Kiss Me, Sheriff!

by Wendy Warren

  “Is that so?”

  She didn’t know what he disbelieved—that she’d been planning to tell him about her past or that Jase’s appearance had come as complete surprise, but the answer to both was, “Yes.”

  With a steady, uncompromising stare, he said nothing more, merely waited for her to begin. So she did, however awkwardly.

  “Jase... Jason Holmes...was my husband. Was, being the operative word. Our divorce was final about a year ago, although the marriage ended before that. Before tonight, I hadn’t seen Jase in over two years, right before he served the divorce papers.”

  “He served you?”

  “Yes. We’d gone through a rough time. He’d started drinking and taking prescription medication. I wasn’t really myself at that point, either, and, well, since I didn’t want to kick him while he was down, he went ahead and filed for the divorce himself. Then he disappeared. No one, not even his parents or sister heard from him. To be honest, until I saw his face this evening, I thought he might be dead.”

  Derek’s brows shot up, and she could tell she had his attention. “Why would you think that?”

  Willa kept her hands cupped around the hot mug. She took a sip of tea, willing its warmth to penetrate the places inside her that were filled with icy fear.

  “Let me back up,” she said, “so it’ll be easier to understand. Jase was a very gifted surgeon. Pediatrics. We got pregnant when I was twenty. Sydney was a surprise. At first we sort of freaked out, but she was a golden child from the very beginning—happy, funny, healthy and a great sleeper. You can’t complain about that, even if the timing isn’t what you expected.”

  Derek set his mug down, his attention riveted, his brow lowered.

  “We had help from very doting grandparents. Jase went to medical school and on to his residency, and eventually I went to culinary school. Life was hectic and intense and wonderful. I was happier than I’d ever been. We were all happy.”

  Derek’s jaw worked over that bit of information, but the time for sparing feelings, his or her own, had come to an end. He needed to understand and that meant she had to tell the truth. “You know,” she confessed softly, “as much as I loved my culinary career, being Sydney’s mom was far and away the best part of me. Nobody could make me laugh like Syd. She practiced jokes before she went to sleep at night.”

  Willa watched Captain slowly clump around the coffee table, making his way toward her. Ever-so-gently, he laid his graying head in her lap. If she didn’t know better, she’d say she saw compassion in his old eyes.

  Upstairs, the floor creaked. Gilberto heading to the bathroom, she assumed.

  “Oh, I brought a picture to show you.” Reaching for her purse, she pulled out the framed 8x10 from her mantel and handed it to him.

  Derek studied the photo. “She’s the spitting image of you. Beautiful. Really. Beautiful.”

  Willa smiled. “She was way prettier. Her features were bolder. She was bolder. That was taken before her first formal school dance. We went shopping for a dress and spent hours getting her ready.”

  She watched him read the note and signature slashed across the bottom of the 8x10. To Mom, From Syd. I love it when you do my hair.

  “She gave me the photo on Mother’s Day,” Willa said. “That weekend, we were all invited to go on a vacation out at Big Bear Lake with a couple of Syd’s friends and their families. Jase was working at Los Angeles Children’s Hospital, and I was an executive pastry chef in South Pasadena. He didn’t have any surgeries scheduled, but there was no way I could go. Mother’s Day weekend is one of the busiest in the food industry. I didn’t want them to miss out since I had to work anyway, so I insisted they go without me. Syd gave me my present before they left.”

  “How old was she in this photo?” Derek asked.

  “Almost eleven.”

  “Same age as Gilberto,” he murmured.

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me more about her.”

  The guarded look that had been on his face since he’d opened the door gave way to an expression of intense listening. Willa took a ragged inhalation. “Syd was a big heart with arms and legs. She never had a ‘best’ friend, because she loved everyone and assumed they loved her back. Her room was always a mess. She was crazy good at most sports. Swam like a fish. Nothing scared her. Not even the things that should have.”

