right,” she relented, deciding she might as well get this meeting over with. If she was cooperative about the dinner arrangements, it might earn her some points in their negotiations.

  He held the door open for her and she preceded him out into the balmy evening. The sky still held plenty of light and the air remained warm. He led her across the parking lot to a midnight-blue Porsche and unlocked the passenger door. As she got in, she noticed a baby car seat strapped to the narrow back seat behind her.

  She didn’t associate new fathers with Porsches. Expensive sports cars seemed like an indulgence intended for carefree bachelors or older fathers going through their second adolescence once their children were grown and gone. Porsches weren’t what responsible parents drove.

  The passenger seat was pushed forward in order to create a little extra room for the baby seat in back. The driver’s seat was pushed way back to accommodate Levi’s long legs. Even so, he seemed too close to her as he settled behind the wheel. When he shut his door, she caught a whiff of citrus and spice undercut with a hint of baby powder. The combination of fragrances was surprisingly sexy.

  She pressed her lips together, and her knees. Ridiculous, thinking of Levi in terms of sexiness. Surely there was a wife somewhere in the picture, and given Levi’s particular physical attributes, Corinne felt safe in assuming that wife would be equally gorgeous.

  None of which was relevant to her. This was work, and he was her opponent.

  “Do you usually conduct business by inviting people to your house for dinner?” she asked as he steered out of the parking lot and into the flow of traffic on Hauser Boulevard.

  He shot her a quick look, then focused on the road. “I rarely have to go out of my way to convince a client that the design I came up with is great.” His grin negated the arrogance in his words. “But no, this is unusual. D.J. has a way of complicating things.”

  A combination of curiosity and frustration—that they were going to his house rather than some nice, safe, public restaurant, that she’d linked him with sexiness in her mind—compelled her to ask, “Isn’t D.J.’s mother available?”

  “No.” His voice was ice-hard, his smile gone.

  All right, then. Maybe there wasn’t a gorgeous wife in the picture.

  “She died,” he added, as if aware he owed Corinne an explanation.

  “I’m so sorry.” A wave of guilt washed through her at having pushed him into discussing something that obviously brought him pain.

  “Yeah. Well.” He signaled and turned left, his gaze resolutely on the road. She had a feeling he wasn’t going to glance her way for the rest of the ride. The poor man was clearly annoyed that she’d tapped into his sorrow. A widower with a baby—no wonder he was frazzled, overloaded, beleaguered by the demands of his career, the grief of his loss and the needs of his motherless son.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  At last he looked at her. “It’s not your fault,” he said, a faint smile vying with the sadness in his eyes.

  “It’s my fault that you’re stuck dealing with me instead of your son tonight.”

  “He’s not my son,” Levi said.

  She stared at him, utterly confused. D.J.’s mother was dead, and his father was…who? Where? Her own background had been complicated, but compared to Levi’s domestic arrangement, her family seemed as conventional as one from a 1950’s sit-com.

  Before she could question him further—just as well, since she’d already asked too many questions regarding matters she shouldn’t care about—he steered onto a rustic unpaved drive which wove around a cluster of flowering lilac bushes and ended in a circle in front of a stone house shaped in a geometric jumble. A Levi Holt design, she realized, more modest in size than what he intended to build for Gerald but just as daring and peculiar, with broken roof lines, oddly angled walls and lots of glass.

  Levi yanked the parking brake, shut off the engine and smiled at her, as if to say he wanted to forget about D.J.’s dead mother and absent father for now, and simply have a pleasant and productive dinner.

  She smiled back, hoping to communicate that she’d be happy to keep things pleasant and productive, too.

  They walked together up to the tall oak double doors and he ushered her inside. The interior was as striking as the exterior. Although not huge, the house seemed spacious, the large room she entered airy and bright thanks to the evening light flooding in through the broad windows. A stairway divided the room into a parlor and a dining room. The furnishings in both rooms were sleek and casual. Colorful plastic toys littered the area rug covering the hardwood floor in the parlor, and a baby swing stood in the corner of the dining room.

  From somewhere beyond the dining room came the sound of D.J. chirping. Corinne followed Levi past the long table and the baby swing and into the kitchen. A pretty blond teenager sat at the small table in a corner of the room, a notebook open before her and a pen wedged between two fingers. D.J. was ensconced in a contraption that featured a padded seat surrounded by a plastic table set on wheels. He pushed himself back and forth across the smooth tiles with his feet, which extended through leg holes in the seat and touched the floor.

  “Thanks,” Levi said, pulling out his wallet and handing the girl a five-dollar bill.

  “No prob.” She stuffed the money into the pocket of her stretch pants—not an easy feat, given how tightly they fit—and scooped up her notebook. “See ya!” Beaming a smile at Corinne, she pranced out of the kitchen. A quiet thump indicated that she’d let herself out the front door and closed it behind her.

