The Baby Wore a Badge

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 cureall,” 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.