by Beth Andrews
Emma shrugged one shoulder.
Kelsey’s eyes kept darting back to the sidewalk, as if judging if it was safe to make a run for it. At first he’d wondered if Emma had actually hurt her feelings, remarking on her hair that way. But now—it sounded crazy—but he wondered if Kelsey was nervous.
His six-year-old daughter made her nervous.
Wasn’t that interesting?
“Did they hurt? You have lots of earrings,” Emma explained when Kelsey just stared. “And one in your belly button. Did they hurt?”
“Only for a minute. It feels like a shot, you know, when you go to the doctor.”
“I had to get three shots before kindergarten.” She looked up at him. “But I didn’t cry, did I, Daddy?”
“No, you didn’t. You were very brave.”
“Hayley has her ears pierced.” Emma fingered her own hole-less earlobes. “She got them for her sixth birthday.”
“Oh, well, that’s, uh—”
“I got a Bratz doll,” Emma said pitifully. As if she hadn’t pestered him for two months straight to get her one.
Kelsey’s startled gaze met his. “They name dolls after brats?”
He cleared his throat. Tried not to think about how good she smelled. “Bratz. With a z.”
“Daddy won’t let me get my ears pierced,” Emma said, sliding him a petulant look.
“I didn’t say you couldn’t get your ears pierced.” Ear-piercing conversation number two hundred and eleven coming right up. “I said you were too young to get them pierced now.”
“When can I, Daddy?”
“When you’ve graduated from college.”
Emma stuck her lower lip out. “Daddy.”
Jack noticed Kelsey looking back and forth between them. Who would have thought that all it would take for calm, cool and cocky Kelsey to be rendered speechless was a child?
“Well,” Kelsey said, already taking a step backward. “I should probably be—”
“Do you want to help us make cookies?” Emma grabbed her hand and began tugging her into the house. “It’s my turn to bring them for snack tomorrow.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Kelsey said at the same time Jack blurted out, “No!”
Both Kelsey and Emma looked at him wide-eyed. He cleared his throat, forced a smile. “I mean, I’m sure Kelsey’s busy. Besides, the cookies are all done.”
“You can come in and eat a cookie, then,” Emma said. “Please. Can she please stay, Daddy?”
Emma clasped her hands together and sent him the pleading look little girls have used on their daddies for centuries. It was like a father’s kryptonite.
Never had it been more important to resist that look than at that moment. Because he knew what his daughter was thinking, knew what she was hoping.
He knew how badly Emma wanted a mother. Any woman would do. The nice lady at the grocery store who smiled at her. The barely legal girl who waited on them at the Snow Pine Restaurant. And her favorite of them all, Nina Carlson. Not only did Nina own Sweet Suggestions, but she could bake, was blond and had two kids of her own.
So there was no way he could allow Kelsey around his daughter. It was also why, when he was involved with a woman, he kept the relationship casual. And he never brought a woman he was seeing to his home or introduced her to his daughter.
And with Kelsey’s brother as a prime suspect in his murder investigation, any relationship with her—no matter how innocent—would cause problems. For all of them.
“Honey,” he said, “Kelsey has to go.”
“Then I’ll go get her a cookie, okay?” She ran into the house, yelled over her shoulder, “I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.”
“Take one that’s already cool,” Jack called.
“So,” she said. “You have a daughter.”
“Yeah.”
He leaned back and waited. Most women couldn’t say enough about Emma. How pretty she was. How smart. Which, of course, he already knew. But he never got tired of hearing it.
“She’s…uh…something.”
He narrowed his eyes. What the hell did that mean?
Before he could demand an explanation, Kelsey added, “Look, I really don’t need a cookie. Why don’t I—”
“Here you go,” Emma called cheerfully as she reappeared with a flat cookie in her small hand.
“Uh, thanks.” Kelsey eyed the cookie more warily than necessary if you’d have asked him. “Uh, I’ll just have a bite.”
She broke a piece off and…man, she actually sniffed it. After taking a deep breath, she popped the crumb into her mouth.
