At the sound of Orville’s voice, Jenny pulled her gaze away from the plate-glass window to her partner sitting across from her. “Were you saying something, Orville?”
The young man banged his forehead with the heel of his palm. “Jenny, you haven’t eaten three bites, and it’s time for us to be getting back on the beat. What’s the matter with you? Are you sick?”
She was sick, all right, Jenny thought miserably. Sick of trying to put Lucas out of her mind and failing. Nearly a week had passed since the night he’d taken her out to his farmhouse. That night had been the last she’d seen or heard from him, and she fiercely told herself she was glad.
Deep down, Lucas probably was a good man. But he was still a man, just the same. And just because she happened to meet a man she liked it wasn’t time for her to cast away her lessons from the past and behave like a lovestruck fool. No, it was good for her that Lucas hadn’t tried to contact her. Even so, she couldn’t help but feel like an old, discarded rag.
“I’m not sick, Orville. Just not hungry.” Quickly she tossed her dirty napkin and empty foam cup onto her plate. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
The two of them dumped their trays and left the fastfood restaurant. In the patrol car Orville reached to start the motor, then paused to cast a concerned look at Jenny.
“You know,” he said thoughtfully, “you’ve been looking sorta peaked the past couple of days. Have you been sleeping all right?”
“Darn it, Orville! If you’d watch the streets as closely as you do me, you might see something of importance!” she snapped at him.
Unmoved by her remark, Orville started the engine and merged onto the busy noonday street. “You are important, Jenny. You’re my partner. If you’re only giving fifty percent of yourself instead of a hundred, I’m the one liable to suffer for it. I mean, it’s not likely we’re going to get into a high-speed chase with a couple of bank robbers in the next couple of minutes. But if we did—well, I’d feel a lot safer about things if you weren’t sitting over there with a moony look on your face.”
A moony look? Jenny wanted to shout he was a bumbling idiot. But she didn’t. Instead she started counting to ten. By the time she reached nine, she felt like a heel.
“You’re right, Orville. And I’m sorry if I haven’t seemed with it these past few days. Something has—well, I’ve had a lot on my mind. But there’s no need for you to be worried. If we get into a spot, I won’t let you down. I promise you that.”
They traveled a few blocks before Orville spoke again.
“You know, it’s not just myself I’m worried about. I don’t want anything to happen to you, Jenny.”
She stared out the car window, her jaw set with firm resolution. “Don’t worry, Orville. I’m not going to let anything happen.”
Later that night when Jenny got off duty, she changed out of her uniform at the precinct station, then drove across town to Savanna’s. It had been a long week, and she couldn’t stand the thought of facing another evening in her empty apartment.
Savanna’s husband, Joe, answered the door and ushered Jenny into the house.
“Savanna is in the kitchen making sauerkraut and wieners,” he told her.
Jenny glanced at her wrist watch. “At this hour?”
Joe laughed. “She had a sudden craving.”
Jenny rolled her eyes heavenward. “I hope for your sake she doesn’t get these cravings in the wee hours of the morning.”
“Oh, it’s pretzels then,” he said with humor. “But I’m getting used to waking up to the sound of munching and crumbs jabbing me in the back.”
Jenny patted his shoulder. “I’ll remind her what a good husband she has.”
“Thanks,” he said with a grateful smile, then motioned toward the kitchen. “Go on back there. She’ll be excited to see you.”
Jenny found Savanna sitting at the breakfast bar eating kraut and wieners. A name-your-baby book was propped open in front of her plate.
“Jenny!” she exclaimed with pleasure when she spotted her friend entering the room. “Come over here and have some sauerkraut with me. It’s delicious. And not a bit fattening, thank goodness.”
Jenny climbed up on the stool beside the blonde. “What’s this I hear about you torturing Joe with pretzels in bed?”
Savanna giggled. “I don’t torture him. I don’t even turn on the lamp.”
“You just chomp them in the dark and let the crumbs fall where they may,” Jenny said with a teasing grin.
