Melanie’s To-Do List

1 Buy the perfect house.

2 Make appointment with sperm bank at perfect time of the month.

3 Paint nursery the perfect baby-duck yellow.

4 Bring newest neighbor perfect housewarming gift.

5 Admire new neighbor’s perfect rear view.

6 Flee in horror. New neighbor is perfectly disastrous ex-husband!

7 DO NOT GIVE IN TO DANGEROUS ATTRACTION!

8 Give in to dangerous attraction.

9 Panic!

Sonny’s To-Do List

1 Forget list. Launch perfect, take-no-prisoners siege on wife and show her I’m the perfect daddy for the baby she’s always wanted!

Dear Reader,

Happy (almost) New Year! The year is indeed ending, but here at Intimate Moments it’s going out with just the kind of bang you’d expect from a line where excitement is the order of the day. Maggie Shayne continues her newest miniseries, THE OKLAHOMA ALL-GIRL BRANDS, with Brand-New Heartache. This is prodigal daughter Edie’s story. She’s home from L.A. with a stalker on her trail, and only local one-time bad boy Wade Armstrong can keep her safe. Except for her heart, which is definitely at risk in his presence.

Our wonderful FIRSTBORN SONS continuity concludes with Born Royal. This is a sheik story from Alexandra Sellers, who’s made quite a name for herself writing about desert heroes, and this book will show you why. It’s a terrific marriage-of-convenience story, and it’s also a springboard for our twelve-book ROMANCING THE CROWN continuity, which starts next month. Kylie Brant’s Hard To Resist is the next in her CHARMED AND DANGEROUS miniseries, and this steamy writer never disappoints with her tales of irresistible attraction. Honky-Tonk Cinderella is the second in Karen Templeton’s HOW TO MARRY A MONARCH miniseries, and it’s enough to make any woman want to run away and be a waitress, seeing as this waitress gets to serve a real live prince. Finish the month with Mary McBride’s newest, Baby, Baby, Baby, a “No way am I letting my ex-wife go to a sperm bank” book, and reader favorite Lorna Michaels’s first Intimate Moments novel, The Truth About Elyssa.

See you again next year!

Leslie J. Wainger

Executive Senior Editor

Baby, Baby, Baby
Mary McBride

MARY MCBRIDE

When it comes to writing romance, historical or contemporary, Mary McBride is a natural. What else would anyone expect from someone whose parents met on a blind date on Valentine’s Day, and who met her own husband—whose middle name just happens to be Valentine!—on February 14, as well?

She lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with her husband and two sons. Mary loves to hear from readers. You can write to her c/o P.O. Box 411202, Saint Louis, MO 63141, or contact her online at McBride101@aol.com.

For Pete and Mary Pancella,

who make such lovely music together

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Epilogue

Chapter 1

Melanie Sears couldn’t help but grin. Not only was it her last day at work, but her boss, the mayor, an elegant if not arrogant man who was addicted to hundred-dollar haircuts and thousand-dollar suits, was down on his pin-striped Armani knees, begging her to stay.

“I’ll be back in eighteen months, Sam.”

“Things are falling apart already.” While he whined, His Honor gestured through his office door toward the reception area. “Look how badly your surprise party turned out.”

Melanie didn’t disagree, but then, even with her own amazing organizational skills, she would have been hard-pressed to bring off the perfect celebratory combination of congratulations on a job well done, happy semi-retirement and baby shower. She knew for a fact, however, that if she had been in charge of her own party, the paper plates and napkins wouldn’t have said Bon Voyage, that she wouldn’t in a million years have served a punch whose main ingredient was Tang, and that she would never, ever, even at gun-point, have hired a mime.

“What the devil was in that punch?” Mayor Venneman stood and began to pick carpet lint from his trousers. “Motor oil?”

She told him about the powdered orange drink and then laughed as she watched his pinstripes shiver. “I’m sure it won’t happen again with Cleo in charge. I gave her a list of preferred caterers, but maybe I should make another copy, just in case.”

“Maybe you should stay.” He slumped into the big leather chair behind his desk, looking more like a petulant two-year-old than the savvy and suave politician he was. “Why do you need to take eighteen months off to have a baby? Why can’t you do what everybody else does? Work until the bitter end, then come back thin and frazzled after a three-month maternity leave with all those nasty pumps and jars and pictures of the kid? Why do you want to have a baby anyway?”

“Actually I want two,” Melanie said with a laugh. “You’re going to have to go through this again in a few more years, Sam. Better get used to it. I’ve got it all planned out.”

Planning was what Melanie did best. When she was ten years old, her mother died, entrusting her only daughter with the care and feeding of Dr. Henry Von Briggle Sears, Ph.D., poet, painter, and perfect specimen of the absentminded professor. Far from considering it a burden, Melanie thrived on making lists, scheduling appointments and seeing they were kept, even making sure that Pop turned in grades to the art history department on time each semester.

While most young girls were learning makeup tricks and fantasizing about their teen idols, Melanie was learning how to balance a checkbook and pay bills and compile lists of dependable plumbers and repairmen. Instead of developing a fondness for lipstick and costume jewelry, she grew enamored of calendars with large spaces, Rolodexes, and Post-It notes.

They’d lived in a huge, century-old, redbrick monstrosity just a few blocks from the university. Pop’s studio on the third floor was the only room where a person had to pick his way through a maze of easels and battered boxes and waist-high piles of books, where every chair was occupied whether or not someone was sitting in it, where the slightest movement might send canvasses toppling like dominoes or set off an explosion of dust motes in the air. The rest of the house was dustless and serene, thanks to Melanie, with a place for everything and everything in its proper place. Always.

“Life isn’t solely about order,” her father had told her more than once. But Melanie wasn’t so sure.

Not back then. Not now, either.

“Lighten up,” people told her.

But the one time in her thirty-one years that she’d lightened up and let go of her beloved lists had been a disaster. Love or lust, or whatever it was she felt for Sonny Randle the minute she’d laid eyes on him two years ago, had rendered her temporarily insane. She must’ve been certifiably nuts to marry him after knowing him only a few weeks. But since the divorce a year ago she was sane again, and fiercely determined to stay that way.

After Melanie left Sam Venneman whining and wringing his manicured hands in his office, she took one last look through the drawers of her desk and behind the sliding doors of her credenza in the unlikely chance that she’d overlooked something earlier in the week. The drawers were empty. Not even a lone paper clip remained. It was the same for the credenza. All the cupboards were bare.

Stashed unobtrusively in a corner were the belongings of her replacement, Cleo Pierce. The former anchorwoman for the local NBC affiliate hadn’t had to be asked twice to shelve her consulting business to take on a job that would put her in constant contact with Sam Venneman, America’s Most Eligible Mayor. Not only had Cleo eagerly signed on as the interim executive assistant, but she’d insisted on a contract that clearly specified that the position would be hers for the entire eighteen months of Melanie’s planned leave of absence.

There was no going back now, but then, Melanie had no intention of changing her mind. It was, after all, a perfect plan.

Her other position at city hall, that of director of community relations, had been more difficult to fill on a temporary basis. In fact, Sam was still interviewing candidates. The pay wasn’t all that great, hardly enough to buy aspirin for all the headaches involved when trying to please nearly two hundred neighborhood associations, each with its own agenda. Some of them needed tax abatements to entice new residents; many needed grants to fix up deteriorating playgrounds and parks; all of them, including her own Channing Square Residents Association, were pleading for higher police visibility and more foot patrols.

To that end, a little over a year ago Melanie had come up with the Cop on the Block program, which would guarantee low-cost loans to officers who agreed to live in selected high-crime areas of the city. The program was her pet project, her baby, and after she’d steamrolled it through the board of aldermen, she’d schmoozed and cajoled and nearly arm-wrestled half the bankers in town until a few of them agreed to provide the loans in return for the unbounded gratitude of city hall and unlimited luncheon invitations and photo opportunities with Sam Venneman and any national dignitaries who visited him.

Although Melanie hadn’t seen the actual paperwork, the first Cop on the Block loan had been approved just this week, so that had been part of the celebration at her surprise party this afternoon in addition to her leave of absence and imminent motherhood.

