Babes in Arms
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Kathleen O'Brien
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CHAPTER ONE
FOR ONE CONFUSED and horrible split second when he first woke up that Monday morning, Griffin Cahill felt—
He couldn’t even say it. He stuffed his aching head under his silk-covered pillow to make the word go away. But there it was, darting around his brain like a sniper, eluding every attempt to capture and evict.
Old.
Griffin Cahill felt old.
It didn’t last long, of course. Because it was ridiculous. Griffin was only thirty-four. He was mystifyingly healthy, considering how little attention he paid the issue. He was active and fit and, by some lucky combination of mix-and-match genes, the first Cahill since the Mayflower who didn’t look like a horse.
Definitely not old.
The sniper receded.
Still, if he wasn’t old, Griffin wondered as he emerged from the pillow and slid his feet over the edge of the bed, why did he ache all over? He hadn’t played tennis yesterday. He hadn’t been out fishing yet this year. He hadn’t—
And then he remembered. Miranda. He was achy because he’d spent the night with Marvelous Miranda, who got her blue eyes from Bausch & Lomb, her blond hair from L’Oréal, and her high spirits from a bottle of Chivas Regal. But she got her body, and her flair for using it creatively, straight from God.
Griffin ran his fingers through his tangled hair. That proved it, then. Women like Miranda damn sure didn’t think he was old. They thought he was a state-of-the-art roller coaster, and one ride was never enough.
So there. Goodbye, sniper. And good riddance.
Griffin’s housekeeper didn’t come until noon on Mondays, so Griffin gathered the sheets off the bed and dropped them into the laundry chute himself. He disliked an unmade bed—especially if it still held a whiff of last night’s perfume.
As he always did, he plotted his day while he showered. Coffee and toast, a couple of hours in the darkroom, two interviews with candidates for this year’s photography scholarship. Then, at five, that damn city council meeting.
Griffin made a mental note. Never, ever again allow anyone to talk him into sitting on the city council. That was probably why he’d woken up feeling so rotten this morning. The politics of Firefly Glen could make a grumpy old man out of Peter Pan himself.
If they weren’t planning to vote on Heather Delaney’s rezoning request today, he might have skipped the meeting altogether. Heather needed his vote, though of course she hadn’t asked him for help. Griffin was well aware that she’d cut out her tongue with a pair of nail scissors before she’d ask him for anything.
Still, he’d go, and he’d vote for her rezoning. Not to do Heather a favor, but merely because it was fair.
He had finished the Glen Gazette and started on the Wall Street Journal when the doorbell rang. He was tempted not to answer. It might be Miranda, who had a tendency to think the Griffin Cahill amusement park was open twenty-four hours a day, which it wasn’t.
But he put his mug on the butcher-block table and crossed his sunny, two-story great room to reach the door. He knew how to get rid of Miranda, or any other uninvited female. And he knew how to do it with a smile.
He opened the door, letting his eyes and his body language send the required rebuff—what a shame, it would have been delightful, but this simply isn’t a good time.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t Miranda. It was someone else, someone who didn’t give a damn about Griffin’s body language. It was Griffin’s little brother, Jared.
And in his arms Jared was holding his twin eight-month-old sons, Stewart and Robert.
Jared lived on Long Island. Hours away. Griffin hadn’t seen him in months. Jared was a corporate lawyer, a hotshot. He hated small towns, Firefly Glen in particular. And where was Katie, Jared’s wife—the one who was officially in charge of those squirming creatures?
For several seconds, Griffin was too surprised to do anything but stare at the babies stupidly. They stared back, frowning in openmouthed curiosity at this man they probably didn’t recognize, though he had met them several times, and each time had brought ridiculously expensive gifts.
“Jared?” Griffin wasn’t doing very well verbally, either. He squinted into the spring sun, trying to read his brother’s face. “What— Is anything wrong?”
“No. Well, yes.” Jared shifted the boys higher on his arms, to balance the burden. “Damn it, Griff. Let me in.”
Reluctantly Griffin moved out of the doorway, and Jared lurched in, bumping clumsily into everything with the huge blue-plaid plastic cases he had slung over each shoulder.
Griffin’s early detection radar was sending out a signal. This didn’t look right. He mustered a smile for the boys, who were starting to get on his nerves. They kept staring with those wide, unblinking eyes. And their little pink pudgy lips were drooling something suspiciously milky in hue.
He managed not to make a sound when Jared jostled the Chihuly bowl that stood on a pedestal by the door. The large green glass rocked precariously. Griffin’s heart waited politely, watching Jared steady the bowl with one hip, before resuming its regular beat.
