Bulletproof Hearts

by Brenda Harlen

  He hadn’t realized the uncomfortable tension he’d felt when he thought of Natalie and another man was jealousy until he felt its release. It wasn’t a boyfriend she’d been waiting for, just a friend.

  Sister, he amended, after a quick survey of the woman beside Natalie. There was no doubt in his mind about that. They had the same pale skin and copper-gold hair. But where Natalie’s hair was shoulder length with loose curls, her sister’s was longer, falling well past her shoulders, over the curve of her breast, in a silky curtain.

  Natalie’s laughter sounded again in response to something her sister said, then she picked up a tall glass from the table between the two chairs and sipped.

  “Look, Mom.”

  A child’s voice interrupted their conversation and both heads swiveled toward the swing set where a pair of legs pumped furiously to send the swing higher and higher.

  “I’m going really high now,” the child said.

  Dylan watched, too, and felt the familiar throbbing of a tiny ache deep inside his heart.

  He hadn’t known Natalie’s sister had a child. He hadn’t even known that Natalie had a sister. He really needed to go—he wasn’t comfortable around kids. But he was mesmerized by the laughing child on the swing.

  “I’m almost higher than the fence,” the child said.

  “Too high,” Natalie’s sister said.

  Natalie nodded her agreement. “We don’t want you breaking any bones on your first day here, Jack.” She swung her legs over the side of her lounger to get up, and then she spotted him.

  She stood, the furrow in her forehead visible above the frames of her sunglasses. “Dylan?”

  He felt uncomfortably like a stalker, caught lurking in the shadows beside her garage. He stepped into the sunlight. “Yeah. I didn’t realize you had company. I just wanted to discuss some developments in the case we were talking about the other day.”

  “Oh.” She glanced from him, to her sister, to the child, and back again. “Is it important?”

  Apparently she was as anxious for him to leave as he was to go. He shook his head. “Nothing that can’t wait.”

  But her sister had already joined her, clearly expecting an introduction. Natalie sighed.

  “Shannon, this is Lieutenant Creighton. Dylan, my sister Shannon.”

  Shannon smiled and offered her hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Lieutenant.”

  “Hey,” a voice called from the background. “Who’s that?”

  The adults all watched with bated breath as the child let go of the swing and sailed through the air. He landed on his feet, then his butt. But he was up again and racing toward them.

  “Who are you?” the child demanded impatiently, aligning himself between his mother and his aunt and facing off against Dylan.

  It was Natalie, not Shannon, who put an arm around the child’s shoulders. “Lieutenant Creighton is a police officer.”

  “Are you in trouble?” the boy asked, a mixture of fear and curiosity apparent in the widening of his blue-green eyes.

  “No.” Natalie smiled. “I work with Lieutenant Creighton.”

  The smile slipped a little as she faced Dylan again.

  “This is Jack,” she told him. “My son.”

  Chapter 11

  My son.

  Dylan stared at Natalie, stunned. He’d known she was hiding something, but he’d never thought it was anything more than the origin of her money. He never considered a child.

  He opened his mouth to speak, closed it again. Words simply eluded him. After a long moment of tense silence, he finally said, “I had no idea.”

  She shrugged, but he saw the weight of guilt in her eyes. It wasn’t something she’d forgotten to mention, she’d deliberately kept the existence of her child a secret.

  “There’s quite a lot we don’t know about one another,” she said.

  Obviously.

  He glanced down at the boy again, at the blue-green eyes that were so much like Natalie’s. At the stubborn lift of his chin, a gesture he’d undoubtedly learned from his mother.

  The vise that had clamped around his chest when he’d first spotted the child on the swing tightened.

  The boy’s presence shouldn’t change anything. Logically, Dylan knew that. But there was no place for logic within the myriad emotions that bombarded him. And through it all was an incredible lancing pain.

  “I shouldn’t have come here.” He took an instinctive step back. “I—I have to go.”

  Natalie’s eyes were cool, her tone cold. “Of course.”

  She was hurt. Beneath the icy façade, he could tell that his reaction had hurt her. He knew he should explain, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t stand there another moment.

  He fled.

  Natalie watched Dylan go, feeling cold despite the heat of the late-afternoon sun beating down on her.

  “I wanna play in the sandbox now,” Jack announced, and he raced away to find his new bucket and shovel.

  “It’s a shame,” Shannon said.

  Natalie turned, deliberately casual. “What is?”

  “That he ditched and ran. From the way he was looking at you, I thought maybe you’d found someone with potential.”

  “I didn’t find him at all,” she denied, ignoring the first part of her sister’s comment. “Lieutenant Creighton and I work together.”

  “Do all of your co-workers drop in on you at home?” Shannon asked pointedly.

  “Dylan’s investigating some new leads in a case I’m prosecuting.”

  “You don’t have to share every little detail of your life with me, I just thought you might want to talk about it.”

  “There isn’t anything to talk about.” She returned to her seat. But her earlier sense of contentment and relaxation had fled right along with Dylan, and she perched on the end of the chair rather than reclining.