Speaking of which, she told herself, she should probably get out of here before one more person asked when the baby was due and then stood counting fingers and looking perplexed when she answered early next January, a full nine months away, or before Claude Davis of the parks department came up with another joke about sperm banks.

Melanie took one last glance around her office. It looked so aimless without her planner open on the desk and so bleak without her collection of Pop’s watercolors on the walls. There were only rectangular outlines now to show where they had hung. She hoped Cleo wouldn’t paint the walls some horrible shade of green or make any permanent changes that would surely drive her crazy when she returned next September.

Most of all, she hoped things didn’t go completely to hell in a handbasket the minute she left city hall.

Well, maybe just a little.

It was nice to be appreciated.

On the way to her car, as always, Melanie slowed her pace to admire the flower beds that surrounded city hall. Since it was April, the grounds were awash in tulips—stately red ones, so perfect they almost looked fake, and smaller yellow ones with waxy leaves and frilly petals. In a few months they’d be replaced by a profusion of daisies and purple salvia. Come autumn, the old limestone building would look gorgeous as it rose from beds of bronze chrysanthemums. Claude Davis of the parks department might have told lousy jokes about sperm banks, but he was a hell of a planner when it came to gardens. Maybe she’d call him next week to give her some ideas for the little space she wanted to plant in her backyard now that she’d have ample time to tend it.

She was pulling her little planner from her handbag to make a note to herself about Claude when she heard the clack of high heels on the sidewalk just behind her and turned to see Peg Harrel, the mayor’s longtime secretary, rushing to catch up.

“Are you really sure this is what you want to do, Melanie?” Peg bent her platinum-colored, pixie-haircut head to light what was probably the first cigarette she’d had since her lunch break at noon. “Single parenthood isn’t any bed of roses, you know. It’s a bummer, actually. My kids would be the first to tell you.”

“I’m really, really sure, Peg.” If she’d said it once, she’d said it a million times lately. Maybe she shouldn’t have been so honest and forthcoming about her plan to get pregnant, but she was so thrilled about this baby and had wanted to share the news with everyone at city hall if not the entire city.

Melanie closed her planner with a little thump and continued in the direction of the parking lot with Peg smoking up a storm at her side. “The party was fun, Peg. Thanks for putting it together. I never suspected a thing.”

“I’ll bet you did.”

“No. Not for a second. Honest,” Melanie lied.

“What did you think of the mime?” The woman nudged her arm. “Wasn’t he a riot?”

Melanie nodded politely although she thought cloying would have been a better description. She wondered vaguely if the world was divided into people who enjoyed mimes and people who ran the other way—screaming—when they saw one coming.

A few yards from her spiffy little yellow Miata, soon to be traded in on a sensible minivan, Melanie reached into her bag for her keys and then sighed. “Leaving isn’t going to be quite as easy at I thought it would be. I’ll really miss everybody. Plus, I’m not used to not working.”

“Oh, you’ll be working, kiddo.” Peg laughed and rolled her eyes. “Trust me. You’ll be working. You just won’t be getting paid for it.”

“Well, that’s true, I guess.”

“You’ll be working twenty times harder than you ever did here. So, when’s the big day?”

“Monday. My appointment is at eleven, so by noon I ought to be one slightly and happily pregnant lady.”

“No kidding. Does it always work the first time?”

“It will with me,” Melanie said, her voice infused with every bit of the confidence she felt. Even though her OB-GYN had cautioned her that three, sometimes four artificial inseminations were the norm before a pregnancy “took,” she was positive that Monday would be her day and that her baby’s birthday would be in the first week of January. It was just too perfectly planned to go wrong.

Peg wrapped her cigarette-free arm around Melanie’s shoulders and gave her a hug. “Well, good luck, kiddo. We’ll try to hold it together while you’re gone. Keep us posted.”

“I will. Thanks again, Peg.”

The woman started to walk away, then stopped. “Oh, with all of the excitement of the party, I almost forgot to tell you. You know that cop who was shot last week? The one who got blown through the plate-glass window?”

“What about him?” As she asked, she could feel that tiny fault line in her heart begin to quiver the way it always did whenever she heard the words “cop” and “shot” in the same sentence.

In this particular case, the officer had been hit during a raid on a crack house in the Bienville neighborhood, one of the highest crime areas in the city. He’d been wearing a bulletproof vest, thank God, but the direct hit had still managed to propel him backward ten or fifteen feet, through a window and out onto the sidewalk. His name was still being withheld from the press, and Melanie had found the whole incident so disturbing that she’d avoided all the memos that referenced it. Even now, having asked, “What about him?” she really didn’t want to know.

“Guess who it was?” Peg asked.

From the way the woman’s eyebrows climbed halfway up her forehead and her mouth kind of oozed to the side, Melanie didn’t have to guess. But before she could prevent the answer she didn’t want to hear, Peg exclaimed, “Your ex!”

“Oh.” While the fault line inside her slipped another tiny notch, she struggled to come up with some sort of appropriate comment. “Well, I’m glad he wasn’t hurt.”

“Me, too. Sonny hasn’t stopped by city hall in quite a while now, has he? Two or three months at least.”

Melanie nodded. It had been two months and two weeks, to be exact, and she didn’t even have to consult her calendar to remember. Her ex-husband’s entrances and exits were always indelible.

“Maybe he finally knows the meaning of the word divorce,” Melanie said. She could have said maybe he’d finally taken her threat of a restraining order seriously. And somewhere in a far corner of her heart she wondered if it was because he didn’t care anymore.

Peg sighed a little cloud of cigarette smoke. “I always enjoyed seeing him, even if you didn’t. I used to keep lollipops in my desk for him when he was trying to quit smoking. Red ones.”

“I remember.” She also remembered how those damned red lollipops increased the sensuality of Sonny’s already way-too-sexy mouth and how many times she’d wanted to kiss him, just to see if he still tasted as good as he looked.

All of a sudden she noticed that Peg was standing there silent and staring at her as if waiting for a reply to a question Melanie hadn’t even heard.

“I’m sorry. Did you say something?”

“Just that it’s a shame to be having artificial insemination when the genuine article is…”

“I’d better get going, Peg, before the traffic gets too bad.” Melanie stabbed her key in the car lock, opened the door, and tossed her handbag inside. “Thanks again for the wonderful party. Hold down the fort while I’m gone, huh? And don’t let Cleo do anything too bizarre to my office, okay?”

“Oh, sure. Good luck, Melanie. But I still think…”

“’Bye, Peg.”

The genuine article.

Peg’s words kept sneaking into Melanie’s thoughts no matter how she tried to dismiss them. It was a good thing she could have made the drive from city hall to Channing Square with her eyes closed because images of Sonny kept distracting her from the worse-than-usual Friday rush-hour traffic inching south on Grant Parkway.

The genuine article.

The first time she’d ever seen him, Solomon Stephen “Sonny” Randle had looked like a genuine bum and smelled as if he’d just climbed out of a Dumpster.

Two years ago, during one of Mayor Venneman’s forays to New York to do the morning talk shows, Melanie had presided in his absence at an awards ceremony for the police department. Always a nervous wreck at such occasions, she’d been even worse that afternoon, sitting up front with the chief of police and various dignitaries, trying to keep her trembling knees together in the way-too-short skirt of her gray gabardine suit.

After she’d made an equally short, rather gray-gabardine speech, she had handed out a score of letters of commendation to fresh-faced young patrolmen in dress blue uniforms with gleaming buttons, and presented half a dozen certificates of valor to older, but no less natty, officers. Then she called the name on the final certificate—Lieutenant Solomon S. Randle—and watched in horror as a bearded derelict shambled from the back of the auditorium to the podium where she stood.

Only the fact that the audience had cheered wildly—including the brass behind her on the stage—kept Melanie from screaming “Somebody stop him!” She’d presented the certificate with one hand while using the other to discretely wave away the garbage stench emanating from the awardee.

Afterward, at the reception that followed, he had come up to her like an ill wind, but one carrying two glasses of champagne.

“Here. Hold these a second,” he’d said in a voice that ranged somewhere between rough gravel and harsh cigarette smoke.

Melanie held the wet glasses, then watched in awe as the derelict cop proceeded to divest himself of one greasy beard, two straggly eyebrows, a terrible scar, and several gold front teeth, to emerge—Oh, Lord, had he emerged!—as the most gorgeous man Melanie had ever seen in her life.

