Sheriff’s Runaway Witness

passed him the formula bottle. A moment later, with a tiny pang that felt oddly like jealousy, she watched her son gulp greedily at the nipple, making the same squeaky sounds he always made when he nursed. His dark eyes were still fastened on J.J.’s face.

“Where’d you get so good at this?” she whispered.

J.J. didn’t answer right away. He’d noticed her legs were bare all the way up to the edge of his old “Life’s a Beach” sweatshirt. Bare, smooth, pale golden skin that looked silky soft to the touch…muscles firm and well- defined…reminded him of a dancer’s legs. It took some effort, but he managed to haul his attention away from the vision.

“My sister’s got three,” he said with a one-shouldered shrug, keeping his eyes on the baby where they belonged. “Last one came while her husband was in Afghanistan. I helped her out a time or two.” He paused, then glanced up to meet her eyes and said with an unexpected harshness in his voice, “Nobody should have to do this by themselves.”

“I didn’t plan to.” She looked away, and he could see her swallow-hard. “Nicky-” She stopped.

“Should have been here for you,” he finished for her. “Yeah, I know. Should be your husband sitting here right now, instead of me.”

She laughed, and he hadn’t expected that, either. He stared at her. “What’s funny about that?”

“It’s not-except…I can’t picture Nicholas doing…what you’re doing.” She paused, evidently thinking about it, and he could see she didn’t feel like laughing anymore. She hitched a shoulder. “He probably would have hired a nanny.”

J.J. snorted. “Hey, whatever works. I guess if you’ve got the money to hire help…”

She shook her head, and couldn’t seem to look at him. “He wouldn’t have wanted me to nurse, either.”

“You didn’t get a say in it?”

Looking at the floor, she said in a low voice, “It’s just that-” she caught a breath “-he would have wanted me all to himself.”

Nice guy, he thought, but said aloud, “Well, I guess he must have really loved you.”

She lifted her head and shot him a defiant look. But before she looked away again he saw a tear-track glimmer on her cheek.

“What, you don’t think he did?” She shook her head slightly, but didn’t reply. He waited.

After a moment, she drew a breath that seemed to steady her, and said in a low voice, “I thought he did- obviously. Or else, why would I have married him? But lately, I’ve been…wondering about that.”

“That being whether he loved you or why you married him?” It occurred to him that he was interrogating her, but either she hadn’t realized it yet, or didn’t mind.

“Both, actually. I thought he loved me…but now I think-I know he loved the way I looked-the way we looked together. He told me often enough-he thought I was beautiful.”

Suspense sizzled inside him and raced beneath his skin. Was this the moment? They were on the subject. He could easily steer the conversation to that last night she’d spent with her husband. So easily…

She drew another of those bolstering breaths. “Now, what I think is, he loved the idea of me, but I don’t think he ever really knew-never even saw the real me.”

The moment had passed…like a river flowing past his feet.

He smiled and said, “And…who is the real you?”

He saw her lips quiver with the hint of an answering smile. “Well…let’s just say…I’m no angel, okay?” She looked down, her face somber again. “I think the main thing is, I don’t look like who I really am. I think I look…you know, little, and, um…kind of sweet-” she coughed and colored a little “-but actually, I have a temper, and I’m a lot tougher, a lot stronger than I look.”

“I can testify to that,” J.J. said, flashing back to those incredible moments with her in the backseat of his patrol vehicle. “I’ve seen what you can do, remember?” He glanced down at the baby now sleeping in his arms, then back at Rachel, and knew that she, too, remembered. Remembered the intimacies that hadn’t bothered her at the time, but maybe were beginning to, judging from the way the pink in her cheeks was deepening.

The moment stretched while he tried his best to block those memories from his mind. Then he frowned, forced himself to concentrate on the present and said, “How do you know your husband wouldn’t have loved ‘the real you’? Did you ever let him see that side?”

She snorted softly. “I guess not.”

“Why?”

She paused, restless now, and he could see the question made her uncomfortable. In a muffled voice, not looking at him, she said, “I was afraid, I suppose. Afraid he wouldn’t want to marry me. Isn’t that stupid? That I really did want to marry him, so badly.”

“Which brings up the second question-why?”

Again, she didn’t answer right away, and he saw another tear run down her cheek. She brushed at it, sniffed and muttered, “Sorry. I don’t usually do this.”

“That’s okay,” he said gruffly. “Hormones. My sister was a mess for weeks.” He was rewarded with a small laugh.

She frowned at the moisture on her fingertips. “Yeah, well. This is very hard on my self-esteem, you know?” She took a breath, faced it head-on. “What I’ve been asking myself is, what kind of person does it make me, that I was so desperate to marry a man who was basically spoiled, selfish, immature and was probably going to make me miserable at some point in the future?”

J.J. just looked at her while he worked on getting his own emotions under control. Because inside him there was a guy doing the fist-pump and hissing, Yes! Which was hard to understand, since even if she was having doubts about whether she’d loved her husband and maybe wasn’t as deeply mired in grief as he’d thought, it didn’t change anything as far as those questions he needed to ask her went. Except as a potential eyewitness, she was still as far off-limits to him as ever, at least for the time being.

But…for the future? He couldn’t keep the thought out of his head. Once he was back on the detective squad where he belonged and out of that desert purgatory…what then? How long did it take for a woman to get over the loss of her husband, even if he had been a selfish son of a bitch?

“Well,” he said, “did you know any of that then?”

She sniffed and whispered, “No, I suppose not.”

He cleared his throat and said carefully, “Let me ask you this. Nicholas Delacorte was a good-looking guy… right?”

“Oh, yes.” She gave a husky laugh and brushed again at her cheek.

“Charming?”

She nodded. “Yes-very.”

“And rich?”

“Yes, but that didn’t-”

“He treated you well?”

“Like a queen.” She’d gone still, and was staring at him intently now.

He shrugged, and forced the words out. They came, sounding like a truckload of gravel. “What’s not to love? You were young, vulnerable, maybe a little rebellious, like you said-and he had a touch of danger about him, too, right?” She nodded slowly. He tipped his head toward her. “So, there you go. Don’t beat yourself up about it.”

He set the empty formula bottle on the island top and stood up. She took a step toward him. He strolled toward her with her sleeping baby a warm, sweet weight in his arms. Close enough to hand her son off to her, he paused, and for what seemed a long time, just stood and looked down at her. And for some reason, she looked back at him, and her lips parted. He felt her warmth, smelled her scent-baby powder and milk and woman-and dangerous thoughts and wants filled his head. Not for you, he reminded himself. At least, not now.

He made a throat-clearing sound and she seemed to echo it, and they performed an awkward little dance while he did his best to hand over the kid without waking him up.

“Might want to burp him before you put him down,” he said gruffly, when his arms were empty again. He turned and hauled himself away from her, and it was like trying to break free of a magnetic field. The place on his body