by Shirley Jump
Beneath his nose, her hair was as soft as feathers, tickling lightly against his skin. He paused, inhaling the baby-light scent, allowing himself that one second of pretending.
Pretending she was his. That he was Sabrina’s father. He trailed a finger along the peachy soft skin of her cheek, the fantasy of this being his family, his life, continuing. He nuzzled Sabrina’s soft head, and imagined carrying her upstairs, putting his daughter to bed, and then shutting the door. To cross the hall and join Ellie, and together he and Ellie would—
Dalton drew back. He filled one of the coffee mugs and headed out of the kitchen, before those thoughts could get too deeply ingrained. They could never become reality, so there was no sense thinking them. He’d hand the kid back to Ellie, and be done with it.
But when he reached the living room, he realized it wouldn’t be that easy. Because Ellie had fallen asleep on his couch, her face soft and stress-free in repose, her feet tucked beneath her.
He smiled, then put the coffee cup on the end table. A second later, he picked up the cup, and put a coaster beneath it. There. Peter would be proud.
Then he found an afghan, and draped it over Ellie, tucking the knitted plaid blanket lightly around her frame. He dimmed the lights and left the room, Sabrina still on his hip.
“Looks like you’re stuck with me, kid,” he said to the baby. She laid her head against his chest again.
Apparently, she didn’t mind. And for the first time since Dalton had found the kid in his living room, he didn’t mind so much, either.
CHAPTER NINE
ELLIE scrambled to a sitting position, in a panic. The baby. Where was the baby?
For that matter, where was she?
Then the room began to come into focus, the pieces assembling themselves in her mind. The leather sofa. Mahogany table. Stone fireplace. She was in Dalton’s house. On Dalton’s sofa.
Dalton?
Oh God. She hadn’t. Ellie racked her brain, then relief hit her. No, she hadn’t. Still, where was Sabrina?
Ellie got to her feet, running a hand through her hair, and padded through the darkened downstairs rooms. “Dalton?”
No answer.
“Sabrina?”
No answer on that end, either.
Ellie headed into the kitchen, but that room was as silent and empty as the living room. A single light burned over the sink, but that was it. No one in the dining room or bathroom—not that she’d expected anyone there.
That left upstairs. Ellie hesitated a moment on the bottom step, listening, but she heard nothing. “Dalton?”
She took one step up, another, then a third, calling his name every few steps. Finally, she reached the landing, and the first bedroom on the right. The door was slightly open, but she paused to knock against the door frame. “Dalton?”
She heard him stir, then call her name in a way that seemed so soft, so intimate, it was as if they were married, and she had just come home at the end of a long day. Come home to him. “Ellie.”
“I…I, ah, woke up and I was…” She forgot what she wanted to say. Forgot why she was here. Forgot everything except the fact that she was standing outside of Dalton Scott’s bedroom, acutely aware he lay a few feet away.
“You were here,” he finished for her. She entered the room the rest of the way. He was sitting up in his king-size bed, against stark white sheets and a stack of white pillows. A thick dark comforter lay over the bed, seeming to invite her in. But most of all, there was Dalton, bare-chested, and very, very sexy.
Whoo.
She inhaled, but couldn’t seem to let the breath go, nor catch the next one. “How…. I mean…why am I still here?”
“You fell asleep on the sofa. I didn’t want to disturb you. I’m sorry, I probably should have left you a note.” He slid off the bed and stood. Much to Ellie’s relief—and a little disappointment—he had on a pair of sweatpants. He crossed the room, his eyes seeming so much larger and darker, more mysterious, in the near dark of the room. “You were like an angel, laying there. It seemed a crime to make you move.”
“Where’s Sabrina?”
“In the room across the hall. Sleeping in the portable playpen.” The darkness draped around them like a blanket, cozy and soft, drawing her closer. Enticing her to enter his bedroom, but she held her ground, even as she wanted to slip into his arms and feel his warm skin against hers.
“How did you get her to sleep?”
