Calista said with enthusiasm as she interrupted him.
Jake stopped, shifting his daughter to his other side. It was uncanny how Marlie always picked the wrong time to fuss. He looked at the young woman his sister had selected. Because he hadn’t finished giving her the background information, he wasn’t sure just what she was saying yes to.
“What?”
“Yes,” Calista repeated with the same smiling, sunny enthusiasm.
“Yes?” He hadn’t really even gotten into his sales pitch yet, something that made him feel decidedly awkward because he wasn’t accustomed to asking for anything, even something he had every intention of paying for. But this eleven-pound bundle in his arms had all the makings of being his own personal Waterloo.
Calista smiled. “Yes, I can be available for babysitting once or twice a week,” she told him. “Or more often if the need arises.” Her schedule was filled to overflowing, but she could find a way to make it work. She was utterly determined.
Having taken the job, Calista bit her lower lip, hesitating for a moment, wondering if she should say anything. The next moment she decided that if it was her in Jake’s present position, she would appreciate being told.
She nodded at Jake’s daughter. “Um, the baby—Marlie, is it?”
“That’s right. Marlie,” he confirmed. He wasn’t all that crazy about the name. Had it been up to him, he would have named her something a little less fancy, but Maggie hadn’t asked for his input in that. Maggie had been very specific about what she’d wanted—and didn’t want—from him.
“Marlie just spat up on your shoulder,” Calista told him.
“What?” He glanced down, embarrassed rather than annoyed.
“Here, let me take her,” Calista offered. The next moment, she was very competently taking the baby into her own arms, drawing the infant away from the scene of the crime.
Even with his limited view, he could see that his daughter had spat up about a fourth of her last meal on the front—and shoulder—of his shirt. That left him with exactly one shirt that hadn’t been christened with recycled baby food and/or formula.
He bit off the oath that automatically rose to his lips. He was still in training when it came down to that. But he was getting there.
Chapter Two
Calista didn’t need to be a mind reader to figure out what the man standing in front of her with the newly stained shirt was thinking. When Erin called to ask about her availability to babysit occasionally in the evening, Jake’s sister had given her a very brief summary of his present situation, including how he’d come to this point.
Although Erin hadn’t gone into any specific detail, she assumed that Jake and Marlie’s mother had been lovers, but that nothing formal had transpired, other than his name appearing on the birth certificate, which gave him legal guardianship to the infant.
However, all that was not any real business of hers. What she felt was her business was that Jake was obviously going to need all the help he could get to facilitate his getting accustomed to this brave new world of midnight feedings, formula runs and ever-increasing pile of stained shirts.
For starters, she thought, she could tell him how to deal with the last.
“If you give me your shirt, I can show you how to treat it,” she said.
He looked at her, not quite sure what she was offering to do. “Treat it to what?”
Calista pressed her lips together, struggling not to laugh. “Not to something, for something. I can help you get rid of that stain,” she explained. “Especially if I can get to it before it has a chance to really set in. Timing’s important when it comes to things like that.”
She could tell by his expression that he felt as if he was navigating in strange, uncharted waters. Most men, like her brothers, weren’t into everyday, mundane complications. Clean clothes were a given, not something you needed to strive for.
And then she saw Jake shrug and then begin to unbutton his shirt.
She stared at him, stunned as she watched the shirt parting down the center of his chest. Her mouth turned to cotton. “What are you doing?”
His eyes narrowed in slight confusion. “I’m doing what you told me. You did say you wanted the shirt sooner than later, right?”
“Right,” Calista murmured, her voice barely audible above a hushed whisper. Her soft brown eyes widened in wonder. She found it hard to tear them away from Jake’s unveiling.
The man had rock-solid biceps and forearms. As for his abdomen, it looked as if it had been carefully sculptured by some divine artistic hand. The last time she’d seen a torso half as good, it had been in a photograph of one of the statues presently on display in a New York museum.
Having stripped off his shirt, Jake now held it out to Calista, exchanging the stained article of clothing for his daughter. As he nestled the infant against his chest, he couldn’t help noting the somewhat dazed expression on the young woman’s face. She was staring at him with a trace of disbelief in her wide eyes. Eyes, he noted, the color of warm chocolate.
“Something wrong?”
Calista blinked, then lowered her eyes. Idiot, she upbraided herself.
“No, nothing’s wrong,” she assured Jake a little too quickly. And then she added, “I’m just glad that Marlie didn’t spit up on your jeans.”
“Oh.” Wasn’t he supposed to give her the shirt now? “I thought you said it was better to work on a stain before it sets in, whatever that means.”
If there were some kind of ritual to follow when it came to laundry, he hadn’t a clue. He just threw everything in together and hoped for the best. Most of the time it worked. But that was before Marlie had come into his life.
Calista realized that she was staring at him again and tore her eyes away, annoyed with herself. She was acting like some gawky juvenile, not like a twenty-two-year-old college graduate who fully intended to make her mark on the world.
“Right, I did.” She focused her attention on the shirt in her hand and not on the man who’d been wearing it.
Whose warmth, she realized, she could still detect in the shirt’s material. She felt her stomach tightening even more.
“Do you know if your sister has any lemon juice? Never mind,” she negated her question in the next breath. “I’ll go ask her.”
And with that, she quickly left the room in search of Erin—as well as a couple of private minutes to herself. She needed to decelerate the rate of her pulse. which had gone into double time and was, even now, threatening to launch into triple time.
Calista found Erin at the front door, just about to leave to meet her husband. Jake’s sister stopped when she saw her and then looked at the shirt she was holding in her hand.
“Boy—” Erin laughed “—I guess Jake
