Always Watching

by LS Sygnet

  My eyes snapped into focus. Johnny stared at my hand covering his, but had the aura of a man who hadn’t stopped praying that tragedy wouldn’t strike at any moment. I sniffled, drew a quick peek from him.

  “Didn’t you hear what I said?” My hand curled around his, tightened its grip. “I’m having this baby, Johnny. I don’t doubt that you love me. My fears have nothing to do with you.”

  He pulled me into his arms and hugged like a grizzly bear. “Why then? What could you possibly fear? Baby, I will always be here for you. Always.”

  “What if I’m a horrible mother? What if I have instincts like mine did?” An unuttered pronoun dropped from my lips. “At least he’ll have you to…”

  Johnny’s lips whispered over my temple. “You’ll be a wonderful mother, Helen.”

  “And what about my gene pool?” Another crux of my uneasy dilemma appeared.

  Johnny peered down at me, tilted my chin up with one finger. “Is that what you’ve been thinking? Helen –”

  I should’ve told him the truth months ago. None of this would’ve happened. First and foremost, I’d be in prison, safely secured away from society where I could no longer be a menace. Love would’ve never developed, hell, I wouldn’t even have realized that I do love Johnny. Things would’ve never progressed that far.

  “You are not your parents. It isn’t some scraped-from-the-gene-pool defect. I know you believe that people make choices.”

  As I had made mine last spring when I pulled the trigger instead of letting the justice system deal with my ex-husband.

  “And this is certainly not about what happened with Rick.”

  My heart seized in my chest.

  “You did not make him kill himself, Helen.”

  I certainly didn’t. That frozen heart of mine took off like a frightened jackrabbit while my brain started plotting. If I married Johnny and then told him the truth, even if he arrested me, he couldn’t testify against me. No lawyer worth his salt would have a problem excluding a spousal confession from being entered into evidence in court.

  Stop it! If he doesn’t know, you’re not telling him. Look at him, Helen.

  I blinked back more tears and saw what honesty would destroy. Another battle was underway inside me.

  Johnny stared hard enough to divine the truth without a confession, and if I had any doubts about how much he really knows and understands me, they were quickly erased.

  “No matter what, even if you lied to me, even if his death wasn’t exactly the way you said, I still love you. I always will. Nothing could ever –”

  I pressed to fingers over his lips. “I’m going to have our baby, Johnny. I’ll love him and be the best mother I can be.”

  Johnny’s lips parted in a wide grin. “You’ve said him twice. I know you haven’t had an ultrasound. Is this mother’s intuition?”

  “I hate it when people refer to unborn children as it.”

  “Do you hope we have a boy?”

  I marveled at how easily Johnny was distracted from a painful conversation. And then I shrugged. “We’ll have what we have, I guess. Don’t most men want sons?”

  “I don’t care either way, as long as he or she is healthy and looks just like his or her mother,” he nibbled at my lips softly.

  “And here I’ve been hoping that all of my genes are recessive.”

  “I’d settle for the beautiful green eyes,” he kissed them. “And the intelligence, and lovely red highlights in your hair. I hope.”

  “I hope he looks like you. I hope he’s exactly like you.”

  Good. Honest. Kind. Strong. Courageous. Boundless patience. My fingers caressed Johnny’s cheek. “Like you in every way, Johnny. I love you so much. Please forgive me for being so cross lately.”

  His head dipped, lips nuzzled the sweet spot on my neck than never failed to ignite passion in me. I moaned softly.

  “They say it’s the hormones,” he whispered. “I think I can deal with it.”

  “Promise me something.”

  “Anything, everything.”

  “When I get emotional or angry for no good reason,” I paused to rake my fingernails over his scalp. “Kiss my neck like that.”

  Johnny chuckled. “Deal.”

  “And then make love to me, because if you don’t, I’ll just get angry again.”

  “Is that how it works?” His smile pressed against my neck. “Oh, if I’d only known that the night I met you. That was the first time I kissed you here,” punctuated with a sizzling reminder.