  Corinne surveyed the room. Levi’s kitchen was much smaller than the kitchen he’d designed for Gerald’s house, so she couldn’t really compare counter space. She could see, though, that his kitchen didn’t have a wasted wall of glass. Appliances and cabinets were arranged efficiently within the compact room. The recessed lights were well positioned, one wall held a rack of pans and pots and another contained a door that led out to a large deck, part of which was screened.

  On the polished granite counter beside the sink sat a platter holding two steaks soaking in a dark, fragrant marinade. A head of lettuce awaited attention on the butcher-block insert on the other side of the sink.

  Levi was actually going to cook for her. The very idea confounded her. No one ever cooked for her, unless she was at a restaurant.

  Not only was he going to cook for her, but he must have known she would say yes to his offer of dinner at his house. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have gotten the steaks prepared.

  D.J. scooted over in his wheeled chair. “Blee-lee-lee!” he shrieked. Evidently this was a happy sound; he gave her a big, toothless grin.

  “Hey, there, buddy,” Levi said, hunkering down to put himself at eye-l
evel with D.J. “Did Tara treat you well?”

  “Lee-lee-lee-ba!” D.J. slapped the flat surface before him as if it was a tom-tom.

  “I thought so.” Levi straightened up and grinned at Corinne.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I think it means Tara treated him well.”

  She eyed the steaks and tried to sort her thoughts. “Tara was the baby-sitter?”

  He nodded and lowered the stainless-steel door of the oven. Potatoes were baking inside. More proof that he’d expected her to agree to dine at his house.

  “I thought you couldn’t find a sitter.”

  “For the whole evening, no. Tara lives just across the street. She was willing to stay with D.J. while I picked you up.”

  “For five dollars? Not a bad wage to do your homework while the baby rolls around in that—” she had no idea what it was called “—thing.”

  “It’s a walker,” Levi told her, then shook his head. “Amazing how quickly you can become an expert on baby equipment. A month ago, I wouldn’t have known about walkers, either.”

  She watched D.J. propel himself around the kitchen, pushing against the floor with his bare feet and babbling incoherently. His mood appeared greatly improved from that morning. Maybe his gums weren’t bothering him. Or maybe he was just so overjoyed to be in his walker, he could bear the teething pain.

  She glanced back at Levi, who was turning the steaks with a fork. “I thought it would be nice to eat out on the porch,” he suggested.

  “All right.”

  He abandoned the steaks for the refrigerator, from which he removed a bright red tomato, a carrot and a stalk of celery. His movements were easy and graceful. He knew his way around a kitchen—at least one that was created sanely, like this one.

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” she offered.

  “Change D.J.’s diaper. Just kidding.” He sent her a quick smile. “Sit. Gather your forces. I’m sure you’re going to want to enter into battle fully armed.”

  “Is this going to be a battle?” she asked, wariness alternating with amusement inside her. She didn’t want to be amused. Amusing her could be Levi’s most potent strategy: get her laughing, feeling comfortable and content, and before she knew it she’d be agreeing to a fireplace in every bedroom and a price fifty percent higher than Gerald had contracted for.

  Levi eyed her over his shoulder, then got to work tearing lettuce into a ceramic bowl. “I hope it won’t be too bloody. If you’ve got an open mind, I’m sure I can convince you that the design I came up with for Gerald’s house is going to work.”

  “It’s not my mind that has to be open,” she pointed out, aware that she wasn’t being entirely truthful. Without her, Gerald likely would have left the design as it was—and he would have been grossly disappointed when he tried to live in what would be a nearly unlivable house. In a way, she’d been the one to open his mind, to help him recognize that the design needed to be revised.

  Levi shook the water off the tomato he’d just rinsed. “I want this house to happen,” he told her. “Mosley wants it to happen. I think we’ll be able to work something out.”

  He seemed a bit more conciliatory than he’d been earlier that day in the hotel’s cocktail lounge. Maybe he felt bad that he’d had to cut that meeting short. Or maybe he was trying to soften her up, cooking for her and being a genial host. Maybe he only sounded reasonable because she was distracted by the graceful motions of his hands as he sliced the tomato, then chopped the carrot into chunks and added them to the bowl.

  D.J. skidded across the floor and bumped into Levi’s leg. “Da! Da! Da!”

  “He’s calling you Da,” she observed, wondering if this meant the child was a precocious genius, already able to communicate in primitive English. Wondering if it meant he thought of Levi as his father.

  “He’s just exercising his vocal cords. I’ll be right back.” Levi lifted the salad bowl and strolled through the dining room and out to the screened portion of the deck.

  She turned to D.J. He bounced on his toes, as if trying to escape the confines of his walker. Raising his hands toward the ceiling, he squealed. Corinne felt utterly at a loss. She had no experience in dealing with infants. No younger siblings, no baby-sitting jobs in her past. No children of her own.

  D.J. kept stretching toward the ceiling, jabbering and grinning, his chubby cheeks dimpling from his smile. He looked so cute, she was tempted to pick him up—or at least enter into a conversation with him. Nothing he said sounded as close to actual speech as “Da” had, though.

