Tana slapped the steering wheel.
She’d needed one of Caden’s miracles, and she’d gotten it.
Tana hadn’t had to maneuver herself into the president’s vicinity. He’d come up to her by the dessert buffet, with the athletic director at his elbow. The president had been impressed with her team, not only with their podium count, but with their attitudes as they’d accepted their individual awards.
Tana hadn’t planned on speaking to him in front of the athletic director, but she’d gone for it, anyway. She’d shaken the president’s hand and told him how much she was looking forward to developing more Masterson student-athletes in the next two years, although three would let her see this year’s freshmen through to their senior years.
The president had insisted on three years.
The athletic director had taken the easy route and agreed, although Tana had practically seen him desperately flipping through his internal files, trying to remember if he’d ever bothered getting around to offering the director of aquatics any contract at all. Regardless, if the president wanted three years, the director would have his assistant write up a contract for three and be done with it. On to next year’s football prospects.
Three years. Tana could stay here in Masterson. She could keep all of her friends, especially the man who’d taught his CPR students to try, even when success seemed impossible.
The man who’d held her baby before he’d taken his first breath.
Oh, Caden—she wanted to see him. She wanted to be with him, with Caden and Sterling, both.
At last, she reached the apartment building. The ancient, creaky elevator was too slow, so she started running up the stairs to the third floor. Excitement could only carry her so far. She hadn’t swum since before the championships in March, so she was overheated and out of breath by the second floor. By the time she got to her door, she was walking, carrying her pumps in her hand and her blazer over her arm, but she was home.
Nobody else was. There was no man stretched out on her couch, no man cooking in her kitchen. The baby swing was empty. The bassinet was empty. Her apartment felt like it had before Sterling had been born.
Lonely.
She dropped her shoes and hurried to the baby’s room, but the changing table was empty and the rocking chair deserted. She backtracked to the living room, but she didn’t see any note from Caden. Her bedroom door was cracked. She pushed it open, hoping, even though Caden never spent time in her bedroom, never, she was hoping—
“There you are,” she whispered in relief.
Her bedroom blinds were drawn, making the room as dark as night in the middle of a bright Texas afternoon, but in the daylight from the hall, Tana could see the unmistakable shape of a man stretched out on her bed, sound asleep, with one sculpted arm thrown over his head. Her baby slept on his chest, held in place by Caden’s sure hand, even as he slept.
She willed her silly heart to slow down. Of course they were here. Caden wouldn’t leave her. He’d promised.
She wouldn’t leave, either, for three years. That would be triple the length of her marriage. Double the amount of time she’d wasted with Jerry. No man had stayed in love with her for anywhere close to three years, but Caden wasn’t in love with her. He was her friend. She couldn’t keep a man for three years, but she could keep a friend forever.
She watched him sleep. It didn’t matter how handsome his face was. It didn’t matter how appealing his solid, strong body looked on her bed. She wouldn’t hope that she’d catch a hint of his aftershave on her pillow tonight. This was not about men and women and sex, he’d said, and she needed to keep it that way, so that she could keep him in her life.
She sat on the mattress carefully, her hip by Caden’s. She and Caden would never split up, never divorce, as long as romance never changed their friendship.
He must have come into her bedroom for the darkness, either to help himself or Sterling fall asleep more easily. Probably himself, after a twenty-four-hour shift. He’d done her a huge favor by coming over so early. Friends took care of their friends, and he always took care of her.
She wanted to take care of him. She should carry Sterling out to his bassinet, so Caden wouldn’t be disturbed when the baby got hungry. She slipped her fingers between the warm baby blanket and warm, muscled man, but Caden pulled Sterling more tightly to him, a little reflex. He mumbled in his sleep. “Itsababy.”
Well. Tana didn’t want to wake anybody with a tug of war. The baby looked as peaceful as Caden, so she slipped her hands free again. Now what?
There was nothing she had to do. She hardly knew how to feel, now that the fear that had been hanging over her head was gone. So relieved, so happy, so tired, all three.
It was a little bit like the way she and Caden had felt after Sterling had been born. The three of them had stayed close together in the truck, locked together in an embrace that made her warm every time she remembered it. To feel that again, even for a few minutes…
Gingerly, she lay on her side and put her hand on the baby’s back with Caden’s. She watched Caden’s chest rise and fall, and she breathed in time with him, an easy breath with every stroke, a lazy way to swim.
