LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

      “Yes, Carolyn?”

      “All done.”

      “The movie’s over already?”

      In other circumstances, Marie would have laughed at the look of sheer panic Luke wore. She was sure he’d never admit it, but he was so obviously clueless as far as how to entertain the child that it was almost funny. Funny in the abstract, that was. Funny only until you took a good look at the little girl. Yesterday Carolyn’s face had been buried in Marie’s chest. When the child had finally fallen asleep in her car seat, her features had been red, swollen and splotchy from crying.

      Today, well my goodness, today Carolyn was a beautiful child not yet a yard tall with crooked wheat-colored pigtails cascading in curls to her shoulders and soft brown eyes framed with embarrassingly long lashes. There was a spattering of freckles running over her cheeks and bridging her nose. As Carolyn’s top teeth bit into her quivering yet pink perfect lower lip, Marie noted those teeth were small, white and charmingly askew. Luke would drop a quick five grand straightening those in a few years, Marie decided.

      Oh, God, Carolyn was still virtually a baby and she was so forlorn and lonely-looking as she stood there uncertainly in the doorway. So lost and vulnerable appearing as she looked to Luke for guidance as to what to do next in this foreign house with this foreign dad in this foreign town.

      Marie’s heart went out to the little waif. Marie was a goner.

      Not liking this situation didn’t change it.

      “It’s almost lunchtime,” Luke finally suggested hopefully after staring nonplussed for several seconds. “How about if I open a can of tuna fish and put it on whole wheat bread? Doesn’t that sound good?”

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