The Reckoning

Emmett knew he had to be gentle with Linda, but then he’d gone ahead and put her in startled-doe mode twice during their first morning together. Once, when he’d surprised her in the hall outside the bathroom; the second time, when he’d told her about Jason.

He was still trying to apologize for it later that morning as he drove her to the grocery store. “Look, I’m really sorry about springing that information about my brother on you.”

She waved her free hand as she scribbled another item on her grocery list in her lap. “You didn’t spring anything on me. I knew about Lily, of course, and have heard mention about the other crimes. I just didn’t know of the connection with you.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“Will you stop that? I’m not some fragile flower, Emmett, that you’re duty-bound to shield from the sun and wind. I’m supposed to be getting used to the world, remember?”

But, damn it, he knew the world was full of fragile flowers and the deadly forces out to do them in. The Jessica Chandler case had proved that to him beyond all doubt. The evil done by his brother Jason only underscored it.

Still, Linda could be as stubborn as she was fragile. Once inside the store, she insisted on pushing the cart, her grocery list clutched in one hand. “I can handle this,” she told him, wrestling with the cart’s wobbly wheels. “Do me a favor and keep your distance.”

So he trailed her, never losing sight of her blue jeans and the wave of blond hair that fluttered down her back. She was thin, but with a few more pounds she’d be rounded in all the right places, he decided. And despite her slenderness, her breasts were full. He’d noticed them beneath the transparent cotton of those girlie pajamas she’d been wearing that morning—and then immediately felt guilty for it.

But the young man standing nearby and stocking the breakfast cereal didn’t seem to suffer the same pangs of conscience. Emmett watched his bold gaze flick over Linda, checking off face, breasts, legs, then wander back to linger on her chest.

Forgetting her admonition, Emmett strolled up behind her. “Everything okay, honey?” he asked, shooting a warning look at the cocky kid and placing a hand on Linda’s shoulder.

She jumped. “What?”

He soothed her with a gentle stroke of his palm. “Everything okay?”

“I…sure. What…?” A flush tinged the fair skin of her cheeks.

Emmett smiled when the stock boy took the hint and returned to his work. “The what is that pimple-faced Lothario who was leering at you a second ago.” Beneath his hand, her arm felt warm and her bones delicate.

Her gaze jumped to the kid, then back to his face. “No,” she said. “I’m old enough to be his mother.”

He laughed and couldn’t stop himself from stroking her arm. “Not a chance.” There was nothing the least bit matronly about the soft mouth, the gleaming length of blond hair, those breasts that didn’t show much beneath the T-shirt she wore but that he could remember so well from the morning—

He dropped his hand with a silent curse at himself. He was supposed to be Linda’s protector, not another lecher like the damn kid up the aisle. “Go on ahead with your shopping.”

Another wide-eyed glance, and then she turned away from him to push the cart onward. In the next aisle she paused again, staring at the array of soup cans and sauce jars. Emmett kept his distance, staying several paces behind as she moved on to the bread and rolls, and then the produce section.

It was when she’d lingered there for several frozen minutes that he realized there was nothing in the bottom of the cart. Nothing. Not one item had made it from the shelves into her basket. In that same instant, she started pushing the cart again, moving in rapid strides down the aisle and then out the doors of the store. In her wake, her shopping list fluttered to the blacktop parking lot. He swooped it up, then broke into a jog, catching up with her just as she shoved the cart into a corral of others.

“Linda?”

She whirled, staring at him as if it were the first time she’d seen him. In her wide eyes he saw the unmistakable sheen of tears. Her lower lip trembled.

“Are you all right?” he asked. Stupid question. She wasn’t all right. She looked frightened and upset and he didn’t know what she needed or how to help her. Without knowing what else to do, he offered her the page of lined paper with its neat column of items. “You dropped this.”

Her fingers drew the list from his. “There’s so many choices,” she whispered, staring down at it. “I wrote cornflakes, but there is more than one brand and then so many other kinds of flakes that I couldn’t make up my mind which box I wanted. And bread. Wheat bread, white bread, butter-top, multigrain…”

Her voice trailed off as a single tear tracked down her cheek.

