Her Perfect Gift by Theodora Taylor Read Free Book Online

rich ones. And even then, she knew Candy was accepting invitations to party with customers in different locations, which was against the rules and not a great idea since she had an eight-month old baby waiting for her at home.
    “This is your morning at the co-op. You’re supposed to be on babysitting duty,” Lacey reminded her, because obviously Candy needed reminding. “Where’s your kid and Ben?”
    Candy sucked on her teeth. “Girl, I put them in the playpen. It’s just for a few minutes. They’ll be all right.”
    “No, they won’t be—“ Lacey closed her eyes, and took a moment to breathe. Technically the babysitting co-op she’d started back when Sparkle was still living with her and needed after-school supervision had been a rousing success and accounted for the low amount of turnover among their single mom dancers. But unfortunately, she’d had to deal with dancers leaving their babysitting duties to come downstairs “just for a few minutes” often enough that she now had an established protocol.
    She walked away from Candy. She’d give the dancer a stern lecture about how babies were never to be left alone in the apartments upstairs, and how if Candy really felt the need to go out, she should drop the kids off at her office where she kept an extra playpen just for such occasions.
    But right now her main concern was checking on the babies. So far, no child had been badly injured in the program, but there was always a first time for everything.
    She let herself into Candy’s apartment with her master key just in time. Candy’s little boy, whose name was Leo but who they had all taken to calling Spiderbaby—“Spidey” for short—because of his early climbing skills, had one leg all the way over the playpen wall and was already teetering over the edge. He would have cracked his little head open on the hardwood floors if Lacey hadn’t dived, just in time, to catch him.
    Spiderbaby giggled as if he hadn’t just been snatched from the gaping jaws of head trauma.
    And despite the circumstances, Lacey’s heart couldn’t help but melt. If her life had turned out differently, she would have loved to have more than one baby. She’d given birth to Sparkle at eighteen under less than ideal circumstances, and she often thought about how nice it would be to have a baby now she was older.
    But that was never going to happen, could never happen, not with the mess she’d managed to make of her life.
    Her phone vibrated and Lacey dug into her pocket to pull it out. It was a text from Tony: “New owner’s here. Where the hell r u?”
    Ben, the little boy who belonged to their only Filipina dancer, chose that moment to get jealous of all the attention Spiderbaby was getting. He burst out crying, raising his chubby little brown arms in a bid to be picked up, too.
    So that was how Lacey ended up coming down the back stairs to the club with not one, but two babies in her arms, one of which immediately started tugging her dreads out of their haphazard bun, perhaps sensing she had no way to stop him, since her other arm was also full of baby.
    The plan was to deposit both of them in her office and then invite the new owner to meet with her there, but she doubted she’d make it down the long hallway without dropping one of them. It felt like her arms were on fire under the strain of two fifteen-pound kids.
    “Oww, Spidey!” she said, when he got a small handful of her hair out of the bun and yanked hard. “You need to stop.”
    But then Lacey stopped in her tracks.
    Suro was standing outside her office door, talking on the phone. However, when he saw her standing frozen at the end of the hallway, he said something to whoever was on the other end and dropped the phone into his suit pocket. He then turned to face her, his expression so stony she immediately intuited three things: He had tracked her down, he was the new owner of the club, and he was really, really pissed.

CHAPTER 6
    AFTER tracking down Lacey and