The Baby Invasion (Destiny Bay-Baby Dreams) Read online

  Copyright Info

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales, or organizations is entirely coincidental. All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.

  Copyright © 2013 Helen Conrad

  Cover Copyright © 2013 DoorKnock Publishing

  Cover images from Shutterstock.com

  First Edition May, 2013 published by DoorKnock Publishing

  The Baby Invasion

  Destiny Bay: Baby Dreams - Book 2

  By Helen Conrad

  Cast of Characters in the series Destiny Bay~Baby Dreams

  THE BABY INVASION

  BY HELEN CONRAD

  Mark Carrington, mining executive,

  and Katherine Carrington parents of:

  Scott Carrington~airline pilot and confirmed bachelor who grew up responsible for so many younger siblings, he’s vowed to stay away from dealing with kids-forever!

  Cathy Feenstra~divorced mother of three who has taken a baby sitting job that leaves her with three more and no idea where their mother disappeared to.

  Beth, Barney and Beanie~Cathy’s children

  April Meadows~ mother of triplets who runs off to Lake Tahoe.

  Robby Crockett~her boyfriend and father of her babies who threatens Cathy.

  Mickey (Adams) Carrington~owner and proprietor of Mickey’s on the Bay, a local café where the Carringtons tend to hang out. She’s now married to Tag.

  Amity Crane~new girl in town with suspicious fascination for Carrington men and a growing baby bump.

  Charity Ames~restauranteur, now married to Ross Carrington and having his baby.

  Margy (Carrington) Marker~Scott’s sister in Tahoe, married to Sam.

  Jim and Frank Carrington~two of Scott’s brothers still living in Reno.

  Shelley Carrington Hudson~Scott’s cousin and good friend, married to Michael Hudson and pregnant.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Cast of Characters in the series Destiny Bay~Baby

  CHAPTER ONE~ Just Being Neighborly

  CHAPTER TWO~ The Mean Man Visits

  CHAPTER THREE~ Super Beanie

  CHAPTER FOUR~ The Etiquette of Soup

  CHAPTER FIVE~ Just Like Old Times

  CHAPTER SIX~ Sad Songs and Good Company

  CHAPTER SEVEN~ Racing Through the Night

  CHAPTER EIGHT~ Breakfast in Mammoth

  CHAPTER NINE~ The Teddy Bears Picnic

  CHAPTER TEN~ Robby Catches Up

  CHAPTER ELEVEN~ Aga Daddy

  Also in the Destiny Bay - Baby Dreams

  Also By Helen Conrad

  Excerpt from Waiting for Someone Like You

  Author, Helen Conrad

  CHAPTER ONE:

  Just Being Neighborly

  Scott Carrington wasn’t expecting intruders-especially not ghostly figures in white nightclothes. So when his backyard was invaded, at first he didn’t trust his own eyesight.

  It was close to midnight. He’d come in late on an international flight with an interminable layover in Bombay. Layovers were always tedious, but this one had been especially bad. He hadn’t been able to sleep, and for some reason, he’d spent hours staring at the ceiling, watching scenes from the most painful chapters of his life, as though it were a stupid and boring movie.

  His mother’s voice served as the film score. “Scott, I just don’t understand you. What are you doing to yourself? Was your childhood really so awful? Why can’t you find a nice girl and…..?”

  He’d groaned and jammed a pillow over his ears as her voice echoed inside his head. His mother had passed away five years ago and he still felt her disappointment as though he’d just heard it yesterday. She hadn’t lived long enough to see him become an airline pilot and begin to make a good living. To her, he would always be a bum. Funny how he couldn’t get past that.

  Sitting in the cockpit of the giant jet airliner, all he’d thought about for the last two thousand miles was how good it was going to feel to soak his aching body in his own backyard hot tub, washing away his exhaustion, washing away his mother’s voice.

  He made the short hop from Los Angeles up the coast to Destiny Bay and drove his Porsche from the airport to the home kept ever ready by his wonderful daily housekeeper, Rebecca.

  Sighing happily, he took off his uniform, then went right out back, leaving the lights off, and slipping into the water. Lying against the side, he gazed up at the star-studded coastal sky.

  He closed his eyes, feeling all the tension begin to ooze out into the hot water, and he sighed again. This was the life. His body was still vibrating from the long flight. He needed this, badly. Groggy from lack of sleep, he began to doze.

  And then for some reason he opened his eyes and something white and fleeting caught his attention. He squinted, looking into the darkness at the end of his yard opposite from his pool. Something moved, then came into full focus for a moment. It seemed to be a girl with long blond hair, dressed in flowing, translucent white.

  He blinked, and the vision was gone.

  “Good Lord,” he muttered to himself. “I must really be beat this time.”

  He was thankful he’d forgone the stiff drink he’d thought about having. Better to see ghostly little girls than pink elephants. He began to sink back down, eyelids drifting shut.

  But no, there she was again, this time shimmying up his tree, her gown fluttering in the breeze. He frowned.

  That was his tree, wasn’t it? Some kind of fruit tree.

