Daddy in Dress Blues

by Cathie Linz

  Jeez, he was getting downright poetic here. A bad sign.

  Or was it? Since when had being with an attractive woman been a crime? Since he’d become a dad probably.

  But this was the best of both worlds. In Jessie he had a woman he was finding increasingly attractive, and a woman who knew how to take care of his daughter.

  “I’s done,” Blue proudly announced from the bathroom. “I’s flushing now.”

  “I’ve tried correcting Blue’s grammar,” Curt told Jessie, not wanting Jessie the Brain to think his kid was stupid.

  “You don’t need to worry or to correct her each time. Instead you could just repeat the words yourself, perhaps say I am done cleaning the kitchen, so she’ll hear for herself how the words go together. It’s a natural progression as two- and three-year-olds start stringing words together, often mimicking what you say.”

  “One of the reasons I now watch what I say around her,” Curt admitted.

  “Good idea,” she replied.

  Was the sunlight coming in through the window playing tricks or had that been a flash of attraction he’d just seen in her eyes? Curt wondered. Maybe Jessie had decided to stop holding a grudge against whatever it was he’d done back in high school.

  Or maybe he was just imagining things.

  He’d been on his own for so long that the thought of flirting with a pretty woman was enough to make his blood flow a little faster. This could get interesting, he decided with a sense of anticipation.

  While Blue sat on the living room floor and played with her toys—an eclectic collection of trucks, dolls, and a well-worn teddy bear— Jessica put Curt through his paces.

  “First things first,” she briskly told Curt. “Let’s begin with emergency first aid. How much do you know?”

  “Enough to give you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,” he drawled.

  This sudden flash of the bad boy she’d known in high school caught Jessica by surprise. She’d let her guard down a bit and he’d snuck up on her with that comment.

  Studying him provided suspiciously few clues as to what he was thinking. The teenage girl she’d been would have become flustered by his intense perusal of her mouth, but the woman she’d become ignored his provocative behavior.

  Or tried to. She quizzed him on various possible scenarios that would require immediate medical attention. He had a pretty good basic knowledge, but needed specifics for pediatric care. And all the while her wayward heart kept beating a little faster. It certainly wasn’t because she found the topic of a first-aid checklist exciting. No, it was because he’d given her a certain kind of look, the kind a man gave a woman he was interested in.

  Things got worse when she handed him a refrigerator magnet with the toll-free number of the Poison Control Center on it. His fingers brushed hers and the resulting tingle of awareness traveled up her arm. A simple touch, a familiar reaction—but one she hadn’t experienced since her high school days.

  Oh, there had been men in her life since then. And she’d felt attraction before. But not this spine-tingling current accompanied by a deep-felt recognition that this person’s touch felt right and deliciously wicked at the same time.

  Flustered, she glanced down to consult her master list. “Uh, the next item on the agenda is mealtime.”

  “Is there a reason we’ve gone from emergency first aid to food? Makes me think you’ve tasted my cooking,” Curt noted wryly.

  It was hard not to smile. “What are you feeding Blue?”

  “Candy and potato chips,” he replied mockingly.

  At her startled look, he added, “What? That’s what you’re expecting, isn’t it? For me to fail.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “No? Then why are you treating me as if I were some raw recruit who didn’t know my…foot from a hole in the wall?”

  “I’m sorry if you don’t approve of my teaching style,” she said stiffly. “I’m no expert at educating adults.”

  “And I’m no expert at taking orders from a civilian, but you don’t see me complaining.”

  “That’s because you’re the one who needs my help.”

  “And you’re the one who offered that help,” he reminded her.

  Offered? Pressed into duty was a more accurate description but she wasn’t about to quibble over semantics. “I’m trying to help you, but it would be easier if you weren’t so stubborn and didn’t have such an attitude.”

  “I’m not the one with the attitude, you are.”

  “I am not,” she vehemently denied.

  “Are so,” he taunted her.

  “Am not!”

