She poked him on the upper arm. “Don’t throw my words back at me. That line was for your benefit. I know better than to believe half of what I say.”
“For the record, I didn’t believe it, either. Letting her stay here just seemed reasonable.” He slipped past her and into the kitchen, where soup bubbled on the stove and the bread she’d oohed over was cooling on a rack on the island. She breathed deeply of its aroma when she followed.
“I can’t believe you made bread.”
“It’s easy bread. You don’t knead it.”
She slid onto a cushy black stool at the island. She couldn’t imagine a much better way to spend an evening than with a sexy guy who cooked and thought she was worthy of even easy homemade bread.
Well, if the evening ended in that super-calm bedroom, that would be better. Even if it ended with just a bit of cuddling on the couch, that would be an improvement over ninety percent of the dates she’d had.
Because Quint was a major improvement over at least ninety percent of the guys she’d dated.
Her cell phone beeped in her pocket, and she pulled it out to glance at the screen. “Chief Dipstick,” she muttered, muting, then setting the phone aside.
“Does he work this late?”
She scoffed. “Are you kidding? He probably just finished dinner, so he figured it was dinnertime here now. Back home, he might see me in the station five times a day, but when he calls, it’s always when I’m at lunch.”
The phone signaled a message, but she wasn’t tempted to listen to it. “I told you he wants to cut Mr. Winchester out of the loop and have me report directly to him? Well, he wanted that report by noon. I told him tomorrow, maybe Friday.” Maybe never.
“Sounds like a fun guy.”
“Yeah. No. He’s a miserable old coot trying to live in the past.”
Quint stirred the soup a time or two, his expression distant. “But you’re not really living if you’re in the past.”
His stark tone made her grimace. She hadn’t meant to include anyone but Dipstick in that comment, and certainly hadn’t meant to remind Quint of his own loss.
But loss of that magnitude didn’t need reminders. Even if he moved thousands of miles away, changed his career, his surroundings and his very self, he would still think of Belinda and miss her every single day. Memories lived everywhere. Nowhere.
After a moment, he set down the ladle and went to a cabinet for dishes. He gestured with the bowls. “Island, kitchen table, dining table, sofa?”
She didn’t ask where he and Belinda had usually eaten. Didn’t care. He didn’t need anything more than a glance at JJ’s auburn hair and hazel eyes for a reminder that she wasn’t Belinda. “Dining table. I really like that chandelier.”
He carried in bowls of soup. She took bread and butter and a dish of freshly grated parmesan. He returned for drinks, and she picked up silverware and napkins. For a few moments, they quietly sat opposite each other, the glass prisms overhead swaying when the furnace came on and stirred the air. It was lovely.
Except for Chica, sitting primly a few feet from JJ, watching every bite like a hawk, prepared to swoop in, snatch the food and possibly take a few fingers in the process. Warily, JJ turned her head so she could focus on Quint but keep the pooch in her peripheral vision. “How long has it been since Belinda...?”
For an instant, he stiffened, as if he’d never been asked the question outright. As if, when he’d first mentioned Belinda, he’d never intended for JJ to presume to bring her up later. If she’d overstepped—
“Passed,” he finished for her, then offered the slightest, faintest, most barely there smile she’d ever seen. “All my life, I just said died. Passed on, passed away, deceased, departed...all those other words seemed pointless. Dead was dead. But I learned it depends on which side you’re looking at it from. When it’s a stranger, died is a perfectly good word. When it’s someone you expected to spend the next forty years with, it’s an awfully hard word.”
“It’s an awfully hard concept.”
“Yeah.” He sliced a piece of bread, buttered it, then laid it on his plate without taking a bite. “Sixteen months ago. The end of November, year before last.”
After Thanksgiving, before Christmas. Hello, ruined family holiday season.
