Maddy pressed her lips together, suddenly struggling with tears that sprang up out of nowhere. Johnny would have been so proud, if he’d known. But he hadn’t. He’d died before she had a chance to tell him that she was pregnant.
We have a son, Johnny. Congratulations.
It was dark within the back seat, with only moderate illumination coming in, thanks to the street lamp, but he still managed to see the tears standing still in Maddy’s eyes. Maybe it was because he could hear them in her voice.
Moving forward awkwardly, being careful not to jostle the baby pressed against his chest, he leaned over and presented the newborn to her. J.T. tucked her arm around the small body. Their eyes met for a moment and held just the way his and Lorna’s had, over the newborn they’d delivered.
J.T. dropped his.
“Careful, he’s slippery.”
She merely nodded, accepting the tiny weight into the crook of her arm, for the moment not trusting her voice to keep from breaking.
It was enough that her heart felt as if it was bursting at the seams.
“There’s a blanket in the trunk,” she finally managed to say.
Looking around the driver’s side of the car, he found the latch to the trunk and popped it. When he rounded the rear of the vehicle, he found the blanket in the trunk on top of a laundry basket, which appeared to be crammed full of sheets and towels. Laundry wouldn’t help him. He needed something with which to cut the umbilical cord, but at least he could clean the baby up a little before wrapping him in the blanket.
Tucking the blanket under his arm and taking a couple of towels out of the basket, J.T. returned to the back seat.
He set the blanket at her feet and draped one of the towels over the back of the passenger seat. “You always travel with clean laundry?”
“My washing machine broke Saturday.” Maddy said, smiling at her son. Everything always happened for a reason, wasn’t that what her mother was constantly insisting? “I did my laundry at my mother’s.” And if she hadn’t, or had taken the basket out when she was supposed to, she wouldn’t have had the blanket and towels available for the baby.
Very gently, he began cleaning off the baby. “Was that where you were coming from? Your mother’s house?”
Despite the pain she was in, Maddy watched, fascinated by how this powerful-looking man could be so gentle as he handled her son. She wondered how many children he had of his own.
She shook her head in response to his question. “No, it was a party. We just landed a huge redecorating account and felt like celebrating,” she explained, but even as she did, she realized that he probably didn’t know what she was talking about. She and her family ran Rossini Decor, a one-hundred-and-ten-year-old firm that still believed in doing things the old-fashioned way, with dignity, honor and honesty. Not to mention taste.
We. He interpreted the pronoun in his own way. “You and your husband?”
The word brought a fresh volley of tears to her, tears she refused to set free. This was supposed to be a happy time—why did she feel so terribly melancholy?
Struggling for control, Maddy raised her eyes to his. “No.”
She said the word with such finality, J.T. knew that he’d trespassed somewhere he wasn’t supposed to go.
Divorced? he wondered.
He looked down at her hand as he returned the freshly cleansed infant to her. She still had on a wedding ring. If she was divorced, it had happened recently. And not by choice, he guessed. Otherwise, the ring would have come off.
“I’d better get you to the hospital.” J.T. glanced back at his car, gauging the distance. He could always bring it closer, until the two cars were almost parallel, but he didn’t want to risk a transfer. But he couldn’t leave his car unattended at this time of night. Fenelli picked a fine time to come down with the flu, he thought. He turned back to her. “All right if I call that ambulance now?”
Maddy bit her lower lip. He was referring to how she’d almost snapped his head off earlier. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful.”
He didn’t want her apologies, and he didn’t want her to be getting any wrong ideas. “No call for you to sound anything at all. We’re supposed to serve and protect. Just doing my job.”
For one moment there, he sounded just like Johnny. Her arms tightened around the baby he would never see. “Yes, I know. My husband was a policeman.”
About to get out of the vehicle, J.T. stopped dead. “Was?”
Such a small word, such a huge meaning. Her heart felt heavy enough to sink down to her toes. “He died in the line of duty eight months ago.”
The number leaped out at him. That means she’d only been a month or less along when her husband had died. J.T. looked at the baby in her arms.
“Did he know?”
“No.”
And that would forever be one of her greatest sorrows, that she’d held the news back from her husband, planning to surprise him with the news on the long romantic weekend they had planned. Johnny had been so eager to have children.
Her voice was filled with sorrow, though she hardly said anything. The heart he was so convinced was incapable of feeling anything went out to her. “I’m sorry.”
Maddy exhaled slowly, trying to steady her breathing. “Yes, so am I.” As J.T. began to get out of the car, she suddenly called after him. “Don’t call the ambulance. Take me in yourself.”
He stood outside the passenger door, unconvinced. “I don’t think I should try to move you—”
“Why not? You’re strong, John Thomas,” she told him, then added, “and I’m stronger than I look,” hoping to convince him.
John Thomas. It felt odd having someone other than his mother call him that. As far back as he could remember, he’d always been J.T., even to Lorna.
He stood for a moment, thinking, then made up his mind. “Okay, I’ll bring the car closer.”
Maddy smiled to herself as she held her son close and waited.
