Father Found

by Judith Arnold

  “No, no—I can do it. I was just checking.”

  “You were just checking whether to use detergent?”

  “Detergent,” he repeated, sending her a smile of amazement. “You know what I’ve learned since Sam’s arrival? Soap and detergent are two different things. My neighbor Gloria told me not to use detergent when I washed baby clothes. She raised three kids and they all survived to adulthood, so I figure she knows more about this stuff than I do.”

  Everyone knew more about that stuff than Jamie did, Allison thought, though she kept her mouth shut.

  “My suspicion is, women get obsessed with these nuances so they’ll feel like experts. Soap and detergent are probably the same thing, but if men figured it out, women couldn’t act as if they were wiser than men.”

  “Women are wiser than men in everything that counts,” Allison declared. “Let me do the dress.”

  He pressed against the wall, leaving her a few inches of wiggling room to reach the washing machine. She felt the warmth of his body at her back, the brush of his thighs against her bottom as she wedged past him. The brief, inadvertent contact caused heat to waft through her, treacherously soft and intimate, like the too comfortable cotton of his shirt against her skin. She narrowed her attention to the array of buttons and dials adorning the top of his washing machine.

  There was nothing sexy about adjusting the settings, measuring the detergent, placing her dress into the machine and pressing the On button. Nothing seductive about the white washing machine and its fraternal-twin white dryer. Nothing the least bit amorous about the tangy scent of the detergent, the churning rush of water into the machine, the glare of the fluorescent light above her head.

  Yet she was afraid to turn around, because once she did she would be unable to avoid Jamie. He was just inches behind her, much too close. The room seemed electric with his presence, the air humming with ominous energy.

  Well, she couldn’t spend the next thirty minutes pressed against his washing machine while it cranked through the cycles. Drawing in a deep breath, she spun around. He was as close as she’d feared, gazing at her with as much potent fascination as he had at Reynaud.

  His eyes weren’t smiling, though. The glow in his eyes was serious. Wicked but deadly serious. For a moment she found herself unable to move.

  The clank of the washing machine jolted her nervous system back to normal. Jamie turned and sauntered out of the laundry room, heading straight for the microwave. “Can you grab the wine?” he asked, gesturing toward the breakfast table by the windows, where the open bottle of wine from the restaurant stood. He began to pull containers of heated food from the oven and arranged them on a tray.

  Allison picked up the bottle. It might be the only thing he asked of her tonight that she could do without getting herself into trouble. She led the way out to the screened porch, holding the door open for him as he carried the tray of steaming food to the table.

  The wine was poured, the plastic dishes distributed on the Road Runner place mats, and she and Jamie took their seats. She found herself less troubled than she ought to be under the circumstances. She was seated in a near stranger’s house, wearing his clothes and feeling longings she wasn’t accustomed to, longings that could lead to disaster when they centered on a roguish man with bedroom eyes who had accidentally fathered a child he was shamefully illequipped to handle, a child who had less than an hour ago regurgitated all over Allison in a three-star restaurant.

  Molly would never believe this.

  Grammy probably would. But then, Grammy had a unique way of looking at the world.

  Seated across the table from Jamie, exerting herself to resist the dazzle of his gaze, Allison had the distinct impression that her own way of looking at the world was about to undergo a few alterations.

  HE HAD NEVER realized that a woman in old, baggy workout clothes could look sexier than a woman in a hot little minidress. Something about the vision of Allison in his clothing made Jamie imagine Allison in his bed, in his shower, in his arms—and definitely not in his old, baggy workout clothes.

  He dug into his food, rummaging through his memory for a safe topic of conversation. If he didn’t start talking soon, he was going to vault over the table and kiss her silly. And he’d already botched enough of this evening to be extremely cautious about putting any fast moves on her. Making a major play for her while she was stuck in his house while his daughter’s barf was being laundered out of her dress didn’t seem like the right thing to do.

