Chapter Four

Their time in Santa Fe was a lot of fun. Ava had been so concentrated on work for so long—to the exclusion of pretty much everything else, especially a personal life. Even though she was well paid for what she did, it still wasn't a lot of money, especially once she paid all her bills. So, she hadn't been able to do a lot of just going out and having fun, even on her own, beyond the occasional drinks with the girls or a staycation here or there when she got some time off. Since Teara was in the same boat, they had mostly spent time together, and that became even more true once she'd had April.

But it had never bothered her. Her family hadn't had the money to blow on non-essentials, either. They all enjoyed each other's company, and except for a few times, when Mom and Dad had piled the family into a car and they'd headed out for Carlsbad Caverns, or once, the Grand Canyon, there hadn't been many instances in her life of just going somewhere for the fun of it.

Again, he insisted on paying for everything, even the small painting she found that she really liked but had put back because she couldn't afford it. In fact, she really couldn't afford anything in the whole market, including the produce, which looked gorgeous and was all organic and all that, but she'd been perfectly happy with supermarket produce—whatever was on sale—all her life, and she couldn't see paying four dollars for a pepper just because it was a "rainbow" pepper.

They had separated a little while they looked around, and when he appeared next to her with a small bag under his arm, Ava just figured he'd bought something he'd liked.

But when they were having an early-ish dinner a little while later, Kurt handed her the package.

She'd thought it was a little unusual for him to have brought it into the restaurant, but she wasn't about to criticize him. Maybe it was something he wanted to show her.

So, Ava was pleasantly surprised when she saw that it was the pastel drawing of a beautiful Angora cat that she had been admiring.

"Oh, wow—you didn't have to do this!"

"I know I didn't. That's why I did it. It's worth it to see you smile like that."

She colored prettily.

"And blush like that."

Ava put the back of her hand to her heated cheek. "Stop that!"

"No." He chuckled unrepentantly, and that low rumbling went right to her clit. "I like making you blush, and I intend to make you do it as often as humanly possible."

She didn't know what it was about him that attracted her so powerfully—perhaps it was because he was being so fastidious about not touching her—it was that powerful voice of his that was getting to her. Even tonight, when he'd collected her from Sheila's, still not having come in to see his friends, for fear of having to confront the baby, she now knew—the closest thing he'd done to touching her was to put his hand at the small of her back, although his hand was barely there—as they went down the front porch steps.

And him saying things like that to her only made it much worse! She could feel her cheeks getting even redder.

"Stop that!" She laughed, but he just grinned at her evilly.

Dinner was a lot of fun—again. It seemed like they would never run out of things to talk about, and they seemed to have very compatible tastes, which was nice. She didn't hesitate to express her real opinion to him about things from Star Wars to political ideas. And when they inevitably disagreed about something, he didn't get all huffy about it and try to win her over to his side, either, although he did make some calm, sound points about things that she hadn't thought about, which she liked.

"Dessert?" the waiter asked, and Kurt looked at her.

"I will if you will."

"How about if we split something?"

"The apple cobbler with ice cream?"

"A woman after my own heart. One cobbler, two spoons, please."

When it came, it was everything that dessert should be—sweet and cinnamony, with oats and brown sugar and almost tart but soft apples to balance out the sweetness, and a very generous scoop of premium vanilla ice cream that melted all over it.

"Holy crap!" Ava said after her first mouthful, making Kurt chuckle.

"My thoughts exactly!"

"This is just how I make mine."

He put his spoon down and looked at her. "You mean you could cook this yourself?"

"I'll go you one better than that. I could make both of the meals we ate—although I'm not well practiced at cooking steak, since I don't eat it at home, but I could easily do the rest of it. And I could probably fake the steak pretty well, too, if I just read some recipes."

"Well, then, I'd say you owe me a home cooked dinner, Ms. LaValley."

Cooking for someone else was something she really enjoyed doing. "You're on, Lieutenant Gilmore." Then she remembered April. "But I don't think you want to come to my place, where the baby is."

His entire body jerked rigidly straight up in his chair as he put his spoon down again, but this time it was an entirely different gesture, full of stiffness and pain. Kurt wiped his mouth with his napkin, not looking at her.

And Ava just wanted the floor to open up and swallow her whole.

He took a swallow of his water and played with his silverware for a few torturously long moments before saying in a voice that was so soft, she almost didn't catch it. "Sheila told you, didn't she?"

Ava wanted to deny it, wondering if maybe she could get him to believe that she had guessed it or just thought that he didn't like kids or something. But she didn't want to be like that with him—she didn't want to try to deceive him, because she knew what it was like to be on the other end of a deception in a relationship.

"Yes," she answered.

Suddenly, he was standing up and spewing bills from his billfold onto the table. "We're going home."

He didn't even wait for her to get up but was already through the restaurant door before she rose from her chair.

Ava took a drink of her water, forcing herself to calm down. He seemed to be mad, and it was triggering her something fierce. She wasn't at all sure that she wanted to get into a car with him if he was going to be like that towards her.

