Single Dad Sheriff (Harlequin American Romance)

by Lisa Childs

  “Are you okay?” Chance asked. His son didn’t move at all even though he’d shut off the car.

  The kid’s head jerked in response, but whether it was a nod or a shake, Chance could not tell.

  “Your finger all right?” he asked, gesturing toward the Band-Aid on Matthew’s pinkie. Tommy Phillips had an identical injury, so Chance was pretty certain the wounds were self-inflicted and hopefully not very deep. Jessie had inspected the cuts, and she’d applied the ointment and Band-Aids. She’d met Chance’s gaze and shared his concern over the bond their boys had formed.

  Matthew’s head bobbed forward in a definite nod this time. A lock of dark hair fell into his eyes.

  “I’ll get your bag,” Chance offered, reaching for the door handle.

  But Matthew’s fingers clutched his arm, holding him back. “Will you go upstairs with me?”

  “Of course,” Chance readily agreed despite increasing dread over the thought of an ugly confrontation with Robyn.

  “I don’t want to go up,” Matthew admitted, his breath hitching with tears he kept proudly blinking away.

  “You have school tomorrow,” Chance reminded him.

  “I don’t wanna go.”

  “Nobody wants to go back to school after spring break,” he agreed. “But you have friends here. You’ll have fun.”

  “Not as much fun as I had with you and Cookie. And Tommy and Jessie.” Matthew gave a loud sniffle.

  While his son’s words brought Chance pleasure, they also made him feel guilty. He’d wanted Matthew’s visit to be so perfect that he hadn’t really considered how hard it might be for the boy to return to his regular life.

  “It probably seemed like more fun because it was different than what you’re used to,” Chance said. “But you’ll get back into your routine with school and friends.”

  “Mom says you’re trying to take all that away from me,” Matthew said, “that you’re going to screw up our lives just like you did when you deployed.”

  Maybe Jessie was right about his battle for full custody—that he was acting out of spite rather than in the best interests of his son. “I’m sorr—”

  “But Mom’s wrong,” Matthew said. “I like it in Forest Glen. A lot. I like my room and the yard and the tree house.” His eyes sparkled. “And my puppy.”

  Jessie had definitely been right about that. The boy hadn’t been able to fight his tears when he’d had to say goodbye to his dog. But no pets were allowed in Robyn’s apartment building, except cats.

  “But that’s not all I really like,” Matthew continued with a glance down at the Band-Aid on his little finger. “I really like—”

  Knocking sounded against the window behind Chance’s head, and he whirled around. It was probably Robyn, tapping the dial of her watch to remind Chance he was a few minutes late. But, like Mrs. Applegate, he’d struggled to keep the car at the speed limit. He’d wanted to drive as slowly as he could, to savor every minute left with his son.

  Some of his tension eased as he noted it wasn’t Robyn but Trenton. As Chance had imagined, he was tapping the face of his expensive watch.

  “You’re late,” the lawyer warned as Chance opened the door. “Matthew needed to be upstairs half an hour ago.”

  Matthew tightened his grip on Chance’s arm. “You’re still coming up?”

  “Yes.” He stepped onto the busy street next to his friend.

  “I can grab his bag and walk him up,” Trenton offered.

  Chance reached into the backseat for his son’s duffel, but he held tight to the handles despite his friend reaching for it. “No. I’m not saying goodbye to my son on the street.”

  Trenton leaned closer. “I was supposed to drive him back. Not you. This isn’t going to go well for either of us if Robyn knows it was you.”

  “I don’t want Matthew to lie to his mother,” Chance explained. “Especially not for me.”

  “I’m not asking him to lie,” Trenton insisted. “It’s just that whole don’t ask, don’t tell thing.”

  “We both know Robyn,” Chance reminded him. “She’s going to ask.”

  Trenton laughed. “I don’t think you ever really knew Robyn. That’s the problem.”

  Chance couldn’t argue with the lawyer. For one, his friend was too good at arguing. For another, he was also right. Chance never would have figured the sweet girl he’d fallen in love with in college would have become the angry, bitter woman his ex-wife was now. Obviously he had never really known her.

