Husband by Choice

And like Max, was man enough to remain in control while he waited.

Chantel.

“Did you find her?” Watching his son, he kept his tone easy.

“Not exactly.”

Hearts couldn’t actually drop. He was a doctor. He knew how the pumping vessel was attached. And knew what stress could do to it, too.

Chantel’s tone made him want to hang up. To watch his boy play in bubbles and know that tomorrow was another day. That the sun would shine again and....

“They found her van, Max.”

Caleb made a motor sound with his mouth. Seemingly unaware that darkness had descended in their bright and cheery bathroom.

“I can’t do it again.”

“Hold on.”

Of course. That was what he’d do. His fingers gripped the side of the tub, slipped and gripped again, bruising the pads and turning his knuckles white. Pressure stopped the blood flow.

With no blood flow there was no pain.

Was there blood in the van? Jill had bled out on the street. And the clean-up crew hadn’t been fast enough. A vision of the empty street with a pool of his wife’s ended life—a photo that had been all over the news for days after she’d saved the life of a fellow officer—sprang to mind.

Caleb splashed. Laughed out loud. And looked to him for a response. Max smiled. His lips trembled and his cheeks hurt, but he kept that grin plastered on his face.

“Tell me,” he said into the phone, careful to keep his tone neutral. He’d promised himself he’d never again be at risk of a phone call like this.

He’d promised.

And then he’d met Meri. Safety conscious, paranoid, locked-in-fear Meri. Who’d found the heart and soul in him that he’d thought dead a

nd gone, awoken it. And given him a son.

“There’s no sign of struggle,” Chantel’s voice held a note of sympathy, but not alarm. “The van was parked nine rows down in front of Chloe’s at the Sun Oaks shopping center.”

An upscale shopping development in the next town over. A maze of stores and parking that covered a square city block.

Meri liked to shop there.

Max’s thoughts calmed. And he rumbled inside. His stomach. His blood pressure. Every nerve on alert.

“Her cell phone was inside,” the thirty-year-old police officer continued. “That’s how they found the van, by tracking her cell. She’d left it on the console.”

Meri’s phone was a lifeline to her—her safety net. One push of a button and she could be connected to law enforcement. To Max. Or to The Lighthouse—a women’s shelter she’d been volunteering at since he’d known her. The shelter she’d lived at when she’d first come to Southern California.

She didn’t go from one room to the next without that cell phone. Wore it in a holster that clipped to any waistband. Showered with it on a shelf she’d had him install above the tile in the stall....

“There was a note, Max.” Another drop in Chantel’s tone. Another splash from the tub. Another rumble inside. “She said that she just couldn’t do it anymore. That she was too worried about Caleb all the time. That she couldn’t even leave him at day care for an afternoon, so how would she ever cope when he went to school? She was afraid that her paranoia would rub off on him. She said she had to go before he was old enough to remember and be traumatized. She left the phone because it was in your name.”

She’d have told him if she was leaving him. She would never have left Caleb. It didn’t make sense. He wasn’t going to panic.

“Were the keys in the car?” If she was ever in trouble and had to run—if she ever thought Steve was after her—she’d leave the car parked with the keys under the driver’s seat. It was one of the many precepts she’d laid out when she’d agreed to marry him.

Precautions, she’d called them.

They had to be prepared, she’d said.