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

by Brenna Jacobs

  “It’s after five, anyway,” he said, already rising. “I don’t mind. Not now and not tomorrow. It’s seriously no problem.”

  “I can’t make you do that again,” Tessa said and was astonished to see what she could only call disappointment flicker across his face. “Let me change his diaper again, and I’ll be ready.” She tried to do it quickly and made sure to use Sanjay’s new invention just in case. “Ready,” she told Ethan.

  “Leaving already?” Mary asked.

  “It’s after five,” Ethan said again, and then he helped her pack up everything she would need to bring home. “I really am happy to drive you guys again tomorrow,” he said quietly as they worked.

  She hesitated, then nodded. “Thanks.”

  They hauled everything to the elevator in one trip, and the doors had nearly closed on them and Calvin’s cries when an arm shot through and the elevator opened. It was Sanjay, thrusting the inflatable changing pad at them.

  “You forgot this.”

  “Thanks, but I don’t need it at home. A blanket on the carpet works okay. I’m leaving it here so I have it tomorrow.”

  He looked nonplussed for a second then nodded and withdrew.

  “Seriously, thanks though,” she called as the doors slid shut.

  “Interesting guy.”

  Tessa glanced up—way up—at Ethan. Dang, he was tall. She wasn’t as petite as Rachel, but he made her feel tiny at five-foot-five. “He is, actually. Just gotta get to know him.”

  “Does he ever talk enough to do that?” Ethan looked doubtful.

  “He talks enough. You’ll see.”

  They talked shop over the baby’s cries on the ride home. She couldn’t concentrate but the skin around Ethan’s eyes tightened with each new gale from the baby, and she hoped talking about work would distract him from the wailing infant. The tight line of his jaw by the time he pulled up to her condo told her she’d failed miserably.

  “Thanks for driving.” She nearly flung herself from the car to open the backseat and get the baby out. She didn’t want to inconvenience Ethan a second longer than she had to. He turned off the car and went to the trunk, unloading the stroller and other gear.

  She slung the baby carrier over her arm and hurried to her front door, setting the baby down inside and rushing back out to haul in the rest of his stuff twice as fast as Ethan was moving. She couldn’t blame him for his reluctance to be around the baby who was now in full squall.

  “Thanks,” she repeated again when Ethan set the stroller frame down inside. She wondered if she was forgetting all of her words except for “thank you” and “sorry.” It felt like those had been eighty percent of her vocabulary today.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” Ethan said, and she braced, fully prepared to take it the wrong way, “but you look really tired.”

  “Thanks.” Then she cringed and added, “you’re not wrong,” just to prove that she still knew other words.

  “I was thinking about tomorrow—”

  She couldn’t bear to hear him try to let her down gently, so she cut him off. “Me too. I really feel fine about driving him myself. I’ll see you at the lab.”

  “That’s not what I was going to say.” His gaze drifted to her hand on the doorknob, ready to close it behind him. “I was going to offer to stay tonight and take a feeding shift with him.”

  “Absolutely not.” The rejection was automatic. This was a no-brainer. She didn’t need anyone else trying to cozy up to her, pretending to be interested in her problems, only to drop her when more important things came up. She would have to figure out how to handle this by herself, and she wouldn’t count on him anymore than she had to. “I’ll be fine. Don’t sweat it.”

  The baby’s cries grew even louder, and she winced and crooked her head in the direction of his car. “Better escape while the getting is good.”

  He hesitated, sliding his hands in his pockets before he nodded. “Sure, okay.” Then he disappeared as she shut the door behind him and turned to stare at the unhappy baby, feeling more lost than she ever had. Once, her mom had disappeared for two weeks with a boyfriend on a gambling spree at a Seminole casino. Tessa felt totally out of her depth then, sneaking the expired food for her and Rachel to eat from the gas station where she cashiered, her panic mounting daily. But even that didn’t scare her as much as staring into the red, angry face of the screaming infant in front of her without the first clue about what to do next.

