Verdict: Daddy

“Sure it is. How can you hand a sweet little angel like Annie over to a cold impersonal system? It’ll break her heart.”

“Foster parents aren’t monsters.” Marissa’s frustration with him was evident in her firm statement and the jut of her very pretty chin.

“Some are,” Blake said quietly, struggling with memories he’d promised himself he’d forget.

Marissa sat silent for a moment, as if digesting what he’d said. When she spoke again, her voice had lost its edge, her posture relaxed. “But you really have no choice. Everyone will know you have her. Unless you leave town with the baby.”

“I can’t leave. I have a business to run.” Blake reminded himself of the appointment he had with the developer the next morning, the appointment he’d canceled today because of Annie.

“Dolphin Bay’s a small town,” Marissa continued. “Eventually someone’s going to turn you in. Vienna Pitts has already tried.”

In the back seat, Bo emitted a low growl at the mention of his neighbor’s name.

“I’ll have to turn you in myself,” Marissa continued, “if you don’t. Not reporting an abandoned child is a criminal offense.”

He glanced at her sharply before returning his gaze to the road. “You’re sure of that?”

“I can’t name the exact statute, but I’ll bet my law degree that’s the case.”

Blake tightened his grip on the steering wheel and didn’t attempt to hide his disgust. “All I want is to keep a sweet little kid safe, and that makes me jail bait? What a country.”

Marissa placed her hand on his arm, and his flesh tingled beneath the smooth warmth of her skin. “Look at it this way. What if Annie had been left on old man Sellars’s front porch?”

“The guy who abused his dog?” Blake shuddered at the memory of the sad, emaciated little pooch.

“Imagine how he’d treat an infant.”

“I don’t even want to go there,” Blake admitted.

“That’s why the laws are on the books, to protect children from falling into the wrong hands.”

“But I’m not like Sellars. I just want to help her.”

“I know that.” Her immediate agreement stroked his ego. “But the law doesn’t, the courts don’t. Not without a proper investigation. And if you’re serious about helping Annie find the right parents, the last thing you need is to get on the wrong side of the system. They’re the ones you’ll have to work with to make sure Annie’s placed in a good home.”

Blake kept his eyes on the traffic while his mind went into overdrive. Motivated by memories of his own unhappiness as a child, he’d hoped he could spare the little bundle deposited on his doorstep the same fate. Too confident that he could simply follow his heart and do what was right, he’d counted on a smart lawyer to manipulate the system in her favor. Behind him, Annie stirred and cooed in her carrier, obviously awake but also content. How could he place her in the same circumstances that had caused him so much grief?

“Any suggestions?” he asked Marissa. “Not that I’m agreeing to turn her in,” he added quickly.

“I know what caring for Annie means to you,” she said softly.

Her empathy wasn’t empty words. More than anyone else in the entire world, Marissa knew what he’d been through, knew how often, just as soon as he’d begun to put down roots, develop attachments to his foster family and feel as if he belonged, something had occurred that necessitated his removal to another foster home.

In his first placement, it had been his foster mother’s discovery that she was pregnant with twins. Suddenly there was no room for a rambunctious five-year-old who wasn’t their own. In his second home with an older couple, Mr. Flint had had a heart attack, and his wife, burdened with his care, couldn’t keep up with eight-year-old Blake. And then there were the Barbers, the place in his memory where he refused to go. Marissa, however, had seen his welts and bruises. Covering up the evidence of abuse in summer shorts and T-shirts had been all but impossible.

Beside him, Marissa sat silently for a long time, seemingly lost in thought as they exited the Skyway and headed through St. Petersburg on the interstate.

“Do you trust me?” Her unexpected question broke the stillness.

Blake flashed her an appreciative look. “That’s why I came to you in the first place.”

“Then let me think about this and make a few calls when we get back to your house.”

“You won’t turn me in?” Blake wondered for an instant if his trust had been misplaced.

