Always You: A Sweet Romantic Comedy (ABCs of Love Collection Books 5-8)

by Brenna Jacobs

  “Let’s take my car, and you ride in the back with the baby. Keep an eye on him.”

  “That won’t improve his safety,” Tessa said.

  “But picture yourself doing it. Does it make you feel better than driving him over by yourself?”

  She pictured it. “Yes,” she admitted. The fact that it made her feel better was even less rational than the worry in the first place.

  “Then let’s get going.”

  “Can you watch him while I gather up all the stuff?”

  Ethan answered by resting his hand on the baby’s stomach, a sign that she could get up and see to business.

  She did, finding the bag Rachel had left with him, grabbing three of the baby rompers, her last clean dish towel so she could burp him, the formula, diapers, and the other things Mary had put on her list. Except toys. She didn’t know what he liked to play with, and Rachel hadn’t left him anything.

  She packed it all, and though it didn’t seem possible, it all fit in the baby bag.

  “Ready,” she said.

  Ethan looked at her, a touch of confusion in his expression. “You are?” His glance flickered down to her ragged pajamas and bare feet.

  Thank goodness she didn’t blush easily. “Right, let me get changed. You still okay with him?”

  He nodded, and she hurried to put on clothes more appropriate for work and handle some basic grooming. She wasn’t sure when she’d last brushed her teeth, much less brushed her hair. She did it now, wishing she had more time to put on makeup; after realizing that Ethan had observed her in grubby mode, she would have felt better with a little feminine gloss and shine, but she didn’t want to cross Mary by taking any longer. Not that she was trying to impress Ethan, exactly. It just would have been nice to prove that she’d grown and changed as much as he had since college.

  Right now, she felt like the same frazzled girl she had been, the one without any parental support for school, the only one who had to work to pay for food and rent while the other guys used those extra twenty hours a week to study and cruise through their exams and projects. And now, here she was, six years later, suddenly feeling as inadequate and out of her depth as she had back then.

  She splashed cold water on her face, trying to calm her nerves, and took a few deep breaths as she studied herself in the mirror, trying to see the professional woman she’d worked hard to become. Instead, she saw a young woman who looked tired and stressed and worried like crazy that she was going to screw up the work project she’d been entrusted with based on her merits, and worse—far worse—the kid she’d been entrusted with based on nothing at all.

  Chapter Six

  Ethan glanced at the rearview mirror where he caught Tessa’s dark brown hair and the fine angles of her profile as she kept her eyes on the baby riding quietly beside her. “Everything okay back there?”

  She didn’t take her eyes off Calvin. “I think so. He’s awake but not fussy. Maybe he likes riding in the car. Is that a thing?”

  “I know babies hating car seats is a thing. My brother always complains about how my niece screams bloody murder the whole time she’s buckled in, so maybe it works the other way too.”

  Tessa didn’t respond or say anything for the rest of the drive, and he sensed that she wouldn’t welcome small talk. That was fine. He wasn’t good at small talk. Engineers were stereotyped as socially awkward for a reason: they could carry on a conversation fine as long as it was a conversation with substance. Mindless chatter? Not so much.

  He parked in front of their building and unbuckled the baby’s seat. “I’ll carry this, if that’s okay with you. I haven’t gone to the condo gym, and I’ll be honest, I’m looking for a bicep workout.” He meant it as a joke so that he didn’t offend her by making the sexist assumption that she couldn’t carry the heavy baby plus contraption, but her eyes darted toward his bicep and away again, almost . . . had she looked guilty for a split-second there? For what? Stealing a look at his modest muscles?

  Suddenly he felt like grinning, but he fought the impulse. Instead, he lifted Calvin in his carrier from the backseat and waited for Tessa to climb out with the baby bag. They walked into the BBMJ lobby where the receptionist gave them her usual courteous smile until she spotted the baby, and her mouth turned to an “O” of surprise. Tessa didn’t stop to explain, so he followed her lead all the way down to the lab.

  When the elevator doors slid open, the movement beyond the doors immediately stopped, Darius and Sanjay both regarding them with astonishment.