He had winnowed the gap between them, and now, Ellie really couldn’t breathe. She could barely even think. “She must have been as sleepy as her mother, because she fell asleep on my chest.”
“She did?” Surprise raised the notes in Ellie’s voice. “And you…well, you let her?”
Dalton might have thought she hadn’t noticed, but Ellie had. The way he remained standoffish with Sabrina, how he tried not to hold her too long or too close. How he avoided opportunities to play with her.
He was a competent babysitter, simply not an involved one. She’d chalked it up to inexperience, to him being a guy, to him not knowing Sabrina very well.
But deep down inside, Ellie knew there was something more. Something that circled around to Dalton’s problems with writing emotions in his novels. What that was, Ellie didn’t know.
Told herself she didn’t want to know, because that would entail getting closer to him. Getting to know him, seeing inside his heart.
“The kid’s not so bad,” Dalton said with a shrug. “She’s got a cute little laugh.”
Ellie’s jaw dropped. “You made her laugh.”
“I played a little game of Peek-a-Boo.” He shrugged, like it was no big deal, but Ellie knew it was. A very big deal. This meant Dalton had done more than tend to her daughter’s basic needs—he’d interacted with Sabrina.
“Peek-a-Boo.”
He grinned. “Are you going to repeat everything I say tonight?”
“I just can’t believe you did that. I mean, all you’ve done is feed her, and rock her. Lay her down for a nap.”
He narrowed the gap even further, one hand sneaking around her waist, pulling her to his hips. She gasped, her hands automatically rising to touch his chest, warm hard planes beneath her palms. Oh how she wanted to kiss that skin and taste every inch of him. In the dark, his touch became ten times more intimate, more…
Like something a husband would do. Ellie’s pulse quickened, her heartbeat accelerated, and her brain sputtered.
“What can I say?” Dalton said. “I guess you two are starting to grow on me.”
She’d come over here earlier tonight to lay down some ground rules. No more kissing. No more physical interaction. She was supposed to be keeping her distance, because that was the only way she could do this.
And here she was in his arms, her entire body wishing he would kiss her, wishing they were married, and this was their bedroom, and they were done with talking, and they could just head over to that bed, and end this aching, demanding need inside her.
“Sabrina and I…we should go home,” Ellie said.
“It’s three in the morning,” Dalton replied. “Too late to be waking the kid and then trying to get her settled again. Stay the night.”
Stay the night, she thought. Oh, how she wanted to. But where. Here? With him? Did she dare? Did she want to?
“You can sleep in the guest bedroom with Sabrina,” he went on, as if reading her mind. “There’s an alarm clock on the nightstand. Fresh sheets on the bed.”
“Stay here. With you.”
His hand came up to cup her jaw, thumb tracing over her bottom lip. Tempting, oh so tempting. She wanted to curve into his body, to forget every intention she’d laid out earlier, as neatly as the freshly ironed linens across the hall. “With me,” he whispered, “but not with me, as much as I would like that. Because I’m trying really hard—” and with that, he danced a kiss across her lips “—to be a gentleman here, and I’m not often one. Or at least not a very good one.”
She rose on her t
oes and kissed him, her fingers making waves in his hair. He was warm, and tasted of sleepy desire, the kind that she knew she’d find if she rolled over in bed and woke him up, wanting to make love at some odd hour. “What if I don’t want you to be a gentleman anymore?”
He groaned, and his grasp on her waist tightened. “Oh, Ellie, don’t…because it wouldn’t take much for me to forget all the reasons I had for spending the night in my own bed. Alone.” He bent down and kissed her again, this time deeper, harder, longer, his tongue tangoing with hers, raising a heat in Ellie’s body that refused to be quenched. “I want you, Ellie, believe me. But you deserve so much more than I can give right now.”
Then he broke away, and stepped back into the shadows of his room. “Go to bed, Ellie. I’ll see you in the morning. Sweet dreams.”
Oh, she’d be dreaming, all right. But she doubted any of her dreams would be sweet. Or about anything but what had just happened.