The transfer from her car to his turned out to be easier than he’d anticipated. Maddy held her son against her and J.T. carried them both from her back seat to his. His fear of dropping her faded. Even with the double load, Maddy felt as if she weighed close to nothing. He’d carried commission reports that weighed more than she did.
The wind had picked up just before he placed her down on the back seat and he caught a whiff of a soft, tantalizing scent that swirled around him like perfumed magic.
J.T. told himself that he was hallucinating and blocked it out.
“I’ll have you there in a few minutes,” he promised, getting in behind the steering wheel.
Safe in the back seat, Maddy felt comfortably isolated from everything that was hurtful. “No hurry. I have everything I want right here,” she murmured, looking down at her baby.
J.T. looked into the rearview mirror, but she was busy with her son. She looked radiant. He felt something stirring within him, emotions that creaked and flexed stiffly like unused muscles.
J.T. turned the car toward the hospital and forced himself to ignore it. This wasn’t about him, this was about a private citizen he was taking to the hospital, nothing more.
“Anyone you want me to call for you?” he asked as he passed through an amber light just before it turned red. The freeway entrance was directly ahead. From where he was, he could see that the traffic was minimal.
“Just my mother.” The baby began to fuss and she started rocking him against her. “She’ll take care of everyone else. I think I should warn you that she’ll want to thank you in person.” If she knew her mother, Lorraine Rossini would insist on it. “They all will.”
He raised his eyes to the rearview mirror, but Maddy’s eyes were lowered as she sat looking adoringly at her son. “All?”
She laughed. He almost sounded wary. “I have a large family. A large, close-knit family.”
He wondered what that was like. He’d been an only child and both his parents were gone before he’d blown out the c
andles on his twenty-fifth birthday cake. His whole world had been Lorna.
“Must be nice,” he murmured, out of a lack of anything else to say.
“It is,” she assured him. And now she had one more to add to the family. Overcome, she pressed a kiss to the small, not quite downy head. “It is.”
He wouldn’t know about that, J.T. thought, and he supposed he never would. His hopes of having a family of his own had died that New Year’s Eve night with Lorna.
Chapter 4
J.T. had intended that to be the end of it.
He’d done what was expected of him. More, really. He’d brought her in to the hospital, then placed a call to Maddy’s mother as she’d requested. He’d patiently listened to Mrs. Rossini shriek with joy as he’d informed her of the details of her grandson’s birth. He’d done all that before leaving the hospital.
Beyond that, his responsibility was supposed to be over.
He certainly didn’t have to have Ambroise, another policeman from the local precinct, drop him off the following morning where he had left Maddy’s car. There was no need to jump-start the dead vehicle. And there had been no need to drive the car to the residential development where she lived and leave it parked safely in her driveway. None of that was necessary or by the book. He couldn’t begin to explain why he did it, other than it just seemed like the right thing to do.
Ambroise had followed him and then waited to take him back to his place. A tall, strapping man with skin like ebony, Evan Ambroise made no effort to hide his approval of the deed. He flashed a broad grin as J.T. got back into his car.
“Glad to see you’re finally getting out, even if it is just to park cars.” He laughed at his own joke as he guided the car out of the development.
J.T. shrugged, staring straight ahead. “Just cleaning up a few details.”
Ambroise gave a knowing grunt. “This detail have a name?”
J.T. didn’t bother acknowledging the question. He knew where Ambroise, a married man with six children and another on the way, was going with this. Both Ambroise and his wife, Claire, had invited him over countless times since he’d lost his wife. They, along with his partner, kept insisting he had to get out, to socialize, to reclaim his life. Nobody seemed to understand that he didn’t want to reclaim it. That it was too empty for him to take back now.
“I helped a woman deliver her baby last night, then took her to the hospital,” J.T. said, his voice hardly fluctuating above a monotone.
“Married?” There was a note of concern in Ambroise’s voice.
“Widowed.” J.T. paused, then added. “That was her car.” He slanted a look at the other man. Ambroise was grinning again. “Don’t make a big thing out of it,” J.T. warned.
“Okay, I won’t.” He glanced at J.T. as they approached the apartment complex where he’d picked him up earlier. “But maybe she will when she finds out her car isn’t where she left it.” He pursed his lips together to keep from grinning again. “Don’t you think you should tell her it’s safe at her place? Seems to me a new mama has enough to worry about without thinking someone stole her car right out from under her.”
J.T. rubbed his hand over his face. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Because he hadn’t been thinking clearly since last night, that’s why. Not since he’d held that baby in his arms.
Hell, not since he’d first seen Maddy. She’d reminded him a little of Lorna, petite and blond—and pregnant, the way he’d always wanted her to be.
But he wasn’t about to admit that to Ambroise. Even a hint of the truth and the word would be all over the precinct. The last time Ambroise had kept anything to himself, it had been a toothache and even that was shared after the first initial ten minutes of silence.
“I was getting to that.”
Ambroise nodded, pleased that J.T. had found an excuse to see the woman again. Wait until he told Claire. “Good. Wouldn’t want one of Bedford’s finest to be mistakenly accused of carjacking.”
J.T. ignored the grin on the other man’s face. The deep chuckle that followed it was harder to block out. It followed him after he’d left Ambroise’s car all the way to his own door.
