by Tina Leonard
They turned the Peter Rabbit lamp on, switched off the overhead light, and April picked up the baby monitor as they left the room.
“Good job, everyone,” Jackson said, sinking into the sofa as they filed into the den. “I’d call that a successful transition. And I’m exhausted.”
“Caleb, get your father a glass of tea from the kitchen, please,” April said, smiling at her father-in-law fondly. No one could have tried harder to be a real part of the newly growing family than Jackson. In fact, she’d heard from Bri that Jackson might have placed a few calls to Social Services, offering them badly-needed diapers and formula donations and anything else he could do to help.
“It wasn’t bribery,” Bri had explained to April with a shrug. “Dad had the McCallum Wing finished, operating and out of his hands. Your struggle to win emergency custody of the quads gave him a new mission. He’d made a call to see if there was anything he could do, got to talking to Mandy Cole, realized there were needs as with any agency, and that gave him a new goal. He said Emily told him it was the right thing to do.” Bri smiled at her sister-in-law with some sympathetic exasperation. “Emily was our mom.”
“Yes, I know,” April murmured. “Bless Jackson’s heart.”
“Oh, he talks a pitiful game. But behind that I’m-dying-until-I-have-my-own-grandchildren exterior is a man who’s pretty content with life. He’s got us all married, three grandchildren, four temporary babies to love and daily communiqués with Mother. He just likes to keep us all feeling like we could do a little more to make his golden years extra-shiny golden.”
April had laughed, but now as she looked at Jackson on the sofa, she saw a man who simply loved his family. Adam, Bri and Caleb had been so fortunate to have Jackson for a father. Whatever bonds he hadn’t been able to form with them as children, he seemed eager to tie now.
She wondered if Caleb had the same latent seed of bonding in him. He’d said he didn’t want to get close to anyone, but did he have the same capacity for allowing himself to heal and move on that Jackson possessed?
“Thank you for all your help,” she said to Jackson, leaning over the sofa back to hug his neck. “It’s meant an awful lot to me.”
He caught one of her hands in his. “Not as much as it’s meant to me, my girl,” he said, his voice tight with emotion.
She couldn’t help herself. After all the years of wanting a family of her own as much as she had, she felt so blessed to have the McCallums embrace her with open arms. Pressing a kiss to Jackson’s cheek, he held her head against him for just a split second. “Thank you,” she murmured.
“You’re welcome,” he whispered back.
Straightening, she caught Caleb staring at her, watching the exchange. To her surprise, he had a baffled expression on his face.
Almost as if he was perplexed by the affection that they shared.
CALEB WATCHED APRIL with his father, and with some surprise—and a lot of consternation—he realized that she loved his old man. Not just loved him, but wanted him to be happy. Appreciated him.
Why he should find this disturbing, he wasn’t certain. He laid the glass of tea she’d requested for Jackson on the coffee table in front of him, glancing up to see his father watching him with some approval and gratitude.
“Thanks, son,” Jackson said.
Caleb nodded, never very comfortable in anything but the role of renegade son. But that need seemed to be falling away from him more and more these days, and it was a direct result of April being in his life, he realized. With April, he found approval in his father’s eyes. Because of her, he’d found a way to give his father exactly what he wanted—family, most especially a second chance to enjoy a large family—and yet Caleb hadn’t had to do a damn thing. Put forth little effort and almost no emotion. April required no true love, no lasting commitment. Zippo. All he had to do was treat her the way he’d treat any woman, with respect and caring, and marry her for the length of time she needed, and he’d won the jackpot of instant “good” rapport with the old man.
The lovemaking had been a helluva bonus, of course.
But other than that, he could skip the emotional connecting he so wanted to avoid, paste a temporary wife and four babies onto the cardboard cutout of his life, and faster than he could say, “Look, Dad, no hands!” he’d won his father’s respect and love.
Damn. Life didn’t really work out that easy, did it?
