His instinct for self-preservation warred with desire. The former told him to back away, the latter wouldn’t allow it. Before he could stop himself, the kiss flowered, then deepened. Something leaped up and seized his gut, wrenching it so that he could hardly breathe.
There was an unbearable sweetness about the kiss, about her. If he let himself go, he would have gotten lost in both. The temptation to do just that was enormous. It had been so long since he had felt anything, so long since his life had done anything but cast empty shadows on the wall.
He touched her face with his hand, her skin heating beneath his. He remembered another lifetime, when things were different.
What the hell was he doing?
Like an explosion of cold air, reality hit. He was kissing a woman he was just doing the most casual of favors for. He never behaved rashly, never led with his feelings, didn’t even have feelings, for crying out loud. And he never, ever, acted on impulse.
But he’d done all three just now in the space of a heartbeat.
Shaken, trying to get his bearings, and angry at himself beyond words, J.T. dropped his hand from her face and backed away.
“Hey, I’m sorry—” He had no idea what to say. Any apology seemed utterly insignificant.
He’d stirred something within her, reminding her that she hadn’t always been a widow, that it wasn’t all that long ago that she’d been a desirable woman. He looked flustered, she thought. Like someone caught with his hand in the cookie jar, knowing that he wasn’t supposed to be there.
Her eyes smiled a beat before her mouth curved. “Why? Do I taste like onions?”
J.T. stared at her for a second before he realized that she was using humor to get them through what had to be an awkward moment for her as well as for him.
“No, I mean—I didn’t mean for that to happen.”
Unless she missed her guess, John Thomas Walker never did what he didn’t want to do. And, right now, he didn’t like the fact that he wanted to kiss her. It was a guilt thing. She could understand that. She’d gone through it herself. It was the first step to making peace with the cold, hard fact that you were alive and the person you loved wasn’t.
“Sometimes acting on impulse can be a good thing.” He was still uncomfortable, she thought. She didn’t want him to be. “And you have nothing to be sorry for. You didn’t exactly pin me against the car.” Her eyes held his for a moment. “And if I hadn’t wanted you to kiss me, you wouldn’t have.”
He laughed shortly. Was she kidding? “You don’t have enough strength to wrestle a flea, you just proved that.”
She realized that he didn’t understand what she was telling him. What she sensed about him. “I didn’t need strength. You’re not the type to force yourself on a woman.”
He frowned. The woman was too damn trusting for her own good. No wonder her family hovered around her. She needed to be protected.
“You haven’t even known me for more than a couple of days, how do you know what kind of a man I am? Just because I wear a uniform—”
But she shook her head. He was on the wrong trail again. “It has nothing to do with your uniform, John Thomas. I can see it in your eyes.”
He tried not to let the warm familiar feeling overtake him. He reminded himself that she was a stranger, barely an acquaintance.
Yeah, an acquaintance you just kissed, an inner voice mocked him.
J.T. snorted, dismissing her naive assessment. “Is that anything like reading palms or tea leaves?”
She knew what he was doing and she wouldn’t let him. “It’s a great deal more accurate. Eyes are the windows of the soul.”
And he had beautiful eyes, she thought. Maddy smiled up into them to make her point.
A soul. He didn’t believe in all that anymore. Didn’t believe in anything, except that pain was endless. “I don’t have one. I lost it over two years ago.”
She looked at him for a long moment, at the sadness she saw just beneath the anger. “Then it’s about time you found it again.”
In the back seat, the baby began to whimper. “What it’s time for is to get you and the baby inside.”
Because it was at least true in part, Maddy offered no resistance.
Leaving her house less than half an hour later, J.T. made himself a silent promise that he wasn’t going to see her again. After all, there was no reason to.
And, except for driving by her house once on the pretext of patrolling the area, one that wasn’t in his route, he’d kept his word to himself.
The temptation to drop in on her the afternoon he’d driven by had been great. But what could he do? Just show up on her doorstep and mumble something inane about seeing how she and the boy were doing? She would have seen right through that and he would have opened the door to further involvement. He’d already told himself he didn’t want that. Didn’t want to be involved with anyone.
So when a call was patched through to his squad car near midnight a week and a half later, no one was more surprised that he was to hear her voice.
He’d forgotten how melodious it sounded. Snapping out of it, he demanded, “How did you get through?”
She’d waited as long as she could for him to come around. When he didn’t, she’d decided to take matters into her own hands. The man couldn’t be allowed to regress into his cocoon again.
“I told the woman at the dispatch desk that it was an emergency, that I was your sister.” Maddy didn’t have to see his face to know that J.T. was far from pleased. But it was all for a good cause. “I’m sorry if I violated protocol, but I wanted to reach you and you haven’t come by.”
J.T. sighed, deliberately ignoring the look that he knew Fenelli was giving him, the one that was sported by proud fathers when their late-bloomer sons finally took their advice and plunged into life.
“All right, you reached me. So what’s the big emergency?”
