“Is this something you really want to do?” Kate pressed.
“Well, the offer came in last month and when I spoke to the headmaster he sounded eager to have me join the staff. He said the interview would pretty much be just a formality, and that if I decided I wanted it, the job was mine.” Her voice gained speed as she spoke. “The salary’s better because it costs more to live in New York City than it does here. I’d say it was pretty much the same salary—”
“You’re not answering the question, Kelsey,” Kate told her gently. “Is going to New York City to teach something that you really want to do?”
“Well, strictly speaking,” Kelsey hedged, “I don’t want to leave you with the baby coming and all. But I’ll make sure I can get a leave of absence to fly back and help you when the big day comes.”
That still wasn’t answering her question. Kelsey wasn’t excited. She wasn’t taking a job—she was fleeing. Kate felt it in her bones. “Kelsey, sweetheart, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong, Mom,” Kelsey insisted a little too adamantly. “It’s just time for me to leave the nest, that’s all.”
“The nest, I can see. You’ve already done that,” she reminded her. “But the state?”
Kate paused, waiting. “How does Morgan feel about your going?”
Kelsey struggled not to let her emotions get the better of her. Her mother had enough to deal with without having a daughter unloading on her.
“I doubt if he feels anything at all, Mom,” she answered. “He said the decision was mine.”
“Maybe Morgan doesn’t want to influence you or make you feel that he’s ruining a big chance for you.”
“No, it’s nothing that noble,” Kelsey assured her. “I really don’t think it matters to him one way or another.” And then she revised her statement. “Actually, I think he looked rather relieved when he heard I was thinking about going out for an interview.”
“I don’t believe that, Kelsey.”
“You didn’t see him when I told him,” Kelsey pointed out. Her voice cracked at the end of the sentence. Kelsey pretended to clear her throat. She needn’t have bothered. Kate was well versed in Kelsey-speak and she had already picked up on the small, telltale signs in both her daughter’s voice and the way she’d said what she had. Kelsey was hurt, very hurt, by what she perceived as Morgan’s indifference. Kate strongly doubted that the patrolman was indifferent. He was undoubtedly still just struggling to deal with his growing feelings for her daughter. Most likely, when Kelsey had mentioned possibly moving to New York, he took that to mean she was leaving him and his sense of self-preservation had kicked in.
Just the way it had with Bryan all those years ago, Kate remembered. At the time he had been a widower falling in love for the first time since his wife had died. His fear of being hurt again had almost caused her to leave him.
“Don’t you think you should talk to him again?” Kate suggested gently.
“No point, Mom,” Kelsey said briskly, fighting the urge to break down and tell her mother how badly she ached inside. Her mother was always a huge comfort, but Kelsey wasn’t a little girl anymore. She couldn’t come running to her mother every time she fell down and scraped her knees. Or her heart. “Look, I have to go. I promise I won’t just disappear into the night. I’ll keep you updated.”
“And when are you going for the interview?” Kate asked.
A round-trip ticket sat on her bureau. “I’m flying out Friday morning.”
Friday morning. Today was Wednesday. That gave her very little time to pull off a miracle, Kate thought. “Come to dinner tomorrow night,” she invited before Kelsey had a chance to hang up.
“Can’t. I have too much to do.” She had a feeling that if she came to dinner, her mother would have everyone else there to try to talk her out of going. And because she really didn’t want to go, she would be an easy mark. She needed to get this moving. “We’ll talk,” Kelsey promised again. The line went dead.
Kate replaced the receiver in its cradle. If Kelsey was thinking about taking the job in New York because she felt that this move would be good for her career or she’d always wanted to live in New York City, she would have hidden her disappointment, wished her daughter well and been glad for her. But Kelsey wasn’t doing this because the city held allure for her or the job was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. She was hurt and needed to lick her wounds far away from the cause of those wounds.
Kate squared her shoulders. Not if she had anything to say about this. To Kate, silence had always been love’s worst enemy. It was time to pull her daughter and Morgan into a meaningful dialogue.
Moving her computer screen so that she could look at it better, Kate punched in the code to open her appointment schedule for the afternoon. She needed to make a few changes.
“Hey, there’s somebody to see you, Donnelly,” one of the patrolman said as he walked into the locker room. He jerked his thumb toward the entrance door.
“Nicelooking lady.”
Morgan instantly thought of Kelsey. The next moment, he scolded himself for allowing his hopes to get the better of him. Kelsey was out of his life. He’d had just finished changing out of his uniform and into his civilian clothes. Shutting his locker, he asked the other man, “You get a name?”
The patrolman shook his head. “I would have gotten a number if I could have. But she wouldn’t give me a name, said she just needed to talk to you. Some guys’ve got all the luck,” the man lamented enviously as he crossed to his own locker.
Morgan frowned. He had to stop letting his imagination get the better of him. This was probably just some citizen he’d dealt with earlier. His shift was over for the day and he had been thinking about what to do with himself until it was time to come in again tomorrow. Life had just become a string of minutes that had no meaning and led nowhere.
