My Best Friend's Baby (4 page)

She rolled closer with a smooth whoosh of
her skate wheels, and turned her hazel-eyed gaze on him. "Something
you want to tell me, Nick? Feeling especially defenseless today? Or
did one of your creations just go kaput on you?"

"My inventions never go kaput." What was she
getting at, anyway? "And I'm not one of your ... projects."

She shrugged. "Have it your way."

"Now wait a min—"

"Friends depend on each other, that's all."
She petted the bird, then added, "Anyhow, somebody brought Shep in
to work last night. They were moving away and couldn't keep
him."

"Somebody brought a bird to Red's pet shop
last night? I didn't know you took that kind of—"

"We don't. Especially now that Red's looking
to sell the place and retire to Sun City with her husband. That's
why I had to rescue him."

"You had to rescue Red's husband? From
what?"

"Kibble overload, actually. Red thought a
little Gravy Train might up Jerry's fiber intake, like the doctor
suggested."

Nick grinned. Chloe rolled her eyes. "Be
serious! I rescued Shep, here, of course."

She raised her finger for a new perch and
smiled like an approving mama as she watched Shep walk onto it. She
lifted him chest-high and petted him with her other hand. He cooed
some more, giving Nick a beady stare that suggested some birds had
all the luck.

And some human guys didn't know what they
were missing.

Nick blinked and adjusted his eyeglasses at
his temples, frowning at the wayward thought. Chloe smiled up at
him, still smoothing her fingers over Shep's feathers, and suddenly
he imagined her fingers stroking over him. He could actually see
her caress in his mind, gentle and crazymaking and accented with
nails painted one of those wild nail polish colors she favored,
like metallic blue or tangerine.

Dizziness walloped him.
This guy doesn't
know what he's missing
, he thought.

She gazed over his array of test tubes and
beakers. "So whatcha working on?"

Magically, she morphed into his old pal
Chloe again. Good old late-late-movie watching, Kahlúa-brewing,
pour-out-your-troubles-to-me Chloe.

Whew
. The last thing he needed was a
distraction like dating the girl next door. Not after all this
time, and not when he had his best chance in three years of
licensing one of his inventions. Especially, particularly,
definitely
not when the clock was ticking on putting
together the prototype and proposal he needed.

"I saw Danny outside, and he says you're not
even blowing things up today," she went on with an air of mock
disappointment. "What gives?"

"What gives? What gives is that four-foot
one-kid wrecking crew out there." Nick glanced through the window
at his nephew. "I'm surprised
he's
not blowing things
up."

"Come on." Chloe rolled closer and looked
out the window, too. "I'm sure you were the same way as a kid."

Her shoulders straightened as she pinned him
with a give-me-a-break expression. "Admit it. You weren't always
Dudley Do-Right in disguise."

"Maybe not, but I've been a steady Steadman
since birth."

"I think there's a cure for that now. An
anti-boredom vaccine or—"

"Ha, ha. Anyway, it must skip a generation,
because Danny's immune." Nick sighed and faced his beaker of
solution again. "I like having him around, but the kid's a
demolition expert in tennis shoes. So far he destroyed my Bunsen
burner, erased my invention journal file—"

"You, being you, had a backup, of
course."

"—sure, but that's not the point. Chloe, in
the twenty minutes since his mother dropped him off—"

"Naomi, Nadine, Nancy, or Nora? I can't keep
them all straight."

"—Naomi, and neither can anyone else except
my mother."

"Nester, right?"

He grinned at her. "Having fun?"

"What? It's cute." She raised her arms,
wobbling a little on her skates as she formed a TV-style frame
around her head. "The Steadman family was brought to you today,"
she said with Sesame Street-style peppiness, "by the letter ‘N' and
the number seven."

"—And since Naomi dropped him off," Nick
continued, returning to the subject of his destruction-happy
nephew, "Danny's done all that, plus almost reformatted my hard
drive, made a mud castle with the potting soil for my research,
and—"

"—and, in general, acted like a perfectly
normal, seven-year-old kid, right?" Chloe folded her arms, turning
her gaze away from the window. "What did you expect when you agreed
to spend Saturdays with Danny?"