  “Let’s get married right away. I don’t want a big wedding or a party or any of that stuff, Johnny. Just you.”

  He hummed against my throat. “Vegas at midnight?”

  “Why can’t we do it here?”

  Johnny abandoned the nibble and stared down at me. “Are you serious about doing it right away? What about our friends? We haven’t even told anyone.”

  “I want to marry you now.”

  “No church?”

  “Johnny, have you forgotten who you asked to marry you?”

  He grinned. “Not for a moment. We have to wait three days for a marriage license.”

  I felt the muscles in my face sag.

  “Of course, I’m sure someone in Bay County could be persuaded to grant us a waiver on that. For a small donation of course.”

  “Johnny, I don’t want you bribing someone for a marriage license.”

  He laughed softly and kissed the tip of my nose. “It’s more like a processing fee to push the paperwork through on the spot. Ten bucks, I think. They don’t allow a ton of waivers, but I think I might have a little bit of pull, don’t you?”

  “Are you sure you won’t regret not having a huge wedding at Saint Angelo’s with a billion friends watching, and your pregnant, blimp of a wife waddling down the aisle in white?”

  Johnny’s hands caged my cheeks. “Helen, if I had thought for one second that you would agree to marry me right away, we’d have done it the day I proposed. I don’t need all that other stuff, as long as I have you.”

  “Where do we need to go, how long will it take to issue the license, and do you have someone on speed dial who can perform the ceremony right away?”

  “We’ll be married before Devlin gets here with his big news about the search of the Sherman house. The only thing we won’t have is rings.”

  “I don’t need one.”

  “Well I do,” Johnny grinned. “I want that thing to be a huge beacon to every man in the world. Hands off. She’s mine.”

  It surprised me how much I liked that idea, though I’d never admit it.

  Chapter 28

  Devlin was pacing in the courtyard in front of our house when Johnny and I returned home late that afternoon. He didn’t question our silence. Honestly, I doubt he noticed it since there was really no opportunity for either of us to get a word in edgewise. I opened the front door while he chattered.

  “There was nothing remarkable in that house. We found a safe with an empty lockbox inside. That was it. But I’ve got Holmes in custody, commander, and she’s scared shitless. I think if we hit her hard with what we already know, she’ll crack. So how about it, Helen? Are you up for a big confrontation?”

  My fingers were still threaded through Johnny’s, the only separation since we exchanged vows and used his parent’s wedding bands to seal the deal had been when entering and exiting the car. My finger curled over his and stroked the ring on his left hand.

  “What makes you think she’ll talk to me?”

  “Because before she had the chance to invoke, I reminded her that the best shot for leniency would be to talk and be honest.”

  “And she didn’t ask for an attorney anyway?”

  “Nope,” Devlin grinned. “Andy said she was pretty subdued when he arrested her. He brought her over to the Sherman place and I read her rights again, before I encouraged her to throw herself on the mercy of the legal system. She’s out at OSI where everyone else except Sherman is locked up. Crevan tol
d me about the thing with Payette last night.”

  The thing with Payette.

  Johnny squeezed my hand.

  “Maybe if we head over there, you can check on her, sweetheart. Make sure I didn’t really do any serious damage last night,” Johnny said.

  This was not how I imagined my wedding night. Ever.

  “Get this,” Devlin rolled forward on the balls of his feet. “I said we didn’t find anything particularly helpful at the house, right?”

  “More than once,” Johnny nodded.

  “I did find something curious, a list of website links in a folder on a laptop computer. We seized it of course, but I’d really like you to take a look at it Helen. It’s looks like gibberish, but I can’t figure out why it would be saved if it didn’t mean something.”

  “A link to what?”

  “A message board on the Darkwater Exchange.”

  “Isn’t that where Crevan was looking for suspicious activity?” I glanced up at Johnny.

  “Yeah, it was. We talked about all of the solicitation that goes on in the Darkwater Bay incarnation of eBay for the sex trades.”

