A man could lead himself to bed, but that didn’t mean he’d sleep

Not when he felt as if he were flying over paradise, craning his neck to look down from that airplane window, wanting to storm the cockpit and yell, “Land here!” even though he knew there wasn’t a runway.

He just couldn’t imagine Mindy looking at him with anything but shock and loathing if he hit on her. Even if he was wrong, even if miraculously she turned out to feel the same way he did, how could he look at himself in the mirror knowing he had what should have been Dean’s?

What would have been Dean’s if not for a bullet.

Dear Reader,

Pregnant heroines have become very popular in romance fiction, but I find myself drawn to writing about them anyway. The nine months of pregnancy are a woman’s most vulnerable time. Accustomed to being an independent adult, suddenly she needs protection and care. At the same time, her life is in flux—even a woman in a secure marriage knows that nothing will ever be the same again. If she finds herself pregnant after her husband has died, when her emotions are already in turmoil, when she has no one to turn to… How irresistible is that for any writer?

With this book I also had the chance to create a hero who believes he needs no one—until he loses the one person who did mean something to him. Reforming rakes has never interested me; shattering the ice around a man who believes himself incapable of love is my kind of challenge.

I hope you’re as moved by these two lonely people who can’t admit they need each other as I was. I’d love to hear what you think!

Best,

Janice Kay Johnson

With Child
Janice Kay Johnson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

BRENDAN JOSEPH QUINN was off duty when he found out his best friend was dead. Beer in hand, waiting for the microwave to beep, he’d settled in front of a Sonics game he’d taped from earlier in the evening. He was so tired his eyes kept crossing. He hadn’t slept except for a snatched hour or two in days. That’s what he did when a case was fresh, when every detail was vivid in his mind, when the memories of witnesses were new and relatively uncorrupted. If an arrest was ever going to happen, it was likeliest in the first two or three days. He and his partner had cleared this homicide by canvassing the neighborhood until they found a kid who’d seen someone hammering on the front door of the murdered woman’s house and had been able to identify the ex-husband.

Booking and paperwork had dragged on, and it was now two in the morning. He intended to gobble the burrito heating in the microwave and then fall into bed. He might last a quarter.

When the phone rang, Quinn stared at it in disbelief. Muting the TV, he dragged himself from the recliner and snatched up the receiver.

“Quinn. This better be good.”

“It’s not good. It’s shitty.”

His sergeant could sound neutral when the streets were filled with rioters tossing cherry bombs. At the heaviness in his voice, Quinn stiffened.

“What?”

“Dean Fenton’s dead.”

“What?” he said again, but in disbelief this time. Denial.

“We got a call an hour ago from one of his security guards. Burglary in progress. By the time a unit got there, the perps were gone and the guard had been shot. Only, turns out it wasn’t one of his employees. It was Dean. We don’t know yet why he was handling a routine night shift himself. Somebody probably called in sick. Bad luck.”

There had to be a mistake. Dean Fenton was his best friend, the only good to come from a bleak childhood. Quinn quelled the wave of sick fear with control he’d learned early, when his mother went out at night and didn’t come back for three days.

No. Not Dean.

Dean Fenton had joined the force with Quinn. They’d gone through training together, risen in the ranks at the same pace. But Dean had a craving for the nice things that money could buy, and he’d turned in his badge to start his own security company.

“Who got the call?” Quinn asked.

“Lanzilotta and Connors. Lanzilotta was pretty shaken up when he recognized Dean.”

Bernie Lanzilotta had played softball with Quinn and Dean. Bernie would know their first baseman.

Quinn shook his head hard. No. Goddamn it, no! Bernie had seen the uniform, maybe the guard was Dean’s age, general build. He’d jumped to a conclusion. Dean was home in bed with his pretty nitwit of a wife right now, not knowing one of his employees had taken a bullet.

“No,” Quinn said.

That same heaviness in his voice, Sergeant Dickerson said, “I asked Bernie if he was sure. He said he was.”

“No.”

“I’m going out there.” Dickerson extended the comment like an invitation.

“Where?” Quinn flipped open his notebook.

The address was in the industrial area at the foot of West Seattle.

“I’m on my way.”

The microwave beeped as he let himself out the front door.

EVEN BEFORE HE EXITED from the West Seattle bridge, he saw the flashing lights. Heading under the bridge, he drove the two blocks to the scene. Chain-link gates stood open to a storage business, the kind with four long windowless buildings containing locked units where people could stow their crap when they down-sized or moved. This place also had an area where customers could park RVs or boats. It was back there that the activity centered.

Numb, his exhaustion forgotten, Quinn parked and walked past squad cars with flashing lights. Ahead was a white pickup with the Fenton Security logo painted on the doors. The driver-side one stood open.

Dickerson, a bulky, graying man, separated himself from a cluster of uniforms and came to Quinn.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

Fear and rage shifted inside Quinn, like Dobermans just waking.

“No,” he said. “No.” He kept walking, circled the back of the pickup.

The body was sprawled on the pavement. Lamps had already been set up, bathing the scene in pitiless white light.

“No,” Quinn whispered, but his eyes burned and the fear swelled in his chest. His best friend, his brother in all but blood, lay with his cheek against the ground, blood drying in his mouth, his eyes sightless. Dead. A few feet from the body, Quinn dropped to his knees. A freight train of grief roared over him, the wheels clattering, metallic and deafening.

He hadn’t known he could cry, but his face was wet.

Strong hands lifted him, steered him out of the harsh light into the darkness, where he slammed his fists against the brick wall of a storage building and let the sobs rack him.

THE DOORBELL BROUGHT Mindy Fenton awake with a start and an automatic flush of heart-racing apprehension. Half sitting up in bed, she turned to Dean’s side before remembering that he’d worked tonight. Her wild gaze swung to the digital clock—3:09 a.m.

Had she dreamed the bell? Nobody would come calling in the middle of the night! Unless Dean had locked himself out. But he had the garage-door opener.

Sitting upright by this time, she strained to hear anything at all. Breaking glass. If an intruder had decided she wasn’t home because she hadn’t come to the door…

The bell rang again.

Really scared now, she turned on her bedside lamp, slipped on her bathrobe, and went downstairs, flipping on lights as she went to make it look as if several people were home.

Dean had left the porch light on. Through the stained-glass sidelight, she could make out a dark shape.

“Who’s there?” she called.

The muffled reply was “Quinn.”

Her heart somersaulted. Fumbling with the dead bolt, she thought, Why? Why Quinn? Why now?

Two men, not just one, stood on the porch. With Dean’s best friend was Sergeant Rycroft Dickerson. She remembered him from her wedding. Six foot four or so and brawny, his graying hair buzz-cut, he wasn’t the kind of man you forgot.

Not that you could forget Quinn, either, she thought irrelevantly. With his straight dark hair, vivid blue eyes, stark cheekbones and contained air, he would never go unnoticed.

“Is…is something wrong?” she squeaked.

Neither face softened.

Quinn asked, “Can we come in, Mindy?”

“I…of course.” She swung the door open.

Quinn first, the sergeant second, they stepped in to the foyer, filling it with a threat of…something. Something she didn’t want to hear.

“I could put on coffee…”

Quinn shook his head. “Mindy…”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“Mindy.” His voice, she realized, was scratchy, rough. “There’s no easy way to say this.”

She backed away, talking fast. “Uh…Dean isn’t home. He will be by seven. I can tell him you need to see him. Or I can leave a note.” She said the last as if it were a super idea, a solution to some dilemma that her inner self knew didn’t exist. “He worked tonight.”

The sergeant reached out. “We know.”

She wouldn’t let him touch her. Clutching the lapel of her gown, she said in a high, breathless voice, “I don’t understand why you’re here.”

Quinn’s blue eyes were almost black. “He’s dead, Mindy.”

“Don’t be silly! He’s not a cop anymore. And he drives so carefully.” She laughed, convincing no one. “What could have happened to him?”

“He interrupted a burglary.” A muscle jumped in Quinn’s cheek. “Somebody shot him.”

Dean? Shot Dean? Her Dean? The idea was ludicrous, impossible, unthinkable.

“Have you tried his cell phone? What makes you think…”

Dark and melancholy at the best of times, Quinn waited her out, his eyes bleak. When her voice hitched and died—no, not died, what an awful choice of words!—trailed off, yes, trailed off, he said in that thick voice, “I saw him. I didn’t want to believe it either. But he’s dead.”

A keening sound seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. Not until Quinn’s face contorted and he stepped forward to draw her into his arms did she realize she was making the sound. She squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her face against Quinn’s chest despite the smell of sweat that wasn’t Dean’s. She wrapped her arms around his waist and held on, because otherwise she wouldn’t have remained upright.

She was still crying out, still muffling that dreadful, shrill, unending scream in his dark shirt. She stayed stiff, her fists filled with his shirt, and tried to smother herself against him.

Quinn muttered brokenly, “God, Mindy. God. I’m so sorry.”

Perhaps shock was wrapping her in thick batting, because abruptly all strength left her, stealing the cry from her throat. She sagged, clinging. Still, Quinn held her. Strong arms, a body more solid than her lanky husband’s. She hadn’t known what he would feel like. He’d never hugged her, never kissed her cheek, never touched her at all. She’d always known he didn’t like her. But for Dean’s sake, they were polite.

Dead.

She heard the men confer, but made no effort to decipher words. Footsteps, and finally Quinn lifted her like a child and sat her on the couch in the living room. Mindy began to shiver.

“Don’t you have a throw?” he said in frustration.

She squeezed her arms against her body and rocked herself, hardly aware when he disappeared and then reappeared with a comforter he must have torn from the bed in the guest room. Even inside it, she continued to shiver. Her teeth chattered.

A weight settled on the couch beside her and Quinn held a mug to her mouth. Tea. Clumsily, with his help, she drank. Hot liquid ran down her chin, joining the tears that wet her face.

After a moment she took the mug from him and gratefully wrapped cold fingers around it. She drank again, letting it scald her mouth, aware it was sweeter than she would have made it but not caring. The heat sliding down her throat felt so good. Her shivers abated.