Jared didn’t even look alarmed, much less apologetic. He merely scowled at the museum-quality piece and shook his head. “That will have to go.”
“Really?” Griffin raised his eyebrows. “And why is that?”
“Because glass is dangerous.” Jared scanned the large, simple room with a critical eye. “God, Griffin, why do you have so much glass around here?”
“I like it.” Griffin let his voice get chilly. “Frankly, I hadn’t noticed it being particularly dangerous. Most of the time it just sits there.”
“Well, when you have kids around, it can be lethal.”
“Perhaps. But you may remember I don’t have children.”
Griffin saw the discomfort dig furrows into his brother’s face. Jared was obviously miserable. Griffin glanced at the boys, at their overflowing bags of supplies. Then he glanced back at Jared.
“Or do I?” he asked mildly.
Jared sighed, a heavy, helpless sound that came from the depths of his diaphragm. He plopped down onto the large beige sectional sofa, his boys still safely in each arm.
“I’m sorry, Griff,” he said. “If there were any other way. If there were anyone else we could ask…” He groaned, obviously reading Griffin’s face correctly. “It’s only for a few weeks, Griffin. I’ll be back in just over three weeks.”
Three weeks? Jared must be out of his mind. Griffin subdued a weird impulse to start talking very loudly and very fast, using his hands, like an Italian grandmother, like someone in a panic. Nonsense. Griffin never panicked. Not even at a moment like this.
“There must be someone else, Jared,” he said slowly and rationally. “Where’s Katie?”
“With her mother in Toledo. Remember her mother is having a hysterectomy? She’ll be there for at least three weeks. She just can’t handle the boys and her mom, too, so I promised I’d keep them while she was gone.”
“If you promised, why are you—”
“I can’t help it.” One of the boys had grabbed Jared’s nose, so his answer had a strangely adenoidal quality. “I’ve got to go to London. Tomorrow. Remember how we thought the Bailey merger had fallen through? No, of course you don’t, I probably never even mentioned it. It’s on again, and I have to be there for the negotiations.”
“But why does it have to be you? Can’t you send—”
“No. I can’t send anyone. I have to be there, or it won’t happen. It’s worth millions, Griff. I have to be there.”
Jared was beginning to sound a little desperate. Even worse, his tension seemed to communicate itself to the children. One of the babies…the one in red. Griffin couldn’t ever remember which one wore red. Robert, maybe? Anyway, one of the boys screwed up his face, as if preparing to let loose a sympathetic wail.
Griffin began mentally scanning the possibilities. There had to be a way to fix this. He had learned in his early years as a photographer that even the trickiest problems had answers, if you just kept trying new ideas. Some small adjustment to an f-stop or the lighting, or the angle or the lens—and suddenly the “impossible” picture was yours for the taking.
“Didn’t you have a nanny? An au pair or something?”
“Just for the first six months. She’s with a different family now. Griff, relax. It won’t be so hard. They’re easy kids, really—”
“Doesn’t Katie have a sister? I thought I remembered a sister.”
Jared frowned at him. “Katie’s an only child.”
“Then who do you use for a baby-sitter the rest of the time?”
“Teenagers. That’s fine for an hour here and there, but Katie would kill me if I left the boys with someone like that for three weeks.” Jared leaned his cheek against the downy head of one of the babies. “She’s going to kill me anyhow. She’s always saying I spend too much time at work. This is just going to prove it.”
He lifted his head, and Griffin was shocked by the raw desperation he saw in his brother’s face. “Griffin, you’ve got to help me. You’re the only person she’ll trust. If it’s anyone else, she’ll really never forgive me.”
Griffin tilted his head. “Come on, Jared. Katie doesn’t even like me.”
“Yes, she does. Well, she trusts you. You knew we’d named you as guardian in our wills. And besides, she’s said several times that you’d make a great father.”
Griffin merely raised one brow skeptically and waited. His little brother wasn’t much of a liar.
“Well, okay, she said something kind of like that. She said it was too bad you were so allergic to commitment because fatherhood would probably be the saving of you.” Jared looked sheepish. “But she thinks you’re smart, and she knows you’re reliable—except with women, of course.”
Griffin half smiled. “Of course.”
“And most important, she knows you’d never let anything bad happen to your own nephews, your own flesh and blood.” Jared’s voice deepened. “Griffin, you’ve got to do this. You’ve got to help me.”
