The choice to remain alone was unequivocal. So yeah, Jayden lived and breathed when Emory didn’t, but he was using his breath to give to others, not to better his own life. He lived to serve others, not to serve his own happiness.
“What did you rob from someone else?”
Their dinner had arrived: a barbecue chicken ranch salad for her, whiskey chicken breast with a baked potato and broccoli for him.
“The chance to be happy,” he said, taking his time cutting his food.
He waited for more questions. Would figure out how to answer them, how much to tell Emma, as they came. And reminded himself why he didn’t engage in casual relationships a lot, either. People wanted to know who they were involved with.
Should know.
And he should know better. Why was he there, eating with her? Why had he opened the door to begin with?
Why was she such an enigma? She was just another coworker, not a big mystery to him.
“You said you go for casual relationships, though.”
“Occasionally.” He was a healthy man, whether he deserved to be or not.
“Is that what this is?” she asked as she stabbed another bite.
“That would be up to both of us, wouldn’t it?” he asked. The chicken wasn’t bad. And when he loaded up the potato, it was pretty good, too.
“We’re both married to our work,” she pointed out.
“True,” he agreed, trying to focus on being busy with his. They’d come together that afternoon for work.
“We know the score.” She punctuated the sentence with stabs of her fork in midair. “Which means no one will get hurt.”
He had a mouthful and so he nodded.
“So, what do you say?” Her gaze seemed to grab his.
“What do you say?” He was playing with her now and enjoying himself more than he probably should.
But she seemed to need his attention as much as he wanted hers. He wasn’t going to snub her. It wasn’t his way.
And when it ended, he’d feel a pang. That would be worse than the guilt he felt at getting what he wanted.
“I’d say that by being who we are, and being here, we’ve both already said yes.”
She’d swallowed the food in her mouth, was watching him. He leaned over and kissed her. Right there in the restaurant. His ribs be damned.
Lips only. And only for a second.
But the deal was sealed.
Emma wanted to think that she wouldn’t have slept with Jayden that night even if she’d had the chance. She wanted to think that, no matter what they ultimately did with each other, she’d at least have had the wherewithal, the good sense, to see him a few more times before falling into bed with him. But she never got the chance to find out.
As it was, he’d gotten a call toward the end of dinner—a parolee of his had failed to come home from work and his wife was worried. After throwing money down on the table to pay for both of their dinners, he’d left his food unfinished and hightailed it out of there. She’d understood completely. Would have told him to hurry, if she’d been given the chance. And still felt...let down...as she sat there alone.
More relieved than disappointed, she told herself, she took the time to finish her dinner and then, pocketing his cash, put the meal on her credit card. She’d asked him to dinner. She’d pay. And hand his cash back to him at the next opportune moment.
Maybe they could have a casual fling. She knew she’d have one or two along the way. Was okay with that. Single parents weren’t all sexless. She’d just have to be circumspect.
And she had to make certain that any sex she had didn’t interfere with her family life, didn’t involve her child’s life at all or affect her work. And she was fairly confident that as long as neither she nor Jayden had any expectations of one another, any fling between them would not affect the jobs they were doing together.
On her way home from dinner, she called Sara Havens Edwin at The Lemonade Stand, to check on Suzie Heber. The woman was supposed to be attending daily counseling sessions but hadn’t shown Thursday afternoon. Sara told her that Chantel Harris Fairbanks, a detective on the High Risk team, had already done a wellness check and that Suzie was at home. She’d been alone and said she was fine. Emma did a drive-by, just in case. Like she’d know what to look for. Mostly just because she felt compelled to be close enough to the woman to somehow be able to save her life.
She was taking this one personally. She knew she was. To the point that for a minute or two after turning off Suzie’s street, she actually thought she was being followed. A truck of some kind had made a couple of the same turns she’d made.
And then it hadn’t. You’d think she was her little sister with the drama she was concocting.