  “Did you mention we were coming?” Tessa asked Mary. Ethan wondered too. It didn’t look like Sanjay or Darius had expected to see them, much less a baby.

  Mary snapped out of her temporary paralysis. “Of course I did. Ethan, put the baby over there.” She pointed to the empty quad that now bristled with boxes and packages. It was the section nearest Tessa’s desk, and he walked over to it and set the baby down.

  “What’s all this?” Tessa asked.

  “Baby stuff,” Mary answered, joining them beside the bewildering assortment.

  “I know that in a general sense. I mean what does this stuff do?” Tessa reached out and touched a black and silver thing that looked like a collapsed folding chair.

  Mary popped it open.

  “That’s a frame,” Ethan guessed.

  “Yes. I checked the brand of his carrier and it goes in this thing to make a stroller. Snap it in and see.”

  Tessa eyed it the way she had their intake manifold on their senior project right before Ethan had pressed the start button and the whole thing sparked and caught a nearby fast food bag on fire. “It’s okay, you go ahead and show me,” she said.

  Mary looked a touch trapped for a second. “Ethan, go ahead.”

  “Why me?” he asked. He could see how it was all supposed to work. That didn’t mean he wanted to be the first one to attempt snapping the baby’s carrier in there based on his best guesses.

  “Why us?” Mary retorted. “Because it’s a baby and we’re women?”

  Dang. He’d walked right into that trap. He shot a look at Tessa, hoping for rescue, but she only fluttered her fingers in a “get on with it” gesture. He took a deep breath and shifted the weight of the carrier to his other hand. Although the seat and the baby were each fairly light, carrying them together had tired his arm far more than he’d expected. Maybe his joke about a bicep workout hadn’t been a joke.

  “I’ll hold the frame steady.” Tessa said it like she was doing him a favor, but he shot her a dirty look, and she had the grace to look a tiny bit ashamed of making him do the unnerving part of this operation. She grabbed the handle and gripped it so firmly her knuckles turned white.

  He stepped up to the frame and positioned the carrier so it looked like the notches beneath it lined up with the bar of the frame then eased it down. There was a satisfying click, and when he tugged on the carrier handle again, the whole thing felt secure.

  “It worked.” There was always something so pleasing when two pieces snapped so easily into place.

  Tessa gave the whole thing a tentative push forward, then pulled it back. “This part seems to work too.”

  “It’s a stroller?” Darius asked, coming over to watch.

  “I guess so,” Tessa said, walking a few more steps with greater confidence. The baby didn’t seem interested, exactly, but he was content to watch the different adults float in and out of his view.

  Mary had bought everything in black and gray, and as she pointed to more items, the small pile of stuff began to take distinct shape to him instead of looking like a big plastic jumble.

  “This is a swing,” she said, pulling something forward, and Darius immediately went to investigate it, turning on different switches.

  “Smart,” he said. “It rocks like a hammock or a swing.” That lured Sanjay over, who bent to examine something Mary called a “bumbo.”

  “Genius,” he muttered, and the sound of his voice startled Ethan. Sanjay wasn’t loud; Ethan
just sort of forgot he could talk.

  They went through a few more pieces, and although Ethan was used to seeing lots of baby equipment in his siblings’ houses, he was still impressed at the number of ways the manufacturers who catered to babies had managed to solve everything from how to rock them when they fussed (there was a recliner thingy that did that) to how to diaper them (an inflatable mattress-type thing to make the baby comfortable on a hard surface).

  “This was so nice of you to buy, Mary, but it’s too much,” Tessa said. “I don’t need it all, and—”

  “How do you know?” Mary interrupted.

  “What?”

  “How do you know you don’t need all this stuff? Didn’t you say you don’t know much about babies?”

  Tessa gave a reluctant nod. “That’s true.”

  “I don’t know either, and neither of those guys do,” Mary jerked her thumb toward Sanjay and Darius who were now trying to figure out how to set up a playpen, “so let’s ask the one person in this room who knows a little about babies. Does the baby need all this stuff, Bedford?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Mary shot an impatient look at Tessa. “See? We might. So better to have it.”

