Some Kind of Wonderful Page 2

  Still, realizing that this tiny girl would grow up with the same doubts and questions tugged at Carol. She knew how the system worked. This tiny child would be taken to a state home. She'd be laid down in one of a series of cribs. She'd cry and wait her turn for attention. She'd be fed, held and cared for, by overworked and underpaid attendants, but she wouldn't get the special time and care that all children were entitled to.

  Her heart ached as old memories rushed into her mind along with worry for the child who was too young to defend herself against the pain that was already headed her way.

  "It's okay, Phoeb," Carol said, swallowing hard. "I'm a big girl. I don't have any 'issues.'" Phoebe Hightower had been her first friend in Christmas. Heck, her first real friend anywhere. And for the past two years, she and Phoebe had bonded over Mel Gibson movies, Chocolate Brownie ice cream, and the lack of interesting men in Christmas. Well, that last part didn't count anymore, since Phoebe had stumbled across a certain sexy carpenter who had changed her opinion on dating life in a small town.

  But even Phoebe didn't know everything there was to know in Carol's past. And that's just the way she liked it.

  "Yeah, but still."

  "Really. No biggie." She didn't want to think about the past she'd left behind a long time ago. The whole point of moving to Christmas had been to build a future and to forget the past, right? Right.

  Phoebe sighed and studied Carol's eyes for a long moment before letting go of whatever she was thinking. "I have to call Social Services."

  Carol's heart twinged painfully again. She looked down at the tiny baby girl and knew that she couldn't let it happen. Couldn't allow this infant to slide into the system when she was less than twenty-four hours old. She herself had far too many memories of institutional life. She'd never be able to live with herself if she simply walked away, knowing that the baby would become just another abandoned child.

  Carol wanted to protect her heart. She really did. But looking at the baby, she knew she couldn't save herself by sacrificing the child.

  "Do we have to?"

  • Phoebe just looked at her. "Yeah. It's the law. The sheriff's already been called. He'll be here any minute."

  "What about if I took her?"

  "Carol..."

  "For now," she said, blurting the words out quickly as if putting hedges on her offer would make the pain less when she eventually had to give up the baby.

  "Are you sure?"

  Carol choked out a laugh. "No. But I can't let her go to a homeT

  Phoebe looked down at the baby, then turned her gaze back to Carol. "We'll have to clear it with Maggie ... but I'm sure she'll approve you." She stepped to the counter and picked up the phone.

  Nerves skittered inside Carol, but she fought them back. She knew what she was doing. And it was temporary, after all. She only half-listened as Phoebe talked to Maggie Reilly Cooper, the local Social Services rep. Instead, Carol watched the baby, and the baby returned

  that solemn stare, as if they were sizing each other up. And Carol half-wondered just what the tiny girl thought of her.

  A few minutes later, the phone conversation had ended, everything was decided, and Carol's new course had been charted.

  "It's official," Phoebe said.

  A new rush of nerves hustled through her system. But she'd made her decision and she wouldn't change it now. "Okay, then, I guess it's just me and Lizardbaby."

  Phoebe laughed and the sound seemed to echo in the small cubicle. "Honest to God—"

  "Lizard baby?" A deep voice from the doorway rumbled through the room.

  An instant later, Quinn did a little rumbling himself as he stood up from his post beside the examining table. The big dog's throaty growl seemed to roll on and on like thunder.

  "Jesus," Jack said and took an instinctive step backward. "You brought a trained bear to the clinic?"

  "Quinn..." The dog's rumbling stopped short and Carol looked at the man warily watching the animal. "He's my dog. He won't bite."

  "Famous last words," Jack muttered and took a cautious step into the room. "Besides, he looks like he wouldn't have to bite. He could probably swallow me whole."

  Carol watched him watch Quinn and she had to admit, at least privately, that she wouldn't mind taking a bite out of Jack Reilly herself.

  Tall enough to qualify for mountain status, he had shoulders broad enough to balance the world and deep blue eyes that looked as though they'd seen way too much misery. By the look of it, his nose had been broken

  once or twice, he had a wide mouth and thick black eyebrows. His square jaw was bristled with a dark shadow of whiskers and his black hair was gleaming wet, as if he'd just stepped out of the shower when he was called to the clinic.

