The Baby Arrangement (The Daycare Chronicles 3)

With that grin on her face, Mallory was gorgeous, choosing his names for their babies. He’d known to just back away, work, give things time to cool down, and everything would be fine.

It always was.

You just had to not get sucked up in the drama.

Like he had when he’d proposed. He’d been all up inside himself, reacting instead of thinking. And he’d almost mucked it all up.

“Oh!” Mallory lurched, fork suspended, eyes wide. And then stark fear crossed her face.

“What?” He stared, tried to assess her expression.

“I just...” She shook her head and put a hand to her stomach.

“Is it the babies? What’s going on, Mal?”

Her features had softened. “I think I just felt one of them move,” she said, looking like some kind of madonna.

She jerked again, straightened, seemed to wait a second and said, “There. It just happened again.”

“Is it the first time?”

He hadn’t been present when she’d first felt Tucker move, so he didn’t know if this was how it happened or how she’d reacted then.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s much stronger than I remember, from before,” she said, half smiling. It was like she was there and yet not. She was probably tuned in to the children inside of her.

“Usually it starts more like gas bubbles, but this...” Her hand on her stomach, she stopped midsentence.

“You’re sure it’s not something wrong?” The sensations seemed to be coming somewhat regularly, and not minutes apart.

“I wasn’t sure at first,” she said, grinning now. “But it’s definitely baby movement. It’s not cramping, and it’s not down low. It doesn’t hurt at all. It just feels...odd. Different than with Tucker.”

“Maybe because there’s tw

o of them in there sharing the same amount of space you had for one.” Now that he knew for certain there was no danger, he was out of his chair, down on one knee beside hers.

He put his hand under hers on her stomach. Feeling Tucker move inside her had been the single most memorable part of the entire pregnancy for him.

He’d been moved—not drama-filled emotion, but different, calmer. More.

He felt nothing under his hand. “Is it still happening?” he asked, loving the feel of her roundness against his palm.

“Yeah.” Her voice sounded different.

“I can’t feel it.”

“It’s stronger than gas bubbles, but it’s not that strong.”

And there he was, his hand on her stomach, clearly hard. In his dress pants the reaction was obvious. She was staring at it, too. He looked at her when she raised her face, ready to apologize, and her eyes pooled with tears.

He held her gaze, reading far more than he could decipher in her look. She looked away first, out the window beside them. Down twelve floors or out to the horizon, he didn’t know.

He cleared the table and threw away the trash.

She was right behind him with the glasses, taking them over to the bar where his cleaning service would take care of them.

She was the only woman he wanted in his life. She was having his children. He wanted to feel them kick inside her.

It was right that he should. Right that she shouldn’t have to handle two babies alone.