April smiled at him, a soft glow of happiness and joy on her face, and his stomach sank. He wasn’t supposed to feel pride when he looked at her. He wasn’t supposed to feel attraction when she carried the babies, nor when she bent over to change diapers. He wasn’t supposed to go into a soft, droopy daydream when she fed them a bottle, rocking them to sleep with a contented hum under her breath. He wasn’t supposed to want to hold her in his arms at night and kiss her neck until she turned to him with the same want he felt burning him.
Life wasn’t easy at all.
He had a feeling it was going to get more difficult.
AFTER HIS SISTER and his father left, the closest emotion he could remember since his partner’s death swept over him.
Panic. Sheer raw panic.
He was alone with four babies and a woman, and they needed to become a family.
For the first time in his life, he truly realized how his father must have felt after his mother had died. He had no idea how to proceed. The flight instinct pushed at him surprisingly hard.
“You get Melissa,” April said, “and I’ll get Matthew. The others will lie quietly for a moment, but these two are a little more rambunctious when they wake up from their nap.”
He did as she asked, mainly because courage was required at this moment, and if there was anything he could call up instantly when needed, it was courage. Cop training. He approached Melissa as if she were a time bomb. Gently, precisely, carefully. “Now, you and I are going to do this successfully,” he told the tiny baby. “Because there’s no one here anymore to hold our hand and bail us out. It’s just me and you, babe, so let’s make it good.”
Melissa, unimpressed with his offer, let out a squall that seemed as loud to him as detonation. “Now, don’t take that attitude,” he told her. “I know you don’t recognize my hands on your little body, but I assure you, I’m very gentle,” he said soothingly. It didn’t really matter what he said to her, did it, as long as he said it with baby-pleasing tones?
Unconvinced, she tore loose a greater shout, her little tongue curling into a tiny disk in her mouth. “My goodness,” he said in the same quiet voice as he carried her over to the rocker. “You are a noisy young lady. If your daddy was here right now, he’d be so proud to know he had given life to either a cheerleader or a carnival barker.”
She was unappeased, and disinterested in the bottle he offered her. “All right, young lady. If you have something else on your mind, why don’t you let me know.”
Melissa cried louder.
“Okay, I think I got the general consensus of the complaint you’re lodging.”
He heard a scraping sound in the hall and poked his head into the hallway. April was dragging the rocker across to the girls’ nursery. “What are you doing?” he demanded.
“I think it was a mistake to separate the children while they’re still so young,” she said, breathless from trying to tug and push the heavy rocker while she held Matthew. “They’re used to sleeping side by side in clear isolettes where they can see each other.”
Baloney. Those babies couldn’t see each other worth flip, he’d be willing to bet. April wanted to see him—and make certain he was doing his job right. Obviously, Melissa’s forlorn attempts at a college-size yell were causing her new mom some angst, rather like a mother bear who hears her newborn cub yelping and rushes to the rescue.
“Hang on,” he said to Melissa over her din. “Your mom is showing some anxiety. You crying is making her think she has to come in here to monitor me.”
But he went out, picked up the rocker and car
ried it into the girls’ nursery, the one with the castle on the wall, so that he and April could sit across from each other. He decided it might be best to show April that he knew exactly what he was doing.
“I think she wants her diaper changed,” he said over Melissa’s cries. “I am particularly adept at this.”
“I’ll just bet you are,” April said, her eyebrows raised. “Don’t you want me to do it?”
“I said I am an expert at this,” he explained loudly. “In crisis situations, particularly where a perpetrator is resisting, I like to perform what I call the sneak attack. Watch closely.”
Gently, he turned the baby on her back and laid her in the crib. “Now, most women don’t complain about this part, but I sense you’re going to show me you’re different, so it’s going to be over before you know what happened, sweetie.” Deftly, he undid the tapes, tossed the diaper aside, scooted a new one underneath the baby, gave her a couple of quick swipes with a diaper wipe and taped the new one in place, before picking her up to snuggle her against his chest—all in under fifteen seconds.
