“So not a woman a week?” Logan asked.
James shrugged. “Between the station and the club, I get busy.” He also had a lot of family in the area, and he did several projects here and there during his time off. He loved women, but he had other interests, too. “At least we can narrow it down to that window of time.” James shoved a hand through his hair. “If only Harper had moved in ten months ago.”
“Why would that have mattered?” Lexi asked. “Have you guys been sleeping together this whole time?”
James shook his head. “We haven’t slept together at all. Yet.”
“Has she been scaring women off?” Lexi asked with a little devious smile. “I like that. Has she been coming over to borrow a cup of sugar and then telling the women that you have an STD or something?”
James lifted a brow. “No, she has not. And that’s very specific.”
“It would be a great plan,” Lexi said, lifting a shoulder. “I would have totally done something like that to women Caleb was with, given the chance.”
Caleb coughed and shifted on the sofa.
Caleb and Lexi had been “friends” who helped each other out with childcare while Caleb worked and Lexi had been going to nursing school. Caleb hadn’t been serious about any other woman in the time he’d known Lexi, but he’d tried to convince himself that she was too young for him and too good for him and not interested in him, and he’d spent some time with other women. Just never around Lexi.
“Well, no, Harper hasn’t been scaring any women off. I haven’t…” James cleared his throat. But what the hell? What was the harm in admitting this? “I haven’t brought any women home since she moved in.”
“You haven’t brought any women here since she moved in,” Logan said. “Or you haven’t been with any women since the professor moved in?”
“Both.”
“You haven’t slept with any women since Harper moved in,” Logan said one more time.
“No.”
“Really?”
James spun to find Harper standing in the doorway again.
And he rolled his eyes. Logan had seen her there and had made that clarification so she would hear it.
James wasn’t sure how to feel about her knowing it now. Because it seemed like an overreaction to what had been going on between them? Maybe. What had been going on between them had been mostly nothing for the first few months. But even from the beginning, it had seemed like something. And he honestly just hadn’t had a strong enough craving for anyone else. He’d kicked himself about it for two months. He’d called himself ridiculous. He’d forced himself to hit on a few girls at the club. But when it came to the end of the night and the want-to-come-back-to-my-place moment, he hadn’t been able to say the words.
Now, though, looking at Harper with her hair mussed, a little bit of worry and a lot of surprise crinkling the corners of her eyes, and the baby on her shoulder, he realized he didn’t regret a thing.
“Yeah, really,” he said with a shrug.
“That’s…”
“I know,” he agreed.
Everyone was quiet for a moment. Then Logan said, “So how are you planning to find them?”
“Them who?” Harper asked.
“The two or three women who could be the little man’s mom,” Logan said with a grin.
He was enjoying the fact that James was going to have to play detective to find the women he’d been with in the window of time the baby could have been conceived. James was going to tell Dana, Logan’s wife, on him. Logan had been as much a playboy as James ever was.
“You have it narrowed down to two or three?” Harper asked.
She’d thought it might be more? For some reason that bugged him.
He hadn’t brought any women home during the time he’d lived across from her.
“Would it have been better if there was just one, who I was really serious about?” he asked crossly.
She blinked at him, probably surprised that he’d been curt with her. He’d never been curt with her before. But honestly, did she want him to have had a serious relationship with another woman that could turn into something more now that there was a baby in the picture? Would this all be better if there was an ex that he might want to rekindle things with if they were going to co-parent?
“Uh, no,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “I guess not.”
The uh was a telltale sign. The professor with a doctorate in languages did not say, “uh.” He nodded. “There’s been no one serious in a really long time. And certainly not in the past year or so. I’ve gone out with a few women, yes, but I’ve been busy doing other things, too, Professor. So yeah, we’ve got a couple of women to track down and talk to.”
She was watching him with wide eyes. “We?”
“Yeah, we. You’re coming with me.” He’d just made that decision.
“I am?” But she didn’t look shocked. She looked intrigued.
“Yes. We’re going to need passion and determination along with common sense and rational thinking to find this woman and get to the bottom of what’s going on once and for all.”
“You need me along for the common sense?”
“Oh, no, you’re the passion and determination. I’ll be there for the rational thinking,” he said.
“You think I’ve got passion and determination about this?” she asked.
“I do.”
“But you can be rational?”
“Of course. I don’t have feelings for these women.”
“But I do?”
He gave her a slow smile. “I think maybe you do, yeah.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Because of the baby. I don’t approve of her, whoever she is, just dropping him off on a doorstep.”
That wasn’t a denial of feeling passionate.
James nodded. “Sure. Protectiveness and possessiveness… of the baby.”
Harper looked at him for a long moment. Then she said, “Okay. Maybe I should go along.”
She should go along. They were in this together. He wanted her there to help ask the important questions, to see that he truly wasn’t emotional about any of these women, and maybe to get a little peek into his life as they searched for this woman. Going back to the places where he’d met these ladies would show Harper a view of him outside his apartment and the landing between their places. And he suddenly wanted her to have that.
He was hoping to get a bigger view of her life and interests as well.
“And we need to stop referring to him as the baby,” she said.
James couldn’t hide his huge grin. He’d known it. “I agree. What should we name him?”
“Well, you know how I feel about names meaning something,” Harper said.
He nodded. “I do.”
“So his name should be meaningful. Something about him, or his situation, or this whole adventure.”
James pretended to be thinking. “This is big. What means ‘found by a handsome, sexy, musically gifted firefighter who learns to balance his heroic career and active social life with becoming an overnight super dad?”
Harper lifted a brow. “Are you done?”