  With shaky hands, she raised the mug of tea to her lips and took a long swallow before continuing. “On that Mother’s Day weekend, Syd, Jase and a couple other families and their kids camped by the lake near a popular swimming and diving area. From what I was able to gather, Syd watched someone do a backflip off the rocks and decided she wanted to try it. Jase had seen some pretty serious injuries from that kind of thing, and he told her no. I guess when he and the other dads went to turn on the propane tanks in the motorhomes, Sydney climbed up the rocks. She told her friends she wanted to see how high it was. No one knows whether she’d decided to dive despite her father’s warning or whether she lost her footing and fell.”

  Derek’s own tea sat untouched on the coffee table now, and he was as still as stone.

  “Syd didn’t surface. The kids started screaming. One of the mothers searched for her while the other ran for Jase. By the time he reached Sydney, she was out of the water, but unconscious. And by the time Life Flight got her to the hospital and I arrived, she was on life support.”

  Willa tried to tell the story as a series of facts, but each word that fell from her lips felt like a self-inflicted blow, and she rounded her torso over her legs in a kind of upright fetal position, as if she could protect herself.

  “While I stayed with Syd round the clock, Jase called in every favor from every expert he’d ever consulted with and then some, searching for a miracle. He wouldn’t leave his office for days at a time. And I sat alone in Syd’s room, searching for her in the hospital bed.”

  Once more, Willa saw the clinic-green walls with their outrageously cheerful decals and the tubes and wires and brilliant, heartbreaking machines that sustained her daughter’s breathing.

  She closed her eyes. “I thought if I believed hard enough, she would wake up. Be my Syd again.” Opening her eyes, she sought Derek’s face, willing him to understand. “The moment you stop fooling yourself is the worst moment of all.”

  “You weren’t fooling yourself,” Derek responded roughly. “You were hoping. Hope is never wasted.”

  “Thank you.” She wondered if Derek realized he was massaging her back? She didn’t want him to stop.

  “Where was Jase in all this?” he asked.

  “Still wrestling with his own demons. We’d begun to visit Sydney separately. We were arguing horribly, saying things to each other we wouldn’t have been able to imagine before the accident.”

  “What did you argue about?”

  “Jase refused what his education told him it was time to admit. That our daughter was gone. And I began to think we’d go crazy if we didn’t admit it. I knew I would never, ever, ever understand, but it was time.” Her throat closed around the words.

  “You took her off life support?” he inquired gently.

  “Not right away. Jase fought it. He fought until she began to have complications.” She took a big jagged breath. “Afterward, his guilt and grief and rage consumed him. We wound up in limbo—unable to go back, but not able to move forward, either.” She wiped away a tear, then looked at him. “I’m sorry I kept you in the dark. You’ve been nothing but wonderful, and I hate that you were blindsided tonight. My only excuse is that in my mind, the private grief kept Sydney alive in some way. Does that make any sense at all?”

  “I can’t pretend to understand it the way you do, but yeah. I guess it makes sense.” He reached for her hands, holding them between his own. Willa could feel their wonderful heat warming her fingers. “I wish I could hav
e comforted you. I wish I’d known your daughter.”

  Her eyes stung. “Me, too. On both counts.”

  “So it’s really over between you and Jase?”

  “It is.” Now that she’d given him the facts and an apology, she wanted to tell him what she’d planned to say before Jase’s arrival, but her nerves skyrocketed. With her heart flopping like a flounder in her chest, she looked into his eyes. “I’m ready to move forward now. With you.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Letting go of her hands, Derek leaned back, raising his face to the ceiling and exhaling a breath he seemed to have been holding for ages. Without looking at her, he put a hand on her thigh, squeezed and said, “Wait here.” Then he rose and crossed to the coat tree in his entry.

  Willa sat, baffled. Had she blown it? Stretched his patience to the snapping point? Waited too long to realize she wanted to realize her feelings ran deeper than those of a mere lover or friend?

  On pins and needles, she watched him root through a pocket in his leather jacket. When he found what he wanted, he returned to her. Clearing his throat, he sat.

