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Tragedy tore them apart. Now tragedy will bring the sisters together again, offering them the chance to find happiness in sorrow…if they choose.

As children, Molly, Lena and Tessa McBride witnessed their parents’ murder-suicide. That life-changing moment shaped their future in unimaginable ways, but was unable to destroy the ties between them.

Molly chose a life of helping others through her work as a nun. But her determination to do good cannot prevent darkness from touching her life…or make her forget the man she secretly loves: her sister’s husband.

Lena longs for intimacy, but fears again losing someone she loves—until she meets Dr. Reece Longworth. His belief in her makes her willing to try to open her heart again. But by the time she learns to love him, will it be too late?

Adopted as a baby, Tessa McBride remembers little of her sisters, but feels the effects of their parents’ deaths as keenly. She seeks fame, but finds herself caught by a man whose promise of love comes with terrible consequences.

Praise for No Regrets by

“Ross’s insight into both romantic attraction and family dynamics is striking.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A steamy, fast-paced read.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A moving story with marvelous characters that should not be missed.”

—RT Book Reviews, 4 1/2 stars

“JoAnn Ross is more than just one of the superstars. She has moved to the elite of the elite.”

—Harriet Klausner

“No Regrets had a profound impact on me…a keeper, in the finest sense of the word.”

—Linda Mowery, The Romance Reader, 5 Hearts

No Regrets

JoAnn Ross

www.mirabooks.co.uk

To Jay. Now more than ever.

Dear Reader,

Many of my stories are born from my own life experience. No Regrets, first published in 1997, is one of those. While I was growing up, the nuns continually assured me that I had a vocation. Although I personally dreamed of becoming a writer, having watched A Nun’s Story too many times to count, I also found it hard to turn my back on a supposed vocation. After much soul searching, instead of becoming a bride of Christ, I chose to marry the man I’m still, after many decades, madly in love with.

Another No Regrets story line borrowed from true life is that my birth father—oops—failed to tell his family about my existence, which makes me, like Grace, a “secret baby.”

Ask writers which of their stories or characters they like best, and you’ll usually be told that books are like children and it’s impossible to choose a favorite. Which is mostly true. But I will admit that of all the characters I’ve lived with over the years, Sister Molly is one I continue to think about often, with warm affection.

I hope you enjoy following her journey to a well-deserved happy ending.

JoAnn

Contents

Prologue

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Part Two

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Part Three

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Epilogue

Prologue

1972

It was Christmas in Los Angeles. Although the temperature was in the mid-eighties the residents of the City of Angels were determined to rev up that old holiday spirit.

The venerable Queen Mary was decked out in its winter wonderland finery, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol was playing to standing-room-only crowds at the Hollywood Bowl, and at the Shrine Auditorium the Nutcracker ballet continued to entrance.

Richard Burton was narrating A Child’s Christmas in Wales at the Shubert Theatre, the Mickey Mouse Very Merry Christmas Parade had returned to Disneyland’s Main Street, and even the hookers strolling Hollywood Boulevard had gotten into the act, dressing for the season in skimpy red-and-white outfits.

But inside a small pink stucco house, located in the shadow of Dodger Stadium, the mood was anything but festive.

* * *

“Molly,” Lena McBride whispered desperately, “I’m going to pee in my pants.”

Ten-year-old Molly McBride drew her sister a little tighter against her. “No, you’re not, Lena,” she whispered back without taking her eyes from their daddy. “You can hold on.”

“No, I can’t. Please, Molly,” she hissed, as she recrossed her legs and pressed her small hand between them. “You have to do something.”

It was a common refrain, one Molly had grown up hearing. Although there was only two years’ difference between them, sometimes she felt more like Lena’s mother than her sister.

“Would you two brats shut the fuck up?” Rory McBride roared, aiming his gun away from his wife and at Molly and Lena.

Amazingly, his shout failed to wake three-year-old Tessa, who continued to sleep on the rug in the center of the room. Her baby sister had been cranky that morning with a cold. Afraid at what might happen if Tessa woke and began fussing, Molly was relieved that the cough medicine seemed to have knocked her out.

“How’s a man supposed to think around here with you brats babbling all the time?”

Having learned to keep quiet when her parents were drinking, which her daddy had been doing until he’d run out of liquor around sundown, Molly didn’t point out that it was the first thing either one of them had said since this all started six hours earlier. When her mama had come home from her afternoon shift at Denny’s smelling—as Rory had put it—of sex and sin, instead of cigarette smoke and fried eggs.

“Lena needs to go to the bathroom,” she announced.

“She’ll have to hold it, because she’s not goin’ anywhere.”

Molly lifted her chin and met his bleary, red-rimmed eyes with a level look of her own. “She needs to go to the bathroom.” Her voice was quiet. But insistent.

He drew in a long drag on a cigarette—his last—exhaled the smoke through his nose like a fire-breathing dragon and glared at her through the blue cloud. “You always have been a real mouthy little bitch, Molly McBride.” He shook his head with mock regret. “I think it’s high time your daddy shut you up.”

He pointed the revolver straight at her, winked and pulled the trigger.

* * *

A phalanx of police cars was parked out in front of the house. Klieg lights lit up the area, making it as bright as day. Behind the police barricade, despite the fact that it was nearly midnight on Christmas Eve, spectators stood in groups, talking about the action as if they were watching a taping of “The Rookies” while video crews from every television station in the city were jockeying over the best vantage positions.

“What we’ve got inside that house is potential multiple homicides,” Lieutenant Alex Kovaleski reminded his men. “The guy’s been threatening to kill himself and his wife and daughters for hours.” As chief negotiator of the Los Angeles police hostage team, it was Alex’s responsibility to see that didn’t happen.

“Why don’t we just rush the house?” a young, impatient rookie asked.

“This isn’t some Hollywood movie. We do that and there’ll be lots of gunfire that’ll look real dandy on the nightly news, but we could end up taking three little girls out of there in body bags.”

Alex knew all too well that when a guy took his kids hostage, his real agenda was to get back at his wife for some grievance, either real or imagined. Killing the kids was a surefire way to hurt a spouse, but Alex wasn’t going to allow any children to die tonight.

“Time’s on our side,” he reminded everyone. “If we get tired, we go home and they send in another fifty cops to take our place. And fifty more. Then fifty more after that. Hell, we can keep rotating cops until doomsday. We can outlast the son of a bitch.”

They’d already cut off the power and water to the McBride house. Intimidation tactics, certainly. The entire idea of hostage negotiation was to control the hostage-taker’s environment.

* * *

“I’m going to kill the fuckin’ bitch,” Rory McBride insisted yet again. It was the fourth time Alex had spoken with him on the phone since the standoff had begun. The previous three times the conversation had ended with McBride hanging up.

“That’s what you keep saying,” Alex agreed mildly. “But you know, Rory, I don’t think you want to do that. Not really.”

“What I want is a goddamn drink. And some cigarettes.”

“Can’t give you any alcohol, Rory. It’s against the rules, remember?” They’d been through this earlier, when he’d threatened to blow out his wife’s brains if the cops didn’t get him a bottle of Jim Beam. “But I suppose I could send a pack of cigarettes in.”

There was a long silence. Then a curse. “Okay. Make ’em Camels. Filterless.”

“Sorry, but that’s not quite the way it works.” The way it worked was that the cops took everything away. Then negotiated things back, one item at a time. “Tell you what I’ll do, Rory. Since I’m feeling generous tonight, and I’d like to get this over with so we can all get some sleep, I’ll trade you two packs of Camels for those little girls.”

Rory McBride’s answer was a ripe curse. When the sound of a receiver being slammed down reverberated in his ear, Alex muttered his own curse.

Deciding to give McBride a few minutes to calm down, Alex studied the sketch of the interior of the house that had been drawn by a woman down the street who was friends with Mrs. McBride. The front door opened right onto the living room, which in turn opened to the kitchen, which meant that sitting on the couch, McBride would have a view of both the front and side doors.

It wasn’t the kind of house you could easily slip a gunman into. Which meant that they’d just have to wait. For as long as it took.

* * *

In that fleeting flash of time after she watched her daddy pull the trigger of the ugly black gun, Molly waited for the roar, stiffened in preparation for the expected pain. And even as she wondered how badly it would hurt to die, she worried how her little sisters would survive without her.

She heard the click of the trigger being pulled, her mama’s shriek, Lena’s scream. Then she heard her

daddy’s harsh, cigarette-roughened laugh.

“You flinched,” he said, his grin showing that he’d enjoyed his cruel trick immensely. “Guess you’re not so tough after all, little girl.”

Leftover fear mingled with fury as her heart continued to pound in her ears. She heard Lena sob something about an accident, felt the moisture running down her own bare legs and realized her sister was not the only one who’d wet herself.

“You had no right to do that, Rory McBride, you sadistic son of a bitch,” Karla yelled. “Molly’s never done anything to you.”

“If you hadn’t gotten knocked up with that snotty little brat in the first place, I could’ve played pro ball. I was state high school All-Star first baseman for three straight years,” he reminded her. And himself. Sometimes those glory days seemed very far away.

“I didn’t get pregnant all by myself, hotshot,” Karla flared. “You were the one who was always tryin’ to get beneath my skirt.”

“A guy didn’t have to try all that hard,” he countered on a snort. “Hell, you were pulling your panties down three minutes after I met you.”

It was an old argument. Molly had heard it so many times, she could recite the lines from memory. She leaned her head against the back of the couch and closed her eyes.

Everyone in the neighborhood knew you were a slut. She mentally said the words along with her daddy. If I hadn’t been so drunk that day you told me you were pregnant, I would’ve figured out that it probably wasn’t even my kid.

Molly was already thinking ahead to her mother’s line that if she hadn’t been so stoned, she never would have married such a miserable loser, and, just to set the record straight, there weren’t any goddamn baseball teams in the country that would have signed a player with two bad knees, when a sound like a gunshot rang out.

Molly’s eyes flew open. She saw her mama’s hand still resting on her daddy’s cheek and watched as a muscle jerked violently beneath Karla’s scarlet-tipped fingers.

Rory slapped her back, a hard, backhanded blow that sent her peroxide-blond head reeling. Then he smiled evilly at his two older daughters.

“I’m going to kill your mama now.” He put the gun to Karla’s temple and pulled the trigger. This time there was a roar, followed by a blinding spray of blood.

As Molly and Lena watched in horror, their daddy stuck the barrel of the revolver against the roof of his mouth.

The thunderous bang reverberated through Molly’s head, followed by the crashing sound of wood splintering as the front door was kicked in.

Alex took in the murder scene—the woman sprawled on the floor, the man draped over her, the blood and pieces of brain tissue darkening the wall behind them.

On a raggedy brown couch facing the door, two little girls sat side by side, their arms wrapped tightly around each other, their eyes wide, their complexions as pale as wraiths’. Nearby, a pink-cheeked toddler sat in the center of a stained rug and screeched.

“Aw, hell.”

Alex dragged his palms down his face, and as the rest of the city celebrated the season of peace and joy, he found himself wishing that he’d listened to his mother and gone to law school.

Part One

Chapter One

December 24, 1986

Later, Molly McBride would look back on this night and wonder if the disappearance of the baby Jesus hadn’t been a sign. A portent that her life was about to dramatically and inexorably change.

At the moment, however, attempting to get to work on time, she had no time to ponder the existence of signs or omens. During the half-block walk between her bus stop and the hospital, she’d been approached by three panhandlers.

“‘Give to him who begs from you. He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none, and he who has food must do likewise.’”

A cloud of foul breath strong enough to down a mastodon wafted between Molly and an emaciated man, but she did not back away. The quiz, administered by the former Jesuit seminarian, was a daily event. And as much as she worried about the man she only knew as Thomas—Doubting Thomas, he’d informed her one day—Molly had come to enjoy them.

“Those are easy, Thomas. The first is from Matthew, the second Luke.”

She cheerfully handed over the cheese sandwich she’d made that morning. “Now I have one for you.”

He bowed and gave her a go-ahead sign as, with yellowed teeth, he began tearing the wrapping off the sandwich.

“‘God created us without us but he did not will to save us without us.’” She waited, not willing to admit that she’d spent hours looking up that obscure quote.

Thomas wolfed down nearly a quarter of the sandwich, rewrapped the remainder and stuck it in his pocket. Then he rocked back on the run-down heels of his cowboy boots and clucked his tongue.

“Me dear, darling, Saint Molly.” His brogue could have fooled any of Molly’s ancestors back in County Cork. “A keenly educated Catholic girl such as yourself should know that Saint Augustine is required reading in any seminary.”

“Actually, I was thinking more of Saint Augustine’s message telling us that we must take responsibility for our salvation, and our lives, than winning today’s contest. If you’re not careful, you’re going to end up in the hospital.”

Beneath his filthy Raiders jacket he shrugged shoulders that reminded her of a wire hanger. “It won’t be the first time.”

“No. But it could be the last.” She put her hand on his sleeve. “I worry about you, Thomas.”

His smile was sad. “You worry about everyone. When are you going to realize, Saint Molly, that no matter what Saint Augustine told us, you can’t save the world?”

“I’ll pray for you, Thomas.” It was what she always said.

“Save your prayers.” It was what he always said. “I’m beyond redemption.”

Molly sighed as he walked away. Then continued on.

Mercy Samaritan Hospital sprawled over a no-man’s land in the shadow of the Harbor Freeway and Santa Monica Freeway interchange like a huge gray stone Goliath. The neighborhood where Molly spent her nights was home to some of the roughest bars, seediest transients and oldest whores in the City of Angels.

Thanks to gang members’ propensity for shooting out streetlights, once the sun went down, the streets and alleys were as dark as tombs. To the residents of these mean streets, the gilt excess of Beverly Hills and the sparkling sun-drenched beaches of Malibu might as well have belonged to another planet.

Mercy Sam, a teaching hospital established by the Sisters of Mercy nearly a century ago, had been more than a place of healing; it had been a living symbol of hope and compassion. Hope had long since fled, along with most of the population of the inner city. Fortunately, although Molly was the only Sister of Mercy still on staff, compassion had remained.

A visual affront to Frank Lloyd Wright’s famed concept of organic architecture, the building featured a hulking main building with two wings. Various outbuildings had cropped up over the years like weeds.

The pneumatic doors opened with a hiss as Molly entered the emergency department beneath the bright red neon sign. The triage area was nearly deserted, as were the fast-track cubicles, where patients with level-one complaints—bloody noses, scrapes and bruises, migraines, intestinal upsets, minor burns and strep throats—were treated.

She went into the staff lounge, changed into the cranberry red scrubs that had recently replaced the hated pink ones and joined the other nurses in The Pit, as the ER was routinely called.

“Merry Christmas,” Yolanda Brown greeted her.

“Happy holidays to you, too.” Nothing in Molly’s voice revealed her painful memories of Christmas Eve. “I’m sorry I’m late.”

“It’s getting tougher and tougher to run that gauntlet,” Yolanda said with a frown. “Nobody rides the bus in L.A. Especially not at night and in this neighborhood. You really ought to get yourself a car.”

Molly smiled, feeling the shadows drift away as her equilibrium returned. “Why don’t you write a letter to the Pope and suggest he cosign a loan?”

Yolanda’s shrug suggested she’d expected that answer to the ongoing argument, but intended to keep on trying, anyway. “You didn’t miss anything,” she said. “It’s turning out to be a blessedly silent night. According to Banning’s report, it was pretty quiet on the day shift, too. Which is pretty amazing, given that not only is it a holiday, it’s a full moon.

“They had only half a dozen patients during their last three hours,” Yolanda continued. “The last one was some guy who sliced his finger to the bone trying to put together a bicycle for his eight-year-old son. He was stitched up, given a tetanus shot, advised to pay the ten bucks to have the store do it next time and was leaving just as I was coming on duty.

“By the way,” she tacked on as an afterthought, “the baby Jesus is gone.”

“I noticed as I walked by the crèche.” Molly sighed. “I suppose it isn’t surprising. Putting a baby doll outside in this neighborhood is just asking to have it stolen, especially this time of year.”

Molly was of two minds about the theft. She found the act wrong, but she couldn’t help envisioning the joy on the face of whatever child received the doll on Christmas morning.

