A Lawman for Christmas

by Marie Ferrarella

  She did this time.

  Not once, but twice, and then again. Three times she reached a climactic peak. The experience was so fulfilling, she didn’t think that there was anything left within her to offer Morgan when, finally, he slid his body along hers.

  Balancing his weight on his elbows, he framed her face with his hands a second before he entered her. The moment he did, the dance, wickedly delicious, began, building an impossibly beautiful castle in the sky that kept on rising.

  Kelsey tightened her arms around him. She held on as tightly as she could, as if she was afraid that he would let her go and she would wind up freefalling through space.

  As the furor built, Kelsey moaned against his lips. Morgan could almost feel the sound pushing the fire in his veins a notch higher. The excitement he felt was barely controllable, barely containable. Although he logically knew it was impossible, she still made him wish this moment could go on forever or at least indefinitely.

  But he couldn’t hold back any longer.

  He needed, wanted to scale that ultimate height and bring her with him. It was a matter of timing and he was good at that, or had been, back when it mattered. Back when he’d been part of the human race and had a wife and child to complete him.

  The moment the summit was reached, Morgan could feel the sadness encroaching. Sadness and a feeling of disloyalty because, unlike the handful of other times when he’d had sex with what amounted to a total stranger, doing this with Kelsey somehow mattered. And in mattering, it tarnished the memory of his past life. The sharp blades of guilt were not far behind.

  She could feel it.

  She could feel Morgan withdrawing from her, not physically, but emotionally. Feel it as if it were a sudden, cold draft that intruded between them, dividing them and wrapping them each in separate, icy sheets.

  “I’m sorry,” she heard him say. The words instantly froze her heart. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that to you.”

  She clutched her anger to her. It was all she had. Anger was her weapon, her shield.

  Kelsey raised herself up on her elbow so she could look down at his face.

  “First of all,” she said in a voice she struggled to keep level, “you didn’t do it to me, you did it with me. In case you didn’t notice, this wasn’t some back-alley assault. You didn’t just drag me by the hair behind some Dumpster and ‘have your way with me’ while I whimpered and pleaded for you to stop.” Her eyes flashed angrily. “What we just engaged in was mutual.” And she really, really didn’t want to regret it, but he was now pushing all the wrong buttons, casting a pall over what had, only moments ago, been glorious.

  “And second?” he asked quietly.

  Kelsey stared at him as if the man had suddenly lapsed into some foreign tongue. Or had lost his mind. “Excuse me?”

  “You said ‘first of all.’ That would necessarily mean that that there’s a ‘second of all’ on your list. What is it?” he asked.

  She raised her chin slightly. Stubbornly. Had her brothers been there, one of them would have warned Morgan that he had just unwittingly stumbled into uncharted territory.

  “And second of all,” she continued tersely, “who was here with us?”

  It was his turn to be confused. Looking at Kelsey, he waited. When she didn’t elaborate, he had to ask, “What?”

  “Who was here with us?” Kelsey repeated slowly, deliberately. Then, before Morgan could protest that he didn’t know what she was talking about, she pressed the point. “While we were making love, there was somebody here with us,” she insisted. “Not at first, but definitely now. And whoever it is is making you feel guilty for making love with me.” Her eyes never left his. “Is it your wife?”

  She got it on the first guess, Morgan thought, irritated with her and with himself for different reasons. He sat up, dragging a hand through his unruly hair. This was all wrong. Damn it, he wouldn’t have thought of himself being this weak. “Look, maybe you’d better go home…”

  She didn’t want it to end this way. Not after she’d scaled such wonderful heights. Because if it did, if she left now, all she would remember would be the argument. And the sharp, painful feeling of being abandoned.

  Not only that, but his flatly stated suggestion felt like a slap in the face. She wouldn’t stand for being “dismissed.” If she left, it would be because she wanted to, not because he told her to.

  “I’m not an expert on these things,” she said, her voice as flat as his, “and I didn’t know your wife, but from what I’ve picked up, she wouldn’t have wanted you to be unhappy. She would have wanted you to move on with your life.”

  “You’re right,” he said. She stared into his face and instantly knew that his agreement wasn’t a cause for celebration. And she was right. “You didn’t know my wife,” he continued, his voice sounding as if his throat was tight. “So you can’t pretend to know what she would or wouldn’t have wanted.”

  Pulling her clothes to her, Kelsey rose to her feet with the dignity of a princess. “Anyone who loves someone wants only the best for them,” she told him stiffly.

  The vulnerable, exposed feeling permeating through her went far beyond the fact that she was naked. Kelsey quickly left the room—and him. She made her way toward the rear of the house, hoping to find either the bathroom or a guestroom so that she could hurry into her clothes in isolation. The sooner she was dressed, the sooner she could work on shedding this embarrassed feeling.

  Kelsey found a bathroom first.

  Shutting the door, she got dressed at lightning speed. If she kept moving quickly, concentrating only on what she was doing, she wouldn’t have time to think, to reflect on the glaring fact that she needed to have her head examined.

  But why? a small voice inside her pressed. You’re not the one with a problem, Donnelly is. He loved his wife so much, he’s completely turned inside out. This isn’t about you, Kelse, it’s about him. About the pain he’s feeling.

