With Child

A man could lead himself to bed, but that didn’t mean he’d sleep

Not when he felt as if he were flying over paradise, craning his neck to look down from that airplane window, wanting to storm the cockpit and yell, “Land here!” even though he knew there wasn’t a runway.

He just couldn’t imagine Mindy looking at him with anything but shock and loathing if he hit on her. Even if he was wrong, even if miraculously she turned out to feel the same way he did, how could he look at himself in the mirror knowing he had what should have been Dean’s?

What would have been Dean’s if not for a bullet.

Dear Reader,

Pregnant heroines have become very popular in romance fiction, but I find myself drawn to writing about them anyway. The nine months of pregnancy are a woman’s most vulnerable time. Accustomed to being an independent adult, suddenly she needs protection and care. At the same time, her life is in flux—even a woman in a secure marriage knows that nothing will ever be the same again. If she finds herself pregnant after her husband has died, when her emotions are already in turmoil, when she has no one to turn to… How irresistible is that for any writer?

With this book I also had the chance to create a hero who believes he needs no one—until he loses the one person who did mean something to him. Reforming rakes has never interested me; shattering the ice around a man who believes himself incapable of love is my kind of challenge.

I hope you’re as moved by these two lonely people who can’t admit they need each other as I was. I’d love to hear what you think!

Best,

Janice Kay Johnson

With Child

Janice Kay Johnson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

BRENDAN JOSEPH QUINN was off duty when he found out his best friend was dead. Beer in hand, waiting for the microwave to beep, he’d settled in front of a Sonics game he’d taped from earlier in the evening. He was so tired his eyes kept crossing. He hadn’t slept except for a snatched hour or two in days. That’s what he did when a case was fresh, when every detail was vivid in his mind, when the memories of witnesses were new and relatively uncorrupted. If an arrest was ever going to happen, it was likeliest in the first two or three days. He and his partner had cleared this homicide by canvassing the neighborhood until they found a kid who’d seen someone hammering on the front door of the murdered woman’s house and had been able to identify the ex-husband.

Booking and paperwork had dragged on, and it was now two in the morning. He intended to gobble the burrito heating in the microwave and then fall into bed. He might last a quarter.

When the phone rang, Quinn stared at it in disbelief. Muting the TV, he dragged himself from the recliner and snatched up the receiver.

“Quinn. This better be good.”

“It’s not good. It’s shitty.”

His sergeant could sound neutral when the streets were filled with rioters tossing cherry bombs. At the heaviness in his voice, Quinn stiffened.

“What?”

“Dean Fenton’s dead.”

“What?” he said again, but in disbelief this time. Denial.

“We got a call an hour ago from one of his security guards. Burglary in progress. By the time a unit got there, the perps were gone and the guard had been shot. Only, turns out it wasn’t one of his employees. It was Dean. We don’t know yet why he was handling a routine night shift himself. Somebody probably called in sick. Bad luck.”

There had to be a mistake. Dean Fenton was his best friend, the only good to come from a bleak childhood. Quinn quelled the wave of sick fear with control he’d learned early, when his mother went out at night and didn’t come back for three days.

No. Not Dean.

Dean Fenton had joined the force with Quinn. They’d gone through training together, risen in the ranks at the same pace. But Dean had a craving for the nice things that money could buy, and he’d turned in his badge to start his own security company.

“Who got the call?” Quinn asked.

“Lanzilotta and Connors. Lanzilotta was pretty shaken up when he recognized Dean.”

Bernie Lanzilotta had played softball with Quinn and Dean. Bernie would know their first baseman.

Quinn shook his head hard. No. Goddamn it, no! Bernie had seen the uniform, maybe the guard was Dean’s age, general build. He’d jumped to a conclusion. Dean was home in bed with his pretty nitwit of a wife right now, not knowing one of his employees had taken a bullet.

“No,” Quinn said.

That same heaviness in his voice, Sergeant Dickerson said, “I asked Bernie if he was sure. He said he was.”

“No.”

“I’m going out there.” Dickerson extended the comment like an invitation.

“Where?” Quinn flipped open his notebook.

