“Nothing?” Grimaldi’s glance took in Mrs. Jenkins, and Audrey and Darcy, the family Rafe hadn’t known he had. And beyond them, me and the rest of the Martins, and finally Carrie.
“Well…” There were certainly plenty of reasons to make the move down here. With Carrie, our part of East Nashville had lost some of its luster, no question about it. With a baby to worry about, Rafe might even be thinking that a less dangerous job wouldn’t be a bad thing. (Or maybe I was the only one thinking that. He hadn’t said anything about it.) But even if he were, none of that meant that Rafe might be willing to move back to this place where he had so many bad memories. And I couldn’t blame him for that.
Grimaldi didn’t say anything else. Nor did I. We sat next to each other in silence and contemplated the future.
Four
“Is this OK with you?” I whispered a couple of hours later.
We were in our room upstairs in the mansion, or more accurately my room, that I had grown up in. Carrie was asleep in her porta-crib in the corner—hence the need to whisper. Once she was asleep, she didn’t usually wake up again until she was hungry, but I didn’t want to take any chances.
Rafe turned his head on the pillow to look at me. “Is what OK?”
“Grimaldi becoming chief of police for Columbia. Taking the job the sheriff offered you.”
“I turned it down,” Rafe said, looking back at the ceiling, “remember?”
I remembered. “I thought maybe it felt different now that she, and not some random stranger, got the job.”
He shrugged. Not easy to do lying down.
“My feelings are a little hurt,” I admitted, “that she didn’t tell us she was thinking about doing this.” I mean, it was my hometown. My brother. My mother’s gentleman friend suggesting she apply for the job. She might have just mentioned it to me—to us—before she went ahead and did it.
“It musta happened quickly,” Rafe said. “It’s just a month since Thanksgiving. And we’ve been pretty busy ourselves.”
We had been, admittedly. I’d gone into labor on Thanksgiving, and then Carrie had been born. And after that, one day had just blended into the next. Grimaldi had stopped by once, I thought, although all that blended together, too. And it had been pretty early on, maybe three weeks ago, so maybe nothing had been settled yet, and she didn’t want to jinx it by saying anything to anyone.
“I’m going to miss her,” I said. She’d leave Nashville, and I’d only get to see her when I went to Sweetwater to visit.
Rafe nodded. He’d probably miss her, too. She was his main contact in the MNPD. He knew other cops—patrol officers Spicer and Truman, detective Jaime Mendoza—but he didn’t have the relationship with them that he had with Grimaldi. While the others were colleagues, he and Grimaldi were friends.
Over in the porta-crib, Carrie made a sound. We both froze, waiting to see if she’d wake up. When she didn’t, we relaxed again. “You know…”
“Yeah?” Rafe said.
“It’s been a month since she was born.”
“Yeah?”
“The doctor said that after a month…”
I didn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t have to.
“Yeah?” Rafe said. He sounded interested.
I nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“You sure it’s safe?”
“The doctor said it would be,” I said.
He hesitated.
When he didn’t do or say anything, I arched my brows. “I never thought I’d see the day when you turned down sex.”
Especially after a month of not getting any, while we waited for my body to heal and life to go back to something resembling normal. That last one was going to have to wait longer—I didn’t think we’d go back to normal until Carrie went off to finishing school at eighteen—but my body was ready. So was my mind.
“I ain’t exactly turning it down…” Rafe said.
He wasn’t exactly jumping at the chance, either.
“It’s because I’m fat,” I said, “isn’t it?”
Carrie made another little protesting sound. We both froze.
“You’re not fat. You’re…” He stopped himself before saying ‘pregnant,’ since that had been his refrain for the past several months.
“I’m not pregnant anymore,” I reminded him. “Now I’m just fat.” My stomach—which I admit has never been as flat as I’d have liked it to be—was poochy and felt like bread dough. Looked like it, too.
“You just had a baby,” Rafe said. “Your body’s been through a lot. Give yourself some time.”
I sniffed. “You don’t think I’m pretty anymore.”
“Christ.” I’m pretty sure he rolled his eyes. “C’mere. I’ll show you how pretty I think you are.”
I held back. “Not if you’re just doing it out of pity.”
He raised himself up on both his elbows and looked at me. The snake tattoo curled around his arm flicked its little tongue at me. “Darlin’…”
“I want you to want to,” I said. “Not just have sex with me because we can. Again.”
He dropped back down on the pillow with a grunt. “Don’t you think maybe it’d be better to wait until we’re at home? In our own house? Without your mama down the hall, and with Carrie in her own room, so we can have thirty minutes of privacy?”
He glanced over at the porta-crib. “I don’t wanna scare her.”
I guess I didn’t, either. And having her there, in the corner of the room, might put a damper on the proceedings. It was just that the doctor had told me to hang on for the one-month deadline, and now it was here, and to be honest, I’d figured that Rafe was even more eager than I was.
“Mother went home with the sheriff,” I reminded him, “so she’s not down the hall.” But I probably should have thought of putting Carrie into another of the bedrooms. There were plenty of them: Dix, Catherine, and I had each had our own growing up. This was a great house for a family with lots of kids.
