by Peggy Jaeger
“Of course I did. Eileen did, too. He was the only guy who ever paid us any attention. Danny never did because he was always too busy trying to make out with you without Mom or Dad catching him.”
“That’s true.” Colleen drew tiny circles over her belly.
Cathy ignored her. “Do you still?” she asked me.
I knew what she was asking but wouldn’t—couldn’t—answer her. Not if I wanted to retain any of my dignity. Really, how pathetic would it sound if I admitted I’d been in love with him for most of my life?
“Do I still what?”
“Have a crush on Lucas Alexander.”
Technically, what I had wasn’t a crush, so I answered her truthfully. “No.”
“You didn’t ask the right question,” Colleen said to her, cutting a squinty glare toward me. “The real question is, do you love him?”
Again, the truth works best.
“Of course I love him.” When they both gaped at me, I mentally crossed my fingers and added, “Like the big brother we were cheated out of having.”
While they both continued to stare at me, openmouthed, I repeated my previous request. “Now I’ve answered your one question, Cathleen. Can we please finish this menu before it really is your wedding day and I have no food to feed your guests?”
I could tell neither of them was happy with my response. Too bad. My feelings for Lucas were going to remain mine until the day I died. If there was anyone who deserved to know, it was the man himself, and there was no way on this good earth he was ever going to hear the words I love you from my lips. That was a weight too heavy to share.
A half hour later, the sound of male voices came through the kitchen door.
“Where are you all?” Slade called out.
“In the living room,” his wife answered.
“Why are you home so early?” Cathy asked Mac when he came into the room flanking Slade.
He grinned and hauled her up from the carpet and into a hug. “Lucas got called to an accident out on the highway at about the same time papa-bear-to-be here”—he thrust his chin at Slade—“said he wanted to go home to make sure the wife and baby were okay.”
Slade plopped down next to Colleen and tossed one arm around her shoulder, the other over the hand still on her belly.
“We’re fine,” she told him, shaking her head. “Honestly, you’d think I was the first woman ever to have a baby.”
“You’re the first woman ever to have my baby,” Slade told her, dropping a kiss to her crinkled nose.
“Our baby,” she told him.
“I feel like you got cheated out of a bachelor party,” Cathy said to her fiancé.
“I don’t.” He mimicked Slade’s movement and kissed Cathy’s forehead. “In all honesty, I’m beat and just want to go home and get into bed.”
From the way Cathy blushed, I knew she was thinking sleep wasn’t going to be on the agenda.
“On that note.” I rose and gathered up the now-empty tray of sandwiches and muffins I’d brought with me. “I’ll head back to the inn so you”—I nodded at Slade—“can fret over your family and you”—I turned to Mac—“can…rest.”
The grin he shot me told me he was thinking along the same lines I assumed my sister was.
A few minutes later, I pulled into the inn. A note from Sarah told me all was well. The guests were all checked in, no problems had popped up, and the breakfast room was laid for the morning. Sunday mornings were typically a busy time with most of my guests checking out and taking their last advantage of a meal before getting on the road.
This morning’s wedding breakfast had gone off without an issue, and I didn’t have another to worry about until the following Saturday when Cathy and Mac would say their vows.
I slipped into my office and began writing the shopping list for my sister’s wedding.
“I think this may be the first time I’ve ever come here and found you sitting down,” Lucas said from the doorway a few hours later. “You’re usually all over the place.”
He wasn’t in his uniform, but his gun was holstered on his hip and he was wearing his badge. I hadn’t set eyes on him since he’d left my kitchen Thursday evening after the unexpected and world-stopping kiss.
“I’m taking advantage of the quiet to get some work done,” I told him, proud I was able to keep my voice even and controlled when my insides were shaking at earthquake levels. “What are you doing here? Mac said you got called to an accident, effectively ending the bachelor bash.”
He leaned a shoulder against the doorjamb. Fatigue and weariness lined his face.
“It was bad,” I said.
A thick breath seeped from between his lips. “Two fatalities. Three, if you include the buck they hit. Couple of high school kids on their way to a movie.”
“Oh, good Lord. What happened?”
“The buck bolted into the road, must have gotten caught in the headlights. Speed was probably involved too, because the skid marks were short. Didn’t look like the kid had a lot of reaction time, and there was too much damage to the car for the driver to have been ambling along.”
He swiped his hands through the hair at his temples and dragged in a breath deep with grief.
“The state guys took control of the scene, but since the kids were Heaven’s own, I was asked to do the death notifications. I just came from the second one. Parents are…destroyed. I called Father Duncan because they’re members of the parish. He’s with them right now.”
I’d never known the emotional toll being the chief of police in our tiny town had on Lucas until right then. Hauling drunks in to sleep off their night or getting in between family disputes were common. But having to tell someone a loved one had been killed was horrible, and I’d never realized it was part of Lucas’s role. Beyond the exhaustion glassing over in his eyes was something that tore at my heart: sadness. Deep, deep sadness.
My heart ached for the heavy burden he bore. Because I couldn’t bear seeing anyone I loved in pain and hurting, I wanted to comfort him in any way I could, so I rose from my chair and crossed the room.