Griffin knew that look, that sad wrinkling of the high, Cahill brow, that twitch under one eye, that pulse just above the jaw. It was the “don’t tell Mother I got suspended for fighting” look, the “don’t tell Dad I wrecked the car” look. It was the “you’re my big brother, and you can fix anything” look. Griffin was helpless against it. He always had been.
“Damn it, Jared,” he said softly. “You’re a serious pain in the ass, did you know that?”
But apparently Jared knew Griffin’s looks, too. He grinned, obviously aware that he had won. “I knew it! I knew you’d say yes.”
“I’ll bet you did,” Griffin said cynically. “I’ll bet your car is filled with the tacky, plastic paraphernalia of parenthood. Toys and bottles and—” he closed his eyes “—and a hundred other items too personal to imagine.”
“Diapers, bro. Zillions of ’em. I even brought you one of those diaper pail deodorizers.”
“How thoughtful,” Griffin drawled, trying not to imagine the situations that would make such an item necessary. “You know, Jared, maybe this isn’t such—”
But Jared was already on his feet. He handed one of the babies to Griffin—the one in red. Was it Robert? Griffin dimly suspected that he ought to find out before Jared drove away.
Jared took the other one—the one in blue—with him to the car. Griffin eyed his red-clad baby much as he might watch a ticking bomb, waiting for him to start bawling because Daddy had disappeared.
But Robert—or was it Stewart?—showed no signs of distress. He studied his uncle for a few seconds, then, apparently finding him boring, transferred his gaze to Griffin’s crisply laundered shirt. He reached out a handful of fat fingers and, as slowly and carefully as the arm of an orbiting space shuttle might lock around a satellite, took hold of Griffin’s top button.
The baby crowed softly, pleased at the success, his damp, toothless mouth beaming. Then, without warning and certainly without permission, he bent his wet face into Griffin’s chest and began trying to gum the button right off the shirt.
Oh, great. It didn’t take a Ph.D. in parenting to know that little hard plastic discs, like buttons, could be swallowed and were therefore dangerous. Like bleach and stairs and light sockets. And sea-green Chihuly art glass.
“I’m afraid not, champ,” Griffin said softly, prying the button free before any damage could be done. Any damage to the baby, anyhow. His once-pristine shirt was soggy with little bubbles of milk that would undoubtedly dry into nasty, smelly stains.
Jared kept bustling back and forth, bringing in more blue plastic stuff than one car should have been able to hold. A portable playpen, two car seats, five boxes of diapers, a diaper pail, a crate of baby food, dozens of plastic bottles, a mechanical swing, a small plastic circle on wheels that Griffin couldn’t figure out to save his life, and more.
And more and more and more. Griffin watched, stupefied, as his sleek, minimalist decor became as junky and cluttered as a carnival midway. God—could it possibly take this much gear to sustain two babies for three weeks? He had photographed whole armies setting out to war with less artillery than this.
“Don’t look so shell-shocked.” Jared, who was still holding one of his sons while deftly erecting the playpen with one hand and one knee, looked over at Griffin with a smile that struck Griffin as completely patronizing. “You’ll get used to it. And maybe you can get someone to help you. Do any of your girlfriends have a secret hankering to be a mommy?”
“I certainly hope not.” Griffin shuddered. “It would mean that my screening process was profoundly flawed.”
Jared laughed. “You’ll never change, will you, Griff?”
“Well, I’m definitely going to have to change my shirt.”
“Don’t bother. Not until they’re asleep for the night, anyhow.”
With that ominous warning, Jared finished with the playpen, then began digging one-handed through an overstuffed suitcase. He emerged with a pair of small stuffed toys. He handed one to the baby he still held, and then brought the other over to Griffin.
With a bubbling cry of obvious delight, Griffin’s baby lurched eagerly toward the toy, a multicolored caterpillar whose eyes had clearly been removed. Griffin had to react quickly to hang on to the boy.
“Say hello to Mr. Giggles, Stewart,” Jared said, waving the rather nasty toy in front of his son’s face.
Ahh. Stewart, then, Griffin noted carefully. This one, the one in red, was Stewart.
Stewart clasped the toy blissfully toward his face, then immediately and, Griffin felt sure, deliberately, dropped it on the floor.
Patiently Griffin retrieved the caterpillar and handed it back to the boy.
“Yes, Stewart,” he said. “Say hello to Mr. Giggles.” He looked impassively over the boy’s head at the shambles that once had been his elegant home. “And goodbye to life as we know it.”
HEATHER DELANEY was so happy it almost frightened her.
