By the end of the week, though, Daisy couldn’t put off leaving any longer. She needed to get back to the real world. Her real world, anyway. As hard as it would be to leave the comfort and warmth of the old brownstone, she had to do so.
Rita and Maria were wonderful about it. Though the three of them had become fast friends, Alex’s sisters understood her need to get back to her own place. To start seriously nesting, just she and the baby.
Alex, on the other hand, didn’t seem to get it.
“I don’t understand,” he said for what had to be the fourth time in the last half hour. “Why are you in such a big hurry to leave?”
“I’ve been here a week, Alex,” Daisy reminded him as she lay the baby on the bed so she could change her diaper.
“And…?” He sat down on the mattress near Angel, then stretched out alongside her, one hand smoothing her soft blond curls.
“And,” Daisy countered, “I have a life. And an apartment—though not on the scale of this one—and it’s time to get back to it.” There. She’d pretty much been rehearsing that little speech all night. And it sounded so convincing even she nearly believed it.
“You can’t have a life here?”
She shot him a look and felt the zing of something wild and rich and hot whip through her bloodstream. Which was another excellent reason for leaving. Honestly, did his eyes actually get darker when he wanted to get his own way? Had he perfected the art of looking both extremely masculine and cuddly at the same time?
Daisy affixed the tapes of her daughter’s diaper, then snapped up the legs of the little pink sleeper that had been a gift from Maria. “Yes, I could have a life here,” Daisy said softly. “It just wouldn’t be mine.”
“Okay,” he said after a long, thoughtful pause. “You win.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Hey,” he said, “you should probably write this down in a journal or something. My family can tell you how rare it is for me to say those words.”
“I appreciate it.”
“I don’t like to lose.”
“You haven’t lost anything,” she reminded him as he sat up and, as if it was second nature to him now, scooped her daughter into his arms and nestled her close to his chest.
Lifting his gaze to hers, Alex said quietly, “Yeah. I have.”
Something like a swarm of bees took flight in the pit of her stomach, and Daisy told herself not to make more of that statement. He was just being nice and didn’t mean at all what her out-of-alignment hormones were hoping he did.
“Alex—”
“So,” he interrupted as he stood up, still holding the baby as if she were a part of him. “You’re all packed?”
Daisy gave him a wry smile. “It didn’t take long. I didn’t arrive with much, remember?”
Reaching out, he smoothed her hair back from her face, then let his fingertips glide down the line of her cheek and sweep under her chin. Tilting her gaze up to his, he looked at her steadily for a long minute, then said, “Always.”
When he and the baby left the room, Daisy plopped onto the mattress. When a woman’s knees turned to water, she reasoned, it was sit down or fall down.
Her apartment building was nothing special. Clean and impersonal, the depressing beige walls of the lobby were decorated only by a line of mailboxes. Daisy stopped off at hers, and Alex was surprised to see how little mail had built up in a week. A couple of bills, an ad circular or two and that was it. Nothing personal. Nothing showing that someone, somewhere, had missed her.
Having grown up in a family large enough to field its own baseball team, he had a hard time imagining being so completely alone. And he didn’t like to think of Daisy being lonely.
Damn it.
As they stepped into the waiting elevator, Alex carried the small suitcase Rita had provided to transport the things Daisy and the baby had accumulated in the last week. He listened to the hum and hiccup of the elevator and frowned as he rested one hand on Daisy’s shoulder in an instinctively protective gesture. The damn thing sounded like it was on its last legs.
He made a mental note to look into it with the building super before he left.
The elevator paused at the third floor, the doors slid open agonizingly slowly and a long-haired guy with ripped jeans and a dirty T-shirt got on. He gave Daisy a long, leering look that had Alex wanting to pummel him. But Daisy paid no attention. As wrapped up as she was in her baby daughter, she probably wouldn’t have noticed if a streaker had walked onto the elevator.
Which worried Alex even more.
Hell, if she paid no attention to her surroundings, how in the hell would she be safe? And if she wasn’t at his sisters’ place, how could he keep her safe? The fact that that really wasn’t his job didn’t seem to register with him.
On the fourth floor, the guy in the torn jeans got off and gave Daisy a last leer as he loped down the hallway.
“Who was that?” Alex asked.
“Huh? What?” She lifted her gaze to his.
“That guy. The one practically drooling on you. Who was he?”
“Oh. I don’t know,” she said as the elevator doors closed and they started up again. “I don’t really know many people in the building. Did he look nice?”
“Did I mention the drool?”
