“Can I ask you something?”
“Will it stop you if I say no?”
I smiled. “Probably not.”
“If you weren’t my professor...and I wasn’t looking for my Umberto…” I trailed off, but the rest of the sentence didn’t even need to be said.
Caine brought the beer he’d been nursing to his lips and stared at me over the top while he finished it off. He set the empty bottle on the table and cleared his throat before leaning in. Then he curled one finger, motioning for me to come closer. I leaned in, and our noses were no more than a few inches apart.
“If I weren’t your professor and you weren’t a nice girl, your re-virginized pussy would be sore as hell right now.”
Rachel
I didn’t feel half bad when my alarm went off. My eyes opened, and I braced myself for a pounding headache and nausea, expecting a hangover. Instead, I was tired, but the typical aftereffects didn’t seem to hit me. After drinking a full glass of water without stopping to take a breath, I decided to climb back into bed for another fifteen minutes.
Caine had insisted on driving me home. Half way, he’d stopped and run into a twenty-four-hour convenience store, coming out with a brown paper bag that he’d handed me before leaving me at my apartment door.
“Take everything inside. It doesn’t work unless you finish it all,” he’d said.
The bag had two bottles of water, a banana, and a single packet of Motrin. Since he’d gone to the trouble of picking it all up, I followed his orders.
Unplugging my iPhone from the charger on the nightstand, I keyed in my password and decided to text him.
Rachel: No hangover. Thank you. You’re a miracle worker. Where were you when I was eighteen?
Caine responded right away.
Caine: You’re welcome. Glad you’re feeling better today.
I was feeling better. The brash brushoff Caine had left me with last week had really been bothering me. Seeing him had helped. Don’t get me wrong, I was more confused than ever—especially with what Davis sprung on me last night—but I no longer felt off balance, at least.
Rachel: I owe you one. For everything. For showing up to make sure I was okay, for talking to me about Davis, taking me home and giving me your secret recipe for a hangover-free morning. Actually…maybe I owe you two. LOL
Caine: We’ll call it one, and we’re even. But can I cash that one in today, if you’re feeling up to it?
I’d forgotten Caine had asked me to cover his class this afternoon. I was working the day shift, but Charlie wouldn’t mind if I left a little early. Late afternoon was always dead anyway.
Rachel: I can cover your class. Sorry, I forgot that was what started my drunken rampage last night.
Caine: Thank you.
Things between Caine and me had changed last night. Our attraction was out in the open now, so I figured cheeky was okay.
Rachel: I’m not covering for you to have a nooner, am I?
I visualized Caine’s lip twitching as he shook his head.
Caine: I do have a date with two pretty girls. But one is two and a half and the other is four, and they usually cry when they see me.
Rachel: ?
Caine: Sister’s kids. She’s having a biopsy this afternoon and needs me to watch her little monsters.
Rachel: Oh. I’m sorry. I was just joking. I hope everything is okay. I’ll cover the class no problem.
Caine: Thank you.
After class was over, I sat in Caine’s chair for a while, waiting for the students to empty out. Sitting in his spot at the front of his room somehow made me feel closer to him. Since I was thinking about the sexy professor, I figured I’d send him a text to see how he was making out babysitting. The thought of Caine wrangling two little girls made me smirk. I wondered if he changed diapers—I’d guess he’d have to in order to watch two girls under four.
Rachel: Class was good. I think they like me better than you. ;)
Caine: That’s good. You might be taking over my job when my sister kills me.
That didn’t sound like things were going well.
Rachel: What happened?
Caine: I forgot Lizzy had a nut allergy. We’re in the emergency room.
I was pretty surprised that Caine had taken me up on my offer to come give him a hand at the hospital—until I got there. I’d lied and said I was family to get into the back treatment area, and I spotted Caine in a little open-curtained examination area on the other side of the nurse’s station, looking uncharacteristically freaked out. He had what I assumed was the two year old dangling from one hip while she cried at the top of her lungs. The older girl was sprawled out on a stretcher, blowing up a latex glove like a balloon.