“Santa’s gonna be paying a surprise visit to some kid’s house,” Yolanda said. “Apparently from now on, the swaddled babe is going to be a bunch of rolled-up towels. The visual impact won’t be the same, but administration has decided it might last through the night.”

Molly wasn’t so certain about that, since clean towels were even more precious than baby dolls around there.

It was almost eerily quiet. There were no metal-bound triage charts in the racks, crisp white sheets covered the high-wheeled gurneys lined up in the hallway outside trauma area A and all the booths were empty, curtains pulled back in anticipation of patients. Molly was Irish enough to be vaguely superstitious of such calm.

“Where’s Reece?” Molly asked.

“Your handsome young brother-in-law is hiding away in waiting room A. Seems he’s got a hundred bucks’ bet with Dr. Bernstein on the Houston Rockets over the Bulls—it’s the third quarter, Jordan’s on a roll and he’s starting to get nervous that his bride is going to murder him when she finds out.”

“Lena would never murder Reece. She adores him.”

And rightfully so, Molly thought. Dr. Reece Longworth, Mercy Sam’s ER resident, was the nicest man she’d ever met. He was also her best friend.

“And he’s nuts about her. The guy lights up from the inside like a Christmas tree whenever she’s around.” Yolanda sighed. “If I could ever find me a man who looked at me the way Reece looks at your little sister, I’d marry him in a heartbeat.”

“Lena’s lucky,” Molly agreed. Lena had met Reece one night two years ago when she’d shown up unexpectedly to eat dinner with Molly in the cafeteria. Instantly smitten, Reece had proposed within the week. It had taken him six months to convince Lena to marry him.

Until Reece, Lena’s choices in men had been disastrous, eerily similar to their own mother’s. All of her lovers—and there had been many—had been carbon copies of their abusive, alcoholic father. Molly often thought that Lena hadn’t believed she was deserving of love, even though she’d been ravenous for it all her life. During those bad years, Lena had reminded Molly of a bottomless, fragile porcelain bowl—impossible to fill and capable of shattering at a touch.

Molly sat staring at the lights of the small artificial tree atop a filing cabinet at the nurses’ station thinking that Lena’s first Christmas Eve with Reece had probably been the only truly happy one she’d ever had. The lights blinked red, green and white, flashing gaily on yellowed and cracked plaster walls in the unnaturally quiet room.

Normally, Molly would never have questioned the rare peace. Emergencies came in spurts. But she could never remember it being as quiet as this.

“You know, this really is starting to get a little spooky,” she said thirty minutes later as she bit into a bell-shaped cookie covered with red sugar sprinkles. “So where are all the customers?”

She’d no sooner spoken than the dam broke—a drive-by shooting; an attempted suicide who’d washed a bottle of nitroglycerin tablets down with a fifth of Beefeaters gin, then burned the inside of his mouth trying to blow himself up with a Bic lighter; and a cop carrying a newspaper-wrapped bundle.

“One of the bums found her in a Dumpster,” he said, shoving the bundle into Molly’s arms.

Sensing what she was about to see, Molly gently placed the newspapers onto a gurney and carefully opened them up. The baby’s eyelids were sealed shut, its pale blue skin gelatinous. She was wet and so tiny, she reminded Molly of a newly hatched hummingbird.

Reece, who’d just finished the unenviable task of telling the shell-shocked parents of the thirteen-year-old honor student that he’d been unable to save their son, paused on his way to check out a lacerated scalp.

“Aw, hell,” he responded in his characteristically even tone that was faintly softened with the accent of the deep South. “Get a neonatologist on the line, stat,” he told the clerk. “Tell him we’ve got an extramural

preemie delivery. And start arranging for a transfer upstairs to NICU, just in case.”

Unlike so many other physicians Molly worked with, Reece Longworth never raised his voice except when it was necessary in order to be heard over the din. Few had ever seen him get angry. Such a relaxed, informal demeanor helped calm the staff, as well as thousands of anxious patients. The fluorescent red plastic button he wore on his green scrub shirt reading Don’t Panic probably didn’t hurt, either.

“She’s so small,” Yolanda murmured as Reece managed, just barely, to put the blade of the infant laryngoscope into the baby girl’s rosebud mouth. “She could fit in the palm of my hand.”

“Probably another crack kid,” the cop muttered as he stood on the sidelines and watched.

While Reece slid the tube between the tiny vocal cords, Molly said a quick, silent prayer and checked for a pulse.

“Sixty,” she announced grimly. She did not have to add that it was much too slow for a preemie.

“Dr. Winston’s the neonatologist on call,” the clerk announced as Reece put in an umbilical line to start pushing drugs. “He wants to know how much the baby weighs. Because if it’s less than five hundred grams, the kid’s not viable.”

As soon as the line was in, Reece bagged the baby girl, forcing air directly into immature lungs through the tube. Molly wrapped a towel around the frail infant in an attempt to warm it.

“See if you can find a nursery scale,” Reece instructed Yolanda. “And round up an Isolette, too.”

When the baby suddenly kicked, Molly felt her own pulse leap in response.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Reece warned as they exchanged a look. “It’s only reflex. No matter what she weighs, we’re not even talking long shot here, Molly.”

“I know.”

Yet, even as she prepared for the worst, even as she saw the infant crumping before her eyes, Molly took the weak little kick as a sign of encouragement. Death was a frequent companion in her line of work, but Molly had also witnessed enough miracles to allow her to hang on to hope now.

Yolanda came back with the scale and a hush suddenly came over the room as Molly placed the baby girl on it.

“Four hundred and twenty grams.” Molly closed her eyes and heard the onlookers sigh in unison.

“Too light to fake it,” Reece said what everyone already knew.

The clerk passed the information on to the neonatologist still waiting on the phone. “Winston says to pull the plug. The kid’s FTD.”

Fixing to Die. Accustomed as she was to the term, Molly was irritated by it now.

As was Reece. “Easy for Winston to say,” he muttered. With an icy, controlled fury that was almost palpable, he marched the few feet to the phone and snatched the receiver from the clerk’s hand.

“As much as I appreciate your consult, Dr. Winston, we don’t throw terms around like that in my emergency department. She may be small, but she deserves the same respect we’d show your child, or wife, or mother, if they showed up down here.”

He hung up.

“All we can do now is make her as comfortable as possible,” he said. Every eye in the room was riveted on him as he turned off the line, pulled the plug from the baby’s lungs, wrapped the painfully tiny girl up again and placed her in the Isolette.

“She’s still breathing,” Yolanda pointed out unnecessarily.

“She’ll stop.”

An aide popped her head into the room. “You’ve got a stab wound in treatment room B, Dr. Longworth.”

He turned to Molly. “I’ll need you to assist.” Without waiting for an answer, he cast one more quick, regretful look at the baby and left the room.

After asking the clerk to page Father Dennis Murphy, who she’d seen going upstairs to bring Christmas communion to Catholics on the medical wards, Molly followed Reece.

After stitching up the wound that had resulted from an argument over whether “Away in a Manger” or “Silent Night” was the Christmas carol most appropriate to the season, Reece stopped by to check the baby again and found her still breathing. They also found the cop still standing beside the Isolette.

“I’m off duty,” he said, as if worried they’d think he was shirking his work. “My daughter’s pregnant with her first. This could be her kid.”

Despite the tragedy of their situation, Molly managed a smile at the thought of a new life on the way. “I’ll add your daughter to my prayers.”

“Thank you, Sister.” Patrolman Tom Walsh, a frequent visitor to the ER due to his work patrolling the seediest parts of the city, managed a smile. “Someone needs to baptize her.”

“Father Murphy didn’t answer his page,” the clerk, who overheard his statement, informed Molly. “The guard said he left about thirty minutes ago.”

“Looks like it’s up to you, Sister,” Walsh said. “How about naming her Mary?” he suggested. “That’s my mother’s name. And it is Christmas, so it fits.”

It took all Molly’s inner strength to grace him with a smile when she wanted to weep. “Mary’s perfect.”

The patrolman put his hat over his heart. Molly sprinkled water over the tiny bald head, wishing for the usual cries, but the infant didn’t so much as flinch. Even so, the hopelessly immature lungs valiantly continued to draw in rasping breaths of air like tiny bellows.

“Mary, I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”

Walsh exhaled a long breath. “Thank you, Sister. I feel a lot better.”

Molly was grateful that she’d managed to bring one of them comfort. With a no-nonsense attitude that had always served her well, she reminded herself that such emotionally painful situations came with the territory. She’d chosen to live out her vocation in the real world, where a sacred moment was when someone shared with you—like Thomas earlier, and Officer Walsh now. If she’d wanted her life to be one of quiet dedication contemplating holy mysteries, she would have joined an order of cloistered nuns.

Baby Mary fought on. Two hours later, when the flood of patients had slowed to a trickle, Molly slipped back into the room and took the swaddled infant who was no heavier than a handful of feathers out of the Isolette. She held her in her arms and felt the tiny, birdlike heart flutter in a last futile attempt to keep beating. Then it finally went still.

As a grim-faced Reece called the death for the record, and Patrolman Tom Walsh made a sign of the cross, Molly, who was suddenly having trouble breathing herself, escaped from the room.

Reece found her on the rooftop, looking out over the lights of the city.

“Repeat Longworth’s rules of critical care,” he said.

The rules—known as Longworthisms—were a joke around the ER. They were also right on the money.

“Number one—air goes in, air goes out,” Molly answered remotely. She didn’t feel like joking at the moment. “Number two—blood goes round and round. Number three—bleeding always stops.” She drew in a weary breath. “Number four—oxygen is good.”

“Very good.” He nodded his satisfaction. “But you forgot the most important.”

“What’s that?”

“Dr. Reece Longworth’s Rule Number Five. Patients always leave.” In an affectionate gesture more suited to a friend and brother-in-law than a physician, he skimmed his finger down the slope of her nose. “It’s a good one to keep in mind. Getting too involved can end up in a flame-out.”

“But it’s not fair. That was an innocent child, Reece, a little girl who’d never done anything but do her best to beat impossible odds. She was so tiny. And so brave.” Believing all life was a gift from God, Molly hated seeing such a gift not being honored.

“I know.” Reece sighed and put his arm around her. “Some days are harder than others,” he allowed. “But you’re still too softhearted for your own good. You’ve got to save a little of that caring for yourself.”

Molly knew he was right. Emergency room nurses—and doctors—burned out all the time. But she couldn’t just turn off her emotions like a water tap.

When she didn’t answer, Reece ran the back of his hand down her cheek in a soothing fraternal gesture that carried absolutely no sexual overtones.

“You know, I suppose the truth is, deep down, I don’t want you to change, either.” Both his expression and his tone were serious. “The patients are lucky to have you. I’m lucky to have you. But you’ve got to learn to let go.”

“I know.” She sighed. “But sometimes it’s difficult not to worry. When you care so deeply.”

It was Reece’s turn to sigh. A faint shadow moved across his eyes. “On that we’re in full agreement.”

* * *

Venice Beach was deserted save for a few couples walking their dogs along the strand. The full moon hanging in the sky created a glittering silver path on the jet water, but as she sat in the sidewalk café, Lena Longworth’s interest was not in the view, but on the woman across the table from her.

“You’ve been having problems at home,” the young woman, who looked a bit like a blond Gypsy, with her wild long spiral perm, floating gauze skirt and heavy sweater, announced.

“Not really,” Lena lied. The truth was, that although Reece was a man of uncommon tolerance, she knew her obsession with having a child had been straining his patience lately.

Although the woman smiled benignly back at her, Lena knew she wasn’t fooling her for a moment. She took a sip of her cola and wished it were something stronger. But she’d promised Reece that she’d never drink and drive. Having been forced to treat too many casualties of such reckless behavior in the ER, he was adamant on the subject.

A silence settled over them. A pregnant silence, Lena thought wryly.

“I have a friend who told me that your cards had predicted she’d have children. Even when the doctors said it was impossible,” she said finally. “Three months later, she got pregnant.”

“The cards are not some magical fortune-telling computer,” the woman who’d introduced herself as Ophelia said. “I can’t make them give you the answer you’re seeking. I can only interpret them.”

“That’s a start.”

“Fine.” Ophelia smiled again. “Have you ever had a reading before?”

“No.” Lena refrained from mentioning that she’d always found such superstitious behavior foolish. She was a sensible woman. She had a degree in education. She taught kindergarten and was married to a physician. She didn’t need New Age mumbo jumbo to make her happy. But still…

Ophelia held out the deck of colorful cards. “Some readers prefer to shuffle the cards themselves. Personally, I believe it’s better if you instill them with your own energy first.”

Although she knew it was only her imagination, Lena could have sworn her fingertips tingled as she shuffled the cards.

“You can deal out your first card whenever you’re ready,” Ophelia instructed. “This will tell us your present position.”

Lena drew the first card from the shuffled deck. The image was of a young man, sitting in front of a tree. In front of him were three goblets; a hand coming out of the clouds was offering him a fourth, but his arms were folded in a gesture that suggested his unwillingness to accept.

“The Four of Cups.” Ophelia nodded. “You can see this is a very lucky man. Unfortunately, he’s so caught up in his own despair he can’t see life offering him a great deal.”

Lena twisted her wedding ring and stared down at the cards. This was already hitting a bit too close to home.

Her marriage had been strained lately. But as soon as she got pregnant, that would change. All she wanted was a child. Someone all her own to love. Someone who’d love her back.

“Why don’t you deal the next card,” Ophelia suggested, her gentle voice breaking into Lena’s unhappy thoughts.

Lena nearly groaned as she looked down at the card depicting a woman sitting in bed, obviously in deep despair, her head in her hands as a row of swords hung ominously overhead.

“The Nine of Swords suggests the seeker senses impending doom and disaster,” Ophelia divulged, once again hitting unnervingly close to reality.

Lena wanted to jump up and run away, but she found herself spellbound by the sight of that anguished, sleepless woman. It could have been a self-portrait.

“As you’ll see, although she’s obviously caught up in her fears, the swords do not touch the woman.” The psychic’s dark eyes swept over Lena’s face. “Often the fear of disaster is worse than the reality.”

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself?” Lena muttered.

Ophelia remained unscathed by Lena’s sarcasm. “That’s often the case.”

Irritated and unnerved, Lena dealt another card. This time the woman was standing alone in a vineyard, a falcon on her arm, a manor house in the background.

“As you can see, the woman is at peace with herself. And her surroundings, which are quite lush and suggest material success. This is a woman who does not need to cling to past or even present relationships. A woman who does not need constant companionship to feel content.”

“So, the cards are saying I’m going to be alone?” Panic surged through Lena’s veins like ice water. One of the reasons she’d agreed to marry Reece was because he’d offered security and protection. If he were to leave…

“The cards don’t imply the woman is without relationships,” Ophelia stressed calmly. “Only that she’s at peace with herself. And her situation.”

Lena’s fear ebbed slightly, even as she glumly wondered if this meant that she and Reece were destined never to have children.

She dealt another card. The Wheel of Fortune.

“The Wheel teaches us that although our circumstances are predetermined, we remain responsible for our own destiny. When joy or sorrow come into our lives, what’s important is that we turn to face it. We’re all constantly being presented with decisions and choices to make. Learning to take responsibility for our own destiny is the most difficult of life’s lessons. But it’s well worth the struggle,” Ophelia said encouragingly. “And now the last one. Which will foresee your long-term future.”

Feeling again as if her fingertips were tingling, Lena dealt a fifth card and drew in a harsh breath as she viewed the evil half-goat, half-human figure holding a flaming torch toward a couple who stood naked and vulnerable, chains around their necks. “A devil?” she whispered feeling goose bumps rise on her flesh.

“Like everything in life, this card cannot be taken at face value,” Ophelia assured her. “The devil represents all energy, positive and negative. He teaches us that if we don’t accept both sides of our nature—the light and the dark—we can develop inhibitions. And phobias. In many cases, he represents the shadowy side of our psyches we prefer to ignore.”

Having taken an intro psych course in college, Lena recognized the Jungian shadow term. Although she’d received an A in the course, she’d never thought of the concept in relation to her own personality.

She stared down at the unappealing card for a long time, allowing another silence to stretch between them.