  She was her mother’s daughter. By the time she was finished getting dressed, her embarrassment—and her anger at being made to feel that way—had vanished. It was replaced by genuine concern for the man she’d left in the other room.

  Coming back out, she found Morgan waiting for her, wearing a pair of jeans and nothing else. She hadn’t been in a position to fully appreciate it earlier, but the man had a washboard stomach the likes of which made her own stomach quiver. She was surprised some woman hadn’t thrown a net over him and dragged him off to her lair way before now.

  He appeared uncomfortable. “I didn’t mean to insult you,” he apologized.

  “You didn’t.” All right, it was a lie, she thought, but his apology had smoothed things out. It also made her want to reach out to him. “Would you like to talk about it?” she coaxed.

  “It?” he repeated. Was she referring to their lovemaking? She hadn’t struck him as one of those women who constantly needed and wanted to talk about feelings, wanted to explore every moment and its significance ad nauseum. Had he been wrong about her?

  She was willing to leave it in vague terms, letting him be the one who elaborated. But nothing that had to do with Donnelly was easy. “Your guilt at being alive when your wife and daughter aren’t.”

  He wasn’t about to be psychoanalyzed. “I don’t feel guilty.”

  Kelsey didn’t back off. “Don’t you?”

  He shouldn’t have apologized. It had given her a whole new head of steam. “I’ve got an early morning,” he told her, cutting her short.

  “So do I.” As she spoke, Kelsey made her way to the front door, picking up her purse where she’d dropped it when they came in. “Give me a call when you finish up the car.”

  The car. He’d forgotten all about that. For a while there, he’d forgotten about everything. Except her. “Yeah.”

  They left it at that, the single word hanging in the air between them long after she went out the door.

  Morgan couldn’t get moving, couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d
behaved like a jerk. Both in allowing himself to get carried away with Kelsey and then in saying what he had to her.

  Behaving like that just proved his basic belief: that he had no business getting involved with anyone socially outside the job. He was better off keeping to himself. He’d had happiness with Beth for a short time in his life, but that was over now. If he thought that lightning could strike the same heart twice, well, even that didn’t mean that he was a candidate. Until he’d married Beth, he hadn’t even thought it could happen once. That it had was a miracle. Guys like him weren’t candidates for miracles on any sort of a recurring basis.

  Despite her smart mouth, Kelsey Marlowe was a nice girl. He didn’t want to mess with her life—any more than he already had, he amended silently.

  The cushions on his sofa smelled like jasmine. Jasmine mixed with vanilla. He’d come into the house, exhausted after the double shift he’d been forced to pull. It was the second one in three days. Robbins and Daniels had called in sick—there was a bug going around—and the lieutenant had asked him if he could fill in for one of them. With nothing and no one waiting for him at home, he’d agreed.

  But now he was drained. Really drained.

  Dropping down onto the sofa, Morgan had instantly detected the scent. It made him think of Kelsey. And just like that, he wasn’t drained any longer. He was wired.

  He thought of the car still sitting in his garage. None of this would have been going on if he’d just let Kelsey take it to a professional mechanic. It wasn’t like him to volunteer to do something without thinking it through first, without weighing any and all possible consequences.

  He’d know better next time, he silently promised himself.

  Because he felt so wired, Morgan decided to try to erode his sudden surge of restlessness by working on the car. It was close to being finished. He just needed to paint the fender he’d picked up at a salvage yard. The fit was damn near perfect.

  Perfect. Not a word he encountered often, he thought, stopping at his refrigerator to take out a can of beer. But he did have that one night with Kelsey, he remembered, letting the memory drift through his mind in full, animated color.

  The next second, annoyed with his lack of control, he dismissed all of it, especially Kelsey. No point in seeing the woman again and further messing up her life. He wasn’t exactly a prize worth having in his present state.

  And Morgan was fairly confident that he’d never be in any other state.

  The phone rang just as he was about to go into the garage. He considered ignoring it, then decided that he should pick it up. No one called him at home if it wasn’t about work. More than likely, this was the lieutenant, wanting him to come back in for some reason.

  Picking up the receiver, he barked, “Donnelly” into the phone. When there was no immediate response, he started to hang up, then tried again just in case it was the lieutenant calling on his cell. Occasional interference in the area tended to block out the clarity of the signal.

  “Hello?”

  Instead of a deep male voice, he heard a bright female voice say, “Hi.” He knew it was her instantly, even before she identified herself. “It’s Kelsey. I’m just calling to find out how the car’s coming along.”

  Morgan did his best to ignore the fact that his stomach felt as if it had just encountered a tourniquet and was being squeezed.

  “The car’s fine.” He realized he’d just given human properties to an inanimate object and given her no information on top of that. “It’s almost finished,” he added.

  “And you?”

  “I’m not almost finished,” he replied tersely.

  “No,” she said patiently, “I’m asking if you’re fine, too.” When he didn’t answer, she phrased it another way. “Are you okay?”

  Ordinarily, he would automatically respond in the affirmative, even if the exact opposite was true. He wasn’t into “sharing.” And yet, he heard himself saying, “Depends on your definition of ‘okay.’”