She was killing him. Killing him. “It’s okay. We’ll figure it out.” He should have taken her to a smaller store her first time, he thought. A mom-and-pop place where she wouldn’t be overwhelmed. “We’ll go home now and figure it out later.”

“No.” Her spine straightened and she lifted her chin, the wet trail of that tear still evident. “No, I can do it.”

And damn if she didn’t. With that stem of hers stiffened, his fragile flower took herself back into the grocery store. This time he stayed by her side, directing the cart through the aisles and limiting her selections to one or two when she seemed confused or uncertain. They made it back to the car thirty-five minutes later, both of them, he figured, exhausted.

But she still helped load the bags into the back of his truck. Then, as he approached the passenger’s door to unlock it for her, he caught sight of her tired, yet elated grin.

“What?” he asked, but he was almost smiling himself, infected by the sense of accomplishment he could see she was feeling. “Pretty proud of yourself, huh?”

She nodded, her grin widening. “Pretty proud of myself, huh. I know it might seem like a small thing to you, but—”

He put his hand over her mouth. “It’s no small thing, I know.” The warmth of her lips moved against his fingers, and shafts of heat raced across his skin and down his back. He thought of her in those flimsy pajamas again and had to step away.

He looked down at his still-tingling hand. “Did you say something?”

She closed the gap between them. “I said thank you.” And as if it were the most natural thing in the world, Linda Faraday went into his arms.

Technically, he supposed she hugged him, but because his hands closed around her slender back, she was against him, warm and secure within the circle of his body.

It was innocent gratitude on her part, that never-say-die protective instinct on his.

Except that when he breathed in the golden-sunshine scent of her hair, when he felt her heartbeat through his palms, it was more than protection that rose within him.

It was lust, and it was only going to complicate everything.

Three

Linda’s first day of “independent” living included more dependence than she’d counted upon. But Emmett—the man, not the machine—helped make her first grocery store experience a success. After unloading the food, a light lunch and a much-needed nap, she decided that the morning’s accomplishment had given her the courage to take a first step toward tackling the most difficult item on her make-a-life-for-herself list.

It was time for her to try acting like a mother.

She found Emmett in the spare bedroom, tightening the bolts on a treadmill that sat in one corner of the room. He was dressed as she was, in jeans and a T-shirt, though he filled his out much better than her. It took her another moment to look away from him and notice the other pieces of gym equipment in evidence—a pyramid of free weights, three sizes of stability balls, a large, rolled-up mat. “What’s all this?” she asked.

“I like to work out,” he answered. “You need to. Nancy and Dean agreed to let me outfit this room as a home gym.”

“I used to pride myself on my good condition,” she remembered, frowning at her reflection in the mirrored closet doors. “Now I’m more stick girl than cover girl.”

“You’ve missed the new trend in cover girls,” Emmett replied, leaning one arm against the machine. “For your information, stick is in. But the treadmill is ready to go if you want to give it a whirl.”

She shook her head. “Not now. I came to ask another favor of you.”

“That’s what I’m here for, Linda.”

It didn’t sit well with her, his promise to Ryan or not. “I’m going to find some way to pay you back.”

“Maybe I can think of something myself,” he said.

She stilled. There was a deep note in his voice that made her think… But no, he wasn’t thinking of her in female terms. Why would he, when she was a woman who couldn’t pick out cornflakes without crying first?

“Well, um, until then…” Heat was crawling up her neck and she cursed the silly turn of her thoughts. “I was hoping you could give me a ride to Ricky’s school. I thought I’d pick him up today.”

“Sure.” Emmett straightened and then reached down and stripped off his T-shirt.

Linda stepped back, staring at the broad expanse of male body caught in her gaze. “W-what are you doing?”

His eyebrows lifted. “Changing my shirt. I got grease on this one.”

“Oh. Well.” She couldn’t argue with that, nor could she take her eyes off her second up-close-and-personal view of a half-naked man in one day. Now that she thought of it, it was her second up-close-and-personal view of a half-naked man in a decade.

Another flush of heat rushed over her skin, and her breath made a silent whoosh of escape from her lungs. The fact was, she hadn’t been thinking of herself in female terms, but now it seemed as if her freedom from the rehab facility had freed something else—the knowledge that the past ten years hadn’t damaged her hormones.