  Not that he’d ever been all that concerned about doing the right thing, but he knew that if he pushed, Allison would push right back. She struck him as the sort of woman who knew how to protect herself from any man who dared not to do the right thing.

  “So, what do you think of those Red Sox?” he asked.

  Allison laughed. “I think baseball is boring.”

  Well, that sure lowered the flame under his libido. Any woman who considered baseball boring wasn’t worth risking a bloody nose over. Even if she did have all that phenomenal hair spilling around her face and down her back, as thick and enticing as Lady Godiva’s, and even if her hands were milky white and slender, and even if her eyes were just a bit too wide, too pure, too tempting a mixture of innocence and wariness…

  Hey, if the lady couldn’t appreciate baseball, what did he want with her?

  Besides that, of course.

  “Tell me about your column,” she said. “I’ve read it—it’s really funny. How did you get started?”

  All right. He’d concede first place in the conversational gambit contest to her. Being able to make charming chitchat was one of those gender specific traits, like knowing the difference between soap and detergent. It came naturally to women.

  But she’d given him a good opening, and he stepped through it willingly. “When I graduated from college,” he said, “I took a job in the business department of the Arlington Gazette because they’d come to my college to recruit and I must have failed to unimpress them the way I’d unimpressed every other recruiter who came to campus. My job was in subscriptions. I was supposed to call people up and badger them. It’s the sort of job you get when you’re completely unprepared for any other job. I got hung up on a lot.”

  “That must have been rewarding,” she said with a smile.

  “Anyway, I did some writing on the side. The newspaper had a central computer system, and once when I thought I was deleting some inane jottings, I accidentally sent them into the great virtual stew, and they materialized on an editor’s monitor. Next thing I knew, I was called in to some muck-a-muck’s office. I figured they were going to fire me for writing comic anecdotes on the job, but they told me to give them fifteen columns—they wanted to see if I had more than one week’s worth of stuff in me. Apparently I do. I can make up a thousand words on any subject.”

  “You’re fortunate,” she said. “Not that you can write on any subject, but that you stumbled into such a nice career.”

  “It isn’t nice,” he corrected her. “Newspaper work is dirty and corrupting. Humor writing devours the soul. Making people laugh is a foul way to make a living.”

  She laughed, and there was nothing foul about it. Her laughter was light and airy, like a breeze dancing through clover. Only breezes and clover didn’t turn him on, and Allison’s laughter did. “Tell me about you,” he requested, wondering if she could hear the tightness in his throat, a reflection of the tightness in his groin. “How did you become a nurse?”

  “My mother was a nurse, and my grandmother.”

  “Family trade, huh.”

  “That alone wouldn’t have been enough,” she went on. “I’m a nurse because I love the work. People…” She paused to sort her thoughts. “People don’t spend enough time and energy caring for other people. As a nurse, that’s exactly what I do. I take care of others. I like it. It’s necessary and it fulfills me. I know that makes me sound like some sort of saint, but I’m not.”

  “I’m glad to hear you
’re not a saint,” he remarked, then grinned as color flooded her cheeks.

  “What I meant was, I’m a nurse for selfish reasons—because it makes me feel good doing things for others, taking care of others.”

  “Why babies?”

  “They need more care than just about anyone else.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” he said. Through the porch’s screen and the open window of Samantha’s room, he heard a thin cry, as if the kid felt it necessary to refute him with a reminder of how high-maintenance babies could be. “I’d better go check on her,” he said, actually a bit relieved to get away from Allison until he could subdue the urge to ravish her with kisses.

  Samantha had fallen back to sleep by the time he reached her crib. On those rare occasions when she was clean and dry and quiet, she didn’t seem to demand much, and he felt adequate as a father. But when she was wet and fussy and obtrusive, he could appreciate the way Allison took care of her, never losing her temper or her poise. He wondered whether she liked taking care of men as much as babies.

