Maternal Instinct (13 page)

Would he want to be?

Yeah. He had this image of her, eyes fixed on his face, hand gripping his, as if he were her whole world while she strained to birth their baby.

Yeah. He'd want to be there.

"Maybe we should go back to work," he said.

She nodded, but didn't move. "You won't tell anybody yet, will you? I mean … anybody at work?"

"Like John?"

"I wish people didn't have to know."

"It'll be hard to hide after a while."

"I know," Nell said miserably.

"They'll separate us, you know. They can move you to a desk job."

That straightened her back. "I don't want a desk job!" she flared. "Not until I have to! If I have to."

"Okay, okay," he soothed. "I won't say anything. You're skinny. It may not show for months."

"Skinny." She looked at him with dislike. "Why you?"

"Goddamn it!" He stood, suddenly angry and restless. "I wish the hell I knew."

Face averted,
Granstrom
got to her feet, too, and hurried past him. He had to stretch his legs to keep up. If anybody paid any attention to the two cops emerging from the rhododendrons to stalk back to their squad car, Hugh didn't notice.

She'd asked the question of the century.
Why?

Why had Captain Fisher assigned the two of them to work together? Why had they been on the front lines at the Joplin Building? Why hadn't one of them decided to go home and sack out instead of getting plastered? Why hadn't he stopped a beer or two sooner, kept his pants zipped?

The sad part was, he knew the answer to the last question.

Nell
Granstrom
had bugged him from the first time they'd done a few shifts together on patrol. They clashed: ideals, methods, attitude. But he had secretly wanted her even then. She wasn't his type. But something about her Princess Grace carriage and the unexpected curves on that tall, thin body had tweaked a chord in him.

He never would have acted on his brief fantasies.

If
they hadn't been assigned to work together.
If
Gann hadn't shot up the Greater Northwest Insurance Company.
If
Hugh and Nell hadn't gotten drunk together.
If
she'd said no instead of kissing him with all the hunger he'd buried.

Fantasies were meant to stay that way.

Reality was what happened when you acted on them.

Chapter 6

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N
ell wished
Hugh hadn't had to drag the announcement out of her. Now she felt in the wrong, and that didn't sit well. She would have told him. Of course she would have. If he had just let her, she thought resentfully. Why, she'd spent the past week planning how she would do it.

She wrinkled her nose at herself in the rearview mirror of her Subaru on the way home. No, she'd spent the week discarding all the possible ways.

Stand up at roll call. "Hey, everybody! Big news. Officer McLean and I are having a baby."

Leave a voice mail at his home. "Um, thought I should tell you that I'm pregnant." That option had actually appealed to her, to Nell's shame.

Wait until the end of a shift, leap out of the car, then stick her head back as if with a last thought. "I'm pregnant." Then run.

She hadn't lied. There wasn't an easy way to tell him. It would be bad enough if they were lovers, but not thinking marriage or forever. At least there would be a
relationship.
Something. As it stood, he was another cop. A near stranger, despite their temporary pairing.

She'd tried so hard not to think about their lovemaking—if you could dignify what they'd done with such a euphemism—that now she could hardly remember it. Or so she'd been telling herself.

But that night she lay in bed and thought,
I
wish it had never happened.
And then, hopefully,
Maybe it didn't.
Just like that, she was reliving every minute.

Swaying across the parking lot, agreeing with a drunk's idiocy that, yes, of course it made sense for them to get in the back seat of his Explorer and get some sleep. And, yes, kissing would be nice, too. The booze had effectively killed her conscience, common sense and her critical inner voice. A few too many beers hadn't, unfortunately, killed her intense response to Hugh McLean.

Damn it, she'd never liked him, but she'd always found him sexy. Her body's involuntary response to the big, dark-haired cop with the cocky attitude and the blue, blue eyes had made her grit her teeth more than once. How could she be attracted to a man who represented so much that she resented? He saw the world in black and white:
I'm right, you're wrong.
The kind of swaggering, macho cop she despised. Women weren't valid partners or friends, they were toys to him, and he always chose the prettiest.

Maybe, she admitted wryly, that was what she'd resented most. Knowing he'd never look her way, see her as the prettiest.

Only, thanks to a few beers, he had. And she hadn't had the pride to slap his hand and say, "Here's one toy you can't have."

Nope, she'd let him play.
She'd
played, though she knew all too well the price a woman often had to pay.

Even with his support, she'd be raising a child alone again, just when Kim was heading off to college. There'd be talk in the department, but it wouldn't be about Hugh, except for some knowing grins. Boys will be boys.

Nell was the one they'd be whispering about, the one who'd face official disapproval, the one who'd be stuck behind a desk while her belly swelled, the one who'd scramble for child care and use every second, of her own sick leave for a baby with ear infections, while knowing she was letting her fellow cops down.
Hugh
would want to see his son or daughter on his days off, when it was convenient. And he'd feel big because he was being a real father.

