She was reeling. Ready to fall over. And still standing. Maybe because it let her lean against Jayden. To stay connected to him. Emma focused on his warmth as he used the key she’d given him to open her front door. They’d pick up her car in the morning.
At that moment, just getting inside her gated community where there were no flashing lights and no more questions, from police or press, had been the priority.
Jayden had to shower. His clothes were blood-spattered. She followed him into her bedroom, watched as he dropped the bag he’d grabbed during a brief stop at his place, at the end of her bed.
In all the nights they’d spent together, he’d never brought any personal items into her home before. She’d given him a spare toothbrush—one she’d received free from the dentist—and that had been the extent of his ablutions in her home.
He hadn’t asked her if she’d wanted him to stay over. She hadn’t said she did. He’d just said, as they’d left the scene, that he had to stop by his place, and she’d nodded. Waited in the car. And seen him come out with the bag.
“I thought you were dead.” She’d told herself to leave it alone. Leave him alone. Parts of her didn’t listen. Because all of her needed him. Really needed him.
“I’m fine.” His words didn’t take away the sting.
“You might not have been if Chantel and her team hadn’t been outside.”
“It was a risk I had to take.”
Yeah, that pissed her off.
He stripped off his shirt. Walked toward her bathroom. “No, you didn’t,” she said, following him. From one vantage point, outside, she could see herself following him, all shrewlike. From another—inside—she couldn’t stop herself.
“You could have stayed on that couch. Let the news come on and show him that Bill really was in custody. That could have calmed him enough for us, or Suzie, to get him to drop the gun.”
Undoing the button on his shorts, he gave her a nod. “It could have. I had to take the surest way to save your life.”
“You have no respect for your own.”
With his shorts undone, but still hanging off his hips, he dropped his hands. Eyes narrowed, he looked at her. “Come again?”
“You were willing to throw your life away, like it doesn’t even matter,” she told him. And then took a couple of steps closer. “Well, I have to tell you, it matters to me. And I’m sure to your parents and to a whole lot of other people, too. You might find it worthless, but it’s got value. A lot of it.”
Okay, she was coming unglued.
He didn’t grin. She had to give him credit for that. But he cocked his head, and that was just about as bad.
“You can go ahead and think you’re another Tom Smith, Jayden. You can find justification for shutting out life as some sort of penance, but I’ve got to tell you, you’re just taking the coward’s way out. Running from the tough stuff. And hurting the people who love you, too, which is even more of waste.”
“I am, am I?”
“Yes.” She’d been right about Bill Heber four years before. And she was right about this, too.
“And you can speak for the people who love me, why? You’ve spoken to them?” He took a step closer to her, not menacing at all. More like he was toying with her. Or challenging her.
She didn’t like either option.
“One of them.” So there. He thought he knew it all, and...
She stared at him. Emotionally exhausted. Not sure how much fight she had left in her.
He took a step back. Smart man.
“I don’t think I’m Mr. Smith, by the way,” Jayden told her. “Listening to Emory’s mother...she divorced him because he pretty much forced her to, but it’s clear she still loves him. That she needs him. And his daughter, and her kids...it’s like he’s robbing Peter to pay Paul, as my mother would say. And another one from her—two wrongs don’t make a right.”
“I think I’d like your mother.”
“I’m sure she’d like you, too.”
Was he ever going to take those shorts off? Get in the shower, so they could go to bed? Couldn’t he see she was rocking on her feet?
“We’ve known each other...how long?” she asked him. Because she was thinking the answer.
“I don’t know. Two years. Three maybe.”
Three and a half, and she was counting. She’d been lead on a case, opposing parole, and he’d been at the hearing, giving his report on preliminary housing interviews and recommendations. He’d recommended the woman for parole.
She’d won. The woman had hung herself in her cell six months later.
She’d been right. Professionally. Facts had surfaced after the woman’s death that had substantiated that.
But he’d been right, too. Knowing that the woman valued a second chance so much she’d taken her life when that chance had been denied her.
“What’s it matter how long we’ve known each other?” he asked, curious.
