Beth Andrews - Do You Take This Cop?

“Put your shoes away,” she said around another bite.

“But I just got to the good part.”

She nodded toward his shoes. “Go.”

He groaned and rolled his eyes.

She lifted the phone to her ear as someone knocked on the door.

“I’ll get it,” Austin said, rushing past her.

“Check to see who it is first,” she reminded him, then said into the phone, “Hello?”

“Hey, it’s me,” Britney said. “Now, promise you won’t get mad…”

Faith watched Austin move aside the curtain covering the door’s window. “That is so not a good lead-in.”

Whoever knocked must not be a stranger, because Austin undid the dead bolt and opened the door.

“You’re right,” Britney admitted, “and you can be mad, but remember, I’m doing this because I want to help you.”

“I don’t suppose that help involves an idea of what to cook for dinner using half a pound of ground beef, two carrots and some stale saltines?”

“Uh…no. Sorry. But this is better,” Britney promised. “I got you a surprise.”

“I hate surprises.” Faith bit into the apple again as Austin stepped aside, giving her a clear view of her doorstep. She inhaled sharply and coughed to dislodge a piece of apple from her windpipe. “Never mind,” she choked out. “It’s here.”

“Already? He was supposed to give me time to prepare you first.”

Phone still at her ear, Faith walked over and stood behind Austin, who tipped his head back to look up at her. “Mr. Coletti’s here,” he said.

“I can see that.” She made the mistake of meeting Nick’s unflinching, cool gaze. In her stomach, it felt as if a baby bird was about to take flight. “Why don’t you put your shoes away and then set the table for me?”

“Are you talking to me?” Britney asked.

“Now why on earth would I ask you to put away your shoes?” Faith said.

“Well, I did leave them by the door…”

Faith smiled and shook her head. “I was talking to Austin. Just…hold on a minute, would you?” She nudged Austin’s shoulder.

“Bye,” he told Nick.

“See ya, Austin.”

She waited until her son was out of earshot. “Britney says you didn’t give her time to prepare me.” Still holding the phone to her ear, she kept her other hand on the door frame, blocking his entrance to her home. Her sanctuary.

If he didn’t get the message she didn’t want him here, he wasn’t as bright as she’d given him credit for.

He set his toolbox on the blue-painted wooden porch. “Should I come back later?”

“Tell him not to go anywhere,” Britney demanded. “Even if you’re mad at him—”

“I never said that.” She bit into her apple. Hey, she hadn’t eaten anything since she’d tried to finish her leftover ham sandwich hours earlier. She was too hungry to worry about crunching in someone’s ear.

“He told me how you got upset about him paying Austin to run an errand.”

Her face heating, Faith leaned against the doorjamb. As soon as she’d walked away from Nick that morning she’d known she’d been out of line. But her fear that he’d been trying to somehow get close to her son by giving Austin something he wanted so badly had overridden her good sense.

“And now he’s standing on my porch with a toolbox at his feet because…why?” Faith asked.

“I asked him to look at your water heater.”

“I’d hate to put him out,” Faith said, straightening.

Nick hooked his thumbs in his front pockets and rocked back on his heels. She squeezed her apple so hard, she half expected to wind up with sauce on her hands.

“He might be able to fix it, which will save you from having to pay a plumber—a plumber who might not even get to it for days. If Nick can’t figure out what’s wrong, he’ll collect his tools and go home. No harm done.”

No harm done? The harm was having Nick Coletti in her house, in her personal business.

“Crap,” Britney said. “Michael’s beeping for me. I have to go. Just let Nicky look at it, okay?”

She hung up in Faith’s ear.

“What’s the verdict?” Nick asked, as if he couldn’t care less one way or the other what she decided.

“I’m not sure why Britney asked you to come over—”

“She’s got a big heart. It’s her greatest weakness.”

“And you’re enabling that weakness?”

“I have a hard time telling her no. Besides, she laid it on thick, told me how much she’d consider it a personal favor to her….”

“She guilted you into coming over here?”

“She’s good at convincing people to do what she wants,” he said, so solemnly that Faith blinked. “She thought if I helped you with your water heater problem, it’d make up for you being ticked off at me and we could all hold hands, sing songs of friendship and skip off over some fairy-tale rainbow.”

Faith cleared her throat. “I don’t think that’ll ever happen.”

“Yeah, well, Brit wants everyone to get along. She’s always been that way, even as a kid.” He tapped the toolbox with the toe of his work boot. “She loves me and considers you a friend, so she wants us to tolerate each other.”

Panic knifed through Faith. Friends? Her and Britney? Why did all the Colettis want to be her friend? Britney was her boss. Period. Besides, when you were friends with people they did things like send their brother to your house. She hadn’t missed all those hints Britney had given her these past few months about how wonderful Nick was, how perfect he’d be for some lucky woman.

That lucky woman obviously being Faith.

“If you want me gone,” Nick said, “just say the word.”

Oh, she wanted. But she’d long since learned that it didn’t matter what she wanted.

She’d play nice with Nick, show him she was just a single mother trying to get by, and then he’d stop looking at her as if she was a suspect in one of his cases.

Damn it, she and Austin were done running. And Nick Coletti wasn’t going to change that.

“I APPRECIATE YOU checking the water heater.” Faith sounded sincere. So why did Nick have the feeling she’d rather eat her apple core then let him in?

“No problem.” He picked up his toolbox and stepped over the threshold, his bare arm brushing against hers, causing his skin to prickle with awareness.

Faith shrank back as if she wished she could disappear into the wall. She shut the door. “Uh…it’s in the basement.”

Nick nodded and took the room in with a quick glance. She sure liked bright colors. If the porch hadn’t proved that, her living room did. The walls were painted a sunny yellow, the plump sofa was green with pink-and-white pillows that matched the high-backed, pink-checked chair in the corner. He squinted and hoped all the cheeriness didn’t burn his retinas.

Talk about a surprise. Going by how she dressed, he would’ve guessed Faith’s home to be more subdued. And much more beige.

He followed her as she put the phone back in its receiver on a small green-painted table next to the sofa before going into the long kitchen. The cupboards had been painted white and in the middle of the room stood a narrow island with a cooktop on one side and an eating bar on the other, flanked by two high-backed wooden stools.

Austin sat on one of the stools, reading. “I’ll get dinner going as soon as I show Mr. Coletti where the water heater is,” Faith told her son.

Nick shifted his toolbox to his other hand. “Why don’t you let Austin show me where it is? That way you can go ahead and work on dinner.”

She looked at him as if he’d asked her the impossible. See? It was things like that, along with her reaction to his giving Austin that five bucks, that had him so damn curious about her.