JJ bit into her own bread, barely noticing the salty tang of the crispy crust or the soft dense crumb inside. She wouldn’t ask how. She wouldn’t push for information. When he wanted her to know, when he felt ready to talk about it, he would tell her and until then—
“What happened?” Good Lord, did she not know herself? Of course, she was going to ask how. The man who rationed out his words a few at a time was talking, and she wanted to know what he wanted to say. She wanted to know everything.
He took another bite of soup, then finally tore the bread slice in two. “She’d been having a sore throat off and on for a year or so. Antibiotics helped, but it always came back, so her doctor suggested a tonsillectomy. It was supposed to be an outpatient procedure. No big deal. They do it on kids all the time, right? She didn’t even want me to take off work to be there because it was so simple, but Sam insisted.”
A tonsillectomy. JJ had hers when she was ten. She remembered only two things about it: her big sisters being so unbelievably nice to her that she’d feared she was dying, and her mother giving her all the ice cream she wanted.
“I stayed with her in pre-op until they sent me out. She reminded me she wanted tiramisu that night, and rice pudding, and mashed potatoes. They took her to the OR, and an hour later, the doctor came out and said...”
His breath caught, and his fingers clenched his spoon so tightly that his knuckles turned white. JJ watched his fingers work, flexing, relaxing. She didn’t want to see the heartache in his face that she could hear in his voice.
After a while, he went on, his tone flat now. Empty. “When they put her under anesthesia, she had a stroke. She never woke up.”
JJ didn’t like to think about death, particularly her own, her parents’, her sisters’, her nieces’ and her brothers-in-law’s. It made her sad and would turn her weepy if she didn’t shy away from the first mention like a spooked horse. The rare times she allowed herself to wonder how her own death might occur, she always chose something job related. An arrest gone bad. An ambush. A hundred-mile-per-hour car chase. Her chief driven to strangle her.
But a stroke? Uh-uh. Natural causes for a healthy woman her age—Belinda’s age—were too unnatural to accept. It was just too wrong.
“Wow,” she murmured. “That sucks.” Almost immediately, she tried to correct the words. “I’m sorry. I’m not good with dea—with passing. I never do death notifications because I’m not empathetic enough. I mean, I am. Empathetic. I just don’t ever know what to say because I kind of get freaked out about it. But I am sorry—”
Her words dried up as Quint took the hand she’d been gesturing with in his. He removed the spoon from her grip and laid it down, then wrapped his fingers around hers. His hand was warm, calloused, comforting as hell.
“I’ve never had to tell anyone that story. My sister was with me at the hospital. She got the details from the doctor, and she told Mom and Sam, and they told everyone else. In all the time since, I never dealt with anyone who knew Linny but didn’t know what had happened.”
He squeezed her hand gently and whispered. “I never dealt with anyone. Until you.” His gaze shifted to hers, damp, intense, exhausted. “I’m glad I met you, JJ.”
* * *
Housework had never been a popular subject in the Foster home. It was a chore to be shared by everyone, even if his sisters did insist their parents were so unfair and that their friends’ parents didn’t make their children do forced labor. Quint couldn’t say he enjoyed it, but he did like the order and cleanliness that followed. Though he supposed in a way he did kind of like it when he had help.
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Disdaining the dishwasher, as he often did, JJ had decided to wash their few dishes by hand. She was filling the sink with hot soapy water while he poured another small serving of food into Chica’s dish.
As far as he knew, the dog had had no vomiting or diarrhea, but he figured caution was the way to go for another day or two. The pup gulped down every bite, then sat on her haunches, looking from him to the bin that held the nuggets, then back again.
“You’d think, having been thrown out like so much garbage, she would be a little humble,” JJ remarked.
“Pits don’t do humble. It’s not in their makeup.” He gave in to Chica’s steady gaze and dropped another dozen small nuggets into the dish. That done, he lowered himself to the floor beside her and watched as she hoovered the extra treats, pushed the bowl away and began sniffing him.
“You like pits.”