“Although it’s not wise to take the cards too literally,” Ophelia said quietly, “the devil often symbolizes the removal of fears and inhibitions that hinder personal growth.”

“Like not being able to love openly?”

“That could be an example. In the fifth position, this is a very good card. You’re facing a time of great growth. A time when much good could come from apparent evil.”

Lena knew a lot about evil. The trick was to somehow learn to accept the good.

“Thank you.” She reached into her purse and added more bills to the ones she’d already paid when she’d first sat down. “You’ve given me a great deal to think about.”

“It was your own willingness to open your heart and your mind to the message of the cards,” Ophelia reminded her.

Open your heart. The words reverberated over and over again in her mind as Lena drove away from funky Venice to the privileged enclaves of Pacific Palisades. That was something she’d never been able to do. Not since that long-ago Christmas Eve.

She’d tried to tell Reece that she didn’t have it in her to love him the way a wife should love her husband. Oh, she admired him, of course. And respected him without question, which wasn’t difficult since he was the most noble, honorable, caring man she’d ever met. And she was truly fond of him.

Her mind drifted back to that day, six months after they’d first met, when he’d taken her hand and led her to a secluded bench in Griffith Park.

“I love you, Lena.” His handsome face had been so earnest, so sincere, it almost made her weep.

She’d dragged her gaze from his to the children pouring out of the yellow school bus that had pulled into the planetarium parking lot. Dressed in a parochial school uniform similar to the one she’d once worn, they were laughing and obviously enjoying their field trip. Lena had been unable to remember a time while growing up when she’d felt even half as carefree as those children looked.

She’d been about to tell Reece yet again that she couldn’t marry him. But as she watched the children lining up in double lines, something inside her moved. The response to the children was as unbidden as it was unfamiliar. Perhaps, she’d thought, if she married Reece and had a child, she wouldn’t feel so empty.

She’d drawn in a deep breath and hoped she was making the right decision. “If you’re really serious…”

“Of course I am,” he’d answered in that calm, rational way she assumed he must have learned growing up in that mansion in North Carolina.

Feeling as if she were perched on the edge of a steep and dangerous precipice, she’d taken another deep breath and leapt daringly over the edge. “Then my answer’s yes. I’ll marry you.”

His joyous whoop had drawn the attention of the children, who’d laughed at the sight of the man picking the pretty woman up and twirling her around in his arms. What neither they, nor Reece had seen, was the shimmer of tears in Lena’s eyes.

The memory of that day, along with the knowledge of how unfair she’d been to the only man who’d ever loved her, made Lena’s eyes fill with tears all over again.

Open your heart. Dear Lord, how she wanted to do that! For Reece, and for herself.

As she turned onto the winding road leading up the cliff to their ocean-view house, Lena realized that unfortunately she had no idea where—or how—to begin.

Then the answer came to her, so bright and vivid, she wondered why it hadn’t occurred to her before.

Molly could help her sort this out. As she had every other problem in Lena’s life. Even before that horrifying night their daddy had gotten drunk and made them orphans.

She’d talk to her big sister first thing tomorrow, Lena decided. After Christmas dinner.

Although it had been a very long time since she could remember having anything to feel hopeful about, Lena was smiling as she pulled her Jaguar into the half-moon driveway.

Chapter Two

“Emergency department.” Impatience crackled in Molly’s usually calm and reassuring voice. She sighed and prayed, as she was so often forced to do, for patience.

“Hello?” There was a slight pause. “Is this Mercy Samaritan Hospital?” Molly thought the hesitant female voice sounded slightly slurred.

“Yes. You’ve reached the emergency department. How can I help you?”

“It’s my husband.”

Molly groaned inwardly, realizing this was going to be one of those calls in which she had to drag the information out one word at a time. Frustrated, she pushed a long jet curl that had come loose from the knot at the back of her neck.

“Has he been injured?”

“Not yet.” There was a sound somewhere between a sob and a laugh. “Although I’m thinking about cutting his prick off with the electric carving knife.” The words were definitely slurred.

“I’d advise against that, ma’am. The police frown on such things. Meanwhile, if your husband isn’t hurt right now, I’m afraid we’re very busy and—”

“He’s got the clap. And he didn’t get it from me.”

Molly rubbed unconsciously at her temples where a headache hammered. “I see.”

“And now I have this goddamn rash, which is the only reason the son of a bitch confessed to screwing around in the first place. So, I guess I’d better come in for a test.”

“That would be my suggestion. You need to be seen by a doctor and get started on antibiotic treatment,” she told the caller. “You should also have an AIDS test.”

“You think I have AIDS?”

Molly heard the sudden panic in the woman’s voice. “I’m only suggesting the test as a precaution,” she said as soothingly as possible. “Since your sexual relationship with your husband was not the monogamous one you believed it to be—”

“I’m not taking any AIDS test.”

“It can be done confidentially, if you’re worried about—”

“If you have AIDS, you die. And if I’m gonna die, I damn well don’t want to know it. I’m also going to kill the bastard if he gave it to me.” That said, the woman slammed down the receiver.

Her ears ringing, Molly took a deep breath, said a quick prayer for both the philandering husband and his angry wife, then returned to the fray.

Her next patient was a two-year-old child who’d been nipped by the family’s new German shepherd puppy.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Molly soothed as she cleaned the puncture wound, gave the little girl a tetanus shot and advised the mother to keep the child away from the puppy until things quieted down after the holidays.

“I need a prescription for a seven-day course of penicillin,” she told Reece, when he paused at the desk to pick up the next chart. “It’s for a dog bite.”

He pulled a prescription pad from a pocket bulging with tongue depressors, a pen light and ampoules of medications.

“I wish people would listen when the Humane Society tells them this is the worst time of year to try to introduce a new animal into the home.” He scribbled the order onto the pad. “Was that a VD call I heard you taking?”

“You’ve got good ears.” Molly wondered how he could have heard anything over the din.

“Nah. I’m just nosy.” He ripped the script off and handed it to her. “So, have you heard the county health department’s new venereal disease slogan?”

“I don’t think so. What is it?”

“VD is nothing to clap about.”

Although it was a terrible pun, an involuntary giggle escaped her lips. “You’re making that up.”

“That’s the trouble with working with you, Sister Molly,” he said on an exaggerated sigh. “You make it impossible to lie. But it’s still pretty good, don’t you think?”

“I think I should have Dr. Bernstein come down for a consult.” Alan Bernstein was the psych resident. “No one should remain this upbeat at the twenty-fourth hour of a thirty-six-hour shift.” Before he could answer, she was off to meet another paramedic who was wheeling in a woman on a gurney.

The patient was dressed for a party in a thigh-high, formfitting red sequined dress and skyscraper heels, one of which had cracked in two. Her hair, the color of a new penny, had been fashioned in an elaborate upsweep and Christmas trees had been airbrushed onto each of her long, scarlet fingernails. Her dress had been torn up one side, and one sleeve had been cut open to allow for an IV drip.

“She was crossing Sunset and got hit by a car,” the paramedic began. The man, whose badge read Sam Browning, had earned the nickname Big E his first night on the job when he’d excitedly radioed that he and his partner were bringing in a twenty-year-old male who’d been “ejaculated” from his Corvette.

“It was my fault,” the patient interrupted, struggling to sit up. “I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

“Fault’s for the cops to decide,” Big E said. “Why don’t you just lie down, ma’am, and let me tell the nurse what she needs to know to treat you, okay?”

“I’m sorry.” The woman gave Molly an apologetic look through lashes coated with navy blue mascara. Molly was momentarily distracted by the thin row of rhinestones bordering her eyelids.

“That’s all right,” she soothed. “I can understand you’ve suffered a great deal of stress.”

“I just don’t want that poor driver to get in trouble. Especially on Christmas Eve.”

“The driver’s pretty shook up,” Big E told Molly. “He insisted on coming along. He’s out in the waiting room. You might want to talk to him after you’re finished.”

“I’ll do that.”

“You won’t be sorry. He’s very handsome,” the patient informed Molly, earning a glare from the paramedic who was obviously frustrated at having been interrupted again. “A girl could certainly do worse.”

“Anyway,” Big E doggedly continued, “according to witnesses, the patient suffered a brief period of unconsciousness—”

“I suppose that’s why I can’t remember what happened.”

“It’s possible you’ve suffered a slight concussion,” Molly said.

“She had some labored breathing in the vehicle coming over here, which suggests a cracked rib,” Big E said, grimly determined to finish his report. “We started her on glucose, thiamine and naloxone. As you can see, there’s no loss of verbal skills and her only other symptoms are retrograde amnesia and a few scrapes and bruises.”

“I skinned my leg when I landed,” the patient revealed as Molly took her blood pressure.

Molly observed the red-and-purple scrape along one firm thigh. The skin around it was darkly bruised. “Don’t worry, we’ll have the gravel cleaned out in no time.”

“But it won’t scar?”

“No.” Molly smiled reassuringly. “It shouldn’t.”

“I’m so relieved. I’m a dancer. My legs are my livelihood.”

“When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a ballerina.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“My family couldn’t afford the lessons.”

“Oh.” The woman pursed her vermilion lips and thought about that for a moment. “That’s too bad.”

“Not really.” Molly began swabbing the wound while she waited for Reece to arrive. “Because I know now I was meant to be a nurse.” She didn’t mention being a nun, since that always seemed to lead to questions, and this patient was already talkative enough.

“I’ve always admired caretaker personalities,” the woman said. “Unfortunately, there aren’t enough of them in the world. Especially these days.”

“I don’t know about the world, but we could use a few more in here tonight.”

“Amen,” Reece agreed as he joined them in the curtained cubicle. “I’m Dr. Longworth. Looks as if someone had a close encounter with Santa’s sleigh.”

The woman laughed, as Reece had intended. When the laugh deteriorated into a wheezing cough, he and Molly exchanged a look.

“I’m afraid we’re going to have to remove your dress, Ms....”

“Fuller. Dana Fuller,” the woman responded in a breathy voice that Molly suspected had little to do with a possible cracked rib.

Molly had seen this happen innumerable times. Reece Longworth was a devastatingly attractive man; whenever he appeared in the emergency room, women invariably took one look at his laughing emerald eyes, perpetually tousled chestnut hair, boyish smile and lean muscular body, and experienced an immediate increase in their heart rates.

“And I’ll be more than happy to take off anything you’d like, Doctor.”

The sexual invitation was unmistakable. Molly was amused by the flush rising from the collar of Reece’s white jacket.

As Molly helped Reece remove the sequined dress, he stared in momentary puzzlement at the flat brown nipples. As comprehension crashed down on him he lifted the sheet he and Molly were pulling up over the patient’s chest and viewed the penis nestled in the curly dark hair.

He’d learned in medical school never to make assumptions, and he assured himself that the only reason he hadn’t realized he was treating a man was because he’d already been working for twenty-four hours. Now, as he managed to keep a straight face and examine the patient’s breathing, Reece reminded himself again why he was hooked on the ER.

He enjoyed the action, the constant surprises. There was nothing worse, he reminded himself as he referred the patient to neurology for a CAT scan, than being bored. Fortunately, that damn sure wasn’t going to happen tonight.

The driver of the car that had struck the cross-dressing dancer was still pacing the waiting room when Molly came to assure him that the patient was going to survive with a minimum of injuries.

“Thank God.” He took both her hands in his. “I’ve been so worried.”

“I can certainly understand that.” Molly smiled her professional caretaker’s smile. “But you can go home now and sleep easy.”

“Sleep.” He thrust his hands through his hair. He was a good-looking man in his mid-thirties. “Lord, I doubt if I’ll sleep for a week, after this.”

“If you’d like, I can ask the physician on duty to prescribe a sleeping pill for you. Just for tonight.”

“No.” He shook his head. “I’ll be all right.” He took another deep breath. “I want to thank you, Nurse…” He glanced down at her name tag, which, due to security measures lobbied for by the female employees of the hospital, had only her first name along with the alphabet soup of initials representing her numerous professional credentials.

He tilted his head and studied her. “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t look much like a Margaret.”

“My friends call me Molly.”

“Molly.” He considered that a moment. “That’s much better. Do you have a last name?”

“McBride.”

“Ah.” He nodded. “I can see the emerald isle in your face, Molly McBride. My mother, Mary Keegan, was black Irish. I should have recognized those lovely blue eyes and dark hair right away.”

“You had other things on your mind.”

“True. But the day I fail to notice a beautiful woman is the day I need to reassess my priorities. My name is Patrick Nelson.”

The conversation was getting more than a little sticky. Molly pulled her hand out of his grasp. “Well, it’s a very busy night, Mr. Nelson, and I’d better get back to work—”

“Would you have a drink with me when you get off shift, Molly?”

“I’m sorry, but—”

“A cup of coffee, then. Or a glass of eggnog. It’s Christmas,” he reminded her. “I transferred down here from San Francisco last month and don’t know many people. I’ll also admit to being so desperate for company that I’m throwing myself on your mercy.”

Patrick Nelson seemed sincere. And nice. Which left Molly feeling a bit like the Grinch about to steal his Christmas. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

“If you’re involved with someone, that’s all right. I’m not going to lie and say that I don’t find you very attractive, Nurse Molly, but if you just want to share some friendly, platonic conversation, that’d be great, too.”

From the flirtatious, masculine gleam in his eyes, she suspected he was looking for more than mere conversation. “Mr. Nelson—”

“Patrick,” he reminded her.

“Patrick.” She decided the best way to handle this was to just go straight to the point. “I’m a nun.”

“A nun?” His gaze swept over her, from the top of her unruly dark hair down to her shoes, stained with blood spatters. “Jesus—I mean, jeez,” he corrected quickly, “talk about a waste.”

This was not the first time Molly had heard that statement. She understood that much of the world found women who’d chosen to sacrifice worldly pleasures mysterious. What she’d never figured out was why so many men seemed to take a woman’s decision to live a celibate life personally.

“I’m afraid we’re in disagreement about that, Mr. Nelson.” She patted his arm. “Have a happy holiday.”

Two hours later, the shift had finally come to an end. After assuring Reece that she’d be at their house for Christmas dinner, Molly retrieved her coat from the nurses’ locker room and left the building.

Unlike the previous night, the street was quiet and empty in the midnight hour. A huge white galleon of a moon soared high in the sky, illuminating the men wrapped in sleeping bags, blankets or newspapers, sleeping in doorways, all their worldly possessions piled into purloined shopping carts.

Molly stopped in front of the crèche. As she’d feared, the towels intended to represent the baby Jesus had been stolen. One of the lambs and an angel were also missing and someone had painted gang signs on Joseph in seasonal red and green paint. A lingering scent of spray enamel blended with the aroma of garbage from the overstuffed Dumpsters and diesel fuel from the trucks that roared by overhead on the freeway.

As she continued walking to the bus stop, Molly thought it sad that those truckers were having to work on Christmas, the one day of the year they should be home with their families.

Families. As content as she was with her life, there were times Molly found herself wondering what would have happened if things had been different? If the police could have convinced her father to surrender, that long-ago Christmas Eve? Or if Tessa hadn’t been taken away from them and adopted by some unknown family. Not a day went by that Molly didn’t think about—and pray for—her missing sister.

She was standing on the corner, waiting for the light to change so she could cross the deserted street, when she became aware of someone coming up behind her.

She reached into her coat pocket, intending to give the poor beggar her usual referral to the mission, when a gloved hand came over her mouth and she was dragged backward, toward the alley.

She fought the man, flailing out with her arms, digging her heels into the sidewalk, trying to slow him down long enough to allow someone to come to her rescue. But he was strong. And so determined.

Her breath was trapped in her lungs, blood drummed deafeningly in her ears. Molly tried going limp, but all that did was earn a vicious curse and cause her hips to hit the pavement with a painful thump.

Her assailant tossed her onto a pile of boxes as if she were a rag doll.

Molly lay on her back, the man standing over her. She couldn’t see his face because of his garish black-and-purple ski mask. His clothes—camouflage printed shirt and pants topped by a faded army denim jacket—were ragged and filthy. His hair was long and stringy and unkempt.

She grabbed hold of the nearest box and flung it at him, but he knocked it away as if it was no more than a fly. And, to her amazement, he laughed. A rich roar of pleasure that was such a contrast to the menace in those black eyes that she almost believed she must be imagining it.

