Tommy's Mom

by Linda O. Johnston

  Eventually, though, Gabe ran out of flavors. “That’s all of them,” he sang to Tommy using one drawn-out note. “Which one do you want?”

  Tommy crooked a finger at Gabe. Obediently, the police chief bent so his ear was near Tommy’s face. Holly watched carefully to see what Tommy would do.

  And then Gabe stood up and made a celebratory gesture by pumping his fist into the air. “Yes!”

  “What?” Holly asked excitedly.

  “Tommy wants rainbow. He told me.”

  And Holly felt tears rush to her eyes.

  SEVERAL HOURS LATER, Gabe knocked with one hand on the door of the well-maintained stucco home that belonged to Holly Poston. He balanced a large pizza box in the other hand.

  The door opened quickly. “Gabe, what are you doing here?” Holly sounded surprised. She was dressed in cut-offs and a midriff-hugging T-shirt. Gabe’s mouth watered, and it wasn’t only from the spice-and-cheese aroma of the food he carried.

  He was here on a mission—a dual mission. But he suspected it was better to mention neither to Holly right now.

  “I hope you checked through the door who was here,” he reprimanded gently.

  The soft flush that spread over her lovely face contrasted attractively with the dark tone of her hair. “I will next time,” she promised. She looked toward the box in his hands. “I assumed that, after ice cream this afternoon, pizza was off.”

  “If you already ate, cold leftover pizza is delicious for breakfast,” he said.

  “Ugh.” She wrinkled her small nose in distaste. “Pizza for breakfast, no. But for dinner—it sounds great! I was thinking about soup and sandwiches, but we can do that another time. Come in.”

  “I hope you like a pizza supreme,” he said. “You and Tommy can pick anything off you’re not crazy about.”

  They’d reached the kitchen, and Holly motioned him to put the box on the table. “I like my pizza with everything,” Holly told him. “Tommy’s more particular, though. Tommy!” she called. “He’s watching TV in the living room.”

  He appeared in the doorway a moment later. He glanced at Gabe and the pizza, then ran toward Gabe and gave him a hug.

  “I’m flattered. I assumed it would be pizza first, hugs later.”

  Tommy smiled, then reached toward one of the plates his mother had gotten from a cabinet.

  A short while later, they all sat at the kitchen table nibbling pizza. Tommy had milk to drink, and Holly and Gabe had iced tea.

  “So, sport, how about a game of catch when we’re done?” Gabe asked Tommy. The little boy, who had tomato sauce at the corner of his mouth and all over his hands, grinned broadly, and Gabe wanted to reach across the table and ruffle his hair.

  He liked the kid. He even liked the taste of domesticity. Not that he intended to get used to it. He was just helping another cop’s family. It was what cops did.

  If he could get Tommy to open up to him, so much the better. He was damn well going to find answers to all the questions remaining about Thomas Poston’s death, and he knew this child could help.

  He glanced at Holly. She watched him with an expression he didn’t understand. There was sorrow in it, and maybe even a touch of suspicion.

  He couldn’t ask, though. Not with her son right there.

  Tommy hopped down and, still blotched with tomato sauce, stood beside Gabe, smiling. He was ready to play ball.

  “Let’s take a minute and clean up, sport. I’ve never seen one of the Dodgers or Angels with their faces dirty with pizza, have you?”

  Tommy’s eyes widened as if in terror. His entire small body began to shake. Gabe grabbed him and held him close. Over his head, he met Holly’s irate gaze. She knew what he’d done—reminded Tommy of that morning.

  The Angels and the Dodgers. Gabe had previously mentioned to her part of what was in the police report. Sheldon Sperling had told of a friendly argument between Thomas and him about the ball teams just before the suspect broke in. Tommy had obviously heard the discussion, associated the teams with what had happened later.

  Good. If he’d heard that, maybe he knew more. And someday soon, he would tell it to Gabe.

  “Don’t do that again.” Holly’s voice was quiet but she spoke through gritted teeth as he held her son.

  He nodded, understanding her anger. He would do what he had to. But next time, if it was something he knew might upset Tommy, he would discuss it with Holly first.