He supposed that talking to his visitor was a good way to stall. God knew nothing waited for him at home. He’d dropped Kate’s car off at her house yesterday, while she and her husband were at work, getting one of the officers to bring him back to the precinct. That left him nothing to work on, nothing to do but think. He didn’t want to think.
“See you tomorrow,” the patrolman called out to him as he walked out.
“Yeah,” Morgan muttered.
And then he froze.
It wasn’t just some citizen waiting to speak to him. It was Kate.
Had something happened to Kelsey? Then he remembered. She was probably here to thank him for dropping off the car. The blanket of disappointment almost suffocated him.
“Mrs. Marlowe, what are you doing here?” he asked. She seemed concerned. “Is there something wrong with the car?”
“No, the car is wonderful,” she said, a quick smile curving her mouth. “It actually runs better now than when it was new.” Reaching up, she placed her hand on his shoulder. “You’re a magician.” The embarrassed smile that flashed across his face belonged to the boy she knew he must have once been. He watched her. Was this about Kelsey after all? He reined in his thoughts, trying not to get carried away without further input. “Then if it’s not about the car, why—
”
“Because I’m going to do something I don’t ordinarily do.” She looked around. They were right in front of the locker room and what she wanted to say required a little privacy. “Is there somewhere we can go that’s out of the way?”
Private by nature, he definitely didn’t want anyone overhearing his conversation with Kate. He suggested, “We could sit in my car.”
She smiled. “That’ll be fine.”
As they left the building, Kate surprised him by hooking her arm through his. She began talking again.
“I don’t believe in butting into my children’s lives,” she told him. “But I really can’t just stand off to the side and watch, either. Because of my profession, I feel I have to speak up—especially when I’m watching a train about to be derailed.”
Reaching his car, Morgan u
nlocked it and held open the passenger door for her. He’d said nothing while they were walking, but now he felt he needed to tell her that she needn’t waste her breath. Kelsey was doing what she wanted to do, and that involved leaving him.
“Mrs. Marlowe—”
Kate raised her hand to silence him as she sat down. “Let me speak first, Morgan, and then you can protest all you want.”
Rounding the hood, Morgan got in on the driver’s side. He closed the door and shut out the rest of the world. “Go on.”
“The pursuit of happiness is guaranteed under the Constitution,” Kate began.
“What the Constitution doesn’t tell you is what to do about it if you have the great fortune to actually stumble across that happiness.” She smiled, shaking her head.
“It doesn’t happen nearly as often as the movies and song writers would like to have us think it does.” She shifted slightly in her seat. “I have always believed that if someone is lucky enough to encounter happiness, he or she should do everything in their power to hang on to it, not just let it go because something ‘might’ go wrong.” She looked at Morgan pointedly.
She had no knowledge of the words that had been spoken between Morgan and her daughter, but given what he had gone through, she could guess. Especially because she had lived through it with Bryan herself.
By Morgan’s expression, she could see that she’d guessed right.
“By walking away,” Kate continued, “that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and you make it go wrong. I’ve watched you and Kelsey together. You fit,” she told him simply. “You make each other happy—not an easy feat where Kelsey is concerned, I might add.” She smiled fondly. “My daughter is headstrong and, although I love her dearly, I am aware of her flaws. She is not the easiest person to live with.
“But Kelsey lights up whenever you’re around.” Kate placed her hand on his, making contact, silently offering Morgan a bridge from his world into hers—and her daughter’s. “And I’ve noticed that the same goes for you.” She paused for a moment, looking into his eyes. Searching for a sign that she had gotten through to him.
“Don’t throw all that away because of some misguided notion you have that you can protect your heart if you don’t allow yourself to care,” she implored. “You’re only condemning yourself to a life of emptiness.”
Taking a breath, she waited for him to speak.
Chapter Fifteen
W hen the silence continued to drag on, Kate leaned over in her seat and softly prompted, “You can talk now, Morgan.”
He was accustomed to maintaining his distance, or had been until Kelsey and her family changed all that. They had just invaded his space as if they belonged there. As if he was one of them and belonged in their world and they in his. Pretending otherwise, especially to Kate, seemed like a futile thing to do. He had a feeling Kelsey’s mother could see past the smoke and mirrors, could see the hurt he felt.
“Is she really leaving?”
“That’s what she says,” Kate answered. “The flight’s tomorrow morning.” She glanced at her watch. “She’s home, packing. Give her a reason not to.”
If Kelsey was packing, then she wanted to go. He had no right to stand in her way.
“Mrs. Marlowe, maybe this is all for the best. She can do better.”
Why were men so stubbornly pigheaded? Kate wondered in affectionate exasperation.
“No,” Kate said emphatically, “she can’t. From where I’m standing, my daughter is about to walk away from someone very special.” She covered his hand with hers for emphasis, driving the point home. “And so are you. If I were strong enough, I’d get you both in the same room and knock your heads together. But I’m not, so I’m going to have to rely on the fact that you both are reasonably intelligent people who’ll see the light if I can just get you to turn your heads in the right direction.”