The address was in the industrial area at the foot of West Seattle.

“I’m on my way.”

The microwave beeped as he let himself out the front door.

EVEN BEFORE HE EXITED from the West Seattle bridge, he saw the flashing lights. Heading under the bridge, he drove the two blocks to the scene. Chain-link gates stood open to a storage business, the kind with four long windowless buildings containing locked units where people could stow their crap when they down-sized or moved. This place also had an area where customers could park RVs or boats. It was back there that the activity centered.

Numb, his exhaustion forgotten, Quinn parked and walked past squad cars with flashing lights. Ahead was a white pickup with the Fenton Security logo painted on the doors. The driver-side one stood open.

Dickerson, a bulky, graying man, separated himself from a cluster of uniforms and came to Quinn.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

Fear and rage shifted inside Quinn, like Dobermans just waking.

“No,” he said. “No.” He kept walking, circled the back of the pickup.

The body was sprawled on the pavement. Lamps had already been set up, bathing the scene in pitiless white light.

“No,” Quinn whispered, but his eyes burned and the fear swelled in his chest. His best friend, his brother in all but blood, lay with his cheek against the ground, blood drying in his mouth, his eyes sightless. Dead. A few feet from the body, Quinn dropped to his knees. A freight train of grief roared over him, the wheels clattering, metallic and deafening.

He hadn’t known he could cry, but his face was wet.

Strong hands lifted him, steered him out of the harsh light into the darkness, where he slammed his fists against the brick wall of a storage building and let the sobs rack him.

THE DOORBELL BROUGHT Mindy Fenton awake with a start and an automatic flush of heart-racing apprehension. Half sitting up in bed, she turned to Dean’s side before remembering that he’d worked tonight. Her wild gaze swung to the digital clock—3:09 a.m.

Had she dreamed the bell? Nobody would come calling in the middle of the night! Unless Dean had locked himself out. But he had the garage-door opener.

Sitting upright by this time, she strained to hear anything at all. Breaking glass. If an intruder had decided she wasn’t home because she hadn’t come to the door…

The bell rang again.

Really scared now, she turned on her bedside lamp, slipped on her bathrobe, and went downstairs, flipping on lights as she went to make it look as if several people were home.

Dean had left the porch light on. Through the stained-glass sidelight, she could make out a dark shape.

“Who’s there?” she called.

The muffled reply was “Quinn.”

Her heart somersaulted. Fumbling with the dead bolt, she thought, Why? Why Quinn? Why now?

Two men, not just one, stood on the porch. With Dean’s best friend was Sergeant Rycroft Dickerson. She remembered him from her wedding. Six foot four or so and brawny, his graying hair buzz-cut, he wasn’t the kind of man you forgot.

Not that you could forget Quinn, either, she thought irrelevantly. With his straight dark hair, vivid blue eyes, stark cheekbones and contained air, he would never go unnoticed.

“Is…is something wrong?” she squeaked.

Neither face softened.

Quinn asked, “Can we come in, Mindy?”

“I…of course.” She swung the door open.

Quinn first, the sergeant second, they stepped in to the foyer, filling it with a threat of…something. Something she didn’t want to hear.

“I could put on coffee…”

Quinn shook his head. “Mindy…”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“Mindy.” His voice, she realized, was scratchy, rough. “There’s no easy way to say this.”

She backed away, talking fast. “Uh…Dean isn’t home. He will be by seven. I can tell him you need to see him. Or I can leave a note.” She said the last as if it were a super idea, a solution to some dilemma that her inner self knew didn’t exist. “He worked tonight.”

The sergeant reached out. “We know.”

She wouldn’t let him touch her. Clutching the lapel of her gown, she said in a high, breathless voice, “I don’t understand why you’re here.”

Quinn’s blue eyes were almost black. “He’s dead, Mindy.”

“Don’t be silly! He’s not a cop anymore. And he drives so carefully.” She laughed, convincing no one. “What could have happened to him?”

“He interrupted a burglary.” A muscle jumped in Quinn’s cheek. “Somebody shot him.”

Dean? Shot Dean? Her Dean? The idea was ludicrous, impossible, unthinkable.

