Father Found

by Judith Arnold

  Abruptly Samantha’s eyes flew open. She opened her mouth and let loose with the longest, loudest, most thunderous burp Allison had ever heard.

  And when the burp had ended, Samantha smiled and spit out a horrifying cascade of semidigested formula across Allison’s dress.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “I’M REALLY SORRY,” Jamie said for the fifteenth time.

  Allison plucked the damp green fabric away from her thighs and sighed. “It’s okay, Jamie. Stuff happens.”

  “Yeah, but it happened all over you.”

  She shrugged. “It’ll wash out. This dress is machine washable.”

  “And I’m going to wash it,” he declared with such conviction she had to suppress a laugh.

  If she thought objectively about the situation, she would have to concede that it was anything but laughable. Her first major date since forever had ended with a baby upchucking all over her, followed by the restaurant’s snooty wait staff all but kicking her, Jamie and the baby out of the restaurant. Never had the maître d’ been more solicitous: “Would the lady like to clean herself up before leaving? Might I have the chef wrap up the food you ordered so you can take it with you? Perhaps you would like to take the rest of the wine with you, as well?”

  If it weren’t for the restaurant’s insistence that Jamie use Reynaud as an overpriced takeout joint, Allison might have asked him to drive her straight home. But dinner, packed in microwavable plastic containers and stacked inside a paper bag that Jamie had wedged into the storage space behind the back seat, awaited. He had argued that she couldn’t strand him with all that food, and besides, she had to give him the opportunity to salvage the evening.

  She’d considered stopping off at home to change her clothes before giving Jamie his chance at salvage work. But if she did that, Grammy would ask too many questions. Jamie managed to convince her that it would be easier for her to come back to his place, borrow a T-shirt and shorts from him and let him run her dress through his washing machine while they ate.

  She didn’t think it would be easier. But this date was obviously not destined to be easy. Yet the challenge of it whetted her appetite—not just for the gourmet food tucked into the rear of the Range Rover, but for adventure. Risk. Jamie McCoy.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked, shooting her a quick glance while he stopped at a red light.

  “Clammy.”

  Behind her, Samantha let out a whimper. She was no doubt feeling clammy, too. She’d spewed her dinner all over herself as well as Allison.

  “No one ever told me,” Jamie remarked, shifting into gear as the light turned green, “that having a baby was going to be so inconvenient.”

  “No one ever told you anything about having a baby,” Allison remarked. “Having a baby can also be a joy.”

  Jamie snorted. “I need to keep being reminded of that. It’s easy to forget.” He steered west toward the fading mauve horizon, an outline of gently rolling hills as the city thinned out. “I will admit there was a moment or two when I almost thought Sam was, I don’t know, a gift or something. Something special. Something precious.”

  “She is precious,” Allison said quietly, worried that Jamie might not recognize this.

  “I know, I know. But…it was just before I left to pick you up, and I was thinking, okay, even without a baby-sitter, my life hasn’t come to an end. I can still do things like a normal guy. I can still take a lady out for dinner. Ha!” he concluded with a snort.

  If Allison had had any qualms about going back to his house, his words assuaged them. He had to learn not to resent his baby. He had to learn that “normal” was a very broad concept and that spending a Saturday evening at home with a baby and a female friend was just as acceptable as going out on the town.

  Friend. It dawned on her that she was Jamie’s friend. When he’d leaned across the table at the restaurant and slipped his spoon into her mouth, she hadn’t felt like his friend. “Friend” didn’t define the tremor of heat that had seized her at that moment, the shiver of yearning that had rocked her as she’d acknowledged her soul-deep attraction to Jamie.

  But few things could squelch desire as effectively as an infant suffering from reflux. Whatever she’d been thinking of Jamie fifteen minutes ago, right now she felt more like his connection with reality—a reality that for the moment entailed being a father to a newborn.

