Her Second-Chance Man

Jessica felt a terrible stab of tenderness for him. He was trying so hard.

A shiver went up and down her spine, but she shied away from the thought that followed it. No, she owed him nothing. For the child and the dog she would do her best.

But Brian Kemp? Healing him was way out of her league.

Still, what could it hurt to offer an opinion?

“I just feel,” Jessica said, choosing her words carefully, “you would make more headway with Michelle if you were able to tell her the truth.”

“About?”

“The way you feel about her. Instead of grilling her friends and looking at her pupils with a flashlight you need to tell her you love her more than the earth, and that you’re worried about her.”

He actually flushed, a lovely shade of crimson that moved up his neck. “If I told Michelle that, she’d tell me to take a leap. And then she’d go dye her hair green and say, ‘Do you still love me now?’”

“And wouldn’t you say yes?”

“No. Okay. Maybe.”

“Let her know you love her.”

“She’ll use it against me.”

“You look like a big, strong guy. You can probably handle it,” Jessica said dryly.

“You know, the truth is not always the best policy. For instance, when you do an interrogation, you always tell the bad guy that his friend spilled the beans, so he might as well give. It’s generally a bald-faced lie, but sometimes it works. So, it’s a lie but it accomplishes something good.”

“Well, yes, maybe on the bad guys, which your niece isn’t.”

“She seems to think I am! You haven’t been living with us for the last six months. She doesn’t like me much.”

Jessica reminded herself, firmly, that his healing was not her business. On the other hand, there would be places, and probably many of them, where his healing and Michelle’s would be interwoven like threads in a tapestry.

“Look what happened the last time she loved,” Jessica reminded him softly. “They died.”

“Are you telling me she’s scared of caring about me?” he asked, incredulous.

“Yes.”

“She sure as hell doesn’t act scared. What makes you think she’s scared?”

Because I loved once, too. Oh, yes, it was a teenage love, more a fantasy than a reality, but that hurt made me afraid to give my heart again, too. How much worse must it be for Michelle?

“Good old hocus-pocus,” she lied.

Chapter Three

It had been a hell of a night, Brian thought wearily as he drove home after his shift. A pair of drunks had taken him on, split his lip and given him a pretty good couple of punches to the ribs. The bruised flesh ached, and he was willing to bet it was ugly. Of course, after all the excitement, one of them could not resist puking in the back of his car.

After the paperwork, he’d gotten a break-and-enter call that had resulted in a foot chase. He’d run six city blocks, full out, until his heart felt like it was going to explode and his legs felt like they were turning to gelatin under a hot sun.

He’d gotten the perp, a young man at least half his age.

It was the kind of night that had once filled him with satisfaction—action-packed, a few bad guys off the streets, pitting his strength against all that was wrong out there and winning. But somehow, since the deaths of Kevin and Amanda, he questioned everything and nothing felt the same as it used to. He felt old. Last night after catching the young burglary suspect, all he could think was that he would have to spend the rest of his shift in a shirt encrusted with his own dried sweat.

The discontent had been there, vague and hovering around the edges of his mind. It had never been something strong enough for him to articulate. Until yesterday, blabbing his fool head off to Jessica about picking up drunks and driving around in a car that smelled like puke.

“Don’t forget sweat,” he muttered. “Maybe next time I see her.”

To add to his general sense of discomfort, he had not seemed to be able to shake Jessica’s words: just tell her you love her more than the earth.

It was that New Age sensitivity gibberish, of course, the type of thing he was terrible at and detested. Besides, his attempts to win over females—any age, any interest group—had always been colossal failures, starting with his mother. Kevin had been the golden child, who met her every expectation, including his choice of a career as a lawyer.

Brian had never been anything his mother wanted him to be. She wanted children who were quiet, obedient and respectful; he’d been loud, independent and rebellious. His unfortunate memory of his mother was of her face sucked in with disapproval every time he entered the room. He’d gone on to earn that very same look from most of the women he’d ever been with.

And then there had been the brief engagement to his high school sweetheart, Lucinda, but her reaction to his career as a cop had been identical to his mother’s. Horror. Lucinda Potter was not marrying a cop.

And Michelle, after meeting the only woman he’d brought home since she’d moved in, a gorgeous blond personal fitness trainer, had rolled her eyes, and said, “Where on earth do you find someone like that?” He resented her insinuation that his failure in the companionship department might have something to do with his selection process. Anyway, that was the last time he’d been out. Four months ago now.

He’d decided women just didn’t get it, or he didn’t get them. You didn’t decide a chat about the state of the relationship was imperative during the Super Bowl. You didn’t tell a man you thought he should trade in a truck—one that had been faithful to him for more than a decade—for a brand-new car with a name he couldn’t pronounce. Personally, if Brian never heard one more word about a broken fingernail or split ends, it wouldn’t be soon enough.

But Brian had looked at Jessica’s fingernails yesterday, on his way to looking for the wedding band or lack thereof, and she hadn’t had any fingernails to speak of, broken or otherwise. And her hair had surely been too short to be split.

There was something about her eyes, a calmness that invited confidences, that made a man feel as if she could solve the mysteries of a restless heart.

“My heart is not restless,” he said, and snorted with derision, just to prove it.

But when he pulled up in front of his house, moments later, it mirrored the way he felt. Empty. His house looked unlived in and uninviting.

It was a modest two-bedroom, stucco bungalow in a newer subdivision of Esquimalt. He kept the lawn mowed and the newspapers picked up, but this morning the house looked cold. He realized, embarrassed by such an unmanly thought, that it would be improved with some flowers, a little landscaping.

Some of the neighbors had landscaped with twig trees surrounded by tiny shrubs.

He realized he yearned for something more flamboyant. Flowers mixed with grass falling all over each other. Since the look would be totally out of place in his well-ordered neighborhood, he supposed that was about her, too.

How could one visit have left him feeling so unsettled? As if he was suddenly seeing his life through Jessica’s eyes?

There was an easy solution to that. Don’t see her again. After all, it had worked last time. But even thinking that felt like a cheap shot.

He went around the side walk and in the back door. He had become accustomed to sharing mornings with Michelle as she got ready for school. She was perpetually grumpy, but better company than no one. More recently, the puppy had added some liveliness to the morning routine, particularly if somebody stepped in some pee.

He took off his boots, went up the four steps into his kitchen, and looked at his surroundings as if he was seeing them for the first time. The room was not messy, because he always shoved the dishes in the oven until he ran out, but it seemed suddenly lacking in any kind of personality.

Jessica’s kitchen had not exactly been tidy. Why had it felt like it was brimming over with warmth and liveliness?

He had a plain, wooden kitchen set, its lines straight and clean and modern—Danish it was called. The fridge and stove gleamed white, and there were European-style cabinets as white as the fridge and stove. Venetian blinds, closed, covered the window over the sink. Now that it had been pointed out to him he found the odd little finger smudge, but it was still a nice room. Efficient. Roomy. Bright. But it needed something.

“Yeah,” he said sarcastically, “like plants hanging from the ceiling and hundred-year-old chairs painted red and yellow.”