When they reached his house he pulled into the garage and closed the automatic door behind them. Only then did they both get out of the car.
“How does a frozen pizza sound for dinner?” he asked when they were in the kitchen. “I don’t really feel like cooking tonight. I’ve got a meat-lover’s in the freezer.”
“I don’t feel like cooking, either, so that sounds good to me. Can I do anything?”
“No, I’ve got it.” As he turned on the oven to preheat, she sank down at the table. “Beer?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” she agreed.
He pulled two beers from the refrigerator and then joined her at the table. It didn’t escape him how normal it felt for the two of them to sit together in his kitchen.
It also felt normal for them to sit on the sofa together and laugh about a sitcom or fall into a deep discussion after watching a crime drama. It worried him that he liked her in his house and sharing his life.
He hadn’t allowed anyone to get emotionally close to him since Suzanna’s murder, but somehow Monica had gotten in. He not only liked her but he believed he was falling in love with her. And no matter how much he loved her, he couldn’t have her.
He had to distance himself from her, but not right now. Despite her chatter, he could feel her fear wafting from her. They had just been through a traumatic experience and now was not the time to pull away from her.
He definitely felt the end coming. He just hoped when all was said and done Monica was safe and sound and could go back to her life with a big story and a few good memories of him.
* * *
AS THEY ATE their pizza Monica kept up a stream of inane talk. She told him about being a pest to her older sisters when she’d been little and her few memories of her mother when she’d been alive.
“All I remember of my mother is her soft hands brushing my hair away from my face right before she kissed me good-night and the way she smelled of roses and vanilla. Do you have any good memories of your mother?”
“Not really. She was pretty much an absent mother once she started doing the dope. Suzanna and I used to joke that we could be on fire and my mother would use us to cook her stuff.”
“That’s so not funny,” she replied.
“I know. So tell me more about you and your sisters.”
“I remember one night my oldest sister and her boyfriend were sitting on our porch swing. I hid in the bushes and watched them because I was sure they would do something scandalous that I could then report back to my father and get her in trouble.”
“And?” His eyes held laughter waiting to be released. She loved that look on his face.
“And nothing. They were so boring I fell asleep. I got in trouble for scaring my dad when he couldn’t find me anywhere in the house.”
The wonderfully deep and warm laugh she’d waited to hear was released from him. She needed the laughter and the talk to keep her fear at bay.
Those long minutes when she’d been sitting in the car all alone and Jake had gone running after the bad guy had been the most torturous she’d ever experienced.
She hadn’t been afraid for herself; rather, all of her fear had been for Jake. She was terrified that he’d be hurt and she couldn’t imagine the world without Jake in it.
And in that intense fear for him, the depth of her love for Jake had been realized. It didn’t matter that they’d known each other only a short amount of time. It didn’t matter that the timing wasn’t right for her to be in love. The truth of the matter was she was in love with him and timing be damned.
Now she had to figure out what she intended to do about it. Right now she wanted to deal with none of it. She just wanted to laugh and eat and relax after the harrowing afternoon they’d had.
“Then there was the time I put a frog in my sister’s bed,” she continued, wanting to make him laugh again.
“I’m sure that didn’t go over well,” he replied.
She gave him a slightly wicked grin. “I can still hear her screams in my head. Sadly I was grounded for a week. When my dad asked me why I would do such a thing, I told him she acted like she was a princess, so I thought if she slept with the frog he’d turn into a prince who would take my sister to his castle.”
He laughed again. “You must have been something else. I almost feel sorry for your sisters.”
“Oh, trust me, they deserved everything I did to them. They were both mean to me when we were all young. When I was nine they had me convinced that I was adopted and Mom and Dad had taken me in because nobody else in the whole world wanted me.”
“So, you never got close to them when you got older?” he asked.
“No. I think a lot of the problem was they were so much older than me. They had different interests than me and we just never really connected. I love them both and we get along fine when we get together for holidays. We just never really became friends.”
“Maybe it isn’t too late to change things with them,” he replied. “I’d love to have more siblings. Wouldn’t your sisters be the keepers of your mother’s memory?”
She looked at him in surprise. “I never really thought about it that way before.” There had been several times in her recent memory that her sisters had invited her to lunch, or to coffee, and she’d always come up with an excuse not to meet them. When this was all over maybe it was time for her to do things differently when it came to her sisters.
She continued to chatter as they finished the pizza and cleaned up the kitchen. After dinner they moved into the living room and turned on the television. It was then that the fear she’d suffered while waiting, while wondering if Jake would return to the car, began to simmer once again inside her.
He sat close enough to her that she could smell the comforting scent of him; she could feel his body heat radiating toward her.
She’d thought he might not return to the car when he’d taken off after the gunman. She’d been so afraid he’d be shot and fall to the ground and die before anyone could get to him.