  He cruised along a winding two-lane road interrupted by an occasional house or unpaved driveway. This was the ritzy end of town, an area of old farmhouses and modem mansions seated on vast acreage. As recently as fifty years ago, most of the estates on the western outskirts of Arlington were working farms. But then word had reached frazzled New York City dwellers that a beautiful rural paradise existed in western Connecticut, less than a two-hour drive from their crowded apartments, and people began to buy the properties for weekend retreats. Old farmhouses became “antique restorations” and tripled in value.

  Most of the estates were vacation homes, but some were occupied year-round. Some of the city folk fell so deeply in love with Arlington’s environs that they gave up their city apartments and settled in permanently.

  Allison couldn’t blame them. The western edge of town boasted vast stretches of virgin forest, rolling meadows and stone walls that had stood for hundreds of years. Unlike Allison’s neighborhood, where the houses were so close to one another that neighbors could converse from porch to porch without raising their voices, here a person had privacy and the beauty of nature, the sense of what Connecticut must have seemed like a century ago.

  Apparently this was where Jamie lived. Allison supposed that if he could patronize a restaurant like Reynaud without balking at the prices, he must be able to afford a residence in the affluent west side of town.

  He steered onto a gravel driveway flanked by a split rail fence. At the end of the driveway loomed an oddly sprawling shingled house. At its center was a simple fifties-style ranch, but wings and annexes spread from that center in several directions. The front yard was scruffy grass baking brown in the early summer heat. Random trees dotted the lawn; the shrubs bordering the house grew unpruned and rambunctious.

  Allison loved it.

  Jamie navigated around one of the building’s wings to a garage, pressed a remote garage door opener and drove inside. “Let me take care of Sammy first,” he said as he turned off the engine, “and then we’ll get you out of that dress.”

  His provocative phrasing jolted her. When she met his gaze and saw the devilish glint in his eyes, she realized that he’d chosen his words deliberately. Maybe she didn’t feel like his friend, after all.

  But before she could turn all huffy and give him a little lecture, he was out of the car, moving to the back seat to unstrap Samantha. For all his teasing, he must have known as well as Allison that with his baby daughter occupying center stage, a seduction was not going to happen tonight. Jokes about Allison’s dress were as close as he was going to get.

  She let herself out of the car while he hoisted his daughter into his arms. He still didn’t seem quite comfortable holding her, but he did a good job of supporting her head even as he leaned over to lift his knapsack from the floor of the rear seat “Come on in,” he called to Allison over his shoulder. “Don’t worry about the food—I’ll come back for it.”

  He led her through a mudroom hall into the sort of kitchen that might be featured in a home decor magazine. The room was large and white with state-of-the-art appliances and grand windows overlooking the backyard. Without breaking stride, Jamie continued down a hall to Samantha’s bedroom. Allison watched from the open doorway as Jamie carried his daughter into the room, dropping his knapsack en route, yanking the drawer of an old bureau open with his free hand and pulling out a clean outfit. He didn’t ask for help and Allison didn’t offer it.

  Her gaze followed him to a small card table, which he used as a changing table. Despite the prominence of the crib and the menagerie of stuffed animals heaped on the chair in one corner,
the room didn’t seem like a nursery. The floor was covered in beige carpeting, the window shaded with vertical blinds, the walls bare white. Other than the animals, the only childlike decoration was a mobile of brightly colored helicopters hanging above the crib. A light breeze entered the window, setting the helicopters’ rotors in motion.

  “I’ll be right with you,” he promised without turning. He seemed to be struggling to get Samantha into her fresh outfit. It was quite a bout, and Samantha was ahead on points. From her angle, Allison could see Samantha flailing, capturing a forelock of Jamie’s hair and yanking on it. He yelped, pried her hand away, and she kicked her feet into his wrist, almost causing him to lose his grip on her.

  Allison could no longer resist the urge to help. She crossed the room in time to see Jamie’s thumb get snared by the narrow sleeve he’d been trying to wrestle Samantha’s arm into. Trying not to laugh, Allison reached over the baby and eased Jamie’s thumb free of the soft fabric. The contact of skin against skin almost made her jerk her hand away.

