First Came Baby. Kris Fletcher

from her old place. Sun catchers in the bay window sent prisms dancing over every surface, adding to the feelings of warmth and welcome.

      “This is better than I expected.” He kicked off his sneakers and flexed his toes. “Oh, man, that feels good. I’ve been wearing those shoes for about thirty-six hours.”

      She wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, I can tell.”

      Her grin told him she was teasing. Which shouldn’t have been as much of a relief as it was.

      She nodded toward the doorway into the next room. “Come on. I’m going to see if I can get Jamie into his crib. Then I’ll give you the grand tour.”

      He kept his eyes firmly glued on the walls and the ceiling as he followed her. For one thing, it gave him a chance to assess the structure. For another, it was safer than watching the sway of her hips as she padded in stocking feet across the plank floors. Or the brush of her hair against her neck. Or the curve of her shoulder where he used to bury his face and inhale her and...

      The floors. Right. Think about the floors. They would need to be sanded and refinished before the place went on the market.

      “You lived here for a while when you were a kid, right?”

      “Right. Just long enough to make it the first home I can remember.”

      As soon as they passed into the kitchen, his heart sank. Someone had obviously painted in here—the walls were a great shade of green, not too minty, just fresh and vibrant—but the cupboards needed a total face-lift, if not a complete gutting. The linoleum on the floor was cracked and peeling. And the window above the sink bore a long strip of...

      “Duct tape?” He glanced from the glass to Kate.

      She seemed embarrassed. “That just cracked last week,” she said. “We had a windstorm. A nasty one. We lost power overnight and had to stay with my mom. When I came back, I found that. I called the glass guys, but as you can imagine, they’ve been pretty busy. I’m on the list for next week.”

      “Cancel them. I can have that fixed in a day or two.” He measured the window with his eyes. “Okay, maybe a little longer, depending on whether the glass is a standard size. But I can definitely do that.”

      “Okay.” She lifted the lid on a slow cooker, releasing a rich aroma he hadn’t smelled in too long.

      “Chili?” he asked.

      “Mmm-hmm. I figured that would be a good one for tonight. If your flight was delayed, it would only get better.” She replaced the lid and kept moving.

      Boone was getting a good hint about which one of them had given Jamie the gene that kept that foot swinging all the time.

      He shook his head and followed her into the next room. It held only a rocking chair—strategically placed in front of a truly massive stone fireplace, complete with rock mantel—a computer desk, a bookshelf, and something that he was pretty sure was a changing table. At least, it looked like the pictures that had come up on the Google searches he’d conducted before Jamie’s birth, when Kate would talk to him about baby equipment. Changing tables and bassinets, bottle brushes and onesies, diaper pails and breast pumps.

      He shuddered. Yeah. He’d probably spent a good ten minutes staring at the pump thing, trying to figure out how it worked and why it wasn’t prohibited as an instrument of torture.

      “When I was little, Nana and Poppy used this as a dining room,” Kate said as she sailed through. “But I don’t have a big table, and it’s kind of silly to have a separate place to eat when it’s just me. So I turned it into a home office. I was going to move Jamie’s crib in here, but then he started cutting this tooth and waking up at night again, and it’s just easier to have him in with me.”

      “Where’s that?”

      She swayed ever so slightly, as if she’d thought about stopping and decided against it at the last second. Too late, he realized how his question could have come off.

      Okay, maybe he shouldn’t have asked right away. But he would be here for six weeks. If he was going to spend time with his son, he needed to know where to find the crib. It was only logical.

      Yeah, you can talk circles around anybody you want, whispered his mother’s voice in the back of his head. But since when did that do anybody any good?

      Kate smiled brightly. “This way,” she said, and led him through a small hallway that held a dresser against one wall, past a door that she said led to the basement, and into a tiny room that was almost completely filled with the bed he remembered so well.

      Now he was the one swaying.

      “It’s small, I know,” she said, gently laying Jamie on the bed and working the zippers on his coat while he made noises that had Boone suspecting the nap was over. “I had to take the doors off the closet to make enough room for the crib. That’s another reason I have to move it. If I wait much longer, he’s going to figure out he’s sleeping in a closet and then he’s going to develop claustrophobia or something.”

      She spoke so casually that Boone would have thought she wasn’t remotely affected by the fact that he was in her room and they were standing mere breaths apart in front of the bed where they had most likely made Jamie.

      Then he caught the pinkness in her cheeks and the way she kept her focus firmly on the zippers. On their squirming, protesting son.

      Probably an excellent strategy.

      * * *

      KATE GAVE THANKS that Jamie seemed happier when he woke up. She doubted the tooth had come through yet, but it seemed things had subsided, at least for the moment. And this way she didn’t have to sit down and nurse him again right away.

      It wasn’t that she was shy about feeding the baby in front of Boone. She’d had plenty of practice during their Skype calls, though that had mostly been in the early days, when Jamie’s schedule could best be described as All Chaos, All The Time. Now things were far more settled, which was just the way she liked it. Easier to predict. Easier to work around.

      But it had felt different when they were in the car. The confined space had made her far too aware of Boone’s presence, his blue eyes darting everywhere, his shoulders filling her little front seat, his breath apparently stealing all the oxygen.

      It hadn’t been the breath itself that got to her, though. More like the way it had hitched a little when she’d adjusted her clothing. And, undoubtedly, flashed him the tiniest bit.

      With Jamie on her hip, she led the way to the stairs. Boone had been very understanding when she’d said there would be separate bedrooms on this visit, but even though she didn’t know him as well as a so-called wife should know her husband, there were some areas in which they were oh-so-intimately acquainted. Boone was no monk. And before he returned to Peru, he had told her that even though their marriage wasn’t what anyone would call typical, he planned to honor his vows while they were separated. There would be no other women while he was gone.

      Since one of the other things she knew about him was that he was a man of his word, she’d had no cause to doubt him. Which meant that she would spend the next six weeks with a very deprived man who was probably feeling the memories as much as she was.

      “Grab your things,” she said when they reached the front door again. “I’ll show you where to drop them.”

      Because yeah. Boone wasn’t the only one who had been deprived. Somehow, when she’d told him to stay here, she had assumed that fatigue and common sense would be enough to guard herself against wayward thoughts and urges.

      Wrong.

      “This banister needs work.” Boone gave it a wiggle.

      “I know. It’s on the list.”

      He made a sound that could have been a groan or a snort. “I’m starting to wonder if six weeks is going to be enough.”

      “Whatever we can’t get