Finally she lifted her head. The sergeant stood a few feet away, looking down at her with concern. Quinn still sat beside her, his thigh touching hers, his face so close she could see individual bristles on a chin that was normally clean-shaven.

“You’re sure?” she asked. Begged.

“We’re sure,” Dickerson said.

Still pleading, although no longer with them, Mindy said, “What will I do?”

There was a momentary silence, and then Quinn stood. “What will you do?” He sounded harsh, the man who had always condemned her without knowing her at all. “I’m sure Dean left you taken care of.”

“I didn’t mean…” she tried to explain.

“Do you have someone we can call?” Sergeant Dickerson interrupted. “Family? A friend?”

She instinctively rejected the idea of calling her mother. Selene was her best friend, but…she was such a talker. She wouldn’t know how to hold Mindy without exclaiming over and over and wanting to dissect the tragic events. And who else could Mindy phone in the middle of the night to say, “My husband is dead. Can you come hold my hand?”

Mindy shook her head. “I’ll wait until morning.” Until then…until then, she didn’t know what she’d do. She couldn’t go back to that lonely bed. Perhaps she would just huddle here and try to imagine the man she loved gone. Erased as if he hadn’t existed.

“We’ve only been married a year.” She heard her voice, high and petulant, as if Dean had broken a promise. But he hadn’t. Till death do us part. It just wasn’t supposed to be so soon!

The two men were talking again as if she wasn’t here.

“I want to work this one,” Quinn said. “Who pulled it? Sawyer and Asavade?”

“Dobias and Williams. And the answer is no. You’re dead on your feet. And you’re too involved.”

“He was my best friend. I need to make this collar.”

“Uh-huh. You going to do it dispassionately? Read ’em their rights? When what you really want to do is kill them?”

Quinn paced, fury and grief radiating from him like heat from a woodstove. Mindy felt it without having to watch him.

“Goddamn it! Don’t shut me out!”

“No.” The sergeant didn’t move. Like Quinn, he seemed to have forgotten her. “Dean radioed in a license-plate number. There may have been an arrest already.”

She listened without real comprehension. Dean was dead? It made no sense. She would have worried if he’d still been a cop, but he owned his own security company. He hardly ever took a shift as a guard anymore. He met with property owners and businessmen, did payroll and billing, grumbled about how hard it was to find and keep good employees.

“They all either want to be cops or prison guards.” He’d made a sound of disgust. “They like the idea of swaggering around in a uniform with a gun in a holster. They find out how boring it is patrolling warehouses and apartment complexes at night, they opt out.”

Mindy came back to awareness of the present when she realized that Sergeant Dickerson had sat on the coffee table. Quinn stood to one side.

“Mindy? You with me?”

She nodded.

“Do you know why Dean worked tonight?”

She nodded again. “A new guy called in sick. Dean was really mad, because it was last minute. The dispatcher offered to go out, but Dean said he’d do it. He liked to once in a while, you know.”

“Any good businessman gets down in the trenches. He’d be a fool not to.”

“I wish…” Tears leaked out although she’d thought herself cried dry. “I wish somebody else had been there. But I feel guilty wishing they were dead instead.”

Dickerson covered her hand with his. “It’s natural, Mindy. You didn’t know them.”

“I do know Mick Mulligan. He’s the dispatcher.” She tasted the tears. “He’s married, and he has two little girls.”

That thought caused a lurch within her, of fear, of renewed guilt, of raw grief. Dean had really wanted to have children. She was the one to put pregnancy off.

“Let’s wait a couple of years,” she’d coaxed. “Let’s be selfish and just have each other for a while first.”

Quinn said explosively, “What if it was a setup? Goddamn it, Dickerson! Let me work this one.”

“Go home. Go to bed.”

A vast, terrifying emptiness swelled within Mindy. They’d both leave any minute. She’d be alone in the house. It was a big house, bigger than she liked, with a cavernous three-car garage and bedrooms they didn’t use, a den and a family room. She could feel those empty, dark rooms around her, echoing her inner fear.

She made a sound—a sniff, a gulp. Still engaged in their argument, both men turned their heads to look at her. She looked down at her hands, clutching the comforter.

“We can’t leave her alone.” Quinn sounded irritated. “I’ll stay.”

That brought her head up. “No! You don’t have to.” But she wanted him to stay. He made her feel safe, and tonight she was terrified of being alone.

His mouth, she’d have sworn, had a faint curl. “If you don’t have a friend you can ask to come over, I do have to stay.” He sounded as if he were talking to a five-year-old who had just announced that she could walk across town all by herself to Grandma’s house. His gaze left her; she was dismissed. To Dickerson, he said, “You’ll keep me informed?”

Mindy shrank into her comforter, wishing she had the spine to stand up, say with dignity, “No, thanks, I’d like to be alone,” and walk them to the door. She’d have been grateful for Quinn’s offer if it had come from anyone but him, or even if he’d made it more kindly. He’d always had a talent for making her feel small.

Her care settled, Sergeant Dickerson expressed his sympathy and regret one more time, then left. Quinn walked him to the door, and they stood out of earshot talking for several minutes, their voices a rumble.

Finally Quinn locked up behind the sergeant and came back to her. “Why don’t you go back to bed?”

“No!” She shuddered. “No. I can’t get in our bed.”

“The guest room, then.”

She didn’t want to go to bed at all. Did he really imagine that she’d lay her head on the pillow and fall into blissful slumber? In the dark, all she would do was imagine a thousand times what had happened to Dean. Had the shot come from nowhere? Or had he been held at gun-point, threatened, beaten? Did he know he might die? She both wanted and didn’t want to know. I’m a coward, she thought. She would lie there wondering what would happen tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.

But she also saw that Quinn wanted her to go to bed, so she nodded and put her feet on the carpeted floor. When she stood, she swayed, and he was at her side instantly, his strong hand clamped on her elbow. He walked her to the downstairs bedroom, and she felt like a child being put to bed. When she climbed in, he spread the comforter over her, then stood awkwardly at the foot of the bed.

“Can I get you anything?”

Mute, she shook her head.

Quinn came around the bed, his hand out to switch off the lamp. She shook her head violently. “No! Leave it on. Please.”

He frowned at her. “You’re sure?”

“I don’t… The dark…”

“Okay. I’ll be right out there. Call if you need me.”

“Thank you,” she said dutifully.

Seemingly satisfied, he left, switching off the overhead light and pulling the door almost closed. His footsteps receded toward the living room.

The sheets were cold, the pillow squishy. It was like being in a hotel room. But she couldn’t seem to care enough to try to bunch up the pillow or even reach for the second one. She just lay on her back and stared at the ceiling.

The house was Dean’s, not hers. The life his. One she’d put on like a borrowed evening gown. She’d felt beautiful and loved and fortunate, but not quite secure. Because, she saw now, it wasn’t hers.

A broken sound escaped her.

Dean. Oh, Dean.

The tears came again, so easily, as if only waiting to be released. But this time she cried silently, alone.

JUST AFTER SIX IN THE MORNING, Quinn’s cell phone rang.

“We got ’em,” Dickerson said without preamble. “They didn’t realize Dean had had time to call in their plate.”

“What were they after?”

“They’re nineteen and twenty-one. They were manufacturing meth in the young one’s father’s trailer. He moved it to storage without them knowing. They’d come to get their stuff, or steal the trailer. Sounds like they were still arguing about that.”

“And the guard that called in sick?”

“Had a hot girl over. Dobias said when he realized he’d be dead if he had gone to work, he barely made it to the toilet to puke.”

“He might not be dead,” Quinn said. “Maybe he’d have timed his route different. Been lazy and not gone in if the gates were closed.”

“He’ll figure that out eventually,” Dickerson said without sympathy. “Apparently, Dobias didn’t feel inclined to point that out.”

Quinn sank onto the couch and bowed his head. He swore. “A couple of goddamn punks.”

“Strung out.”

“And that’s it.” He shoved his fingers into his hair, uncaring when they curled into a fist and yanked. “Dean’s gone, and Daddy’ll probably hire a good lawyer who’ll claim they were too stoned to take responsibility for pulling the trigger.”

“You know the D.A. will try to throw the book at them.”

“Son of a bitch,” he said clearly, and pushed End, letting the phone drop to the carpeted floor.

Two shit-faced punks who’d freaked, and Dean was dead.

Quinn didn’t want to believe it. He’d dozed briefly on the couch, and in his sleep had been woken by Dean, who had punched him in the shoulder and said, “What in hell are you doing on my couch? Your own bed not good enough for you?” Quinn had met the grin with his own, and reached out for his friend’s hand. He’d woken before they touched, and opened his eyes to an empty living room.

Down the hall, a bar of light still lay across the carpet. Mindy had never turned off the lamp. He wondered if she’d slept. Wasn’t sure if he cared. She’d known Dean for a year and a half, not a lifetime.

Dean and Quinn had been flung together as roommates in a foster home when Quinn was thirteen and Dean twelve. Almost twenty years ago. They’d had a fistfight the first day, grudgingly agreed to a truce the second day, and by the third Quinn had lied to protect the younger boy from their foster father’s wrath. Wrath, both had realized as the weeks and months went by, that was more show than reality; George Howie was a good man, as kind in a less demonstrative way as his wife. The two boys had been lucky in more ways than one. They’d been able to stay until, each in his turn, they’d graduated from high school. And they’d become close friends. Brothers.

As the night dragged on, Quinn had done his grieving, as much as he’d allow himself. His mother had taught him well that he couldn’t afford to be incapacitated by fear or sadness. He didn’t even know who his father was. His mother was an addict who’d progressed during his childhood from pills and pot to shooting up. She’d disappear for days at a time. He’d scrounge for food. By the time he was eight or nine he was shoplifting when the cupboards were bare. His mother got skinnier and skinnier, the tracks on her arms and legs livid, veins harder to find. He learned how to catch her at the perfect moment to get her to cash her welfare check so he could take some money before she spent it.

