gone over to Garden City. Is it urgent? I can get him on the radio and tell him to call you.”
“That’s okay. Just tell him when he gets back. That’s soon enough.”
“Will do.”
“How’s the baby, Becky? I thought you had another week of maternity leave coming?”
“I did, but Justin started growling around here and the temp just up and quit on Friday, so here I am.”
“I know he’s glad to have you back.”
“That’s what he says today. By tomorrow my return will be old news and he’ll be jumping down my throat like always.”
“Yes, but you know how to growl right back,” Sharon Lynn reminded her with a laugh. “Justin has never intimidated you.”
“That’s because we’ve known each other since kindergarten. I know all his dirty little secrets. Whoops, I’ve got another call coming in. You take care now.”
“Bye, Becky.” She hung up the phone slowly.
“No news?” Cord asked.
“Justin’s in Garden City. He’ll call when he gets back.”
“Do you think he’s over there checking out the lead?”
“The dispatcher didn’t say.”
“But you think that’s what he’s gone over there for, don’t you?”
She nodded. “Garden City’s not his jurisdiction. I don’t think he’d be over there otherwise.”
“Then we wait.”
“Don’t you need to get back out to White Pines?”
“Not until we know something,” he said.
“But Daddy—”
“Your father will understand.” He gave her a look suggesting she might as well stop arguing. “Now how about heating up a bottle for our girl? She’s beginning to get fussy.”
“I’ll take her,” Sharon Lynn offered.
“No, you won’t. She’s just fine right here with me, aren’t you, sweet thing?”
The baby reached up and looked for all the world as if she were patting his cheek in agreement. Cord had a silly, enchanted grin on his face that almost broke Sharon Lynn’s heart. He might not have said the words, he might be taking this wait with stoic patience, but he had every bit as much at stake on the outcome of Justin’s investigation as she did.
When she had the bottle warm, she came out from behind the counter and stood beside Cord as he fed the baby. When Ashley was sucking lustily, he glanced at Sharon Lynn, then reached over and slid his arm around her waist, drawing her closer. It was an intimate gesture, one that reminded her all too vividly of how thoroughly, solidly masculine he was, but there was nothing sexual about the loose embrace.
So why was she suddenly imagining the sweep of his hand from her waist to her hip, the slow caress of her breast? Why was she tingling in a totally unexpected and purely feminine way? Why in the midst of panic, with the threat of losing Ashley imminent, why was she feeling so totally and thoroughly alive again? She wasn’t at all sure she wanted to know the answer to that.
They were still close together when the first of the customers came in wanting lunch. She left his embrace with reluctance, stepped away from him and the baby. It was only a few feet, with merely a narrow span of Formica separating them, but suddenly she felt colder and more alone than she could remember feeling at any time since Kyle’s death.
* * *
After making a call to Cody to explain the delay, Cord lingered at Dolan’s for the rest of the afternoon. He couldn’t bear to leave Sharon Lynn to face the wait alone. Truthfully he wasn’t sure he could have endured the wait any better out at White Pines, even if Cody had tried working him to death.
The truth was he was stunned by the speed and depth of his feelings for Sharon Lynn and the baby he’d refused to put down all afternoon. Every time he was with them that initial tug of yearning he’d felt to turn them into a family grew into something more and more powerful. As impossible as it seemed, the bond between him and Sharon Lynn was already deep and lasting, every bit as strong as if they’d been husband and wife and shared the birth of this child.
For the first time in his life, he wasn’t afraid to admit that he was gut-deep scared. Not of the emotions. They’d felt right to him from the beginning. But of losing it all, everything he’d found here in Los Piños. Justin Adams had the power to take it all away from him, if he came back from Garden City with news that the baby’s mother wanted her back. He feared that losing Ashley would