A nearby sound suddenly caused him to stiffen, as alert as an infantryman on reconnaissance. Taking advantage of his momentary shift in attention, she scrambled to her knees and on a half crawl, half stagger, tried to make her way over the tumbling, shifting pile of cardboard.

Unfortunately, he proved faster and, grabbing hold of her hair, yanked her back as the cat, who’d made the distracting noise, shot out of the alley.

He held her down with a booted foot that threatened to crush her chest. “What’s the hurry, honey?” His deep voice vibrated through her, sending icy fingers of fear zipping up her spine.

“You don’t want to do this.” She tried for a calm, reasonable voice, but the tremulous tone gave her away. “I can help you. I can help you find someplace to stay, some food—”

He struck her, a vicious blow to the face, cutting her off in midsentence. Seeming pleased with himself, he hit her again, with a backhanded slap that made her ears ring.

“Please.” Molly was not above begging, if that’s what it took to stay alive. “I’m a nun.”

Even as she said the words, Molly was infused with guilt. As if a nun was better than any other woman? More deserving to be spared the horror of rape? Yet she couldn’t help hoping that deep down inside this monster was a man who might respect her vocation.

She’d thought wrong.

“Even better.” As if to please himself, he hit her again. Harder. Her head was still spinning as she heard the sound of bone breaking and felt her cheekbone shatter beneath his fist.

A memory flashed through her mind, a memory of her father slapping her mother. Right before he’d put that gun to her head. Refusing to die as Karla McBride had, Molly managed to curl her fingers around a beer bottle and pushing herself up, slammed the bottle against the front of the mask.

“Bitch!” Her attacker roared like a wounded lion and swung his arm at her, sending her tumbling back into the boxes. She heard the beer bottle rattling as it rolled away.

He ripped off the mask and pressed the back of his gloved hand against his nostrils. When he took his hand away and viewed the black leather copiously stained with dark wine-colored blood, he screamed, “Fucking cunt!”

Molly felt him ripping away her clothes, exposing her to the chilly December air. But there was no longer anything she could do to stop him.

Through the swirling bloodred haze filling her head, she watched the heavily booted foot swing forward, then moaned as it landed with a bone-shuddering strength between her lax thighs.

His heavy demonic weight came crashing down on top of her, crushing her lungs, stealing her breath. Molly tried to scream as he battered his entry into her tight, dry virginal body, but the pained sound caught in her throat, choking her.

The back of her head kept banging against the asphalt as he pounded away violently at her defenseless body. Sometime during the seemingly endless assault, Molly vomited violently. Over herself and over the monster.

And then, as the crimson haze spread and she prayed silently to a God that seemed to have abandoned her, Molly finally surrendered to the enveloping darkness.

Chapter Three

Reece was almost home free. His grueling shift was over, he’d showered, shampooed the smell of disinfectant, disease and death out of his hair, shaved and changed into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt that didn’t have a single bloodstain on it. He took the poinsettia he’d remembered to buy for Lena, and was headed toward the door when he saw a ragged man arguing with the security guard.

He considered trying to sneak out another exit, but recognizing Thomas and knowing that Molly would never forgive him if he turned his back on whatever problem was plaguing the former priest this time, Reece cursed beneath his breath and waded into the breach.

“What’s wrong, Thomas?”

“It’s Molly.” The eyes beneath the filthy hair were wild with distress. “I tried carrying her here, but—”

“Where is she?” Reece interrupted, tossing the poinsettia toward the nearby counter. It missed and landed on the floor, spilling dirt and breaking stems, but no one noticed.

“Out there.” He pointed a filthy finger. “She’s in bad shape, Doc.”

That was, Reece discovered, an understatement. Her face was bruised and battered, her eyes were swollen shut, she was stripped nearly naked, allowing him to see the bite marks on her breasts and the vaginal bleeding. She was also unconscious.

“Jesus Christ.” He knelt down and felt her thready pulse.

“Christ has nothing to do with this, Doc. Whoever did this to Saint Molly was a devil.”

Reece couldn’t argue with that. As he scooped her from the pile of trash, he understood the impetus behind crimes of passion. He was not, by nature, a violent man. But he could easily kill with his bare hands whoever had done this to Molly.

Thomas followed him to the hospital door. “Is she going to die?”

Reece looked at the distress on the man’s haggard face, and for the first time since Molly had introduced them, felt a kinship with this man whose life had gone so tragically wrong.

“Not on my watch,” Reece promised. The doors hissed open and he carried her into the light. And to safety.

* * *

A few miles away, a young woman cursed beneath her breath as she viewed the flashing lights in her rearview mirror.

“Terrific,” Tessa Davis thought as she pulled her Mustang convertible over at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine.

The days when movie stars, bathed in the dazzling glow of klieg lights, arrived in limousines to attend premieres at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre were long past. And the fabled glitter surrounding the walk of fame had given way to junky tourist traps. Even so, as she’d driven into the city last week, Tessa had gazed in awe at the Hollywood sign gleaming like a beacon in the rising sun and imagined she could breathe in the scent of glamour and success.

Unfortunately, she was finding out what generations of beautiful women before her had discovered the hard way: success was not instantaneous. As she watched the cop climb off his motorcycle and come walking toward her, Tessa could envision additional hard-earned savings flying away.

She rolled down her window and flashed her most dazzling smile. The one that never failed to bring boys to their knees.

“Is something wrong, Officer?” Her eyes were wide and innocent.

“I don’t suppose you happened to notice that red light you just went through.”

“Was it red?” She chewed on her bottom lip. “I was certain it was still yellow.”

“It was red.” He pulled off his black leather gloves. “May I see your driver’s license?”

Damn. He appeared immune to feminine charms. Sighing, Tessa took her billfold out of her purse and held it toward him.

“If you wouldn’t mind taking it out of the folder, ma’am,” he said politely.

Of all the cops in the city, she had to get Mr. Play-by-the-Book. Hadn’t anyone told him this was supposed to be the season of goodwill?

“I really am sorry.” She tried again as he perused the license.

“You’re from Oregon?” He looked up from the photo to her face.

“Portland.”

“And now you’ve come to Hollywood to be a movie star.”

He didn’t have to make it sound so impossible. When Tessa chose not to answer what she took to be a sarcastic question, he glanced across the street, where two women clad in fishnet stockings and short shorts leaned against a storefront.

“You know, this isn’t the safest neighborhood anymore,” he warned her. “Not even in the daytime.”

“Now you sound like my dad.”

“He didn’t want you to come to Lotusland,” the cop guessed.

“That’s putting it mildly.” Tessa sighed, thinking how General Marshall Patton Davis had her life all mapped out for her.

“Let me guess.” He folded his arms across the front of his leather jacket and rocked back on the heels of his boots. “You were supposed to get your teaching degree from the local college.”

“Actually, I was majoring in fine arts at the University of Portland.”

“Close enough.” His smile revealed appealing dimples. “Then, after graduation, you’d settle down with the boy next door—”

“The air force aviator next door.”

“Ah.” He grinned at that. A broad flash of white that held considerable charm. “So you were destined to be Mrs. Top Gun.”

“Mrs. Tom Kelly.” Despite the circumstances, Tessa was beginning to enjoy herself.

He gave her a quick, unthreatening perusal. “I can’t see you spending your life playing the role of a loyal, supportive military wife while your husband played war games with his macho pals.”

“Neither could I. Which is why I’m here.” It might not have been a bad life, being married to Tommy and having his babies. If she hadn’t had other plans.

Big plans. Like becoming a famous actress. And someday earning her own star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.

“And now you’re going to be the next Demi Moore.”

Tessa lifted her chin. “The first Tessa Starr.” Tessa Davis, she’d decided long ago, was too boring for the woman she intended to be.

He laughed at that. A rich, bold sound that slipped beneath her skin and warmed her in a way that Tommy never had. “You’ve definitely got the right attitude. And the looks. If you’ve got even a smidgen of talent—”

“I have a lot of talent.”

“Sounds like you’re on your way. So, have you found a place to stay yet?”

“I’ve rented a room in West Hollywood.” At first she’d been a bit taken aback by the red-haired transvestite dressed in a marabou-trimmed dressing gown who owned the house, but the room in the funky bungalow was the most affordable she’d been able to find that didn’t remind her of the Bates Motel.

“Sounds like you did okay,” he said when she told him about her landlord and gave him her address. “But I think I’ll run the guy through the computer, just to make sure he doesn’t have a record.”

“Oh, I’m sure he’s perfectly safe.”

“Probably is. But I’d never forgive myself if he turns out to be a serial killer and I end up investigating the disappearance of the first Tessa Starr. Protect And Serve, that’s our motto.” He dimpled again in a way that made her feel warm all the way to her toes. “So, do you have any plans for Christmas dinner?”

“I saw a sign in the window at Denny’s advertising the turkey special.” She refrained from admitting she’d been there applying for a job after discovering that waitress positions at all the trendy eateries were filled by equally gorgeous women who’d gotten to Los Angeles before her.

“Denny’s?” He shook his head. “That’s no way to spend your first Christmas in Tinseltown. How would you like to have dinner with me?”

“With you?” As a policeman, he was undoubtedly safe. But Tessa didn’t think it wise to allow herself to be picked up by the first handsome stranger she met.

“I should have mentioned that I’m eating at my brother’s house. My mother will be there. She can properly introduce us.”

Even her overprotective air force general father couldn’t complain about that, Tessa decided. “If you’re sure your brother won’t mind last-minute company.”

He laughed. “Miles always throws a bash on Christmas Day. So many people show up, you could probably invite the entire Dodgers team—and their families—and he wouldn’t notice. Although,” he said on afterthought, “I doubt if anyone would miss your appearance.”

The masculine appreciation in his friendly blue eyes was all it took to overcome Tessa’s last lingering concern. “It sounds wonderful.”

“Terrific. Why don’t you go home and change into something a bit more festive while I finish up my shift. Then I’ll pick you up about two this afternoon.”

Although Tessa hadn’t wanted to admit it, even to herself, the idea of spending her first holiday alone had been more than a little depressing.

There was just one more little thing. “What about my ticket?”

He shrugged. “It’s Christmas. I suppose I can let you get away with a warning.” His eyes sparkled with laughter. “This time.”

As she watched him walk back toward his motorcycle, Tessa took this serendipitous meeting as a sign that her dreams really would come true.

It was only after the cycle had roared away that Tessa realized she’d never thought to ask his name.

* * *

She was flying. From her bird’s-eye vantage point, high in the stunningly clear sky, Molly could see the vast cobalt expanse of the Pacific Ocean, edged by ribbons of sparkling, diamond-bright sand. The tide was ebbing, leaving pastel pink and ivory shells in its frothy wake. She soared higher, taking in the lush green hills, the unmistakable Los Angeles skyline, the crescent-shaped bay off Catalina Island. The sun was a gleaming ball, sinking toward the water, casting a ruby-and-copper glow over the landscape, giving it an otherworldly appearance.

It was so quiet up here, with only the sound of the air rushing over her outstretched arms. So peaceful. Looking down at the idyllic-appearing landscape, one would never imagine that the city could harbor so much cruelty, pain and suffering. She began to soar even higher, toward the vast firmament with its sparkling stars and Milky Way glittering like gold dust scattered over midnight blue velvet.

As she flew past the sun, her flowing silver sleeves suddenly went up in flames, engulfing her in a blazing fireball. She came crashing back to earth, hitting the ground with a bone-rattling thud that made her moan.

“Reece! She’s coming to!”

Lena’s familiar voice sounded as if it was coming from the bottom of the sea. Molly thought she heard Reece answer, but she could not make out the words. She struggled to regain consciousness, tried to open her eyes, but they were so heavy and her mind was so fogged, she gave up the attempt and drifted back into the mists.

The next time she woke, the sun was streaming in through the window, and Molly wondered what she was doing in bed in the middle of the day. She must be ill, she decided. But that was odd because she never got sick. The nuns at the Good Shepherd Home for Girls had always said she had the constitution of a horse. And the personality of a mule.

Concentrating mightily, Molly managed to rouse herself, then immediately wished she hadn’t. Her muscles were screaming with pain, there was a bone-deep throbbing between her legs, her breasts felt as if someone had touched a torch to them and her face ached horribly. So horribly, Molly wondered if her dream of burning up hadn’t been a dream at all.

It took a herculean effort, but she managed to pry her eyes open. The first thing she saw was Reece, slouched in a plastic chair across the room. He was asleep.

She opened her mouth to say his name, but her lips were too dry to form the words. Her faint moan snapped him from his light sleep.

“It’s about time you decided to wake up and join the living.” As a doctor, Reece had thought he’d become immune to suffering and death. Until he’d seen Molly lying amidst all that garbage, valiantly clinging to life.

He held out a plastic glass, encouraging her to take a sip of water from the straw. “Not too much.” He took the glass away too soon. It seemed she’d barely had a chance to wet her lips.

“I’m…so…thirsty.” It was not Molly’s nature to complain. But she felt as if all the sand on the Los Angeles coastline had somehow ended up in her mouth.

“I know. But you’ve been on IVs for the past eight hours, so you’re in no danger of dehydration—”

“Eight hours?”

“Thomas found you when I was going off shift.”

Thomas? She shook her head, then wished she hadn’t, when lightning flashed behind her eyes and boulders inside her head shifted.

“Was I—” she had to struggle to get the words out “—in an accident?” Molly felt as if she’d been run over by a bus.

“There’s plenty of time to get into details later.” He reached down and brushed her dark hair away from her forehead with a soothing touch. ”Lena’s been going out of her mind with worry. She’s in the cafeteria. Let me go get her.”

He left the room, leaving her question unanswered.

Molly was staring up at the ceiling, trying to focus her mind, which she realized was fogged with some heavy-duty painkiller—Demerol?—when she became aware of the sound of footfalls on the tile floor.

The sight of the blue uniform took her back suddenly to that terrifying night when the house had been surrounded by police. She could hear the unforgettable sound of the front door being kicked in, and she gasped involuntarily. The sudden intake of breath was incredibly painful.

“The doc said your ribs are cracked,” a baritone voice rumbled. “You probably should avoid any deep breaths.” Ignoring hospital rules, he sat down on the bed. “How are you feeling?”

His face bore a striking resemblance to Alex Kovaleski. But this was not the man who’d tried for so many hours to talk her father out of murder. It was his son, Dan, who had, over the intervening years, become almost like a brother to Molly.

“Thirsty,” she managed.

He glanced over at the pink plastic glass. “Did Reece say you’re allowed to drink anything?”

“Since when did you become a stickler for rules and procedure?”

He laughed at that and held out the glass to her. “Welcome back. I told Lena that low-life slimeball couldn’t beat the spunk out of you.”

“Beat?” After taking a long wonderful drink, she tried to blink away the fog clouding her memory. “I was beaten?”

“Aw, hell. Reece didn’t tell you?”

“No.” But Dan Kovaleski’s frown spoke volumes. “I guess it’s up to you.”

He looked as if he’d rather try to serve a speeding ticket on Zsa Zsa Gabor. “How about we wait and see what the doc thinks you’re ready to hear?”

“I never would have taken you for a coward, Daniel Kovaleski.”

He cursed ripely. “Anyone ever tell you that you’ve got to be the most stubborn female God ever made?”

“All the time.” The familiar sparring helped clear her head and take her mind momentarily off her pain. “Personally, I’ve always taken it as a compliment.”

“You would.” He cursed again, softer this time as he linked their fingers together. “There weren’t any witnesses, Molly. At least none that we could find, which doesn’t mean anything.

“Right now, all we know is that you left the hospital a little before midnight. Six hours later, Thomas showed up at the ER door, frantic because he’d found you lying unconscious in the alley a few blocks away.”

Her fingers tightened on his. “Is he all right?”

Dan shrugged. He had never liked Molly’s dangerous predilection for picking up strays. “Thomas is Thomas. He’s the same as he always is. Nuts.”

“He’s in emotional pain,” she managed to argue. “But he still managed to get help for me.”

“Point taken.” His gaze drifted out the window toward the mean streets. “It’s also a possibility that he’s the one who did this to you in the first place, then suffered a sudden case of remorse. Or fear.”

