demanded that he give her back to them. Even tried to file a motion in family court to bar him from leaving the state of Georgia. Hadn’t worked. They continued to insist that Sandy had meant to leave them in charge, but she’d died suddenly and without a will. Frank, who loved to hurl insults via email, had once referred to him as “the sperm donor.”
Levi could take a lot of shit and not blink, but when they insulted him, they were insulting Grace’s father, too, so he got a little more sensitive. To his mind, how she’d been conceived was nobody’s business. The way he raised his daughter would be his business and his alone. He’d be there for her—present, not absent like his own parents had been, although the distance his parents had created wasn’t one he or anyone else could blame them for. They’d been concerned for the poverty-stricken people of the world, and Levi wasn’t one of them. As a child, he’d had the added weight of guilt for missing his parents. They were off saving the world. And him? At least he’d had his grandfather.
But something had gone right for him today when he’d knocked on Carly’s door. He’d found himself an expert. If nothing else, maybe her heart was in the right place. Not to mention her legs. Her ass. Okay, he was going to try not to notice that again.
She’d offered to babysit nights, which meant he could have a social life again.
He hadn’t seriously dated anyone in years. Grace had reformed him overnight, but the stiff boots still didn’t quite fit. He’d need to stretch them out, wear them in. Carly was just the kind of girl he never would have approached in the past. Nice girl. Good girl. Pretty and sweet, but wouldn’t want to get too dirty or anything.
* * *
LEVI WOKE WITH a start. The midafternoon Saturday sun slid through the cracked blinds of his bedroom, almost blinding him. It was official. Grace had turned him into a vampire. He’d fallen asleep with the baby monitor in his hands when he’d only meant to close his eyes for a second.
Since he was off the clock, he’d fallen asleep when Grace went down for her nap. And dreamed of sweet Carly, which made no sense when he could dream about a Playboy centerfold, Katy Perry or anyone else in his wild fantasy life. But the girl next door was kind of smoking hot up close. Unapologetically curvy, with legs that went on for a country mile. Sensual, full lips. He’d been dreaming about licking those kissable lips of hers and more. Much more.
The doorbell rang and Levi groaned, rolling out of bed. He rubbed his eyes and quickly looked in on Grace to see that she was still sleeping in her crib—it was daytime, after all, what else would she be doing—then went to open the front door.
Carly stood there smiling until her eyes locked in somewhere around his pecs. As if she could see right through him again. She wasn’t smiling any longer but seemed something more like transfixed. He checked to see if Grace had spit up on him again, and that was when he realized he wasn’t wearing a shirt.
“Crap. Come on in.”
Levi dipped into his bedroom to grab a T-shirt and pulled it over his head, meeting Carly in the foyer. “Sorry about that. I fell asleep.”
A smile had become frozen on her face. “Am I interrupting...anything?”
It took him a minute, because sue him if he was beginning to forget what a sex life resembled. Lately when he took off his shirt in the middle of the day, it was because there was regurgitated baby food on it. But Carly had just reminded him of how much he missed sex. This was not helpful.
He rubbed his prickly chin. Hadn’t bothered to shave this morning, when the only girl he had to impress didn’t have any of her own teeth. “Nah, I was sleeping when Grace sleeps.”
Smile back full force. “That’s smart.”
“You doing okay?” He felt a smile coming on. She seemed so...enthusiastic.
“I could use some help if you have a little time. No worries if you don’t.”
“What’s up?”
“A manufacturer sent me a crib to review that’s supposed to be the easiest to assemble, and I thought I’d put it together and test that out.” Her hands were in the air, as if trying to reenact the process. “And then if you decide I can babysit her, she can take naps at my place, instead of in the car seat. But—”
“Too many moving parts?”
She sank her teeth into her lower lip. “The diagram makes no sense to me.”
“That’s okay. I put together Grace’s crib in a few minutes. It’s not a problem.” He went to his bedroom to grab the baby monitor handset, then followed Carly to her house.
Carly led him to the spare bedroom, where he set the handset on a nearby dresser. The room had a sewing machine in one corner, piles of fabric on the chair and a dummy wearing half a dress. In the middle of the room stood random parts to the crib. The rails, headboard, baseboard and screws and nuts were scattered all over the floor. A screwdriver lay near the diagram and instructions wrinkled enough to appear as though they’d been through someone’s fist. So it looked like she’d tried, really tried, to understand the instructions. Made him smile. She was winging it. In many ways, he could relate. Oh, hell, who was he kidding? Lately, in all ways.
And for someone who had gone through his life with a plan set in stone, sue him if he felt like the ground underneath him was constantly shifting these days. But this, assembling a crib, he could do. It was mechanical. The parts fit together and made sense. What’s more, they’d stay together after he was done.
He went to his knees and took a quick look at the instructions. Simple. But when he grabbed the screwdriver, Carly stopped him.
“You should teach me how. Let me do it.”
“Seriously?”
“Sure. I mean, if I’m going to rate how easy or how not easy it is to assemble for moms, I think I should be the one to do it.” Her amber eyes fixated on his, hand held out for the screwdriver. Waiting.
He handed it over after a beat. Reluctantly. It was her house and her crib. Next door, he had a tool kit with power tools, including a screwdriver. But hey, this could be a lot more fun.
He did, in fact, enjoy working side by side with her for the next few minutes and surely could be excused for taking a whiff of her hair when she leaned close to grab a screw. Smelled like coconut.
“Here,” he said, handing her another screw and nut. “You’ll need this next.”
She took it from him, her hand bumping into his briefly. Her skin was silky soft. Smooth. And all this talk of screws and nuts had made him as horny as a bear after a long damn winter. It had been a while since he’d felt this attracted to or this pulled in by any woman. But why did it have to be this woman?
After a few more minutes, Carly successfully attached one side rail—while he held it up for her—and smiled at him with such obvious pride that his heart pinched.
“Hey, you’re pretty good at this,” he lied. He’d have been done with this crib twenty minutes ago, but maybe that part didn’t matter as much as the look on Carly’s face.
“Well, I don’t want to brag, but I know my way around a sewing machine. Mine breaks down a lot.” She nodded in the direction of the machine in the corner.
She leaned forward to reach in front of him and her low-riding jeans slid down just enough to reveal a beautifully curvy patch of smooth skin rounding out to a perfect ass. He swallowed hard, his mouth suddenly parched. If she kept this up, he would soon tease himself into oblivion.
Finally, after what seemed like an hour of torture, she’d put together the crib. She then checked the sturdiness by tugging on the rails several times, making him smile again.
“Hey, look, I did it.”
“You did.”
“With your help.”
She left the room and came back a few minutes