  “Pretty big haystack might’ve just gotten a whole lot smaller. Think about it, Helen. We’ve got someone who was caught red handed with a desktop link to the very place we thought might’ve been used as a means of communication.”

  “But I thought you said it looked like gibberish, Dev.”

  He grinned at me. “What, you really thought these people would have frank communications about selling human beings without some kind of encryption? C’mon, Helen. You know better than that.”

  “If they’ve encrypted their messages, we’ll need someone who specializes in cracking those kinds of codes. Sorry, guys, but that person isn’t me,” I said.

  “You need to see it, Helen. It’s not that kind of encryption. Think bizarre word jumble.”

  “Like the one in the Sunday paper?”

  Devlin was in the habit of consciously avoiding eye contact with his commanding officer since Johnny threatened to tear him to bits if he ever touched me again. Frankly, I was surprised that Johnny hadn’t immediately shoved my ring finger under his nose and uttered some schoolyard taunt.

  “I don’t have a clue what it could be,” Devlin said. “Which is why I want Helen to look at it, sir.”

  Johnny snorted.

  I tensed, and he felt it instantly.

  “Sorry, honey,” he muttered. “Do you feel up to this?”

  “I don’t see what choice we have, though this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind for a leisurely Sunday evening.” Yes, my new husband pulls enough strings to not only find a magistrate to marry us, but to finagle a marriage license out of a government agency closed on weekends.

  I caught Devlin’s expression out of the corner of my eye. It was riddled with questions.

  “Am I interrupting something here? You two are acting… odd.” Devlin recoiled from his own words the second he spoke them. I wouldn’t have been shocked to see him stand at attention and salute Johnny with copious sirs.

  Johnny’s itch to dig at Devlin became so palpable, I had no choice but steer the conversation elsewhere. “You know I’ve been under the weather this past week. I was hoping for a quiet evening without criminals.”

  Impossible with me in the room. That’s the irony of my life, I suppose.

  “If we head out to OSI now, we could be back before it’s terribly late,” Johnny said. “You could still have your quiet evening at home with your –”

  “Yes,” I interrupted. “We’ll meet you over there, Devlin. Give us five minutes and we’ll be right behind you.”

  Johnny grinned wickedly. “Five minutes, huh? Are you waiting for him to get to the gate so we can step outside for a more traditional entry into our home?”

  “You can’t just tell him like that, Johnny,” I hissed an angry curse under my breath. “You know how he feels. You know how I feel. Is it really necessary to kick him when he’s already down?”

  The smile faded to something decidedly less happy. “So that’s the deal, huh? We can be married, but we have to keep it a secret. You want to have our baby, but I’m not allowed to be publicly elated. You –”

  “We are in the middle of a huge investigation with enormous implications if we don’t close the case. It has nothing to do with anything else, Johnny. Do you want him working the case or moping around because you didn’t share our happy news, you taunted him with it?”

  “Are you ashamed to be seen wearing a wedding band in public too?”

  “Of course I’m not. This is definitely not what I imagined we’d be doing on the night we got married. I’m not happy about it. I’d rather be here, alone, with you. Curled up in front of the fireplace talking about how happy I feel. Instead I have to go talk to another monster and have something else unpleasant taint the happiest day of my life.” I stepped close and wrapped my arms around his waist. “Please don’t derive happiness or satisfaction from hurting someone who – whether you like it or not – has become a very good friend to me, Johnny.”

  His arms wound around me automatically, chin rested on the top of my head. “Well, I did get the girl.”

  “Let’s get this over with so you can finish what you started earlier.”

  “What I started?”

  “You know. The thing. With my neck.”

  Lips and teeth grazed sensitive skin. “This thing?”

  “Tease. Can we please get this over with?”

  “Whatever you want, Mrs. Orion.”

  “Johnny …”

  “You’re gonna have to decide eventually if you want my name or to hang on to the one you’ve got. Would it really be so horrible to have mine?”

  “No. It’s just… another change. The past few days have been monumental in that regard. Wouldn’t you say?”