As I got closer, I got a better look at the little girl. What the? What the heck was she wearing? It looked like a backwards T-shirt and a strange diaper of some sort.
“Hi,” I said.
Caine was definitely relieved to see me. “Hey. Thanks for coming.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Lizzy is going to be okay. It’s just a rash, luckily. They gave her some Benadryl, and the doc wants to keep an eye on her for a while.”
I smiled at the little girl on his hip, and she quieted her screaming to check me out. “Hi, there. You must be Lizzy.”
I’d assumed the older girl lying in the bed was the patient, but the niece Caine was holding had a rash on her face and neck.
The sweet little girl nodded while her bottom lip quivered. She had a crazy head full of red ringlet curls. I reached out and fingered one. “I love your curls. They remind me of Merida. Do you know who Merida is?”
She nodded.
“I bet you’re brave just like the Disney princess.”
I pushed a long curl that was plastered to her wet cheek back off her face. The bracelets on my wrist jingled and caught her attention.
“You like those?”
She nodded again.
“I’m Rachel—a friend of your Uncle Caine’s. You want to wear one?”
He eyes lit up, and she nodded again, only faster this time.
I slipped two of the bracelets from my wrist and held them out. She smiled and let me put them on her. It was then that I got a closer look at what the poor thing was wearing.
“Ummm…Caine? Why is her diaper duct taped?”
“I couldn’t get the damn thing to stay on.”
I held back my laugh as best as I could. The poised picture of perfection was so out of his element and frazzled.
Extending my arms, I smiled warmly at Lizzy. “Can I hold you? Maybe I can fix your diaper and put your shirt on the right way.”
Caine’s brow furrowed as he looked at his niece. It was obviously news to him that her shirt wasn’t on right. Lizzy was apprehensive, but eventually she leaned toward me, and I took her from her uncle’s arms.
“Do you have a diaper bag?”
“No. I flew out the door so fast, I didn’t even think about diapers.” He looked at his niece’s bare legs. “Or pants, apparently.”
I smiled. “That’s okay. I’m sure the nurse can give us one.”
The other little girl sat up from the stretcher and was looking at me.
Caine did the introduction. “This is Alley. She’s no help getting a diaper to stay on either.”
Lizzy and I visited the nurse’s station, and one of the aides was nice enough to go up to the pediatric unit and get us a few diapers and a small package of wipes. She also grabbed us kid-size pajama pants. After I straightened Lizzy out in the bathroom, I went back to Caine and Alley.
“All fixed.” Lizzy was smiling now. “And I think her rash has started to fade already.”
Caine examined his niece. “You’re right.” He raked his fingers through his hair. “Thank Christ. The last thing my sister needed today was to come home to one of her kids in the hospital. She had thyroid cancer at twenty and had her thyroid removed. Last week she found a swollen lymph node under her arm. Doctor doesn??
?t think it’s anything, but she’s freaked out anyway. They’re doing a biopsy as a precaution.”
“Wow. I’m sorry to hear that. I hope everything turns out okay.”
Caine nodded. “Thank you.”
A doctor stopped by to check on Lizzy, who was still in my arms. He pulled the curtain along the track on the ceiling and converted the open nook to a private treatment room. “How’s the little princess doing here?”
Caine answered. “It looks like the rash is starting to fade a little.”
“Let’s take a look.” He examined Lizzy’s face, belly, legs, and arms. “The Benadryl is kicking in. Let me just examine her one more time, in maybe a half hour, and then we can send you on your way. She’s going to be getting sleepy from the medicine pretty quick.” Before he walked out of the curtained area, he added, “Or not. Sometimes Benadryl can have the opposite effect on kids.”
Less than an hour later, we were discharged with a handful of papers. I walked Caine to his car and helped him strap the girls into their car seats.
