Loves Me, Loves Me Knot (28 page)

Once he’d been sure Jenna wasn’t pregnant, though, and . . . okay, he hadn’t left so much as been kicked out . . . he’d thought he’d be relieved to get back to his usual routine. Instead, he’d found himself dragging around ever since his alarm had gone off that morning. Both physically and emotionally, he just couldn’t seem to generate a spark of interest in anything these days.

“You ready for today’s op?” Eric asked.

“Sure,” Gage responded automatically. “You?”

“Always, man. Gotta put the bad guys in jail and make the streets safe for innocent women and children.”

It was a much-used line and common joke within the PD, but for some reason, hearing it this time sent a stab of something cold and painful through Gage’s chest. His heart squeezed, and his ribcage seemed to tighten around his lungs.

Turning his head, he glanced at the inside of Eric’s locker. Aside from a small magnetic mirror and CPD decal, the door and sides were covered in family photographs. Eric and his wife. His wife and three children. School pictures of each of the kids as they passed through several different grade levels. Eric, his wife, and the kids all together in front of a tree at Christmas.

He had a family, seemed happy, didn’t appear to spend every minute worrying about what might happen. To them, or to him. Other officers—both in undercover or other departments—were married with children, as well, he knew.

How did they do it? How did they not go crazy with the knowledge of all the bad things that could happen to the ones they loved?

He wasn’t afraid of much in this world—hell, as a cop, he’d faced just about everything there was to be afraid of—but the idea of losing Jenna to violence, to having her hurt in some way and being powerless to stop it . . . He’d rather have his guts ripped out and stomped on while his heart was still beating and he was alive and conscious enough to feel every twinge.

The idea of having kids with her and having to worry about them, too . . .

He broke out in a cold sweat and realized his hands were curled into fists at his sides.

Okay, this could not be normal. For the first time, he began to realize that maybe his concern for Jenna and
their possible progeny might be slightly over the top. What other explanation could there be, since the other men in his unit, other men in his line of work, didn’t seem to suffer the same reluctance to reproduce?

“Hey, Cruz?” he said in a quiet voice, the words scraping past his raw, dry throat.

“Yeah?”

He shifted back a step from the row of lockers and took a seat on the low wooden bench running between. “Can I ask you something?”

His tone must have alerted his friend that something was up because Eric’s movements slowed and he cast Gage a curious glance. “Yeah, man, sure. What’s up?”

“Your family. The wife and kids. They’re good?”

Eric’s face lit up, his mouth lifting in a smile as though someone had flipped a switch.

“They’re great, thanks.”

“And you don’t worry about them?” Gage asked.

“ ’Course I worry about them. But that’s what this is for.” He patted his chest, his palm covering the small gold cross he wore there. Always, whether it was visible or tucked inside his shirt.

Gage shook his head. “No, I mean
worry
about them. With all the shit we’ve seen, everything that’s out there ready to take somebody down whether they deserve it or not . . . Aren’t you afraid something will happen to them?”

For the first time, Eric turned to really look at him. If anything, the eye contact, the sudden intense scrutiny, made Gage nervous. He felt like enough of a pussy bringing this up to begin with; he didn’t need a coworker peering too deeply into his soul.

“I suppose if I stopped to think about it, I would,”
Eric replied. “But life’s too short, man. I mean, anything could happen to any one of us at any moment. You could walk out of this building and get hit by a bus. I could trip on a shoe lace walking down the stairs and break my neck.” He shrugged. “No one to blame. Nothing anyone did or didn’t do to cause it, just an act of Fate.”

“But bringing a baby into the world,” Gage pressed. “There’s some dangerous stuff out there. Don’t you worry something will happen to them? To this innocent kid who has no way to protect himself? To your wife?”

“My wife can take care of herself,” Eric said with a chuckle. “Hell, she scares me sometimes, so I have no doubt she could bring down any jerk-off who so much as looked at her funny. She can protect the kids, too, for that matter. But to be safe,” he said, voice growing serious, “I’ve shown her a few self-defense moves. Taught her how to fend off an attack and not be too squeamish to kick a guy in the nads, if she needs to.”