Emma’s eyes shone as she watched her. But he didn’t miss Kelsey’s grimace.
She chewed, swallowed and looked at Jack. “Could I talk to you for a minute?”
He shrugged and moved farther out onto the porch, well aware of his daughter’s curiosity.
“I hate to tell you this,” she said, her voice so low he had to bend close to hear her. “Seeing as how you’re dressed to grill and all, but your cookies—” She stopped, cleared her throat.
“What about them?”
“Well, they’re…”
Jack whipped around at the sounds of gagging and retching. He knelt by Emma. “What’s wrong? Are you sick?”
Emma, her face squinched up in disgust, spat chewed cookie onto the porch and threw the remains over the rail into the grass. “These cookies are yucky, Daddy!”
And with Kelsey as a witness, his daughter promptly burst into tears.
CHAPTER SEVEN
KELSEY SHIVERED IN THE COOL breeze. But that didn’t stop a bead of perspiration from trickling down her back. Kids did that to her. Made her sweat.
Jack was kneeling in front of his daughter and Kelsey squeezed her eyes shut. His daughter. Talk about a surprise. It had never crossed her mind that Jack could be a father.Not that it should have. It wasn’t like they’d known each other all that long. Or had many meaningful discussions. She knew he was a cop and intent on sending her brother to prison, but that was all.
Which she probably should’ve considered two nights ago when they’d kissed.
Okay, so her hormones had taken over. Heat of the moment and all that—still, it didn’t fully excuse her actions. For God’s sake, she’d kissed a cop. And not just any cop but the chief of police, who also happened to be a single father.
It was like the end of the world as she knew it.
Jack picked up Emma and murmured to the little girl in an attempt to get her to stop crying. He kissed her tear-stained cheek and rubbed slow circles over her back.
Kelsey’s mouth went dry. There was definitely something wrong with her. Why else would she be thinking about the way Jack had kissed her the other night? About how it had felt when his large hand had slipped under her shirt and caressed her skin.
“Take it easy,” Jack said. “They can’t be that bad.”
Kelsey blinked. He wasn’t even talking to her. He was talking to Emma. Emma whose eyes glimmered with tears, an occasional, soft hiccup escaping her Kewpie doll mouth. Emma who stared up at him with all the love and adoration little girls are supposed to feel for their daddies.
Kelsey’s heart contracted. The connection between Jack and his daughter, the way he attempted to soothe her, was so pure and sweet. For the first time in years Kelsey regretted what she’d never had. Her own father took off before she was born but growing up she’d told herself she didn’t miss not having a dad. And yet, when her mother married Glenn Hopkins, she’d been stupid enough to hope that Glenn could be the father she’d always pretended she never wanted.
Those hopes were effectively killed a short time later when Glenn split her lip for not cleaning her room.
Admittedly, she didn’t know much about raising kids, or even what it was like to be a daughter who gazed up at her father with absolute trust and complete, unabashed love. But jeez, Emma was looking at Jack like he was the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny and Santa Claus all rolled into one.
Well, technically he was all those things. And he was trying to pull a fast one over on Emma. Which made his duplicity even worse. Santa would just admit the cookies were awful and move on from there.
It was up to her to set him straight.
“Oh, they are,” Kelsey assured him. After all, she’d had the bad luck of tasting one. “Those cookies are really, really bad.”
Emma’s lower lip quivered before she sent up a wail that had the hair on the back of Kelsey’s neck standing on end.
Jack patted Emma’s back. “I’m…sure…they’re…fine.” He grit out the words over the kid’s cries.
Right. Like saying it slowly and stressing the word fine is going to somehow transform a bunch of toxic cookies into something edible. Good plan.
Kelsey shrugged. It was no skin off hers if Jack sent his daughter to school with bad cookies.
A sudden vision of a roomful of little kids clutching their stomachs and writhing on the floor in agony assaulted her.
“Look,” she said, “I know you don’t want to hear this, but I can’t stand by and say nothing. It would be cruel.”
