The Once and Future Father

She was trying very hard not to let her emotions break through. Inside, it felt as if she had a pressure cooker on, full of steam, ready to explode. Digging her fingers into his arm, she turned around to face the long trip back to her room.

The pace was getting to him. He’d never been one to hurry things along normally, but there was nothing normal about this. “Why don’t I just carry you back? It’d save time.”

Lucy blocked his hand as he moved to pick her up. “No,” she snapped. “I can do this.”

She didn’t want him holding her. Not if she could avoid it. If he held her now, she would lose her strength and just dissolve against him, sobbing her heart out. She’d encountered enough setbacks in her life today as it was. She wasn’t about to set herself up for more.

Annoyance at her stubbornness warred with a grudging admiration for her grit. Dylan managed to curb his impatience until they’d returned to the door of her room. But once he opened it, he swept her up into his arms and carried her the rest of the way.

“What are you doing?” She was almost too exhausted to offer a protest.

“Cutting about forty minutes off the trip back to your bed.” Dylan caught himself thinking she still felt as if she weighed next to nothing.

He had her back in her bed in little more than four quick strides.

“Everything all right in here?”

Turning around, Dylan saw a nurse with salt-and-pepper hair in the doorway, peering into the room. She looked from him to Lucy.

“Fine,” Lucy assured her. “I just got a little tired. It was my first time out of bed.”

The nurse nodded knowingly. “Shouldn’t try to do too much first time up.” And then she smiled, her eyes washing over Dylan before they came to rest on Lucy. “A lady could do worse than have a handsome man carry her around.”

With a wink aimed at Lucy, she left, closing the door behind her.

Dylan moved back from her bed as she slowly toed off the slippers from her feet one at a time. The effort almost drained the remainder of her energy. She moved her legs under the covers, relieved to be lying down again.

With a sigh, she looked up at him. “Do you think you’ll catch whoever killed Ritchie?”

He didn’t answer her directly. “It’s not my case.”

She didn’t understand. “Then why…?”

He was asking himself the same thing. “I thought it might be easier on you, hearing the news from me.” Dylan shrugged carelessly. “Obviously I miscalculated. I hadn’t figured on you being pregnant.”

The coldness in his voice sliced through her. Defenses locked into place. “We can’t always factor in everything. So, who is handling Ritchie’s case? Do they have any leads?”

“Detectives Alexander and Hathaway, and they’re not even sure where he was killed, yet. There was no blood at the crime scene, so he was moved.” He went with the obvious first. “You said Ritchie was working. Where?”

“At a restaurant. He’s a—was a waiter.” Her mouth curved slightly. “He said they call them servers now.”

Yeah, they did. Another attempt at depersonalizing everything, Dylan thought. He would have said it was a good thing, but there were times he wasn’t sure. Being anesthetized was close to being dead, and he’d felt dead for a long time.

Except for the time he’d spent with Lucy.

But all that was over now. He’d made his peace with the fact. He just had to remember that, that’s all.

“Do you know where Ritchie worked?”

She nodded. “It’s called Den of Thieves.” He was staring at her. His face was impassive, but she could see that she had caught him by surprise. She wanted to know why. “What?”

It was a hell of a coincidence. “Are you sure that’s where he worked?”

Why did he doubt her? “Yes, I’m sure. A friend of his got the job for him.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know, Ritchie didn’t give me a name. Just someone he knew.” She should have pressed harder for an answer. She should have done so many things differently. Her eyes met Dylan’s. “Someone he said owed him a favor and this was his way of paying him back.” And then she remembered something. “I don’t know if this means anything or not—”

His eyes pinned her down, the detective in him coming out despite efforts to the contrary. “Let me be the one to decide.”

She tried to get the words just right. “A couple of days ago, Ritchie told me he was on to something. Something that would put us in the money and on the right side of things for a long time to come.” Taking a dim view of his schemes, she’d told him to forget about it then. But Ritchie had been too stubborn to listen.

“Did he say what?” Dylan asked.

She shook her head. “You know Ritchie, he gets—got—excited over things.” It was so hard to think of him in the past tense. She wasn’t sure just how she could bear it. “But he always played them close to his chest if they weren’t completely aboveboard. He said there was no reason for me to know, too. That’s what made me think it was dangerous.” She bit her lip, taking a deep breath. It didn’t ease the ache in her chest, or the one in her throat. “I told him that I didn’t want him doing anything illegal and he said he wasn’t the one standing on the wrong side of the law.” Despite her best efforts, a tear spilled out, followed by another. She brushed them away with the back of her hand. “That’s what got him killed, wasn’t it?”

He curbed the desire to wipe away her tears. The word no hovered on his lips, but he tried to avoid lies whenever possible. The only lie he’d ever told Lucy was that he didn’t love her.

“Possibly.”

He was going to have to get back to Alexander and Hathaway on this. As well as Watley. Den of Thieves was suddenly one man short. The task force could use this information to their advantage. Could plant one of their own men inside.

The fact that he was using this tragedy as a tool to further the investigation disgusted him, but he knew that ignoring it couldn’t help Ritchie now. And there was far more at stake here than just a dead man’s sister’s feelings and his own personal code of ethics. Other people’s lives were involved. Innocent people.

“What exactly did Ritchie say to you?” He saw that she didn’t understand where he was going with this. “Did he physically have something, some kind of evidence that he was going to blackmail someone with?”

Things began to crystallize in Dylan’s mind. A few weeks ago, the accountant for Den of Thieves, Michelson, had approached the local D.A., saying that the restaurant was a front for money laundering. But the man had vanished without a trace before any sort of case could be made. If for some reason the person Ritchie was looking to blackmail was Alfred Palmero, the owner of the restaurant, it would go a long way toward explaining things.

Lucy shook her head, frustrated. “I don’t know. He wasn’t specific.”

Dylan wondered how much he could tell Lucy about this, then decided that for her own protection, and that of the child she’d just given birth to, she needed to know at least some of it.

Because he knew he had a tendency to be far too blunt, Dylan tried to pick his words more carefully this time. “If he was looking to blackmail his boss, Alfred Palmero, your brother made the mistake of getting in over his head.”

“Your brother,” she echoed, looking at Dylan with disbelief. Could he really be that cold? Of course he could. Why did the fact keep surprising her? “You make it sound as if you didn’t know him.”

Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. “Lucy, I was just—”

But she was tired and angry and more than a little fed up. With him, with everything. All the hurt she felt finally made her temper snap.

“Keeping your distance, yes, I know. The way you do with everything. With me, with him, with life. You’re very good at that. Keeping your distance. Protecting yourself at all costs.” She was through crying over him. “Look, I don’t need you coming into my life right now, disrupting everything. Thank you very much for coming by, for helping me, but I’d really just rather not see you again, all right?”

Dylan felt his own temper fraying. But he knew she had a right to what she was saying. “Sure, fine. I understand.”

The thing of it was, he thought as he walked out, that he did understand. He would have probably played it the same way she had and for the same reason. For self-preservation.

But he still couldn’t shake the image of Lucy’s expression from his mind.