He’d still smelled to high heaven in his undercover garments, but by then she almost hadn’t cared.

The three weeks that followed had been not just a whirlwind, but a complete sensual blur unlike anything she had ever experienced until she’d woken up married in Sonny’s disheveled downtown loft.

She now woke up at the wheel of her Miata on Grant Parkway to realize she had missed her turn onto Channing Avenue. Melanie cursed her ex-husband for derailing her again, then circled around in the terrible traffic and finally made the turn onto Channing only to find herself behind a moving van that seemed intent on going three miles per hour and hitting its brakes every few hundred feet.

Anyplace else and she might have given the truck an irritated beep of her horn to speed it up, but since it appeared that somebody was moving in, Melanie was patient. Heaven knows Channing Square needed all the residents it could get. Besides, she didn’t mind driving slowly because it gave her a chance to look around and to savor the late-afternoon spring in Channing Park, one of the oldest and most beautiful in the city.

Although she’d only lived here a year, as the recording secretary and official historian for the Channing Square Residents Association, Melanie knew this little corner of the city inside out. The park’s thirty acres had been dedicated in 1845, but the grand residences that surrounded it hadn’t started going up until after the Civil War. In the 1870s they had risen with a Victorian vengeance, one graceful Second Empire town house after another, and then the staunch redbrick Federals and the somber Romanesque Revivals. For a few glorious decades Channing Square had been the most prestigious address in the city.

Then, as happened in so many cities, the rich folks had moved on to bigger and better homes, leaving the mansions in Channing Square behind to suffer the consequences of the coming years. And suffer they did, especially during the Depression when most had been cut up into small apartments. By the 1980s the once-great neighborhood had become a slum with half of its homes’ windows boarded up and crack dealers holding sway on every corner. The beautiful park had been overgrown with trash trees and weeds, its lovely Victorian bandstand, which had once played host to the John Philip Sousa Band, becoming a place to turn quick tricks or to stash dead bodies in the dark of the night.

All of that changed in the mid-eighties when a few brave souls moved back from the suburbs. A few more followed, and a few more, until finally the reclamation was in full swing. At last count, a hundred twenty of the square’s two hundred houses were occupied and undergoing some form of rehab, all the way from the early, gritty stages of demolition to the delicate finishing touches of paint on the cornices.

Melanie had loved every minute of the year she’d lived here. Her own Victorian painted lady was on Kassing Avenue, just to the west of the park. After she’d moved out of Sonny’s loft, she’d bought the small limestone-fronted Second Empire town house from Dieter Weist, the architect who was rehabbing it on spec. He’d finished the first floor and two second-floor bedrooms for her in record time. All that remained to be done now was the nursery and the playroom that would take up the entire third floor. During the next nine months that was what she planned to do so everything would be ready for the arrival of little Alex or Alexis in January.

There were far worse places to raise a child, she’d decided. Channing Square was a neighborhood in every sense of the word. It was like a small town where the residents all knew one another, worked together, and looked out for their neighbors’ safety and well-being. If the crime rate hadn’t come down quite as far as she would have preferred, that problem ought to be remedied somewhat in the future by the Cop on the Block program.

When the moving van turned onto Kassing, Melanie smiled and made a little thumbs-up sign. All right! Now if it just stopped at the rattrap of a house next door to hers, the house everyone feared was destined to be the last to ever be renovated, her day would be complete. No, her next several years would be complete without the constant worry of living next door to an abandoned Victorian nightmare.

The van’s brake lights flared once more just before the driver signaled he was pulling over to park in front of the big red brick place at 1224 Kassing Avenue. Melanie waved cheerfully as she passed by to turn into her driveway at 1222.

Life was good. It was very, very good. Come Monday, it would be just about perfect.

The tradition in Channing Square was to welcome new residents as soon as possible with a small gift, usually something edible and preferably homemade. Being the soul of organization that she was, Melanie kept a stash of her buttermilk blueberry muffins in the freezer for just such an occasion, so she picked out half a dozen, tied quick blue ribbons on each one, and arranged them in a wicker basket with a blue-and-white checked napkin.

“Eat your heart out, Martha Stewart,” she thought as she trotted down her front steps, then followed two men and a king-size mattress up the steps and through the front door of 1224.

What a mess! With some of the windows still boarded, it was dark inside but still light enough to see that the place was a shambles. In what had once been a grand front parlor to her right, she couldn’t tell the pattern on the ancient wallpaper for all the dirt and water stains. A great hole gaped in the wall where a marble fireplace had once been. There was mold growing across the ceiling and trash—a Dumpster’s worth—all over the floor.

Her new neighbors certainly had their work cut out for them. Up until that moment her excitement had pretty much been confined to the sale of the property alone. But now Melanie actually started thinking about the neighbors themselves. She wondered if they had children. Her perfect world might become even more so if one or two potential baby-sitters moved in right next door, or even better, future playmates. A smile crossed her lips as she imagined a little girl calling, “Mom, I’m going next door to play with Alexis” or a little boy yelling across the yard, “Hey, Alex. Wanna ride bikes?”

She glanced around in the hope of seeing the people who would undoubtedly come to play such a huge role in her life. She’d feed their children peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with carrot sticks. Maybe she’d sit with them in little chairs at the kindergarten Christmas program. Maybe her daughter would marry the boy next door. All of a sudden, instead of welcoming new neighbors, she felt as if she were about to greet her future.

“Excuse me, lady,” somebody said behind her. Melanie stepped aside to let two men and a big-screen TV pass by.

“Is the owner around?” she asked.

“I think he’s in the kitchen,” one of the men said.

Assuming the kitchen was at the back of the house, Melanie picked her way carefully down the dark, garbage-strewn hallway. Her nose identified dust and mold along with countless other odors she didn’t even want to name. What a rattrap. If something small and furry skittered across one of her feet, she was going to toss her welcoming basket of goodies in the general direction of the kitchen and make a beeline for the front door.

If she’d had any sense she would have changed into her sneakers rather than wear the new pair of black Ferragamo pumps she’d worn to work that day. The soles kept sticking to the floor as she walked, and she could only hope it was bubble gum that she’d have to be cleaning off later. A little shiver of ickiness ran down her spine.

“Hello?” she called out. “Anybody home?”

When no one answered, Melanie decided she’d leave her welcome basket with a note saying she’d drop by tomorrow. She stepped through a doorway into a kitchen that was quite a bit brighter than the rest of the house and not nearly as trashed. There was a man standing at the sink, drinking from the plastic top of a thermos. His back was to her so all she could see was longish hair, a pair of wide shoulders, and the lovely hug of faded denim over one truly great male butt.

How come whenever she hired moving men they always turned out to be thugs with crew cuts and beer bellies rather than pure hunks like this guy? She was making a mental note to get the name and number of the moving company from the side of the van when the hunk at the sink slowly turned around.

Melanie made a little strangling sound deep in her throat, then gasped, “Oh, my God!”

He cocked his head, setting that killer grin of his on a sexy, almost perilous slant. “Hello, darlin’.”

“What the hell do you think you’re doing here, Sonny?”

“I live here, Mel. I’m the new Cop on the Block.” His gorgeous blue-one-minute, green-the-next gaze strayed to the basket of muffins in her hands. “Are those for me?”

Chapter 2

It was a good thing Sonny Randle had quick reflexes, otherwise he’d have a shiner the size of Oregon thanks to the rocklike frozen muffin his ex-wife had hurled at him just before she’d turned and fled the kitchen.

He ignored the slight tremor in his hand as he re-filled the red plastic cap of his thermos and stood at the sink sipping his lukewarm coffee and watching Mel storm across her driveway and back into her house. A moment later, one by one, he watched the interior shutters on the south side of the house snap closed.

Okay. No surprise there. It was exactly what he’d expected. The muffin had been unanticipated, however. Actually, he was probably lucky that she’d thrown a muffin at him instead of a brick.

Suddenly one of her shutters opened a fraction, just enough for Sonny to discern her silhouette as she peeked out. He couldn’t see her face, but he knew her eyes were giving off hot blue sparks and she was grinding her teeth and clenching her fists, already making a mental list—complete with Roman numerals and subheadings—of what she was going to do to get rid of the menace next door.

