The Baby Trail (Baby Bonds #2)

by Karen Rose Smith

  Frustrated and unsettled, he went back to his room and paced.

  Is this the way Cheryl had felt when she didn’t know where he was or what he was doing? When he had to drop out of sight for a few days? When he landed an undercover assignment that had taken him away for a couple of weeks?

  And what about when she was pregnant? She’d begged him not to take that last assignment. The doctor had told him worry alone couldn’t cause a miscarriage, but Garrett was as sure now as he was then that it had played a part. He had caused her miscarriage—their miscarriage—the loss of their baby.

  When he heard the clatter of shoes on the stairs, he went still. Not waiting for Gwen to enter her room, he met her in the hall.

  “Where have you been?” he growled.

  It took him a few moments to observe the fact that she was dripping wet and so was the newspaper she’d tried to hold over her head to protect her from the rain.

  Holding two bags in her other hand, she smiled. “I just went to get supplies. You know women, can’t stay overnight someplace without shampoo and—” She stopped. “What’s wrong?”

  He stuffed his hands into his jeans pockets. “Nothing’s wrong. I just didn’t know where you were.”

  “What did you think? That I’d vanished into thin air? You were getting your shower, and I certainly wasn’t going to try to communicate through a shower door.”

  “You could have left a note.” Then before she could see how rattled he’d really been, he went into his room.

  Instead of going to hers, however, she followed him. “I knew I was only going to be gone a few minutes.” Her curls were wet and curling more than usual above her jacket collar.

  “You’re dripping on the floor,” he pointed out. “You’d better get dried off.”

  After setting the newspaper and the bags on a wooden chair, she moved closer to him. The rain seemed to enhance the scent of her perfume or shampoo or whatever it was that had driven him crazy all day in the car.

  “I didn’t mean to worry you,” she said softly.

  He wasn’t going to deny that she had. “Forget it. Go get changed.”

  “I take care of myself, Garrett. I’m not used to announcing my comings and goings, even when I lived with Dad. He didn’t usually know if I was there or if I wasn’t, and he really didn’t care.”

  “Because of the alcohol,” Garrett said gruffly.

  “Yes. Were you truly worried? What did you think might have happened?”

  His defenses felt as thin as a veil around this woman. “We’re in a strange town. Who knows? When you’ve seen what I’ve seen—women getting snatched, kids getting snatched, men who don’t have a conscience, you learn nowhere’s safe. Even in the best of circumstances, life’s a crap shoot.”

  “What kind of work did you do?”

  “I did whatever was asked of me.”

  Her voice went even softer. “And what did it cost you?”

  “It cost me my marriage and a child.”

  Her eyes went wide. “Someone took your child?”

  “No. This wasn’t the fault of a bad guy. I was the bad guy.”

  Her hands fluttered out as if to touch his arm in comfort, but he couldn’t let her do that. He crossed to the window and stared out at the rain. “Cheryl knew I was FBI when she married me. I think she was impressed by the idea—that it was glamorous or something. I don’t know.”

  “Dangerous men can be the most sexy,” Gwen murmured.

  He glanced at her and saw that she meant it. “I wasn’t dangerous, but my job could be and I couldn’t talk about most of it. I don’t know what Cheryl thought. That I’d sit behind a desk, in a suit, carry a gun, arrest perps from a distance.”

  “What did you do?”

  “It wasn’t only what I did, but how and when I did it. Cheryl began to resent the beep of my cell phone, a call to duty in the middle of the night, situations that sometimes kept me away for days.”

  “Was not understanding your work the biggest problem?”

  “Yes, or else our personalities were…or our expectations. I’m still not sure. Cheryl expected marriage to be a forever love fest, but then the realities of life set in.”

  “Neither of you got what you bargained for.”

  “That is the ultimate understatement. After she became pregnant, I talked to my supervisor. I was assigned to cases close to home.”

  Gwen was near again, and he hadn’t heard her move. “Where was home?” she asked.

