The Baby Magnet

Marie patted his arm bracingly. “Sure they will, kid. Ever hear of a work permit? If twenty dollars a week really isn’t enough to keep you in the style you’re accustomed to or you need extra cash ’cause you don’t qualify for the good student discount, why, I’ll be happy to get Grandpa to sign for one. No problem.”

“Think you’re so smart,” Jason muttered under his breath and braced himself. “Watch the kid on the bike.”

“I see him, I see him.”

“The speed limit’s twenty-five. You’re doing almost thirty. How come your hands are on ten and two? My driving instructor says they should be on nine and three so the airbag doesn’t break them if it goes off. Of course he’s only a total loser. His airbag probably goes off every day of the week and twice on Sundays.”

“Jason, I’ve been driving for eight years now. I think I can handle it.”

“Couldn’t prove it by me,” her uncle said under his breath. “There’s a car coming. Watch him.”

“I’m watching him, Jason, I’m watching.” Marie wondered how parents ever put up with getting their kids through to their licenses. Especially if they had more than one. If Jason corrected her driving one more time, she’d be forced to murder him. There wasn’t a judge in the country that would convict her, either. Not if they’d had any kids with learner’s permits of their own.

Marie knew better than to get drawn in. She absolutely did. She should just ignore him. That would be best. Ignoring Jason, however, was a bit like trying to ignore a nest of disturbed wasps. It was damned hard not to notice all the little pricks and harder still to keep from swatting back.

“Stop sign at the end of the block.”

Marie’s knuckles were white against the steering wheel when she blew. “Shut up, Jase,” she directed. “Just…shut the heck up.”

The car safely garaged once more, Marie called her insurance company, then retreated upstairs. She pulled the shades down and hid in her bedroom for an hour. Teaching Jason how to drive was going to make an old woman out of her in next to no time. She had to fight the urge to get up and go check her hair in the mirror.

Luke Deforest probably found gray hair a turn off.

What? How stupid. She didn’t—shouldn’t—care what Luke Deforest thought about her hair or any other of her body parts. Yes, she did. Well, she’d get over it. She’d see to it.

Marie took a deep breath and held it, then slowly exhaled. This was all Jason’s fault. He was making her lose her mind. After all, what did she know about dealing with an adolescent? Heck, she’d been one herself not that long ago. Finding herself so quickly and abruptly on the receiving end of all that adolescent garbage was throwing her psyche into shock, that was all.

Marie took another deep breath, slowly exhaled and dug out an old Paul Simon CD, curled up in her favorite reading chair over in the corner and vegged out while Paul crooned softly in the background. Of course she was damn lucky to hear him at all over the boom de booms emanating from just down the hall. Still, it was soothing. When Marie finally emerged, she went down to the kitchen confident she was once more in complete control. For sure she wasn’t going to give Luke Deforest another thought. Maybe she should bake some cookies and take them with her to their meeting tomorrow. See if she couldn’t soothe the savage beast. She could always say they were for Carolyn so he wouldn’t suspect anything.

Marie produced a small meat loaf for dinner which precipitated a lot of gagging sounds and threats to hurl up the meal, but honest to God, you couldn’t serve pizza every night, could you? Pepperoni was not exactly the best example of the protein group you could find. The salad was put away untouched except for the small portion Marie herself had taken.

Marie was pathetically grateful when, after downing half a container of double fudge brownie ice cream, Jason cleared out of the kitchen without offering to help or doing so much as clearing a dish. Frankly, she’d rather do it herself than have to put up with her uncle for ten more seconds. The sound of his bedroom door shutting—loudly—came as a blessed relief. And then the house began to shake. Boom boom de boom.

No way was she getting that subwoofer thing for him. Absolutely not. Why would any sane person pay money to make a bad situation degenerate to worse? She turned an oldies station on the radio all the way up to camouflage Jason’s exaggerated bass and sang along with Aretha Franklin, shaking her hips while she finished cleaning the kitchen. R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Oh yeah, her and Aretha, they were both craving it, needing it.

Lord, she was obviously overtired. She was going to bed.

