“Tessa.”

This time Noah whispered her name—as if their shared past drew his breath from depths she hadn’t known she’d reached. His gaze washed her with the same insatiable need she felt. A yearning that had nothing to do with sex.

They were two people who’d lost everything. Seeing him brought it all back. The joy as well as the pain. Joy scared Tessa more. She didn’t want to remember that much happiness now that she’d lost it.

“I don’t want you here.” What she meant was she never wanted to need him again.

His grimace acknowledged what she couldn’t say. “Who did this to David? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” She wasn’t. She wanted to cry—for David, for his daughter, for herself and maybe a little for this empty-eyed shadow of Noah.

Dear Reader,

Imagine that the loss of your beloved baby girl has broken your marriage. You’ve taken refuge in a small Maine town, working with your best friend in a law practice that drags you back into life. But then you find your friend murdered, leaving you as his daughter’s guardian—and somehow as the prime suspect.

Only the threat of losing another child would make you call your ex-husband for help. That’s what happens to Tessa Gabriel when she becomes Maggie’s guardian. She calls the best homicide detective she’s ever known, her former husband, Noah—and he comes because he believes clearing her of the charge might make up for letting her down in the past.

I hope you’ll enjoy finding out what Maggie has to teach Noah and Tessa as they discover the killer who’s still threatening Tessa and their future.

I’d love to hear what you think. You can reach me at anna@annaadams.net.

Best wishes,

Anna Adams

Maggie’s Guardian
Anna Adams

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To the ones who were there and to those who could only

watch. We continue to survive September 11.

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

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

ICY RAINDROPS PLUMMETED out of the gray sky to pound on homicide detective Noah Gabriel’s head. He planted one foot in front of the other, hoping to reach District C6’s station door before he dropped to his knees. He’d stayed out too late, drunk too much and recounted each second of his broken marriage too thoroughly last night. His ritual for the past eighteen months.

He kept meaning to put Tessa and their lost baby girl out of his mind, just as Tessa had turned her back on him. But he never drank quite enough. And the next day, he always battled a hangover that felt like an anvil player composing inside his head.

He reached the sidewalk in front of the station just as two female patrol officers burst through the glass doors. Their high-pitched voices sliced through his scalp, excising the last functioning sections of his brain. Ducking around the women, he skidded on an empty soda can and rammed his shoulder into the building’s dirty brick wall.

Laughter at his expense actually raised the women’s voices to a more lethal tone. Noah dragged the door shut behind him to escape the pain, but once he was inside, the disgruntled swearing and shouts that grew louder as the afternoon progressed battered him.

Suck it up, he told himself, taking the stairs two at a time. By the top, he considered passing out. Fighting dizziness and unfamiliar pangs he faintly recognized as hunger, he followed the squares of gray—once white—tile floor that led him to his desk.

“Gabriel,” his commander, Captain Larry Baxton, barked.

Noah concentrated on not looking as if he wanted to kill someone before he let himself focus on the other man. Baxton brandished a fistful of pink telephone message slips.

“Glad you could make it—why don’t you let these people know I’m not your secretary?” He slammed the messages on Noah’s desk. “We have two from your ex-wife, and I’ve lost count of the rest—from some police chief in Maine. I especially don’t want to talk to that Podunk crossing guard again. Got it?”

Baxton pivoted toward his own office. From their respective desks, Noah’s fellow detectives eyed him. They weren’t idiots, and they couldn’t know he’d made sure his vices hadn’t begun to compromise a gift for catching bad guys. They seemed to think he’d forgotten this group of men and women were a homicide team.

With their stares like stilettos in his back, he dropped into his torn leather chair. His body weight butted it into a stanchion that bounced him forward again. He ignored the knowing snickers that insinuated he’d come to work under the influence. Why try to prove he was sober?

He scooped up the scattered messages. From the top slip, Tessa’s name leaped off the “who called” line.