  In a short while, Tommy stopped shivering. Gabe looked down to find him staring at the floor. His face wasn’t as dirty now. Some of the tomato sauce was now on Gabe’s light blue shirt.

  “Let me have your shirt right away,” Holly said, a chill remaining in her voice. “I’ll get the spot out.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Gabe said. But when Holly insisted, he unbuttoned the shirt and shrugged it off, handing it to her.

  He felt self-conscious standing in her kitchen, with only a sleeveless T-shirt covering his torso. But when he noticed her appreciative wide-eyed glance at his chest and biceps, it wasn’t self-consciousness that he felt. At least his dress trousers were loose enough that she shouldn’t be able to see what was happening at his crotch. He hoped.

  Or did he?

  He wasn’t here to play house with Holly, only to investigate a murder and to see she wasn’t lacking for anything—anything platonic that required a man’s presence. That was all.

  “Hey, Tommy,” he said, then cleared his throat to get rid of the gruffness in his voice. “You ready for that game of catch?”

  HOLLY WATCHED and listened out the open kitchen window as she used a stain remover to get rid of the tomato sauce on Gabe’s shirt. It seemed unsettlingly intimate to be handling his shirt this way. It seemed even more disturbingly intimate to watch his bared biceps ripple and flex as he played catch with Tommy.

  “Cut it out,” she told herself, glancing down at the shirt. She wasn’t some sex-starved vixen. She was a mature woman, a widow with a child.

  The stain was gone, thank heavens. She quickly put the shirt down on a chair and began to rinse off the dishes…still staring out the kitchen window.

  She liked the way Gabe treated Tommy as they played ball. She liked it a lot.

  But she was still angry that he had said something to remind Tommy of the night Thomas was killed. Could it have been inadvertent? She doubted it.

  But maybe she was wrong. Maybe the more reminders there were, the quicker Tommy would talk about it and start to heal.

  Maybe the fact that Gabe was a cop didn’t mean he’d do anything to solve his case, even harm a little boy.

  She watched them play with a beach ball large enough for Tommy to grab onto and even catch now and then. When he did, Gabe would cheer. When he didn’t, he’d say something encouraging.

  Holly tried not to compare this game with the few Thomas had engaged in there in the backyard with Tommy. They’d seldom lasted more than ten minutes. Her husband would grow frustrated at his young son’s lack of dexterity and call it an evening.

  After nearly forty-five minutes, Gabe led Tommy into the house. “He wore me out,” he said, panting. “You have a budding outfielder there, Mrs. Poston.”

  “Could be,” Holly said proudly, ruffling her son’s head as he beamed happily up at her. She considered doing the same with Gabe before she felt herself redden. Fool, she chided herself.

  Later, Gabe not only helped with Tommy’s bath, but also read him a bedtime story again. This time, though, Tommy didn’t respond to Gabe’s good-natured game to try to get him to speak.

  Perversely, Holly was glad. Tommy had spoken for Gabe twice but not for her, despite her attempts to convince and cajole him.

  “Next time, sport,” Gabe said. “Good night now.” And he bent down and gave her son a kiss on the cheek.

  Holly went into Tommy’s room and said good-night, too. She kept the door partially open behind her when she left.

  Tommy didn’t like being alone now, but he tolerated it as long
as he could see the nightlight across the hall in the bathroom and his door stayed ajar.

  Now what? Could she gracefully get Gabe to leave? She didn’t want to be alone with him, in her house, with his shirt off.

  Nor did she want him to feel obligated to keep coming back, to take care of them.

  When she returned to the living room, Gabe had put his shirt back on and was buttoning it. Good. She had no reason to feel so uncomfortable with the man now. But she had to pull her eyes away from his deft fingers as the remaining glimpse of his broad, T-shirt covered chest disappeared below blue fabric.

  Holly stood by the door. “Thanks for playing with Tommy tonight. I appreciate it. But we’ll be fine, really.”

  “Tommy’s a good kid. And as I told you before, we’re all family. Everyone on the force is there for the wife and kid of a downed cop.”

