You're My Baby by Laura Abbot Page B

He punched in Shelley’s phone number, steeling himself for her reaction.
    Which was every bit as histrionic and patronizing as he had anticipated. Ten minutes later, after hearing how disappointed Shelley was that now Andy wouldn’t receive all of his father’s attention and being berated for putting his new wife’s needs ahead of his son’s, he managed to beg off and call Andy to the upstairs extension. That conversation had been pure Shelley! The very accusations she’d tossed at him were what she’d been guilty of for years. With her, men came first. Andy, second.
    He sat, head down, hands dangling between his legs, the weight of the day’s events cowing him. A few minutes after he heard the shower shut off, he mustered the energy to rise and knock on the bathroom door. “Pam? Are you about finished in there?”
    When she opened the door, a misty cloud of steam hit him in the face, along with a smell like June roses.His vision cleared, and he gawked. Standing before him in a fluffy peach-colored terry-cloth robe was Pam, her head wrapped in a towel, her smooth, clean skin flushed from the heat, her tawny eyes fringed with long lashes. “I’m done. Do you need in?”
    He gulped. “In a while. I thought maybe we ought to settle a few things before we turn in.”
    â€œLike?”
    â€œOur morning routine, for starters.”
    She edged past him toward the bedroom, where she sat at the foot of the bed toweling her hair dry. “As you can see, I’m an evening shower person. I’ll need about fifteen minutes in the bathroom in the morning.”
    He couldn’t take his eyes off her. When she raised her arms to massage her scalp, the robe gaped, revealing a sheer nightie it would be folly to think about. Tendrils of hair trailed down the nape of her neck, and he wanted nothing more than to throw off the towel and plunge his hands into her hair and…
    â€œWhat about you?”
    Me? “What about me?”
    â€œThe bathroom,” she prompted.
    â€œOh, yeah. I get up at six. I’ll be cleared out of there by six-thirty.” He stuffed his hands into his pockets to have something to do with them.
    â€œYou know I’ve been thinking,” she went on. “If we’re to pull this off, we need to know a little more about each other. Our histories, likes, dislikes, that kind of thing.”
    It made sense. “We haven’t had much time to consider stuff like that, have we? But what about Andy? He’ll suspect, if we talk around here.”
    â€œI was thinking maybe we could slip off campus for our lunches this week.”
    Now her hair fell to her shoulders and she worked on drying the ends. Without makeup, she looked younger. Something about the intimacy of her sitting on his bed in her nightwear tangled his tongue. “Sounds good. Tomorrow then?”
    She nodded. “Also we have to think about how to make the announcement of our marriage.” She lowered her hands and spanned them across her abdomen. “The sooner the better,” she whispered.
    That made sense. You didn’t have to teach in the math department to compute nine months. “What about the all-school assembly day after tomorrow?”
    â€œThat would certainly kill all the birds with one stone.” She looked up, her eyes holding a spark of humor. “Or we could just tell Geraldine Farley.”
    He grinned. Mrs. Farley, one of the school patrons, was notorious as Keystone’s number one gossipmonger. “The assembly’s far safer. Besides, we wouldn’t want Andy to think our marriage is a secret. I’ll tell him in the morning that we’re making the announcement Thursday.”
    Pam stood, her bare feet unaccountably arousing. Grant resisted the urge to let his gaze lift to her bare knees. “Tonight went better than I expected,” she said. “With Andy.”
    â€œI wish I could say the same for my