He quickly averted his gaze to the toe of one of his scruffy sneakers. This was going to be a very long night.
Luke brought Sam her drink and gave A.J. a fresh bottle of beer. Fighting the urge to down the entire contents, he sipped at it instead. As Luke walked past on his way to sit on the arm of Rachel’s chair, the breeze from his passing wafted a hint of Sam’s soft, flowery perfume to A.J. His groin tightened. He pulled the throw pillow from behind him and laid it casually on his lap.
“Now, Mommy? Can I ask now?” Maggie begged Rachel.
Lovingly, Rachel brushed a strand of blond hair off Maggie’s cheek. “Yes, baby. You may ask now.”
“Aunt Sam?” Maggie said, sidling up to Sam. “Will you come to my birthday party Sunday after next Sunday?”
Sam frowned as if doing a quick calculation of Maggie’s time frame. “Wouldn’t miss it for anything. Let’s see now,” she said, appearing to be deep in thought, “what kind of present do I get for someone who’s gonna be twenty-nine?”
Maggie’s face grew concerned. “Aunt Sam, I’m only gonna be seven.”
Sam laughed and hugged her. “My mistake. You look so much older.”
When she let go, Maggie stepped back, her blue eyes dancing with excitement. “Mommy and Daddy are taking me to swim with the dolphins, and then we’re gonna have a birthday picnic. We’re gonna have cake and deviled eggs and hot dogs and balloons and—” The child took a fast breath. “Uncle Jay’s coming, too.”
A.J. watched as Sam’s smile melted as fast as ice cream on a hot day, then was quickly replaced by one obviously forced for the child’s benefit. “Of course, I’ll have to check to make sure that I don’t have to work.”
“Oh, please, Aunt Sam. Please. It won’t be any fun without you.”
A.J. silently agreed.
“Well, we’ll see.” Sam chucked her under the chin.
A pang of disappointment arrowed through A.J. She was trying to back out because he’d be there. Then he recalled something.
Nice try, Sam, but you’re not gonna wiggle off the hook that easy.
“You don’t have to work that Sunday,” he said.
Pink flooded her cheeks. “Oh? How do you know?”
He grinned. “I saw the duty schedule in Santelli’s office.”
She glared at him for a moment, then turned to Maggie with a smile. “Well, then, I guess you can count me in.”
“Yippee,” Maggie yelled. “Aunt Sam’s coming, too, Daddy.”
“Yes, we heard, and I’m sure everyone in the neighborhood did as well.” Luke looked at his daughter as if she were the most important thing on earth. “Okay, Magpie, time for bed,” Luke said.
Maggie frowned. “Aw, Daddy. Can’t I stay up just a little more time?”
“Bed,” her mother repeated more firmly. “We said you could stay up long enough to invite Aunt Sam. You’ve done that, so now, it’s time to say good night.” Rachel waited patiently while Maggie reluctantly hugged and kissed A.J. and Sam, prolonging each endearment as long as possible.
A sinking sensation invaded A.J.’s stomach as he watched both Luke and Rachel disappear down the hall with their daughter, leaving him and Sam alone. He suddenly felt as if the rug had been pulled out from under him. Why did this woman have the power to make him feel like a kid fresh out of the tenth grade on his first date?
Sam sighed.
“Bored?” he asked for lack of anything else to say.
She looked at him and shook her head. “No, just thinking. I was kind of hoping they’d have a regular birthday party for Maggie. You know, the kind with lots of kids, balloons, ice cream, noisemakers, a clown and all the regular kid stuff.”
“Sounds as if you’ve been to a few of these shindigs yourself.”
Her blue eyes lost their sparkle, and she turned away. “No. I’ve never been to a birthday party.”
A.J. frowned. Surely she had been to a birthday party sometime in her life. “Not even your own?”
Sam shook her head, then rose and went to the bar. “Especially not my own.” Busying herself by adding ice to her glass, she avoided his gaze. “The Tiny Tots beauty pageant in Phoenix was on my birthday every year, so there was never time. Besides, my mother thought birthday parties were a waste of money.”
He cringed at the sadness that tinged her voice. “So, you were a child beauty queen, huh?” Why hadn’t he known that? But then there was so much about Sam he didn’t know. So much he wanted to know. Like everything that had happened to her from the time she left the birth canal to when she’d walked into Rachel’s living room tonight.
As she walked back to the sofa, she tucked a stray hair back into the knot at the base of her neck. His fingers itched to release the confining hairdo and watch the night-black strands fall over her shoulders while he—
“That was my other life,” she said. “One that I gave up when I stowed the trophies and certificates in my spare-room closet.” She took a long gulp of her drink, then glanced anxiously down the hall where Luke and Rachel had disappeared. “Can we talk about something else?”
“Sure.” The conversation about her childhood may have ended, but A.J. could see by the frown lines between her eyes that she had not stopped thinking about it.
A pain cut across his heart for the woman whose childhood consisted of nothing more than a few trophies and certificates stuck away in a closet. But mostly it ached for the little girl who had never blown out candles on her own cake, never taken part in a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey, never dove into stacks of presents while her excited friends looked on. How many other things had she missed out on because her mother had evidently never considered the importance of having a childhood?
Sam squirmed under A.J.’s watchful gaze from across Rachel’s dining-room table. She added her empty cake plate to the stack Rachel was collecting. After depositing them in the sink, Rachel refilled Sam’s coffee cup. Adding cream and sugar, Sam stirred the light brown liquid and tried to block out thoughts of that kiss she and A.J. had shared that kept popping into her head every time she looked at him. If she allowed herself, she could still feel how warm and sweet that kiss had been. How her heart had cried out for him to take her in his arms and never let go. How—
She blinked away the daydream and checked her watch. “It’s getting late. Can we get down to the reason for this little gathering?” she asked, hoping to distract A.J. and get this evening over with.
Rachel laid a manila folder in front of them. “Sam’s right. We need to talk FIST business,” she announced. “What did you two find at the bookstore?”
In the year since Rachel and Sam had founded FIST, they had investigated several arson sprees, a serial arsonist and at least a dozen insurance fires. Though they’d started slow, word was rapidly spreading around the state that if a fire chief or an insurance company had a fire that required special investigation, they called FIST.
“This was an easy one,” Sam said, brushing a strand of hair from her cheek.
“What do you know about Bayside Insurance?” A.J. asked.
“Rachel?” Luke looked at his wife.
Rachel opened the folder and scanned it. “They’re an old company that was absorbed into the Florida Life and Property Company. When they merged, most of the Bayside employees