Harlequin Heartwarming May 2016 Box Set (71 page)

CHAPTER TWO

T
HE
JANGLE
OF
his cell phone made Jack Evans hastily sweep his desk, shoving aside papers and lifting files to check beneath them till his phone slid out from inside one of the folders—the Scarlett Daniels homicide. She was the third victim of Chicago's most recent serial killer, the South Side Slayer, as the media had dubbed him. Scarlett's murder was arguably the grizzliest of his three victims.

“Evans here,” he said, managing for once to answer his cell before the call went to voice mail.

“Jack, Brett Watters. I found the daughter of your murder victim.”

“Rose Daniels?” Finally. “Alive?”

“Living and breathing.”

“Where is she?”

“We got a ping off her driver's license. She was pulled over for speeding near some hole-in-the-wall in Wisconsin.”

Huh. He'd figured if the girl was still among the living, she was running from something, more likely
someone
, but he hadn't expected her to make it that far out of Chicago. “Does this place have a name?”

He could hear the sound of his colleague tapping on a keyboard. “Riverton. That ring any bells?”

A whole cathedral full of them. “That's my hometown, so, yeah, it sure does.”

“Huh. You don't say. Want me to give the Riverton PD a call, have them ask her some questions?”

Jack opened the top drawer of his desk and plucked a business card out of the pencil tray. He'd put it there almost two months ago, the day he'd returned to Chicago from a rare visit to his hometown to attend his friend Eric Larsen's funeral.

He'd looked at the card every day since.

Emily Finnegan, Reporter.

The
Riverton Gazette
.

Beneath that, her phone number and an email address.

He thought about her every day, too, even when he wasn't looking at her card. He hadn't wanted to. Simply hadn't been able to stop himself. He'd thought about calling her but had decided against it. What would he say?

Thanks for a good time? Too tasteless.

See you next time I'm in town? Too vague.

Better to let it be. With some regret, he was now wishing he had given her a call.

Years ago, they had been paired up as maid of honor and best man at Eric and Annie's wedding. Tall and reedy, a glossy-haired brunette with a brown-eyed gaze that didn't miss a beat, Emily had returned home for the big event from Minneapolis, where she'd been studying journalism. Quiet, though not so much shy as watchful and reserved. It would have been a cliché for the best man to hook up with the maid of honor, so he hadn't tried. But he'd wanted to. The next time he'd seen her was at Eric and Annie's son's christening. He and Emily were godparents, and a post-baptismal hookup would have been even tackier. Again, he'd let it go.

Eric's funeral had been a game-changer. A change driven by grief, the raw emotion of the day, the sharp reminder that life could be unexpectedly short. As a homicide detective, Jack knew about death, had seen it up close and personal in a way few did. He possessed intimate knowledge of all the gruesome ways people could die. What he didn't know, he'd realized the day of Eric's funeral, was how they lived. He had no idea how
he
needed to live, and he'd discovered just how clueless he was as he'd helped carry his friend's casket to the waiting hearse and later stood on the sidelines, watching a young widow with her family, each of them grieving the loss of a man they had loved. They should have been angry with the world, with the unfairness of losing someone so young. They were mourning their loss, of course, but they were also honoring their loved one by moving on with their lives and caring for one another. By living.

After the funeral, Jack had spent a polite amount of time exchanging platitudes with people he barely knew, drinking bitter coffee and eating several crustless triangle sandwiches that were a church-hall staple. He had spoken briefly with Annie and then left. He had encountered Emily dashing out of the coatroom with her jacket slung over her arm. He had done the gentlemanly thing and helped her put it on. They had walked out of the church and into a deluge, so he'd offered her a lift and suggested they go for coffee. That had segued into dinner. He had assumed they'd have nothing in common. The energy of city life pulsed through his veins, and she was a small-town girl through and through. So when he'd taken her home, he shouldn't have stayed. But he had.

“Evans? You still there?” Brett's voice dragged his attention back to the business at hand and the card between his fingers.

“Yeah. Sorry. What were you saying?”

“Should we have the Riverton PD interview the Daniels woman for us?”

“No.” Jack set the card next to the stack of reports on his desk. “I'd like to talk to her myself. If I leave now, I can be there in five hours. Could you ask them to—”

“She's not going anywhere. They've given her a twenty-four-hour suspension, and her car's been impounded. She's been drinking.”