“Thomas would never hurt anyone.”

Dan’s expression was cop hard. “You can’t be sure of that, Molly.”

“I’d stake my life on it.”

“When all that Demerol wears off and you can think rationally again, you might just realize that may be exactly what you’ve done.”

Although the brief conversation had exhausted her, she had to stand up for a man she knew didn’t have the strength to stand up for himself. “Thomas isn’t responsible.”

“Actually, you’re probably right,” he agreed with obvious reluctance. Two strong-willed people, they’d argued often over the years and neither was fond of losing. “Since the test results came back negative.”

“Test results?”

A reluctant smile hovered at the corner of his grimly set lips. “From what we could tell, you bopped the guy a good one, kiddo. Not all that blood in the alley was yours.”

“Nor Thomas’s.”

“No.” He gave her a long look as if judging whether or not to say more.

Belatedly understanding his dilemma, Molly decided to help him out. “I was raped, wasn’t I?”

He closed his eyes, briefly. When he opened them, Molly saw regret and embarrassment. “Yeah.” He exhaled a long breath. “Hell, Molly, I’m so sorry.”

She thought of all the rape victims who’d come through the doors of the ER and realized that in some way, she might be fortunate her memory had blocked out the assault. “You and Reece don’t need to tiptoe around the subject. I’m no different than any other rape victim.”

“Yes you are,” Dan shot back. “The fact of your being a nun—and a virgin—should put you off-limits to creeps like that.”

Jacob’s daughter, Dinah, had been raped, Molly remembered. When she also recalled that Dinah’s brothers had massacred all the men in the rapist’s city to avenge the defilement of their sister, she decided not to share that particular Bible story with this grim-faced man.

“Virgins get raped every day. Some of them are children.” Although her eyes were barely slits, she managed to meet his frustrated gaze. “And I’ve seen you deal with that.”

“True.” This time it was his fingers that tightened on hers. “But what you don’t see is me throwing up afterward.”

Molly tried to smile, then flinched when the attempt pulled the stitches Reece had sewn in her top and bottom lips. “You’re a good man, Dan. And you’re definitely your father’s son.”

His grip loosened, his smile brightened his brown eyes. “Speaking of Pop, he’s been driving everyone nuts waiting to get in to see you.”

Amazingly, Alex Kovaleski had taken an interest in the orphaned McBride sisters after that fateful night fourteen years ago. He’d even tried to adopt them, only to be informed that divorced men were not suitable fathers for little girls.

The bureaucrats were wrong. Molly didn’t want to think about how much worse their rocky childhoods would have been without Alex Kovaleski in their corner.

He’d attended her Profession Day, his chest puffed up with pride as she’d repeated her vows and had the slender gold ring of Christ slipped onto her finger. And although he was a man given to wearing plaid shirts and jeans while off duty, he’d willingly donned a morning coat to give Lena away at her wedding to Reece. Her unconscious smile tugging at the stitches returned Molly’s mind to her reason for being a patient in her own hospital, but before she had a chance to think about that, Lena rushed into the room and threw her arms around her older sister.

“Do you have any idea how much you frightened us?” she asked on a sob as tears streamed down her delicate cheeks. “I was so afraid I’d lose you. Just like…”

Lena didn’t finish the sentence. There was no need. Molly knew they were both thinking of their mother. And Tessa.

“I know.” Although the tight embrace was making her ribs feel as if they were on fire, Molly hugged her sister back. “It’s okay. I’m going to be fine.”

“Of course you will,” Lena agreed. Belatedly remembering Molly’s injuries, she released her. “And as soon as Reece lets you out of here, we’re going to have the biggest celebration in history.” She gave Dan a watery smile. “You and your dad are invited.”

He grinned back. “We wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

They might not be a Norman Rockwell painting, Molly admitted. But she and Lena and Reece, along with Dan and Alex, made one pretty terrific family. And even as her head throbbed and her body ached, she felt the warmth of love in the room and knew everything was going to be all right.

Chapter Four

Elaine Mathison was a stunning woman with a lion’s mane of tawny hair that tumbled over her shoulders. She was tall and slender, and wore a simple tube of ivory silk designed to showcase a figure toned from hours spent with a personal trainer.

“Hello. And aren’t you lovely!” she welcomed Tessa. She exchanged a look with Jason—that was the handsome policeman’s name, Tessa had learned. “Darling, you’ve outdone yourself this time.”

“Tessa was afraid she’d be crashing the party,” Jason revealed.

“Nonsense.” Elaine smiled. “A party can never have too many beautiful women. Believe me, darling, with your fresh, innocent looks, you’re going to be a hit.” That stated, she linked arms with the young woman and led her across the sea of white marble in the entry hall.

A massive crystal chandelier dominated the hall, showering sparkling light on a towering sculpture of two lovers in an intimate embrace. Palm trees framed the arched doorway of a living room shimmering in silver and white.

Set high in the hills of Bel Air, the house boasted stunning views of the glittering city below and the dazzling waters of the Pacific Ocean. The scene reminded Tessa of something from the Arabian Nights. Just gazing out over the scene was like being on a magic carpet ride above Los Angeles.

Although there weren’t as many big-name movie stars as Tessa might have wished for, she did recognize several guests. All the women, she noted with a tinge of envy, were young and ravishingly beautiful, and the men older, but still handsome. And those who weren’t handsome looked as if they had so much money, it didn’t matter. Expensive perfumes filled the air, mingling with the seasonal scents of juniper, fir and pine.

Tessa was not overly intimidated by the unfamiliar splendor. Having grown up on air force bases all over the world, she’d acquired the instincts of a natural chameleon. By the time she was ten years old she’d attended seven schools and had developed the ability to adapt her behavior to immediately fit in to her new landscape. She’d worn Izod polo shirts and khaki shorts in New England, flowery cotton summer dresses in Georgia, faded jeans and eelskin boots in Wyoming.

She’d hiked the Grand Canyon, donned Gore-Tex against the unrelenting rains of the Pacific Northwest to ride a racing bike along thirty miles of Mount Rainier’s Wonderland Trail, and had, in what she would always consider the ultimate endurance test, sat through Wagner’s famed Ring Opera with fellow senior year drama students in Germany. Of course, the fact that she’d been having a secret, passionate affair with her teacher, a self-professed Ring fanatic, made the experience more palatable.

She’d no sooner sat down beside the pool with Jason when Elaine approached.

“Darling,” she said to her son, “I hate to bother you with business, when you’ve just arrived, but Jeremy Stone insists on speaking with you in the library. It seems he’s in desperate need for someone to serve as a police consultant on his new movie and of course you immediately came to mind.”

“I’ve already got a job, Elaine,” Jason said equably.

“Of course you do. But if you’d only talk with him.”

He sighed as if this was a familiar argument, and turned toward Tessa. “I won’t be long.”

She smiled up at him. “I’ll be fine.”

He laughed at that and ran a finger down the slope of her nose. “Oh, you’re a lot better than fine, Tessa Starr.”

Still glowing from that tender touch, Tessa was watching a stunning blonde clad in a thong bikini playing a spirited game of Marco Polo with an aging television comic when a handsome man wearing obviously expensive linen slacks and a collarless shirt approached. If Jason hadn’t just left, Tessa would have sworn it was him.

“My baby brother tells me you’re an actress,” he said, handing her a slender crystal flute of champagne.

“Jason’s your younger brother?” She took a sip. The pale gold wine tasted like sunshine on water.

“By eight minutes. And I do my best not to let him forget it.” His grin might have been a replica of his brother’s, but the devils in his dark eyes were all his own. “But I have to admit this time the kid has definitely demonstrated terrific taste.”

Tessa took another sip of champagne. “Thank you,” she murmured into her glass.

“Don’t thank me. Thank whatever magnificent gene pool you were spawned in.” He rocked back on his heels. “I assume you have photos?”

“Of course.” She was pleased for a chance to demonstrate that she wasn’t as naive as he thought her to be. She pulled the photos from her oversize purse.

Although Tessa thought them flattering, Miles’s frown was not encouraging. “These look like high school graduation shots.”

“Your brother thought they were good.”

“My brother’s a cop. All he saw was a drop-dead gorgeous female. While I, on the other hand, see the unflattering shadow beneath your eyes, and the way whoever was behind the lens didn’t even try to show off your cheekbones.”

He reached out and ran his fingertips along the bones in question. “You could cut crystal with these,” he murmured. “But that hack made you look like a chipmunk-cheeked farmer’s daughter.”

That stung. “I suppose you’re an expert on photography?”

“Actually, I am.” Rather than appearing fatally wounded by her attempt at hauteur, he seemed amused. He cupped her elbow in his palm. “Come with me and I’ll show you what a real photographer can do with a face like yours.”

Tessa didn’t think she liked him. She knew she didn’t trust him. However, now that he’d pointed out the flaws in the photographs, she could see that he was right.

She was trying to decide what to do when Jason returned. “You keep manhandling my woman, Miles,” he said mildly, “and I’ll have to throw you in the slammer.”

“I was just going to show Tessa my rogue’s gallery.”

“I think she’d rather see my Wanted posters.” He put his arm around her bare shoulders. “Wouldn’t you, sweetheart?”

She looked back and forth between the two brothers, trying to figure out whether or not their rivalry was real or a longtime game they enjoyed playing.

“You’re scaring her,” Miles complained. The smile he bestowed on Tessa was absolutely harmless. “Would you feel better if Officer Friendly here came along with us?”

Tessa reminded herself that a faint heart never achieved anything. “I think I’d like to see your photographs.”

“Terrific.” He nodded with satisfaction. “I’ve shot some of the most stunning faces in the business. And believe me, very few of them can hold a candle to you.”

Exchanging a look with his brother over the top of her head, he led Tessa back into the house.

* * *

The next time Molly woke, she found another familiar face sitting in the chair beside the bed.

“You realize, of course, that you scared us all to death,” the elderly nun, who was the closest thing Molly had to a mother, scolded.

“Next time I’m raped and beaten, I’ll try to be more discreet about it.”

A frown furrowed the forehead that, when Molly had first met her, had been covered by a starched wimple. “This isn’t a joking matter.”

“On that we’re in full agreement.” Molly scooted up in bed, wincing at the pain in her hips. Obviously Reece had cut back on his orders for drugs. “How’s Lena?”

“Your sister’s going to be fine.” The nun fingered her rosary beads absently. “Thanks to her husband. The man appears to be a rock.”

“He is that.”

“Father Murphy said a mass for you this morning,” Sister Benvenuto announced. “And the congregation is praying for you. As are all the members of the order, of course.”

“Tell everyone I appreciate their prayers.” Molly glanced around the room. “It looks as if someone threw a hand grenade into the middle of the Rose Parade.”

“You have a great many friends. The red and white carnations in that plastic Santa Claus vase are from Thomas. I have every suspicion that he stole them from a supermarket.”

Molly figured Sister Benvenuto was undoubtedly correct in her assumption. “It’s the thought that counts.”

The older woman shook her head. “You’re too easy on him. With the proper motivation he could return to the work he was called to do.”

“If God can’t provide the impetus, I’m not about to try.” Molly sighed as she thought about Thomas. “Besides, if he hadn’t given up the priesthood, he wouldn’t have been there to help me.”

“I suppose we’ll just have to write it off as another case of the Lord working in mysterious ways.” The older woman’s gaze sharpened as she studied Molly. “I was afraid we were going to lose you.”

“There was a moment I thought that, too.”

Molly knew the nun was not talking about her leaving the order, something they’d discussed on more than one occasion. Each time Molly had dared to profess doubts about a true vocation, Sister Benvenuto had assured her that such thoughts were not only normal, but expected. That such reflection would ultimately make her even more committed to her religious calling.

“It’s going to be difficult to deal with,” the nun predicted. “But you’ve always been strong, Molly. And with God’s help, you’ll survive this test of faith just as you’ve survived every other trial in your life.”

Although she didn’t believe that God would have deliberately caused her to be brutally attacked, to test her as he had Job, Molly saw no point in arguing. Even during her teens, when she’d been an angry young girl, rebelling against the myriad rules the sisters who ran the Good Shepherd Home for Girls had expected her to obey without question, Molly had admired the nun’s seemingly unwavering faith. So unlike her own, which always seemed to question everything.

“What would I ever have done without you?”

“God only knows. Although there’s always the possibility you could have ended up on the street, like those poor girls I pass every day,” the no-nonsense nun said briskly.

“Being sent to Good Shepherd was the best thing that ever happened to me.” What at first had seemed to be punishment, had in the end proven a blessing. The home for girls had been a sanctuary, the first Molly had ever experienced. “I wish Lena could have had the same security.”

Molly had often thought it ironic that Lena, who’d tried so desperately to fit in, was the one who’d suffered the most by being constantly shuffled from foster home to foster home.

“Lena is going to have to learn that true strength comes from within,” Sister Benvenuto said sagely.

Unable to argue with that, Molly was grateful for Yolanda’s interruption.

“I vant to suck your blood,” she said in a ghoulish voice. The sight of the gag store fangs gleaming white and red in the nurse’s dark face made Molly laugh. When you worked in a world where the bizarre and horrific were commonplace, sometimes laughter truly was the best medicine. And the only way to stay sane.

“This is the first in the series of HIV tests, isn’t it?”

“Now, aren’t you a clever girl. Anybody’d think you were a health-care professional, or something.” Yolanda took the fangs out of her wide mouth, put them in her pocket and pulled out a rubber tourniquet. “Hold out your arm.”

Molly did as instructed.

“Lordy,” Yolanda complained, shaking her head as she studied Molly’s freckled arm. “You call those veins? Those are purely pitiful, girl.” She wrapped the tourniquet around Molly’s upper arm.

“Lucky thing you’re in the hands of an expert. Health services tried sending up one of their lab vampires, but I cut him off at the pass. They tend to spatter the stuff all over, and with that pale white skin, I figured you didn’t have any blood to spare.”

When she took a needle out of another pocket and uncapped it, Sister Benvenuto rose. “I believe it’s time I let you get some rest, dear.”

Molly didn’t blame the nun for escaping. Hating having blood drawn even more than she disliked drawing it, Molly would have left if she could.

“I’ll return during visiting hours,” Sister Benvenuto assured her. “Sister Joseph is making those fudge brownies you used to enjoy. She’s making enough to bribe the medical staff into giving you preferential treatment.”

“As if anyone would have to bribe us to take care of our own,” Yolanda muttered after the older nun had left the room.

“She means well.”

“I suppose so. Although she reminds me an awful lot of that harridan who used to rap my knuckles whenever she caught me chewing gum at Sacred Heart Academy.”

The needle slipped into the vein as smoothly as a hot knife through butter. Although accustomed to the sight of blood, seeing her own filling the cylinder was an entirely different matter.

“All done.” Yolanda capped the cylinder and released the tourniquet. “I have to ask you if you do IV drugs.”

“You know I don’t.”

“Just following procedure. So, how about safe sex?”

Molly laughed at that, but the sound held no humor. “Before or after Christmas Eve?”

“Point taken. I’ll have the lab rush this and either Reece or I will let you know as soon as the results come in. You’ve got three more of these over the next nine months. When you test negative on the third one, you’ll be home free.”

“Thank you for saying when and not if.”

“Positive thinking is a powerful thing. Sister Crack-the-Whip who just left might call it praying, and existentialists might call it meditating, but the way I see it, it’s all the same thing.”

Although she knew Sister Benvenuto would probably have her down on her knees saying an Act of Contrition and countless rosaries for such heresy, Molly decided she’d be willing to pray to God, all the saints, Mohammed, Buddha, the Dalai Lama, even some ancient druidic pagan oak tree if only she could dodge this deadly bullet.

“If I get AIDS, I’ll just die,” she muttered, more to herself than to Yolanda.

She and her longtime friend exchanged a gloomy look. Then burst into laughter.

* * *

“She’s going to be all right,” Reece assured Lena once again as they drove home from the hospital together. Although he never would have wished such horror on Molly, he couldn’t deny being grateful for the change seeing her sister victimized seemed to have made on his wife these past days.