“I’m so sorry,” I said as I wrapped my arms around his waist, laid my head on his chest, and hugged him as hard as I could.
His hands took their time to weave around my back and hold on to me.
“I can’t imagine how awful it is to tell a parent their child is dead. Or to tell anyone someone they love is gone.”
His voice was thick and strained when he said, “It’s the only part of the job I hate.”
I hugged him harder.
“All I keep thinking is those kids were a little older than Robert. I’ve been worried, like any parent, since he’s gonna be driving now and the chance something could happen while he is…is huge. The two tonight weren’t on drugs, or drinking, or doing anything they shouldn’t have. They were simply on their way to a fun evening, and now they’re dead. Gone in a heartbeat. They’ll never grow old, go to college, get married. Do anything with their lives.”
His voice broke, and I had to bite back tears. I had no words of wisdom, nothing I could say to ease the pain flowing through him, so I simply held on as hard as I could.
The beat of Lucas’s heart, slow and steady against my ear, went a long way in calming my own nerves. In all the years we’d known one another, we’d never embraced in this manner before. Sure, Lucas had hugged me and tried to offer comfort when Danny, then Eileen, had died. But then it had been in a shared grief way, both of us raw and hurting from the loss of someone we loved. Over the years, at family functions or social events, we’d greet each other with a quick side hug and head nod. Never full body contact like now.
His chest expanded as he pulled in a full breath while his long fingers trailed up and down my back.
“As soon as I was done with the second notification, I got back in my car and just sat there for a while, trying to figure out why stuff like this happens,” he said. “Why innocent lives have to be lost. There’s no reason for it,
no logic.”
“Nanny always claims it’s God’s plan, and we shouldn’t question it. She said that more times than I care to remember when Eileen died. She truly believes God takes people from us and has some reason known only to him, for doing so. I can’t accept that. I don’t think I ever will.”
“Father Duncan told the same thing to the parents tonight. I don’t know what to believe. It seems cruel to take a child so tragically from its parents. If anything happened to Robert, I don’t know what I’d do, how I’d be able to go on. I’d be as shattered as the parents I spoke to tonight.”
We both stood there for a few moments, lost.
“I’ve got a half dozen reports to fill out, a few phone calls I need to make,” he said at length, his voice sounding as tired as he looked. “Plus I need to get on home and make sure World War III hasn’t broken out in my absence. But sitting in the car, I realized I didn’t want to go back to the station or head home. I couldn’t.” He pulled back and stared down at me. There was so much emotion filling his eyes, I found my breath catching.
He pulled his hands from around my waist and cupped my face between them. I simply got lost in the dark green and gold flecks in his irises that reminded me so much of a moonlit glen.
“I put the car in gear and aimed it right for here. Right to you. I needed to see you, Maureen. Talk to you. Just…” He shook his head and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he said, “Knowing you’d be here to listen about the miserable night I’ve had, probably want to make me something eat”—my heart lifted at that—“made me feel…better somehow.”
His shoulder hitched. “I’m not doing a good job of explaining this.” He lifted my chin in his hands so I was forced to stare up at him. In all honesty, I couldn’t have looked away if I wanted to.
“Maureen.” His thumbs caressed my cheeks as his eyes gave voice to what he couldn’t say with words. He shook his head, one corner of his mouth ticking upward. “When I’m with you, all the bad stuff going on around me fades away. No matter what kind of day I’ve had with Dad or the thousand little annoying things that come up on the job, stopping by here to see you, have a cup of coffee, or even beg a few cookies helps me keep going. Makes it easier to get through the day.”
“I’m glad I can help.”
“You do more than help. It sounds corny, but whenever I’m around you, I feel like I can take a full breath and just…be. It’s been that way for a long while now. Why do you think I stop by so often when I have no reason to?”
I gave him a shrug now. “I figured it was because you’re always hungry and you know what a soft touch I am when it comes to my family and friends.”
The other corner of his mouth joined in and a small grin lifted his lips. “That’s one of the perks of coming here, but not the reason.” His voice lowered, deepened. “Not the real reason.”
He sucked in a breath, then let it go slow and steady, his eyes focused on mine the entire time.
“What do you mean, not the real reason?”
One of his hands slipped to the back of my neck and cradled it. He ran his other thumb along the seam in my lips. A thousand heated flares ignited at his touch. My heart jackhammered inside my chest, and there was no conceivable way he couldn’t hear it.
The emotions darting across his eyes changed. Desire replaced the sorrow, heat cleared away the fatigue like the sun burning off morning fog. As he bent his head down, I instinctively went up on my toes. With my arms still woven around his waist, I grabbed on to the back of his shirt so I wouldn’t collapse in a puddle on the floor. When he’d kissed me before, it had been a surprise I hadn’t been prepared for.
But now I knew his intent—and more: I knew what his touch could do to me, how it could make me forget all the self-imposed rules I had against telling him how I felt, how much I loved him.
“When I kissed you the other night, I never got the chance to tell you something before Robert interrupted us.” He swiped his finger across my bottom lip again, tightened his hold on my neck.
“Wh-what?”
