He put his arm over the back of the sofa as Penny leaned against him with her hand on his chest.
“She came to me with a case,” Kadin said.
Penny sobered. “If it weren’t for Kadin, a serial killer of young girls would have continued his demented ways.”
“Penny never takes enough credit for her part. She’s the one who came to me with her suspicions.”
“We did work together. In the process, he showed me how wrong I was about my view of family compared to my career.”
“And she taught me how to believe in love again. She changed my life.”
“Not that much. We got lucky when we found each other.” Penny looked at Reese and then Jamie.
“I felt the same way when I met Reese,” Jamie said. “Finding love isn’t so rare. It’s having the ability to recognize it when it’s presented to you.” He looked at Reese pointedly.
Dang, he sure wasn’t afraid to say it the way he saw it. Reese, uncomfortable and out of sorts, averted her gaze. He intensified the uneasiness that hadn’t left her since they arrived.
A baby began to cry, a soft, sweet sound that carried from a back bedroom.
“That’s what really brought us together,” Kadin said, starting to rise.
“I’ll go.” Penny stood. Then she turned to Reese. “Would you like to meet your half brother?”
“Oh.” Flustered, Reese sat stiffer. She hadn’t anticipated this. She had known Kadin had a son, but she hadn’t thought of the infant in terms of family.
“It’s okay, Reese,” Jamie said. “Go and meet him.”
His encouragement oddly soothed her frayed nerves. Why was she so fish-out-of-water with this?
“If you’re not comfortable...” Penny hedged. But her hope that Reese would join her was clear.
Kadin remained silent, although he studied Reese without giving away what he was thinking. If he had the same hope as his wife, Reese couldn’t see it. But he likely possessed practiced stoicism when necessary. Criminals would never know what really went on in his mind as they were being questioned.
Reese got up from the chair and Penny smiled before leading her down the hall to the first bedroom. A portable crib had been set up in the bedroom, the queen-size bed undisturbed next to it.
Reese stepped slowly forward, both dread and amplified curiosity coursing through her. Bending over the crib, Penny lifted up the crying baby and brought him to her.
“What’s the matter, my brave little one,” Penny cooed, taking the baby to the changing table next to a small dresser.
The baby made soft mewling sounds in the arms of his mother, and then started up a new wail when she put him down and began to change him.
Fascination kept Reese riveted. She spent most of the time it took to change him staring at his face. She’d seen lots of babies and held a few of them, but all had been distant from her. Her family had been small growing up. Her parents didn’t have a large extended family. She didn’t know her cousins. Her aunt and uncle—her adoptive father’s brother—lived in Texas and rarely visited. Her grandparents were getting up in age. She visited them every so often and they were together on holidays, but she had never felt a close bond with them. In a way, she thought they might have withheld the full extent of their love. Not intentionally. They just hadn’t expressed themselves deeply.
The baby’s crying stopped and he stared up at his mother.
“There we go.” Penny lifted the child and kissed his pudgy cheek. She held the baby in front of her face, love melting in her eyes and curve of her mouth. The boy’s mouth expanded into a joyously innocent, bunny smile, toothless except for the two front uppers and lowers. “There’s someone I want you to meet.” Adjusting the baby in her arms, she brought the boy over to Reese. “Reese, meet Clayton Tandy. Clayton, meet your half sister, Reese.”
Clayton looked up at Reese, the exuberant smile fading, changing to a look of rapt fascination. The way babies registered their environment and the people in them amazed Reese, the mystery of it. What went on inside the new minds of infants?
“Hi, Clayton.” Reese put her pinkie in the tiny child’s hand. Clayton curled his small fingers around her in a surprisingly tight grip for one so young.
A sound of delight burst out of Clayton and he batted his hands and feet, then stretched as though wanting to be free of the confines of his mother’s arms and fly into Reese’s, giving Penny the challenge of hanging on to such a wiggle worm. Reese’s adoptive mother said she had done that when she was a baby. She could never stay still for long.
“Kadin’s mother said he did that when he was a baby,” Penny said. “Always in a fight to defy gravity. She used to call him superbaby.”
“My mother didn’t call me that, but I was the same way.”
Penny shot a startled glance her way. “Really? How funny. It runs in the family.” She laughed softly and lightly, capturing the attention of her son again.
Clayton went still in trancelike wonder over the sight of his mother, his tiny brain processing every sound she made.
“Would you like to hold him?” Penny handed her the baby.
“Oh, I...”
Penny placed Clayton in her arms.
The warm, small bundle captivated Reese in an instant. Clayton stared up at the new face, focused and gathering information.
“He’s taken to you quickly,” Penny said. “I’ve never seen that. Usually he fusses when he’s first out of my arms.”
Reese couldn’t attribute that to kinship, but holding this baby did feel different than others. The baby must be able to pick up on senses like that.
Clayton began making sounds as though trying to mimic talk. He said something that sounded like Dada.
Penny laughed. “His first word. Kadin was holding him when he said it. We cried for an hour, it was so touching. Don’t ever tell Kadin I told you. This little baby can take him down with a word.”
