LITMIR.BIZ

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doing two weeks of community service by walking Bentley every day after school, if he wanted. He wanted. Case closed.

      Nick liked cases like that. Cases with happy endings. Cases without bodies. Without hospital records.

      Okay, so someone on the Culver case liked how he’d handled the dognapping and thought he’d be a good babysitter for a week? He looked through the list of witnesses. He’d spoken to the owners of businesses near where Harriet had tied up Bentley. Clyde Heff of Clyde’s Burgertopia. Sau Lan of Sau Lan’s Noodle Shop. The manager of the general store. The yoga studio. Then he’d forced himself into Hurley’s Homestyle Kitchen to talk to Essie Hurley.

      If only he’d spoken to Essie first. She’d been in the kitchen making biscuits and had actually seen the boy take the dog and walk off, but hadn’t thought anything of it until Nick came by. He’d been avoiding Hurley’s these past few months. Even when he’d craved baby back ribs for dinner or those flaky biscuits slathered with apple butter with his three o’clock coffee break. Just the sight of the peachy-pink-colored Victorian reminded him of Georgia. And he’d tried like hell to put Georgia Hurley out of his mind. But because he could have solved the dognapping case in five minutes had he only gone into Hurley’s first, he’d decided just this morning to end his boycott of the place and had ordered from there today. His plan was to connect barbecue burgers and Creole-sauce-slathered catfish po’boys with his thankful stomach instead of a particular Hurley with silky golden-brown hair and big green eyes. And a slick, rich boyfriend.

      Oh, him? Just an acquaintance I ran into. Ready, darling?

      A cold ache seeped into his bones, despite the eighty-five-degree temperature outside.

      Nick was “oh, him.” Just an acquaintance. After a woman he barely knew had managed to accomplish something no other woman had: made him feel something more than lust, made him open up about himself, which he rarely did. About the childhood he never talked about. What his mother had endured. His mother passing two years ago and Nick moving back home to Blue Gulch to take care of Avery, sixteen and a grieving mess.

      For Avery, he’d lived in his childhood home for six months before he couldn’t take another second of it, of remembering the constant sound of his rageful father slamming the front door, shouting, his mother fruitlessly trying to calm him down with a ready beer and a plate of meat and potatoes, the kids out of sight, out of earshot, lest they upset him, lest he start using his fists against his wife and the son who’d try to intervene.

      Avery had been furious about having to move to a new home in Blue Gulch, not wanting to leave her childhood home, but she was ten years younger than Nick and remembered very little of their father, who’d died when Avery was just five. But Nick had spent fifteen years being afraid of his father, Vincent Slater, career officer on the Blue Gulch police force. The sight of his gun in his holster used to scare Nick to death, that his father would snap and shoot his mother.

      When Nick was fifteen, Vincent Slater had been killed in the line of duty, chasing a burglary suspect who turned and fatally shot him. His partner had fired back at the perp and killed him.

      Nick could remember his surprise, that you could grieve so hard for someone you thought you hated, someone you’d wished was dead a million times before.

      He’d decided to become a cop to try to understand his father better, but Nick was nothing like his dad and he’d understood nothing. Over the years, mostly in Houston, where he’d served for five years until he moved back home to care for Avery, he’d met some hotheaded cops like his dad, but it didn’t seem to be the job that had turned them. They’d always been hotheads; it was just their personality. He’d once asked his kind, gentle mother why she’d married Vincent Slater, why she hadn’t packed up him and Avery and left, and she’d said sometimes the opposite of what you are draws you, you admire it, and then things turn bad, things turn ugly and you feel trapped for a million different reasons you can and can’t explain. I’m so sorry I didn’t do more to protect you was one of the last things his mother said to him.

      Nick’s stomach twisted. He was never getting married. He was never having kids.

      He stood up, his chest tight.

      I’m pregnant with your baby, Nick.

      Well, unless Georgia had never slept with the Suit in the thousand-dollar shoes, Nick couldn’t understand how she could be so sure.

      He wasn’t going to be a father until she explained that little mystery. Not that he wanted to hear one damned word from her about it. He got it. Clear as day. Her actions had told him everything he needed to know about Georgia Hurley.

      Nick Slater, a father. He closed his eyes and almost laughed—that was how crazy the idea was. Yes, Nick could learn how to change a diaper and remember to point down tiny male anatomy so that he didn’t get sprayed in the chest—again. But being a father was about a hell of a lot more than just stepping up, which Nick would do if he really was the father of Georgia’s baby.

      As he was doing with Timmy. Stepping up. Taking responsibility, despite being 1,000 percent sure that he wasn’t Timmy’s father. He’d had a long, self-imposed dry spell in the women department until he met Georgia Hurley. And another since her. Whoever Timmy’s mother was, she definitely knew Nicholas Slater was not her son’s father. She’d chosen him as a safe keeper for a different reason.

      The problem here, Nick realized, was that he didn’t want to take care of Timmy. He would, but he didn’t want to. First of all, he wouldn’t be any good at it. Two, something about that helpless, defenseless, innocent baby had his protective instincts on red alert, giving him that unsettled, uneasy, on-guard knot in his chest and stomach. He’d lived with that feeling his first fifteen years of life and the past two, when he and his kid sister would be at each other’s throats and he was so damned afraid he’d mess up and Avery would decide to drop out of high school.

      So yes, he could take care of Timmy. But he did need to hire a full-time caregiver. That way, he could track down Timmy’s mother, find out what her situation was, do what he could to help and reunite a mother and child. The note she’d left made him think she wasn’t a nut job or a rage-aholic or an irresponsible, immature shirker.

      These days, though, Nick would give his gut, which had always served him well, a D-. Maybe an F.

      Someone knocked on the door. He glanced at his watch. Four o’clock. Timmy’s mother? Three hours separated from her baby had been enough, maybe. He rushed to the door and pulled it open.

      Oh hell. It was Georgia Hurley. She had a big basket in her arms.

      “I brought some things for Timmy,” she said, gesturing to the basket.

      She still wore the pale blue sundress that draped over her curves, her hair now up in a topknot. She was too damned pretty, too damned sexy, even at four months pregnant.

      He took it from her, eyeing the pack of diapers and various ointments and burp cloths. “Thanks.”

      “Can I come in?” she asked.

      He stepped aside to let her enter. “Of course.”

      “Nice place,” she said, glancing around.

      “I let my sister pick out a lot of the furniture,” he explained as he led the way into the living room. “Otherwise those couches would be black leather and not ‘eggplant twill,’ whatever that is.” Letting Avery do the decorating had saved their relationship back then; she’d been less angry about having to move, about not taking most of their furniture. The worn old upholstered recliner his father had fallen asleep drunk in most nights? Not taking it. He had brought over some of his mother’s favorite furnishings, but anything that reminded him of his father had gone into storage for Avery to decide what to do with when she was ready to furnish her own place.

      She smiled. “Did she leave the cat?”

      He was surprised she remembered that. “She sure did. Mr. Whiskers hates me. He pretty much sleeps all day in Avery’s room and comes out twice a day for breakfast and dinner. Sometimes I forget he’s even here.”

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