“I’m not that bad,” Savanna insisted with a laugh, then shoveled up a forkful of kraut and popped it into her mouth. “I never knew how much I loved this stuff until I got pregnant.”
“How have you been feeling? Other than hungry?”
“Fine. Wonderful.” Savanna glanced at her between bites. “How are you? You looked peaked.”
Jenny frowned. “You sound like Orville.”
“So he noticed, too?” Savanna lay her palm against Jenny’s forehead. “Has the flu bug been going around down at the station?”
“Oh, stop it! I’m not peaked or ill,” Jenny said with annoyance. “I just haven’t been sleeping well lately. I’ve had a lot on my mind.”
Her plate empty, Savanna carried it to the sink and rinsed it beneath a stream of water. “Couldn’t be that trucking tycoon you were telling me about is keeping you up at night?”
With a weary groan Jenny slid off the stool and joined Savanna at the sink. “I haven’t even seen the man. Not since—we went out to dinner the other night.”
Savanna was suddenly bubbling with excitement. “You went out to dinner with the man? Jenny, that’s wonderful! Where did he take you? What happened? Tell me all about it!”
Jenny’s first instinct was tell Savanna that nothing had happened that night. But she realized that wouldn’t quite be telling the truth. Something had happened. Lucas had shown her a glimpse of his future, and in doing so, Jenny had caught a glimpse of her own. And the sight had left her lonely and afraid.
Propping herself against the counter, Jenny quickly described the dinner she and Lucas had shared, then went on to tell about the trip to the old farmhouse and all the things she’d learned about him there.
“So the man wants to marry and have children,” Savanna mused. “That’s encouraging.”
Jenny shook her head. “Don’t let those wheels of yours start racing,” she told Savanna. “I’m not ever going to marry again. And even if I did consider it, Lucas has a thing about cops. A close friend of his was killed in the line of duty. He doesn’t believe he could deal with a wife being on the police force.”
Savanna’s eyes grew wide and calculating. “You talked about that?”
“Only in theory,” Jenny assured her, then groaned with frustration. “Oh, I don’t know why I’m telling you any of this. There’s nothing really between us. I don’t even want anything to be between us.”
“Bull!”
A kettle on the stove suddenly let out a whistle. Savanna filled a ceramic teapot with boiling water, then dropped in several bags of decaffeinated tea.
“There’s no bull about it,” Jenny replied. “I’m using good old common horse sense here. And it tells me that I’d be a fool to let my heart get mixed up with the man. Besides, 1 haven’t even heard from him. That tells you how interested he is in me.”
“And you’re obviously disappointed.”
Jenny opened her mouth to protest, but nothing came out. For the past few days she’d been lying to herself, telling herself she wasn’t really waiting for his call or to hear his knock on her apartment door. Maybe it was time she quit lying to herself and to Savanna.
“Okay, so I have missed him,” she said glumly, then groaning helplessly, she closed her eyes and rubbed them with the tips of her fingers. “I don’t understand why he made such a big issue of wanting to know me and then— Oh, I wish there wasn’t even such a thing as the male species. It would make life much simpler.”
“Speak for you
rself,” Savanna said cheerfully.
Jenny frowned at her. “Well, that’s easy for you to say. You have a wonderful husband who loves you.”
Savanna placed the teapot, two cups and milk and sugar on a tray, then carried it to where Jenny sat holding her forehead.
“Jenny, Jenny,” Savanna scolded. “I’m worried about your memory. You seem to forget that less than a year ago I was crying my eyes out over Joe. At that time in my life I believed I didn’t want to marry him or any man.”
“You came to your senses.”
“Only because you helped me open my eyes and see what I really wanted in life.”
“I already have everything I want,” Jenny countered.
“Then what are you squawking about?”
Jenny remained silent as she watched Savanna pour the tea. What was she squawking about? she asked herself.