He smiled and lifted his hand in a friendly little wave, then watched the shutter snap closed again.

You can run, babe, and you can hide, but it’s not going to do you any damned good. Now that I know what I did wrong, I know how to do this right. And we’re so right, Mel. You and I.

“Hey, Lieutenant,” a voice called from the hallway. “Where do you want this couch?”

“Be right there.”

Sonny drained the last of his coffee and screwed the cap back on the thermos without taking his eyes off the battened-down house next door. Right about now Melanie would be wound in a tight little ball in the corner of her own couch, her long legs tucked beneath her and her soft, shiny hair hooked firmly behind her ears and her lower lip wedged between her teeth while she took pen in hand to compose her battle plan.

The siege had officially begun.

Number One on her list was calling city hall, but that proved to be useless on a Friday at almost six o’clock when everyone had gone home. Melanie swore as she slammed the receiver back into its cradle, then looked at her list again because she was so upset she’d forgotten what Number Two was.

Right. Call Mike Kaczinski, Sonny’s partner, to see just what the hell her ex-husband was up to. She didn’t believe for one millisecond that he had taken out a loan, low-cost or otherwise, to buy the place next door. Cop on the Block, her aunt Fanny’s sweet behind! Lieutenant Sonny Randle not only worked undercover vice, he also ate, slept, and breathed it. What did he want a house for? He was never home!

Melanie stalked to the window again and opened the shutter a quarter of an inch. Squinting fiercely, she could see the movers close the back of their truck as they prepared to leave. There was no evidence of the new alleged homeowner. She craned her neck and angled her head so she could look down his driveway where his horrible muscle car sat like a black pit bull chained to a cement block. Wonderful. If he really was moving in, she had that roaring engine to look forward to at all hours of the night.

It was starting to get dark so she closed the shutter tightly and turned on a lamp in the living room. The exposed brick of the walls was always warm and comforting, and seemed no less so now that she was about to have a nervous breakdown. She went back to her cozy corner of the couch, pulled up her feet, and hugged her arms around herself, pretending for a moment that this wasn’t happening, that the perfection she’d experienced just half an hour ago was still possible.

She gazed around at the lovely haven she’d created for herself here in this more-than-a-century-old house in its antiquated cranny of the city. Almost all of the furniture had belonged to her parents so, just like them, it was an odd blend of elegant and eccentric. The camel-back Victorian sofa was upholstered in a rich rose silk and piled with bright needlepoint pillows that her father had designed. Just to her right, on the marble-topped table beside the sofa was the bronze-and-stained-glass lamp Pop had made, with its shade like lovely bits of melted rubies and emeralds and sapphires. Scattered across the floor were the Persian rugs her mother had collected.

On the other side of the foyer, the dining room was an odd but somehow perfect blend of American and European antiques. Beyond that, the kitchen was a cozy mix of blue-and-white Portuguese tiles and gleaming copper and brass.

While the whole house was colorful and eccentric, it was also neat and orderly, just the way Melanie liked it. The way she needed it. There was security in order, in having everything in its proper place. She wasn’t fussy, though. And she certainly wasn’t Felix Unger, although that’s who she’d felt like when she shared Sonny’s Oscar-Madison-like space.

Sonny.

Damn.

Casting a baleful glance at the list she’d left by the phone, she realized she couldn’t call Mike Kaczinski. Not at the Third Precinct, anyway. If he had been involved in last Friday’s shooting, along with Sonny, then he’d probably be on leave or vacation, too. That also meant that the new Cop on the damned Block would have time on his hands and nothing to do but aggravate her until he went back to work.

Fine. Let him try. She’d keep her shutters closed and her doors locked and she wouldn’t answer the phone. There was plenty of food in the fridge and freezer. She didn’t have to go out. At least not until…

Oh, my God. Her appointment Monday at eleven.

No. Don’t even think about that right now, she warned herself. Don’t think about the little vial packed in dry ice that arrived just yesterday at Dr. Wentworth’s office from the sperm bank in Chicago. How long did those little guys last? She couldn’t remember.

If she cancelled and set a new appointment for next month, that would shift everything. Everything! Instead of being born in January, her baby wouldn’t be born until February. Then, instead of being a determined and hardworking Capricorn, Little Alex or Alexis would be a quirky Aquarius. Oh, Lord. Instead of having a little photocopy of herself, she’d be giving birth to a Sonny.

She was shuddering at the very thought when her doorbell suddenly chimed.

Don’t answer it. Let him stand out there all night, all weekend, all year.

But being the orderly soul that she was, Melanie couldn’t stand not responding to a ringing phone or the repeated ding-dongs coming from her front door. She opened it a crack, then let out a tiny bleat of relief when she saw that it wasn’t Sonny, but rather Joan Carrollis from down the street. Melanie practically pulled her in by her lapels, then slammed and locked the door behind her.

“What in the world…?” the little brunette exclaimed.

“I’m sorry.” Melanie reached out to realign the lapels of Joan’s navy blazer. “I just didn’t want… Oh, never mind. Did I miss anything at the association meeting the other night?”

Joan and her husband Nick, both CPAs, had been the co-treasurers of the Channing Square Residents Association since its founding. Melanie liked the forty-ish woman and appreciated her no-nonsense style not to mention the precision with which she kept the association’s books.

“No,” she said, “you didn’t miss a thing, but if you haven’t been next door yet, you’re missing the boat. Have you seen your new neighbor?” Joan sounded as breathless as a teenybopper.

“Briefly,” Melanie said, wondering if that was actually drool beginning to form in a corner of the woman’s mouth. Good grief.

“Hubba, hubba.” Joan rolled her eyes and poked Melanie’s arm with her elbow.

“Excuse me?”

“I said, hubba, hubba. You know, as in the man is majorly attractive.”

“Oh.” He wasn’t that major, Melanie thought sullenly.

Joan gave a little sigh. “Well, I just wanted to give you a heads-up before he’s swamped by invitations from all the single women around here. And I wanted to thank you, too, you devious little bureaucrat.”

Melanie blinked. “Thank me?”

“For seeing that the first Cop on the Block is ours, of course. Nice going, Melanie. You didn’t waste any time. I can’t tell you how much we all really appreciate it.”

“Oh. Well…”

Now, wishing it had occurred to her to do something devious, such as rushing through the paperwork for some nice, balding sergeant and his family of five, Melanie waved goodbye to Joan while she cast a furtive glance next door.

Then she stepped back inside and locked herself in. Permanently. She’d been looking forward to making pasta for the first dinner of her leave of absence and to enjoying what would be just about her last glass of wine for the next nine months. Now, with her perfect evening in a shambles, she ate a grudging bowl of cold cereal, then climbed into bed at eight, in the hope that she’d wake up in the morning to discover this was just a terrible dream.

Instead, she woke up shortly after midnight to the sounds of a party next door.

Sonny pulled an ice-cold beer from the cooler, snapped off the cap, and lifted the bottle in a toast.

“Hey, with warm friends and wet beer, who needs electricity or plumbing, right? Thanks, guys.”

When a dozen or so candlelit faces grinned back at him, Sonny had to swallow a lump in his throat. For such a hardass, he was getting pretty soft and mushy these days, he thought as he sidled out of the front room and made his way toward the kitchen and a moment of solitude rather than blubbering in front of his colleagues.

He’d only told Kaczinski and one or two others about the house, but at least forty people had shown up over the past few hours for the surprise housewarming. It was heartwarming, too, because he’d been working alone and undercover so long he’d actually forgotten how many friends he had in the department after nearly thirteen years.

A few new neighbors had dropped in, too, but not the neighbor he loved. Mel had doused all her lights about eight o’clock. Then, around midnight when the volume of the party went up a couple notches, he noticed a bit of yellow light seeping through the shutters of one of the upstairs windows next door.

It wouldn’t have surprised Sonny if she’d called the cops when things got a little noisy, but then on second thought she’d been peeking out the window enough to realize that most of the cops in the Third Precinct were already here.

Most importantly, he was here and alive after the incident last week that should have killed him. The DEA had asked for local backup on a raid on a meth lab in a desolate block on Sixteenth. Since Sonny was familiar with the area and the layouts of most of the abandoned buildings there, he was the first one through the door of the defunct auto dealership.