She laughed, and despite the flicker of anger sputtering through him, a part of Alex responded to the sweet, nearly musical sound. “Right,” she said. “Drooling over a woman who just gave birth. Because I’m just so irresistible.”
Damn straight.
But she simply didn’t see her appeal. Those wide blue-green eyes, soft chestnut hair and the fragility that belied her strength did something to a man. Made him want to go find dragons to slay for her. Made him want to do stupid things like throw his coat over a puddle, like good ol’ Sir Walter Raleigh, who’d given every other male in history a bad name.
Daisy touched something in him Alex hadn’t thought about in years. Not since his fiancée had broken their engagement on Valentine’s Day two years ago. Back then, he’d thought he’d had it all. A gorgeous woman to love, a fascinating career and a future with no boundaries except the ones he would set himself.
Then the Barone curse had reared its ugly head.
Well, at least his parents blamed his broken engagement on the curse. Alex had just been blind-sided by a woman who’d gone from red-hot to icy cold in sixty seconds flat. Hell, he still wasn’t sure why Megan had taken off, though he didn’t miss her anymore. When he’d recovered from the hurt and his heart was mended, he’d vowed to steer clear of the “permanent” kind of woman. He wasn’t about to risk being thrashed again.
Not that he’d become a monk or anything. He had plenty of women. More than his fair share, probably. But they were women who were no more interested in happily ever after than he was. They shared some laughs, some sex and then said goodbye, no hard feelings.
Until Daisy Cusak appeared and knocked every logical thought clean out of his head.
Now he was getting in way too deep with a woman who was so much the permanent kind she practically had an imaginary white picket fence surrounding her.
The elevator stopped at the fifth floor, and the doors opened onto a long hall that was just like every other hall in the building. Same beige paint. Same iron-gray industrial carpeting. Same stainless steel light sconces on the wall every five feet. Same sad, narrow window at the end of the hall.
Sunlight streamed in through the bare window, adding brightness to what would otherwise be a dismal scene. But again Daisy paid no heed to anything but the baby in her arms. She took off down the corridor, with Alex just behind her. Each door they passed looked exactly like its neighbor.
Beige.
God, he could really learn to hate that color.
She stopped at the fourth door on the left, and when he came up behind her, Alex had to smile. Naturally, Daisy’s door would be the one distinctive note in an otherwise grim place.
Her door had been painted a bright, glossy sunshine yellow. Affixed to the door was a brass knocker in the shape of a sleeping cat, and engraved on its tail in a flowery script was the name Cusak. In front of the door lay an old-fashioned welcome mat.
“I like your door,” he said simply, though in truth he meant so much more. He liked her attitude. A single mother, she wasn’t worried about being alone, just wanted to get on with her life. Living in a world of beige, she’d refused to be beaten down by it and instead had chosen to fight back with a splash of defiant color. He admired people who stood up to the world and fought for a piece of it on their own terms.
Daisy smiled at him as she dug in her purse one-handed for the key. “I like bright colors,” she said simply, then grinned as she came up with the key like a diver bringing up a piece of prized salvage.
She unlocked the door, threw it open and stepped inside, Alex right behind her.
Instantly, Daisy felt a wild mixture of pleasure and trepidation. She hadn’t known until this moment just how much she’d missed her own little apartment. Everything familiar reached out welcoming arms to her, and she smiled to be back in a place that was so much a part of her.
But she was also a little hesitant about having Alex here. Her home was so very different from what he was probably used to. And it bothered her to realize just how much she wanted him to like it. She’d poured so much of herself into decorating the tiny apartment that if he felt uncomfortable here—or worse, just plain hated it—it would be as if he was rejecting her, too.
She needn’t have worried.
“This is great,” he murmured as he walked past her into the room.
Her gaze followed his, noting everything that he was seeing for the first time. A veritable rain forest of slightly droopy water-starved plants covered nearly every flat surface. Potted daisies and African violets vied for space with ferns and various colored coleus. English ivy trailed from three different pots and had been trained to stretch out leafy arms to embrace framed photographs of faraway cities. Paris. Madrid. Moscow. Athens. Dublin. All of the places Daisy hoped to visit one day.
As Alex did a slow turn to look at everything, Daisy noted the colorful rag rugs dotting the worn gray carpet. She saw the overstuffed furniture and tried not to compare it with the lovely silk pieces she’d left behind at Gina’s place. The Barone apartments were beautiful, but this was home—the nest she’d made for herself and her child—and she was proud of what she’d accomplished here. The warm, soft afghans she’d crocheted herself, the pillows she’d sewn and stuffed, the pale yellow paint she’d applied to the kitchen cabinets…everything here was hers. And for a girl who’d grown up with nothing to call her own, that meant everything.