  “Northern Virginia.” The sound of the rain drowned out his heartbeat, a beat that grew harder and stronger around Gwen.

  “What happened?”

  There didn’t seem to be any turning back now. “I got involved in a case before Cheryl got pregnant. Details aren’t important, but the information I had in my head was. Anyway, the long and short of it was that I was called away for a week. While I was gone, Cheryl miscarried.”

  When no sound came from Gwen, he swung to face her. He was surprised to see her eyes bright with tears.

  The rat-a-tat of rain on the roof pounded in his ears until Gwen said, “She blamed you.”

  “We both blamed me. I put work before her and the baby.”

  Gwen didn’t recoil or look away. “Could you have turned down the assignment?”

  “No. Not ‘no’ as in I’d lose my job if I did, but ‘no,’ as in we had to round up someone who was going to hurt even more people if I did.”

  “She didn’t understand the duty and responsibility of who you are?”

  How did Gwen know him so well in such a short time? “She believed duty and responsibility to her and our child came first. Now I think she was right. I think it’s hard for men to separate ego from their job.”

  “You think ego drove you rather than duty?”

  He kept his gaze locked to hers and said honestly, “I’ll never know.”

  After a moment, she asked, “Is that why you left the FBI?”

  He blew out a breath, glad this discussion was almost over. “I didn’t leave until after my divorce. I told Cheryl I’d quit and do something in security. But she’d given up on us.”

  “No counseling?”

  “She said that wasn’t in the cards. No counselor could make her forgive me.”

  Gwen’s eyes went deeply brown as if she couldn’t imagine saying that to someone. But she hadn’t lost a child. She hadn’t been on the other end of a marriage with a husband who disappeared for days and left at the beep of a cell phone. What kind of woman could forgive a man who did that to her?

  What kind of woman could live with his lifestyle now, solitary most of the time before taking off at the sound of a cell phone to rescue a child?

  The answer wasn’t so elusive—the kind of woman who could understand just how important rescuing children was to him. The kind of woman who could love a man more that she needed him.

  A bead of water dripped from Gwen’s hair onto her jacket collar. She’d stood there listening to him as if she weren’t wet all over.

  “You’ve got to get changed,” he said.

  “Garrett…”

  He held up his hands to stop the comfort she wanted to give, and almost touched her. But he closed his hands into a fist instead. “Enough. It does no good to rehash history.”

  “It does if you learn from it. It does if it helps you connect with someone else.”

  Connect. Damn if he didn’t feel a connection to this woman, and he hadn’t gone looking for it. He shouldn’t have connected at all. She was optimism, he was cynicism. She was hopeful, he was pragmatic. She had dreams and his were long gone. What did connect them?

  Her brown eyes pulled on the strings of the protective web around his heart. Her worry about Baby Amy urged him to help her. Her freckles, her curls, her smile, jump-started an engine that had run in neutral since long before his divorce.

  “Staying here tonight wasn’t a good idea,” he admitted.

  “It’s cozier than a motel.”

  “It�
��s too cozy. If you get out of those wet clothes, what are you going to put on?”

  “I bought a sleep shirt at the drugstore.”

  The idea of a sleep shirt didn’t seem a good alternative measure to Garrett. “And then I suppose you’ll wrap a sheet around you for a robe?”

  “I can,” Gwen assured him with a solemn nod.

  Garrett didn’t know whether to laugh or shake her. “I’m going to regret bringing you along.”

  “Do you want to list the reasons why?”

  “No, I don’t. But I know you’ll push until I do. So here goes. Number one, I don’t need a sidekick. Number two, I eventually draw out the information I need. Number three, I don’t like partnering with women, because there’s too much chance of misunderstanding, more with regard to the case than personal matters. Men and women just don’t think alike. Number four, the idea of you in a sleep shirt in a bed twenty feet away isn’t my idea of investigating a case.”

