The drive home was better than the drive to the train because she was in the car. He could tell Levi was pleased that she was there. Whenever the car stopped, he would look over at her, his eyes soft and his head tilted. Everything was better when she was with them. Maybe if she realized this, she wouldn’t leave anymore.
Dinner was good. They ate on the porch and Levi let him stay in his walker. He loved being in the walker on the porch, because the floor was cool and slick and the outside seemed to be all around him. They talked, soft grown-up voices murmuring, sometimes a touch between hands.
Then came his bath, which she gave him. She was so gentle, talking to him while she sloshed water all over him, telling him he was getting bigger and growing more hair and his teeth looked very nice and he had the stickiest fingers in the world. She dried him and dressed him and Levi gave her D.J’s bottle so she could feed him. Even though it wasn’t her breast, he was so glad she was feeding him he didn’t mind.
And then, the best part. She lifted him in her arms and sang the lullaby, the one that went, “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word…”
He knew the song. His mother used to sing it.
It was getting harder and harder for him to hold onto his mother. She had long hair, he remembered that. And she would sleep across the room from him, and he would see her shape in the darkness. She used to laugh a lot, and call him Damien…but he could no longer picture her face. It was fading like the world when the sun disappeared at the end of a day. Trees he’d seen clearly through his window slowly dimmed, grew darker and less distinct until he could no longer see them. That was how it was with his mother’s face.
But the lullaby—he remembered that. His mother used to sing it. “Hush, little baby…”
Hearing it again almost made him cry—and it almost made him laugh. The music went into him like air, sweet and full of life, swelling inside him. He felt cleansed by the song, washed inside the way the bath had washed him outside.
She kissed his forehead and laid him in his crib. He hugged his bear close and felt his blanket settle over him like a quiet breeze, Then she joined Levi at the door and turned off the light. The lullaby was still in his head when he fell asleep.
Chapter Twelve
RAIN HAD POUNDED down on Arlington Friday night, augmented by drum rolls of thunder and an occasional flicker of lightning. By Saturday morning, the storm had passed, leaving the northwest corner of Connecticut green and fresh.
D.J. was babbling in his crib at the other end of the hall. Levi could hear him; his needle was set on the kid’s frequency. It had taken him weeks to develop that sensitivity. The first few nights after he’d brought D.J. home, he’d been so exhausted his sleep had been deep enough to block out the world. D.J. had had to holler at top volume to get his attention—which the kid had wanted constantly, which had contributed to Levi’s exhaustion, which had made D.J. have to holler even louder…. It had been a self-perpetuating downward spiral.
But now they knew and trusted each other. If D.J. wasn’t desperate for a diaper change or some food, he simply chattered to himself, or maybe to his teddy bear. Nonsense syllables, gobbledy-gook, the hushed sound of a happy child greeting the new day.
Corinne must have been tuned in to D.J.’s frequency, too. She hadn’t needed two months to grow accustomed to his sounds; just a few nights in Levi’s house. Her eyes fluttered open the moment D.J.’s gibbering penetrated Levi’s partially closed door, and she smiled. “He sounds cheerful.”
“He is.”
“I guess he slept through the storm.”
Levi grinned and tightened his arm around her. He and Corinne hadn’t slept through it. The first rumble of thunder had awakened them, and he’d gotten out of bed and crossed to the window for a closer look at the downpour. He loved rain.
Corinne apparently loved it, too. “We used to get storms like this in Phoenix,” she’d told him, joining him at the window and watching the rain slash silver across the night. “The ground would be so dry it couldn’t absorb all the water, and we’d get flash floods. Then, the next day, we’d be back to desert weather again.”
They’d stood together in front of the window, their bodies naked and warm from the bed, the rain so close yet safely sealed away from them. He’d moved behind her, his arms ringing her waist like a belt, and gently nipped her ear. She’d leaned into him and he’d skimmed his hands up to her breasts, and she’d turned to face him and they’d started kissing again, hard, greedy kisses until they’d tumbled back onto the bed and made love. The rain had lashed the windows and he would have sworn that the instant she climaxed the sky filled with a searing white flash of lightning.