He remembered the last time he saw her, her eyes hectic.

“I feel like shit. I’ve got to score. Now, you go to school, hear? I might not be home tonight, but you can take care of yourself, right?”

She hadn’t waited for an answer. She’d known he could. He’d been doing it since he was six years old.

Only, that time she hadn’t come home. The police finally came knocking. She’d overdosed and was dead, they told him with faint sympathy. They’d looked at the squalor of the apartment and shaken their heads. Child Protective Services workers came to get him.

The Howies’ was Quinn’s fourth foster home. Either he did something wrong, or the people lost interest in fostering. One family decided to move to Virginia and didn’t offer to take him. Another one got nervous when their daughter turned eleven, started to get breasts and developed a crush on the brooding boy they were collecting state money for. Each time, he shrugged and moved on.

Until he finally found somebody to care about. Dean Fenton, a skinny boy with a copper-red cowlick and freckles on his nose.

“My mom’s coming back for me,” he’d always said.

Quinn tried at first telling him that she was probably dead like his mother, but Dean would throw fists and scream, “She’s not!” so Quinn took to shrugging and saying, “Yeah. Sure. Someday.”

The adult Dean had gotten drunk one night and said, “Yeah, she’s dead. I always knew. Give me hope over truth any day.”

Quinn drank a toast to that—hope over truth—even though he didn’t believe in fantasies. He’d have starved to death as a kid if he’d allowed himself to dream. You survived in this life by facing facts.

But Dean…Dean had softened Quinn. Made him laugh, acknowledge that sometimes faith in another person was justified.

They’d balanced each other, because Dean needed to be more of a cynic. The saving grace was that he listened to Quinn.

Had listened, Quinn corrected himself, lifting his head to look at that band of light on the carpet. Dean hadn’t wanted to hear a bad word about pretty Mindy Walker. Quinn had shrugged and shut his mouth, figuring the romance would pass. He could remember his shock when Dean had come over on a Sunday afternoon to watch the Seahawks play and said, “Congratulate me. Mindy agreed to marry me.”

They’d both said things they regretted then, but they’d patched up their friendship, and Quinn resigned himself to the inevitable divorce, something Dean wouldn’t take well after a lifetime of instability.

Now there wouldn’t be a divorce. Instead, there’d be a funeral. Quinn wouldn’t be listening to drunken soliloquies and supporting a staggering friend home. Instead, he was left with the grieving widow. A flighty, shallow girl-woman with spiky blond hair and a pierced belly button who played at arts and crafts.

Quinn let out a soft oath. Dean would expect his best friend to take care of his bewildered widow, the woman whose first thought hadn’t been of her husband, tragically struck down, but rather, “What will I do?”

“Damn you, Dean,” Quinn said under his breath. “Why her?”

CHAPTER TWO

MINDY AWAKENED RELUCTANTLY, knowing even before she surfaced that she didn’t want to face conscious knowledge of something.

Her eyes were glued shut and her face felt stiff. She was aware without moving that she wasn’t in her own bed. A hotel?

She pried her eyes open, then squeezed them shut. The guest room. Dean.

Oh, Dean.

Grief rushed over her, wave upon wave powerful enough to knock her down if she’d been standing. She gasped for breath and turned on her side to curl into a ball as if she could resist the emotional battery by making herself compact, by covering her head with her arms.

Nausea struck with the same force, making her shudder. She scrambled from bed and ran across the hall to the guest bathroom, having the presence of mind to turn on the ceiling fan before falling to her knees in front of the toilet and retching.

Clinging to the toilet seat, she emptied her stomach. At length she sat on the floor and leaned against the wall, her bent head laid on her forearms braced on her knees. She breathed. In through her nose, out through her mouth. Ordering herself, as if a function so basic had become a challenge.

Why hadn’t she told Dean? Why, oh, why keep to herself news that would have elated him? Eyes closed, she imagined his whoop of delight and huge grin.

She’d thought maybe this weekend. She just wanted to be sure. She’d always had irregular cycles. Being late this month might not have anything to do with that morning when he’d turned to her in bed and only later did they realize neither had used protection. But she’d thrown up every morning this week, and two days ago she’d bought a home pregnancy kit and watched the little strip turn pink.

She hadn’t told him because… Oh, she hardly knew. Because she hadn’t thought herself ready to have a baby, and she’d wanted to face what this meant to her and to her alone before she got swept up in Dean’s joy. Because she hadn’t totally trusted the kit and intended to repeat the results or get a proper pregnancy test in the doctor’s office first. Because she’d wanted to make sharing the news a special occasion that she’d vaguely seen as including candlelight and a romantic dinner. He’d been busy all week, distracted, exasperated at being shorthanded at work and unable to find qualified applicants for the position he had open. She’d waited for a better moment, a better mood.

All week, Mindy had hugged the secret to herself, not stirring from bed until he left the house because the instant she moved the nausea hit. She’d always been an early riser, and he had teased her about becoming a sloth, to which she’d wrinkled her nose and laughed because he hadn’t guessed.

Sitting on the cold bathroom floor, Mindy cried until exhaustion made her blessedly numb. Then she dragged herself up, peered without interest through swollen eyes at the mirror, and splashed cold water over her blotchy face. Her hair poked out every which way, but she didn’t care.

The house was quiet, one lamp on in the living room. Was Quinn gone? She didn’t care about his presence or absence any more than she did about anything else. She put on her robe and shuffled out to the kitchen simply because going through the motions of living was all she knew how to do.

The smell of coffee brewing and bacon frying filled her nostrils before she’d taken a step into the kitchen. If she hadn’t already emptied her stomach, she wouldn’t have been able to bear either. As it was, after a brief hesitation she continued into the kitchen, made bright by a skylight and a double set of French doors opening onto the back patio. Although she could hardly have made a sound, Quinn turned from the stove and gave her an appraising look.

“How are you?”

He couldn’t tell? She only shook her head and sat down at the table set for two in front of the French doors. She and Dean had loved eating here rather than in the more formal dining room. The table was just as she’d left it last night, set with woven place mats from Guatemala and a vase of daffodils.

“Coffee?” Quinn asked.

“No, thank you.”

“Juice?”

She almost said no, but she had to eat and drink for the baby’s sake.

“Thank you.”

He brought her cranberry juice and a plate of scrambled eggs—not fried, thank heavens—and bacon. Mindy tried not to look at the bacon.

Quinn added a plate of buttered toast to the middle of the table and jam still in its jar. He sat down across from her with his own breakfast.

When she didn’t immediately pick up her fork, he ordered, “Eat.”

She complied because she’d already decided she had to eat and because she didn’t care one way or the other. Neither spoke. She managed to finish the eggs and most of one piece of toast before she pushed her plate away. Quinn’s appetite didn’t seem much better, despite the spread he’d cooked.

“Dickerson called this morning. They’ve already made an arrest.”

From a great distance, she stared at him. “What?”

“Two punks. Nineteen and twenty-one.” He talked about a meth lab and two strung-out young men who had in an instant snuffed out Dean’s life.

“How…”

“You mean, how did they make the arrest so fast? Dean. The minute he saw a burglary in progress, he called it in. We had the license-plate number.”

She did remember them talking about that last night. It just hadn’t sunk in.

“Do you think he knew…”

A nerve jumped beside Quinn’s eye. “Things like that happen fast. He probably saw that they were young, got out of his pickup to confront them, and one of them pulled a gun.”

She nodded, wanting to believe he was right, that it had happened so quickly Dean hadn’t had time for fear. She hoped he’d died instantly.

“His body…” Again, Mindy hardly knew what she was asking. Where his body was, she supposed, and what she was supposed to do to plan a funeral.

Quinn understood. “They’re doing an autopsy today, and then I imagine his body will be released.” He suggested a funeral home and they talked about when and where to hold the funeral. It was as if they were planning a bake sale, concentrating on details so they didn’t have to think about what the occasion was really for: lowering Dean’s body into a grave.

“Do you have people you need to call?” he finally asked.

“Yes, I suppose… His friends…”

He raised his brows. “I’ll let them know.”

Mindy felt a twinge of resentment at his sense of entitlement but then felt guilty. Quinn was surely grieving as much as she was.

She nodded and stood, picking up her plate. “I think I might lie down again.”

Was she imagining the disdain in his eyes?

“It’s ten-thirty.”

She stopped in the middle of the kitchen. “So?”

“There are arrangements to be made.”

“Dean…” She swallowed. “Dean hasn’t been dead twelve hours. Arrangements can wait.” She continued to the sink, set her plate down hard enough it clunked and kept walking. Out of the kitchen, to the bathroom—barely pregnant, and already she had to pee incessantly—and then back to the guest bedroom, where she climbed in and curled into a fetal position on her side.

The pillow was almost flat where her head had been when she’d awakened this morning. The sheets felt cold again and smelled faintly of fabric softener. She’d washed them just a couple of weeks ago, after Quinn had stayed over. As she’d always done when Quinn was around, that evening Mindy had tried hard to be friendly but finally made excuses and went upstairs to watch a video and then read in bed, leaving the men to their beer and basketball. She would hear shouts of laughter once she left them, and an easiness to their voices they didn’t have when she was present. Had Dean been aware how strained the relationship was between his best friend and his wife? He had to have noticed something, but he’d never said a word to her beyond, a few times, trying to explain Quinn.

“He had a rough childhood.”

“Any rougher than yours?” she remembered asking, a hint of tartness in her tone. “You grew up in a foster home, too.”

“Yes, but before that I knew my mother loved me.” Dean had frowned, his usually laughing face serious. “I trusted her. Quinn never had anyone he could trust.”

He hadn’t wanted to tell her too much, and Mindy did understand. Quinn was a very private man, and would probably hate to find out Dean had said even as much as he had.

“Get Quinn to tell you someday,” Dean suggested.

He couldn’t have realized the disdain Quinn felt for her, or he wouldn’t say something so ludicrous. But he had felt the tension; she’d sensed he was working extra hard to keep conversation light and flowing when Quinn was over.