  Straightening her spine, she also squared her shoulders. “I can eat alone.”

  “That might be a very good idea.”

  If he wanted to push her away, he’d succeeded because the look in her eyes said she was hurt as well as…disappointed?

  Without another word, she picked up her bags and went into the bathroom, leaving drips on the hardwood floor. He heard the door close to her bedroom. It wasn’t a slam, but it might as well have been.

  They were done connecting…at least for tonight.

  It was midnight when Garrett glanced at his luminous watch dial. He’d never minded silence. The on-and-off drip of rain usually put him to sleep. But after getting the frustration of being near Gwen and emotionally exposing himself off his chest, he felt like a heel.

  Gwen hadn’t changed into her sleep shirt, at least not until after Cora had brought supper to them and they’d gone to their separate rooms. Then he hadn’t seen her again. After dinner, in a very polite voice, she’d announced through his door that she was going to get a shower. The problem was—he could hear the sounds from the bathroom all too well, and his imagination was too vivid for his own good. Not only that, but a steamy gardenia scent had seeped under the door and invaded his room in a continuous cloud that he’d finally had to escape. He’d gone downstairs to the parlor, had a glass of wine, chosen a magazine and sat there and read it cover to cover. When he returned upstairs, Gwen had been closeted in her own room again but the bathroom wasn’t the same. The gardenia smell lingered. He noticed her toothbrush and toothpaste, shampoo, conditioner and lotions she’d obviously bought at the drugstore. Then on his side of the double sink, he caught sight of the disposable razor, another toothbrush and an extra-large white T-shirt. She’d thought about him on her shopping excursion.

  He’d almost knocked on her door then. Almost.

  Now he sat up on the edge of the bed. Yellow glow from a streetlamp seeped through the blinds so he didn’t turn on a light, just grabbed his jeans from the chair next to the bed and slid them on.

  When he opened his door into the bathroom, he saw light under her door. Secretly he’d hoped she’d be asleep and this could wait until morning.

  “Gwen,” he called. “Are you awake?”

  Her voice sailed through the closed door. “I’m awake, but I’m in my sleep shirt and I don’t have a sheet wrapped around me.”

  In spite of himself, he had to smile. That was the thing about Gwen Langworthy. Her dry humor whetted his appetite for more. There hadn’t been any laughter in his life for a long time.

  “Can I come in anyway?”

  There was only a brief hesitation until she answered, “Come on in.”

  Gwen wasn’t wrapped in a sheet, but she was in bed with the covers drawn up over her breasts. There was a slight wariness in her eyes but it was replaced by something else that lit a fuse in him as her gaze settled on his chest, on his navel, and traveled back up to his face.

  “Can’t sleep?” she asked lightly, setting aside the magazine she was reading.

  “No, I can’t. I shouldn’t have been so harsh earlier.”

  “You weren’t harsh, you were just stating the situation as you saw it.”

  “No, what I was trying to do was to build a solid wall between us.”

  Surprise flickered over her face that he’d admitted his motives.

  “We’re attracted to each other, Gwen. That’s been obvious since we set sight on each other. But I don’t intend to foul up your life or let you complicate mine.”

  “You have to put yourself in a position of power, don’t you?” she asked softly.

  Anger rose up fast and furious. “It has nothing to do with power or control. I’m looking out for both of us.”

  She scooted over on the bed under the covers, then she patted the quilt.

  Gwen was a communicator. God save men from women who wanted to talk! If she’d invited him into her bed to have sex, he could have turned her down flat because he knew it was best for both of them. However, he couldn’t turn down this invitation to communicate, not after what he’d said to her earlier. With patience born of years in the field—he was going to listen and not talk himself—he sat by her hip, inhaling the scent of gardenias.

  “You’re not my protector. You’ve no right to make decisions for me,” she began. “If you don’t want to get involved, if you want to back away, that’s fine. But don’t base your actions on what you think is best for me or what you think I want, not unless you ask me.” There wasn’t any anger in her words, just maybe a hint of exasperation.

