She didn’t want to wait long, though. She was already thirty-two. And it might take a year for her to get pregnant.
Yes, it was all very practical, she thought as she sipped from the half glass of wine she’d poured on her way outside.
Sure, she was curious about the circumstances that had led Jayden Powell to believe that he’d stolen his happiness from another, but she didn’t need the details. The man was owning whatever mistakes he’d made. That was all she needed to know. It wasn’t like they were entering a relationship. There’d be respect, tenderness, absolutely, but they weren’t about warm fuzzies.
Leaving her wineglass next to her phone on the table between two loungers, she crossed the cool decking to retrieve the pool cleaner and skimmed the top of the water. There wasn’t much to collect. A small bug or two, a wayward leaf from a bougainvillea plant close by. The pool’s automatic vacuum system took care of much of the cleaning.
She liked to skim, though. Spent a lot of hours at the pool in the dark, slowly clearing the top of the water while she worked through prosecutorial strategies in her mind.
Maybe she should go see her parents. A two-day dose of her sister would be enough to take away any immediate loneliness she might be feeling. Loneliness that could make her more susceptible to Jayden Powell. And in the meantime, spending time with her folks, assuring herself they were as healthy as Mom had assured her they were, and seeing her nieces, too, would fill up her emotional well. Children had always done that for her, even Anna, before she’d been spoiled to the point of rottenness. Yeah, a dose of those two sweet girls would ease a bit of the sting of waiting for her own baby.
She’d check flights. As soon as she had a break in her caseload that would let her get away. And after she’d been successfully inseminated. It would be good, to tell them, in person, that she was pregnant.
Yeah, it was a plan. A good plan.
The pool was clean, and the probation officer still had not called.
In fact, he didn’t call until just before midnight. She’d given up and gone to bed, had been lying there playing a puzzle game on her phone, hoping to relax enough to fall asleep, when the thing rang.
Just before she’d reached the top of a mountain, too. She’d been about to win a big prize—in the form of extra game tools—and there was Jayden’s name, interrupting her moment.
“Hello?” she answered, wishing her increased heart rate was due to not being able to claim her rewards but knowing it was not.
“Is this too late? You said you worked late every night, and since we seem to have similar work habits, I thought you’d be waiting to hear what I found on the app.”
“I was waiting, yes, and I was still up.” Sitting up in bed. With only a short, spaghetti-strap nightshirt on. Without panties. Her secret. A concession to Ms. Shadow, who’d announced several years before that she preferred to sleep in the nude. Emma insisted on a nightshirt. The lack of panties was a compromise.
“I’m just on my way home now, calling to let you know that while I’ll get to it when I get home, I’ll call you in the morning. It’s been a long night.”
“Is everything okay or should I be expecting another case file on my desk in the morning?” She was half teasing. Obviously he wasn’t going to send every one of his cases her way.
“He didn’t break parole, he broke his leg, among other things,” Jayden said, sounding tired.
She figured it might be nice for him to have someone waiting up for him at home with a cold beer, or a glass of wine, and a few minutes to sit with him before he tended to more work. Someone who’d understand that, though it was late, he still had work to do. Someone who’d support him in that endeavor.
Not her. At all. Just someone. He was a nice guy.
“He was in a car accident on the way to work,” Jayden was saying while she reeled her mind back into appropriate spaces. “He took a shortcut on a country road that cuts through some groves, was thrown from the car and then hobbled and dragged himself, thinking he was heading back to the road, but ended up being farther into the groves.”
“Oh my God. That’s horrible.” She was there in her mind. Lying in pain with no way to call for help. “Is he going to be all right?”
“Yeah. I waited with his wife until he was out of surgery and the doctor came out to talk to her. They expect a full recovery.”
“And was there alcohol in his system?” She knew Jayden would have waited to hear about the toxicology report.
“Nope. The report was clean.” He sounded pleased, as he would be.
She was pleased, too, to know that they were on the same wavelength. “How did they find him?” she asked.
“He’d agreed to be on my location app, so we found his car almost right away. His phone was in the car, in a holder, with the GPS still on. It took us a while to find him in the dark, in what was really more woods than anything.”
He’d had one hell of a long day. “You need to get some rest,” she told him. “Bill Heber’s information can wait until morning. It’s not like we’re going to be able to do anything with it until then. And you can see that he’s where he should be, right?”
“I check every hour.”
“Except when you’re asleep, I hope.”
“I’ve got an alarm set up to let me know if there’s movement outside of a perimeter. It tells me anytime he travels enough miles in any direction to get within five miles of Suzie’s home.”