Jack checked his watch. Seven-thirty. An early start by anyone's standard. He knew Rose had been raised by a drug addict and spent a lot of years in and out of foster homes. The Chicago PD wanted to know more about her relationship with the suspect they had in custody, and to what level, if any, she was involved in the homicides. Also, were they the reason she was on the run?

“Could you give them a call, let them know I'm on my way? I'll talk to her when I get there.” By then, she should be sober enough to answer his questions.

“You got it.”

Jack closed the files on his desk and shoved them into a drawer, scrolled through the list of contacts on his phone and hit the one called Home.

“Mom, Dad,” he said after their voice mail beeped, glad he hadn't woken them. “I need to be in Riverton for a few days. See you tonight.”

He picked up Emily's card, debated whether or not to call her, too, let her know he was coming to town. No. He'd surprise her. Smiling at that, he slid the card into the pocket of his leather jacket.

“I might be late,” he added to the message he was leaving for his parents. “Don't wait up.”

* * *

H
ER
SISTERS
HAD
insisted that Emily take the pregnancy test immediately, so she had reluctantly barricaded herself in the second-floor bathroom, alone. The result was positive, as her gut instinct had been telling her for the past week.

Now what? The only thing she knew for sure was she wasn't ready to venture back into the world, and she wasn't ready to face her sisters.

Why had she lied? Telling them she was having Fred's baby was the dumbest thing she'd ever done. What must they think? What had she been thinking? Fred had been her best friend since first grade, the closest thing to a brother she'd ever had, and just about the last person in the world she could imagine making a baby with. Fred? The very idea made her cheeks burn. Now she wouldn't be able to face him, either.

Then there was Jack Evans, the real father of this tiny human who had taken up residence inside her. No need to worry about how to face him. After one night with her, he had hightailed it back to Chicago, never to be seen or heard from again.

She would have to get in touch with him, tell him about the baby. She wasn't ready to go there, though. Not yet. This news was too new, too unsettling, too overwhelming. Jack was not part of her life, never had been, not in any real or meaningful way. And he never would be.
Don't think about him
, she told herself.
Not now.

Besides, she had more pressing concerns. Her sisters were waiting downstairs. They would pepper her with questions, most of which she wasn't ready to answer. She needed to figure out something to tell them, though. Aside from Fred and her father, of course, they were the two people in the world who always had her back, and now she was going to need their support more than ever.

CJ would be this new little person's irrepressible, fun-loving aunt, the one who took him or her kite flying and horseback riding. She'd teach him or her how to blow bubble-gum bubbles. The farm was as much a part of CJ as her free spirit. According to her, she had a perfect life—teaching riding lessons, taking B & B guests on trail rides, boarding horses for several families in town, and operating a successful therapeutic riding program. CJ would welcome this baby with arms as wide as the world.

Annie, the world's best mom, knew all about raising a child on her own, but at least she'd done things in the proper order. Marriage first, baby second. The recent and unexpected death of her husband had been beyond her control, but she was coping as only a natural-born supermom could. She carpooled to softball games, helped with homework, baked the most awesome bake-sale cookies on the planet, all while single-handedly keeping house, running a business and making it look easy. Annie's huge heart was brimming with all the care and attention this newcomer would ever need.

Fred, too, would be great with the baby. He'd be a sort of surrogate dad, as soon as he got over the shock—no, make that horror—that she had told her sisters he was the father. Once he was over that, he would always be there for her and—Emily ran her hands over the almost indiscernible curve of her belly—whoever this was.

But for now, it's just you and me, kid.

Her heart rate amped up, and she realized she had been standing at the bathroom window, staring unseeingly through the white lace drapery. She pushed aside her panic along with the delicate fabric and focused her attention on the familiar scene below. The grassy backyard gave way to the soon-to-be-planted vegetable garden with its deer-proof fence and the chicken coop with its fox-proof enclosure. Beyond those, a stand of poplars, their branches studded with new buds. The stables, still visible through the trees, would soon be obscured by a trembling, leafy-green curtain. Emily had committed every square inch of this place to memory, could picture it clearly in any season. She loved the farm as it was now, sun-warmed and fresh from the late-spring rains. Summer would arrive any minute, and she would always associate it with the long, lazy days of school holidays. Then the sudden burst of autumn color would gradually fade to the monochrome that was a Wisconsin winter, then it would be Christmas, and after...

The baby would be here, and she'd be a mom. A fresh wave of panic rolled over her. Truthfully, she didn't know the first thing about being a mother, never having had one, or at least, scarcely able to remember a time when she had.