Dalton spent the rest of the night staring at the ceiling, pretending to sleep. Acutely aware of the woman across the hall, and how close he’d come to having her in his bed.
Damn. He’d either made the best decision of his life tonight or the worst one.
Finally, at six, he gave up on sleep and went down the hall to the third bedroom that served as his office. He powered up his computer, worked a little on his book, following his normal morning routine of writing a scene before getting to the carrot of checking his e-mail. He’d learned long ago that the Internet could be a huge time waster, so the best thing to do was to get some work done—and then allow himself the reward of getting to his messages.
“Good morning.”
He spun around on his chair, to find a sleep-rumpled and sexy as hell Ellie at his door. “Good morning.” He smiled. “Wow.”
“What?”
“You’re…gorgeous.”
“And you are blind. I look awful in the morning.”
“If that’s awful, then I need to check my dictionary, because I’ve been using that word the wrong way.” Dalton took a moment to process Ellie’s presence. He hadn’t had a woman wake up in his house in, well…forever. Odd didn’t even begin to describe the sensation, but coupled with that was a nice sense of hominess, of completeness.
Alarm bells clanged in his head. Dalton was treading awfully close to a danger zone he’d vowed to steer clear of.
Ellie stepped inside the office. “What are you doing?”
“Working. Or trying to, anyway. More like buying time until I check my e-mail.”
She laughed. “I do the same thing. Only with me, it’s coffee. I’d stand there and inhale the entire office coffeepot and not get any work done in the morning if I didn’t pace myself.”
“If you want coffee, there’s a pot right over there.” He grinned. “I have the same problem. So I made it easy, and brought the pot to me. No more excuses to hang out in the kitchen and avoid work.”
She laughed, and crossed to the carafe, filling a mug for herself. While she did, Dalton turned back to the computer. Right now he was stuck. He’d come to the scene with the female detective, where she was supposed to react to the horrific crime scene. A murdered family, not one she had known, but an event which brought up a painful event from her past. And thus far, this morning’s writing had been—
Terrible. About as emotional as a philodendron.
He typed a few words. Hated them. Backspaced them into oblivion. Typed a few more, hated those twice as much, and repeated the delete. His gaze strayed to Ellie.
“Can I pick your brain for a minute?”
She stopped stirring sugar into her coffee, and glanced over at him, her tousled hair seeming to beg a man to run his fingers through the brunette locks. “Sure. What do you need?”
You. Me. Alone for a long weekend.
Dalton cleared his throat. “If you came across two dead bodies in a bedroom, throats slashed, their guts splashed on the walls, and you’d seen this killer’s work before, back when you were—”
She paled. “Uh…what are we talking about?”
“Sorry. My book.”
“Oh. You had me worried there for a second. It’s a little early in the morning for the whole guts splashed on the walls thing.”
He chuckled. “Forgot not everyone lives in my world.”
She crossed to him, the carafe in her hand, and refilled his coffee mug without him asking. Dalton sat back, amazed at that small gesture—and how nice it made him feel to be taken care of. How he could get used to that. And how he shouldn’t even be thinking about such a thing, not with a woman like Ellie.
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” She pulled up the second chair and sat beside him, sipping at her coffee. “So you want to know how I’d react to such a scene?”
He nodded. “My heroine has been through something similar in her past. So this brings up a lot of really painful memories. She sees the same murder, in her mind, when she walks in and sees this dead family.”
“Dalton, I don’t know if I can help. I mean, what we’ve been doing up until now has been pretty simple, but I’ve never seen anything like that and I don’t know anything about crime scenes or murders.”
He pushed off from the desk and spun toward her. “You don’t have to. Think about it in terms of an experience you have had. Like…” He searched for a word, waving his hand vaguely.
“Like losing my husband,” she said softly. Pain marched lines across her face, into her eyes.
What was he doing? Why was he opening this door? Just to write a book? He should back away, stop this right now. She mattered more than some stupid book. “Listen, Ellie, forget I said anything. I’ll be fine.” Dalton turned back to the computer.