As these dark thoughts continued to fill her head, she moved closer to him. Emotion permeated her chest and tears pressed hot at her eyes.
“Monica, are you all right?” he asked.
She turned and looked at his beautiful face and the tears that had only burned at her eyes began to fall. “No...no, I’m not okay,” she managed to say. “I... I think I’m having some kind of stupid delayed reaction.”
“A delayed reaction about what?” His gaze was soft, but obviously bewildered.
“I was just so afraid for you when you took off running after the gunman.” Her emotions were spiraling out of control and at the moment she couldn’t do anything about it. The tears chased each other down her cheeks as a choking sob escaped her.
“Hey, hey,” he said softly, and then he did what she wanted him to do more than anything in the world...he drew her into his arms.
She clung to him as her tears continued to fall and she was grateful that he held her so tightly that she could feel the reassuring steady beat of his heart.
His arms warmed every cold place in her body and she welcomed the warmth. They also offered strength and the assurance that he really was okay.
At this moment her getting her story seemed unimportant. What was important was that Jake survive through this. It was important that he keep building beautiful structures that inspired people. He needed to continue to live and breathe and laugh until the natural end of his life. And she’d like to live that long, wonderful life with him.
Her tears slowed and finally stopped. Reluctantly she pulled back from him and gave an unsteady laugh. “Sorry about that. I don’t want you to see me as a big crybaby.”
“I don’t, and I’m sorry you were so frightened,” he replied.
“I really was. All I could think about was you being wounded and lying all alone in somebody’s yard
.”
He smiled at her. “I feel like we’re a couple of old cats who have nine lives.”
“What scares me is I think we’ve already used up several of those lives,” she replied.
He sobered and held her gaze. “Monica, there’s no reason for you to use up any more of those cat lives.”
She shook her head to stop anything else he was about to say. “We’ve already had this discussion more than once and there’s no point in having it again. I’m in this until the very end.”
He frowned. “You’re extremely stubborn.”
She grinned. “Yes, I am, and you should remember that.”
“So noted.”
They returned to watching television. But she was still deep in her thoughts. Without her fear, there was nothing to stop her from thinking about her feelings for him. She began to nibble on her fingernail.
“I thought you were trying to stop that,” he said.
She gave him a sheepish smile and dropped her hand back to her lap. “Thanks for reminding me. I’d like to have pretty nails, but I can’t achieve that if I don’t quit chewing on them. It’s a nervous habit I need to stop.”
“Are you nervous right now?”
“Not really,” she replied.
As they continued to watch television, her thoughts were all over the place. When had her emotions toward him gone from liking him to loving him? Had it been when he’d released his last burst of laughter? Or when he looked at her with that soft, warm gaze that made her feel like the most important woman in the world?
Had she fallen from like to love the first time he’d kissed her? Or had it been when he’d told her about his sister and she had shared his pain?
She didn’t know the answer. All she knew was that despite her desires to the contrary, she was in love with Jake Lamont. And she believed he had feelings for her, too.
When the show they had been watching ended, she turned to look at him. “Jake, why don’t you want a long-term relationship in your life?”
The question obviously took him by surprise. “I just don’t.”
“Do you mean right now you don’t want one or you never want one for the rest of your life?”
“I intend to be alone for the rest of my life,” he replied. Tension had straightened his shoulders and his eyes became dark and hooded.
“Don’t you eventually want a family? Maybe children?”
He leaned forward and raked a hand through his hair. “I thought about it at one time,” he answered after a long pause. “But then I changed my mind.”
He looked achingly sad. She placed her hand over his. “Was your change of mind because of Suzanna’s murder?”
He hesitated once again and then gave a curt nod of his head.
“Oh, Jake. Do you really think that’s what Suzanna would want for you? To be alone for the rest of your life?”
“It doesn’t matter what she’d want. She isn’t here and this is a choice I’ve made for myself,” he replied. He pulled his hand from beneath hers.
“Then it’s a choice that makes me very, very sad for you,” she replied softly.
“Don’t be sad for me. I’ll be fine. I have my work and that’s all I need.”
“Work doesn’t keep you warm on a cold night.”
“When my bedroom gets cold, I just turn up the heater,” he replied.
“Work doesn’t make a good conversationalist,” she countered.
“I like talking to myself just fine,” he answered flippantly. “Besides, you’ve said the same thing, that you don’t want a long-term relationship.”
“That’s just for right now. Eventually I do want a family. I want to be married and have two children. I want to wake up in the morning and see a man who loves and adores me every morning across the kitchen table. I want to sleep in the same man’s arms every night until I die. I can’t imagine that you wouldn’t want that same thing for yourself.”
“Well, I don’t.”
