Reluctant Dad

by Carla Cassidy

  “A little Sheetrock, a drop ceiling, some carpeting and it would be a cozy space for children to play.” She knew she was babbling, but she didn’t want to give him an opportunity to apologize for the kiss, to somehow try to take it back. “I think I’ll call somebody in the next week or two to give me an estimate on what it would cost. I figure if I stack all this stuff in the corner, whoever comes out will be able to get a better idea of what I want.”

  There was a long moment of silence. “I can help you stack,” he finally said.

  She breathed a sigh of relief, grateful he didn’t intend to follow up on the subject of their kiss. “That would be great.”

  They worked silently, shifting items to the corner. Melissa desperately tried to keep her thoughts schooled away from the heat of his lips, the warm comfort of his arms surrounding her. She knew she would be a fool to follow through on any desire she might feel for Dominic.

  It was only natural that she would feel a certain kinship with him. He’d delivered her child, had stood beside her as she’d buried the man she’d been married to. Surely it was only the circumstances of their forced cohabitation, and her own vulnerability, which made him so appealing.

  Besides, she would be a fool to believe that he could feel anything for her except the natural sympathy of a man for a recent widow. And if she confessed what her relationship with Bill had really been like, his sympathy would turn to pity. And in his pity, she would find shame. The shame that had made her keep her secret for so long, the shame of what she’d been willing to sacrifice in the name of love.

  “Melissa, there’s something here.”

  Dominic’s voice pulled her from her thoughts. She looked over to where he pointed, to a manila envelope shoved between two pieces of pipe. “What is it?” she asked as she set down the last of the items they’d moved.

  He picked it up and opened it. He withdrew what appeared to be a photograph. Studying it for a moment, his forehead wrinkled into a frown. “It’s a wedding picture,” he said. He looked at her, his eyes filled with questions—and concern.

  “What’s one of our wedding pictures doing down here?” she asked rhetorically as she moved toward him. His eyes darkened and a shiver of apprehension climbed up her spine. She reached out and took the picture. She gazed down at it in confusion, bewilderment.

  Dominic was right. It was definitely a wedding photograph. The bride and groom stood before a stained-glass window, their hands clasped to show the sparkling wedding rings each wore. Clad in a white tuxedo, Bill smiled as he looked into the eyes of his bride—a woman Melissa had never seen before.

  Chapter 8

  “Bill never mentioned anything about being married before?” Dominic asked a few minutes later as they sat at the kitchen table. Melissa sat across from him, her face still reflecting utter bewilderment as she stared at the wedding picture.

  “No, he... Maybe it’s a hoax.” She looked at Dominic, her eyes wide and dark blue with confusion. “You know, one of those pictures where you dress up and pretend?” For a moment hope lightened the color of her eyes and her features relaxed slightly. “Bill and I once had a picture taken of us as pioneers. It was at a carnival that came to town. I wore a saloon dress, and the photographer put Bill in buckskins.”

  She bit her bottom lip and stared at the photograph once more. “But this isn’t like that, is it? It’s not a Polaroid and it was obviously taken by a professional.”

  Gently Dominic took the picture from her. The bride looked young, with soft blond hair cascading to her shoulders. Her brown eyes were set a little too close together, and a faint scar marred one cheek. Still, she was a pretty young woman whose eyes sparkled with love, with hope for the future.

  He flipped the photo over and spied small print at the bottom. “Do you have a magnifying glass?” he asked.

  Melissa. nodded, got up and rummaged in a kitchen drawer. A moment later she returned and handed him a small magnifying glass. He studied the small print. “Dano’s Photography Studio. There’s a date, too.” He put the glass down and looked at Melissa. “The picture was taken eight years ago.”

  “Two years before Bill came to Wilford,” Melissa replied. She frowned thoughtfully. “There’s no address?”

  “None. Just the name of the studio and the date.” Dominic set the picture down and gazed at Melissa. He tried not to focus on her mouth, which had opened so eagerly beneath his.

  He didn’t want to think about the kiss they’d shared—a kiss that had stirred depths in him he’d forgotten he possessed. It had been a mistake, one he didn’t intend to repeat.

  If he really cared about Melissa, he would help her escape the pending charges of murder. If what she said was true, she’d lost her husband to a violent crime.

  “We have to assume that eight years ago Bill married this woman,” he said. Her eyes darkened once again, but Dominic steeled himself against the visible sign of her pain. They couldn’t afford to get caught up in emotions. “There’s only one reason I can think of that Bill wouldn’t tell you he’d been married before.”

  “Because he had something to hide,” Melissa answered softly. She scooted her chair back and stood, as if finding immobility abhorrent. “Why didn’t he tell me he’d been married before? What could he possibly have been hiding?”

  She paced back and forth, her brow wrinkled in thought. “Maybe it was just an unhappy marriage, something he didn’t want to dredge up. Bill wasn’t a man who talked about himself much.” Her features softened. “Initially that’s what charmed me about him, the fact that he seemed so interested in me—my thoughts, my dreams, my world.” Instantly, all softness faded, swept away by a hard glint in her eyes. “I was too young and naive to realize his feigned interest in me might have been manipulation to keep the focus off him.”