“I respect them. They’re a good dog with a bad reputation mostly caused by bad owners.” He leaned against the cabinets and crossed his legs at his ankles. For a moment, water running was the only sound, then Chica climbed onto his lap and performed her hyperfast sniffing routine before lying down there with her head on his knee.
“People are the source of all our problems.” JJ rinsed the dishes, left them on the drain board and dried her hands. As naturally as if it was her own kitchen, she squirted the lotion on the windowsill into one palm, then rubbed her hands together as she sat down opposite him.
“Speaking of problem people, I’m taking Maura to lunch tomorrow.”
He nodded. She’d mentioned it earlier in passing. “You okay with it?” He didn’t trust Maura or Zander, but JJ was almost as experienced and certainly as well trained as he was. She wore her Taser and had her gun locked away. She could handle herself.
“Yeah. I told her girls’ day out, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be just her and me. One time her parents set her up on a date with the son of some friends who had just moved back to South Carolina from France. She didn’t fuss or complain. She just happily showed up at the country club restaurant. With another date in tow. Her reasoning was if the guy was allowed to bring a date, why wasn’t she?”
“So your girls’ day out might be just you two, or include Zander, or every other woman she knows in this area. She’s tough to predict.” Quint was coming to appreciate unpredictability. He’d gotten out of bed Monday morning, expecting another ugly day like the previous 480-some ugly days, and instead he’d met JJ. He wasn’t generally melodramatic, but three days, out of 480-some ugly ones, had changed everything. He felt it. Was afraid of it. Welcomed it. Would appreciate it, and JJ, until the day he died.
Three short days.
Life could change in an instant, people said, and he couldn’t recall a time when they hadn’t meant it in a bad way. Accidents, tragedies, death. Life could change in an instant, and sometimes that change was good. A cop stumbled, and the sniper’s bullet flew harmlessly over his head. A light got stuck on red, keeping a vehicle full of kids out of the intersection when the drunk driver barreled through. A gate mix-up stopped a passenger from boarding the plane that was going to crash.
There were bad in-an-instant events. But in one instant, he hadn’t known JJ Logan existed, and in the next, he did, and it was the best thing that had happened to him in a long time.
“What are your plans while we’re dining?” JJ asked.
“I was thinking I could work on my surveillance skills.”
“On Zander, if she leaves him at home?”
“On you.” He watched her. Would she be offended? Was she thinking that if he were going out with Zander, she wouldn’t even consider following him? That this was a big-strong-man-versus-frail-incompetent-woman thing?
“Good,” she agreed, then nudged his foot. “You didn’t expect me to whine, did you? Because I’m not that kind of cop. Backup is always good.”
“I went to the academy with a hotshot who was ordered to wait for backup at a domestic dispute, but he loved being the hero, so he raced in anyway. The husband shot him in the head.”
“Domestics are bad,” she said sympathetically. “We had one family that we never went in to see without at least four officers. It was a mom, dad and two sons in their twenties. Their usual affectionate exchanges were closer to assault than most of us ever see. When they were pissed, they threw punches and dishes and furniture. Dad threw a son at Mom one time. Just heaved him over his shoulder, and kid and Mom both went out the window, rolled off the porch and landed at the feet of the chief before Chadwick. His only response was to remark, ‘Business as usual, Mercy Ann, isn’t it?’ And the mom replied, ‘Can’t talk now, Chief. I’ve got to kick my old man’s butt.’”
Relaxation eased over Quint. He knew exactly the kind of family she was talking about. Cedar Creek had their share. In fact, the Bensons headed the list, though Marisa stayed out of the fray. Though he and Linny had never lacked for conversational material, knowing JJ had experienced all the same things he had on the job made for a certain connection.
And he was already feeling so many connections that he damn near sizzled with them.
Providing a distraction, Chica stretched and stood up, then trotted to the back door. JJ looked proud of how much the dog had learned in half a day until Quint stood up, offered her his hand and drily said, “I’m glad cleaning floors isn’t my job.”