  “But it must have cost a fortune.”

  “A baby fortune,” Mary agreed. “But I’m charging it to our budget as a materials expense, because this project can’t continue if you’re not here, and you can’t be here unless that baby is with you, and that means we need this stuff.”

  “Does that mean we can’t get him into the onsite daycare?”

  Mary gave her head a short shake. “Not unless you’re his legal guardian, and we can’t do anything about that today. So until you get that straightened out, he’s hanging out with us here in the lab, and HR can bite me.” She hurried back to her desk as if that had settled the whole argument.

  Well, Ethan thought as Tessa surveyed it all again with a bemused look on her face, maybe it did.

  “Get to work,” Mary barked, and they all hurried to their spaces, Tessa rolling the baby’s new stroller to rest near her desk.

  It was quiet for about an hour other than the clack of keyboards and soft grunts. Those were from the baby and Darius, who, Ethan was learning, greeted every insight or frustration in his work with a grunt, the good stuff getting a slightly higher-pitched grunt than the bad stuff. The baby grunts . . . those Ethan couldn’t interpret.

  He was surprised by how quiet the lab was beyond that. At Standard, they’d had far more engineers working in one space, and most of them could go on forever about their projects. Not here, though. And not that he could have contributed to break the silence, anyway. He was still wading through Tessa’s documentation on the project, though he had only the last two months of work left to read.

  He didn’t mind. She took meticulous notes, and he liked slipping inside of them and watching the workings of her engineer brain march out in tidy lines of text. It reminded him of how brilliant she really was. It took him no time at all to adjust to the quiet and to wonder how he’d ever worked in the noisy environment of his last lab, which is why he nearly fell off his chair when a shrill wail split the air.

  Sanjay clapped his hands over his ears, and Mary and Darius both whipped their heads in Tessa’s direction. Or more accurately, to the stroller. It sounded like Calvin was angry and revving up to say so again, even louder.

  Tessa hopped to her feet and reached in to unbuckle him. “I’m guessing he needs a diaper,” she said. “Sorry, guys.”

  “Go blow up the diaper changing pad thing, new guy.” This was from Mary, but Ethan would have been happy to help anyway. He hurried to the pile of stuff and found the package with the picture of the inflated diaper changing surface on the front. He shucked off the plastic and after a quick examination revealed that it used the same mechanism as inflating a beach ball, he went to work.

  Two minutes later, he would have been cursing under his breath if he’d had any breath to spare. It took a whole lot more hot air than he’d expected, and since he had none left over for swearing, he put his mind to work designing a better inflation mechanism. Maybe something like those inflatable rafts where you pulled a cord and they—

  “Is it ready yet?” Tessa called over an even fussier Calvin.

  Ethan held up a finger to indicate almost and blew faster until it felt nice and firm and he sealed the valve. It looked like a mini pool raft, kind of. “It’s ready.”

  She’d already slung the diaper bag over one shoulder and held the baby over the other. “Do you mind just setting it down over there against the wall? I’ll change him over there.”

  He did as she asked then hovered awkwardly, feeling gangly and unwelcome, all twiggy limbs and neurosis, while he waited to see if she needed anything else.

  She lay Calvin down on the pad and glanced up at him. “I’ve got it, thanks.”

  He nodded and went back to his desk, wishing he knew what else to do. Her glance had been the barest moment, but he’d seen exhaustion and uncertainty in her eyes before she turned away. He returned to his computer, trying to find his place in his notes, when a startled yelp broke the new silence, and everyone twisted in Tessa’s direction.

  She held her hand in front of her the way his nephews did when he chased them with a Super Soaker and for pretty much the same reason: the baby had released a stream of pee that had caught her right in the face, and she was fumbling for a diaper, probably to toss on top of the sudden fountain.

  “Gross,” Darius said with a touch of awe. Mary looked disgusted. Sanjay just looked, then turned back to whatever he was tinkering with.

