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God, she thought, logging onto her e-mail, I’d kill for a Diet Coke with caffeine. But it was not to be. She was going to have to opt for decaf coffee, instant, no less.
Waiting for the screen to come up, she made her way back to the lunchroom and found the carafe marked HOT WATER and poured a cup. It steamed as she returned to her desk. She didn’t want any of her coworkers to note that she’d switched from “high-octane” to “unleaded” because she hadn’t shared her secret with anyone, including Nate Santana, her fiancé and the father of her unborn child. He had no children of his own, and she wasn’t sure how he would react to the news. She trusted him, loved him, and had agreed to marry him, though she’d been reluctant as she’d walked down the aisle twice before, once to Joe Strand, her son Jeremy’s father. A cop like her, he had died in the line of duty. Theirs had been a rocky, if passionate union. The same could be said for husband number two, Luke “Lucky” Pescoli, a sexy trucker who had swept her off her usually grounded feet. She’d married him on the fly and the results were their daughter Bianca and a divorce. Lucky had remarried Michelle soon afterward who was, in Pescoli’s biased opinion, a life-sized, walking, talking Barbie doll, barely older than her stepson Jeremy and a whole heck-of-a lot smarter than she let on.
As she carried her mug back to her desk, Pescoli heard Blackwater on the phone, but she didn’t peer into the sheriff’s office as she passed, not like she used to when Grayson was there. She couldn’t stomach the thought of Blackwater leaning back in Grayson’s chair, feet on the desk, receiver to his ear as he kiss-assed the higher ups; or, more likely, sitting ramrod stiff in the chair and doing isometric exercises as he restructured the department.
Maddening.
Once seated at her desk again, she shoved aside a stack of papers, then added freeze-dried decaf coffee crystals to the steaming water
in her mug and stirred with a spoon she kept handy in the top drawer. She caught a glimpse of one of the pictures she kept on her desk and felt a tug on her heart. The shot was of Jeremy at nine, his smile stretched wide, his teeth still a little too big for his face, his hair mussed. He was standing on a flat rock near the banks of a stream and proudly holding his catch, a glistening rainbow trout.
Her heart squeezed. The years since then had flown by and he was nearly an adult who, despite her protests, was going to follow in his parents’ footsteps and become a cop.
Lord help us, she thought, though the truth was that her son had saved her life recently, and it seemed, in so doing, had finally crossed the threshold into manhood.
After taking a sip of her coffee, she felt an instant souring in her gut. From the coffee? Or Blackwater, whose voice still carried down the hall. Irritated, she rolled her chair to the door to shut it and thought, again, of the new life growing inside her.
Pregnant.
And pushing forty.
Now that had been a surprise. She had near-grown kids already. Jeremy was almost out the door . . . well, that had yet to be seen, but he’d made a few futile attempts in the past. Bianca was in the last years of high school and deep into teenage angst.
So now a baby?
Starting all over again with diapers, sleepless nights, shifting schedules, and juggling a full-time job?
She wasn’t ambivalent about the baby, not really. She just knew how much work and chaos a baby brought into the home, especially a home that wasn’t exactly picture-perfect already. And she wasn’t married. Not that being unwed and pregnant was such a big deal these days, but Santana was already pushing for them to tie the knot.
She had the ring to prove it, even if the band with its diamond was currently tucked into a corner of the top drawer of her bureau. She’d had it on briefly, but with everything that had happened recently, she didn’t feel like bandying it about quite yet.
She took another sip of the coffee, found it too bitter, and put the half-drunk cup aside on her already cluttered desk.
A sharp rap on her door sounded, then Alvarez stuck her head inside. “Busy?” she asked as Pescoli swiveled in her chair. “Or do you have a minute?”
“Something up?”
Alvarez shook her head and slipped into the tiny room, leaving the door open a crack. “I just wanted to see if you’d gone to visit Grayson.”
“Not for a few days. I was going to drop by the hospital after work. Wanna go with?”
“I was there last night.” Alvarez was grim as she shook her head.
“And?”
“Not good.”
“It’s only been—”
“I know. But I expected him to, I don’t know, come around by now.” Compressing her lips together, Alvarez gave her head a quick shake as if dispelling an unwanted picture in her mind. Though it had been Pescoli who’d found him lying in a pool of blood at his cabin, Alvarez had been the most shaken up by the attack on their boss.
“They’re moving him out of ICU, into a private room,” she added. “That’s what one of the nurses told me before I went in to see him.”
“I thought he was going to be transferred to Seattle, a neurological unit specializing in brain trauma or something.”
“That plan’s been scrapped and I don’t know why,” Alvarez said, obviously frustrated. “The doctors seem to think he’s stable enough that he doesn’t need round-the-clock observation, that he’ll get better with time, but I don’t know.”
“He’ll be okay.”
