style="font-size:15px;"> But twenty minutes later he was still waiting. Furious now, he tossed the paper he was reading to the seat beside him and was just about to go to the cockpit and tell the pilot to leave, when he saw the pilot walking toward him.
“Mr. Cayne, there’s a problem in the terminal that needs your attention.”
Gabe looked up at Art Oxford. “My attention?” he asked, confused.
“There’s a woman claiming you’re waiting for her…”
“Now, you know I’m waiting for a woman, Art!” Gabe said, bounding from his seat and starting out of the plane. “You should have just told them to let her through.”
“But this woman has—” Art began, but Gabe didn’t stay to listen to the end of his sentence. He didn’t have time to wait. In the few minutes it would take for the pilot to call to the terminal to tell security to allow Kassandra through, Gabe could straighten this out himself and probably more satisfactorily.
Storming across the tarmac, Gabe muttered to himself about incompetent people. Everybody had been told to let a five-foot-six blonde through to his plane, yet here he was having to make a personal identification. He bounded through the glass door, strode through the small terminal, burst into the manager’s office and nearly knocked Kassandra on her bottom.
Dressed in a black wool coat and fluffy cashmere hat, she didn’t look anything like the women Gabe normally dated. She wasn’t tall. She wasn’t slender. And she certainly wasn’t sophisticated. Though, she was cute. Cuddly. Sexy in a sweet kind of way. Unfortunately, she was also holding a baby. A little girl dressed in a one-piece pink winter garment with a bunny embroidered on the front. One shock of black hair peeked from beneath the rim of a pink knit cap. She was sucking on a plastic thing that must have been a modern-day version of a pacifier, though Gabe had never seen one that fit flat against a baby’s lips before. The minute Gabe stepped into the room, the kid spit it at him.
It thumped against his chest, then bounced to the floor.
“Hey!” Gabe yelped, jumping away from them. He looked at Kassandra, who appeared sufficiently mortified, but the baby only grinned, held out her arms and said, “Dada.”
Beyond angry, beyond confused, beyond everything, Gabe merely looked at Kassandra.
She cleared her throat, then bent to retrieve the pacifier before she turned to the airport manager. “Mr. Byron, could we have a little privacy, please?”
“Sure,” Charlie Byron said, rising from his seat. “You want me to take Candy with me?”
Kassandra shook her head negatively, then watched as Charlie left the room, closing the door behind him.
“This is the reason I keep nagging you about your noise,” Kassandra said as she shoved the dirty pacifier into an open diaper bag. “I have a daughter.”
She paused, waiting for him to respond, but Gabe was so flabbergasted he didn’t know what to say. Not only did this explain why she always complained, but it made him feel like a heel for disturbing a baby. Worse, it appeared she’d decided to bring her baby to Georgia. Georgia! To meet his mother, his father and his grandmother!
“This is her first Christmas and I don’t want to miss it. Besides, I didn’t want to impose on anybody by asking them to watch her for three weeks.” Kassandra drew a long breath. “So I decided to bring her along,” she added softly, cautiously.
“I see,” Gabe said as he slid onto a chair, then covered his face with both hands. He absolutely, positively did not know what to say…or do. Taking this woman and her baby to Georgia wouldn’t work. His last-minute attempt to save himself from looking like a liar to his family had failed.
“Look,” Kassandra said, obviously becoming annoyed with him. “It isn’t as bad as you think. Candy’s a baby, not a pet rat. I had a choice. Miss out on this opportunity—which I need—or bring Candy along. I didn’t want to lose this chance, so here I am. Now you have a choice. Take us as a team or leave us as a team, but as I recall—” she paused until she caught his gaze “—you didn’t put any stipulations on your offer. You just told me to show up at the airport.”
“You,” he said, then rose so he could pace. “I told you to show up at the airport. Not a package deal. I need one girl, not two. And one of you is a little bit too young for my taste, anyway.”
The baby babbled happily, clapping her chubby little hands and staring at Gabe as if he were the Prince of Wales, but Kassandra looked at him as if he were crazy. “I don’t want to leave her. Three weeks is a long time, and it’s her first Christmas. That’s a special time. I don’t want to miss it.”
“No, I suppose not,” Gabe muttered. Aside from a few company picnics, he hadn’t had much contact with babies before. And this one made him nervous. Oh, she was cute enough, but she also had a very unusual way of looking at him—almost as if she already knew him. He tried to get himself out of Candy’s line of vision. But the baby must have thought they were playing some kind of game, because when Gabe moved out of her way, she peeked around her mother’s shoulder to find him. When she saw him, she grinned, revealing two teeth trying to sprout from her upper gums. “But even so, I can’t take the two of you to meet my family.”
“Fine,” Kassandra said, and she smiled, albeit halfheartedly. “That’s your choice. You can’t say I didn’t give you an option.”
If her voice hadn’t quivered with disappointment, Gabe might have thought this was a bizarre scheme to annoy him since she was so good at that. Because her voice had trembled, Gabe knew all this was real. She really did have a baby, and she really did hold out the hope that Gabe would let her take Candy to Georgia with them. He glared at her. “Some option.”
She shook her head. “That all depends on how you look at it. If you need a fiancée as bad as you say you do, Gabe, then we’re actually better than nothing.”
His eyes narrowed, but he knew she was right. Taking this woman and child home for the holiday would be much better than taking no one. If he took no one, he didn’t have to admit he’d lied. He could always make up the story that he’d broken up with his fiancée. But then his grandmother would be disappointed. And he didn’t want his grandmother to be disappointed—not on her last Christmas. Taking Kassandra would make his grandmother happy.
That’s as far as he would allow himself to think for right now. “Okay. You win. Let’s go.”
Kassandra smiled, and Gabe felt the strangest tightening in his chest. She genuinely was one hell of an attractive woman. Not his type, Gabe reminded himself, but very attractive.
Before he could finish that thought, Kassandra pointed behind Charlie Byron’s desk. “Candy’s car seat, diaper bag, playpen, swing, high chair and overnight bag are all over there,” she said, and watched Gabe’s mouth fall open.
“All that for one kid?”
“We left most of her things at home,” Kassandra announced casually, though she agreed an eight-month-old was not the perfect traveling companion. Still, it wouldn’t do to give Gabe any other way or means to find fault with this situation. Particularly since he hadn’t yet thought of the most obvious complication. “You can get those. I’ll ask Mr. Byron if he can assign someone to help me get my things from Sandy’s car. We should be on our way in ten minutes.”
