“In the car?” Mike echoed, horrified. “Kate, you could have been—”
Kate cut him off. There was absolutely no reason to go there or torture himself with what could have happened. She didn’t believe in speculation that left a person tortured.
“But I wasn’t. I didn’t even get a bump on the head.” To prove it, she pushed back her bangs, exposing her forehead to Mike’s scrutiny. “One of Bedford’s finest was driving right behind me and he insisted on taking me to the hospital.”
“Which reminds me,” Bryan said. “I want to meet this police officer. I need to personally thank him for taking care of you.”
“Kelsey knows where he lives. She can get in contact with him and invite Officer Donnelly to dinner,” Kate told him. Which brought everyone’s focus back to a small but vital piece of information that had temporarily been pushed aside. Mike held up his hand, bringing the conversation to a temporary stop.
“Hold it. Let me get this straight.” He spared his sister a glance before asking Kate,
“Kelsey knew you were in the hospital and that you’d fainted?”
“Of course she knew,” Trevor said impatiently, feeling just a little betrayed. “She just said Kate fainted.”
Mike turned to his sister. “And when you called us to invite us over for dinner tonight, you knew Kate was pregnant?”
This was where lying would really come in handy, Kelsey thought. But she opted to go with the truth. In the long run, it was for the best. Keeping the secret hadn’t been her idea anyway. “Yes.”
Travis, Trent and Trevor were triplets and inclined, at times, to share the same thought. This was no exception as they simultaneously cried accusingly, “You knew and you didn’t tell anybody?”
Kelsey held the truth up as a shield. “Not by choice. Mom asked me not to.”
Mike shook his head, stunned by both the news and the fact that Kelsey had kept it from them. “Doesn’t matter. Since when could you ever keep a secret? You’re like a sieve. Secret goes in, secret comes out almost immediately.”
Kelsey lifted her chin defensively. “There’re a lot of things about me that you don’t know,” she sniffed. Closing her fingers around her husband’s hand, Kate raised her voice to be heard above the growing din. “Boys, I didn’t have Kelsey call all of you here to listen to you argue. This is time for a celebration—”
“Celebration? Why don’t we hold off for a while? The baby might turn out to be another Kelsey,” Trent pretended to protest. It got him a swat to the back of his head from his sister.
When Trent turned to his wife for comfort, Laurel raised her hands in protest.
“Don’t look at me. I’m on her side.”
“Face it, guys,” Kelsey said cheerfully. “We finally outnumber you.”
Travis addressed his stepmother. “I vote for a boy.”
“Me, too,” Trent and Trevor chimed in.
Mike raised his hand in the air. “Ditto.”
Kate laughed. “Sorry, boys, I’m afraid that it doesn’t work that way.” She glanced at her daughters-in-law and Shana. “Maybe your ladies can explain it to you later.”
“Or better yet, show us,” Trevor suggested, nuzzling Venus.
“Later,” Bryan suggested firmly, then rose to his feet, bringing Kate up along with him. “C’mon, guys, dinner’s getting cold. Let’s take this discussion to the dining room,” he urged, leading the way.
“What did you make, Kate?” Trevor asked, ushering Venus before him. More than anyone, Kate was responsible for his pursuing his love of cooking and getting a restaurant of his own.
“Not me,” Kate said, slipping her arm around Kelsey’s waist. “Kelsey wanted to make dinner.”
“Oh God,” Travis groaned, rolling his eyes. “Get out the stomach pump.”
Kelsey looked at his fiancée. “Shana, you want to hit him, or should I?”
“We’re not married yet,” Shana reminded her. “You can do it.”
“If you insist,” Kelsey said, grinning just before she smacked Travis upside his head.
The day felt as if it had gone into a sudden death playoff, lasting way too long. Morgan had been involved in a two-hour car chase in pursuit of a stolen vehicle. It had ended badly, with the carjacker crashing the stolen car into another car. The driver of the second car had been thrown and was in critical condition, while the carjacker had gotten himself all but permanently sealed in the crumpled front seat.
