To Protect & Serve (35 page)

“I won’t.”

When her mind finally surrendered to the pull of sleep, her last thought was that he still hadn’t moved from that spot, and she hoped he would just stay there right next to her forever.

Jeff waited until her breathing slowed and found its own rhythm. In the darkness of the room, he was surprised he could see anything, and yet her beauty could pierce even the blackest of the black. He sat for a few more minutes and then pushed up from the floor, catching the edge of the table for balance. With one more look down, he stepped from the room and closed the door softly behind him.

A look at his watch verified what he already knew. Quarter-to-four, and they still had a mountain to get through. Back in her office, he folded himself onto the carpet and smiled. She was crazy to think she could’ve tackled this on her own, and she was just crazy enough to have pulled it off too. He picked up a stack and got back to work.

It was the front office door that Lisa heard first. It jolted her from the marvelous dream she was having of them sitting in some field together flying kites. Slowly she yawned and stretched. That was when she remembered, and causing a head rush, she sat straight up and looked at her watch. It was almost eight.
Why hadn't he hadn’t awakened her?

“Jeff?” Sherie said in surprise when she opened the door and found him rather than Lisa in the inner office. “What’re you doing here?”

“Working,” he said as his fingers threw the envelopes into the five stacks surrounding him, one for each week in September.

“Oh,” Sherie said, and although it tried, her voice couldn’t quite make it sound like that was the exact response she had expected. She looked out into the front office. “Where’s Lisa?”

“Sleeping,” Jeff said, flipping three more letters into one of the piles.

“Oh.” Sherie nodded. “Okay.” She started out.

“Oh, Sherie, do you have any more of these boxes somewhere?” He held one up.

“Maybe…” Her attention jerked outside the door as shock descended across her features. “Lisa?”

“Don’t say it,” he heard Lisa say, and he smiled at the sound.

One more small stack and all they had to do was get the weeks in order. When she walked in, Jeff’s heart said how much he had missed her over the last four hours.

“I’ll get some coffee,” Sherie said uncertainly, and she left.             

“Sleep well?” Jeff asked.

Lisa sat down in a heap right next to him and dropped the shirt into his lap. “You were supposed to wake me up.”

He smiled at her. “It’s that whole kissing a sleeping princess thing. I knew how much you hated that.”

“I didn’t say you had to kiss me.” Her face scrunched together. “There are other ways to wake a person up, you know.” Then she really looked at her office and stopped. “You’re almost finished?”

“Ten more,” he said, flipping through the last stack in his hand. When the last of them hit the pile
s, he sighed and scooted back against a chair and wiped his hands over his eyes tiredly. “Now, all we have to do is get each week sorted.” With a small yawn, he picked one stack up and righted the envelopes. “These we don’t have to worry about. They’re all last week in September, so we can put them over here, and use them only if we have to.” That pile landed next to the wall.

“Coffee,” Sherie said, walking into the room, and after she had handed them each a cup, she pulled the box from under her arm. “And here’s your box.”

“Thank you very much.” Jeff  set his coffee to the side and picked up another stack of envelopes. “I say we start here, last week in August and work our way forward.”

“We,” “our,” Lisa was waking up enough to catch onto those words, and her heart was suddenly asking why he was sitting in her office, not offering to help but helping. “You don’t have… work or something today?”

“Nope. It's your lucky day. I’m off until Saturday morning.”

Thursday to Saturday? She ought to be good and insane in that amount of time. “You really should go home and get some sleep.” Lisa heard the phone ring in the outer office, but her mission at the moment was to get him out of hers. “I’m sure you’re exhausted…”

“Lisa?” Sherie said through the intercom, “Zebra Carpets on line one.”

With a tired shake of her head, she pulled herself up from the floor and grabbed the phone. “Matheson Agency. Lisa speaking.”

“Good, you’re there,” the voice on the other side said. “Terry forgot to call you about our staff meeting today.”

“Staff…?”

“We’ve got some concepts for promotions we want to bounce off of you.”

Her hand went to her hair, and she knew with one touch why Sherie had looked at her so strangely when she’d come out of the conference room. “I really don’t…” She stopped and sighed. “What time is the meeting?”

