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“Show me. Please,” he added.
“Just act naturally.”
“Easy for you to say,” he muttered.
“Here…” Jessica bent down to lift Blue in her arms, propping the little girl on one hip. “Like this.”
“That’s a girly way to hold a kid,” Curt scoffed.
She raised an eyebrow at his tone of voice. “Oh, so now you’re the expert?”
“Here.” He took Blue from her and after an awkward moment or two, shifted his daughter so that she was perched atop his shoulders.
“Giddeeup horsey!” Blue shrieked, digging her heels into his chest.
“Be careful she doesn’t use your hair as the horsie’s reins,” Jessica warned him.
“It’s not long enough,” he replied, clearly not concerned.
He was right. But since his hair wasn’t long enough for her to take handfuls of, Blue instead grabbed hold of his ears.
“No grabbing of ears,” he ordered, wincing slightly. “Do you read me, young lady?”
“Yessir.” She tried to salute and in doing so almost fell off his shoulders. Lowering her, he gingerly propped her against one shoulder and held her in the crook of his left arm.
“Gotta go potty!” Blue loudly announced, whereupon he hastily lowered her to the floor as if she were radioactive.
“Need any help?” Jessica inquired, trying not to laugh.
“Who are you asking, Blue or me?” Curt said.
“Both of you.”
“Blue can go to the bathroom on her own, thank God. The cabinets in there are kid proofed, too.”
Jessica was pleased to note that he still kept a watchful eye toward the open bathroom door down the hallway.
During Blue’s absence, Jessica thought this might be a good time to address the issue of emotions. “Blue needs to know that you’ll love her no matter what, not just when she’s all cleaned up or when she’s a good girl. Remember that your child will look to you as a model of how to express emotions, so you need to make a point of ex pressing them honestly.”
Emotions weren’t some thing a marine needed. In fact, in his mind they did nothing but get in the way. As for honesty, he didn’t think Jessie really wanted him ex pressing his inner panic. No, giving in to fear never accomplished anything in his view.
“Blue needs to see signs of your love and affection,” Jessica continued. “Various ways of doing that are giving her hugs and kisses to congratulate her when she completes a difficult task, or to console her when she cries, or to comfort her when some thing hurts.”
“Is that what your father did for you?”
His question caught her by surprise. “No,” she quietly replied. “Quite the opposite.”
“Yet you seem to have turned out okay,” Curt pointed out.
“Appearances are deceiving.”
“So basically you’re telling me that if I don’t hug her at just the right time she’ll be screwed up for life? Gee, no pressure there.”
“I thought marines were used to dealing with pressure,” Jessica countered.
“Yeah, well, I still don’t think pa renting should be so complicated,” Curt grumbled.
“Stick around, soldier. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” Jessica drawled with a grin.
Sucker punched. That’s how Curt felt. From nothing more than Jessie’s unexpectedly saucy smile. Ambushed by a woman with eyes so green they put sunlit leaves to shame.
Jeez, he was getting down right poetic here. A bad sign.
Or was it? Since when had being with an attractive woman been a crime? Since he’d become a dad probably.
But this was the best of both worlds. In Jessie he had a woman he was finding increasingly attractive, and a woman who knew how to take care of his daughter.
“I’s done,” Blue proudly announced from the bathroom. “I’s flushing now.”
“I’ve tried correcting Blue’s grammar,” Curt told Jessie, not wanting Jessie the Brain to think his kid was stupid.
“You don’t need to worry or to correct her each time. Instead you could just repeat the words yourself, perhaps say I am done cleaning the kitchen, so she’ll hear for herself how the words go together. It’s a natural progression as two- and three-year-olds start stringing words together, often mimicking what you say.”
“One of the reasons I now watch what I say around her,” Curt admitted.
“Good idea,” she replied.
Was the sunlight coming in through the window playing tricks or had that been a flash of at traction he’d just seen in her eyes? Curt wondered. Maybe Jessie had decided to stop holding a grudge against whatever it was he’d done back in high school.
Or maybe he was just imagining things.
He’d been on his own for so long that the thought of flirting with a pretty woman was enough to make his blood flow a little faster. This could get interesting, he decided with a sense of anticipation.
While Blue sat on the living room floor and played with her toys—an eclectic collection of trucks, dolls, and a well-worn teddy bear—Jessica put Curt through his paces.
“First things first,” she briskly told Curt. “Let’s begin with emergency first aid. How much do you know?”
“Enough to give you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,” he drawled.
This sudden flash of the bad boy she’d known in high school caught Jessica by surprise. She’d let her guard down a bit and he’d snuck up on her with that comment.
Studying him provided suspiciously few clues as to what he was thinking. The teenage girl she’d been would have become flustered by his intense perusal of her mouth, but the woman she’d become ignored his provocative behavior.
Or tried to. She quizzed him on various possible scenarios that would require immediate medical attention. He had a pretty good basic knowledge, but needed specifics for pediatric care. And all the while her wayward heart kept beating a little faster. It certainly wasn’t because she found the topic of a first-aid check list exciting. No, it was because he’d given her a certain kind of look, the kind a man gave a woman he was interested in.
