Wife, Mother...Lover?

by Sally Tyler Hayes

  She’d been in Chicago for three days after her sister’s funeral, had talked to Mitch and offered to do anything she could for the boys. But he’d turned down her offer of help.

  Feeling like more of an outsider than ever within her own family, and telling herself it was probably too late ever to mend fences with them, Leanne had taken off again, working in a pure frenzy. Sporadic reports over the phone from various relatives told her the boys were growing quickly and that Mitch was a rock.

  Apparently, the rock was showing signs of cracking.

  Quickly, efficiently, Leanne dumped the contents of her suitcase on the floor beside her bed, then opened the drawers and the closet doors so she could pack her suitcase once again.

  Mitch couldn’t give up the boys. She wouldn’t let him.

  Mitch McCarthy, one of Chicago’s finest, was busy tailing a suspect, though his mind was on something other than ridding the city of crime.

  He was anxious to get home to make sure the boys were all right. This morning, he’d left them with a virtual stranger, a nineteen-year-old college dropout, the daughter of a friend of a friend, someone the boys had never seen before.

  Of course Mitch didn’t have much of a choice. He’d missed so many days of work already, either because the boys were sick or because yet another sitter had quit, that he couldn’t miss any more. He had some family in the area and a few good friends, but he’d taken advantage of every one of them in the past sixteen months as he struggled to raise the boys alone.

  This morning, there simply hadn’t been anyone else available to watch the twins. He didn’t know who was going to take care of them tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the next week. Hopefully, one of the agencies he’d called would come up with someone. Or his network of friends and family would come through again, either with a temporary replacement or a permanent one.

  It wasn’t the life Mitch wanted for his boys. And he knew they were suffering because of it. It was getting harder and harder for him to make it out the door without feeling as if he were abandoning them every day.

  His partner’s wife, Ginny, who had two small children of her own, assured him that all children went through a phase when they clung to their parents and either wept or pitched a fit when left with anyone else. Despite the fact that it could darn near break a parent’s heart, it was perfectly normal.

  Mitch wouldn’t know about that. Normal didn’t quite apply in this situation. His boys didn’t have a mother. Their father worked too much, so he could feed them and clothe them and keep a roof over their heads, and the room in his house where the live-in nanny slept might as well have a revolving door on it.

  Something had to give, Mitch told himself yet again. He’d given up on telling himself everything was going to get better.

  Picking up the radio, he had the dispatcher patch through a call to his house. He wanted to make sure everything was okay. When the call finally went through, Mitch could hear one of the boys crying in the background. He had to shout to be heard.

  “Erin?” Was it his imagination, or was the baby-sitter crying, as well? “This is Mr. McCarthy. What’s wrong?”

  “One of the boys...” Breathlessly, the girl explained that she simply couldn’t tell them apart. “He fell. Just a minute ago. I turned my back for a second. I swear, that was it. And they’re so fast—”

  “Erin—” he cut her off and willed himself to be calm, to keep driving the car and to think “—is he hurt?”

  “He had a cut. On his head. And a split lip. He was bleeding. I was so scared. And both the boys were crying.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Your mother came—”

  “My mother? She lives in Ohio, Erin.” Four hours away. She didn’t show up unannounced.

  “Mother-in-law,” she corrected herself. “She got here right after the accident, and she thought your son needed to see a doctor, so she took him to the hospital. And I’m here. With the other one.”

  The other one? Dammit.

  “What hospital?” he asked.

  “Uh...St. Something.”

  “St. Luke’s?”

  “Yes.” She hesitated. “I think so.”

  Mitch groaned. Kelly had died at St. Luke’s. Mitch hadn’t set foot inside the place since.

  “I’m really sorry,” the girl said to him.

  “How long ago?” he asked.

  “Maybe twenty minutes.”

  Surely if the problem was serious, someone would have gotten word to him by now.

  “What should I do now?” the girl asked.