When the fire department came on the scene, they had to use the Jaws of Life to extract the carjacker. The man had screamed the entire time. Once freed, he’d been taken to the hospital in a second ambulance.
The felon looked far too young to buy the alcohol emanating from his pores. Unlike the innocent driver he’d hit, the carjacker was conscious and cursing a blue streak as he was taken away to the hospital.
How did people get to be so stupid? Morgan couldn’t help wondering as he hung a work lamp on the inside of the hood of Kate Marlowe’s car. Moving it over a fraction, he managed to maximize the beam of light.
He’d just finished fiddling with the lamp when he heard a car approaching. It slowed down then stopped right before his house. Morgan reached for the weapon he’d laid down next to his tools.
Getting out of her vehicle, Kelsey found herself looking down the barrel of a service revolver. Survival instincts had her instantly raising her hands over her head. She took a tentative step forward. Slowly.
“I didn’t realize I had to ask for permission to approach.”
What was she doing here? Morgan put the safety back on his weapon. “Sorry,” he apologized, his tone flat as he put his gun back down on the counter. “Wasn’t expecting you.”
“Who were you expecting?” she asked, eyeing the weapon. “Some thug with a grudge?”
He picked up a wrench. “Let’s just say that I like to be cautious.”
“O-kay,” she allowed, stretching the single word out as far as it could go.
“What are you doing here?” he asked as he returned to work on the vehicle. He’d replaced a number of damaged hoses yesterday and wanted to be sure they were all carefully tightened. “Checking up on your mother’s car?”
It was as good an excuse as any, she thought, working her way up to the real reason she was here. “Sort of.”
He wasn’t used to having anyone stop by.
Beth would have been inviting her to dinner, he thought. She always cooked more than they could eat in a single sitting. But all he had were the remnants of his fast food order. He sincerely doubted that Kelsey would be interested in splitting.
“Want something to drink?” he finally offered. “I’ve got soda and beer.”
“I’m fine,” Kelsey told him. “But thanks for offering.” She ran the tip of her tongue along her lips. Now or never. He’d already turned her mother down once, so what did she have to lose? “Speaking of which—”
He raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”
Kelsey cleared her voice. The words rushed out. “My mother sent me here to offer you an invitation to dinner tomorrow night.” She held up her hands in case he was going to turn her down. She’d already made up her mind not to take no for an answer. “Actually, it’s my father’s idea. Not that she wouldn’t have tried to invite you a second time herself—it’s just that I think she’s busy trying to process the fact that she’s going to have a baby.”
Morgan set down the wrench he was holding and looked at her. “Why would your father want to invite me over?” The Marlowe home was located in Spyglass Hill. The people who lived in Spyglass Hill didn’t rub elbows with people from his side of town.
“To say thank-you for saving his wife in person,” she told him simply.
“Your father could just show up at the precinct if he wanted to do that.”
“My dad doesn’t believe in doing things in half measures,” she informed him. “Not since he married Mom. From what I’m told by my brothers, she taught him how to seize life with both hands and
embrace it.” But they were getting away from the immediate subject. “So, are you free?” she asked. As a rule, he went out of his way not to fraternize with people. “People” included the men and women on the job and his neighbors. The latter group had tried to get him to come to a barbecue and a birthday party. After two refusals, neighbors stopped trying.
He liked it that way. Morgan had made his peace with facing day-to-day life away from the force as a solitary man. He kept his head high and his expectations low. That way he wasn’t caught unaware or disappointed.
But Kelsey was a different story entirely. She continued looking at him expectantly. She might have gone on like that indefinitely, he realized. He finally shrugged his shoulders and said yes to get rid of her. “Okay. Yes, I guess so.”
“Good.” She moved on to the next step. “Mom wanted me to ask you what your favorite meal is.”
He laughed shortly, adjusting one of the belts. “Anything that microwaves in less than five minutes.”