  She was used to touching people: holding patients’ hands, rubbing their backs, massaging their feet during labor or brushing sweat-damp hair back from their faces. She believed skin contact was essential for patients—even patients who were healthy, as the maternity patients at Arlington Memorial usually were. As a nurse, Allison considered her work physical. She liked the tactile aspects of it, the human interaction.

  But this was different. This was a man, a funny, sexy man. And the simple act of extricating his fingers from a garment designed for a child not much larger than his hand suddenly revived all those shivery, tremulous, not exactly friendly sensations she’d experienced in the restaurant.

  Rescued from the baby garment, Jamie flashed her a smile of gratitude. “These outfits are ridiculous,” he said. “Look at the size of the snaps! I’ve seen molecules bigger than that.”

  “Maybe you’d be better at this if you’d grown up playing with dolls,” Allison suggested, sliding the baby’s arms into the sleeves with no difficulty.

  “Yeah, sure. Most guys have undressed Barbie a million times in their imaginations. It doesn’t help.”

  “Barbie isn’t a doll,” Allison declared. “She’s a three-dimensional pinup.”

  “My point exactly.”

  Clothed and dry, Samantha puckered her lips and sighed. “Just think, you might be buying Barbie dolls for Samantha someday,” Allison said, brushing the gossamer strands of the baby’s hair back from her forehead.

  “That would be enough to kill the fantasy. I’d rather buy her a dump truck and a set of Star Trek action figures.”

  “Lucky girl,” Allison murmured, grinning at Samantha. “Is that what you’d like? A dump truck and Ferengi?”

  Samantha waved her hands toward Allison as if asking to be picked up. Allison lifted the baby, kissed her cheek and then handed her to Jamie. His eyes seemed focused on Allison as if she’d done something profound, something he needed to learn through observation.

  “I guess you want some dry clothes, too,” he finally said, tearing his gaze from her. He walked out of the room, motioning for her to follow.

  The room he led her to had to be his bedroom. She tried not to dwell on the implications of the king-size platform bed, the plush carpet, the thick beige terry cloth robe hanging from a hook inside the open bathroom door. She tried not to glance past that door to see if he had a sunken tub in the bathroom, a wall full of mirrors, a whirlpool. She didn’t want to know, any more than she wanted to know just how soft the array of feather pillows spanning the head of the bed would feel beneath her head, how smooth the sheets would feel against her skin, how well she and Jamie would fit on that broad, inviting mattress.

  He was too busy rummaging through the drawers of his Shaker-style dresser to look at her, which was probably just as well. She wouldn’t want him to guess at the thoughts that were making her cheeks burn with color—specifically the thought that the only thing that would make his bed look more inviting would be him in it.

  “Everything I own is going to be too big on you,” he was muttering, slamming one drawer and yanking open another while simultaneously adjusting his grip on his wriggling daughter. “Here—these shorts have a drawstring…and here’s a shirt. If you want to wash up, the bathroom’s through there.” He gestured vaguely with his hand, then fired a grin into the air and raced out of the room.

  Maybe he had been thinking what she was thinking. Even with Samantha in his arms, maybe he’d been aware of the fact that he and Allison were in his bedroom and that more than once this evening erotic undercurrents had coursed between them. Maybe that awareness unnerved him as much as it unnerved her.

  God bless Samantha, she thought, giving the baby full credit for keeping the date from slipping from a PG-13 rating right through R to X. Focusing her mind on the baby to the exclusion of anything else, she worked down the zipper of her dress and shimmied out of the damp garment. Her slip was damp, too, but she couldn’t imagine handing the champagne-hued lingerie to Jamie for laundering. Instead, she carried it into his bathroom to rinse in the sink.

  No Jacuzzi. No wall of mirrors. His bathroom boasted a feature more startling than that: a wall of glass rising up from the edge of the tub to the ceiling. She stifled a shriek and dove back into the bedroom. For heaven’s sake—all she had on were her nylons and a bra and panties the same silky shade as her slip. And she’d marched right into a room with a wall of glass! Someone could have seen her!