  Apricot, maybe. He never paid any attention to it, letting the gardener take the fruit he wanted, and throwing out the rest. And now it contained one ghostly little girl.

  Unless he was seeing things.

  His gaze sharpened and he tried to wake up enough to concentrate. Something told him this was no vision. Visions didn’t eat apricots. This had to be a real little girl.

  Suddenly there was another child, a towheaded boy built like a fireplug, also in white. The child stopped and gazed about the yard and Scott could have sworn his eyes gleamed with an unearthly light. Then he, too, disappeared, only to reappear shimmying up the tree.

  Scott frowned and shook his head to clear it. One part of his brain was telling him to close his eyes and ignore the children---they were figments of his imagination that would soon go away.

  Another part of his brain was trying to rouse him, to warn him his territory was being invaded, that it was time to rise and defend his land from interlopers.

  He moved restlessly in the water, not sure which impulse to follow. After all, he hadn’t been home for two weeks. If a small family of wandering ghostly children had decided to take up residence in his yard, so be it. They didn’t seem to be hurting anything. As long as they kept the noise level down…

  No, wait. There was a third child. This one moved on terribly unsteady and very bowed little chubby legs.

  And this one saw him.

  He stopped, standing very still, dressed only in diapers, and then he raised a chubby hand and pointed at Scott.

  “Aga doo,” the toddler seemed to say.

  “Beanie!” cried a voice from the tree. “Go home! Go home now!”

  “Aga doo,” the youngest repeated, pointing in Scott’s direction again and seemingly frustrated that no one was paying attention to his warning. “Aga!”

  Scott sighed. There was no use kidding himself, no use hoping this was all a midnight mirag
e. It was obviously a toddler invasion. He was going to have to rouse himself to do something about it.

  Any minute now.

  “Beanie.”

  This time the voice was adult and coming from the neighboring yard. Scott’s head swivelled and he waited, sure the owner of the voice would appear out of nowhere, just as the others had.

  “Beanie, where are you, you little rascal?”

  Scott sat very still and watched, fascinated, as the bottom end of a plank in the fence shared by the two yards rose like one side of a teeter-totter and another ghostly figure slipped into the yard.

  This one was also dressed in white—but this one was definitely no child. The white was made from some sort of gossamer fabric and formed adorable baby doll pajamas the like of which he hadn’t seen since his teenage fantasies.

  And this one had all the rounded attributes of a full-grown woman. Silver blond hair curled in ringlets down her back. The pretty, heart-shaped face was creased with a worried look as she gazed about the yard.

  “Beanie?” she called out. “Where are you?”

  Scott realized, suddenly, that he was holding his breath. He could see all of them now, the two in the tree, the young one hovering at the bottom, the lovely woman searching for them.

  Each wore white and each seemed to be glowing somehow. The thought that they were supernatural flickered through his mind again, but he dismissed it quickly. He was fully awake now, and fully aware that they were all too real.

  “Beanie!”

  She’d found the baby and scooped him up into her arms.

  “You bad boy. Coming over here barefoot! Who knows what awful things this man has in his yard?”

  She peered up into the tree. “Beth! Barnaby! You two get down this instant! You’re supposed to be in bed and you know it!”

  “Mommy, we’re just getting apricots. The man doesn’t want them.”

  She shifted the baby from one hip to the other with the practiced ease of a longtime mom. “Well, that’s true. How anyone can let good food rot. ...”

  “He’s a mean old man,” the young voice answered. “The kids down the street told me. He’s a mean old man and he hates kids.”

  “Mean old man,” a male version of the voice echoed from the treetop.

  Scott found the urge to defend himself rising in his chest. Mean, maybe-but old at thirty-five? Hardly! It was time to assert his authority in the situation. He looked about for his towel and found it hanging almost close enough to reach.

  “If he doesn’t like kids,” the woman was saying, “it’s just as well he’s never home, isn’t it?’”

  “Where is he, Mommy? Where does he go?’”

  The baby chose that moment to glare at Scott again, lift his little hand and point, yelling “Aga! Aga!”

  But no one paid any attention.

  His mother merely shifted him a bit on her hip and went on talking up into the tree to her other children.

  “I don’t know, honey. April didn’t tell me. On trips, I guess.”

  She reached her free arm up to help the little boy down.

  “Come on, Beth. You’ve got so many apricots in that nightgown, you won’t be able to walk.”

  “I hope he doesn’t come back while we’re staying in April’s house. I hope he never comes back. I hope-“

  Scott had taken just about all the verbal abuse he was ready to take. He wasn’t used to being called mean and being shunned.

  “Guess what,” he said in a deep, loud voice, surging up out of the water and reaching for the oversize towel at the same time. “It’s too late for hoping. He’s already back.”

  He whipped the towel around his dark, naked body and pulled it tightly around his hips. “Now would you like to explain just exactly what all you people are doing in my yard?”

  That was as far as he got. For mere fractions of a second the four intruders stood transfixed, shocked by his presence. Then they swung into action.

  The woman screamed. The little girl screamed. The little boy screamed, and so did the baby.

  Caught up in the moment, Scott almost screamed himself.

