So with Erica’s help, she had menus completed for both the rehearsal dinner and wedding reception…rooms reserved…flowers ordered…linens, silverware, and glassware lined up… Invitations had gone out the week before to the small group of guests Erica and Christian had decided to include in their special day—mostly family and a few close friends—and RSVPs were already flooding in.
All in all, she was very proud of the progress they’d made in such a short amount of time. Of course, she suspected that as soon as the happy couple left the reception for their honeymoon, she would crash and burn, sleeping for a month straight.
In fact, just last week, when Erica has insisted she take an afternoon to relax and enjoy a full spa day with her, she’d fallen asleep on the table during her massage. Erica and Trevor’s sister Melissa, as well as their brothers’ significant others, Sabrina, Samantha and Avery, had all joined them. It had been a Girls’ Day of sorts, something Haylie didn’t get to experience very often given her hectic schedule and, yes, lack of close female friends back in Denver.
The women had kept up a constant stream of chatter and laughter, and though she’d managed to stay awake during their manicures, pedicures and cucumber face wraps, Haylie had simply drifted off during the massage. Not surprising, considering how amazingly relaxing it had been, but still.
She had to admit that it had been both fun and informative to meet so many other members of the Jarrod clan. In addition to being gracious and friendly, they’d treated her just like “one of the girls,” and she’d genuinely enjoyed herself.
As curious as she knew they must be about her sudden appearance in Aspen and her living arrangements with Trevor, they hadn’t asked a single awkward question or given her even one piece of unsolicited advice about Erica’s wedding. Something she had definitely been on guard about from the very beginning.
Dropping some of her things near the oak-and-marble island with a tired sigh, she started to shrug out of her heavy winter coat while simultaneously loosening Bradley’s warm snowsuit.
“Hey.”
Trevor’s low voice startled her, and she jerked around to find him coming down the stairs. As usual when at home, he was dressed in jeans and a thick sweater. Today’s choice was khaki-green and did amazing things for both his chest and eyes.
Not that she had any business noticing the mouth-watering appeal of either.
“Hi,” she greeted him, still tugging and unzipping.
Moving through the house’s open-design living area, he crossed to the kitchen and took Bradley right out of her arms. “Here, let me.”
For a second, she froze, used to doing pretty much everything herself, and unused to having assistance with much of anything, especially the baby.
No, that wasn’t quite true, was it? Ever since moving in with him, Trevor had been quite helpful. He’d supplied her with everything she’d needed to be comfortable and do her job for Erica, and then some. He was courteous and accommodating and was almost obsessively single-minded about lending a hand with Bradley.
As unnerving as it was on a lot of levels, he got definite brownie points for how involved he’d been in Bradley’s care. He’d asked her early on to show him everything he needed to know about babies, adamant about learning how to prepare bottles and formula, change a diaper, give Bradley a bath.
He seemed to have a million questions—which was understandable, she supposed, from a man who didn’t have much experience with young children, but suddenly found himself faced with the possibility of fatherhood. And more than once in the middle of the night, when she hadn’t hopped out of bed quickly enough in response to Bradley’s cries, Trevor had come to her door, tapping softly and offering to help with whatever the baby needed.
Given that they didn’t even know for sure yet that Bradley was his son, he was certainly doing everything that could be expected of a new father.
On the one hand, having Trevor around to take care of everyday obligations that she was normally responsible for all on her own was nice. It relieved a modicum of her personal stress and gave her a little extra time each day to focus on the preparations for Erica’s wedding.
On the other, she wasn’t sure she liked somebody else playing parent to Bradley, even if that person most likely was his biological parent. But she was so used to caring for her infant nephew by herself, she didn’t want anyone usurping that position, pushing her out of Bradley’s life. And if someone else could care for him as well as she did, then that was a real possibility.
Oh, who was she kidding? When those DNA results came back and showed that Trevor was Bradley’s father—which she fully believed would be the case—chances were he would take the baby away from her. Or try to, anyway.
Lord, why had she come here in the first place? It had seemed like the right thing to do at the time, but now… The thought of losing custody of Bradley made her blood go cold, and she wished she could go back in time and do the wrong thing by keeping the baby to herself.
Stripping Bradley down to his brown corduroy pants and long-sleeved duckie shirt, Trevor set the bulky snowsuit aside, then arranged the infant on his hip as if he’d been doing it half his life.
“Have you had dinner yet?” he asked.
She shook her head, still feeling slightly uneasy as she shrugged out of her own outerwear.
“You look tired. Why don’t you go upstairs, change clothes, maybe take a long, hot bath. I’ll get Bradley fed, and you can decide what you’d like to eat later.”