Falling in love hadn’t been on his agenda, not while he was still adjusting to the whole fatherhood thing. But then, fatherhood hadn’t been on his agenda, either. His parents would have lectured him not to question but simply to accept what fate had delivered unto him—and in this instance, they’d be right. He was simply going to accept it, all of it—the baby and the woman.
D.J.’s voice rose in pitch, not quite demanding but close. Corinne started to ease out of Levi’s arms, but he refused to let her go. “He can wait a minute,” he whispered, urging her onto her back and taking her mouth with a deep kiss.
She returned his kiss for a few heavenly seconds, then pulled away. “He needs us,” she said.
Levi stifled a curse. He recalled the subject of Allison Winslow’s Daddy School class on Monday night, her lecture about how a baby could interfere with its father’s sex life. He supposed this was part of what he had to accept.
He didn’t have to be overjoyed about it, though.
Reluctantly, he climbed out of bed, donned a pair of jeans and lent Corinne his bathrobe, which fell to her ankles but didn’t drag on the floor. She rolled the sleeves up an extra cuff, tightened the sash around her waist and hurried out of the bedroom as if D.J. was crying out for her.
Maybe he was. He immediately released a flurry of giggles when Corinne entered his room. “Hi, D.J.,” she greeted him. No gushy patter, no baby-talk, no calling him “cutie” or “doodlebug” or “jelly-bean.” Just “Hi, D.J.,” as if he were an old pal she was used to seeing on a regular basis.
Levi hesitated in the doorway while she glided across the room to the crib. The sight of her and D.J. greeting each other so easily, with such familiarity, caused something to glint inside him, a diamond buried in his gut. As beautiful as that diamond was, its sharp edges poked at him, causing twinges of discomfort.
If he loved Corinne, he had to be delighted by her rapport with D.J. And he was. But…
Damn it, he was selfish. And short-sighted, and stupid and stubborn—but he didn’t want it to be so easy for her. He’d had to work hard to cultivate the parenting habit, to overcome his fear and resentment and accept his fate without question. He wanted it to be hard for her, too. He wanted her to turn to him for help, to lean on him, to let him facilitate her relationship with D.J. He wanted to be the number-one Holt in her life.
Objectively, he knew his feelings were ridiculous. She wasn’t comparing the two of them, favoring one over the other. Or if she was, Levi was clearly her favorite. After a night with her, he knew that what existed between them was immeasurably powerful.
But what existed between her and D.J. wasn’t exactly trifling. The way they interacted, D.J. chortling and burbling and reaching for her as she reached for him in a perfectly synchronized movement… It was as if they didn’t even need him.
Annoyed with himself for his petty jealousy, he entered the room and pulled a clean diaper from an open package. “What do you say we have some breakfast and take a drive? There are some beautiful back roads outside of town, up into the hills. Everything always looks kind of magical after a rain.”
She spun around and smiled, such a sweet, open smile he hated himself for having resented her closeness to D.J. “That sounds wonderful,” she said.
Breakfast was far from peaceful—cream of wheat and a
banana for D.J., toast, coffee and fruit for him and Corinne, everything eaten briskly because D.J. was obviously ready to assault the day. Corinne took a quick shower while Levi got D.J. dressed, and then he left the two of them together while he showered. As he stood under the hot spray, he tried not to think about what they were doing in his absence, how much thicker their bond was growing.
What kind of an idiot was he? He could just imagine what his poker pals would say if he tried to explain it to them: “I don’t like the way things are going. Corinne gets along too well with D.J.” Evan, who had fallen in love with his fiancée in large part because she’d adored his children, would tell him he was certifiably insane. Murphy would laugh in his face. Brett, who was a fervently confirmed bachelor, would shrug and shake his head and insist he didn’t get the whole daddy thing. Tom Bland, a private investigator in town, would offer to open a file on Corinne, to make sure she wasn’t the sort who might spirit D.J. away and flee the state. Tom tended to view every problem, no matter how minor, as deserving of its own investigation.
