The Man Who Would Be Daddy
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“I’ll keep that in mind.” She waited, but he said nothing else. With a perplexed sigh, Christa walked away from the service station.
Tyler was still waiting for her when she returned to her van. He was leaning against the hood of his car, talking to Elliott. The other squad car was nowhere in sight.
Straightening as she approached, Tyler nodded toward the gas station. He’d watched her brief encounter with Robin’s rescuer. Body language told him that it hadn’t gone the way Christa had wanted it to.
“What was that all about?”
Christa opened the passenger side and climbed in with Robin. All she wanted to do now was go home, sit holding Robin in her arms and forget about all this.
“I was just trying to thank him. I wanted to do something to show how very grateful I am.” She shrugged as she snapped the seat harness around Robin. “He told me to get out of the way.”
Tyler had surmised as much from the look on her face. “Some people can’t handle gratitude. They get embarrassed.”
Christa climbed out again, then pulled the door shut. She turned her face up to Tyler’s. “I know, but if he hadn’t been there—”
He wouldn’t let her do this to herself. She’d already been through too much lately as it was.
“But he was.” When she looked away, Tyler bracketed her shoulders with his hands, forcing her to raise her eyes to his. “Don’t dwell on what ifs, Christa. It’ll drive you crazy. You were the one who taught me that, remember?”
She sighed. “Yes, I remember.”
Her shoulders sagged as if all the fight had been drained from her. Tyler knew better than that, but he let his hands drop to his sides.
“We’re going to need you to come down to the station and make a statement.”
Christa just wanted to put this all behind her. Being a cop’s daughter, she should have realized she couldn’t do that so quickly. “Now?”
Ordinarily, he would have said yes. But this was his sister. And though she was trying to put up a brave front, he knew she was shaken. Hell, he was shaken by what had almost happened. She deserved a little slack.
“No, why don’t you go home first? Take care of the bump on your head and clean up that scrape.” Taking hold of her hand, he turned it to examine her palm. The blood was already beginning to dry. “You can come down to the precinct later.” She flashed a small smile in response. Even that lit up her face. It was more like the Christa he was accustomed to. “Want me to drive you home?”
Home was a condo she had just leased last week. It was a little more than a mile down the road and still in a state of chaos, but right now, it was a haven.
She shook her head. “No, you go do what you have to do to earn your paycheck.” Christa saw the concern in his eyes. She placed a hand on his arm. “I told you, I’m fine.”
Tyler could only shake his head in response. “Stubborn as ever.”
Her eyes slanted toward the gas station. Malcolm Evans, if that was his name, was bending over the car he’d begun working on when she walked away. Its yawning hood was hanging open over him like the mouth of a shark that was getting ready to deliver a final bite.
“Yeah,” she answered, “I am.”
A deep, cleansing breath that helped her push aside the entire harrowing experience. She pulled open the door on the driver’s side of the van and climbed in. Robin sat dozing in her seat. Poor thing, she was exhausted.
That makes two of us.
Tyler shut the door behind her. “Buckle up or I’ll have to issue you a ticket.”
“Bully.” She slid the metal tongue into the clip. It clicked into place. “I’ll be by later this afternoon, all right?”
“Whenever you’re ready. Ask for Detective Harold. He’ll ease you through this.”
“Thanks.”
As she pulled out of the parking lot, she saw her brother in her rearview mirror. He was walking over to the gas station. She wondered if he was going to have any better luck with the solemn-eyed Good Samaritan than she had had.
The police station had grown a great deal since she’d wandered the small, narrow halls as a child. Those times, she had been ushered in by her mother to visit her father at work.
A sense of pride had always shimmied through her here, even though she’d been very young. The pride had multiplied as her brothers joined the force. Christa liked the idea of them being part of what made things right in the world, part of what kept the peace.
The halls weren’t narrow anymore. Renovated, the station seemed like something that belonged on the ground floor of a corporate building, not a police station. But it was a station nonetheless. A place where perpetrators were fingerprinted, where victims told their stories. It was a place where people came after bad things had happened to them.
People like her.
Christa shivered and wished she didn’t have to go through this.
It could have been a lot worse, she reminded herself as she squared her shoulders.
Detective Harold was a new name to her. She’d known many of the old-timers. Her father had always brpught his work home with him, cleaning up some of the coarser, uglier details as he went along. The men he worked with became a phantom part of the family.
The redheaded policewoman at the long reception desk looked up and waited expectantly as she asked, “May I help you?”