For one lightning-brief instant, Kathy felt a stab of pity for the big, gruff marine. Obviously he was completely lost when it came to babies. Her gaze swept over him, and she had to admit that it was the first time she’d seen him when his uniform wasn’t in tiptop, picture-perfect condition.
A line of baby drool meandered down the front of his shirt, and his left forearm, where the baby’s wet bottom had been perched, was damp from wrist to elbow. Amazingly enough he hadn’t seemed to notice. His tie was crooked, and even the row of medals on his pocket looked slightly askew. And his crystal-blue eyes shone with a quiet desperation that reached her at an elemental level. All in all he was the picture of a man at the end of a very short rope.
All right, so she’d been avoiding him for weeks. So she hadn’t wanted to get close to him in any way. It didn’t matter now that he was a love-’em-and-leave-’em type, did it? This wasn’t about relationships. This was about a baby and an apparently out-of-ideas man.
Should be safe enough.
“Do you have extra diapers?” she asked.
He snorted a laugh. “Does China have tea?”
Kathy followed him out of her apartment, across the hall and into his place. She stopped short on the threshold, staring in stunned amazement at mountains of stuff. Well, this explained all of his trips up and down the hall all day.
She gave a look to the still-sniffling, but generally quieter, baby in her arms. Jiggling her gently, she smoothed one hand up and down the little girl’s back and whispered, “Boy, you’ve really turned him inside out, haven’t you?”
Brian marched through the mess directly to a pile of diapers. He tore open a package and turned around, holding one diaper in an outstretched hand like a peace offering. The hopeful expression on his face was hard to miss.
“You want me to change her?”
Relief shot across his features. “Would it help if I begged?”
Her lips twitched, but she swallowed the smile before it could grow. Snatching the diaper from him, she walked to his couch, laid the baby down and got to business.
He watched every move she made, and while she worked, she heard him muttering under his breath, though she was only able to understand about every other word.
“Diapers…wet…didn’t think…poor kid…hopeless…”
With the wetness off her bottom, the baby seemed much more agreeable, and Kathy lifted her onto her lap, smoothing her little skirt down over chubby knees. A twist of frustrated maternal instincts had her fingers linger on the lacy edge of the girl’s hem before she turned to look at the man standing opposite her.
“Thanks,” he said tightly, and shoved both hands into his pockets.
“You’re welcome.”
He nodded. “I suppose you want to hear that long story now….”
“Oh, yeah,” she admitted. She was definitely wondering why a confirmed bachelor, a sergeant in the marine corps, was suddenly buying out baby furniture stores. Where had the little cutie come from?
He nodded again and pulled one hand from his pocket to scrape along the side of his head one more time.
If he kept that up, he’d rub away the little hair the marines let him have.
“Y’know what?” she asked suddenly. “Why don’t we take care of the baby first. Get her settled…. She is staying here, right?”
“Yeah,” he said tightly.
“Okay, then. When she’s down for the night, you can tell your long story.”
He looked relieved.
Bouncing the baby slightly, she asked, “Have you fed her?”
“No.”
Wet diaper, no food, no wonder the poor little thing had been screaming. Shaking her head, Kathy stood up, perched the baby on her hip and headed for the kitchen, with Brian only a step or two behind her.
“Well, there’s no shortage of food,” she murmured.
“I got a little of everything,” he said, and waved one hand at the dozens of jars scattered across the countertop.
“So I see. How about bottles? Have any of those?”
“Yeah,” he said, squeezing past her in the too-tight space, headed for yet another brown bag. As his hips brushed against her backside, Kathy gulped in a breath of air and deliberately tried to ignore the swift, undeniable rush of heat that swamped her. Busy here, she told herself. Baby first, hormones later.
Correction…hormones never.
Brian pulled a bottle from the bag with the flourish of a man who’d stumbled across a gold nugget.
“Great,” she told him. “Fill it with milk and warm it a little in the microwave.”
“Milk,” he repeated, then smacked his own forehead with the flat of his hand. “I didn’t buy milk.”
“You’re kidding? There’s something you forgot to buy?”
He leveled an unamused smile at her, and she shook her head.
“I have some in my fridge,” she told him.
“Saved.” He eased past her again, and Kathy gritted her teeth against the sensation of him rubbing against her.
While he was gone, she sat the baby on the counter, rummaged around in drawers for a spoon, then standing in front of the baby to keep her from falling off, opened a jar of applesauce.
The little girl’s mouth opened eagerly for that first bite, and Kathy laughed and kept the food coming. In no time at all the applesauce was gone and the baby’s eyes were beginning to droop.
Brian finally came back with a warmed bottle of milk, and Kathy took it and the baby into his bedroom. Laying the girl in the middle of the bed and propping pillows alongside the open edge, she gave her the bottle and watched as the milk quickly began disappearing.
Before the bottle was half-empty, the baby was sound asleep, one hand lying across her still-tear-stained cheek.
Kathy turned her gaze from the child to the room she’d been sure she would never see. Spartan was the first word that came to mind.