“I know.” She put her hand on his leg. “Thanks to you. If you hadn’t done all that you did…”

Her voice drifted off and she stared out at the brilliant lights of the city as they drove up the curving road to their Pacific Palisades home. The house, situated on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Coast Highway and the ocean beyond, was more expensive than a resident could afford, but Reece was independently wealthy. He’d inherited a generous trust from his parents, who’d died in a plane crash when he was a boy.

He slanted her a sideways glance. “How are you with all this?”

“Strangely, although I was panic-stricken when you first called, I’m doing pretty well.” Lena shook her head. “All my life, even when we were separated, I knew that Molly would be there for me if I ever needed her.”

“In a heartbeat,” he agreed.

“I think, although she meant well, her protective behavior kept me from growing up.”

Since there was no way he was going to get trapped into agreeing that the woman he adored was immature, Reece didn’t say anything.

“Then, of course, I married you, who took over where Molly left off.”

He laid a hand over hers. “I think it’s only natural for a man to want to protect his wife.”

“I suppose.”

Lena thought back to the tarot card reading. Amazingly, the destiny foretold that night seemed to be coming true. Out of apparent evil, she remembered the young woman saying sagely, much good can come.

“What happened to Molly made me realize I can’t always count on other people taking care of me. It’s time I learned to stand on my own two feet.”

Something inside Reece went still. And cold. “Are you saying you want a divorce?”

“A divorce?” Shocked, she looked over at him. “Of course not.” Turning her hand, she linked their fingers together. “You’re the most wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me, Reece. I just think it might be a nice change if you were to discover that you were married to a woman. And not a girl.”

Reece thought about that and decided she was right. As much as he adored his bride, there were times when he found being the sole focus of her life—along with her desperate desire for a child—more than a little wearying.

“You certainly don’t have to change on my account. I love you just the way you are.”

“I know. And I thank God for that every day. And I’m not changing for you. I’m doing it for me.” Lena smiled, pleased with the plan she’d come up with while drinking far too many cups of that toxic waste the hospital cafeteria tried to pass off as coffee. “Although I think you’ll find some side benefits.”

There was something in her voice. Something lush and sensual, an impression that was heightened by the way she’d begun trailing her fingernail up his thigh.

“Why, Mrs. Longworth,” he murmured, “are you trying to seduce me?”

She laughed at that. A silky, womanly laugh designed to get beneath a man’s skin. “I am going to seduce you, Dr. Longworth.” Her fingers trailed higher. “And you’re going to love it.”

The sound of his zipper lowering was the sexiest thing Reece had ever heard. Or felt. When she freed his erection from his jeans, blood rushed from his head straight into his groin.

“Jesus, Lena.” The words clogged in his throat, his breath was trapped in his lungs. “If you’re not careful, you’re going to make me run off the road.”

“Don’t worry, darling.” She bent her head and pressed her lips against the tip of his penis. “I promise to be very, very careful.”

Her breath was like the Santa Ana winds that blew in from the desert, fanning flames he’d banked for too long. From the first night of their honeymoon, wanting to prove himself different from all the users she’d gotten involved with before him, Reece had gone out of his way to treat his bride with consideration and respect. Their lovemaking, while enjoyable, had remained restrained.

After she’d become obsessed with having a child, the only times they made love were on those days when she was most likely to conceive. And although he adored her to pieces, lately he’d begun to feel more like a stud bull than a husband.

“Lord, Lena,” he groaned as she took him fully into her ripe wet mouth. “You’re going to get us both killed.... Let me…” He managed, just barely, to turn into the half-moon driveway and cut the engine.

On the verge of exploding, Reece grabbed hold of a fistful of thick silky hair and yanked her head up.

“Let’s go in the house.” His voice was harsh and guttural. “I want to take my time. And do this right.”

The silvery moonlight streaming through the windshield illuminated her face, letting him see the sexual fever burning in Lena’s eyes.

“You can take all the time you want.” She unfastened her seat belt and straddled him. “Later.”

“What the hell did you do with your panties?” he gasped as she teased the tip of his throbbing cock with hot female flesh.

“I tucked them away in my purse before we left the hospital.” She put her hands on his shoulders, her mouth on his.

That she’d planned this seduction made it even more exciting. Reece’s fingers delved beneath her sweater, digging deeply into the bare skin of her waist as he forced her down on him at the same time he slammed up to meet her.

Their teeth clashed as their mouths ate into one another’s, their tongues tangled. The ride was hard and fast, their slick damp bodies slapping against each other in a ruthless need for release. When she cried out his name, then shuddered violently, Reece gave in to his own white-hot, explosive climax.

He stayed deep inside her as they enjoyed the aftermath of passion. “I can feel you,” he murmured against her throat as the rhythmic tightening of her inner muscles continued to caress him like silken gloves.

“Mmm.” She tilted her head and outlined his mouth with the tip of her tongue. “I can feel you, too. And you feel so good inside me, I don’t think I’ll ever move.”

“We’d get arrested for indecent exposure.”

“I’m willing to risk it if you are. Besides, we have friends on the police force who’ll vouch for us.”

Reece felt his body beginning to warm again, but became aware of the chill of the December night. “I want you again.” Shoving her sweater up, he took her breast in his mouth, suckling deeply in a way that made her body involuntarily clutch at his. “But this time I want to do it with all our clothes off. Inside, where no one can hear you scream.”

As she felt him growing hard again inside her, Lena shivered with anticipation. And just a touch of erotic fear. “Are you really going to make me scream?”

He bit her nipple, not harshly, but with a dark sensual intent that caused excitement to curl in her belly. “You bet.” His tongue soothed the tingling flesh. “And you’re going to love it.”

Reece proved to be a man of his word. He did wonderful, wicked things to her. And then, when she was positive there couldn’t be more, he’d proven her wrong.

But this time it was different, Lena mused as she lay wrapped in her husband’s arms, luxuriating in the feel of him still buried deep inside her. Because for the first time since they’d been married, she’d given him more than her body. She’d given him her heart.

And that, she thought with a soft smile as she drifted off on gentle wavelets of sleep, made all the difference.

Chapter Five

Molly had always suspected she wouldn’t make a very good patient; she was too restless to lie in bed all day. Daytime television was a revelation, filled with programs about women who loved men who murdered, mothers who slept with their daughter’s boyfriends, husbands who got their wives’ best friends pregnant. Since her work had given her an up-close and personal look at society’s ills, none of the subjects shocked her. What was surprising was that viewers would be interested in watching all these depressingly dysfunctional relationships.

She tried to read, but every time an ambulance cut its siren outside the ER doors, or a code came over the loudspeakers, she wanted to jump up and return to the battle. If her days were boring, her nights were anything but. Her sleep was interrupted at regular intervals by horrifying nightmares in which she was forced to suffer the rape, which she now remembered, over and over again.

From her talks with the psych resident, Alan Bernstein, Molly understood the night terrors were her subconscious mind’s way of struggling to deal with the trauma she’d suffered. She also became convinced that as soon as she was allowed to return to the routine of normal daily life, the nightmares would stop.

Yolanda remained sympathetic, but refused to do anything to help Molly escape what she’d come to view as her imprisonment.

“Reece says if you’re a good girl he may sign you out tomorrow.”

“I’ve already been here five days.”

“So, you’ll be here six.”

Molly muttered something that while not exactly a curse, wasn’t exactly nunlike, either. “At least tell me what’s happening down in The Pit. I never thought I’d miss that place, but I do.”

“Taking religious vows doesn’t prevent you from becoming hooked on the adrenaline rush, just like the rest of us.”

Molly couldn’t argue with that. She’d be the first to admit that the impatient streak that had once resulted in her being disciplined as a child with depressing regularity, now made her a natural ER nurse.

“Oh, there is some news,” Yolanda said. “About Benny.”

Molly’s own petty frustration was instantly forgotten. Benny Johnson was a five-year-old boy who’d suffered more than any child should have to. He’d been born a crack baby on Molly’s first day in the ER. His near-fatal withdrawal had been excruciatingly painful, making more than one battle-hardened ER nurse cry.

Social Services had taken Benny from his mother. Unfortunately, they’d turned him over to his grandmother, who was no model of maternal expertise, either. By the time he was six months old, Benny had suffered a broken arm and possible head injuries from being shaken.

He’d been put in a crisis nursery, only to be released to his mother again when she was released from a drug-abuse treatment program. Two days later, Benny was back with mysterious burns.

The cycle had continued for five years. And each time Benny showed up in The Pit for treatment after another one of his accidents, Molly was more tempted just to take the poor little boy and run away.

“What now?”

“He came in this morning all bruised, with cracked ribs. The court’s toughened up. He’s going to be released for adoption over his mother’s consent.”

That should have been good news, but unfortunately, Molly knew better.

“Older children are difficult to place,” she murmured. She also recalled, with vivid clarity, that long ago day when she’d eavesdropped on a conversation between the Mother Superior who ran the orphanage and prospective parents.

The well-dressed couple who thought Lena “sweet” and were prepared to overlook the fact that Molly could be “a bit of a handful,” had been reluctant to adopt the sisters because of their background.

“How can anyone know about genetics, really?” the man had asked. “What if one of the girls harbors some impulse that might cause her to violently explode with rage? As her father did?”

“That’s highly unlikely,” the nun had assured him.

“Unlikely perhaps. But you can’t guarantee it’s not a possibility.”

“There are no guarantees in life, Mr. Howard,” the nun had tried again. “Even if the Lord were to bless you with your own children—”

“That’s just it. They’d be our own. And believe me, Sister, there are no murderous alcoholics in either my wife’s or my family. No.” Molly, who was standing with her ear against the door, had heard a deep sigh. “I’m afraid it’s just not worth the risk.”

Over the years the faces in that office had changed. But the argument had remained the same. Molly and Lena McBride were damaged goods.

“Benny has a lot of strikes working against him when it comes to adoption,” Molly murmured, thinking back on those lonely, frustrating days when she and Lena had been forced to watch other children leave the orphanage with their new families.

“That’s sure true. But you know Dr. Moore?”

“In pediatrics?”

“That’s him. He and his wife have been trying to have kids for ages with no luck. I overheard him talking to the social worker about getting the paperwork started.”

“Oh, that is good news.” Sometimes God did answer prayers. “Is Benny still downstairs?”

Yolanda’s sharp look revealed that she knew Molly all too well. “Yes, but you’re not—”

“I promise not to do any work. I just want to keep a little boy company for a while.”

“Reece will kill me.”

“Reece is too much of a sweetheart to kill anyone. Especially these days.”

“You noticed that the doc’s been floating up somewhere on cloud nine, too?”

Molly returned Yolanda’s grin with one of her own. “You’d have to be blind not to notice.”

“He’s got the look of a man who’s getting laid regular. And your sister’s looking like a kitten who discovered a saucer of cream. I swear, if I hadn’t sworn off marriage after my third divorce, I’d almost be willing to give it a try again.”

Molly laughed. She didn’t know what had happened between Lena and Reece. But whatever it was, she was definitely more than a little relieved at the change.

“If you could just get me some scrubs,” Molly coaxed, returning to their previous subject.

Yolanda folded her arms across her ample breasts. “If you tell anyone where you got them…”

“I won’t say a word. Cross my heart.”

Muttering to herself, Yolanda left the room, but returned a few minutes later with a pair of green surgical scrubs. “I didn’t see a thing,” she said. Then left again.

Molly found Benny in one of the waiting rooms, seated at a small table. Someone had given him a box of crayons and a coloring book, but he hadn’t touched them, and sat staring out into space. Molly didn’t want to know what the child was seeing. What he’d already seen. She also hoped that Dr. Moore and his wife had an immense store of patience.

“Hi, Benny,” she said cheerily.

He looked up, his expression flat until he saw her bruises. “Somebody hit you, too, Sister?”

“I’m afraid so, Benny.”

He thought about that for a minute. “People aren’t supposed to hit nuns.”

“People aren’t supposed to hit children, either. But sometimes people do.”

“Yeah.” He looked down at the backs of his small hands, which had circular scars that could only have been made from cigarette burns.

“Have you had lunch yet?”

“Yeah. One of the nurses brought me a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich from the cafeteria. And some chocolate milk.”

“That was nice.”

“I like chocolate milk.” Despite his words, his eyes had gone flat again.

“How about popcorn?”

He shrugged. “It’s okay, I guess. I only ever had it once. When the lady at one of the places I was staying took a bunch of us to see An American Tail.”

“That was a cool movie.”

Another shrug.

“I was sitting upstairs feeling a little sorry for myself when I decided popcorn might cheer me up.” Molly decided a white lie in this case was definitely one of the more venial sins she’d committed. “But I hate snacking alone and can’t eat the entire bag anyway. So, I was kind of hoping you’d help me out.”

She watched the flicker of interest in the depths of his dark eyes.

“I guess that’d be okay. Since I have to hang around here, anyway, until the social worker shows up.”

“Thanks, Benny. I really appreciate your helping me out.”

She took him into the nurses’ lounge, retrieved a bag of popcorn from her secret hiding place and put it in the microwave.

Five minutes later, they were working their way through the plump white kernels.

“I heard the nurses talking,” Benny volunteered. “One of them said that Dr. Moore wants to be my dad.”

“How do you feel about that?” Molly asked, popping the top on a soft drink can and handing it to him.

“I guess that’d be okay. I never had a dad.”

“I lost mine when I was little, too,” Molly volunteered.

He gave her a long look, but didn’t ask any questions. Molly knew all too well how children from violent homes learned the importance of keeping secrets.

“Johnny Brown has a dad. He hits him. A lot.”

“Dr. Moore would never hit you, Benny.”

“You don’t think so?”

“I know so.”

He fell silent, mulling that over.

“I guess it’d be okay, then.”

“I think it would be even better than okay,” Molly agreed mildly.

That little worrisome matter settled, neither Molly nor Benny said anything else. There was no need to. For both of them, the quiet companionship was enough.

* * *

Molly was packing away the last of her toiletries. She was finally being allowed to return home to her own apartment. At least that’s where she had thought she’d be going. Until Lena had shown up, determined that she come and stay with her.

“You and Reece have been acting like you’re newlyweds. The last thing you need is me hanging around your house.” Molly returned to the adjoining bathroom for the shampoo. “What if you want to make love hanging from the dining room chandelier while I’m in the room eating my microwave dinner?”

“Molly!” Lena appeared shocked that her sister would even think of such a thing. “You’re a nun!” Then color flooded into her cheeks as she thought of the fantasy game she and Reece had played last night. The one where he’d been a ruthless Norman plundering the Saxon countryside. And dear Lord, how wonderfully he’d plundered!

“All this is beside the point,” she insisted, shaking off the sensual memory. “Because we’re not going to be alone anyway.” Her shoulders slumped beneath her pale blue angora sweater. “Reece’s aunt called last night. She’s arriving in town this evening.”

“Theo’s coming here?” Molly had met Theodora Longworth at Reece and Lena’s wedding. A successful writer, she was a bold, larger-than-life character who could have stepped from one of the pages of her romance novels.

“She’s gotten an offer to be head writer for some soap opera,” Lena said glumly.

“Wouldn’t that mean she’d have to settle down?”

“I don’t know. I suppose so. I do know that if the woman is going to be living under my roof, I need someone in my corner.”

“Why? She seemed genuinely fond of you at the wedding.”

“She’s filthy rich, Molly.”

“So’s Reece. And that’s never seemed to bother you.”

“Because he’s never acted rich. Theo is just so…” Lena’s voice trailed off.

“Like Rosalind Russell’s portrayal of Auntie Mame?”

“With a lot of Bette Midler thrown in.” Lena sighed. “I’ll really feel better if you’re staying at the house, too. Heaven knows we’ve plenty of room.” Rooms she’d planned to fill with children.

Molly suspected that the invitation was more than a little due to Reece and Lena’s concern about her returning home alone to her apartment, which was in a neighborhood not much better than the area surrounding the hospital. However, whether or not they’d done it intentionally, they’d managed to come up with a situation she couldn’t refuse.

“Just for the next week or so,” Molly insisted. “But as soon as I come back to work, I’m returning to my own place.”

“Oh, thank you!” Lena rushed forward to hug Molly, remembering the cracked ribs just in time. “I promise, Molly, I’ll make this up to you.”

“There’s certainly nothing to make up to me. Lounging around your house is not exactly on par with doing missionary work in Zaire.”