Emmett paused beside her on his way out of the room. “Do you feel okay?”

His skin was golden and smooth, and the route from his muscled shoulder to the bulge of his rock-hard bicep was fascinating. She swallowed. “I, um, I’m fine.”

He reached out a finger and tapped her nose in a big-brotherly gesture. “Give me two minutes and then we’ll go.”

She spent the two minutes telling herself it was perfectly normal to have sexual feelings. It was a good thing. Another sign of progress, another optimistic portent that she could be a complete person at some future date, that she could be a whole woman—which would include, most importantly, being a mother.

Mother.

Just thinking the word caused her hormones to evaporate and everything else inside of her to freeze up. But she managed to follow Emmett to the car and tried to appear composed as he pulled into a parking spot near the school.

Linda checked her watch, licked her dry lips. “We’re early.”

Unrolling the windows with the electronic controls, Emmett shrugged. “No problem. We’ll wait.”

But waiting made her nervous. To distract herself, she scanned the cars nearby, checking out the other mothers waiting behind their wheels. They all seemed to be doing three things at once—talking on cell phones and filing their nails and scanning small calendars, or talking on cell phones, sipping bottled water and handing toys to small children in car seats. They wore their hair in perky short cuts or high perky ponytails.

She combed her fingers through her long, straight fall of blond hair. “Maybe I should do something with all this.”

“It’s beautiful.”

Her chin jerked toward Emmett. She’d forgotten he was there. “What?”

“Your hair. It’s beautiful. You’re beautiful.”

She felt herself flushing again. “You…I…I wasn’t fishing for compliments.”

“I’m stating facts. I saw how you were looking at the other women and it wasn’t so hard to follow your train of thought. You don’t need to worry about how you measure up.”

“You’re quite the observer,” she said, not sure that she liked that about him.

He shrugged. “Just some of Uncle Sam’s fine training. But you’re familiar with that, aren’t you? Ryan said you were an agent with the Treasury Department before your accident. That you were looking into some discrepancies in the books at Fortune TX, Ltd. and that’s how you met Cameron Fortune, Ricky’s father.”

“Cameron Fortune.” She repeated the name, then looked away. “I’ll bet your Uncle Sam training made it clear you shouldn’t get personal with the target of an investigation. That you shouldn’t fall in love with him and then do something as stupid as sleep with him.”

“Is that what happened?” Emmett asked quietly.

“I don’t know.” She scrubbed her hands over her face. “That’s what Ryan pieced together in the days after the accident. But when I came fully conscious, I couldn’t add any more to the story. My memory of those months at the Fortunes’ company are completely gone. I remember crossing the stage to receive my master’s degree when I was twenty-one years old. I remember going straight from there to the fifteen-week new agent training course. The next thing I remember is Nancy Armstrong talking to me, her face starting to sharpen in focus. I looked her straight in the eye and told her I wanted a Diet Pepsi, the first clear words I’d spoken in nine years. But between the diploma and the diet drink…almost nothing.”

“Nothing of your feelings for Cameron?”

Lifting her hands, she shook her head. “No.”

“Must make it hard to believe you’re a mother, then.”

She was afraid to admit to it. “But I am. Ricky’s been blessed to have Nancy and Dean. They’ve raised him as their grandson. But I’m his mother.” And, please God, let me start feeling like one any moment now. She cared about the little boy. It wasn’t hard to enjoy a rambunctious, normal kid, but mothering him… How did one learn the rules of that?

In the distance, a school bell rang. Around them, car doors opened and those confident, perky-haired mothers emerged, cell phones still in one hand, satchel-sized purses or bottles of water or toddlers in the other.

Taking a deep breath, Linda pushed down on the door handle. “I’ll be right back,” she told Emmett.

“I’ll come with you.”

A real mother wouldn’t need his presence, but she didn’t bother putting up even a token protest. Instead, she shoved her hands into the front pockets of her jeans and followed the trail of women heading toward the front gates of the school.

A troop of kids in yellow plastic hard hats emerged first, some carrying Stop signs. Linda glanced over at Emmett.