Without watching her, Jeff watched her. One person standing beneath a mountain of problems and trying to deal with all of them on her own. She had strength and determination in spades, but delegating had obviously gotten lost somewhere along the way. When she hung up, his gaze traced over to her. “Problems?”

“You could say that. I’m supposed to be at Zebra Carpets at ten o’clock.” Her shoulders fell forward under the weight
of life. “But I can’t leave now. Look at this place.”

“Tell you what,” he said gently, holding her up with his gaze and voice as he stood and walked over to her chair. “You go home, grab a shower, get you some non-wrinkled clothes, and then go to your meeting. We’ll handle things here.”

“But what about…?”

“We’ll handle things.” Carefully he lifted her from the chair by one arm. “Now, go, and don’t worry about us.”

Exhaustion was good for something, he thought as he laid her purse over her shoulder and led her to the outer door before pushing her through it. At least she was too tired to argue coherently. “Drive carefully.”

With only a small wave of acknowledgement, she walked away. When she closed the outer office door, Jeff looked at Sherie like they were on a secret mission together. “How fast can you make a database?”

“Ten minutes depending on what’s in it,” she said, lowering her voice.

“Fabulous. This is what we need…”

Why she was going to Zebra Carpets when it was obvious she should be working on the youth conference, Lisa couldn’t clearly tell. She drove home and showered, which felt really good. Then she put on clean clothes, which felt even better, and wrapped her hair into a twist. When she was finished, she actually felt like living again, which was a downright miracle. Grabbing her purse, she trekked to her door and back down to her car. The sooner she got this over, the sooner she got back to the office, the mere thought of which was sending the butterflies in her stomach swirling.

Her arm still felt the heat from his hand lying there the night before, and her cheek still felt his shirt curled beneath her. Most of all her heart still felt what it was like to be in his presence again, and no matter what rationalizations she tried to use on herself, none of them were working. Despite the space and time she had managed to put between them, he had never moved from his place in her heart, and she was beginning to get the sinking feeling that he never would.

Every computer in every room of the Matheson Agency was manned by an employee diligently entering information into databases configured for the week he or she was working on. Every so often Jeff would get out of Lisa’s chair and go around to check on them, but that really wasn’t necessary, they were all intent on getting this done quickly and accurately. When he sat back down in Lisa’s chair after one such round, a quiet smile washed over him. Somehow, sitting here, he felt her presence. It was like sunshine on a dark soul, and it felt wonderful.

The GTO sitting on the third level was hard to miss when Lisa pulled back in at twelve-twenty. So he was still here. Simultaneously her mind said that was horrible, and her heart said it was fabulous. At the door to her office, she took a breath, wrenched the doorknob, and stepped resolutely inside. Sherie sat at her desk, and despite the audible snap of the door, she never looked up.

“I’m back,” Lisa finally said, peering around the ultra-quiet office with concern. “Everybody out for lunch?”

“No, the guys are in the back. Jeff’s working on your computer.” Sherie took a bite of her sandwich without ever really looking up.

“My… computer. On what?”

“Database,” Sherie said, setting one paper to the side and scrutinizing the information on her computer closely.

Lisa arched her eyebrows. “O… kay.” Without another word, she walked to her office door and peered inside. Sherie was absolutely right. There sat Jeff surrounded by the blue window at his back, looking very much like Sherie had—totally engrossed in what he was doing. “Knock. Knock.”

He looked up, and some part of her deep down said she liked that look in his eyes. “Back already?”

“It wasn’t as bad as I thought,” she said, swinging her purse into the chair opposite the desk and noticing that there were no longer envelopes stacked everywhere. Slowly she followed her purse into the chair. “What’d you do with the envelopes?”

“Collating.”

“Huh?” she asked, wondering what rabbit hole she had fallen down.

“We’re putting them all in this database Sherie came up with so we can collate them and put the kids in the workshops in the order they applied. Much easier than doing it on paper.” Still his attention seemed riveted to the screen.

“And Kurt and Joel?”

“Third and fourth week,” Jeff said. “I’ve almost got this first week done, Sherie’s on week two, and once that’s done, all we have to do is put in the earlier ones and shuffle.”