She wasn't sure she could stand it. She'd been through more than enough of that kind of terrible, terrifying, seething silence already, and she wasn't much interested in signing up for more.

Still, she didn't have an easy way home, and an Uber ride from here back to her place would be a fortune. There was no one else she felt she could call to come and pick her up, so she was going to have to ride back to her place with him.

He was already in and had started the car, but she stood outside it for a long while, trying to talk herself into getting in.

Kurt noticed almost immediately and quickly got out to come around the end of the car. "Are you—"

Ava backed several steps away from him as he approached her, and he stopped cold in his tracks, looking almost more stricken than when he'd left the restaurant.

"—okay?" he finished, more softly, taking a step away from her, even though he really wasn't anywhere near her.

"Yes, I'm fine," she answered, but he could tell by how wispy her usually robust voice was and the fact that she wasn't looking at him, but rather at the ground, that she was lying.

He put his hands up. "You are absolutely safe with me." Then he gave a big sigh. "I'm not angry with you. I'm not angry with Sheila, either. I'm not happy with her, but that has nothing to do with you."

She didn't look particularly convinced by what he'd said in the least. She looked as if she wanted to flee out into the night, and he couldn't have that.

Nothing could have been more designed to inspire protective feelings in him than for her to seem to be afraid of him. He couldn't bear it—never could. He knew his size could be intimidating to some people—usually women—and he did his best to try to mitigate that. Kurt couldn't remember a time when he didn't want to stand between himself and anyone who wasn't as big and strong as he was, and she was about a third of him, if that.

His voice was so calm and hypnotic, she wanted to cave in to him immediately but steeled herself against a response that had gotten her into trouble before.

"She and I will have words about this, but like I said, that's no reflection on you. And, just so's you know, I don't hit women. Or men, if I can avoid it. Mostly I don't have to, with the men, I mean. Sometimes they want to take on a cop, or whatever, when I was in uniform, or if I'm out with the guys and someone gets drunk, they'll often find the biggest guy in the place, which is usually me, and want to fight him. But I haven't done that in a very long time."

He'd said more than he might have because he knew that some women—including his wife—had said that it could be very comforting when he used a particular tone that he was long out of practice in using anymore.

Ava still didn't look any less frightened at the end of his speech, though.

"And, because it bears repeating, I don't hit women. You're safe with me." The thought that she had obviously not been safe with someone else was making him grind his teeth practically into powder, but he tried to put those murderous feelings aside. He opened her car door. "Get in, please." Kurt consciously imbued his voice with just the slightest touches of firmness and expectation that she was going to obey him.

And, to his great relief, it worked, if slowly. He didn't hang around—wanting her to close the door herself when she was ready—but got back behind the wheel. When she was in and had latched the seatbelt, he noticed that she was pressed tightly up against the car door.

There was nothing like a terrified woman to make you forget your own problems, he thought as he got them back onto I-25, headed south.

It was excruciatingly quiet in the car for a while. He wasn't quite sure what to say to her to reassure her further that he wasn't about to hurt her, and she wasn't sure what to say to him either, to comfort him about his loss or diffuse his anger—even if it wasn't aimed at her.

In her experience, the fact that he wasn't angry with her really wasn't a mitigating factor in how he was going to treat her when the car stopped.

Because he really couldn't stand the idea that she was afraid of him, he took a chance and reached out across the car to try to slip his hand beneath the one of hers that was resting on her thigh.

She started at the contact but didn't draw away, and he didn't grab her hand or latch onto it, but merely laced his fingers loosely with her very cold, stiff ones. That was it—nothing more demanding than that. He squeezed it once, then relaxed it again, hoping he was letting her know that she could keep holding his hand or move away. It was her choice.

As they drove through the night, he began to talk to her about his wife and child as he loosely held her hand, always reclaiming it in the same gentle manner after he had to use it to steer. It was the first time he'd done so with someone who hadn't known them at all. Hell, he hadn't really talked much to anyone who did know them, either. He couldn't. He just… couldn't.

But it was dark, and she was there, and he hoped that, if not what he was saying, but how he was saying it, might explain his behavior at the restaurant and help her relax some.

"I met Maureen on a blind date. I hate blind dates. I think everyone does. But she was a riot—a real handful—always laughing and cutting up and trying to make me laugh, whether I wanted to or not, and I knew before we'd even gotten to dinner that I was going to ask her to marry me. And this is when I was just on patrol, when I didn't have two nickels to rub together, and I was thinking that. I'd never considered marriage with any other woman I'd dated, but it was almost the first thing I thought of when I met her. Almost," he repeated revealingly.

"She was tallish, a redhead. A real spitfire—smart and funny and sassy. She taught school in Belen, where she'd grown up, and I spent every minute I could with her, and eventually, I outlasted all of the other guys she was dating. Persistence pays off sometimes.

"We'd only been together about a year when I asked her to marry me on her birthday. I wrapped the ring box up as her present, and took her to her favorite restaurant, then got down on one knee and everything. I have never been so nervous in my life as I was that night, because I really wasn't all that sure that she'd say yes."

