Page 18 of Christmas with the Boy Next Door

He waved it off and took a swig of cocoa. “No worries. And for what it’s worth… it’s smart you don’t do sleepovers. Nothing good happens after midnight.”

Robin bit her lip, remembering Matthew saying something similar when Abby was a baby, and he’d first suggested they have a no-sleepover rule. Was that a cop thing or a normal thought for guys who couldn’t help but protect the people they cared about?

Shaking it off, she decided to get back to Jack’s earlier question. “Um, so, you asked about Matthew.”

Surprise flickered over his face as he glanced up at her. She wasn’t sure if that meant he didn’t think she’d be willing to circle back to the topic, but Robin knew she needed to.

The sparks between them were undeniable, and even though she knew Holly had warned him away from her in vague ways throughout the years they’d been acquainted, Robin felt that telling him the whole story would help him understand just how important it was that neither of them acted on their chemistry or companionship.

If he had any other job, she’d be his in a heartbeat. She likely wouldn’t go so far as to tell him that, but after years of getting to know the kind of man he was beneath the badge, she knew it to be true.

Now that he was here permanently and she could feel herself starting to lose control over her feelings, she could only hope that telling him what happened to Matthew would prevent him from trying to take this further than the connection they shared.

“So, four years ago…”

CHAPTER7

Jack

Jack heldhis breath as Robin started her story. Holly had always told him it wasn’t her story to tell, and he’d respected his sister for that. She hadn’t grown up in this small-town-gossip hub, and after being burned by invasive paparazzi when she was a star living in Hollywood, she valued privacy and letting people tell their own stories.

Even though he’d been curious to hear Robin’s for years now, he hadn’t gotten the courage to ask her until tonight. And that courage was brought on by several things.

First, his house next door already felt like a home, and yet, sitting here at Robin’s kitchen table while her daughter entertained friends made him feel like the only thing his new home was missing was the two of them in it.

It was strange, to be sure. Even though he’d met her three years ago, he didn’t know her on a deep enough level that it would make sense for her and her daughter to fit into the sense of home that he’d been searching for.

As evidenced by the conversation they were having now, in fact. He didn’t even know what happened to her husband other than that he’d been killed on the job. The same job that Jack now possessed, in the same town where Matthew had worked.

Which was, unsurprisingly, the second reason he needed to ask for more details. He wanted to put aside his doubts and ask this woman to have dinner with him. He wanted to ask her to give him a shot. If her answers to these questions would dampen that need inside of him, he had to hear them.

“He left for work like he did every morning. He kissed Abby on the way out the door while she ate her cereal”—she paused and looked down—“and did the same for me as I packed up my briefcase for the day, and then he was off.”

As an officer himself—and an active-duty Marine before that—Jack knew the significance of her starting her story from this point in time.

For the loved ones left behind when a service member or a first responder died, they always remembered their last goodbye. They always remembered that it was supposed to be a normal “see you later” and not the last time they’d ever see them. They’d always feel a tinge of regret over not making that moment more drawn out or significant, because now that it was burned into their hearts and souls as their final minutes with the person they loved, they considered it to be wholly inadequate.

“He’d gotten called out to a park on the outskirts of town. There were reports of a man with a gun acting erratically. Well actually, they didn’t know for sure it was a gun at first. Dispatch said it was possible, but the witnesses weren’t sure.”

The difference between animmediate threatand animminent threatwas hard for dispatchers to distinguish sometimes, and Jack quickly picked up on the fact that Matthew hadn’t been clear on the situation when he got the call. Jack had been there many times, and he hated that feeling.

“His beat partner—who you’ll meet soon, Holden—was supposed to follow him there,” Robin continued. “But then there was some other emergency, and he got delayed.”

Jack swallowed hard. In Philly, there was no way that would happen. Reports of a possibly armed, erratic man would’ve been a high enough priority that multiple units would respond. Plus, most officers—especially those on night shift—rode with a partner in the same car.

But Snow Hill wasn’t Philly, and they simply didn’t have the manpower or the crime rate to support such things. The guy probably wasn’t worried about it at all, considering how safe his town was, and that made the ending he already knew was coming even worse.

Robin took a sip of her cocoa before going on, then clung to the mug and brought it in front of her as if she needed it for strength. “Since he was alone, no one knows what happened at the park. The witnesses who’d called about the man were a jogger—she had only been about twenty years old—and an elderly woman who was walking her dog, so both of them left the scene before Matthew even arrived.”

It was understandable that their first priority would be to get the heck out of there, but it still made Jack squirm in his seat. He acknowledged her statement with a nod, hoping there would be more to the story, even though part of him knew there wouldn’t be much.

“Holden met up with him as soon as he could.” Robin’s eyes welled up with tears, and she swallowed with what looked like considerable effort. “It was too late.”

Her jagged whisper cut him right to the bone, and even though he’d known going in that Matthew had died, hearing that he hadn’t had backup so there’d been no hope of things turning out differently had every muscle in his body aching as if they’d been thoroughly strained.

That situation was every cop’s nightmare. When Jack went out on calls like that in Philly, he’d always had the luxury of knowing he had a partner at his side, and backup was only a call away. There were enough cops who worked his beat that when he and Tommy had gotten into trouble—and they had, on multiple occasions—additional units wouldn’t be far out.

But showing up to a dangerous situation like that without a partner or the necessary backup? It sounded like being forced to walk a tightrope between two skyscrapers without a safety net. The fear Matthew must have felt when things took that turn for the worse, and the fact that he knew there’d be no one to have his back, was palpable for Jack.

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