But Ambroise was right. He’d made a mistake. Maddy was going to have no way of knowing where the car was unless he told her.
Which meant he was going to have to see her again.
“No good deed goes unpunished,” he muttered under his breath, remembering something his mother had once told him.
With a sigh, he got into his car and drove to the hospital.
J.T. walked slowly to the bank of elevators in the rear of the hospital. For a place that housed the sick, it was incredibly cheerful looking, its colors bright and uplifting without being annoyingly sunny. And the smell was absent. That daunting medicinal smell that made a man’s stomach turn to jelly.
He didn’t particularly want to be here. Especially not twice in two days.
“This is not a big deal,” J.T. told himself. “I’m only dropping by to tell the woman about her car.” And while he was at it, he supposed it wouldn’t hurt to see how she and the baby were doing. After all, every case had to be followed up. This was just a routine follow-up, nothing more.
J.T. refused to entertain the notion that maybe he wanted to see her just to see her. The fact that they had experienced something special last night, something that tended to bond people for years to come, was not allowed to enter into it. He’d brought her son into the world and had been a critical part of nature’s miracle, but he was putting that behind him. There was no point in letting it get to him, no point in dwelling on it at all.
If he did, if he let himself get even moderately involved, it would prove to be much too painful down the line, and he had had a bellyful of pain, enough to last a lifetime.
His.
When he got out of the elevator on the fifth floor, J.T. went straight to the nurses’ station and asked for directions. There was no sense in wandering around the corridor, wasting time while trying to find her room. He just wanted to go in, deliver his message and leave. The faster he found her, the sooner he would be on his way.
The older nurse he’d asked paused to look at him over her rimless glasses. “Another one, eh?”
“Excuse me?”
The woman shook her head. “Never mind. I just had no idea we were getting ourselves a celebrity here.” She laughed at the private joke she shared with herself. “Keeps the place lively, I guess.”
He had no idea what she was talking about. “Is Madeline Reed on this floor or not?”
“Oh, she’s here all right. Room 512. Just take the corridor down that way.” She pointed toward the left. “Follow the voices, you can’t go wrong.”
He didn’t bother asking what that was supposed to mean.
As he drew closer to the end of the corridor, J.T. heard the murmur of voices. As promised. When he reached Maddy’s room and opened the door, he came face-to-back with almost a human wall of people, some milling around the single bed, others lounging by the window. Everyone looked to be in great spirits. At first glance, it looked as if some firm had decided to hold their annual company picnic in her small room.
J.T. stood in the doorway, hesitating for a brief moment. He could always come back. Or better yet, just call the hospital later and ask for her room. He should have done that in the first place, he thought. Although she probably wouldn’t have heard the phone ring with all this noise.
Just as he turned to leave, someone grabbed his arm in both of hers.
When he looked, there was a short, beaming older woman in a bright red dress attached to his arm.
“Are you J.T.?” she asked. By her expression, she already seemed to know the answer.
His eyes narrowed. “Yes.”
His surprise melted away almost immediately as he took in the woman’s dancing blue eyes, fair complexion and dark blond hair. Aside from the fact that she was somewhat heavy-set, she could have passed as an older version of Maddy.
“I
thought so. You looked just the way she described you. I just wanted to hug the man who saved my baby.” Before he could say anything in protest, the woman threw her arms around him and squeezed, He saw the family resemblance immediately.
Her mother’s squeal of pleasure alerting her, Maddy shifted her attention toward the doorway.
Poor John Thomas, she thought. Her mother tended to be a bit overwhelming as well as dramatic. But that had ceased to embarrass her a long time ago.
“Mother, I was giving birth, not dangling from a broken redwood branch forty feet off the ground.”
“Same difference,” Lorraine Rossini sniffed. “I could tell you horror stories.”
Still holding onto J.T., Lorraine forged her way to her daughter’s bed. The sea of people readily parted down the middle to allow them to pass.
He felt like Moses, except no one was allowing him to go free.
“I know you could,” Maddy answered, suppressing a wide smile. But it had no trouble reaching her eyes as she looked up at her latest visitor. “You came back.”
She made it sound as if he’d promised that he would. Why would she have thought that? “I wanted to tell you that I moved your car.”
An older man, barely five-six, with black hair streaked with silver, moved directly into his path. “You impounded her car?” It was a gruff challenge.
“Calm down, Dad,” a woman in the crowd counseled. “Let the man talk.”
J.T. frowned, directing his response to Maddy rather than to the man who might or might not have been her father. “No, I parked it in your driveway.”
An older woman, not her mother, gave him a long, interested look. He’d seen potential Sunday dinners at a soup kitchen get less scrutiny. “How did you know where she lived?”
“He’s a policeman,” he heard Maddy’s mother explain. “They know everything.”
Again, he kept his eyes trained on only Maddy. It was easier that way. “I looked in your purse,” he told her. He’d taken the purse out of her car just before they left for the hospital. “I didn’t think you wanted someone ticketing your car,” he added, then upbraided himself for thinking that he needed to explain.
A Mother's Day: Nobody's ChildBaby on the WayA Daddy for Her Daughters Page 12