“And that, little one, is a sneak attack. It’s best if you know about such maneuvers on the part of the male species so you can fend them off later.” Sitting down in the rocker across from April, he said, “Don’t you have anything you want to say? Questions? Comments? Praise?”
“I do have a question. Is the sneak-attack part of the cop manual, or just yours?”
He grinned at her, calming the now-almost-still Melissa with the warmth of his arms. “Are you asking out of professional curiosity, a need to learn my diapering skills or a desire to experience my sneak attack?”
Chapter Thirteen
Well, Bri had once mentioned that Caleb was fairly confident with his appeal to the opposite sex. Not interested, just confident. And he’d already shown her that he could back up his confidence, April thought with a warming of her female anatomy.
He was suggesting none too bashfully that he could have her panties off before she knew it—and that she wouldn’t even protest.
He was right.
How she’d love to wipe that smug grin off his face.
Melissa did it for her, burping up a giant bubble of formula all over his shirt. “Oops, I think I hear Craig waking,” she said, scooting swiftly from the rocker. “You’ve already proved you’re equipped to deal with all female emergencies and otherwise, so I’ll leave you to it.”
And she hurried from the room, cherishing the surprised and somehow appalled expression on Caleb’s face. “Well, he deserved it,” she said, snuggling her face against Matthew’s warm neck. “I’ll leave him with Chloe and Melissa, since he thinks he’s got all the know-how when it comes to sugar-and-spice-and-everything-nice. I’ll settle for snips-and-snails-and-puppy-dog-tails, not that I can claim to have his experience with the opposite sex, but just because it’s good for him to recognize that sneak attacks on a female might give him unexpected results, like Melissa’s sneak attack on him.”
Matthew didn’t seem to care about the battle of the sexes, though, as he allowed her to slip him into his crib. Slowly, she drew a blanket over him, then went to check on Craig. Though she’d pretended she heard him crying, the baby slept peacefully.
She might not have this much quiet again for a while. With Caleb here to take care of Melissa and Chloe—and keep an ear out for the other two—she decided to shower and change. Creeping from the room, she peered into the girls’ nursery.
Caleb had his back turned to her. The babies were safe in their cribs, and he had just finished pulling off the offensive shirt. She held back an instant gasp. Broad and strong, his muscular back tapered into a trim waist. A thick leather belt corded through the blue-jeans loops. His feet were bare, as if he was planning to…he reached to his front, and she realized he was undoing his belt buckle. Those jeans were about to come off, and it didn’t matter that she’d lain in his arms one night enjoying more bliss than she ever thought possible. She hadn’t seen him up close and personal in fairly good light, and as much as she secretly might want to see him in the raw, she simply couldn’t. She fled, heading into the bathroom and quietly closing the door so that he wouldn’t know she’d passed down the hall.
“Okay,” she said, her heart beating hard in her chest. “Rule number one of communal living. We don’t take off clothes unless the door is closed. Maybe we need a bell. Something to alert the other person that clothes are about to be shed.” No, not after Caleb’s sneak-attack theory. She had a funny feeling ringing a bell when she was about to undress could cause a Pavlov’s-bell type of reaction.
The door to the bathroom suddenly opened, and April gasped, startling Caleb as much as he’d startled her.
He was wearing nothing but a baby blanket around his waist, tied in a knot, Roman-style.
Swiftly, she turned her back on him and covered her eyes.
“Sorry!” they both said at once.
“No, I’m sorry. I thought you were in the boys’ nursery,” Caleb said.
“It’s okay,” April said on a rush. “Of course, you need to take a shower to wash that stuff off you. I wasn’t thinking. I’ll just squeeze past you, and—” She backed up, determined to get past him without seeing more than she had. Instead, she bumped into him, and he put a hand out to steady her.