  She felt silly, watching him in tongue-tied helplessness. But to look away would be rude. “Tell Levi to change the design for Gerald’s house,” she urged D.J., feeling even sillier. “Tell him to make Gerald’s house normal, like this house.” No sunken living room here, she noted. A sunken living room would have been hazardous to D.J. when he cruised around in his walker. “Tell Levi I don’t want to enter into battle with him tonight.”

  She peered out the door to the deck and saw that Levi had exited to the unscreened part to remove the grill cover. His rangy body was silhouetted against the twilight-pink sky. She hoped he wouldn’t don an apron emblazoned with some goofy barbecue saying, like “Kiss Me—I’m the Chef!” She hoped he wouldn’t cow her with pretentious commentary about which wine went best with his steaks.

  Most of all, she hoped they could skip the battle. She didn’t want to fight him. She wanted him to see things from her perspective, she wanted to make sure everything got fixed the way it should be…but she didn’t want to go to war with Levi. What she wanted…

  He draped the grill cover over a chair and leaned against the deck railing for a minute, staring out at his backyard, his face shadowed. What she wanted, she realized, was to get to know him better. To find out how he’d wound up with D.J., and when he’d designed and built his own house, and why a man like him didn’t have a wife and children of his own.

  What she wanted was to figure him out.

  *

  SHE WAS BACK. The sound of her voice made him happy. She had a good voice, a voice that gave him reason to believe everything was going to be okay.

  She had good eyes, too. They weren’t sad the way the man’s were. They looked like morning, when he woke up and the world was full of light.

  He tried to tell the woman he was glad she was here, but she didn’t understand him. So he just followed sound of her voice, the rhythm of it, the hard, clicky noises and the smooth ones. Not a lullaby like his mother’s voice, but still a soothing sound.

  He wished she would take him out of the walker so he would know what she felt like. Her fingers had shiny tips. Her hands would be soft, he knew.

  He wondered if the man liked this woman. He could never tell what the man was thinking from his face. Only from his hands and the way his voice sounded, from the way he stood and the way he held D.J. D.J. could tell that the man felt tired sometimes, or grumpy, or sad. Or happy, when his voice got shimmery bright and he called D.J. “Buddy.”

  His mother used to call him Damien.

  He wondered what this woman would call him.

  *

  FEEDING D.J. some apple sauce and a bottle didn’t take Levi too long. D.J. tended to eat sparingly in the evening, then wake up around ten-thirty at night for a final snack to tide him over until breakfast. It amazed Levi to think they’d fallen into a routine so easily. Actually, it was Levi who had fallen into D.J.’s routine. D.J. determined what happened in this house, in Levi’s life. He was merely the baby’s slave, surviving from day to day.

  On this day, he wanted more than to survive. He had a great-looking woman in his kitchen, observing him while he spooned the apple sauce into D.J.’s pudgy mouth. He wanted her to think he was competent and loving. He’d heard from friends that a certain type of woman was turned on by men who revealed their nurturing sides. He hadn’t even known he had a nurturing side, but if he had one and it turned Corinne on—

  Hell, what was h
e thinking? She’d come to Arlington to duel with him over a project, not to melt into a puddle of sentimentality watching him wipe slobber off D.J.’s chin with a wad of paper towel.

  She was damned attractive, though. Much more attractive than she’d looked in her prissy gray suit that morning. The rounded neckline of her blouse displayed her slender throat and the delicate hollow at its base where her collarbones met.

  It felt good to be noticing such details. It felt normal. It felt as if the axis of Levi’s world was straightening itself, the earth resuming its old, familiar rotation.

  A good-looking woman was in his house. She was going to eat dinner with him. They’d talk, they’d get friendly, they’d…who knew? Test the waters, perhaps.

  Sure. Then he’d suggest that she go back to her boss in New York City and tell him to drop to his knees and thank the gods of architecture that he had a visionary like Levi Holt designing his home for him.

  The thought made him laugh. She gave him a curious glance and he busied himself wiping D.J.’s face. “I’ve got to bring him upstairs and put him in his crib,” he said. “Can I get you a drink first? I’ve got wine, beer, scotch—”

  She gave the question a great deal of thought, her eyes flashing with doubt. Should he assure her that getting her drunk wasn’t his plan?

  After a few intense moments she said, “I’d like a glass of wine.”

  “Red or white? The red will go better with the steaks.”

  “Then red.” Her smile seemed hesitant but game.

  While D.J. played the tray of his high chair like bongos, Levi uncorked the bottle of Bordeaux he’d brought upstairs from the basement. Unlike Gerald Mosley’s dream house, Levi’s didn’t have a wine cabinet in the kitchen. He lacked the space for one. But if he were serious about collecting wines—which he wasn’t—he’d certainly enjoy the convenience.

  He filled the bowl of a stemware glass halfway with wine and handed it to her. Then he hoisted D.J. into his arms. “I’ll be right back,” he promised, hoping the kid would oblige him by settling down quickly.

  She nodded and cradled her wineglass in her hand without drinking. Giving D.J. a playful boost, he strode from the kitchen.