twelve long, excruciating months, she’d found her son.
Johnny understood life, particularly his role in it. He worked hard enough to be the best at whatever he did. He took satisfaction from that. He did what was expected of him, expected by himself and others. He went with the flow.
Strong urges, other than the normal sexual ones a guy got, didn’t play a significant role in his life. He wasn’t driven. Had no great passion. He was a mind guy all the way.
Which was why that Monday night in July, the evening of his daycare visit with Tabitha, would remain with him forever. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t walk away from her—the steps it would take to get him to his room in their suite. His mind told him to leave. Something unfamiliar held him rooted to the spot.
“Go have your shower,” he told her. “I’ll order some dinner and open a bottle of wine.” They’d picked up a couple of bottles down by the beach the evening before from a shop selling local wines. They’d bought a limited-production white that had won an award at San Diego’s Toast of the Coast Wine Competition.
They’d talked about having a glass. He’d been thinking about it on and off all day. A glass of wine with Tabitha. But she’d been quiet on the ride back from the daycare. The kind of quiet that meant she needed some time alone. Some space.
Usually they talked after a visit, but when she got quiet like that, he was supposed to leave her alone in her world, knowing she’d be back when she was ready.
He was supposed to go to his room.
That was their way, and it had been established from the very beginning—by deed more than conversation—and neither of them had ever deviated from it.
So what the hell was he doing? More crucially, why?
It wasn’t the first time she’d thought she found her son. He was quite certain it wouldn’t be the last. He only wished he was as certain that she would find the child someday. And that this boy, Jason, was her Jackson...
He’d rinsed off quickly, dressed in a newish pair of tan shorts and a black polo shirt, and was pouring the wine by the time Tabitha’s bedroom door opened. He hadn’t been sure she’d come back out.
She’d put on the tie-dyed, spaghetti-strap, calf-length sun dress she wore at home a lot on her days off. It had reds and browns in it, offset by gold. The casual red Italian sandals she wore with it struck him as odd, since they weren’t going anywhere. He was barefoot. Just as he always was around the house these days.
He kept looking at the curves of her calves, finding them erotically attractive—calves. Tabitha’s calves.
One look at her face, though, and erotic thoughts fled. This was Tabitha. And the unfamiliar light in her eyes, as though she was bursting with secrets and ready to fly off her rocker in some kind of desperation, or so his imagination told him, called to him in an entirely different way.
He handed her a glass of wine. Held his up and waited for her to tip hers to it, as they always did.
“To our goals,” he said. She clinked her glass against his, but didn’t repeat the toast. She sipped instead. Then she curled up on the sofa, her feet tucked into that cute butt.
He sat on the other end of the couch, glass in hand.
“It’s him, Johnny.”
She sounded...different then she had before. The whole desperation thing?
Again, what did he do with that!? His job was to encourage her, to keep her spirits up so they didn’t pull her permanently under. To let her know she wasn’t alone.
And to be Chrissy’s dad sometimes.
Hers was to help him make a success of Angel’s food truck.
He had another three months of sabbatical. There was no reason for her to panic, yet. To think her time was running out.
“A lot can happen in three months,” he said.
Her nod was a relief. Until she said, “We need a plan, though. Time’s not the issue. Neither is the truck, since we’re doing better than either of us imagined and sold more here in one day than we have anywhere else. We can come down every week on my days off. It’ll save having to get permits in other counties, finding new spots... You’ll be able to build a real following.”
The food truck was his last concern at the moment. But he liked the practical way her mind was working, so he nodded. “Fine with me.”
Her smile warmed him as he took his next sip, and he told himself it was really the wine that had affected him. But he wasn’t exactly buying the explanation. Two days in a row now, he’d been getting the hots for Tabitha.
Stranger things had happened than a perfectly healthy guy being attracted to an absolutely gorgeous woman. Except that he’d been traveling with her, living next door to her, sharing dinners and suites with her, for months without thinking about taking her to bed.
“We need a plan,” she said again, her expression needy, confident and expectant all at the same time.
A plan for sleeping together and remaining friends until their exit date? He’d set aside a year of his life to honor Angel. He couldn’t sleep with another woman.
Trashing his first “plan” thought, he took a moment to come up with another.
Tabitha had been different ever since she’d seen that online picture of the boy at The Bouncing Ball the previous week. She’d run over to his house, coming in without knocking—which they did when they were expecting each other. But this time there’d been no warning. He could’ve been standing in the kitchen naked instead of in his pajama bottoms...
He might have said something, too, if he hadn’t noticed the tears in her eyes, the trembling of her hands as she held out the picture she’d just printed.
Yeah, she’d been different ever since.
And so had he.
This whole thing of his...it was her fault. Her barging in on him in his pajamas.
“What kind of plan?” he finally asked when nothing useful was forthcoming.
“Detective Bentley won’t be able to compel a DNA test based on what we’ve got. We need to find a way to get more. Alistair can follow up on the name Jason, but without a last name...”
Alistair Montgomery was the PI Johnny had hired. The guy was willing to do whatever Johnny asked as long as he got paid for it. But following up on a common first name? In San Diego?
Not liking where this was going, he felt everything slow down as he watched her. “What exactly have we got?”
“Jason—Jackson. Single dad. A year. Liver disease. A picture that matches the age-progression photo.”
She listed everything as though going over facts that were a given, as though hoping they’d see what might be missing. He wondered how long it would be before she figured out he was missing from this collection of hers. Or rather, his buy-in... The picture might closely resemble the age-progression, but he wouldn’t call it a match.
“Liver disease?”
“Mark’s mother died of it,” she said, and he remembered her having told him that. After he’d first met her and she’d been telling him her story. That last visit, Mark’s mother had just died, but she hadn’t known that when she dropped Jackson off at the home Mark shared with his mother. They passed off in the driveway...
He nodded. “That’s right...” He drew the word out, as if he was getting it now, while frantically trying to figure out how to support her, be a friend, encourage her, without lying.
“So,