“Not until we’ve exhausted every option,” she said. “But I’d be lying if I promised not to. I have a responsibility to the law. And to Annie.”

Her last statement hurt. “I feel a responsibility to the kid, too.”

MARISSA SAT in the authentic Stickley arts-and-craft-style chair, with its deep, comfy cushions, and cradled Annie in her arms. Bo curled at her feet. The friendly animal had taken a liking to the child and dogged the steps of whoever held her. Opaque sage-green draperies, drawn across the windows at Marissa’s back, shielded the room from the prying eyes of Vienna Pitts, ever vigilant across the street.

The child’s weight felt comforting against Marissa’s heart and filled her with a soothing contentment. Annie sucked the last of the formula from the bottle provided by Agnes, and her tiny eyelids fluttered. Even though the baby was dropping into sleep, Marissa was reluctant to place her in the crib Blake had moved from Agnes’s house into his living room. She liked too much the feeling of completeness that holding Annie provided.

Blake came in from the kitchen with an earthenware mug of steaming coffee and set it on a table by her elbow. With his own mug he settled into the chair opposite hers in front of the hearth. Instead of flaming logs, inappropriate in the Florida heat, the fireplace held a massive terra-cotta pot of verdant, healthy ferns, a testament to Blake’s skill with plants. His simple but impeccable taste was evident in every corner of the room, from its pale camel-colored walls to the rich-honey finish of the heart-of-pine floors, and the Hal Stowers beachscapes on the walls. Blake’s business must be booming for him to afford such art. She smiled inwardly, glad that the homeless friend of her childhood finally had such a special place of his own.

“Did you finish your calls?” he asked.

She nodded. While he’d moved baby equipment from Agnes’s and fixed a supper of Spanish bean soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, she’d called her mother to say she wouldn’t be home until later. Then she’d tracked down Debbie Arnold at home. Debbie, whom she’d known in law school, had opened a family law practice in Dolphin Bay after graduation.

Marissa stiffened at the thought of what she had to tell Blake, felt Annie jerk in response and forced herself to take a deep breath to relax. “You’re not going to like what I have to say.”

Bo raised his chin from his paws, cocked his ears and turned his head, homing in on the distress in her voice.

His gray eyes bleak, Blake peered at her over the rim of his coffee mug.

To delay delivering bad news, she rose, carried Annie to the crib and tucked her in. Bo followed, turned around three times, then lay beneath the crib. Marissa would have liked to hold the child longer, to appreciate her baby scent and relish the weight of the infant in her arms, but she recognized the folly of growing attached to a baby she might never see again.

Resisting the urge to comfort Blake with a hug, she returned to her chair. No other man she knew would have placed himself in Blake’s position, creating so much trouble for himself for an unknown baby. How had such deep kindness developed in someone who’d received so little of it as a child?

And Blake had always been kind, she reminded herself. She remembered the time in middle school when he’d wiped away her tears after the class bully had teased her for being a skinny runt. Blake had insisted that good things came in small packages, then made her laugh by telling silly jokes. She wished now she could tell him what he wanted to hear.

Instead, squaring her shoulders, she came out with the harsh truth. “There’s no getting around it. You have to give Annie to the authorities. If you don’t, you could face charges.”

“What kind of charges?”

“Serious ones. Interference with custody is a felony offense.”

Obviously undeterred by the dire possibilities, he set his handsome mouth in an unyielding line. “I can’t accept turning her in. There has to be another way.”

She hesitated, not wanting to fan false hopes, but he had to know the facts. “There is a slight possibility you could get her back.”

Hope suffused his face with an appealing light, like a kid who’d just been granted a special wish. How could a man look so mature and yet so boyish at the same time? Women all over Dolphin Bay had to be throwing themselves at his feet, even though he’d insisted earlier in her office that he had no love life.

“How soon could I get her back?” he asked. “Immediately?”

“No.”

“How soon?”