Emily swung away from the window and faced herself in the bathroom mirror. She had been only four years old when her mother left them, and she had been waiting for her to come back ever since, a silly childhood fantasy she had never outgrown. She stared hard at her reflection. No matter how the future unfolded, she would figure this out, and she would always be there for this little one. Always, always,
always
.

“And, please, be a girl,” she whispered. She didn't know anything about boys, and at that moment, she didn't like them much, either. At least not the ones who stayed the night and never called.

She looked down at the plastic pregnancy stick and wondered for the umpteenth time how she could have let herself get so caught up in the moment. Because it had been
the
moment, she reminded herself, the one she had fantasized about since she'd started high school and her hormones had kicked in. She had been an underdeveloped fourteen-year-old. Jack Evans had been sixteen and in lust with Belinda Bellows, the knockout who had been crowned queen of Riverton's Riverboat Festival, with the requisite physical assets needed to pull it off. Emily had been invisible back then, and she had stayed invisible, as far as Jack Evans was concerned, until her brother-in-law's shocking death had put her on a collision course with the heart-searingly handsome Chicago PD detective.

During a cozy dinner conversation about pasts and futures—his and hers and Riverton's—she had been surprised to learn they had things in common. A lot of things, actually. They both preferred dogs to cats, marinara to alfredo, red wine to white. Regrettably, they had shared a bottle of wine over dinner. Red, of course. And then he had walked her back to her little apartment above the newspaper office...and
that
was how she'd ended up here, two months later and too many weeks late, holding this stupid stick with its two colored lines. She hadn't heard from him since. No phone calls, no emails. Not even a lousy text message. Calling him would have made her seem desperate, so she hadn't.

The shuffle of footsteps in the hallway was followed by a light knock on the bathroom door.

“Emily?” Annie asked. “Are you still in there?”

“Be right out.” She tossed the remains of the pregnancy test into the trash and unlocked the door. As her father had often reminded her when she'd landed herself in trouble, it was time to face the music.

CHAPTER THREE

A
FTER
A
RIDICULOUSLY
tearful conversation with her sisters, during which Emily extracted promises they wouldn't breathe a word of her pregnancy to anyone, especially not their father, it was now almost lunchtime, and she was back in town. Standing in front of Morris's Barbershop, she closed her eyes and took a deep, steadying breath. She opened them again and yanked on the door handle before her courage fled and dragged her away with it. The bell jangled, and the open sign clattered against the glass. No turning back now.

Fred was sweeping the worn black-and-white tile floor as he always did after finishing up with a customer. She had been anxiously watching from the newspaper office across the street, waiting for Elroy Ferguson to leave. Fred was alone now, whisking Elroy's salt-and-pepper hair clippings into a tidy pile. Her best friend's familiar, slightly lopsided smile should have made her feel at ease. He glanced at the big clock above the door.

“You're early. Is that lunch?” he asked, eyeing the brown paper bag she carried.

She nodded and managed a weak smile. She set the bag on the counter. “I need to talk to you about something.”

“What's up?” he asked, bending his tall, lanky frame to brush the sweepings into an old metal dustpan, its yellow paint chipped from many years of service.

She flipped the lock on the door, turned the sign to Closed and pulled down the roller blind, its frayed edges barely covering the glass. She was a little misty-eyed by the time she turned back to face him. More tears? Seriously, what was the matter with her?

“Wow, must be important,” Fred said, dumping the hair clippings into the trash bin. He leaned the broom in a corner, hung the dustpan on a hook next to it, and then he looked at her, really looked at her. His amusement turned to concern. “Emily? What's wrong? Is it your family? Your dad?”

She shook her head. Her throat had squeezed shut, and the words wouldn't come.

Fred crossed the floor in a flash and pulled her into a hug. “Hey. Whatever it is, it's going to be all right. Just don't cry, okay?”

“O-o-kay,” she hiccupped, but now that the waterworks had started, she couldn't stem the flow. What was wrong with her? She never cried.

Fred didn't say anything more. He simply held her, letting her tears soak into his shirt, patiently waiting for her to compose herself.

He smelled like shaving soap and styling mousse. His shoulder, more bony than muscular, had always been available for her to lean on. They were best friends. She had known him forever. He knew her better than anyone else ever had or ever would.

Dear, sweet Fred. Loyal, down-to-earth, dependable. He'd make a great dad. Perfect, really. He would always be there for his kid, just as her dad had been for her. Steady, patient, reliable. Exactly what every child needed in her life. Or
his
life, since there was only a fifty-percent chance she was having a girl.