She was nearly asleep when she realized she was slow-blinking into Caden’s tropical-blue eyes.
“Had a long night?” she whispered.
He nodded slightly, a little rustle on the pillow. “Your day?”
“I’m home. I’m so glad I have this home. I’m so glad I have us, like this.”
But Caden had closed his eyes and drifted back to sleep.
She closed hers and followed his lead.
* * *
Caden checked his watch.
Fifteen minutes until his shift started. Tana was cutting it close this time. The school year had begun, and she was juggling a new schedule this September. Sterling slept through the nights now, so Caden no longer had an excuse to sleep at Tana’s place. But, between the daycare center’s hours and Tana’s coaching schedule, Caden still had plenty of excuses to see her and Sterling. It was babysitting, not dating, friendly meals and laughter, not passionate nights, but it kept them in his life.
Caden sat on the massive chrome bumper of Engine 37 and waited. Sterling sat in his lap, facing out. He loved to see what was going on in the world.
“What’s up, my dude?” Keith was speaking to the baby, of course. Everyone spoke to the baby, and Caden couldn’t blame them. He thought Sterling was one of the most interesting people he knew, too.
Tana rounded the corner of the station, calling to him from down the sidewalk. “I’m sorry I’m late.”
And there was the most interesting woman he would ever know.
She was as athletic and graceful as ever. Her face was still beautiful and her eyes were deep brown, but she had something extra now. Motherhood had put a permanent glow about her, one that came from loving her child and being loved in return.
Sterling was never stingy with letting his mother know how much he loved her. When Tana walked into a room, the baby would kick his feet in enthusiasm, babble or laugh, and generally light up like a Christmas tree.
As Tana got closer, Caden stood Sterling on his thighs, so the baby could bounce in joy. “I feel you, little fella, I feel you. She’s pretty awesome.”
Caden wished he could be so open with his feelings. He couldn’t go striding out of the engine bay to eliminate the distance between them faster, couldn’t scoop Tana off the sidewalk and kiss her hello like she was the woman of his dreams.
Not yet.
“Hello,” she said, smiling as she came right up to him, as if she were going to greet him with a kiss—but she dropped the kiss on top of Sterling’s head, inches from Caden’s mouth.
Caden smelled orange blossoms. “Someone got her laps in today. Must be why she’s in such a good mood.”
“How do you always know?” She scooped up Sterling with an unconscious toss of her hair. More orange blossoms.
It had taken Caden a few weeks to figure it out, once the doctor had given her the go-ahead to resume her swimming. She used a regular shampoo at her apartment, but she showered at the pool with a special chlorine-removing shampoo that smelled like orange blossoms.
He’d first smelled flowers in her hair when he’d given her a ride to the Tipsy Musketeer after the CPR class. He knew now that she’d been swimming the day he’d met her. He knew a lot of things about her now—except the reason she kept him so firmly in the friend zone.
Caden stood to say goodbye. He stepped close to Tana and the baby, so close he could have wrapped them in his arms, his to have and to hold. His gaze dropped to Tana’s lips as they curved into a smile, soft and inviting, and he willed her to meet him halfway. She wanted to, he was certain, because she started to lean toward him, but she caught herself. Again. Always.
Not always, he corrected himself. Just not yet.
Caden brushed his kiss over Sterling’s baby-fine hair instead, because that was all Tana could handle.
“Bye. I’ll miss you.” He said it to Sterling, but his gaze was locked with Tana’s.
“We’ll miss you, too.”
We. Not her, the woman, missing her man. We meant her and her baby. It was nice. It shouldn’t make the space between his shoulder blades tense with irritation.
“I’m dropping him off at your place tomorrow, before Javier’s CPR class, right?” She leaned around Caden to smile at Javier. “You’re not planning to keep us more than an hour, I hope.”
“I want to get home as much as you do,” Javier answered.
It struck Caden that her smile for Javier was different from her smiles for him. Tana and Javier were just friends.
He and Tana were not. They were more, so much more, and tomorrow would mark a year since he’d met the woman of his dreams.
Not yet needed to become now.
“Bring Sterling to the classroom with you,” Caden said. “I’ll meet you there.”