  He barely managed to be civil. “Take good care of the other one until I can find someone to come and get him.” “Yes, sir.”

  Mitch broke the connection, then waited for another police car to continue the tail. All the while, he told himself that one of his sons couldn’t be seriously hurt. Surely it was enough that the boys had lost their mother two days after they were born. If there was any justice in the universe, they were due smooth sailing from there on out.

  Of course, being a cop for all these years, he had grave doubts about the amount of justice left in the universe.

  And he was scared. Being a parent, seeing how incredibly helpless and vulnerable his sons were, had given him a new appreciation for the concept of fear.

  The boys were only sixteen months old. They could barely walk without falling over their own feet. Teddy said very little. Timmy could say about two dozen words that were barely comprehensible to someone who knew him, and Mitch had left them with a teenager he’d never met before.

  Mitch swore aloud in the empty car, a luxury he wouldn’t have in the crowded hospital.

  At that moment, he missed his wife so much.

  Kelly would have known what to do, what to say, just how to soothe her injured child. And she would have been here every day to keep his boys safe and healthy and happy—something Mitch didn’t seem able to do himself.

  Finally, he was free to swing his car down the nearest freeway exit and head for the hospital. The drive seemed to take forever. He spent the time talking to his dead wife, hoping she was listening. Maybe she had the answers he didn’t. Maybe she would tell him what to do. Or show him. Because he just didn’t know anymore.

  I love ‘em, Kelly. You know that. I love ’em so much.

  But the boys needed so much more than love.

  At the hospital, calling on every bit of crisis-management training he’d ever received, he managed to speak clearly and calmly, his tone dead even, when he asked about his son. He managed to stand there for a full thirty seconds and say nothing else when the clerk shuffled through some papers before directing him to treatment room five.

  Rounding the corner, he found the room. It was empty.

  For a second, Mitch leaned against the wall and had to work hard to breathe.

  “Mr. McCarthy?”

  He turned to see a no-nonsense-looking woman in the pinkish garb the nurses at the hospital wore. “Yes. Where’s my little boy?”

  “He’s been taken upstairs for a CT scan—a precautionary measure, the doctor believes. Try not to worry too much. I can show you where he is, but you have to promise to get your butt back down here soon and fill out some paperwork for me, okay?”

  Mitch quickly cut a deal with the nurse. He must have looked as bad as he felt, because she took him by the arm and led him down the hall, showing him where to go.

  “Timmy’s a cutie,” she said, chatting to him as they went. “Going to have a real shiner for a couple of days.”

  Twenty minutes later, Timmy was back downstairs in a treatment room, waiting for the doctor.

  Mitch held the little boy, who was exhausted from all the commotion and excitement. Timmy had fallen asleep while struggling in vain to find a way to get his right thumb into his mouth so he could suck on it, despite the fact that he had a swollen and cut lip as well as a cut above his eye.

  Rena, his mother-in-law, had been banished to the waiting room after subjecting Mitch to
an earful about the unsuitable conditions she’d found at his house today. It was a mess, the boys obviously weren’t being supervised properly and God only knows what the sitter had been doing when Timmy got hurt, Rena told him.

  She’d never come at him full steam like that before. Instead, she’d been quietly concerned, had merely made suggestions about the right thing to do for the boys.

  Mitch would do the right thing, if only he knew what it was.

  Squeezing his son a little more tightly, he tried to reassure himself with the doctor’s words. Timmy was going to look battered and bruised, but his injuries were not serious.

  But whatever had happened today was very serious to Mitch. And to his mother-in-law, who felt the boys should be with her and her husband.

  Mitch hadn’t thought he’d ever be the kind of man to give up his kids, but he’d begun to consider it. Today’s accident forced him to think even harder about what was best for his sons.

  Certainly, they deserved a better life than they’d had with him these past few months. They deserved better than to have lost their mother, too, he thought bitterly, but there was no righting that particular wrong.

