LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter One

      He hated being late. It was one of those traits that he had always thought was rude in others and unforgivable in himself. But in the past few months, being late had seemed to become his inevitable fate. It was as if he was doomed to constantly be running behind every deadline, every event in his life.

      It had been that way since last April. Twelve impossibly long months. A year.

      A year in which Alec Beckett felt as if he were trapped in the last few minutes of an old war movie he’d once seen where the hero was running along the railroad tracks, trying to catch a train that would take him to freedom.

      No matter what he did, that train just seemed to be getting farther and farther away from him.

      And it had just gotten worse. Ellen had up and quit on him without so much as a full day’s notice. She was the third nanny to leave in a year, if you didn’t count the one he’d fired. It seemed that he was having no better luck in picking nannies than he was having in catching up.

      “Not your fault, Andrea.”

      Alec looked down at the baby tucked against his chest. When she stared at him with those wide, green eyes, he sometimes had the feeling that his daughter could intuit things, that she knew exactly what he was thinking and reacted to iL Never mind that she was only a little more than a year old and had trouble feeding herself without sharing the contents of her spoon with her curly blond hair. She could see into his very soul.

      “I just want you to know that. None of this is any of your fault. Everything just looks as if it’s falling apart, but it’s not. We’re going to get through this, you and me. Don’t you doubt that for a minute. Daddy’s going to get his act together any day now.”

      He said it with enough feeling to almost convince himself.

      Andrea smiled at the sound of her father’s voice and uttered something unintelligible in response that he took to be agreement His daughter’s smile never ceased to uplift him. Andrea was the single being his whole world revolved around these days. Now that Christine was gone.

      The small parking lot behind him was crowded with cars, family vehicles mostly, attesting to the fact that the people who were attending the session had probably already arrived.

      He’d meant to leave work early, but then Rex had cornered him in the hallway, desperate for some data that was supposed to be delivered to a buyer by tomorrow noon. That set him back considerably. Rather than be early, Alec had wound up being half an hour late.

      “Boy, this being both mom and dad business doesn’t get any easier with time, does it?” He looked down at Andrea ruefully as he hurried up the five cement steps to the squat, new building where such warm and nurturing-sounding classes as Family Planning and Baby Gamboling were held regularly. The class he was rushing to was called Baby and Me. “I know, I know, you don’t have anything to compare it to. But it’ll get better, I promise. There’s a lot of room for improvement here.”

      And improvement was what he was bent on. It was what had led him to sign up for the class in the first place. It would have been the kind of thing that Christine would have done, had she had the opportunity.

      He’d hardly had proper time to mourn her. One moment, he was a widower, the next, the father of a tiny baby girl who was being placed in his arms. There’d been no time for tears. No time for anything except seeing to Andrea’s needs and working.

      It was only in the middle of the night that time seemed to stretch out endlessly, like a line that was plumbed down to infinity.

      It had been a year and he had gone on with his life, but it wasn’t easy. Alec kept his days so filled with work that there was no opportunity for grief, no opportunity for thought. Andrea saw to it that at least part of his evenings were busy. And all the while, Alec kept his emotions at arm’s length until he could deal with them.

      If ever.

      “No music,” he murmured to Andrea as he pulled open one of the double doors leading into the building.

      The Baby and Me class was supposed to take place on the ground floor, first room to the left, just around the corner. If class was in session, he thought that there would be some sort of children’s songs floating through the air.

      “That’s a good sign. Maybe we’re not as late as I thought.”

      He wasn’t sure why he thought there should be music coming from a Baby and Me class, he just did.

      Truth of it was, he didn’t know what to expect from such a class, only that attending it would be a good thing for Andrea. He wanted her to grow up healthy and happy, and he wanted to compare notes with other parents to see if he was doing things right.

      Maybe someone here would know where he could find a reputable nanny at a moment’s notice. God knows he was at his wit’s end.

      With Ellen quitting yesterday evening and a meeting he absolutely had to attend this morning, Alec had turned to his mother in desperation and prevailed upon her to watch Andrea for the day.

      Alec smiled to himself. Roberta Beckett wasn’t the kind of woman Norman Rockwell had envisioned when he’d been painting all of those warm scenarios of hearth and home and loving grandmothers. She wasn’t anyone’s idea of the typical grandmother, which wasn’t surprising since she hadn’t been a typical mother, either. She didn’t even answer to “Mother,” only to “Roberta.”

      That change had come about almost fifteen years ago. Roberta had suddenly felt too young to have a fifteen-year-old son. Adjustments had to be made. Since he couldn’t get younger, she did. She’d ceased being “Mother” and became “Roberta,” falling somewhere between a sophisticated older sister and an eccentric aunt.

      Sometimes, Alec thought, he really missed saying the word mother.

      He looked at Andrea. So would she, he thought.

      That was why he had to make it up to her. And attending this class was as good a way as any to begin. He meant to do all the things with his daughter that Christine no longer could. And all the things that Roberta had never done with him. He meant to give Andrea a stable family life, even if he was the only one in her family.

      Hell of a way to start out, he thought, being late like this.

      Hurrying around the corner, Alec ran straight into another roadblock. This one was softer. And noisy. A surprised squeal echoed around him, mingling with the sound of childish cries. In his rush to get to the room, he’d bumped into a dark-haired woman who appeared out of nowhere like a storm, dressed in silver leggings and a bright blue, overly long T-shirt hiked up on one incredibly slender hip.

      Weighed down with diaper bag and other paraphernalia, she was holding a squirming baby in her arms.

      The howl was deafening. For a split second Alec wasn’t sure if the noise was coming from his baby or hers. And then he realized that both were crying, more in startled surprise than anything else.

      “Sorry,” he apologized, raising his voice to be heard above the din.

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