A Mother in the Making. Lilian Darcy

she turned to Jack. “Tell me to shut up if you hate this,” she said. “Cormack often does. Even though he knows it helps my sanity.”

      “You need help with your sanity?”

      She shrugged and grinned, and her red earrings swung against her tanned neck. “Life gets complicated. I’m the go-to girl in the O’Brien family and my baby sister is being a pain in the butt right now—she’s just turned eighteen. Helps to yell at idiots in traffic instead of yelling at her.”

      “I can relate to that,” he said, thinking of Terri and her new husband, and the ice junkie with the crazy gun. “Sometimes you need to off-load stuff onto someone safe.”

      “Yeah,” she said quietly, as if she’d understood his thoughts. “Um, are you going to ask the doctor about that, too? I mean, about…”

      “Crying on your shoulder?” He raked his teeth over his lower lip, a little scared that even just saying the words might bring those hair-trigger emotions bubbling back up.

      “Yep. That.” She glanced across at him, must have seen the way his face had gone tight. She added lightly, “Not that your tears have ruined my gorgeous silk blouse or anything.” She fingered her plain cotton T-shirt.

      The humor helped. “I’ll buy you a new one in gold satin,” he promised. “You want C & C Renovations embroidered on the pocket, like on that one?”

      “Seriously, though…”

      “How about if we’re not?” he said quickly. “Serious, I mean. I’ll ask the doctor. He knows I’m seeing the counselor and taking time off.”

      “Okay. Just wanted to check.”

      “Well, thanks, but I think I have a handle on this.”

      She made a tricky lane change in silence, then asked, “And your partner, how’s he doing?”

      “He took a vacation with his wife to Bermuda. She’s great. Down to earth. Says she’s planning to come home pregnant. Her dad’s a cop, too. Russ’ll be okay.”

      “He didn’t get shot.”

      “The getting shot is the least of it. It’s the shooting someone else that breaks you up.”

      “I can imagine.”

      “Here’s the doctor’s building coming up on the right, after the next light. There’s parking out front. You can wait in the pickup, if you want. Hopefully this won’t take long.”

      “Hmm, wait in the pickup… Does this doctor have good magazines? Or just ones with fish and cars on the covers?”

      “What’s wrong with fish and cars?”

      “Despite the toolbox, I am actually a girl, Jack,” she drawled. “I believe we’ve already covered that? I gotta catch up on my celebrity gossip or I grow forests of unwanted body hair overnight.”

      He laughed. “No forests. He has good magazines.”

      “Then I’ll come in and read.”

      They waited five minutes before Dr. Seeger called him in, and he left Carmen with her pile of glitzy reading.

      “Okay,” the doctor said, sounding way too eager. “Let’s see if I can cause some pain.”

      Bottom line, he could.

      Other than that, the news was good.

      “I don’t think you’ve caused any further damage,” Dr. Seeger said. “Your blood pressure is normal and your temperature, your heart. There’s no sign of infection or swelling. It wasn’t hurting until I poked at it just now?”

      “No, but if I twist…”

      “Don’t twist. You’re, what, ten days out of surgery? You’re still healing. Go easy on this.”

      “Do I have to lie down?”

      “Not unless you want to. Have you been taking your pain medication?”

      “I stopped it. Made my head too fuzzy and I hated it.”

      The doctor fixed him with a thoughtful look. “It’s probably good that you’ve stopped, although I wouldn’t recommend that strategy to every patient. You’re the type who thinks he’s cured if he can’t feel actual pain. The hero type. If you pop painkillers, who knows what you’ll do to yourself and never realize.”

      They negotiated Jack’s exact level of permitted activity for a couple more minutes, and Jack wondered if maybe this “hero-type” thing had some truth to it. Dr. Seeger certainly seemed able to predict a few of his recent behavior patterns with a high degree of accuracy. There was also the lingering suggestion that the “hero” label wasn’t one hundred percent complimentary.

      He left the doctor’s office with mixed feelings.

      “He says I can keep painting,” Jack reported when he got back to Carmen in the waiting room. He looked pleased and a little thoughtful.

      “Is that good?”

      “Hell, yeah!”

      “What else did he say?” She put down her magazines and stood up, sensing he was eager to get out of there. The car keys in his hand provided a tiny clue. He was jiggling them impatiently, even though they belonged to his own car, not the C & C pickup that they’d arrived in, and he wasn’t even driving.

      “What else?” he echoed. “Good blood pressure, no infection or swelling. And he says I should go easy on the painkillers because I’m the—” He stopped.

      “The what?” she prompted.

      “Nah. Nothing.”

      “Go on. Worst patient he’s ever had? Rarest blood group on the planet?”

      He shrugged, tucked in the corner of his mouth and spread his hands. “The hero type. For what it’s worth.”

      What was it worth?

      Carmen didn’t know.

      She didn’t have a lot of experience with heroes.

      Chapter Three

      Four days of solid work later—a lot of splintered wood, a lot of paint fumes, a lot of dirt and mess, the occasional presence of Rob to help with the heavy work, not much conversation—Carmen flipped her cell phone shut and announced to Jack, “That was Cormack. He and Rob should be here with the new kitchen cabinets in about a half hour. They’ve hit a delay at the warehouse, but they’re sorting it out.”

      “No problem,” Jack answered easily.

      He had seemed more relaxed as each day passed. His side looked to be hurting him less, and he’d told her that Ryan was coming tonight, for the first of his more-frequent weekends here. Carmen could see Jack was happy about it, but a little wound up at the same time. He’d looked at his watch several times over the past hour.

      “At least, it’s no problem for me,” he added. “Do you have somewhere you need to be?”

      “No, I’ll wait. We won’t get any of the cabinets put in tonight, but they’ll take a while to unload from the truck, and we’ll want to check them for any damage or anything that’s wrong. Will it be a problem if we’re still here when Ryan arrives, though?”

      He looked at his watch again. “Shouldn’t be.”

      But he frowned. Carmen already had the impression that his ex’s reactions could be unpredictable.

      It was late Friday afternoon and almost dark out. Chilly, too, with so many windows open to air out the smell of fresh paint. Jack had almost finished the sunroom. He’d been working with a roller at the far end, rapidly filling in the last sections with long, smooth strokes.

      Carmen watched him as he returned to the work. He leaned down to the roller tray, still favoring his injured