My Best Friend's Baby (15 page)

"Before you come up with a multi-level
marketing scheme, maybe you'd better come check it out for
yourself." He grinned and aimed her bird toward her, letting Shep
click-click his way across a sweepstakes envelope and onto her
shoulder again. "You want to?"

"Hmmm."

"Hmmm?"

"Hmmm, I hope you weren't planning to enter
that," Chloe replied, leaning forward to examine the Shep surprise
on the envelope.

Nick leaned forward, too. "But I'm already a
winner!"

She grinned and batted her eyelashes at him.
"You were always a winner with us, Nick."

"Cute. Anyway, come on inside, and I'll show
you what's got your menagerie all riled up."

"I'd better take these guys home first,"
Chloe said, taking Moe from his new perch around Nick's shoulders.
"Next thing you know, Shep will decide you're his new lovebird
companion and things will get really interesting."

Nick shuddered. "I don't even want to know
what you mean by that."

"Nope, you probably don't. See you in a few
minutes!"

Chloe's 'few minutes' stretched into a
half-hour before Nick heard her coming up his front walk.
Female
standard time
, he thought as he opened his front door and
watched her approach.
It was a whole other dimension
.

She waved, hurrying with surprising
pregnant-bellied grace between the white oleander bushes bordering
his walk and front porch. Her sneakered feet clomped quickly over
the porch floorboards.

"Look!" she shouted, waving a huge,
ripped-open express mail package. "This was waiting on my doorstep
when I got home."

She bounded inside, powered by excitement
and something else Nick couldn't define. He shut the door and
turned to find her jiving across his living room, hugging the
package to her chest. This time, that 'glow' of hers was no joke,
and it this time it didn't come from a workout or her pregnancy. It
came from whatever was in that package.

Hell.

It could only be one thing, Nick figured.
And even though he'd known it would come someday, the reality still
felt like a sucker-punch to the gut.

"So, when's Bruno coming back?" he
asked.

Chloe's head came up. Her fingers froze on
the package. Somehow, he'd liked it better when she'd been hugging
the damned thing. At least then, she'd looked happy.

Well, he'd be damned if he'd make her
miserable now. Wasn't this what they'd both worked toward for so
many weeks? Bruno was coming back. Nick would be able to
concentrate full-time on work again for a change. They should both
be ecstatic, dammit!

Or at least one of them could be.

"I mean," he went on, forcing the words past
his suddenly-aching throat, "you must be wanting to go get things
ready for him. You know, to meet him at the airport, or—" Why
wasn't she moving? "—or the harbor, I guess. What's the preferred
marine mode of travel anyway?"

His voice cracked on the joke. Swearing
under his breath, Nick stared toward the test tubes he'd arrayed in
their holders on the coffee table, all set up to show Chloe the
different varieties of pet sports drinks he'd come up with. For
some reason, the samples looked smaller than he'd remembered.

"Oh, you mean this!" she cried, waving the
package. "Nick, it's the—"

"Yeah. Good news, huh?"

She beamed. Hell, next she'd probably want
to read him the damned thing.

"Let me put these back in my office and
we'll—"

"Nick, wait." Her voice came hesitantly from
across the room. "I'm sorry. Your invention ... awww, Nick, I was
too excited to think straight. I should've—"

"No apologies necessary." Striding toward
the table, he swept the tubes into his arms. They clinked against
each other, sounding hollow as his heart felt. "I can show you
these another time."

"No, wait," Chloe said. "It's just been so
long since I've heard from my dad, that I couldn't wait to—"

She kept on talking, but Nick's brain
stuttered on the word 'dad,' and refused to catch up. The package
wasn't from Bruno?

Her hand touched his shoulder. "Why don't
you show me what's got Larry and Moe all crazy over you today, and
then we'll do this," she said, nodding toward the envelope and
shaking it a little in her excitement. "Okay?"

Only one thought zinged through his head,
replaying itself like a record stuck on one really well-played
groove:
The Package Wasn't From Bruno song
.

"Okay?" she prompted.

Nick shook his head to clear it and focused
on Chloe. It wasn't an easy task, considering the way she was
bouncing in place.

