The Baby Wore a Badge

by Marie Ferrarella

  “Calista Clifton isn’t a teenager,” Erin informed him of the young woman she was thinking of. “And she doesn’t smell like cats. She’s bright, cheerful and comes from a huge family, so she’s no stranger to baby spit-up or diapers. You’ll like her,” Erin promised, for now not bothering to cite the young woman’s other credits or mention her incredible work ethic. There was no response on the other end of the line. “Hello? Hello? Jake, are you there?”

  His sister’s voice roused him.

  Jake realized that he was no longer looking at anything. Jerking, his eyes flew open.

  It was at that moment that he realized that the water in the saucepan had almost boiled completely away and that he’d just dropped the phone receiver he’d been holding on the counter. He’d literally been asleep on his feet and the receiver had slipped out of his fingers.

  Snatching it up, he pressed the receiver against his ear.

  He didn’t bother with an explanation, or apologizing. It would only give Erin more of an upper hand than he was already giving to her.

  “Yeah, I’m still here,” he answered.

  Pressing his ear against the receiver, he tried to hold it in place using his head, neck and shoulder as he twisted the dial to the off position and moved the saucepan over to another burner.

  Jake stifled a yelp as the metal handle he’d grabbed burned the center of his palm. The pain shot up to the roots of his hair.

  Sucking in a steadying breath he pushed beyond the pain and said, “Okay, you talked me into it. I’ll take a leave of absence and come up. You can get this Callous person—”

  “Calista,” Erin corrected.

  “Yeah, her,” he agreed. And then the policeman inside him came out as he added, “But I want to interview her before I let her watch Marlie.”

  He heard his sister laugh. The warm sound was comforting. “I wouldn’t have it any other way, big brother.”

  She didn’t really need the money.

  Between her summer internship for her cousin Bo Clifton, who just happened to be the mayor of Thunder Canyon, and her part-time job clerking at the Tattered Saddle, the local antique store, her finances, though not exactly overflowing, were in relatively decent shape. And what with the two jobs, free time wasn’t exactly hanging heavily on Calista Clifton’s hands.

  But the fact of the matter was she really liked children, especially babies. And she also liked the feeling she got when she helped people. So it was hard for her to say no to the situation, as Erin Traub explained it to her, involving Erin’s older brother because it actually encompassed both a baby and helping.

  Even so, the thing that had ultimately cinched it for her was when Erin’s brother, Jake Castro, walked into the room. She’d agreed to meet him and was sitting in Erin’s spacious, sun-drenched living room when Jake came in holding his seven-month-old daughter in his arms.

  If she was being honest, Calista would have had to admit that she’d noticed the baby belatedly. But that was only because Jake Castro was quite possibly the most incredibly handsome man who had ever crossed her path.

  He was certainly handsome enough to cause her stomach muscles to tighten more than a little and for her palms to grow just the slightest bit damp. The latter hadn’t happened to her since she was sixteen years old and had that wild crush on the captain of the football team—a guy who had turned out to be as empty and soulless as he was handsome.

  Jake didn’t look as if he was guilty of being empty or soulless. Not from the way he held that baby.

  “It wouldn’t be very often,” Jake was saying to her after Erin had made the introductions and stated what they hoped her role would be in this situation, then slipped away so they could get acquainted. “Maybe once or twice a week at most, but—”

  There was no need for him to try to convince her, Calista thought. He’d had her the second he’d walked into the room. Before he’d ever opened his mouth and she’d heard that baritone voice.

  “Yes,” Calista said with enthusiasm as she interrupted him.

  Jake stopped, shifting his daughter to his other side. It was uncanny how Marlie always picked the wrong time to fuss. He looked at the young woman his sister had selected. Because he hadn’t finished giving her the background information, he wasn’t sure just what she was saying yes to.

  “What?”

  “Yes,” Calista repeated with the same smiling, sunny enthusiasm.

