Apb: Baby. Julie Miller
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course.”
Lucy sighed with a mixture of longing and regret as the baby’s sweet weight filled her arms and settled against her. “He’s so tiny. How old do you think he is?”
“I’d say a week. Two, tops,” Niall answered from behind her. “Obviously, pediatrics isn’t my area of expertise, but I know enough to handle the basics. I still think he needs to see a pediatric specialist to ensure a clean bill of health. Now what can you tell us about his parents?” Niall stepped aside as she circled the coffee table and sat on the edge of his sofa to hold the baby more securely. She heard a huff of what could be resignation a second before the cushion beside her sank with his weight. When she tumbled toward her tall neighbor at her shifting perch, his hands shot out to balance her shoulder and cradle her forearm that held the baby. “Easy. Don’t let go of him.”
“I couldn’t.”
Niall’s hand remained beneath her arm, making sure of her hold on the infant. His chest pressed against Lucy’s shoulder, and for a split second she was overcome by the normalcy of the family she’d never known and would never have. A mother, a father, a child they shared together. The yearning inside her was almost painful.
Blinking rapidly to dispel the impossible image of the brainy doctor cop and her creating a perfect little baby together, Lucy scooted away to break the contact between her and Niall Watson, although she could still feel that crazily addictive warmth he radiated. “What’s his name?” she asked, craving the information as much as she needed to put space between her and her errant fantasies.
“He didn’t come with an ID,” Niall answered. “He didn’t come with anything. Not even a fresh diaper. If you could answer at least some of my questions—”
“Son.” The older Watson chided the tone in Niall’s voice and offered her a smile. “I nicknamed him Tommy. But that’s just a family name I was using so we could call him something besides ‘little munchkin.’ We were hoping you’d be able to fill in the blanks for us. But I take it you’re not the mother.”
His green eyes were kind, but Lucy still felt the sting of truth. “No. I... I can’t have children of my own.”
“I’m sorry. You seem like a natural with Tommy, too.”
His kind words enabled her to smile back. “Thank you.” But a glance up to the man seated beside her indicated that answers were the only thing that was going to soften that empirical focus zeroed in on her. He was this baby’s champion, and nothing short of the entire truth was going to satisfy him. “I think... Tommy...” She stroked her fingertip over his tiny lips, and they instinctively moved to latch on, even though he was asleep. “I have no idea who the father is. But I think he belongs to my foster daughter, Diana Kozlow.”
Niall’s posture relaxed a fraction, although that stern focus remained. “The woman whose name you kept calling out.”
Lucy nodded. “Technically, she’s my former foster daughter. Diana was with me for six years until she aged out of the system. She’s twenty now. We kept in touch for a year or so. But I lost contact with her after that. She changed her number, changed her job. I had no idea she’d gotten pregnant.” She nodded toward the screwdriver on the coffee table. “I gave that to her in a tool set one Christmas. I guess she broke into my apartment to leave the baby with me. Probably took the twenty I had stashed in my knitting basket. She called me out of the blue yesterday—said she had something she wanted to show me. I invited her for lunch today, but she never came. I tried calling the number she used, but the phone went straight to voice mail.”
She rocked back and forth, ever so subtly, soothing the infant as he began to stir. “I went to my office to look up her most recent address and phone number to make sure I had it right—and discovered she’d left me a pretty disturbing message on my answering machine there. I’ve been out looking for her ever since. One of the neighbors at the last address where I knew her to live said Diana had a boyfriend move in with her about six months ago. She never knew his name, so that was a dead end. Shortly after that they moved to Carmody Street, she thought—”
“Carmody?” The elder Watson muttered a curse under his breath. “That’s not a good part of town. You didn’t go there to look for her by yourself, did you? At the police department, we call that part of town no-man’s-land.”
“I can believe it.” The two men exchanged a grim look. “No one there recognized Diana, and they couldn’t tell me the boyfriend’s name, either. I wasn’t sure where to look after that. How does a young woman just...disappear?” Lucy’s thoughts drifted to all the morbid possibilities that had driven her to search for Diana. “Why wouldn’t she keep Tommy with her? Why wouldn’t she stay at my place with him if she was in trouble?”
“If she’s the mother,” Niall cautioned. “We’d have to blood-type him and run DNA on both mother and son to be certain.”
A DNA test couldn’t tell Lucy what she already knew in her heart. “He looks like her—the shape of his face, the thick dark hair. What color are his eyes?”
Thomas shrugged. “You know, I don’t remem—”
“Brown,” Niall answered.
Lucy glanced up when he reached around her to tuck in the tiny fist that had pushed free of the blanket. She didn’t mind Niall’s unvarnished tone quite so much this time. He’d put his clinical eye for detail to work on doing whatever was best for this baby. “Diana has brown eyes.”
Niall’s startling blue gaze shifted to hers for a moment before he blinked and rose from the couch. He paced to the kitchen archway before turning to ask, “Did you save that message?”
Lucy nodded.
The two men exchanged a suspicious sort of glance before Thomas picked up a notepad and pen from the table beside the recliner. Niall adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose before splaying his fingers at his waist and facing her. “Maybe you’d better tell me more about your friend Diana. And why you thought she might be dead.”
Lucy added another round of quarters to the clothes dryer. “Oops. Sorry, munchkin.”
She quickly apologized for the loud mechanical noise and leaned over the infant fastened into the carrier sitting on top of the dryer. But she needn’t have worried. Tommy was still asleep, his tiny body swaying slightly with the jiggle of the dryer. She smiled, resisting the urge to kiss one of those round apple cheeks, lest she wake him again. He’d fussed and bellowed for nearly an hour upstairs before she remembered the advice she’d once heard from a coworker about tricks to help stubborn babies fall asleep and got the idea to bring Tommy and all his new clothes and supplies down to the basement laundry room to wash them.
Instead of disturbing him again, she opted to pull a blanket dotted with red, blue and yellow trucks from the basket of baby clothes she’d just unloaded and drape the cotton knit over him, securing him in a warm cocoon. Then she picked up the basket and set it on the neighboring dryer to start folding the rest of the light-colored sleepers and towels and undershirts. She was handling more than one problem here. She’d removed the noisy baby from Niall Watson’s apartment so the enigmatic doctor could get some much-needed sleep. Since she had no chair to rock the baby in, she’d found the next best thing down here in the laundry room. And at this time of the morning, before the residents stirred to get ready for church or work, she’d found a quiet place for herself to think without being distracted by hunky neighbors with grabby hands and hard bodies, or caring for the needs of a newborn with too little sleep herself, or worrying about the unanswered calls and cryptic clues surrounding her foster daughter’s disappearance.
When the second load of darker clothes was done in twenty minutes or so, she’d take Tommy back up to Niall Watson’s apartment and sneak back in without waking him. Then she’d have another hour or two to curl up on his stiff leather couch and