Colin picked up his own cup and pretended to toast them, then took a sip. “Okay, I guess I’m all caught up, then,” he commented.
“Would you like to ask me any questions?” Ellie asked, looking at Heather.
Heather looked as if she was fairly bursting to ask questions. The only problem was which to ask first and which to leave for a later time. “Do you ever get nervous?”
“You mean on the air?” Ellie asked. She smiled in response. “Sure, lots of times.”
“Really?” It wasn’t that Heather didn’t believe her; she looked as if she was thrilled to discover that her newest idol was human.
“Really,” Ellie repeated.
“But you never look nervous.”
Ellie leaned in confidentially toward the girl. “Want to know a little trick?”
“Sure!” Heather answered enthusiastically.
Ellie told her the truth. “That’s because I pretend it’s just the person and me, talking as if we were old friends.”
“Like we’re talking now?” Heather asked as she realized that was exactly what was happening. Ellie was talking to her as if they had always known each other.
“Like we’re talking now,” Ellie confirmed.
The woman was good with Heather, Colin thought, and he appreciated it. Because she was, he didn’t want to abuse Ellie’s time or her patience.
“If you have anything else you want to ask Ms. King, why don’t you do it now?” Colin urged his niece. “I’m sure that Ms. King is very busy and we don’t want to keep her from her work.”
Ellie looked at him, masking her surprise. He was actually using the excuse she had prepared to use. But now that she was here, she found that despite her reservations—and that one rather dark cloud that was hanging between them—she wanted to stay awhile. She was enjoying Heather’s company. The girl was both older than her years and yet still refreshingly untarnished and innocent. That was rare these days when ten-year-olds were going on twenty in ways that would take innocence away from them.
“Actually, I cleared this morning so I could do this,” she told Heather, throwing the detective a quick glance, as well. “So go for it,” she encouraged. “Ask away.”
Heather grinned like a child who had just been admitted to Santa’s workshop in late November. All the newly built toys had yet to be wrapped up and accounted for—so she could have her pick.
“Okay.”
* * *
They’d been talking for more than an hour. For the most part, it had been Heather asking questions and Ellie answering them. Occasionally, Colin would slip in a question himself. He had to admit that he was surprised that the news reporter turned out to be so accessible and human.
He hadn’t known exactly what to expect when he’d initially set up this meeting. He supposed he’d expected a plastic would-be celebrity, someone playing the part of a so-called reporter/personality until she grew tired of answering questions or pretending to answer questions. But Ellie King wasn’t plastic. Unlike some of her counterparts, she seemed to be very genuine. He appreciated the fact that she was interacting with his niece and treating her not like an underling or a child but like a person who mattered.
As for Heather, he could see that she was really enjoying this. It did his heart good to see her like this. It was the first time he’d seen the old Heather, the girl she’d been before her life had been so cruelly stripped of both her parents. Before she was made to face the fact that life had a very real dark underbelly.
He realized that he had the reporter to thank for that, at least in part. By paying attention to Heather, by treating her like a person whose feelings were important, the woman had allowed this side of Heather to resurface.
He was about to say something to Ellie to get her to understand that he was grateful for this when his cell phone began to ring, interrupting his train of thought. Colin frowned even before he checked the screen to see who was calling.
Part of him already knew.
Wound up like a top, Heather abruptly stopped talking and glanced at her uncle as he took out his phone and swiped the screen to take the call.
Ellie saw the look on the girl’s face. “Something wrong?” she asked Heather.
“It’s probably work,” Heather said in a subdued voice, suppressing a sigh.
“I’ve got to take this,” Colin told her. With that, he left the table.
“Does this happen a lot?” Ellie asked the girl, trying to sound sympathetic at the same time.
“It happens enough times,” Heather confirmed. She shrugged philosophically, trying to make it seem as if it didn’t bother her. “They need him.”
“I’m sure they do,” Ellie told her, putting her hand over the girl’s.
Heather smiled her gratitude.
The call was short. They always were. Pocketing his phone, Colin came back to the table. He didn’t sit down. By the look on Heather’s face, he knew that she already knew what he was going to say. For once he really wished he didn’t have to, but there was no way around it.
“Sorry, honey. We’re going to have to end this. I’ve got to get you home and get Olga to come to stay with you.”
“Olga’s the Russian lady next door,” Heather explained to Ellie before turning her emotive eyes up to her uncle. “Do you have to go?” she asked.
“I’m sorry, Heather, but I’m afraid so.” He turned toward the reporter. “Thank you for meeting us like this. It was really very nice of you—”
Ellie cut him off before he could finish. “There’s no need for it to end.”
“I’m afraid there is. I’ve got to get Heather home,” Colin began to explain again in case the woman didn’t get it.
Ellie held her hand up, stopping him again. “Why don’t I follow you and stay with Heather while you’re gone?” She flashed a smile at Heather. “We girls can just keep on talking.”
For a second, Colin was speechless, fully aware that Heather was pleading with him with her eyes, asking him to agree. In good conscience, he knew he couldn’t.