At home. Emma wished she could call Suzie herself. To question her. She’d been able to get through to Suzie four years before, when most people had failed, but didn’t know that the woman would trust her again. Suspected Suzie wouldn’t and didn’t blame her, since Bill Heber had gone to jail for another unrelated incident, instead of for the murder of their child.
Hoping that Jayden would call yet that night with Bill Heber’s location statistics, she set to work on the Luke Lincoln case. The man’s arraignment was the next day and Emma had to make certain that he went straight back to prison for parole violation. Any other charges she might file, like illegal possession of a weapon, could come in the next few days.
By ten o’clock, there’d still been no call from Jayden. Her sister had called from Florida, worried that their father might be having heart problems, talking about the pressure it put on her, to carry the burden of their parents aging all alone. She called her mother, immediately, to find that her father had had heartburn after a Mexican dinner two nights before and was as healthy as could be.
She took a shower, standing there until the water ran cold, and then, in a short robe and bare feet, headed out to the small walled-in pool in her backyard. Not to swim. She just liked sitting out there at night, with the pool lights on, listening to the quiet. Her home was in a gated community. She felt safe. And yet...yearned for air.
She’d had a message from her doctor that afternoon, wanting to know if she was ready to schedule another insemination. She was physically ready. But hadn’t called back.
Probably a good thing, since she’d practically made an agreement to have sex with a hot probation officer. Her life plans, her baby plans, weren’t changing at all. But it might be best to get her little “thing” with Jayden out of her system before having a baby planted inside her.
She didn’t want to wait long, though. She was already thirty-two. And it might take a year for her to get pregnant.
Yes, it was all very practical, she thought as she sipped from the half glass of wine she’d poured on her way outside.
Sure, she was curious about the circumstances that had led Jayden Powell to believe that he’d stolen his happiness from another, but she didn’t need the details. The man was owning whatever mistakes he’d made. That was all she needed to know. It wasn’t like they were entering a relationship. There’d be respect, tenderness, absolutely, but they weren’t about warm fuzzies.
Leaving her wineglass next to her phone on the table between two loungers, she crossed the cool decking to retrieve the pool cleaner and skimmed the top of the water. There wasn’t much to collect. A small bug or two, a wayward leaf from a bougainvillea plant close by. The pool’s automatic vacuum system took care of much of the cleaning.
She liked to skim, though. Spent a lot of hours at the pool in the dark, slowly clearing the top of the water while she worked through prosecutorial strategies in her mind.
Maybe she should go see her parents. A two-day dose of her sister would be enough to take away any immediate loneliness she might be feeling. Loneliness that could make her more susceptible to Jayden Powell. And in the meantime, spending time with her folks, assuring herself they were as healthy as Mom had assured her they were, and seeing her nieces, too, would fill up her emotional well. Children had always done that for her, even Anna, before she’d been spoiled to the point of rottenness. Yeah, a dose of those two sweet girls would ease a bit of the sting of waiting for her own baby.
She’d check flights. As soon as she had a break in her caseload that would let her get away. And after she’d been successfully inseminated. It would be good, to tell them, in person, that she was pregnant.
Yeah, it was a plan. A good plan.
The pool was clean, and the probation officer still had not called.
In fact, he didn’t call until just before midnight. She’d given up and gone to bed, had been lying there playing a puzzle game on her phone, hoping to relax enough to fall asleep, when the thing rang.
Just before she’d reached the top of a mountain, too. She’d been about to win a big prize—in the form of extra game tools—and there was Jayden’s name, interrupting her moment.
“Hello?” she answered, wishing her increased heart rate was due to not being able to claim her rewards but knowing it was not.
“Is this too late? You said you worked late every night, and since we seem to have similar work habits, I thought you’d be waiting to hear what I found on the app.”
“I was waiting, yes, and I was still up.” Sitting up in bed. With only a short, spaghetti-strap nightshirt on. Without panties. Her secret. A concession to Ms. Shadow, who’d announced several years before that she preferred to sleep in the nude. Emma insisted on a nightshirt. The lack of panties was a compromise.
