You Are the Reason by Renae Kaye Read Free Book Online

no answer from the hallway, and I froze. He wouldn’t have left me with the baby while he went in the bedroom and…?
    “Jake!”
    The voice floated back my way. “I’ll be… there… one minute.”
    Fuck. He would.
    I looked back at Maxine, who was starting to pump her little arms in frustration. “Jake, your daughter’s starting to cry,” I called in warning.
    “Pick… her up.”
    Pick her up? Oh, shit. That sounded so easy, but it was a minefield of problems. What if I squeezed her too hard? What if she threw up on me? What if there was smelly stuff coming out the other end? What could I do?
    “Patrick?” I yelled a little desperately. “Come and help a mate, please.”
    There was no answer.
    “Patrick?”
    Jake’s voice came back on a breathy whisper. “Patrick’s… busy.”
    I had half a mind to storm into that bedroom and yell at my friends, but that would mean leaving Maxine all alone in the kitchen. What if she choked on something while I was yelling at her daddies for getting their freak on? What if someone broke into the house and stole her? What if there were an explosion?
    I was in charge of this baby, and it was up to me to protect her. Trying not to think too much about it, I scooped her up, keeping one hand under her head and another under her bottom. She was crying in earnest, but lowered the volume and opened her eyes when she felt me pick her up. I lifted her, held her in mid-air for a moment, drew her to my body, and rested her on my chest. I awkwardly patted her back, hoping I wasn’t breaking a small delicate rib with each whisper touch of my hand.
    I was going to kill Jake for putting me in this situation.
    Her crying lessened, but she was still grizzling, so I tried rocking side-to-side like I’d seen mothers do. The volume went down another notch, and I felt brave enough to try a little forward step.
    By the time Patrick and Jake emerged from the bedroom with sheepish looks on their faces, I was gingerly pacing the length of the kitchen, patting Maxine’s back and humming a tune. I figured that Maxine wouldn’t know it was an old Green Day song.
    I glared at my friends. “Did you have fun?” I asked snappishly.
    Patrick rubbed at his jaw and didn’t reply, but Jake grinned through his embarrassment. “Actually, yes. Thank you for asking.”
    I sighed in exasperation. “Don’t do it again.”
    “What?” Jake asked. “Don’t have sex while we have visitors in the house? Or don’t leave you alone with a sleeping baby?”
    “She wasn’t sleeping,” I growled. “I didn’t know what to do.”
    Patrick gave me a sympathetic pat on the back as he made for the coffeemaker. Jake raised his eyebrows. “She was sleeping when I left the room, and now she’s sleeping on your chest. Where’s the problem?”
    I was startled. “She’s sleeping?” I craned my neck to try and see her face, and sure enough, she was sound asleep, and her little rosebud mouth pouted. When did that happen?
    “You have the magic touch, Davo,” Patrick said as he pressed buttons on the machine. “You don’t happen to need a place to stay, do you? I hear the midnight to five a.m. shift for babysitting Maxine is open if you want it.”
    The problem with Patrick being blind was you couldn’t tell him to fuck off using a look or hand gesture. And I didn’t want to say the words because Patrick was obviously against using that sort of language around his baby. And I also couldn’t whack him because both of my hands were occupied with his daughter.
    I decided to make my point in a different way. I stalked over to the kitchen table and bumped it with my hip, sending it skidding across the floor by about six inches. Patrick’s head whipped around at the sound, and his face showed shock that I would do such a thing.
    Yes—I had listened to my friend whine about the need to have all the furniture in the house lined up to its exact point so that the blind man was not hitting his shins all the time. Jake