“My sister insisted I take these things in case I had to go somewhere in an emergency. I told her she was nuts, I wasn’t planning on driving anywhere, but she stuck them in my car anyway.”
“Sounds like your sister made the right call.”
Caine grumbled. “She’ll lord that over me until we’re eighty, too.”
After the girls were strapped in, Alley asked if I could come back to her Uncle Caine’s to play with her. I’d started to say I couldn’t when Caine interrupted.
“I make a mean macaroni and cheese, if you’re hungry. You sure I can’t persuade you? We might have another diaper incident, and I’m almost out of duct tape. I may need to resort to Krazy Glue.”
I smiled. I was tempted, but when Caine’s face turned serious and he looked me in the eyes and said, “Please?” there was no way I could say no.
“I’ll follow you.”
His face lit up, and my damn heart started to race in response.
Calm down in there. He isn’t inviting you to a romantic dinner. He only wants you to help with his nieces. Put on a diaper, not take off your clothes.
The entire drive to Caine’s house, I tried to reason with my heart. Talk it down from the perch of excitement his invitation had pushed it out onto. But there was no reasoning with it. My head knew the truth, yet my heart didn’t really seem to give a shit.
Rachel
A gigantic black lab ran full-speed to greet me and almost bowled me over. I kneeled to say hello. “Hi, big guy. You’re so cute. What’s your name?”
Caine answered. “That’s Murphy.” He attempted a stern voice. “Down, boy.” The dog completely ignored him and attempted to burrow into my body.
I scratched behind Murphy’s ears while he went crazy sniffing me. “He listens to you well.”
“That’s your fault. He’s never going to listen with the way you smell.”
“The way I smell?” I wasn’t quite sure how to take that.
“A dog’s sense of smell is 1,000 times greater than a human’s.”
“And what, exactly, do I smell like?”
Caine walked over to where the dog was still mauling me and gave his collar a firm tug. “Come on, Murph. Give her a break, buddy.”
Eventually, the dog backed off enough for me to stand. Caine leaned in and took an exaggerated whiff of my neck with his eyes closed. “Summer. You always smell like summer.” Then he stepped back and winked. “My favorite season.”
And there went my damn pulse again. The talk I’d given myself in the car on the way over went out the window. Caine chuckled, probably at the expression on my face.
“Come on in. I’ll give Murph a treat to distract him from how good you smell.”
I followed Caine and quickly forgot everything else once I got a look at his place.
Totally not what I expected.
Caine’s apartment was incredible. I’d assumed it would be nice, but not this nice. The girls had run down the hall to get a video they wanted to watch the minute we walked in, and I looked around in awe. His living room was bigger than my entire apartment. Not to mention, he had a foyer. A foyer in Manhattan? That entryway alone had to be worth five hundred bucks a month. Caine noticed my expression. “My great grandfather started an investment company. Every subsequent generation of the West family grew the fortune he’d made by another zero. Except me. But I did inherit twenty-five percent of the company from my grandfather. It pays slightly better dividends than a teacher’s salary.”
“Uhh…slightly? I’d say. You have a view of the damn park.” I walked to the wall of glass. “This place is amazing.”
When I turned back, Caine was standing in the kitchen, which was open to the living room, and staring at me.
“Thank you for coming today,” he said.
“I owed you one, remember?”
“You would have come whether you owed me one, or I owed you ten.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because that’s the kind of person you are.”
The girls came running back to the living room with a backpack. They jumped up and down. “Can we play tea?” they asked us.
“I guess she’s having that opposite effect from the Benadryl,” Caine grumbled.
“Sure. I love tea,” I said.
Alley unzipped the backpack, lifted it by the bottom, and dumped the entire contents onto Caine’s couch. It looked like she had enough ceramic teacups and saucers for a party of twenty.
The girls started to set the coffee table, and I walked to Caine’s stainless steel kitchen. “Do you have herbal tea?”