A battered chest of drawers, a straight-backed chair with camouflage uniform pants draped across the seat. A pair of boots lay discarded in one corner of the room, and a stack of paperback books towered unsteadily beside the bed. Directly opposite the bed were mirrored-glass, sliding closet doors.
He caught her reflected gaze with his, and even in the dim light through the open door to the living room, she saw trouble in their depths.
With another quick look at the baby, she led the way back to the living room, getting as far away from that king-size bed as she could get.
He moved to close the bedroom door, and Kathy stopped him. “No, leave it open so we can hear her.”
“I don’t want to wake her up.”
“As long as we don’t yell, we won’t. She’s pretty tired.”
“Big day,” he commented dryly.
“For both of you, I’m guessing,” Kathy said, and took a seat on the couch.
He dropped into the closest armchair, propped his elbows on his knees and cradled his head in his hands. “You have no idea,” he said, before lifting his gaze to meet hers.
Unbelievable. And humbling, he thought. Kathy had come into his apartment, calmed the baby and brought him peace again…all in less than fifteen minutes. Hell, at the moment she made a better marine than he did.
So the first night of his new life was taken care of. Now all he had to do was figure out the next thirty years or so.
“Try me,” Kathy said, reminding him that she was still waiting to hear his “long story.”
Sighing, he leaned back in the chair and looked at her. For weeks now he’d been trying to get her into his apartment. Trying to get her alone. Well, here they were. Alone in his apartment…with a sleeping baby twenty feet away. What was that old saying about being careful what you wish for?
“She’s my daughter,” he blurted out, figuring he might as well get used to saying the words aloud.
“Your daughter?” Her voice lifted on that last word into an eerie realm of disbelief.
He couldn’t blame her.
“
You sound as surprised as I was a few hours ago when I first heard the news.” Although he doubted very much that her heart was racing, her stomach spinning and her brain slipping into something that was just short of a coma.
“You’re telling me you didn’t know you had a child?”
“That’s about it,” he said tightly, rubbing one hand across aching eyes. Embarrassing to admit to that little tidbit, he thought. Then, while he was on a roll, he went on and told her the rest of it. About Maegan’s mother, their brief affair and her tragic car accident only a week or so before. “In her will she left instructions that Maegan was to be delivered to her father—me.”
“What about her family?”
“She didn’t have any.”
“And that’s the first you heard of Maegan?”
Her voice sounded strained, like she was squeezing words past her throat. Well, hell. What did she have to be so annoyed about?
“Yeah. Mariah never said a word to me about a baby.”
“So this is all her fault?” Kathy asked.
Brian looked at her warily.
“Did you give her a chance to tell you?” she asked.
“A chance?” Hell, they’d spent nearly every night of six weeks together. You’d think she could have found a spare minute or two to impart that knowledge without him taking her aside and saying, Now’s a good time to tell me if you’re pregnant or not.
“That poor woman,” Kathy continued without waiting for an answer and pushed off the couch to pace. “Having a baby alone…and then dying when the child is so young she won’t even remember her mother.”
He’d thought of that, too, and it broke his heart a little for both Maegan and Mariah. They’d been cheated out of time together.
But he couldn’t very well change that, could he? Of course it was sad. And tragic. If Mariah hadn’t died, they’d all have been better off.
Kathy shook her head as she walked briskly from one side of the living room to the other and back again. Brian recognized anger when he saw it, but for the life of him he couldn’t figure out what he’d done to deserve it.
“What are you so hot about?”
“This is just so…male,” she said.
“What?” Man, it was never a good thing when a woman started generalizing about the male gender.
“You guys,” she said. “All of you. You roll in and out of relationships. You never stick around. You make promises you don’t keep, and inevitably it’s the women and children who get hurt.”
Pride stung and personal integrity attacked, Brian had to fight back.
“Hold on a minute, lady,” he said, and shoved himself up from the chair. Just a foot or two away from her, he looked into her chocolate-brown eyes and continued, “You can’t lay this all off on me. What about Mariah? She could have told me about the baby. For whatever reasons, she chose not to.”
“What would you have done if she had told you?”
That brought him up short. After a moment’s pause he lifted both hands and let them drop again. “Honestly, I don’t know. And now I’ll never know. Because she didn’t give me that choice.”
Her full lips tightened just a bit, but she nodded as if agreeing with him.
“As for breaking promises,” Brian went on, feeling a rush of outrage fill him as he stared at the woman who looked offended enough for all womankind, “I’ve never made a promise I didn’t keep. I don’t know what kind of man you’re used to dealing with, but my word means something to me. I don’t give it lightly.”
Kathy almost believed him. His blue eyes flashed. The stubborn tilt of his square jaw and the tense set of his broad shoulders all went to convince her that maybe she was wrong about this particular man. Maybe.
But what else was she supposed to think? He’d been flirting with her like crazy for weeks and hadn’t exactly seemed the home-and-hearth kind of guy.
Still, now he was the father of a baby girl, and by the looks of things he was in way over his head.
“Okay, I’m sorry,” she said, more to change the subject than for any real need to apologize.