He actually saw the instant the ammonia odor of urine reached her nose, saw it twitch as her mouth thinned in a straight line. Chica stood at the door, pretending the pool behind her had just mysteriously appeared. Wow, lucky she’d already passed those tiles before the nasty got there.
Oh well, it could have been worse.
He got a spray bottle of all-purpose cleaner, a pair of vinyl gloves and a small tub filled with old rags. “Gloves, rags, spray, then toss everything icky in the trash.”
JJ gave him a narrow look as she pulled on a glove, then mockingly saluted. He put on a battered jacket that was hanging next to the door, hooked on the leash and followed Chica out into the night.
Chica shivered in the cold and made quick work of finding an appropriate spot to finish her business. Even so, by the time they returned to the house, a four-foot square of tile was cleaned, sanitized and dried, and the kitchen was empty. He and Chica went into the living room to find JJ sitting at one end of the couch, the arm at her back, her knees drawn onto the cushion. She appeared to be studying the lamp on the opposite end table, a large art glass piece with a prairie arts–style shade, all subdued colors, straight lines and geometrics. The one behind her matched it, while the chandelier in the entry was similar enough to complement them.
She looked right in this house that he and Linny had done together. It was clean lined and welcoming and warm, and she fit as if she’d been part of the design. As if she belonged.
But how could she? In a few days, she would go home. All the way back to South Carolina. But she could come back. He could go there. They could email, text and video call in between. They could be together even in different places.
For a while, at least.
“You’re quick and efficient,” he said as he sat down at the opposite end, angled to face her.
She grinned. “Thank you. My mom says my talents shine in strange places.”
“Outshooting every man in the department.”
“Taking down suspects.”
“I bet you’re quick with the Taser or pepper spray.”
She nodded. “I’m a good tree climber, toilet cleaner and pizza-crust maker. I’m a decent babysitter, and I can spot a good deal on boots from a hundred yards. I can also roll my tongue and wiggle my ears one at a time.”
“You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you?”
Her answering smile was radiant. She wasn’t merely good-natured. She looked for reason to be happy in the smallest things. He admired that. He needed to copy it.
He wanted that kind of light in his life again.
“How long will they let you stay?” The question surprised him. He’d just been thinking about her leaving, but it wasn’t something he wanted to focus on right this moment. Tonight was a different sort of night. An anything’s-possible sort of night. Leave reality until tomorrow.
“I have no idea. Mr. Winchester says money is no obstacle, and the chief is glad to not have to see me every day.” She shrugged. “I can’t even make a guess. In the real world, how long is long enough on something like this? But in the real world, Chadwick would have told Mr. Winchester to contact the local police or hire a private detective. A real-world chief never would have agreed to send an officer—a detective—in the first place.”
“Chica is very glad he did.”
The dog, lying in front of the fireplace, lifted her head to look at him, then JJ, before resettling.
“Do you know she bares her teeth at me when you’re not looking? She does not look on me as her rescuer. She does, however, like you.”
He appreciated the dog’s affection. He appreciated more that it kind of ticked off JJ. She was used to being adored by, if not all, most. “Females like me.”
“I bet they do. Even when you were surly, I liked you. Maura liked you before you rejected her. And obviously, Belinda liked you a whole lot.”
“She did. Enough to stick with me for twelve years. To live with me for ten.” The more he talked about Linny, the easier it got. Not by a whole lot, granted. It still stirred all the aches and sadness inside, but it didn’t feel like hot coals dancing across raw skin anymore. Not quite. That was an improvement.
It helped that talking about Linny seemed easier for JJ than most people. She apparently didn’t feel threatened by Belinda’s sad story or her importance in his life. She didn’t avoid the subject or expect him to. She was empathetic and accepting without treating him as if he might break. A lot of people had believed he might. Including himself.
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