How could such short legs cover so much ground, so quickly? streaked through Meg’s head as she and her oldest brother, Doug, took off after Abbie, even as she knew they were too far away to catch her before she lost her balance and fell in. One second, the baby had been chasing one of her cousins, the next she’d vanished, panic slicing through Meg like a ragged knife.
A knife that viciously twisted when she saw her baby girl gleefully running right toward the water, which to her probably just looked like a big wading pool.
“Abbie!” she yelled again, her heart pounding harder than her feet against the grass. “Come back! Come back!”
But at the precise moment the baby teetered on the edge of the pond, Russ dashed out of nowhere and snatched her to safety. The little girl erupted into startled tears, twisting around and wailing for Meg.
“Oh, God!” Meg ran up to pull Abbie from his arms, burying her face in her baby’s warm curls. “Thank you so much—”
“First rule of being a parent,” Russ said, fury snapping in his eyes, “is that you never take your eyes off your child, not even for a moment! What on earth were you thinking?”
“Whoa, man,” Doug panted out, trying to catch his breath. “Chill. No matter how careful you are, sometimes kids get away—”
“It’s okay, Dougie, he’s right,” Meg said, her heart painfully thumping as her wobbly legs gave way and she sank to the grass, Abbie still clasped tight. Over and over, she stroked the baby’s hair, shaking her head. “I should have kept a better eye on her, I should’ve—”
She burst into tears.
“Aw, Meggie, don’t.” Just like all her brothers, Doug hated tears. “It’s okay, the baby’s fine—”
“I know she is, but…” Sniffing, she looked up at her brother. “Go on back to the others. Just…give us a minute, okay?”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. Go on.”
As Doug trudged back up the hill, Meg looked at Russ. “So now you think I’m a total idiot.”
His mouth pulled into a tight line, he glanced away. Blew out a breath. “It was a knee-jerk reaction, sorry. But things happen so quickly…”
“Tell me about it. I swear, I looked away for a second and she was gone. I’ve never, ever done that before.” She kissed Abbie, whose tears had stopped, as well. “And I won’t again, believe me.” Silence. Meg took a deep breath and said softly, “You don’t hate kids at all, do you?”
A long pause preceded, “No.”
Meg nodded, then tried to get up, although her legs were still shaky. “I think we’ve both had enough adventure for one day. Thanks again.”
“No, wait,” he said after she started off. “I’m done here—let me take you guys home.”
“It’s just six blocks, I can manage. Besides…” She glanced at his truck, then back at him. “No car seat.”
“Then I’ll walk you.”
Meg almost smiled. “You don’t trust me to get the kid home in one piece?”
He didn’t smile. But when he lightly touched her arm to say he needed to tell Nova, who’d apparently taken the truck back around to the house, he was leaving, every nerve ending she possessed went kaflooey.
Not good, she thought.
At all.
***
All the way back to Meg’s place, Russ fought to erase the image of his sister’s raised brow and “Oh, yeah?” expression from his brain. He was only remotely successful. Which is more than he could say for the struggle to erase the freaked look in Meg’s eyes when she grabbed her daughter out of his arms.
Or his own idiocy of coming down on her so hard. Especially when it was perfectly obvious the incident had scared the stuffing out of her.
Seeing them home was the least he could do.
“No, I’ll carry her up,” he said when they reached the slightly run-down Queen Anne where Meg had her apartment—on the third floor. So for the second time that day he felt the sweet weight of a baby against his chest, this time the dead weight of a totally sacked-out baby.
“Don’t look too hard at the apartment,” Meg said when she unlocked the paneled door. “Tidiness isn’t my thing. Especially with a toddler.”
And indeed the place was a mess. Not in a should-be-condemned way, though. Just in a baby-lives-here way; the sunny, wood-floored living room overrun with toys and other kid stuff. What you could see around the pulled-out sofa bed, the boldly flowered sheets a rumpled heap.