  That thought brought up a couple of lovely images that she hadn't had nearly enough time to enjoy when he spoke again, shattering her concentration.

  "You must be Dr. Hightower," he said and offered his hand.

  "I am. Thanks for coming so fast." Phoebe shook his hand firmly, then nodded at Carol. "This is Carol Baker, she found the baby."

  He shook her hand, too, and Carol felt a slight zap of heat as their palms brushed together. Surprised, she closed her fingers over her palm, as if to hold on to that little burst of electricity just a while longer.

  "And," Phoebe was saying, "this little girl is our mysterious stranger."

  Jack sidestepped around Quinn and moved in for a closer look. "Newborn?"

  "No more than a few hours old," Phoebe said softly.

  He shifted a look at Carol and she suddenly knew what a butterfly must feel like when it was pinned unexpectedly to a board. "You found her?"

  "Yep."

  "Where?"

  "The manger."

  "Huh?"

  Carol glanced at the baby, more to break eye contact with the big man still watching her than anything else. Really, he had a penetrating gaze that could make you confess to just about anything. No wonder he became a cop.

  She knew the Reilly family. Impossible to live in Christmas and not know them. Jack was the oldest, then there was Sean, a priest, then Eileen, perpetually pregnant or so it seemed, and now working on number three, then Maggie, mother of two and the local representative for Social Services, and finally, Peggy—at eighteen, the baby and family favorite. So Carol knew all about Jack Reilly, though she'd never met him before now. She knew he'd left town to join LAPD. That he'd been married and divorced. That he'd quit the big-city police force a couple of years ago—but no one outside his family seemed to know why.

  He'd come back to Christmas as a favor to the ailing town sheriff. Now he was the temporary chief of their tiny department, which was why he was standing here, giving her a look that said clearly, "Talk now or down at the station ."

  Really, she thought. Maybe she was watching too much TV.

  Staring up into those compelling blue eyes, Carol said, "I found her in the Nativity scene in the town square."

  "And what were you doing in the town square in the middle of the night?"

  Well, she didn't like the tone of that question. So she fired right back. "I was doing a fertility dance with my coven. Did I mention that I practice the black arts?"

  "Uh-huh " he said, sarcasm dripping from his tone.

  He never batted an eye. That shouldn't surprise her, though. He'd probably heard far worse in LA.

  "She walks her dog every night at midnight," Phoebe said.

  "He's my familiar," Carol added.

  "He's a bear."

  "You're really not a people person, are you?" Carol asked.

  "How'd you guess?"

  "Hello?" Phoebe waved both hands until she had their attention. "About the baby .. ."

  "Right. I'll call Maggie. See what she wants us to do about the baby."

  "I just hung up with her," Phoebe told him. "She's agreed to allow Carol to be an emergency foster parent."

  Jack shifted his gaze from the doctor to the tall, brown-haired woman in the faded jeans a
nd the too-tight white tank top emblazoned with a head shot of Santa. She straightened up as though presenting herself for formal inspection. Her eyes were the color of good scotch and her breasts were high and full, and she was just the right height for him to kiss her without getting a crick in his neck.

  Not that he had any plans in that direction. And if he had planned on finding a woman, he'd get one just a little less crazy, thanks.

  he come full circle and returned to answering the call for help in the middle of the night? Almost two years ago, he'd walked away from the force. Turned his back on the things he knew and told himself that he'd never go back again. Yet here he was—temporarily at least—back in the saddle. He couldn't get out of it. He'd already given his word. But that didn't mean he wouldn't resent being pulled back into a life he'd deliberately left behind. And it didn't mean he wouldn't walk away again—just as soon as he could.

  After all, what else could he do to repent—short of dying and being reincarnated as a cockroach?

  Turning his head to look at her, he stopped dead when he came nose to nose with the bear. "Jesus!"