Watching him work, Kelsey shook her head. “I think she was referring to a real meal, Officer Donnelly.”
It had been a very long time since he’d found himself facing a real meal. Morgan raised his eyes from the inside of the engine and looked at her. “I don’t know. Surprise me.”
I want to, Morgan Donnelly, Kelsey caught herself thinking as heat rushed up and down her body. But, because her mother expected some feedback, Kelsey pressed. “No, really. Pot roast, lasagna, chicken parmesan, name it. My parents really want to show you how much they appreciate you going out of your way.”
He said something under his breath that she didn’t catch, other than “good deed”
and “punished.” “Just doing my job,” he told her dismissively. “It’s part of the job description.”
“You hung around at the hospital to see how my mother was doing and you’re working on her car right now. As far as I know, that doesn’t come under anything that can be found in the police procedure manual.”
After hours, dressed as a civilian, he found that he didn’t work and play well with others. The uniform was his shield, something he could hide behind. Right now, he had no place to hide.
He’d already turned the Marlowe woman down once, he thought, annoyed. Why couldn’t she just take no for an answer?
“This isn’t necessary, you know,” he told Kelsey, grinding out the words. “The invitation, dinner, not necessary,” he repeated with feeling.
“I’m afraid it is as far as my dad’s concerned. And you already know Mom wants you to come.” She was losing ground and tried another approach. “Don’t worry, you won’t have to talk if you don’t want to. There’ll be plenty of people there to pick up the slack for you.”
“Plenty of people?” Morgan questioned. He hadn’t any desire to attend when he’d just assumed it was going to be just Kelsey and her parents. Now he really didn’t want to accept the invitation.
Kelsey nodded. “Yes. My brothers and their wives. All except for Travis. He’s just engaged but almost married. His fiancée will be there, too. And in Trent’s case, his son.”
“Brothers.” Morgan rolled the word around in his mouth. When he’d been very young he’d wished for a brother or two to take the edge off his loneliness. He’d learned how to do that on his own. “How many do you have?”
“Too many,” she quipped. Especially when they ganged up on her. But for the most part, she wouldn’t have traded her life for anyone’s. She paused, debating with herself if she should add the last part. “And I should tell you before you show up and it throws you—”
Morgan stopped trying to work and gave her his full attention. He had no idea where she was going with this. “Throws me?”
“Yes. Three of my brothers are triplets.” And then she replayed her words in her head and laughed. “Well, of course it would take three of them to be triplets. If there were only two, they’d be twins. Anyway, Trent, Travis and Trevor take some getting used to before you can tell them apart. It’s a little overwhelming at first, but it can be done,” she assured him.
She made it sound as if it would be more than a onetime event. He wasn’t sure if he could stand even one dinner. For now, he didn’t argue. “You said three of your brothers, so how many do you have?” he repeated.
“Just four.” Her own words amused her. There was no “just” when it came to her brothers, especially when she thought back to the years when they were growing up. But she didn’t want to rattle Donnelly. “And they’re all decent guys—just don’t tell them I said so.”
He had no intention of spilling to her brothers because, more than likely, he wouldn’t be meeting them. But then he had a nagging feeling that if he protested, the perky woman before him with the dancing, bright blue eyes and the torrent of golden-blond hair would launch into some kind of frontal attack until he surrendered. So, for the sake of peace, he nodded. “No problem.”
Morgan hadn’t counted on the Marlowe woman being able to read body language.
“Oh, there’s a problem, all right,” she said.
Kelsey’s tone aroused his curiosity. “What do you mean?”
She looked at him knowingly. He realized he wasn’t dealing with some emptyheaded, fluffy little blonde. There were brains inside that head of hers.
“You’re not planning to go, are you?” She didn’t give him a chance to deny it.
“Morgan, my mother doesn’t ask for much. Most of the time she’s busy making sure all of us have what we need. I don’t want to see her disappointed. If she wants you at dinner, then you’ll be at dinner,” Kelsey said with finality. “It’s as simple as that.”
