“Hello?” Surprisingly, her sister answered on the first ring, sounding wide-awake.
“It’s me.”
“Are you okay?” Immediate panic and concern.
“I’m fine. Relax.”
Jennifer took an audible breath. “Did you find out who sent that Lorenzo guy?”
“No. But I didn’t call to talk about that.”
There was a brief silence. “What’s up, then?”
Skye smiled and touched her stomach, wondering what it would feel like as the pregnancy progressed. “I think I’m in love.”
“With the detective you told me about?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?”
“Except that I’m more scared of this than anything else.”
Jennifer laughed softly. “You two are getting closer?”
“He brought his son over tonight, Jen. It’s the first time he’s ever let me spend an evening with Jeremy, and it was…”
“What?”
She smiled to herself. “Wonderful.”
“So you like this boy?”
Skye closed her eyes as she remembered the grin on Jeremy’s face when she lit the candles on his cake. “I do. He’s darling.”
“Do you think you could love him?”
“I’m sure I could.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“What if I let go and fall headlong into this and…and it doesn’t work out?” What if the guilt took over, and he went back to Lynnette?
“You’ll get hurt, like the rest of us when we’re rejected. Then you’ll pick yourself up, dust yourself off and move on. Heartbreak is part of life, Skye. Protect yourself against that, and you’re not really living.”
She’d known that all along, of course. She’d told herself the same thing before she’d called Jennifer. But she’d needed to hear someone else confirm it. “So I shouldn’t call him up and tell him I don’t want to see him anymore?”
“No!” Laughter filled her stepsister’s voice. “You should get some sleep and see what tomorrow brings.”
“Right. Sleep,” Skye repeated, and for the first night since Burke, she didn’t check her doors and windows repeatedly before climbing into bed.
It was time to live like a normal person, even if that meant trusting something as changeable and fickle as love.
The ringing of the phone sounded ominous even in her sleep. Reluctant to stir, Skye tried to block it out—until she realized it might be Sheridan or Jasmine. If one of them was calling this late, it’d be important.
Rolling over, she nearly knocked the phone off the nightstand in her half-awake attempt to answer. “Hello?”
“Skye, it’s David.”
She rubbed a hand over her face, trying to shake off her lethargy. “Is anything wrong?”
“Nothing for you to worry about. It’s just work. I got a call. Someone stumbled across a body in an empty lot, and I gotta get over there. Any chance you could spend the rest of the night here so someone will be with Jeremy?” His voice fell, and his next words revealed a certain amount of embarrassment. “I’m sorry to ask you this, but I can’t reach Lynnette. I don’t know if she’s still out drinking, or if she went home with someone or—”
“No problem. I’ll throw on some clothes and leave right away.”
“So you’re naked?” he said.
She laughed at how easily he’d been distracted. “Not quite.”
“It’s still a great mental picture.”
“See you when I get there,” she said, smiling.
The next time Skye awakened, it was to the sound of cartoons in David’s living room. Was David back? She wasn’t sure, but Jeremy was most definitely awake.
Covering a yawn, she sat up and took a moment to orient herself. Then she got up, ran a comb through her hair and brushed her teeth before she went out to explain why she’d once again been sleeping in David’s bed. She didn’t want to startle Jeremy when he came searching for his father.
But Jeremy didn’t seem surprised to see her. “Did I wake you up?” he asked, slightly chagrinned.
“No,” she lied, deciding it was pointless to make him feel bad just for turning on the TV.
“Good. My dad said I wasn’t supposed to wake you up.”
She perched on the arm of the couch. “You’ve talked to him already this morning?”
“Yeah, he’s at work. He said you should call him when you get up.”
She couldn’t believe she’d missed the ringing of the phone, couldn’t remember a time she’d slept so deeply in the past four years. “He must be tired after being up all night.”
“Being a policeman isn’t easy,” Jeremy said, and Skye had to smile at how grown-up he sounded.
Leaving him to his cartoons for a few minutes, she went into the kitchen to call David.
“Hey, how’d you sleep?” he asked, his voice instantly warming.
“Really well.” She loved being in his home, smelling a hint of him in the bedsheets. She didn’t love lying to him about the pregnancy, but she figured they were going through enough difficult transitions right now. Opening herself up to love and loss was one thing; committing relationship suicide from the get-go was another. “Where are you?”
“Still at the crime scene.”
“What happened last night?”
He didn’t answer right away.
“David?”
“Maybe you should sit down.”
She gripped the phone a little tighter. “Why would I need to sit down?”
“You know the victim, Skye.”
“I do?” She took a deep, shaky breath. “Who is it?”
“Sean Regan.”
She slumped into a chair. Poor Sean. She was supposed to make a difference. But not this time… “Are you sure?”
“He was wearing a Medic Alert bracelet,” David was saying. “He was a diabetic.”
“I didn’t know that.”
David said nothing, allowing her a moment to grieve.
“Who found him?” she asked.
“A man named John Roberti. The body was in a creek behind a vacant lot at a Quick Shop.”
“How was he killed?”
“The corpse was too decomposed to tell. Someone stuffed it into a canister and rolled it into the water. It looked like it had been there a while. If this was summer, there wouldn’t have been anything left besides bones and…”