  “What about the baby? Does he or she get to be an Orion?”

  “How about if you interview Nanny Holmes and I stay home and sleep?”

  “All right,” he chuckled. “You’ve made your point.”

  I thought about little else than the drastic changes in my life while Johnny drove to OSI. The case was far removed from my mind. The impending arraignment tomorrow for Melissa Sherman seemed lost in a haze of personal issues. I couldn’t stop thinking about marriage, and the peanut sized life growing inside me.

  Though I hadn’t admitted as much to Johnny, I hoped for a son. In my head, he was already named for his father. Behind the foreign budding hope lurked the shadow of my past, who I really am. I struggled to push it down deep and pretend that person never existed. Maybe letting go of the Eriksson name would make it easier to become someone else. Evolution. Wasn’t that what Johnny called it?

  “Helen?”

  I looked over at him.

  “We’re at OSI. Are you all right?”

  Well, let me think on that one. I murdered my husband, lied to the FBI, was drugged by a mad man, shot by a drug lord, arrested my nemesis, killed the man who subsequently murdered said nemesis while I was sequestered in an office a few yards away, almost lost the man I love, hunted a sociopathic killer who hated homosexuals, outed a dear friend quite by accident, found out I was pregnant and married Johnny, having formerly sworn off marriage for all eternity after the first in a very long line of this is not really my life experiences. No. I am not all right. I may never be all right again.

  “I’m fine, Johnny. Dreading this, but fine.”

  “I’ll talk to Holmes. You look at this laptop business,” he said. “Deal?”

  “I told Crevan you proposed.”

  Johnny smirked. “Yeah, he mentioned it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you knew? We could’ve had at least one friend be a witness this afternoon.”

  “I had to promise that I’d buy his surprised act when we broke the news.”

  “That rat,” I grinned. “You know I’m not trying to keep this an indefinite secret, right?”

  “I understand your l
ogic, frightening as that might be, but maybe it would be better if we say something instead of letting our friends, including Devlin, simply notice the rings, Helen.”

  I pulled my phone out of my purse and dialed a number while Johnny watched with narrow eyes and a furrowed brow.

  “Good evening princess. I trust our mood is better than it was earlier.” Maya’s greeting was half serious, half teasing.

  “I said I was sorry, Maya. What can I say? It’s been an unusual week for me.”

  “Johnny says you’re feeling better. Is that the truth?”

  “It is. Listen, I called because I wanted you to be the first to hear some news. I’d rather not give it over the phone, but… it’s about to become common knowledge, so this is gonna have to suffice.”

  “Oh?” I could hear the grin in her voice. Given Johnny’s confession that Maya and Crevan suspected my pregnancy, I was sure she expected that news instead of the other shocking development I was about to reveal.

  “Yeah, and I hope that after I tell you, you won’t be completely irate with me for not saying something right away. It was a spur of the moment decision.”

  Johnny’s eyebrows darted together and dove in V formation toward his nose.

  “Let me rephrase,” I said. “I made the decision for the right reasons, but it’s not something I believed I’d ever do again.”

  He clasped my free hand and squeezed.

  “All right,” Maya drawled slowly. I felt a twinge of smug satisfaction at having derailed her assumption.

  “Johnny asked me to marry him last week, Maya.”

  “What?”

  “I said yes, and today… well we’re married.”

  “Oh my God! It really was a nervous stomach!”

  Not really, but it bought me a little more time before I would be forced to share the rest of our earth shattering news.

  “Helen, why didn’t you say something? Is that why you were upset that Johnny went to Montgomery without you?”

  “It’s a long story, Maya. Anyway, we’re at OSI right now, Johnny’s going to question a suspect and I’m looking over some evidence Devlin collected from the Sherman house in Montgomery, but they’re going to notice rings and… well, it’s my wedding day and I’m not really handling the idea very well that Johnny is going to be out of my reach for a minute. I thought you’d probably kill me if a bunch of cops learn the happy news before I told you so …”