The tall blonde gave up looking for a piece of paper and asked Derrick to sign the back of her shirt instead. She pushed her hair high on her head and turned about to give him access. He did as she asked, and then laughed at something she whispered into his ear. The brunette wasn’t the sort of girl who liked to be outdone. She lifted her shirt high enough to show off her bellybutton ring and asked him to sign her flat-as-a-board stomach.
Derrick was in charge of the grocery cart and Ryan, who happened to be fastened to the carrier buckled to the front of the cart. Ryan was growing more restless by the minute. He cried out, letting Derrick know enough was enough.
“Sorry girls, but it looks like my son needs me.”
“He’s so cute,” the woman said as she reluctantly pulled her shirt back into place. “I didn’t know you had any kids.”
The blonde slipped a business card into the front pocket of his jeans. “Let me know if you ever need a babysitter.”
“Yeah, okay,” Derrick said as he unbuckled Ryan from the carrier and held him close to his chest.
Jill left the cucumbers and got as far as the broccoli when she saw the women walk off. Derrick was smiling at Ryan, and he lifted him high enough in the air so he could kiss the tip of his nose.
How many years, Jill wondered, had she longed for exactly this sort of moment with Thomas? She and Thomas had been introduced by her parents when she was eighteen and a freshman at NYU. The attraction between the two of them had been instantaneous and they were engaged before she turned nineteen. After Thomas graduated from law school, her father hired him as an in-house attorney at his law firm in New York. She’d spent many hours dreaming of someday having Thomas’s baby. She’d always wanted a large family and she’d always imagined sharing the joys of parenting with someone she loved.
With one hand holding his son, Derrick used the other hand to push the cart her way. “I think I’ve got this whole baby thing down to a—”
A long burp cut him off in mid-sentence.
Jill laughed at the wide-eyed surprise on Derrick’s face as they merged together in the aisle. Whenever they spent time together, she found herself laughing. “It’s a good idea to always put a cloth on your shoulder before you burp him.”
“You don’t say?”
She helped him place Ryan back in the carrier. When that was done, she used baby wipes to clean the spit-up from his shirt. “There. You’re good to go.”
He pushed the cart while she followed at his side. “Is it always this difficult for you to grocery shop?” she asked him.
“What do you mean?”
“All the fans stopping you every few minutes and asking for autographs.”
“Oh, that. Sure, it takes time, but as far as I’m concerned, handing out autographs goes with the territory.” He pulled the business card from his pants pocket and shoved it into her baby bag. “In case you ever need a babysitter.”
Once again Jill found herself staring into expressive brown eyes. Judging by the lines crinkling the corners of his eyes when he smiled, he’d spent a lot of time outdoors and even more time laughing. She liked this man, Ryan’s father, a man she had no business liking. Her parents would never approve. They had a habit of pigeonholing people. They considered athletes to be overpaid and pampered. They would not approve of his jeans or untucked button-down shirt. They would not care for his tousled hair or his brawniness, a sign of arrogance in their eyes. No, they would never learn to like anything about Derrick Baylor. And although she knew it wasn’t fair or right, the realization made her like him even more.
“So what are we going to cook for your parents?” he asked.
“We?”
He followed behind as she pushed the cart to the meat section. “I’m not invited?”
She picked out a pork tenderloin and placed it in the cart. “Well, it’s just that—”
“You don’t think I stand a chance in hell of ever gaining their approval, do you?”
“Where were you when they took us out to dinner last week? They aren’t regular people, Derrick. They’re judgmental and—”
He laughed as he threw an arm around her shoulder and drew her in close. “Lighten up. I was only teasing. I have no intention of barging in on your dinner. You and Ryan need to spend some time with your family alone.”
“I think somebody wants to talk to you.” She gestured with her chin toward a man standing behind him, a handsome, slightly older man with striking blue eyes.
Derrick turned about. “Max!” he said.
The two men shook hands, clearly excited to see one another.
“Jill, this is Max Dutton, one of the best linebackers in NFL history.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Max said, “but I appreciate the compliment.”
Max stepped forward and shook Jill’s hand. He wasn’t as tall as Derrick, but what he lost in height, he made up in width—all muscle and brawn. “And who is this little guy?”
“This is our son, Ryan,” Derrick told him.
“I hadn’t heard.” Max slapped Derrick on the back. “Congratulations.”
“How many kids do you have these days?” Derrick asked Max. “Every time I see you in the paper, it seems Kari and you are having another baby.”
Max grinned. “Our oldest, Molly, graduated from USC a few years ago and now she and her mother are busy writing a mother-daughter nutrition book together. The youngest, Austin, will be a year next month. I finally got myself a boy. Not that I wasn’t fine with all girls, because I was. Girls are fun. I should know since I now have four of them.”
“You have been busy.”
“I better let you two lovebirds go,” Max said. “I just ran inside to grab milk, but then I saw the two of you looking into one another’s eyes as if time had stopped and that’s when I realized it was somebody I knew. We’ll all have to get together sometime. Kari would love to meet Ryan and your lovely wife, Jill.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Derrick said as he shook Max’s hand.
