The Single Dad Finds a Wife. Felicia Mason

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       Chapter Three

      The only thing on David Camden’s mind was picking up that prescription, getting Jeremy settled in bed and then figuring out a way to show Dr. Spring Darling that he wasn’t the sort who took an unneeded handout. She had to have overheard that fiasco at the front desk.

      After that, he would figure out how he was going to make the meetings in the morning with first the public safety officials and then the mayor and planning officials. That his priorities were turned topsy-turvy didn’t at all surprise him the way it should have. His son and securing the deal with the City of Cedar Springs should have been his only two concerns. Yet here he was disturbed and wondering about the impression he’d made on a woman he’d just met.

      He’d seen her as a woman, someone he could be interested in and that hadn’t happened in a long time.

      “Focus, Camden,” he coached himself.

      He had work to do and none of it involved a tall blue-eyed blonde.

      David forced his attention to his current dilemma.

      He couldn’t take Jeremy with him to the meetings, and he couldn’t afford to blow this deal. The opportunity for his company, Carolina Land Associates, was too great, and, in a way, Jeremy’s future depended on his sealing the contract.

      He also wondered if Dr. Spring Darling was the Darling he’d read about in the online edition of the Cedar Springs Gazette—the Darling so vocally opposed to and leading the effort to squelch the very notion of development in the city. But before he could investigate any of that, he needed to make sure Jeremy was all right. A glance over his shoulder and to the backseat of the sport utility vehicle confirmed that his little slugger was still knocked out.

      He’d fallen asleep almost as soon as David got him buckled into the child safety seat.

      After a quick dash into his hotel room to retrieve the wallet he’d left on the dresser next to the television’s remote control, he got a quart of orange juice and the medicine. David insisted on paying cash for the prescription—despite the pharmacist’s assurance that it was free. The last thing he wanted to do was take away a resource from someone who actually needed it.

      He roused Jeremy long enough to get him undressed, to the bathroom and back into the big bed. When they’d first checked in, the boy had loved the idea that he would get to sleep in a big bed like Daddy’s. Jeremy had jumped on both double beds and giggled as he hopped from one to the other. But David knew he’d soon want to climb back into his own bed at home, the one decked out like a Formula One race car.

      David stared down at his sleeping son as a concept that would enhance his presentation to city officials began unfolding in his mind.

      Jeremy’s bedroom furniture and the children’s waiting room at the clinic had given him an idea. He picked up his sketchbook and settled on the sofa to make a few preliminary sketches. Liking where it was going, David fired up his computer and worked on a design for a green space that would meld nicely with a concept he had for a play on the old-style garden apartments that were popular in the 1970s and 1980s. He wrote nouveau retro in the margin on the sketchpad page, then created a computer file with the same name as the design ideas tumbled over each other.

      Buzzing disturbed his train of thought.

      David looked around, trying to determine the source of the noise. The television was on mute; a guy surrounded by fruits and vegetables and a perky blonde assistant hawked what, had the sound been up, he would have heard was the best juicer ever created on planet Earth.

       Bzzz. Bzzz. Bzzz.

      The radio on the nightstand between the beds glowed 11:20 p.m. He’d been working for a couple of hours and hadn’t realized it.

       Bzzz.

      No sound came from the radio.

      Jeremy had flung the light blanket off and was turned practically upside down on his bed, the sheets in a twist.

      Then it dawned on him. The phone. He’d had it on vibrate and it was...where? He cast his gaze around the hotel room, wondering how he could lose something in a space the size of a studio apartment. Then he remembered. The counter in the bathroom. He’d put the phone down when they’d come in and gone straight to the toilet.

      He padded his way over and decided to take the call there so Jeremy wouldn’t be disturbed. He grabbed the phone before it fell to the floor after buzzing its way to the edge of the sink counter.

      “Camden here.”

      “That’s no way to answer the telephone. I’ve told you that at least a hundred times, dear.”

      David breathed a sigh that was both relief and exasperation. Charlotte Camden, his missing-in-action mother, had decided to check in. He’d left a couple of messages for her earlier in the day and hadn’t heard a peep from her.

      “Mom, where are you?”

      “I’m at Becky’s. She sends her love.”

      David rolled his eyes. The only thing his aunt Becky would send would be an order form for cookies or magazines or overpriced gift wraps and bows from one of the thousand civic group fund-raisers she always seemed to be in charge of. There were only so many peanuts and church cookbooks and happy cat calendars that a person could buy or tolerate.

      “We had a lovely girls’ day out,” his mother said. “We went to a new spa here in Greensboro and had facials, and then we ate lunch at a cute little bistro...”

      David СКАЧАТЬ