Things got worse when she handed him a refrigerator magnet with the toll-free number of the Poison Control Center on it. His fingers brushed hers and the resulting tingle of awareness traveled up her arm. A simple touch, a familiar reaction—but one she hadn’t experienced since her high school days.
Oh, there had been men in her life since then. And she’d felt at traction before. But not this spine-tingling current accompanied by a deep-felt recognition that this person’s touch felt right and deliciously wicked at the same time.
Flustered, she glanced down to consult her master list. “Uh, the next item on the agenda is mealtime.”
“Is there a reason we’ve gone from emergency first aid to food? Makes me think you’ve tasted my cooking,” Curt noted wryly.
It was hard not to smile. “What are you feeding Blue?”
“Candy and potato chips,” he replied mockingly.
At her startled look, he added, “What? That’s what you’re expecting, isn’t it? For me to fail.”
“That’s not true.”
“No? Then why are you treating me as if I were some raw recruit who didn’t know my…foot from a hole in the wall?”
“I’m sorry if you don’t approve of my teaching style,” she said stiffly. “I’m no expert at educating adults.”
“And I’m no expert at taking orders from a civilian, but you don’t see me complaining.”
“That’s because you’re the one who needs my help.”
“And you’re the one who offered that help,” he reminded her.
Offered? Pressed into duty was a more accurate description but she wasn’t about to quibble over se man tics. “I’m trying to help you, but it would be easier if you weren’t so stubborn and didn’t have such an attitude.”
“I’m not the one with the attitude, you are.”
“I am not,” she vehemently denied.
“Are so,” he taunted her.
“Am not!”
“Am not, am so, am not, am so, am not, am so,” Blue said in a singsong voice.
Startled at hearing herself mimicked, Jessica had to laugh. “We did sound like a couple of three-year-olds,” she noted ruefully.
“I am three,” Blue proudly stated, holding up three fingers. “This old.”
Jessica smiled down at her. The little girl was such a sweetie. “You certainly are.”
“What did you do to G.I. Joe?” Curt’s voice reflected his dismay.
“I made him pretty.” Blue held the action figure up to show off the large flowered hat she’d put on it.
“G.I. Joe doesn’t wear flowers,” Curt stated with emphatic outrage. “All the other G.I. Joes would laugh at him. Put his helmet back on.”
Blue looked at her father uncertainly before her big brown eyes slowly filled with tears.
“Jeeez.” Curt exhaled as if someone had just stomped on his foot, or maybe even his heart. “No crying. Big girls don’t cry.”
“Sure they do,” Jessica inserted. “It’s okay to feel sad, honey.” She scooped the little girl in her arms. “I think that G.I. Joe looks great in that hat.”
Blue sniffed and hid her face in Jessica’s neck. Which allowed Jessica to give Curt a look that would have scorched steel.
“Okay, big girls cry,” he allowed. “Some times. But a marine’s daughter doesn’t cry.” He reached over to awkwardly pat Blue once on the back. “You’re a marine kid now and you can…” He’d been about to say chew nails, but then he reconsidered the wisdom of that, knowing how Blue tended to take everything he said literally. “And you’re even more powerful than G.I. Joe. You’re tougher than other kids.”
Her tears stopped, and she held out her arms for Curt.
He took her, and his embrace was easier now than it had been when Jessica had first walked into the apartment. A second later Blue was giggling at Curt’s Three Stooges im per so nation. Or maybe he was making Jim Carrey-like funny faces. Whatever, it made Blue laugh.
“Come on, let’s show Jessie how you can put away some of these toys.” Lowering Blue, he pointed to the pile of toys his daughter had strewn around the living-room floor. “One, two, three, four,” he said in a softer version of a drill sergeant’s voice. “Get those toys off Daddy’s floor. Left, right, left, right. Move those trucks right out of sight.”
Jessica waited until later that afternoon, when Blue had finally tired herself out and fallen asleep to approach Curt on the subject of toughness.
“I’m amazed how she’s able to keep going as long as she does,” Curt noted from the doorway to Blue’s bedroom. His daughter was curled up on the bed, with her right arm around her teddy bear. G.I. Joe, minus the flowery hat, sat on her bedside table. “She was supposed to begin her nap at fourteen hundred hours. That was thirty minutes ago.”
Re turning to the living room with him, Jessica said, “Some times you have to be flexible. And you have to remember that she’s barely three years old. She’s a little girl, not a marine. A little girl who’s recently lost her mother.”
“I’m aware of that,” he said stiffly.
“Does Blue ever talk about her mother, about missing her?”
“She told me her mother is ‘upstairs in heaven’ and asked me if that made me sad.”
“And what did you tell her? That marines don’t get sad?”
He glared at her. He hadn’t put it exactly like that, but pretty close.
Jessica sighed, as if Curt’s gaffe was to be expected. “That might explain why she’s being so stoic about things. About not crying, about wanting to behave and not do anything wrong.”
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