“I know this will strike you as a bizarre concept, but Levi says it will make the master bedroom romantic.”
“Romantic? Why should I care about that?”
Corinne couldn’t help laughing. The question was so Gerald. Not only was he hopeless in the context of business matters, but he was clueless on the subject of romance, too. That was one of the things Corinne liked best about him. Deceptive and seductive were not part of his vocabulary. He thought scoring was something baseball teams did. It would not occur to him to lure a woman upstairs to his bedroom, lay a fire and then lay the woman.
Corinne was utterly safe with him.
And she liked safety, she really did. Risks were fun in the corporate world, but in matters of the heart… She’d seen what happened to her parents when they’d taken romantic risks: divorces. Remarriages. More divorces. Splintered families, fractured hearts, bitter recriminations—and for Corinne, moves from house to house, from parent to parent. What was the point? Where was the payoff for that kind of pain?
“Anyway, the bottom line is that the new price on delivery is thirty thousand more. The bathrooms were a big-ticket item. With the other stuff, the costs of modifying the designs was for the most part offset by the simplification of the specs. The solarium would have cost a bit more than the mudroom, so while Levi is charging you to alter the design, he’s deducting the excess the solarium would have cost and it’s pretty much a wash.”
Gerald said nothing.
“I did the best I could,” she added.
“Let me ask you this,” Gerald posed. “Is it a house you could live in, the way it is now?”
She frowned. What was he really asking? Her objective opinion on the house’s livability, or something more?
Good grief, she didn’t even want to think about what that something more could be. A month ago—even a day ago—she’d have had no trouble thinking about it, but now…
Now, she’d kissed Levi Holt. A simple kiss, a meaningless kiss, a kiss that had led to several long hours of hard negotiations interrupted only by breaks for coffee and D.J.’s assorted antics. If she hadn’t been distracted by the baby she might have gotten the fireplace out of the bedroom, or wheedled the new price down a few thousand dollars. But D.J. had been pawing at her leg, pinching her nylons and trying, incredibly, to pull himself to his feet. She’d been afraid he would hurt himself or tear her stockings.
Or maybe she hadn’t been afraid of anything. Maybe she’d just wanted to hold him one more time.
So she’d taken him onto her lap, where he’d snuggled up against her and sat calmly. She’d felt strategically stronger with him in her arms—two against one, Levi’s nephew turning his back on his uncle and choosing to side with Corinne. Yet somehow, once she’d had D.J. in her arms, her arguments against the wall of glass had lost their potency.
Perhaps D.J. had been a double-agent, cuddling up to her in order to sap her of her power.
What did it matter? Neither he nor his uncle were relevant to her life anymore. She’d finished dealing with Levi and left Arlington. The Holt boys were history.
“Corey?”
She realized she hadn’t answered Gerald’s question. “Sure, I could live in it,” she said, choosing not to mull over its subtext.
“Good. So, have you had supper yet? I could pick up some Chinese and come over.”
She considered his offer. If he came over, they’d eat General Gao’s chicken and mu-shu pork and talk about the client Gerald was counseling to upgrade the technology behind his on-line venture before he attempted an IPO. They’d talk until midnight, and then Gerald would pat her shoulder or maybe—if he was in a particularly affectionate mood—kiss her cheek, and he’d leave.
It would be a way to insure that she wouldn’t spend the evening seated on her bed, gazing toward her window at the apartment building across the street and thinking about letting in the night. She wouldn’t be thinking about an expanse of woods and a screened-in porch and the soothing rhythm of a baby’s respiration whispering through an intercom speaker.
She certainly wouldn’t be thinking, hours later, about any kiss Gerald had given her.
“I’m pretty tired,” she demurred. “I’ll see you at the office tomorrow, okay?”
“Sure thing.” He wasn’t even savvy enough to recognize that he’d been rejected. And honestly, Corinne wasn’t rejecting him. She loved him. He was Gerald.
But tonight… Tonight she wanted to think about the world outside her window, a universe dark yet full of life. She wanted to think about a baby who’d tucked himself into her arms as if he belonged there, and about a man who’d kissed her lips as if he belonged there, too.
