Santa's Seven-Day Baby Tutorial. Meg Maxwell

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       Chapter One

      FBI agent Colt Asher’s new mission: infiltrate an Amish village and recoup a stolen black-and-white guinea pig named Sparkles.

      What Colt should be doing right now was planning his vacation, some much-needed R & R, maybe on the Gulf of Mexico or a trip to New Orleans for some beignets and good bourbon. Or he could dust off his passport and take off for France. Italy. Germany. Practice his Spanish in Madrid. Instead, late in the afternoon on the day before his two-week vacation would start, his boss, Harlan Holtzman, had called Colt into his office with a special request.

      Yesterday, Harlan had taken his eight-year-old niece out to lunch for her birthday in their hometown, Grass Creek, a suburb of Houston, where the FBI office was located. On the way to the pizzeria, the girl had spotted a black-and-white guinea pig in the window of the pet shop and wistfully said her birthday and Christmas wish combined was to have that guinea pig for her very own and she’d name it Sparkles and take good care of it. Harlan, the old softy, planned to surprise the girl. So this afternoon he’d gone back to the pet shop and bought the critter and a bunch of whatever guinea pigs needed, like a cage and wood shavings and hidey tunnels. He then set down Sparkles in his new cage on the curb near his pickup while he went back in the store to collect the huge bag of shavings and guinea-pig pellets. A clerk had then talked his ear off about proper care of the critter and got him to add a book called Caring for Your New Guinea Pig to the bundle.

      “A twenty-four-dollar Christmas present ended up costing me over one hundred and fifty bucks!” Harlan muttered.

      Bigger problem: when Harlan finally came out to the truck with the shavings and pellets and book, Sparkles and his cage were gone. A guinea-pig thief in Grass Creek? Most unusual. The boss asked around, and one woman reported that she did see an Amish girl with red pigtails take the cage off the curb and put it in her buggy sometime before it moved on, but the woman hadn’t realized she was witnessing a theft. According to her statement: I mean, the Amish don’t steal, right?

      Apparently, they did. Or this one girl did, anyway.

      What wasn’t unusual was seeing Amish folks in Grass Creek. The Amish community was about ten minutes away from the large town with its bustling center, where Amish folks had a very popular indoor market to sell their baked goods, wares and handcrafted furniture. Though Colt lived fifteen minutes away in Houston, he’d gone to the Amish market for all the tables in his condo, and last spring, when he wanted to buy two cribs for his then pregnant-with-twins sister, he wouldn’t have shopped anywhere else. The craftsmanship was impeccable. Colt also never passed the stall with the Amish-baked lemon scones and sourdough bread without buying enough to stuff his freezer. There were always several Amish buggies around Grass Creek every day. He’d never been to the Amish community itself. But if there was one thing Colt knew from ten years as an FBI agent, it was that anyone, even an Amish girl with red braids and a bonnet, was capable of anything. Colt had arrested men who looked like bad guys in action movies and he’d arrested the most angelic-looking women who you’d never suspect of a thing.

      Guard up, always. That was Colt’s motto. It had to be.

      His guard hadn’t been up on his last case. He needed this vacation to clear his head, to forget what had happened. But there was something he’d never forget: that one of those angelic-looking women had managed to con him and betray him and it would never, ever happen again.

      “I wouldn’t ask you to drive out there, Colt,” Harlan said. “But Jones and Cametti just left on the gun-running case, and I’ve got that damn fund-raiser dinner I can’t get out of, and since your vacation technically doesn’t start until you leave tonight, I can ask you while you’re still here and not feel that guilty.”

      Colt laughed. “No problem, Harlan. I’ll have Sparkles at your house in a couple hours.” A drive out to all that farmland and fresh air was probably just what he needed. A perfect start to R & R.

      “Appreciate it, Colt. Thank you.”

      He’d drive to the Amish village, flash his badge around and ask about a red-haired girl who’d been to town today, recover the guinea pig and drop him off at Harlan’s, and then he’d pack his bags and throw a dart at the world map hanging in his living room. Where it landed was where he’d go to forget that disaster of a last case...and remember.

      * * *

      As Jordan Lapp’s buggy came around the curve in the road, Anna Miller glanced up from the calf she was bottle-feeding in the barn of her farmhouse and sent up a prayer: Please, please, please do not be here to propose.

      She was twenty-four. And unmarried. Spinster age for an Amish woman. Over the past five years, she’d turned down ten potential suitors and the eight marriage proposals that had come anyway. Some of those proposals were more about her being the right age and not married. Some of the men had truly liked her. One had loved her, and she’d broken his heart, which had broken hers.

      Anna had always hoped that the undeniable fact that she was “different” would make her unappealing to the men of her community. It hadn’t. She was outspoken. She talked too much about what she read in novels and nonfiction. She didn’t understand why cooking and laundry were “women’s work.” She wore overalls instead of dresses to do her barn chores and paint the handcrafted furniture their community produced. Orphaned when her mother passed away two years ago, she lived alone, unusual for the Amish, but her onkel Eli preferred she live in her family home and not with him and her aenti Kate because Anna was a “bad influence” on their eight-year-old daughter, Sadie.

      Her matchmaking onkel had promised a few of her would-be suitors a horse or furniture to sell if they would propose to Anna. The man was a well-meaning busybody, but Anna knew he was operating more out of love for his wife, who worried about Anna incessantly, than out of a need to control his niece. All the proposals had been turned down, infuriating her uncle, irritating her aunt and earning an “unacceptable” respect from her young cousin, Sadie.

      “Cousin Anna is her own woman,” Sadie had said with pride in her voice over lunch one afternoon, her new favorite novel, Anne of Green Gables, on the table beside her sandwich.

      Sadie’s mother had raised an eyebrow but had said nothing, which was telling. Anna was her own woman. Consequence: Anna was also alone. Sadie’s mother would allow her young daughter to see for herself how Anna’s choices affected her. Anna admired that about her aunt, even if Kate was making a point. Of course, Sadie was being raised Amish and attended church and followed the Ordnung, the rules of behavior. But Sadie read widely, just as Anna always had. Her cousin’s heart—and head—would guide her, just as Anna’s had.

      Jordan emerged from the buggy. Uh-oh: he was in his church clothes, a black jacket and pants, a black straw hat. He stopped in front of her, patted the calf, and smiled nervously. “Anna, here’s the thing. The past couple of months, I’ve sent my brother and a cousin to ask you if you’d date me. You told them no. So I’m going СКАЧАТЬ