Normally, when he worked undercover, he didn’t wear a vest. But that day somebody had tossed him one, saying, “This could get ugly.” He’d shrugged into the heavy blue garment just before kicking in the front door and walking into the wrong end of a .44 Magnum and the path of a cop-killer bullet.

The damned thing had blown him backward through the dealership’s dirty plate-glass window, practically out onto the street. He remembered lying there, in all that broken glass, looking up at a bright blue sky and thinking it was a shame that he was dead because all of a sudden he knew how badly he’d screwed up with Melanie and he realized just what he needed to do to fix things. If ever somebody had craved a do-over, it was Sonny just then.

As it turned out, when the bullets had stopped flying and the dust had settled, he hadn’t been dead or even that badly injured. The impact of the bullet had cracked a rib and the subsequent collision with the pavement outside had given him a concussion. Maybe that was good. Maybe he’d needed a brutal jab to his heart and a thorough shaking of his head to see things straight. Now all he had to do was convince his ex-wife that he was no longer the selfish son of a bitch who had ruined their marriage.

“There you are.” Mike Kaczinski came up beside him. He set the candle he was carrying down on the counter next to the sink. “You feeling okay, Son?”

“Oh, sure.”

“How’s the rib?”

“Fine.” Sonny shrugged. “It only hurts when I breathe.”

“And the head?”

“That’s fine, too. It only hurts when I think.”

Mike chuckled softly. “Well, that shouldn’t be a problem, then.”

The candle flame barely cut the darkness around the two friends as they stood there side by side. They’d met in grade school, gotten in all the obligatory trouble together in high school, shared a room at college, and then finally cheered each other through the police academy. Mike had been Sonny’s best man, not just at his wedding, but in every sense of the word.

Like Sonny, he wore his dark brown hair on the long side, the better to blend in on the street. Unlike Sonny, he’d gone home every night to a solid, happy marriage for the past ten years.

Now the two of them stood shoulder to shoulder, looking out the window at the rectangle of yellow light on the second floor next door.

“She’s planning to get pregnant next week from a freaking sperm bank.” Sonny’s voice barely rose above a rough whisper.

“Yeah. I heard.”

“I’m not going to let that happen, Mikey.”

“Yeah. I figured.”

When the last reveler drove off into the wee small hours of the morning, Melanie slipped back into bed, beat her pillow to a pulp, and pulled the covers up over her head. Okay. So she wasn’t going to wake up in the morning to find it was all a bad dream. It was a living nightmare, and she was going to have to deal with it one way or another.

She’d be damned if she’d stay barricaded behind locked doors. Sonny was just going to have to move. Seattle would be nice. Hong Kong would be even better. A bit closer, there was a house around the corner on Garland Boulevard that Dieter Weist and his partner had almost completed so Sonny wouldn’t have to be bothered with all the drudgery that went along with rehabing. He didn’t know the first thing about rehabing anyway. Good grief. When she’d lived with him in his loft, he hadn’t even owned a screwdriver or a hammer to put a picture up on a wall, much less known how to use either one.

What was he planning to do? Live in that hovel next door while plaster rained down on his head and garbage squished under his feet?

He didn’t even have electricity yet, for heaven’s sake. No plumbing, either, judging from the Day-Glo-colored Porta Potty that she had spied tucked behind the dilapidated back porch.

Why was he doing this? She wanted to rip open the shutters and wrench up the window and scream, “It’s over. It didn’t work, Sonny. Just—for God’s sake—let it go.”

If she did that, though, he’d only yell back, “You love me, Mel. You know it.”

Dammit. She punched the pillow again and dug herself deeper into the mattress. That was the problem. She did love him. She just couldn’t live with him.

If only she’d known that when he’d handed her those two glasses of champagne and then shucked his disguise like some gorgeous butterfly emerging from a hairy cocoon. If only his voice with its too-much-whiskey and too-many-smokes timbre hadn’t sent a cascade of tingles down her spine when he’d called her darlin’ the first time, as in “Let’s get out of here, darlin’.”

Melanie was far too practical, way too levelheaded to be swept off her feet, so she’d finally come to the conclusion that Sonny must have drugged her those few weeks before they’d gotten married. That first night, after they’d left the awards ceremony and after he’d showered and changed at the precinct, they’d sat in the back booth of a little jazz club, the sparks between them nearly setting the place on fire.

No one had ever made her feel like the molten center of the universe before. No one had ever made her forget what time it was, what day it was, what century. No one had ever gotten her into bed on the very first date and then gotten her to stay there for an entire weekend.

He had to have drugged her.

It wasn’t just the sex. During those early weeks Sonny had made her feel like a new person, somebody completely recreated. She’d never once made a list of any kind. She’d barely even opened her planner except to make certain there was no official function that would prevent her from being with her man.

Sonny had been with her constantly—24/7 as they said in the department—because, like now, he’d been on vacation following a shooting. He’d been sexy and funny and charming and attentive and sweet and…

…And in her drugged, delirious condition she’d married him one afternoon at city hall in Judge Beckmann’s chambers with Sam Venneman as her maid of honor and Mike Kaczinski as his best man.

Then Sonny’s time off work had ended and she’d hardly seen him anymore. It seemed her then-new husband’s view of the ideal marriage was one where he worked long hours, sometimes two and three days at a time, undercover on the street, then came home expecting the honeymoon to continue under the covers with his irritated bride.

No sooner had she tidied up his messy loft than he stumbled in to fling newspapers everywhere, to put T-shirts in his sock drawer, to rip out the neatly tucked covers from the foot of the mattress to accommodate his long legs, to claim he couldn’t make plans for the future because he didn’t even know what he’d be doing next week.

She’d made lists and Sonny had made excuses.

After six months, during four of which she’d had a headache that felt like a cannonball inside her skull, Melanie had walked out and filed for divorce.

For his part, Sonny went through an approximation of the Five Stages of Grief. Denial: “There’s nothing wrong with our marriage, babe.” Anger: “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Bargaining: “I can change, Mel.” Depression: “Aw, hell, darlin’. Why don’t you just stick a knife in my heart and get it over with?”

Finally, or so she’d thought when he’d stopped calling her constantly and dropping by city hall every other day, he’d reached the last stage. Acceptance.

Obviously she’d been wrong about that. Sonny hadn’t changed a bit. He never would. He’d always be his spur-of-the-moment, let-the-devil-take-tomorrow, what-me-worry, haphazard self. And she’d always be the worrier, the list maker, the Queen of Post-It notes and the planner.

The twain would never meet.

And one of the twain, dammit, would have to go.

Melanie squeezed her eyes closed, determined to wrench at least a few hours sleep from the chaos that suddenly surrounded her.

Next door, at that precise moment, Sonny took a swig from his bottle of beer and a long drag on his cigarette, then leaned back his head and closed his eyes. He’d kept a couple candles burning to ward off any lowlife who might be looking for an unoccupied place to crash for the night. If that warning didn’t prove successful, he was still wearing his shoulder holster with his service pistol snug under his arm.

He was almost hoping some coked-up derelict did stumble in, thus offering him a legitimate excuse to shove somebody up against a wall and work off some of the foul mood he was in.

Cop on the Block at your service, ma’am. What was that? You say you want a baby?

Every time he thought about what Melanie planned to do, his gut churned, tying itself into a thousand tight little knots, and his heart surged with a sort of primitive rage. It made him nuts to think of his wife getting pregnant by another man, artificially or otherwise. If otherwise, at least he’d have the pleasure of killing the guy. What could he do about the artificial deal—stomp a little vial and grind it into the floor?

He’d found out about her cockamamie plan last week, the same afternoon he’d gone through the plate-glass window. That revelation, coupled with the one he’d had from the .44 Magnum, had finally propelled him into action. Waiting for Mel to change her mind obviously wasn’t working, and merely telling her that he’d changed wasn’t good enough or fast enough in light of this baby deal.

The Cop on the Block notion had seemed inspired at the time. He filled out the paperwork, sat on his captain’s desk until he signed it, then personally walked it through the approval process at the Third Street Bank. If the nerdy little vice president in charge of loans filed a complaint, Sonny was fully prepared to say that he’d simply drawn his gun to make certain the safety was on.