Max wrapped his arms around Jill and gave her a friendly hug before he slipped away and disappeared down the nearest aisle.
Jill felt her cell phone vibrating at the bottom of her purse, but chose to ignore it. “Well, that was interesting,” she said. “I believe I just met a human tornado.”
Derrick laughed as he followed her down the aisle with all the spices and teas. “I hope you don’t mind that I didn’t correct him when he referred to you as my wife.”
“No problem,” she said over her shoulder. “I’ve been called worse.”
“Very funny,” he said.
She stopped in front of the spices and tried to remember what she had needed. “How’s your knee feeling?”
“It’s better.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “I try not to think about it, especially since I’m not going to let it slow me down when training camp starts in a few weeks.”
“What does the doctor say about that?”
“Nobody but Connor knows about my knee. I plan on keeping it that way.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Football players play with injuries all of the time.”
“No game is worth losing a limb over,” she said. When he didn’t answer right away, she looked at him and noticed him studying her closely.
“What?” She lifted her fingers to her face, feeling for crumbs or something wet and sticky. “Do I have something on my face?”
The expression on his face confused her. The man was one big contradiction. When he reached out a hand and moved some hair out of her face, she didn’t stop him.
“There’s something about you, Jill Garrison, that makes me feel good inside, something that makes me want to reach out and touch you to see if you’re for real.” He brushed the pad of his thumb over her chin and then leaned forward to kiss her.
She put her hand on his chest to stop him. “Don’t do this, Derrick.”
“Do what?”
“Pretend like
this thing between us, whatever it is, is something more than a simple friendship. Every time you touch me like this, or gaze into my eyes like that, you confuse me. Please don’t fool me into thinking you have something more to offer than you really do.”
He seemed to think about what she said before he straightened. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
A part of her had hoped he would tell her she was wrong about him having feelings for Maggie, maybe even tell her he was falling for her, and he couldn’t stop himself from kissing her any more than he could stop the earth from rotating on its axis. But he didn’t say another word.
Ignoring the kick in the gut, she forced a smile and said, “Help me find the allspice and let’s get out of here before that photographer takes another picture of us.”
He looked over his shoulder and the saw the flash of a camera.
This was the last time she was ever going to go shopping with him. Between his fans, friends, and photographers, what should have taken thirty minutes had taken well over an hour. At this rate, she was never going to get anything done today.
~~~
They were five minutes from home when Derrick was forced to put a firm foot on the brakes of his SUV in order to miss hitting a stray dog.
A car coming from the opposite direction was approaching fast.
“That poor dog is going to get hit,” Jill said.
The dog stood squarely in the middle of the road. Jill squeezed her eyes shut, unable to watch.
The car swerved and honked as it passed, but the dog hardly flinched.
“That does it.” Derrick pulled his car to the side of the road, shut off the engine, and put on the hazard lights.
“Be careful. This is a dangerous road.”
He shut the door and headed straight for the dog, but the animal ran, making its way down the middle of the road. Derrick stuck a hand out as if he were a traffic cop and tried to stop the next car, but the car swerved around him and the dog and whizzed by in a blur.
“Are you crazy? Slow down,” he called after the car.
The dog was confused. From the looks of it, the poor thing hadn’t eaten in days. Its fur was matted and one of its eyes was swollen shut. When it wasn’t running, it walked with an uneven step. A kindred spirit, Derrick thought.
“Derrick,” Jill called from the car. “You’re going to get yourself killed out there.”
This was the second time in less than an hour that Jill worried over him: first his leg and now this. “Don’t worry, darling,” he called back. “I promise to return unharmed.”
She rolled her eyes at him and then pulled her head back into the car.
It took him twenty minutes to get his hands on the mutt. With the ugly beast in his arms, he waited for traffic to pass so he could cross the street safely and get back to his car.
The windows were rolled down and Jill was sitting in the back seat feeding Ryan.
Standing on the safe side of the road and looking into the open window, he let Jill take a look at the dog. “I never should have wasted my time, let alone risked my life, to save the mutt. Look at him, would you?”
The dog angled its head. One ear stuck straight up, the other ear flopped to the side. One eye was swollen shut. A thick scar cut through the right side of the dog’s mouth, causing its yellow crooked teeth to show and making it look as if the animal was smiling. The upper part of its body was bald while the rest of the dog’s body had random patches of wiry, coarse grayish fur that looked more like human hair than fur.
Jill wrinkled her nose. “What kind of dog is it?”
“Good question. At this point, I’m not even sure if it is a dog.”
She laughed.
“I don’t see any houses nearby and it doesn’t have a collar. I guess I’ll have to take him home and make a few calls to the local vets in the area and see if anyone is missing a dog that looks like a cross between a Siamese cat and a giant Chihuahua.”
Jill climbed out of the car with Ryan in her arms and shut the door behind her.
“Why don’t we put Ryan’s carrier in the front for the rest of the ride home?” Derrick asked.