  “That’s sweet, but we’ll be fine.” Holly repeated louder and more firmly. But instead of taking the hint Gabe sat down on the couch and crossed his legs.

  “Tommy needs to talk about what he saw on the morning of the murder,” he said.

  She couldn’t argue with that.

  “It’ll help him heal,” Gabe continued. “And he can help us find the bad guy.”

  Holly crossed her arms rigidly in front of her. “He needs to heal at his own speed.” She heard the chill in her voice. “He won’t, if reminders scare him to death—like your transparent reference to what he might have heard. Believe me, I want to know what happened, too, but I won’t let you frighten Tommy to solve the case.”

  Gabe stood. His green eyes were as stony as if they’d turned to granite. “Is that what you think, that I only had solving the case on my mind?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  She tried not to flinch as he took a step toward her. “Your son is hurting, Holly. Unless he talks about what’s hurting him, he won’t feel any better.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Turning encouragement into games…well, that’s just something I know works.”

  “How?” she demanded. “From your vast experience as a parent? A child psychologist, maybe?”

  “No. From personal experience.”

  Holly stared. “What do you mean?”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s time for me to leave.” In several strides with his long legs, he reached the door where she stood.

  But she didn’t get out of his way. “No, it would have been time for you to leave five minutes ago,” she said, controlling the anger that simmered within her. “But not now, not after you say something that fills me with a zillion questions.” She took a calming breath. “Please, sit down and I’ll make us some coffee. Then you can explain.”

  He was close to her. Very close. He should have intimidated her, standing at his full height, towering over her and glowering that way.

  But somehow he didn’t. She stood her ground. He stood his.

  And then he said, “All right. I could use a cup of coffee. And maybe this is a story you need to hear.”

  GABE PICKED UP a news magazine from the sleek wooden coffee table by the couch as he waited for Holly’s return from the kitchen. He put it down again. He’d come in here because he wanted to organize his thoughts. Thumbing through a magazine wouldn’t help.

  He was no closer to figuring out how to explain things five minutes later when she returned to the room.

  “It’s brewing,” she said. “I’m making decaf. I don’t need caffeine right now. I get too little sleep as it is.”

  “Fine.” He glanced around the now-familiar living room. The off-white paint on the walls was a little dull. Maybe he could offer to redo the room for her. Brighten it up a little.

  It’d be a hell of a lot easier than explaining his entire life.

  She sat in an upholstered chair, watching him suspiciously. Still, he liked the quizzical quirk to her dark, full eyebrows. The way her soft, moist lips pursed a bit, as if encouraging him to speak. Damn, but she was a pretty lady.

  And he was procrastinating…a trait he wouldn’t have tolerated among the officers who reported to him.

  “Look,” he said finally, staring into her deep brown eyes. He prayed she’d stay peeved and wouldn’t act sympathetic. He didn’t want sympathy. Didn’t need it. Not now, after so many years. “It’s simple. My father was a cop in Sacramento. My mother died in a car wreck when I was eight. There was a shootout at a convenience store… My dad saved some women, a couple of kids shopping there, but he got hit. He died.”

  “Oh, Gabe!” He saw the horror in Holly’s face.

  Damn, there was the sympathy he didn’t want. Where had her anger gone? That he could deal with.

  “How old were you? Did you have any other family?”

  “I was ten. An only child. Both my parents had been only children, and my grandparents were gone, too.”

  “How awful!”

  Seeing tears in her eyes, he glanced over her shoulder toward a spot on the wall. “Fortunately,” he said, “the assistant chief of police at the time was Lionel Sevvers.”

  “Sevvers? As in Evangeline?”

  “Her older brother. As I told you, all cops on a police force are family. Lionel took me in. He had two kids of his own. And he and his wife Alice were very patient with a scared kid who didn’t want to talk to anyone about anything, least of all his fears.”

  He heard Holly draw in her breath. “Oh,” she said very softly. “I see.”

  She rose and came toward him. He stiffened before glaring up at her. “Do you think that coffee is ready yet?”

