An Unexpected Christmas Baby (The Daycare Chronicles 2)

“Lunch would be good,” she said, sounding a little less tense. “But dinner on Friday was good, too.”

“Today wasn’t.”

“No.”

“What did you do when you left?” Had she called a friend? How did she cope?

“I went to work.” That he could completely relate to.

“Owens is closed on weekends.”

“I have temporary clearance with security.”

“Are you at the office now?”

“Yes.”

He pictured her there. The building was quiet after hours. Peaceful. He did some of his best work when he was the only one on the floor.

Pictured himself there with her and actually got hard.

Either he was heading into the rest of his life or screwing up. At the moment, he wasn’t sure which.

“You didn’t get to finish your movie,” he told her.

“You could tell me about it.”

He heard invitation in her response and, settling back in his chair, beer in hand, he gave her a fairly detailed rundown of a movie he’d seen for the first time in junior high. He’d been in foster care, a six-month stint, and the family he’d been staying with had been watching old Charlie Sheen movies. The actor had just been hospitalized after having a stroke from a cocaine overdose. Flint’s mother had been in jail at the time for possession of crack. The movie had a profound effect on him—establishing for him, very clearly, that ethics were more important than money. But that money came a very close second. It had also given him his lifelong fascination with the unending opportunities provided by the stock market.

Not that he told Tamara all of that. With her, he stuck to the plot.

Until she asked him what it was that attracted him to the movie to the point of having watched it so many times. Then he told her about seeing it for the first time.

“Wow, that seems a bit callous to me,” she said. “They knew why your mother was in jail, right?”

“I was certainly under that impression.” He’d never asked.

“Did you say anything to them?”

“Nope.” He’d known from experience that any questions from him would just lead to more lectures that he’d neither needed nor wanted. Or, worse, more scorn.

He was the bastard son of a drug user. Assumed to be like her, because how could he not be? He’d never experienced anything different. Not many good people were drawn to him.

“Did you know from the first time you saw the movie that you wanted to be a stockbroker?”

He sipped from his bottle. Chuckled. Pictured her in the converted closet they’d given her as an office and wished a glass of wine on her.

“I wasn’t prone to lofty dreams,” he told her. “I was curious about the market, but it didn’t really occur to me that I’d have the opportunity to live in that world.” She was easy to talk to. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had been interested in him as a person.

Maybe some of that was his fault. He hadn’t been all that open to sharing his life. Even with Stella. He’d shared his time. His plans. His future. But not himself.

He’d only just realized that...

“So when did you start believing in the opportunity?”

It took him a second to realize they were still talking about the stock market. He picked up the baby monitor on the table. Made sure the volume was all the way up. Diamond, who was just inside the door in her carrier on the table, had been asleep for more than half an hour.

“I had a minimum-wage job in high school, but I’d been earning extra money by going through trash, finding broken things, fixing them and then selling them. I’d made enough to buy a beater car and was saving for college. And I got to thinking I should look for things that were for sale cheap—you know, at garage sales—and then fix them up and resell them.