Oh, is it, now? “You realize that threatening a policeman is against the law.”
“No threats,” she said innocently, spreading her hands wide to emphasize her point. “Just a friendly nudge in the right direction. Now, is six o’clock okay with you?”
He shrugged. Maybe he’d go and maybe he wouldn’t. He’d see about what he’d do tomorrow. “As good a time as any.”
“Good, now that that’s settled,” she brightened considerably as she moved in closer beside him and faced the exposed engine, “tell me what you’re doing.”
He tried not to notice that her perfume seemed to fill his senses. “You’re a car junkie?” he asked. Her smile was as sunny as her mother’s. “I wouldn’t put it that way, but I’m always open to learning something new.”
He had this unsettling feeling that she had just promised him something. Chapter Seven
H e was not looking forward to this.
But the same gut feeling that warned him of danger on the job told him that if he didn’t put in an appearance at the Marlowes’, the younger Marlowe woman would show up on his doorstep again—and keep showing up until he made good on his promise.
They were right, he thought, tying his tie for the third time as he stared into the bathroom mirror. Those people who said that no good deed ever went unpunished, they were dead-on. What he should have done the other day was call the paramedics the second Kate Marlowe had driven her car into the bushes and let them handle the situation.
But he supposed that on some level he never got over being a Boy Scout. And Boy Scouts didn’t leave people, especially women, if they needed help. It was no more in him to have walked away from Kate than it was to walk away from a drowning man in the hopes that the next person on the scene would come to the man’s rescue. Still, his life would have remained simpler if he’d followed a different course….
Hindsight was a bear.
“You eat and you go. ‘Hi’—chew—‘goodbye,’” Morgan told his reflection with feeling. “With any luck, you’ll be back here in a couple of hours.”
The civilian looking back at him in the mirror appeared far from convinced that things would go that smoothly. Not with that little blonde with the flashing blue eyes as the wild card.
Maybe it was the clothes that were throwing him, Morgan thought, appraising himself carefully. He wasn’t ac
customed to wearing anything other than his uniform or jeans and a T-shirt in his off hours. Right now, he wore a light blue dress shirt—the only one he owned—the one he’d worn to Beth and Amy’s funeral. The same could be said for his navy blue jacket. The only thing he had on that he’d worn in the last two and a half years were the light gray slacks. When the tie still refused to come out right after a third attempt, Morgan muttered a curse, unknotted it and slid it off. With an exasperated sigh, he opened the top button in his shirt and left it that way. In his opinion, ties were only wasted pieces of fabric. He glanced at his watch. It was just a little past five-thirty. The invitation was for six. He might as well get going, Morgan decided grudgingly. The sooner he got there, the sooner it would be over.
Instead of a comb, Morgan opted to run his fingers through his sandy-blond hair.
“Good enough,” he pronounced, taking one last glance in the mirror.
A smudge on his shoulder momentarily stopped him in his tracks. He glanced down at his jacket and didn’t see it, even when he put his thumb under the material and propped it up. Looking back at the mirror, he saw that the smudge had moved. It was closer to his chest now. Morgan frowned. The smudge was on the mirror, not his jacket. With a shake of his head, Morgan made a mental note to clean the mirror when he got the chance. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d cleaned it.
Considering the nature of his job, cleaning mirrors—cleaning anything within his house really—had rather a low priority on his list of things to take care of. Muttering under his breath that this whole dinner thing was a complete waste of his time, Morgan walked out of the house, locking the door behind him. A couple of hours, no more, he promised himself. It was a promise he intended to keep.
Kelsey glanced at her watch. He was late. Not by much, but he was late.
Maybe she should have gone to his place and escorted him back to her parents’
house. Not that she thought he’d lose his way—he was a policeman for heaven’s sake, and they all came equipped with an inner GPS—it was just that she strongly suspected that he’d cop out at the last moment, no pun intended.
[Kate's Boys 05] - A Lawman for Christmas Page 6