As she stood by the fanciful front door to Spring House, she touched her fingers softly to the exquisite cut-glass doorknob. Then she ran them slowly along the cool edge of the beveled rainbow glass.
So lovely. And it all belonged to her. Well, to her and the Firefly Glen Mountain Savings and Trust Company.
She closed her eyes, absorbing through her other senses the happy camaraderie of the workers around her, half-a-dozen men who were whistling, wallpapering, painting, sanding, hammering and laughing.
They thought they were doing an ordinary remodeling job, just a routine cut-and-paste, as the architect had called it. They had no idea they were putting the finishing touches on a dream.
A deep thrill beat fast in her chest, and she took a long breath to slow its pace. But she couldn’t help herself. She loved Spring House, this pink-and-white gingerbread Victorian mansion that was one of the Glen’s four premiere “season” houses. Really loved it. She always had. She had dreamed of living here, working here, creating a family here, as long as she could remember.
And now, or at least as soon as the city council put their official seal of approval on her zoning variance this afternoon, the dream would come true. The remodeling was almost complete. Next Monday, Tuesday at the latest, she would be able to close up her little office over on Main Street and move her fledgling obstetrical practice here, to the first floor of Spring House.
She rested her forehead against the glass of the door, marveling that she had actually had the courage—or was it the foolishness?—to invest so much, both emotionally and financially, in one grand, outrageous, beautiful plan.
One dream.
Because frankly her track record with dreams was fairly abysmal.
She was thirty-three years old, and in all those years she had allowed herself to want—really, truly, desperately want—only three things. She had wanted to know her mother, who had died when she was three. Much later, she had wanted her father to win his war with cancer. And she had wanted Griffin Cahill to love her.
Yep. Heather Delaney was batting zero in the dream department.
Until today.
“Heather, have you fallen into a trance? We’re going to be late. And where’s your umbrella? It’s raining buckets out there.”
Heather smiled at Mary Brady, her bossy young receptionist and good friend. Mary was five years younger than Heather, but she had raised four brothers, and she hadn’t been on the job ten minutes before she had begun running Heather’s life, too.
“Maybe I have fallen into a trance,” Heather said softly, transferring her gaze to the window, where she could see one of the dedicated workers kneeling in the mud, trying to get the last of the pansies planted before the rain drove him inside.
“Oh, yeah? Well, snap out of it.”
Heather didn’t respond. She touched the fine Irish lace curtain that fell like a soft white mist alongside the window. She could hardly bring herself to leave. She wanted to be here to see every minute of the transformation.
She took a deep breath, and the air was full of wonderful smells—wood chips and fresh paint and clean, sweet rain.
“I keep thinking I’m going to wake up and discover that none of this is really happening.”
Mary had dug a second umbrella out of the hall stand, and she nudged it against the back of Heather’s hand.
“Oh, it’s happening all right. But it’s going to be happening without you if you don’t hurry. It’s ten to five already.”
Heather took the umbrella and began to open it. Mary was right. She needed to be there when the council took up her request. They might have questions.
With a low cry, Mary leaped to stop her. “Good grief, Doc, what’s the matter with you? Do you want to jinx this vote before we ever get to city hall?”
Heather shook her head. “Mary, you know I don’t believe in—”
“Well, I do. We’ve already got the rain. That’s bad luck right there. You don’t want to go opening any umbrellas indoors, not on a day as important as this.”
Heather began to protest again, but somewhere in the back rooms of Spring House a loud bang sounded. A worker cursed, and then something shattered, something heavy and glass and probably dreadfully expensive.
Heather winced, thinking of her tight budget, but a look of true horror spread across Mary Brady’s tanned and lovely face.
“Oh, no,” she said, wide-eyed. “You don’t think that was a mirror, do you?”
“Mary,” Heather said sternly. “Stop pretending you’re some old-country Irish fishwife. You know perfectly well that superstitions are pure nonsense. The city council has already given tentative approval to this zoning variance. Mayor Millner himself told me to go ahead with the construction. Nothing can happen now to spoil things. Not at this late date. Not even a broken mirror.”
Mary returned the glare haughtily. “Tempting fate. Overconfidence. That’s as bad as a broken mirror any day.”
Groaning, Heather stepped out onto the wide verandah and opened her umbrella. She didn’t care what Mary said. She didn’t care about rain or mirrors or anything else.
This was her day, the day Dr. Heather Delaney finally caught a dream by the tail and reeled it in. She intended to enjoy every minute of it.
“NO. NO BABIES. NO.”