  Chapter Eight

  Ethan drove the short distance to his parking spot and fought not to slam his car door when he climbed out. It shouldn’t bother him that Tessa had pushed him out, but he resented the inefficiency. This was a problem he could help her solve, but she was being as stubborn as he remembered her from college.

  That had been his one hesitation with taking this consulting gig before he went to Switzerland. Once Tessa had decided on how a problem should be solved, it was nearly impossible to get her to look at it from a different direction. The thing was, she was almost always right.

  In this case . . . she wasn’t. It was college all over again. She’d been hard to work with on their senior seminar project because she wasn’t great at collaboration. She could and did outwork everyone, but he and the other guy on their team had had to fight to get any input into it. Well, Ethan had. The other guy had been content to do as told and take the credit for Tessa’s work. But ultimately, when Tessa had finally listened to Ethan, they’d figured out together how to make their air purifier work.

  Calvin wasn’t his problem, Ethan knew. But he was here, he was willing to help, and he knew a little more about babies than Tessa did. It’s not like he had opinions about what she should do with the kid on a long-term basis, but he could at least give Calvin a bottle or two and let her get some sleep. She’d only handled him solo for one night, and she already looked like she was unraveling.

  It was already affecting her work, and after she’d been so relentless in recruiting him for the final stage of this project, he’d assumed she’d do anything to protect the progress of the project, including letting him help with Calvin so she could get enough sleep.

  Whatever.

  If she wanted to become her own personal sleep-deprivation project, he couldn’t do anything about that. What he could do was figure out a more efficient inverter for the stored energy in the road panels. He walked into his condo and opened his laptop to study the factory specs on the electric vehicle they were adapting for the feasibility study.

  About an hour later, a knock sounded at his door. He opened it, fully expecting to find Tessa. Instead, it was a GrubMates driver.

  “Are you Ethan?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “This is yours.” She thrust a plastic carry-out bag at him. He accepted it on reflex.

  “I didn’t order anything.”

  “There’s a note on the receipt. Tip was taken care of. Bye.”

  He closed the door and fished the paper out, reading the typed message in “Special notes” at the bottom. “Baby is okay now. Thanks for worrying. I don’t cook, but I feel like you were obsessed with ramen in college. This is the grownup version. See you tomorrow.”

  He opened it to find a container of beef pho, and he shook his head. She was right. He’d been about to warm up a Cup O’ Noodles. This smelled way better.

  He texted her a thank you and sat down to eat it then went right back to his work, shoving aside the twinge of guilt that arose by habit. It had been almost a year since Sarah had walked out on him for good, but he’d listened to so many of her lectures about his workaholism and how he didn’t pay enough attention to her that it had become a reflex to brace himself against them.

  But he had no reason to feel guilty anymore. He had to remind himself of that. She’d forfeited any claim to his time the minute he’d shown up at her place to surprise her with a spontaneous dinner date and had walked in to find her half-dressed and fully sprawled across the lap of some dude he’d never seen before
.

  The details had come out later, and each one had made him feel like a bigger cliché. Turned out she’d actually given up any claims on his time six months before when she’d started cheating on him with her trainer. Because of course it was her trainer.

  Ethan wasn’t sure why she’d even bothered trying to keep their relationship going during the affair. The only thing he could figure was that he’d become a habit for her. They’d been together since college. It was either that or she preferred his fatter paychecks. Engineering wasn’t as glamorous as being a personal trainer, but it definitely paid better.

  The solution had been obvious: he broke up with her on the spot. But his habit of becoming defensive any time he brought a problem home to solve hadn’t faded. A lot of habits from being with Sarah had lingered.

  It was why he’d been happy to leave Denver a month early to consult for Tessa’s project. He’d rather pass the time in Palm Valley and his sparse apartment until his project at Klieber started than stay in the apartment that bore Sarah’s fingerprints everywhere. She’d happily spent his money decorating it for him, but it was all to her taste, and when she was gone, he realized he liked it even less than he liked her.

  This place was smaller and emptier, but maybe that’s why he felt like he could breathe easier for the first time in months. And soon, when he was in the alpine air of Switzerland, his head in the literal clouds while he was neck deep in new engineering problems to solve, he’d breathe freely.