Shortly before noon the next day, Marie rang Luke’s doorbell. She’d spent time choosing her outfit, applying her makeup and had actually plugged in the curling iron and worked on her hair. She waited for Luke to answer, pleased that she could still pull herself together into a decent package. It had been months since she’d bothered to try. She’d settled for clean ever since assuming responsibility for Jason. Who was there to impress? One of his acne-riddled, fifteen-year-old buddies? No, thank you.

Luke, on the other hand, was fair game. He’d intimidated her the day before, looking better than any man had a right to, almost like some kind of male model for crying out loud. Except there’d been absolutely no sign of mousse in his hair nor had he stunk to high heaven of any kind of men’s cologne. No, Luke just naturally exuded everything that was masculine.

And all that was feminine in her cried out in response, which was really stupid. Did she have no self-protective instincts at all? Had she learned nothing from her marriage?

While she waited she thought about Carolyn. As far as she knew, Luke was a bachelor. Wade had never spoken about his brother having been married or having any kind of previous entanglement of the female kind—which Luke obviously had had since Carolyn existed—but then again, Wade hadn’t been one to speak much. Flex his biceps, yes. Talk, no. There’d been a time in her life when a guy’s pecs were recommendation enough to pursue a relationship. She’d naively assumed a well-built body wouldn’t embarrass itself by anything less than a sterling interior. Thank God she’d grown past all that.

Luke opened the door just as Marie was beginning to wonder if he’d remembered their appointment.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” Marie responded as she studied him curiously. He’d been impeccably dressed yesterday when Jason had whacked him. Now here it was, Sunday, almost noon and the man looked, well, disheveled, to be kind.

It was annoying that her heart rhythm picked up anyway. For the life of her, she couldn’t come up with an adequate reason why. His jeans were old, frayed, with his knees showing through the few remaining horizontal threads still there. He wore a collared white broadcloth shirt, but it was unbuttoned, untucked and wrinkled. The shirt was short-sleeved and his arms emerged from them thick, heavily muscled and furred. Dark hair curled out from the top of his undershirt, letting Marie know his chest was also furred. If she hadn’t seen his hair yesterday, she’d think he hadn’t combed it in a month of Sundays, so unkempt did it appear now. And Luke’s feet were bare. Bare. Marie shook her head. It was discouraging and ridiculous in equal parts that her heart still lurched at the sight of him. The vision of him now just didn’t fit with yesterday’s image. Nothing about him did.

Would the real Luke Deforest please stand up?

“Come in,” he invited, rather formally Marie thought, considering his attire.

Today’s Luke Deforest was living proof of the old adage that clothes did not make the man. Messed and mussed, this was still one fine-looking specimen of the male variety. Marie became determined not to show any signs of her discomfiture. “Thank you,” she replied, nodding acceptance of his invitation and stepping regally, she hoped, into Luke’s foyer. She had to thread her way around several shopping bags from stores whose names were familiar to her from her own trips to the mall. She recognized some of the bags from yesterday.

Calypso music drifted in from the back of the house.

Her eyes adjusted to the dimmer interior lighting.

The exterior of the house had been impressive. A warm-colored brick, the large two-story house sat on a wide, deep lot. The landscaping was minimal, a sign of both the newness of the home and its current owner’s disinterest in gardening, Marie suspected.

The inside appeared spacious and expensively if unimaginatively finished, with lots of moldings and wide, thick, intricate woodwork throughout. From what Marie could see, all of it seemed to be painted a basic, unimaginative white.

Luke led her through a very masculine-looking living room with white walls and tan carpeting accented by a supple black leather L-shaped sectional. The pink satin-bound blanket from yesterday and a stuffed green bunny about a foot and a half tall lay obtrusively on the couch and Dr. Seuss books lay on the brass-and-glass coffee table before it. Matching brass-and-glass end tables supported black lamps with black shades. They passed through the room, which had little by way of actual decoration, into—she wouldn’t have thought it was possible—an even more masculine study.