  “Am not, am so, am not, am so, am not, am so,” Blue said in a singsong voice.

  Startled at hearing herself mimicked, Jessica had to laugh. “We did sound like a couple of three-year-olds,” she noted ruefully.

  “I am three,” Blue proudly stated, holding up three fingers. “This old.”

  Jessica smiled down at her. The little girl was such a sweetie. “You certainly are.”

  “What did you do to G.I. Joe?” Curt’s voice reflected his dismay.

  “I made him pretty.” Blue held the action figure up to show off the large flowered hat she’d put on it.

  “G.I. Joe doesn’t wear flowers,” Curt stated with emphatic outrage. “All the other G.I. Joes would laugh at him. Put his helmet back on.”

  Blue looked at her father uncertainly before her big brown eyes slowly filled with tears.

  “Jeeez.” Curt exhaled as if someone had just stomped on his foot, or maybe even his heart. “No crying. Big girls don’t cry.”

  “Sure they do,” Jessica inserted. “It’s okay to feel sad, honey.” She scooped the little girl in her arms. “I think that G.I. Joe looks great in that hat.”

  Blue sniffed and hid her face in Jessica’s neck. Which allowed Jessica to give Curt a look that would have scorched steel.

  “Okay, big girls cry,” he allowed. “Sometimes. But a marine’s daughter doesn’t cry.” He reached over to awkwardly pat Blue once on the back. “You’re a marine kid now and you can…” He’d been about to say chew nails, but then he reconsidered the wisdom of that, knowing how Blue tended to take everything he said literally. “And you’re even more powerful than G.I. Joe. You’re tougher than other kids.”

  Her tears stopped, and she held out her arms for Curt.

  He took her, and his embrace was easier now than it had been when Jessica had first walked into the apartment. A second later Blue was giggling at Curt’s Three Stooges impersonation. Or maybe he was making Jim Carrey-like funny faces. Whatever, it made Blue laugh.

  “Come on, let’s show Jessie how you can put away some of these toys.” Lowering Blue, he pointed to the pile of toys his daughter had strewn around the living-room floor. “One, two, three, four,” he said in a softer version of a drill sergeant’s voice. “Get those toys off Daddy’s floor. Left, right, left, right. Move those trucks right out of sight.”

  Jessica waited until later that afternoon, when Blue had finally tired herself out and fallen asleep to approach Curt on the subject of toughness.

  “I’m amazed how she’s able to keep going as long as she does,” Curt noted from the doorway to Blue’s bedroom. His daughter was curled up on the bed, with her right arm around her teddy bear. G.I. Joe, minus the flowery hat, sat on her bedside table. “She was supposed to begin her nap at fourteen hundred hours. That was thirty minutes ago.”

  Returning to the living room with him, Jessica said, “Sometimes you have to be flexible. And you have to remember that she’s barely three years old. She’s a little girl, not a marine. A little girl who’s recently lost her mother.”

  “I’m aware of that,” he said stiffly.

  “Does Blue ever talk about her mother, about missing her?”

  “She told me her mother is ‘upstairs in heaven’ and asked me if that made me sad.”

  “And what did you tell her? That marines don’t get sad?”

  He glared at h
er. He hadn’t put it exactly like that, but pretty close.

  Jessica sighed, as if Curt’s gaffe was to be expected. “That might explain why she’s being so stoic about things. About not crying, about wanting to behave and not do anything wrong.”

  “That’s a good thing.”

  “As I told you when we had that discussion at the preschool, Blue is terrified of doing something wrong. Maybe she thinks that if she misbehaves, you’ll disappear or die the way her mother did. Or that you’ll send her away. I’m not sure, but I think it’s important that we do find out what she’s thinking, what she’s feeling.”

  “I’m no good at that kind of touchy-feely…stuff.”

  “Tough noogies,” she retorted. “You’ll just have to learn how to get good at it. Meanwhile I need some facts to work with here. Do you know how Blue’s mother died?”