  “Mom’s probably not even here,” Matthew said as they headed into the building. “She’s probably at the hospital, like she always is.”

  “Do you have a key?” Chance asked. He hadn’t seen one in his son’s bag. Matthew had a cell phone and charger, though.

  “Nah, Mrs. Ruiz will let me in,” Matthew assured them. But after they left the elevator car and walked down the hall toward Robyn’s apartment, it wasn’t the housekeeper who opened the door at their knock. It was Robyn herself. With her dark hair in a close-cropped style that offset her wide eyes and delicate features, she looked younger than her thirty-three years—more like the college girl he remembered. But her jaw was clenched, her dark eyes brimming with anger and impatience as she met his gaze, and she was again the ex-wife who’d punished him for signing up for another deployment.

  Then she looked at Matthew, and her eyes warmed and glistened. She closed her arms around their son and clung tight to him. “I’ve missed you so much!”

  Matthew hugged her back for a moment before jerking away. “You probably didn’t even notice me gone,” he accused her, reminding Chance of the claim Tommy Phillips had made when they had first met.

  But Tommy had been wrong. And from the flash of hurt in Robyn’s dark eyes, he suspected that Matthew was, too.

  “You’re never around,” the boy said, adding insult to injury.

  “Matthew, I’m going to pretend that you didn’t say that,” his mother replied. “You’ve had a long drive home, so you’re probably tired—you look as if you didn’t get enough rest this past week. Why don’t you go to your room and lie down for a while before dinner?”

  “I want to say goodbye to my dad.”

  Chance flinched.

  “Well, I don’t want to say goodbye,” Matthew said, noticing his father’s reaction. “But you’re making me. And I don’t want to. I have to.”

  “You have to go to your room now,” Robyn said, color flooding her pale complexion. “And I’ll send your father back to say goodbye before he leaves.”

  Matthew glared at his mother and turned to Chance for confirmation. He nodded.

  “Great, you’ve done it already,” she sniped after their son’s door slammed. “You’ve undermined me.”

  “So Matthew told you about the dog?”

  “Dog? You got him a dog, too?” Her voice rose in anger to the same shrill pitch Tommy had used to imitate his mom. “The tree house wasn’t enough?”

  “A week with my son wasn’t enough, not after all the time you’ve kept us apart.”

  “C’mon, folks,” Trenton said, finally breaking his uncharacteristic silence. “Making accusations isn’t going to help either of you, and it’s only going to upset your son. Let the lawyers handle this.”

  “Maybe that’s the problem,” Robyn said, her eyes narrowed in a waspish glare as she turned on Trenton with resentment and animosity. “Maybe we need to get the lawyers out of it and talk to each other.”

  “Yes,” Chance agreed, but reminded her, “You’re the one who’s refused to take any of my calls.”

  Robyn sighed. “Are we going to keep playing the blame game?”

  “I’m not playing games,” he vowed to her, just as he had Jessie.

  “No, you found other people to play the games.” She snorted. “When I called him, he talked nonstop about Tommy and Jessie. Your plan worked. He had a lot of fun with those boys.”

  “Jessie’s not a—”

  “Let her talk,” Trenton interrup
ted. “Jessie’s not important.”

  But Chance was afraid that she was, that she was so important to him he didn’t know if he would be able to give her up and move back to Chicago if he didn’t win the custody battle.

  “No, Jessie and Tommy aren’t important,” Robyn said, “because Matthew has friends here, a lot of them in the neighborhood and more at school. You can’t take him away from his life.”

  “He can make a life with me in Forest Glen,” Chance said. And the life he imagined was Matthew and he and Tommy and Jessie sitting around the dinner table as they had that perfect night and each of the four following nights. “It’s a great place for a boy to grow up.”

  She shook her head. “My son is not moving.”

  Chance’s lawyer spoke for him. “That doesn’t sound like a compromise.”

  “It’s not,” Chance said. And Trenton was wrong. He knew his ex-wife; he knew she didn’t compromise. She was only happy if everyone did what she wanted them to do.