So far, so good. The house was his. He was sitting here, a mere twenty feet from Melanie’s place. Of course, he was sitting in the dark and his toilet was outside and Mel was barricaded behind locked doors, but—by God—he was here. Now he just had to convince her that he was capable of change.

As for Mel, she didn’t have to change even so much as a hair for him. He’d probably fallen for her the first time he’d seen her up on the stage at that awards ceremony exerting nearly superhuman effort to keep her knees together in that tiny little gray skirt while two hundred pairs of eyes were zeroing in on them and two hundred good but lecherous souls were silently pleading for just one little peek.

Okay. Maybe at first it was just the challenge of those lovely, super-glued knees. But after an hour of being with her that night, Sonny had quickly forgotten about the knees in order to focus on her quick, bright, and almost comically organized mind. And though he might have teased her about the lists and date books she produced from her handbag like a succession of clowns from a midget car, a part of him—an important, bone-deep part—truly envied the order and apparent certainty in her life.

Until Mel, the women he’d been with had lives as erratic as his own. Sheila, the flight attendant. Tammy, the traveling sales rep. Barb and Cathy and the other Cathy, all cops, all the time. Maybe the haphazard attitude was a habit with him, acquired from too many moves as a kid from one foster home to another. Maybe it was a defense. If he didn’t make plans, they couldn’t go wrong. Who knew?

But Sonny knew that from the minute he’d met Melanie Sears, he’d felt as if he’d found a permanent home. Then, because he continued to be an erratic, undependable, insensitive jerk, he’d promptly lost her.

He would’ve cut off his right arm for a second chance. Or quit smoking. Really quit this time. Whatever Mel wanted. Anything.

All she had to do was ask.

Assuming she ever spoke to him again.

In the meantime, he’d made his own list. After “Get Melanie Back” came “Fix up this freaking dump.” He drained the last of his beer, dropped his cigarette into the wet remnants in the bottle, then prayed he could slide into a few hours of dreamless sleep.

Chapter 3

There was no wake-up call in the world quite like the squeal of the hydraulic lift on a big flatbed as it prepared to slide a boxcar-size Dumpster onto a concrete pad.

Melanie groaned her way out of bed, snarled through her shower, and then got dressed and stomped downstairs to fix breakfast. She was starving after eating just a skimpy bowl of cereal the night before.

Sometime during the course of the night—sometime between the raucous hooting and door slamming of the party and the ground-shaking thud of the Dumpster bin shortly after dawn—she had decided to not let Sonny Randle ruin her life. Twice. If he couldn’t accept the fact that their marriage was over, that was his problem. Not hers. If he wanted to waste his time trying to convince her otherwise, it wasn’t going to work.

She had plans, and she was going to follow through with them no matter who moved in next door. Anyway, dammit, she was here first.

Muttering to herself, she pulled a box of eggs and a carton of orange juice from the refrigerator. She wasn’t going to quit eating right just because Sonny was here. Of all the times in her life that good nutrition was important, it was now, prior to her pregnancy. She wasn’t going to alter a lifetime’s worth of good habits just because the King of Chaos had moved into the neighborhood.

As if to emphasize her steely resolve, she cracked an egg so hard against the edge of the bowl that it splattered across the shiny white tile counter and dribbled down the front of the oak cabinet. She didn’t feel the least bit guilty blaming that on Sonny, too, as she grabbed a paper towel to clean it up. In fact, whatever went wrong from here on out would clearly be his fault if for no other reason than sheer proximity.

While she ate her scrambled egg with neat little bites of whole wheat toast, Melanie did what she did best. She made a list. Even if she decided to postpone Monday’s appointment until next month, there were a million things that needed to be done. These weren’t tasks she’d overlooked, but ones she’d saved for this special time. It was how she’d planned to spend her pregnancy, indulging herself in getting ready for the birth.

The nursery, on the second floor adjacent to her room, needed everything. She couldn’t wait to shop for the crib and the dresser and the sweet little night-light that would adorn it, but those would only come after she painted the walls the perfect shade of yellow that she had yet to find. Not daffodil. And it wasn’t quite pale lemon sherbet, either. The best way she could describe the color in her head was baby-duck yellow. Melanie wrote that at the top of her list. Surely someone at the paint store would know exactly what she meant and be able to mix up a batch with ease.

She wrote down brushes, rollers, and paint tray, then decided that was probably enough for one day’s To Do list. After all, she didn’t want to finish everything in the first month and then have nothing to do for the next eight.

After she rinsed her breakfast dishes, she peeked out the window to see if the coast was clear enough to sneak out and get the morning paper. The big red sandstone house next door looked just as deserted as it ever had. The Cop on the Block, she supposed, was somewhere in the debris, sleeping off the effects of his orgy last night.

Melanie opened her front door and stood on her front steps a moment, stretching her arms toward the cloudless azure sky, then gazing at the pink-and-white blossoms of the dogwood trees in Channing Park. Next April on a lovely morning just like this one, she couldn’t help but think, she’d be bundling the baby in a stroller and heading off for a lovely turn around the park. One more reason, she thought, to not cancel Monday’s procedure.

There were always joggers and power walkers and just plain amblers moving at their individual paces around the park. Right now Melanie could see the Wrenn sisters coming down Kassing at a pretty good clip. She waved, hoping if they paused to chat, she didn’t mix up their names the way she usually did. One was Susan and the other Sandy, but she was never quite sure which. There was only a year between them but they looked like identical twenty-something twins, both tall and terribly blond, and tended to dress that way, no doubt thoroughly enjoying the confusion they created. This morning they were wearing jiggly little T-shirts and a thin coating of hot-pink Spandex on their long legs.

She didn’t have to worry about their names, though. As they passed on the sidewalk in front of her yard, both sisters waved and called in chirpy unison, “Hi, Melody,” getting her name wrong as they always did. Then, without slowing, they continued on to 1224 where they quite suddenly put on the brakes.

“Hi, there,” Susan or Sandy purred.

“Hi, there,” Sandy or Susan echoed.

“Morning, ladies.”

That voice! That sandpapery baritone with its top notes of booze and tobacco nearly brought Melanie to her knees. One quick glance revealed her ex-husband, a vision in a faded denim shirt and jeans, lolling on the little front porch next door as if he actually belonged there.

While he was chatting up the Wrenns, Melanie stalked down the walk for her paper. It wasn’t on the walk, or under her little boxwood hedge, or anywhere to be seen. It was when she turned back toward her house and cast another furtive glance in Sonny’s direction that she realized he was sitting there with the sports section draped over his knee. The son of a bitch stole her newspaper!

The minute Susan and Sandy cooed “Nice meeting you” and got under way again, Melanie yelled, “Is that my paper?”

“I borrowed it to look at the Classifieds,” he called back.

She chewed on a few prime curses before she shouted, “Well, are you done?”

“Almost.” He picked up the paper and disappeared behind it, apparently without the slightest intention of returning it to her in the near future.

God! Nobody on the planet could set her hair on fire the way Sonny did. She knew she should’ve shrugged with monumental indifference and sauntered back inside her house, but instead she clenched her fists and went charging across her yard toward his.

“Give me my damn paper,” she shrieked as she pounded up the little flight of stairs to his porch. But just as she reached to grab it from his hands, Sonny stood and held the paper high over his head.

“Just a minute, Mel. I want to see if my ad is in here.”

She glared at him. Not that she cared one bit or was even mildly curious, but she still heard herself asking, “What ad?”

Sonny was looking up now, squinting in order to read the paper high over his head and well out of her reach. “This ad,” he said. “Good. They got it in.”

Melanie was gearing up for a leap worthy of a W.N.B.A. superstar when he suddenly snapped the paper closed and handed it to her. “What ad?” she asked again.

“I’m selling my car.”

He lowered himself onto the thick sandstone blocks that formed the sidewall of the small porch while Melanie continued to stand. She wasn’t at all sure that she’d heard him right. He’d had that gas-swilling, evil, black vehicle forever. It wasn’t just transportation. It was his alter ego, as much a part of him as his sea-colored eyes and his devastating smile.

“You’re selling the Corvette?”

“Yep.” He leaned back against the house and slung a jean’s-clad leg up onto the porch wall. “You were right. It’s not a family car.”

