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And after all that fucking drama, Beau was his anyway. He’d missed every prenatal appointment, he hadn’t been Beth’s labor coach, and hadn’t even seen the kid until she was a day old, but now she was his and no one else’s, for as long as he decided to keep her.
She was the evidence of his ex’s infidelity, and his failure to keep her happy, and yet he couldn’t lay the blame for that on an infant.
/> Juliet showed him options for the bar and for flooring, but it was hard to focus with Beau’s soft hair tickling his cheek. He inhaled the scent of warm, clean baby and couldn’t remember being this relaxed in a long time. Maybe in years.
It was funny how he’d never realized he gave a shit about kids. Now, as he looked down at her cherubic little face, he didn’t know if he could hand her over to someone else. He’d been working on her attachment, but it had backfired. He was the one getting attached.
There was no helping it. He’d even talked to Konstantin and his buddies to see if they were interested in adopting her so he could still see her sometimes, but they and their wives were all breeding like rabbits and wouldn’t be able to give Beau the attention she was going to need to attach properly. They’d known Beth and been friends with her, but it wasn’t the same as the connection he had.
He could have been Beau’s father.
For a minute, when Beth had told him she was pregnant, he’d thought he was.
He was kind of a fuckup, though, and a little girl deserved a dad with a job she could talk about at school. What if the urge to keep her was just selfishness?
When Beau was sound asleep and her diaper was changed, he put her to bed, checking that her blanket wasn’t too close to her face and that he hadn’t left any soft toys in the crib. His mattress on the floor was unmade, so he straightened the blanket before going back down to Juliet, just in case she wanted . . . a tour of the house.
As he reentered the great room, Juliet was looking out the window onto the dimly lit front lawn. Framed by the window, she was pale and ethereal against the night.
Because he lived in it, he rarely noticed his own chaos, but now he looked and saw the piles of detritus that probably drove a woman like Juliet batty. He’d been disorganized enough before the baby, but now there was baby equipment and supplies strewn as far as the eye could see. There was a powder pink plastic hamper in the middle of the great room that was overflowing with dirty sleepers, burp pads, and receiving blankets. At some point, Grant had tossed a stuffed dog in the air and it had stuck in the chandelier, and nobody had bothered to get it down yet.
Juliet turned to look at him and his breath caught. Damn, she was beautiful.
“I guess I should get going,” she said. Was there a hint of reluctance in her voice?
“You don’t want the grand tour?”
“Of this huge, beautiful house getting no attention?” she teased. “This place is either a dream or a nightmare for a woman like me. I can see the untapped potential, but I haven’t been hired for the job.”
Will gave a short laugh. “That’s sort of how I feel about you.”
“Mr. Ellis, we’re talking about my line of work, not my sex life.”
“Your sex life needs as much work as my house.”
She shrugged. “Well . . . you’re not wrong.”
“But the baby.”
“It’s not just Beau. It’s also us. The kink. All of it.” She grimaced. “You scare me, and you make me scare myself.”
“Okay.”
“That’s it? Okay?”
He ran a hand through his hair, not caring if it was a mess. The rest of his life was.
“We barely know each other, Juliet. I wanted to get to know you before all this”—he waved a hand at the baby equipment—“but I’ve never chased a woman and I’m not about to start now, when I know you don’t want to sign up for what I’d have to offer.”
“You’re keeping her.”
A jolt of emotion hit him square in the chest. He hadn’t been ready to admit it to himself, but there it was.
“Yes. I am.” The admission was freeing, somehow. No more excuses about not being able to find other parents. The truth was, he’d been hoping not to come across a family he couldn’t find excuses to reject. For a few of them, he’d had to get creative.
“There aren’t many men who’d raise their ex’s baby.”
“She could have been mine. Would have been if I’d kept her mother happy.”