He nodded.
“Have you thought about what you’re going to do with her now that you have her?”
“Hell,” he said gruffly, turning from her to walk to the window that overlooked the neighborhood behind them. “I haven’t had a chance to think about anything.”
“You can’t take her to the base with you.”
She thought she saw him shudder, but she could have been wrong.
“There’s a day care center on base,” he said, as if considering it for the first time.
Kathy’s stomach jumped.
“But she’s in a strange place already. Does she really need more strangers to deal with?” And why was she arguing against a perfectly good solution to the sergeant’s problem?
“I suppose not,” he agreed stiffly, and rubbed one hand across the back of his neck. “But I don’t know what else to do. In case you hadn’t noticed,” he added with a wave of his hand at the room around them, “I’m a little out of my depth.”
“I could watch her for you while you’re at work. At least temporarily, I mean, until things calm down around here and you decide what you want to do.” The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. She blinked and could almost see those words hanging in a bubble in front of her face, as though she were a character in a comic strip. Quick, she thought. Somebody hand her an eraser.
Too late.
Brian Haley turned toward her and the streetlamp from outside haloed his head and shoulders in a pale, white light. “Are you serious?”
Was she? Kathy thought about it for a second or two. She worked at home. Made her own hours. She could do it. And the memory of little Maegan cuddled against her warmed her right down to her toes. She could pour all of her stifled maternal urges into that one small bundle of humanity who probably needed it just as badly as Kathy did.
The only problem would be in dealing with Brian Haley on a daily basis. Even when she’d been avoiding him, he’d had a serious effect on her. Spending too much time with him could get…difficult. But she was a big girl, not some teenager driven by bouts of lust and fantasies. She could handle it.
“Yeah,” she said quietly. “I think I am.”
“Why?” he asked just as quietly.
Couldn’t blame him for being curious. She’d stonewalled his advances for weeks, and now she was volunteering to put herself in harm’s way every day.
“Does it matter?”
He studied her for a long moment, then released a heavy sigh. “At this stage of the game,” he mused, “I guess not.” A half smile curved his mouth as he took a step toward her.
She shook her head and backed up a step. Better to get some things settled right off the top. “Don’t misunderstand, Sergeant. I’m going to take care of the baby. Not you.”
He raised one light-brown eyebrow, and Kathy’s toes curled. Oh, brother, what was she letting herself in for?
“Strictly business?” he asked.
She cleared her throat noisily. “Business.”
“It’s a deal, then,” Brian said and held out one hand.
She looked at it as if it was a snake, and had to work up her nerve before she slid her hand into his. But even braced for the contact with his skin, as his fingers curled around hers, she felt a white-hot burst of light shoot straight from her fingertips along her arm to dazzle her heart.
“Deal,” she repeated, forcing her voice to work despite the knot lodged in her throat. Then she pulled her hand free, but couldn’t stop the tingling sensation burning just beneath her flesh.
She could feel it in her bones.
She was in deep trouble.
Six
The first week of Brian’s new life made boot camp seem like a vacation in Tahiti.
It wasn’t hard enough, trying to get a little sleep while being kept awake listening to every snort and sound the baby made for fear she’d stop breathing in
the night. Oh, no, he had to put up with Jack Harris’s constant stream of questions and survive a mountain of unsolicited advice on parenting from a man who only two years ago was as blissfully ignorant on the subject as Brian himself.
He was being sucked into a world he’d never wanted to enter. He was learning things he had no interest in knowing and doing things he would have laughed at if someone had prophesied it a month ago.
Add to all that the fact that every time he turned around, Kathy was taking him shopping for more baby stuff and you had one unhappy marine.
Who knew kids needed so much junk? How had any child ever been raised properly without an electric dirty-diaper container or a baby monitor or a deluxe stroller with optional extra seat, he wondered? And who in the heck had come up with the item he’d just seen? Flushable potty targets! Thank God he had a girl, not a boy—he wouldn’t have to teach her to aim.
Pitiful, what his life had come to.
Brian groaned quietly and let his gaze scan across the latest baby department he’d found himself in. Two aisles over, Kathy had Maegan perched on one hip as she flipped through rows of dresses, pj’s, sweaters, shirts and shorts. His eyes glazed over. What difference did it make how many clothes a baby had? It’s not as though she was going to wear them out playing ball or something. Although, he reminded himself with a sigh, she did manage to dirty up every shirt he owned.
Who would have thought such a pretty lady could contain so many disgusting fluids?
“Excuse me,” a woman’s voice said from close by, and Brian turned to look at the middle-aged salesclerk hovering at his elbow.
“Yes, ma’am?”
She smiled and shifted her gaze toward Kathy. “I believe your wife’s trying to get your attention.”
The word wife had him stiffening up instantly. But he looked at Kathy and nodded as she waved him over. He walked toward her, his gaze scanning her thoroughly from head to toe. Oh, there were lots of words he could use to describe Kathy Tate. But by his definition wife wasn’t one of them.
The Daddy Salute Page 5