“Traffic patrol,” he said.

The traffic patrol! Of course it was the traffic patrol—the older kids of the elementary school who were charged with getting the littler ones safely across the street. As she watched, individuals peeled off the small crew to stake out the corners of the nearby intersection while more little kids poured out of the gates. Some headed for yellow school buses, some ran into the arms of the cell phone mothers, and groups gathered to cross the streets.

In the streaming parade of children emerging from the school, Linda couldn’t find Ricky.

Studying the faces around her, she made her way toward those open front gates, her shins bumped by plastic lunch boxes, her thighs thumped by backpacks that gave each little kid linebacker shoulders. “Ricky!” she heard a high voice yell, and she spun left to follow the sound, but lost the speaker in a sea of pigtails and porcupine-spiked hair.

She whirled back, telling herself she’d find her son, telling herself not to panic, telling herself even a person without a brain injury might be confused within the mass of chattering voices and afternoon exuberance. Breathe, Linda, breathe.

“Grrrr!” Something knee-high and wearing a gruesome, paper-plate-with-poster-paint mask came at her, eyes glittering, bitty fingers curled into claws. Linda drew instinctively away from it, and her back hit someone else’s solid frame.

Emmett’s. He held her against him with an arm across her waist. “It’s a jungle out here, isn’t it?” he said against his ear.

Even as his warm breath sent goose bumps sprinting down her neck, Linda relaxed against him. Just as it had in the grocery store, his presence calmed her and gave her renewed strength.

“I don’t see Ricky,” she said. “Could we have missed him?” The cell phone moms hadn’t missed their kids. Already they were climbing back into their cars, their kids in tow, their mouths still moving as they continued their calls.

“We didn’t miss him.” Emmett placed a hand atop each of her shoulders and turned her back to the intersection of streets. “See that Stop sign over there?”

Attached to the Stop sign was Ricky, his features almost lost beneath the plastic yellow brim of his hard hat. Her son, Ricky. Star of the traffic patrol.

At least, that was how it seemed to her. A swell of warmth rose inside her as she watched him nod to the group of children waiting on his corner. They hurried through the crosswalk under his serious gaze.

She looked up at Emmett. “He’s very good at that, don’t you think?”

“Truly a prodigy.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Are you laughing at me?”

He shook his head. “No. You just sounded so motherish.”

She considered the notion. “No, I don’t have the cell phone for it.”

“What?”

“Never mind.” She returned her gaze to Ricky, watching as he monitored the last of the crossers, then tucked his Stop sign under his arm and headed back for the school. She realized the instant he saw her.

“Hi,” she said, hoping she still had that motherish tone that Emmett had noted. Maybe if she sounded like a mother and acted the part, she’d really begin to feel like one. “Good day at school?”

“What are you doing here?” he asked, his eyes darting toward his patrol buddies and then back to her face.

“I thought maybe you’d like a ride home today, instead of taking the school bus. We could stop for…ice cream or something.” She glanced up for Emmett’s approval, but he’d drifted away from her and Ricky.

“I want to take the bus.” His glance flicked over to another boy, who was standing shoulder to shoulder with him. “Anthony and I always take the bus home together.”

She shrugged. “We could take Anthony with us. For the ice cream, too.”

Anthony’s dark-chocolate eyes widened. “I can’t go home with a stranger. My mother would kill me!”

“I’m not a stranger,” Linda started to say, but Ricky was pushing his friend toward the school.

“C’mon, Anthony, we have to put our signs and stuff away,” he said, herding the other boy off.

“Ricky, wait!”

He turned back reluctantly. “What do you want now?”

“I—” She sighed. “You really want to go home on the bus?”

“Yeah.”

She rubbed her palms against the front of her jeans. “Well, then, I guess that’s what you should do. I apologize for coming here without checking with you first. And I apologize about thinking I could take Anthony with us. I didn’t think. I didn’t realize—”

“That he’d get in trouble. A real mom would know that.” He turned and walked away from her.

A real mom would know that. A real mom.

She couldn’t fool Ricky, could she? Even if she sounded like a mom, acted like a mom, learned all the mom rules, none of those would get her anywhere if Ricky himself didn’t want the mother in his life to be her.

