Safe in His Arms

“Look, I’m already here, so you might as well put me to work. I could hang out with Emma while you’re finishing dinner. You said it’s a hectic time of day, so …” He glanced around the chaos in her kitchen. “And, besides, Emma is already setting up dolls in the living room. Do you want to be the one to tell her I can’t stay to play?”

Lindsay caught sight of her saucepan in her side vision. Steam was seeping from under the lid where the asparagus had to be overcooked. The head of cabbage lay on the cutting board where she’d abandoned it.

“Fine,” she said, blowing out a frustrated sigh. “You can stay. But this is my house and my rules, and I—” She stopped, wincing. “Did I really just say that?”

“From your parents?”

“My dad.”

“My brother tells me that, as a parent, you say every one of those things you promised yourself you’ll never say to your own kids.”

In a roundabout way, he’d just called her a parent. During all of the discussions with her mother and father and even with Delia’s attorney, no one had called Lindsay a “parent.” She liked the way that sounded.

“So …?” Joe gestured toward the living room with a flick of his thumb.

“Go ahead. Just play with Emma until I can get food on the table.”

Farther down the hall, he turned back. “I’ll be sure to follow your rules. In your house.” With a grin, he was off and around the corner to the living room.

Emma must have been hiding because giggles drifted down the hall. Lindsay could tell the exact moment when Joe found her hiding place as those giggles multiplied. Joe really was amazing with her niece. Fun but firm. Playful but not a pushover. Maybe he could teach her a few things about working with children.

No matter what it took for her to become the best caregiver for Emma, the kind that Delia had hoped for when she’d named her guardian, Lindsay was willing to do it. And if that meant taking unsolicited advice from a Michigan State Trooper, then she would do that, too.

“You could stay for dinner,” she heard herself saying.

Joe popped around the corner with Emma hanging on his leg. “Sure, I’d love to stay. Thanks.”

Lindsay nodded. He’d won. She should have been frustrated that he’d gotten his way, after all. But she was relieved that Trooper Joe Rossetti wasn’t leaving, and she couldn’t explain why.

Yet, relief wasn’t the worst of what she was feeling. Her sweaty palms and the butterflies in her belly felt an awful lot like anticipation. Was she really looking forward to sharing dinner with the guy who reminded her of everything she’d lost and whose presence there today was like a neon sign announcing her weaknesses as a guardian? Even telling herself that he was there on her terms, not his, didn’t make her feel any less edgy. Anticipation … now, that worried her most of all.

Chapter Four

“That was great,” Joe said, as he pushed back from Lindsay’s blond-wood dinette table and wiped his mouth on a cloth napkin.

A pretty pink blush crept across Lindsay’s cheeks, and she stared down at her plate. “No, it wasn’t. The salmon was overdone, and the asparagus was as limp as pasta noodles.”

“I happen to like pasta noodles, even when they’re well past al dente.” He also liked the little smile that spread on her lips over the compliment and how pretty she looked in her T-shirt, cutoffs and ponytail, but he kept those things to himself. No need to ruin a pleasant dinner by getting himself tossed out on his ear.

“Then you should have loved that stuff.”

“It was fish.” Emma’s tone left little doubt about what she thought about fruits of the sea.

Joe and Lindsay looked at each other across the table and laughed. They’d done an awful lot of laughing over this dinner, which had started out tense at best. Mostly, they’d laughed about the antics of the three-year-old who sat in a booster seat so high that her knees bumped the table edge. Occasionally, though, they’d found something funny that one of the adults had said, as well.

“I guess that says it all when you’re three,” Joe said when the laughter died down.

“I should have known better than to cook fish for a child, anyway,” Lindsay said with a frown.

“Some kids like fish,” he said because she seemed to need some kind words.

“I don’t like it.” Emma made another face.

“Not that one, apparently.” Lindsay tilted her head to indicate the child who’d eaten only enough to survive, mostly pushing her food around on her plate to create little pink-and-green piles.

Not most of the kids he’d ever met, either, but Joe didn’t mention that. And asparagus was seldom a hit with the under-ten crowd. He kept that to himself, as well.

After Lindsay sent Emma upstairs to get her pajamas ready for her bath, she started stacking the dishes. “Dinner’s a daily battle around here.”

Joe carried several plates to the counter. “Have you ever considered making ‘kid-friendly’ meals like pizza, chicken fingers and mac and cheese?”

He was glad she hadn’t lifted her stack of serving dishes because as aghast as she looked, she would have dropped the whole thing on the floor.

“I don’t want to feed her that stuff. What kind of guardian would I—”

She stopped herself, but he got the gist of what she was saying. “Plenty of people give their children kid food. Do you think they’re all bad parents?”

“Of course not, but I …” She let her words trail away and shrugged.

“You’re awfully hard on yourself, aren’t you? My brother and I survived for a whole year on grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup after—well, we survived, anyway.”

Lindsay turned back from the dishwasher with curiosity in her eyes. “Why did you—”

“Never mind. It’s not that interesting a story.” He was sorry he’d mentioned it. Since when did he talk about his mother’s death and the lost years that had followed it? Rather than stand back and give Lindsay the chance to ask more questions, he helped her load the dishwasher.

“All I’m saying is, you should relax and give yourself a break. It’s okay for kids to have those things sometimes. It’s all about balance.”

He thought he’d been convincing, but Lindsay only started shaking her head.

“I have to get this right. To be the best guardian for Emma. I have to do it for her … and for Delia.” Immediately, her eyes filled, but Lindsay blinked back her tears. “I will get it right.”

“And I thought you were just worried about some deep-fried balls of processed chicken and globs of high-fat cheese mixed in with carbohydrate-filled pasta noodles.”

It wasn’t the best timing for a joke, but Joe either had to tell one or allow the emotion clogging his throat to really embarrass him. This all hit a little too close to home, to two little boys and the father who’d been forced to raise them alone.

“I was worried about those things, too.”

He couldn’t decide whether it was her smile or her determination that dazzled him, but he heard himself saying, “You’ll get it right. I know it.”

Lindsay stared back at him with wide eyes. Why did she find his statement of belief in her so surprising? He’d already said too much, yet he was tempted to say more, to tell her how impressed he was by her determination and her loyalty. That he’d thought those qualities were exclusive to people in uniform, not pretty redheads with the cutest freckles on their noses.

Okay, he wouldn’t have said that, but still he was grateful when the sound of a faucet from upstairs made sure he wouldn’t have the chance. A literal gift from above.

“Uh-oh.” Lindsay glanced up to the ceiling before starting for the stairs. “Emma, honey, please turn off the water until I get there.”

She seemed surprised when the faucet squeaked off again, as if she hadn’t expected the child to obey her.

“Well, I’d better get up there before she goes tub diving.” She started out of the kitchen, but then stopped and turned back to him. “Do you want to—”