She blinked. “You don’t have a family, Sonny.”

“Not yet.” He cocked his head, squinting against the morning sun at Melanie’s back, but nevertheless pinning her with eyes that had turned a deep and warm Bahamian blue. “But I’m working on it.”

“Well, I wish you’d work on it someplace else.” She let go of an exasperated sigh as she plopped down on the top step. Her anger seemed to suddenly fizzle out, frustration taking its place. “This is crazy, Sonny. Buying this house. Pretending to be a docile Cop on the Block when you’re nothing of the sort, not to mention pretending to be Joe Homeowner.”

“I’m not pretending.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, please.”

“I’ve changed, Mel. Honest to God. Just give me a chance to—”

“Stop. I don’t want to hear this.” As she spoke, without even being aware of it, she was rolling the classified pages into a tight little log. When Sonny reached out for her hand, she batted his away with her newly discovered weapon. “Don’t. Just don’t.”

He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender, then grinned. “You’re going to have to iron that paper before you read it, Felix. I know how much you hate wrinkled news.”

That did it. She was mad again, and only partly because he was right. She despised it when anybody read the paper before she did and got the pages all misaligned and unwieldy and…well…just messy.

“I’ll just take my wrinkled news and go home,” she said, snatching up the rest of the paper he’d littered all over the porch. “And since you’re the Cop on the Block, I don’t think I should have to remind you that it’s illegal to take someone else’s property, Lieutenant Randle.”

“It won’t happen again,” he said solemnly despite the twinkle in his eyes. She was halfway across the driveway when he called, “Hey, Mel.”

Now what? “What?” she snapped.

“Got any plans for this afternoon?”

Did she have any plans? That was a little like asking the state of Idaho if it had any potatoes, wasn’t it? “Yes, I do. Why?”

“I need to drop the ’Vette off at Stover’s Garage. There’s a kid up there who’s going to detail it for me before I sell it. I wondered if you could give me a ride back.”

She sighed. “Okay. But the only reason I’m doing it is because I don’t think you’re capable of letting that car out of your sight for more than two seconds. I’ll believe it when I see it.” She looked at her watch. “I’ll pick you up at Stover’s at eleven, Sonny. That doesn’t mean eleven-ten or eleven-fifteen.”

“Mel, darlin’, eleven to you means ten forty-five. I’ll be there.”

“I doubt it,” she muttered under her breath.

At ten forty-five, true to his word, Sonny was out in front of Stover’s Garage, watching the Saturday traffic on Grant Parkway for Melanie’s little Miata. He chuckled to himself, thinking how he’d raised her hackles with the newspaper this morning. It hadn’t been intentional. He’d planned to read the ads, then press every seam and fold before slipping the whole thing back into its plastic sleeve and tossing it onto her front walk.

Still, he had to admit he kind of enjoyed her snit. It had been a while since he’d seen one. Not that he found all of her quibbles and quirks endearing, particularly the virgin newspaper one, but they all stemmed from the part of her he loved and needed so desperately in his life. She was as beautiful and predictable as the sunrise, and he’d spent way too many years alone in the dark.

And as much as he needed her stability, she needed him to loosen her up, to raise those hackles of hers and ruffle her pretty feathers once in a while so they didn’t harden in concrete. Damned if she’d acknowledge it, though.

He looked over his shoulder at his car—low slung, black as Darth Vader and twice as dangerous—parked on the garage’s back lot between a wimpy turquoise Neon and a hulking Chevy Suburban. For a second he was tempted to snatch his key off the pegboard in the back room, start the throaty engine, and peel out onto the parkway after laying down ten feet of rubber in a desperate attempt to recapture his youth. But why he wanted to do that was a mystery. His youth had sucked. So had his entire life until Melanie had come into it.

He reached into his shirt pocket for a cigarette and was lighting it just as familiar voice nearby said, “Hey, Lieutenant, babe. Long time no see. What you up to these days?”

Sonny had a network of snitches all over the city that was the envy of every cop in every precinct. Hookers and pushers and thugs. Dime-bag men with dollar grudges. Disenchanted gang bangers. Snoopy grandmas who spent their days glued to their front windows. Some of them knew him as a vice cop. To others he was just a guy out hustling on the streets like everybody else.

Walking toward him now in a halter top and short shorts and on high platform shoes was a young woman he knew only as Lovey. She wasn’t much over twenty and had huge, sleepy amber eyes and skin the color of café au lait with enough needle tracks to make her a leading contender for Miss Pincushion. What a waste of a beautiful young woman.

“Hey, Lovey. How’s it going?” He plucked another cigarette from his pocket, lit it, and handed it to her.

“Thanks, man.” She reached out a long-nailed, slightly trembling hand for the proffered smoke, no doubt in need of a much more potent fix. “Hey. I heard you got shot.”

“Nah. That was just a nasty rumor somebody started,” Sonny said. “Or maybe wishful thinking.”

“You got enemies, Lieutenant?”

“One or two,” he said. “You know, that offer I made you a while back about the rehab program still stands. You interested?”

Lovey shrugged and inhaled so deeply there was hardly anything to exhale. “Maybe one of these days. You still in the market for information about Slink Kinnison?”

Was he! He’d been trying for more than five years to pin something that would stick to that scumbag and send him away so he couldn’t get any more sixth and seventh graders hooked on his locally made and often lethal meth. Last week’s raid hadn’t put a dent in the guy’s operation. If anything, it probably gratified him to have blown Sonny through a window.

Already reaching for his wallet and a couple of twenties for Lovey’s information, Sonny had to remind himself that he wasn’t on the job right now, which meant he wouldn’t be reimbursed for the money he laid out, no matter how important her information was.

A week ago he might have thought, What the hell, it was only money, but now that he was a responsible homeowner who needed every spare cent to rehabilitate his ancient dump, Sonny said, “I’m on vacation for a couple weeks, but if you want to check with Heilig or White down at the precinct, I’m sure they can come up with a little something for you. You know them, right? Heilig’s the tall guy and White’s black. Here. I’ll write down the precinct phone number for you and their extension.”

He patted his pockets to no avail. Where was a pen when you needed one? “Do you have a pen and something I can write on?” he asked Lovey, who, after a lengthy search, managed to produce a crumpled tissue and a stick of black eyeliner from her tiny purse.

The tissue tore all to hell when he tried to scribble the numbers and the thin black crayon broke. Just as Sonny was swearing a blue streak, Melanie’s little yellow Miata pulled up at the curb. Out of habit, he checked his watch and was shocked to see that it read two minutes after eleven, which made her late for maybe the second or third time in her entire thirty-one years!

“Wait here,” he told Lovey. “I know just where I can get a pen and paper.”

He opened the passenger door, leaned inside, and couldn’t restrain himself from saying, “You’re late.”

Melanie stabbed him to death with a look. “That’s because I changed my mind about coming forty-eight times.”

“I’m glad you came. Can I borrow a pen, Mel, and something to write on?”

It didn’t surprise him to see her flip open the little center console and immediately produce a tiny spiral notebook with a tiny, color-coordinated pen clipped to its cover.

“Who’s your friend?” she asked as she handed it to him.

“My snitch,” he corrected. “I’ll be right back.”

While he wrote the phone numbers for Lovey, Sonny said, “After you talk to Heilig and White, you stay as far away from Slink Kinnison as you can, Lovey, okay? It probably wouldn’t even hurt to leave town for a little while just to be on the safe side. Tell Heilig you need a little extra for bus fare. Is there any place you can go?”

The hooker shook her head. “Gotta stay close to my main man, Elijah. He takes care of me. He takes good care of all of his girls. You know?”

He knew only too well how her main man took care of her, by keeping her higher than a kite. Over the years Sonny had come to the bitter conclusion that the only thing wrong with prostitution was the pimps. Lovey’s was Elijah Biggs, who weighed four hundred pounds when he wasn’t wearing fifty pounds of gold jewelry and whose license plate proclaimed Bigg Man. One of these days Sonny was going to see that the big man got a one-way ticket to the state penitentiary instead of always using the revolving door of the city jail.

“Here.” He flipped to a clean page in the little notebook. “Here’s my cell phone number and my new address, just in case.” He tore off both pages and gave them to her.

