The Lawman's Convenient Bride Read online

  Alone at last.

  Sagging back against the door, she willed herself to pull it together.

  But the tears kept pushing. They were going to get out. She just couldn’t keep swallowing them down.

  Letting her knees buckle, she sank to the floor and slammed both hands over her mouth, as if that could keep the tears from escaping.

  It couldn’t. She couldn’t.

  So she leaped to her feet again and marched to the bed. Shoving aside the tangle of unfolded laundry, she threw herself down with a hard, hopeless sob.

  Chapter Five

  It took Seth a while to get Marybeth settled. He walked a path from the kitchen to the great room and back again, bouncing her just a little with each step, creating a rhythm, a combination of movements, that usually worked to quiet her down.

  As he walked her, he rubbed her tiny back, stroked his hand over the peach fuzz on her little head and whispered to her. He called her his girl, the best girl, the sweetest girl around.

  The crying got weaker, then became intermittent, interspersed with hiccups. Slowly, the hiccups stopped, too.

  Finally, with a tired little sigh, she went quiet.

  A few cooing sounds, another sigh...and silence.

  He carried her to the room he slept in and shut the curtains to block out what was left of the daylight. Then he put her down on her back on the blow-up bed, arranging pillows on either side of her to make sure she couldn’t somehow wiggle over near the edge.

  She was sleeping peacefully, innocent as an angel.

  Now, to find out what was up with Jody.

  The three bedrooms in the house were grouped together on a small L-shaped hallway off the front entry. He left the door open to his room. If Marybeth cried, he would be able to hear her. Jody’s room was only a few steps away.

  He tapped on her door. “Jody?” No response. He tried to decide whether to knock again or leave her alone. But then the door slowly opened.

  Puffy eyes and a red nose gave her away. She wasn’t crying now, but she had been.

  “You okay?”

  “Not really.” She smoothed back her tangled hair and slid a glance over his shoulder, toward the other two bedrooms. “Is she...?”

  “Sound asleep. I put her on my bed and boxed her in with pillows. She’s never been in that pretty room you made for her, right?”

  Jody sniffled. She rubbed at her nose with a wadded-up tissue. “Right.”

  “So I didn’t put her down in there.”

  “Um. Okay.”

  “I thought maybe if she woke up in a strange room, she might be scared or something.”

  Jody made a strangled sound—a wild laugh, maybe. Or a tortured sob. He couldn’t really tell which. “You’re amazing, you know that? You’re ten times the mother I’ll ever be.”

  He had no idea how to respond to that, so he went with, “You’re a fine mother.”

  Apparently, his reply amused her. She let out a tight little laugh—which was great, he decided. He would take amusement over a breakdown any day. She asked, “And you’ve determined this, how?”

  He didn’t even have to think it over. “You’re here for her. You want what’s good for her. It’s obvious you love her and will do anything for her.”

  “It is?” Her voice was so small. Lost-sounding.

  He knew she needed comforting. And he was there to do whatever she and Marybeth needed. He held out his arms. “Come here.”

  She didn’t even hesitate, only swayed toward him with a sigh. He gathered her in. They stood there in the open doorway to her room, arms wrapped around each other. He breathed in her coconut-and-vanilla scent from the lotion she used on Marybeth and tried not to think too hard about how good her body felt pressed close to his.

  “I should pull myself together,” she mumbled against his shoulder. “But you’re kind of good to lean on.”

  “Lean all you want. Whenever you need to.” He rubbed his chin against her silky hair, realized that was going a bit far and stopped.

  “I was so sure,” she whispered, pressing herself even closer against him, her voice low enough that he could barely make out the words. “I had it all planned. I was going to do it right this time around.”

  He remembered what she’d blurted out concerning first and second babies the night Marybeth was born. It was probably none of his business. Unless she needed to talk about it. In that case, he was more than willing to listen.

  Stroking a hand down her back, he echoed, “This time around. Meaning there was a time before?”

  * * *

  Jody lifted her head from his shoulder and looked up into his stern, square-jawed face.

  What was it about him? At first, she’d only wanted him to leave her alone. But now she couldn’t even imagine how she would have survived the past week without him. She couldn’t wait for him to show up at the end of each day. It meant so much to know he was right there in the spare room every night, ready to pitch in whenever she needed him.

  She held his gaze. “You already know there was a time before.”

  He answered with a slow nod. “You want to tell me about it?”

  Did she? “Yeah. And to work up the courage, I’m going to need cake. Lots and lots of cake.”

  He lifted a hand. His fingers ghosted down her temple and guided a stray curl behind her ear, the light touch warming her through and through. “You have to eat your lasagna and Caesar salad first.”

  “Oh, now. There’s a real hardship.”

  He actually smiled then, and it looked really good on him. “Excellent. We have a plan.”

  With a lot more reluctance than she wanted to admit to, she pressed her hands to his broad chest and stepped back. His arms dropped away. She went to the nightstand and got him the baby monitor. “The receiver’s already in the kitchen.”

  He took it and turned for his room.