  “Yes?” He hadn’t really even gotten into his sales pitch yet, something that made him feel decidedly awkward because he wasn’t accustomed to asking for anything, even something he had every intention of paying for. But this eleven-pound bundle in his arms had all the makings of being his own personal Waterloo.

  Calista smiled. “Yes, I can be available for babysitting once or twice a week,” she told him. “Or more often if the need arises.” Her schedule was filled to overflowing, but she could find a way to make it work. She was utterly determined.

  Having taken the job, Calista bit her lower lip, hesitating for a moment, wondering if she should say anything. The next moment she decided that if it was her in Jake’s present position, she would appreciate being told.

  She nodded at Jake’s daughter. “Um, the baby— Marlie, is it?”

  “That’s right. Marlie,” he confirmed. He wasn’t all that crazy about the name. Had it been up to him, he would have named her something a little less fancy, but Maggie hadn’t asked for his input in that. Maggie had been very specific about what she’d wanted—and didn’t want—from him.

  “Marlie just spat up on your shoulder,” Calista told him.

  “What?” He glanced down, embarrassed rather than annoyed.

  “Here, let me take her,” Calista offered. The next moment, she was very competently taking the baby into her own arms, drawing the infant away from the scene of the crime.

  Even with his limited view, he could see that his daughter had spat up about a fourth of her last meal on the front—and shoulder—of his shirt. That left him with exactly one shirt that hadn’t been christened with recycled baby food and/or formula.

  He bit off the oath that automatically rose to his lips. He was still in training when it came down to that. But he was getting there.

  Chapter Two

  Calista didn’t need to be a mind reader to figure out what the man standing in front of her with the newly stained shirt was thinking. When Erin called to ask about her availability to babysit occasionally in the evening, Jake’s sister had given her a very brief summary of his present situation, including how he’d come to this point.

  Although Erin hadn’t gone into any specific detail, she assumed that Jake and Marlie’s mother had been lovers, but that nothing formal had transpired, other than his name appearing on the birth certificate, which gave him legal guardianship to the infant.

  However, all that was not any real business of hers. What she felt was her business was that Jake was obviously going to need all the help he could get to facilitate his getting accustomed to this brave new world of midnight feedings, formula runs and ever-increasing pile of stained shirts.

  For starters, she thought, she could tell him how to deal with the last.

  “If you give me your shirt, I can show you how to treat it,” she said.

  He looked at her, not quite sure what she was offering to do. “Treat it to what?”

  Calista pressed her lips together, struggling not to laugh. “Not to something, for something. I can help you get rid of that stain,” she explained. “Especially if I can get to it before it has a chance to really set in. Timing’s important when it comes to things like that.”

  She could tell by his expression that he felt as if he was navigating in strange, uncharted waters. Most men, like her brothers, weren’t into everyday, mundane complications. Clean clothes were a given, not something you needed to strive for.

  And then she saw Jake shrug and then begin to unbutton his shirt.

  She stared at him, stunned as she watched the shirt
parting down the center of his chest. Her mouth turned to cotton. “What are you doing?”

  His eyes narrowed in slight confusion. “I’m doing what you told me. You did say you wanted the shirt sooner than later, right?”

  “Right,” Calista murmured, her voice barely audible above a hushed whisper. Her soft brown eyes widened in wonder. She found it hard to tear them away from Jake’s unveiling.

  The man had rock-solid biceps and forearms. As for his abdomen, it looked as if it had been carefully sculptured by some divine artistic hand. The last time she’d seen a torso half as good, it had been in a photograph of one of the statues presently on display in a New York museum.

  Having stripped off his shirt, Jake now held it out to Calista, exchanging the stained article of clothing for his daughter. As he nestled the infant against his chest, he couldn’t help noting the somewhat dazed expression on the young woman’s face. She was staring at him with a trace of disbelief in her wide eyes. Eyes, he noted, the color of warm chocolate.

  “Something wrong?”

