The Boss's Baby Affair(38)

Every one of them would have fought to keep her child. And every one of them would’ve been stunned that he could threaten to cut a woman off from the child she’d given birth to.

Even if she had agreed to give that baby up…

Nick lifted his hand and carefully brought the razor down in a long sweeping line. In minutes the white foam was gone, the shave complete. His skin glowed, clear and unsullied by stubble.

Yet Nick suspected the same wasn’t true of his soul…

Once showered and dressed, Nick paused on the upstairs landing. Glancing at his watch, he saw it was already well past breakfast time.

Instead of heading for the stairs, he checked himself and went the other way. To the wing that held the nursery—and Candace’s room.

Where the landing widened into a sitting area, he stopped.

Candace had pushed the glass table aside and was lying flat on her back on the carpet. A DVD showing a group of mothers doing exercises with babies was playing on the television screen that hung on a wall. Candace’s arms were fully extended as she swung Jennie above her.

Both of them were laughing.

The shorts Candace wore were white and very, very brief. The ice-blue tank top fitted snugly over her curvy breasts.

Hell. The hollow in Nick’s chest contracted into a tight, hard ball.

Desperately he looked away, scanning the room. The place looked—sounded—like a home. In a way that the perfectly decorated space never had before.

It even felt like a home.

He dithered on the periphery, not wanting to break the mood.

But a movement must’ve given him away because Candace turned her head—and saw him. Her laughter stilled. She lowered the baby and started to sit up.

“Don’t stop,” he said. “It looks like Jennie’s having the time of her life.”

Candace smiled hesitantly, and Nick felt as if the room had been flooded with more sunshine.

His cell phone chose that moment to ring.

It was his doctor confirming that he was almost certainly Jennie’s father.

Nick thanked him for his help and killed the call. Staring at the woman on the mat, a heavy beat thundered in his ears.

Candace had told the truth. He hadn’t believed her. Once again the sense of his soul being less than pure struck him. He shook off the thought, strode forward and sank onto the floor beside her, his legs awkwardly long in the confined space.

Jennie reached a hand toward him, and he gave her his. She grasped his thumb with a grip that was surprisingly strong.

“You’ll get wool from the carpet all over your suit,” Candace warned, folding slim, bare legs under her and resting Jennie in her lap, still attached to his finger.

Nick forced his eyes away from her smooth limbs.

Down, boy.

So this was how she was going to play it. As if that ugly scene between them last night had never happened.

For a split second Nick considered forcing the issue, trying to explain his confusion—what Jennie was coming to mean to him. Strangely enough, he hadn’t needed the doctor’s call to care about the baby. That had happened all by itself in some miraculous way.

The hesitation stretched into a pulsing pause, became overlong, and the moment passed.

Finally, he took the conversational olive branch she’d offered. “A bit of lint on my trousers hardly matters.”

Everything that mattered in his life sat right in front of him. Jennie, snuggled into Candace’s lap, holding on to his thumb like there was no tomorrow. Candace, her cheeks flushed with exertion, her eyes sparkling.

“Candace—”

Her eyes were bright, inquiring. “Mmm?”

“That was my doctor.”

The brightness faded a little.

“And?”

“The tests are back. You were right. Jennie is my daughter.”

Ominously, she didn’t say that she’d told him so. She tightened her arms around the baby until Jennie objected. Her stillness was starting to concern him.

He needed them…both of them.

Jennie perched on Candace’s lap looking comfortable and at ease. Both had been so utterly absorbed in each other until he’d come along and ruined it. They didn’t need him at all.

That realization made his heart miss a beat.

For the first time he had some inkling of how Jilly must’ve felt in those long years she was married to him.

He’d behaved like a bastard, resenting the fact that Jilly had trapped him into a marriage he hadn’t wanted…yet couldn’t refuse. It had been a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea, and he’d been determined not to drown. So Jilly, the agent of his downfall, had borne the brunt of his anger.

Nick was starting to like himself less and less…

As if she sensed his thoughts, Jennie dropped his thumb and turned her attention to tugging at strands of blond hair that had escaped Candace’s hair tie. Instead of pulling away, Candace simply laughed.