The Baby Wore a Badge Page 16

  He’d gone from being afraid that what he was feeling for Calista was only because he was in a tailspin over Maggie’s death to knowing that he wasn’t on the rebound. What he was feeling for this perky, upbeat, resourceful, intelligent woman had absolutely nothing to do with Maggie or rebounds. And as for having anything to do with Marlie, the connection there was only the relief he felt in knowing that Calista loved the baby.

  Damn, but for such a simple life, his had gotten way too complicated, he thought.

  “Maybe I want to go through with this,” he told her quietly.

  “You want to go through with this?” she echoed, even as she tried to wrap her head about this. There had to be a joke here somewhere.

  Jake took a breath. He’d put it out there. There was no backing off now, not after he’d just proposed in effect. “That’s what I said.”

  She heard the words, but the intent just wasn’t sinking in. Not on any level that was actually penetrating her brain.

  “You want to marry me?”

  It was a question, not a statement, so he answered it as such, simply.

  “Yes, I want to marry you.”

  “But why?” she pressed. “There’s no need to pretend anymore.”

  Maybe it would go over better if he continued to act as if there was a need for them to go through this, although he had no idea why she was acting like this. “Maggie’s parents are expecting to attend a wedding. They’re expecting to see us get married. If we renege on that, they might renege on the rest of it.”

  Okay, so now it was all making some sense. Why hadn’t he admitted to this in the first place? “So you are marrying me because you want to keep Marlie.”

  Okay, he thought, enough bantering and waltzing around. A joke was a joke, but he was dead serious. It was time to take a chance and call a spade a spade and not some fancy, expensive garden tool.

  “I’m marrying you because I want to keep you.” That didn’t come out right, he thought. “I mean— Oh hell, you know what I mean.”

  Frustrated, he pulled over to the side of the road and turned off the ignition key. He didn’t want to have a car accident while he was trying to set the course for the rest of his life—and hopefully hers.

  “Don’t you know me well enough by now to know that I wouldn’t have agreed to some cooked-up, phony marriage-on-paper-only scenario to keep Marlie, much as I love the kid? Nothing good can come out of perpetuating a lie. The truth has an ugly way of surfacing when you least expect it.”

  She was still confused. “But when I volunteered to marry you so you could keep Marlie, you acted like you thought it was a good idea.”

  “Seemed like the easier way to go at the time,” he confessed. “I knew that arguing with you was as pointless as a pigeon trying to fly against the wind. Best-case scenario, arguing with you would just send me spinning off into circles.”

  “Okay, that explains earlier,” she said slowly, doing her best to untangle the various skeins of this so-called proposal of marriage. “But you just went along with it in front of the O’Sheas.”

  “I know.”

  She could only come to one conclusion, a conclusion that put her at risk and left her utterly vulnerable, especially if it turned out to be wrong. But she had to ask him.

  “Are you—?” She couldn’t bring herself to finish the question, to ask him if he was really asking her to marry him.

  “Yes,” Jake finally said as the silence threatened to drag on forever.

  She felt as if she’d somehow slipped into an alternate universe without noticing it. “You’re actually asking me to marry you?”

  “That’s usually what the head couple does at a wedding,” he agreed. “They get married.”

  Calista searched his face, waiting for him to begin laughing. He didn’t. “Did I miss the part where you did the actual asking?” she finally asked.

  “The question—and your answer—were kind of taken for granted when you said you would be willing to marry me,” he confessed.

  “I was agreeing to a marriage of convenience and that is not the same thing as saying I’d marry you after you proposed to me.” She could feel her heart accelerating in anticipation as she waited for him to either confirm or deny the proposal he seemed to think he had tendered.

  Jake debated starting the car again and revisiting this topic later, with a fresh dose of courage. But he couldn’t just start up the car and drive away from this. Not really. It had to be ironed out first.

  He never thought he’d love someone else again after Maggie broke his heart, not once but twice. The first time when she turned down his proposal, the second when she died on him. At the end, he’d loved Maggie a great deal.

  But he loved Calista differently and quite possibly, in the absolute sense, perhaps even more than he had loved Maggie. Because Calista loved him back.

  He looked at Calista for a long moment, struggling to pull his thoughts together, wanting to get this right because in all likelihood, although Calista was a forgiving person, he had just one shot at this. And if it fell apart on him…

  He wasn’t going to allow that to happen. A woman, he thought, deserved to hear a decent marriage proposal. And Calista deserved everything he could give her and so much more. Because she had given him back his identity, his sense of hope and pulled his world together into a neat little package, allowing him to make sense of things again. Allowing him to feel again.