Emmett didn’t need the skills of observation he’d honed through his FBI experience to know that Linda’s conversation with Ricky hadn’t gone well. Not only had she walked away without the boy, she’d spent the entire ride back home in a deep silence.

He’d let her stew, because he didn’t know what else she needed.

Back at the guest house, when she asked him to show her how to use the new treadmill, he’d hoped the exercise would exorcise the demons that were plaguing her.

Instead, they seemed to be punishing her.

She’d already been on the machine for thirty minutes, her speed increasing from a walk to a fast walk to a brisk jog, as if she were trying to outrun whatever was bothering her. The shorts and T-shirt she’d changed into clung to her perspiring body and the tendrils of hair around her face were wet.

Still, she kept on moving, her long ponytail swishing behind her back, her running shoes slap-slap-slapping against the treadmill’s belt.

Under the pretext of doing his own workout, he’d kept an eye on her. But he couldn’t pretend any longer that he wasn’t worried.

“Maybe you should quit,” he called from across the room over the machine’s hum.

She acted as if she didn’t hear him, so he set down the free weights he’d been pumping and strolled over to her. He stood right in front of the piece of equipment, ducking his head a little so that their gazes met. “Maybe you should quit,” he repeated.

“Believe me…I’m thinking…about it,” she panted out.

“Quit running,” he clarified, then leaned forward to reach the keypad where he could reduce the speed of the belt. “It’s time for your cooldown.”

She frowned at him, though her feet slowed. “Don’t need…a keeper,” she got out. “Used to be…fit. Very fit.”

“You’ll be fit again.” He punched the pad a second time, reducing the speed even more. “Unless you give yourself a heart attack first. And I charge extra for CPR.”

She made a face at him, even as she sucked in a couple of long breaths. “You don’t believe me… Used to be one tough woman.”

Her pace had slowed to a walk, and he let his gaze linger on her slim legs and their long stride. Toughness wasn’t an antidote to evil and tragedy, he thought to himself, frowning. Ryan had been tough. Lily Fortune was tough. But they hadn’t escaped the darkness the world could deal out. Jessica Chandler had been tough, too—the sweetest, toughest victim he’d ever tried to help—but in the end she’d been just that—a victim.

“Secret agent accountant.”

That brought his attention back to the present. “What did you say?”

Walking with her hands on her hips, she took another deep breath. “That’s how I saw myself. Sure, I had degrees in the dry fields of finance and business, but when I was recruited as an agent for the Treasury Department, I saw myself as Linda Faraday, secret agent accountant.”

It made his lips quirk. “You were young, weren’t you?” he murmured.

“Our new agent course included firearms as well as physical training. Not as intense as what you G-men go through, but I thought I could handle myself.”

Her fingers touched the keypad, and the treadmill’s hum stopped. Linda stepped off the machine and grabbed the small towel hanging on its handrails. She blotted her face with it, her words coming out muffled. “Apparently it wasn’t physical training that I needed, but emotional.”

She was talking about her affair, her affair with the subject of an investigation—Cameron Fortune. Sudden anger snapped inside Emmett, surprising him with its stinging lash. Ryan’s brother had been twice her age and canny, no doubt. The son of a bitch, Emmett thought. The son of a bitch took advantage of Linda and then irrevocably changed her life.

But Emmett kept his emotions off of his face and out of his voice. “He was a handsome and charming man, by all reports.”

She looked at him over the towel, strangling it between her hands. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?” she asked, her voice bitter. “The person I thought I was wouldn’t be swayed by good looks and charm.”

Though he was lousy at light banter, he tried to ease the tension of the moment. “Oh, good. Then maybe I have a chance with you.”

She didn’t crack a smile. “As if I would know what to do if I had you. I was no good as Linda Faraday, secret agent accountant. Ricky doesn’t think anything of me as a mother. I doubt I’m much of a woman, either.”

Despite those words, her flowery, female scent was in the air, tickling his nose, shaking awake the lust that he’d felt when he’d held her in his arms that morning. He couldn’t stop himself from pushing back a damp tendril of her bright hair. “Give yourself time.”