His Best Friend's Baby

“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 hidden. Until it was too late.”

“Remember that when you get tired of all the Mitch stories this town can tell. These people never knew him like we knew him.”

He met her crystal gaze and they were suddenly knit together, not just by that morning in Germany, and not by the terrible, forbidden things he felt for her, but in their knowledge of Mitch Adams.

The Mitch the whole town refused to believe existed.

“I thought I married someone else,” she said. “The way he talked, I thought… Well, I thought he was a different person.”

“I understand,” he said. An expression of gratitude spread over her features.

“It’s been a long time since someone has said that to me.”

The moment stretched taut and then snapped. He looked away with a cough—hot and uncomfortable with how much he still wanted his best friend’s widow.

She laughed nervously and wiped at her eyes. “Look at me,” she said. “I arrive out of the blue to start crying on your porch.”

“Go ahead. Cry away.”

She turned aside and studied the stars while he studied her. Birds called and dogs barked and Jesse lifted himself from the chair and stupidly, foolishly, was about to lower himself onto the steps so he could touch her, smell her. Press his lips to the quick pulse that beat in her neck.

“Do you know Mitch’s parents real well?”

The air went cold, dousing the flames in him.

“Yeah.” He sat down heavily.

“What are they like?”

“They hate me,” he said, getting right to the point. “They’d hate you sitting on this porch with me.”

“Because of the accident?”

The word shattered the serene picture they made like a pane of glass. His intentions, his desire for her, turned to ash. They weren’t two strangers engaged in warm conversation, carefully scoping out the edges of their feelings for each other.

Mitch was between them. Mitch and his death and the accident.

He almost laughed. Accident? People could be so stupid. Didn’t anyone realize there were no such things as accidents?

“Among other things,” he said and shrugged.

She must blame him, at least a little, for Mitch’s death. How could she not? Her husband was dead while Jesse was alive. In his head the math was simple.

“Jesse?” She looked at him warily. The pressure in his chest grew unbearable. “That morning in Germany when you—”

“Don’t.” He groaned and shook his head. The honesty in her eyes and the ache in his chest defeated him so, like a coward, he looked away. “Don’t say anything. I’m sorry. I’m… sorry.”

“Sorry?”

He refused to look at her, willing her to get off his porch. He had been stupid to let her stay. Drugs or no drugs.