After she stemmed the flow of tears, she gripped his upper arms, tipped her head back and stared up at him.

“You look awful,” he said.

“Gee, thanks. Just what a girl wants to hear. I'm glad I ruined your shirt.” The crisp white cotton was smeared with dark mascara and tan-colored eye shadow.

“That's okay. I have a clean one in the back.”

Of course he did.

“Just in case,” he added.

This was the Fred she'd always known. Mr. Just-in-case. Mr. Always-prepared.

Why couldn't he be her Mr. Tall-dark-and-dreamy?

She gave him a long look, taking in his wavy sand-colored hair, unruly eyebrows, gold-flecked hazel eyes and nicely shaped mouth. For the first time in all the years she'd known him, she wanted to feel something when she looked at him, that special something for that one special person. But she didn't. It just wasn't there.

What was wrong with her? How could she feel all fluttery for someone like Jack, someone who would never be there for her, when she already had this great guy in her life? Fred would make a perfect father and a wonderful husband...for someone. Not for her, though.

“Em?”

“What?”

“You're kind of scaring me.”

“Sorry.”

“What's going on?”

She took a deep breath, held it, exhaled in a rush. “I'm pregnant.”

Fred stared at her, opened his mouth, closed it again, leaving his first thought, whatever it was, unspoken.

She waited.

“Um, wow, I...” He stepped back, looked her up and down, his gaze finally coming to rest on her midsection. “You...you're having a...”

She nodded. “A baby.”

“Jack Evans's baby.”

Now it was her turn to stare. “How on earth did you figure that out?”

“The day of Eric's funeral, I closed the shop for a couple of hours so I could go. Later that afternoon, I came back here, and it was business as usual. Before I closed up, I saw the two of you going into the café down the street. What was that, two months ago? And now you're...”

Having a baby.
Fred seemed unable to say the actual words out loud.

“What did he say when you told him?”

“Well, that's the thing.”

“You haven't told him?”

She shook her head.

“Em! Why not?”

“Because I only found out this morning.” Because the thought of telling Jack terrified her, and because some secret little part of her hoped she wouldn't have to. She hoped having her family and her best friend to support her and this new little person would be enough, even though in her heart she knew it wasn't the right thing to do.

He hugged her again. “So I'm the only person who knows?”

She shook her head against the soggy mess she'd made of his shirt. “My sisters know, too. CJ found the pregnancy test in my bag, and they made me take it while I was out at the farm this morning.”

“That must have been interesting. How did they react when you told them it was Jack's?”

“I didn't tell them.”

“Your sisters didn't ask? Didn't try to pry the truth out of you? That's hard to believe.”

“They did. I kind of lied.”

Fred leaned back and stared down at her, momentarily confused. “You told them it was somebody else's?”

She glanced up at him but couldn't bring herself to confess. She didn't have to.

He let go of her and abruptly stepped back. “You didn't. Emily, tell me you didn't tell your sisters that this...”

She lowered her head and fixed her guilty gaze on the toes of her beige ballerina flats.

“You did. You told them... You told them...” His voice had risen a full octave. He stabbed the fingers of both hands through his hair, held them there. He had a tendency to blush when he was embarrassed or angry. Right now even his ears were crimson, and he was looking a little wild-eyed, too. “You told them it was
mine
? That I...? That
we
...? Why would you do that?”

Her sisters would find out the truth soon enough, but since she had humiliated her best friend in the whole world, she owed him an explanation now.

“I don't know. It was all so unexpected. I drove over to Wabasha early this morning and went to the pharmacy there.” If she'd bought the test in Riverton, half the town would know by now that she might be pregnant.

“On my way back to town, I stopped at the farm for my usual Saturday-morning coffee date with my sisters. I had no intention of actually doing the test while I was there. I was going to wait till I was alone at home, but then my phone rang and CJ opened my bag to look for it and...surprise.”

Fred's color was gradually returning to normal, and he'd stopped pulling at his hair. Now he stood, arms folded, silent and waiting.

“I was hoping I wasn't pregnant,” she continued. “I was hoping I was late, you know? It happens a lot, but I've never been this late—”

Fred's color deepened again. “Stop. Too much information. I don't need to know how late or how often you're... Geez, Em. That's just...”

“Okay, okay, I get it.”
Too much information
. She was feeling woozy all of a sudden, which made no sense, and she reached for the back of one of the barber chairs for support. The chair pivoted away from her, and she lost her balance.

Fred caught her.