“Have you tried his cell phone? What makes you think…”

Dark and melancholy at the best of times, Quinn waited her out, his eyes bleak. When her voice hitched and died—no, not died, what an awful choice of words!—trailed off, yes, trailed off, he said in that thick voice, “I saw him. I didn’t want to believe it either. But he’s dead.”

A keening sound seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. Not until Quinn’s face contorted and he stepped forward to draw her into his arms did she realize she was making the sound. She squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her face against Quinn’s chest despite the smell of sweat that wasn’t Dean’s. She wrapped her arms around his waist and held on, because otherwise she wouldn’t have remained upright.

She was still crying out, still muffling that dreadful, shrill, unending scream in his dark shirt. She stayed stiff, her fists filled with his shirt, and tried to smother herself against him.

Quinn muttered brokenly, “God, Mindy. God. I’m so sorry.”

Perhaps shock was wrapping her in thick batting, because abruptly all strength left her, stealing the cry from her throat. She sagged, clinging. Still, Quinn held her. Strong arms, a body more solid than her lanky husband’s. She hadn’t known what he would feel like. He’d never hugged her, never kissed her cheek, never touched her at all. She’d always known he didn’t like her. But for Dean’s sake, they were polite.

Dead.

She heard the men confer, but made no effort to decipher words. Footsteps, and finally Quinn lifted her like a child and sat her on the couch in the living room. Mindy began to shiver.

“Don’t you have a throw?” he said in frustration.

She squeezed her arms against her body and rocked herself, hardly aware when he disappeared and then reappeared with a comforter he must have torn from the bed in the guest room. Even inside it, she continued to shiver. Her teeth chattered.

A weight settled on the couch beside her and Quinn held a mug to her mouth. Tea. Clumsily, with his help, she drank. Hot liquid ran down her chin, joining the tears that wet her face.

After a moment she took the mug from him and gratefully wrapped cold fingers around it. She drank again, letting it scald her mouth, aware it was sweeter than she would have made it but not caring. The heat sliding down her throat felt so good. Her shivers abated.

Finally she lifted her head. The sergeant stood a few feet away, looking down at her with concern. Quinn still sat beside her, his thigh touching hers, his face so close she could see individual bristles on a chin that was normally clean-shaven.

“You’re sure?” she asked. Begged.

“We’re sure,” Dickerson said.

Still pleading, although no longer with them, Mindy said, “What will I do?”

There was a momentary silence, and then Quinn stood. “What will you do?” He sounded harsh, the man who had always condemned her without knowing her at all. “I’m sure Dean left you taken care of.”

“I didn’t mean…” she tried to explain.

“Do you have someone we can call?” Sergeant Dickerson interrupted. “Family? A friend?”

She instinctively rejected the idea of calling her mother. Selene was her best friend, but…she was such a talker. She wouldn’t know how to hold Mindy without exclaiming over and over and wanting to dissect the tragic events. And who else could Mindy phone in the middle of the night to say, “My husband is dead. Can you come hold my hand?”

Mindy shook her head. “I’ll wait until morning.” Until then…until then, she didn’t know what she’d do. She couldn’t go back to that lonely bed. Perhaps she would just huddle here and try to imagine the man she loved gone. Erased as if he hadn’t existed.

“We’ve only been married a year.” She heard her voice, high and petulant, as if Dean had broken a promise. But he hadn’t. Till death do us part. It just wasn’t supposed to be so soon!

The two men were talking again as if she wasn’t here.

“I want to work this one,” Quinn said. “Who pulled it? Sawyer and Asavade?”

“Dobias and Williams. And the answer is no. You’re dead on your feet. And you’re too involved.”

“He was my best friend. I need to make this collar.”

“Uh-huh. You going to do it dispassionately? Read ’em their rights? When what you really want to do is kill them?”

Quinn paced, fury and grief radiating from him like heat from a woodstove. Mindy felt it without having to watch him.

“Goddamn it! Don’t shut me out!”

“No.” The sergeant didn’t move. Like Quinn, he seemed to have forgotten her. “Dean radioed in a license-plate number. There may have been an arrest already.”

