Hush, Little Baby

  HUSH, LITTLE BABY

  The Daddy School

  Judith Arnold

  “Judith Arnold writes beautifully and poignantly. Highly recommended!” Romance Readers Anonymous

  Copyright © 2001 by Barbara Keiler

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  To learn more about the author, and to sign up for her newsletter, please visit her website.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  About the Author

  About the Daddy School

  Prologue

  THE LAST TIME he’d been here, Ruth had brought him. “It’s my absolute favorite place in the whole world,” she’d rhapsodized, and although she’d often resorted to hyperbole, in this case he could see her point.

  The bluff was one of a long row of palisades looming high above the Pacific Ocean. Rock broke through the dry grass, and the trees—small, gnarled evergreens stunted by the wind and the lack of soil—were nothing like the trees back in Connecticut. A slope of scrub-covered stones and ledges descended from the bluff to a beach so narrow it looked like a seam of glossy shells and white sand separating the ocean from the earth.

  He recalled sitting on the bluff’s straw-brown grass last June, feeling the salty wind tug at his hair as he gazed out at an uninterrupted horizon of sea and sky. Ruth was beside him, her legs crossed and her long, dark braid unraveling in the breeze. The sun dipped in and out of a misty haze, but her eyes glowed enough to brighten the afternoon. “Isn’t this place gorgeous?” she asked.

  Levi nodded.

  “I hike up here whenever I want to think, when I want to plan things out.” She plucked a strand of grass from the ground and twirled it around her finger. “I have to tell you something.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  Pregnant. His baby sister. All right, so she hadn’t been a baby for a long time. In her mid-twenties, she’d reached an eminently acceptable age to get pregnant. But he couldn’t picture her handling such a huge responsibility. She was a weaver, for crying out loud, unmarried, footloose and carefree, sharing a ramshackle house with three other artisans.

  “Who’s the father?” he asked delicately.

  She laughed and a sharp gust of wind scattered the sound. “Oh, don’t worry about him.”

  He immediately began to worry. “Why? Who is he?”

  “He isn’t around anymore. He’s from L.A. He was up here for a couple of months on business.”

  “What kind of business?” In Mendocino County, the biggest business seemed to be agriculture, the major crop marijuana. Crafts were another popular industry in the region; Ruth and her housemates earned their livings by selling their creations at craft shows and in boutiques, pooling their resources to save money. Among the four of them, they usually had one functioning car, and their meals relied heavily on grains and greens. But they did all right for themselves.

  Still, Levi struggled to imagine his sister having an affair with a businessman just passing through.

  “He works for a film company. He was scouting locations for a movie. He was here for a couple of months, but he ended up deciding they’d be better off filming in British Columbia.” She smiled placidly. “It’s really perfect, Levi, because I don’t want him in my life. We weren’t in love for anything. Don’t get me wrong—he was a nice guy. Good-looking, too. This baby is going to be beautiful.” She rubbed her hand gently over her abdomen.

  “Does he know you’re pregnant?” Whether or not Ruth wanted the man in her life, Levi thought she ought to be practical. Given her precarious finances, she couldn’t afford to be so cavalier about child support. And in all fairness, the man deserved to be told. If Levi fathered a child, he’d want to know.

  Ruth shrugged. “It wasn’t a great romance. Just a fling. I didn’t plan this, but it happened and I’m thrilled. Be thrilled for me.”

  Levi swore he was thrilled.

  In late January, Ruth gave birth to Damien. A big, strapping, healthy boy—and Levi was thrilled. He couldn’t get away from work at the time, but he promised Ruth he’d take his annual June trip to California. He’d spend a week with her and her new son and develop his skills as a doting uncle.

  It wasn’t June. It was May first, but there he was, on the bluff overlooking the Pacific. Ruth had brought him to this place again.

  He stood apart from her small circle of friends as they tossed her ashes into the air at the edge of the cliff. He didn’t want to see if the ashes would fall all the way down to the water, if they’d get caught on the narrow ledges on the way down or a sea breeze would curl around them and carry them away. He didn’t want to know.

  Ruth was dead. His sister. Twenty-six years old, an aneurysm, and now she was dead.

  Sandy, a potter and one of Ruth’s housemates, wept silently while Doug, a leather worker and another housemate, sang “Amazing Grace.” Ruth had loved that song, but it was too unbearably sad. Levi clenched his hands and his jaw and kept his gaze on the horizon, dreaming that Ruth might live on in the shimmer of golden sunlight dancing along the waves, that her spirit would soar in the wind. Several other friends of Ruth’s held hands and sang along with Doug. The baby dozed in a carrier someone had lugged up the steep path to this spot.

  Levi wished he could disappear, be somewhere else, go to a place where none of this had happened, none of it was real. Ruth. His baby sister. He didn’t want to believe she was gone.

  Sandy sidled over to him, dabbing at her face with a crumpled tissue. “We have to talk,” she murmured.

  “Okay.” He sounded wooden to himself, numb.

  “Ruth wasn’t as much of a flake as you might think,” Sandy said, a faint smile fighting through her tears. “When Damien was born, she wrote a will.”

