Verdict: Daddy. Charlotte Douglas
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stiffened at the thought of what she had to tell Blake, felt Annie jerk in response and forced herself to take a deep breath to relax. “You’re not going to like what I have to say.”
Bo raised his chin from his paws, cocked his ears and turned his head, homing in on the distress in her voice.
His gray eyes bleak, Blake peered at her over the rim of his coffee mug.
To delay delivering bad news, she rose, carried Annie to the crib and tucked her in. Bo followed, turned around three times, then lay beneath the crib. Marissa would have liked to hold the child longer, to appreciate her baby scent and relish the weight of the infant in her arms, but she recognized the folly of growing attached to a baby she might never see again.
Resisting the urge to comfort Blake with a hug, she returned to her chair. No other man she knew would have placed himself in Blake’s position, creating so much trouble for himself for an unknown baby. How had such deep kindness developed in someone who’d received so little of it as a child?
And Blake had always been kind, she reminded herself. She remembered the time in middle school when he’d wiped away her tears after the class bully had teased her for being a skinny runt. Blake had insisted that good things came in small packages, then made her laugh by telling silly jokes. She wished now she could tell him what he wanted to hear.
Instead, squaring her shoulders, she came out with the harsh truth. “There’s no getting around it. You have to give Annie to the authorities. If you don’t, you could face charges.”
“What kind of charges?”
“Serious ones. Interference with custody is a felony offense.”
Obviously undeterred by the dire possibilities, he set his handsome mouth in an unyielding line. “I can’t accept turning her in. There has to be another way.”
She hesitated, not wanting to fan false hopes, but he had to know the facts. “There is a slight possibility you could get her back.”
Hope suffused his face with an appealing light, like a kid who’d just been granted a special wish. How could a man look so mature and yet so boyish at the same time? Women all over Dolphin Bay had to be throwing themselves at his feet, even though he’d insisted earlier in her office that he had no love life.
“How soon could I get her back?” he asked. “Immediately?”
“No.”
“How soon?”
“Maybe a few days…but most likely not at all.”
He slumped in his chair as if resigned to the inevitable. “What do I have to do?”
Sensing his distress and hurting for him, Marissa switched into her objective legal mode, both for his sake and her own. She had to suppress her feelings to prevent them from coloring the facts. “First thing in the morning, you call the Child Protection Investigation Department of the county sheriff’s office. They’ll pick up Annie.”
“What’ll they do with her?”
“Debbie Arnold, my friend who practices family law, promises they’ll put her in a good temporary foster home. She’s agreed to act as the child’s legal representative, pro bono. She’ll make certain that Annie’s well taken care of.”
Blake nodded, so obviously dejected Marissa had to squelch again the urge to hug him and struggled to regain her objectivity. “Debbie thinks she can get you a hearing with Judge Standiford within a couple days.”
Blake’s expression brightened slightly. “And the judge will return Annie to me until she’s adopted?”
“Whoa, not so fast. There’s another aspect we haven’t considered.”
Blake cocked his head. “What?”
“Annie’s mother.”
“The judge can’t give her back to a woman who abandoned her.” Blake looked horrified. “What if the mother does it again?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Sounds cut-and-dried to me,” he said grimly. “Obviously, her mother didn’t want her.”
“It appears so,” Marissa agreed, “but child protection investigators will have to locate the mother. First, because abandoning her child is a criminal offense—”
“Locked up, she couldn’t have Annie back,” Blake said with clear satisfaction.
“Although abandonment is a third-degree felony, women who abandon their children aren’t always sent to jail,” Marissa said. “The court considers all the circumstances. Annie’s mother may have had a very good, even if misguided, reason for leaving her baby on your porch.”
“But if Annie’s placed in foster care, I have a shot at getting temporary custody?”
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