Crossroads (Beautiful Biker MC Romance Series) - DD Prince Page 0,32

bottle up because he wasn’t a tiny baby and I was thinking the coolness might also help with the teething. I gave it to him, but he cried loud as he tried to drink it and I saw that his tongue was coated in white. Was this oral thrush?

This baby had some teeth in his mouth already (he was ugly-crying so it was obvious when I’d first seen him at the park) and Luke had been gone eight months. I would’ve guessed this little guy was likely just over a year old and that might mean that these could be molars coming in and I knew those ones were rough ones to come in. He was on the thin side. There was no food here but a part of a jar of peaches and some milk. I looked in the cupboards and didn’t find anything but a couple of chipped bowls and nothing that you could make into a meal. But, if he had thrush in his mouth, which I’d heard of but never seen before, it’d be hard to get him to eat anyway.

I also suspected he’d be wet, so I looked around for a sign of diapers. I found a diaper bag in the bottom of the stroller. It had two diapers in it and a half a box of teething cookies.

I decided to get him changed and then see if he was interested in a cookie.

He was drinking from his bottle but still had wet tears on his face and seemed to be struggling with it. I took his track bottoms off and removed his diaper. The diaper rash I saw made me hiss in shock. It was red, raw and looked sore. His diaper was heavy with wet. He’d had it on a long time, for sure.

“Oh wow, you poor little guy.”

I sifted through the diaper bag for any sort of ointment but found none.

I left his bottom half naked and took him with me to the bathroom. I grabbed a bottle of baby body wash and took it and him to the kitchen and decided to give him a bath in the (now) clean sink. Another problem. No clean towels.

Damn it.

The linen closet had some pillowcases and a mess of make-up but no towels. I kept him in my arms and rapped on the bedroom door.

No answer.

I opened it a crack, wondering if I’d find a basket of clean laundry. What I found rivaled the mess I’d already cleaned. There was an empty crib with a large and very stained adult sized pillow in it.

And there was something else. No Melanie.

I moved deeper into the room and it was getting increasingly alarming with every step I took. An empty booze bottle. Condom wrapper. A hypodermic fucking needle.

“Oh my God,” I said.

Where the fuck was she? I stepped back out for my phone and did a twirl trying to find my purse. What?

Oh, my phone was in my pocket. I reached for it. But, where was my purse? I’d set it down on the couch when I got in.

I stared. I didn’t put it in the tub with the dirty clothes, did I?

Nope. No sign of my bag anywhere.

Did she sneak right by me and fucking steal my purse on her way out while I was washing dishes or carrying clothes into the bathroom? I went back into her bedroom and looked out the window. We were on the ground floor so she could very well have gone out that way, too. And she had to have taken my bag.

I spotted some diaper cream on the floor by the crib so grabbed it. Almost empty but I would scrape what I could get out for at least one application.

Trevor was clinging to me and looking around curiously, still naked from the waist down.

“Oh boy. We’re in a pickle, aren’t we? Where’s Mommy, Trev?”

He’d stopped crying, but his face was drooly and he was definitely running a fever.

I took him back to the kitchen and ran the water to give him his bath in the now clean sink. He played with a few clean Tupperware containers while I washed him. He was definitely underweight and not feeling well. I tried to be silly and get him laughing, hoping to put him at ease, but he sort of looked at me like I was crazy, but kept emptying the water from the sink he was in to a square container in the empty sink beside him with a