“Wait until you spend a few days with Theo.” Lena’s expression of impending doom echoed her glum tone. “I hate this time of year, anyway.” She sighed and began picking at her fingernail polish. “Do you ever think about that night?”

“Of course.” Molly knew Lena was not referring to the recent Christmas attack, but the earlier one.

“I used to think about it all the time. It’s gotten better, but it never goes away. Like a scab I can’t resist picking.”

“May’s almost as bad,” Molly murmured.

“When you walk in the drugstore to buy some aspirin or tampons and get attacked by all those aisles of flowery Mother’s Day cards,” Lena agreed. “I didn’t think it bothered you. That once you became a nun—”

“God automatically took away the pain on my Profession Day?”

“Something like that.”

It was Molly’s turn to sigh. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.”

“I guess not.” Lena walked over to the window and stared down at the parking lot, but Molly suspected it was not the cars she was seeing, but that long-ago scene that had been imprinted indelibly on both their minds. “Do you ever hear Mama’s voice?”

“No. I stopped being able to hear her about the third year after Daddy…after it happened.”

“I do.” Lena glanced back over her shoulder. “Every once in a while, I imagine I hear her singing. Remember how she used to love to sing?”

The memory was bittersweet. “Just like Patsy Cline.”

“Yeah. I remember her once telling me how tragic it was that Patsy had died so young in that plane crash. And then she died too young, as well....

“I think that’s why I turned wild for a while, until I met Reece,” Lena admitted. “Because I have this terrible fear I’m going to die young, too.” She dragged her hand through her thick auburn hair. “I look just like her, don’t I?”

Molly didn’t like where this conversation was going. “I suppose there’s some resemblance,” she hedged.

“I stole a picture the day the social worker took us away,” Lena revealed. “It was a snapshot of Mama in a bathing suit at the beach. I’ve kept it all these years. I look at that picture and it’s like looking in a mirror....

“Then I look in the mirror and it’s as if Mama’s ghost is looking back at me. As if she’s reminding me that I could die anytime, just like she did. Like Patsy did…

“Did you know that I’d planned my funeral when I was twelve?”

“You never said anything.”

“I wrote it all down. So you’d find it after I died. I still update it every year, but I’m always a little surprised when I don’t make all that many changes. I’ve planned your funeral, too. And Reece’s.”

“I didn’t know that, either.” Molly reminded herself that she’d only been a child herself, that she’d done the best she could for her sister under the circumstances. Nevertheless she felt a familiar stab of guilt that she hadn’t managed to provide Lena with the security she’d needed growing up.

“Of course you didn’t. Because I never told you. But it seems as if I’ve spent my entire life waiting to die. Waiting for people I love to die. Which was why I was so terrified of loving Reece.

“If he was ten minutes late coming home, I knew he’d had an accident on the freeway. If I called here and he didn’t answer his page, I was certain some crazed homicidal junkie had taken him hostage and was going to kill him. I was so fixated on all those morbid thoughts that I was too afraid to enjoy life.”

“And now?” Molly asked carefully.

“I think it’s finally sunk in that the secret to life may be living for the moment, but it’s also important to make certain that the moment’s worth living for.”

“And that’s where Reece comes in.”

The thought of her husband was like a bright and comforting sun, burning away the gloomy clouds in Lena’s mind. Her smile literally lit up the room. “Absolutely.”

* * *

Tessa was having no difficulty enjoying life.

“Well?” She twirled around, arms held out, showing off the beaded evening gown as a child might show off a new party dress. “What do you think?”

Jason Mathison sat in a gray suede chair, a pilsner of imported Australian beer in his hand as he gave her a slow, judicious look. “It’s red.”

“Well, of course it is.” Tessa grinned. “You said you wanted me to look sexy for New Year’s Eve. And this is definitely the sexiest dress so far.”

The strapless scarlet gown fit like a glove, plunged to below the waist in back and was slit high on both thighs.

“It’s overkill.” He frowned and pulled a cigar out of the pocket of one of the Armani jackets he favored when off duty. Tessa still hadn’t decided which look she found sexier—the starched blue uniform of authority or this aura of casual money.

The chic blond saleswoman clad in Armani gray herself, immediately leaned forward to light the cigar. “I tried to suggest something a bit more subdued,” she murmured. “But your friend had her own ideas.”

“You should have explained my preferences.”

Tessa didn’t like the way they were talking about her as if she wasn’t there. “You said you liked my Christmas dress.”

“It had a certain gut-level masculine appeal.” The glint in his eyes made her think he was remembering the short skirt and low-scooped neckline. “But if you want to break into the business, we need to upgrade your image.”

“This is Hollywood.” If there was one thing the general had taught Tessa, it was not to surrender without a fight.

“Actually, it’s Beverly Hills.” He puffed on the cigar, and although the noxious smell was bound to get into the fabric of the exquisite gowns displayed around the showroom of the famed Rodeo Drive boutique, Tessa noted the saleswoman didn’t utter a word of complaint.

He turned to the statuesque blonde. “I want to see her in the Bill Blass.”

“Not that one.” Tessa had rejected the dark unadorned gown at first glance. “Why don’t you just see if there’s a nun’s habit hidden away in the back room? Or perhaps some sackcloth and ashes?”

Jason laughed at that. “I’m beginning to understand how Henry Higgins must have felt when trying to turn Eliza Doolittle into a lady.”

When the saleswoman laughed, as well, Tessa became irritated again. “I am a lady.”

Although the smile didn’t fade, his eyes suddenly turned as hard as blue stones. “Then you should dress like one,” he said reasonably.

Realizing that she’d just run up against his professional cop intransigence, Tessa exhaled a deep dramatic sigh, snatched the dress from the woman’s arms and stomped back into the marble-walled dressing room.

Damn him! The change was so dramatic, it took Tessa’s breath away. She stared at her reflection in the three-way mirror, stunned by the sleek, sophisticated woman looking back at her. The black halter-necked gown, which had appeared so drab on the padded silk hanger, skimmed over her body like a jet waterfall and proved a startling foil for her fiery hair. Although she’d always regretted her pale skin, the unadorned black dress made it gleam like porcelain.

Jason instantly confirmed her appraisal. “Perfect. There won’t be a woman in the room who’ll be able to hold a candle to you.” He turned to the saleswoman. “She’ll need gloves. Above the elbows. And those black silk pumps in the window.”

By the time he dropped her off at her apartment, Tessa was floating on air. “I feel like a fairy-tale princess. But it was all so expensive, and I know policemen don’t make all that much money…”

“I told you not to worry about that.” He skimmed the back of his hand down her face. “Miles and I both inherited money from our grandfather.”

“But you still work.”

“Although I enjoy the ability to make a beautiful woman happy, I’ve never found the life of the idle rich to be appealing. I like being rich. And I like being a cop. This way I have the best of both worlds.”

He was leaning closer, his lips a whisper away from hers. All she’d have to do would be to go up on her toes, just the least little bit…

“Would you like to come in?” Her heart was in her voice. And in her wide green eyes.

“I’d love to. But duty calls.” As if reading her mind, he tipped forward and brushed his lips against hers in a light, friendly kiss that created a flare of heat that only left her wanting more. Much, much more. “I’ll pick you up tomorrow night at seven.”

She tamped down her disappointment that the first kiss he’d given her was over so soon. She knew he found her attractive. Even an independently wealthy man didn’t spend so much money on a woman unless he was interested. Telling herself that she should be grateful that he was proving to be the kind of gentleman she could actually take home to her strict father, Tessa vowed that it was time for things to change.

“I’ll be ready,” she promised.

As she watched him walk back to the black Porsche, she pressed her fingers against her lips and decided that no matter how ladylike she looked tomorrow night, she was going to pull out all the stops to seduce this man she was falling in love with.

Chapter Six

Theodora Longworth hit Los Angeles like a hurricane. To Lena’s vast relief, Reece’s aunt insisted on staying at her favorite bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She did, however, manage to make her presence known, and although Lena was obviously intimidated by the fifty-year-old woman’s powerful life force, Molly found her a welcome diversion from her own problems.

“Gin,” Theo announced as she put her cards on the table with a flourish. She’d ostensibly come over to the house to keep Molly company while Reece and Lena went out to a New Year’s party with the hospital staff.

Although Molly had assured them that she was more than capable of spending the evening alone, she’d gotten the feeling that were it not for Theo’s presence, Lena, who’d continued to hover over her like a mother hen, would have refused to go.

As she’d cut the new deck of playing cards earlier in the evening, Theo had informed Molly that she never played for penny ante stakes, not in any part of her life, including card games. “However,” she’d stated, “given your unfortunate vow of poverty, I suppose I’d be willing—just this once—to play for chump change. So, how much can you afford to lose?”

“Twenty dollars.” Surely that should last all night.

After spending the next two hours getting thoroughly trounced, Molly decided she’d definitely been overly optimistic. “Did anyone ever happen to mention that cheating is a sin?”

Molly’s dry tone flew right over Theo’s head. “Good thing I’m a Baptist,” the older woman shot back as she deftly palmed a queen of hearts. “And for your information, Sister Molly, I was taught in the Healing Waters Sunday school that the Lord helps those who help themselves.”

“Then He should be extremely proud of you,” Molly muttered as she glared at the miserable hand Theo had dealt her.

“I have no doubt about it,” Theo said cheerfully as she laid down a five card straight of hearts.

Secretly, Molly was grateful Theo hadn’t reined in her typically outrageous behavior on her account. Ever since the rape, everyone had been treating her with kid gloves. It was definitely a relief to have someone finally behaving as if Molly were a normal person.

Five minutes later, she’d lost another hand. “The Lord does love a cheerful giver,” Theo said encouragingly as Molly counted out the dimes and quarters.

“Well, you’ve cleaned me out. So I guess that leaves us no choice but to tune in to Dick Clark’s New Year’s countdown at Times Square.”

“Now, let’s not be in such a hurry.” Theo swept the change into her gold leather duffel bag. “How about I advance you a stake?”

“So I can lose even more?”

“You never know.” Theo shuffled the cards with a flair that would have put an old-time Mississippi riverboat gambler to shame. “Maybe you’re about to get lucky.”

Molly knew, without a single doubt, that Theo was about to start cheating to let her win. Since that held scant appeal, she was trying to figure out a way to turn Reece’s aunt down when the doorbell chimed.

Theo left the room and returned two minutes later with Alex Kovaleski in tow. “You’re off the hook, kiddo,” she told Molly. “Gorgeous here has offered to take your place at the table.”

“Why do I feel like Wild Bill Hickok just before he drew that deadman’s hand,” Alex drawled. He bent down and kissed Molly’s cheek, kindly ignoring the way she involuntarily flinched at the male touch. “How you doin’, sweetheart?”

Embarrassed by her behavior, Molly managed to smile up at him. “I’m a lot poorer than I was two hours ago. Theo cheats.”

“Hell, if the woman tries it with me, I’ll arrest her. After all, gambling’s still illegal in California.”

His gunmetal gray eyes sparkled with the amusement Molly had first seen directed Theodora’s way at Lena and Reece’s wedding. Although they were two totally dissimilar individuals, it was obvious they found each other more than a little entertaining.

“It figures you’d threaten me with that.” Theo folded her arms over her breasts. “Did I ever tell you that I’m not overly fond of authority figures?”

“Several times.” He folded his own arms. “Did I happen to mention that one of these days I’ll win you over with my unrelenting charm?”

Theo snorted. “You did. And I recall telling you that better men have tried.”

“Other men perhaps,” he said with that same unshakable confidence that had once made him a good hostage negotiator. “But not better.”

His eyes warmed to pewter as they skimmed over her. Although she was staying home, she’d dressed for the evening in a colorful full skirt, white satin blouse and glittering beaded vest. Molly half expected her to break out a pair of castanets and start dancing at any moment.

“You really are looking better than ever, Theodora,” Alex said. “And although you looked great as a blonde, your new hairdo is dynamite. You remind me of Rita Hayworth in her prime.”

To Molly’s amazement, Theo blushed to the roots of her newly dyed red hair like a schoolgirl. “Compliments like that will get you anywhere you like, Officer.”

Molly decided it was time to give the couple some privacy. “Well,” she said, pretending to stifle a yawn, “it’s been a long day. I think I’ll go upstairs to my room.”

“Don’t you want to watch Dick Clark bring in the New Year?” Theo asked a bit too quickly.

Molly was greatly amused by the way she seemed suddenly nervous at the idea of being alone with Alex.

“Why bother? He’s not going to look any different. And the ball will come down on time, the same way it always does. No, I’d rather get some sleep and be fresh to watch the parade tomorrow morning.”

“We haven’t even popped the champagne yet. It’s Cristal,” Theo coaxed.

“I’m not supposed to be drinking while I’m on medication,” Molly reminded her. “Why don’t you share it with Alex?”

“I’d rather have a beer,” he said. “If you have one.”

Theo tossed her head in a way reminiscent of Hayworth’s famed Gilda. “There you go, with that Mr. Macho routine again.”

“It’s not a routine.” His grin was quick and wicked, and even Molly, who’d always considered this man the closest thing she’d ever known to a loving father, couldn’t help noticing that it held considerable masculine charm. “And believe me, sweetheart, I’m just getting started.”

When Theo shot back that she hadn’t left a glorious beach on Thebes to come all the way to California just to be hit on by some beer-drinking civil servant, Molly decided it was definitely time to call it a night.

She was not surprised when neither Alex nor Theodora noticed her departure.

* * *

High atop the Westin Bonaventure hotel, Lena swayed in her husband’s arms, trying to get up her nerve for the conversation to come. She’d made the decision to put the past behind her, to begin the New Year with a clean slate, and that meant it was time—past time—to tell Reece about that long-ago Christmas Eve night.

His arms were wrapped loosely around her waist, his lips were nuzzling the sensitive flesh behind her ear. “You are,” he murmured, “the most beautiful woman in the room.”

“Flatterer.” She tilted her head back to allow his mouth access to her neck.

Reece readily obliged. “It’s the truth.”

“What about her?” Lena asked as a vision in black swirled by.

Reece paid no attention to the stunning redhead. “She can’t hold a candle to you.”

Even as she knew that wasn’t the truth, Lena laughed softly with delight. “You’re prejudiced.”

“You bet.” He drew her closer. “I’m mad about you, Lena Longworth. And if it wasn’t for the unfortunate fact that the chief of staff of Mercy Sam just happens to be dancing five feet away, I’d drag you beneath the dessert table and ravish you.”

The idea was deliciously wicked. And inviting. Tempted to put off the carefully planned conversation until tomorrow, Lena reluctantly reminded herself that she’d already waited far too long.

“Being ravished by the sexiest man in the room sounds wonderful,” she admitted breathlessly as he dragged her against him, inviting her to feel his erection. Her body warmed and softened in automatic feminine response. “But there are a few things I need to tell you.”

Although he’d been fantasizing about unzipping the froth of gilt-threaded ivory chiffon, then running his lips down her delicate spine, kissing each vertebra in turn, something in his wife’s tone garnered Reece’s unwilling attention.

“Are you all right?” He knew she’d had an appointment with her gynecologist. “You told me that your exam went well.”

“I’m fine.” That was the truth, so far as it went. Yet another thing they’d have to discuss tonight, Lena thought. “Really,” she insisted when she viewed something that looked amazingly like fear in his eyes. “But we really do need to talk. I was hoping we could go downstairs to our room.”

Reece had been hoping the same thing. The irony was that when he’d booked the suite, he’d had a much more romantic scenario than talking in mind. “Whatever you want, darling.”

It was what he always said. But as they walked hand in hand across the dance floor, Lena wondered if Reece would still want her. Once he’d heard her story.

* * *

Tessa watched the attractive couple leave the ballroom. Although it was more than obvious that they were madly in love, something told her that the reason for their early departure was not a midnight tryst, but something far more serious. She’d watched their discussion, witnessed the concern, followed by resolve move across the man’s handsome features.

“I’m beginning to feel ignored,” Jason murmured in her ear. “You’ve been watching that guy all night.”

“I’m sorry.” She smiled up at him. “Actually, I’ve been watching his date. She looks so familiar.” Of course that couldn’t be, Tessa had been telling herself. After all, she’d only been in Los Angeles a week. “Do you know either of them?”

