Her nod was tiny and slightly ashamed. Shouldn’t she be grieving for the death of even a stranger, feeling—how did it go?—that the loss of any man diminished her? Instead she felt violated because he had bled out his life in her house.
And she was afraid.
“Natalie, look at me.”
Startled, she realized that they were stopped at a light in the old part of town. An enormous Queen Anne style turn-of-the-century house on one corner was now a bed-and-breakfast; across the street, an antique shop spilled onto the sidewalk from what had probably once been a carriage house. She had been blind to the view of the bay during the drive here, to the arrival of a ferry that had disembarked the long line of cars waiting to race up the hill toward the highway. John lived here in Old Town, just a few blocks away, in a more modest restored Victorian.
She turned her head to meet his frowning gaze.
“I will not let you be hurt.” His words had the power of a vow. “I promise.”
The idea panicked her. Natalie shook her head hard. “No. Don’t promise. How can you? At some point, I’ll have to go home even if you don’t make an arrest. What if he did come back? Are you going to abandon your children to hover in my shrubbery every night? No,” she said with finality. “I don’t want to be a weight on your conscience.”
A horn sounded behind them, then another one. For a moment John still didn’t move, his electric, brooding eyes holding hers. Then he blinked, shuttering the intensity, and flung an irritated glance at the mirror.
“Yeah, yeah, hold your horses,” he growled, stepping on the gas. He drove the remaining blocks in silence, but her stolen look saw the deep lines carved in his forehead. In front of his house, he set the emergency brake and turned off the engine. Turning a near-scowl on her, he said, “All right. How’s this instead? I’ll do my damnedest to keep you safe.”
“That,” she said, smiling shakily, “I can accept. Gratefully.”
SHE WAS GOING TO ACCEPT his help gratefully?
Driving away from his house, John gave a grunt of wry amusement. Oh, yeah. Sure.
The next moment, his brows drew together. No, he wasn’t being fair. Natalie would be grateful, all right.
She would just hate having to be.
Actually, he liked that about her. His mother excepted, the women John had known well had tended to be dependent on the men in their lives. They assumed a man would fix anything that was wrong.
Not that Natalie was the prickly type; far from it. She was warm, gentle, relaxed, a comfortable voice on the phone when he felt like talking out a day’s problems. But she was also determined—sometimes infuriatingly so—not to lean on anyone, even if she was a new widow.
No matter what he did for Natalie, no matter how trivial, she’d thank him gravely but with a troubled expression puckering her brow. Then he could count on her bringing a plate of cookies to the station, or sending a casserole home with him, or buying gifts for Evan and Maddie. She had to balance the scales. Always.
In John’s book, friends did each other favors. Natalie was on her own now, and he didn’t mind picking up some of the slack. He liked working with his hands, and if painting her house meant dumping the kids at their friends’ homes, heck, they’d have a better time with their buddies than they would if he took them out to the spit anyway. It wasn’t as if his five-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter didn’t get plenty of his attention. Except for work, he was with them most of the time.
He knew Stuart Reed hadn’t left any life insurance, and he was pretty sure Natalie didn’t make enough to be able to afford to put out fifteen hundred dollars or so to have her house painted. The very fact that she bit her lip, let him do the work and thanked him prettily told John that he was right: she needed him.
She just wished like hell that she didn’t.
Did she feel guilty at putting him out? Hate any hint of dependence? He didn’t know, hadn’t asked. John would have been over there cleaning out her gutters no matter what. She was his partner’s widow. Stuart would have done the same for John’s children, if he’d been the one to go.
Natalie seemed to understand and accept that. She’d let John hold her when he brought the news of Stuart’s death. He had stood beside her at her husband’s funeral, kept an arm around her as Stuart’s casket was lowered into the ground and the first, symbolic chunk of earth was flung down onto its shining surface. That was John’s place, and she hadn’t tried to keep him from it.
Huge dark circles under her eyes, she’d gone back to work a week after the funeral. She hadn’t asked to be held again, and wouldn’t. Admiring her strength, John had found himself talking to her as if she was another man.
He knew she was a woman, of course. Her ripe curves and leggy walk might have fueled a few fantasies under other circumstances. But that wasn’t how he thought of her. It was her laugh and her wisdom and her grave dignity that characterized her. He’d never been friends with a woman before, but somehow it had happened with her, perhaps because he’d known her for several years as his partner’s wife. That was another page out of John’s book: you didn’t lust after a friend’s wife.
The end result was that he’d quit noticing her looks. He liked talking to her. He’d call just to see how things were going, stop by casually to do small jobs around the house he figured she wouldn’t get to. She seemed to enjoy his kids. As far as he knew, she hadn’t begun to date. No possessive man had taken to hanging around questioning John’s presence. He and Natalie had an easy relationship that he savored. He didn’t know when—if ever—he’d been able to relax around a woman.
But she wasn’t going to like having new reason to be grateful, he reflected.
The damn ferry traffic was still bumper-to-bumper up the main drag. Drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, John strove for patience.
His mother had been just the right medicine tonight, he decided. Strong herself, Ivy McLean expected everyone else to be as well.
He’d left Natalie in his mother’s competent but not tender hands. Her brand of coddling, he suspected, would suit Natalie Reed fine.
Ivy McLean hadn’t been the most sympathetic of mothers when her three sons took turns being heart-broken by high school femmes fatales or suffering knee injuries on the football field. Get over it was her sometimes impatient message. Stand up tall, focus on what’s important. Football was not. Neither were teenage romances.
Swearing when he didn’t make it through an intersection before the light turned red, John grimaced. Come to think of it, not much that had mattered to seventeen-year-old boys had been truly important in Ivy MacLean’s eyes. Grades, she cared about. Living honestly and with integrity. Accepting the duty their father’s murder had laid on all three boys.
In Natalie Reed’s case, Mom would understand a degree of shock and would respect outrage. She would be kind in her brisk way, without encouraging an excess of tears or self-pity or fear. Hell, John thought ruefully, most likely Mom would buck Natalie up and have her ready to rip down the crime scene tape and move home tomorrow morning, to hell with the murderer on the loose.
Maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea.
Earlier,