“Hang on a second,” Luke muttered and Marie stood, waiting until he came back with a kitchen chair for her to sit on. He placed the chair behind the massive glass-topped black desk, next to his brass-nail-studded black leather and far more professional chair.

He sank, rather gratefully Marie thought, into his chair and waved her into the other. “Sit,” he said and ran a hand through his hair, making it stand up all the more. “If I remember right from last night, we’ve got maybe ten or fifteen minutes before the movie ends. When I went to get your chair Ariel had already given up her voice to become human and the king of the mer-people was being turned into a newt or something equally repulsive by this evil overweight octopus. I’ve got to admit the octopus is pretty awesome, but I’m telling you, it’s wearing thin. The whole thing is wearing very thin. Hell, I’ve had the kid for less than twenty-four hours and I’ve already got the damn movie practically memorized.”

Marie was confused. Why was he so unfamiliar with his daughter and how come she’d never heard about Carolyn before? A long-ago divorce? How long ago could it have been with Carolyn being so young? How often did Luke get to see her? There had to be a mom somewhere, but where and how did she fit into the picture? After all, it took two to tango and Carolyn was living proof Luke knew how to dance.

“Are you divorced?” she asked. “Do you just get Carolyn certain weekends a month or something like that?”

Luke scrubbed his face with his hands. “I wish. No, it’s nothing easy like that. Carolyn’s mother died a little while ago. It’d been a while since I’d last seen her. Took them a while to track me down, I guess. Carolyn’s here to stay and neither one of us is at all sure how we feel about that.”

See? She was right. Men were jerks. Except for her grandfather who’d always been there for her, but he was a lot older. Maybe they improved with age. Sort of like cheese. Then again, didn’t some varieties just get stinkier the older they got?

“You’re the child’s father and you haven’t bothered to have any contact with her before now?” she questioned incredulously, forgetting in her ire how very large he was. “They had to track you down to inform you of her mother’s death? What kind of a man are you?”

“A tired one,” Luke informed her grimly. “A very tired one. Carolyn refused to stay in her own bed last night. She kept climbing in with me. And let me tell you, that child has the boniest elbows and knees you’ll ever run into. I know. I ran into them consistently and constantly all night long. Most restless sleeper in town, no, on the continent. No joke. She got me once in the throat. I couldn’t breathe. Thought I was going to die.”

“You evidently survived the ordeal,” Marie said without a great deal of sympathy. She was amazed by the man’s total lack of sensitivity. “I’m sure she’s just feeling insecure. For heaven’s sake, Luke, her mother just died and she’s been shuffled off to a father she doesn’t even know.”

Luke half rose out of his chair and pointed his finger at her. “Listen, lady, you don’t know what—” He stopped in midsentence, paused, shook his head, then sat back down. “No, never mind. It’s nobody’s business but Carolyn’s and mine. Just trust me on this. There are things I’m not free to discuss here. They’re between Carolyn and me and we’re the ones who’ll work them out. I hope.” He’d muttered that last and Marie barely caught it.

Puzzled, she stared at him. Luke Deforest, the man who only yesterday looked like he could take on the world and win suddenly looked like he’d gone a couple of rounds more than he should have. The man looked defeated. Marie felt the tug on her heartstrings and was confused and angered. He pulled on her in so many different ways how was she supposed to stay uninvolved here? Well, she’d done her share of mothering for this month. Maternal instincts, sexual instincts and any other kind of instincts that had her thinking about jumping on the bandwagon here were just going to have to forget it. Marie was currently unavailable. Jason was enough to deal with. She wasn’t going to take on Luke and his defenseless little daughter.

She was getting going while the going was good.

Once again Marie tried to rise. “It certainly sounds like you’ve got your hands full so I’ll just get out of your way. You’re not ready to leave and I’m sure the insurance company can deliver the loaner car to you if you ask. Here, I stopped and picked this up on the way over.” She tried to hand him a copy of the police report she’d filed. “I’ll leave this here for you to look over and I wrote down my phone number and insurance information so you can—”

“Daddy?”

If Marie hadn’t been looking right at him, she wouldn’t have noticed the slight recoil.