Cherish (Covet #1.5) (12 page)

Jess pulls my jacket tighter around her shoulders.

“I remember why I changed the garage code. Dylan let himself in one night, shortly before Claire and I arrived. He called us on our bullshit because by that time we were really playing with fire, and he could see it from a mile away. After he left, we almost crossed the line, but I stopped it. If we’d slept together or taken the relationship any further, it would have had the potential to ruin her marriage. And there was also a part of me that knew Claire was only a substitute. If I had really wanted to move on, there are plenty of unmarried women in this town I could have moved forward with. Claire asked me once if I still loved you, and I told her it didn’t matter. But of course it does, because I still love you, Jess, and I won’t let you go again. No matter what happens in the future or how hard you push me away. I won’t stop this time until I get you back.”

“I’m never going to push you away again. But I’m ready for there to not be so much hurt.”

“That’s life, honey. The potential is always there for something to hurt us. But if you can bring that hurt to me, if you don’t try to hide it, I’ll do my best to get you through it.”

She nods her head. “I promise you I will.”

“I’m freezing. Let’s go home.”

“Bye, baby,” she says to Gabriel, rubbing her hand along the marker.

“Bye, Gabriel,” I say, reaching for her hand as we rise and walk to the car. I don’t let go until I open her door.

Before she slides behind the wheel, she kisses me and says, “I still love you too.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

DANIEL

The guys cheered when I walked into the station on my first day back, and I shook many hands as I made my way through the building. If someone had told me when I first woke up from my coma that one day I’d be back in uniform and heading out on patrol duty, I probably wouldn’t have believed them. The days of lying in a hospital bed unable to remember much of anything now seem light-years away. My memory isn’t one hundred percent and probably never will be, but mostly it’s the odd, insignificant detail that I struggle with.

When I returned home around eleven thirty that first night after spending my day responding to calls and pulling people over, Jess was waiting up for me.

“How was it?” she asked.

“It was good.”

“You’ve come full circle.”

I pulled her into my arms and kissed her. “And picked you up somewhere along the way.”

Jess and I got married again. The courthouse seemed a little impersonal, but planning a wedding ceremony didn’t really appeal to us either. We compromised with a short ceremony at home, with just our families in attendance. Afterward, we celebrated at a restaurant with our families and closest friends.

“I hear we have some newlyweds with us tonight,” our waiter had said when he delivered a bottle of champagne to our table, courtesy of the guys down at the station.

“Not exactly newlyweds,” Jess said. “We were married to each other before.”

The waiter looked confused. “Well, uh, congratulations anyway.”

Jess went back to work too. She’s selling advertising again, for a different TV station than the one she used to work for, but only because her old company didn’t have any openings and this one did. The only drawback is that our work hours don’t coincide, but we’ll both have to be patient until I can get back on the day shift. For now, I’m getting up with Jess in the morning and she’s staying up until I get home. We’re both tired, but we don’t really care.

Yesterday, while patrolling the parkway, I pulled over a man going twelve miles an hour faster than he should have been. As I prepared to leave the safety of my squad car, I took deep breaths and tried to calm my galloping heart. Routine traffic stops are getting harder for me, not easier. My physical symptoms, which are essentially those experienced by anyone with post-traumatic stress, include shaking and sweating; my muscles tighten, and I find it hard to breathe. I had to take several deep breaths before I left the car and approached the driver-side window of the silver Lexus sedan.

He was in his midthirties, give or take. Suit and tie, although his jacket was lying across the passenger seat. A quick scan of the interior revealed no visible weapons or immediate threats. Even so, it felt like I was breathing through a straw. “Do you have any idea how fast you were going?”

“Too fast, I know. Haven’t traveled in a while. I just want to get home to my wife and kids.”

He handed over his license and registration, and I took them back to my car to radio his information to dispatch. When I saw the name, I scrapped the ticket I’d already started to fill out and replaced it with a warning. When I handed it to him, the surprise was evident in his expression. He studied me, puzzled. Then he glanced down at my signature on the warning, and realization dawned on his face.