  He owed her a great deal. More than he could ever possibly hope to repay. But he intended to try. If he was lucky, it would only take the rest of his life.

  “I love you.”

  Calista’s eyes widened and then crinkled into a pleased smile. “Wow, talk about a disarming opening line,” she cried appreciatively.

  So far so good. Ever so lightly, he skimmed his fingertips along her cheek. Silently telling her things. And then Jake pushed forward.

  “And I want, selfishly maybe, to be able to keep, for as long as I can, all the joy you’ve brought into my life. I figure I’ve got a better shot of doing that if we get married and I can legitimately keep you close. So yes, to answer your question from the beginning of this conversation, I am asking you to marry me. Not to keep Marlie in my life, but to keep you in my life. Because without you, everything else just falls apart, including me. Marry me, Calista. Marry me and keep my world together.”

  She struggled to keep a straight face as she asked, “So I’m what, superglue?”

  “You’re anything you want to be as long as you’re mine,” he told her.

  She took a breath, not wanting to blurt out her answer, or shout it out, either. She didn’t need to think about it, but she didn’t want him thinking that she was so easily gotten. Didn’t want him worrying somewhere down the line that she’d gotten swept up in the moment and agreed to something that she was apt to regret once she came to her senses.

  Deep in her heart, she already knew that agreeing to marry him was never going to be something she would change her mind about.

  She was being much too quiet, Jake thought. That worried him. Deeply. He’d never known her to be quiet. Was that a bad sign, then? Was she ultimately trying to find the words that would let him down easy? She needn’t bother. There were no such words.

  He’d already made up his mind that that was going to be impossible. He wasn’t going to let her say no. Now that his heart was made up, he was going to find a way to get her to say yes, even if he had to reinvent himself a dozen times a day until she finally found a version of him she wanted to remain with and that she liked.

  “You’re not saying anything,” he finally said, unable to wait any longer.

  And then hope rose as he watched a smile creep into her eyes. “That’s because I’m giving it to the count of ten.”

  “Ten?” The woman certainly believed in maintaining an air of mystery. “Why?”

  “So you don’t think my answer is just a knee-jerk reaction.”

  “Oh.” He nodded as if that actually made
sense. A lifetime of acting as if he understood the way her mind worked was standing in front of him and he couldn’t be happier. “What number are you up to?”

  “Nine.”

  One more to go. “I had no idea that you counted that slowly.”

  “I don’t usually.” She couldn’t hold her grin back a second longer. “Okay, ten,” she announced. And then the grin turned into a smile. The most beautiful smile he’d ever seen. To say her smile would have lit up a room would have definitely underdescribed her wattage power. It was the kind of smile that could light up whole cities at a time.

  And it was aimed at him.

  Jake realized that he’d been holding his breath, waiting. Hoping. Now that he’d made up his mind and had given himself permission to love again, there was nothing he wanted more than to have her agree to marry him. “And your answer is?”

  Calista feigned indecision and confusion. “Could I hear the question again, please?”

  He played along and framed the question properly. “Calista Clifton, will you marry me?”

  Enough of this hard-to-get stuff. “Yes,” she cried. “Oh, yes!”

  “Good answer,” he told her as a wave of sunshine spread throughout his soul.

  “Just ‘good’?” she asked innocently.

  Taking advantage of the fact that Marlie was sleeping in the rear of the car and that he’d stopped the vehicle to have this conversation with Calista in the first place, Jake gave in to the very strong urge that he’d been grappling with.

  He pulled Calista into his arms and just before he kissed the woman who’d taken possession of his heart, he said, “I’m better at showing than talking.”

  And he certainly was.

  Special thanks and acknowledgment to Marie Ferrarella for her contribution to the Montana Mavericks continuity.

  ISBN: 978-1-4592-0930-5

  THE BABY WORE A BADGE

  Copyright © 2011 by Harlequin Books S.A.

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  °°Forever, Texas

  *Cavanaugh Justice

  †The Doctors Pulaski

  ~Kate’s Boys

  ††The Fortunes of Texas: Return to Red Rock

  ¤¤The Baby Chase

  ¶Matchmaking Mamas

  °The Fortunes of Texas: Lost…and Found

  ‡Montana Mavericks: The Texans are Coming!