He watched her walk away until she rounded the corner and was out of sight, not even trying to kid himself that he wasn’t checking out the legs that her khaki shorts revealed. It had been a long time, a long, long time, since he’d held her ankle in his hand. The sensation was burned into his mind, all the same.
He turned to Javier. “Ever think to yourself, ‘If I could do it over again, knowing what I know now…’?”
Javier raised a brow in question.
“Do me a favor,” Caden said. “Let me teach that CPR class for you tomorrow night.”
Javier raised both brows. “I don’t think you know what the word favor means.”
Caden breathed in the lingering trace of orange blossoms. “I met a woman named Montana McKenna at that CPR class. I’ve waited a year to have a chance for a do-over.”
* * *
The CPR class was being held in the same building as last year.
Tana waited by the vending machines, pushing the stroller back and forth to keep Sterling asleep. He’d zonked out during their walk across campus, which was exactly why she kept his car seat clipped to the stroller more often than she buckled it into the swim-mobile.
The indefatigable Granny Dee was peering into the car seat. Tana was afraid she was going to poke the baby, so he’d wake up and she could play with him. She wouldn’t really, of course. Probably not.
“Oh, joy. Oh, rapture.” Ruby was the center of attention. “It’s that time of year again. The annual CPR recertification. Nothing says autumn like the scent of alcohol wipes and a plastic dummy.”
Shirley giggled. “Maybe the instructor will be another hot bachelor. Since Tana didn’t want the last one, maybe she’ll have better luck this year.”
“Not want him?” Tana objected. “We’re best friends.”
“That’s not the same thing as wanting a man,” Ruby said. “I have no idea why you haven’t let Caden out of the friend zone, but if it’s not going to happen, then I guess it’s not going to happen. What kind of guy would make you want to hire a sitter and go out for some adult fun?”
Strong arms, but holds babies like they are precious. Whips up the fluffiest scrambled eggs before you even know you’re hungry. Sets your parents straight without being a jerk. Dances like a man who knows what he’s doing. Looks hot in a uniform, coming and going.
In other words, Caden Sterling. The one man she couldn’t have, because then she wouldn’t have him as a friend. It made sense to her, but she’d given up trying to explain to Ruby why she needed a friend more than a lover.
Tana pulled the stroller closer to herself. Granny Dee was trying to wake the baby, darn it.
Ruby bit her lip in consternation. “You’re not bringing the baby to class, are you? That is not going to help you catch a guy. Walking in with a stroller and a diaper bag is kind of a boner-killer.”
“Ruby…please. There are innocent ears here.”
Ruby rolled her eyes. “If Sterling’s first words are boner-killer, then he really will be the most impressive baby ever born.”
“I think she meant my ears,” Granny said. “But I know all the lingo you kids use.”
Behind Tana, a masculine voice addressed the milling group of people. “All right, CPR time. Let’s get started.”
Tana smiled before she turned around, because she knew Caden’s voice. “Hi. How was work?”
“I’m still working. There’s been a change in plans. I’m teaching this class.”
“Oh.” Sterling was sleeping like an angel. She doubted it would last for another full hour, though. “Then I’m so sorry, but my childcare arrangements just fell through. I’ll have to bring my baby to class. If he cries, I’ll just slip out. I’ll still be able to pass the test, if you let me take it.”
“You have to do what you have to do, Coach. We’ll work it out.”
“I’m getting that déjà vu feeling.”
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”
Ruby huffed past them, rolling her eyes. “You two need to get a room. Please, please, get a room. I can’t take another year of this.”
Ruby held the door open and gestured for Caden to go in, so he could set the dummies down at the front of the classroom. Tana followed, pretending not to admire the fit of a firefighter’s navy uniform slacks, the way she and Ruby had at a grocery store last Halloween.
Granny followed them all. She kept her voice pitched just under the squeak of the stroller wheels as she poked Tana with one finger. “I cannot believe you’re keeping that hunk of bacon in the friend zone.”
* * *
Tana watched Caden as he tossed his bags into the back of his truck.
“I can drive you over to the Tipsy Musketeer,” he said.
Except for the fainting, this night was going like it had last year.
Tana played along. “We have someone new with us this time, but I let Granny Dee give him a bottle while you were testing the rest of us. He should be good for a little while.”