  “The opposite of going to hell on a toboggan,” she supplied.

  The doorbell rang. He glared over his shoulder at the front door. What the hell was this, Grand Central Station?

  “Hold on. There’s someone at the door,” he told her, crossing back to the living room.

  “Yes, I know.” She smiled at him as he opened the door. “It’s me,” she concluded brightly as they made eye contact.

  Morgan punched the off button on the portable phone, then dropped his arm, still holding on to the unit. “Are you stalking me?” he said.

  “No.” Although it wasn’t visible, she could have sworn she detected a hint of a smile on his lips, one that he was fighting to hide. “It used to be called ‘being concerned,’” she told him, closing her cell phone and slipping it into her pocket. “I was just passing by and saw the light.”

  He found that highly suspect. “How do you just ‘pass by’ a house in a residential community, especially if that house is at the end of a cul de sac?”

  Undaunted, she said, “I could have friends in the neighborhood.”

  She was lying. And yet, she looked so innocent. He had a feeling that she made a hell of a poker player.

  “Do you?”

  “Depends.” She raised her eyes to his in a movement that whispered of sex. The tourniquet around his stomach tightened again. “Are we friends?”

  He heard himself laugh and was more surprised by the sound than she was. Morgan shook his head. “I’ve never been friends with a crazy person before.”

  The corners of her eyes crinkled as she smiled at him. The smile was warm, seductive, and it made him want to make love with her despite all the vows he’d made to the contrary.

  “First time for everything,” she told him. “How do you feel about weddings?”

  The question knocked him for a loop. Damn woman did that on purpose, he thought, to see his reaction. “In general, specifically or my own?”

  “Yes, yes and no.” Before he could ask another question, Kelsey handed him a small, delicate off-white envelope with scalloped edges. His name and address were written in precise handwriting across the front. There was no return address and no postage affixed.

  She watched him look the envelope over, as if he was debating even opening it. She saved him the trouble. “It’s for Travis and Shana’s wedding.”

  “Travis,” he repeated, then shook his head. Why would he be invited to the wedding? “I’m not even sure which one of your brothers that is.”

  Kelsey laughed and quipped, “As long as Shana knows, that’s all that’s important.” And then she became more serious. “My mother said to tell you that she’d really like you to attend.”

  Kate was a very nice woman, but why would she care one way or another if he attended. “Why?”

  “Because she thinks you need to be around people a little more.”

  If anything, he’d welcome the reverse. “I am around people. Five days a week, I’m around more people than either you or she encounter.”

  “Happy people,” Kelsey emphasized, “not people who are angry or hurt.” She eyed him pointedly. “My mother likes to fix people.”

  Where the hell had that come from? And just what was she trying to tell him? “And you?” he asked.

  He couldn’t take his eyes off her mouth as a smile slowly unfurled on her lips. “They tell me I take after my mother.”

  He rather liked the woman’s mother, but that didn’t mean he was willing to give Kate Marlowe or her daughter a pass to meddle in any aspect of his life. He was fine just the way he was.

  “Well, no disrespect to your mother intended, but I’m not broken.”

  The minute he said it, he could hear the trap snapping shut around him.

  “Then attending shouldn’t be a problem,” Kelsey told him.

  He laughed shortly. “I was doomed from the start, wasn’t I?”

  This time, he could almost taste her smile. Was this what an addict felt like, wanting something that wasn’t any g
ood for him?

  “Pretty much. This really will mean a lot to Mom. To all of us.”

  He couldn’t begin to understand why a group of relative strangers would care whether or not he showed up at a family wedding. But he had a feeling that if he really pushed for an answer, Kelsey would tell him. At length. It was much easier—and far more peaceful—just to go along with it. So he did.

  He sighed. “I guess I can’t say no.”

  “That’s the general idea. Now that that’s settled, can I see how the car’s coming along?”

  “Yeah, sure, why not?” At least he understood cars, he thought, taking refuge in the familiar.

  Morgan led the way to his garage.

  Chapter Twelve

  “You have no idea how glad I am that you came,” Kate told Morgan, clasping his hands between her own.

  The wedding had been beautiful and the reception was being held at Trevor’s restaurant, Kate’s Kitchen. Trevor had named the establishment after her since she was the one responsible for his having enough nerve to follow his dream. Up to the point when he went off to culinary school, his father had been counting, none too secretly, on his becoming a lawyer and joining him in the firm along with Trent.

  It had been a very hectic morning and afternoon and this was the first opportunity that Kate’d had to say something to Morgan that didn’t revolve around instructions or dealing with yet another wedding emergency.

  She sounded sincere, Morgan thought, and his mouth quirked in a half smile. Ordinarily, when he heard those words, it was because he’d arrived to help a citizen in some sort of trouble. Technically, he supposed that actually did apply here, seeing as how he’d had to step into someone else’s shoes to prevent what Kate had called a “wedding disaster.”

  With a self-conscious shrug, he murmured something that sounded like “No problem.”

  Dressed in a full-length light blue dress, Kate looked more like the groom’s older sister than someone old enough to be his mother.