All I've Ever Wanted - Adrianne Byrd [44]
Even through the alcohol-induced haze, she knew what he was trying to do. “Yeah. I’ve been harassed by the police and then caught in the middle of a police shoot-out at a baseball game.”
“An interesting spin on events.”
“It’s the way I see them.”
His leveled gaze seemed to evaluate her. “Sure you do.”
She shrugged her shoulders and didn’t say any thing further.
“What helped you to cope?”
Kennedy’s gaze fell and a familiar sadness embraced her like an old friend. “My son.” She nodded in remembrance. “He’s all I have left. He’s my will to live, to be the best person I can be. I don’t expect you to understand. You don’t have children.”
When she looked up again, she was surprised to find that Max’s gaze was no longer on her. He seemed to be transfixed by something beyond her. Impulsive, she glanced in that direction, but nothing was there.
“I have a son.” His voice broke.
She was sure that her expression showed her surprise.
The butterfly smile he gave her looked pained. In fact, his entire demeanor had changed.
“I even had the house with the white picket fence, a wife and a dog.” He tilted up his bottle and drained the remaining contents in one long gulp. “So don’t think you’ve cornered the market on pain and loss.”
Kennedy blinked, surprised he’d allowed his mask to crumble before her. As she stared at him, she clearly saw her vulnerability, as well as his strengths, and they both unnerved her.
The alcohol gave her courage to ask, “What happened?”
He remained quiet for so long, she thought he wasn’t going to reply.
“She broke my heart,” he finally responded.
Raw pain dripped from his words and seemed to infect the air. When his gaze returned to hers, it was as if they both stood naked before one another.
“Did you love Lee Carsey?” he asked.
“With all my heart,” she responded without hesitation.
He nodded. “It’s good to have loved, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” she said in a broken whisper. It was good to have experienced love, she reaffirmed. It was the one thing that could make you glow like the sun and that would allow you to hope, dream and embrace everything that life had to offer. Yet, at the same time, it completely terrified you: terrified you to lay it all on the line with the possibility of coming up empty…like she had.
“I don’t think I could do it again,” she said, numbly.
“Why is that?”
“It takes too much of you. Hurts too much when—”
“When it’s snatched away,” he finished for her.
Their eyes met, plunging them into a deeper level of intimacy.
“What about you?” she asked. “Are you willing to risk it all for love again one day?”
He frowned as he thought about it. “I don’t know. If you had asked me a year ago, I would have said no. Better yet, hell no.”
She smiled. “So you’re a romantic?”
He shook his head. “More like an optimist. Who knows, maybe my partner is rubbing off on me. He’s constantly telling me there’s someone for everyone. I think he’s the romantic.”
“An optimistic cop. That sounds like a contradiction to me.”
Max’s deep laugh proved contagious, and helped erase the remaining tension that lay between them.
“You know, our sons are approximately the same age. Little Frankie is five.
“Franklin Dwayne Collier, II. We named him after my grandfather.”
Max’s pride in his son was clear. She draped the extra-large pajama top more securely over her legs as she pulled them from the floor and tucked them beneath her. “You have a good relationship with him?”
“As close as one weekend a month will allow?”
She shook her head and waited for him to return to the subject.
“My wife.” He caught himself. “Make that my ex-wife. She decided that she loved someone else after seven years of marriage.” His gaze trapped hers. “That someone, of course, was my best friend.”
His gaze captured hers.
Sympathy was the last thing he needed, she realized, but she couldn’t keep the emotion from showing in her expression.
“Hell, I don’t even know why I’m telling you all of this,” he said, his voice