The Virgin Cowboy Billionaire’s Secret Baby(61)
He folded it in half and slipped it in between his hand and the hard drive. “I’ll let you get back to work. See you this evening?”
“Okay. Text me if anything on the list doesn’t make sense or—”
“Or we can go pick it up together on a different day.” He smiled. “Relax. We’ve got time, and we’ve got this”—he held up the list—“under control.”
Dara nodded. “All right.”
He kissed her forehead. “I’ll see you tonight. Don’t work too hard.”
“I won’t.”
As he started to leave, she said, “Matt.”
He turned around.
She smiled. “Thank you.”
Chapter Seventeen
At the end of Dara’s street, Matt rolled to a stop. While the truck idled, he skimmed over the list she’d given him.
Crib. Changing table. Rocking chair. A bunch of shit he’d never even heard of. What the hell was a boppy?
Well, there was one way to find out. He set the list aside and started driving again.
On his way into town, he hesitated. There were a few shops around Aspen Mill where he figured he could find most of this stuff, but they were all family-owned. He preferred Mom-and-Pop places, but in this situation, that didn’t seem all that wise. If one person saw him giving a crib a second look, tongues would start wagging all over town.
He sighed, glancing briefly at the list on the passenger seat.
Without a second thought, he pulled onto the interstate and accelerated.
The interstate was a mess through Goldmount. The town had grown faster than its two lanes of freeway could handle, and the state was busy adding a lane in each direction and more ramps to cut down on congestion. Matt thought they needed two more lanes, but the powers that be apparently believed otherwise.
After crawling through the thick traffic, Matt finally made it to the main drag through town. Where it used to be a narrow street lined with no-name shops and a restaurant whose name he couldn’t remember, it was now a broad stretch of freshly painted asphalt with roundabouts to minimize the backups, gleaming signs directing people toward the strip malls, and huge banners around a construction site, each promising in giant letters that the biggest and most amazing shopping experience would be opening by the end of next summer. All the buildings were cream-colored and uniformly designed, differentiated only by their individual signs and logos.
In short, it was hideous.
Goldmount was his brother’s pride and joy. Goldmine, he called it. Within five years of Adam getting his hands on the Coolidge farm, this would be Aspen Mill.
Matt shuddered, and his stomach turned. No, he wouldn’t think about that today. All that mattered today was the list sitting on his passenger seat. Everything he needed to pick up for their baby.
Two roundabouts down from the interstate, he turned into one of the expansive parking lots and found a space in the shadow of a big box baby store. List in hand, he went inside.
He looked over the list again. Some of this, he’d defer to her, but he could take care of most of it. She’d been pretty specific about furniture. Not just styles and colors, but model numbers. He found everything except the rocking chair she wanted, so he had them special order it. For the rest of the furniture, he took the tickets and added them to the shopping cart he’d been navigating around the giant store.
Then he wandered through the aisles of smaller things. How a creature as tiny as a baby required this much stuff, he had no idea, but hopefully Dara knew what she was doing.
A rack of stuffed animals caught his eye. Specifically, a bright green dragon that looked like one he’d had when he was a kid. The age tag said two years and up, but he put the dragon in the cart anyway—it could stay on a shelf until the baby was old enough.
He went up and down every aisle, staring at contraptions and devices that looked more like medieval torture devices than anything. Some were on Dara’s list, some weren’t—he picked up what he could readily identify.
By the time he’d been through the store twice, he had three quarters of the list crossed off, and a very full shopping cart.
On his way to the checkout line, the book rack caught his eye.
Holy shit.
He’d been worried that he wouldn’t know what he was doing. With all the shit in his cart that baffled him, he was pretty sure he’d been right. Given the number of books on the subject, some of which rivaled the size of his college textbooks, maybe he was more clueless than he’d thought. He was fucked, wasn’t he?
Dara hadn’t listed any books, so he didn’t pick any up. When he saw her this evening, he’d find out if she had any she could recommend, and if not, there was always Amazon.