  Shannon sat facing her. “It isn’t just the way he was looking at you,” Shannon said. “It was the way you looked at him.”

  That silenced Natalie.

  “And I’d guess,” her sister continued, “from the way he looked at Jack, that Lieutenant Creighton didn’t know you had a child.”

  “It’s not something I put on my résumé.”

  “You should have told him.”

  She flinched at the censure in Shannon’s voice. “Maybe I didn’t tell him because I knew he’d react exactly the way he did.”

  “Or maybe he reacted the way he did because you didn’t tell him.”

  She picked up her iced tea, took a long swallow. “Why are you defending him?”

  “I’m not,” Shannon assured her. “I just don’t want you judging all men by the actions of one.”

  “This from the sister who’s always preaching that we should learn from our mistakes.”

  “You were twenty-three years old. You made an error in judgment. The mistake would be in giving up any hope of a future with someone else because of it.”

  “There’s only room for one man in my life,” Natalie said, directing her gaze across the yard to where Jack was crashing his dump truck into a wall of sand he’d constructed.

  “You have a generous and loving heart,” Shannon said. “Don’t close it off.”

  She frowned. This definitely wasn’t her sister’s usual lecture. “What’s going on, Shan?”

  “I’ve done a lot of thinking since you decided to take this job,” her sister admitted. “And I’ve realized that the three of us have been together for so long we don’t know how to be with anyone else.”

  “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to come here,” Natalie admitted. “You’ve taken care of us for too long. You took me and Jack into your home when we had nowhere else to go, you helped me finish law school and provided round-the-clock daycare for my child when I couldn’t. And you took it all in stride. There was nothing you couldn’t do, nothing that fazed you.

  “And although I needed and appreciated your support, I was starting to resent how capable you were. I ne
eded to do this, to know that I could.”

  “I understand why you needed to do it,” Shannon admitted. “I just don’t understand why you had to do it so far away from Illinois.”

  “You do know why,” she reminded her sister softly.

  “Yeah, I guess I do.”

  It was only after Shannon had gone back to Chicago on Sunday and Jack was tucked into bed that Natalie allowed herself to think about what her sister had said.

  Was she judging all men on the basis of what Eric Lawrence had done to her?

  Maybe.

  But Dylan was hardly the first man she’d known to run for cover when he found out she had a child. Not that she’d dated much. Since she’d had Jack, she had neither the time nor the inclination for any kind of relationship.

  There had been a few men who’d expressed an interest, some who’d quickly changed their minds when they’d found out about Jack. She hadn’t been sorry to see them go. Her son was the most important part of her life, and if she ever found a man who really wanted to be with her, he’d have to be willing to accept Jack, too.

  Obviously Dylan wasn’t that man.

  But something about his reaction continued to nudge at her subconscious long after she’d tucked her son into bed for the night. The way his cheeks had paled, his breath had quickened. The way he’d backed away, almost as if he was afraid.

  Which was ridiculous, of course, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more to Dylan’s retreat than the fact that she hadn’t told him she had a child.

  The large brown envelope was in her mailbox with the rest of her mail when Natalie got home after picking Jack up from day camp Monday afternoon. Like the envelope that had been delivered to her hotel room three weeks earlier, it bore no name or address, and she was immediately apprehensive.

  “Mom.”

  Jack’s impatient demand for attention cut through her momentary paralysis.

  “Sorry.” She put the pile of mail aside and forced a smile. “What did you say?”

  “I asked if I could go outside to play before supper.”

  “Oh. Sure.”

  “Great.” He was already halfway to the door.

  “Stay in the backyard,” she called after him.

  The only response was the slamming of the screen door.

  She exhaled a shaky breath and reached for the envelope with trembling fingers. There were half a dozen photos this time, images captured in glossy full color.

  Who was doing this to her?

  Why?

  She wanted to snatch up the pictures and stuff them into the garbage, but she knew they wouldn’t cease to exist just because she wanted them to. She settled for stuffing them back into the envelope. Then she picked up the phone.

  She barely had time to catch her breath before Dylan’s deep voice came through the line. “Creighton.”

  “Hi. It’s, um, Natalie.”

  “What’s wrong?” He sounded genuinely concerned, as if he really cared. But it was his job to serve and protect, and she’d be a fool to think it was anything more than that.

  “I got…more pictures.” She swallowed, feeling not just as if the privacy of her home had been invaded by whoever had put the envelope in her mailbox, but that the sanctity of her person had been violated.

  There was a long pause, as if he was considering what to do. He hadn’t hesitated to come to her hotel room when the first package had shown up there. But so much had transpired between them since that time. Now he knew she had a child, and he clearly didn’t want to be anywhere near either of them.

  “I can bring them to your office in the morning,” she said.

  “No.” His response this time was immediate, decisive. “I’ll pick them up now.”

  “That’s not necessary,” she told him, feeling the need to issue at least a token protest.

  “I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes.”

