Page 30 of The Playboy's Most Unexpected Baby

“Yeah, yeah.” He rolled it through the paint tray. “Do you think this color was a good choice?”

“I do. Cadet blue is popular right now. Not so bold that it would be an eyesore, but bright enough that it isn’t boring.” Olivia dragged the ladder over to the wall and climbed up high enough to reach the place where the wall met the ceiling.

Charlie watched her. “Is that safe?”

“Don’t tell me you’ve never been up on a ladder before.”

“Not one like that.”

“One like what!”

“One that wasn’tattachedto anything! It looks like it might fall over.”

“Charlie, what kinds of ladders have you been on?”

“Well — there’s a ladder on my yacht to climb up out of the water.”

“It is egregious that you haven’t taken me out on your yacht,” Olivia informed him. “What kind of man has a yacht and doesn’t takehis own wifeout on it? If you keep this up, I’m filing for divorce.”

“Sure you will,” Charlie bantered back. “You can’t divorce me before this place is sold, and you know it. And I’ll take you on the yacht, but that’s not going to happen if you fall off that ladder and break your neck.”

“It’s fine,” Olivia assured him. “I’m not going to break my neck. Even if I fell off, I’m not that high off the ground. I’d have to land on my head for it to be a serious problem.”

“Could you not joke like that?” he asked.

She looked back at him, surprised by the anxiety in his tone. “Hey, are you okay?”

“Maybe I should be the one on the ladder,” Charlie said. “That might be a smarter way to do this. You can do the paint roller.”

“No, this way makes more sense,” she said. “You can reach higher with the roller than I can.” She hesitated. “Charlie, I’m not going to fall off the ladder.”

He forced a laugh. “I’m being stupid, right?”

“A little,” she said, very gently. “It’s okay. I’ve done this dozens of times. There isn’t anything to worry about.”

“Right,” Charlie said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m so worried about it. You’re right. Nothing is going to happen. I know that.”

Olivia looked at him for a moment. He really did look stressed, and she didn’t know why. This wasn’t very dangerous. Was it possible that he had a fear of ladders?

She turned back to the wall. She’d brought the smallest bucket of paint up with her and balanced it on top of the ladder, and now she dipped the brush in and began to work.

How odd, that Charlie would worry about her like that. It wasn’t the kind of thing she was used to from him. But then, hehadjust been through a loss, and grief could show up in strange ways. Maybe he was feeling fearful of losing someone else so soon after the loss of his aunt.

Maybe… but wouldn’t that mean that Olivia was someone he cared enough to try to hold on to? And she wasn’t. Their connection was intended to be temporary. He was going to have to let her go eventually. Of course he wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to her — Olivia understood that. But for him to develop this paranoia about it? It would make sense for him to feel that way about hisrealwife if he had one, but not about her.

She bit her lip, wondering what it all meant. Wondering whether it was going to be uncommonly hard for him to say goodbye when they inevitably went their separate ways.

Surely not. He’s a player. He lets women go all the time. It’s what he’s best at.

No, she was reading into things. It made perfect sense that he wouldn’t want to see her fall off the ladder and seriously injure herself. That didn’t mean he was caught up in his feelings about her. She wouldn’t have wanted to see something like that happen to him either.

Of course, shewasa little caught up in her feelings.

She was projecting. She wanted to think that she wasn’t alone in feeling this way, so she was allowing herself to imagine that his words and his actions meant that he felt the same thing. That wasn’t what it meant at all. No one would want to see another person fall off a ladder, and if he had no experience with such things, it made perfect sense that he would be nervous.

Having reasoned it out, she found it easy to push the thought out of her mind. She returned her attention to painting.

“Hey!” Charlie yelped.

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