Suddenly she was presented with the expanse of pale blue shirt fabric pulled firmly across his broad shoulders. A prickle of heat raced across her skin. She wanted to allow her hands to roam, to trace the shape of him under the material, to luxuriate in the warm solidness of him.
He didn’t move—patiently waiting for her to help him with something for his daughter. Which was enough to snap Jenna out of the mood that had descended. Quickly, she tightened the straps to fit firmly around him, ignoring the exquisite torture of her fingers brushing against him.
“Okay, I think that’s about right,” she said brightly. “I’ll pop Bonnie in, and check the fitting again then.”
As he turned back around, Jenna picked Bonnie up, gave her a quick kiss on the cheek and slid her into the pouch strapped to her father’s chest. Bonnie’s neck arched against the head support and she locked her gaze on her father’s face.
“I think she likes it already,” Jenna said.
Liam put a hand up behind Bonnie’s head, as he examined as much of the carrier as he could see, as if making an assessment about its construction and the safety of his daughter. “I thought I’d seen babies facing the other way.”
“As she gets a bit older, we can adjust it and have her facing forward. Older babies like to see the world, but right now she’d rather be snug against you.”
Liam whispered something to Bonnie, and Jenna saw his Adam’s apple move slowly up and down. Tears of tender emotion pressed at the back of her eyes, but she blinked them away and busied herself reading the instruction leaflet that came with the carrier, despite having read it several times already, and allowed father and daughter to have their moment.
“Did you wear one of these much with Meg?” he finally asked, glancing up.
Jenna smiled as she circled him, testing the straps and the fit. “She practically lived in one. After work, I was busy trying to get our washing and cooking done. But I hadn’t seen her all day, so I didn’t want to be apart from her either.”
He nodded in understanding. “And with the carrier, you could do both things at once.”
“In theory,” she said wryly. “Often I’d get distracted by Meg and end up with no washing or cooking done and I’d eat a banana for dinner.”
She felt the low rumble of his laugh as it vibrated through his chest and quickly dropped her hands. “I think she’s safe and snug in there,” she said, stepping back. “How does it feel?”
He leaned a fraction to one side, then the other and swiveled at the waist, as if testing the carrier’s scope. “It’s surprisingly comfortable. I mean, I know she’s there and my center of gravity is different, but I’d expected it to feel more cumbersome.”
“That’s great. Why don’t you take a walk through the house? See if it feels secure while you move around.”
He wandered off, ambling from room to room, leaving her watching him. But she felt more like a voyeur than someone supervising the process. His body moved with such masculine grace, and the carrier straps emphasized the set of his shoulders.
Her heart clenched tight. Why was she having such inappropriate thoughts about her boss? And, maybe more important, why was she so ineffective at controlling them?
She sank into the dining chair and covered her face with her hands, forced to acknowledge that she was quite possibly in over her head.
* * *
Two days later, Liam met Jenna and the babies at the door to his research facility. On a whim—one he was still struggling to understand—he’d sent a note to the house inviting them down to see where he worked.
“Hi, Liam,” Jenna said brightly. “Thanks for the invitation.” She’d worn a summer dress and an orange wide-brimmed hat, and for a moment he felt a pang at not being able to see her silky blond hair.
“Hi,” he said, looking at the double stroller. “It might be better if we carry them. And you won’t need your hat in here either.” He slipped off his white lab coat, threw it over one arm and scooped Meg up in the other. Meg was the heavier of the babies, so he’d instinctively reached for her to save Jenna’s arms, but he’d surprised himself lately by liking Meg in his arms almost as much as Bonnie. She had such a sweet personality even at this young age.
Jenna picked Bonnie up and followed him through the doors.
“I’m glad you could make it,” he said as they walked down a corridor.
“We wouldn’t have missed a personal tour for anything, would we, girls?” Meg gurgled in his arms at her mother’s voice.
Beyond family and his research staff, he’d never allowed anyone into his rooms. Corporate espionage was always a concern—if there was a flower he’d developed and was about to patent, a competitor would love the opportunity to see it and try to trump him.
But there was a personal element too.
Since the day his father had given him a plot of land and free rein to breed his own flowers when he was fifteen, he’d always grown his plants with a fair amount of privacy. He had staff to help now, to carry out tasks such as replicating his experiments to ensure the plants would throw the same flower every time and that the cultivars were healthy. But, in his own lab on a day-to-day basis, he still worked alone. It was a more personal space to him than his home.
So why he’d invited Jenna Peters into his inner sanctum was anyone’s guess. He inwardly winced. He could rationalize it and say he was letting his daughter visit him at work—something he hoped she would continue to do as she got older—and she needed her nanny to bring her, but he knew that wasn’t the truth.
There was something about Jenna that he trusted. Sure she’d been reluctant to talk about her childhood when asked, but he’d decided it must be painful for her. She simply wasn’t the type of person to hide anything from him.
As they walked down the sterile white corridor past rooms filled with activity, a few of his staff rushed over to coo over the two babies, but even those who didn’t watched his progress. Having non-research or admin staff in the building was enough of a surprise to raise eyebrows, but his personal assistant had told him that his instant fatherhood had been a hot topic of gossip among the staff, so he was sure the rumor mill had filled everyone in on whose baby was in the nanny’s arms. He found he didn’t mind the extra attention as much as he usually did.
They passed through a set of double doors into the area where he worked. Usually he was the only one in these rooms unless he called on an assistant to lend a hand. His heart rate felt uneven and he realized he was uneasy, waiting for Jenna’s reaction.
Jenna stood in the middle of the first room, Bonnie in her arms, and turned around in a full circle. “This is where you work, isn’t it?”
His attention snapped to her. “How did you know?”
“It...” Her voice trailed off as she looked from the surroundings back to him. “This is going to sound crazy, but it feels like you in here.”
“Feels like me,” he repeated dubiously. He narrowed his gaze as he took in the rows and rows of seedlings that he hoped would grow up to be something special, the whiteboards covered in diagrams of the generations of the cultivars, the computers and microscopes. “I’m not sure how it ‘feels’ any different in this room from the other rooms we passed along the way.”
“That’s the crazy part.” She grinned at him. “Maybe—” She leaned in and sniffed his shoulder, and Meg made a grab for her hair. “No. I was thinking maybe it smelled like your cologne in here and my subconscious picked it up, but you’re not wearing any.”
He tried to get his lungs working again after she’d leaned so close. “None of the staff wear cologne to work,” he said, hoping his voice was normal. “We often need to smell fragrances from a flower, so we don’t want outside influences floating around.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know what it is then. I’ll keep thinking about it.” She wandered over and peeked through the glass panels in the door to the next room. “What’s through here?”
A small swell of pride filled his chest—this project had been his greatest success so far. “Something I’ve been working on.”
Watching her face so he didn’t miss her reaction, he opened the door and waved her through.
Five
As Jenna stepped through the doorway of Liam’s laboratory, her breath caught in her throat. The windowless room had artificial lighting beaming down on rows of benches covered in small black pots that were bursting with glossy green leaves, each with the same flower on long stalks rising elegantly. It was a single, curved petal of a lily, but this bloom was darkest blue. It was stunning.
“Liam, you created this?” she asked once she’d found her voice.
He nodded. “Well, it was a joint project with Mother Nature.”
“It’s amazing.” She walked along the benches, looking at flower after flower, each as perfect as the last. “Has anyone else seen them?”
“Just the staff here. And Adam and Dylan, so they’re ready for when we release it to the public.”