good for her niece, and, with any luck, it might also be good for Avery as well.
Gabby approached the cluttered office and saw that Trevor was sitting at his desk, his chair pushed sufficiently back to accommodate him and the baby he still had in his arms.
From the looks of it, Cheyenne had fallen asleep in his arms.
Gabby stood there for a moment, taking in the scene and wishing she had a camera to preserve the moment. But then, she probably couldn’t take the shot anyway. The flash might wake up her niece.
“See, I knew you had it in you,” Gabby said out loud to him, although she knew to keep her voice down to a low whisper.
Only maximum control kept Trevor from starting in response to the unexpected sound of her voice.
He’d been too preoccupied, marveling at the peaceful way the infant he was temporarily in charge of had just drifted off to sleep without any encouragement at all. One minute, the baby’s incredibly blue eyes were wide open, taking in everything around her, the next minute, they had drifted shut, the long black lashes seemingly resting like soft, silky, spidery crescents on the slight swell of her small, pink cheeks.
A little bit of envy had tugged at his soul when he’d watched her. If he had to have a kid, why couldn’t he have one like this, he wondered, rather than the wailing banshee he’d got? It was a horrible thing for him to think, but he hadn’t asked for this situation.
Nothing ever seemed to take the easy route in his world, Trevor thought in a moment of resigned frustration. Somehow, according to some vast eternal plan, it stood to reason that the cranky kid would be the one he’d wind up with. Maybe this was appropriate.
Lost in thought like that, lamenting his current state and annoyed with himself because of it, Trevor hadn’t heard Gabby coming up behind him and, barring the control he could exercise over himself, he would have very nearly jumped.
As it was, it took the man several long seconds to gather himself together sufficiently in order to answer her.
“All I did was hold her,” he answered Gabby, turning his swivel chair around so that he faced her. “She did the rest.” He nodded at the baby he was holding.
If this Colton woman was trying to flatter him into thinking that he was up to the task of caring for this daughter who had materialized out of nowhere, it wasn’t going to work. He knew exactly what he was and wasn’t capable of and raising a kid fell into the latter category.
“You’re just being modest,” Gabby told him, dismissing his words with a careless wave of her hand. She’d never met a man who shied away from taking any credit the way this man did. “I bet you’d be a natural if you just gave yourself half a chance.”
Gabby said the words with such conviction, he could only stare at her in absolute wonder. Did she actually believe what she was saying? Or did she just think she could hypnotize him into believing her? Either way, it wasn’t happening.
When he finally had a chance to get a word in edgewise, all he could do was shake his head. And then, curious, he had to ask, “Do your horses ever come back to the stable?”
Because he’d worked the streets as a police officer, he’d come across a lot of people in his time, but he could honestly say that he had never met anyone who just radiated supreme optimism and babbled incessantly about everything eventually being right in the world. Gabriella Colton did just this. Every bit of her seemed hell-bent on brightening her surroundings. For his part, he’d seen too much of life’s underbelly to dip into that well water the boss’s youngest daughter was drinking. People were either good or bad, and given a choice between the two, people usually went with the latter.
He also believed that if anything could go wrong, it did. What that meant in this case was that most likely, Avery’s mother was not going to come back for her. Which, in turn, meant that he was going to be stuck with a baby unless he could figure a way out of this situation.
Right now, he was thinking about giving her up for adoption. She stood a better chance with parents who wanted her and were willing to learn what it took to take care of her. He didn’t have the time or the patience—or the financial fortune—to raise a kid.
It took Gabby a couple of moments to figure out what the man was saying to her.
Rather than take offense at his tone, she smiled and said, “Yes, actually my ‘horses’ do come back to the stable,” she said, using his metaphor. “But then,” she continued, deliberately smiling as widely as she could, “I just take them out for another ride.”
He shook his head. “It figures,” he snorted. The woman was clearly flighty. What did she know about life—or hardship? But then, he supposed there was something almost admirable about her rabid determination to remain so upbeat in the face of everything—including the self-centered, wounded-bear of a father she had. Living in the Colton family was no easy feat.
“You put the kid to bed in my room?” he asked.
Faye Frick, the Colton’s head nanny for the past couple of decades, had unearthed an extra crib for Avery and had it brought to his room.
Faye had a way of looking out for all of them, he recalled fondly, though his expression never changed. He cared about Faye a great deal.
Years ago, the widow had taken it upon herself to raise him when his own father, a former wrangler at Dead River, had dumped him and taken off for parts unknown. He’d been all of fourteen at the time and determined to live on his own, although the state had other ideas about the way he would spend his next four years. He would have been swallowed up by the system if it hadn’t been for Faye.
Consequently, he had always had a soft spot in his heart for the older woman, but it still didn’t mellow his rather abrupt way of interacting with all the other people around him.
“Actually, no, I didn’t put her in your room,” Gabby replied.
His dark brows narrowed as his eyes bored into her. “Where did you put her to bed?” he asked, even as he told himself it really didn’t matter where the kid was sleeping, as long as she wasn’t here, hollering in his ear.
Gabby couldn’t help looking rather pleased with herself for having thought of this. “I thought I’d treat your daughter to a nap in Cheyenne’s crib—in her nursery,” she specified, just in case Trevor didn’t make the connection right away.
The man might be head of security, but she suspected that incidental details like cribs with canopies and specially decked-out nurseries were completely under his radar.
“You didn’t think the one she has was good enough?” he asked.
Trevor’s sharply worded question caught her completely by surprise. He was unnerving her again, she realized, and she’d almost stepped back, away from the scowl she saw looming over his brow.
She had to stop that. Stop avoiding confrontation. She was a Colton and she would be running that center for troubled teens soon enough. They weren’t all going to tiptoe around her just because she was trying to do something decent and charitable for them. They would come on angry and resentful at times—just as this man was doing right now.
If she didn’t learn how to stand up to him and stand up for herself, then she might as well pack it in right now, Gabby reasoned.