“Can we sit down?” she asked. “I brought lunch, remember?” She pointed to the brown bag on the counter. Maybe she'd feel less light-headed if they were having this conversation on a full stomach.

“You thought you could butter me up with lunch?”

“Annie made sandwiches. Ham and Swiss on rye, with extra mustard.”

He narrowed his gaze, but she could see she had his attention. It was one of his favorites. “She sent some of her apple strudel, too.”

His features softened a little. “You sort of had me at extra mustard, but no sane person ever turned down your sister's strudel.”

Emily smiled. Given Fred's appetite and the universal appeal of Annie's pastries, she'd known the strudel was her ace in the hole.

“Come on,” he said. “We can sit in the back office. Just don't think that one of your sister's killer lunches gets you off the hook.”

Fred led her into the cramped office-slash-storage room off the back of the barbershop and sat her in a chair. He unpacked the sandwiches and two generous slices of strudel and set them on the narrow wooden table, then pulled two bottles of water from the mini-fridge.

Emily found the small, familiar space vaguely reassuring. She'd always liked this little room, couldn't begin to count the number of hours she and Fred had spent in it over the years—playing Go Fish when they were kids, working on high school assignments, catching up on town gossip during her brief visits home from college. These days they usually met for lunch at the Riverton Bar & Grill down the block, but today's conversation was not for public consumption.

Fred sat across from her, peeled the plastic wrap off Annie's signature sandwich, bit off a mouthful and slowly chewed while he studied Emily through narrowed eyes.

She didn't know what to say, and Fred was in no hurry to fill the awkward silence. This must be how a criminal felt, sitting in an interrogation room, trying not to squirm beneath the steely gaze of a hardened detective. Like Jack. He would be cool and collected, in spite of feeling disillusioned about his job. Over dinner that night he had told her being a homicide detective was taking a toll on his work life, his personal life...his
life
. Still, he had been surprised when she'd asked if he had considered making a change. Never, he'd said. He had known since he was a kid that he was going to be a big-city cop. He had invested everything in his career. Change wasn't an option.

Well, Jack Evans was in for a surprise. Emily Finnegan, the one-night stand who hadn't been interesting enough or attractive enough to warrant so much as a phone call, now had some news that would change his life forever. Forget calm, cool and collected. Jack Evans was going to go ballistic.

“So here's what I don't understand,” Fred said. “After all this time, you finally got what you wanted, but you didn't say anything to anyone. Not me, not even your sisters.”

“What are you talking about? I've never, ever said anything about wanting a baby.” She'd never said she didn't want one, either. Having a baby had always been one of those someday things that would happen eventually. Someday.

“I'm not talking about kids. I'm talking about Jack Evans.”

Emily's face heated up. “I had a crush on him in high school.”

“And now?” Fred challenged her with his unwavering gaze.

She shrugged. “He has an interesting job. He's smart and he's...”

“Hot?”

That made her laugh. “Yes,” she conceded. She could always be honest with Fred. “No one's going to argue with that, but for me he's always been...you know. Haven't you ever felt that way about someone? Your head is telling you this person is completely wrong for you, but your heart goes all wobbly, and your brain turns to mush every time you see her?”

He solemnly shook his head, and her heart broke for him a little. He was a great guy, and he deserved to find a woman who would fall completely head over heels for him. “It'll happen,” she said.

“In Riverton?”

“Stranger things have.”

“I suppose. And nice try, by the way.”

“What did I do?”

“Shifted the subject from you to me. You do that all the time.”

It was true. It was the reporter in her.

“Sorry.” And she was, sort of, as she gave him a long look. Really looked at him, willing herself to feel something more than sisterly affection. Fred was a nice guy, and he'd be a great dad. They'd been best friends for such a long time. It could work, maybe. Couldn't it?

“Em?”

“What?”

“Don't look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you're going to try to talk me into being part of whatever crazy story you told your sisters.” He was blushing again. “Not going to happen.”

She dropped her gaze, nibbled at the crust of her sandwich.

“You know I'm here for you,” Fred said. “Always have been, always will be.”

She tipped her head back and took a sip from her water bottle, then hastily dropped her gaze, so Fred couldn't see her eyes getting watery. More tears? This was getting ridiculous.

“You should be happy, Em. You deserve to have someone special in your life, too.”

Tears rolled down her cheeks. “He isn't
in
my life. He went back to Chicago the next day, and I haven't heard from him since.”

“You're joking.” Fred handed her a paper napkin to stem the waterworks. “You mean he...? And he didn't...? I think he and I need to have a talk.”