“I think so.”
It was amusing to see him sit on the floor and sip tea out of a little cup. Watching the way the girls interacted with him, I could tell he spent a fair amount of time with them, even if he was inept at changing a diaper.
“I take it this isn’t your first time playing tea?”
“I’m forced to play it twice a month when I go to my sister’s for dinner.”
“Do the girls live here in the city?”
“No. They live up in Chappaqua. That’s where I grew up. My sister stayed there to be near my mom.”
“I lived in Westchester growing up, too. Pleasantville.”
“You go to Pleasantville High School?”
“Umm…no. I moved to the city long before I got to high school.”
During our two cups of tea, I loved watching Caine jump at the commands of a four year old. “Lift your pinky when you hold your teacup, Uncle Caine. You’re slurping. The spoon goes on the saucer, not the table.”
Finally, it seemed the girls had mellowed out a bit. Lizzy was actually yawning.
“You tired, Lizzy?” Caine asked.
She yawned again in response.
He stood and lifted the sleepy girl into his arms. “Come on. How about you lie down, and I’ll put the TV on for you?”
“Can I sleep in your bed?”
“Sure. Come on.” Lizzy leaned from Caine’s arms, reaching out to me. “Can you come put me to sleep, too, Rachel?”
I looked to Caine, and he shrugged. “Sure, let’s make it a party.”
Of course he was being sarcastic, but the girls didn’t catch it and were excited anyway. The four of us walked down the hall to his bedroom.
An unexpected blush rose on my cheeks as we entered the room. Caine’s bed was huge, definitely a king size. The four-post, carved-mahogany frame made it look even larger. It was also extremely high off the ground. The masculine feel of it really seemed to fit him. I could easily imagine him sleeping naked in it. Face down. With that tight ass I wanted to bite so badly peeking out from underneath a sheet.
I hadn’t even realized I’d stopped in the doorway of the room, lost in my thoughts as I stared at the bed, until Caine spoke.
“You can come in. I won’t bite.”
Bite. That did it. That’s all it took for the light blush on my face to heat to what I’m
sure was a lovely shade of crimson. Caine took one look at me and a wicked grin beamed from his handsome face. He set Lizzy down, helped Alley up onto the bed, and walked back to the door, where I was still standing, twisting my watch back and forth on my wrist.
His hot breath tickled my neck as he whispered, “I know what you’re thinking.”
My entire body tingled from only his breath touching my skin. I could only imagine what would happen if his hands were on me. Oh, God. Now I’m thinking of him, in that bed, with his hands on me. I swallowed and took a deep breath, only to find Caine’s scent still lingering as he walked back to the bed. Why couldn’t he at least smell bad?
He fiddled with the TV in his bedroom, connecting wires to a DVR.
“I take it you don’t watch movies in bed very often?”
“Pretty much the only time this thing turns on is when these two are here.”
Conversation about TV and little girls was good—I was starting to feel calmer.
“I can’t fall asleep without watching TV for a while,” I told him. “I guess you’re one of those people who falls asleep the second your head hits the pillow?”
Caine finished hooking up the wires, and the screen illuminated with the preview of some Disney movie.
Again, he walked back to me. “I didn’t say that. There are other things to do before you fall asleep at night that I prefer over television.”
I must’ve looked like a deer in the headlights, because Caine chuckled. “Relax, I’m just screwing with you. You looked uncomfortable, so I thought I’d help you out and make it worse.”
“I’m going to go clean up the tea mess.” I waved to the girls from the door and backed out of the room.
Five minutes later, Caine returned to the living room. I’d just finished washing the tea set and was drying the little dishes before packing them back into the girls’ backpack.
“They’re really sweet girls,” I said.
“Luckily they take after their uncle and not their mom.”
I laughed. “Yeah, right.”
Caine took the dishtowel from my hand. “What, you don’t think I’m sweet?”