Lovey studied the numbers a moment. “You move into one of those big old ugly places on Channing Square? What’d you want to do that for?”

“I don’t know. I must be crazy.”

She angled her head toward Melanie’s car at the curb. “That’s your lady?”

“Yep.”

“She live in Channing Square, too?”

“Yep. Next door.”

“Next door!” Lovey laughed. “Well, that explains why you’re crazy, then. I’ll see you around, Lieutenant.”

“You be careful, Lovey.”

“All the time, honey. All the time.”

By the time Sonny slung his long legs into her little car, Melanie was wishing she’d changed her mind forty-nine times instead of forty-eight. That way she would’ve stood him up instead of having to sit and watch him do the job he did so damn well.

He wasn’t one of those cops who got off on being the long, hard arm of the law, who wore a badge and a constant smirk, and felt entitled to push people around if they dared get in his way. Sonny honestly believed he was making the city a better and safer place, day by day, person by person. She could tell from the expression on his snitch’s face that the woman not only felt safe with him, but adored him, as well.

And if she knew her ex-husband at all, she knew he had probably just given the woman his phone number and told her to call him anytime, day or night.

“I thought you were on vacation,” Melanie said as she angled her car back into the flow of traffic.

“I am.”

“So, what’s with the snitch?”

“Nothing,” he said. “She just needed a little advice.”

“I guess you’re aware that the city’s not responsible or in any way liable for actions or expenses of officers when they’re on leave.” She knew her words had come out in an annoying, almost schoolmarmish tone, but she couldn’t help it.

Sonny just laughed. “I’ll bet you’ve got a copy of the city code in your handbag.”

“I do not.”

“In the glove compartment, then.”

Still laughing, he reached forward to open it, and Melanie swatted at his hand.

He turned to face her as much as his seat belt and the confines of the car would allow. “I guess you’re aware that I’ve been on the job for over thirteen years now, and despite my charming and lackadaisical air, I do have some idea what the hell I’m doing.”

“I know, but… Oh, damn.” She slapped the palm of her hand against the steering wheel.

“What?”

“I just missed the turn onto Channing. Now I’ll have to circle around and that’ll make me late. Dammit, Sonny. It’s all your fault.”

“Late for what?”

“The hardware store.”

“You have an appointment at the hardware store?”

She took her eyes off the road long enough to pitch him her most irritated look. “No, I don’t have an appointment. I just wanted to be there by eleven-fifteen.”

He looked at his watch and said, “Well, I’ll tell you what. It’s eleven-oh-eight right now. If we forget about dropping me off at the house and just head straight to the hardware store, we can be there by quarter after.”

Braking for a red light, Melanie turned her head to her right. Sonny was sitting there, his knees up against the dashboard and the world’s most innocent expression on his face. “‘We’?” she asked.

“Yeah. I needed to go to the hardware store anyway. This’ll save me a trip later. Then I can take you out to lunch when we’re finished. Maybe to Dominic’s or that new place down on Jefferson. What do you say, Mel?”

What did she say? To herself Melanie said she should have seen this coming. Give Sonny an inch and he immediately wanted a mile. How could she have been such a jerk? Knowing him as well as she did, how could she have allowed him to blindside her like this? Why was she letting him rattle her so?

“No problem,” she said, trying to sound as if she meant it, as if his mere presence didn’t faze her in the least. “I’ll take you to the hardware store. But I’ll pass on the lunch. Thanks, anyway.”

Sonny had forgotten that shopping with Melanie was the equivalent of attending a nitpicker’s convention. Even before they got in the store, she had to wait for just the right spot to open up in Dandy Andy’s parking lot.

“Pull in over there,” he’d said, pointing out an open space up ahead of them.

“Too narrow.”

“How ’bout over there? There’s plenty of room.”

“Are you kidding me? Next to a twenty-year-old beater with dents in its door?”

Well, hell. It didn’t make any difference to him where she parked or how long it took her to do it. He was just happy to be this close.

Once inside the store, Melanie whipped a list out of her purse and studied it gravely for a moment before she said, “This ought to take me about twenty minutes. Half an hour at the most. Shall I meet you up here in front or out by the car?”

“Whatever.” He said it on purpose just to watch her eyes kind of pinwheel and her tongue hit the back of her teeth with an irritated little cluck. “Up here is fine.”

“Do you have a lot to get?” she asked as she pulled a shopping cart from its nest.

“Well. Yeah. Everything.” He nearly laughed watching her try to keep the top of her head on and the steam from pouring out of her dainty nose and delicate ears. “How ’bout if I just tag along behind you and pick up stuff as I go?”

“Suit yourself.” She snapped her list taut and took off with a little snort.

Still trying to not laugh, Sonny wrenched his own cart from the row and followed in her wake. There was nothing quite like Mel’s fine, firm, denim-cheeked wake. Ah, damn. How he wanted to reach out for a perfect handful of her.

The momentary attack of lust made him think about the imminent baby business, and his stomach knotted up again. Since this was Saturday, that didn’t leave much time till Monday and the damned artificial deal. If he couldn’t get her to even go to lunch with him, how the hell was he going to convince her to let him impregnate her?

Because he would. Sonny knew that as well as he knew his own name. Mel would’ve been pregnant the very first time they’d made love two years ago if they hadn’t used precautions. Two bodies didn’t come together the way theirs did and not set life in motion. Two people didn’t send sparks off the way they did and not start a fire someplace. If he was certain of anything, it was that.

He caught up with Melanie in the paint aisle. “What’re you planning to paint?” he asked.

“The nursery,” she answered chirpily, sending his stomach into acid overdrive. He felt like throwing up, so he leaned his forearms on his cart and bent his head while Melanie accosted the paint guy with one of her typical opening remarks guaranteed to send a poor, overworked and underpaid salesclerk’s eyes pinwheeling.

“I’ve got a very specific shade of yellow in my head,” she said.

“In your head,” the guy replied with a smirk in his voice.

Sonny didn’t even want to see the one on his face because then he’d have to do something about it.

Oblivious to the kid’s rudeness, Melanie pressed on. “I didn’t see the exact shade on any of those little swatches. Maybe I could try to describe it for you.”

“Ho-kay,” the kid said somewhere between a yawn and a groan.

“It’s not as bright as a jonquil,” Melanie said. “And not as soft as lemon sherbet. I guess maybe there’s a bit more gold in it than green. What I’m imagining is a baby-duck yellow.”

The kid could barely restrain a guffaw. “Baby-duck yellow.”

“Well, yes. That’s how I imagine it.”

While she went on at excruciating length, Sonny contemplated a few of the color swatches in the display case on his left. Who knew there were so many shades of white? Arctic white. Swiss white. Rice. Ice. Mel wasn’t so far off the mark with her ditzy name, he decided.

“You sure you don’t want a baby-chick yellow, lady?”

“No.” She was adamant but sincere, as only Melanie could be. God bless her. “That’s too yellow. Way too soft. Baby duck is exactly the shade.”

“What about baby canary?”

The clerk’s sarcasm sailed right over her pretty, precise head. “No. That’s too soft, too.”

“Ho-kay. How about baby-piss yellow? Or maybe…”

That did it, dammit. Sonny had the kid’s narrow shoulders pinned up against the paint machine in two seconds flat. “Are you deaf, pal? The lady said baby-duck yellow.”

“Y-yessir.” His face had gone a perfect shade of Arctic white.

“You think you can mix her up some of that?”

“Y-yessir.”

“All right, then.” Sonny loosened his grip on the lapels of the helpful orange jacket. “How much do you need, Mel? A quart? A gallon?” he asked over his shoulder.

There was no answer.

“Mel?”

When Sonny turned to look, Melanie was gone.

If she’d had any spine at all, Melanie thought, she’d jump in her car and leave Sonny in the dust the same way she’d left him in the paint aisle. She looked over her shoulder in time to see him come out of the hardware store, pause just long enough to light a cigarette, and then continue toward her.

Melanie picked up her pace, but even so Sonny reached the Miata before she did.

“What the hell did you think you were doing in there?” she yelled at him.

“What do you mean, what was I doing?” he yelled back. “Nobody talks to my wife that way.”

She wanted to rip her hair out in frustration. “I’m not your wife.”

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