“Sorry about that. I won’t hold you to the offer, Nikki.”
Nikki scraped the blob off with her thumbnail and rubbed the dark blue fabric with the corner of the washcloth. “I’ll just move my name tag up to cover the spot,” she said. “Come on, Laura. You do this all the time. Surely I can handle it for three days.”
Nikki had taken care of the twins before, of course—for an evening now and then to let Stephen and Laura go out for a sandwich and some adult talk, and once in a while for an afternoon so Laura could get her hair cut or see a doctor. This would be no different, she told herself. Only longer.
Much longer, she realized on Saturday afternoon as she took the twins out of their stroller after a walk. She was exhausted because Zack had awakened at two in the morning with a nightmare and it had taken an hour to get him settled again. She’d already run through every activity she could think of and built so many block towers to be knocked down that she was qualified for a job putting up a skyscraper. And she hadn’t even looked at the briefcase full of paperwork that she’d brought with her.
And they were not quite halfway through the weekend. She had just as many hours stretching in front of her as had already passed.
What she’d failed to take into account was that the twins at eleven months were far more active and inquisitive than when they had been infants. They were no longer charmed by the slow revolution of a mobile above a crib. Peekaboo and pat-a-cake were no longer exciting. Not only had they had been actively annoyed at being strapped into the double stroller, but they’d made it clear they were highly insulted when Nikki refused to let them kiss all the neighborhood dogs.
By the time she untangled Anna’s safety harness and extracted her from the stroller, Zack had already crawled into the narrow space between the couch and the recliner in pursuit of his ball, and got himself stuck.
Zack started howling at his predicament, and Anna began howling in sympathy. Nikki was just drawing a breath and thinking about joining them when she heard the back door open and a deep voice call, “Anybody home?”
She gritted her teeth. Seth Baxter. The Lone Repairman had finally found time to look at Laura’s broken-down dishwasher.
Why right now? she wanted to shout. Why not last week, when Laura had been at home? Or if he absolutely had to come this weekend, why couldn’t he have showed up that morning, during the fifteen-minute span when Zack and Anna had been contentedly playing with two empty boxes and a stack of plastic yogurt cups? Or last night after they’d been bathed and tucked into their cribs?
Of course, by the twins’ bedtime she’d been practically a zombie herself, with pureed peaches and baby shampoo down the front of her sweatshirt…
Not that Seth Baxter would have cared what she looked like, anyway.
In the last two years, every time she’d ever come face to face with the man, he had acted as if he found her mildly interesting—worth one long appraising survey, but nothing more. She’d come to expect that no matter what she was doing or how she was dressed, Seth would scan her with that same slightly ironic gleam in his eyes, looking her over just long enough to make her want to scream—and then, as if the sight of her bored him to tears, he would turn his attention to something else. Nikki would rather have him ignore her completely, but she supposed the chances of that happening were nil.
Of course, all things considered, she didn’t exactly blame him for inspecting her as if she were a curious breed straight out of the zoo, because that was pretty much the way she’d acted the first time they’d spent any significant time together—though his own actions hadn’t exactly won any etiquette prizes.
She sighed and reminded herself to be grateful that she didn’t run into him more often. Once every few months was bad enough.
“In the living room, Seth.” She stooped to extract Zack from his predicament.
Seth came around the corner from the kitchen. “Nikki? What are you doing here?”
She snagged the back straps of Zack’s overalls and tugged him out from under the edge of the couch. “Didn’t anybody tell you about the cruise?”
“Yeah, Steve said something. I forgot it was this weekend.” He leaned against the stubby wall which separated the living room from the dining nook, arms folded across his chest. “I wondered what they were going to do with the house apes. Zack, buddy, you’ve got to remember how to get yourself into reverse.”
Nikki finished wiping Zack’s tears and took a good look at Seth. It had been several months since she’d seen him—across a baptismal font, where he’d been holding Zack while she cradled Anna—but he matched the picture in her mind almost exactly. His dark-brown hair was sun-streaked and longer than it had been at the babies’ christening, and he was wearing jeans and a polo shirt instead of a suit. But he was every bit as tall and lean as she remembered, his eyes were just as stunningly green, and his shoulders pushed the limits of the knit shirt. And the look…yes, there it was. Half-bemused, half-fascinated, and totally wary—the same expression that always made her want to scream.
Anna stopped crying, dropped to her hands and knees, and scrambled across the carpet toward Seth. He picked her up almost absently, still looking at Nikki. “How’s it going?”
She was darned if she’d admit that a few minutes ago she’d been ready to howl along with the twins. “Great. We’re doing fine.”
“Uh-huh. How many times has Laura called?”
“From the ship? Just once, when they first got on board.”
“That’s amazing.”
“She said she’d call back, but I heard Stephen in the background reminding her this was supposed to be a vacation. Anyway, she doesn’t need to check in—she left a full list of instructions on the refrigerator door, right next to her appointment calendar.”
“Her list actually fit on the refrigerator? I’d have expected a whole volume—alphabetized and cross-indexed.”
Nikki smiled. “Maybe she just didn’t have time to write it all down. But it doesn’t take an instruction manual to know that these two need a nap right now. I was just ready to put them to bed, so don’t let me keep you from working on the dishwasher.” She stepped closer to him, close enough to feel his warmth, and held out her free arm to take Anna.
The baby had nestled into Seth’s shoulder, and she didn’t seem inclined to move. Nikki stroked the baby’s back. As her fingertips neared Seth’s forearm, braced under Anna’s bottom, Nikki felt tingles run along every nerve.
Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself. You’ve touched him before.
At least…Well, she must have touched him somewhere along the way, she told herself, even if right at the moment she couldn’t remember a specific occasion. They must have shaken hands when they were introduced, for one thing—though when she stopped to think about it, she couldn’t remember actually meeting Seth. He must have just been part of the crowd, at some party back in the dark ages when Laura was dating Stephen and Nikki herself had been engaged to Thorpe. Perhaps it had been about the same time the four of them had started to make plans for a double wedding…
The dark ages, indeed.
Seth held the baby out so she could get a grip on Anna’s waist. Nikki’s hand brushed his arm, and she jerked back a little before she