“I’m okay!” She darted around him, reaching out to grab the doorknob and pull the door shut behind her. Pulse racing, she leaned against the wall, relaxing only when she heard the shower turn on. “Oh, boy,” she said under her breath. “Now I know why women throw themselves at him like grenades set to explode on impact.”
Great-looking in clothes, he was even better nude. With a baby blanket around his waist, he was awesome.
She’d made love with him. And though she hadn’t been able to see much on their wedding night since neither of them had stopped what they were doing to flip on a light, she knew what that pink-and-blue-giraffes-print blanket was hiding.
A groan escaped her, and this time it wasn’t because his confidence annoyed her. It was because she remembered—and because he was right about sneak attacks.
She wanted to be in his arms again, making love—and she shouldn’t have in the first place. There was no reason to make love with a man with whom she wasn’t in love. Wasn’t going to marry.
“Not marry for real,” she qualified to herself.
“Got any towels?” Caleb asked, jerking the door open and peering through the crack.
She barely stopped the scream that nearly tore from her throat. His hair was wet, his chest glistening from the shower. She didn’t dare let her gaze wander any lower, instead remaining steadfast on his face. “Under the sink,” she said quickly.
“Thanks.” He gave her a devilish smile, and slowly closed the door.
Darn it! He knows exactly what he’s doing to me—and he’s loving it.
BY NIGHTFALL, they were both exhausted.
“I knew it was going to be a lot of work. I just didn’t know how much,” Caleb said. “It’s a good thing you’ve got me here.”
She had moved an extra chair into the den area so that they wouldn’t both have to sit on the sofa. Her chair was plush and comfy, and she’d curled her feet up under her, relaxing into the softness. “Having all these children will probably make me very ready to see you whenever you’re going to be around,” she said, her voice already sleepy.
Did he ever have a surprise for her, little-miss-I’ve-got-to-do-everything-myself. “I’ve taken indefinite leave from my job as well. I plan to be here until things get a bit more manageable.”
Her eyes snapped open, and he couldn’t tell if she was pleasantly or unpleasantly shocked. “Why?”
He shrugged, trying to act casual. It was her house, after all. He was the interloper, even though they’d planned for him to stay here once the babies arrived. But he was pretty certain April had been thinking more of a nighttime schedule for him rather than around-the-clock. His feeling was that the tiny lady might n
eed more help than she thought, and he didn’t even want to envision a scenario where she might get herself in a jam with no one here to help her. “I want to put all my efforts into finding Jenny, for one thing. It’s tough to do that, and work a full-time job. I had a lot of leave built up, since I don’t like to take vacations.”
Hell, he’d never had any reason to. Where would he have gone? Staying busy kept him from remembering and thinking about things he didn’t want to.
He hadn’t even really had to ask for an indefinite leave because he had so much paid time coming to him. “I plan to do nothing but help you take care of the babies, and find Jenny.” And make certain you don’t overwork yourself and make yourself ill. That wouldn’t do anyone any good, and it would worry me real bad.
But he didn’t make the pronouncement out loud because it would bring Independence Day with all the stars and stripes and marching-band protesting forth from April.
“Are you sure? I hate for you to have to give up your life because of me, Caleb. What about your dad? Doesn’t that make an awful lot of work—”
Caleb held up a hand. “It’s fine, April. You ought to know by now that Dad would rather have me here so he can get hour-by-hour reports. In fact, it’s probably either me or Dad.”
She smiled a little, her eyes sparkling. “You’re probably right about your dad.”
He intended to be right about a lot of things. Mainly, that he thought it was best if he was here with her.
“But I’m not used to living with a man around the clock,” she said worriedly. “There’s only one bathroom. The hall is narrow. The kitchen is small. I never did buy a futon.”
“April, I’m pretty adaptable. You’re not announcing a headline by telling me this is a dollhouse. It’s just right for you, and I like it because of that. I would have been fairly weirded out to find out that you lived in a house with massive leather furniture and an animal’s skull and horns on the wall.”