The Detective's 8 Lb, 10 Oz Surprise. Meg Maxwell

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СКАЧАТЬ forty-five minutes now. Nick had looked in on him eleven times. Still breathing: check.

      There at all and not a figment of his imagination or some crazy dream: check.

      Keeping him too occupied to fully process that Georgia was pregnant with his child: check.

      The moment he stepped back into the living room, the uneasy feeling hit him in the chest, in his throat, in his head. Again. There was a baby in his bedroom, a tiny human he was responsible for. Every time he sat down and tried to focus on how to go about finding Timmy’s mother, he would hear a cry or a sound and leap up like a lunatic and rush into the bedroom and find Timmy exactly as he’d been four minutes ago and four minutes before that: sleeping peacefully.

      Everything inside him was on red alert for the baby to start crying or fussing. According to the salesclerk at Baby Center, if Timmy cried, Nick should eye or feel the diaper. Check for diaper rash. Calculate last feeding time and decide if the baby is hungry. If the baby is fed, changed, rash-free and still fussing, pick him up for a burp. If he’s still fussy, cradle him upright against you and hum softly.

      Nick wasn’t a hummer. He did not hum.

      After he’d left the station, left Georgia just standing there like a jerk, he had buckled Timmy in the backseat of his car, driven over to the Blue Gulch Clinic and had Timmy checked over. Perfectly healthy and deemed to be five weeks old. Since Nick wasn’t the baby’s legal guardian, he couldn’t authorize a DNA sample. He’d been hoping he could in order to check that database to possibly find a biological match between the baby and someone he’d arrested—even just as a start. But he’d have to dig through his records and try to figure out some connection between a recently pregnant woman and a case he’d worked. He’d do some investigating, find out someone had a baby five weeks ago named Timothy, and voilà.

      Between now and voilà, he had a baby to take care of. He’d barely made it through the past few hours. How would he get through an entire seven days?

      I’ll take care of him for the week. I could use the on-the-job training.

      He really was almost grateful that he had a very immediate problem on his hands—finding out who Timmy’s mother was—so that he couldn’t focus on Georgia and her bombshell. Or her job request.

      After the clinic he’d driven over to the Baby Center two towns over and asked that helpful clerk for the essentials. A few hundred dollars later, Nick had a few footed onesies, burp cloths, a couple of extra blankets, a big pack of diapers, two huge containers of baby wipes, a baby monitor, a baby swing and a tiny lullaby player that hooked over the side of the basinet. When he found Timmy’s mother, he’d let her keep all the stuff if she needed it, or donate it if she didn’t. And he would find her—well before the seven-day deadline. He had to reunite mother and child, for both their own good. And for his.

      He sat back down at his dining room table with five boxes of case files, representing the past two years as a detective on the Blue Gulch police force, in front of him. Chief McTiernan was way behind the times in shifting to digital records. So somewhere in these files—police reports, notes and documents from various agencies—was the key to Timmy’s mother. Nick had made a good impression on someone, someone who’d entrusted him with a five-week-old baby. Someone related to a suspect? A perp? A witness? Someone who was a suspect, a perp, a witness?

      He finished reading through his last case file—solved a few days ago in less than two hours, almost a record. Bentley, the miniature greyhound that Harriet Culver had adopted from the animal shelter last week, had been dognapped from where she’d left him tied to a pole near Hurley’s Homestyle Kitchen while she ran in to pick up a to-go order. An hour later, his investigation led him to the dugout at the middle school baseball field, where eleven-year-old Jason Pullman was hiding with Bentley and teaching him how to play fetch. Apparently, his parents wouldn’t let him have a dog, and the greyhound had been sitting there all alone, so... Harriet had settled on the tearful, remorseful Jason doing two weeks of community service by walking Bentley every day after school, if he wanted. He wanted. Case closed.

      Nick liked cases like that. Cases with happy endings. Cases without bodies. Without hospital records.

      Okay, so someone on the Culver case liked how he’d handled the dognapping and thought he’d be a good babysitter for a week? He looked through the list of witnesses. He’d spoken to the owners of businesses near where Harriet had tied up Bentley. Clyde Heff of Clyde’s Burgertopia. Sau Lan of Sau Lan’s Noodle Shop. The manager of the general store. The yoga studio. Then he’d forced himself into Hurley’s Homestyle Kitchen to talk to Essie Hurley.

      If only he’d spoken to Essie first. She’d been in the kitchen making biscuits and had actually seen the boy take the dog and walk off, but hadn’t thought anything of it until Nick came by. He’d been avoiding Hurley’s these past few months. Even when he’d craved baby back ribs for dinner or those flaky biscuits slathered with apple butter with his three o’clock coffee break. Just the sight of the peachy-pink-colored Victorian reminded him of Georgia. And he’d tried like hell to put Georgia Hurley out of his mind. But because he could have solved the dognapping case in five minutes had he only gone into Hurley’s first, he’d decided just this morning to end his boycott of the place and had ordered from there today. His plan was to connect barbecue burgers and Creole-sauce-slathered catfish po’boys with his thankful stomach instead of a particular Hurley with silky golden-brown hair and big green eyes. And a slick, rich boyfriend.

      Oh, him? Just an acquaintance I ran into. Ready, darling?

      A cold ache seeped into his bones, despite the eighty-five-degree temperature outside.

      Nick was “oh, him.” Just an acquaintance. After a woman he barely knew had managed to accomplish something no other woman had: made him feel something more than lust, made him open up about himself, which he rarely did. About the childhood he never talked about. What his mother had endured. His mother passing two years ago and Nick moving back home to Blue Gulch to take care of Avery, sixteen and a grieving mess.

      For Avery, he’d lived in his childhood home for six months before he couldn’t take another second of it, of remembering the constant sound of his rageful father slamming the front door, shouting, his mother fruitlessly trying to calm him down with a ready beer and a plate of meat and potatoes, the kids out of sight, out of earshot, lest they upset him, lest he start using his fists against his wife and the son who’d try to intervene.

      Avery had been furious about having to move to a new home in Blue Gulch, not wanting to leave her childhood home, but she was ten years younger than Nick and remembered very little of their father, who’d died when Avery was just five. But Nick had spent fifteen years being afraid of his father, Vincent Slater, career officer on the Blue Gulch police force. The sight of his gun in his holster used to scare Nick to death, that his father would snap and shoot his mother.

      When Nick was fifteen, Vincent Slater had been killed in the line of duty, chasing a burglary suspect who turned and fatally shot him. His partner had fired back at the perp and killed him.

      Nick could remember his surprise, that you could grieve so hard for someone you thought you hated, someone you’d wished was dead a million times before.

      He’d decided to become a cop to try to understand his father better, but Nick was nothing like his dad and he’d understood nothing. Over the years, mostly in Houston, where he’d served for five years until he moved back home to care for Avery, he’d met some hotheaded cops like his dad, but it didn’t seem to be the job that had turned them. They’d always been hotheads; it was just their personality. He’d once asked his kind, gentle mother why she’d married Vincent Slater, why she hadn’t packed up him СКАЧАТЬ