Strangely enough, it was the fact that she could hear just how emotional he was getting that made Ava relax. Any man who was still that much in love with his wife couldn't be that bad, could he?

Kurt was too caught up in his own memories and misery to notice at that moment. "Our wedding was very small because no money, but it was wonderful just the same. I didn't care in the least what we did or didn't do—I would have been fine going to a J.O.P. on a Friday night with our best friends as witnesses, but I knew she wanted something more formal, so we got married at her parents' house. They have a nice lawn and a little gazebo, and it was small and intimate, and when it was over, I couldn't believe that she was really mine. I was sure that we'd be just that happy for the rest of our lives."

He cleared his throat, and it took him a long moment to pick up the thread of his story. Ava squeezed his hand. "You don't have to keep talking if you don't want to."

"But I do, if you don't mind. I know Sheila told you some of it, but I want you to hear it from me."

"Okay. I just didn't want you to think that you had to keep talking to help me be comfortable."

His gaze darted to her then back to the road. "Oh? That's good. So, Mo was right."

It sounded strange to her to agree with a dead woman she'd never met, but Ava repeated, "Yes, she was right."

"Good. I'm glad to know that that works for you, too."

She had succeeded in diverting him a little, so he was able to continue.

"It took us a while to get pregnant—much longer than I would have thought, considering how often we were trying, frankly. We never could get enough of each other."

Ava smiled in the darkness at that.

"Oh, crap, I didn't mean to say that. That wasn't very gentlemanly of me, was it?"

"I never knew her, but I get the sense—from you and Sheila both—that Maureen wouldn't mind."

He chuckled. "No, she wouldn't have." He took another deep breath. "Anyway, our daughter, Hannah, arrived when we'd been married four years or so. She was the most perfect little thing I'd ever seen. I was there, in the delivery room, and I was the first person to hold her. It was like a punch in the gut and the most incredible high at the same time—knowing that you've created this little life who is totally dependent on you. I cried."

Ava nodded, murmuring, "I would hope so."

Kurt looked at her again for a second, as if trying to gage her sincerity. "Really?"

"Of course! Who wouldn't cry to hold their child in their hands for the first time? You'd have to be pretty hard hearted not to, in my book. I'd be worried about you if you hadn't cried."

"It doesn't… put you off that I just told you that I cried?"

"Absolutely not. Men are allowed to have the same feelings as women. You run away from any woman who says it would bother her. That's just plain cold."

"I'm glad you feel that way." He turned off on the exit that led to Sheila and Jack's. "They were the apples of my eye, the two of them. I loved every single second I had with them—dirty diapers, PMS, fighting, making up, two am feedings—all of it."

"Sounds like you were a hands-on dad. Good for you."

"I was and I tried to be very attentive to Maureen, too, especially after the baby."

"I can believe that you would be that way," Ava admitted, and she did.

"Well, I'm no saint, but she's…" He paused, and she sensed him gathering himself in preparation for stating the reality of the situation. "…she was the mother of my child. They deserved the best from me."

Then she heard him draw a shuddering breath. "And yet I let them die on that road."

Ava clenched his hand tightly and didn't let go, feeling so incredibly sorry for him—for them, what had been that whole small, perfect family. "You didn't let them die. You had no control over the weather, or the other driver, or anything."

They pulled up in front of Sheila's place but not into the driveway. He was so overwrought—and yet trying to keep it together in front of her—that he just let the car roll to a stop as he stared through the steering wheel at nothing, breathing heavily.

He was so starkly upset that Ava wasn't about to leave him alone.

She went so far as to put her hand on his upper arm. "Do you want to go into the house? Maybe it would be good to talk to Sheila and Jack—"

His sharp, "No," was final.

"Then what can I do to help you?"

His hands gripped the steering wheel as he ground out, "I'll be fine."

She knew he was only saying that because he was a man, and so many men—even nowadays—felt that they couldn't reach out for help from anyone, but she wasn't asking; she was telling.

"Drive me to your place," Ava said suddenly.

Kurt's head rose a bit, but not much. He still wasn't looking at her. "You don't have to do that."

"I know, but I want to. I'll sit and have a drink with you—soda for me and something more potent for you. I don't want you to be alone."

"Yes, but you need to get home with the—"

She spared him from having to say the word. "Baby. Yes." She already had her phone in her hand. "Sheila? Yes, it's me this time. Look, I want to go to Kurt's for a nightcap, and I don't know how long we'll be. Are you okay with that? Thank you. Yes, I will. You're a lifesaver, Sheila. Thank you." Ava put her phone back in her purse. "She's going to think that we're very strange people, always calling her from five feet away."

He was still just sitting there, staring wide eyed at nothing, not even crying, and her heart went out to him.

"Go on. Drive to your place, where you're comfortable."

This time, he did look at her. "You're sure?"

Ava nodded, saying, "I'm sure." And she meant it.