  Still shrieking, the neighbors ran for the fence. The woman shoved the baby through, then the other two children, before slipping through herself, screaming all the while.

  “Hey,” he yelled, going after them, frowning in annoyance at all the noise they were making. Half the town must have heard them by now. “You could at least apologize.”

  He reached the fence and leaned over it, watching them run for the house next door, the woman carrying the baby and stopping to help the little boy. The little girl was the straggler, looking back and calling to her mother in a broken voice, “Mommy, I dropped all my apricots!”

  Pangs of guilt shot through him. After all, what had they been doing that was all that bad? Just eating fruit he didn’t bother with himself. Was that so terrible?

  He looked down. Apricots covered the ground at his feet. He reached down and picked a couple of them up.

  “Hey, kid,” he called over the fence. “Here. Catch.”

  He tossed two nice big apricots to the girl.

  Instead of reaching out to capture them, she screamed again. “Mommy! He’s throwing things!”

  Scott shook his head, aghast. “No, I was just--“

  Too late. The woman had whirled and was bearing down on him.

  “Listen, mister,” she stormed as she neared where he stood. “I know we were trespassing. I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again. But it was a harmless thing we did. And for a grown man to stand there and throw things at a child!”

  “No, really,” Scott said, trying to smile.

  She was close now, and even in the moonlight, he could see that she was a very pretty young woman. Pretty women usually liked him. Women in general, in fact, usually fell all over him. Surely once he’d explained....

  “I wasn’t throwing them at her. I was throwing them to her. You do see the difference, don’t you?” He gave her the “we adults understand these things” look and shrugged charmingly, expecting to see that familiar little glint appear in her gaze, to see the line around the mouth soften, the lips begin to turn up at the corners.

  Unfortunately, those things didn’t happen.

  Instead, she put her hands on her hips, facing him as though he were a barking dog and she a mama cat protecting a basketful of kittens. The hard line around her mouth tightened. Her blue eyes flashed unfriendly fire.

  “I’ve heard about you, mister,” she told him evenly. “You lay a finger on anyone of my children and I’ll make sure you’re sorry for it.”

  Scott would have liked a pause in which to pursue the topic. He’d never made any bones about the fact that he liked his privacy, that he would prefer to live among adults in a place where the patter of little feet was not often heard.

  But he wasn’t the boogie man. This reputation for hating kids seemed to be getting out of hand.

  Before he could begin his own defense, a sound came from the house. Everyone turned toward it. Easy enough to identify, it seemed to strike each one of them with the same sense of horror.

  “Babies,” Scott said, staring at the pretty woman. “More babies.”

  He quickly counted the three still outside. The sound coming from the house indicated at least two more.

  “How many kids do you have, lady?” he asked incredulously.

  Her eyes shone with defiance. “As many as I want, mister,” she replied. But she began to back away toward the house.

  “Wait.”

  As horrifying as the prospect of even more children was he found he didn’t want to lose her so quickly.

  She hesitated. “What is it?”

  For a long moment all he could do was look at her. The backlight from the house was illuminating her, showing off her trim waist, rounded hips, and the full, dark-tipped breasts.

  The baby doll pajamas were practically transparent. Her wild silver hair flew about her face like an enchanted mist, and
her long, slender legs ended in fluffy, white bedroom slippers, completing a picture that was sending his senses into a tailspin.

  Common sense was tugging on his consciousness, trying to remind him that with all these children, there must be a father around somewhere.

  “I ... listen, couldn’t we start over here? I didn’t mean to scare you and the kids.”

  Her blue eyes were wary, cynical.

  “No? Then what exactly did you mean to do?”

  He shrugged disarmingly, but ignored the question. “I’d like to get to know you better,” he said with the smooth tone of a practiced charmer. “After you get those little ... those kids to bed, why don’t you come on over for a nightcap?”

  The husband problem nagged at him. After all, babies didn’t usually appear on doorsteps these days. There was always a father involved, at least at the onset.

  “You and your husband,” he added hastily. “After all, we’re neighbors. We should talk.”

  He smiled.

  She didn’t.

  “Sorry mister,” she replied evenly. “I teach my children, not to talk to strangers. They learn best by example.”

  With a flick of her hair, she turned and strode quickly to the sliding glass door where her children were waiting. Scott watched her disappear, drawing the drapes behind her. He sighed, feeling strangely lonely all of a sudden.

  Turning back to his own dark house, he started across the lawn, and quickly realized why the woman in the baby doll pajamas had been scathing about his yard. Against his tender bare feet, the grass seemed to have turned into a field of jagged rocks and lethal stickle burrs.

  “Ow, ow, ow,” he muttered in agony as he made his way gingerly across it.

  When he reached the patio, he bent down to pull out a few burrs, at the same time grabbing at the towel that kept sliding off his backside and swearing under his breath. Compared to this hostile hellhole he called home, Bombay was beginning to seem downright attractive.

  Things looked a little different in the morning as Scott sat and drank his orange juice and gazed out at the shiny blue, Destiny Bay sky with not a cloud in sight.