Molly was examining the five-foot-long stuffed dolphin sitting in the corner of John’s office when the door suddenly opened and he walked in. She straightened guiltily, though what she had to feel guilty about she didn’t know. There was no law against looking at other people’s stuffed dolphins.
“Oh,” John said, when he saw her. “Someone donated that for Baby Aphrodite. I was going to take it over to the hospital, but I keep forgetting.”
“Cosette,” Molly said, automatically.
John appeared confused. “What?”
“Cosette. Tabitha named the baby Cosette, after the character in Les Misérables.”
“Oh.” John stood there in the doorway looking, as always, tall and dark and impossibly handsome in his uniform. It was all she could do to keep herself from throwing her arms around his neck then and there and kissing him.
But of course that’s not what she’d come there to do. She’d come to apologize. Hopefully kissing might follow, if she was lucky.
It would all depend on what happened in the next few minutes.
“Well,” he said, closing the door behind him. The door had a large piece of plywood in the middle of it where Molly imagined there’d once been a plate of glass. She supposed something had happened to break the glass—possibly it had been shattered by the elbow of an unruly perp who’d needed subduing.
John headed toward his desk, which Molly saw was scrupulously—some might say even compulsively—tidy.
“I guess Cosette is better than Aphrodite,” he said. “Easier for other kids to spell when she gets to school, anyway.”
“Yes.” Molly stood there awkwardly, wondering how to begin. She wasn’t used to being wrong, so this was difficult. Not that she was wrong wrong, but she didn’t want to go around being the word police. That was wrong. People had the right to express their feelings. “Listen,” she began. “I want to apolo—”
“No, I want to apologize,” he interrupted. “I never meant to—”
“No, let me go first.” Molly approached his desk, refusing to allow its tidiness to intimidate her. “I’ve just come from the hospital. I met Tabitha—and her parents.”
“Oh.” He hadn’t sat down, or offered her a seat, either. They each stood, the desk separating them. “That must have been . . . interesting.”
“It was. You were right.” Molly plopped the pie she’d purchased from the Mermaid Café onto the center of his desk. “Banana cream pie. Tabitha is a deeply confused girl. I wouldn’t personally call her bananas, because I find that term insensitive. But she’s got a lot of growing up to do, and she definitely needs her parents, even if she’s intent right now on pushing them away.”
“Well,” John said, looking down not at the pie, which was covered in a clear plastic lid glistening with condensation, but into Molly’s eyes. “I just got through interrogating her boyfriend. And he’s a real treat. I don’t blame her for being so messed up after what he’s put her through, even though—get this—the guy is in love with her.”
Molly’s jaw dropped. “What?”
“Yeah. Don’t get me wrong—he’s completely conflicted about the whole fatherhood thing—who wouldn’t be? Parenthood is the toughest job in the world. But he loves her. That’s why he let himself get caught, and confessed, even. He feels terrible about what he did, even if that doesn’t excuse it, or mean he isn’t going to be punished for it.”
Molly shook her head in wonder. “Well, Tabitha will be happy to hear that. She thinks he’s coming to get her and the baby, and take them sailing around the world.”
“That isn’t going to happen. Not for fifteen to twenty years anyway. Maybe a little less, with time off for good behavior.”
Molly shook her head. “People do crazy things for love.”
“Oh, yeah?” His grin pulled at her heartstrings. “What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done for love?”
Molly looked down at the pie between them. “Probably this.”
His glance fell down to the pie, then moved swiftly back up to her eyes. His grin faltered, and he reached a hand out across his desk to grasp one of hers. “Molly,” he said, in a voice gone suddenly hoarse.
Molly clutched his fingers in her own, unnerved as always by the brightness of his electric-blue eyes, and felt her pulse race. She began to babble. She couldn’t help it.
“I’m not saying I love you, of course,” she prattled. “It’s much too soon for that. But I certainly like you—more than like you. And I’d enjoy spending more time with you, if that’s something you’d be interested in.”
His fingers tightened over hers. “That’s something I’d be very interested in,” he said. “I more than like you, too, Molly.”
Then he pulled her toward him by the hand, gently, so that their lips—nothing else, only their lips—were touching across the desk. It started out as the sweetest kiss Molly had ever experienced, full of forgiveness and hope.
But the longer it lasted, the more desire crept in. He really was, Molly decided, the best kisser she’d ever met. And since this time they weren’t being interrupted by a knock or a cell phone ring, when he slid a hand around Molly’s waist to pull her closer, she didn’t mind leaning so dangerously near the pie that she almost put a knee in it—it was worth it, if she could feel more of this man who had the ability to melt her insides at his slightest touch.
Who knows how much more intimate things would have become between them if the door to his office hadn’t been flung open suddenly and a young girl’s voice hadn’t said, “Hi, Dad—Oh!”
Molly tore herself away from the sheriff and threw herself into a nearby office chair.
“Oh, Katie.” John sat down quickly behind his desk. “Is school out already?”
“It’s a half day.” Katie looked suspiciously from her father to Katie. “Teacher conferences. What were you two doing just now when I walked in?”
“Dance lesson,” Molly said, just as John said, “Kissing.”
Molly threw John a disbelieving look, but he only returned her glance with a So, what? shrug.
“She’s going to have to know the truth sometime if we’re going to do this,” he said to Molly, who felt herself turning red. To Katie, he said casually, “Miss Montgomery and I are dating. And it’s polite to knock before you enter a room, Katie.”
Instead of looking horrified or bursting into tears or doing any of the things Molly most feared a teenage girl might do upon hearing her father was seeing a woman other than her mother, Katie Hartwell laughed and dropped into the visitor’s chair opposite Molly’s.
“Ha, I knew it,” she said, letting her legs dangle over the arm of the chair. “So where are we going for dinner?”