Griffin stared at his housekeeper, wondering what had ever possessed him to hire such a bad-tempered old bat. It was just one hour of baby-sitting. No big deal. You’d think he had asked her to dance naked in the middle of the town square.
“It’s just an hour or two. I have to get to the council meeting. I have to go right now, Mrs. Waller. I’m already late. It started five minutes ago.”
She folded her arms over her apron and stared at him. “No babies. I took this job, I never said babies.”
Griffin cast a desperate glance out the half-open door. It was a monsoon out there. The five-minute ride to city hall would probably take fifteen in this weather. He tried to remember how many other things were on the agenda before Heather’s zoning variance came up. Enough, he thought. Enough that he still could get there in time.
If Mrs. Waller would just listen to reason.
“Look, Mrs. Waller, they’re both asleep, and I’ll be back very soon.”
“They’ll wake up,” she said darkly.
The sad truth was, she was probably right. They hadn’t slept more than ten minutes at a time since they’d arrived this morning. But still, this was important. Why couldn’t she see that?
“Damn it, Mrs. Waller—”
She scowled fiercely, the lines in her sharp face deepening into troughs of displeasure. “No cursing. No babies, and no cursing.”
God. Griffin was ready to tear his hair out. But the twins had been working on that all day, and his scalp was already sore. What, he wondered, was the diabolical fascination babies had for grabbing things and trying to stick them in their mouths?
As if he didn’t have enough to contend with, the telephone took that moment to ring. He picked it up, growling “What?” in a voice that could have etched glass.
“Where the hell are you, Cahill? You need to get down here.”
It was Hickory Baxter, one of the other four councilmen. Griffin frowned, wondering why Hickory sounded so tense. He’d been late for meetings before himself. In fact, Hickory had been known to skip a meeting altogether now and then.
“Why? What’s going on?”
Hickory lowered his voice to a whisper. “I’m not sure. But I don’t like it. Somebody has been stirring things up on the zoning.”
Griffin wasn’t sure he had heard correctly. “Zoning? You mean Heather’s request for a zoning variance?”
“I tell you, I smell something rotten. It may be Millner. You’d better get down here, Cahill. And you’d better hurry, or she may take a fall on this one.”
With that cryptic warning, the old man hung up. Griffin replaced the receiver slowly, trying to make sense of it all. How could anything have gone wrong with Heather’s zoning variance? The council had given its tentative okay two months ago. The Planning and Zoning Commission committee had unanimously recommended approval. So had the Firefly Glen Chamber of Commerce and the Home Owners’ Association.
Heather was no doubt deep in construction on Spring House already.
But Griffin recognized that urgent note in Hickory Baxter’s voice. Hickory had been old Doc Delaney’s best friend, and he loved Heather like a daughter. He might be mistaken, but Hickory obviously believed that someone was about to hurt Heather.
That meant Griffin couldn’t play power games with Mrs. Waller any longer. He knew how to reach her, so he went straight for the kill.
“An extra hundred dollars,” he said bluntly. “For one hour. An extra hundred dollars in this week’s check.”
He saw her eyes light up, and he knew he had hit on the right amount. Though she worked like a Trojan cleaning houses every day of her life, Griffin suspected that Mrs. Waller was probably richer than he was. She loved money, would do almost anything if you offered her enough cash. And, as far as Griffin knew, she had never been seen spending a single cent.
“A hundred and twenty,” she said slowly, her narrowed eyes appraising him, estimating the depth of his desperation. “No. One-fifty. Because they will wake up.”
He could get her down to one twenty-five, but he didn’t have time to haggle. “Done,” he said, pulling on his raincoat. “Those boys had better be damn happy when I get back.”
“They will be as happy as kings,” Mrs. Waller said, smiling for the first time since he had dared to suggest that she might serve as a baby-sitter. She followed him to the door, helping him with his coat, oddly expansive now that she had secured her cash bonus.
She handed him his umbrella. “So, Mr. Cahill. A beautiful woman is making you rush like this and be crazy? This is all because of a woman?”
Griffin paused at the threshold, turning his collar up against the driving rain. He considered trying to explain that, while Mrs. Waller might think he was a good-for-nothing dilettante, he was actually a city councilman, that it was his duty to attend all city council meetings.
But would he really have spent a hundred and fifty dollars, abandoned his innocent nephews and tramped through this rain just to cast a vote on some anonymous businessman’s zoning request?
He sighed. Of course not.
“Yeah,” he said, glancing back at her sharp, clever face with a rueful smile. “This is all because of a woman.”
