in any boardroom, but babies terrified him. They were too fragile, too dependent. He held his hands up in surrender as the baby began wailing. Loud. “I never touched Louie until he couldn’t break. That baby is breakable. She’s smaller than a loaf of bread.”
“Ugh!” She knelt beside the basket and picked up the wailing baby, cradling it against her stomach.
“Don’t drop it!”
She gave him a deadpan stare, then turned a worried gaze to the baby. “She won’t stop crying.”
“Bounce it.” He tried to remember anything he might have heard Bridgette say when Louie was little, but blood rushed through his ears, and his only thought was, Holy fuck. It can’t be mine!
She bounced the baby in her arms, and the baby’s eyes slammed shut, her cries escalating into shaky, shrill sounds that tore at his gut. Ben dropped to his knees beside Aurelia and said, “Do the shoulder thing!”
“Shoulder thing?”
“Put it on your shoulder. Burp it!”
“Burp it?” Aurelia scowled. “You’re an idiot. There are diapers in the basket. Look for a bottle.”
He dug around beneath the tiny diapers and found a bottle. He must have been looking at it like it was a foreign object, because Aurelia gave an exasperated sigh and snapped, “Shake it!”
He shook the hell out of the bottle as the shrill cries vibrated into long, shaky, gut-wrenching sounds—and then fell silent, like the baby couldn’t breathe at all. “She’s not breathing! Do something! CPR? What if she’s sick? Oh God, Rels! Did we do th—” His words were drowned out by another piercing wail.
“Give me that!” Aurelia snatched the bottle, shifting positions, sitting cross-legged and cradling the baby against her belly. She put the bottle to the baby’s lips, and it panted, gulped—wailed—and then the tiniest pink lips he’d ever seen wrapped around the nipple. He held his breath as the baby gasped again, whimpered, then suckled the nipple. It kept up the agonizing suck-gasp-whimper-suck pattern so long Ben thought he was going to pass out, before he remembered he wasn’t breathing.
“Fuuuuck,” left his lungs in one long, tortured breath. “First stop Vic Preacher’s, before the cops.” His buddy Vic was a pediatrician.
“To see if you’re the father?”
“To make sure she’s not sick, and yeah, that other thing.”
“You can’t drive her without a car seat.”
“Then we’ll walk, because it’ll take too long to go shopping and she could stop breathing again. We know nothing about this kid.” Suddenly hit with the realization that this wasn’t Aurelia’s problem, he said, “You’ll come with me, right, Rels?”
“What?” she said absently, staring at the baby with a dreamy expression.
Seeing her look at the baby like that made his gut twist in a different way. The image didn’t fit. Aurelia was his good-times girl, the only woman with whom he could talk about anything. She starred in all his darkest fantasies, which was torture since he couldn’t have her, but she made one hell of a hot fantasy, and he wasn’t nearly ready to give that up. His mind shouted, No! Stop looking at her like that!
She gazed up at him through those long lashes that drove him crazy and whispered, “She didn’t stop breathing. She was just hungry.” She looked down at the baby and said, “We suck at babies, Ben, but at least we didn’t break her.”
CHAPTER TWO
“LET’S GO,” BEN said as he came downstairs wearing a tight black T-shirt with the jeans he’d worn last night, looking just as harried as he had when he’d taken the stairs two at a time on the way up. His feet were still bare, his five-o’clock shadow was dark as night, and his thick dark hair looked like he’d pulled a sexy all-nighter, though Aurelia knew better.
It was the morning delivery that had him chasing his tail around his massive house, grabbing his keys, walking back and forth from the kitchen to the living room, and doing everything he could to avoid looking at the sweet little girl in the basket.
“Go where?” Aurelia asked softly so as not to wake the baby. She couldn’t wrap her head around the idea that the baby might actually be Ben’s. Other than in his work, which he nurtured and cared for like it was a living, breathing thing, he avoided anything remotely close to commitment.
His dark brows slanted in annoyance. “The doctor’s. I said that already. I called Vic and he said to bring her by whenever we could. Let’s go.”
“Right, with no shoes and no car seat. Ben, she’s sleeping. Haven’t