She laid a hand on his arm. “No, really, it’s okay. I want to help you.”
“You don’t have to talk about this.”
“Yeah, I do.” And in her voice, he heard that she did. She drew in a breath, then let it out. “I haven’t talked about this to anyone, not really. Everyone around me has said I need to deal with it. So I can move on.”
He waited.
“I need to move on. Not just for me, but for Bri. To do that, I have to talk. As much as I’d rather do anything else.” Another breath, in, out, then her gaze met his. “I never told you how he died, did I?”
He shook his head.
“Car accident. Not one of those mercifully fast ones, either.” Ellie ran a hand through her hair. “He was hit crossing the street. Heading to work.” Her voice dropped into a softer range, grief tempering the words. “You just never know when you’re going to die. And for Cameron, it was as simple as that. Some moron on a cell phone running a red light.”
“I’m so sorry, Ellie.” Damn. Should he let her continue? Or cut this conversation off now, before it hurt her anymore?
But she kept going, as if now the water faucet had been turned on, and there would be no shutting it off. “At first, we thought he’d be okay, but it turned out he had all these internal injuries, and a few days later, he was gone. Thank God we had those days, because at least we could talk about us, about Sabrina. We had those conversations, the ones so many people don’t get to have.” She lifted her gaze to his and he saw the tears welling in her beautiful green eyes, tears he couldn’t make go away, not this time. “At least we got to say goodbye.”
“Oh, Ellie…” What could he say? What could he do? He reached for her, but she stepped back, as if saying, don’t touch me now, not yet, not until I’ve said it all.
“Cameron left me with a mortgage…and nothing else. No life insurance, no plan. It wasn’t his fault, I mean, he was young. Who thinks they’re going to die at twenty-nine? He kept meaning to get life insurance, to set up a will, but…”
“It’s just not something you think about at twenty-nine,” Dalton finished.
“Yeah.” She paused a long moment, her gaze in some faraway place, and gestured toward his computer. “It wasn’t a horrible crime scene like your heroine ha
d, but it was horrible to me. And it hurt.” She drew her gaze back to his, the tears spilling onto her lashes now. “It hurt so bad, Dalton. So bad. I never thought I’d move on. Or get out of bed. Or breathe again.”
A crack ran through his heart, breaking it like thin ice. He stepped forward, not letting her escape this time, and reached out, taking her hands in his. “Ellie, I wish I’d known. I’d have…well, I don’t know what I’d have done, but I’d have done something.”
“There was nothing anyone could do. It was all on me.” She looked down at their clasped hands. “I had to force myself to get out of bed every morning. To put one foot on the floor. To leave the house. And do you know why I did it?”
He shook his head.
“For her,” Ellie said, her voice so soft, the words were a breath. “If I didn’t have that baby growing in me, that life on the way, I don’t know how I would have made it.”
He didn’t know how she’d done it, either. What a hell of a woman. He admired her a hundred times more now than he ever had before. She’d gone on after an incredible tragedy, a real life heroine, stronger than any of the women he’d created on the pages of his novels. And she was still doing that every day of her life.
“You’re stronger than you think, Ellie. You’d have been fine.”
A smile worked its way across her face. “Maybe I would have.”
He brought her closer to him. “I’m serious, you would have been fine.”
She tipped her chin. “All I know is that having Bri saved me. She got me through a really hard time, but…”
“What?”
“Nothing, really. It’s just hard to have a loss like that and a lot of changes afterward.” Then she glanced at his computer screen. “So you asked me, how I’d react if I saw a death that reminded me of a horrible death I’d gone through before, and I can tell you, at first, I’d be frozen, all over again. I wouldn’t act. Not for a little while. I’d be picturing all I’d lost, and be so afraid of losing that again, even if it wasn’t the same situation. There’s so much at stake when you get close to someone, but so much more when you lose them. Because you can’t ever say those words you meant to say. You can’t ever give that hug you wanted to give. Those moments are gone. They’re gone.” The last words added in a whisper that nearly broke Dalton’s heart.