“I heard you.”
Laughing, Reese saw Kadin and Jamie standing in the doorway. Then she looked down at the baby again. “You must be in awe every day.”
Kadin walked into the room. “Life couldn’t be any better than it is right now.”
“If he’s as protective of Clayton when he grows up, the poor kid will have trouble making his own way,” Penny said.
Reese handed him Clayton, who burst into another show of pure delight. “That’s what we argue about now.” He kissed Clayton’s nose, speaking in baby talk that didn’t match such a big and powerful man. “When we first met it was a battle over losing our hearts to each other.” Kadin looked down at his son again, a look filled with the miracle and object of infinite and incomprehensible love. “If we would have only known.”
The baby had most assuredly changed this man’s life. Reese had a sneaking feeling that he was about to do the same to hers. She looked over at Jamie, who’d stepped into the room with them. And him, too.
“Come on, Jamie. Help me get dinner on the table.” Penny put her arm on Jamie’s and guided him toward the door.
He looked back at Reese with what she could only call glad hope. He was banking on what Kadin would do to her, or specifically, how he’d change her way of thinking.
But Reese didn’t see it like that. She had clear goals. She had a plan for her immediate future. She wasn’t ready to settle down. Jamie needed to believe her. She didn’t want to go through another messy breakup. But she would break it off with him if she felt their relationship was taking her down a path she hadn’t planned ahead.
“You have some of his features,” Kadin said.
Reese looked down and had to agree the shape of his nose and mouth might resemble hers, but on such a young one it was hard to tell.
“What was your daughter like?” she asked, before thinking.
Th
e question stunned him. She caught the brief cessation of joy in looking at his son, replaced by a haunting memory.
But he recovered and said, “Energetic. Strong. She had her mother’s eyes and hair, but she had my build and adventurous spirit.”
“She was muscular?”
He grunted a laugh. Clayton reached up to put his hand on Kadin’s chest, unable to touch his face, which apparently had been his intent. “Not like a boy. She had long limbs and her arms weren’t weak like some girls. Not to be insulting. If she’d have grown to be an adult, she might have cursed me for her muscles, but she’d have been beautiful.”
“I’ve always had broad shoulders.” She had great muscle tone. “No bony arms on me.”
“Do you curse me?”
“No. It helps in my profession.” That triggered a memory. “There was this girl in grade school that other kids picked on. She wore glasses and had thick red hair and freckles. She wasn’t attractive. Her teeth were crooked and she had a big nose. One day some boys were giving her a hard time. She was trying to get on her bike to go home after school but they weren’t letting her. They called her names, pulled her ponytail and tossed her glasses from one to the other.
“I was sick of watching them torment her. So I went over there and yelled at the boy holding her glasses and calling her Raggedy Ann. I told him to give the glasses back or I’d give him a bloody nose.” She smiled with what came next. “All four of them stared at me. But the boy with the glasses didn’t do what I wanted, so I let my bike drop and marched over there and slugged him good. He fell to the ground and dropped the girl’s glasses. I faced off the other three.” She put her hands on her hips and moved her feet wider apart. “I stood like this and asked them if they wanted a piece of me. The girl picked up her glasses and pedaled fast down the street. One of the three boys said he didn’t hit girls and the boy I slugged stood up and said neither did he. They left and the next day I had a new reputation in school.”
“Nobody bullied that girl again, did they?” Kadin slipped his finger in Clayton’s hand and the baby curled his fingers.
“Nope. She and I became close friends. I still talk to her to this day.”
He looked up from Clayton, whose eyes had begun to droop closed. “I think Annabelle would have turned out the same way. She had a feisty streak in her. Her mother had trouble keeping her in check. I often had to have talks with her. She’d always listen, too. She was my little girl.”
Reese wondered if he’d ever spoken of his daughter in such a happy way since her murder. Maybe he had, but she didn’t think he had many moments like that, especially not before meeting Penny.
“You do her justice every day you work for your company.”
“Annabelle is in a peaceful place now. Everything I do is in the name of her memory, but if I was completely honest, it’s more for me.” He watched his son fall asleep in his arms. Lowering the baby into the crib, he tucked him in with the soft blanket and stood there a moment longer. “What made you decide to get into law enforcement?”
Reese couldn’t single out one defining reason. “I don’t know. I guess it just always interested me. Playing the game Clue. Watching crime stories. The news. Bullies...”
He nodded. “The depraved and heartless hurting the innocent. That always got me, too.”
“I wanted to do something about it.” She felt passionately about that. And in that moment, she realized that’s what kept her from finding a man to marry and having kids.
“Maybe you should think about joining DAI. You’d be surrounded by like-minded people.”
At first the suggestion lightened her, a spark of agreement showering. Then she thought of what it would take to make that happen. Leave Never Summer. Abandon her dream of becoming sheriff...
* * *
Two days later, Reese still felt melancholic after that evening with Kadin. He seemed less of a detective to her and more of a father. She would be more comfortable thinking of him only as a detective. She didn’t even notice Jamie follow her into her room, preparing for bed as though they’d done it every night for years. He’d been her rock that night and had given her the space she needed to think over everything. She couldn’t help feeling grateful. More. He made himself important to her. He meant something.