Nick shook his head. "Aww, I don't know.
Don't get me wrong, I love the little guy. And with my schedule,
spending weekends with my nieces and nephews is about as close as
I'll ever get to having a family of my own."

"I dunno about that, Nick." She turned her
back on him and gazed out the window again. "My dad's theory was
leap-year parenting, and I turned out okay."

In spite of it
, Nick added silently.
If he ever did have a family, he'd want to devote more time and
care to it than Chloe's multiply-divorced parents had. The way he
saw it, a man could either be a good father and husband and
provider—or he could be a great achiever and innovator and workman.
Trying to be all those things simultaneously wasn't fair to
anyone.

But the point was, "I'm telling you, I'm
lucky as hell not to have kids yet, Chloe. I swear I'd never get
anything done."

"Yeah. Lucky, lucky you."

"Nice sarcasm. What's gotten into you?"

She shrugged and trailed her fingertips
along the tabletop beside them. "Maybe what'shername's ticking
clock is contagious."

He shuddered. "I think there's a cure for
that now."

"Har, har," Chloe snorted, her gaze falling
on his filled beaker. "So, what's this great new invention of
yours?"

Thoughts of nephews and destruction
faded.

"It's a growth accelerator." He ran his
fingers along the smooth glass beaker. The solution within winked
blue and green, an ocean of possibilities. "This is a new version I
came up with this morning. I was just about to test it."

He waggled his eyebrows at her. "Want to
watch?"

Chloe grinned. "That's not the kind of
question a girl like me gets asked very often."

"That's because that menagerie you keep next
door scares off half your dates." He picked up the beaker and
prepared to pour.

"Fun-ny. I'd hardly call a dog, a cat, a few
fish, a hamster and—" she kiss-kissed at the bird on her shoulder
"—Shep here, a menagerie. I'd need to add at least a representative
lizard or turtle to even begin to have that kind of variety."

She propped her hands on her hips, pushing
her right skate forward and back, adding the imminent threat of
wheeled lab destruction to her words.

"Besides, my so-called menagerie loves me.
And they don't snore, leave dirty socks lying around,
or
bail out on me when the going gets tough." She gave him a pointed
glance. "That's not something you can say about just any
old—oh—oh—oh!"

Her right skate shot out from under her.
Flailing, she clamped her hands onto his biceps, making his
solution slosh against the sides of the beaker. If he didn't lose
the whole thing between Danny, Chloe, and Chloe's winged avenger,
it would be a miracle.

Gritting his teeth, Nick raised the beaker
out of reach and inadvertently pulled Chloe halfway into the air,
too. She shrieked and clutched his middle instead.

"Are you sure you know what you're doing
with that?" She eyeballed the solution. "I think you spilled some
of your magical kool-aid on Shep."

The bird in question flapped to the light
fixture and resumed his attempts to cast disco-ball mood lighting
down on them.

Chloe glanced worriedly upward. "Are you
okay, Shep? Do you feel anything yet?"

As if the bird planned to answer
.
Nick frowned and put down the beaker. "I'm at least as good with
magical Kool-Aid as you are with roller skates," he pointed out,
wrapping his arms around her so he could unclench her fists from
the small of his back. It felt like she was bending his vertebrae
into new and interesting shapes.

Wait a minute
... he held her in his
arms for a second, testing his reaction. No thoughts of stroking,
kissing or anything else remotely erotic popped into his head. All
clear. Double-whew! His earlier Chloe-induced fantasy had clearly
been an aberration.

Maybe he'd been working too hard. Eight
hours at the office and half as many more at home inventing each
night would take its toll on any guy's libido, wouldn't it? It only
made sense he'd fixate on the nearest woman within squeezing ...
stroking ... kissing ... distance. Even if said woman happened to
be his best platonic female friend.

He had to start getting out more.

Nick set her upright again and picked up his
beaker. Chloe shot him a small, inexplicably disappointed glance,
then bumped her hip onto his lab table and stared at him. "Okay,
let's have a look at what this joy juice of yours can do."