I hadn’t realized that Mother wouldn’t be sleeping here, though, and I hadn’t wanted to wake her in the middle of the night when Carrie started crying—which she invariably did—so I’d kept the baby in our room, where we could keep the door closed and I could get to her quickly and shut her up.
Now that consideration had come back to bite me in the butt.
“You’re a bit of a screamer,” Rafe told me, with a glance over at the baby. “You sure you can be quiet enough that we don’t wake her?”
I had no idea, but I was willing to give it a try. And for the record, I don’t think I’m all that much of a screamer.
Anyway, if we did wake her up—coitus interruptus by baby—I’d feed her and put her back to sleep and get my five hours in the middle of the night. That was her limit right now: five hours of sleep, straight. Which meant I was usually up around one or two in the morning. If she ate now, I’d get to sleep until almost five. And surely five isn’t too early to get up on Christmas morning.
“Let’s give it a try.”
He shrugged. “I’m game if you are.”
I was. Even if the whole situation, by this point, was a bit awkward. I’d been hoping for a slightly more enthusiastic response to my news that we could have sex again, to be honest. I had imagined his eyes darkening and the corners of his mouth turning up in that little half-smile that curled my toes…
But I guess maybe it was normal that things were different after you had a baby. Maybe we just needed some time and a little effort before things went back to the way they were.
I wiggled closer and put my hand on his chest.
He turned to look at me. And I must have looked worried, because he smiled. Not the smile that curled my toes, but something even better. Warmth, and care, and love, all wrapped up in one lovely package of white teeth and dark eyes. He lifted his hand to cup my cheek, the tips of his fingers disappearing into my hair.
“C’mere, darlin’.” He slipped his hand around my neck and tugged.
“I love you,�
� I said, sniffing, as he pulled me closer.
“I love you, too. Now hush, and let me show you.”
No problem. I hushed, and he did just that.
* * *
We did manage to keep the screaming to a minimum, so we didn’t wake the baby. Of course, she woke up a couple hours later on her own, because she was hungry. Rafe padded across the cold wood floor to pick her up and give her to me, and then he drifted off to sleep again while I fed her. That conked her out again, as well, and by the time we all woke up the second time, the sun had crept above the hills to the east and was slanting through the gap in the curtains.
Carrie was fussing, so Rafe made the trek across the cold hardwoods one more time, to pluck her out of the porta-crib and dump her in my arms. He slid back under the covers, the soles of his feet cold where they touched my leg.
“I don’t hear my mother,” I said, as I prepared to feed Carrie. “Or the dog, for that matter.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think she came home last night. I woulda heard her.”
I thought he would have, too. He a very light sleeper, from two years behind bars and ten more undercover. Not an easy guy to sneak up on, even when he’s asleep.
“I guess we’re on our own for breakfast.”
“I think we can manage,” Rafe said. “We do all the other days.”
We did. And I was sure we could manage, too. I just hadn’t expected Mother to still be gone.
“You don’t think anything happened, do you?”
She’d slipped off the road on her way home from Bob’s house, and ended up in a ditch, and had frozen to death out there.
“They went in his truck,” Rafe reminded me. “He woulda had to take her back home. And I don’t think she woulda started walking.”
Doubtful. Even if they’d had an argument of some sort—and why would they?—Bob wouldn’t have let her walk out in the dark and cold in the middle of the night. He would have taken her home. Or he would have made sure someone else did. Like Dix. Or Jonathan. Or Rafe.
“We didn’t miss a call, did we?”
He shook his head. “We woulda heard the phone. There’s nothing to worry about, darlin’. They just got caught up in doing what we were doing, and she decided she didn’t wanna make the walk of shame in her party dress last night.”
Most likely. Even if the idea of my mother and the sheriff doing what we’d been doing made me feel sort of twitchy. Not because I didn’t know what they were doing, but because it just wasn’t an image I wanted in my head.
“Changing the subject.” Sort of. “Do you think I should call over there, just to make sure everything’s all right?”
“No,” Rafe said. “It’s six in the morning. Let’em sleep.”
“Later?”
He shrugged. “I guess, if she ain’t here by ten or eleven, you could call.”
Ten or eleven? If she were freezing in a ditch somewhere, she’d be dead by then.
Not that there were very many ditches between here and town. And not that my mother would be out there by herself, as already established. But I felt like I ought to do something.
He had a point, though. If Mother and the sheriff were in bed, where normal people are at six in the morning, and especially if they were doing what Rafe and I had been doing last night, I didn’t want to interrupt.
So I fed Carrie, and we lounged in bed until seven, when we took our leisurely time getting showered and brushed and dressed. I took the opportunity, while Rafe was in the shower, to text my brother.
Have you heard from Mother?
Dix had children, so I figured it would be safe to text him at seven on Christmas morning, since his girls had probably been tearing the paper off presents for at least an hour.
It took a minute before he answered. Isn’t she there?
She went home with Bob last night, I texted back. After you left. She didn’t come home.
Another minute passed before another message came in. She’s probably still there.
You haven’t heard anything?
He hadn’t. Have you called?