  Mitch closed his eyes and savored the sensation of having his son this close, and thought about the finality of what he was considering.

  Giving up the boys.

  He couldn’t even say the words aloud. But there were nights when he thought of nothing else, and it made him absolutely sick inside.

  Still, all he had to do was glance down at Timmy’s bruised face and remember how hysterical the sitter had sounded and the way Teddy had been crying, and he knew something had to change. Because he and his sons couldn’t continue to live this way.

  Chapter 2

  Leanne boarded another plane leaving New York three hours later. From the airport in Chicago, she tried calling her father and Amy, before finally finding someone home at Mitch’s house.

  “Hi. Is Mitch in?” she asked.

  “No, he’s not. Who is this?”

  “His sister-in-law, Leanne Hathaway.” she replied, not recognizing the woman’s voice.

  “Oh, sorry. You startled me. For a minute... You sound so much like Kelly.”

  Leanne closed her eyes and swore she wasn’t going to cry. She hadn’t been back to Chicago since Kelly had died. Now that she was here, she had to be prepared. There would be places where she’d expect her sister to walk around the corner any minute. She would meet people who knew Kelly, who thought Leanne looked like her and sounded like her. It was going to be difficult, in a totally different way than mourning her sister all alone had been.

  The woman on the phone said, “Mitch is at the hospital with Timmy right now. He had a little accident this afternoon, but I don’t think it was serious.”

  Trying to calm herself, Leanne remembered three different times she’d ended up calling a neighbor to take her and one of her siblings to the emergency room. Her father had worked second shift, she’d been on her own with her brothers and sisters from after school until her father came home around midnight. She’d seen them through Amy’s broken arm when Amy was eight and fell off her bike, a cut on Kelly’s chin that needed six stitches, a high fever that had made Alex delirious one evening.

  Kids had accidents all the time, she reminded herself.

  She managed to ask what hospital Timmy was at, then remembered to inquire about her other nephew.

  “He’s fine. He and my little boy are playing right now.”

  Which meant the children were still living in Mitch’s house. She wasn’t too late this time.

  “Thank you,” she told the woman, then found a taxi to the hospital. In the emergency room, someone directed her to Timmy’s room. Then she stood outside, trying to calm herself anew.

  Peering through the glass treatment-room doors, she saw Mitch. His back to the wall, he was watching Timmy, who was curled up asleep in a big, metal crib. Mitch’s chest was heaving. Leanne saw those big shoulders of his rise and fall with each labored breath. He almost seemed to be suffocating.

  Raking a hand through his hair, he gazed down at the floor, up at the ceiling, then back at the crib. When he finally turned slightly, she saw a single tear on his cheek, before he hastily wiped it away, all the while looking even grimmer than before.

  And then Leanne couldn’t go inside. It hurt too much to see him this way, to imagine what it must have been like months ago when Kelly had died.

  She couldn’t help but think of that day she’d finally made it home, too late for the funeral. Standing by the grave site, she’d thought she was alone, when she turned and saw a tall, lean, utterly dejected-looking man. Mitch.

  Heedless of the dark-blue suit he wore, he’d been leaning against the wide trunk of a tree with his hands shoved into his pockets, his eyes downcast. Leanne saw dark circles under those bloodshot eyes, saw an ashen tint to his complexion, a look of disgust on his face.

  “You’re late,” he announced bitterly.

  She’d flinched, then closed her eyes to block out the sight of her sister’s husband in utter misery. “Mitch...”

  He waved off her words with an impatient hand. He had hair the color of a field of wheat, a deep brown shot through with gold. Normally, his eyes were green, not tinted red, and his lips wore just a hint of a smile.

  “She wanted you with her when the twins came, because she was scared,” he accused. “She hadn’t asked you for anything in so long. Couldn’t you have given her that at least?”

  “I didn’t get the letter,” Leanne cried. “Not until it was too late. I would have come back, but it was too late.”

