The Diaper Diaries

The letter ended the same way they all did. Thank you for caring.

"I'm too damn busy to care," Tyler snarled at his secretary, who'd just deposited today's stack of heartrending pleas for cash on the corner of his steel-and-glass desk.

"You always are," Olivia Payne agreed cheerfully. With her graying hair held back in a bun, she looked staid and professional--an appearance that was entirely deceptive. She nodded at the letter Tyler held in his hand. "Anything interesting?"

Tyler fanned out the four pages of closely written text dotted with exclamation points. "Some guy wants two hundred grand to save the red-spotted tree frog. If we don't act fast, we might never see the frog again."

He picked up another letter--a single-page e-mail asking for thirty thousand dollars to buy computers for a preschool-- and weighed it against the frog letter, as if he could somehow gauge the relative worthiness of the two causes.

The Warrington Foundation, whose purpose was to give away some of the multimillion-dollar profits earned by Warrington Construction, had hired extra staff in the new year to do the preliminary evaluations. It was their job to send polite rejections to the men who wanted bigger breasts for their wives and the people seeking donations to surefire lottery schemes.

But that still left anywhere up to a hundred potentially genuine requests for the chairman--Tyler--to read each day. Many of them ended with what seemed to be that mantra: Thank you for caring.

Tyler folded the first page of the frog letter into a paper airplane.

All he cared about right now was convincing the powers that be in Washington, D.C., that he was the right person to head up their new think tank, established to determine how charities and government could work together to support families. They were looking for someone who understood the concerns of ordinary American families. And Tyler had ended up on the shortlist thanks to the foundation's good work with various children's charities.

Presumably, he was at the very bottom of that shortlist. Yet he wanted the job to an extent that surprised him and would have amazed his family, who would doubtless say he was more suited to a think tank on how to get more fun into people's lives.

Tyler flipped his hand-forged-silver Michel Perchin pen between his fingers as he contemplated his possibly irredeemable reputation. Every news report about his work at the foundation was countered by a juicy piece in the gossip pages about "playboy bachelor Tyler Warrington." He'd made a major lifestyle adjustment--dating the same woman every night the past two weeks--but he wasn't sure that act of heroism was enough. Correction: after the headline in this morning's Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he knew it wasn't.

He smoothed out the paper plane, slapped the two letters together, handed them to Olivia. "The frog's a no go. Invite the preschool to pitch at the next committee meeting."

What could be more ordinary and American than preschool?

Maybe his PR team could write an opinion piece about early-childhood education and submit it to the Journal-Constitution in Tyler's name.

Olivia tucked the letters into her folder. "I'll deal with these right after I go downstairs. Joe called to say there's a delivery for you. He sounded pretty excited."

"Just as well our security guy doesn't make the allocations." Unlike Tyler, Joe was a sucker for the attention-getting ploys to which some people resorted when they asked for money. "If it's balloons, cake or cigars, tell him to take them home to his kids." He raised his hands in self-defense against Olivia's daggered look. "Okay, okay, hold the cigars."

OLIVIA RETURNED carrying a faded green duffel bag in a fierce grip, the straps wrapped around one hand, her other arm underneath the bag. She cradled it with a delicacy that suggested its contents were at least as valuable as the Venetian-glass sculpture she'd spent hundreds on last week.

Tyler shoved his chair back from the desk, got to his feet. "What is it?"

Very gently, she slid the bag across the surface of the desk; Tyler saw the zipper was open. "Take a look," she invited, her voice curiously high.

He parted the top of the bag, peered in. And met the un-blinking blue gaze of a baby.

Wrapped in a whitish blanket and wearing a soft yellow hat so that only a little round face showed...but definitely a baby.

"What the--" Tyler leaped backward, glared at his secretary. "Is this a joke?"

Olivia blew out a breath as she shook her head. "A young woman came in, told Joe she had a delivery for you. She excused herself to go to the bathroom and left the bag on Joe's desk. After a couple of minutes, the baby sneezed--gave Joe a heck of a fright. That's when he called me."

Tyler raked a hand through his hair. "For Pete's sake, the woman's probably still in the bathroom. Or by now, back out with Joe and wondering where her kid's gone. Take it back down."