  Calista blinked, then lowered her eyes. Idiot, she upbraided herself.

  “No, nothing’s wrong,” she assured Jake a little too quickly. And then she added, “I’m just glad that Marlie didn’t spit up on your jeans.”

  “Oh.” Wasn’t he supposed to give her the shirt now? “I thought you said it was better to work on a stain before it sets in, whatever that means.”

  If there were some kind of ritual to follow when it came to laundry, he hadn’t a clue. He just threw everything in together and hoped for the best. Most of the time it worked. But that was before Marlie had come into his life.

  Calista realized that she was staring at him again and tore her eyes away, annoyed with herself. She was acting like some gawky juvenile, not like a twenty-two-year-old college graduate who fully intended to make her mark on the world.

  “Right, I did.” She focused her attention on the shirt in her hand and not on the man who’d been wearing it.

  Whose warmth, she realized, she could still detect in the shirt’s material. She felt her stomach tightening even more.

  “Do you know if your sister has any lemon juice? Never mind,” she negated her question in the next breath. “I’ll go ask her.”

  And with that, she quickly left the room in search of Erin—as well as a couple of private minutes to herself. She needed to decelerate the rate of her pulse. which had gone into double time and was, even now, threatening to launch into triple time.

  Calista found Erin at the front door, just about to leave to meet her husband. Jake’s sister stopped when she saw her and then looked at the shirt she was holding in her hand.

  “Boy—” Erin laughed “—I guess Jake was more desperate than I thought.”

  Calista shook her head, puzzled by the reference. “What?”

  Erin gestured toward the shirt. “Well, Jake’s obviously offering you the shirt off his back to get you to agree to take the job.”

  It took Calista almost a full beat to realize that Erin was kidding. The sight of Jake Castro’s bare torso, blended in with his low-slung jeans that hung precariously on well-toned hips had rattled her more than she was willing to admit even to herself.

  “Very funny,” she finally commented, then informed Erin, “By the way, I’m taking the job.”

  Erin nodded. “I had a hunch.” The sentence was accompanied by a wide—and relieved—grin. And then she raised her eyebrows quizzically. Calista had obviously come looking for her and she rather doubted that it had been just to inform her about her decision. She looked back at the shirt the younger woman was holding. “Can I help you with something?”

  But before Calista could say anything in response, a deep voice right behind her answered the question for her. “Calista says she can get rid of that stain for me—that’s actually my favorite shirt,” he added in case Erin wondered what all the fuss was about.

  With Jake on the scene, Calista managed to snap out of her mental reverie and found her tongue.

  “Do you have any lemon juice?” she heard herself asking Erin. “Soaking a stain in lemon juice usually helps get the stubborn ones out,” she told the other woman.

  That was news to Erin. But then, she really wasn’t all that domestic-minded. Yet.

  “Good thing to know,” Erin commented. She thought for a moment before answering. “If we have any lemon juice left, you’ll find it in the refrigerator door, next to the skim milk.”

  “I’ll go look,” Calista offered. “If you don’t have any, I can take the shirt home with me. I’ve got some lemon juice in the garage,” she recalled.

  That seemed like an odd thing to him to keep around. “You deal with a lot of spit-up during the course of the day?” Jake asked her.

  “It doesn’t just work on spit-up. It’s good for getting out all sorts of stubborn stains,” she explained as she made her way into the kitchen. “It’s not a magic cure-all,” she added, not wanting to mislead him. “But pretty nearly.”

  “Huh.” He looked at the back of Calista’s head for a split second, thinking she had pretty light brown hair, then commented, “Learn something every day.”

  Jake was right behind her and she was finding it more and more difficult to pretend that the man wasn’t practically mouth-wateringly naked.

  “That’s life,” Calista responded cheerfully. “One great big beautiful learning process.”

  My God, had she just uttered those inane words? Great. Now he probably thought she was some kind of dork, half Mary Poppins, half nerdy science geek. Or maybe even worse.