Nick stared back at her, momentarily
discombobulated by the dispirited note in her voice. Chloe had
always been his most ardent supporter, even more than his family
and close-packed clan of relatives. They'd known him all his life,
and none of them actually believed any of ‘Nicky's little
inventions' would ever amount to anything. But to Chloe, his pal
and confidant, he was Mr. Wizard and The Science Guy and the
Absent-Minded Professor, all rolled into one big ‘you can do it'
package.

Nick rubbed the side of his nose,
temporarily skidding his glasses askew. "What's the matter, Chloe?"
he asked, setting them straight again. He tried to peek at the
calendar hanging on the wall behind her without being too obvious
about it. "Is it that time of—"

"Say it and die."

Her threat lacked punch, but he shut up
anyway. He pulled the potted ivy close again.

She thumped her hip on the table, setting
test tubes tinkling in their holders. A sheaf of Nick's notes
trembled atop the computer monitor and scattered like cottonwood
leaves over his chair and floor. Chloe gazed at them with a faintly
morose expression and crossed her arms over her chest. Sigh.

He gently tipped up an ivy leaf and poured a
little solution into the soil inside the plant's terra cotta pot.
Beside him, Chloe's next sigh trembled past his ear. The ivy's
glossy leaves fluttered.

He quit pouring. "Spill."

"What?" She shouldered next to him and
peered up at Shep. "You did spill some? How much? Is Shep going to
be okay?"

"Aside from remaining a bird, yes." Nick
pulled over the next test-group plant, being careful not to look at
her. "I mean, spill. Whatever's bugging you."

Silence.

An instant later, she grabbed the beaker.
"No wonder your experiments take months, at this rate," she
muttered. "You need an assistant or something."

She looked around his lab, frowning at a
stack of pizza delivery boxes in the corner. "You know, somebody to
tend to the details of real life for you while you're off in La-La
Land inventing stuff."

Nick folded his arms, looking at her
carefully. "Now I know something's bothering you. You only turn
mean when cornered."

Chloe's startled expression caught him
unaware. So did the way she chewed her bottom lip, looking ...
vaguely guilty, if he didn't miss his guess. She thrust her hands
into her hair, loosening her bright bandanna by mistake and showing
off the paler blonde highlights she'd crowed about to him last
week. The gesture was a dead giveaway. She'd never have messed up
her hair for anything less than sex or a natural disaster.

Nick had a feeling this fell into the
disaster category.

Chloe had a secret.

He wanted to know what it was.

"Well, I ... ah ..."

Good move. He gave her ten points for
convincing hesitancy—except Chloe was probably the least hesitant
person he knew. "Mmmm-hmmm?" he nudged.

"I—I—" She rolled her eyes, clearly
conjuring up a whopper. The question was, a whopper to cover
what?

"Good start," he coaxed, feeling close.

Her eyes brightened. "I'm worried about
meeting Mr. Griggs at the bank tomorrow, that's what!" she cried.
"That's it!" Her newly-triumphant gaze shifted to him and lost a
couple degrees of cockiness. "I mean, sure. That's it. That's
what's bugging me."

"You're worried about your loan
application." It wasn't a question.

"Umm, sure."

"Come on," Nick said. "What kind of a—"

"That's it." She practically oozed relief,
now that the lie was out. With a flourish worthy of game show
hostesses everywhere, she raised the beaker.

Thoughts of her mysterious secret and
whatever rebuttal he'd been about to make flew out of Nick's head.
No, she couldn't. She wouldn't ...

Gaily, Chloe poured every aquamarine drop of
solution into the first ivy pot. "There! Now you can go on and do
something fun with your day," she announced, whisking her palms
together.

In the pot in front of them, the soil
sizzled. The sound grew louder, loud enough to attract even Shep's
birdbrain onto the scene. He swooped onto Chloe's shoulder and
cocked his head. She did the same. So did Nick. He'd never heard
anything quite like that sizzle.

An instant later, the lustrous green ivy
plant drooped in its pot, looking about as growth-accelerated as a
strip of overcooked bacon.

"Looks like it's back to the old drawing
board." Chloe looked sadly at the ivy. "But I know you can do it,
Nick. Hey—can I watch?"

Chapter Three

Chloe couldn't believe it had come to
this.