She listened without real comprehension. Dean was dead? It made no sense. She would have worried if he’d still been a cop, but he owned his own security company. He hardly ever took a shift as a guard anymore. He met with property owners and businessmen, did payroll and billing, grumbled about how hard it was to find and keep good employees.

“They all either want to be cops or prison guards.” He’d made a sound of disgust. “They like the idea of swaggering around in a uniform with a gun in a holster. They find out how boring it is patrolling warehouses and apartment complexes at night, they opt out.”

Mindy came back to awareness of the present when she realized that Sergeant Dickerson had sat on the coffee table. Quinn stood to one side.

“Mindy? You with me?”

She nodded.

“Do you know why Dean worked tonight?”

She nodded again. “A new guy called in sick. Dean was really mad, because it was last minute. The dispatcher offered to go out, but Dean said he’d do it. He liked to once in a while, you know.”

“Any good businessman gets down in the trenches. He’d be a fool not to.”

“I wish…” Tears leaked out although she’d thought herself cried dry. “I wish somebody else had been there. But I feel guilty wishing they were dead instead.”

Dickerson covered her hand with his. “It’s natural, Mindy. You didn’t know them.”

“I do know Mick Mulligan. He’s the dispatcher.” She tasted the tears. “He’s married, and he has two little girls.”

That thought caused a lurch within her, of fear, of renewed guilt, of raw grief. Dean had really wanted to have children. She was the one to put pregnancy off.

“Let’s wait a couple of years,” she’d coaxed. “Let’s be selfish and just have each other for a while first.”

Quinn said explosively, “What if it was a setup? Goddamn it, Dickerson! Let me work this one.”

“Go home. Go to bed.”

A vast, terrifying emptiness swelled within Mindy. They’d both leave any minute. She’d be alone in the house. It was a big house, bigger than she liked, with a cavernous three-car garage and bedrooms they didn’t use, a den and a family room. She could feel those empty, dark rooms around her, echoing her inner fear.

She made a sound—a sniff, a gulp. Still engaged in their argument, both men turned their heads to look at her. She looked down at her hands, clutching the comforter.

“We can’t leave her alone.” Quinn sounded irritated. “I’ll stay.”

That brought her head up. “No! You don’t have to.” But she wanted him to stay. He made her feel safe, and tonight she was terrified of being alone.

His mouth, she’d have sworn, had a faint curl. “If you don’t have a friend you can ask to come over, I do have to stay.” He sounded as if he were talking to a five-year-old who had just announced that she could walk across town all by herself to Grandma’s house. His gaze left her; she was dismissed. To Dickerson, he said, “You’ll keep me informed?”

Mindy shrank into her comforter, wishing she had the spine to stand up, say with dignity, “No, thanks, I’d like to be alone,” and walk them to the door. She’d have been grateful for Quinn’s offer if it had come from anyone but him, or even if he’d made it more kindly. He’d always had a talent for making her feel small.

Her care settled, Sergeant Dickerson expressed his sympathy and regret one more time, then left. Quinn walked him to the door, and they stood out of earshot talking for several minutes, their voices a rumble.

Finally Quinn locked up behind the sergeant and came back to her. “Why don’t you go back to bed?”

“No!” She shuddered. “No. I can’t get in our bed.”

“The guest room, then.”

She didn’t want to go to bed at all. Did he really imagine that she’d lay her head on the pillow and fall into blissful slumber? In the dark, all she would do was imagine a thousand times what had happened to Dean. Had the shot come from nowhere? Or had he been held at gun-point, threatened, beaten? Did he know he might die? She both wanted and didn’t want to know. I’m a coward, she thought. She would lie there wondering what would happen tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.

But she also saw that Quinn wanted her to go to bed, so she nodded and put her feet on the carpeted floor. When she stood, she swayed, and he was at her side instantly, his strong hand clamped on her elbow. He walked her to the downstairs bedroom, and she felt like a child being put to bed. When she climbed in, he spread the comforter over her, then stood awkwardly at the foot of the bed.

“Can I get you anything?”

Mute, she shook her head.

Quinn came around the bed, his hand out to switch off the lamp. She shook her head violently. “No! Leave it on. Please.”