She really should make some calls, Mindy thought drearily. Quinn must hate feeling obligated to stay even this long. If she had a friend coming over, he could leave in good conscience.

But it wasn’t as if she’d asked him to stay. He could go home any time he wanted. She wished he would go.

Mindy felt a pang of guilt, because the truth was she’d been grateful last night that he was staying. She’d even been grateful that he had come with Sergeant Dickerson to give her the news. It had been possible to cry on him because she knew that, in his own way, he loved Dean, too.

Perhaps he would just leave, now that he’d realized she was done weeping on his shoulder. If she closed her eyes, and shut out the world, perhaps when she awakened the next time, he’d be gone. And she could cry again, and drift through the empty house, and try to imagine life in it without Dean.

WHY WAS HE SURPRISED that she left the dirty work to him?

Quinn drove home that afternoon to collect some clean clothes and toiletries, phoned in to clear a couple of days from work, then went back to Dean’s house to do jobs that should have belonged to Dean’s widow.

Sitting at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, he called the funeral home, then flipped open Dean’s address book. Starting with the As, he methodically worked his way through, leaving messages some of the time, speaking to a few people.

Yes, it was a terrible tragedy. Dean’s wife was prostrate. The funeral would probably be Saturday; they would notify everybody once they knew for sure.

Quinn hesitated when he flipped the page to the names that began with G and H. He’d have to call the Howies. Dean had stayed in closer touch with them than he had. They’d been at Dean’s wedding, of course, but otherwise it had been…oh, hell, two or three years since Quinn had called them. They always sounded so damn grateful, his guilt would rev up another gear.

He almost skipped them now, put off contacting them until later, but wouldn’t let himself. He had plenty of flaws, but cowardice wasn’t one of them.

“Nancy?” he said, when a woman answered the phone.

“Yes?” His foster mother’s voice had acquired a fine tremor. She must be—he had to calculate—in her seventies.

“It’s Quinn. Brendan Quinn.”

“Oh, my goodness! Brendan?” Her voice became muffled. “George, it’s Brendan on the phone!” She came back. “How nice to hear from you. My goodness, it’s been a while.”

“I know it has. I’m sorry. Time seems to race by.” He despised himself for the weak excuse.

She’d always let him off the hook too easily. “Oh, it’s just nice to hear your voice now.”

“Nancy, I’m afraid the reason for my call isn’t good.” He drew a deep breath. “Dean’s dead.”

The silence was achingly long.

“Dead?”

“He was shot last night. On the job.” As if to quiet her moan of grief, he kept talking, told her about the circumstances, the arrest, that he was at Dean’s house right now.

“Oh, his poor wife!”

Even as he said the right things—Mindy was resting, in shock—Quinn felt anger again. She and Dean hadn’t known each other that long. Dean had had girlfriends who’d lasted longer than he’d known Mindy. In fact, Quinn was going to have to call one of them, who had stayed friends with Dean. But Mindy was the wife, and therefore assumed to be the person who would be most devastated by his death.

Knowing damn well he was being petty, Quinn still couldn’t stamp down that spark of something that was a hell of a lot closer to jealousy than he liked to admit.

Nancy handed off the phone to George, who asked for the details again. Quinn told him when the funeral was tentatively set for and promised to call again when plans were firm.

“Now, you take care of Mindy,” George ordered.

After hanging up, Quinn stood to pour himself another cup of coffee. The Howies had sounded as if they’d lost a son. Had they really cared that much? Dean, of course, had been easier to love; despite his often expressed faith that his mother would be coming for him any day, he had craved closeness in a way Quinn hadn’t. Quinn had never known whether he was just a paycheck from the state, an obligation they punctiliously fulfilled, or something more. They’d respected his reserve, his pride, and saved the hugs for Dean.

Shaking his head, Quinn took a long swallow of coffee and reached for the address book again.

He was hoarse by the time he reached Smith and Smithers. Dean had had a lot of friends.

Unlike Quinn, who had never had that talent. Didn’t even want it. He didn’t much like crowds and therefore avoided parties. He hated small talk and polite insincerity. Sometimes realized he just didn’t know how to make friends.

God. Pain rose in a shattering wave, like the agony when a bullet had splintered his shoulder blade. He’d just dialed a number but had to hit End and put the phone down.

Twice now in not much over a year he’d had to face how badly he needed his one close friend. The only person who knew his secrets, his weaknesses, his history. Having to watch Dean marry someone who was so wrong for him had been bad enough.

But Quinn hadn’t felt this swirling void of loneliness since he’d answered the door to find policemen on the doorstep, there to tell him his mother was dead. Maybe it had been there inside him the whole time, but he’d closed it off. Built a floor, firmly nailed down, to seal off a dank, dark basement that seemed to be occupied with rats that scurried out of sight when he looked but watched with blood-red eyes and the glint of sharp teeth when he half turned away.

He let out a rough, humorless laugh. What an idiotic image! Okay, damn it, he didn’t let himself dwell on his occasional loneliness, sometimes wished he had Dean’s gift for closeness with other people. But rats! Poor me, he mocked himself.

What he was feeling was the grief of losing family. For most people, there must be a moment when they realized that the last person who’d known them when they were young was gone. When parents died, or a sister or brother. For Quinn, Dean was that person. Like anyone else, he’d deal with the loss.

Mindy reappeared at five o’clock. She looked like hell, he thought critically, seeing her hover in the kitchen door, her vague gaze touching on microwave, refrigerator, table, as if she’d never seen any of them before.

She was pretty, he’d give Dean that. She always had had an air of fragility, accentuated now. Maybe five feet four or five inches tall, Mindy was incredibly fine-boned. She kept her golden blond hair chopped short in a sort of unkempt Meg Ryan style that somehow suited the long oval of her face and her huge gray-green eyes.

The first time Quinn saw her, she’d worn tight jeans cut so low, he’d raised his eyebrows. A smooth, pale stomach had been decorated with a gold belly-button ring. Her baby T had been tight enough for him to see that she wasn’t wearing a bra, and that her breasts were small, high and nicely formed. Dean had leaned close to say something that made her giggle. Not laugh, like a grown woman, but giggle.

According to Dean, she was twenty-five. Twenty-six now; Quinn had had no choice but to attend the party Dean had thrown for her birthday, during which she’d clapped her hands with delight, danced with such abandon she’d kept whacking people, and almost cried when she’d failed to blow out all the candles.

“Oh!” she’d cried. “I won’t get my wish!”

Dean had blown out the last two, then wrapped a comforting arm around her slender shoulders. “Sometimes you need help to get a wish.”

Her absurdly long lashes had fluttered quickly, as if she had to blink away tears, and then she’d flung herself against him and kissed him passionately. The crowd whistled and applauded.

Except for the passionate part, Quinn had felt as if he were at a birthday party for a friend’s sixteen-year-old daughter. He’d wondered what she and Dean had to talk about. She was an artist, Dean had always said proudly, but the only product of her artistry Quinn had ever seen was the hand-painted Welcome sign that hung over their front door. It was pretty. Michelangelo, she wasn’t.

He hadn’t thought much of it when Dean had first started dating her. She’d seemed young and flighty, but she was legal and willing. Some people enjoyed having yappy miniature poodles, too. Not his choice, though.

But marriage? He was still shaking his head.

At the moment, half her hair was spiky, the other half flattened from the pillow. Her face was puffy, her eyes bloodshot, her slender figure hidden inside a thick terry-cloth robe that was bright turquoise decorated with red and gold stars. Barefoot, she shuffled toward the refrigerator as if she were an old lady.

“Hungry?” he asked.

Her gaze swung toward him as if she hadn’t noticed he was there. It registered his presence without interest.

“Um,” she mumbled.

“I can cook or order something. Pizza?”

She shuddered.

“How about Chinese?”

Her response was slow, as if neural synapses weren’t firing at normal speed. “Okay,” she finally agreed.

She did manage to pour herself some juice while he called. When she carried it to the table and sat down, she said, “You’re still here.”

“I didn’t want to leave you alone. Since you never got around to calling your mother or a friend.” Quinn shrugged.

“I don’t want anybody right now.”

He tried to hide his exasperation. “Then you’re stuck with me.”

She was quiet for several minutes. Then, like a puzzled child, she asked, “Why don’t you like me?”

Because you’re silly, not too bright and self-centered. Because sooner or later, you were going to get tired of Dean and break his heart.

Quinn didn’t say a word of what he thought. Instead, he snorted. “What makes you think I don’t like you?”

Okay, maybe the not-too-bright part wasn’t true. She looked at him with knowing, sad eyes.

He found himself amending. “It’s not that I don’t like you.”

She kept waiting. Or maybe she had lost interest in any answer and was just staring into space he happened to occupy.

“I didn’t think you and Dean were a good match.”

Anger flared in her voice. “And you were the expert…why?”

“I knew Dean a hell of a lot better than you did!”

“And me not at all.”

His jaws knotted. “That might be because you were too busy giggling and flirting with Dean to hold a rational conversation.”

“I didn’t know I was required to present my credentials to you.”

They glared at each other.

Then, as quickly as their petty argument began, it ended. Her face crumpled. Her voice drifted. “Oh, what difference does it make?”

After a moment of struggle, she regained control, sipped juice and went back to glancing vaguely around the kitchen. Eventually, her gaze reached the address book and phone at his elbow.

“Have you already called some of Dean’s friends?”

“I called everybody.”

“Everybody?” Her gaze lifted to his face. “Shouldn’t I have done that?”

“You didn’t seem up to it.”

She was starting to look mad again. “You mean, I wasn’t willing to do it today, before Dean’s body is even cold.”

“Did you want his friends to find out he was dead from the six o’clock news?”

“No.” Emotions waged war on her face. “Will it be…”

“On the news? Damn straight. He was a cop.”

“Not anymore.”

“As far as we’re concerned, he was one of us. Reporters will see it the same.”

“You could have said…”

Sharper than he had meant to be, Quinn said, “Murder makes the news. I didn’t know I had to tell you that.”

Resentment smoldered in her eyes and made her lips pouty. She even looked childish.

