Not because it hadn’t been good. Far from it. Somehow that night with Hannah had been the best one of my life. And it couldn’t—wouldn’t—be repeated, so there was no point in dwelling on it.
“I’m just saying. A healthy adult male needs certain activities to keep his equilibrium.”
“Seriously?” I was not blushing. Absolutely not. I ran my finger along the inside of my collar. It was just warm in here.
“Don’t play coy with me. I know you’re not making time for the important things in life. I was so happy you went out on New Year’s and came home with lipstick on your collar to boot. I was hoping we’d see more of that young lady around here, but I should’ve known you’d go right back to work as if nothing ever happened.”
“You know the situation with the paper. If I let up for even a minute, we could lose everything.”
“You’re not going to lose everything, but maybe you should.”
Stunned, hurt, I sat back in my desk chair and stared sightlessly at the rows of projections in Excel on my computer screen. One of the many reasons I loved my grandmother was because she didn’t have a whit of interest in the family business. She didn’t care about money, unlike my mother who considered financial worth before she spoke to a person.
Okay, she wasn’t quite that bad, but bad enough.
But for my grandmother to openly say she hoped I failed? I’d always counted on her support, even if she didn’t quite get why maintaining what I saw as the family legacy was so crucial.
“Snug,” she said a moment later, breaking the silence. “Don’t misunderstand me. I know how important the paper is to you. It does my heart good knowing how much you care about making your grandfather proud. He’s gone, but you’ll never forget him, will you?”
“No,” I murmured.
Sharing penny candies while sitting in my miniature rocker at his side when I was a boy. Laughing as we sat in a fishing boat in the early morning fog and waited for tugs on the line. Perching on his lap and pretending to drive his big old Oldsmobile in the driveway when I wasn’t more than five.
No, I would not forget.
“But there’s ways you can honor his memory other than working yourself to the bone. Times are changing, honey, and you can’t reverse the clock. Much as you might want to. Much as I might want to, matter of fact.” She laughed, but I could hear the sadness just beneath it. “He would want you to be happy most of all. In your early days of running the business, you were. Now? Not so much.”
“I’m happy spending time with you and Lily. She makes me laugh every single day.” That was sterling truth. “Even more now that she’s starting to crawl. Heaven help me.”
I still didn’t have the faintest idea how to be a parent of a baby. A little girl, no less. But Lily was not listening to my pleas to stay small and safe in her crib. She was determined to walk, whether or not I was ready.
In the meantime, I was setting out quilts for her to crawl on and covering up every outlet I could find with safety covers.
Or at least I had managed that in the bachelor pad I currently lived in. But I’d decided shortly after the new year that Lily could not grow up in an apartment in the city. Well, she could, but I had plenty of money, so what was I saving it for if not to spoil my loved ones? She was my daughter now, and I didn’t want her to lack for anything. She deserved a big backyard in the suburbs with a giant swing set and room to run.
Hell, perhaps someday I’d even get her a pony. Wasn’t that every little girl’s dream? I’d need acreage for that.
Someday. Maybe.
In the meantime, I’d recently closed on my dream home for now in Crescent Cove. It boasted five bedrooms—although I didn’t quite know why I needed so many—along with a fireplace in several rooms, including the master bedroom. It also had four bathrooms, a huge backyard, and a Jacuzzi tub among other amenities.
It was a lot of house for one man and one baby. Unless I managed to convince my gran to move in, which was doubtful because she claimed to need privacy for her and her “boyfriend.”
Yes, my sixty-seven year old grandmother was getting way more action than I was.
“All the more reason you need some help. I don’t know why you see hiring a nanny as admitting failure. You simply can’t be everywhere at once, Snug.”
“I’m well aware of that fact. As I’m about to be late for a meeting with the advertising director of athletics at the university.”
In truth, I wasn’t late yet. I added in extra time before and after every appointment, just in case. I was the kind of guy who preferred my dates—back when I’d had some—to be on a form of birth control while I used a condom, because ample protection was best.
And birth control related to the current line of conversation, how? Jesus. My brain was everywhere at once lately.
I rubbed the knot in my forehead. I blamed Hannah for this. She was the reason I had sex in mind so often nowadays when I’d once relegated it to the shelf where it belonged.
Even thinking of her name made me shift in my chair.
Over the past two months, I’d worked fucking hard at erasing that word from my thoughts. Every time memories of that night we’d shared plagued me, I threw myself into work or into tending Lily. Eventually, the flashbacks disappeared, even if now and then, I had to use a scotch chaser to rid myself of them.