It was as if he’d read her mind. She was tired and more than a little worn out simply from the schedule she’d been keeping lately, but while she knew she needed to eat at some point, what she wanted was to sink beneath about a foot of bubbles for an hour or two and let the hot water and steam-filled room wash away the stress and exhaustion of the day.
But she hated that he knew that…or could read her so easily. Or maybe she hated how reliant she’d become on him, knowing that he intended to take Bradley away from her once it was proven he was the baby’s father—and how comfortable she was with that reliance.
The truth was, she liked living here, under Trevor’s roof. She liked coming home at the end of the day to find him here, or being here when he walked in the door. She liked talking to him, and looking at him, and smelling the faint scent of his cologne in a room long after he’d left it. And she liked having someone to help her with Bradley, to care about Bradley, after doing everything alone for so long and being the only person in her nephew’s life who gave a damn about him.
But all of that also made her feel threatened, insecure. When it came to Bradley, the more Trevor learned to do on his own and the more confident he became in his ability to care for an infant, the less she would be needed. And when those tests finally came back, showing that he was the baby’s father…well, she would be pretty much expendable, wouldn’t she?
She pressed the heel of her hand to the center of her forehead, where a headache that hadn’t been there five minutes ago began to pound right between her eyes.
“Go ahead,” Trevor told her, moving around her statue-like form to the cupboard, where he began to collect assorted baby food jars for Bradley’s dinner. “We’ll be fine.”
Yeah, that was the problem.
But without a word, she dragged herself upstairs, too tired and suddenly out of sorts to pass on the offer of a nice, hot bubble bath, even if it had been suggested by the man who’d put her out of sorts in the first place.
Resisting the urge to reach around and pat himself on the back, Trevor walked quietly into Haylie’s room and laid Bradley down in the crib in the corner. He put the baby on his back, just as Haylie had instructed the first time she’d shown him how to put the boy down for a nap, and wound the timer on the jungle animals mobile hanging overhead.
He was pretty sure he’d remembered everything. After feeding Bradley, he’d given the baby a bath in his bathroom because Haylie was still locked in hers, then put him in a new diaper and Onesie. He’d even brought along a pacifier, which Bradley was busily sucking while his eyelids grew heavier and heavier.
Trevor was getting pretty good at this, if he did say so himself. As unhappy as he’d been when Haylie had first dropped Bradley in his lap, and as nervous as he’d been when he’d first decided to step up to the plate and learn his way around the care and feeding of an infant, he was now confident that if the paternity test came back naming him Bradley’s biological father, he would be fully capable of caring for the child on his own. It would mean some rearranging of his life and normal routine, but he could do it.
Just as the baby’s eyes drifted closed one last time and the suction on the pacifier slowed to only an occasional twitch of his soft, round cheeks, Trevor heard the bathroom door click open.
Raising his arms to the side like someone being held at gunpoint, he kept his back to that side of the room, hoping against hope that Haylie wouldn’t be startled enough by his presence in her bedroom to shriek and wake the baby.
Not sure whether or not she’d noticed him yet, he took a step away from the crib and whispered, “Sorry. I was just putting Bradley down for the night.”
He waited a beat, wondering if he was standing in the middle of an empty bedroom, talking to himself. But a second later, she whispered back.
“It’s okay. You can turn around, I’m dressed.”
Dressed, Trevor decided, when he’d done what she suggested, was a gross understatement.
Haylie stood just outside the bathroom in a pale peach robe that looked as if it was made of some kind of satin or silk that—unless his eyes were playing tricks on him—he could see straight through. At the very least, the diaphanous material was clinging to her damp skin in all the right places, making his mouth go bone dry and his groin tighten with want.
Her hair was twisted up and covered with a towel, but while he stood there trying to catch his breath, she tilted her head, swung her hair free and used the towel to continue to dry the long, damp strands.
He knew there was a four-month-old in the room with him, but all Trevor could think about was tossing Haylie down on the bed and making love to her. She was rosy-pink from her bath, some flowery fragrance wafting from the open doorway, and she was nak*d beneath that robe. It made him itchy, twitchy and hard.
“Did he get his dinner?” she asked, apparently heedless of the erotic thoughts racing through his brain.
He nodded, slipping his hands into his pockets to keep from doing something truly stupid like reaching for her, and rocking back on his heels. “And a bath and a fresh diaper.”
Her eyes widened slightly and her movements slowed. She didn’t say as much, but he knew she was surprised he’d managed so well all on his own. He half expected her to cross to the crib and double check that he hadn’t taped Bradley’s diaper on backward or stuck his head through the Onesie’s leg hole.
He bit down on a grin when instead she only murmured a half-approving, “Good.”
She twisted around to drape the wet towel over the bathroom doorknob, and her robe parted, the V at her neck opening just enough to flash the swell of one pale breast.