“It doesn’t.”
Or did it?
“I was wrong to lash out at you earlier today, about...you know, not being perfect. Insinuating that you were failing the real challenge—learning to forgive yourself,” she said.
“Okay.”
“I was upset, thinking you were giving yourself permission to not have a life, with Emory’s father as your justification.”
“And it would have mattered to you so much...if I was like him?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. Picked a piece of lint off the carpet. Adjusted one of the pillows on the bed.
Wondered what was in his bag. Did he normally sleep in pajamas? Had he brought them over?
“What you said about the real challenge being learning to forgive yourself...” he said, moving to the end of the bed. “You might have been right about that.”
She glanced at him. “You think so?”
“Do you?”
“I know I need to be a little better about it, myself,” she said. Poor Ms. Shadow Side. Emma had shunned a part of herself, a valid, real, worthy part, because she couldn’t handle the excruciating pain life had brought her. She’d been running away from herself. “I didn’t want my baby to die, Jayden. I already loved it so much...”
She was crying. She couldn’t believe it. Tears streamed out of her eyes and down her face. She’d almost lost Jayden that night.
Lost him before she’d even had him. Except as a play toy.
He nodded. “I know.”
“How could you know? You weren’t there. You didn’t even know me then.”
“But I know you now.”
He wasn’t touching her. The bed practically separated them, with her at the side and him at the end. And yet...she’d never felt so intimately connected to him.
“I know you now, too.” Her throat started to dry up.
Jutting his chin, he nodded again then said, “You looked like you wanted to let Suzie go tonight.”
“She made mistakes. Maybe some big ones. But she was the victim. Not the criminal. She didn’t tell me that he was the one hitting her when I spoke to her Monday night, but she could have argued that she wasn’t under obligation to testify against her spouse.”
“She’s not his spouse.”
“I think she is,” Emma told him. “I noticed that she had a wedding ring on a chain around her neck. I think we’re going to find out that they were married.”
Sometimes life was hard. Too hard. Like when you got on a motorcycle to please the man you thought you loved and your baby died. Or you tried to give a guy the life he thought he wanted and he died instead.
And sometimes life blessed you, too. Didn’t it?
“I found out something tonight,” she said, thinking about courage. About reasons to live. To get up every day. To fight for justice.
“What’s that?”
“I don’t want to know what my life would be like without you in it.”
Yep, she got another nod. She could almost have predicted that one.
“You going to take your shower?” she asked.
He didn’t nod. At least he did her that favor, saved her from one more of those infuriating nods. Stripping off his shorts, and then his briefs, he strode naked to her shower, turned on the water, and stepped inside.
Good thing, too.
He didn’t see the tears, or hear the sobs, that burst from her as she undressed, turned out the bedroom light and crawled into bed.
Jayden took a long shower. He washed away the blood of the man who’d been shot that night. And maybe a bit of the blood that he’d had on his conscience for more than a decade. He’d done Emory Smith a huge disservice.
And maybe he’d given the boy his greatest desire in life, too.
Who knew why some died young and others lived past the times their minds even knew who they were?
Jayden sure as hell didn’t.
He’d been wrong about Bill Heber—the man really had killed his own child in his wife’s body. And he’d been right, too—Bill had honored his second chance.
And loved his wife—albeit in a sick way that was unacceptable.
Jayden stayed under the spray after all but the bathroom light went out. Until the water ran cold. And then, reaching for one of the two towels he’d seen on a rack, he dried himself off. Top to bottom. Feet last.
A guy needed some things he could rely on. Some things that didn’t change.
But if he was going to be true to himself, to keep his word and honor life—both that had been and that which was left—he had to know when change was necessary and when it wasn’t. He had to have the courage to face that change. Or to turn away from it.
No matter how much it hurt, he had to make a choice.
Hanging his towel, he turned out the light. Padded across the carpet, pulled down the covers and slid beneath them.
Emma didn’t move. After several nights in bed with her, he’d grown to recognize the sound of her breathing as she slept. He didn’t hear it.