“You can put her down in her crib. In there,” Meg said, nodding toward another door. The baby’s room was tiny, for sure, but bright and cheerful with a white crib and rocker, a thick, colorful rug on the floor. He laid down the zonked-out kid, a smile tugging at his mouth when she plugged her thumb into her mouth. When he returned to the living room, however, the sofa had been put back together, many of the toys gathered into a large laundry basket beside it. And in the middle of the room, an obviously anxious young woman with big, hopeful brown eyes.
“Um…would you like to stay for lunch? If you’re not busy, I mean. It’s, um, the least I could do, considering you saved my baby’s life.”
Russ smiled, her earnestness wrenching open something inside him he thought for sure would stay closed forever. “I kept her from falling in the pond, but I think ‘saving her life’ might be stretching it.”
Meg’s eyes watered. “It’s deep there. And I don’t swim. And a baby can drown in a frighteningly sh-short amount of t-time.”
Instinct sent Russ across the room to gather Meg into his arms, absorbing the aftershock, although he wasn’t sure which one of them he was comforting. Seconds later, though, she pulled away, swiping at her eyes. “Sorry,” she said with a nervous laugh. “I’m a total wuss when it comes to my kid.”
“It’s allowed,” he said, and she smiled, and the tightness in his chest eased a little more.
“So…are sandwiches okay?” she said, moving into the tiny kitchen. “Mom makes sure I’ve got tons of deli stuff.”
He opened his mouth to say, “I really have to go.” But what came out instead was, “That’d be great, thanks.”
Because he’d been right—she smelled like flowers.
***
Meg had thought for sure offering Russ lunch would send him fleeing. Especially after that hug. Oh, she’d remember that hug for a long, long time. A man who could hug like that…
Don’t even go there, chickie.
Anyway.
That he was still here an hour later was nothing short of astounding.
And puzzling.
Because, as they worked through the sandwiches, her mother’s macaroni salad and bowls of ice cream, they talked. About everything. Their remarkably similar middle-class childhoods. His sister’s decision to have her husband’s baby. Meg’s extensive Red Sox memorabilia collection, which Russ dubbed “impressive as hell.” How summer had always meant trekking out to Fenway with his dad.
“Same here,” she said, averting her gaze to spoon the last bit of mint chocolate chip out of the bowl as they sat on opposite ends of her sofa, the only sound a lone cicada’s drone in the leafy oak outside her windows. Dude was clearly big on family ties. So why wasn’t he married, already? Clunking her spoon into the empty bowl, she said, “I prided myself on being able to heckle the Yankees louder than all three of my brothers put together. Season ticket holders would cower when they saw us coming.”
Russ chuckled and their eyes met for a second longer than necessary, long enough for Meg to see the combination of nostalgia and longing in his eyes, to feel something she hadn’t felt in a long, long time. And sure as heck had no business feeling for somebody she’d just met. But there it was, an almost physical sensation of the pieces clicking effortlessly into place.
This time Russ looked away. “How’d you end up working at Armstrong?”
“Oh, that’s just for two weeks. I’m what you call a professional temp.” When Russ frowned, she said, “I like changing jobs every couple of weeks, although some last longer than that. Keeps the brain from going stagnant. I think I’d die if I had to face the same job, day in and day out. Besides, I like meeting new people. Learning new things.”
“You got something against stability?”
She shrugged. “What can I say, I bore easily.”
Russ looked at her for a long moment, then blew a soft laugh through his nose. “Every morning for breakfast I have a bowl of Cheerios with one teaspoon of sugar, half a grapefruit and a glass of orange juice. Can’t remember the last time I had something different.”
Meg’s brows lifted. “Wow.” Then she grinned. “Bet you never leave the house without making your bed, either.”
“Nope.”
When Abbie’s get-me-up cry pierced the sharp, uneasy silence that followed, Meg jumped to her feet, nearly knocking her bowl off the coffee table. “Be right back.”
Except when she returned, Russ was gone. Meg shut her eyes. Doofus, she thought, then went about the rest of her day, refusing to let herself dwell on things that weren’t meant to be.
Until the next day, when she and Abbie got home after church and found Russ sitting on the house’s steps. With a large, funny-looking stuffed bunny.
He rose. “I thought…maybe Abbie would like this?”
What the heck…?
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