"Are you kidding?" he asked. "I'll show you
this later. It's not every day you get a supersize express mail
from your father."

"It's never, actually," she admitted,
raising the package and turning it to read the addresses on the
front. "He's very busy." She frowned briefly, then her gaze zipped
to Nick. "Are you sure?"

Nodding, he arranged the test tubes on the
coffee table. As long as it wasn't a letter from Bruno in that
package, he'd listen to just about anything.

"Okay!" She jigged toward him, all
excitement restored. Her smile brightened as she put her hand in
the envelope. The flexible waterproof packaging bulged outward as
she rummaged inside, talking non-stop.

"He must have gotten my letter about the
baby," she said breathlessly. "I wasn't sure whether I should send
it to his vacation house in Florida or his new apartment in
Manhattan. You know, he's always, ummm, on the move."

She withdrew a small bubble-wrapped bundle
and an embossed ivory card, hugged the items to her chest, then
all-but threw them toward him in her excitement. "Look!"

"Okay!" he squealed, mimicking her
high-octane delivery, grinning despite himself as he caught
everything. Her enthusiasm was impossible to resist.

The bubble wrap crinkled as Nick juggled
everything to get the card on top. He rubbed his thumb over the
monogrammed initials on the front of the card. Ritzy. But then, if
he remembered correctly, Chloe's father was some sort of big
corporate executive for an international consulting firm. He could
undoubtedly afford something nicer than a drugstore note card,
especially for his own daughter.

Beside him, Chloe hugged his arm excitedly.
"Go ahead," she told him, giving his biceps a vise-grip squeeze.
"Read what it says!"

Resisting the urge to flex, Nick flipped
open the folded note card. A business card fluttered out. He caught
it with his thumb just before it slipped to the floor, and turned
it to read the words beside the tasteful logo.
Sloan, Hinkle,
Hinkle-Sloan, and Carmichal: Consultants
.

"Whoa," he murmured. "Consultants too
exclusive to reveal what they're supposed to be consulted about.
Ritzy."

"I guess," she said, shrugging as she read
over his shoulder. "I've never visited his company, but it keeps
him pretty busy."

Not too busy to advertise for more business
from his own daughter, Nick noticed. What kind of guy slipped a
business card into his family mail?

Chloe tapped it with one tapered, red
fingernail. "Hinkle-Sloan is my father's second wife," she
explained. "Remember, the one I told you about?"

"The wedding where you wore your Brownie
uniform instead of the flower girl dress they gave you, and staged
a sit-down strike in the middle of the church aisle?"

She gave him a mischievous grin. "I was
seven years old," she said, making a show of examining her manicure
with inch-thick innocence. "What did I know about weddings?"

"Enough to know you didn't want your dad to
re-marry, I guess."

"They managed to squeeze past me and do it
anyway," Chloe told him, resting her hand on her middle and
stroking gently. "And anyway, it wasn't just me. The ring bearer
helped, too."

"See? Even then you could wrap a guy around
your little finger."

"Fun-ny."

"He wasn't wearing a Brownie uniform, I take
it."

"No, he thought his knees looked too knobby
in the little skirt."

Nick laughed as she snuggled nearer. Her
belly nestled companionably against his hip, familiarly warm and
round beneath her sweatshirt. Chloe hadn't been this close to him
since their patio-table encounter, Nick realized. Over the
intervening weeks, she'd kept her distance from him. Now, if he
hadn't had his hands full already, he'd have pulled her even
closer.

"Since the wedding, it's really been
Hinkle-Sloan-Carmichal," she went on, wrinkling her nose, "but
Tabitha doesn't think that looks nice on a business card."

"Aww, poor Tabitha." He grinned. "I hate it
when multi-marriages wreck my business cards. Sooo
inconvenient."

"Be nice," she ordered. And pinched him.

"Youch!" he yelped, rubbing his elbow
against his side. "Be nice yourself, you big bully."

"Sorry." She jabbed him in the ribs. "Hurry
up and look at everything!"

Nick gave her a sideways glance and realized
she was probably oblivious to all the Three Stooges poking and
jabbing she was doing. In fact, she wasn't even looking at him
anymore. Instead, she squished up closer to his arm and stared at
the things in his hands, twirling her hair against her cheek.