  “I’m used to being in charge,” he admitted, seeing what she meant about wanting power and control.

  “But you’ve also worked on teams, I imagine. You do that when you try to rescue a child. Don’t you think of us as a team?”

  He wanted to deny there was an “us” but if he looked at the two of them honestly, he couldn’t do that. “You’re too smart for your own good,” he grumbled.

  “You don’t like smart women?”

  “I like smart women. But not when kissing them rattles my bones.”

  She was looking at him as if the kiss and thinking about it rattled her bones, too. If he kissed her now, she’d soon lose that sleep shirt and his jeans would be on the floor before he could say her name.

  Standing, he informed her, “We’ll get breakfast in the morning and then go to that thrift shop.”

  “You’re going to have problems with us being teammates, aren’t you?”

  She sounded so wistful, he had to laugh. “It’s going to take some work,” he agreed.

  Crossing to the door, he stopped and let his gaze linger on her freshly washed face and hair, her cute nose, her delicate chin. “Thanks for the toothbrush, razor and shirt. I can use all of it.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Living in the moment was unbearably tempting. The idea of sliding his body close to Gwen’s and finding satisfaction with her was a primitive drumbeat pounding Garrett’s good sense to smithereens. After he tore his gaze from hers, he stepped over the threshold into the bathroom and closed her door.

  He regretted it as soon as he did it. It was one more regret on a list of too many to count.

  Chapter Six

  “Where do we go from here?” Gwen asked Garrett as they sat in his SUV in her driveway the next day after their return trip from Laramie.

  She found she wasn’t just asking about the case, but about them. During the trip Garrett had opened up to her, and she guessed that was rare for him. Last night she’d wanted very much to make love with him, yet she’d known neither of them was ready for that.

  Now when his steady gray eyes acknowledged her deeper question, she held her breath.

  “At least we know Amy’s mother was likely from Laramie. It’s luck that Flo struck up a conversation with the girl. Although we still don’t know this young woman’s name, we do have an accurate description—long straight brown hair, hazel eyes, about five-three.”

  “We also know her mother kicked her out
when she got pregnant and she went to live with her boyfriend.”

  “I think it’s time we put a composite sketch together. When I asked the sheriff if he had anyone who could do that, he said he didn’t. Do you know any artists?”

  “Lily Reynolds who owns Flutes and Drums has done some painting. Maybe she could do it.”

  “I’ll find out.”

  Gwen hadn’t slept last night. She had been too attuned to the fact that Garrett wasn’t that far away. She’d been mulling over and reliving their kisses, their conversations, the magnetic pull between them. She’d never felt this interested, intrigued or turned on by a man before.

  Unfastening his seat belt, Garrett shifted toward Gwen and laid his hand on her thigh. “What’s the matter?”

  “We’re at a dead end. Even if you send that sketch to every police department in Wyoming, what are the chances someone will recognize this young woman?”

  “You just never know. But we don’t have to wait for that. I’m not finished in Wild Horse Junction yet.”

  His hand on her thigh sent heat radiating from the spot. “What do you mean?”

  “Once I have a sketch in hand, once I talk to the convenience store clerk and the waitresses again—because both will have to give Lily Reynolds their input—we could unearth something else.”

  “We?” she asked with a teasing smile.

  A twinkle danced in his eyes that she hadn’t seen there before. “Let’s just say I’ve accepted the whole ‘work as a team’ thing.”

  The air in the SUV suddenly got thinner as her heart thudded. Before she thought better of it, she said honestly, “I enjoyed our trip to Laramie.”

  The twinkle was replaced by something darker. Primal hunger, maybe? Desire that went far beyond a few minutes of kissing? Although no rain fell, the day was still gray. Colder weather was moving in. In Garrett’s SUV they were secluded from the world outside as well as the wind buffeting the vehicle. They were secluded from everyday concerns that didn’t seem to have a place here.