  * * *

  Jody ate her dinner and had her cake. By the time they carried their plates to the sink, she was half hoping Marybeth would wake up and give her an excuse not to rehash old news.

  But her daughter slept on.

  They went into the great room and sat on the couch together—Jody at one end, Seth on the other. She tucked her stocking feet up on the cushions and tried to decide where to start.

  Seth waited, not pushing her.

  Finally, she began, “During my last year of high school, I got pregnant by my high school sweetheart...” At three months along, right after graduation, she’d finally worked up the nerve to tell him. “He went ballistic, accused me of trying to pass some other guy’s baby off as his. And then he packed up and moved to Indiana. He was already registered at Notre Dame for the fall.”

  Seth muttered something under his breath.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Never mind. Go on.”

  She pulled a throw pillow from behind her back, braced it on the sofa arm and leaned her elbow on it as she explained how crazy things had been with her family then. “My dad’s first wife, Sondra, had just died. The day after the funeral, he married my mother and moved her, Nell and me into the mansion he’d built for Sondra. Elise still lived there at the time and so did her best friend, Tracy, who’d been taken in by Sondra when Tracy’s parents died. Elise was reeling from the loss of her mom—and then in moves her dad’s husband-stealing new wife and two of the kids she’d had by him.”

  “Bad?”

  “Unbearable. We’re all close now. We’ve put all the old garbage behind us. But at the time, Elise and Tracy hated Nell and me, and we hated them right back. We all resented my mother for being a total home wrecker. There were fights, screaming matches. I only lived there for two months and then I moved out again. I told everyone I couldn’t take all the drama...”


  “But really, it was because of the baby?”

  “Yeah. But I didn’t tell anyone—not anyone in my family, not any of my friends. I just couldn’t deal with talking about it, somehow. I was eighteen, so nobody had to know.” She’d found an adoption agency who tracked down her runaway boyfriend in Indiana. “My ex-boyfriend signed off all rights to the baby. Then the agency found me the Levinsons, a really wonderful couple in Sacramento. The Levinsons paid all of my expenses. They flew me to Sacramento and put me up in my own apartment. I had all the money I needed for living expenses during the remainder of my pregnancy. They also made sure that I had the best prenatal care.”

  “Nobody in your family wondered why you’d suddenly moved to California?” He sounded skeptical.

  “It was a hard time for the family. My half siblings were totally pissed off at how my dad married Willow so fast and installed her in Sondra’s house. None of us—meaning my mother’s kids—liked it, either. My moving to Sacramento for a while didn’t even make the radar with them. Except for my mother. She’s usually the definition of self-absorbed, but somehow she figured it out. I was six months along when she showed up on my doorstep. She didn’t give me a hard time, just wanted to know how I was and insisted on meeting the Levinsons. She’s never told anyone, as far as I know.”

  “It’s a secret, then—from everyone else in your family?”

  A curl of defensiveness tightened her belly. “It’s just... It’s never been something anyone needed to know.”

  “That wasn’t a criticism.” He looked at her so levelly, and his voice was kind. “I just needed to know if the information is confidential.”

  “I am going to tell them. One of these days.” She glanced toward the unlit fireplace and tried not to feel like crap about everything.

  After a minute or two, he nudged her along. “So...you had the baby?”

  She just wanted this sad, old story over with. “Yeah. A little boy. The Levinsons took him right away. I didn’t want to see him or hold him, you know? Didn’t want to take any chance of getting too attached. The Levinsons and I agreed not to keep in touch. When he’s eighteen, if he chooses to, he can contact me. I moved back home a few weeks after the birth. That should have been the end of it. But then, about two years ago, I couldn’t take it anymore, wondering. Worrying that I’d done the wrong thing, that maybe he was unhappy, maybe he needed me.”

  “You got in touch with the couple who adopted him, after all?”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t want to freak them out, get them scared that I had changed my mind. I just wanted to know for sure that he was all right. So I hired a private investigator. He worked up a detailed report, including pictures of the Levinson family with my little boy, whose name is Josh. I could see from the photographs that he’s happy. There was one of him hugging his mother in the front yard...” The pointless tears blurred her vision again. She dashed them away. “All that to say that I believe Josh Levinson is doing just fine.”

  Seth grabbed the box of tissues from the coffee table. He held them out to her.

  She took one and blew her nose for the umpteenth time that evening. “And now...”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, the plan was that this time, with Marybeth, I would do it right, you know? I would keep my baby and have it all handled. I would be calm and relaxed and completely on top of things.”

  “That’s a tall order.”

  “A lot of women manage it.”

  “Jody, you’re doing fine.”

  “But Marybeth seems so unhappy. I mean, am I starving her? It seems like she’s hungry all the time. So far it just feels like I’m getting everything wrong.” She lowered her head and tore at the soggy tissue in her hands.

  “Hey.” Seth’s hand settled over hers, so warm, slightly rough, wonderfully soothing.

  She looked up on a ragged breath and met those surprisingly soft brown eyes of his. Had she expected him to judge her?