Gage thought about that for a minute. He’d seen Jenna pissed, and it wasn’t pretty. No doubt she could take a man’s head off at ten paces with nothing more than a book end. (Something he unfortunately knew from personal experience.)

For that matter, since she carried those damn knitting needles around with her ninety percent of the time, she could probably stab an offender in the eye, throat, stomach, groin, thigh . . . anywhere she could reach. And if he taught her how to do that effectively, how to use her keys as a weapon, her purse as a weapon, her entire body as a weapon . . .

“What about your kids?” he asked.

Eric considered that for a moment, then said, “You know, with the kids, you pretty much have to protect them twenty-four-seven the first few years. But there’s not a lot to protect them from, street-wise, so you just keep an eye on them and make sure they don’t swallow anything smaller than their eyeballs. After that, you start teaching them, too. You teach them to look both ways before crossing the street, not to take candy from strangers, to deal with bullies at school, say no to drugs . . . the usual.”

“It’s that easy?” Gage asked doubtfully.

“Not quite that easy, no,” Eric admitted with a small shake of his head. “But if you do it right and raise them to see and understand the dangers, then you don’t have to worry so much about them falling into something they can’t handle.” He paused for a moment, then gave a little
hmph
of sound. “I guess that’s the real secret. You do the best you can to prepare them to handle whatever situations they might come across, then you pretty much have to let go and pray they make the right decisions.”

The tightness in Gage’s chest and abdomen hadn’t abated, but his mind was running about a million miles a minute, and he was relieved when Eric didn’t ask why he was suddenly so interested in all of this. He pretty much let the conversation dwindle on its own, then went back to prepping for their drug-bust operation, and Gage did the same.

Could it really be as simple as his friend made it sound? Oh, he knew raising a child wasn’t a simple matter by any stretch of the imagination, but was it possible it wasn’t the nightmare of hidden traps and dangers he’d envisioned? Folks had kids every day, right?
Yeah, one was occasionally found dead in a snow bank or wandering the streets alone. But a lot weren’t.

And he could cross the fear of parental abuse right off the list, because there was no way he or Jenna would ever hurt or neglect one of their own children. If he had his way, he’d pretty much smother them in bubble wrap from head to toe the minute they were born, so even getting a paper cut would be virtually impossible.

It was too much to digest all at once, but Eric had given him something to think about. Given his rock-solid determination of the past couple years to avoid fatherhood and vulnerability at any cost, he considered that progress.

When Charlotte pulled her long, wood-panel station wagon up to her house, she’d been gone almost a full two weeks, was running on Zingers and Mountain Dew, and had to tinkle like a toy poodle.

Jenna’s car, with its adorable magnetic daisies stuck all over, was nowhere in sight. Not that Charlotte was surprised. It was, after all, Wednesday night, and she only had about an hour to hit the potty, check her darling babies—oh, how she’d missed them while she was gone—unhitch the U-Haul from the car, and get to The Yarn Barn herself.

Throwing open the driver’s-side door, she scooted around the front of the wagon, then hotfooted it into the house and headed straight for the bathroom before the little fender-bender in that expo building parking lot became only one of the accidents she had to account for from her time away.

After taking care of business, she came back downstairs
and made her way out to the barn. Her babies were all tucked into their stalls for the night, dozing or enjoying some munchies. They looked healthy and fit, and Charlotte’s heart swelled with relief.

Not that she didn’t trust Jenna to take proper care of the sweet little beasts, but no one could look after them quite the way Charlotte did. She knew each of them by name, knew their individual quirks and personalities. Knew that all-white Snowball loved tiny pieces of apple and carrot, and that the black and white Domi (short for Domino) frightened easily. Really, really easily. And he didn’t just kick or spit, as was typical of alpacas when they got nervous or scared, but his eyes went wide and he also piddled a tiny bit down his leg.

For that reason alone, she didn’t race up to her baby boy’s stall and shout the joy of her return. Instead, she waddled quickly but quietly to each stall to greet her darlings individually.

Pumpkin, one of her favorite light brown darlings, lifted her head, spotted Charlotte, and trotted over to the half-door with a wide grin on her long, narrow face.