“I read The Times. I don’t watch much TV. And following local murders is not my hobby.”

Which part of The Seattle Times did she read? he wondered uncharitably. The comics?

“Dean’s murder will be in the morning papers, too. I thought the news would better come from one of us.”

“So you just took over.”

A headache began to bore into his skull. “I took over when you decided to spend the day napping.”

She rose to her feet, looking anguished, furious and completely grown-up. “When I spent the day grieving! Instead of worrying about whether somebody Dean played golf with once in a while found out in the first twenty-four hours that he was dead!”

The doorbell rang.

Quinn shook his head and went to answer it. He half expected that by the time he got back to the kitchen, she’d have retreated to the bedroom. Instead, she stood at one of the French doors looking out, her back to Quinn.

Quinn wondered, though, how much she could see through her own reflection in the glass. Maybe nothing; maybe she was studying her own haunted face.

“Dinner,” he said, lifting the sacks.

“I did love him, you know.”

Pain squeezed his chest, roughened his voice. “I know.”

He hadn’t been sure, not when Dean was alive. Now, he was beginning to believe she did.

“Just so you believe that much.” Sounding incredibly weary, she turned from the view of the garden and came to the table.

He got plates and silverware and dished up. She waited docilely, her head bent as if she found the weave of the place mat fascinating. He wondered if even the slight effort of spooning moo goo gai pan and kung pao beef onto her plate would have stopped her from eating. But once he put food in front of her, she picked up her fork and took a bite.

Like this morning, neither of them ate much. But they tried. When she pushed her half-empty plate away, he did the same.

“Why,” he said, trying to understand, “won’t you call your mother?”

She gave a seemingly indifferent shrug. “We’re not that close.”

“Doesn’t she live around here?”

“Issaquah.”

Fifteen, twenty minutes away.

Mindy stood. “Excuse me. I have to…” She fled.

Staring after her, Quinn wondered what he’d said wrong. Or did she just hate Issaquah, the mecca of up-scale shopping with the chic shops that made up Gilman Village? Mama, he concluded, must have money to live in Issaquah. Somehow that didn’t surprise him. He added spoiled to Mindy’s list of sins.

He turned on KOMO news and watched as the camera panned “the storage business where in the early hours of this morning a former Seattle Police detective was struck down, allegedly by two young men trying to steal this travel trailer.” The camera focused on the white pickup truck with Fenton Security emblazoned on the door, then zoomed in on the Fleetwood. When Quinn was gravely told that “a source informs us that the young men may have been manufacturing methamphetamine in this trailer,” he used the remote to turn the damn TV off.

Quinn’s stomach roiled. Too vividly he saw Dean’s body sprawled on the pavement, the blood in his mouth, the glazed eyes. Why had Dean decided to confront the two punks? Why in hell hadn’t he waited for the cops?

Quinn’s fist hit the table so hard the dishes jumped and a shockwave of pain ran up his arm.

He heard a small sound and looked up through the blur of tears to see Mindy staring at him from the doorway. He knew what he must look like, his lips drawn back from his teeth in an agony of anger and grief.

After a moment, she turned and left him to mourn alone.

Quinn let out a harsh sound. The two people who Dean had loved most couldn’t stand each other. Pretty goddamn sad.

CHAPTER THREE

ON A SUNNY MAY DAY, hundreds watched Dean Fenton be laid to rest at the cemetery. Endless tears rolled down Mindy’s face. Struggling with grief that balled in his throat like a jawbreaker that was trying to choke him, Quinn remained rigidly conscious of his dignity. Mindy, apparently, didn’t care.

She looked inappropriate for her role as grieving widow to begin with. With a suspicion she’d have nothing to wear, Quinn had suggested a couple of times over the week that she go shopping or order something online. She’d ignored him, of course, and now wore—well, he guessed it was a business suit for a twenty-something, which meant the skirt hugged her butt and left a long expanse of leg bare while the jacket was form-fitting over what seemed to be a camisole, the lace showing at the V. It wasn’t even black, but rather white. Call him old-fashioned, but in his opinion a widow shouldn’t go to her husband’s graveside wearing clothes that advertised her body.

Naturally, she hadn’t thought ahead enough to bring tissues, and had turned to him with wide-eyed desperation earlier at the church when tears and snot had begun to run down her face. Wasn’t that a mother’s job? he’d wondered, but he could already see that she was right: she and her mother weren’t close.

Mom had shown up today, he had to give her that, but had seemed annoyed at the necessity of missing a luncheon for some club she belonged to. From the minute she’d arrived, Mindy looked sulky and even younger than usual.

The Howies were here, too, of course, Nancy looking much as she had at the wedding except for the sadness on her sweet, soft face, and for the tremor that affected not just her voice but her hands. Every time Quinn looked at her, she held them clasped together, as if one could control the other. Parkinson’s?

George, in contrast, seemed to have aged ten years in one. A thick head of graying hair had turned white and fine, a dandelion puff instead of strong sod. His shoulders stooped, and his knuckles had become gnarled. Quinn had felt the difference, when they’d gripped hands in greeting and grief.

Now the first clod of dirt was flung atop the casket. Quinn shuddered and felt Mindy do the same beside him. A cry escaped her lips. He laid a hand on her back and she gave him one wild look before turning back to the raw earth and shining cobalt-blue casket. Her mother had somehow managed to be standing on the other side of Sergeant Dickerson, who had been heavily paternal in response to her dabbing a tissue at the corner of her eye.

As the crowd broke up, she turned immediately and took in her daughter’s ravaged face. Her own froze. Laying a hand on Dickerson’s massive arm, she turned toward the parking lot without waiting for Mindy. The Howies hesitated, then started on their own toward the cars.

Quinn had no objection to hanging back, although he frowned at the few scattered rhododendrons rather than letting himself look again into the hole.

Finally Mindy let out a deep sigh and turned in a confused way as if unsure where to go. He took her elbow, pointed her in the right direction, and they followed the stream of mourners returning to their cars. Unfortunately, they still had to face the reception to be held in a hall at the church, where everyone would want to say a few words.

She lurched and almost went down. Quinn’s grip saved her. He hoisted her upright.

“I’m sorry! My ankle turned.”

He looked down at her spiky white heels.

“You could have worn flat shoes.”

“These are the only white ones I have,” she said, as if that was any kind of answer.

“Black is traditional, you know.”

“But Dean hated black. Didn’t you know that?”

In fact Quinn, who wore black much of the time, hadn’t known that. The minute she pointed it out, though, he realized Dean had tended to wear bright colors and chinos rather than dark slacks.

“He…” Her voice faltered. “He’d have rather seen me in white than black.”

All right. So she meant well. Her appearance still wouldn’t play well with the older cops and much of the viewing public, who—thanks to the ever-present news cameras—would see a sprite who appeared to dress out of the Victoria’s Secret catalog weeping at graveside and flashing a hell of a lot of leg on tonight’s local news.

But he forbore to tell her that.

“You want to go by the house so you can, uh, touch up your makeup before we go back to the church?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care.” She paused. “I suppose.”

While he waited in the living room, she disappeared for about two minutes. When she came back, her face was still puffy but clean, and she’d renewed her mascara.

“I’m ready.”

He nodded and they let themselves out the front door. She sat in silence beside him as he drove. Not until they pulled into the parking lot did she let out a broken sigh.

“Dean would have liked an Irish wake. A celebration, not…”

She didn’t have to finish. He knew what she meant. Not a lament, a ceremony to share regrets.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Maybe when we’re ready.”

They exchanged a rare glance of accord before getting out of the car, standing side by side looking at the open door to the hall, and—in his case, at least—gathering composure.

Her ankle turned in those damn silly shoes on the steps leading down to the daylight basement reception rooms. Once again, he grabbed her in the nick of time. Shaking his head, he led her in a meandering route among the mourners so she could accept their condolences. Her tears returned within minutes and the mascara began to run again.

Half the Seattle police force was here, of course, but also plenty of people Quinn either didn’t know or had a feeling he’d met once or twice. Dean had had a lot of friends. Maybe some of them were casual golf buddies, but they’d cared enough to show up at his funeral, decked in dark suits and ties, on a sunny Saturday perfect for golfing.

“You’re Quinn?” some of them said, shaking his hand. “He talked about you. Said he hoped you’d end up his partner in the security business someday.”

Despite the spasm of pain he felt every time he thought of Dean, Quinn managed a crooked smile. “He knew I’d never quit the force, but he was too stubborn to take no for an answer.”

One of them grinned. “Yeah, hell, he made us play thirty-six holes one day last September even though it was eighty-six degrees, because he couldn’t get a handle on his slice and he was too damn stubborn to quit.” The grin faded as the friend remembered he’d never watch Dean Fenton take a swing with his three wood again. “He bought us a round afterward.”

Quinn made time to talk to the Howies, who reminded him about some of Dean’s more outlandish exploits when he was their foster son, then hugged Mindy, asked Quinn not to be a stranger and left. Frowning, he watched them go, George stooped like an old man and Nancy with the shakes she’d told him with one stern glance not to mention. Not today.

Mindy, Quinn realized reluctantly, wasn’t the only obligation he’d just inherited. Dean had been, for all practical purposes, the Howies’ son, the one who remembered their fiftieth wedding anniversary and sent them for a weekend to the Empress in Victoria, the one who called unexpectedly, who made sure they were all right. He hadn’t mentioned Nancy’s tremors, maybe because he hadn’t thought Quinn would care.

But, damn it, he did care, whether he wanted to or not. The thought made him uncomfortable. An obligation. That’s all he had to think of them as. Dean would expect him to step in.

With no booze being served, the crowd trickled away fairly fast. Mindy, Quinn saw, looked skim-milk pale and on the verge of collapse as she thanked people for coming. He looked around for her mother but didn’t spot her.

At Mindy’s side, he said, “I think we can leave now.”

“Really?” Her gaze went past him and she gave a shaky smile at someone behind him. “Thank you so much for coming today.”

The couple, who looked vaguely familiar to Quinn, said a few kind words about Dean and left.

