LITMIR.BIZ

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Yes, you probably will need that.”

      She took another of her business cards out of her purse, wrote her address on the back and handed it to him, watching as he read it simply because she couldn’t take her eyes off him.

      “This is close by,” he said when he glanced from the card to her again.

      “It took me about ten minutes to get here.”

      “So all this time you’ve been right under my nose and I didn’t even know you were there.”

      “Well, not right under your nose, but not too far from here. About six blocks.”

      “Strange to think of that,” he mused for no reason she understood.

      So, rather than commenting on it, she said, “Then I guess I’ll see you tomorrow evening.”

      “Bet on it,” he answered decisively as she said goodbye and left him standing in the doorway.

      And as she returned to her car, Keely wondered if he’d forgotten that he was coming to her place to meet his potential son rather than to see her.

      But it gave her a dangerous little thrill just the same.

       Chapter Two

       C larissa Coburn.

      That was a name Devon had hoped never to hear again. And by the next morning, as he went through photographs he’d taken of wild boars in Africa in preparation for his meeting with a gallery owner, he still wasn’t happy that he’d had to.

      He considered Clarissa—hands down—the biggest mistake of his life. A mistake he’d already paid dearly for. And now he had to wonder if it was going to haunt him forever.

      She’d seemed so perfect for him when he’d met her at a bar in Denver. Dancing on a table, she’d caught his eye immediately, and then she’d literally fallen into his lap and asked him out to dinner.

      He’d accepted, of course, pleased by his good fortune and flattered by her initiative. He’d liked her. She was beautiful—tall and leggy, well built, blond, sexy as hell. Not to mention smart and witty and a natural flirt who sucked him in before he even knew she was flirting with him.

      Over dinner they’d discovered that they were both free spirits, ready to pack up at a moment’s notice and take off—Devon for work, Clarissa for any reason. To Kenya. To Alaska. To east Asia—they’d both been to some of the farthest reaches of the globe and intended to see even more of it.

      They’d found that they shared the same likes and dislikes in food, in music, in movies. They even had similar plans for the future—neither of them were interested in marriage or family until much later in life.

      They’d just plain hit it off, which had led to them spending the next three months together.

      Three wild months during which Devon hadn’t thought about anything but Clarissa. Three months during which he hadn’t cared if anyone else in the world existed.

      Three months during which Clarissa hadn’t thought about anyone but Clarissa, or cared if anyone but Clarissa existed, too.

      Because that was also Clarissa.

      She was a hedonist—that’s what she’d said about herself. And she’d proved it again and again. If she wanted something, she made sure she got it. If a whim struck her, she followed it. And whatever felt good to her at any given moment was what she did.

      Who cared about the consequences? That was something else she’d said more often than he could count. If there were consequences she didn’t like, she just didn’t accept them. Or she let someone else deal with them….

      “Apparently even if the consequence was a baby,” Devon muttered to himself as he began to put the pictures he’d chosen into his portfolio.

      An eight-month-old baby.

      An eight-month-old baby who could be his….

      That possibility hadn’t even begun to seem real to Devon yet.

      A baby…

      He could be a father….

      That might be all right for his older brothers. They’d both only recently become dads under unusual circumstances.

      “But me?” Devon said.

      He didn’t even want to think about it. About what it could mean. About how unsuited he was for parenthood.

      He didn’t know the first thing about babies or kids or being a father. He wasn’t domestic—he paid a service to take care of his yard. He employed a neighbor woman to clean his house and do his laundry, to stock his refrigerator if he was going to be around long enough to actually drink milk.

      And that was the biggest thing—his being around. He wasn’t. He traveled. A lot. Some months—hell, some years—he was away from home more days than he was there. He didn’t subscribe to a newspaper because he was never around to read it. He didn’t bother with a hardwired telephone or with cable TV because they were a waste of money when he wasn’t there to use them.

      Did that sound like the description of someone who should be a father?

      Of course it didn’t.

      Plus, he didn’t want to be a dad. To be the one person some little kid depended on. For everything. For every mouthful of food. For clean diapers and whatever else babies required that he couldn’t begin to fathom. For clothes and shelter and learning to walk and talk—how was he supposed to know how to teach someone to walk and talk?

      And the kid wouldn’t be a baby forever. Then what? Then he’d be the person to teach it right from wrong. The person who had to decide if the kid needed braces and how long to spend on homework and when to let it drive or date or a million other things that parents did.

      “Maybe it won’t be mine,” Devon suggested, realizing he was breaking out in a sweat just thinking about what it would entail if Clarissa’s baby was his.

      He flipped to the beginning of his portfolio to make sure he had all the photographs in the sequence he wanted them, escaping his own thoughts for a moment.

      But only for a moment before the whole subject of a baby, of his own possible parenthood, sneaked back into his mind again.

      But it was no easier to believe.

      Keely Gilhooley had said it—he—was a good baby, Devon reminded himself as if that might help ease some of the gut-wrenching tension he was experiencing. She’d said Harley was adorable and even-tempered and sweet.

      Maybe a little like Keely Gilhooley herself, he thought.

      Not that Devon knew anything about her temper or her temperament. But she was pretty adorable.

      He’d opened his door to find her on his porch and thought, Well, this is my lucky day.

      Little had he known….

      But still, Keely Gilhooley—just her name made him smile—was very, very easy to look at. In fact, she was so flawless that, with the autumn sun setting her aglow, for a moment Devon had thought she was some kind of vision.

      He had a weakness for redheads. And she was most certainly that. Not just strawberry blond and not the unflattering orangey-red that some people sported. Keely Gilhooley’s hair was deep, rich, glistening red. Cherrywood red. And as if that weren’t enough, it was full and curly, too. The kind of hair that just made him want to grab handfuls of it as if it was a whole bunch of spun silk.

      But the hair was only the beginning of her appeal. She had mesmerizing eyes. Great big, round eyes that were green but so light a green they were luminous. Ethereal eyes that might have made him think she were heaven-sent even without the sun making a halo around her.

      And if the hair and eyes weren’t enough, she also had skin like a porcelain doll’s. Smooth, perfect radiant skin.

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