“Watch your speed. Nothing is more important than reaching your destination safely. I’m sure your wife and children would agree.”

“I’ll slow down. Thank you.”

I nod at Claire’s husband. “Have a good evening, Mr. Canton.”

When I got home that night I told Jess that being on patrol wasn’t working out very well for me.

“I’m not surprised,” she said.

“Really?”

“I could tell that something was bothering you.”

“I thought I was hiding it pretty well.”

“You can’t hide anything from me.”

“When I think about the possibility of someone changing my life again because they’ve decided to pull out a gun or a knife, I get really angry.”

Jess put her arms around me and said, “You’re the bravest man I’ve ever known, and I know that returning to the force was something you had to do, but I’ll be damned if some random person at a traffic stop is going to take you away from me. Not after we’ve worked so hard to find each other again.”

I kissed her forehead and pulled her close.

“Have you thought about what you’re going to do?” she asked.

“I’m almost forty. That seems a little old to be making a career change,” I said.

“People change careers all the time,” she said. “Who cares how old you are if what you’re doing makes you happy? And I just so happen to have a great idea if you’d like to hear it.”

EPILOGUE

JESSIE

I meet Daniel at the door when he comes home from work. He’s whistling and smiling. “Good day?” I ask.

“The best. But nothing is better than coming home to my girls,” he says, leaning in to kiss us both.

Daniel is usually home by six unless there’s an especially messy murder, in which case it’s hard to say when he’ll be home. But I don’t mind, because most of the time he’s walking in the door shortly after I’ve picked up our daughter at Mimi and Jerry’s on my way home from work, which means we can eat together as a family.

“Da,” Stella says, reaching out to grab Daniel’s nose.

“Hi, sweetheart,” he answers in return.

She laughs as Daniel takes her from my arms and walks into the living room, cuddling her close.

Having another baby wasn’t something I thought would be in the cards for us. We weren’t trying to conceive, but we weren’t “not trying” either. In retrospect, this line of thinking seems a bit irresponsible because Daniel and I are certainly biologically capable of conceiving. It was almost as if my ovaries watched us get our act together and said, “What the hell. Let’s join in.”

We were at a restaurant having dinner when I took one whiff of my salmon and nearly threw up on the table. Daniel swung into Walgreens on the way home, marched inside, and came out with a test.

“No way,” I said, shaking my head emphatically. “I’m not going to get my hopes up.”

When we got home, he handed me the stick and said, “Go pee on this.”

He found me bawling on the bathroom floor ten minutes later.

When Daniel came home not long after he returned to his patrol job on the police force and told me he didn’t think it was going to work out for him, I wasn’t surprised. I’d known even before he mentioned it that he’d started to struggle a little. I also knew how important it was to Daniel that he was able to go back to work. But no one ever said he couldn’t change his mind about the nature of that work.

When Daniel graduated from college with his criminology degree, he told me his stint with the police department would be temporary. Later, when he told me how much he liked being a police officer and that he’d decided to stay in law enforcement instead of moving on, I told him I understood. But I was always afraid something would happen to him, and years later, my worst fears were realized.

Daniel now works as a crime-scene investigator as he’d once intended, and by the time he gets to the crime scene, the criminals are long gone. When he walks out of the house every morning, I no longer have to worry that someone will shoot him. I still worry, but it’s of the garden variety. If he’s late coming home, I don’t obsess about his safety.

He’s happier than I’ve ever seen him.

I’m the one who plucks our daughter from her crib every morning because I had fears of my own that I needed to conquer. Stella is six months old now, and the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome has lessened significantly, but not entirely. I tell myself I won’t lose another baby, but the truth is I don’t know that for sure. But what I do know is that my worrying about it won’t change anything.

