Safe in His Arms

by Dana Corbit

  Since no sounds were coming from the living room, except for the saccharine sound of Emma’s favorite kids’-music CD, Lindsay was relieved that the child had found something with which to occupy herself for a few minutes. Now Lindsay would be able to finish making dinner in peace.

  She lifted the pan lid and used a fork to test the doneness of the asparagus. She only needed to start on the salad and wait for the oven buzzer to go off for the salmon, and she would have a meal on the table. Maybe Emma would even like what she’d made for dinner this time.

  But just as she chopped through a head of red cabbage, the doorbell rang.

  “What now?”

  She dropped the cabbage and knife on the cutting board and hurried down the hall to the living room.

  “Remember, Emma, don’t answer the—” The word “door” died on her lips as she glanced around the living room. Emma wasn’t on the couch or near her pile of toys. Even her portable CD player lay abandoned.

  “Emma?” Lindsay called, as she started up the stairs, her pulse scrambling. She expected the child to come racing down the hall. It and her bedroom were empty.

  “Emma Claire, where are you?” She started down the steps again.

  “Hey, Lindsay. Out here.”

  Her heart was pounding, but she stopped as she recognized the familiar voice coming from outside. What was Joe doing here? She hurried across the living room and opened the door. Joe stood on her porch with Emma resting on his hip. Lindsay could only stare at them, her mouth falling slack.

  She wanted to yell at him for showing up at her condo after she’d expressly told him she didn’t need his help, but how could she, when he was standing there holding the child she hadn’t been watching closely enough? When Emma’s escape was proof positive that she was doing a lousy job.

  Joe stepped up to the storm door and opened it. “Look who just slipped out the front door to greet me.”

  “I can see that.”

  His smile grated on her. Okay, maybe she wasn’t the best guardian, but he didn’t have to rub it in. He was the one who’d popped in uninvited and had given a three-year-old a reason to sneak outside. And if he was insisting on showing up as the protector of the public, why was he out of uniform again, wearing jeans and a snug T-shirt that hugged his well-formed arms, chest and shoulders? She didn’t even want to think about whether she should have noticed those things at a time like this, or at any time for that matter.

  “I was just telling Emma here that even when she sees a friend outside, she can’t go out without her Aunt Lindsay.” He lowered the child to the ground.

  “Trooper Rossetti is right,” Lindsay said, no matter how much it grated on her to admit it.

  “Sorry,” Emma said in a small voice.

  “It’s okay, but you’d better come inside now.”

  Lindsay made just enough room for her niece to slip past her, and then she reached for the door handle and tried to close it.

  “Thanks for coming by, but it’s a crazy time of day around here, and we were just about to eat, so…” She paused, hoping he would get the hint to leave, but the oven timer went off, and he still hadn’t turned down the walk.

  “Shouldn’t you get that?”

  “Yeah, I’d better.”

  She waved and started down the hall. She’d only taken a few steps when a squeak of the door had her turning back. Emma had grabbed Joe’s hand and was pulling him inside, and Joe was letting her. Was the trooper always this dense over social cues, or was he being this annoying on purpose?

  “Do you want to play dolls?” Emma asked, as she led him toward the toy box Lindsay had moved from her old bedroom.

  Lindsay started back toward them, but the buzz kept coming from the kitchen. Finally, with a frustrated sigh, she stalked out of the room.

  Just as she pulled the pan from the oven, she sensed Joe behind her. Either that or the skin on the back of her neck was becoming gooseflesh for no good reason. Setting the pan aside, she turned to face him.

  Joe stood in the doorway, with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops, like a blue-jeans model. Only his jeans had the spotted look of someone’s painting pants, and the hole in one of the knees appeared to have been earned the hard way. At least he had the decency not to look smug that he’d managed to stay despite her wishes.

  Lindsay peeked behind him, but Emma must have stayed in the living room.

  “Wasn’t I obvious enough that I was trying to get you to leave?”

  The side of his mouth lifted. “No, you were real clear there.”

  “So why are you still here?”

  “I was invited.”

  That lazy smile annoyed her, but the jolt of electricity she felt shocked her in more ways than one. What was wrong with her? She crossed her arms. Just who did he think he was, staying when he knew she didn’t want him there? And an invitation from a three-year-old didn’t count, either. Joe must have sensed that she was about to say something acidic enough to bore a hole through his skin because he held up both hands to ward off the assault.

  “Look, I’m already here, so you might as well put me to work. I could hang out with Emma while you’re finishing dinner. You said it’s a hectic time of day, so…” He glanced around the chaos in her kitchen. “And, besides, Emma is already setting up dolls in the living room. Do you want to be the one to tell her I can’t stay to play?”

  Lindsay caught sight of her saucepan in her side vision. Steam was seeping from under the lid where the asparagus had to be overcooked. The head of cabbage lay on the cutting board where she’d abandoned it.

  “Fine,” she said, blowing out a frustrated sigh. “You can stay. But this is my house and my rules, and I—” She stopped, wincing. “Did I really just say that?”

  “From your parents?”

  “My dad.”

