Baby In The Making. Elizabeth Bevarly

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СКАЧАТЬ either. She’d seen worse. No, what troubled her most was how little Yeager Novak seemed to be bothered by the six tidy stitches binding his flesh just north of the waistband of his silk boxers. Then again, as far as Yeager’s garments were concerned, this was par for the course. Such was life sewing for a tailor whose most profitable client made his living at cheating death—and planning similar travel adventures for others—then brought in what was left of his clothing after the most recent near miss to have them mended. Or, in the case of the shirt, completely recreated from scratch.

      Yeager towered over her from her current position kneeling before him, tape measure in hand. But then, he towered over her when she was standing, too. Shoving a handful of coal-black hair off his forehead, he gazed down at her with eyes the color of sapphires and said, “I’ll never let a bull get that close to me again.” He darted his gaze from the stitches on his torso to the ruined clothing on the floor. “That was just a little too close for comfort.”

      Hannah blew a dark blond curl out of her eyes and pushed her reading glasses higher on her nose. “That’s what you said last year when you ran with the bulls.”

      He looked puzzled. “I did?”

      “Yes. It was the first time you came to see us here at Cathcart and Quinn, because your previous tailor told you to take a hike when you brought in one too many of his masterpieces to be mended.” She arched a brow in meaningful reminder. “Except when you were in Pamplona last July, you escaped into a cantina before the bull was able to do more than tear the leg of your trousers.”

      “Right,” he said, remembering. “That was where I met Jimena. Who came back to my hotel with me while I changed my clothes. And didn’t get back into them for hours.” His expression turned sublime. “I probably should have sent that bull a thank-you note.”

      Even after knowing him for a year, Hannah was still sometimes surprised by the frankness with which Yeager talked about his sex life. Then again, his personal life sounded like it was almost as adventurous as his professional life, so maybe he had trouble distinguishing between the two on occasion.

      “Or at least sent Jimena a text that said adios,” Hannah said, striving for the same matter-of-factness and not sure if she quite managed it.

      He grinned. “Hey, don’t worry about Jimena. She got what she wanted, too.”

      I’ll bet, Hannah thought, her gaze traveling to the elegant bumps of muscle and sinew on his torso. Yeager Novak might well have been sculpted by the hands of the gods. But the scar left behind by his latest stitches would be in good company, what with the jagged pink line marring the flesh above his navel and the puckered arc to their left. He had scars all over his body, thanks to his extreme adventurer ways. And thanks to his total lack of inhibition when it came to being fitted for clothes, Hannah had seen all of them.

      “So you think you can fix the shirt and pants?” he asked.

      “The pants will be fine,” she told him. “They just need a good washing. But the shirt is a goner.” Before he could open his mouth to protest, she added, “Don’t worry, Mr. Novak. I can make a new one that will look just like it.”

      He threw her an exasperated look. “How many times have I told you to call me Yeager?”

      “Lots,” she replied. “And, just like I told you all those other times, it’s Mr. Cathcart’s and Mr. Quinn’s policy to use ‘Mr.’ or ‘Ms.’ with all of our clients.”

      Just like it was Cathcart and Quinn policy that Hannah wear the ugly little smock she had to wear while working and always keep her hair confined, as if the shop’s sole female employee was a throwback to the Industrial Revolution.

      “Anyway,” she continued, “I learned pretty quickly to keep all of your patterns and cut enough fabric for two garments whenever I make one.”

      He smiled in a way that was nothing short of devastating. “And I love you for it,” he told her.

      She smiled back. “I know.”

      Yeager told Hannah he loved her all the time. He loved her for making him clothes that fit like a glove. He loved her for mending them when he thought he’d ruined them. He loved her for being able to remove bloodstains, oil stains, pampas stains, baba ghanoush stains, walrus stains...stains from more sources than any normal human being saw in a lifetime. And, hey, she loved Yeager, too. The same way she loved cannoli and luna moths and sunsets—with a certain sense of awe that such things even existed in the world.

      She went back to measuring his inseam, pretending the action commanded every scrap of her attention when, by now, she had Yeager’s measurements memorized. There was no reason he had to know that, was there? Sometimes a girl had to do what a girl had to do. Especially when said girl was between boyfriends. Like eight months between boyfriends. None of whom had torsos roped with muscle or smelled like a rugged, windswept canyon.

      “Have you ever been to Spain, Hannah?” Yeager asked.

      “I lived for a while in what used to be Spanish Harlem,” she told him as she penned his inseam measurement onto the back of her hand. She lifted the tape measure to his waist. “Does that count?”

      He chuckled. “No. You should go to Spain. It’s an incredible country. Definitely in my top five favorite places to visit.”

      Hannah would have told him her top five were Queens, Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island, since she’d never ventured outside the five boroughs of New York. For fifteen of her first eighteen years, it was because she’d been a ward of the state, and even though she’d been shuffled around a lot during that time, she’d never landed outside the city’s jurisdiction. For the last nine years, she hadn’t had the funds to pay for something as frivolous as travel. What didn’t go to keeping herself housed and fed went toward funding the business she’d started out of her Sunnyside apartment. Things like travel could wait until after she was the toast of the New York fashion industry.

      “What are your other top four favorite places?” she asked.

      She was going to go out on a limb and say that, to a man who’d built a billion-dollar company out of creating extreme adventure vacations for other alpha types, Sunnyside and what used to be Spanish Harlem probably weren’t going to make the cut.

      He didn’t even have to think about his response. “New Zealand, Slovenia, Chile and Iceland. But ask me tomorrow and it could be a whole different list.”

      Hannah jotted the last of his measurements onto the back of her hand with the others, returned the pen to its perennial place in the bun she always wore for work and stood. Yep, Yeager still towered over her. Then again, since she stood five-two, most people did.

      “All done,” she told him. Reluctantly she added, “You can get dressed now.”

      He nodded toward the clothes on the floor. “Thanks for taking care of this.”

      “No problem. But you know, you could save a lot of money on tailoring if you stayed in New York for more than a few weeks at a time.”

      “There’s no way I can stay anywhere for more than a few weeks at a time,” he said. “And I won’t apologize for being an adventurer.”

      Hannah would never ask him to. She couldn’t imagine Yeager sitting behind a desk punching a keyboard or standing on an assembly line screwing in machine parts. It would be like asking Superman to work СКАЧАТЬ