  The damn dog was sitting straight up on the passenger seat, riding shotgun with him like they were old pals. The only problem was, Jack had never been eyeball to eyeball with a dog that damn big. Brown eyes stared unblinkingly into his. Hot dog breath puffed onto his face. And he had the distinct impression the animal didn't quite trust him.

  Jack knew just how he felt.

  The top of the dog's head scraped the roof of the car. His big, powerful body looked cramped in the low-slung passenger seat and Jack told himself that was the problem. The dog only looked gigantic because he was sitting in a Mustang. If Jack had had a bigger car—like, say, a Greyhound bus—the dog would look normal.

  "Does he have to stare at me like that?" Jack asked, never breaking eye contact with the dog.

  "Like what?"

  He leaned farther away from the mutt and told himself it was caution, not fear. "Like I'm a Scooby Snack."

  Laughter bubbled from the back seat and the sound of

  it was ... good. He didn't want to think about why—so he added it to the already long list of things he wasn't going to think about.

  "Quinn, stop scaring the sheriff." "Who said anything about being scared?" "I'm sure you are, but it's not manly to admit it." "Even mountain men walked a wide path around a bear," he said tightly and ordered himself to ignore the dog still staring at him.

  Scowling, he flicked her a glance, while listening to the dog, whose grumbling sounded sort of like thunder from a cloud hovering three feet over your head. In the yellow glow of the fog lamps lining the street, the blond streaks in Carol's hair shone with a golden light.

  She was tall and he knew she couldn't have been too comfortable in the back seat of a Mustang. But she didn't seem to mind while sitting beside the baby. Jack could understand that. Babies tended to bring out the deepest emotions in people—good or, as he'd seen too often on the force, bad. She kept glancing at the baby, as if half-expecting it to disappear from the car seat. The whole time they'd wandered the aisles in the twenty-four-hour grocery store, she'd carried the little thing carefully—like you would a ticking time bomb. He couldn't decide if she was inexperienced with kids, worried about becoming too attached, or expecting the missing mother to come tearing into the store to reclaim her child.

  That last one probably wasn't an issue. In his experience, women who abandoned their babies didn't have a change of heart and instantly become Mother Teresa. They went on about their lives, trusting that strangers would give their child what they couldn't—or wouldn't. Jack couldn't quite figure Carol Baker out. Not many people would have reacted so emotionally to the situation.

  Most would have taken the baby to the hospital, or called the cops and then walked away—gone back to their own lives. But Carol had not only stayed with the child, but when push came to shove, she'd agreed to take the baby in.

  Why?

  Even as that one single word whispered through his mind, he told himself to back off. To put aside the old instinct to pry into motivations. He wasn't a cop any-more. He'd left that world behind—along with his old life. Now was what mattered. And now he had a temporary job in the town where he'd grown up, his old room at his mother's house, a woman with Santa on her shirt in his back seat, and an abandoned baby to investigate. Not to mention the bear.

  "So where do you live?" He practically growled the question and even he winced at his tone. She didn't seem to notice.

  "Off North Pole, left on Jingle Bell Way."

  Jack sighed.

  "I heard that," she said. "What's wrong?"

  "Just this town," he admitted as the light turned green and he stepped on the gas. "Christmas—everywhere you look Christmas in spring, summer, and fall." He shook his head and steered the car into a left-turn bay. "In LA, I'd always hear people complaining about how retailers started hawking Christmas earlier and earlier every year." He glanced at the blinking, electric Frosty the Snowman out in front of Elves' Hardware and choked out a laugh. "But here in la-la land, we get it day in and day out."

  "I like Christmas," she said.

  "Christmas is hard enough once a year. All year is a little much for anybody." Especially these days, he

  thought, and then instantly turned his mind away from memories he'd spent the last two years burying.

  He turned left on Jingle Bell Way. "Where's your place?"

  "The Victorian here on the corner."

  "Naturally." He pulled up out front and parked the car at the curb. Studying her house, Jack felt another sigh building, but he squashed it. What would be the point?