His mouth tightened, a painful, involuntary response. As “Tessa” whispered inside his mind, angry grief stirred to a boil. Not content to raise hell in his off-duty head, she had to sabotage his working hours, too?

He held the pink paper square over the garbage can beside his desk and then opened his fingers. Not bothering to watch it flutter away, he concentrated blurring eyes on the next message. Left by Chief Richard Weldon.

The chief was from Prodigal, Maine. Noah glanced back at the garbage can. Tessa had moved to Prodigal after the divorce. It’d be one hell of a coincidence if she and the chief of police in her new hometown wanted to talk to him about something different.

He searched for Tessa’s other message. Beneath her name, he read the words, “She said never mind.”

Never mind? She called him out of the blue after eighteen months, and she thought “never mind” was enough explanation?

He stared at the stack of Weldon’s messages. Baxton had just slashed the word “urgent” across each of the slips. Urgent must be an understatement. Tessa wouldn’t have called him for anything less vital than the end of the world.

He toed his chair in a circle until he faced his desk again. The divorce Tessa had demanded gave him an excuse to ignore her summons.

But if she was in trouble? He reached for the phone, his body a drum that vibrated in time with his pulse. The sight of his own shaking hand made him back off. He shrugged out of his black leather jacket. He’d started to sweat.

Get a grip. He closed his eyes and faced truth in the darkness. A grip on what? Pressing his fingertips hard against his throbbing temples, he fought wave after wave of pain. Nothing put Tessa in perspective. And her “never mind” hadn’t let him off the hook. She wouldn’t have called if her problem was something she could handle by herself.

He stared at the phone again, dreading the rejection in her voice, disillusionment that had swallowed any softer feelings she’d had for him. He’d survived the eighteen months since his daughter’s death, by learning to make himself numb. Opening his eyes again, he swiped his hand across his mouth.

What kind of man let a woman do him this way?

“If you’re sick, go to the men’s room.”

Noah turned, an answer ready for the smart-ass colleague who’d offered such sound advice, but the Ann Landers with the big mouth was actually a suspect being booked.

Noah planted both palms on his desk. He could either sit or clock the guy. And clocking the guy might impinge on their case against him. They didn’t get jaywalkers up here. Just scum who’d killed one or more innocent human beings.

Breathing deeply, he stared at Richard Weldon’s name. He’d talk to Weldon first, and maybe he wouldn’t even have to call Tessa. He snatched up the receiver and then punched in the number. After one ring a man identified himself as the police chief.

“Noah Gabriel, returning your call.”

“I’ve tried to reach you all day.”

He took enough of that tone from Baxton. Noah eyed the stack of messages. “Yeah?”

“It’s about your wife. I don’t know how to tell you—I’m not even sure I should tell you, but I’ve put her in an office in my station.”

“So?” An office—that was Tessa’s big crisis?

“Look, buddy, when your wife called you, I heard her ask for ‘Detective’ Gabriel. As a professional courtesy, I’m letting you know I have her.”

“For what?” He wasn’t holding her for anything big if he’d only shut her up in an office. Noah almost smiled as he pictured Tessa’s reaction to being “held” at all. Five feet four inches of trained lawyer, dogged independence and, if you crossed her, notable fury. He remembered how he’d crossed her, and his urge to smile passed. He swallowed hard, his throat muscles contracting.

He’d been the one to find their baby daughter in her crib that hellish morning. Her name stole across his thoughts, too. “Keely,” a body blow that caught him unaware. He usually tried not to let himself think her name. He hadn’t said it out loud since her funeral.

Not since the moment he’d realized Tessa blamed him. He’d checked the baby last the night before she’d…

But SIDS gave you no warning.

He hadn’t known he should plant himself beside his infant daughter and listen to her breathe all night. He hadn’t even known he should have kissed her cheek one more time, stroked the downy black hair off her warm forehead before her skin grew cold. He shook his head and swallowed, trying not to get sick at the memories that raked him.