Insecurity clue number one. Messing up that
immaculate hairstyle of hers. He wondered what was bugging her.
Maybe she'd thought the package was from Bruno, too, and was
disappointed it wasn't.

Grrr. He resisted the urge to rip open the
bubble wrap, and scanned the message on the card instead.
Congratulations, Chloe
, it read in neat laser-printed type.
Tabitha and I
—

He quit reading and looked up. "Chloe, this
message is printed. As in, computer-generated and printed."

Her forehead wrinkled as she glanced at the
card.
Yup, it's still the same one
, her expression said. "Of
course it is. Catch up, Nick! This is the nineties. Secretaries
don't hand-write things these days."

"Secretaries?"

"My dad suggested I route my correspondence
through one of his secretaries," she said on another shrug. "It's
more expedient."

His jaw dropped.

And snapped shut when Chloe laughed.

"I know, I know," she said with an
ignore-those-pesky-concerns kind of wave. "You're thinking my dad
must be some big old stuffy corporate muckety-muck, having
secretaries at his beck and call like he does, right? But—"

"No," Nick interrupted, "that wasn't
precisely what I was thinking, but—"

"—but not even four secretaries would have
that effect on him. He's a regular guy, really."

"Four. Four secretaries?" And the guy still
couldn't find the time to handwrite a note to his only daughter, a
month before his first grandchild was due?

"No, he only has three secretaries," Chloe
said. "Sheesh, Nick, you're not listening. And all I'm saying is,
my dad's just an ordinary Joe who happens to be in big
business."

She stared expectantly at him for a minute,
then prodded his shin with her sneakered foot. "Keep reading!"

Nick looked at the note card, and seriously
considered shredding the thing. That was about the nicest treatment
it deserved. But Chloe seemed thrilled to have it, so he only
raised it higher and went on reading.

Tabitha and I, it said, are delighted with
your news. We'll be thinking of you during our annual Christmas
cruise next month! Give the newest Carmichal a kiss for grandpa,
and call me if you need anything. Love, your father, Newton
Carmichal.

At least the signature was handwritten.

Beside him, Chloe sighed. "Isn't that
sweet?" she said. Then she nudged him in the side. "Did you see how
he put 'grandpa' in there? How he said to call him if I needed
anything?" She hugged herself and beamed up at him. "Thank God for
Lucinda."

"Lucinda?"

"Secretary number two."

"Of course."

"If not for her, my letter might never have
reached him."

"Right."

How had he never noticed how outrageously
... absent her father was? How thoughtless?

"And you know, this really gives me hope,
Nick. I think this might be a new beginning for us," she went
on.

"You and Lucinda?"

"Me and my dad, silly." Chloe poked him
again and gazed fondly at the card. "Sweet, huh?" she asked.

Nick gazed down at her smiling, sunlit
expression, and realized there was nothing else to do. He didn't
have the heart to tell Chloe a truth she so obviously didn't want
to hear. So he smiled right back and lifted the bubble-wrapped
package still waiting to be opened.

"It's really nice, Chloe," he murmured.
And you're really a liar, Steadman
.

He rattled the package in his hand, then
winked. "And what's this, do you think? Gold-plated mutual funds?
Baby bootie bonds?"

"He's not a stockbroker." She took away the
note card and hugged it close while Nick unwrapped the bubble-wrap.
"Just look, will you? I can't wait for you to see!"

The last of the clear cushioned coating came
away. Nick looked inside. Nestled inside the wrap, nestled inside a
fancy white box, nestled inside a pillow of tissue paper, was a
shiny silver thing wrapped with a white ribbon. Monogrammed with a
set of three script letters too fancy to make out on the curved
surface and polished to a high-gloss, it looked kind of like a
miniature silver dumbbell.

For a newborn baby? The fitness craze was
getting way out of hand.

Never mind, he told himself. Say something
nice.

"Umm, I can see my teeth in it," Nick said,
making a face at his reflection. "What do you know about that?"

"I know!" Chloe burbled, dancing up on
tiptoes. "Isn't it great?"

"It's—it's—" He turned it over,
experimentally hefted it like a tiny barbell. "What the hell is it,
Chloe?"