  Ethan got up and walked over, not wanting to intrude but unwilling to leave her without any help.

  “Can I do something?”

  She blinked up at him. Her face was wet. He winced. “Sure. Find my sister and solve all my problems.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault I have no idea what I’m doing.” She carefully lifted her hand as Calvin kicked his legs, but the stream had stopped. He looked around the lab like he had no cares.

  Ethan crouched and pulled out a few wipes for her.

  “Baby urine is very clean,” Mary called helpfully. When they both glanced over their shoulders to stare at this announcement, she shrugged. “Google says it’s clean, so don’t be grossed out.”

  “I’m still grossed out,” Tessa mumbled. She wiped her hands and face and dabbed at her shirt while Calvin kicked like a frog. He even cooed, and Ethan smiled until he caught Tessa’s glare and stopped.

  “I’ll go back to my desk, then.”

  A few minutes later, Tessa returned to hers too. She’d moved Calvin into his swing and Ethan caught a glimpse of him gnawing on his fist before he turned his attention to Tessa.

  “All good?”

  She nodded and woke up her computer without another word. The next hour passed quietly with the exception of his questions to Tessa clarifying points in her notes, but that was about all they got before Calvin fussed again.

  “It has to be food, right?” She stared at Ethan as if pleading for him to make that wish come true.

  “Probably, yeah.”

  “Sorry, guys,” she said, digging into the bag beside her. “He’s going to be a little cranky while I make his bottle, but I think this is all he wants. Give me a minute.”

  She rose with the can of formula and an empty bottle and hurried toward the exit that led to the breakroom across the hall. Calvin’s fussing did get louder, and when Ethan heard Darius sigh, he rose and picked Calvin up from the swing, unbuckling him and putting him over his shoulder and patting him to soothe him. When that didn’t work, he offered him his pinky to suck on, something he’d seen more than one sibling do to appease one of their kids until a bottle or breast arrived to the rescue.

  Calvin latched onto him greedily, and Ethan braced for the moment the baby realized he wasn’t getting any milk, but Calvin didn’t fuss, just settled down to suck like Ethan’s
pinkie was a pacifier. He felt stupidly proud that it had worked.

  Tessa returned a couple of minutes later, and when she reached for the baby, Ethan gave a soft shake of his head. “It’s okay. Why don’t you give me the bottle? I’m still reading the notes, so I don’t need my hands for anything. I can hold him while you work.”

  She hesitated then nodded and handed him the bottle. “That makes the most sense. Thanks.”

  He sat at his computer and fed Calvin. He was peering at a particularly complicated shear equation in Tessa’s notes when he had the distinct feeling of being watched. He blinked and found Darius standing slightly over his left shoulder.

  “It eats fast,” the other engineer observed.

  “He does?” Ethan didn’t know what was fast for a baby.

  “It’s only been eating five minutes and the milk’s almost gone.” Darius pointed at the bottle.

  Ethan still had no idea if that was fast or not. What he didn’t know about babies would fill a ten terrabyte hard drive, he was realizing, ancient foster brother experiences aside.

  “It might be too fast for him,” Darius added.

  “What is?”

  “The flow rate. I’ll investigate.” Then he returned to his computer leaving Ethan to stare after him. Flow rate? He did an anxious check of Calvin, but while he was sucking down the formula at a good clip, he didn’t seem to be otherwise distressed.

  “Everything okay?” Tessa asked.

  “Yeah.” Probably. He hoped? He had no idea except the baby wasn’t fussing, and that seemed to be the one and only clue when something was wrong so far.

  “What size nipples do you have, Tessa?” Darius called.

  “Excuse me?” She sounded appalled. “That is none of your business.”

  “This says that a four-month-old needs a medium-flow bottle nipple. What size do you have?”

  Ethan watched Tessa’s cheeks grow pink and fought with everything he had not to laugh. He’d been thrown by the question too, but it must have felt even stranger to Tessa.

  “I don’t know,” she said, her voice calm again, but her cheeks stayed pink.