crumpled the paper in his fist. “Which one of you ladies did this?”
His bet was on Matt, who sat a few feet away from him in Stone’s office, making no effort to conceal his smile. “Wouldn’t need to ask if you were paying attention.”
Levi would grin like that, too, were he engaged to Sarah Mcallister, spending nights wrapped in those mile-long legs.
Damn, he was horny. It had been so long. He wouldn’t mind a sweet woman lying under him or on top of him. Just...not Carly.
This morning when he’d dropped Grace off at Carly’s, she’d been wearing a short dress that showed off a pair of wickedly curvy legs he couldn’t have even imagined. Her hair wasn’t pointed in different directions like it had been the first day she’d watched Grace. She’d put some effort into her appearance this morning, maybe to reassure him that he’d made the right choice.
So he had a new nanny, and he wouldn’t kiss her again. Levi didn’t need someone like Carly in his life. She had the power to draw him in and suck him dry when he had so little left to give these days. Right now he needed easy, casual and definitely no more life-altering situations.
The three of them, Stone, Matt and Levi, were having one of many meetings to work toward the achingly slow progress of turning a small county airport into a regional one. Even if all his synapses were optimal, he had nothing. He was a pilot, not an administrator. But when Stone needed help, a friend didn’t say no and live to tell about it. So Levi had come to the meeting and nodded in what he hoped were all the appropriate places. A regional airport would mean the pain of TSA but also more traffic, more flights and, most important of all, more money. He sure as shit could use more money. He could also use at least one decent night’s sleep. Just one, please.
Levi squashed a yawn.
“Hey, I can’t have you up there if you’re not on track,” Stone said. “Fresh as a daisy.”
“No worries, boss.” Levi saluted. “I’ve got this. I was with the air force. You may have heard of it?”
“You’ve got to fix it, bro.” Matt leaned back in his chair and studied Levi.
“What am I supposed to do? Order her to go to sleep? It doesn’t work that way.”
“Hell if I know,” Matt said with a shrug. “But you can’t do this on your own. You know that, right?”
“Why the hell can’t I?” There again, he resented the fact that no one seemed to have the slightest bit of faith in him as a father.
While he told himself that they were all trying to help, when Matt and Sarah or Emily and Stone showed up on the occasional weekend and shoved him out the door for some R & R, he fought it every time. Grace was his deal, his responsibility, and not theirs. And he did not fall down on his responsibilities. Plus, he could handle it, lack of sleep included. He already had enough of the lack of confidence in him from Sandy’s parents and didn’t need his buddies questioning him, too.
“You’re a guy.” Stone slid him a look as if those three little words explained everything.
“Wake up to the twenty-first century. There are single dads doing this every day, and doing it well.” He tore off a piece of paper from the airplane and wadded it up between his fingers.
“Maybe so, but it wouldn’t hurt you to think about settling down now. With a good woman.” This was from Matt. “And I don’t mean the beach babes you normally hang with.”
“What the hell? That’s my favorite kind.”
Matt quirked an eyebrow. “You need a woman with an IQ bigger than her tits.”
Levi scoffed. “This is about what I expected from you whipped fools. Never would have thought I’d see both of you settled down like a couple grandpas.”
“Hey, life is good.” Matt crossed his arms behind his head, his I-got-laid grin full throttle.
Stone gave Matt a censuring look, and Levi took that time to wet his spitball.
“You going to see Lily again?” Matt said. “Who knows. Maybe this could be the one.”
Lily did seem nice, so too bad he didn’t believe in the one. She worked events at the ranch Emily’s family owned, and they’d been introduced a week ago. They’d had coffee at the Drip, talked for a couple hours. Levi was supposed to call her next week to set up dinner. He didn’t expect much. In fact, he’d had more chemistry with Carly while bonding over a baby crib, which said something.
“I’m never getting married. It’s the single life for me.” Levi scoped out his aim and best shot. It was looking like Matt for the win, which was perfect.
Most of his friends wanted him to slow down. And he understood the reputation he had, though much of it had been greatly exaggerated. For instance, it wasn’t true that he’d taken two women home after a bar fight in Yonkers, New York, two years ago. The bar fight part was true, since some jackass had been slapping a girl around. But the rest of it? Levi had never found out how that particular rumor started.
Matt opened his mouth as if to add something when the spitball Levi aimed hit him square in the nose and fell to his lap. “Well, shit.”
The conversation went downhill from there.
A few minutes later, Emily opened the door and caught all three of them in the middle of Spitball War Z.
“Not again.” She shook her head. “You’re cleaning that up.”
“Enough.” When Emily shut the door, Stone threw his last volley, which Levi caught in midair.
After the meeting in which they’d discussed the planes that most needed work, picking up more plane inventory and how they might best accomplish that with little or no money, Levi had a flight lesson scheduled with a retired software CEO from the valley who’d recently purchased his own plane. Before that, he grabbed his phone to check in with Carly.
When he heard Grace crying in the background, it was all he could do not to run out like a jet at Mach speed. “Something wrong?”
“She’s okay. Okay, that’s okay, baby,” Carly said, sounding a little frantic herself.
He got that. Grace’s wailing could even make him break out in a trickle of sweat when she carried on for hours.
“I’ll get her down for a nap now,” Carly said. “Don’t worry. She’s fine.”
He hung up and found a desk to check his email. As anticipated, another one from Frank Lane. God forbid he should pick up his phone even one of the many times Levi had tried to call him. This one suggested that Levi retain a lawyer, because Frank would sue for custody if it came to that. To pile on the guilt, he mentioned that Grace’s grandmother cried for her daily. He hoped Levi felt good about that.
Levi felt like a pile of dog shit.
Of course, he couldn’t afford a lawyer. Levi fired off a response, inviting both of them to visit him in Fortune yet again, but clearly stating that he would never give up his daughter.
Maybe this time the message would get through.
