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years.
    “Help yourself.” Her teasing was good natured. She still couldn’t take her eyes off him as he reached for the cup and poured the coffee, his muscles rippling visibly under his wrinkled white T-shirt. “Did you have a rough night?”
    He sipped the steaming brew, finally peering at her over the brim of the cup. “Ah, I needed that. I slept in an unfamiliar bed. You know how that can be.”
    More sarcastic remarks came to mind, none of them good natured now. But if Jake Macintyre had spent last night in another woman’s bed, what was it to her? “With all the traveling you do, I’d think you’d get used to that.”
    He’d probably slept with women in strange beds all over the world in the past twelve months, while she grew to the size of a circus fat lady with his child inside her. The thought had not escaped her while she was pushing what felt like a small car out of her body.
    “I do, but only after a few days. Say, where’s my girl?”
    “Napping. She won’t be up for another forty-five minutes.” She poured herself a cup of coffee too, although it would be her third of the morning. “We were up at six. I’m sure I’d have no trouble at all sleeping in a strange bed, or even on a rock.”
    “Done it,” he said, flashing his twinkling smile. “I’ll get started down here. I have two cameras for the nursery and one for the living room.”
    “Can I help?” She followed him back to the front hall, where he pulled a couple boxes off the pile.
    “Do you have a set of tools?”
    “Just the basics. I bought safety latches to install on my cabinets and I was planning to have Seth or Richard install them for me.” She opened the front closet and took out the still-unopened toolbox.
    “These will do. I can do the childproofing stuff too, but I might have to stay for lunch. I saw an Indian place down the street where I can get takeout. Do you like curry?”
    “Lunch?” She hadn’t expected him to stay more than a couple hours, and eating together seemed so … intimate. Then she realized she was back to her foolish thoughts and behavior of the previous day. She’d given birth to the man’s baby after having the best sex of her life with him, but they couldn’t share a meal from a cardboard container?
    He grinned. “The meal between breakfast and dinner?”
    “Curry would be great.” She didn’t tell him she had the restaurant’s number on her speed dial, assigned to the number three. Only because the pizza place was number two, and number one was assigned to her mother. She loved to cook, even just for herself, and dinner parties were her favorite way to entertain. But the last party she could remember had taken place in her Wickham apartment.
    Jake set up the cameras while Violet cleaned in the kitchen and picked up baby clothes and toys. Even when he wasn’t in her immediate proximity she was constantly aware of him, and not sure how she felt about having this man in her house. She’d never lived with a man, but had imagined how it would be. Sometimes absorbed in his own interests, but with a spark of connection always between them — the way her mother and David Gallagher were together. She turned her head and their eyes caught and held for a moment before he returned to his task.
    He was here because of Daisy, she knew that, but what about the attraction he’d felt to her last year? Was it completely gone? She caught sight of herself in the mirror over the mantel and almost laughed. The difference between her appearance the night of her party last June and now was like comparing Cinderella the night of the ball to one of her ugly stepsisters — or maybe even her step mother .
    Less than an hour later they heard Daisy “talking” over the baby monitor and she went up to get her. When she reached the bottom of the stairs with the baby in her arms, Jake was removing a teddy bear with a big red bow from one of the boxes. Daisy started to kick and reach for the toy.
    Jake laughed.