Jack frowned at her over Emma’s head. “Don’t you think you’re being a tad overdramatic?”
His kid was blubbering away, shaking her head back and forth in a display of angst the likes of which Kelsey had never seen. And he thought she was overly dramatic?
“No. I don’t.” Could he at least tell Emma to tone it down? But Jack just continued with the useless jiggling and back patting. Kelsey raised her voice. “Have you tried one?”
“No, but I’m—”
“Hey, kid,” Kelsey said, and Emma turned to her in surprise. “Suck it up already…You can stop crying now.”
A muscle jumped in Jack’s jaw. “Don’t yell at my daughter.”
“That wasn’t yelling.” She should know. Growing up, if Glenn wasn’t using his fists, he was yelling.
Amazingly, Emma stopped crying.
Not knowing how long this reprieve would last, she ignored Jack’s anger and kept her gaze on Emma. “Why don’t you go get your daddy one of those cookies? Let him decide for himself how they taste.”
Emma sniffed and used her sleeve to wipe her nose, making Kelsey grimace. “Okay,” she said with another sniff and wiggled until Jack set her down.
“Listen,” he said when Emma was out of earshot, “I’m sure the cookies aren’t that bad. And I don’t appreciate you upsetting Emma.”
“Yeah, well, I’m betting the other parents aren’t going to appreciate their kids having their stomachs pumped.”
He drew closer to her. “I made those cookies myself.”
“I wouldn’t brag about it if I were you.”
He was so close now, her fingers twitched with the need to touch him. She attempted to push back the growing awareness, the building desire. But she made the mistake of looking up into his gorgeous blue eyes. All thoughts emptied from her head as her heart picked up speed. Her body yearned to close the distance separating them.
Emma burst through the doorway and Kelsey took a quick step back.
“Here, Daddy.” Emma pushed between Jack and Kelsey and held a cookie up to him. “Try it.”
Jack smiled down at his daughter and shoved the entire cookie into his mouth.
That wasn’t a smart move. Having been on the receiving end of those cookies, Kelsey felt for him. But that didn’t stop her from smirking.
His face remained expressionless as he chewed. And chewed. And chewed. He swallowed mightily.
She didn’t bother to conceal her triumphant expression. Just tilted her head, grinned sweetly and asked, “Want another?”
JACK FOUGHT THE GAG REFLEX. “No, thanks. You made your point.” He knelt back down to face Emma, steeling himself against the tears he knew would come. “Listen, honey, why don’t we forget about the cookies? We can call Nina and—”
And just like that, Emma’s eyes filled up again.“Hey, it’s all right.” He gathered her close. “We’ll stop by Sweet Suggestions in the morning—”
“No!” Emma sobbed.
“Why not? We’ll pick up something better than regular cookies. How about those cupcakes you like? The ones with the sprinkles?”
“I don’t want to buy cupcakes,” Emma insisted. In the circle of his arms her body was stiff and unyielding, her face red and wet from tears. “I told all the kids we were gonna make cookies.”
He bit back a frustrated sigh. “They won’t care, honey. And once they see the cupcakes they’ll—”
“They will care. Everyone always brings in cookies. No one buys cupcakes. And Miranda will laugh. She’ll laugh and say she told me so.”
Jack sat back on his heels. “Miranda? Wasn’t she in your kindergarten class?”
Emma nodded, her words coming out choppy. “She says…I’m the only one…who doesn’t have a mmm…mommy to make cookies with me. And…I told her that I had a…a daddy and that we could so make cookies.” Her face scrunched up again. “But she said…she said…daddies weren’t like mommies. She said daddies can’t make cookies.”
He felt sick. “You tell her…” He stopped and thought better of what he’d been about to say. “Listen to me, Emma. Here…” He wiped her tears gently away with his fingertips. “Are you listening?” He waited until she nodded. “Good. It doesn’t matter what Miranda says. Daddies can too make cookies, and the next time it’s your turn to bring in a snack, we’ll make the best cookies ever. I promise.”
