Mischief 24/7 (20 page)

Which made Teddy’s life so much easier, didn’t it?

He could wallow in his misery over the wife who’d left him, the brother who’d betrayed him. He could continue to work long hours as a Philadelphia homicide detective and then, later, at the Sunshine Detective Agency. He could travel to Ireland with his friend Father Muskie, pretend he was still a cop by working his cold cases, and he could occasionally drop into a bottle—and Jade would
understand.
Because Jade knew
what it was like to be rejected by someone you loved.

But all of that was for another time…

“Did you think I didn’t need you, Jade?” he asked her quietly, holding her hand, stroking his thumb across her palm.

“No, don’t be ridiculous, of course I…” She stopped, lowered her head again. “I knew you needed parts of me. We weren’t married all that long, Court.”

“No, we weren’t, were we? And I was gone a lot, wasn’t I? I should have taken you with me. That was stupid. But I thought I could work faster if you weren’t with me and I could be home sooner. I, uh, I don’t travel nearly as much as I did when we were married.”

Jade simply nodded. “That’s… that’s probably smart. You were always on the move.”

“I’d never had a reason to stay in one place, not until you. And I’ll admit it, Jade. Every time I came home, it was like a honeymoon all over again. I really didn’t think about what you were doing while I was gone. I think I just supposed you were happy doing what other wives did. You shocked the hell out of me when you said you wanted to work with Teddy again. I thought that part of your life was over.”

“We
should have had this talk a long time ago, Court,” Jade said, wiping her hand across her damp cheeks again. “We probably should have had this talk before we got married.”

He reached over to push a lock of hair behind her ears. “We’re talking now.”

“Yes, we are, aren’t we.” Jade turned to look at him, and he longed to believe it was with love in her eyes. “There hasn’t been anyone since you, Court. I think you should know that.”

“I didn’t even need cold showers,” Court told her with a small, self-deprecating smile. “I just wasn’t interested. You’re the only fantasy I’ve ever had, and if I couldn’t have the reality anymore, I didn’t want the fantasy.”

Jade touched her fingers to the opened collar of his dress shirt. “We could… maybe if we were very careful, and if we didn’t expect too much of each other too soon… you know… then maybe we could… we could maybe
try
to—”

He put his arms around her and gently took her mouth, even as a soft cry escaped her lips.

Did she feel it? Holding her, loving her, was like coming home. The passion was there, yes. That had been there since the beginning. Maybe it was only in this last year, spent apart from that passion, which had given them both the time to realize
that even if they could live without the passion, they couldn’t exist without the love.

The salty taste of her tears mingled in their kiss, bittersweet, and he felt an involuntary shudder rack him when she slipped her arms around his waist.

Yes. This was what they needed right now. Not the passion. The love.

“Hi, honey, I’m ho-ho-ho-home. Whoops—talk about your lousy timing. Sorry, guys.”

Court swore under his breath as he and Jade looked at Jessica, who was now grinning like a…well, the way only Jessica could grin. “Hi, Jess. Matt downstairs?”

“Uh-huh,” she said, still grinning. “Hey, look what I got,” she then said, holding up her left hand, her fingers spread. “Wait, let me go stand over next to the window so the sun can catch the stone. Matt picked it out all by himself, and it’s perfect. Jade, don’t you think it’s perfect?”

“Do you want to kill her or should I?” Court said quietly, barely moving his lips.

Jade squeezed his hand. “It’s probably for the best right now. You go downstairs and tell Matt what we learned about Jermayne, how we’re going to meet with Joshua Brainard in a couple of hours, and I’ll let Jess gush at me. We, uh, we’ll continue this later?”

“Yeah,” Court said, seeing the mix of confusion and dawning realization in Jade’s eyes. She didn’t look defeated anymore, no longer the wounded bird she’d been since Teddy died. He believed, needed to believe, that she was at last beginning to look forward again, beyond the mistakes of the past, beyond solving her father’s murder. “Let’s do that. Let’s very definitely schedule that really soon. In fact, why don’t you just pencil me in for the rest of your life?”

The sun shining on Jessica’s engagement ring could be no brighter than Jade’s smile. “I think that could probably be arranged.”

“Hey, people!” Jessica said, walking back over to them. “Doesn’t anybody want to see my ring?”