  Levi tried not to snort. Ruth didn’t exactly have a substantial estate to dispose of. Most of the time, she’d been close to broke. He used to send her money when she was facing a particularly lean stretch.

  “She’s left you the baby,” Sandy said.

  “What?”

  “She left you Damien.”

  He’d met his nephew for the first time only yesterday, when he’d driven up to Ruth’s house from the airport in San Francisco. He’d been in no mood to bond with a strange infant. His sister had just died. He could hardly think, let alone get excited about her baby.

  “She wrote it in her will,” Sandy explained. “She signed it in front of witnesses. It’s all legal.”

  “I thought—my parents—”

  “You know she’d never trust your parents to raise her son.”

  Levi nodded reluctantly. Ruth had been estranged from their parents for years. Levi himself had little to do with them.

  “Then why not you?” he asked. “You lived with her. You saw how she was raising him. You would know what she’d want.”

  “What she wants is you, Levi. She wants you to be a father for her son.” Sandy pressed her hand to his. “She wants you to do this for her. You will, won’t you?”

  He closed his eyes. How could he? He was a bachelor with a demanding career and a busy life back in Connecticut. He
’d just lost his beloved sister. He didn’t even know how to change a diaper.

  She wants you to do this for her.

  “Okay,” he heard himself say. In his heart he knew he had no choice. “I’ll do it.”

  Chapter One

  CORINNE WORE her gray suit. She liked the way it made her feel: cool, composed and invincible. She was about to enter into combat with Levi Holt, and she didn’t want to be emotional about it. The gray suit contained her emotions very nicely.

  Straightening her shoulders, she entered the barn-shaped building that housed Arlington Architectural Associates. From the outside, the building on the eastern edge of Newcombe Street was boxy and bland. But inside the front door she found a brightly lit hub of desks and drafting tables, jingling phones and staffers chattering and scurrying about. One young woman wore stretchy black capri pants and a loud pink blouse; one young man wore a silver eyebrow ring. A stairway at the far end of the room led up to an open second-floor hallway lined with doors. Private offices, Corinne guessed. Levi Holt was probably behind one of those doors.

  She’d never met him, and she didn’t know much about him. All Gerald had told her was that the man was brilliant and talented. “Just do what you think is best,” Gerald had advised her. “Take care of it.”

  Of course, that was what Gerald always told her. That was why he’d hired her. That was why he was desperately in need of her and half in love with her: because she took care of everything.

  The fellow with the eyebrow ring moseyed over to her. A pencil was wedged behind his ear and a slightly mangled roll of paper protruded from a hip pocket of his jeans. In her tailored suit and low-heeled black pumps, Corinne felt a generation older than him, even though they were probably no more than a few years apart in age.

  “Can I help you?” he asked, smiling congenially.

  “I have a nine-thirty appointment with Levi Holt.”

  “Oh.” He glanced over his shoulder, as if searching the room for backup support. With a shrug, he turned back to her. “Levi’s having kind of a rough morning. You might want to come back later.”

  “I don’t think so.” She didn’t care how brilliant and talented Holt was, or how rough his morning was. She’d driven to Arlington last night, checked into a hotel and awakened at seven-thirty that morning, just so she’d get here on time. She was not going to come back later.

  “Well…” The young man shrugged again. “It’s up to you. He’s in his office.” He pointed to one of the doors opening off the upstairs walkway. “Take the stairs, hang a right and it’s the second door. I’d walk you up there, but…” He pulled the tube of paper from his pocket and rapped it importantly against his palm. “I’ve got stuff to do.”

  “No problem. I’ll find it.” She gave the man a frosty smile, smoothed the straps of her leather tote bag over her shoulder and stalked through the maze of desks and drafting tables to the stairs.

  The air smelled of gourmet coffee. A phone on a nearby desk the stairs rang, chirping like a hungry parakeet. The stairs themselves were open-backed, floating up to the second story. It occurred to Corinne that this building might very well have been a real barn years ago, before the town had grown big enough to swallow all the farmland around it, and that the architects who worked here could have redesigned it, turning the loft into the second-floor offices, opening skylights in the sloping roof, hanging large, bright lamps from the rafters on braided steel cables.

  Overall, the effect wasn’t bad. Overall, Levi Holt’s design for Gerald’s house wasn’t bad, either. It was just flawed, and the flaws needed to be dealt with. Gerald shouldn’t have signed the contract before he’d discussed the plans with Corinne, but he had. Now she was going to have to make things right.

  From the upstairs walkway, the first floor looked more organized. The desks and tables were positioned to form a pattern. The man with the eyebrow ring had unfurled his roll of paper and was reviewing it with a pony-tailed fellow dressed all in black. Maybe they knew what they were doing.

  Maybe Levi Holt knew what he was doing, too. Maybe he knew a hell of a lot more about how to build a dream house than Corinne ever would.

  But Gerald had asked her to fix this mess, and so she would fix it.

  She turned right and knocked on the door the man downstairs had indicated. After a moment’s silence, she knocked again.