  “The compromise is that I might agree to sharing custody,” Robyn said, “if you swear you’re not going back into the reserves and if you move back here.”

  Chance didn’t respond to her offer; he was too stunned she’d made it. Instead he walked down the hall to his son’s room. He knew it was Matthew’s because the door was open again. The room was smaller than the one Jessie had decorated for him in the farmhouse, and it was cramped with furniture and clothes. The only thing visible out the window was the brick wall of another building and the metal of a fire escape. This was the life Chance had known: concrete and brick and the incessant noise of traffic and sirens. He’d wanted more for his son, and he could give that to him in Forest Glen.

  But if he didn’t win the custody battle, he wouldn’t be able to give him anything. Could he risk it? Sharing custody with Robyn in Chicago would be better than not being able to see his son at all. But could he do it? Could he give up everything—and everyone—in Forest Glen?

  He closed his arms around his boy, who clung to him. “I’ll see you again,” he promised. And he had never broken a promise to his son; he’d come home from Afghanistan in one piece. “Your mother and I will work this out. You and I will spend more time together.”

  “I wanna spend all my time with you,” Matthew said.

  That had been Chance’s plan, but he wasn’t certain now if that was best for his son.

  “It’s best for the boy to share custody,” Trenton said a short while later as they stepped inside the elevator car. “I can tell the mediator that we’ve come to an agreement, and a judge will approve joint custody with no problem.”

  “You’re saying that I can’t win full custody?”

  “I’m saying that you need to move home.”

  But Chicago wasn’t home anymore. Forest Glen—and Tommy and Jessie—was home. But he had once put other things and other people before his son when he’d signed up for the reserves and then that second deployment. He couldn’t do it again. He had to put Matthew first. The boy’s happiness was more important than Chance’s.

  JESSIE SWALLOWED a sigh as she watched her son push his food around his plate without bringing the fork to his mouth once. She couldn’t blame him. The only thing she’d swallowed since they’d sat down to dinner was her wistful sigh.

  “You feeling okay?” she asked.

  Tommy nodded. “When will Chance be back?”

  She wasn’t the only one getting too attached to the ex-Marine. But even though she and Chance had made love, they couldn’t plan a future together. Their lives were too complicated.

  “He might be gone a couple of days,” she warned her son. Spending all that time with Chance and his son had been a mistake for both her and Tommy.

  “Chicago is that far away?” he asked, his eyes wide with concern. It wasn’t just Chance he missed; he and Matthew had formed an obvious bond.

  “No, it’s only a few hours.”

  “Is he going to stay there—in the city—with Matt?” Tommy asked.

  Eventually. Jessie believed Chance would have to move back to Chicago if he wanted a relationship with his son. She couldn’t imagine a judge removing the boy from the parent who’d been taking care of him—and judging by his sweet manners, good care—for the past year. While she commiserated with Chance’s situation, she hoped a judge would also consider how well she’d raised Tommy alone if Keith sued her for custody.

  “No, he’s not staying in Chicago.” Yet. “He’s coming back to Michigan, but on his way home, he’s stopping in Battle Creek for a day or two.”

  He’d promised to check out Keith more thoroughly than he already had online. Keith had no criminal record and worked in the accounting department of a pharmaceutical company just over an hour away from Forest Glen. He’d lived so close and yet their paths had never crossed since that day he’d kissed her goodbye when he’d left for college.

  “Why can’t Chance come right home?” Tommy asked. “What’s in Battle Creek?”

  She swallowed hard again, choking on the fear that overwhelmed her. She hadn’t told him she’d asked Chance to look for Keith because she’d worried that the man might still not be ready for parenthood. But Tommy deserved the truth, no matter what it was. “Your father.”

  “Who?” Tommy asked again, his pale blue eyes wide with shock.

  “Your dad lives in Battle Creek.”

  “That’s not that far away, right?” Tommy asked. “Isn’t that where we saw the giraffe?”