Most people would probably say Charlotte was crazy, that alpacas couldn’t grin. But Charlotte knew better—on both counts.

“Baby!” she exclaimed, throwing her arms wide to give the creature a giant hug.

Next came Sprinkles, Daisy, Snowball, Rascal, and finally Domino, all of whom got big hugs and kisses and tons and tons of super-special Mama lovin’.

She spent longer than she probably should have snuggling with her sweetie pies, but eventually she broke away, tossed them each a bit of extra hay for being such
good furry babies, and reluctantly made her way back to the station wagon.

After dragging the bulkiest pieces of her luggage to just inside the house and unhooking the trailer hitch, she gathered her most recent knitting project onto the passenger side of the front seat beside her and cranked the engine. The ancient vehicle rumbled to life, purring like a big, happy jungle cat and lurching beneath her like an industrial washing machine.

Maybe this was why she’d had a thing for hogs in her younger days. The roar of an engine, the vibrating sensation that rippled through her entire body and set her skin to tingling. All that power. All that massive metal, with some big hunk of man perched on top.

Charlotte’s cheeks turned rosy as a flush of heat stole through her body. The girls in her knitting group might think she was just a silly old woman, but she’d been a real chippy in her day. Oh, she’d never played fast and loose—she wasn’t
that
kind of woman. She’d never teased the fellas just to get attention, either. But she’d had her fair share of suitors. And just like her niece, she’d had a bit of a thing for the bad-boy type.

If she’d been a few years—all right, decades, she admitted reluctantly—younger, she’d have probably set her hat for Gage herself. What a tall, tattooed drink of water he was, that one.

With a shake of her bright orange beehived ’do, she put the wagon in gear and backed out of the drive, setting off down the graveled road toward town at a fast enough clip that a giant cloud of dust and dirt blew out behind her, kicked up by her rear tires.

Thinking about Jenna and Gage made her wonder what had happened with the skein of yarn she’d left
with her niece before going on the road. It was magic yarn, infused with special true love powers, so surely something wonderful had occurred by now, right?

Perhaps Jenna had met a nice young man and fallen madly in love. Granted, she’d only been gone two weeks, but Charlotte was a firm believer in soul mates and love at first sight. And with the extra-special yarn at work, drawing in suitable mates, anything could happen.

At five minutes after eight, she pulled into the parking lot of the strip mall where The Yarn Barn nestled snugly between a coffee shop and one of those ninety-nine-cent stores. She found an open space only a few spaces from the front door, grabbed her things, and hurried inside.

There was a skip in her step and a wide smile on her face, not only because she’d been gone for so long and missed her Knit-Witting pals, but because she couldn’t wait to hear about Jenna’s whirlwind romance. She just knew her niece would be grinning from ear to ear, bursting at the seams to share her good news.

The others had already arrived, filling most of the chairs that the store had arranged in a circle around a small coffee table for multiple crafting groups to use on different afternoons and evenings during the week. There was a crochet group, a quilting group, a sewing group, and even an appliqué class that met in the same space.

Several reusable ceramic mugs with The Yarn Barn logo on them sat on the low table, filled with both hot and cold drinks from the small refreshment area the store provided, and the steady, staccato click and clack of needles coming together could be heard over friendly chit-chat.

Charlotte loved that sound. It was a sound of comfort to her. Of home and happiness.

“Hello, everyone,” she greeted them, taking a seat across the circle from her favorite members of the group—Jenna, Ronnie, and Grace. Of course, they were her favorites because she knew them best and spent the most time with them outside of their weekly knitting meetings.

Cries of “Charlotte!” went up all around, warming her right down to her toes. She’d only been absent from two meetings, but she’d really missed them, and it felt good to be back and to receive such a cheerful welcome.

“How was your trip?” Grace wanted to know after everyone had jumped up to hug her. And that nearly overlapped Ronnie’s inquiry of “When did you get back?”

She told them all about her time on the road, becoming one with the highway and the big-rig drivers who made it their home. The truck stops where she’d eaten, and the rundown motels where she’d stayed. She’d been like Thelma on her way to meet Louise.