  The name of her shop, Christmas Carol's, was just as cutesy as any other business in town. In the dark, it was hard to tell what color the place was, but there were neatly planted gardens lining the sidewalk leading to the front steps and baskets filled with flowers hung from the eaves and dotted the length of the wraparound porch. Strings of multicolored lights outlined the edge of the roof and then twined around the porch columns. A wide, and he assumed, artificial, evergreen wreath studded with bows and ornaments decorated the front door, and electric candles had been left burning in the windows.

  Jesus. She was every bit as bad as every other nut in town.

  "Christmas Carol's" she prompted from the back seat. "Get it?"

  "Yeah," he said, turning off the engine and unbuckling his seatbelt. "I picked right up on that subtlety."

  "Are you always this crabby? Or am I just special?"

  He turned around to look at her and managed to avoid bumping into the dog's nose as he did. "It's the middle of the night. I've been grocery-shopping. I'm driving around with a trained bear sitting in my front seat—"

  "And I appreciate it."

  He kept going. "I spent an hour traipsing around a

  Nativity scene looking for clues to the missing mother of an abandoned baby—"

  Carol frowned at him, and quickly leaned over to cover the baby's ears with her hands. "Don't say that in front of her."

  "What?"

  "A-B-A-N-D-O—"

  "For God's sake, it can't understand what we're saying."

  Carol straightened up and glared at him. Her dog must have picked up on her sudden twist of anger because the damn thing growled again and damned if it didn't sound like another crash of rolling thunder. Jack inched backward. No point in taking chances.

  "She's not an it. And you have no idea what she can and can't understand. People—even babies—know when they're being talked about. They know when they're loved. They know when they've been ... A-B-A-N—oh, forget it." Quickly, carefully, she undid the straps holding the newborn into the car seat, then scooped it up into her arms, tucking the blanket around it. "Doctors tell pregnant women to talk to their bellies, right?"

  A flash of memory zipped through Jack's brain and was gone again in the next heartbeat. He didn't even pause to be grateful. "Yeah. That's for the tone of voice to be heard.
"

  "Then why not just hum? Why talk to them? Babies have ears. They can hear."

  "Sure, but it's like me trying to understand Italian. It's just noise."

  "You don't know that for sure."

  "Neither do you." Jesus, had he just said that? Was he starting to sound like a third-grader? Were they about to get into a rousing chorus of "yes sir, no sir"? Or, "shut

  up, no you shut up"? Good God, what coming back to Christmas had brought him to. 'Tine. Talk to it. Sing to it. Whatever."

  Quinn whined, growled, and took a step forward. Unfortunately, that put one big paw directly on Jack's nuts. Pain exploded through his body and splintered into a fireworks show in his brain. He was pretty sure his eyes were wheeling behind closed lids. "Jesus, get off me." Groaning, he shoved at the damn dog and didn't budge it an inch. Instead, the damn thing stepped down even harder, pushing its face into Jack's and blowing hot dog breath all over him.

  "Quinn, sit down."

  "Not now" Jack managed to choke out through clenched teeth. Breath wheezed in and out of him as he tried to scoot out from under the dog. Christ, if the dog sat on him, he was a dead man.

  "Sorry! Quinn, no"

  Now the dog was getting agitated and that's all he'd need, Jack thought. The dog gets riled and he'd have two of its paws on his nuts and then he'd be looking for a job with the Vienna Boys' Choir. With his left hand, he reached to one side, sprung the door latch, and somehow found a way to roll out from under the dog and onto the street.

  Of course, he landed on a rock that jammed his right knee. So he'd have a limp. At least his nuts would recover. And at the moment, that's all he was concerned with. Kneeling on all fours on the damp street, he took several deep breaths before trusting himself to move. When he did, he swiveled his head and came eyeball to eyeball with the beast.

  "You lousy, no-good son of a—"

  "Not in front of the baby," Carol warned from the

  back seat. "And besides, it wasn't Quinn's fault. You upset me and that upset him."

  The dog was upset?

  "Right." Jack choked out another groan and shook his head as his breathing evened out and the pain subsided into a dull throb he'd probably carry for the rest of his life. "You two were upset. I need a hospital, but that's not important."