  “At the Binder Park Zoo, yes,” Jessie said, surprised Tommy remembered the trip they’d made a few years ago and even more surprised that they had been so close to his father without realizing it.

  “So why does Chance have to stay there so long?” Tommy asked. “We didn’t have to spend the night when we drove down to the zoo.”

  The kid had an incredible memory. “Chance is going to talk to your dad. Before I tell him about you, we need to make sure that he’d be a good dad.”

  Tommy nodded. “Chance wants to make sure he’s a good guy, not a crook.”

  She laughed at his perceptiveness. “Yes.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Well, I do, honey. I don’t want him spending time with you if he’s changed from the nice young man I remember.”

  “If he was nice, how come you didn’t marry him?” he asked.

  “Because he didn’t love me,” she admitted, knowing that back then she probably would have said yes had he proposed. But then she would have wound up like her cousin, divorced once she’d discovered what love really was. “That’s why I didn’t tell him about you,” she explained. “I didn’t want him to be with me just because of you.”

  Tommy nodded. Maybe he wasn’t too young to understand.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I still should have told him about you. And I’m going to do that soon, once Chance comes back.”

  Tommy shook his head. “But I don’t want him anymore.” He jumped up and pushed back his chair with such force that it toppled over. Barking erupted as he startled the labradoodle puppy awake from its bed in the corner of the kitchen. “I don’t want my dad! I want Chance to be my dad and Matt to be my brother.” Tears streaked down his face. “I want Chance…”

  He ran from the room, the curly-haired puppy on his heels.

  Instead of chasing after them, Jessie pushed her plate toward the center of the table and laid her head on her arms. She felt like crying, too, because he wasn’t the only one who wanted Chance.

  “HEY,” TOMMY SAID when Matthew answered the phone. “Are you home yet?”

  “No.”

  “You’re still driving?” Matthew and Chance had left early that morning because Tommy had had to get up really early for him and his mom to say goodbye. He’d cried so hard watching his new friend drive off with Chance, but that was probably because he’d been so tired.

  “No, this crappy apartment isn’t home,” Matt replied, sounding as if he had a runny nose. “I want to come back to Forest Glen.
”

  “Yeah, it would be so cool if you could move here,” Tommy said.

  “Are you taking care of Cookie?” Matt asked.

  He glanced down on the floor where the little yellow dog chewed on one of his shoes. His mom wouldn’t like that the new tennis shoe was all torn and slobbery. But Tommy didn’t care. He wasn’t too happy with his mom right now. Or with anything else.

  “Yeah…but just till your dad gets back here,” Tommy said. “Cookie’s your dog.”

  “Our dog,” Matthew corrected him. “My dad’s not home yet? He left a while ago—after him and my mom got done fighting.”

  “They were fighting?” Tommy couldn’t imagine Chance getting mad at anyone, but then Matt’s mom had been keeping him away from Chance. That had probably made him mad. Would Tommy’s dad be mad that his mom had kept him away from Tommy?

  “Yeah.” Matt sighed. “I guess it’s cool that they’re fighting over me, you know. That they both want me.” But he didn’t sound like he really thought it was cool, especially since he sniffed again. “I just think it’s really lame that I can’t pick.”

  “Who would you pick?” Tommy wondered.

  “I love my mom,” Matt said. “She’s not around a whole lot, but she has a really important job. So I get that she’s busy. But I can always call her. She never goes out of the country. If I needed her, she’d be there for me.”

  “So would your dad,” Tommy defended Chance. “He’s the sheriff. He’s there for everybody.”

  “Mom says that’s the problem,” his friend explained. “He’s there for everybody else but us.”

  Tommy didn’t like Matt’s mom very much. “Do you believe her?”

  Matt sighed again. “I don’t know who to believe,” he admitted. “Dad promised me that he’d be part of my life now, that we’d spend time together, that I’ll always come first with him.”

  “You can believe him,” Tommy said. “He kept his promise to me.”

  “What promise?” Matt asked.

  “The first time we met I asked him to find my real dad, and he has.”

  “You don’t sound too happy about it.”