“I’ve never seen them before in my life.” He watched the sway of the woman’s hips in the full short skirt and knew he’d remember those long, wraparound legs.

“Perhaps she’s an actress.” She was certainly attractive enough, Tessa thought. Her dark auburn hair glowed like autumn leaves highlighted by a benevolent sun and her green eyes tilted upward, catlike, at the corners. Perhaps the woman had been a bit player in some movie or television program she’d seen.

“She’s good-looking enough to get work,” Jason agreed. He drew his head back and gave her a long assessing look. “But you are, without a doubt, the most ravishingly beautiful woman here tonight.”

The way he was looking down at her, as if she was a raw piece of clay he’d molded to his own personal preference, made her feel a bit uneasy. However, Tessa couldn’t deny that the analogy definitely fit. Not only had he chosen her dress, he’d selected her jewelry—borrowed from Fred Hayman—her hairstyle and even her makeup, which had been applied by a woman who was alleged to have done Susan Sarandon’s makeup in the movie The Witches of Eastwick.

The dramatic makeover had not been in vain. From the looks she’d been getting all night, it was obvious his creation had met with instant approval.

“Hey, kid,” a voice behind her said, “how about giving me an opportunity to show Tessa which brother inherited the dancing talent?”

Jason grinned down at Tessa. “Whatever you do, don’t flatter him. His head’s already big enough.” Without asking if she wanted to change partners, he handed her over to his brother, leaving Tessa feeling once again like a piece of property.

* * *

It was a night made for romance. The glass wall in the hotel room provided a dazzling view of the city lights. A late-afternoon rain had washed away the smog, and the stars shone like diamonds in the midnight black sky.

“Would you like some champagne?” Reece had ordered a bottle of Dom Pérignon and caviar to be waiting when they arrived back at the suite. A splendid bouquet of long-stemmed red roses had been delivered, as well.

The story Lena was determined to tell Reese wasn’t exactly a cause for celebration and she debated turning down the offer of champagne. Then decided that a little bottled courage might be in order, after all.

“Thank you. That sounds wonderful.”

Although the words fit the occasion, her expression reminded Reece of a condemned prisoner on the way to the electric chair. The fear he’d felt earlier rose again. Again he tamped it back down and concentrated on opening the wine. The cork came out of the dark green bottle with a discreet pop and a hiss of vapor.

“You do that very well,” Lena murmured. She looked at Reece, so handsome in his custom-tailored tux, marveled not for the first time at the easy sophistication of this man she’d married, and wondered why he hadn’t chosen a sleek, elegant woman from his own world for his wife.

“It’s all in the wrist.” He had no idea if that was the case. But he felt the need to say something to ease the strain building between them. He poured the sparkling wine into the flutes, then handed one to her.

“To the best wife any man could ever wish for,” he said, lifting his glass in a toast.

“To the best husband,” she corrected quietly.

Reece wished to hell she’d smiled when she’d said that. “How about a compromise? To us. And a New Year filled with love and laughter.”

Reece swore inwardly when he watched the suspicious sheen of moisture suddenly appear in her eyes.

“To us.” It was little more than a whisper. Lena took a sip. Although the sparkling wine danced like laughter on her tongue, her mood remained bleak. When the suffocating silence settled over them again, she began nervously rubbing a crimson rose petal between her thumb and index finger, releasing the blossom’s sweet fragrance.

Never having been one for game playing, Reece decided that as much as he wanted to let Lena take her time with whatever it was she wanted to say, he’d go nuts if they didn’t just cut to the chase.

“Is this about your visit to Dr. Carstairs?”

“No.” She abandoned plucking petals from the roses and began running her finger nervously up the crystal stem of the champagne flute. “Yes.” She shook her head. “No.”

Reece forced a smile he was a very long way from feeling. Happy goddamn New Year. He wondered what magic it would take to make his wife happy.

“Which is it, sweetheart?” Not wanting to make things worse than they already appeared to be, he managed, just barely, to keep his building frustration from his voice.

Her bare shoulders slumped. “Dr. Carstairs only confirmed what all the other doctors have already told me. That there’s no way I can ever conceive a child.”

She’d already shared the unhappy news with Molly, who’d assured her that her infertility, possibly due to a sexually transmitted pelvic infection acquired before her marriage, had not been punishment from God for her promiscuous behavior. But still, having been brought up under the stern guidance of the St. Joseph nuns, Lena couldn’t help wondering.

“I always wanted children,” she murmured, looking out over the city, wondering how many people were sitting home alone, wishing they had someone—anyone—to love them. New Year’s, she knew from personal experience, could be one of the loneliest nights of the year. That thought reminded her of all the strangers she’d gone to bed with, just to avoid being alone. “I always dreamed of becoming the mother I never had.”

“I know how important having a child is to you, sweetheart,” Reece said carefully, feeling as if he were making his way across a deadly conversational minefield. “But I’ve never felt any great need to perpetuate the Longworth name. And we could adopt.”

“I suppose that’s one possibility.”

She sighed and sat down in the suede chair across the room. Although he longed to take her in his arms, Reece took the fact that she’d chosen not to sit next to him on the sofa as a sign she needed her own space to tell him what was bothering her.

“You never asked how my mother and father died.”

“I figured you’d tell me. When you were ready.”

She smiled at that. A soft sad smile that tore at something elemental inside Reece. “You are so incredible. I’ve never known anyone with such patience.”

For some reason, her words rankled. “Dammit, Lena, don’t make me into any kind of saint. Because I’m not. I’m just a man. Who loves you with a depth I never would have imagined possible. I’ve tried to come up with a word for how I feel. Obsession comes close. But it’s still not enough.”

She felt the traitorous tears overbrimming her eyes. “I’m never going to make it through this if you keep making me cry.”

Reece managed, just barely, to remain where he was, watching with admiration as she drew in a deep, calming breath. She’d changed since Molly’s attack, the emotionally frail young bride he’d married had begun to show signs of becoming an independent woman.

Lena turned her gaze away from him and looked back out the window at the lights of the city below them. “I can’t remember a time when my parents weren’t fighting.” Her voice was soft, little more than a whisper, but Reece had no difficulty hearing it in the hushed room. “About everything. And anything. My father was a big man. With a big hairy belly that always stuck out from beneath his sweat-stained undershirt. And big hands that loved to hit little girls. But of course, I was very little, so perhaps he wasn’t so big at all. Perhaps he just seemed that way....

“Did I ever tell you I had a kitten?”

“No,” Reece said carefully, feeling like he’d just entered one of those dark carnival fun houses that weren’t really any fun at all but filled with monsters who’d gleefully leap out and scare the piss out of little kids.

“Her name was Miss Puss in Boots.” She turned toward him, her eyes as flat as her voice. “Because she had white paws. Like little boots. I found her in the alley and brought her home. Molly helped me hide her in our bedroom closet and every night I’d let her out of her box and she’d sneak beneath the blanket and curl up next to me and purr. I used to listen to that sound, like a small warm little engine, and it helped me block out the sound of the fighting.”

She fell silent. Reece waited.

“One night he came in to drag us out of bed for some perceived misbehavior. I can’t remember what, and it probably wasn’t anything at all. Drinking always made him paranoid and he’d imagine all sorts of things we might have done. Or even thought.

“Anyway, he found Miss Puss. He pulled her out of the bed, and Molly tried to stop him. He knocked her away and she hit her head on the corner of the metal bed frame. If I live to be a hundred, I’ll never forget that sound.

“She still has the scar on her temple. It’s faint, but if you know it’s there, you can see it. There was so much blood, I thought she was going to die. But of course she didn’t....

“Then he strangled Miss Puss with his big hairy hands. And threatened to do the same to us if we ever brought another animal into his house.”

As an ER doctor, Reece thought he’d seen all the evils humans could do to one another. But never had such horror hit so close to home.

“My God, Lena—”

“No.” She held up a hand. “Please, just let me get this all out. Because it’s taken me years to get up the nerve to say it out loud, and if I stop, I may never be able to do it again.”

Reece tamped down his building fury and nodded.

“I think he raped our mother that night. I didn’t understand the sounds coming through the wall from their bedroom at the time. But now I believe that’s what happened. Then he left the house to go out drinking.

“Molly and I tried to see if Mama was all right—we could hear her crying—but she wouldn’t open her bedroom door. She told us to go to bed and everything would be all right in the morning.... She always said that. But of course it never was.”

Lena shook her head and dragged her hand through her hair. In the moonlight streaming in through the window, the diamonds in her wedding band glistened like ice.

“Molly put a Band-Aid on her head to stop the bleeding, which it really didn’t do, but it finally slowed down. At least it wasn’t streaming down her face anymore.

“Once Mama seemed to be all right, Molly wrapped Miss Puss in a clean nightgown. Then, when we knew he wasn’t coming back that night, when it was safe, she got a flashlight and we went out in the backyard and Molly dug a hole and we buried Miss Puss.

“Our house was by Dodger Stadium and Molly had just finished saying a prayer, when the game ended and suddenly the sky lit up with the most wonderful fireworks.”

She closed her eyes. “I can still see them today. They were so beautiful. The most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. And Molly told me they were in celebration of Miss Puss’s arrival in heaven, where all the angels would love her and she’d have all the cream and kibble she’d ever want.”

Reece had always known what a special person Molly was, but for the first time he was getting a sense of the burden she’d had put on her young shoulders, and he finally began to understand her seemingly limitless capacity for caring.

As if in a trance, Lena continued to relate the story of the lives and times of Lena and Molly McBride. Reece had been sickened by the saga of Miss Puss, but he was horrified by his wife’s tale of the murder/suicide of her parents.

When she was finally finished, when she’d unburdened her heart and her soul, including the self-

destructive sexual behavior that may have left her unable to have children, she turned to him, her eyes wide and dark in her too-pale face.

“So now you know the truth. And I’ll understand if you decide you can’t love me any longer.”

A complicated rage burned through Reece. He wanted to beat her dead father to a pulp for having inflicted such terrible pain on his family. His feelings for Lena’s mother wavered somewhere between fury and pity.

But since there was nothing he could do to correct past sins, at this moment Reece’s overriding urge was to shake his wife. To shout at her. To ask her what the hell kind of man she thought he was that he could ever hold her responsible for any of those horrors she’d described. But understanding that his anger was directed toward the injustice of what had been done to her, he managed, just barely, to hold his tongue.

“I told you—” He had to force the words past the massive lump of anguished fury that had taken up residence in his throat. “I love you, Lena.” Needing to touch her, to hold her, he crossed the room and drew her into his arms. “More than life itself.”

“But…”

“Shh.” He pressed a finger against her trembling lips. She was like a block of ice in his arms. “You’ve had your say. Now it’s my turn, okay?”

She nodded, her shimmering wet eyes on his.

“If I could go back in time and erase all those things that happened, I would. Unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way, so I can’t change the past. But the one thing I can do is to vow to spend the rest of my life helping you to feel happy. And safe.”

Relief flooded through Lena, like a cool crystal river.

“You’ve already done that,” she said on a deep, shuddering breath. “I realize I don’t say it enough, but I’ve been happier since meeting you than I ever thought possible. And I’ve never felt so safe.” Wrapping her arms around his waist, Lena hung on for dear life.

Reece kissed her then. A deep, heartfelt kiss filled with love and promise. And then he carried her into the bedroom, where he made love to her with a tenderness that made her cry all over again.

But this time, Lena’s tears were not born of sorrow, but joy.

Chapter Seven

“You’re very good,” Miles said with apparent surprise as he led Tessa through a sophisticated tango.

She tilted her head back and gave him a coolly dismissive look that fit the style of the dance to perfection. “For a ‘chipmunk-cheeked farmer’s daughter’?”

He had the grace to laugh at that. “Thanks to my brother’s expert eye, no one would ever know you weren’t born with a fistful of gilt-edged stock certificates in your lily-white hands.”

He slipped his fingers beneath her hair, brushing at the suddenly ultrasensitive skin at the back of her neck in a way that created little tremors. “I think you should pose for me.”

“Really?” Her pulse quickened. The photographs lining the trophy wall in his Bel Air home looked like a promo for “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”

“You’re a gorgeous woman, Tessa. With the right photographs you could end up owning this town.”

“Right now I’d settle for a part in a feminine hygiene product commercial,” she muttered.

Although Jason had told her that it would be almost impossible to make an appointment with an agent during the holidays, she was admittedly impatient. And there was also the salient fact that her traveler’s checks were disappearing a great deal faster than expected.

His hand warmed her back as he bent her into a low dip. Tessa could feel each of his long fingers against the pale flesh bared by the halter-style dress. “Oh, I think we can do a great deal better than that.”

There was something in his eyes—something that promised more than a photography sitting—that caused a frisson of fear to skim up her spine. But before she could dwell on it, the music stopped.

“You can let me up now,” she suggested.

“I suppose you’re right.” His smile was slow and unnervingly intimate as he kept her bent backward over his arm. If he suddenly let go of her, she’d fall to the floor.

“Miles—” Her heart was hammering in her throat. From fear. And something else. An emotion darker and more dangerous than she’d ever felt before. And strangely, more enticing.

They’d become frozen in some sort of strange tableau, Miles’s hooded eyes looking down at her, while she stared back up at him, when a familiar deep voice shattered the spell.

“Dammit, Miles,” Jason complained, “quit playing your cat-and-mouse games with Tessa. She’s not one of your usual women. She’s a nice girl.”

“So you keep telling me.” His eyes not moving from hers, Miles lifted her back to an upright position. But as he did so, his fingers dipped even lower beneath the black silk, creating a flare of sparks. “Such a pity,” he murmured as he trailed the back of his other hand down the side of her face. Tessa could feel the heat, the bane of a true redhead, rising in her cheeks.

“Don’t pay any attention to my brother.” Jason knocked Miles’s hand from her face in a fraternal, nonaggressive way that suggested this was not the first time he’d had to come to the rescue of one of his dates. “Anyone in town can tell you that Miles is the evil twin.”

“It’s a dirty job.” Miles’s insolent eyes settled on her lips in a way that made Tessa’s mouth go dry. “But someone’s got to do it.... So, when are we going to do it?”

“Do it?” she echoed blankly.

“Your photos. As it happens, I have some time next Wednesday afternoon about five.”

Tessa couldn’t help glancing over at Jason, who laughed in response. “You’ve gotten her spooked, Miles.” He put his arm around her waist and drew her against his side in a possessive gesture that made Tessa feel immediately safe. “I’ll go with you and stand guard to make certain my evil twin doesn’t get any kinky ideas, then afterward we’ll go out on the town.”

“That sounds wonderful.” There was one more thing to be considered. She didn’t want to be obligated in any way to Miles. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate your fitting me into your busy schedule, but I’m not certain I can afford—”

“Why don’t you let me worry about that,” Jason broke in smoothly.

“But you’ve already done so much.”

“And had a dandy time, too.” His smile, in contrast to his brother’s, was warm and absolutely harmless. “Why hoard money when you can use it to make people feel good?”

He was such a good man. Such a generous one. Tessa was instantly reassured. “I don’t know how I can ever repay you.”

He winked in a sexy, seductive way she suspected very few women could resist. “I’m sure we’ll come up with something. If we put our heads together.”

He then turned to Miles. “Five o’clock it is. And don’t forget, my partner, Dan Kovaleski, just got transferred to the vice squad. You try to use my girl for any of those dirty pictures you like to take, and I’ll turn you in.”

“The kid always was the family snitch,” Miles told Tessa in a light, easygoing way that almost made her think she’d imagined his earlier dark edge. “I suppose that’s why he became a cop.”

As the twin brothers shared a laugh, Tessa’s mind was not on a joke she suspected they’d shared before, but on what Jason had called her.

My girl.

As the words warmed her, thrilled her, Tessa decided that they were the sweetest she’d ever heard.

* * *

While Lena slept in Reece’s arms and Tessa rang in the New Year on the dance floor, Molly was tangling the sheets of the queen-size bed in the Longworth guest room.

Caught up in the grips of a nightmare, she tossed and turned, tortured by images that shifted in and out of focus like a fun-house mirror, tossing back reflections that altered reality.

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