Caden put the stroller in the truck bed while Tana buckled Sterling’s car seat in the center of the leather bench where he’d been born.
They drove toward the Musketeer in silence, which wasn’t how it had been the year before. “If we’re reliving last year, then I think you should be telling me to keep drinking until I have to pee.”
Caden smiled briefly as they stopped at the one traffic light between campus and the pub. He put his hand on Sterling’s chest and gave him a wiggle. “How’re you doing there, little fella?”
Sterling looked at him with a perfectly serious expression and answered by blowing some slobbery bubbles. Satisfied with that communication, he went back to work on getting a giraffe-shaped teether into his mouth.
Caden parked across the street from the pub. It was the same spot he’d parked in one year ago, the exact spot where he’d congratulated her on her pregnancy. Babies are a good thing.
She hadn’t expected to feel emotional about a parking spot. “Why are we doing everything the same tonight?”
“When I look back, it was one of the most significant nights of my life. I met you. But if I could go back and do it again, I would do it differently.”
“You would?” She sounded a little breathless, but those three little words, I met you, had sounded almost as significant as the romantic three little words that changed lives. They’d changed hers when other men had said them, and not for the better. It was irrational for her to wish she could hear them from this man.
“Last year, things were going well up to this point,” he said. “So far, so good, right?”
On the other hand, men could be so dense. Even Caden.
“Maybe good for you. I’d fainted.”
“Which is how I found out you were pregnant. If I hadn’t known, I would have asked you out after class.”
“What?” But she’d heard him.
“You wouldn’t have given me your number or let me buy you a drink, but I wouldn’t have known why. It would have hurt my pride. I might have done something stupid, like giving up on getting to know you. Or I might have tried even harder to get you to go out with me, and you would have shut me down, and that would have been the end of us.”
The end of us. It sounded frightening, a loss she didn’t want to contemplate.
Caden turned off the truck and sat back. “I’m kind of glad you fainted, because here we are.”
“That’s…something I’ve never thought about. I didn’t know you’d been planning to ask me out.”
He jiggled the giraffe in Sterling’s mouth affectionately, then shifted in his seat to face her full-on. “The first time I saw you, you had your back to me. That’s my defense for immediately checking out your legs. I couldn’t see your personality or even your face, but you had and still have the sexiest legs I’ve ever seen, bar none.”
Tana gaped at him. He thought her legs were sexy? She walked on them all the time around him—well, duh—but he never checked them out, not that she’d noticed.
“I looked away to talk to someone. When I looked back, you were facing me with this expression on your face like…” He shook his head. “I don’t know. Like you were looking to see if I was who you thought I was? The bottom line is that I saw your serious brown eyes, and I thought, ‘I have got to get her name and number. I need to know her.’ Simple as that.”
Tana looked away, out the windshield. This was really dangerous. He was saying things she wouldn’t be able to forget, things that would forever color their relationship differently. She should stop him, say something bright and friendly and change the subject, but much too much of her was deeply flattered, drinking this in like it was what she’d always wanted to hear.
“You were talking to Granny Dee,” she said. “I was thinking that you were very respectful and kind to her.”
“That was it? I’ve wondered about it for a year. I moved your certificate to the bottom of the stack, so you’d be the last to leave and I could ask you out, did you know that?”
“But then I told you I was pregnant, so that threw a wet blanket on everything.”
“No, it didn’t.” He touched her face.
He never touched her face. They sat next to each other a lot. They bumped shoulders to get each other’s attention, and they put the baby in each other’s arms when he was sleeping or screaming, but she’d never run her fingertips over Caden’s cheekbone or under his jaw, like he was doing to her now, tracing the lines of her face.
“By the time you told me, I’d already seen how smart you were, how much other people liked and respected you. I’d already seen you force a CPR dummy to come back to life with a vengeance. You told me you were a lifeguard and the new director of aquatics, and I thought you were so interesting. I liked you. Being pregnant didn’t change any of that.”
He put his hand back on the steering wheel and looked toward the pub. His profile was serious in the town’s lights. “But this is the point I wish I could do over, Tana. Right here, this moment. This is when I watched you walk across the street and disappear inside that pub.”
“Nothing bad happened to me.”
“I was so sure you were starting a family with another man, that there was a boyfriend who was about to hear the biggest news of his life, some guy in Houston.”