What Levi had with Corinne wasn’t a problem. It was a terrific relationship with amazing potential. He ought to be over the moon with gratitude that he could have found a woman like her just when D.J. had invaded his life.
He reminded himself of that several more times while he dressed. He located Corinne and D.J. outside on the back deck, gazing out at the grass. Lingering raindrops glistened across the lawn like clear pearls. Corinne held D.J. high in her arms, one hip jutted out for balance. They could have been a mother and child.
Oh, Ruth, D.J. whispered under his breath. I hope what I’m doing is okay. I hope this thing between D.J. and Corinne is good.
It felt good as they drove out of town and into the hills, passing old barns, rambling corrals penning horses, countless apple orchards and dense woods. If the ground had been less damp from last night’s storm—and if D.J. hadn’t been with them—Levi might have suggested hiking one of the trails that cut through the state forests and climbed the modest hills. From the peaks of those hills they’d be able to see all the way into New York State.
But Levi wasn’t in the mood to push D.J.’s stroller up a trail. So they only drove through the scenery, and he told Corinne that someday they’d go hiking.
“How’s the house coming?” she asked as they headed back toward town.
“Do you want to have a look?”
“Sure.” She smiled. “I’ve never seen a house get built. In New York City, they build skyscrapers, but everything is steel beams. It’s not like seeing an actual house grow up out of the ground.”
“Did you ever play with building blocks as a kid?” he asked.
“I had Legos. How about you?”
“No Legos. We had some of those classic wooden building blocks. I loved building things with them—houses, towers, bridges, entire cities—but they fell apart too easily.”
“Do you ever build models at work?”
“Sometimes. We do mostly computer modeling, though.”
He steered onto the main route than ran along the western edge of town. Estates, some charming and some ostentatious, sprawled across the acreage. A few of the houses were old—refurbished farmhouses and manors. His partner Bill had renovated some of them.
He steered onto a side road, and from there onto the narrow dirt lane that led past a stand of trees to the construction site. The foundation was in and the framing begun, tall beams and studs rising from the concrete base. The wood had been thoroughly washed in last night’s storm, and it remained shaded in sections where the dampness clung.
No one was at the site. When a project was on schedule, Levi couldn’t see any reason to pay a construction crew overtime to work on weekends, and since he’d adjusted the completion date on Mosley’s contract when Corinne had negotiated the design changes, this project was on schedule.
To her, the site might look desolate. To him, it looked like a house gestating, soon to be born as a genuine home. He could visualize the walls rising around the skeleton of boards, fleshing them in, creating a living entity. He could picture the stone façades, the sloping roofs, the broad panes of glass letting the outside in.
Wanting to impart his vision to her, he shut off the engine, climbed out and unlatched the tiny trunk space beneath the hatchback, where he stored D.J.’s folding stroller. He snapped it open, then straightened up to find Corinne standing by her open door and leaning into the back seat to unstrap D.J.
Cripes. They were like a married couple, he thought—a happy little family, Daddy getting the stroller while Mommy got the baby. Life would be so much easier for him if there always was a mommy to get D.J. If Corinne was a permanent part of his life, he would never have to get both the stroller and the baby all by himself. What a concept.
A dangerous concept—especially because it seemed so obvious to him, so natural. This warm, sunny Saturday morning could be any day, the two of them working in a smooth choreography as they attended to D.J. He could visualize it as clearly as he visualized an entire house simply by viewing a bare-bones structure of two-by-fours.
Corinne smiled as she approached him with D.J. in her arms. She settled the kid into the stroller and he kicked his feet in a movement Levi knew reflected excitement. D.J. loved his stroller, for some reason. He displayed as much joy being strapped into it as he did being strapped into his car seat or arranged in his walker. This was a boy who liked wheeled vehicles.