  Erin opened the front door and quickly crossed the threshold. If she didn’t leave now, there was no telling when she’d finally get the opportunity.

  “Well, I’ll leave you two to your chemistry experiment,” Erin called out. “Let me know how it goes.” She glanced one final time toward the young woman she’d brought over to meet Jake. “See you soon, Calista.”

  “Soon,” Calista echoed with a nod, then looked at Jake. “Unless you’ve changed your mind about hiring me as your sitter,” she qualified.

  She had a strong hunch that the man with the rock-hard chest had an acute aversion to women who gazed up at him with doe eyes. If he’d suddenly changed his mind about the arrangement, she didn’t want to make it hard for him to tell her.

  “Why would I change my mind?” he asked, mystified by her thinking. “You’ve definitely got the job,” he assured her, then laughed. “I don’t strip off my shirt for just anyone.”

  He was teasing the young woman, he realized. He hadn’t done something like that—or anything else that was remotely lighthearted in nature—since he’d heard the awful news about Maggie getting shot.

  He remembered his breath suddenly freezing in his lungs despite the warm weather—spring in New Orleans had a sticky dampness to it like no other place. And then, for weeks, he’d alternated between suppressed rage and numbness. He’d just assumed that things like teasing and smiling were behaviors he wouldn’t be revisiting for a very long time to come and were, consequently, tucked away deep in his past.

  Calista swallowed. Her mouth was inexplicably—not to mention incredibly—dry.

  “I see,” she replied, doing her best not to appear as affected as she was by this man.

  At bottom, she tried to tell herself, individuals were all just a bunch of skin, tissues, organs and a great deal of water, haphazardly thrown together to form an arbitrary whole.

  But, oh, the composition that had gone into making Jake Castro, she couldn’t help thinking, growing warm all over again.

  The next second, she was chastising herself for a second time. What was she, twelve? No, she was twenty-two, a grown woman, for heaven’s sake, on a clearly cut path that was to ultimately lead to some sort of a position with the local government, possibly even an elected one. All of which meant that she couldn’t afford to act like some starry-eyed juvenile just because the man standing next to her with the baby in his arms didn’
t appear to have an ounce of fat on him, even in his spare back pocket.

  “Ah, lemon juice,” she declared, spotting the little green plastic bottle with a picture of a lemon on it tucked away in the far end of the refrigerator door.

  Saved by a grocery item, Calista thought, mocking herself sarcastically.

  Bottle in hand, she looked around for somewhere she could continue this baptism-by-lemon-juice process. At first glance, nothing seemed to stand out.

  “Do you know if your sister has a large plastic bowl she isn’t using, or a sink I could take over for, say, a few hours?” she asked him hopefully.

  The question caught Jake off guard. His eyes shifted to the shirt, then back to her. “This is going to take a few hours?”

  “It might,” Calista allowed, then qualified. “It can be sooner and I’m not going to hang out here the entire time waiting,” she promised, guessing that was probably what he was afraid of. “I just need somewhere I can leave your shirt to soak without having it disturbed or in the way.”

  For the time being, until he could find his own place, Erin had insisted that he remain with her and her husband. When he and Marlie had arrived and Corey had chimed in with the same invitation—and as far as Jake could tell, his brother-in-law was actually sincere—Jake found himself agreeing. Secretly, he had to admit that he was relieved. It was always easier looking for a place if he had somewhere that served as his home base until he found something suitable for himself and the baby.

  “There’s a bathroom off the guest room that I’m using,” he volunteered. “You could leave my shirt soaking in the sink.”

  Calista grinned, nodding. “Sounds like a plan.” She gestured vaguely toward the front of the house. “Lead the way.”

  Marlie made a gurgling noise as her father turned on his heel. The next moment, Calista saw him shiver. She guessed at what had happened even before he told the baby, “At least this time there’s nothing for you to get dirty.” Marlie had spat up on his bare shoulder.