think it’s nice.” He grinned at his niece, whose chubby fingers patted his cheek. “Uncle Stuart has lots of very pretty friends.”
“Well,” Payne said. “Keep your pretty friends away while Bree is here. I don’t want you distracted from baby-sitting.”
“Sure.” Stuart would have laughed, but he didn’t dare. He kept his family and his social life separate, so whatever lovely lady he was dating wouldn’t get the wrong idea and think there was going to be anything permanent in the future. Payne didn’t look the least bit relieved, but she couldn’t take the baby to Maine with her either, not right now.
“Do you really think you can handle this until Temple gets home?” she asked. Temple was their younger sister.
“No problem,” Stuart uttered, but he knew and his sister knew that taking care of a six-month-old baby was one hell of a job and not under the “no problem” category at all. But Stuart figured he and Bree could muddle through. “What’s an uncle for?”
“Are you sure?” Payne looked worried, but his older sister almost always looked worried. Stuart moved her toward the door.
“We’ll get along just fine.” His niece was in his arms, tugging on his earlobe as if she wanted to remove it from his head and fling it across the polished wood floor. Brianne Nicole Johnson liked to throw all sorts of things. “You brought her playpen, right?”
“It’s outside, by the door.” She paused and looked around his black-and-white living room. “This ultramodern furniture looks dangerous.”
He looked at his glass and chrome coffee table, his leather sofa and an entertainment center that had cost more than a semester at college. “It costs too much to be dangerous and besides, Bree is going to be too busy to have time to hurt herself, Payne. The activities list you gave me is two pages long.”
His oldest sister frowned again, but this time she walked toward the door. “Temple will be back in town by dinnertime. She said she’d call you from the airport and then come right over and get Bree.”
“Fine. Give me a call tonight and let me know how Phil’s mother is.”
“I will.” Now Payne looked as if she was about to cry. She loved her in-laws, and the thought of her mother-in-law in the hospital was almost more than Payne could bear, especially now, with her husband in Australia on a business trip. The three Thorpe siblings shared the same dark hair, athletic builds and dark brown eyes, but Payne was the emotional one of the family. And, as the oldest, the bossiest. “Make sure she eats on time.”
“Mummm,” the baby hummed, one chubby hand reaching out to her mother. Payne kissed her three more times and then hurried toward the door. She turned around once more and gave her brother another order. “You will make sure she takes a nap? And that her car seat is fastened correctly? And if she gets sick or anything, you can call her pediatrician. The number’s in the bag.”
“Fine.”
“And tell Temple I’m counting on her.”
“We can take care of Bree,” he assured her, knowing damn well his sisters didn’t actually believe he was thirty-five.
“Don’t forget her photo appointment at four-thirty. If she doesn’t get it done now I’ll have to wait another three months to get in. Oh, and I scheduled it between her nap and her dinner, so make sure you follow the schedule,” was Payne’s parting order.
“Will do.” Stuart shut the door and turned to Bree. “Your mom’s a real pain in the—well, you’ll figure that out when you’re fifteen.” Bree’s big brown eyes stared unblinking at him. “Then you call Uncle Stuart for help, okay?”
“Mmmm,” his niece gurgled and gave his ear another painful twist.
Stuart glanced at the clock on the mantel. It was going to be a long afternoon.
“I JUST DON’T KNOW WHERE the time goes,” Anna Gianetto muttered. She squinted at her watch. “Is it four-thirty or three-thirty?”
“Four-thirty,” Kim told her neighbor.
“Already? Ooh,” she said, fanning her ample bosom with a Providence Photography brochure. “I brought you too many things today.”
“It’s okay. My last appointment isn’t here yet.” Kim adjusted the array of children’s clothes so that the light was right and then, with Anna’s digital camera, took the picture.
“You do good work,” Pat O’Reilly said, patting Kim on the back while Anna retrieved the clothing. “You’re a good girl to do this for us.”
“I don’t mind,” she told them. She knew they were worried about her right now. Everyone was, which was more than a little disconcerting. Kim Cooper never liked being the center of attention.
“Well, you’re a good girl,” Patrick repeated.
“I know.” She winked at him. Her neighbors were like family since she’d known them almost all her life. Their venture into selling things on eBay, an online auction house, provided them with extra spending money and Kim with their company. They made her laugh, though her sister Kate thought Kim was a little bit crazy for hanging out with the elderly neighbors. “It’s a nice change from babies and cats and dogs.”
Patrick, a short, wiry man in his early eighties, shook one gnarled finger at her. “One of these days you’ll have your own babies, Kimmy, don’t you worry.”
“I’m not worried,” she promised. Two years ago, when Jeff broke off their engagement and said he “couldn’t commit,” she’d believed her family’s declarations that life held all sorts of wonderful surprises and all she had to do was stay cheerful. Recently she’d decided that maybe her life was simply going to be one long day after another. The men her sister had tried to fix her up with hadn’t been the least bit interesting—or maybe, to be fair, the men themselves weren’t interested in a nonglamorous version of her twin.
“You should get out more,” Anna said. “You spend too much time by yourself.”
“I will,” she promised, as she did every time her neighbors came to the studio. “I promise.”
“Robbie likes you,” Anna said. “He stops by from that gym of his sometimes, you know. ‘Aunt Anny,’ he says, ‘what am I doin’ wrong that Kim won’t marry me?”’
“I’m not in love with him, Anna.” Kim secretly thought Robbie, a competitive weight lifter, was more in love with his own body than wanting anything to do with hers. Anna, determined to take care of her young neighbor, had a legion of nephews she’d thought were “just right” for Kim.
“You could try harder. Women shouldn’t wait so long to get married these days,” Anna advised. She put the carefully folded clothing into a brown shopping bag. “That’s why they have trouble having babies, now. Their eggs are old. That’s not the way it was in our day. I got pregnant on our honeymoon.”
“Yeah,” Pat said. “Mary and I had our first boy when we were twenty.” He frowned, trying to remember. “Or maybe it was nineteen. My memory sure as heck isn’t what it used to be.”
“It’s too bad that things are different now,”