  It was the first time Dominic had seen a crack in the facade, a hint that all had not been well in the Newman marriage. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. Sometimes when you’re in love, you only see what you want to believe.”

  She looked at him in surprise. “You sound like you speak from experience.” She sank back down at the table. “Tell me about Abigail.”

  Dominic didn’t want to dredge up all the old baggage, all the emotional trauma he’d tried to get beyond. And yet he knew Melissa wanted something, anything to momentarily ease her own fears, delay the dissection of her own life with a man who’d obviously had secrets—secrets that might have led to his death and her own possible peril.

  He leaned back in his chair, aware of the ticking of the kitchen clock, the expectant gaze on Melissa’s face, the soft cooing of Jamison in his infant carrier on the floor nearby. Everything seemed to fade as he thought back to Abigail—her life, and her death.

  “Although Abigail and I both grew up here in Wilford, she was four years younger than me, so we were never in school together. We didn’t really officially meet until one night about three years ago when her apartment was broken into and I was the officer who responded.”

  His chest tightened with emotion as he dived into the past. “Abigail was smart, funny, and ambitious. She’d been poor all her life and was determined to change that.” He smiled as a rush of memories swept over him. “She was always reading the society pages, magazines that focused on the wealthy. She studied the way the women dressed, the way they carried themselves, then emulated them.”

  “You two started dating,” Melissa said, more a comment than a question.

  Dominic nodded. “Yeah.” He raked a hand through his hair and leaned forward. “Abigail told me I was her transitional guy, that she was only dating me until she found Mr. Wealthy. But I didn’t believe that. I thought if I was patient, her obsession with money would eventually wane.”

  “You must have loved her very much.” Melissa’s words were filled with a bittersweet wistfulness.

  Dominic looked at her for a long moment. “I did, and I thought at the time that love would be enough for her. But I was wrong. It wasn’t enough. She marr
ied old man Monroe, along with all his banking money.”

  As always, his stomach rolled as he thought of the last time he’d seen Abigail...lying dead beside him. “She called me the evening of her murder, begged me to meet her at her apartment. Against my better judgment, I went. She told me she was going to leave Monroe. She encouraged me to celebrate with her, pouring glasses of champagne from a bottle we didn’t know had been drugged.”

  He got up from the table, irritated that Melissa had dragged him back to the night that had changed everything in his life. “None of this matters anymore. The past is gone.”

  “But the past is never really gone, is it?” Melissa said. She picked up the picture of Bill and the bride. “I mean, this is proof that history can come back to haunt you.”

  Dominic nodded, although he had no intention of ever allowing his past to haunt him. He just wanted to forget it. Learn from his mistakes and go on.

  He sat back down at the table, shoving any lingering thoughts of Abigail and the night of her murder aside. “That picture probably has nothing to do with Bill’s death, but it does speak of secrets in his past—secrets we need to explore. Maybe the answer to whoever killed him lies in that past.”

  “But we know by the date on the back that we’re talking eight years ago. I don’t even remember where Bill lived before Wilford. How on earth are we going to explore any of it?”

  Dominic frowned, a headache scouting for a place to pound at the back of his head. “We’ve got the name of the photographer. We’ll start by trying to find him. I’ve got a few friends left in the police department who can make some inquiries, see if we can’t hunt down some information on Bill. You said you thought he was from a small town in western Kansas?” Melissa nodded. “Then we’ll start in the state of Kansas and see what we can find on Bill Newman.”

  “I just have this terrible feeling that time is running out, and we’re no closer to finding out who killed Bill than we were the day it happened,” she said.

  Innocent victim or cool, calculating killer? Again Dominic was filled with confusion. No matter what the truth, he found himself fighting the impulse to take Melissa into his arms and kiss away the worry lines that furrowed her forehead.

  This kind of caring was new to him. It went deeper than anything he’d ever felt for anyone else before. And it scared the hell out of him.

  “We’ll figure it out, Melissa.” He stood, realizing the headache had gained a foothold and now thudded with dull intensity at the base of his skull. “In the meantime, I’m going to go back downstairs and see if I can find anything else that we might have missed.”

  “And I’ll search up here.” She straightened her back, her eyes shining with steely resolve. “I—I haven’t been in the bedroom since...that evening, but I’ll check all the drawers, the closet, and see if I can’t find something, anything that the police might have missed.”

  Dominic knew that entering that bedroom would be traumatic for her, guilty or innocent. He admired the determination that tightened her features. She might look vulnerable and fragile on the outside, but she obviously had a well of inner strength to draw from when needed. “You want me to go in there with you?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “We can cover more territory if we search different areas. I should have scoured this entire house the moment I had the opportunity to see if there was anything here that might point to Bill’s killer.”

  Again Dominic fought the irrational impulse to gather her close to him, enfold her against his chest. Instead, he turned and headed for the stairs leading down.

  Once in the basement again, he leaned his forehead against the concrete wall, hoping its coolness would ease the throb of his headache. He knew his head hurt because a battle waged inside his brain—good sense fighting bad, logic contesting illogic. And he knew it was all a result of kissing Melissa and the simple knowledge that he wanted to kiss her again and again.