But it surprised her to realize that she cared what Alex thought of her home. She half held her breath and waited for his reaction. When it came, she wasn’t disappointed.
He looked at her and smiled, with warm approval shining in his eyes. “I like it. It’s…cozy.”
“Thank you.” Pride filled her and she was suddenly ridiculously glad to have him here. “I’ll just go put Angel down in her crib.”
Daisy walked past him, through the small living room, to a tiny hallway leading to the bathroom, her bedroom and the nursery. Angel’s room was the smallest, but here, too, Daisy had left her stamp of originality.
The walls were painted a soft sky blue, and clouds had been sponged on in a pale shade of cream. The effect was like a summer day and showcased the sections of picket fencing she’d nailed to the wall and the flowers she’d painted coming out from behind the slats. The crib was secondhand, given to her by one of the waitresses. But Daisy had painted it white, then made the sheets and comforter and bumper pads in a boldly striped fabric of blues and greens and yellows. A whitewashed rocker sat in one corner and a narrow chest of drawers stood against the far wall. Beside the crib was a small square table boasting a lamp with a Little Bo Peep lampshade.
“You did all of this, didn’t you?”
He’d followed her in, and somehow hearing his voice in her house seemed…right. Which should have worried her. But she was just too darn happy to be home to care about that at the moment.
Laying her sleeping daughter in the crib, Daisy turned around to look at him. “Yes, I did. I like painting and fixing things up.”
“You’re good at it.”
“Thanks.”
He leaned one shoulder against the doorjamb and shoved his hands into his jeans pockets. He looked so darn good standing there that Daisy had to remind herself not to get attached. But she was pretty sure it was too late for those kinds of warnings.
“Makes me wonder what you could do with the BOQ on base.”
“BOQ?”
“Bachelor officers quarters. They’re about as sterile as you can get.”
“You can do wonders with a little paint.”
“Some of us apparently can,” he admitted. His gaze dropped, drifting over her from her head to her toes and then slowly back up again. She felt it as surely as she would have if he’d touched her.
Her skin was humming and her breathing quickened in response to a flash in his eyes. And suddenly Angel’s room was too small. Too enclosed. But then, the way she felt around Alex, Daisy had a feeling that Fenway Park would seem too intimate.
“Thank you for bringing me home,” she said, and swallowed hard. Bracing herself, she slipped past him and out of the room, somehow managing not to shiver when her arm brushed against his chest.
“No problem.”
He followed her into the living room, and when she simply stood there, obviously waiting for him to go, Alex took the hint. He headed for the front door, oddly reluctant to leave. Oh, he knew he should. But then, when did he ever enjoy doing what he was supposed to do?
“Look,” he said, stopping so sharply that she ran into him from behind. He turned quickly, grabbed her shoulders to steady her, and tried to ignore the heat rushing from his hands into her and back again. Damn, there was some kind of powerful connection here. “How about I go get dinner?”
“Alex, you don’t have to do that.”
“I know I don’t have to. I want to.”
“I don’t know….”
“You have to eat, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, so do I.” His fingers tightened on her shoulders. “And I hate eating alone.”
She smiled and shook her head. “You don’t have to eat alone. You have a big family and probably lots of friends who’ve been wondering where you’ve been for the last week.”
He grinned back at her. “You’re prettier than any of them. And frankly, I’d rather look at you over the table.”
She thought about it. He could almost see the wheels turning in her mind, and he wanted to tell her to stop thinking. To just feel. He knew damn well that she was experiencing the same sensations he was when they were together. Wasn’t that worth exploring a little further?
What did they have to lose?
“Come on,” he prompted. “What’dya say?”
She started to shake her head, so he cut her off at the pass. “I’ll make you an offer too good to refuse.”
Daisy laughed. “You sound like a gangster movie now.”
“No machine guns, I promise. Just the best pasta you’ve ever had.”
“Hmm. From which restaurant?”
He gasped dramatically and slapped one hand to his heart. “You’re kidding, right? You think an Italian would go out to buy pasta?”
“No?”
“Boy, have you got a lot to learn.”
“I guess so,” she said, still chuckling.
Her laughter ended, though, when he leaned in and planted a quick, soft kiss at the end of her nose. “And, honey, I’m just the man to teach you.”