Finished, Kate looked at him expectantly. She had done all she could. The next move, they both knew, was his. You would think that by now, Kelsey thought, no part of her still believed in fairy tales. All that “finding the right man” and “living happily ever after” really was a fairy tale.
Okay, her parents had a wonderful marriage, but that was rare and the result of luck more than anything else. Luck that her brothers had scared off not one, not two, but three nannies in relatively short order, throwing her father into a state of panic that had him virtually trolling for nannies. Luck that he’d brought Mike to a neighborhood party instead of sending him off on his own because it was so close by. Luck that her mother had picked that particular party to entertain and work her magic. And even more luck that her mother had been a starving student having progressively more and more trouble making ends meet. If any of that hadn’t happened, she wouldn’t have happened and there wouldn’t have been this wonderful, long-term marriage to look back on as part of her background.
Maybe, Kelsey thought, tossing a black pencil skirt into the suitcase laying open on her bed, if her parents had been divorced, she wouldn’t have grown up looking at life through rose-colored glasses. She wouldn’t have seen marriage as a haven. Moreover, she would have seen the world with all its warts and blemishes and known that losing her heart to a man was a huge mistake.
That jerk who’d said that it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, she thought resentfully, flinging in several pairs of underwear. The “lost” part hurt like hell.
Damn it, tears meshed into her lashes, sliding down her cheeks.
Annoyed, Kelsey stopped flinging clothes and wiped the tears away with the back of her hand. He wasn’t worth them. If he wasn’t worth the tears, there wouldn’t have been any tears. She certainly wouldn’t be shedding them now. Her head ached. She wasn’t making any sense anymore.
God, but she felt like exploding. If she didn’t vent soon—
Kelsey grabbed the book she kept on her nightstand in hopes of eventually finishing it and flung it as hard as she could against the opposite wall. The noise that was made when it made contact with the wall wasn’t nearly loud enough.
Her frustration didn’t abate, even an iota.
She needed something heavier, something more substantial to throw, she thought angrily. Like a stack of dishes, one by one. Or Morgan.
Kelsey took in a deep, cleansing breath and then let it out slowly. It helped. For approximately five seconds. So she took another. Just as the doorbell rang. She glared toward the front of the house. Now what?
The doorbell rang a second time. Then a third. No sooner had the sound of insistent chimes died away than the knocking started. The knocking soon gave way to pounding. Hard pounding that threatened to bring down her front door.
The scenario was all too familiar. A couple of months ago, she’d been the one pounding on Morgan’s door. Was this Morgan? Had he suddenly come around? Stop it, Kelsey, she thought. It’s not Morgan. It’s probably just some kid, selling subscriptions for his school. She wouldn’t be here to read any magazines.
Deciding to ignore whoever was out there, she went back to packing. For all of ninety seconds.
There was no way to ignore the pounding as it grew increasingly louder. Whoever was out there must have huge, hard fists. It sounded as if he could go on pounding indefinitely.
Marching out of the bedroom, she crossed to the front door and swung it open.
“I’m not interested!” she yelled and then froze.
It wasn’t someone selling subscriptions.
It was Morgan.
“Well, I am!” he shouted back at her. His eyes blazed as they swept over her.
“Don’t you know any better than to open your door without looking to see who it is?” he demanded. His anger made her forget what he’d first shouted at her. Forget to ask just what he meant. If he wanted a fight, damn it, he was going to get one. Tossing her head, she lied. “I knew it was you.”
He didn’t believe her. “How?” he demanded.
/>
He hadn’t told anyone where he was going, although he had a feeling that Kate had probably guessed he was coming to see Kelsey. Still, his gut told him that she wouldn’t have said anything to her daughter, wanting her to be caught off guard.
Kelsey’s mind raced as she tried to come up with an answer to back up her claim.
“The pounding sounded familiar.”
He stared at her. “I never pounded on your door,” he reminded her. “You pounded on mine, remember?”
“No,” she shot back. She was so angry at his presumption in coming here she couldn’t think straight. Didn’t he realize that she was trying to get over him? Was he here to just jerk her around, to see if she still cared? “I am trying to forget everything about you.”
Kelsey stopped abruptly, blowing out a breath. Everything she’d promised herself about her behavior if their paths should ever cross again had just gone out the window.
“Sorry,” she said in a much more subdued voice. She was better off pretending to be indifferent than angry if she wanted to get back at him. “I didn’t mean to shout. I just get edgy when I have a lot to do in a short amount of time.”
“And what is it that you’re trying to do in a short amount of time?” He knew the answer, but he hoped that if she was forced to say it out loud, maybe she would change her mind. On the way over, he’d decided that he was willing to try anything.
“Fly to New York.” With that, she turned on her heel and walked back into her bedroom.
He could feel her words skewering his stomach. Pressing his hand to his belly as if to stem the flow of blood, he followed her. The sight of the opened suitcase on the bed with clothing overflowing out of it pinched his gut even harder.
“So you’re really going?” he heard himself ask.
“Sure. I’m exploring my options,” she said, throwing his words back at him. “You know, what you told me to do when I asked you if I should go.”
[Kate's Boys 05] - A Lawman for Christmas Page 14