She wanted to think about things she’d never thought about before.
*
“WHAT I’M SAYING,” Levi bellowed, “is that the courtyard is adding a lot to the overall price and it’s not contributing enough to the design. It’s going to keep us out of the running.” He had to yell because D.J. was howling. The kid had awakened from his nap in a royal snit, and neither a bottle nor an application of ointment to his gums had soothed him. Since Levi, Bill and Phyllis were meeting downstairs in the main room, the entire building, from the carpeted floor to the raftered thirty-foot-high ceiling, echoed with D.J.’s wails.
Phyllis glared at the squalling baby on Levi’s shoulder before arguing, “The courtyard is essential to the design. We can’t submit this proposal without it.”
“I agree. But I think you’ve got to make the courtyard do more than it’s doing the way it is now. Maybe plant some trees in it, turn it into a garden.”
“That will increase the price even more.”
“Yeah, but the courtyard will be making a clearer statement,” Levi rationalized, then muttered, “Zip it, D.J., would you?”
“Maybe you should stuff a sock in his mouth,” Bill grumbled. Levi heard him, because at that very moment D.J. chose to shut up. The violence in Bill’s suggestion should have offended Levi, but he couldn’t blame his partners. They resented his bringing D.J. to work. Hell, he resented it, too.
“The nanny starts on Monday,” he assured Bill and Phyllis.
Phyllis used her hand to brush back her straight gray hair. In her early sixties, she’d become an architect at a time when many women felt constrained to choose between motherhood and a career. She’d opted for a career, and she’d enjoyed great success with her soaring urban designs, like the office/residential tower they were discussing right now, which she intended to submit to a Boston developer currently accepting bids. But Levi couldn’t help wondering whether his sudden surrogate fatherhood irritated her in some personal way.
Of course it irritated her. It irritated everyone. She and Bill and all the associates were working at one hundred percent strength, and Levi was giving only fifty percent. The other fifty percent was consumed by D.J.
At least he’d reached an agreement on the Mosley project. Sure, it was a project he’d landed before D.J. had entered his life, but it had almost gotten away from him, and he’d reeled it back in. He’d made some compromises, but he’d kept the kitchen the way he’d visualized it, the way the house demanded it, the way Mosley and anyone else who ever entered that house would appreciate it. It wasn’t as big a commission as Phyllis’s Boston project had the potential to become, but it represented a nice payday for the partnership, and even with D.J. mixed into the negotiations, Levi had managed to get the thing done.
One small, perplexed part of him suspected that D.J.’s interference might have actually helped, that the baby’s presence had been instrumental in persuading Corinne to compromise.
He couldn’t figure out what it was between them. An acceptance, an affinity, almost a collusion. When Corinne was around, D.J. acted differently. He was less agitated, more attentive. They connected on some nonverbal level. Just as her nearness seemed to calm D.J., his nearness seemed to soften her. Once she’d lifted him into her lap yesterday morning, her arguments had seemed blunted, a
nd she’d ultimately capitulated on the design features most important to Levi.
On the other hand, maybe D.J. had had nothing to do with it. Maybe it had been Levi’s kiss that had convinced her.
Hell, that kiss had sure done something to him.
She’d left town after their meeting, and he missed her. It was ridiculous; she was just a client’s representative. Levi’s only significance to her was as an architect she disagreed with on a few items.
But he’d kissed her. Just once, just a light, friendly, PG-rated kiss, but it had been like a taste of a rich gourmet treat, so delicious it had made him ravenous. He wanted more.
He had to ignore the want. She was back home in New York and he had a baby to take care of—and a couple of partners who were not very happy with him at the moment. D.J. wasn’t terribly happy, either. He whimpered and shoved at Levi, performing isometric exercises against his shoulder and arm and occasionally head-butting him for good measure. Two of the associates had wandered off to a corner of the room to huddle, as far from D.J.’s high-decibel bleating as they could get. Levi wished he could join them there.