  She was relieved, and grateful. She didn’t want the pictures in her house. She wanted him to take them away, then maybe she could pretend they didn’t exist.

  Dylan could have sent one of his detectives. He could have sent a uniformed officer. There was no reason that he had to go, and a million reasons he shouldn’t.

  But he’d never avoided situations simply because they were painful, and he owed it to Natalie to deal with this personally. From the moment she stepped into Merrick’s apartment, they’d been bound together by this case. She didn’t deserve to be palmed off on someone else now to spare him some discomfort.

  Besides, uncomfortable or not, he was concerned about her. Someone—and he’d bet his badge and his gun that “someone” was Conroy—was playing mind games with her. She hadn’t given him any details about the pictures, but he knew they were somehow connected to the Merrick investigation and Ellis Todd’s upcoming trial. And he worried that as long as she was working to prosecute Conroy’s accountant, she was in danger.

  It took him only thirteen minutes to get from the station to her house. She must have been watching for him, because she opened the door before he even had a chance to knock.

  She offered him a weary smile. It was more than he deserved.

  “Thanks for coming,” she said.

  “No problem.”

  He wanted to put his arms around her, to offer comfort and support, but after everything that had happened over the past couple of weeks, he wasn’t sure she would accept either.

  Natalie stepped away from the door and led him into the kitchen. He glanced around with part curiosity, part apprehension. “Where’s…” he cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Where’s your son?”

  “Outside,” she said. “I didn’t want him to see these.”

  He nodded. His initial relief that he wouldn’t have to see the child was immediately replaced by guilt for so desperately wanting to avoid any contact with Natalie’s son.

  He took the package she handed him and spread the photos on the table. Natalie’s car parked outside Merrick’s apartment building. Natalie getting out of the car. Walking toward the building. Standing outside Merrick’s door. Knocking on the door.

  “Someone else was there.” He was stating the obvious, but he didn’t know what else to say.

  She merely nodded, her arms wrapped tightly around herself.

  “Are you sure you didn’t see anyone around the building that night?”

  She shook her head. “No one. I’ve gone back over that night again and again in my mind. I didn’t see anyone.”

  But someone had been waiting for her, watching her, and that someone could have done a whole lot worse than taking a few pictures. The existence of the photos confirmed that she had been set up to find the body. He still couldn’t figure out why.

  “I want you off this case, Natalie.”

  “I can’t dump an assignment because of some photographs.”

  “Beckett never should have assigned this case to you.”

  She lifted her chin. “I’m capable of doing my job, Lieutenant.”

  He sighed. He was only trying to protect her, but somehow she’d managed to interpret his concern as a criticism and he knew he’d never get her to back down now. Which left him with no other option but to go over her head to John Beckett.

  The back door slammed again.

  He froze; Natalie quickly stepped in front of the table to shield the photos from her son’s view.

  “Mom, when are we gonna eat?” Jack stomped into the kitchen. “I’m hungry.”

  “Soon,” she told him. “I’m just finishing up some business with Lieutenant Creighton first.”

  Curious blue-green eyes settled on Dylan. “Are you staying for dinner?”

  He was blindsided by the question. “Oh. Um. No. I’m not.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because…” He faltered under the child’s direct gaze. “Because I wasn’t invited for dinner.”

  “I’m sure my mom wouldn’t mind.” And with that proclamation, he turned back to his mother.
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  She flushed, glanced at him apologetically. “You can stay for dinner. If you want. If you don’t have other plans.”

  She’d offered him an out, and although there was a part of him that was eager to accept it, another part was curious. Curiosity won out.

  “I’d like to stay,” he said. “If you don’t mind.”

  Natalie continued to look uneasy, but her son grinned. “Cool.”

  “But your mom and I still have some things we need to talk about first.”

  Jack sighed heavily and turned back to his mother. “Can I have a snack?”

  “You can have an apple.”

  The boy made a face, but selected a piece of shiny red fruit from the basket on the counter.

  “I’ll let you know when dinner’s ready,” Natalie told him.

  “Okay.” Jack was already heading back outside.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “I know Jack’s invitation put you in an awkward position.”

  He shrugged. “I have no objection to a free meal.”

  She smiled, some of the earlier tension gone from her face, and he was struck again by how beautiful she was. How much he’d missed her. “You haven’t tasted my cooking.”

  “I think I’ll risk it.”

  She gathered up the photos on the table and shoved them back into the envelope. “You don’t have to stay. I can tell Jack you had some kind of emergency.”

  “Maybe I want to stay.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’d like a chance to get to know your son.” Until the words were out of his mouth, he hadn’t realized it was true.

  She handed him the package of pictures.

  “Why?” she asked again, her voice heavy with suspicion.

  “I know I reacted badly when I found out about Jack, and I’m sorry for that.”

  She shrugged. “You aren’t the first man to hit the highway because of my son.”

  “I was blindsided by the fact,” he admitted. “You never mentioned having a child.”

  “It’s not really something that comes up in conversation.”