Hot To Touch - A Firefighter's Baby Romance Page 16

  I woke up early on Sunday to the smell of coffee and warm milk, and the sound of Ace up with Melanie. She was fussing a little, and he was talking to her in a low, kind voice, punctuated now and again with yawns.

  “There’s my girl. See? Tastes just the same, it’s just not attached to Mommy. Drink up, you’ve got a lot of growing to do.”

  I smiled sleepily and sat up, stretching. I no longer had to be so careful of my midsection; the birth had been six weeks ago, and I was finally starting to feel back to normal. Well, aside from my breasts, which felt about the size of my head.

  But this was what I had signed up for: broken sleep, body changes, and the tiny, precious, yellow-wrapped bundle all but lost in the crook of Ace’s arm as he sat beside the bassinet in our sunny bedroom. Just a little over seven pounds now: healthy and active, but as tiny as her dad was huge.

  Ace looked up as I grabbed my robe off the chair. “Hey. Did you get any sleep?”

  “Probably around six hours off and on. I’ll get a nap later when she does.” After some struggles, we were falling into a fairly comfortable routine, with Melanie and each other. A lot of taking turns, a lot of compromises. “How’s it going, Big Daddy?”

  “Oh, she’s still filling up diapers like a champ. Think she’ll do another growth spurt soon?” He held the tiny bottle of breast milk carefully; I heard her slurping away at it greedily as I got near.

  “Probably,” I said with a grin.

  I looked down at her, all hazy blue eyes and tiny, chubby cheeks over the bundle of blanket. A single whorl of strawberry-blond hair covered her head. My daughter, I thought.

  Ace had gone baby-crazy these past few weeks. He beamed down at her like he’d finally found his new calling in life—and perhaps he had.

  He had that look on his face again as he fed her. “Oh, my God, she’s so damn cute. I want five.”

  I grinned. “Seventeen hours of labor, my guy. Let’s enjoy this one for a while before we work on another.” I poked him in the chest, and he snickered.

  “Okay, okay. Still…wow. We really did good, didn’t we?”

  “Yeah, we did.”

  Melanie had been born a little late, but very healthy, which was a relief after a pregnancy that had driven me out of my skull. Swollen feet, swollen everything, never able to find a comfortable position to sleep, and of course, Ace fussing over me constantly as I faced the one battle he couldn’t fight for me. Fortunately, he was the best support guy I could have asked for.

  He fed our daughter while I worked on feeding us. The refurbished farmhouse we had moved into on the outskirts of Denver had an enormous kitchen and triple-glazed windows that looked out onto a wooded canyon. I admired the view as I puttered around.

  Our fridge was a quarter full of tiny containers of breastmilk. Apparently, my mammary glands had the same work ethic I did.

  “Moo,” I muttered as I dug past them for pancake fixings. “This is getting a little ridiculous.”

  Ace choked, doing his best not to laugh. “See? We need more babies ASAP to drink all this up!”

  A tiny fist raised his direction and he looked down.

  “What?”

  I chuckled as I piled up ingredients next to the stand mixer. “Hopefully she wants seconds.”

  My mind wandered as I cracked eggs into the mixing bowl. It had been a crazy few quarters for Archimedes Gears since I had left the company for good, but not really because of any actions of mine. I hadn’t ended up suing them or publishing what I knew. I hadn’t ended up stealing their best people, or many of their clients. Some of my previous coworkers, especially the women, did come to work with me. Not because I pestered them, but because they were fed up with the rampant sexism at Archimedes Gears.

  I hadn’t really made war on them, because I had found it wasn’t necessary. A more natural solution came about that made sure they finally realized just how indispensable I had been.

  Archimedes Gears had been struggling ever since I had left. Though I had left the office and all projects in good order, they were now in obvious disarray from Ian’s mismanagement. They were being forced to settle multiple lawsuits for breach of contract. The board was suffering various upheavals as the stock devalued and investors demanded answers. Two members had been off sick with stress.

  The Orloff brothers, however, had never bothered to sue Ian, or Archimedes Gears, even after all of that. They had the means, they had a good reason, and they were powerful enough to swat down my father’s former business completely. But instead, they had kept that ability on reserve, showing no inclination to actually use it.

  I didn’t know if they felt guilt about the fire that had resulted from their resort’s neglected electrical system, or if they had found enough amusement from seeing how the board and Ian had needed rescuing by the very people they had dismissed as beneath them. Or maybe it was just pity, once I had confided my plans to them and they had realized just how much the company had come to lean on me.

  I had no idea. Like much about the Orloffs, their motives remained a mystery even as we got to know them better.

  As I mixed the pancake batter and chopped fruit and nuts as toppings, I thought about Ian. I knew from the few employees who had kept in touch with me that he had spent the last four months scrambling to figure out how to actually do his job properly, after being yelled at in many board meetings. I knew that he was leaning heavily on my old project documentation to try and learn.

  Hopefully, he would. Maybe he would actually be able to figure things out and help them rally back into a modest, unambitious local engineering firm. If he could finally learn from his mistakes, and become a better person, he was welcome to his piece of Denver’s mid-level market share.

  I didn’t need much local business anyway. Peak Engineering’s clients were already international after only eight months. The Hawaii project had attracted the Japanese. The Japanese projects had attracted the Europeans. Melanie’s first bout of world traveling had happened while she had still been in my belly.

  Now, of course, I was partway through a year of reduced-time work from home so that Ace and I could both be there for our daughter. I still fielded a lot of phone calls and video conferences, but that was all right. Being up with my daughter meant I could also make contact at odd hours with clients across the globe.

  It was amazing how many of them wanted to know about my baby. After the pregnancy had been treated like a shameful thing back at Archimedes, it was a surprise, but executives and officials homesick for their own families often seemed to thrive on a dose of cute. Maybe being a mom made me seem a bit more trustworthy, too. But part of that was a reputation I was and had been earning, for ethics and for hard, honest work.

  No client ever had to find out after the fact that I had overpromised on my work, or covered up a problem without telling them. I couldn’t have lived with myself—and for that matter, Ace couldn’t have lived with me. He kept me level even when I was short on sleep and dealing with unrealistic expectations left and right.

  Now that I was away from the same old grind of trying to impress people who didn’t even want me there, it amazed me how much easier it was to impress normal people—even demanding ones. I was like a runner who had worn heavy weights for years, and now took them off and could practically fly.

  Our new headquarters would open next year, in a shining white-and-steel spire that would tower over downtown. I was already green-lighting some of the most innovative and diversity-sensitive hiring, training, and retention programs in the country, as well as offering an array of engineering scholarships with an aim toward recruitment.

  Nobody working for me would ever wonder if I looked down on them because they were different from me, or if I was willing to give them a hand up or support their projects. They would know I could be relied on to do the right thing.

  It was not enough for me anymore to impress men like my father. I had to surpass them, and I would. I already was.

  And I couldn’t have d
one it without Ace at my side, encouraging me, and questioning the assumptions and habits that had kept me tied down for years.

  He really had rescued me, in more ways than one.

  The End

  I hope you’ve enjoyed Ace and Naomi’s story!

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