  “I was told it was a car accident. She fell asleep at the wheel while driving home after work. She worked nights as a cocktail waitress at a club in San Diego. The social worker told me that Gloria had a number of her friends watching Blue and that she was accustomed to being apart from her mother.”

  “Even so, I’m surprised Blue hasn’t mentioned her more. Have you brought up the subject?”

  He looked at her as if she were nuts. “Why should I? Like I said, she knows Gloria is dead.”

  “Telling Blue that big girls don’t cry will actually make it harder for her to mourn and get past her mother’s death. You need to allow her to express her emotions.”

  “All right, already. I won’t tell her that marine’s kids don’t cry. I’ll let the kid cry buckets if she wants to.”

  “And you’ll hold her and comfort her if she should want that. And you’ll reassure her that you’re here for her long-term, no matter what. That she can count on you.”

  Not that Jessica had been able to count on Curt. He’d never bothered contacting her after that fateful night, hadn’t been fazed by what had gone on between them. She’d been the one who’d been terrified she’d gotten pregnant. She’d been the one who’d waited for him to come back from boot camp, because informing him she might be pregnant wasn’t something she felt right telling him about in a letter.

  Why did he still have such a powerful impact on her, after all this time? She hadn’t expected the chemistry to still exist. Not that Curt had pushed it. If he had, she’d have been out the door so fast his head would have spun.

  Instead it had been a million small things—the intensity of his gaze as he’d listened to her, the lean strength of his fingers as he’d fumbled with his daughter’s Mickey Mouse sipping cup, the sense of power he projected. The latter was something new, something he’d lacked in high school, and she suspected it came from his years as a marine, accustomed to taking care of himself no matter what the situation. Here was a man who could protect in the most physical and fundamental sense of the word.

  Couple that with the occasional flare of his bad-boy tempting sex appeal and it made for a very potent package.

  He’d been her first love, and she supposed that those poets who said you never forgot your first love were right after all. Even if that first love forgot you.

  “Blue needs to know she can count on you,” Jessica repeated. Some of the anger she was feeling, at her own vulnerability to Curt, came through in her voice.

  “Are you mad at me about Blue or is it something else?” Curt demanded. “Because I’ve had the feeling since I first met you that you’ve been ticked off with me. Why is that?”

  “You first met me back in high school,” she reminded him.

  “Is that why you’re angry? Just because I didn’t recognize you right away?”

  Right away? It had taken him an entire week! “I never expected you to remember me,” she replied honestly. At least, she hadn’t expected it once she’d seen his blank look when he’d walked into her classroom. She’d expected plenty when he’d come back from boot camp. She’d expected him to smile at her, talk to her, kiss her, tell her that what they’d shared meant something to him, that he hadn’t been feeding her a line when he’d told her how beautiful she was and how special. She hadn’t expected him to completely ignore her, to turn his back on her.

  Curt frowned. “If you didn’t expect me to remember you, then what is the problem?”

  He was the problem. Having him back in her life stirred up the old cauldron of emotions that she’d kept a tight lid on since then. But she couldn’t tell him that. So instead she said, “The problem is that you’re a father now and I’m not sure you realize what that means.”

  Her words stung him where he was the most vulnerable. “Are you saying that I’m not taking my responsibilities as a father seriously?”

  “No, I’m not saying that at all. I’m just saying that I’m not sure you realize what a tremendous responsibility this is.”

  “Being responsible for the lives of forty-five marines in my unit when we’re under attack from enemy fire is a tremendous responsibility. Fatherhood is a piece of cake compared to that,” he scoffed, a part of him hoping that if he said that often enough he’d come to believe it.

  She gave him a look that was almost pitying. “You really don’t have a clue, do you.”

  It wasn’t a question so he didn’t bother answering it. “I know what I’m doing,” he stated. “And what small things I don’t know, I can learn.”