“Where’s your mother?”

“Gone.” Again she looked past him, and her eyes filled with tears. “Selene! Oh, I’m so glad you’re here.”

Selene wore a sleeveless white sweater and a flowery skirt that swirled to her calves. Her wild dark curls were barely subdued by a barrette. He made a private bet that she was a college student.

After the two women hugged, Mindy turned to him. “Quinn, this is my best friend, Selene Thomas. She’s a grad student at the UW.”

He nodded and said by rote, “Thanks for coming today.”

Big dark eyes filled with tears. “Dean was such a sweetie.”

The two hugged and commiserated some more while Quinn shifted from foot to foot. He just wanted to get the hell out of here. Maybe take a run, or go to the gym. He wanted to work himself into mindless exhaustion. Maybe then he’d sleep tonight.

“Selene is going to stay with me tonight,” Mindy told him. “So you’re off duty.”

He felt a lurch of profound relief.

“We can talk all night,” her friend promised.

Personally, Quinn thought what Mindy needed was to sleep. She was looking frailer by the day, to the point where he’d had to set aside his cynicism. She wasn’t eating enough to keep a bird alive, and judging from the dark circles under her eyes wasn’t sleeping either. She seemed unable to think about practicalities.

Dean’s will had left everything to her except a few mementos to Quinn. She’d wept and refused to worry about where a safe-deposit key might be or whether bills might be coming due. Quinn had made himself keep his mouth shut. So far. It had only been a week. She hadn’t buried her husband yet. Even a nitwit like she was would start thinking about money and groceries and hiring a lawn service soon.

He hoped.

“Off duty?” Selene echoed, blinking at him.

“Quinn’s been making me eat and mowing the lawn and returning phone calls.” Mindy’s huge, smudged eyes met his. “He doesn’t think I’m capable of taking care of myself.”

He knew she wasn’t capable of taking care of herself. He was hoping like hell that the state was temporary. Being the long-term guardian of a twenty-six-year-old adolescent wasn’t his idea of a good time. Damn it, Dean, he asked for the thousandth time, why her?

“You want to prove you can,” Quinn suggested, “why don’t you start eating more than a few bites at a time?”

“Because…” Color touched her cheeks and her gaze slid from his. “Because I can’t eat when I’m upset.”

Quinn’s eyes narrowed. That wasn’t what she’d intended to say. He’d have liked to know what she’d been unwarily about to admit. But he only nodded and asked Selene if she had a car.

Well, no; she’d ridden the bus.

“I’ll drive you two home. If,” he added with courtesy to Mindy, “you’re ready?”

She sniffed and nodded.

Selene chattered during the drive. What a nice ceremony. Everybody really liked Dean, didn’t they? The house must seem so big without him!

At the last, tears began to roll down Mindy’s face. Again. Quinn glared at the rearview mirror, but her friend was oblivious.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

Mindy swallowed hard. In a watery voice, she said, “I don’t know. I haven’t thought… Not yet…”

Quinn pulled into the driveway. “Shall I come in?” Please, no, he begged.

Mindy shook her head and gave him a shaky smile. “We’ll be fine. Thank you, Quinn.” To his surprise, she reached out and squeezed his hand. “I mean it.” Then she got out to join her friend on the sidewalk.

“Nice to meet you!” Selene called, as he waved and put the car into reverse.

He flexed his fingers. Mindy didn’t touch him if she could help it. He didn’t touch her, except recently when it was obvious somebody had to steer her to where she was supposed to be. They’d never been comfortable with each other. He’d seen that she was physically demonstrative with everyone else—with her youthful gaiety, she hugged, kissed, danced and even sat on laps without the slightest inhibition. He guessed he’d killed her spontaneity toward him the first time they met. Except for falling into his arms to sob the night he came to deliver the news, this was the first time she’d voluntarily touched him.

His mouth twisted into a sour smile. He must have looked good in comparison with her charming mother.

Quinn grabbed his gym bag and went to the health club. After changing into his usual gray T-shirt and old sweatpants, he snagged a basketball and went into the gym. Late afternoon on a Saturday, it was completely empty. He dribbled the ball, each bounce echoing sharply. Instead of the sound annoying him, he liked it. It seemed to accentuate his solitude.

He warmed up with a few easy layups, then free throws, finally challenging himself with tougher and tougher shots, driving to the basket, spinning, shooting backward, shooting from damn near halfway down the court, from the corners. When he’d worked up a sweat, he dropped the basketball back in the bin and went to the weight room. He wasn’t quite alone here, but the few men who’d claimed a machine or a bench were preoccupied with their own rhythms.

When Quinn’s muscles began to groan, he moved on to a treadmill, setting the timer for half an hour. By fifteen minutes, he was wearing down. He’d been too inactive this week, spent too much time holding the pitiful widow’s hand, figuratively rather than literally, of course.

His shirt was soaked by the time he finished, his legs as shaky as a newborn colt’s. He wiped his face on a towel and went back to the gym to shoot some more baskets anyway, testing his control, his discipline, satisfied only when the ball dropped neatly through the hoop without ruffling the net.

Finally, he showered, changed into swim trunks and dived into the pool. The cool water closed over him, sliding across his skin, insulating him for a few brief moments from the world. By the time he showered again, got dressed and slung his gym bag over his shoulder, he felt almost like himself.

FOR THE ONE DAY, Mindy had actually liked Quinn. He’d been her rock. A silent chauffeur, a hand when she needed one, a steady gaze to help her ground herself. For all his composure, she’d felt the magma beneath, the hot, unsettling grief that matched her own, and she was grateful for that as well. Dean had been liked by many, but loved, she suspected, by only a few. The Howies, Quinn and her.

Her gratitude and warmth of feeling didn’t last through the next day, never mind the next week.

He wanted her to call people, to do whatever it was the attorney needed to start probate. He wanted her to make decisions.

“What are you going to do about the business? Mindy, Mulligan says he’s left several messages and you haven’t called him back.”

She’d spent the morning puking her guts up and had barely had time to force down a piece of dry toast and some juice. “I’ll call him.”

“When?”

“What are you, my conscience?” Didn’t he ever go to work anymore?

“When people start coming to me because they can’t get answers from you, I figure a little prodding is due.”

Anger flared, along with renewed nausea. “I said I’ll call!”

He didn’t budge, just stood in front of her with his arms crossed and his expression unyielding. “And what will you say?”

“I don’t know!” she all but shouted. “Why do I have to decide now?”

“Because Fenton Security employs fourteen people and has a couple of hundred clients. The employees are waiting to find out whether they still have jobs. Without Dean, the clients are going to start dropping away. A business doesn’t run itself.”

“Mick…”

“Is a fine dispatcher. He can’t charm businessmen or handle billing. He might hire, but he’ll never fire anyone. Besides,” Quinn continued inexorably, “Dean didn’t work sixty-, seventy-hour weeks for fun. He did it because shit happened if he wasn’t around, because there are things he couldn’t delegate. And,” he paused, waiting until she defiantly met his eyes, “the business can’t afford to pay someone to do what Dean did. Mindy, you’ve got to look at the books. If you hire someone to replace Dean, you’re not going to be making a damn thing. And you’ll be trusting a stranger.”

She felt as if he were trying to stuff her into a small closet. Dark, claustrophobic, the air thick and musty. She was grabbing for the door to prevent him closing it those last inches.

“So what are you suggesting?” She heard the rasp of her breathing, as if she were asthmatic. “That I run it?”

Worse than that idea was the slight curl of his lip and the pity in his eyes. Don’t be ridiculous, he might as well have said.

“No. I’m suggesting you sell it.”

She moved restlessly. “I don’t even know how…”

“So you’re going to take another nap and refuse to think about it?” he asked with raw contempt.

“No!” Her eyes filled with tears. Yes. He was stripping her bare, finding out how utterly incapable she was and holding up a mirror so she could be sure not to miss her own inadequacies. Clasping her arms around herself, she said, “Why won’t you leave me alone?”

“Because I owe it to Dean to make sure you don’t lose everything he worked so hard for. He’d expect me to be sure you’re all right.”

“I’m not all right!”

His voice softened. “I know. But you still have to make decisions. That’s the way it is.”

So, despite her nausea and the tears that kept flooding her eyes, Mindy sat down and pored over computer printouts. What salaries and taxes and benefits cost, the expense of keeping a fleet of Fenton Security pickups prowling dark corners of the city at night. She looked at income and outgo and Labor and Industry statistics, discovered how much Dean had been involuntarily contributing to build Safeco Field and the Seahawks Stadium. She saw personnel records and realized with dismay that the average security guard didn’t stay with the company more than eight or ten months. Dean had been hiring constantly, wasting money on training, then regularly having to let shirkers go.

“How,” she whispered at last, “did he make any money?”

“By cultivating clients and by making damn sure his guards were doing their job, not spending the night sipping coffee at a diner.”

“Oh.” Exhausted, she sat back. “Will anybody want to buy the business?”

“Sure. He’s in the black. Not many small businesses are.”

“Do I advertise it?”

Quinn frowned. “No. You might scare the clients.” He paused. Hesitated, she might have said, if it had been anyone but him. “Do you want me to ask around? There are plenty of cops with the same dream Dean had.”

“Please,” she said, but without the gratitude she would have felt two hours ago. Why couldn’t he just have made this offer then?

“All right.” He squared the pile of papers. “Now, the bills—”

“No!” Despite her tiredness, Mindy shot to her feet. “Not now. Maybe tomorrow.”

With scant sympathy, he said, “They’re piling up.”

The attorney had left half a dozen messages, too, and she didn’t want to talk to him, either.

“I did what you wanted. Now, will you just go?”

“All right.” He nodded. “We’ve made a start.”

A start, she thought hysterically.

After he left, she took a nap. Then she made herself listen to phone messages. Mick had questions, the attorney had questions, several people had left condolences. A reporter from the P.I. was still hoping for comments. After deleting them all, she carried to the table the basket into which she’d been throwing correspondence. Quinn was right; the bills were piling up.

