“I’ll give you that.” Her tone softened. “It wasn’t easy.”
“So why?” he pressed. “Why not tell me later? Why not call me after he was born?”
“I was trying to protect him.” She said it so matter-of-factly, as if it were the most natural answer in the world.
“From me?” he asked, incredulously. Her silence seemed to confirm it, and he shook his head. “What did you think I was going to do? Did you really think I was that much of a jerk?”
“I didn’t think you’d want to be in his life,” she said.
“So you didn’t bother giving me the chance?”
“You weren’t exactly father material!”
There it was. The truth stung. He’d been a messed-up kid, looking for trouble. He’d flouted authority, put all of his money into his motorbike and taken great pride in doing things his own way. But he’d been a teenager, so it wasn’t surprising that he hadn’t been acting like an adult yet.
“I’ve grown up,” he said quietly. “Was I really so bad?”
“There was a lot going on at the time,” she admitted, and she pulled her dark hair away from her face. “My mom used to warn me about rebel boyfriends. My dad had been hers—did you know that? You were just like him—making your own rules, the rebel without a cause. But that doesn’t translate well into parenthood. It’s hard having a father like mine.”
Ben remembered Sofia’s strained relationship with her father. He’d often wondered if she’d jumped onto the back of his bike so readily just to see if her dad would try to stop her. Her father never had—not in the obvious ways, at least. Ben had never had a father in his life, either, so he’d never been one to judge someone else’s daddy issues—something his own son would probably have plenty of, too.
“I know this is a lot to dump on you at once.” Sofia broke the silence. “I don’t know what else to say. I’m sorry. I was afraid. You have to understand it from my perspective. I was having a baby, and I loved that baby more than anything else in the world, even when he was too tiny for me to even show—”
Did she think she had the monopoly on love? It wasn’t all that different for fathers.
“I know exactly what that’s like,” he said.
“You do?” Sofia stopped, swallowed. “You have children?”
He hadn’t meant to bring Lisa and Mandy up, and he heaved a sigh. Here Sofia was in the flesh, a reminder of how he’d failed his wife, bringing the news that they’d made a baby together back before he’d become a Christian—long before he’d met Lisa. And to make matters even worse, when he looked at Sofia McCray, he still saw that gorgeous girl who used to make his heart skip a beat. He wasn’t about to tell her about the family he lost—not yet.
“Never mind. We have work to do,” he replied gruffly. He restarted the car.
She was silent, and he was relieved when he saw a pickup truck whipping through a four-way stop and weaving from one lane to the other. He sent up a silent, and ironic, prayer of thanks for the distraction. He knew who this was—it was Mike Layton, a local journalist he’d already arrested three times for domestic violence.
“Hold on,” he said, slapping on the siren and stepping on the gas. The cruiser roared forward, and Sofia was pushed back into her seat, her eyes widening in surprise.
Making sense of past pain was hard. Pulling over an intoxicated driver—that was his comfort zone. He’d enjoy this one a little bit, and if Mike had been drinking, there was no way he was letting him get home before a nice, lengthy detox. Mavis Layton’s safety relied upon that.
* * *
The car lurched, and Sofia sucked in a breath of surprise, her stomach hovering in her middle as the car catapulted them forward. Ben’s expression was steely, and he moved with precision, his hands sliding over the steering wheel with the fluidity of practice. This was a side to him she’d never seen before—the cop at work—and she found that she wasn’t afraid with him behind the wheel. Nauseated from being whipped around, perhaps, but not afraid.
That had always been the allure of Benji Blake—his complete confidence in his own abilities. She remembered how her mother used to lecture her about riding on the back of his bike, but she’d never felt at risk while he was driving. There was something about the feel of his leather jacket in her grip, her helmet resting against his back as they sped along the familiar old roads. He’d gone too fast, and he’d kept her out too late, but he’d never made her feel unsafe. Not once. Except it was no motorcycle now, it was a police cruiser, but the feeling was uncomfortably similar.
The blue pickup truck ahead of them wove to the other side of the road, then slowed to a stop at the curb. She strained to get a better look.
“Is he drunk?” Sofia asked.
“That’s my guess,” Ben said, punching the plate number into the computer on his dash. “You can come out with me, but stand back.”
He put a hand on the butt of his gun and reached for the door handle.
“Don’t you need to wait to figure out who he is?” she asked, jutting her chin in the direction of the computer on the dash. A smile flickered at his lips.
“I know who he is. That’s Mike Layton—one of the writers at your paper.”
“That’s Mike?” She shaded her eyes against the morning sunlight. Mike didn’t seem like the type to have a drinking problem, not that she knew him very well, only having been at the job for a week. Landing this assignment was due to her experience in this kind of research with the last paper she’d worked for in California. She should be grateful for this assignment, but right now she found herself wishing that she’d been a little less ambitious when she arrived.
Ben got out of the car and headed toward the driver’s side of the truck. Sofia unbuckled her seat belt and got out, edging closer so that she could hear their words, but still attempting to stay out of Mike’s immediate line of sight. It would be awkward if her coworker knew that she saw him at his worst.
Ben pulled open the truck’s door and stepped back.
“Step outside, Mike,” Ben said, gesturing toward the side of the road. “Drinking this morning?”
“No,” Mike retorted. “This is ridiculous. Don’t you have better things to do than to harass me?”
“Step outside the vehicle.” Ben’s tone turned stony, and Mike reluctantly got out and muttered something under his breath.
“Hey, get your hands off me!” Mike snapped as Ben easily flipped Mike around so that his stomach was against the truck, and pulled out some cuffs from his belt. Ben was muscular and solid, the smaller man giving no contest.
“Hey, seriously!” Mike said loudly. “I didn’t do anything!”
“Speeding, failure to stop at a stop sign, erratic control of the motor vehicle...” Ben seemed to be enjoying this, and he slapped the cuffs down on Mike’s wrists a little harder than necessary. Mike winced as the metal tightened down with a series of clicks. “And some general disrespect to an officer of the law. Sit tight.” Ben led Mike around the side of the truck. “We’ll do a Breathalyzer.”
“Are handcuffs really necessary?” the smaller man asked huffily, then his gaze fell on Sofia. Color suffused his face, and he looked away. Sofia pitied Mike in that moment, and anger rose up inside of her. Was Ben trying to prove something, or was he just taking out his anger about the revelations that morning? And how exactly was this kind of heavy-handed policing supposed to create the kind of environment where a community watch program was even effective?
Ben ambled past Mike and headed for the cruiser once more.