His Best Friend's Baby. Molly O'Keefe

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      He simply nodded, worried that if he opened his mouth, words he barely allowed himself to think would fly out.

      When she sat on the step and wrapped the sweater around her legs, resting her chin on her knees, Jesse let himself go. He let go of all the mistakes he had made and the ghosts that were catching up with him. He left the broken and battered shell of his body and allowed himself to be a man on a porch enjoying the evening with the woman of his dreams. He let possibility and hope hover close. The what-ifs he refused to think about settled on his shoulders like snow.

      What if she were here to give him a second chance? What if life weren’t as cruel as he had always thought? What if it were possible for him to be forgiven?

      “I didn’t know you’d left Germany,” he said, engaging in conversation even though he knew it was a bad idea. He remembered everything she’d said in Germany. All the small hints and gifts of herself she’d made during those brief twenty-four hours. He knew she hated mushrooms, couldn’t sing, loved to run.

      He knew she was so lonely she cried most nights.

      “There was nothing keeping me there,” she sighed. “I didn’t have many friends and my mom was back and forth between Iraq and D.C., so I decided to come here.”

      “Looking for a family?” he asked, the drugs making him loose and careless.

      She smiled at him. “Constantly. You want to adopt us?” She joked but it fell flat in the thick air.

      No, sweetheart, he thought, reminded of all the things he really wanted to do to her.

      Wain stood up from his spot at Jesse’s side with a groan and shuffled over to Julia. He sniffed her, must have decided she was okay and collapsed on the step above her.

      She smiled and scratched the old guy’s ears.

      “Nice dog,” she said.

      “He’s yours if you want him,” Jesse said, though his hand itched with a sudden desire to scratch those old ears.

      Wain curled up into a ball and soon started to snore.

      “Have you heard anything about Caleb?” Julia asked quietly. “I called the hospital a few times to check on him, but then I got so busy with—”

      “Still in the coma.” He was reluctantly touched that she would keep tabs on the survivors of the accident that had killed her husband. Touched, but not surprised. Julia was a good person. Good in a way most people never were. In a way he never dreamed of being.

      He’d stopped checking in on Caleb, mostly because he, Jesse Filmore, was a coward. He’d already killed three men in that accident, he didn’t want to know about the death of another one added to his conscience.

      “I got your note,” Julia said. She referred to the stupid, morphine-induced lapse of judgment that had resulted in him asking a nurse to write a note to send to Julia. A sympathy card. He couldn’t even remember what he’d said. “It really helped.” She sighed heavily and smiled at him.

      He looked away and said nothing. What could he say? I’ve thought of you every day for months. I wish I’d never met you.

      “That night in Germany seems like a million years ago, doesn’t it?” She rested her cheek against her knee and watched him, her blue eyes glowing with things he refused to recognize.

      Seems like yesterday, he thought but didn’t say.

      “I couldn’t believe it when Mitch showed up out of the blue, and with you, no less.” She chuckled and rubbed her nose on her knee as if she were scratching an itch.

      The desire to touch her was so strong he could taste it, bitter and hot in the back of his throat. Thanks to meds, everything had a rosy sort of glow, a sparkle, and she was so damn gorgeous—although she would have been so even without the effect of medication.

      “We didn’t get a lot of warning about the assignment,” he told her, his tongue seeming to function its own. “It was real quick.”

      “I’ll say. It was all real quick.” She sighed.

      Their briefing had taken all of two days and then they were gone. And Mitch was dead. Real quick.

      “We had fun though, didn’t we?” she asked.

      “It was the wine,” he said, though Mitch had been the only one who’d drank it.

      “It was the company. And the stories.” She pulled at a thread in the hem of the sweater. “Those stories Mitch told about you guys growing up and all the trouble you got into.”

      “Mitch got us in trouble, I was just the cleanup.” The official blame-taker. No one had believed the troubled kid with the drunk for a father and everyone had believed the star football player who could always outrun the cops.

      “Come on,” she teased. “Mitch said painting the water tower was your idea.”

      He smiled, remembering. “Yeah, you’re right.”

      There had been good times with Mitch. His wild streak had called out to Jesse’s own and in high school there was nowhere he’d rather have been than causing trouble with Mitch.

      Mitch, however, had adopted that wildness as his life mission. Jesse found that, by default, he’d still been expected to clean up after his old buddy, long after the thrill had worn off for him.

      She wrapped her arms around her knees and lifted her feet a little off the step so she balanced on her butt.

      “Mitch told me you were a dancer,” Jesse blurted.

      Julia shook her head, her eyes suddenly darker. “My husband said a lot of things…most of them not true.”

      “He wasn’t known for his honesty.”

      Julia’s eyes got sadder and Jesse could feel sympathy churn through his gut. The silence stretched and he watched her profile, the sweet line of her cheek, her nose. The perfect rose of her mouth. He was the only other person in the world who knew what Mitch was really like—and high on painkillers he couldn’t deny her the small bit of comfort she clearly needed.

      “He was hard on the people who loved him,” he finally said.

      She turned wide eyes on him. “You sound like a man with experience.” She tried to smile, but failed, and that told him so much about what being married to Mitch had cost her.

      His hands itched to stroke her narrow shoulders, but not for comfort. Not as further cleanup after Mitch.

      Jesse wanted to touch her for himself.

      “Everybody in this town loved him, but no one knew him. There was only one guy stupid enough to be his best friend.”

      She bit her lip and he wondered if he’d gone too far. If he’d read her wrong and her emotions for her husband were stronger than he thought. Maybe she didn’t know what a bastard Mitch was.

      “He was pretty good at keeping the worst of himself СКАЧАТЬ