“I’m just on my way home now, calling to let you know that while I’ll get to it when I get home, I’ll call you in the morning. It’s been a long night.”
“Is everything okay or should I be expecting another case file on my desk in the morning?” She was half teasing. Obviously he wasn’t going to send every one of his cases her way.
“He didn’t break parole, he broke his leg, among other things,” Jayden said, sounding tired.
She figured it might be nice for him to have someone waiting up for him at home with a cold beer, or a glass of wine, and a few minutes to sit with him before he tended to more work. Someone who’d understand that, though it was late, he still had work to do. Someone who’d support him in that endeavor.
Not her. At all. Just someone. He was a nice guy.
“He was in a car accident on the way to work,” Jayden was saying while she reeled her mind back into appropriate spaces. “He took a shortcut on a country road that cuts through some groves, was thrown from the car and then hobbled and dragged himself, thinking he was heading back to the road, but ended up being farther into the groves.”
“Oh my God. That’s horrible.” She was there in her mind. Lying in pain with no way to call for help. “Is he going to be all right?”
“Yeah. I waited with his wife until he was out of surgery and the doctor came out to talk to her. They expect a full recovery.”
“And was there alcohol in his system?” She knew Jayden would have waited to hear about the toxicology report.
“Nope. The report was clean.” He sounded pleased, as he would be.
She was pleased, too, to know that they were on the same wavelength. “How did they find him?” she asked.
“He’d agreed to be on my location app, so we found his car almost right away. His phone was in the car, in a holder, with the GPS still on. It took us a while to find him in the dark, in what was really more woods than anything.”
He’d had one hell of a long day. “You need to get some rest,” she told him. “Bill Heber’s information can wait until morning. It’s not like we’re going to be able to do anything with it until then. And you can see that he’s where he should be, right?”
“I check every hour.”
“Except when you’re asleep, I hope.”
“I’ve got an alarm set up to let me know if there’s movement outside of a perimeter. It tells me anytime he travels enough miles in any direction to get within five miles of Suzie’s home.”
Emma’d known she could rely on him. She’d just had no idea quite how good he was.
The thought made her squirm a little bit in her bed as her shadow side suddenly tried to engage a takeover—imagining his enriched performance in much more personal endeavors.
“I’ll get to it yet tonight,” he said. “I have a full day tomorrow. So I should get off of here.”
For a split second she thought about telling him she thought she’d been followed on the way back from Suzie’s that night, but didn’t want to lose his respect by making issues where there were none. The truck had disappeared from behind her long before she’d made it home. And she’d had no legitimate business driving by the woman’s house in any case.
“Right. Okay. Thanks for calling...”
“I’ve been thinking about you on and off all night,” he suddenly admitted.
That wasn’t good. She was smiling anyway. Because she’d been thinking of him, too.
“I’ve been thinking about what we talked about at dinner,” he continued, sounding hesitant, and her spirits dropped several notches.
She pulled her nightshirt, which was already covering her crotch, down even farther, yanking her bedsheet up to her neck.
“Thinking what?” she asked. There weren’t going to be any complications, either way.
“That even though we’re not starting anything, relationship-wise, my goal is to make you feel good. If ever there’s a time when that stops, this stops.”
Heart pounding, grinning, her body on fire, Emma sat there for a second, having a hard time believing she’d actually met someone so much like her. Even stranger was that she’d known him peripherally for a while and hadn’t known this about him.
“That works both ways,” she said. “If I’m not making you feel good, it stops.”
“Agreed.”
“Okay, good.”
So when were they going to do it? Part of her was dying to know. Pushing her to ask him to stop by right then.
But Emma knew better. She told him good-night. Hung up. And left the rest just hanging there.
Anticipation, the buildup to release, the tease, would make it all that much better when it finally happened.
And it was going to happen.
Finally, something she and Ms. Shadow could agree upon.