  It shouldn’t have happened, and he wished with all his heart he could take it back, forget the sweet heat of her mouth, the way her body had leaned into his so intimately.

  He had to forget his desire for her. The worst thing he could do would be to allow the close proximity of their living arrangements, the trauma that she was experiencing to mask itself as some sort of developing love between them.

  At best, Dominic would be a rebound man in her life, a temporary solution to loneliness. He couldn’t go through that again. He refused to allow his heart to bear that kind of pain.

  Besides, although he saw the way Melissa occasionally looked at him—the shy, sweet glances of a woman attracted to a man—he couldn’t forget the secrets that shadowed her eyes; secrets she wasn’t sharing.

  He had been a cop, and in his soul ran the blood of a man who believed in justice done, justice served. So where was justice in this case? Was Melissa guilty of Bill’s death? Should he go to Detective Mawlins with his suspicions that she was abused by her husband?

  His heart rebelled. He had doubts as to her innocence, but he had doubts as to her guilt, too. If Bill had been responsible for those marks on her legs, then the man had been an animal. He frowned. There were still so many unanswered questions. He would wait, see what happened. Follow his heart instead of his head.

  He pushed away from the wall, reminding himself that his job was to protect Melissa from any potential attacker and help her find evidence of who the real killer might be. Nothing more. If he found proof that she’d killed Bill, then he would decide what to do. But until then, he would do what he was hired to do.

  He couldn’t afford to care for her and little Jamison on any deeper level. His heart had suffered enough bruises for one lifetime.

  Melissa set Jamison’s carrier on the floor in the hallway just outside the master bedroom. Even though she knew it was ridiculous, she didn’t want the baby in the room where his father had been killed.

  She stared at the closed bedroom door for a long moment, dread walking up her spine with heavy fingers.

  The first night she and Bill had stayed in the house had been some months ago, on the night before the movers arrived with their furniture. They’d slept in sleeping bags on the floor of the bedroom, and her mind had been filled with all of Bill’s false promises.

  Bill had been in an unusually good mood, a mood she now identified as one of triumph. He’d managed to talk her into a reconciliation. She was pregnant with his child and afraid to be alone. He’d won. And in his triumph he’d been magnanimous. It had been one of the few happy moments she’d known in this house.

  Why had she stayed? Like so many women in these circumstances, she didn’t have an easy answer. She’d believed she loved Bill. She’d wanted to prove to her father that she could make her marriage work; she’d believed if she loved Bill enough, he would change. Her reasons for staying were all tied up in her own emotional needs, in fulfilling distant dreams, in a fantasy she tried desperately to create.

  Shoving these thoughts aside, she gripped the doorknob and opened the door. She breathed a sigh of relief as she realized Samantha had done a thorough job of cleaning up after the police.

  The room looked as it always had except a bedspread she’d never seen before covered the bed. Of course, the old one would have been taken in for evidence. For a few moments she simply wandered around the room, touching items here and there, allowing her initial dread to slowly dissipate.

  Regret ached in her heart as she picked up Bill’s comb from the top of the dresser. If she hadn’t reconciled with him, would he still be alive? Even though there had been times in the past several months when she’d truly hated him, hated the things he said to her, the meanness that sparked inside him, she’d never really wanted him dead—not this way.

  But God help her, she was glad he was gone—glad she would no longer wake up with the metallic taste of fear in her mouth and fall asleep drowning in salty tears.

  Shoving aside these thoughts, she started her search first in the closet. After she went through
each pair of pants, every suit jacket, she methodically folded them and made a pile on the bed. Bill’s clothes would not go back in the closet. She would box them up and give them to charity.

  It didn’t take her long to go through the clothing. Her hunt yielded several matchbooks, a few scraps of paper with customers’ names and phone numbers written on them, some loose change and several pens. Nothing suspicious, nothing out of the ordinary.

  Next, she tackled the boxes that lined the shelf in the top of the closet. One box held the paperwork for the house, another contained photos that had been taken during their marriage. She pawed through the pictures and picked out one that had been taken on her wedding day.

  Sinking down on the bed, she studied the photo, consciously comparing it to the one Dominic had found downstairs. There were lots of similarities. Bill wore a white tuxedo in this photo, and he gazed at Melissa with the same adoring look he’d given the other woman.

  Although Melissa and Bill had had no pictures taken in front of a stained-glass window, the one Melissa held depicted them before the church altar, with glowing candles on either side.

  Melissa stared at the image of herself, so young, so filled with hope, with dreams of a future full of love. And the first year of their marriage had pretty much lived up to her expectations. It was in the second year that tiny cracks began to mar the happiness; insidious incidents, seemingly small and isolated, but ones that set up a pattern that eventually became Melissa’s imprisonment.

  “Find anything?” Dominic asked from the doorway.

  She looked up at him, her vision surprisingly blurred by tears. Self-consciously she swiped at her eyes, then shook her head.

  Dominic came over to her and gently took the wedding photo from her fingers. He gazed at it momentarily, then dropped it into the box. “It does get better. Grief never really goes away, but it does become more manageable.”