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CHAPTER NINETEEN
It had taken Kevin less than a month of being on house arrest to get so bored that he’d violate the terms of his house arrest. The kid was brazen as all get-out. He’d tried to sell pot to an undercover cop right in front of Tim’s fucking front door.
Tim had been tempted to leave him at the jailhouse rather than to try to negotiate on his behalf. He was through with coddling the kid and was ready to teach him a hard lesson about consequences.
But Heidi had pleaded for Tim to give Kevin one more try, and it’d always been so hard for him to say no to Heidi. She so rarely asked for anything.
Tim and Heidi waited in the hallway outside the judge’s chambers in the courthouse where Kevin was getting a more professional lecture than either of them could have given him. They sat quietly. Heidi drummed her fingertips softly against her thighs. Tim just ground his teeth and seethed.
“You know what?” he murmured after five minutes of staring at the wall clock.
Heidi raised an eyebrow in query.
“I give up.”
“On Kevin?” Heidi sat up straighter.
“No. Not on Kevin. On everything else. The wife-and-kids thing. Maybe it’s just not meant to happen, and Kevin is just a big neon sign telling me where my focus should be. Maybe I should invest my energy exclusively on him until we’ve fixed this thing.”
“Oh, Tim,no.” She grabbed his hands and gave them an encouraging squeeze. “I don’t believe that.”
“Hard not to.”
“Just give it some time. It may not seem like you have much, but you’re not exactly going to wake up tomorrow morning and roll yourself into a freshly-dug grave.”
“Up until yesterday, I thought the same thing, but a bad night’s sleep and three calls from Kevin’s lawyer this morning changed that.” He extricated his fingers from Heidi’s and slouched in his seat. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Evidently, I screwed up with yet another person. Valerie’s fallen off the planet.”
Heidi’s eyes went wide. “How long has she been AWOL?”
“A month.”
He’d tried not to think about it, but her avoidance of him had seemed particularly purposeful about a week in. By two weeks, he’d started to fume.
What went wrong?
“I’m sorry. I could tell she was hitting the right chords for you, and I know that doesn’t ever happen.”
“Do you think I would be out of bounds if I tracked her down? I could probably get Carine to tell me where she went, at least in general terms.” He’d told himself that he wouldn’t—that he wasn’t going to change his policy of never giving chase just for her. But in the past, he hadn’t been so invested.
No other woman had made him perseverate on the idea of crawling into bed at the same time every night and kissing the day’s secrets out of her. He’d soothe her aches. Distract her from her worries and eliminate all the ones he could.
He’d give her a home and a family, and he couldn’t stop thinking about what that might look like for them. He couldn’t stop thinking about the rapport they’d have.
But she had towantto. She obviously didn’t want to. She’d run.
Heidi drew some air through her clenched teeth and crossed her legs at the knees. “You know, for once, I don’t have any good advice to give. Valerie’s a complicated one.”
“What would you want if you were her?”
“Me? Well, I’d want to be chased, even if I don’t think I plan to commit. Knowing that you’re wanted can possibly lead to other things.”
“Hmm.” Tim rubbed his chin contemplatively. “And if I stop wanting her so easily, she’ll think I never really wanted her in the first place.”
“Bingo.”
He didn’t want Valerie to think that. Perhaps, at first, he’d only been looking for fun and expecting nothing, but now he was playing for keeps. He saw the potential in them being together.
“I’ll see what I can find out, then,” he murmured.