The attorney had said she could continue to write checks to pay bills and daily expenses. Okay, she thought, she could do this. She’d paid her own until she’d married Dean, so it wasn’t like she didn’t know how to write out a check for the phone bill. And it would give her enormous pleasure the next time Quinn showed up to say, Oh, I’ve already done that.

She opened a tablet of paper and decided to list what she owed first. She didn’t even know what Dean paid for.

Mindy found a bank statement first and discovered that the mortgage was an automatic deduction. An enormous one. She stared at the amount with dismay. A neighbor had sold recently, and if this house was worth about the same… There must not be very much equity, or Dean wouldn’t have been making such big payments.

After a moment she shrugged. It wasn’t as if she had a choice.

A few lines down she spotted two more deductions, both car payments. His and hers. She’d driven a beater when she’d met Dean, and he’d insisted on buying her a new car. He’d worry about her, he’d said when she’d protested. And Dean had loved the Camaro he drove, but he still owed an awful lot on it. Thinking about the car, fire-truck red, sitting in the garage made her falter and blink back more tears.

Swallowing, she made herself go on, reaching for the next envelope and neatly slitting it open with the letter opener she’d found on Dean’s desk.

This one was a MasterCard. He owed $4,569. Mindy had never even had that big a credit limit before. She wrote the amount of the debt, the creditor and the payment on the second line, after the mortgage.

The gas bill was way higher than she’d expected, too, as was the water and sewer and the Nordstrom bill and bills for two different Visa cards. He owed a whole lot of money on the boat that occupied a third of the garage. He’d loved that boat, too, a white cabin cruiser he’d renamed The Mindy after he’d met her. He loved to take friends out on the Sound. Mindy, who didn’t swim very well, hadn’t actually enjoyed going out. She’d pretended she got queasy, but the truth was that panic had flooded her from the moment water opened between the dock and the hull.

The boat, at least, was easy—she’d sell it as soon as she could.

There was enough in the checking account to pay all the bills, but not much would be left over. Especially since some of these payments were already late, and the next month’s bills would be arriving soon. Dismayed, she recalculated a couple of times. She guessed she would have to call the attorney. Dean had had investments, hadn’t he? Maybe they could sell some stock, or cash in a CD, or something.

She debated whether to write a little note on each bill saying something to the effect that Dean Fenton had died unexpectedly, that the will was in probate and she, his wife—no, widow—would be the one now paying. But wasn’t that something the executor should do? Dean’s executor, of course, was Quinn, who in that capacity had every right to nag her and maybe even override her decisions. She didn’t know.

She opened the checkbook, but didn’t write anything for a long time. Dean L. and Mindy A. Fenton, the checks all said. Only, now it would just be Mindy A. She was responsible for all those debts. Debts she hadn’t even known they owed.

With shame she realized she should have known. Would have, if she’d ever asked or expressed any interest. But she hadn’t. Dean had acted as though he loved to take care of her and give her anything she wanted, and with this house and the boat and the Camaro and his own business, he’d looked as if he could afford to. She knew he’d been a cop until not that long ago, but it just hadn’t occurred to her that he’d borrowed heavily on future success that wasn’t going to happen.

With a sinking feeling, she admitted if only to herself that some of Quinn’s contempt was justified. She’d been some kind of…trophy wife, something fun and pretty like the Camaro or the boat. Not really the partner she’d imagined, or she would have known.

The panic she felt as she wrote checks, one after another, wasn’t much different than the panic that bounced in her when the expanse of water opened between the boat that began to feel oh so tiny and the shore, shrinking to a faint smudge like a mirage.

Dean was dead, and she was pregnant, and unless—please God!—he had lots of investments, she wasn’t going to have enough money to keep up with these bills.

She had to start selling things, and soon. Quinn, she thought with a small coal of anger, suspected how things stood, or he wouldn’t have been nagging the way he had. How dared he not say anything and make it sound like it was she who’d been lax!

And Dean… How dared he keep buying and buying, throwing parties and playing golf and insisting she had to have the little BMW in the driveway, and never tell her he didn’t really have the money!

After she’d put stamps on the bills, she would mount a search for the safe-deposit key the attorney kept asking about.

She had to know where she and the small flutter of life inside her stood.

CHAPTER FOUR

ONCE HE’D GOTTEN HER to thinking about money, by God that’s all she seemed able to think about. When could he find a buyer for the security business? How did she go about selling the boat? Now the Camaro. The cherry-red Camaro Dean had coveted all his life and loved with a passion.

“What?” Quinn stared across the paper-strewn kitchen table at Dean’s widow. “You’re already planning to sell his car?” When he wasn’t even cold in his grave?

She heard the unspoken part. Her face took on that closed, stubborn look he was coming to detest even more than the frail, woe-is-me expression she’d worn for the first few weeks.

“I don’t want to drive it, and I can’t afford the payments.”

“How much are they?”

She pushed the bill across the table.

Quinn picked it up and frowned. She was right. Dean owed a whopping amount, and she really couldn’t keep up the payments.

Quinn had been spending most of his off hours either making decisions in Dean’s place for Fenton Security, mowing the lawn and doing upkeep on the house, or helping Mindy untangle her husband’s financial affairs.

Secretly, Quinn was appalled by how recklessly Dean had borrowed. Maybe he shouldn’t be—Dean always had wanted the nice things in life, and had been a bigger risk-taker than Quinn. But damn it! He’d been living on the financial edge, Quinn was discovering. Balancing fine, because his business was successful and expanding, but without a hell of a lot in the way of reserves. He’d have been in deep doo-doo if the economy had taken a downturn, for example, and a good share of his clients had gone out of business or decided they could do without security.

But Quinn wouldn’t have criticized Dean aloud to anyone, much less to the cute little blonde who’d enjoyed all of Dean’s toys as long as someone else was paying the bills.

“I’ll buy the Camaro,” he heard himself say.

“And paint it black?”

That stung. “Thanks.”

She flushed. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah, I’m serious. Dean loved that car.”

“Then…if you’ll take over the payments, it’s yours.”

He was blown away by the offer even though there was no way in hell he could take it. He’d started to think of her as greedy, but, okay, maybe she had some conscience.

“I’ll pay you.” He hesitated, then forced himself to say, “But thanks.”

Her eyes were wide and luminous. “I meant it. Dean would love to know you’d kept his car.”

“And I can afford to buy it.” He held up a hand. “No argument.”

The momentary glow on her face was extinguished, and Quinn felt like a crud.

“Okay,” she said, voice dull. “Do I really have to wait for probate to finish before I sell stuff?”

“We’ll talk to Armstrong,” Quinn promised. Surely the attorney would be reasonable. “If the bills can’t be paid, something has to go.”

Mindy nodded and said like a child, “Are we done?”

He pictured her, a tiny, scrawny kid, asking politely, “May I be excused now?”

“Bored?”

As she stood, anger flashed on her face, erasing the childlike impression. “Frustrated. I might as well go watch TV. I can’t do anything about any of that.” She waved at the piles of bills and bank statements.

With strained patience, he said, “Solutions don’t always happen instantly, just because we want them to.”

“Have I ever mentioned that you’re a jerk?” she snapped, and shoved the chair in.

He rubbed the heel of his hand against his chest, where his heartburn was acting up. “Your opinion was obvious enough, thank you.” And rich, he thought, coming from the drama queen. No, not queen—princess. Little Miss I’m Entitled.

She stomped out. Suppressing his own frustration, Quinn put away the papers in a plastic file box and left it on the table. He was almost glad when his beeper went off. A dead body would be a welcome diversion.

HE BEGAN TO WONDER if she was throwing parties every night, or maybe just attending them. Far as he could tell, she was never up before ten or eleven in the morning, and then she would look puffy-eyed, wan and repelled by any suggestion that she should make decisions. Quinn didn’t remember Dean ever commenting that she was a night owl, but then he and Dean had hardly ever talked about Mindy at all. It had been safer that way.

As far as Quinn could tell, she wasn’t job hunting, so he guessed she was planning to live on her inheritance as long as it lasted. Thus her panic about unnecessary drains on the final total.

Quinn had originally figured she’d be left a wealthy young woman, but clearly that wasn’t going to happen. Too many bills had come to light, too few investments. Still, when it all shook out, he thought she’d have a decent amount left. If she was careful, enough to get by for a couple of years without working. Pretty good deal considering she hadn’t been married that long and hadn’t had a damn thing when she’d met Dean.

Quinn recalled she’d worked as a barista at a Tully’s downtown, which was where Dean had met her. She’d apparently been making a little on the side with her “art.” She’d probably sold a few painted wood signs to friends. The talent Dean raved about hadn’t been discovered by the wider world. She’d lived with a houseful of minimum-wage friends and students near the university.

Given her background, what right did she have to be unhappy to find out she wouldn’t be wealthy? But clearly she was. She got more petulant by the day, more determined that everybody hurry, hurry, hurry so she could sell whatever wasn’t nailed down.

He’d stopped by this morning to tell her he thought he had a buyer for Fenton Security. A pair of buyers, more accurately.

Quinn was beat, after a hard night. A body had fallen from the Olive Street overpass, landing on the windshield of a semi and shattering the glass. The semi had jackknifed, resulting in one hell of a traffic snarl that had closed I-5 south for three hours. The poor schmuck who’d hit the windshield was grizzled, dirty and wearing three layers of clothes and boots with soles that must have flapped when he walked. Staggered, more likely, from the powerful odor of cheap wine that had wafted from him along with the sickly tang of blood. Turned out he was well known in the missions around the Pioneer Square area. Nobody knew his name. Said he went by Crow. Just Crow.

A witness out walking his dog late had spotted a souped-up Toyota pause on the overpass just before she was distracted by the sound of splintering glass, the squeal of brakes and the scream of metal striking concrete abutments. Weirdly, she had even remembered half the license-plate number.

“Because it’s identical to mine,” she had said. “ALN. I call my car Alan because of the license plate.” She’d looked a little embarrassed at the admission. “But the numbers were different.” Her eyes had gone unfocused, and then she’d said in triumph, “Seven hundred. It was seven hundred something. I don’t remember the rest.”