“I want you to be Johnny’s godfather.” Grateful that he didn’t cut her off, Maddy took advantage of the silence to hurry through the rest of what she had to tell him. “The ceremony’s taking place this Sunday at St. Mark’s on Alton at two o’clock. I guess I’d better get off now. Call me.”
J.T. stared at the two way receiver in his hand as static took the place of her voice. The woman was unbelievable. Swallowing an oath, he replaced the receiver as little more forcefully than was really necessary.
Fenelli shifted in his seat, a grin wide enough to do the Cheshire Cat proud on his florid face. J.T. could sense it before he even saw it. “So, what haven’t you been telling me?”
J.T. stared straight ahead into the inky darkness. “Nothing.”
Fenelli chuckled. “Nothing’s got a really sexy voice.”
He’d been partnered with Fenelli for four years. When he’d opted to take the night shift, Fenelli had made the switch with him even though he’d told the older man it wasn’t necessary. Now that he thought of it, that gave Fenelli a great deal in common with Maddy, J.T. thought. “It’s a long story.”
The streets were long and dark, slumbering like the residents in the houses they passed. “Hey, we got time and I like long stories.”
J.T. snorted. “Yeah, I know. You tell them all the time.”
Fenelli had grown up the next to youngest in a family of seven. He had a hide like a rhino and never got insulted. “Turnabout is fair play.”
J.T. knew his partner wasn’t going to let up until he told him. After deliberating, he gave him the story in a nutshell.
“I helped her deliver her baby. It was the night you were out with the stomach flu.” He looked at his partner accusingly. “If you had been on patrol, you would have been the one to deliver it.”
Fenelli refused to rise to the bait. He was as optimistic in his views as his partner was pessimistic. He insisted that was why they got along. He was also a great believer in fate. “Hey, there’s a reason for everything. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to be on duty that night, ever think of that?”
“No,” J.T. snapped. But he did. He’d thought about it a lot this last week and a half. Thought about it every time his thoughts turned to Maddy which was a lot more often than he was happy about. The bottom line was that he knew his life would have been less complicated if Fenelli hadn’t called in sick.
The next morning, J.T. went to Maddy’s house to tell her that she was simply going to have to find someone else to be the baby’s godfather. The words were right there, on the tip of his tongue. He’d rehearsed them on the way over, just in case he forgot.
But when she opened the door and he looked at her, the words somehow became lost.
She was standing there, wearing a blue cotton dress that would have seemed shapeless on anyone else. On her, it accented curves that hadn’t been there just a week and a half ago. Other than the baby she had tucked into the crook in her arm, there seemed to be no evidence at all that she had given birth recently.
He realized that one of the little white buttons on her dress was open, allowing him a view of full, firm breasts he shouldn’t be been privy to. He also realized he was staring and quickly lifted his eyes.
She’d just finished feeding the baby and congratulated herself on her timing. She opened the door wider in silent invitation.
“I was hoping you’d come by.”
Finally finding his tongue, J.T. got right to the point as he walked in. “Why me?”
She closed the door behind him, flipping the lock. “Because you were there to help me through a difficult time. Because yours was the first face that Johnny saw and I’d like to find a reason for him to see it again every once in a while.”
No way, sorry. Uh-uh. Nope. He shoved his hands into his pockets, feeling oddly powerless in the presence of this petite woman. “So exactly what’s a godfather supposed to do?”
This was actually easier than she’d anticipated, Maddy thought. She shifted Johnny to her shoulder and began to pat his back, waiting for the tiny telltale burp. “Technically or really?”
He looked at her darkly, struggling not to react to the woman in any way but impersonally. He would have had an easier time winning a cheerleading contest.
“I’m not interested in technicalities.”
She enumerated what she was hoping for. “Show up once in a while and play catch with him. Maybe occasionally take him to a ball game. Remember his birthday and Christmas.” She smiled at him, her features softening as she remembered. “Show him what his father would have been like if he’d lived. I want Johnny to be proud of the fact that his dad was a policeman.”
J.T. struggled to resist. He knew he didn’t want to say yes, saw further complications if he did. But the word “no” just wouldn’t come out as easily as it had for most of his life. Not to her. He wasn’t about to analyze why.
“It doesn’t bother you that I might not be the same religion as you and your son?”
It was a requirement, but there were ways around that. Tiny white lies could be forgiven. In the grander scheme of things, she was saving a soul. Or at least bringing a man back among the living. She’d had her family to help her through her difficult time. She’d already figured out that J.T. had no one.
Maddy shook her head to his question. “He’s got uncles for that.”
J.T. spread his hands. He was off the hook. “Then he’s got uncles to play catch with.”
She laughed. “You obviously haven’t seen my brothers play ball. They’re great interior decorators and each one has a fantastic eye for color and proportions. But doing anything remotely productive with a round little object flying through the air at them is another story.” Turning the baby around, she held him up in front of J.T. so that the infant’s cherubic face was close to his. “How can you say no to this face?”
J.T. took the excuse she offered him as a graceful way to surrender. But in his heart he knew that it wasn’t Johnny’s face he couldn’t say no to.
“I can’t.”