  “It’s too late now,” he said, his gaze as sharp and as cutting as a razor blade.

  “What happened?” She’d gotten only the sketchiest of details as she’d struggled to get back to Chicago.

  “A blood clot,” he said, puzzled even now by the explanation. “Some out-of-the-blue kind of thing that isn’t supposed to happen.” He shoved his hands back into his pockets and stared off into the sky. “Women aren’t supposed to die having babies anymore. They aren’t supposed to die when they’re twenty-five years old.”

  Leanne had no answer, suspected no one did. “And the boys?”

  “They’re fine.” He stopped to take a labored breath and shake his head, as if he still couldn’t believe it. “Except they just lost their mother.”

  Leanne had wanted to weep, even though she would have sworn she had no tears left. And she’d wanted to go to Mitch, to tell him how sorry she was and to offer to do something. But she couldn’t imagine what that would be.

  “What about the boys?” she asked. “How are you going to manage?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far ahead.” He raked a hand through his hair and looked as if his world had ended. “We’ll manage, I guess. What choice do we have?”

  “In the letter...Kelly asked me to help with the boys.”

  He stared down at her, measuring her, assessing. “Leanne, you’ve been back...what? A half a dozen times in the past ten years?”

  “Yes.” Maybe that many times.

  “What kind of help could you possibly be with the boys?”

  She flinched as if he’d struck her. What had there been to come back to? she wanted to shout at him. No one had wanted her here.

  Except Kelly. Kelly had wanted her. Five weeks earlier.

  And Leanne had been too late.

  She’d understood her brother-in-law’s anger, hadn’t even tried to defend herself.

  If she’d ever felt needed or wanted, she would have come. Maybe she still could. “If you need anything, anything at all, for the boys...”

  He gave her a look that felt like a blast of wind coming across the polar ice caps. He wouldn’t need anything from her.

  “I’m sorry, Mitch,” she said, then turned and walked away.

  And that’s where they’d left it.

  Until now. Until she couldn’t run away anymore. After all, she’d made a
promise to Kelly to do what she could for the boys, and that was one promise she intended to keep.

  Looking into the treatment room, Leanne vowed not to let anything Mitch McCarthy said convince her to leave this time. Taking a deep breath, she pushed the door open. Mitch turned at the sound, and she felt his gaze rake over her, felt the chill that found its way into the air.

  He didn’t want her here. His look said so all too clearly.

  Well, that was no great surprise. Leanne straightened her shoulders and forced her chin up. “Hello, Mitch.”

  “Leanne.”

  “How’s Timmy?” She stared down at the sleeping child. His lip was all swollen, the area around his eye swollen, as well, and there was a bandage over his right eyebrow.

  “He’ll be fine.” Mitch’s voice was rough and low and chilling. “What are you doing here?”

  She thought of her options. I was in the neighborhood? He’d know better. As he’d so succinctly pointed out to her at the cemetery that day, she was hardly ever home.

  “Amy called me,” she said finally.

  “Oh? I didn’t know you and Amy were speaking to each other.”

  “Mitch, don’t.” Leanne couldn’t help but flinch as the words cut into her. She’d never known this man to be cruel. Fiercely protective of his wife and no doubt now his sons, but not cruel.

  She and Mitch were the same age, both thirty-two, and Leanne had known him for a long time before he’d married her sister. And what she’d known about him, she’d liked.

  Unable to help herself now, Leanne studied his features. He’d folded his arms in front of him, a move that had the fabric of his shirt straining across the muscles of his shoulders and arms. He was pale under the tan, with shadows under his eyes and hollows to his cheeks that hadn’t been there before. Of course he was still an incredibly handsome man, an appealing one, too, as long as he wasn’t looking at her. So often when he did look at her, his mouth had settled into a grim, straight line, as it did now. There was a wariness in his eyes, and something that had her feeling all his defenses were on alert when she was around.