Nell winced at her pettishness. He was offering more than many men would. He'd actually taken the news well. He hadn't asked why she had spread her legs if she wasn't on birth control. He wasn't pretending he hadn't been there, in every sense. He hadn't argued when she told him she wouldn't have an abortion. He'd actually been willing to stand beside her when she told Kim, which was perhaps the noblest part of all.

He really was being decent about this, Nell had to admit. So maybe he wasn't the jerk she used to think him. No, of course he wasn't. She'd seen enough signs of smarts and self-doubt and even kindness from him during their weeks working together to have learned that much. She was luckier than she could have been. Hugh wasn't the kind to lose interest a few years along. This baby would have a father.

Working together should have been easier once she'd been straight with him, Nell was sure.

Within a day, she'd discovered that for some reason, it wasn't. His new-formed solicitude didn't help. He actually came around and opened her car door at their first stop the Monday morning after their talk. When she gaped, a dull red flush crept over his cheekbones.

"Sorry," he muttered. "I just thought…"

"I was a lady?"

"I was thinking about you being pregnant, and wondering if you're tired the way my sister-in-law was the first few months, and—" He shut up.

Joining him on the sidewalk in the dry hot shade of an enormous cedar tree, she lied, "I'm not tired. If you start opening doors for me in public view, the whole world's going to find out I'm pregnant."

"Yeah." He grimaced. "Treating you like another guy just goes against my instincts."

"And always has," she said, sotto voce, only he heard her.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You know."

He blocked her way up the sidewalk. "No, I don't. Tell me."

She thrust out her chin. "You don't like women cops."

He braced his hands on his hips. "Have I ever treated you differently than I would a man?"

You screwed me in the back seat of your Explorer,
she had the sense not to say.

"You don't like to let me drive."

"That," he said with a growl, "is because you don't focus. For God's sake, your head is turning because a damn rose is in bloom or a new antique shop has opened! I'm a better driver."

Nell flushed, because she had remarked on both when she was behind the wheel. "Cops are supposed to be observant."

"We're looking for criminal activity, not home gardening tips."

Good time to shift direction. "You were ticked when the captain assigned me to work with you."

He threw his hands up. "Big shock! We've never gotten along. You
think
like a woman, not a cop."

Her temper increased a notch. "Did it ever occur to you that cops don't
have
to think like men? Just because they've always been men?"

"No."

Nose to nose, they glowered at each other.

"Maybe that's because men so often
don't
think," she snapped, and made a move to push past him.

His hand shot out and gripped her upper arm. "You drive me crazy," he said in an odd voice.

She made the mistake of turning her head and saw that his eyes glittered with some powerful emotion. That shimmering gaze froze her, wide-eyed and breathless.

About the time her eyes started to burn from the need to blink, Nell managed to croak, "Good."

His fingers bit into her arm, and for just a second she thought he was going to pull her to him. Then, nostrils flaring, he abruptly released her.

"We have an interview to do."

Ignoring her shaky knees, Nell sniped, "And I thought you'd forgotten."

Behind her, he said roughly, "You never know when to shut up, do you?"

Starting up the walk to the split-level house set on a wooded lot, Nell said, "Gee. Maybe that's because I'm a woman."

A low frustrated sound followed her up the porch steps. She managed to clamp her mouth shut on a similar sound that expressed the simmering tension that she might have labeled PMS if she weren't pregnant and therefore definitely
not
premenstrual. Unfortunately.

Nell rang the doorbell. Hugh and she waited, both staring straight ahead, as if the plain paneled front door was the Mona Lisa.

This interview garnered a first corroborating tidbit.

Carrie
Engen
, a young sales rep, had been trembling under her desk when she heard the first shot. "I thought it would be closer," she said, her forehead wrinkling in remembered puzzlement. "Then there was just this … silence." She shivered. "For maybe a minute or even two. And then I heard another shot. It seemed closer." Her gaze appealed to them. "I must have been wrong. Right? I know sound does strange things."

They already knew her office was across the hall and two doors farther from the elevator than Jerome Ryman's.

"What about footsteps? Voices?"

"Kind of a—a shout." She wrapped her arms around herself, grief and shock on her face. "I think it was Jerome. It must have been." She swallowed. "Why did that man shoot Jerome and no one else on our floor?"

They were evasive and soothing: they didn't yet know, they hoped still to understand Gann's motivation for targeting Greater Northwest, but she had to understand that somebody in his state of mind was irrational.

Outside again, Hugh mopped his brow. "I hate feeding someone like her a line of BS."

"Me, too," Nell agreed. "She
knows
something isn't right."

"She'll make a good witness," he said practically.