The stroller didn’t move too smoothly on the rutted, spongy ground. Corinne struggled to steer it and Levi took over, navigating it around mounds of dirt and textured ruts left by the trucks and construction equipment. “Here’s where the garage is going to go,” he said as they ambled to one side of the foundation. Maybe he could get Corinne to see the house where only the potential for one existed. “The back patio is going to spread out from here, and then the pool will go in somewhere around here….” He gestured toward an expanse of muddy dirt.
“Poo! Poo!”
“That’s right, D.J.—a pool.”
“Poo-poo-poo!”
Corinne laughed. “Something tells me he wants to go swimming.”
“He’s too young,” Levi said automatically, then rethought his answer. He had no idea if D.J. was too young to go into a pool. If Ruth were alive, she’d probably be taking him into the ocean with her. She was wild that way, afraid of nothing. And maybe allowing a seven-month-old baby into the water wasn’t such a dangerous thing. He’d have to look it up in his guide book, or ask Allison Winslow at the next Daddy School class.
He wished he knew such details, the things other parents knew because they’d had months to prepare for the arrival of their children. He also wished the thought of donning a swimsuit and bringing D.J. to the pool at the YMCA didn’t elicit an unwelcome dread inside him. He supposed the Y scheduled children’s swimming hours, during which the pool would fill with mothers and their babies—in their diapers? Ugh!—and he’d be the only full-grown male in the water. He’d feel awkward and out of place. When he swam, he wanted to swim, consuming laps until his lungs ached and his arms felt leaden. How could he do that with D.J.? He’d have to stay in the shallow end, the water washing over his ankles while D.J. giggled and splashed and peed.
He glanced at Corinne beside him, gazing out at the area where the pool would be located. Her hands in the pockets of her jeans, her T-shirt draped loosely over her shoulders, her hair ruffled by a breeze, she frowned slightly, as if exerting herself to visualize what he saw so clearly it could have been a photograph in front of him.
She seemed a world away from the naked woman who had stood watching the storm with him last night—and yet the world she was in now appealed to him just as much. It was a world in which a mother and a father could take turns bringing their baby into the shallow end of the pool. A world in which two people shared responsibility for the baby, instead of one well-intentioned but overwhelmed man bearing that responsibility alone.
He’d thought he w
ouldn’t want to visit that world with Corinne. He’d been worried about whether D.J. was a greater draw for her than Levi. But the prospect of teaching D.J. how to swim—just one of countless skills D.J. had to be taught—spun Levi a hundred eighty degrees around. Maybe it would be just as well if Corinne cared more for D.J. than for him. It would sure make his life easier. And regardless of whom she cared for more, he already knew sex with her was great.
He couldn’t decide whether to curse or to laugh at the detour his mind had taken. He’d gone from wanting all Corinne’s adoration for himself to recognizing how convenient it was that she adored D.J. He was actually even thinking of her in the context of something resembling marriage.
“I’m still not sure Gerald is going to want one of those free-form pools,” she commented. “He’s not exactly a free-form guy.”
“He can work that out with the pool contractor,” Levi said, relieved that this issue wouldn’t require another renegotiation of Mosley’s contract.
“I’ve seen those free-form pools, and they can look really pretty if you landscape them and put in a waterfall or a rock formation. But Gerald isn’t into gardening, and waterfalls seem so right-brained. I just don’t think that’s his kind of thing.”
The sound of an approaching car caught Levi’s attention. He turned to stare through the house frame, the timber filtering his vision like bars on a prison cell, casting vertical stripes across his view of the large SUV that rumbled up the dirt drive. It was an army-green Range Rover, the sort of vehicle a suburban warrior who’d never seen actual combat would drive.
“Who’s that?” Corinne asked, squinting through the house frame. “One of your construction workers?”
He couldn’t think of anyone on the crew who drove a green Range Rover. “It might be a trespasser,” he muttered, moving protectively closer to her, his muscles tensing in alertness.
The SUV bounced to a halt next to his Porsche, the engine died and the driver’s side door was pushed open. He tightened his grip on the handle of the stroller and kept his eyes on the door, waiting for the intruder to reveal himself.
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