She released a deep sigh. The conversation was going nowhere and she knew for sure now wasn’t the time for her to confess that she was in love with him. That definitely wouldn’t make the remainder of their time together comfortable.
It was funny...a couple of weeks before she would have been arguing that her work was enough, that she didn’t need or want any relationship to take her mind off her ultimate goal of success.
But what really defined success? Was it a thousand more blog followers or looking at the same man across a dinner table for the rest of your life? Was it getting the big story or was it having somebody who wanted to share the little moments of your life with you?
All she hoped for right now was that somehow before this all came to an end, Jake would decide he wanted love and a long-term relationship in his life and she desperately hoped he’d realize he wanted that with her.
Chapter Nine
It had been an awkward conversation the night before and the next afternoon Jake found it playing and replaying through his mind. He sat at the kitchen table with a sketch pad before him, but the last thing on his mind at the moment was building designs.
All he could think about at the moment was the warmth of Monica’s body in his arms while she’d cried with her fear for him. When he’d told her he intended to live his life alone, her beautiful blue eyes had radiated sadness...and something else...something that had made his breath catch in the back of his throat.
For a moment he’d thought he’d seen love shining true and strong from her eyes. He didn’t want her to love him. Dammit, she was supposed to just want her big story and nothing more from him. Her loving him would only make telling her goodbye that much more difficult. And he had every intention of telling her goodbye when this was over.
Once again they had spent a couple of uneventful hours of the night staking out Adam’s house. They had both been quiet during those hours and he’d been grateful to get home and go to bed.
Unfortunately his sleep had been filled with visions of her. In his dreams they had been sitting on a metal beam, staring up at the stars overhead, and then they had been in his bed and making love. He’d finally awakened with a bittersweet longing for what he couldn’t have.
She was now in his office, doing research for the podcast she did every night at eight. He never told her but when she was doing her podcast from his office, he was usually in the kitchen watching it on his laptop.
She always looked professional clad in dress blouses, although beneath his desk where the viewers couldn’t see she was in shorts and sandals.
Her takes on the news stories of the day were different and thought-provoking. She offered the viewers human-interest stories that were sometimes funny and sometimes sad.
Once she left his house and they returned to their own private lives, he would never watch her again. It would be too painful to see her on the air every night and remember her time here with him.
She’d told him that she hoped they would be friends at the end of all this and he’d agreed that would be nice. But he realized now he couldn’t be her friend. When this was all over he had to completely cut her from every aspect of his life.
He’d pray for amnesia where she was concerned. He’d open up all his doors and windows to rid the house of her exotic scent and make sure not an article of clothing of hers remained behind when she left here.
There was no way he’d want to meet her for a friendly lunch or for coffee. When they said their final goodbyes, he needed to somehow never think about her again.
He looked up as the object of his thoughts bounced into the kitchen. “Guess what?” She sat at the table facing him, her eyes sparkling brightly.
“What?”
“My snitch just called me. He said earlier this morning some man walked into the North Patrol station and confessed to being the Vigilante Killer and they’re taking his claim
very seriously.”
“Did he tell you who it was?” Jake sat up straighter in his chair as a burst of adrenaline filled him. Was it possible? Would the killer really turn himself in?
“No, he said he’d call me with more details as soon as he could.” She leaned forward, a simmering energy wafting from her. “Do you think this could really be the end?”
“I don’t know. The guy taking shots at me yesterday didn’t seem to me to be the kind of man who would suddenly develop a conscience and feel remorseful enough to turn himself in,” he replied dubiously. “But I suppose anything is possible,” he added. “Did he give you any indication when he might get back to you?”
“I got the impression it wouldn’t be that long. He said things were popping very fast on the case.”
“Who is this source of yours?” he asked curiously.
“He’s a lieutenant at the North Patrol.”
“And how did you get hooked up with him?” he asked. “Did you show up on his front porch, too?”
She laughed. “No, we dated for a while in high school and remained good friends after we broke up.”
“Is this somebody who still might have a thing for you?” He wasn’t sure why he held his breath waiting for her to reply.
“Heavens, no,” she said with another laugh. “In fact, he married one of my best friends and they have a four-year-old and a new baby.”
He didn’t want to examine the wave of relief that shot through him. She obviously had him twisted up in his brain. “So I guess we just have to wait until we have more information,” he said.
“Even though this wouldn’t exactly be a big and dramatic end to a story, him turning himself in would be the best way for this to end for everyone,” she said.
“As long as he can’t kill another person, that’s all I’ve ever cared about,” he replied. Right now he had too many questions to feel confident that this was really the end. It just seemed strange that the perp would decide to give up and turn himself in.
“But I’m sorry that it sounds like you won’t get your big story...unless you decide to go public with everything I told you about the murder pact. Now that would probably be the kind of sensational story you want.”
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