She might still be awake.
Hands shaking, he slid up against her back, pressed his chin over her shoulder and whispered in her ear. “I don’t ever want to know what life is like without you in it.”
She didn’t turn. Didn’t seem to move at all.
“I don’t know what the future brings,” he told her. “I don’t know what mistakes I might make. I don’t know if I’ll ever be an asshole again. But I know I’ll make mistakes. And be selfish sometimes... I can promise to always put your happiness before my own. I might not do it.” He had to stop. Emotion clogged his throat. He could feel every breath she took. And took them with her. Calming. Wanting to sleep.
Just lie there with her and sleep.
“I’m not always going to agree with you.” Her words entered the air on a whisper.
“I’m going to be right sometimes,” he told her.
“I don’t want to know what my life would be like without you in it.” She was crying again as she repeated her earlier words.
He turned her over, blinking away a moisture that astounded him. Scared him, even. No one had ever meant to him what she did.
In such a short time.
Or over time.
Maybe he’d been heading in her direction from that first case three years before. Maybe he’d needed more time to heal. Or to pay.
“I don’t want to live without you,” he told her, looking her straight in the eye in the darkness. He kissed her then.
Slowly. Softly. He was hard. But not needy. Not really even wanting all that much at the moment.
“I want to have a baby, though.”
He’d known, of course. She wasn’t going to be complete without knowing what it felt like to have her baby grow to fruition inside her.
“I’m not sure I can be a good father.” But he knew a man who’d been a darn good example. And might be willing to be a teacher, too.
“See, that’s where having two of us trying to have a relationship kind of works, because I am sure you can become a good father.” Emma’s words knocked him off course again.
And onto this new road, once more.
“You’re a good father every single time you give one of your clients a second chance,” she told him. “You have faith in them. You look after them. You counsel them. You save them from themselves sometimes. And, when necessary, you discipline them. Even when it means holding them accountable for their mistakes. Even when it hurts you to do so.”
Had his father ever held him accountable? Jayden couldn’t be sure. He’d known there were lines he couldn’t cross. So he hadn’t really tried.
His father had given him space in which to fly. And maybe kept him tethered on some invisible parental line, too.
But he was a man now. Not a boy. Or a teenager. Or a college kid. He was a grown man. It was time for him to find out if he had what it took to fly without protection.
“I don’t want to know what it would be like to spend another night alone in my house with you alone in yours,” he said.
She was crying again. He could feel the sobs in her body against his.
“I love you, Emma Martin.”
“I love you, too.”
The words cascaded around him. Through him. Settling in.
“So...you think we can always remember those we’ve lost, but forgive ourselves?” He had to ask.
“I do.”
“You up for sharing this place with a feral, no-named cat, who you probably won’t ever see?” Made sense that they’d live at her place, not his. Hers was ten times as nice.
And gated. Didn’t mean harm couldn’t come to her there...but there was less chance of it.
“The way I picture it, the cat’s going to have a name as soon as I see it and figure out if it’s male or female. And, within a month, he or she will be sleeping on the end of our bed.”
Yeah, she would see it that way.
And she’d probably be right.
“You think you’ll be up for sharing this place with a baby we might make at some point?” she countered.
It would take him some time. He didn’t kid himself about that. But for her...and for the child he so badly wanted to have with her...
“You think you can figure a way to get that cat out from under my bed and over here?”
“You going to help me?”
He’d said he didn’t want to spend another night in his home with her in hers, so... “Of course.”
“Then yes, I can get the cat out.”
“And I can share this space with whatever family we make together, canine, feline, human...who knows...maybe even some more fish.”
He wasn’t thinking it would be easy. Wasn’t sure how good he’d actually be at it, but he’d do it. And give it his all.
Because one thing Jayden knew about himself that just didn’t change...
He was a man of his word.
If you enjoyed this great romance,
keep an eye out for other books in the
Where Secrets are Safe miniseries,
available now from Harlequin!
Keep reading for an excerpt from Hunting the Colton Fugitive by Colleen Thompson.