  It swung open while her hand was still raised. Startled, she fell back a step and gazed up at Levi Holt.

  Gerald hadn’t mentioned that Holt was well over six feet tall and sinfully handsome. Of course, that wasn’t the sort of thing Gerald would have noticed—the handsome part, anyway. Gerald himself was short enough that, beyond a certain point, everyone looked extraordinarily tall to him.

  Corinne took a moment to gather her wits. At five foot nine, she wasn’t used to men towering over her. Nor was she used to being stared at with such intensity. Levi Holt’s eyes were dark and sharp, his gaze boring into her like a precision drill. He had chiseled cheeks, a sensitive mouth and a jaw that looked stone-hard.

  He also had a baby on his shoulder.

  She turned her attention from his eyes to the baby. It lay silent and motionless on top of a cloth draped over Holt’s shoulder. It was dressed in a fuzzy yellow one-piece outfit. Fine, dark curls of hair swirled across its scalp, and its face was flushed.

  “Don’t say a word,” Levi Holt whispered, backing away from the door.

  Well, that was a great way to get this meeting started.

  She remained in the doorway, watching as he moved in measured steps to a stroller in a corner of his office. Bending at the knees, he kept one hand firmly on the baby while he released the stroller’s back with the other, lowering it into a reclining position. Very, very slowly, he eased the baby off his shoulder and into the stroller. He hunched over the stroller for a moment, poised as if expecting something awful to happen, and then straightened up. The cloth, a square of white cotton, remained on his shoulder.

  It was a diaper, Corinne realized.

  She had traveled all the way to Arlington, Connecticut to revise the design for the dream house her boss was going to have built on the four-acre parcel he’d bought in the western part of town, and the architect on the project had a diaper on his shoulder.

  Wonderful.

  “Look, Mr. Holt—”

  He held his hand up to silence her and gave her a stern glare before he pivoted to check on the baby. Satisfied that she hadn’t awakened it, he crossed to the door, his footsteps muffled by the carpet. “I’ve just spent the last half-hour getting him to fall asleep,” he said. “If you wake him, there’ll be hell to pay.”

  She sensed his threat: if there was hell to pay, she’d be the one picking up the tab. She considered that possibility completely unreasonable, though. She hadn’t brought the baby into the situation. She’d wasn’t going to let Levi Holt hold her responsible for the success or failure of his son’s nap.

  All right. He was a new father. Evidently he’d suffered some sort of child-care snafu that morning. The baby-sitter had called in sick, the mother was in Chicago on business—whatever the reason, Dad had gotten stuck with primary parenting duties today. And being a new parent—and a man—he was probably a bit anxious about fulfilling those duties.

  Maybe if Corinne offered sympathy for his plight, he would accept all her requests for changes in the design without making a big fuss. They could both be nice to each other. Niceness as a strategy: it could work.

  He didn’t look nice, though. He looked…intense, every nerve in his body tuned a half-step sharp. There was an edge to him, an alertness, as if he was prepared to explode into action at the most subtle signal.

  “I’m Corinne Lanier,” she whispered, shooting a quick glimpse at the stroller across the room to make sure her voice was soft enough not to rouse the child. “I work with Gerald Mosley, and—”

  “Gerald Mosley.” He raked a hand through his hair. He had large hands, she noticed, perfectly proportione
d to his large body. And longer hair than she’d realized at first, given the way it was combed back from his face. It was thick, walnut brown and wavy, and the ends brushed against the diaper on his shoulder. Beneath that diaper he wore an ordinary blue business shirt, a loosened tie featuring a busy pattern of blue and brown splotches, and pleated brown trousers that emphasized the length of his legs. He was built like a basketball player—a college player, not a pro with pumped-up muscles but a lean, lanky athlete, someone who would rely on finesse rather than power to score.

  “Gerald Mosley,” she repeated. “He signed a contract to have you design and build a house for him. However, he and I have reviewed the plans, and—”

  Levi held his hand up to silence her again. She thought she’d kept her voice muted, but he shot another anxious look at the stroller. Maybe he was going to use the baby to shut her up. Maybe this was a ploy to keep her from making demands and negotiating effectively. Maybe the baby wasn’t even real; it was a lifelike doll that Holt whipped out when he was expecting a difficult meeting with a client.

  A faint whimper from the stroller convinced her it wasn’t a doll. Holt continued to stare at the stroller, as if he could will the child back to sleep. Apparently he could. After a moment, the whimpering faded away.

  Nodding, he joined Corinne in the doorway. Not exactly a suitable place to hold a meeting. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, slightly louder than a whisper. “This appointment slipped my mind.”

  “Well, I’m here.”

  “Yes.” He glanced behind him, let out a long breath and shook his head. “Again, I apologize. Things just didn’t work out the way I expected.”

  She felt a pang of genuine sympathy for him, and it startled her. He’d screwed up, he was jeopardizing the success of this meeting, he might very well refuse to make the changes in Gerald’s house without charging exorbitant fees—and he was insufferably handsome, to boot. With or without a diaper on his arm, Levi Holt wasn’t someone for whom she ought to be feeling sorry.