  But could he learn how to love? That was the major question here. Because if he couldn’t love Blue it didn’t matter how much he knew about emergency first aid, he wouldn’t be able to cure the ache in her heart caused by a father unable to love her as she deserved to be loved.

  Jessica should know. She’d experienced it herself.

  Jessica’s father, a corporate executive, moved every year. Her mother never complained, saying that what was good for Jessica’s father was good for the family. As an only child, Jessica found the moves very difficult. As soon as she made friends, she had to pack up and leave them.

  By the fourth grade, she stopped making friends. What was the point? It would only end up with her waving at them in tears as her family’s car pulled out of that particular driveway for the last time.

  It wasn’t until her father died of a heart attack, on the job, that the moves stopped. So did their income, as her mother discovered to her dismay that her husband was deeply in debt after having played the stock market in a highly speculative financial deal that had gone wrong.

  Jessica had been thirteen, and just about to start high school. They’d had to move again, from the affluent western suburb of Naperville into the city where her mother had gotten a job. But Jessica had been able to stay at the same northwest-side high school all four years.

  She hadn’t been able to say so many things to her father, to ask him why he’d never been able to hug her or show her any affection. To ask him if he’d ever really loved her at all. To tell him that she’d loved him and was sorry she’d disappointed him.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  Curt’s aggressive tone of voice interrupted her thoughts. “Wha…at?” She blinked at him, retreating from the tunnel of memories.

  “I said what small things I don’t know about fatherhood I can learn and then you give me the silent treatment.”

  “It wasn’t you. I was thinking of someone else.”

  Her comment irritated him. For some reason he’d never considered the possibility that she’d have a life of her own now, with a man of her own. He’d checked her ring finger early on, before he even recognized her as Jessie the Brain. But the fact that she wasn’t married or engaged didn’t mean she wasn’t going with someone.

  “What’s his name?” Curt demanded.

  She blinked at him. “Whose name?”

  “The guy you were thinking about.”

  “I don’t care to discuss it. Now, getting back to Blue…”

  “You’re evading my question.”

  “No kidding,” she retorted.

  “What are you t
rying to hide? Unless you’re going to try to tell me that you weren’t thinking about a man?”

  “I’m telling you that it’s none of your business,” she repeated, getting angrier by the second. “Where do you get off asking me personal questions anyway?”

  “You asked me personal questions. Why is your life suddenly off-limits? Why are you so touchy?”

  “I am not touchy. And if you must know, I was thinking about my father.”

  “Oh.” His laugh was rueful. “I should have figured that out instead of thinking you were mooning over some guy.”

  Mooning over some guy? As in mooning over Curt? Did he think she didn’t have a life of her own just because she didn’t want to talk to him about it? “For your information, I am seeing someone.”

  “Seeing someone?”

  His mocking tone of voice aggravated the heck out of her. “Why do you say it like that?”

  “Like what?” he countered, moving closer to her as if daring her to step away from him and admit that he got to her.

  “As if it weren’t true.” Refusing to give an inch, she tipped back her head to glare at him. She was so close she could see her own reflection in his brown eyes. “You don’t believe that I’m seeing someone?”

  “I don’t believe how much I want to kiss you,” he whispered right before his lips covered hers.

  Chapter 4

  SHE SHOULD HAVE BEEN prepared. She wasn’t.

  She should have pushed him away. She didn’t.

  She shouldn’t have responded. But she did.

  For a marine, he moved with subtle sensuality. He didn’t come marching in to lay claim to her mouth. Instead he stole in beneath the cover of her defenses, coaxing her into surrender with an erotic declaration of intent. His lips rhythmically brushed back and forth against her trembling mouth.

  Tilting his head in the opposite direction, he targeted her mouth once more.

  And then it was too late. Too late to be logical. Impossible to be coherent when excitement was surging through her body so rapidly that her entire being was flushed with it. Then he caught her bottom lip between his teeth, drawing it into his mouth to suck and nibble until she was moaning with pleasure.