“L
OOK,
T
EDDY,
” Jade said, walking into his office holding the large crystal vase filled with three dozen long-stemmed yellow roses. “Look what Court just had delivered. Aren’t they beautiful?”

“Beautiful, honey.” Teddy barely looked up from the newspaper crossword puzzle he was working at his desk. “What’s a seven-letter word for remuneration? Starts with P.”

“Payment,” Jade said as she put the vase down on the desktop and leaned over Teddy’s shoulder to peer at the puzzle. “I don’t see that clue there.”

“There’s clues everywhere, Jade, if you just look,” Teddy said, and he was pointing his pencil at the roses as he spoke. “Court Becket must have enjoyed your company this weekend.”

Jade felt her cheeks flush with embarrassed heat. “Now I see where you’re going here. Subtle, Teddy, really subtle. Those flowers are not payment for services rendered, Teddy. That’s cruel.”

He pushed back his chair and swiveled the seat to look up at her. “Maybe you’re right. But it’s meant to wake you up, little girl. You went away
for the weekend with a man you barely know. You went to his house, you slept in his bed. In my line of work, there’s a name for women who do that. I told Father Muskie you’d be at Confession this Saturday.”

“Oh, you did, did you? Well, you can just tell Father Muskie—”

“He’s wrong for you, Jade,” Teddy said, his tone now soothing, that hint of lilt he always came back with from his trips to Ireland softening his words. “No, no, don’t look at me like that. I’m only thinking of what’s best for my little girl.”

That was Teddy’s answer for everything he did: he was only doing what was best for his girls.

But today, for reasons she didn’t understand, Jade wasn’t buying it. Today she had another theory.

“Are you, Teddy?” she asked him, walking around to stand on the other side of the desk. She braced her palms against the old wood as she looked at him. “Or are you thinking about how Court lives in Virginia? How maybe I might soon be living in Virginia if he asks me to marry him? About how, if he did ask me, maybe I’d say yes? Maybe even about how you’d manage here alone without me? Would you be that selfish, Teddy?”

Teddy’s fists came down so hard on the wood that Jade involuntarily stepped backward. “Selfish, is it? You’re calling me selfish? You’ve got a nerve, Jade Sunshine. I’ve been alive a damn sight lot longer than you have, little girl, and I know what

I’m
talking about here. I see the stars in your eyes. You think it’s enough to be all starry-eyed and your stomach doing flips when you see him?”

“Teddy, I—”

“You think kisses are enough? Looking at those flowers, I’m thinking he thinks the same way as you—with anything but his brain. You don’t have a mother, so it’s up to me to say these things.
Sex,
little girl, that’s what you’ve got right now, since you’re looking at me like you don’t know what I’m saying here. There’s a lot more to marriage than sex, Jade.”

“So speaks the marriage expert,” Jade muttered, a part of her wondering who could have said those words, because it certainly couldn’t have been her. She never spoke like that; she wasn’t a cruel person. What was wrong with her? “Ah, Teddy, I’m sorry.”

He got to his feet and came around the desk to fold her in his big, comforting arms, to kiss the top of her head as he led her over to one of the chairs in front of the desk.

“It’s all right, sweetie pie. You just said what you were thinking. I’m no expert, that’s for sure. But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from my mistakes. Come on, sit down here and let your sorry excuse for a father bare his battered old soul to you.”

Before she sat down, Jade touched the vase, perhaps for courage, and then waited for Teddy to open the left bottom drawer of the desk and pull out the cloth bag that held his treasured
bottle of Crown Royal and a shot glass. Reverently he lifted the squat bottle from its pouch and poured a measure into the glass.

He also kept a bottle of fine Irish whiskey in that same drawer, and she saw that emerge more often. The Crown Royal was held in reserve for either the best or the worst of times. She thought she had a pretty good idea which of the two this moment was for him.

“Sláinte,
Jade,” he said, holding up the glass, and then he sipped at it, not downing it quickly, as he did his nightly shot-and-a-beer, because, as he said, this was liquid gold he was drinking.

The problem was, he was drinking that liquid gold and those “medicinal” shots and beers more and more often as the years went by. As he grew lonelier?

“Where do I start, Jade?” he asked her, leaving the Crown Royal bottle on the desktop. “How about with this, all right? Opposites attract, sweetie pie, but they don’t stick for long. You are who you are, and Court Becket is who he is. Opposites. Like me and your mother.”