We still live in Daniel’s house. The room he used to keep the treadmill and weights in has been transformed into a nursery with soft gray walls and bright pink polka dots. I waited until Stella was born to decorate the nursery because there was a part of me that wasn’t strong enough to do it before she arrived. Baby steps, I told Daniel.

We could have moved into a bigger home, but I love this house and feel like we brought Stella into a place that already had so much positive energy. This is where we found each other again. It’s where we healed, Daniel physically and me in every way possible.

We’ll stay until we outgrow it. But until then, this is where we belong.

Summer is in full swing and the air is thick and humid. My mom and dad accompany us to the Fourth of July carnival. It seems as if the whole town has turned up, and we push Stella’s stroller through the crowd, stopping now and then to chat with friends. Daniel gives Stella licks of his ice cream, which makes her squeal in delight.

There is a woman walking toward us who looks vaguely familiar. She’s holding hands with a man and there are two children walking with them, both with blond hair. She watches Daniel as he leans down to give Stella another lick. At first I can’t place her, but when she gets closer, I notice that she’s smiling.

And she looks a lot like me.

As she passes by, I return her smile and nod slightly.

It’s still early when we return home from the carnival, so I ask my parents if they can stick around a little longer. “Just a half hour or so. There’s something I want to do with Daniel.”

“Of course,” they say. “Take your time.”

Daniel looks at me questioningly.

“Come on,” I say to him, taking his hand and leading him out to the garage. I pull the tarp off the motorcycle. “Let’s go for a ride.”

“I don’t know, Jess.”

“Why? It’s all ready to go.”

I know this because Daniel tried to sell the motorcycle about a month ago. A man called and said he was on his way and definitely wanted to buy it, so Daniel took off the tarp and pushed it out onto the driveway. He spent the better part of the afternoon out there, washing it and changing the spark plugs. He filled the gas tank and changed the oil. I heard the engine from inside the house when Daniel gave two quick twists of the throttle before turning it off. For some reason, the man never showed, and Daniel let the ad expire.

There’s no danger if he wants to ride. Daniel has passed all his cognitive tests and also the special test he had to take in order to resume operating a motor vehicle. One night when we were lying in bed, he told me that the fear of something happening to him isn’t because he’s worried about his own life. It’s because he doesn’t want to leave me, and now Stella, alone. For some reason, the motorcycle signifies risk for Daniel, and risk is something he avoids at all costs.

“Look at that sunset. I told you that one day you would get on that motorcycle and ride off into it. Are you really going to deny me the experience of riding off into it with you?”

He laughs. “That’s so cheesy, honey.”

I laugh too. “Let’s do it anyway.”

I grab the helmets from a hook on the wall and strap mine on, handing the other one to Daniel. He starts the bike, and even though he may not be aware of it, he smiles when he hears the engine. I climb on behind him and put my hands around his waist.

He plays it safe, but it’s almost as if I can feel him coming alive as we get farther down the road. Before I urge him to open up the throttle, I take my hands off his waist just long enough to throw my arms up in the air in triumph.

THE END

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am deeply grateful for the contributions, assistance, and support of the following individuals:

My husband, David, and my children, Matthew and Lauren. The three of you mean more to me than fictional characters ever will.

Jane Dystel, Miriam Goderich, and Lauren Abramo. You are truly the trifecta of literary-agent awesomeness.

Dr. Trish Kallemeier and flight paramedic Rick Kallemeier. Thank you for explaining the Glasgow Coma Scale (“Less than eight, intubate!”) and answering my questions about traumatic brain injuries. I’m so lucky that such a wealth of knowledge can be found right in my own neighborhood.

Sarah Hansen at Okay Creations. Thank you for working tirelessly to find the right image for this cover. Your talent is truly amazing.

Anne Victory of Victory Editing. Thank you for your eagle eye and your words of encouragement. You put a smile on my face every time I work with you.

Guido Henkel. Thank you for your formatting expertise. I can rest easy knowing that my manuscript is in your very capable hands.