  En route back to the porch, he detoured to the laundry room. The washing machine had shut off, and he transferred her dress to the dryer. He reread the instructions printed on the inside of the lid—he was better at drying clothes than washing them, and he’d had a great deal of practice using both machines over the past week, but it didn’t hurt to brush up. He doubted that shrinking Allison’s dress was the quickest way to get her into his bed.

  Back in the kitchen, he spied on her through the porch door. She was standing, gazing beyond the screened walls at the bucolic vista surrounding his yard. Usually he would be admiring that vista as well, appreciating the rose and lavender streaks left behind by the setting sun.

  Right now, however, he had a more appealing vista: the sight of a tall, slim woman with a cascade of copper-tinged curls spilling down her back. The borrowed male clothes she wore only emphasized her femininity. And her bare feet…oh, yes. Her bare feet were slim and pink and unbelievably pretty.

  She turned as he pushed open the porch door, and he saw she was holding her wineglass, which was nearly empty. He tried not to take her wine consumption as a gauge of how lucky he was going to get tonight.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked.

  He wondered for a moment whether he looked as if everything wasn’t okay, then realized she was asking about Samantha. “She was just talking in her sleep,” he reported. “Telling all her nasty little secrets. Too bad she doesn’t speak English.”

  “You were gone awhile.”

  “I put your dress in the dryer. Thirty minutes and you could be out of here if you wanted.”

  She smiled hesitantly. “Is that a hint?”

  He approached her slowly, not wanting to spook her. “I don’t do hints well. Subtlety isn’t my long suit.”

  “I noticed.”

  “So if I wanted to get rid of you, I’d say, ‘Gee, Allison, why don’t you wear your dress wet?’ Although, come to think of it, I bet if you put that dress on wet, I’d never want you to leave.” Like now. Like the way she wore his shirt and shorts, her eyes so wide and luminous as she gazed at him, her cheeks still flushed with telltale pink. He never wanted her to leave.

  He saw a tinge of panic in those beautiful, expressive eyes, but she bravely lifted her glass to her lips and took another sip. As he moved a step closer, she took another sip and discovered that her glass was empty. She glanced down at the goblet, scowling as if it had betrayed her.

  “I have more wine,” he offered.

  “No, thanks.”

  Before she could scoot past him to place the glass on the table, he took it from her and set it down on the nearest end table. He could reach her easily now; she was less than an arm’s length from him.

  “Jamie…?” Her voice twisted up into a question.

  “You are the sexiest nurse I have ever known,” he said, resting his hands on her shoulders.

  To her credit, she didn’t flinch. “How many nurses have you known?”

  “Billions. Maybe trillions.”

  “Oh, my. Trillions,” she said, her speech accelerating, her voice rising again. It was the only sign of how nervous he was making her. He wished she would relax, because he had a pretty good idea that she wanted exactly what he wanted. She just didn’t seem sure how to accept that wanting, whether to rush headlong into it or flee.

  All right, then. He would do the rushing. If she fled, she fled, but he hoped to heaven she wouldn’t.

  His hands tightened slightly on her shoulders, and he drew her toward him. “You’re not going to make a pass at me, are you?” she asked, her eyes meeting his, searching his face.

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, proving exactly how unsubtle he could be, “I am.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  KISSING ANY MAN would have been a novelty for Allison after such a long stretch of celibacy. But kissing Jamie was unlike anything she’d ever experienced before. His hands were both rough and tender, gentle enough to cradle a baby but awkward in their gentleness. His eyes were blindingly bright, a dazzle of silver and emerald barely dimmed by his lowered lids. And his lips…oh, his lips.

  His kiss was strong the way a wind could be strong. You couldn’t see it, but you could feel the strength of it, be moved by it, be caught up or knocked down or torn apart by it. You could stand your ground, resisting its fierce pull, or you could yield to the tempest and let it carry you away.

  She yielded, letting the sensation storm inside her, deep and swirling, creating tiny whirlwinds and eddies that spun her emotions until she was reeling, her balance undermined. She leaned back and found Jamie’s arms wrapped around her, holding her up, protecting her from the very force he had unleashed within her.