“I don’t know how long I’ll be gone,” he told the woman.
He couldn’t expect her to hang around until he came home. Olga, on the other hand, was accustomed to popping over and remaining until all hours. Besides, he paid the woman for her time. She’d initially protested, but they’d worked out equitable rates. Fortunately, her work time at the cleaning service was flexible enough for her to be able to make these arrangements.
Ellie, however, seemed determined. She must have seen how much Heather wanted to go on talking with her.
“I fully understand,” she told the detective. “Tell you what. Why don’t you give me this Olga’s number and if I have to leave for some reason before you can get back, I’ll call her to come over?”
At that point, Heather stopped pleading with her eyes and her mouth took over, as did her hands, which she used to clutch his arm, as if that would somehow give her more leverage.
“Please, Uncle Colin? Say yes.”
He in turn looked at the reporter making what he considered to be a rather generous offer. “You sure about this?”
“I said I cleared my morning—and to be honest, I cleared the rest of my day, as well. I was going to go shopping,” she confided. “But this is a lot more satisfying than going shopping. Apparently, I underestimated the number of questions Heather would have for me.” Her eyes met Heather’s and she winked at the girl. “Seems like we just started to scratch the surface.”
Heather mouthed “Thank you” to her, then turned back toward her uncle.
“Please?” Heather begged again.
Colin sighed. “If I say no, I’m an ogre,” he commented.
“And we really can’t have that,” Ellie told him even as she appeared to agree with his conclusion. “
Nobody likes an ogre.”
He’d always had trouble saying no to Heather, although now that he’d become both mother and father to her, there were instances when he had to. But this didn’t really need to be one of them. And as long as the reporter didn’t seem to mind, who was he to say no?
“All right, as long as you’re all right with this, I’m not the one who’s going to kill this little get-together,” Colin said.
Heather was all but bouncing up and down in her seat. “Oh, thank you!” she cried excitedly.
“Okay, then, where are you parked?” he asked Ellie, getting down to logistics.
“In the north forty,” she quipped, standing up. “Why don’t you give me a few minutes to pull up in front of the café so that I can follow your car? Better yet, give me your address in case I lose sight of the car.”
Before he could try one more time to demur, Heather was rattling off their address. Ellie quickly wrote it down on her napkin and put it into her purse.
“Got it,” she announced.
You certainly do, Colin couldn’t help thinking, feeling as if he’d gotten swept off his feet by a hurricane.
And with that, it was a done deal.
Chapter Seven
Colin was completely and utterly exhausted as he unlocked his front door.
For a while there, it looked as if he wasn’t going to be able to come home at all tonight. But then he caught a break and just like that, the case was put to rest. At least as far as he was concerned.
They’d been shorthanded at the station, so when the call went out regarding an Amber Alert, his was the next name on the backup rotation and he’d been called down. But it had ended well, which ultimately was all that really mattered.
Colin finally let himself into his apartment. Not for the first time he thought, Thank God for Olga. Otherwise he would have been really hard-pressed to get someone to stay with Heather at a moment’s notice the way his job at times necessitated.
As he closed the door behind him, Colin heard the TV. He recognized some of the dialogue. A series marathon was running on one of the cable channels. Olga favored that program, telling him she watched it in order to try to perfect her English. He suspected the fact that the leading man was exceptionally good-looking might have had something to do with it, as well.
Walking into the living room, he was about to greet his neighbor but then stopped dead in his tracks. Instead of the pleasantly rounded grandmotherly woman who periodically brought over baked goods and “leftovers” that suspiciously didn’t look as if they were leftovers at all, he was looking at Ellie King sitting on his recliner.
“You’re not Olga.”
Ellie’d been dozing off and on during the last hour but was now instantly awake. She sat up, her eyes meeting his.
“I don’t know if that’s an observation or an accusation,” she responded, the corners of her mouth curving.
Glancing past the woman, Colin saw that his niece was on the sofa, curled up like a kitten and very soundly asleep.
“What happened?” Colin asked.
Ellie’s brain still felt slightly foggy. She rose from the recliner, pulling herself together. “What do you mean?”
Colin rephrased his question. “Why didn’t you go home?”
“We didn’t finish talking. Your niece really likes to talk,” she told him with a laugh.
“And you stayed?” he asked, surprised. Colin noticed that Heather was covered with a throw that he kept on the back of the sofa. This had to be the reporter’s work.
“Well, it seemed kind of rude to walk out on Heather in midsentence. Besides, I was enjoying her company.” She glanced at the girl and smiled. “And I kind of think she was enjoying mine.”
In his mind, there was no doubt. “Oh, I’m sure she was. She couldn’t wait for Saturday to come so she could meet you. But once she fell asleep, why didn’t you call Olga to come over?” he asked. “Don’t you have somewhere else you have to be?”
It was one o’clock in the morning. The only place she had to be at that time of night was in bed.
