it?
“What does a car like that mean to you?” she asked the cab driver, just in case she had it wrong.
“That you can have any girl you want,” he muttered.
Bingo.
“If he opens her up, I’m not going to be able to keep up with him,” the cabbie warned.
“If he opens her up, I’m going to kill him,” she said. “He has a baby in there.” My baby. Of course, Jake was not officially her baby. Unofficially he had won her heart and soul from the first gurgle. Now, post-Brent, she had decided Jake might be the only baby she ever had.
Emotion could capsize her unexpectedly since Brent had hit her with his announcement, and she felt it claw at her throat now, defended against it by telling herself that sweet little baby boy was probably going to be lethally charming someday, just like his uncle.
Twice, in the space of five minutes, steady, dependable Dannie had thought of killing people.
That’s what heartbreak did: turned normal, reliable people into bitter survivors, turned them into what they least wanted to be. In fact, it seemed to her, her recent tragedy had the potential to turn her into her parents, who had spent their entire married lives trying to kill each other.
Figuratively. Mostly.
“You shouldn’t say you’re going to kill people,” Susie told her, a confirmation of what Dannie already knew. Susie was hugging the new teddy bear that had arrived in her uncle’s office along with the car seat. The teddy bear did not seem to have softened the child’s view of her uncle at all.
In Susie’s view, Uncle Josh was the villain who had torn her mother away from her. A teddy bear was not going to fix that.
A lesson Uncle Josh no doubt needed to learn! You could not buy back affection.
The car seat and the teddy bear had arrived within minutes of a quiet phone call. Dannie had heard him giving instructions to have a baby crib set up at his apartment. In the guest room with the Jacuzzi. Which begged the question not only how many guest rooms were there, but why did you need a guest room with a Jacuzzi?
Obviously, for the same reason you needed a car like that. Entertaining.
Still, she had gotten the message. He spoke; people jumped.
And he’d better not even think of trying that with her! She might have been the kind of person who jumped before Brent’s betrayal. She was no longer!
They arrived at a condominium complex not far from his office building, and Dannie tried very hard not to be awed, even though a guest room with a Jacuzzi should have given her ample time to prepare herself for something spectacular.
She was awed, anyway. Even though Melanie and Ryan certainly had no financial difficulties, she knew she was now moving in an entirely different league.
The high-rise building appeared to be constructed of white marble, glass and water. The landscaping in front of the main door was exquisite: lush grass, exotic flowers, a black onyx fountain shooting up pillars of gurgling foam.
She was fumbling with her wallet when Joshua appeared at the driver’s window, baby already on his hip, and paid the driver. He juggled the baby so he could open the door for her. There was no sense noticing his growing comfort with the baby!
Instead, she focused on the fact that if the great Joshua Cole was aware he had parked the horrible yellow thing in a clearly marked no-parking zone, it didn’t concern him.
But she’d do well to remember that: rules were for others.
A doorman came out of the building to move the car almost instantly. Another unloaded her luggage from the trunk of the cab.
Joshua greeted both men by name, with a sincere warmth that surprised her. And then he was leading her through a lobby that reminded her of the one and only five-star hotel she had ever stayed at. The lobby had soaring ceilings, deep carpets over marble tile, distressed leather furniture.
For all that, why did it feel as if the most beautiful thing in the room was that self-assured man carrying a baby, his strength easy, his manner unforced?
Few men, in Dannie’s experience, were really comfortable with children. Brent had claimed to like them, but she had noticed he had that condescending, overly enthusiastic way of being around them that children hated.
She hoped it was a sign of healing that she had remembered this flaw in her perfect man!
It was a strange irony that, while Joshua Cole had not made any claims about liking children and in fact radiated unapologetic discomfort around them, he was carrying that baby on his hip as if it was the most natural thing in the world to be doing.
Joshua chose that moment to glance down at the bundle in his arms. She caught his look of unguarded tenderness and felt her throat close. Had she just caught a glimpse of something so real about him that it made her question every other judgment she had made?
What if the World’s Sexiest Bachelor was a lie? What if the sports car and clothes and office were just a role he’d assumed? What if he was really a man who had been born to be a daddy?
Danger zone, she told herself. What was wrong with her? She had just been terribly disappointed by one man! Why would she be reading such qualities into another that she barely knew?
Besides, there was no doubt exactly why men like Joshua Cole were so successful with women. They had charm down to a science.
It made it so easy to place them in the center of a fantasy, it was so easy to give them a starring role in a dream that she had to convince herself she did not believe in anymore.
Enough of fantasies, she told herself. She had spent the entire year Brent was away building a fantasy around his stupid cards and e-mails, reading into them growing love, when in fact his love had been diminishing. She was a woman pathetic enough to have spent her entire meager savings on a wedding dress on the basis of a vague promise.
Joshua went to a door off the bank of elevators and inserted a key.
The door glided open, and Dannie tried not to gawk at the unbelievable decadence of a private glass elevator. How was a girl supposed to give up on fantasy in a world where fantasy became reality?
The glass-encased elevator eased silently upward, and even Susie forgot to be mad at her uncle and squealed with delight as they glided smoothly higher and higher, the view becoming more panoramic by the second.
The problem with elevators, especially for a woman trying desperately to regain control of suddenly undisciplined thoughts, of her fantasies, was that everything was too close in them. She could smell the tantalizing aroma of Joshua, expensive cologne, mixed with soap. His shoulder, enormously broad under the exquisite tailoring of his suit jacket, brushed hers as he turned to let the baby see the view, and she felt a shiver of animal awareness so strong that it shook her to the core.
The reality of being in this elevator with a real man made her aware that for a year Brent had not been real at all, but a faraway dream that she could make into anything she wanted him to be.
Had she ever been this aware of Brent? So aware that