“Court isn’t anything like—”

“Don’t interrupt, Jade, this isn’t easy for me. “Your mother was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. You look so much like her, my heart still sometimes has to remind itself to beat when I look at you and see her young again, mine again, looking at me like maybe I was something
special, not just this dumb flatfoot street cop like my dad before me.”

He took another sip from the shot glass.

“You showed up seven months after we were married, Jade, did you know that? You did, and I was that thrilled to have you, because you got my Claudia to the altar. I was so happy, I didn’t see what I should have seen, what we both should have seen. Opposites attract Jade, like I said. That doesn’t mean they fit well together.”

“Are you saying you and Mom might not have gotten married if she hadn’t been pregnant with me?” Jade didn’t know how that made her feel, not exactly. She did know the news didn’t make her feel particularly good.

Teddy took yet another drink from his shot glass, this one more of a full swallow. “Back then, I don’t think it would have made a difference, no. Now I wonder if maybe I wasn’t already feeling her looking at me a little differently, wanting things I couldn’t give her. So maybe we slipped up one night and maybe we didn’t. Maybe it was just me. Does it matter? Your mother was so happy to be getting married and having her own house, her own babies. We just needed to be together. You were our first fight, though, I’ll say that.”

“Then she didn’t want me,” Jade said, nodding, because that explained a lot, answered many questions she’d had all her life.

“No, she wanted you,” Teddy said quickly. “It was
the Jade
I didn’t want.
Jade? What kind of a name is that, not that it didn’t grow on me. But Claudia wanted fancy, had a big thing for fancy, and so you’re Jade. When Jolie came along I didn’t even fight it, because by then there were other battles. The big new house Claudia wanted, the trips she wanted to take, the cleaning lady she needed, the hairdresser up on Broad Street who cost twice as much as the shop that was good enough for every other wife we knew. The worst, though, was that I was never home. Hell, I was moonlighting three nights a week just to pay for the fancy car she said she had to have.”

“And Hawaii?” Jade asked, looking at her father’s colorful Hawaiian shirt, thinking of his closet filled with other colorful Hawaiian shirts.

“I told her we’d get there,” Teddy said, and Jade got the feeling he wasn’t really talking to her anymore, but only
at
her, as he relived years of un-happiness. “I needed to put in my thirty years, get my pension and then we’d go. Then… then, uh, there was Jessica. Claudia never forgave me for Jessica. By then maybe I didn’t care so much. I was getting pretty tired of the big ideas, the big dreams, the
I want, I want, I have to have.
”

“That’s when she started going away, wasn’t it? After Jessica was born. Where did she go, Teddy, those times she left?”

Teddy finished off the contents of the shot glass and poured another measure. “You think I asked?
If I asked, she might have told me. I was only glad that she came back. Until she didn’t come back. Maybe a part of me was glad then, too.”

He looked across the desk at Jade. “And that’s what I’m telling you, sweetheart. Wanting isn’t enough. That stars-in-the-eyes feeling isn’t enough, not in the long run, not for the long haul. You and this Court Becket? You’re from different worlds. Born different, raised different, with different hopes and dreams. I don’t want you hurt, baby. I want you to look past the stars in your eyes and see that before you and that man do something you’ll both regret.”

“I, uh…”Jade said, getting to her feet, picking up the vase of fragrant roses. “I’ll think about it, Teddy. I think you’re wrong, but I’ll think about it.”

He picked up his glass, drained it in a single gulp. “You do that, little girl, you just do that.”

She hesitated in the doorway. “Don’t drink it all, Teddy, please.”

“Don’t you worry about me. I’ll be fine,” he said, pouring yet another measure. “Jade?”

She turned around one last time. “Yes, Teddy?”

“Margaret Mary,” he said, his smile sad. “That’s the name I wanted for you. Maybe all our lives would have been different if Claudia could have been content with just a husband who worshiped her and a sweet little baby girl we’d named Margaret Mary Sunshine….”

“T
ELL ME THE NAME
again, Court, please. I want to get it right for my news exclusive when we bring good old Joshua down,” Jessica said as she filled a plate with the small, crust-free sandwiches Mrs. Archer considered proper. “Carpenters’ Hall? Where’s that?”