  “My brother tells me that, as a parent, you say every one of those things you promised yourself you’ll never say to your own kids.”

  In a roundabout way, he’d just called her a parent. During all of the discussions with her mother and father and even with Delia’s attorney, no one had called Lindsay a “parent.” She liked the way that sounded.

  “So…?” Joe gestured toward the living room with a flick of his thumb.

  “Go ahead. Just play with Emma until I can get food on the table.”

  Farther down the hall, he turned back. “I’ll be sure to follow your rules. In your house.” With a grin, he was off and around the corner to the living room.

  Emma must have been hiding because giggles drifted down the hall. Lindsay could tell the exact moment when Joe found her hiding place as those giggles multiplied. Joe really was amazing with her niece. Fun but firm. Playful but not a pushover. Maybe he could teach her a few things about working with children.

  No matter what it took for her to become the best caregiver for Emma, the kind that Delia had hoped for when she’d named her guardian, Lindsay was willing to do it. And if that meant taking unsolicited advice from a Michigan State Trooper, then she would do that, too.

  “You could stay for dinner,” she heard herself saying.

  Joe popped around the corner with Emma hanging on his leg. “Sure, I’d love to stay. Thanks.”

  Lindsay nodded. He’d won. She should have been frustrated that he’d gotten his way, after all. But she was relieved that Trooper Joe Rossetti wasn’t leaving, and she couldn’t explain why.

  Yet, relief wasn’t the worst of what she was feeling. Her sweaty palms and the butterflies in her belly felt an awful lot like anticipation. Was she really looking forward to sharing dinner with the guy who reminded her of everything she’d lost and whose presence there today was like a neon sign announcing her weaknesses as a guardian? Even telling herself that he was there on her terms, not his, didn’t make her feel any less edgy. Anticipation…now, that worried her most of all.

  Chapter Four

  “That was great,” Joe said, as he pushed back from Lindsay’s blond-wood dinette table and wipe
d his mouth on a cloth napkin.

  A pretty pink blush crept across Lindsay’s cheeks, and she stared down at her plate. “No, it wasn’t. The salmon was overdone, and the asparagus was as limp as pasta noodles.”

  “I happen to like pasta noodles, even when they’re well past al dente.” He also liked the little smile that spread on her lips over the compliment and how pretty she looked in her T-shirt, cutoffs and ponytail, but he kept those things to himself. No need to ruin a pleasant dinner by getting himself tossed out on his ear.

  “Then you should have loved that stuff.”

  “It was fish.” Emma’s tone left little doubt about what she thought about fruits of the sea.

  Joe and Lindsay looked at each other across the table and laughed. They’d done an awful lot of laughing over this dinner, which had started out tense at best. Mostly, they’d laughed about the antics of the three-year-old who sat in a booster seat so high that her knees bumped the table edge. Occasionally, though, they’d found something funny that one of the adults had said, as well.

  “I guess that says it all when you’re three,” Joe said when the laughter died down.

  “I should have known better than to cook fish for a child, anyway,” Lindsay said with a frown.

  “Some kids like fish,” he said because she seemed to need some kind words.

  “I don’t like it.” Emma made another face.

  “Not that one, apparently.” Lindsay tilted her head to indicate the child who’d eaten only enough to survive, mostly pushing her food around on her plate to create little pink-and-green piles.

  Not most of the kids he’d ever met, either, but Joe didn’t mention that. And asparagus was seldom a hit with the under-ten crowd. He kept that to himself, as well.

  After Lindsay sent Emma upstairs to get her pajamas ready for her bath, she started stacking the dishes. “Dinner’s a daily battle around here.”

  Joe carried several plates to the counter. “Have you ever considered making ‘kid-friendly’ meals like pizza, chicken fingers and mac and cheese?”

  He was glad she hadn’t lifted her stack of serving dishes because as aghast as she looked, she would have dropped the whole thing on the floor.

  “I don’t want to feed her that stuff. What kind of guardian would I—”

  She stopped herself, but he got the gist of what she was saying. “Plenty of people give their children kid food. Do you think they’re all bad parents?”

  “Of course not, but I…” She let her words trail away and shrugged.

  “You’re awfully hard on yourself, aren’t you? My brother and I survived for a whole year on grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup after—well, we survived, anyway.”

  Lindsay turned back from the dishwasher with curiosity in her eyes. “Why did you—”

  “Never mind. It’s not that interesting a story.” He was sorry he’d mentioned it. Since when did he talk about his mother’s death and the lost years that had followed it? Rather than stand back and give Lindsay the chance to ask more questions, he helped her load the dishwasher.

  “All I’m saying is, you should relax and give yourself a break. It’s okay for kids to have those things sometimes. It’s all about balance.”

  He thought he’d been convincing, but Lindsay only started shaking her head.

  “I have to get this right. To be the best guardian for Emma. I have to do it for her…and for Delia.” Immediately, her eyes filled, but Lindsay blinked back her tears. “I will get it right.”

  “And I thought you were just worried about some deep-fried balls of processed chicken and globs of high-fat cheese mixed in with carbohydrate-filled pasta noodles.”

