Apb: Baby. Julie Miller

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       Chapter Three

      Lucy added another round of quarters to the clothes dryer. “Oops. Sorry, munchkin.”

      She quickly apologized for the loud mechanical noise and leaned over the infant fastened into the carrier sitting on top of the dryer. But she needn’t have worried. Tommy was still asleep, his tiny body swaying slightly with the jiggle of the dryer. She smiled, resisting the urge to kiss one of those round apple cheeks, lest she wake him again. He’d fussed and bellowed for nearly an hour upstairs before she remembered the advice she’d once heard from a coworker about tricks to help stubborn babies fall asleep and got the idea to bring Tommy and all his new clothes and supplies down to the basement laundry room to wash them.

      Instead of disturbing him again, she opted to pull a blanket dotted with red, blue and yellow trucks from the basket of baby clothes she’d just unloaded and drape the cotton knit over him, securing him in a warm cocoon. Then she picked up the basket and set it on the neighboring dryer to start folding the rest of the light-colored sleepers and towels and undershirts. She was handling more than one problem here. She’d removed the noisy baby from Niall Watson’s apartment so the enigmatic doctor could get some much-needed sleep. Since she had no chair to rock the baby in, she’d found the next best thing down here in the laundry room. And at this time of the morning, before the residents stirred to get ready for church or work, she’d found a quiet place for herself to think without being distracted by hunky neighbors with grabby hands and hard bodies, or caring for the needs of a newborn with too little sleep herself, or worrying about the unanswered calls and cryptic clues surrounding her foster daughter’s disappearance.

      When the second load of darker clothes was done in twenty minutes or so, she’d take Tommy back up to Niall Watson’s apartment and sneak back in without waking him. Then she’d have another hour or two to curl up on his stiff leather couch and try not to notice how much the smell of it reminded her of the man himself. Crushes were terrible things when they were one-sided like this. Niall Watson, ME, was a good catch, according to her mother’s standards—not that she credited Alberta McKane for giving her any useful set of values to judge a man by. But he was as dependable as he was curiously aloof, and that was a quality Lucy valued more than several framed degrees or the amount of money a man made. She vowed to be a good friend to her socially awkward neighbor, but she didn’t have to torture her dreams with the vivid memory of his body flattened against hers as he pinned her to the wall. If he was a different man he’d have kissed her then. And chances are, she would have responded to that kiss with a purely female instinct.

      But Niall Watson wasn’t that man. He had a set of rules he lived by, an order of right and wrong he believed in. He wasn’t a smooth talker. He wasn’t much of a talker, period. But, awkward body contact aside, he treated her with respect. He put Tommy’s and his family’s needs above anything he and his hormones might feel. And that made him so much more attractive to her than anything her mother could have envisioned.

      Stress, fatigue, the rhythmic sound of the dryer and the warmth of the insulated laundry area were beginning to have the same hypnotic effect on Lucy as they did on Tommy. After several big blinks, her thoughts drifted and her hands came to rest in the pile of warm cotton garments. Her chin was dropping toward her chest when hushed voices entered her dreams. “Down here.”

      “Are you sure?”

      “If her car’s outside, but she’s not at her place, then yes.”

      “This is a mistake.”

      “I just have to know—”

      “Get out of here.”

      Lucy snapped her head up at the slam of a heavy door from somewhere above her. The muffle of words weren’t inside her head. They were as real as the terse, angry exchange of voices bouncing off the concrete-block walls outside the laundry room. She touched the gentle rise and fall of Tommy’s small chest, reassuring herself that he was safe, while she blinked the grogginess from her eyes and reoriented herself to the waking world. “Hello? Is someone there?”

      “I know you’re here,” came a heavily accented voice. “You can’t take what is mine.”

      Lucy thought she heard a bell. Someone getting off the elevator?

      Or on it. “Move. Don’t let him see you. Go!”

      “Where is she?” the louder voice shouted. “You know what I want.”

      Lucy СКАЧАТЬ