The Baby's Guardian by Delores Fossen Page B

would be a long time before he stopped looking over his shoulder.
    “Sir, here’s the takeout you ordered,” someone saidfrom behind him. It was one of O’Malley’s men, someone Shaw trusted. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have taken the bag and handed it to Sabrina. “I figured you’d need to eat something,” Shaw told her.
    She thanked him, Shaw gave the officer some money, and he closed the door and locked it. The toiletries he’d requested were there as well, sitting in a plastic grocery bag. There was even a change of clothes stacked next to the bag. Lieutenant O’Malley certainly worked fast.
    “Eat,” Shaw insisted. “And then get some rest.”
    She tipped her head toward the bathroom. “I think I’d like a shower first.”
    He nodded. The shower might help her relax, and it would give him a few minutes to get some much needed updates about the case. But Sabrina didn’t head to the bathroom. She turned, stepped closer and looked up at him.
    “I know I’ve been saying this a lot, but thank you. I’m not sure I would have gotten through this without you.”
    “You would have.” But Shaw was glad he’d been there. For the baby’s sake.
    Sabrina’s sake, too, he reluctantly admitted.
    She leaned into him, putting her head against his shoulder. Like the other times they’d touched, he felt the attraction. The heat simmering between them. But he felt something else, too.
    An intimacy that went beyond the attraction.
    Again, he wanted to think this was all about the baby, but it scared him to realize it wasn’t.
    “What am I doing?” he asked, aloud. He’d meant tokeep that question inside his brain, but it somehow made it to his mouth.
    Sabrina pulled back, studied his face and then gave a heavy sigh. “I ask myself that all the time. I want you, too much,” she added with a grimace. “But you’re Fay’s husband.”
    “Widower,” he corrected, and he hoped that would sink in if he said it often enough.
    “Widower.” Sabrina repeated it, as well. When her gaze met his again, there were tears in her eyes. “You know what Fay said to me right before she died?”
    He knew, though it hurt too much to remember. Fay had phoned Sabrina, after she’d taken a bottle of sleeping pills, and Shaw knew this because it’d been Sabrina who had contacted him, had told him to get to Fay, that she was dying. Shaw had listened to the message that Fay had left on Sabrina’s answering machine. It’d been part of the routine investigation to declare Fay’s death a suicide.
    “We don’t have to talk about this,” he insisted.
    But Sabrina continued as if she hadn’t heard him, “Fay told me to take care of you. I swear, I tried to do that.”
    She had. That’s what this baby was all about. At least, it’d started that way. It felt different now. He felt different. But the guilt was still there.
    “Do you know what Fay said to me when she was in my arms dying?” he asked. Part of him wondered why he was opening this too-raw wound, and the other part knew it had to be done.
    Sabrina blinked back tears and shook her head.
    “Fay said I should take care of you, that you and I should have the baby that she couldn’t give me.”
    The breath rushed out of her, and Shaw held her because she looked ready to fall. “I’m sorry. So sorry,” Sabrina repeated. “I didn’t know she said that. She shouldn’t have asked that of you.”
    “Yeah. She should have. Fay had a lot of problems. Old baggage from being abused in her childhood. New baggage from the infertility issues. But she always put me first. Even when she was dying, she knew how important a baby was to me. How much I wanted a family of my own.”
    That was his old baggage. He hadn’t been adopted like Sabrina or abused like Fay, but his parents had been killed in a car accident when he was five years old. He’d been shifted around from one family member to another, never finding a place he could call home.
    Yeah, the old baggage had shaped him,