I told him I hadn’t, since I didn’t want to interrupt anything. He could draw his own conclusions—and probably did—from that.
I’m sure she’s all right. Wait till 9 and call then. Or I will.
I told him I’d take care of it. Merry Christmas.
See you later, he texted back. Which he would. Christmas dinner was at Catherine and Jonathan’s again this year, and we’d all be there this afternoon, to partake in the Christmas goose. Or ham or turkey or whatever my sister had seen fit to make.
Rafe made it out of the shower, and I went in. By the time I got out, he’d taken the baby and gone downstairs, probably in search of coffee.
Yes—I drew a deep breath—I could smell it all the way up here. If I hurried, there’d probably be some for me, too.
I scrambled down the stairs and scurried down the hall toward the kitchen. There was no sign of the dog, so Mother definitely wasn’t back. Rafe had Carrie sitting in her car seat in the middle of the kitchen island, and was cooing to her over the rim of a cup of coffee. She was smiling back, making happy noises.
“Good morning,” I said, looking around. “No Mother?”
He shook his head. “There’s coffee in the pot.”
I’d already seen it, and was on my way. I had missed coffee during the months I was pregnant. I still didn’t drink a lot of it, since I was nursing the baby, but I did allow myself a cup—sometimes two—in the morning.
I doctored the coffee the way I liked it and took a sip. Mmmm. “Dix said it would be OK to try to contact Mother after nine o’clock, if she isn’t home.”
“If you’re that worried,” Rafe said, “that you had to call your brother before eight o’clock on Christmas, maybe you just oughta contact her now.”
“You think?”
“No,” Rafe said. “I think you oughta leave her alone. She’s a grown woman with a boyfriend. A boyfriend who’s the sheriff. If something was wrong, we woulda heard.”
Easy for him to say. She wasn’t his mother.
And then I felt guilty, because Rafe’s mother was dead. Once upon a time, a year and half ago, he’d gotten that call saying his mother was no longer among the living.
Naturally, that only made me more eager to make sure my mother was all right. To take my mind off it until it was appropriate to call, I suggested we could go out into the foyer and open Christmas presents. It would give me something to do while I waited for it to be nine o’clock.
So Rafe took the baby carrier in one hand and his coffee in the other, and followed me back down the hall to the foyer, where we found a small pile of presents underneath the tree. He installed me and Carrie in the small parlor where we’d all been sitting last night, and started carrying in presents for us to open.
Most of the stuff was for Carrie. That’s what happens when you have a baby. Nobody cares about you anymore. She got toys, and clothes, and more toys, and more clothes, and I got the very distinct impression that I wasn’t the only one who liked to play dress-up with my baby doll.
“She can wear this later today,” I told Rafe, and held up a sweet little red velvet dress with matching booties, and an appliqué of a snowflake on the front.
He nodded, in the process of opening a package that, from the configuration—soft and squishy—contained clothes. He was sort of squinting at it. I guess he was afraid the paper would come off and it would turn out to be another of those hideous Christmas sweaters like the one Mother had given him last year, with reindeer and snowflakes on a virulently bright background.
It wasn’t. It was a sweater, but it was soft and gray and looked like cashmere, and would probably look great on him.
“Pretty,” I said. He nodded, and put it aside, but his hand lingered for a second on the softness.
There was no ring under the tree this year. Last year there had been. I was still wearing it, next to my plain wedding band. A blue ston
e from Rafe; not an engagement ring—we hadn’t been at that point yet, he’d told me—but between you and me, I’d taken it as a proposal. I’d already known by then that I wanted to marry him.
There were no handcuffs under the tree, either, and no Christmas-themed lingerie. Also no economy-sized box of condoms, one of which played Christmas music. That had been Grimaldi’s contribution to last year’s festivities.
This year she gave me a certificate for babysitting services—hers—whenever I wanted a romantic evening alone with my husband. It would have to be scheduled around her crazy schedule, I assumed, whenever someone hadn’t dropped dead and she wasn’t in the middle of an investigation.
But no. Wait. She wasn’t a Nashville homicide detective anymore. After the holidays, she’d be the chief of police for Columbia.
The chief of the Columbia PD was offering to babysit my infant. I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about that concept.
And anyway, if she was in Columbia and I was in Nashville, how was that supposed to work out?
Rafe’s present from Grimaldi had come in an envelope, too. While I’d been contemplating my babysitting certificate, he’d sliced open his own envelope and was looking at the sheet of paper he’d found inside.
“Babysitting?” I asked.
He glanced at me. “Scuse me?”
“Grimaldi gave me a certificate for babysitting, whenever you and I want a couple of hours to ourselves. I don’t know how she figures that’s going to work, if she’s going to be living here now, and we’re still in Nashville. I mean, it doesn’t make any sense to drive all the way to Maury County for a date. Maybe she’s planning to come up to Nashville when we need her, although that seems kind of like a waste of time, too, doesn’t it?”
I would have kept babbling, but I got the impression that he wasn’t really listening to me.
“What?” I said.
He didn’t answer, just handed me the piece of paper. And suddenly it all became clear.
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