“I don’t know, honey. I—” She shook her head with helpless resignation. “Savanna, when Lucas was showing me that old house and talking about filling it with his children, I—I’d never felt more sad or alone. I thought about you and Joe and Megan and the new baby on the way and I kept wondering why I had to ruin my life over someone like Marcus. Why couldn’t I have met Lucas back then? Back before Marcus turned me into something less than a woman?”
“If you’re expecting sympathy from me, Jenny, you’re not going to get it. Marcus didn’t turn you into something less than a woman. You only think he did. You’re beautiful and sexy and intelligent. And it’s never too late to start over. To try again.”
Jenny’s eyes clouded with despair. “I’m thirty-four years old, Savanna. I’d be crazy to take a risky chance with what future I have left.”
Ignoring her tea for the moment, Savanna reached over to cover Jenny’s hand with her own. “What sort of future will you have if you don’t?”
Jenny dumped two spoons of sugar into her teacup, then gave it a vicious stir. “I’ll tell you what kind of future I’ll have,” she answered. “I’ll have a safe, predictable future. And that’s what I want the most.”
Savanna rolled her eyes with frustration. “Then, my dear, you’d better forget all about Lucas Lowrimore.”
With a grim set to her jaw, Jenny lifted the teacup to her lips. “That’s exactly what I intend to do,” she said.
And she would, Jenny assured herself. As soon as she figured out how to do it.
Chapter Seven
The next evening Jenny and Orville were cruising May Avenue when the dispatcher came over the radio with a domestic disturbance. Being the nearest officers in the vicinity, the two of them answered the call.
In the few minutes it took to reach the scene, Jenny drew in several calming breaths and tried to steel herself for what was ahead.
“You hate these things, don’t you?” Orville asked as he wheeled the patrol car through a busy intersection.
She darted a glance at her partner. “Don’t you?”
He nodded grimly. “I guess every officer does.”
“Well, at least the man isn’t armed with a gun.” It was the only positive thing Jenny could say.
“Sometimes fists are just as bad.”
“Yes, I know,” she said. And it was something she’d spent the past five years trying to forget.
The domestic call turned out to be an ugly scene. Several minutes passed, though to Jenny it seemed like hours, before they finally managed to handcuff the combatant husband and calm the bruised, weeping wife. By the time Jenny wrote out the arrest report later that evening, then drove home, she was as limp as a dirty dishrag.
What’s the matter with me? Jenny asked herself as she stepped tiredly into her apartment. In the past ten years, she’d been on many domestic calls. Some of them far rougher than this one tonight. It was a part of her job, and she’d learned to deal with the ugliness of it. So why had the sight of that battered woman shaken her to the very core of her being? Why was she still sick inside? And most of all, why did she feel so damn useless?
In the bedroom, she unbuckled her weapon and tossed it onto the foot of the bed. Then, unbuttoning her shirt, she walked over to the dresser mirror and studied the tired image staring back at her.
She was a police officer, she thought angrily. She should be able to do more to help women like that—like she’d once been. It was one of the reasons she’d gone into the police academy in the first place. Because she thought she could make a difference. What a joke!
Leaning closer to the mirror, she rubbed her fingertips over the dark hollows beneath her eyes. She wasn’t the same Jenny Prescott she’d been three weeks ago. At that time, she’d been satisfied with her job. Now she was beginning to wonder if she’d been a fool all these years to think she could help even one battered woman. Worse than that, she was beginning to wonder if she’d simply been hiding behind a badge and a gun for ten years.
Damn his hide, it was all Lucas’s fault, she muttered to herself as she stepped into the shower. If he hadn’t come along and messed with her mind, she’d still be a contented woman. Lonely, maybe, but that was an easy price to pay compared to the turmoil she was going through right now.
More than an hour later Jenny was lying on the couch, trying to get interested in a movie, when a knock sounded at the door.
Frowning, Jenny glanced at the digital clock on the VCR. It was too late for any of her friends to be calling, and if Captain Morgan needed her, he’d simply telephone.
Tossing her tumbled hair out of her face, Jenny walked barefooted to the door.