  ***

  A rattle above his head woke him, and he blinked awake, not sure what was happening for a minute while his eyes adjusted to the darkness. What was—

  Oh. It was his phone. He grabbed it and noted the time above Tessa’s name in the display. 2:12 in the morning. “Hi,” he said, sitting up and ready to spring into action.

  “Hi, sorry to call so late. I just . . .”

  He heard Calvin wail. “Baby isn’t sleeping?”

  “No. Do you know what I should do? Google has failed.”

  “I’ll come over.”

  “You don’t have to—” But an angrier wail interrupted her.

  “I can’t solve the problem remotely. It’s not a big deal to run over. See you in a minute.” He hung up and grabbed a T-shirt to throw on with his shorts, slipped on his sneakers without bothering with socks, and headed over to Tessa’s. He could hear Calvin from the sidewalk, and he let himself in when he found the door unlocked.

  Tessa was pacing the living room, bouncing the baby and looking faintly panicked again. “Nothing’s working,” she said, raising her voice to be heard above him.

  “What have you tried so far?”

  She gave him a rundown. A bottle, a new diaper, rocking. “He won’t stop.”

  “Can I hold him?”

  She handed him over without any objection and wilted on the sofa. Ethan cradled Calvin, trying to think through what his mother had done when they’d had an inconsolable infant. It happened sometimes when they got a drug-addicted baby who was removed from the mother at birth. Maybe that was the problem here?

  “Is your sister an addict?”

  Tessa’s head flew up. “Excuse you?”

  “I’m just wondering.”

  “She may be irresponsible in all other ways, but she’s not an addict.”

  “Okay.” He wasn’t going to debate with her when she was clearly exhausted. He fished out his phone and did a search while he softly bounced the baby. The motion made the wails quieter but they didn’t stop. “If I read off a list of behaviors to you, can you tell me which of these fit Calvin?”

  “Yeah, go ahead.”

  “Tremors, sleep problems, irritability, high-pitched crying, tight muscle tone, hyperactive reflexes, seizures, yawning, stuffy nose, diarrhea, dehydration, sweating, unstable temperature. Any of those ring a bell?”

  She stared at him, her eyes bloodshot. “At least half of them, but I don’t know if it’s normal for him or not. What’s a high-pitched cry? That’s what all his cries sound like. And he doesn’t sleep great, but I kind of thought most babies didn’t. It’s the same with most of those symptoms.”

  She was right. He’d pulled up a list of symptoms of drug-addicted babies, but they had no idea what Calvin’s baseline was, so how would they know if this was different? He glanced at the time again. Only five minutes had passed since he’d walked in, but the screaming baby had made it feel like an hour. He wished that were true, because it would mean his mom was waking up on the east coast for her first cup of coffee and he’d be able to ask her. But he didn’t want to wake her up early for this, so he’d have to figure it out.

  “It’s a list of signs of a drug-addicted baby,” he confessed to Tessa. When she got a scary glint in her eye, he held up his free hand in a “whoa” gesture. “It’s not an insult to your sister. I’m troubleshooting here, and I know some of the fussiest foster babies we got came from drug-addicts. Just ruling things out.”

  Tessa pressed her lips into a tight line before she gave a sharp nod. “Okay. But no, even though she’s always been a handful, I’ve never known her to use any kind of drug. I’ll ask her, but I’m not sure she’ll answer. She hasn’t answered any of my texts.”

  Calvin’s fretful fusses turned into a sharp, angry wail, then back to fretting again.Tessa’s eyes went slightly glassy. The way she looked was exactly how he’d felt for weeks after he and Sarah split.

  “Why don’t you try to sleep?” he asked. “I promise you can trust me with Calvin, and my mom will be awake in an hour, and I’ll call and get her advice. But I really think you need to sleep.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “For being tired? Come on.”

  “For dragging you over here. To my house. To Palm Valley to work on a project I’m suddenly ghosting.”

  “That’s the tired talking. Sleep.”