Emma’s breath quivered out softly. The knot in his gut loosened. He couldn’t believe it. He’d managed to get through to her.
“I want to make them now,” Emma said, fresh tears falling.
He closed his eyes and wondered if it was too late in the parenting game to ask for operating instructions. “Hey, squirt, why don’t you run inside and throw all those cookies in the garbage?”
“But, Daddy—”
Jack straightened, laid his hand on her head. “Go blow your nose and wipe all those tears away,” he said using his best cop voice. When in doubt, revert to what you know. “We’ll figure something out.”
Of course his cop voice had no effect on Emma. She didn’t budge. “You promise, Daddy?”
“I promise,” Jack said solemnly. He gave her a slight swat on the behind and, well aware of Kelsey’s attention on their byplay, prayed Emma would do as she was told.
He watched in relief as his daughter ran into the house. Now if he could just leap tall buildings in a single bound, he’d be all set.
“Your cookies sucked,” Kelsey said into the silence, “but you did a good job with her.”
He didn’t care what Kelsey thought of him. Couldn’t afford to care. Her opinions about him, his job—specifically the way he handled Shannon’s murder case—or his parenting skills meant nothing.
So why did her praise warm his heart?
“Thanks. Now I have to figure out what I’m going to do. To make more cookies I’ll have to run to the store.” He held his watch up to his face, swore softly. “The store that closed four hours ago.”
“What do you need?”
“Chocolate chips. Eggs. And some baking soda.”
“You ran out of all those with that last batch?”
“Not exactly.”
“You didn’t follow the recipe, did you?”
“I followed the recipe.” He wasn’t a complete moron. “I just didn’t have any baking soda. Or eggs. And since I didn’t have any chocolate chips, I broke up a couple of chocolate bars.”
“Why did you go to all the trouble of making cookies when you didn’t have all the ingredients?” she asked, and he could’ve sworn he heard a smile in her voice.
“I didn’t think it would matter.”
“Uh…wrong.”
“Cut me some slack. I wasn’t planning on playing Betty Crocker tonight.” Not until he’d discovered the note in Emma’s backpack reminding him it was her turn to bring in a snack for school tomorrow.
Kelsey
stepped toward him, back under the light. “What’s the big deal? Just buy the cupcakes. The kid’ll get over it.”
He rubbed a hand over his face. Damn, but he was tired. “I doubt it.”
“Why?”
He pressed his lips together. “Let’s just say the last time it was her turn to bring in a snack, I sort of dropped the ball.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, now this I have to hear.”
“It’s no big deal. I didn’t find the note reminding me it was our turn until we were walking out the door and…” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Come on. What did you send with her? Granola bars? Carrot sticks? Low-fat muffins?”
“Raisin bran,” he mumbled.
“What?”
“I sent in twenty-two sandwich bags of raisin bran.”
Her low, husky laughter sent a ripple of awareness up his spine. “Oh, man. You so owe her.”
“I know. But I’ll handle it.”
He needed Kelsey gone so he could be left alone to deal with his daughter and this miniature crisis. He tried not to rely on others or ask for help with Emma. And he sure as hell didn’t want to start now, not with Kelsey Reagan.
Except Kelsey hadn’t moved.
Jack reached behind him and held open the door. “It’s getting late,” he said, taking a step back. “You probably need to get going.”
“Do you have any oatmeal?”
He froze. “Oatmeal?”
“Yes. Not the instant kind, either.”
“You want me to give the kids sandwich bags of oatmeal?”
“No,” she said in exasperation with a hint of humor. “Do you have any or not?”
“I think so. My mom makes it for Emma for breakfast sometimes—”
“What about sugar? And butter?”
“Yeah…why?”
She sighed deeply. “It looks like I’m going to do you a favor here, Sheriff.”
God help him, even with his job on the line and his kid crying buckets, he didn’t have any problem coming up with what type of favor he’d like Kelsey to do for him. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t strike me as a woman who goes around granting favors.”