Before she could analyze the situation too much, he stripped to his underwear and crawled into bed, turning on the TV with the remote.
“You’re making yourself awfully comfortable.” Every night he did that.
“Come to bed, Reese.”
He dismissed her complaint. She was too tired to argue. With her back to him, she undressed to her underwear and reached for her nightgown. Donning that, she went to her side of the bed, lying stiff and clutching the covers to her chin, hyperaware of him next to her, just a foot or so from her skin. His hard body. She wanted to feel his weight on her again. The longer she spent with him not touching, the more she craved him.
Would she create a problem for herself if she viewed this as a hot, sexual fling? Isn’t that what she’d had with him in Wyoming?
She listened to him put down the remote as he seemed to content himself with watching TV.
She turned her head.
He turned his.
She saw the leashed passion in his eyes. She felt the same. He kept his word, though. He didn’t move.
His hand rested on his stomach, a hard flat stomach. The covers came to just above his groin.
She burned for him. Lying in the same bed, looking at him. It was too much. She should have made him sleep on the couch. Why hadn’t she? This was why. Melting for him. Itching to touch him and never stop falling into his eyes. He remained still.
She began by rolling onto her side with her head on her hand. Still, he didn’t move. She smiled, unable to stop.
“Are you going to tease me now?” he asked.
She reached over and put her finger over his lips. “Shh.” Right now she just wanted to look at him.
“Reese...?”
Realizing it wasn’t fair to let him think she was teasing, she withdrew her finger. “Be quiet. You’re going to ruin this if you keep talking. I’m not teasing. Just let me look at you.”
His eyes took on a darker, smoldering heat, which only served to tempt her further. He swept her back into a soft float, sailing on this mysterious enticement. He wore no shirt and his hand rested on his rippling abdomen. She took her time taking him in, drinking the sight of him, letting the sensations build.
At last, she couldn’t endure any more. She felt flushed and breathless by the time she reached over again and this time pushed the covers down, past his groin. Rewarded with the confirmation she’d see what she hoped she would, she put her hand over his erection beneath his underwear. His stomach rose and fell faster.
He moved his hands, folding them behind his head, causing his stomach muscles to contract and give her a jolt of desire.
She moved closer to him and had to put her mouth there, on the hard muscles. She kissed him. He tasted salty and smelled of spicy bath soap. She’d never experienced anything like this before. The men she’d dated hadn’t fascinated her this much, or interested her to this degree.
She crawled on top of him, seeing him close his eyes to restrained passion. She loved that he let her do this. She enjoyed the feel and taste and texture of him, his ribs, his chest, one nipple, then the other. His pulse ticked through the veins in his neck and she pressed her lips to the evidence of his desire. Up his jawline to his chin and, finally, her destination. She arrived at his mouth, smelling his sweet breath just before he put his hand on the back of her head and kissed her. His other hand came down from behind his head to lift the hem of her nightgown. She rose up to get it off, on her knees to give him room to remove his underwear. Going back down on him, she felt his erection through her underwear and everywhe
re else her body came in contact with him. Meeting his gaze, she savored the sensation the connection caused before kissing him. The slow, soft, reverent movements of their mouths joining as one sent currents of electric desire through her. She quaked with need. She didn’t care about consequences. She only cared about this. Him. How he made her feel. How this made her feel.
He seemed to be caught under the same potent spell. When they paused in the kiss and once again connected deeply with their eyes, he moved to put her on her back and then took over the position on top. He’d restrained all he could, she realized, as he pushed her legs wider and probed for her. Guiding himself, he slowly entered her. The magical sensations erupted and she knew she would not take long. He would bring her to orgasm faster than any man had before him. She tipped her head back into the mattress, consumed by unbearable pleasure, and cried out as he began to thrust harder.
When he collapsed on her and caught his breath along with her, long moments passed. She needed time to return to reality, too. Like her, he hadn’t seemed to have planned to make love this way, with such gripping emotion and need. He might use their chemistry in his favor, but he was just as susceptible to the backlash. Knowing he was as vulnerable as her kept her from being frightened.
He lifted his head and looked down at her, confirming what she suspected. In his eyes she saw uncertainty, a rarity in a man like him. He pursued her and made no attempt to hide that from her. He charged forward with all he held in importance. Right now she was the most important thing to him. But he couldn’t control his feelings for her, and having these intense relations with her came with risk. Would he ease up on her out of concern for the security of his heart? And did she really want him to?
Chapter 9
The next day, Jamie sat with Reese at a round table crammed in the small space of the Never Summer Hotel office, going through boxes of old guest records. Three desks lined the walls, surrounding the table and piled with binders. They’d checked the bed-and-breakfasts and motel in town—two had gone out of business and the motel hadn’t kept records. A lodge and a cabin-rental resort had produced two possible names. They’d already shown the photo of Ella’s mystery man around town and no one recognized him. Too much time had gone by. If the man had come to town or passed through, no one remembered seeing him.
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