  Hiding her scantily clad body behind the door, she peeked into the bathroom. No, no one could see her other than perhaps a curious bird. The wall backed onto a dense, sunset-lit forest Jamie’s nearest neighbor must be quite a distance away.

  Still, she found it peculiar that his bathroom would be so…exposed. Did he actually shower before that broad stretch of glass? Did he actually stand stark naked in the room, his body on full display?

  Why was she thinking about him stark naked, anyway?

  She hastily ran her slip under the faucet and then hung it on a towel rack to dry. It looked disconcertingly intimate there, but she wasn’t going to carry it through the house in search of a more appropriate drying spot. For lack of a better idea, she left her stockings on the towel rack, too. They hadn’t been touched by Samantha’s eruption, but Allison would feel bizarre wearing them under a pair of athletic shorts.

  Returning to his bedroom, she slipped Jamie’s T-shirt over her head. The neckline was too wide and the sleeves fell past her elbows, but the soft gray cotton cuddled her. The shirt had undoubtedly been washed countless times—which implied that Jamie had worn it countless times. Maybe he’d sweated in it. Maybe he’d slept in it

  Maybe she needed to get back to focusing on Samantha real fast.

  The shorts were gray cotton, too, and much too big, although she was able to cinch the drawstring tightly enough to keep them from sliding down her hips. She inspected her reflection in the mirror and decided she looked markedly less attractive than she had in the clinging green dress. The shorts came all the way down to. her knees, and the shirt was so baggy she could swim laps inside it. It would take some clever guessing for a man to realize a full-grown, postpubescent woman was lurking inside all that fabric.

  She pulled a comb from her purse and attempted to neaten her hair, then gave up and padded barefoot out of the bedroom, bringing her dress with her. The mouthwatering aroma of food beckoned her down the hall. Reaching the kitchen, however, she found herself alone. The bag the restaurant had packed with their take-home dinners stood on a counter near the microwave oven, which was in use, but Jamie was nowhere in sight.

  “Out here,” he hollered.

  She spun around and spotted the screened porch adjacent to the kitchen. He was on the porch, still dressed in his tailored slacks and crisp white shirt, although he’d rolled the sleeves up to his elbows. He leaned over a glass-topped table to arrange place mats and silverware before the two cushioned chairs that faced each other across the table.


  Allison abandoned the warm tiles of the kitchen floor for the cool cement of the porch and inhaled another delicious aroma—the tart pine scent of the surrounding forest. Nearing the table, she noticed that the place mats featured scenes from Road Runner cartoons. Not exactly the classy ambiance of Reynaud, but frankly, Allison felt more at home with cartoons than with damask tablecloths and heavy sterling flatware.

  “Where’s Samantha?” she asked.

  “The little twit,” he muttered, placing a wineglass at each place mat. “Now she’s asleep again. She waits until she’s ruined everything and then she zones out.”

  “She didn’t ruin everything,” Allison argued.

  He straightened up and turned to her. His gaze skimmed the length of her, scrutinizing her ridiculous, ill-fitting outfit. After reaching her bare feet he reversed direction, inspecting her calves, the drooping length of the shorts, the voluminous drape of the shirt and her disheveled hair. Closing his eyes, he shook his head and chuckled. “She ruined your dress,” he remarked.

  “No, she didn’t. We just have to get it into the laundry.”

  “Laundry.” He pulled the sodden green garment from her grip and strode into the kitchen. She followed, aware that he could ruin her dress more effectively than Samantha could. Allison couldn’t believe a man so inept with a baby could handle a laundry chore without shrinking or bleaching or otherwise destroying what he was washing.

  The laundry room extended off the kitchen, a narrow alcove scarcely big enough for two adults standing side by side. To give him more room—and to keep from hovering and micromanaging his efforts with the washing machine—she remained in the doorway, poised to leap into the fray the moment she felt a genuine threat to her dress.

  He studied the dial settings on the machine intently. “I use soap, right?” he finally asked.

  Her dress was definitely under threat. “Let me do it,” she offered, venturing a step into the crowded room.