“That’s too dangerous,” Jill said. “I’ll sit in the front with the dog to keep him from jumping on Ryan.”
Once the baby was buckled into his car seat in the back and Jill was in buckled in the passenger seat, Derrick set the dog on her lap. She wrapped her arms around the ugly thing, her nose wrinkling when she got a whiff of skunk and who knew what else.
He watched the dog for a moment, making sure it wasn’t going to try and escape or bite his way out of her arms. “Are you all right?” he asked. “The dog seems friendly enough.”
“I’ve never seen a scarier looking animal,” Jill said. The dog tried to escape from her lap, but she held tight. Every once in a while the dog would stop and sniff Jill and then go back to sniffing the dashboard.
Derrick climbed in behind the wheel. “Are we good to go?”
“If you want to make a quick trip to the dentist for a cleaning, I’m sure I’ve got another few hours left in me.”
He looked at her and grinned. “Is that sarcasm I’m detecting?”
The smile she gave him in return made his heart beat a little faster. What the hell was wrong with him? Did he have feelings for Jill? How could that be? He was confused, he told himself. Maggie was the only woman for him.
Jill’s phone rang. Keeping one arm around the dog, she somehow managed to answer her cell phone by the second ring. By the time she hung up, he was pulling the car into the parking lot of their apartment building.
“Another problem with the magazine?” he asked.
“It’s always something,” she said. “Every month we test some of the main recipes, but this month we’re scheduled to have a cook off featuring three busy stay-at-home moms. The restaurant we were planning to use fell through. As you already know, our tester chef quit and I haven’t had time to find someone to replace her.”
“Anything I can do to help?”
“Not unless you have a restaurant-size kitchen I can use.”
The dog was excited at the prospect of getting out of the car. Jill struggled to hang on while he pawed at the window. “Calm down,” she said, giving the animal a gentle pat on the back. The dog looked at her with one ear pointed forward.
Derrick jumped out of the car and came around the front so he could grab hold of the dog. “I’ve got the beast,” he told her. “I also happened to have a restaurant-size kitchen you can use.”
Chapter Eighteen
Sandy straightened her newly-fitted pencil skirt, retrieved her compact mirror from her purse and checked her lipstick. Then she took a deep breath and headed inside the office building. The click of her three-inch heels made a racket as she walked across polished slate. She made her way to the directory where she searched for Connor’s name. Her newly manicured nail followed the list of names until she came to Dr. Connor Baylor, Suite 300.
Perfect.
She’d had a pap smear three months ago, but she wasn’t the squeamish sort, and she figured an extra examination never hurt anyone. The elevator doors opened. She stepped inside and pushed the number three button. The ride up was smooth and uneventful, but once she stepped into the hallway and saw Suite 300 looming ahead of her, her heart rate kicked into high gear.
Pull it together, girlfriend. Sandy hadn’t felt this out of sorts since her date two years ago with Glenn Price, a semi-famous singer from Britain. She walked into the lobby, signed in, and took a seat with the other women waiting their turn. After filling out the paperwork, she picked up Sports Illustrated and rifled through the pages, trying to get her mind off of what she was doing…and what she would say to Connor when he opened the door and saw her sitting on his examination table.
She didn’t have to wait long.
The nurse led her down the hallway and to the third room on the right. Dr. Connor Baylor was nowhere in sight. The nurse had her stand on the scale. Next, she took
Sandy’s blood pressure and temperature. “Go ahead and put this gown on, top and bottom. Dr. Baylor will be in shortly to see you.”
Sandy stripped down to her thong underwear and push-up bra. She then took her time folding her clothes and setting them neatly on the chair in the corner of the room. A knock sounded on the door. Only a minute had passed since the nurse left the room. She figured the nurse had forgotten something. “Come in.”
When she turned to the door, she noticed Connor’s broad shoulders filling the opening.
The nurse stood directly behind him and tried to get a peek at whatever had stopped him in his tracks, but he kept her at bay. “Sorry,” he said. “I thought you were—Sandy—what are you doing here?”
“Hi, Connor.” She reached for the paper gown. “You were so quick I figured it was the nurse again.”
His gaze started at her feet and quickly worked its way upward, settling on her face.
His expression, Sandy realized, was unreadable. If anything, she would have to guess that he was not pleased. “I’ll leave you alone while you get the gown on and then we’ll talk.”
“Whatever you say, doc.”
He gave her a tight smile and backed away, shutting the door behind him.
Man, oh, man. Connor Baylor needed to lighten up. He acted as if he hadn’t seen it all a thousand times before. She took off her undergarments and put on the paper gown as instructed. She took a seat on the edge of the examination table and swung her legs straight out in front of her so she could admire her pedicure. Her nails had been painted a deep red, matching her lipstick.
Endless minutes ticked by before a knock finally sounded on the door. This time the nurse came in first and then assured Dr. Baylor that the patient was ready for him. Connor Baylor was obviously a stickler for rules.
Having My Baby Page 18