“Ms. Abbott, you’re amazing,” Quinn’s current partner had told her with a generosity that didn’t come so easily to Quinn.

Ellis Carter was bumping against retirement, which meant he could be a little slow in the rare event of a chase, but his warmth and ease with witnesses more than atoned for the potbelly and arthritic knee.

They had run the plates and—bingo!—had come up with only one blue Toyota Supra carrying license number 7—ALN. It was registered to a twenty-something scumbag who, when he’d answered his doorbell, smirked at the idea that he might have tossed a drunk from the freeway overpass just for fun. The smirk had faded when he’d heard there was a witness. The friend hovering in the background had broken and run. Getting him to babble had taken less time than cleaning up the mess on the freeway.

All Quinn wanted to do was go home and crash, but he figured he should share the good news first.

He rang the doorbell, and after a long delay, Mindy appeared, still in her bathrobe.

“Quinn.” She didn’t sound thrilled to see him on her doorstep at ten in the morning.

Face it—she probably wasn’t thrilled to see him no matter what time of day it was.

He studied her puffy, tired eyes and the dark circles beneath them. “Still not sleeping?”

Mindy let out a puff of air that was half laugh, half exasperation. “So I look like crap. Tell me something I don’t know.”

“I didn’t mean…”

“It doesn’t matter.” She could go from animation to lifeless quicker than most of the residents of Seattle who actually died. “Did you need to talk to me about something?”

“Can I come in?”

“I suppose.” Still in zombie mode, she stepped back. Looking at the floor, she waited, seemingly unaware that her robe gaped open exposing…

God. Was that one of Dean’s T-shirts? Yeah, Quinn decided, it was. She’d taken to sleeping in her dead husband’s shirts. And boxer shorts that he hoped like hell weren’t Dean’s. He caught a glimpse of those long, long legs and of her bare feet. Those he’d seen before, as she went barefoot most of the time at home and conceded to necessity by wearing flip-flops when she went out except in the direst weather. She used to paint her toenails, though. Not just pink or red. He’d made a habit of glancing at her feet just to see what she’d done now. Sometimes her nails were turquoise, or silver glitter, or had tiny flowers or eyes of Osiris or peace signs painted on crayon-bright backgrounds.

Now, he saw a chip or two of red clinging to the cuticles, but she must not have touched them since… He stopped there. Since before.

Still in the entryway, he faced her. “I might have found someone to buy the business.”

“Really?” Accentuated by the smudges beneath them, her eyes looked more gray than green when she lifted her gaze to his face.

“You know Lance Worden? Scarecrow?”

Her face cleared at the nickname and she nodded.

“He and a buddy of his were looking to start a security company in south King County. Didn’t want to compete with Dean, and Scarecrow—Worden—thought with Federal Way and that area growing it would be good territory. But depending on price he’d be interested in Fenton Security instead.”

“Would he keep the name?”

“We didn’t get that far,” Quinn said with scant patience. He’d expected her to be pleased, maybe even excited, and instead she was worrying about something meaningless.

Maybe he should share her regret at the loss of one more piece of Dean’s identity, but honest to God he was getting tired of answering the phone five times a day to answer questions for Mulligan, who in the absence of Dean had lost any ability he’d ever had to be decisive.

“Oh.” Mindy’s mouth twisted. “It’s just…Dean was so proud of the company. Sometimes he’d wash one of the trucks here, in the driveway, you know, and I’d see him stop when he was drying it and give a few extra rubs to the logo. Sort of polishing it.”

Oh, damn. Quinn had seen Dean do that, too.

More harshly than he’d intended, he said, “There’s no more Fenton.”

Her chin came up. “I’m a Fenton.”

The idea was jarring. “You’re going to keep the name?”

She was pissed off now. “Of course I’m going to keep the name! Dean and I didn’t get a divorce!”

“I didn’t mean…”

“What did you mean?”

He had no idea. “Just…you haven’t been Mindy Fenton that long. The name must still feel strange to you. I thought…”

Her eyes narrowed. “I’d want to ditch any memory of Dean as quickly as possible.”

As so often happened around her, a band of pain began to tighten around his skull. “Can we not argue?”

“Fine.” She turned her back on him and stalked toward the kitchen.

Quinn followed.

Mindy poured herself some juice and didn’t offer him anything. She carried it to the table and sat without inviting him to join her, either.

“So I just need to come up with a price?”

Leaning against the breakfast bar, Quinn reminded her, “Probate…”

“Oh, God.”

“We might be able to come up with an agreement that makes it a done deal except for the formality of the sale closing,” he suggested. “So Scarecrow and his partner could take over the business as soon as possible, even if we can’t tie the bow until Armstrong says it’s okay.”

“But I wouldn’t get the money until then?”

“Maybe not.” He frowned. “Probably not.”

Her eyes got misty. God almighty. She was going to cry over a check being delayed for a few months.

“You’re not that broke, are you?” he asked.

“No. No, I… No.” She sniffed, wiped at her eyes, and said, “Everything makes me cry. I’m sorry.” One more sniff and she squared her shoulders. “How do I set a price?”

“I’ve already done that.”

She set down her juice glass. “You’ve…what?”

“I found out there are formulas. Assets and income minus debts and costs.”

Voice tight, she said, “I don’t get any input?”

His jaw muscles spasmed. “What input would you have given?”

He apparently had a gift for infuriating her. “You don’t know any more about Fenton Security than I do! What makes you…”

“Who the hell do you think has been running it for the last month? Or didn’t you wonder why Mulligan gave up calling you?”

“Even Dean took a few days off! I thought the company could run itself for a week or two. I never gave you permi—”

“I’m the executor,” he interrupted her. “That gives me the right to put a value on assets, and to make damn sure they don’t lose value.”

She didn’t like that, but couldn’t argue. Finally she said sulkily, “Do I get to know what your formulas say Fenton Security is worth?”

He told her.

She blinked, sat in silence for a long moment, gave her head a little shake, and then said, just above a whisper, “That’s less than I thought it would be. Um…quite a lot less.”

Quinn didn’t want to be doing this. He wanted to be home, the window blinds drawn, stretched out on his bed in his shorts. A couple of aspirin would be dulling his headache and sleep would be dragging him deep.

But something like pity made him go over and pull out the chair across from Mindy.

“Yeah. It’s less than I thought it would be, too. But Dean borrowed a lot on the business. There are some big debts.”

“Oh.” She sounded and looked forlorn. “I wish…”

“What?”

“He’d told me.”

Quinn wished the same. Hadn’t Dean known how shaky the footing was, how far the plunge to the ground would be? Why hadn’t he taken success a little slower? Waited to get a boat, to expand the business, to drive the dream car?

But Quinn knew the answer. Despite the fact that his mother never did come back for him, Dean had been the eternal optimist. Hell, the eternal adolescent. “Nah,” he’d have said. “That won’t happen to me.”

But death had happened, and he hadn’t expected that, either.

Quinn tried to smile. “He enjoyed the damn boat and the car and…” His pretty wife.

Her eyes filled with tears again, even as she gave him a smile as wry as his. “He did, didn’t he?” She sniffed again. “Will you, um, negotiate for me?”

He’d already begun, but he was smart enough not to tell her that. He only nodded.

“I guess I should shower,” she said, starting to stand.

It struck him suddenly that she’d lost weight. Her pixie face had acquired some hollows that hadn’t been there before. The robe hung off one shoulder, exposing a bony protuberance on her shoulder and the most pronounced collarbone he’d ever seen.

“You’re not eating enough.”

She yanked the robe around herself. “And you know this how?”

“I haven’t seen you eat more than a few mouthfuls in…” He couldn’t remember. “You look skinnier.”

“You know, Quinn, Dean always said you didn’t have a girlfriend because you had trouble trusting anyone. I’m starting to think it’s because you’re a heck of a lot better at insults than you are at compliments.”

He’d gone rigid halfway through this speech, hating the idea of her and Dean talking about him, of Dean telling her things about him that were supposed to stay between the two of them.

Her face changed. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”

Quinn just walked out. He was hardly aware of her staring after him.

Goddamn you, Dean, he thought, and didn’t even know if he was angriest at his best friend for psychoanalyzing him for the benefit of anyone who’d listen, or for dying.

TWO WEEKS LATER, Mindy stood naked looking at herself in the full-length mirror on the closet door. She was pretty sure she was three-and-a-half months pregnant, and she could already see changes in her body.

She was skinnier, thanks in part to grief but mainly to the never-ending nausea. Morning sickness, ha! When she first got out of bed in the morning was her worst time, sure, but her stomach stayed queasy most of the day. If she actually threw up, she’d feel better for a little while—long enough to realize she was starved and to stuff her face—but then she’d just get sick again. So she barely managed crackers and celery and carrots—the clean sharp taste of raw vegetables tasted especially good—and clear soup. Juice and crackers for breakfast, chicken noodle soup for lunch, and vegetables and more crackers at intervals the rest of the day.

She’d lost almost ten pounds, which she knew couldn’t be good. But she was trying. And the morning sickness would go away soon. Please God.

Despite the weight loss, she was starting to have a little pooch below her belly button. If not for the missing ten pounds, her jeans might have been getting tight around the waist. And her breasts, too, looked fuller.

She made a face at herself. Or maybe they just looked bigger because the rest of her was so skeletal.

Brendan Quinn sure knew how to make a girl feel good.

Dean had been dead six weeks now, and she was starting to dread the very sight of Quinn. That made her feel petty, because he was doing so much for her. Most of it unasked.

Sighing, she glanced once more at her skinny, pregnant body and turned away, picking out underwear, T-shirt and jeans from the dresser.

A couple of weeks ago, she’d started sleeping up here again, in the bed she’d shared with Dean. She felt less lonely here. Sometimes she’d even pretend to herself that he was just working late, that he’d wake her when he got home and…

She gave a sad laugh. Everything nauseated her right now. Making love would not have been in the cards.

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