She felt like she was shuffling but not the items in a database. At that moment Kurt appeared at the door.

“I got three done,” he said. Then he stopped when he saw Lisa. “Oh, hi.”

“Hi,” she said, turning to look at him doubtfully.

“Great.
” Jeff pulled the stack of non-enveloped papers out. “Put these in a separate one, and we’ll be in business.”

Kurt took the papers and disappeared as Lisa looked after him in astonishment. “How did you get him to do that?”

“What?”

“He got something done.”

“Of course he got something done—that’s the point, isn’t it?”

Yes, it was the point, so why did she have so much trouble getting it accomplished? “So, can I help with this little project of yours?”

Instantly he looked up. “Oh, I’m sorry. You want to finish this?”

“Not really.” Her smile came although she wasn’t sure she wanted it to. “How about if I finalize the workshop schedule so when you’re ready to collate, it’ll be ready too?”

“Good plan.”

On wobbly legs she stood and walked over beside him at the computer, taking the mouse from him. When he looked up, she was only inches away, and she felt his gaze. “Just let me print out the stuff I have, and the computer’s all yours.” The edges of her skin melted under his gaze.

He wanted to say something. She felt it, and yet he recalibrated his attention back to the computer. In seconds the printer was working its magic. When it was finished, she took the sheaves back around to the other chair. “Don’t mind me. I’ll just be over here… working.”

Taking turns sleeping in the conference room, Jeff and Lisa worked all of Thursday and most of Friday. By seven o’clock, the schedule was finished, the applications were collated, the two lists had been merged, and Sherie had even verified everything with each speaker and every school. Alone, Lisa never could have accomplished it, and yet with the army he had amassed for her, that and so much more seemed possible.

“So,” Jeff said as Lisa put the finishing touches on the poster mock-up on her computer.

“So,” Lisa said, immediately stifling the yawn that jumped to her throat. Her gaze didn’t want to look at him in that chair, knowing the next time she looked it would be empty.

“You want to go get some hot dogs or something?” he asked as if the fragile limb he was standing on might break.

She looked over at him. With everything she had, she wanted to accept, and yet she knew that accepting would put her right back where she’d been the month before—talking herself into believing they had a chance. “I’m beat. You’re beat. You’ve got work in the morning.” Her hand clicked to save the document. “I really think we’d better call it a night.”

Not really looking at her, he nodded. She wanted to say something so he wouldn’t look like he understood exactly what she was saying.

“Can I walk you to your car?” he finally asked.

Knowing she should say no, her heart took one look at him, smiled, and said, “Sure.”

Making each step last as long as he could, Jeff walked with her to the parking lot. There was nothing his arms wanted more than to reach over and take her in them, but he knew that wasn’t what she wanted out of this night. It hurt, but he was willing to respect that so long as she let him walk beside her and didn’t tell him outright to get lost. Seeing no other option, he dug his hands into his pockets lest they betray his best intentions and reach out to her.

“I guess things are going well at work,” Lisa said, bringing up the one topic he knew she didn’t want to talk about.

“Yeah, pretty well. I start aircraft rescue on Monday.”

Her gaze jumped over to him. “You’re already through the hazmat thing?”

He looked at her in surprise and nodded. “End of September.”

“Oh, congratulations. One more rung up. Huh?”

It felt like six rungs down. “Yeah.”

“Is the truck running again?”

“Better, finally. I thought Gabe was going to blow a gasket before I finally figured out it was the fuel injector.” He smiled. “Never hurts to know a little about engines.”

They walked up behind the GTO.

“Well,” she said, burying her gaze in the darkness at their feet, “I guess this is good night.”

“I guess.” But he didn’t move. His spirit had anchored his feet to the asphalt.

When she looked at him, it was with unnervingly soft eyes. “Thanks for everything. I would’ve been sunk without you.”

“I’m always just a phone call away,” he said gently. “If you’ve ever got an office-full of envelopes and no idea what to do with them.”

She smiled. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

He didn’t know why, but standing there looking at her, Jeff couldn’t help himself. Carefully he bent forward, and with a touch on her arm, he kissed her cheek. “Take care.”

Looking positively bewildered,
she nodded, turned for her car, got in, and waited for him to shut the door. “I’ll see you.”

