“What have you figured out, sweetheart?” Anthony asked.
“A couple of things, actually. One about me….and one about you.”
“Me?” Anthony tilted his head to the side, but his grin told her he wasn’t worried.
Mary nodded. “Mmhmm. First, about me. Or people, generally, I guess. We can only do what we can do. But if we don’t take time to take care of ourselves first? We won’t even be able to do that much. It’s like when they’re going through the emergency instructions on an airplane before takeoff. They always tell you to put your own mask on first and then help someone else with theirs.”
Toby sighed. “You’re a very wise woman, love. And you’re right.” He sat straighter in the tub then bent over and kissed her—a sweet, light down payment for later. “I’m going to work on not beating myself up over Joey. He made his own choices. As an adult, he made his choices, and he has to be responsible for them.” Then Toby looked over at Anthony. “So, you figured out what he was hiding, did you? Spill it, please.”
She recalled Anthony’s admonition that she’d better figure it out. “Anthony Corbett, tough cop, a man few others would dare cross, has had a secret dream all his life. One that other boys and then men might have scorned.”
Anthony’s smile widened. “Go on.”
“His dream was for something that would hopefully form the foundation of his life. He wanted to meet a woman who would be his soul mate, marry her, and claim for himself the kind of loving give and take he saw between his own parents.” She reached up and caressed his face with her hand. “How old were you when you began to dream that dream?”
“Ten. And the only one I ever told was my mother. She promised me I’d find you.” Then he looked over at Toby. “And I figured out, oh, I think not long after I became friends with Jake and Adam Kendall—before they found their Ginny—that the reason I hadn’t met my soul mate yet was because I was destined to meet you first, a brother with whom I could share a wife.”
Then he looked at Mary. “I had faith you’d figure that out.”
Mary liked very much that he was pleased she had. She snuggled close between her two men, and it was most definitely her favorite place to be. “How did your call to your captain go?” She knew that both Anthony and Toby had been worrying about their jobs over the last couple of weeks. They wanted to be where they could do the most good. If that turned out to be on the job in Waco, they would likely insist that she stay in Lusty. She didn’t look forward to being separated from them, but in this case, she would follow their wishes.
Her men were cops, men who believed that the words “to serve and protect” meant more than a catchy tagline.
Mary didn’t know what the immediate future held for any of them. But she wouldn’t worry about it now. Grandma Kate had it exactly right. Be aware and informed. Be as proactive as you could be. And then understand that sometimes, in life, people weren’t necessarily in charge of their own fates. She paraphrased Grandma Kate’s words and held them for her own. What seems so hellishly long to get through now will one day seem as if it wasn’t all that bad, after all.
Maybe she would write those particular words down so she could read them to herself when she needed them. Knowing myself as I do, I will need them often.
“Toby and I made the call together, just after he finished speaking to Beck. We only have one ongoing case at the moment, and the captain is passing that over to a couple of the other detectives in the squad. He’s happy to let us stay here until we find out the results of the test we just took. Of course, then I had to explain to him about the quarantine period, and being retested a few times even in light of the negative results we got earlier. Since we’re under medical supervision, it’s all good.”
She didn’t give in to her anal side and point out that they would have to endure a lot more tests during the quarantine period. They knew the drill because they were the ones that wrote the damn rules for how Lusty was going to handle this thing.
So instead, she just said, “Good. So now all we have to do is wait it out—this quarantine.” Mary exhaled and looked from one of her fiancés to the other. Looking at them, reading their expressions, she was getting the idea that they had made another call together, one that concerned her.
Rather than wait, she asked, simply, “What?”
“We want to snuggle and sleep with you between us each night,” Toby said. “But it worries us that you might already be sick, and we don’t know it.”
“Or that you may be.” Mary said the words softly.
Anthony nodded. “Yeah, or that we may be.”
“And…”
“And we’re going to eat healthy and get lots of fluids and lots of rest,” Toby said. “So, if we are sick, we’ll be in the best possible shape to beat it.”
It took her just a moment to understand just what it was they were saying. She couldn’t help but let her men know what she thought of what they had come up with. It didn’t matter that she didn’t say a word. She felt the way her face contorted as if she was looking at men who had lost their ever-loving minds. She knew they got the message loud and clear.
“We’ll have a whole lifetime together,” Anthony said. “Once we get through these next three weeks.”
Men and women were entirely different. If that wasn’t something that she’d learned through all her people-studying and the other research she’d done, it was something
