Free Right by Her Side by Christie Ridgway

monkeys?”
    â€œBecause the stuff is indestructible. Believe me. I spent one Saturday night amusing myself by trying to put a dent in the coffee table with everything from a Sam Adams beer bottle to a construction-quality sledgehammer. There’s still not a mark on it.”
    â€œI would have supposed you spent your Saturday nights in more interesting ways than that.”
    He paused on the stair landing and stared down at…his wife. Since his divorce, he’d had his share of women. But none of them was interesting, he realized. Not in the way that Rebecca, with her wavy hair and valentine face, wearing her cartoon-printed hospital scrubs, was interesting to him.
    Alarm edged down his back. What the hell did that mean?
    It meant none of them had carried his baby, idiot.
    Despite that calm, cool voice of reason in his head, his feet were still slow taking the stairs, so slow that she caught up with him. At the top, he gestured toward the open gallery space. “My home office, but feel free to use it if you’d like.”
    She nodded, then headed toward the short hallway on the right. “And the bedrooms are here?”
    â€œYes. I thought—” He froze as she glanced over at him.
    â€œYou thought?” she prompted.
    â€œTh-th-the…” He was stuttering! Stuttering! “The first room, in front of you, I thought might make a nice nursery. It gets the morning sunlight and is closest to the stairs. Or maybe that’s bad, to be so close to the stairs? And the morning light might wake the baby too early or…”
    Terrific. Now he was babbling. Ultraconfident, just-follow-my-lead Trent Crosby was babbling.
    â€œAre you all right?” Rebecca asked, frowning.
    â€œOf course I’m all right.” This was his idea, wasn’t it? This whole marriage thing was his idea, his grand, well-devised, completely-thought-out, completely-the-right-idea, completely-not-a-mistake plan.
    â€œThen that seems like a fine room for the baby,” Rebecca said. “So where am I to sleep?”
    The million-dollar question. The one that had pulled that self-assured rug from beneath his feet just secondsbefore. The one that had only occurred to him when she’d said the common, ordinary word bedrooms.
    â€œTrent?” She was looking worried again, and she moved toward him. “What’s the matter?”
    Her nearness only made his sudden discomfiture worse. His fingers loosened on the handles of her suitcases and they plunked to the ground. She took one of his hands between both of hers. Noticing the platinum band on her fourth finger didn’t help matters. Smelling her didn’t help matters. Shouldn’t a nurse smell like Band-Aids and iodine? Something boring and practical like that?
    Rebecca smelled sweet, a light, powdery, sweet scent.
    He wondered if her skin tasted sweet.
    He knew her mouth did.
    She was staring up at him with those innocent, baby-doll eyes, and he felt like a lecher because she was the mother of his child and he was getting hard thinking about her skin, her mouth and what her hair would look like loose around those breasts of hers he’d never seen, really had never had the chance to even judge beneath the tentlike clothes she wore. He was a lecher, all right.
    And a loser. Because he’d failed in devising a way to accomplish one very important part of this whole marriage idea of his. How could he have been so stupid? When he’d proposed their practical marriage, he hadn’t meant it to be a chaste one. There had been enough of a sexual simmer between them for him to know a physical relationship with her wouldn’t be a hardship.
    But in all his hurry to get her to the altar, he’d never broached the idea with Rebecca. It seemed a bit crass to bring it up now.
    Which meant Mr. Cross-the- t ’s and Dot-the- i ’s had made a mistake. He’d never planned exactly how to get his wife into his