  “Sure. But—”

  He took a deep breath and stood. He smelled her soft scent, like a succulent, ripe fruit that he couldn’t identify. He didn’t want to smell it, allow it to distract him.

  But she reached out. Her hand touched his arm. “Gabe, I’m sorry. I didn’t understand. I knew you were trying to help Tommy, in a way. But I didn’t realize you know how he feels.”

  He laid his hand over hers, feeling her soft, warm flesh. His shrug wasn’t quite as careless as he’d intended. “I don’t, not exactly. I was ten. He’s four. I only heard about how my dad died, though it was all over the news for a while. But I wasn’t there when it happened.”

  “Still…”

  He looked down into the soft pools of her brimming eyes. “It was a long time ago, Holly. The Sevvers…well, they were great. I eventually started talking about what happened, how miserable I felt about it. How scared I was. After that, things got a hell of a lot better.”

  “I know Tommy needs to talk,” Holly admitted. “I’ve been trying to encourage him, too. But to push him—”

  “I have no intention of pushing him,” Gabe blazed. She pulled her arm away in obvious alarm at his sudden anger. “Sorry,” he said. “The thing is, I want him to talk, for his own sake. For the sake of solving the case, too. As quick as we can get him to, but at as little risk of danger as possible to him.”

  “What danger?” Holly’s fury reappeared, a tigress protecting her cub. “Do you think he saw the murder after all?”

  Gabe shook his head. “I doubt it, though I wouldn’t risk his life on my suppositions. Whatever he saw probably wasn’t enough to worry the suspect. But Tommy must have seen something. He’s most likely too young to understand its significance. But if the killer’s still around and ever feels imperiled—”

  “Then he might come after Tommy.”

  Gabe nodded. “It’s always a possibility. That’s the most important reason of all to catch the killer fast. Just in case.”

  Holly took an audible breath. “Just in case,” she repeated. She looked up fiercely at Gabe. “He hasn’t said anything to me or to the psychologist. He responds to you better than anyone. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea if you spend a little time around here, encouraging Tommy. You’ve already said you and your officers will be helping out with chores and things. If you make that public, the killer wouldn’t be suspicious. The damn media has been clamoring for an interview,
a human interest story, but I’ve been putting them off.”

  “Right. I’ll have our public information officer put out the word. I did notice while Tommy and I were outside that your lawn could stand to be mowed.”

  Holly’s wry grin showed that her temper had calmed once more. “True. But Gabe, if Tommy starts talking, it’d be better if no one knew, wouldn’t it?”

  “We’ll make sure it gets out, when he does begin speaking again, that he just won’t talk about that morning.”

  “That’s right!” Relief lightened Holly’s face. She sighed, then tilted her head back to look up at him. “Thank you, Gabe.”

  “You’re—”

  He didn’t finish, for as he gazed into her eyes, he saw the warmth and gratitude there…and something more? Or was that only wishful thinking?

  He felt his heart begin to race, even as he reached for her.

  She didn’t resist as he took her into his arms. His lips touched hers, gently at first. So gently that he felt both unsatisfied and tantalized by the sweet and seductive taste of her. With a soft moan of frustration, he pulled her closer. Tightly against him. Deepened the kiss. Waited for her to resist, to pull away, tell him to get lost.

  She didn’t. Instead, he heard a soft sound of surrender and need as she pressed herself against him. Her body was slender but nevertheless curvaceous. He wanted to savor those curves even more. He reached between them, touched one soft breast over her tight T-shirt, felt a nipple begin to bud beneath his fingers, rubbed it gently.

  His tongue delved farther into her mouth, tasting her. Wanting to taste her more, all over.

  His groin tightened almost painfully. He pressed against her, felt her respond with a low moan that made him even crazier. She didn’t pull away. Did she need him as much as he desired her?

  Only then did the sound he’d been hearing touch his consciousness. A frightened cry. Tommy was having another nightmare.

  Holly stepped back. She blinked as if dazed, but in a moment she, too, became cognizant of what had interrupted them. “Tommy!” she said.