“All right,” Phyllis said, studying her design on the computer monitor. “We could plant a few trees in the courtyard.”
“Make it a garden—oof!” He grunted as D.J. gave him sharp kick to his diaphragm. “A garden spot. A bit of outside trapped within the building. Don’t just plant the trees—incorporate them. Make them the reason for the courtyard’s existence.”
“It’s a good idea,” Bill agreed, then smiled faintly at Levi. “Why don’t you go someplace and mellow the kid out? He’s really being disruptive.”
“I’m sorry,” Levi mumbled, suppressing a touch of envy over the fact that, while Phyllis had forgone children for her career, Bill was able to enjoy both children and a career because he had a wife at home to handle the parenting chores. Bill never had to worry about who was going to watch his kids while he was at work.
Phyllis gave Levi’s free arm a squeeze. Everyone at Arlington Architectural Associates knew why he had a disruptive baby perched on his shoulder. They sympathized. Bill had donated the crib D.J. now slept in—his youngest was two years old and had graduated to a junior bed—and the entire staff had chipped in and bought a collection of toys for the baby. “We thought it would be more sensible than flowers,” Phyllis had explained.
But for all their condolences and compassion, they were sick of listening to D.J. screech and squawk. Levi was sick of it, too.
“Monday,” he repeated. “The nanny starts Monday.”
“And we’re all counting the minutes,” Bill teased. “Go take him for a drive. That might knock him out.”
“I have some other ideas,” Levi said, gesturing with his free hand toward the computer monitor. “You might consider widening the entry a little. That would make it look more welcoming—ow!” D.J. had given him another sharp kick in the solar plexus. The kid had the makings of an Olympics-caliber judo expert, or perhaps a bouncer in a bar.
“Get out of here,” Bill ordered him.
Nodding and rubbing his lower ribs, Levi spun around and strode toward the door.
He was less gentle than he might have been while strapping D.J. into his car seat, but D.J. didn’t seem to mind. Levi had learned over the past month that D.J. preferred rough-and-tumble to gentle. He liked being tossed around, hoisted into his car seat, treated with a level of physical force Levi wouldn’t have considered appropriate for a baby. Maybe it was because D.J. was a boy, or because he had outgrown his newborn fragility. He liked to roll around on the floor, crawl, ricochet off the walls in his walker—and he liked when his Uncle Levi manhandled him. For the first time in thirty minutes, D.J. stopped crying.
Levi resisted the temptation to race back inside and finish discussing the office building entry with Phyllis. Bill was right; a spin around town would probably lull D.J. to sleep, and if Levi paced the drive correctly, he could get back to the office in time to work for another hour before the kid woke up and started screaming again.
Lacking a better idea, he headed west, figuring he’d check out the site of the Mosley house. After Corinne had left his office yesterday, he’d sent word to his construction engineer that he should go ahead and start digging the foundation. He might as well see how things were progressing there.
The west side of Arlington was deceptively rural. It looked pastoral because the houses were set far apart on sprawling acreage, but no one actually farmed all that acreage. What farms existed in the Arlington area—small vegetable farms and apple orchards—flanked the eastern end of town.
But the west side was where the interesting architectural specimens were. Westsiders were, for the most part, wealthy weekenders and urban expatriates. They’d buy parcels of land, tear down whatever structures currently stood on that land, and then hire architects like Levi to build their mini-Xanadus for them.
His first commission had been on a house on the west side. A newspaper reporter who’d become a syndicated columnist had bought a small, rundown ranch house and had asked Arlington Architectural Associates for some ideas on how to expand it. Bill and Phyllis had given the assignment to their new associate—Levi, fresh out of architecture school, the ink still damp on his diploma. He’d developed a whimsical design of extensions spreading out from the core of the house. There had been lots of windows, lots of glass, a screened porch. No dark rooms, no low ceilings, no imprisoning gloom. Nothing that could even remotely resemble the house Levi had grown up in.