  “But—”

  “Please? It’ll make me feel better even if it doesn’t make you feel better.” He suspected she might be willing to do it if she thought she was helping him even if she wasn’t willing to do it for herself.

  Finally, she nodded. “Thanks. I’ll sleep for an hour, then you can go home.”

  “Sleep until your alarm goes off. It’s fine.”

  She climbed off the sofa like a pile of bricks was weighing her down, but eventually she trudged up the stairs and disappeared.

  He looked down at Calvin and smiled although Calvin wasn’t paying him any attention, his little mouth stretched in a grimace as he writhed and grunted. “What do you need, buddy?”

  He got a whimper.

  “Diaper? Bottle?” He glanced around. “Swing? Let’s try the swing.” But when he’d settled him in and started it swaying, Calvin still fretted. He tried making faces and silly noises like his brother did with his kids, but it didn’t help. He was relieved he could stop those because they made him feel dumb.

  But so did Calvin’s fretting, which wasn’t getting any better. Maybe he wanted to swing more? He tried pushing the swing harder to give it more momentum, but it was designed to move at a predetermined speed, not respond to pushing. It made sense, he thought grudgingly. That way mischievous older siblings couldn’t come along and set the swing going too high or fast when parents weren’t looking.

  If he had a little more time and no baby to worry about, he could take it apart and figure out how to disable that feature, but as Calvin squawked and his lip quivered, Ethan abandoned any tinkering plans and tried to look for a more immediate solution. He’d been way overconfident in thinking he could handle this any better than Tessa had.

  The baby seat caught his eye. The handle was locked in position flush against the seat itself, but . . . he scooped Calvin from the swing. “I have an idea.” For a split second he stopped fussing as Ethan swooped him up and toward the carrier, which made Ethan optimistic that his next idea might work.

  He settled Calvin into the carrier and triple-checked his harness, moved the handle to carrier position so the whole thing loo
ked like a basket, then he stood and swung the carrier in a wider trajectory than the swing allowed. Calvin fussed. He sped up. The fussing subsided for a minute then started up again, but Ethan smiled. “I understand,” he said to Calvin in the carrier. He made his passes long and fast, turning himself into one of those amusement park rides that looked like a giant swinging Viking ship that eventually did a full revolution. But instead of screaming like those riders did as his vessel went higher and higher, Calvin settled right down.

  After a couple of minutes, Ethan was satisfied that it wasn’t a fluke. Calvin’s eyes peered at him on each pass, but he didn’t fuss. Ethan was pleased until a couple more minutes passed, and he realized how tired his shoulder was getting. The baby and carrier had felt so light when he picked them both up, but muscle fatigue didn’t care about how something felt after thirty reps. He’d spent enough time in the gym after the breakup to know that all too well.

  “It wasn’t the gym where her trainer was,” he told Calvin. But Calvin only watched him quietly. Unfortunately, his eyes didn’t look a bit sleepy yet.

  Ethan switched arms. How long could he keep this up? Even switching back and forth, he could only swing the baby for so long before his shoulders would quit cooperating and the crying started again.

  His phone buzzed in his back pocket and startled him. Now what? Was Tessa calling him from upstairs?

  But when he pulled it out, the caller-ID display read, “Mom.”

  “I’m fine.” It was always best to start this way when she called unexpectedly.

  “You are not. Tell me what’s wrong. Are you hurt? What happened?”

  “There is no such thing as ESP, Mom. I’m fine.”

  “It’s not ESP, it’s mother’s intuition, and you can just have an argument against it in your own engineer brain because you’ll never convince me. Now tell me what’s up.”

  “There’s nothing wrong.” The last time she’d called him insisting her intuition was flaring, he’d been sitting on his sofa, two hours post-Sarah cheating bombshell, reeling from the sudden crater where his heart used to be. “No one has cheated on me lately, there’s no car accident or burn or flu, nothing.” Those were all reasons she’d called in the past. He didn’t believe in “woowoo” intuition but there was no denying she had a history of impeccable timing with these calls.