Ellie shrugged, dismissing his question. “If I did, Detective, I assure you I’d be there. No, this turned out to be one of those rare days where I was the mistress of my own fate, able to spend my day doing anything I wanted to.”
“So you chose to spend it with a ten-year-old?” he asked incredulously. That didn’t sound very plausible to him. Ellie was considered a celebrity of sorts. Celebrities didn’t choose to hang out with ten-year-olds unless they were related to them.
“A very precocious, entertaining ten-year-old,” Ellie amended. There was a fond expression on her face as she looked at the sleeping girl again. “She’s really a great kid,” she told him.
“I know,” he responded, looking at his niece. “That’s why I worry about her.” He wanted to protect her, to keep Heather from getting hurt. But there was no way to Bubble Wrap her world—or even her.
“You shouldn’t,” Ellie told him. “In my humble opinion, Heather’s amazingly well adjusted and bright, and I have a feeling she’ll go far.” Her eyes shifted back to the detective. “And she speaks very highly of you, you know.”
“You talked about me?” Colin asked her, clearly surprised.
“She talked about you,” Ellie clarified, not wanting him to get the wrong idea. “I just listened. In her estimation, you’re about ten feet tall and stop just short of leaping over tall buildings in a single bound,” she said, amused.
Because Heather was asleep in the living room and he didn’t want to wake her just yet, Colin indicated that they should move into the kitchen. He pulled out a chair at the table and sat down.
Debating her exit, Ellie decided to join him for just a minute. “There’s some dinner, if you’re interested,” she told him. When he looked at her curiously, she pointed to a covered pan on the stove.
“Olga stopped by?” he asked. If she had, why hadn’t the woman stayed?
The next moment, Ellie answered the question for him. “No, I made it.”
“You cook?”
Someone else might have taken offense at his obvious stereotypical view of her, but Ellie let it go, choosing instead to just be amused.
“I can do more than hold a microphone in my hand, yes,” she said, addressing a more elaborate question that she assumed was going through his mind. “Nothing fancy, just some fried chicken breasts,” she told him, adding, “They’re still warm, if you’re hungry.”
The moment she said the word, he realized that he actually was. Very hungry. With good reason. “Other than the coffee this morning, all I’ve had is some stale pizza left over in the break room, so fried chicken sounds pretty good to me, warm or cold.”
She was already uncovering the pan and taking out a piece of chicken to put on a plate.
“Then by all means, eat,” she urged, placing the plate in front of him. Without thinking, she took a seat opposite him. “Did you get your bad guy?”
For just a moment, Colin lost himself in the taste of the chicken cutlet he’d bitten into. It wasn’t just good; it was very good. He relished it, then realized that the woman had asked him something. The words, however, were lost to him.
So he looked up at her, puzzled. “What?”
Ellie began to explain. “I assumed that whatever called you away involved a bad guy of some sort. I was just wondering if you got him.”
She flashed a smile at him, knowing that she was invading territory he might not be at liberty to talk about yet. In her experience, police personnel had this maddening habit of asking questions but not answering them when they were involved in an ongoing case. It always made her want to dig deeper.
When the detective didn’t say anything in reply, she assumed that this was another one of those “no comment” instances. E
llie began to get up from the table. “You don’t have to tell me,” she said, resigned.
He was eating—and really enjoying—the chicken she’d made. His mouth was full of the savory flavor, which was why he couldn’t answer her. In lieu of that, he made a noise and waved her back down in her seat.
“You want me to sit. Okay.” She complied, sinking back down in the chair for the moment. She noted how he was doing away with the piece of chicken she’d served him. Some would call it doing it justice, she thought, rather pleased.
“Is this because you want me to stick around until you’re sure I didn’t poison you?” she deadpanned.
“You don’t look like you’d poison anyone,” Colin told her when he could finally speak.
“Ever see a picture of Lucrezia Borgia?” Ellie posed innocently.
Colin shook his head before taking another forkful of the crisp chicken meat. “You do like to keep people guessing, don’t you?”
“That’s what makes life exciting,” Ellie replied. “Well, since you’re still obviously alive,” she began philosophically, getting up again, “I’ll consider dinner a success and let myself out.”
She was about to walk out when she heard Colin say, “We got him.”
Turning around to look at the detective, Ellie asked, “Excuse me?”
“You asked if we got the bad guy,” he reminded her. “We did.”
She smiled, pleased that he’d answered her but now exceedingly curious about the details that went with the story.
“Congratulations,” she told him, doubling back to rejoin him.
“He wasn’t actually a bad guy,” Colin said, amending his previous statement. “Maybe a more accurate description of him is that he wasn’t a bad person—he was just very frustrated.”
Reclaiming her chair, Ellie sat down for a third time. He’d phrased it that way on purpose, she thought, to lure her back in. That in itself surprised her. She would have thought he’d be happy to see her go.
How about you? Why aren’t you making good your exit? Why are you hanging around the man who couldn’t save your husband?
Twice a Hero, Always Her Man Page 7