Their Baby Bond

He couldn’t remember when a woman had ever made him feel so turned inside out.

Using the key Tori had supplied, he opened her front door. When he called her name, she didn’t reply.

Returning to his truck, he took his toolbox out of the back and carried it into the house. He’d set up the saw on the patio. First he’d work on the closet in the baby’s room, building and fitting shelves, attaching a low bar that a child could eventually reach. When he’d discussed prefabricated closet organizers with Tori, she’d wanted this done the old-fashioned way. He didn’t blame her. The fixtures would be sturdier and last a lot longer. Hopefully he’d finish the closet today and could begin the patch plastering. This job could go into next week when all was said and done.

He was headed down the hall to the baby’s room when the bathroom door suddenly opened. Tori stood there with one pink towel wrapped around her head and another fetchingly tucked in at her breasts. The sight of her long, graceful legs made him forget all sense of propriety.

He swore just as she gasped, “Jake!”

“I rang the bell,” he managed to say in a low, accusing tone, controlled with a great deal of effort.

“I must have been in the shower. I overslept this morning and I’m running late. I thought I could get dressed before you arrived.”

“It’s after eight.” He couldn’t take his eyes off her. She was clutching both the towel at her breasts and the one enfolding her hair as if her life depended on holding them in place. Almost mechanically he offered, “If I’m going to be in your way, I can start out on the patio.”

“No. You won’t be in my way. But I…” Her face was red, and turning redder. “Could you…could you just turn your back until I get into the bedroom? I’m afraid something’s going to give way…”

He realized he was waiting for exactly that. If the towel slipped… He kicked himself for being a boor. “Sure.” He swiftly turned and faced the living room. “I didn’t mean to barge in on you like this.”

“No problem,” she said a bit breathlessly as she scurried down the hall to her room. “It’s my fault for not setting my alarm last night. I was writing in my journal until late and I fell asleep.”

As he glanced over his shoulder, he saw she was hidden behind her bedroom door now. Only her head and one shoulder peeked out. The turban had apparently come loose because she swiped that towel away. Her wet hair framed her face. She looked vulnerable, younger than the thirty he knew she was and tempting enough to kiss.

Concentrating on her words rather than his last thought, he said, “Someone once suggested I do that. Keep a journal. But I couldn’t see the point.” Before he’d decided to take a leave of absence from the police department, he’d had sessions with one of the psychologists.

“Oh, there is a point to keeping a journal. It helps me sort things out. It helps me articulate thoughts that haven’t completely formed yet. Putting them down on paper somehow releases them from my head and my heart.”

Although he knew he shouldn’t, he couldn’t help closing some of the space between them. “Maybe you just have a talent for it.”

She shook her head and her wet hair swung. “It doesn’t take talent. It just takes time and…honesty.”

That was the crux of the matter. Maybe he knew if he was completely honest with himself, he’d never recover from what had happened in Albuquerque.

As they gazed at each other, the space in the small hall seemed filled with sparks of electricity. He was much too conscious of what she wasn’t wearing, of the bed a few feet from her door. How did he get drawn into conversations with Tori that opened up places he wanted to keep closed?

With a great effort he decided that a lighter touch would be best. So he forced a smile. “I’d better get started or I’ll still be here when you get home for supper.”

Then he went into the baby’s room to examine the areas that needed to be plastered. Working with his hands would help him forget about a woman he was thinking entirely too much about touching.

Tori’s arms were full of packages when she returned home that evening. As she peeked into the nursery, she saw Jake sweeping debris into a corner. “I left work a little early. One of the department stores was having a terrific sale on baby clothes.”

All day she’d thought about Jake seeing her barely dressed, the look in his eyes when he had. Her gaze swept the room and the work he’d done. “It looks great. How soon can I paint?”

“I’ll finish the plastering tomorrow. You should give it at least ten days.”

“Barbara’s not due for three weeks. I might be able to get it painted and let it air out. I plan to keep the baby with me in my room for the first week, anyway.” She knew she was babbling, but she was still embarrassed about this morning, and talking kept her less aware of Jake.

“You might not get much sleep. Babies make all kinds of sounds,” he offered practically.

“I doubt if I’ll get much sleep, anyway. We’ll see.”

One of the bags in her arms started to slip, and she would have dropped everything if he hadn’t strode quickly toward her and taken a few of the bags. He smelled like man, and work, and stirred up sensations she’d kept a lid on for years. When he was this close, all she could think about was kissing him.

“Where do you want these?” he asked huskily.

Breaking eye contact, she went over to the closet, examining the prepainted shelves he’d installed and the bar securely fastened in the lower section. “We can put all the bags in there for now.”

She was stacking her purchases on the shelves when he approached with the ones he held. His arm brushed against hers. “I thought you’d be gone when I got home,” she murmured.

“It didn’t work out that way,” he said easily, though his eyes had gone almost black, and she glimpsed the fire and intensity there.

She knew both emanated from a place inside Jake that had led him into police work. Why was he working with tile, instead? She decided to go at the conversation sideways. “I guess you put in less hours now than you did on the police force.”

His expression became wary. “I suppose that’s true.”

“The night of the prom when I asked you why you were going into police work, you said you wanted to make the world a better place. Was that the only reason?”

As he thought about her question, she held her breath. She needed to know this piece of the puzzle.

Straightening the packages he’d set on the shelves, he finally answered her. “I became a cop because of my father.”

Tori hadn’t known anything about Nina’s family when she’d worked with her all those years ago. She’d met her mother once or twice, and back then Rita Galeno had seemed quiet and reserved, maybe even withdrawn. Much different from the way she’d been the other night. “Your father encouraged you?”

Jake gave a humorless, short laugh and turned away. “Not in the way you mean. He was an angry man—angry at the world for the hand it had dealt him. When he drank, the anger would come out. If a meal displeased him, if Nina and I made too much noise, he’d erupt like a volcano.”

“Did you know why he was angry?”

Leaving her standing at the closet, Jake once again picked up the broom. “Because of me. My mom was pregnant with me and they had to get married. I never saw one happy moment in their marriage. She never stood up to him, never wanted more than she had. I was about twelve when I asked her why she stayed. She was so matter-of-fact about it. She said Dad earned a good living, and she had no education and two children to raise. How could she make it on her own? I came to believe that my father didn’t want to be married or responsible for a family, and that’s what kept him short-tempered. My mother was always sad because she felt like a hostage.”

“So…why police work? To intervene in domestic disputes?”

This time Jake’s answer came more slowly. “I learned very young that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Whenever Dad was volatile, my tone of voice, the right words and a sympathetic ear could defuse his anger. When I joined the police force, I think I did it simply because I wanted to keep peace. Everything I’d learned with my father led me into hostage-negotiation work, and eventually I supervised and was a primary negotiator on the team.”

Supervisor of the negotiations team—the epitome of protection and responsibility. “Why did you leave?” she asked quietly.

He kept sweeping. “It doesn’t matter.”

She knew that wasn’t true. But it was obvious Jake was drawing a boundary between them, a boundary that now felt too restrictive.

“Jake…” she began.

Propping the broom against the wall, he approached her, his eyes dark and piercing. “Leave it alone, Tori.”

But she couldn’t. “Why?”

“Because my life cracked into a thousand pieces and I’m trying to glue it back together. It’s a solitary road.”

That was another piece of the puzzle she needed to understand him. “You’ve always chosen the solitary road, haven’t you.”