“Yeah,” he said, and sadly he pushed the door closed. His gaze couldn’t even watch her drive away as he stood there helpless in the face of the end.

Work the next day held no fascination for Lisa. She didn’t want to work. In fact, she had sent everyone home saying they should have a Saturday off for a change. No, all she wanted to do was sit in that chair and feel him wrap around her. Over and over her rational side said that she had been down that road already. It led only to heartache, and yet she asked the walls if that was true, then what was this hole in her heart that felt so painfully unfixable? It felt like an ache that could sweep her under at any unguarded moment. Everywhere she looked, he was there, but not just in the office but in her heart and her spirit as well.

All she wanted was to spend one more minute with him. One more and then one more and then… Pulling her knees, clothed in denim up into the chair with her, she spun the chair, and her gaze slipped to the rain falling outside her window. The first cold rain of the winter with spring so far away it was merely a promise and nothing more. “God, I don’t know what to do here. It’s like I can’t live with him, but I can’t live without him either… I was doing just fine, you know, before You sent him into my life. I was doing just fine. I was… well, not exactly happy but...” Her mind drifted back to those days; however, instead of the take-charge, can-handle-anything person she thought she’d find there, all she saw was a woman desperately trying to win the attention and affirmations of everyone around her—and failing miserably.

In her mind’s eye she saw herself rushing to the next meeting, zapping anyone who got in her way, and criticizing herself over every little detail that wasn’t perfectly in place. Only now did she feel the loneliness that followed that woman everywhere, and Lisa cringed away from her. One small tear slipped over her lash and down onto her cheek. Until him, life was one long string of forgettable moments, but with his entrance into her life—every moment had suddenly become one that she wanted no more than to hold onto forever.

“This is insane,” she said, righting the chair, wiping her eyes, and standing up. There had to be something more productive than sitting around an empty office crying all day.

Gabe had tried to ask about the situation, three times already, and although Jeff was able to put him off, he wasn’t nearly so successful with his own heart. He couldn’t explain it, but being with her made him feel alive in a way he hadn’t felt in many, many years. As the clock wound around to five, he thought about Eve. It would be nice to talk to someone—even if he already knew which side of the fence she would fall on. He laughed softly at that, a small gust and he could as easily as not end up right beside her on that side.

Nowhere. Not one single place could Lisa go that he didn’t follow her. Not to her apartment, not to the little café down the street, not even to the streets themselves. As she walked, the mere sight of the walk sign yanked up the loneliness. Driving, the thought of that clutch and all its inherent problems knifed through her heart. At the park oblivious to the darkness and the rain, she got out and walked over to the tree as her heart flew with the memory of his kite into the sky. Leaning against the tree as the cold rain dripped around her, she closed her eyes, trying to breathe. The farther she ran, the closer he got, and for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out how to run any faster.

“I called you Thursday,” Gabe said that evening as they sat at the tables long after everyone else had gone on stand down. Jeff didn’t look up. His mind was too heavy to let him. “I thought maybe we could hit the racquetball courts or something, but I guess you were busy.”

Slowly Jeff nodded.

“You know it might help to talk about it,” Gabe finally said. “I’m not Ashley, but I can do a mean imitation of her. ‘Now, Jeff, this is what you should do…’”

Frustrated, Jeff scratched his head. “I wish somebody could tell me what to do.”

“Well, what’re your options?”

“Homicide
or suicide.”

Gabe’s eyebrows shot up in concern.

“I try to make this work, and end up killing her. Or I don’t and end up killing myself,” Jeff clarified plaintively. “Great choices, huh?”

“Isn’t there a middle ground?”

Jeff shook his head. “Not that I see.” He cracked his fist on the table. “Ugh, if I could just get her out of my head…”

“Do you really want to?” Gabe asked.

For a moment Jeff thought about that question and then lifted his gaze. “No.”

“I love him,” Lisa said two seconds after the door swung open to reveal Eve standing on the other side of the threshold in a bathrobe and pink slippers.

“Lisa, you’re soaking wet.”

Forlorn and trembling, Lisa hadn’t even noticed that fact. “What am I going to do, Eve?”

