Santa's Seven-Day Baby Tutorial. Meg Maxwell
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“I might have done the finishing. I love working on baby furniture. I have a special weakness for infants. The past couple of months I’ve been helping to care for the Sanderson triplets. Their parents have three young ones and now three babies.”
“Must be a noisy house. It’s quiet here,” he said, glancing around. From his expression, she could see that he appreciated the quiet and the land. The Amish community stretched for miles in this rural area, and Anna could barely see the roof of her aenti and onkel’s house in the near distance. Sometimes she loved the solitude, when it was just her and her thoughts and her books. But other times, she yearned for conversations like this one, where she’d hear things she’d only read about.
“Ja. I live alone. My parents are gone. It’s just me now. Do you live in Grass Creek?” She wanted to know everything about him. A glance at his left hand told her he wasn’t married. She wondered if he had a girlfriend. Or a fiancée. Sex before marriage was forbidden in her community, but it wasn’t in his world. Her thoughts traveled in a direction that made her toes tingle and her cheeks flame. His hard chest, flat stomach and muscles were obvious through the shirt he wore.
“Next door, in Houston,” he said, reminding her that she’d asked a question and shouldn’t be ogling the man. “In a skyscraper condo on the thirty-second floor.”
She sighed again, this time inwardly. He lived in the sky and chased bad guys for a living. He was unlike anyone she knew. Anyone she’d ever know...here. But he was like her, too. He had close family he didn’t know—his twin brother. Just like she had close family she didn’t know, her cousin Mara. She wished she could talk to him more about that, over coffee. But she couldn’t exactly invite the man inside her home. His car had been parked by her barn long enough that someone must have spotted it. She had no doubt they were being watched by the curious and the worried.
Ignore them, she told herself. This gorgeous specimen of a man is here, right now, so talk to him while you can.
“The thirty-second floor,” she said, imagining being in a building that high up, looking out on the lights of a city like Houston. “That sounds wonderful. I’ve always dreamed of seeing the world outside this village, outside of Grass Creek. My aunt, Sadie’s mother, thinks I should take my long-put-off rumspringa—experience life as an Englisher—so I can commit or not to the faith.”
“Why don’t you?” he asked.
Before she could respond, one of the calves mooed and she realized she still had one more calf to feed. She could stand here and talk to the agent all day. Stare at the agent all day. But why prolong this? He would leave any minute now and she would never see him again unless she happened to cross his path at the Amish market. Fanciful Anna needed to be realistic, as her aenti and onkel always said. “I’d better feed the little guy or he’ll come charging. Which is good—he’s in perfect health now and ready to go home.”
The agent nodded—and held her gaze a beat longer than the usual. She wasn’t imagining his attraction to her, coveralls and paint stains and calf poop and all. This interaction with the agent would sustain her a good long time. No matter how unsettled she might be feeling about her life and what she wanted, her thoughts were her own and now they’d be filled with this man.
“And I’d better get Sparkles back,” he said. “Thank you again for your help. You handled the situation very kindly.”
Neither of them moved.
She glanced at Sparkles in his cage. Brought together by a black-and-white guinea pig, she thought with a smile. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to cover the cage from prying eyes.”
He nodded and she found a large cloth. “Merry Christmas, sweet Sparkles,” she said to the critter, then covered the cage. He took it in his right hand, gave her something of a smile and then held the cage in front of him as he walked to his car. She stood in the doorway of the barn, watching him go. Wishing he could stay. He quickly put the cage in the back, then glanced toward her and held up a hand.
She held up hers. Then he got inside and drove back up the dirt road, leaving her strangely bereft.
Any moment now, her entire village would descend on her, curious about what the Englisher wanted with them. She would say it had to do with a missing pet and she’d explain that none of the villagers was missing a pet. Not the truth, exactly, but not a lie.
She watched the agent’s car disappear up the long drive, then she closed her eyes to commit everything about him to memory.
* * *
After dropping off Sparkles with the boss’s relieved wife, Colt was officially on vacation. The muscles in his shoulders relaxed just a bit. He stood in front of the world map in his living room and tried to settle on a destination. Europe? Asia? Stick closer to home? Someplace warm like the Florida Keys, maybe.
He couldn’t decide because he was distracted. And not by the last case or the deceitful woman who’d managed to con him.
But by Anna Miller. The Amish woman. Her inquisitive pale brown eyes and pink-red lips, which were unadorned. The long blond braid that fell down past her shoulders almost to her waist. Her curiosity. The way she’d listened so intently.
His intercom system buzzed, jarring him out of his thoughts. His doorman informed him his sister and her husband were on their way up. That was weird. Cathy and Chris lived just a few miles away and weren’t the “stop by” kind of people. The parents of seven-month-old twins, they were regimented to a fault—they planned, made lists and scheduled their lives around sleep times.
The doorbell rang and he opened the door; his sister wheeled in the twins in their double stroller, while her husband carried a small suitcase and a huge tote bag. The two of them looked harried. Thirty-year-old Cathy seemed on the verge of tears, and Chris looked exhausted, like he’d been up all night with babies. Probably had been.
“Remember when we spoke this morning, you mentioned you hadn’t picked a vacation destination yet and had no tickets booked anywhere?” Cathy asked, a small glob of what looked and smelled like peach puree on her shoulder.
He narrowed his eyes at her. “I remember.”
“Our nanny just canceled on us!” Cathy said, tears glistening in her eyes. “She had the dates of our cruise wrong and now she can’t watch the twins for the week. She’s wonderful—not just a neighbor we’ve known for years, but a loving, fun grandmother with so much experience.”
Oh, God. He was beginning to see where this was going.
“We haven’t been away from the boys in seven months,” Cathy said. “The cruise is our Christmas present to each other and we board in three hours. We’ll have to cancel unless...”
He stared at Cathy. He stared at Chris.
No. No, no. This couldn’t be happening. He loved his nephews, but his experience at babysitting had been limited to an hour here and there while visiting so his sister could get some treadmill time or watch a TV show and his brother-in-law could tinker with his car. Watching the twins in their family room, all baby-proofed and set up with foam pads and crawling areas and toys, when their parents were screaming distance away, was a piece of cake.
But Cathy was asking him to babysit two seven-month-olds for an entire week.
It was almost funny.
“Pleeeease,” Cathy begged.
“Please. God, please,” his brother-in-law added.
Colt’s stomach twisted. He glanced at Noah on the left side of the stroller. The very cute tyke was chewing some kind of cloth-like book with pictures of monkeys. Nathaniel, equally adorable on the right, was picking up what looked like Cheerios from the tray table and examining them. He flung one and giggled.
Cathy stepped in front of the stroller, blocking them and their criminal ways. “It’s just seven days, Colt. You’ll still have a solid week left of your vacation to recuperate.”
Just seven days. Just