He frowned at her. “You’re sure?”

“I don’t… The dark…”

“Okay. I’ll be right out there. Call if you need me.”

“Thank you,” she said dutifully.

Seemingly satisfied, he left, switching off the overhead light and pulling the door almost closed. His footsteps receded toward the living room.

The sheets were cold, the pillow squishy. It was like being in a hotel room. But she couldn’t seem to care enough to try to bunch up the pillow or even reach for the second one. She just lay on her back and stared at the ceiling.

The house was Dean’s, not hers. The life his. One she’d put on like a borrowed evening gown. She’d felt beautiful and loved and fortunate, but not quite secure. Because, she saw now, it wasn’t hers.

A broken sound escaped her.

Dean. Oh, Dean.

The tears came again, so easily, as if only waiting to be released. But this time she cried silently, alone.

JUST AFTER SIX IN THE MORNING, Quinn’s cell phone rang.

“We got ’em,” Dickerson said without preamble. “They didn’t realize Dean had had time to call in their plate.”

“What were they after?”

“They’re nineteen and twenty-one. They were manufacturing meth in the young one’s father’s trailer. He moved it to storage without them knowing. They’d come to get their stuff, or steal the trailer. Sounds like they were still arguing about that.”

“And the guard that called in sick?”

“Had a hot girl over. Dobias said when he realized he’d be dead if he had gone to work, he barely made it to the toilet to puke.”

“He might not be dead,” Quinn said. “Maybe he’d have timed his route different. Been lazy and not gone in if the gates were closed.”

“He’ll figure that out eventually,” Dickerson said without sympathy. “Apparently, Dobias didn’t feel inclined to point that out.”

Quinn sank onto the couch and bowed his head. He swore. “A couple of goddamn punks.”

“Strung out.”

“And that’s it.” He shoved his fingers into his hair, uncaring when they curled into a fist and yanked. “Dean’s gone, and Daddy’ll probably hire a good lawyer who’ll claim they were too stoned to take responsibility for pulling the trigger.”

“You know the D.A. will try to throw the book at them.”

“Son of a bitch,” he said clearly, and pushed End, letting the phone drop to the carpeted floor.

Two shit-faced punks who’d freaked, and Dean was dead.

Quinn didn’t want to believe it. He’d dozed briefly on the couch, and in his sleep had been woken by Dean, who had punched him in the shoulder and said, “What in hell are you doing on my couch? Your own bed not good enough for you?” Quinn had met the grin with his own, and reached out for his friend’s hand. He’d woken before they touched, and opened his eyes to an empty living room.

Down the hall, a bar of light still lay across the carpet. Mindy had never turned off the lamp. He wondered if she’d slept. Wasn’t sure if he cared. She’d known Dean for a year and a half, not a lifetime.

Dean and Quinn had been flung together as roommates in a foster home when Quinn was thirteen and Dean twelve. Almost twenty years ago. They’d had a fistfight the first day, grudgingly agreed to a truce the second day, and by the third Quinn had lied to protect the younger boy from their foster father’s wrath. Wrath, both had realized as the weeks and months went by, that was more show than reality; George Howie was a good man, as kind in a less demonstrative way as his wife. The two boys had been lucky in more ways than one. They’d been able to stay until, each in his turn, they’d graduated from high school. And they’d become close friends. Brothers.

As the night dragged on, Quinn had done his grieving, as much as he’d allow himself. His mother had taught him well that he couldn’t afford to be incapacitated by fear or sadness. He didn’t even know who his father was. His mother was an addict who’d progressed during his childhood from pills and pot to shooting up. She’d disappear for days at a time. He’d scrounge for food. By the time he was eight or nine he was shoplifting when the cupboards were bare. His mother got skinnier and skinnier, the tracks on her arms and legs livid, veins harder to find. He learned how to catch her at the perfect moment to get her to cash her welfare check so he could take some money before she spent it.

He remembered the last time he saw her, her eyes hectic.

“I feel like shit. I’ve got to score. Now, you go to school, hear? I might not be home tonight, but you can take care of yourself, right?”