“Who is it?” she asked cautiously.
“Lucas.”
Lucas! Her hand fluttered to her throat. What was he doing here? Tonight, at this ridiculous hour? And why was her heart suddenly pounding with pleasure? She was sure she’d convinced herself she never wanted to see him again.
“Are you going to let me stand out here till the sun rises?”
Flustered, Jenny fumbled with the bolt lock. When she finally managed to get the door open Lucas was standing on the other side, his black hair rumpled by the wind, his cheeks dimpled with a sheepish little grin.
“I know it’s late,” he said, stepping into the apartment.
Jenny shut the door behind him, then turned. “Late! Lucas, it’s the middle of the night!”
He shrugged. “I’m sorry. But I couldn’t wait to see you.”
Her eyes wide with disbelief, she echoed, “Couldn’t wait? It’s taken you over a week to decide if you wanted to see me again? And then it suddenly hit you around midnight to come over here?”
Lucas’s dark eyes slid over her outraged face, her tumbled mass of red hair, then more slowly over her silk pajamas and the sensual curves beneath them. She was the most desirable, beautiful woman he’d ever known, and for the past week her memory had consumed him. Cop or not, he had to have her in his life. It was that simple.
“I’m afraid you’ve got it wrong. It’s taken me a week to get back to town. I had to go to Chicago for a few days, then on to Cleveland.”
“I take it there wasn’t any telephones in either city?”
Laughing, Lucas reached for her hand. In spite of herself, Jenny gave it to him, then felt her heart immediately turn over as he pressed his lips against her palm.
“So you wanted me to call,” he said with lazy pleasure. “That’s encouraging, Jenny. Real encouraging.”
Pulling her hand from his grasp, she marched over to the couch, picked up the remote and smashed the off button. “You know what I meant, Lucas. You go for a week without even bothering to call, then you show up in the middle of the night like—an eager lover. You must think I was born yesterday!”
Lucas shrugged out of his leather jacket, walked over to the couch and tossed it over the back.
“I didn’t call because I wanted to give us both time to ponder about things. And no, I don’t think you were born yesterday. I believe you’re glad to see me,” he said with irksome confidence. “Even though you don’t want to admit it.”
“I’m not glad to see you,” she said, her heart fluttering as he came to stand in front of her.
“You’re lying,” he said, his hands curving over the top of her shoulders. “I think you’ve missed me this week. The same way I’ve missed you.”
His fingers burned through the silk pajama top. Jenny could only wonder if they would feel that hot against her bare skin. “Lucas, I—”
His eyes glinting, he lowered his head toward her. “I can see you’re a woman who has to be shown instead of told. And I think it’s high time I did some showing.”
In the back of her mind, Jenny knew what was coming, but she couldn’t seem to lift a finger to stop it. Then it was too late. His lips were on hers, and she was irretrievably lost.
Other than a friendly peck on the cheek, it had been years since Jenny had been kissed by a man. And even then it hadn’t been like this. Her head was spinning, her heart pounding madly as his lips tasted hers, his hands crushed her hips against his.
With a groan of surrender, Jenny curled her arms around his neck and welcomed the intimate invasion of his tongue between her teeth.
Long moments passed before Lucas finally pulled his mouth away from hers. When he did, Jenny’s head lolled weakly against the crook of his arm.
“Dear Lord, it’s a good thing I hadn’t done that before I left, or I could have never stayed away from you a whole week,” he said, his voice husky with desire.
Her breathing still ragged, she opened her eyes to see his face was still only inches from hers. Trying to rally her senses, she levered a wider distance between them.
“Why did you do that?”
“Because I’ve wanted to do it for weeks. And because you needed it.”
Jenny’s mouth fell open. “I needed it? That northern air you’ve been breathing this past week must have done something to your brain.”
His hands hugged her waist. “The air didn’t, but the time away from you did. It cleared up my thinking.”
Her expression was skeptical. “You’ve had trouble with your thinking?”
Wanted: Wife Page 10