Protecting the Pregnant Witness

She was snuggled up against his side in the truck now, her rumpled clothes refastened, her breathing slow and even. When he felt her stirring, he leaned over and pressed a kiss to the crown of her dark sable hair. When she tilted her chin and smiled at him, he knew what he was feeling.

Guilt.

He’d taken slaps across the face and a belt across his backside that didn’t hurt as bad as this. He’d betrayed a friend tonight. Two of them. On the day Aaron had died, he’d made him a promise. Visiting his son in jail and boinking his daughter weren’t exactly how he’d intended to honor Aaron’s memory.

Some damn fine protector he turned out to be.

Josie’s soft smile turned into a quizzical frown. “What are you thinking about?”

“Your dad.” He shifted a little space between them, so that his thigh was no longer touching the tempting warmth of hers. “This wasn’t my finest moment. I took advantage of that big heart of yours. I needed…” His deep sigh of remorse echoed in the truck. “I just needed.”

“You needed to connect with someone who cared. Someone who would listen and let you feel what you needed to.” She zipped her jacket and folded her arms across her middle. Was she cold? Rafe slid over to the steering wheel and pulled out his keys to start the truck and turn on the heater.

“Yeah, well, I should have stopped at talking.”

“Not your strong suit,” she teased. “You’ve always been a more physical being.”

“I told Aaron I would always take care of you. Tonight, I just used you.”

“That’s insulting.”

“Josie.”

“Hey, I’m not a naive girl anymore. You’re not my first, Rafe, so I knew what I was doing. It’s not like you forced me.”

“Damn close.”

He found her crystal-blue eyes across the cab, saw them blanch wide and then darken. She turned in her seat, twisting the argument back on him. “You would have stopped if I’d asked. But I didn’t want you to stop. Sometimes a relationship works that way. One partner needs more than the other at a given time. It’s a mutual give and take.”

“We don’t have a relationship like that.”

“Would that be such a bad thing?”

Oh, yeah. He was not relationship material. Definitely not with his former partner’s daughter. After tonight, he might not even be friend material. “My emotions were out of control. That was a mistake.”

She sat up ramrod straight, her Irish temper coloring her cheeks. “Making love was a mistake? Or feeling something was a mistake?”

Making love? She thought that wham-bam, thank-you, ma’am, was how it was supposed to be between a man and a woman? Just what kind of jerks had she been dating, who hadn’t shown her how good it could be if a man took his time and… Ah, hell. Put on the brakes. Don’t go there.

He squeezed his hands around the steering wheel. “I’m sorry, Jose. I made a promise to your dad to take care of you. I’m sorry.”

“Stop apologizing. I always figured it would be intense with you. That’s kind of exciting. And you know I…care about you.”

And he cared about her. But he couldn’t keep trouble away or screen those jerks or even make sure she got safely to her car when she worked too late if his senses were blurred by his emotions and his focus was distracted by long legs and lush lips and that gorgeous fall of dark hair. He could hardly do right by her if he was the trouble. “Look, I already failed Patrick. I couldn’t keep him off drugs and out of jail. I don’t want to mess up what we have.”

“Rafe, what about what I want?”

He opened his door and stepped out into the night. The bracing air filled his lungs and cleared his head of her lingering scent. “You’ve got class in the morning and you need to get home. I need to get back to the precinct garage and get the SWAT van cleaned up and refitted for our next call.”

She grabbed her backpack and climbed out her side of the truck. “You have to do that tonight?”

Oh, yeah. He needed to get his hands busy doing something besides itching to reach for Josie again. He needed to busy his mind with a task where he didn’t have to second-guess his every move. “I’m a jerk, okay?”

“Please stop. It hurts me to hear you talk like this.”

“I never wanted to hurt you. I don’t want things to change between us. I want you to be able to trust me. I need you to trust me. Nothing like that will ever happen again. I promise.” After she unlocked her car, he opened the door for her and waited while she slid behind the wheel. Man, he wished she’d let him pick out something more reliable than this rattletrap for her. At least she let him change the oil and keep the motor tuned up and running as well as a beater car like this one could. “Go on, I’ll wait to make sure your car starts. I’ll see you next time you work at the Shamrock.”

