One Night With You by Candace Schuler Read Free Book Online

the cocktails they were drinking because, Teddie said, he had read that alcohol was bad for the developing fetus.
    In the months to come they had more or less taken charge of her "delicate" health and would have, if she had let them, tried to run her entire life. It was Teddie who helped her paint the bright cartoon circus animals that marched around the walls of the baby's room and it was he, an interior designer who worked at home, who watched for the delivery truck that brought the new, snow-white nursery furniture.
    Hardly a week went by when she didn't find another recipe for some vitamin-packed health drink or some informative article on prenatal care stuffed into her mailbox, with the important parts always highlighted with a yellow marker pen.
    It was Larry who had fortunately been at home that Sunday morning to drive her to the hospital when she started having labor pains nearly two months early. He had stayed on at the hospital during her surprisingly brief labor and was the one who called her mother with the news that there was another redhead in the family.
    So much, in fact, did her two neighbors seem to enjoy their new, self-appointed roles as surrogate fathers that Desi's mother, who had come to stay with her for those first few weeks after the birth, had delicately tried to suggest that perhaps one of them was Stephanie's daddy.
    The thought made Desi laugh out loud, jiggling the baby enough to wake her.
    "You slept through traffic jams and exercise class and Pavarotti," Desi accused her, smiling fondly as she unstrapped the carrying pouch to lay her child on the wicker changing table, "but now you wake up. Why is that, I wonder?" she asked the baby, who continued to stare up, following the sound of her mother's gentle voice with round, wondering eyes.
    Jake's ey es, Desi thought, for the hundred-thousandth time.
    They had lost that unfocused blueness common to most newborns within two weeks and were now a dark, Hershey-bar brown. Very definitely her father's eyes; bright and curious and meltingly sweet, in a tiny face that was otherwise a baby-sized replica of Desi's.
    Desi sighed, resolving once again to put all thoughts of Jake out of her mind. He was no part of her life now. He had never been, really. But it was hard, so very hard, not to think of the man when she looked at the daughter he had given her.
    "Come on, darling," she said, scooping up the now-dry baby. "Let's you and me go get us a little snack. All that exercise made me hungry."
    She carried the baby down a short hallway papered with scattered sprigs of blue forget-me-nots and yellow primroses, and into the bright sun-filled kitchen.
    Whatever else anyone might say about Teddie, she thought absently as she strapped Stephanie into her infant seat, they couldn't fault his excellent taste. The kitchen was a rather narrow room, more long then wide, high ceilinged like the rest of the apartment, the walls covered in blue-and-white checked gingham. White cotton-lace curtains fluttered at the bay window, and the gleaming golden-oak cabinets were glass fronted with blue forget-me-nots hand painted on the white ceramic knobs. A white wrought-iron chandelier decorated with twining green leaves and blue flowers hung over the table. Not strictly Victorian, but antique nonetheless and perfectly in keeping with the rest of the room.
    The furniture and accessories in the apartment were Desi's own. Most of them were neither Victorian nor even truly antique. Somehow, though, her mixture of graceful white wicker, starkly modern chrome and glass, with a few pieces of early Americana and Art Deco thrown in for good measure made a pleasing, if somewhat eclectic, whole.
    "Won't she be cold wearing just that?" asked Teddie, dropping the last load of the groceries on the blue-tiled counter.
    Desi glanced over her shoulder to where Stephanie lay in her infant seat, staring with wide, fascinated eyes at a Boston fern as it slowly swayed in the warm breeze coming in