  He had such strong arms.

  His entire body seemed strong. Not uncomfortably tall, not overly muscular, but solid as granite and utterly male. His shoulders were broad, his chest sleek, his waist trim. His hips were a few inches away from hers, although that narrow space didn’t make her feel at all safe. Then again, how safe could a woman be with a gale-force wind whipping at her from inside and the most heavenly mouth caressing her lips from the outside? She was clearly under siege.

  And she loved it.

  “I’ve been wanting to do this ever since the first time I saw you,” he murmured.

  “The first time you saw me, you were barging into my class ten minutes late.”

  “That’s right.” Even though he was smiling, he continued to kiss her, touching his lips to her cheek, the corner of her mouth, the tip of her nose. “If I’d had any decency—which I don’t—I would have been thinking about what a terrible thing it was to be late for class. But all I could think of was that you were beautiful, like a skinny Botticelli angel.”

  She ought to have been insulted. But she laughed instead. “I’m not skinny.”

  “Compared to Botticelli, you are. Those Renaissance angels could have used a bit of liposuction and a three-month membership at the local gym.”

  “You really think I’m skinny?”

  “I think you’re perfect.” He freed his hand from the heavy fall of her hair and trailed his fingers down her back until he reached the hem of the T-shirt, which he lifted to stroke the skin at her waist. The light friction of the contact dazzled her.

  Slowly, seductively, he moved his hand higher, tracing each ridge and indentation along her spine, the hollows on either side of it, the curve beneath her shoulder blades, the span of her bra strap. His hands were broad and hard, and his caresses seemed to burn right through her flesh.

  She was going to have to take a breath soon. If she concentrated, she might recall how that particular life skill was performed. But before her memory could clarify itself, his mouth was covering hers again, coaxing her lips apart, her teeth. His tongue filled her mouth with a hungry surge, and she decided remembering how to breathe wasn’t really all that important, after all.

  Anyone who could create such torrid sensati
ons with his kisses ought to be avoided. Jamie was dangerous. But she couldn’t draw away from him. The deep thrusts of his tongue, the erotic play of his fingers against her skin, the light yet insistent pressure of his hips against hers, sucked her into the eye of the storm, luring her into that magnificent center where nothing but Jamie existed. No logic, no self-preservation, no accidental pregnancies. Just Jamie McCoy.

  Wait a minute. That last item did exist, and Allison would be wise to remember it. He’d gone on a Caribbean vacation and met a woman, and if he’d used precautions, he’d used them carelessly. And now there was a baby.

  That was the kind of man Jamie was.

  It hurt to break from him, but Allison found the strength to lean away. Her respiratory instincts took hold as she pulled deep lungfuls of air into her body. Her mind resumed functioning and she regained her bearings. She was standing barefoot on a screened porch in Jamie’s house, wearing Jamie’s clothes, feeling Jamie’s arms tight around her and seeing his eyes spill their yearning silver light down into her face.

  “We can’t do this,” she murmured.

  “We can’t?”

  She shook her head and tried to swallow her regret. If she made the slightest move to slip out of his embrace, she was sure he would let go of her. The problem was, she didn’t want him to let go. She wanted to hurl herself back into the hurricane, to forget everything she was supposed to remember and let him have his way with her.

  As if it sensed her ambivalence, the dryer announced the end of its cycle with a loud buzz. “My dress is done,” she said.

  Jamie didn’t move. He obviously didn’t care that her dress was done. He brushed a light kiss on her forehead, then leaned back and peered into her face. “Okay. Tell me why we can’t do this. Have I overwhelmed you with my charm?” he guessed, his grin indicating that he knew exactly how charming he was.

  “I’m not sure overwhelmed is the word I’d use.” Even if it was damned close to the truth, she conceded silently.

  He regarded her in the dim light, his smile beckoning. “Maybe it’s because you don’t believe in kissing a guy on the first date—except that it’s too late to throw that one at me. We’ve already kissed.”