She turned the key. Once the engine growled to life, he started to leave. But Josie put out her arm to keep him from shutting the door. “Just for the record? You weren’t a jerk for making love to me. Now you’re being a jerk.”

Of that he had no doubt.

He jumped back as she slammed the door, knowing he deserved worse. Once inside his truck, he followed her out of the parking lot but turned in the opposite direction toward his condo. He’d better be keeping a lot more than a few miles of physical distance between them. What the hell was he thinking? That was the problem—he hadn’t been thinking.

Josie’s skin was cool and pale in the frosty moonlight. Her touch was so gentle, so certain. He’d gotten more drunk on her lips than the beer she’d served him earlier that night. And her body—her tall, lithe, sweet body with those long legs snugged around him…

“Damn.” He was breaking out in a sweat that had nothing to do with the heater in his truck.

Josephine Erin Nichols was his friend. His unofficial ward. His penance for letting his friend and mentor die ten years ago.

She was pretty and kind and sexy and funny, and strictly off-limits. And yet, for several mindless minutes tonight, she’d been everything he needed. Exactly what he needed.

He’d been a rutting bull who’d taken advantage of her friendship and compassionate nature. Hell, he’d barely gotten a condom on and hadn’t even asked if she was on the pill. In his saner days before this one, he hadn’t wanted to know if his sweet, hardworking buddy was sleeping with anyone. She was either working one of several part-time jobs, studying or going to school, so he knew she didn’t have much time to date. He hadn’t even had the presence of mind to make sure that she’d found the completion he had.

He was a jerk. A lonesome, selfish, let-friends-and-children-die-on-his-watch jerk. He’d been on his own since high school for a reason. And it wasn’t just because he’d severed all ties with his worthless parents. He’d become obsessed with his job and the sweetheart he’d been engaged to had left him. He was alone because he couldn’t make a relationship with a woman work.

But he could find solace in her beautiful, willing body.

Rafe picked up speed and merged into the late-night traffic that was mostly big rigs at this time of night on Interstate 435, and waited for the lightning bolt of her late father’s spirit, or his own troubled conscience, to strike him dead.

Chapter Two

The Present

“You didn’t bring me any cigarettes?”

Josie Nichols let the accusation in her half brother Patrick’s tone sink in and curdle with the nausea already rolling in her stomach. “By the end of this summer, I’ll be a registered nurse, and I’m not going to support such an unhealthy, expensive habit. Anyway, you promised me you were quitting.”

“That was last month.” Patrick leaned back from the plastic table in the KCPD detention center where she’d come to visit him between classes at UMKC and her nightly shift at the Shamrock Bar. His blue eyes narrowed as he brushed his dark hair off his forehead. Their black-Irish looks were about the only thing she had in common with what was left of her so-called family. “I’ve got pressures in here that keep me on edge, and a couple of smokes could go a long way toward making me feel better. Besides, they’re like cash in here.”

Josie slipped her hand below the tabletop, gently rubbing at the small bump on her belly, trying to coax some cooperation from her stomach. “What do you need to buy in jail?”

“Protection. Weed. Private time in the shower.” He leaned forward again, propping his elbows on the table. She noticed the sinuous lines of a snake circling his forearm. Great. He’d given himself another tattoo. Sanitary considerations aside, their father would be so proud. Not.

“Are you in some kind of trouble?”

He paused for a moment, blinked, then sat back, silencing whatever he’d been about to share. “No more than usual. You bring me cigarettes next time you come.”

Although her regular bouts of morning sickness had passed, long times between snacks and stress like this visit could easily trigger that unsettled feeling. Josie hadn’t told Patrick about the baby. She hadn’t told anyone beyond their Uncle Robbie—who’d found her in the Shamrock’s restroom kneeling over the toilet two afternoons in a row, and said he recognized the signs from his own dear late Maureen—and the nurse practitioner-midwife who was taking care of her. The midwife was paid to be discreet, and no one kept a secret better than Robbie, even though he’d pestered her time and again to give him the father’s name so he could “set the ruddy bastard straight.”