Tana caught her breath.
“I know,” he said, as if she’d argued. “There was no man, but I was certain you had someone. A boyfriend, a lover. You wore no ring, so I assumed there was no fiancé or husband, but there would be, if the man had any kind of a brain. Now I know it was your parents that you were going to tell in person, in Houston.”
That much was true. She hadn’t really lied about that. She hadn’t really lied about anything. Ruby had misunderstood her analogy of Jerry being no more involved than a sperm donor, and Tana hadn’t said anything to correct her. Everything had snowballed from there. She hadn’t known one could make a snowball out of things that were never said, but it was huge, and it was chilling.
Caden shook a plush rattle toy for Sterling, then waited patiently as the baby concentrated on grabbing it. “Aren’t you going to ask me what I would do differently, if I had it to do over again?”
She really shouldn’t.
But she did. “What would you do differently?”
“I was the only person who knew you were pregnant. I told you that you should have your friends toast you with cranberry juice, remember?”
She nodded.
“If I had it to do over again, I would get out of this truck and go drink a glass of cranberry juice with you.”
It sounded so simple, yet he sounded so remorseful.
“Since it was a secret, I would catch your eye and raise the juice in a silent toast. You’d know what I meant. If I could, I’d go back and add a little celebration to your night, because you had something to celebrate, but no one else to celebrate it with.”
The expression on his face was one she’d never seen before, not in an entire year. Regret? Sorrow.
She didn’t fight the impulse to smooth her thumb over the tiny wrinkles at the corner of his eye, although there were no tears for her to wipe away. He closed his eyes as she touched him in this new way.
“It’s a lovely thought, my friend, but please don’t be so sad. You barely knew me.”
He opened his eyes, and she pulled her hand back at the intensity she saw burning in them.
“Imagine it, Tana. If I’d chosen that path a year ago, your friends would have become my friends so much sooner. We would have tailgated together at some football games last fall. You would have made friends with the guys at the firehouse in January instead of May, because I would have asked you to be on our team for the station’s pancake fundraiser. I would have volunteered to be the medic at every one of your swim meets this season. All of that could have happened, even if you were married and pregnant with your third baby. Our lives would have been better, if we’d been friends.”
Friendship. He was talking about friendship. Sexy legs and serious eyes were thrilling, but thrills didn’t last. The baby chewing on a giraffe in between them was more important than the way her heart had pounded as Caden had traced her face. Friendship gave her child stability. A passionate night with Caden would disrupt everything.
The dangerous part of her wanted it, anyway.
“Instead, since I couldn’t have you the way I wanted to have you, I felt so sorry for myself that I pulled out of this parking spot and drove home. I ended up not having you in my life at all.”
“Everything’s good. We are friends now.”
“Yes. But if I’d walked into that pub a year ago, we would have already been friends when we waltzed to that Christmas carol at Thanksgiving. I would have known you well enough to believe you when you said you couldn’t work things out with a sperm donor, instead of assuming you were just really pissed off with someone in Houston. I could have talked with you later, maybe caught lunch at the diner with you one day, to try to understand why you’d chosen to have a baby on your own.”
He cupped her face fully. No light touch, this. His hand was strong, his palm was warm, the same hand that had taken her pulse on a pool deck, the same palm that had caught her newborn’s kicking foot. “And then, Tana…then I would have asked you out on that date, because I’ve caught you looking at me the way I look at you. We would have been dating for four months before the baby came. You would never have wondered who would be your ride home from the ER. You would never have cried over not having a Lamaze coach—”
“Caden. Caden.”
“And I would not have had to wait an entire year to kiss you.”
Caden pulled her close and claimed her with a kiss that held nothing back. He reached for her with his other hand, too, cupping the back of her head, tumbling her hair forward, stirring up the scent of orange blossoms.
Tana grabbed a fistful of his shirt at his shoulder. She kissed him with all the pent-up passion she’d kept so carefully hidden, but not because he was the type of man who could inspire her to hire a sitter for some adult time. Not because he was a handsome man with a firm backside and a confident, masculine walk. Not because he was the man with the bare chest and low-slung jeans in the golden light of sunset.
She kissed him because he was her everything.
The baby between them kicked his feet and babbled “da-da-da-da-da” in delight.