Gently Eve reached out and took hold of Lisa’s arm to pull her into the apartment. “First of all we’re going to get you dry so you don’t catch pneumonia. Then we’re going to get you something warm to drink and have a little chat about making absurdly illogical choices.”

“I thought I could do this,” Lisa said later as she sat on Eve’s couch, drinking the mocha-flavored coffee and pushing her still-wet hair back with her fingers. “I really did. I thought if I just kept going, kept working, kept moving, that I would forget about him.”

“You’re asking a lot from work,” Eve said skeptically.

Lisa raked her hand across her damp nose in frustration. “Then he came the other night, and all my plans just blew up in my face. Now all I can think about is where he is and how he is and how much I want to see him again.” She took a small sip of the coffee, which did nothing to warm her frozen insides. “I can’t even think straight anymore. It feels like I’m going crazy.”

“It feels like you’re in love.”

Lisa shook her head and closed her eyes, laying her head backward on the couch back. “I’m just so confused.”

“About what?”

“About everything—where I want this to go, why I can’t get him out of my head like I’ve done all the rest of them. I’ve never seen myself with someone like Jeff. Jeez, I’ve never seen myself with anyone—much less someone like Jeff. I mean he’s sweet and kind and completely wonderful…”

“Yeah, just the kind you want to throw back.”

“But he won’t talk to me,” Lisa said in frustration. “And then there’s this whole fireman thing which makes me completely nuts.” Eve nodded slowly, and Lisa’s heart fell when she realized she shouldn’t be laying this on the one person who understood all too well. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t…”

“No,” Eve said softly. “It’s okay.” She sighed and then looked at Lisa. “When I first met Dustin, and he told me he wanted to be a fireman. I thought, ‘Oh, cool. Saving lives. Making a difference. Awesome.’ Later, of course, the fact that in order to save those lives he had to risk his own occurred to me. But by then I loved him, and there was no going back.”

“But how did you do it? How do you say, ‘Go ahead, put your life on the line every day, and I’ll just sit back and hope it all works out for the best.’”

“Well, I did some of that too, but early on we made a pact to spend every moment we could together. That way if something ever did happen, we would know we hadn’t wasted time being angry with each other over the job.” Eve exhaled. “See, a lot of people live their lives taking for granted that they’re going to have a tomorrow. Dustin and I never did that. We were thankful for every minute we had together.” The words stopped for a moment. “I have no regrets.”

“But he’s gone. Aren’t you angry about that?”

“I get angry, and sad, and terrified, but mostly I’m just thankful that even if we didn’t have forever on this earth together, we had the time we did. Because of Dustin, I know what love is—I’ve felt it. I’ve experienced it. I know the highs it can take you and the lows it can drop you, but I have to tell you if I had to do it all over again, even knowing what I know now, I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.”

Lisa shook her head slowly. “I don’t know if I can have that much faith.”

“There are more things in this world than what we can see, Lis. Like that night of the fire. I’d never been gone when he was on-duty before. It was like an unspoken vigil I kept—sitting here in the dark waiting for that door to open the next morning. Then my company wanted me to go to Dallas that weekend. I didn’t want to go—not because of me but because of Dustin, but he wouldn’t hear of me staying here. I had to ‘take the next step up’ and if going to Dallas would help me do that, then that’s what he wanted me to do.

“He took me to the airport, and right before I got on that plane, he took me in his arms, and he told me that he loved me forever. I can’t explain it, but I think he knew.”

“You never got to say good-bye,” Lisa said with understanding.

Softly Eve smiled. “We didn’t have to. It was never good-bye with me and Dustin. It was always until I see you again. That was Dustin’s idea because I had such a hard time when he’d leave at first. So we didn’t say good-bye, we always said, ‘until I see you again.’
And it’s true, too. I know there’ll be a time and a place somewhere down the line that fires don’t happen and people don’t die, and we’ll be together again. Until then, I know his love is with me every day.”

In theory it sounded so good. In reality it sounded more difficult than anything Lisa had ever done.

“You have to learn to let go,” Eve said. “Life will take its course with or without you grabbing the wheel and trying to force it to be one way or the other—all that does is make your arms hurt. Let go and trust that whatever happens, it’s for the best.”