  “I knew you’d lost someone. I saw the books on your front porch, the ones about grief. But I never dreamed you’d lost a child.” He met her eyes. “You humble me. I don’t mean that lightly, and I’m not patronizing you. There’s not a doubt in my mind that you were an amazing mother to Sydney, because I’ve seen you with Gilberto. You’re a natural.”

  Willa’s heart beat in an erratic rhythm. Derek was unusually nervous.

  “The thing is,” he continued, “I knew from the beginning, from the time you first came to work for Izzy, that you were special. Loving and good in a way that didn’t jive with the distance you were keeping. I told myself not to stalk you. I mean, if you weren’t interested then how warped was it to keep pursuing you? But my gut said you were the one.”

  “Derek, I think... I... I should—”

  “No, let me say this. It’s what I meant to say when I got to your house tonight.” His elbows were on his knees, his head turned toward her, his expression as open and vulnerable as she’d ever seen. “You’re the love I’ve waited for. The past two weeks, while we were helping Gilberto with the play and couldn’t even squeeze in a real date—they’ve been the most mundane, wonderful weeks of my life.”

  He looked down at his hands. Concentrating on his face, Willa had neglected to look at the item he held. Now she noticed it. Oh. Oh, my. Oh, no.

  “I planned to do this earlier.” Turning over his hand, he revealed a small, sapphire-blue velvet box.

  Willa felt as if she were in a dream, the kind in which everything moved in slow motion, and you couldn’t react quickly enough no matter how hard you tried.

  “I love you, Willa. I don’t want to waste another minute living without you. Whatever life brings, I want to be by your side.” He opened the box. An absolutely stunning ruby-and-diamond ring glowed in its velvet bed. “The ruby reminds me of you. Unique, rare.” The first genuine smile of the evening lit his face. “And, it goes real well with your hair.”

  Slipping from the sofa to the floor, with one knee bent, Derek asked humbly, “Will you marry me?”

  “Oh, Derek.” She reached for his hands, not the ring. Tears sprang to her eyes. “When I said I want to move forward, I... I meant it, but...in a relationship that’s open-ended. I want to be there for you, too, but as a...a...” She struggled to find the right word. “A girlfriend.” Derek’s brows swooped abruptly. “A steady girlfriend,” she assured, but she could tell by his expression that she was making it worse. The intensity of his stare unnerved her even more.

  Silence as heavy as an anvil fell onto the conversation.

  Slowly, Derek raised himself to the sofa. He snapped the ring box shut and dropped it on the table in front of them. Elbows on his knees, he put his head in his hands and spoke with great care. “I can see that after what you’ve been through, it would be hard to commit again. But I’m not Jase. I’ll never walk away.”

  “That’s not what this is about—”

  “Of course it is,” he insisted. “If you’d had someone to help you get through the pain—”

  “It would have helped, yes, but it wouldn’t change my mind about today. It was wonderful with Syd, but—” Anguish clogged her throat. “I don’t want children of my own again, Derek. I just can’t do it.”

  “You’re still grieving. You don’t know how you’ll feel in time.”

  “I know how I don’t want to feel again. It’s been two years. You have to accept what I’m telling you.”

  “But you could be a girlfriend,” he said, making her wince at the mocking tone. “So, if it was just me, you’d consider marriage?”

  Willa had a hard time meeting his gaze. “I don’t know how you did it,” she said, “but you managed to break through every rational reason I ever had not to fall in love again.” She shook her head rapidly. “I’m botching this so badly. I’m sorry. I know how much you want to be a father. The thing is, you are one. You and Gilberto are a package deal. I know how much having him here means to you. I do, and I’m happy for you. I just can’t risk—” She blinked at the welling tears and fanned at the sudden heat in her cheeks with her fingertips. “I won’t risk feeling that kind of pain again.”

  “And you think being a girlfriend will keep you safe?”

  She felt like an idiot when he put it that way. “Maybe not completely, but...”