  It wasn’t the best timing for a joke, but Joe either had to tell one or allow the emotion clogging his throat to really embarrass him. This all hit a little too close to home, to two little boys and the father who’d been forced to raise them alone.

  “I was worried about those things, too.”

  He couldn’t decide whether it was her smile or her determination that dazzled him, but he heard himself saying, “You’ll get it right. I know it.”

  Lindsay stared back at him with wide eyes. Why did she find his statement of belief in her so surprising? He’d already said too much, yet he was tempted to say more, to tell her how impressed he was by her determination and her loyalty. That he’d thought those qualities were exclusive to people in uniform, not pretty redheads with the cutest freckles on their noses.

  Okay, he wouldn’t have said that, but still he was grateful when the sound of a faucet from upstairs made sure he wouldn’t have the chance. A literal gift from above.

  “Uh-oh.” Lindsay glanced up to the ceiling before starting for the stairs. “Emma, honey, please turn off the water until I get there.”

  She seemed surprised when the faucet squeaked off again, as if she hadn’t expected the child to obey her.

  “Well, I’d better get up there before she goes tub diving.” She started out of the kitchen, but then stopped and turned back to him. “Do you want to—”

  “See myself out? Sure.” He hoped he didn’t sound as disappointed as he felt.

  She blushed just like she had when he’d complimented her cooking. “Uh…I was going to ask if you wanted to wait here until I finish with Emma’s bath and her bedtime story, but if you need to get home—”

  “I could stay,” he rushed to say. Yes, he could, but the question was whether he should. His sweaty hands and dry mouth suggested that answer was a big “no.”

  “I’ll finish cleaning up the kitchen while you’re doing that.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  He waved off her refusal. “It will keep me occupied while I wait.”

  “Okay, then.”

  She appeared as nervous as she had two days before, when she’d shown up at the Brighton Post to dig around in a recent past that would have been better left undisturbed. He listened for her footfalls on the steps, and then the sound of running water upstairs, before collecting the pans on the stove and filling the sink to wash them.

  But all he could think about as he scrubbed the pans and wiped down the counters was what he was still doing in Lindsay Collins’s condo when the child he was concerned about wouldn’t be around for the rest of the night. He was still helping out, right? He was here because he wanted to come to Lindsay’s aid to relieve his guilt over the accident and what he’d failed to tell her about it. Only those things.

  “Yeah, you keep telling yourself that, buddy,” he said under his breath.

  “Did you say something?”

  Caught, Joe shut off the faucet and turned to face her. The running water, as he rinsed down the sink, must have been what kept him from noticing her approach. His senses were off with her. Until lately, he wouldn’t even have considered it possible that someone would be able to sneak up on him, and she’d done it without even trying.

  Lindsay stood in the doorway with her arms crossed, her frustration obvious in the hard set of her jaw.

  “It was nothing.” He cocked his head to the side. “Boy, that was a quick bath and story. What was it, a picture book?”

  But Lindsay didn’t smile the way he’d hoped she would. If anything, her posture tightened.

  “No book at all. Just a bath.”

  “Oh, weren’t you planning to read—”

  “I was. We read a book together every night. It’s one thing that she used to do with Delia that I’ve tried to continue every night she’s with me. It keeps away her nightmares. Usually.”

  “Don’t feel as if you need to change your nighttime schedule just because I’m here.” That was all he needed, for his presence there to make things worse between Lindsay and her niece. “In fact, you really shouldn’t change—”

  “I didn’t.”

  Joe stared at her. She wasn’t making sense. The same woman who was afraid to let her niece munch on a few chicken nuggets was just going to blow off one of their few daily routines because they had
company.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She didn’t want me to read a story to her tonight.” She blew out a frustrated breath. “She wants you.”

  Lindsay expected gloating when Joe joined her on the tiny deck a half hour later, after story time with Emma. Time that should have been hers. How would she prove to her parents, a judge in the custody proceeding and even herself that she was the right guardian for Emma if she couldn’t even get the child to choose her as the person to read her a bedtime story?

  This was what she deserved for inviting Joe to stay just because she needed adult conversation. Okay, who was she kidding? She’d invited him to stay because he was easy on the eyes, and he’d made her laugh all night. No matter how flattering the attention he paid her was, Lindsay needed to remember he was only there for Emma.

  Shifting in one of the chairs in her faux wicker deck set so she could straighten her stiff leg, Lindsay watched him and waited.

  But Joe didn’t say anything at all as he stood resting his hands on the rail and staring out into the wooded area at the back of her complex.

  “Well, did she go to sleep?” she asked finally.

  “She was about to when I left,” he answered without looking back at her. “She asked me to leave the closet light on.”

  “She likes that. Can I get you some iced tea?”

  “Maybe in a while.”

  She waited for him to tell her more, but he seemed strangely subdued as he continued to look out into the darkness. “What book did she choose for you to read?”

  “Love You Forever.”

  “The one by Robert Munsch?” Now she understood why he’d become so quiet. She could barely avoid choking up when she read Emma that story about a lullaby that a mother sang to her son. “She picks that book a lot. Delia used to sing parts of it to her.”