  Maybe. A little—after all, he was such a straight-and-narrow, upstanding sort of a guy.

  But Seth didn’t judge. “Your high school sweetheart was clearly no hero, and you did what you had to do at the time. You even checked back later to make sure the child was all right. And you’re not getting it wrong now. Marybeth is healthy. She’s going to be fine. You need to stop being so hard on yourself.”

  Jody sniffed. “Thank you.” She probably shouldn’t have, but she let her body sway toward him.

  He didn’t pull back. On the contrary, he wrapped those big arms around her and gave her a hug. For a lovely, lingering moment, she leaned into his solid strength, breathed in his clean scent and allowed herself to feel completely safe and protected.

  And then a series of fussy little cries started up from the baby monitor.

  “Shh,” he whispered, his breath warm against her hair. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and she’ll go back to sleep.”

  “We can hope.” She shamelessly indulged herself and snuggled in closer.

  But the cries from the monitor only increased in length and intensity. Reluctantly, Jody pulled free of his embrace. She dabbed up the rest of her tears.

  “I’ll get her,” he said.

  She managed a smile. “You’re the best. But it’s definitely my turn.”

  * * *

  It really helped, Jody realized, to confide in Seth, to let him reassure her and comfort her.

  Within the next couple of days, the nursing seemed to go better. Marybeth still cried, but not nearly so much. She finally seemed to be getting enough milk.

  By the end of that week, Jody knew she should tell Seth he didn’t need to stay over anymore, that she could manage just fine on her own. But Sunday was Mother’s Day, the biggest flower-selling day of the year—with the possible exception of Valentine’s Day.

  When she mentioned the crushing workload at Bloom over that coming weekend, Seth took family leave from the justice center. He looked after Marybeth full-time on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Mother’s Day, so that Jody could run between the house and Bloom getting ready for the big day and then selling flowers like crazy when Sunday finally came.

  She promised herself that on Monday, once the Mother’s Day push was over, she would sit down and have a talk with Seth. She would tell him how much she appreciated all he’d done and suggest that the time had come for him to move back to the ranch.

  But Monday came and went. Somehow, she never quite got around to reminding him that she didn’t need him living in her spare room anymore.

  So he continued to show up every evening bringing wonderful baked goods from his fans at the sheriff’s office and spelling Jody with Marybeth. He went back to the ranch once or twice a week to check in with the couple who took care of the place. But he lived at Jody’s, essentially. And she just let him.

  Because he took such good care of her little girl—and of Jody, too, to be honest. She counted on him more than she should have. Her life went so smoothly when he was around.

  And sometimes, in the evenings while Marybeth slept, they would stream a movie together or just sit and talk about nothing in particular—like what went on at the sheriff’s office and how his dad liked living in Dunedin, Florida, and how her mother had seemed driven to travel constantly since her father had died.

  So yeah. When he left, she would not only miss his help with Marybeth, she would miss his company, too.

  Elise, Nell, Clara and her half brother Darius’s new wife, Ava, all stopped by that week. When they teased Jody that the sheriff had fallen for her, she shook her head and explained how Seth just needed to be there for Nick’s little girl.

  By then, Jody was taking Marybeth with her to Bloom for a few hours each day and feeling more and more confident that she hadn’t turned out to be a complete failure at motherhood, after all. Really, it wasn’t fair to Set
h the way she kept taking advantage of him. The guy had his own life. How could he get out there and live it when he spent every spare moment with her and her baby?

  Friday morning at breakfast, she made herself broach the subject. “Friday already,” she said, going for a light touch. “Can you believe it?”

  He sent her one of those looks. Like he could tell from her voice that she was probably up to something. “I’ve noticed it generally comes after Thursday.”

  “What I meant was, maybe you want a night off for once. You could catch a movie, go out for a beer...”

  He frowned and then he shrugged. “I can watch a movie here with you, and there’s beer in the fridge.”

  Okay, so much for the offhand approach. She wiped her mouth with her napkin. “Fine, Seth. I’ll be more direct.”

  “Good idea.” He watched her, those gold-flecked eyes wary.

  “You’ve been here every night since we brought Marybeth home from the hospital...”

  He set down his coffee cup. “You want me to get my stuff together and go back to the ranch, is that it?”

  “No, I... Seth, I love having you here. I honestly do. You’re incredible with Marybeth and you’re always so helpful, and I enjoy your company, too.”

  “So what’s the problem, then?”

  “Nothing. There’s no problem. It’s just, well, you’ve been beyond wonderful, but you have your own life and I have mine. We can’t just go on like this, with you living in my spare room indefinitely.”

  “Why not? I like it here. I like everything about living here. I like helping out, being with Marybeth. And as you said, you and I get along great.”

  “But I—”

  “Wait a minute.” Now he was scowling. “Is it that you’re afraid people will talk?”

  She laughed. She couldn’t help it.

  His scowl deepened. “Why is that funny?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, who even worries about stuff like that anymore?”

  His ears turned red. “I do. And if it bothers you, I—”