  The tension in the air crackled to an uncomfortable level. “But as a girlfriend, you could walk away if you felt yourself getting in too deep. Right?” he demanded harshly then raised a hand before she could respond. “Never mind, I’ve heard enough.” He stood and took a step back.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You said that.”

  Willa shook her head. She really was an idiot. It was over. Why hadn’t she accepted the fact before she’d come here tonight? It had been selfish to assume she could chop her affections into carefully controlled bits, like a dieter trying to make a chocolate bar last as long as possible. Why would anyone be satisfied with that? Why should he?

  Clasping her hands beneath her chin, she said, “I’m so sorry—okay, I know, you’ve heard that already. I don’t know what to say except... I have to know my limits.”

  He swung around, his expression filled with disbelief. “That’s the coward’s way of saying you’re still running away. Like Jase did.”

  “That’s unfair! Jase had started drinking,” Willa argued, feeling defensive now. “He was actually trying to protect me by leaving!”

  “No, Willa. Jase was protecting himself. He ran away from the reality that life dishes out crap sometimes, and it’s up to us to turn the crap into something decent. Something meaningful, even if we wouldn’t choose it for ourselves in a million years. But you don’t run away.”

  Standing now, Willa faced off with him. “You don’t understand. You can’t possibly understand.”

  Striding forward, Derek grasped her upper arms. “I know I love you. I know we should be together. Not only when it’s easy and not just for a while. Forever. For better, for worse.”

  “Derek.” Willa groaned with frustration. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t! Don’t tell me about forever.”

  “You’re right. I’ve never lost a child. I don’t know what that’s like, not at all. But I know one thing—” he paused and took a deep breath “—I want a woman to love and a house full of kids to share that love with. I want pets and chaos and the whole messy works. I want it with you. And I believe, deep down, if you’d let yourself, you’d want that again, too.”

  No. Just...no. Though she wanted to explain, there were no more words. She couldn’t do it again, and it was beyond her at the moment to make him understand.

  No matter. He obviously read it
in her face.

  A log fell in the fireplace, sending a shower of sparks up the chimney as Derek scooped the ring box off the table and looked down at it. Captain’s head swiveled toward them before he yawned noisily.

  Derek bobbed his head once. “Okay.”

  Her chin wobbled miserably. “I’m—”

  She stopped herself, but he knew what she was about to say and raised his eyes to hers. “No. If you were really sorry, you wouldn’t be doing this.”

  She had no retort.

  Derek shrugged. “Well, I guess this is it.” He moved toward the foyer.

  Wordlessly, Willa followed.

  “Good night, Willa,” he said, holding open the door.

  She nodded, not trusting herself to push words through the new spate of grief that rose like a tidal wave.

  Frigid air stung her lungs as she stepped onto his front porch. The click of the door behind her seemed as final as any sound she had ever heard.

  * * *

  Two nights later, Willa was wide awake and staring morosely at the shadowed ceiling above her bed when the phone rang. Yellow light pooled as she turned on her bedside lamp then searched the nightstand for her cell. DEREK, the screen read.

  Pushing herself up against the headboard, she held her breath. They hadn’t spoken or seen each other since he’d closed the door on the night he’d proposed. She’d moved like a zombie through the past two days, the grief she’d tried to avoid front and center no matter what she was doing. Now merely seeing his name on caller ID filled her with adrenaline. Had he changed his mind about insisting on marriage? Was he phoning to say he wanted to try being in an open-ended relationship after all?

  Did it matter?

  Since she’d left his house, Willa had become more convinced with each passing minute that it had been ludicrous to believe she could be Derek’s “girlfriend” and still maintain a safe distance from Gilberto. Or, a safe distance from him, for that matter. Her mind and emotions were already in turmoil. Imagine if they’d been in a long standing relationship and then broke up. Or if they were together, in love, and he was killed on the job, God forbid. The very thought made her feel so sick, she thought she might throw up. What had she been thinking, getting involved with someone in his line of work?