Free A Daddy for Her Daughter by Tina Beckett Page B

definitely shouldn’t do. She didn’t need the complication. And neither did Kaleb. Nor did her daughter, who had been uprooted from her home and dragged three states away from everything she’d known and loved.
    Only Chloe seemed to love Seattle just as much as Maddy did.
    â€œWell, this is not going to happen again.” Reaching the kite, she grabbed it. The police officer was right about its condition. The poor thing’s wooden skeleton was broken in four places. One of those, a compound fracture, had the stick coming right through the plastic skin.
    â€œAnd you’re sure of this why?”
    Was he kidding? There was no way he should want this any more than she should.
    Except she had. And she did. Definitely not a good combination. “Because I have a daughter, and I don’t want her to get hurt.”
    That seemed to bring Kaleb to his senses. In fact, his face seemed to pale slightly. “Right. No parent wants to see their child get hurt. Or suffer.”
    There was something in his words that made her pause and blink up at him before her gaze moved lower. His left ring finger was bare, just as hers was. But like hers, it was hard to completely erase an indentation where a ring once was. And Kaleb’s finger had a definite depression across the base of the digit, although the skin stretched across it was as tanned as the rest of his finger. So it had been a while.
    Had he had a child? A wife? If so, where were they?
    Before she could even form a question, Kaleb had taken the kite from her hands and turned it over in his own. “Speaking of kids, I’d better get this back to my place and fixed up. Or you will have one disappointed child on your hands.” His jaw tightened slightly. “And as for what happened a few minutes ago, I agree with you. It is not going to happen again. I’ll make sure of it.”
    * * *
    Kaleb paused with the suture material still in his hand—his patient sitting with his lacerated chin tilted toward him. How could he have let himself get so carried away yesterday at the park? He’d been oblivious to everything around him—even the police officer—totally caught up in kissing Maddy. He hadn’t done something like that since...
    Since he and Janice had met in medical school. That first semester had been a blur of getting to know each other. Moving in together. Getting married.
    Having a child.
    They’d waited to get pregnant until they’d both graduated, so they would have time to spend with their child. He hadn’t realized how little of that there would be, in the end. If only he’d been more attuned to what was happening with Grace, he could have...
    He stifled the thought, poking the needle through the next section of tissue, and tried to make sense of what had happened at the park.
    This weird urge to sketch Maddy had come over him as he’d watched her wrestle with that length of line on the kite. And of course sketching meant looking. And when his gaze had drifted down her body, his own flesh had been busy tightening. His mind had already been traveling down dangerous paths at the speed of light. And when she’d noticed the purring sound he’d worked so hard to perfect, and had recognized it for what it was, it had sent a jagged bolt of sensation arching through his gut—the ill-concealed wonder in her eyes doing a number on him.
    When he’d actually bent to kiss her, he’d only meant it to be a quick peck and release. Just enough to whet his appetite but not enough to actually satisfy it. Only once he’d started, he hadn’t been able to stop. Until that officer had made him think past his belt buckle.
    Then she’d mentioned her daughter, and sent his thoughts reeling to another place and time. That was when he’d really started wondering what the hell he’d been thinking.
    He still wasn’t sure.
    â€œAre you okay, Mr. Jansen?” His patient, a