“You don’t know how lucky you are,” Levi murmured to D.J., who was making pleasant cooing sounds in his car seat behind Levi’s right shoulder. “You’ve had some lousy breaks, but I’ll never let you grow up in a house like that. I swear it, buddy. You have my solemn vow.”
“Da!”
“That’s right. Da.” Around a bend in the road, Levi spotted a man approaching the mailbox at the mouth of his driveway. “There’s my very first client, D.J. Would you like to meet him?”
“Da!”
“Yes, he’s someone’s dad.” Just by reading Jamie McCoy’s “Guy Stuff” column in the Arlington Gazette, Levi would have known this. Jamie based his weekly essays on his own life, and over the past couple of years they’d often dealt with his experiences with his daughter.
Until a month ago, Levi had found such columns amusing but not particularly relevant. They still weren’t particularly relevant, but he could now read them with a small degree of personal expertise, and he could laugh and groan and nod over Jamie’s descriptions of paternal frustration.
He slowed the car as Jamie reached his mailbox. Jamie glanced at Levi, apparently recognized him and broke into a grin. “Levi Holt!”
Levi stopped and rolled down his window. “Hey, Jamie. How’s the house?”
“We may need a new extension on it. No joke—my wife wants another child.”
“She can have this one if she wants,” Levi muttered, jerking his head toward D.J.
Jamie leaned down and peered through the window. “Hey, there, little guy! How’s it going?” He turned his gaze back to Levi. “I guess you’ve been doing a lot of living since I last saw you.”
Levi shook his head. “Not that kind of living. He’s my sister’s son. She passed away unexpectedly and named me his legal guardian.”
“Oh. Wow.” Jamie frowned. “That sucks.”
Levi remembered why he’d always liked Jamie McCoy. Not only was the man more open-minded and easier to work with than certain other clients who sent headstrong, beautiful women to Arlington to fight their battles for them, but he was frank and unpretentious. He said what he was thinking and didn’t lapse into platitudes.
“Daddy! Daddy!” A child’s shrill voice drifted down the gravel driveway, followed by the child it belonged to—a cheerful girl in denim shorts and a gray T-shirt reading Dartmouth Athletic Department, a miniature version of the T-shirt Jamie was wearing with his denim shorts. The girl wore bright pink sneakers rather than r
atty white ones like her father’s, and she had all manner of sparkly hairclips adorning her mop of curls. “Daddy, I saw a cappapillar!”
“Caterpillar,” Jamie corrected her. “Wanna see something even cooler?” He lifted her up so she could peek through the car window. “It’s a baby!”
“Ba! Baaa!” D.J. was clearly excited by the sight of a child, even if she was more than twice his age. “Ba-baa!”
“Baby!” the little girl cheered. “Why is he saying ba-baa?”
“He can’t talk yet,” her father told her.
“That’s stupid.” The girl wriggled out of his embrace and romped back up the driveway, apparently preferring caterpillars to humans.
“She’s going to make an inspiring big sister,” Jamie said, then snorted. “Obnoxious twerp. I’ve got to work on her manners.” He peeked back into the car. “I don’t think you’re stupid,” he reassured D.J., who squealed with laughter.
Levi observed Jamie’s obvious ease with his daughter and D.J. When Levi had first met him, he’d been a bachelor, defiantly boyish and carefree. How had he journeyed from that blissfully adolescent condition through the state Levi was in—responsibility seasoned with equal measures of panic, resentment and overprotectiveness—to an emotional level of relaxed equanimity?
“How old is your daughter?” he asked.
“Just graduating from the Terrible Twos.”
“Is she terrible?”
“She’s the stuff of nightmares,” Jamie boasted, then laughed. “Her current passions are graham crackers, early Rolling Stones, and Legos. And caterpillars,” he added. “Last week’s passions were raisins, dinosaurs and Disney sing-along videos. Next week’s passions will probably be kumquats, sky-diving and Armani.”
“But you’re weathering it okay?” Levi needed reassurance, even though he could not imagine a time D.J. would ever be interested in Armani. Caterpillars and sky-diving, yes, but not high fashion.
Hush, Little Baby Page 10