“That I don’t want to be just your friend anymore, Maureen.”
“You don’t?”
“I haven’t for a while. A long while.” He hissed out a breath as he glanced down at my mouth, then back up to my eyes again. “A damn long while. I want more than the simple, easy friendship we have between us. I think, at least I hope, you do, too. I can’t believe you’d have kissed me the way you did if you didn’t want the same thing.”
He had me there. Before my old self-preservation habits could kick in and explain to him why a relationship other than friendship between us wasn’t good, he kissed me.
Any notion this wasn’t a good idea flew from my brain like dust in the wind.
I let out the breath I’d been holding in a long whoosh and shot my hands up his chest to grip his shoulders for dear life. Forget about my knees turning into a puddle; my entire body dissolved into liquid when he slid his tongue alongside mine and tugged.
“Please tell me you want this too, Maureen.” He lifted his head and peered down at me, uncertainty in his eyes.
The knowledge he was unsure of my response went a long way in proving how well I’d hid my true feelings for him.
I swallowed and traced my finger across his bottom lip. “This is a…surprise.”
“I don’t know how it can be.”
“Lucas, you’ve never said or done anything to indicate you wanted me to be anything other than a friend. A close friend, for sure, but never like a, well, a girlfriend.”
The deep groove that so rarely appeared popped up between his eyebrows. “Don’t we always have fun when we’re together?”
“Of course we do.”
He nodded. “And didn’t you enjoy yourself the other night when we were out to dinner?”
“You know I did. But I never in a million years thought of it as a date. It was simply a friend helping a friend.”
The groove deepened to a crevasse. “I’m really starting to dislike that word.”
“Friend?”
“Yeah, and what it implies.” He tightened his hold on me. “Maybe I haven’t made what I feel, what I’ve wanted, clear to you in the past. But I’m saying it now. I want to be with you, Maureen, and just so there’s no misunderstanding on this, not in a friend way.”
The implications of that declaration were huge.
“Are you sure?”
“I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.” The furrow finally smoothed. “I’ve been trying for months to figure out a way to tell you how I feel without scaring you.”
Months? Good gravy! Lucas’s capacity to keep his feelings hidden rivaled mine.
“Why did you think I’d be scared?”
He shrugged, then pulled me back to rest on his chest and dropped his chin down on the top of my head. “I’ve known you since you were a kid. Watched you grow up. And I’ve always felt you thought of me like a big brother.”
“You certainly acted like an obnoxious one at times. Tick Jones as a case in point.”
The quiet drum of his low laugh reverberated against my cheek. “I’m not gonna apologize for looking out for your best interests.”
“Keep telling yourself that.”
He shifted until we were eye to eye again. “What I feel when I think about you, Maureen, is nothing like a brother feels for a sister. It’s all pure male want for a woman. Believe me.” The truth was written on his face. “The other day in the cemetery I almost came unglued when you said you were meeting Boyd. I realized then I had to tell you before it was too late and you got involved with him.”
“Honestly, Donovan Boyd was never a consideration, and I told you that. Pointedly.”
He shook his head. “I know guys like him, though. The more you say no, the more persistent they become. When Robert told me how handsy he was, I knew I was right. I wanted to wipe that smug grin off his face when I saw him here.”
“And this would be you not acti
ng like a big brother, would it?” I rolled my eyes.
“Believe me there was nothing sibling-like about what I was feeling.” He hauled in a breath. “I was worried to tell you how I felt, Maureen, because I know you. I know how you think and knew you’d be frightened it would change how we are together. You’d fuss about what would happen if it didn’t work out, or if we didn’t suit. Or what people might say about us.”
Or if you realized too late I wasn’t what you really wanted.
“Those are valid concerns, you know,” I said aloud. “We both have reputations in this town to uphold, and you know how negative gossip can destroy people. I wouldn’t want to ruin anything between us. You’re a part of my life, Lucas. An important part. I would hate if we did something to wreck it.”
“I get that.” His arms tightened around me. “Adult relationships are hard, I know. My marriage proved it to me. And if we do this, if we start dating, if we get involved well, romantically, things will change between us. But for the better. I believe that, Maureen. Can you?”
The logical part of my brain screamed a flat out no to his question. I had too many fears, too many secrets I’d kept from everyone I loved. I was still convinced a long life wasn’t in the cards for me, and if I gave in to this desire, I knew Lucas would be hurt in the end.
But standing in my office with this man’s arms around me, a man whom I’d loved every day of my memory, the emotional side of my brain kicked the smart side to the proverbial curb.
“I can,” I heard myself say.
Lucas’s face lit up like a Christmas tree. The sorrow flew from his eyes, and his shoulders relaxed to their normal, calm attitude.
“I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear you say that.” He kissed me, quick and hard, then slow and soft.
“But—”
“No buts.”
“Yes, there’s a but. An important one.”
After a moment’s consideration, he bobbed his head, once. “Okay. Tell me.”
I licked my lips, and Lucas sucked in all the air around me, his gaze dropping down to my mouth. “You’re practically family, Lucas. You’re Cathy’s best friend and Nanny’s, for lack of a better word, nemesis.”