Rage, his abiding companion for the past year and a half, clenched his hand around the receiver. He saw himself throwing the telephone through the nearest damn window—but he didn’t do it.

Civilized men held on. For what? How the hell was he supposed to know?

“What did you say, Chief Weldon?” Even to himself, he sounded as if he were strangling.

Weldon hesitated a lengthy moment. “I’m letting you know your wife may be in deep trouble.”

“I’m not married.” He’d said it so many times he’d learned how to make it sound as if it didn’t hurt.

“Your ex-wife, then. Man, I don’t know what’s wrong with you two, but you’d both better listen to me. She found her partner dead in his office today, stabbed. At least she says she found him, but we have no witnesses, and I’ve heard some ugly stories about her and Mr. Howard. I’m not holding her officially right now, but I thought you’d want to know I plan to question her again.”

“David? Stabbed?” One more death shouldn’t shock him. It did. The pounding in his head built up steam until Noah suspected his brain must be all veins, no gray matter.

“David Howard, that’s right.”

Grief for his friend and for David’s small daughter overtook him, until instinct intervened and he stopped himself from feeling anything. He focused on the small-town policeman’s crazy accusation. “You think my wife murdered her best friend? With a knife?”

He forgot the “ex” part of his relationship with Tessa. “She couldn’t lift a finger, much less a knife, to hurt anyone, and especially not David. They’ve known each other since kindergarten. David and their law firm—” He broke off. David and Tessa’s firm had dragged her out of the ashes of the divorce.

“I’m not sure what I think. Mr. Howard’s wife hasn’t been dead a year yet. We know he and Mrs. Gabriel were close, and we heard your marriage broke up about five months before Mrs. Howard passed away.” The chief’s wary breath wheezed in Noah’s ear. “Their receptionist tells me they argued lately. Frequent arguments. I have to wonder if they were lovers’ quarrels.”

“You’re nuts.” This guy was implying Tessa had killed David because of what—unrequited love for her best friend? “Tell my wife to shut up until her lawyer comes.” Standing, Noah yanked his jacket back on, one-handed.

“You’re not married anymore, remember?”

“I’m on my way, Chief, and I’d advise you to go by the book with my wife. That includes letting her out of your two-bit station house.”

“She’s resting. We’re doing her a favor.”

Noah swore into the phone before he slammed down the receiver.

SHE WASN’T AFRAID, but the moment the office door began to open, Tessa Gabriel swiped tears of grief off her face and eased around the desk. She brushed against musty dime-store drapes whose stink washed her in a wave of nausea. She covered her mouth briefly, determined not to show Weldon the least sign of weakness.

“Mrs. Gabriel.”

She searched his gaze for some sign he’d heard from Noah. He stared back, challenging her with his suspicions but not with rage. Illogical relief swept her. Noah would have fired him up.

She’d called her former husband out of habit—the last remnants of once-upon-a-time days when she’d believed she could depend on him—before he’d proved he wanted nothing more to do with her. When she’d come to her senses, she’d called back and told him not to come, but who knew which message he’d pay attention to?

Forget Noah. She’d deal with the cops on her own, and she’d call Child Protective Services and get Maggie out of whatever home they’d put her in. Planning for Maggie made her think of David, and she almost cried again.

She forced a little steel into her spine. She knew how to honor his memory—by taking care of Maggie, making sure his and Joanna’s love for her figured more strongly in her life than their deaths.

“The sooner you talk to me, Mrs. Gabriel, the sooner we’ll finish.”

She hadn’t realized she’d gone silent. Her throat hurt as she held back grief. “I’ve told you everything I saw. What more do you want? I didn’t kill David.” And she couldn’t believe he thought her capable of plunging that huge knife into David’s body again and again and again.

But she took a leaf out of her ex-husband’s book. Don’t let them see you care. They can’t touch you if they don’t know how bad it hurts. Her sorrow might even make her look guiltier to this half-blind police chief.

“I think David must have disturbed a burglar.” She tensed as she pictured his body among the bloodied papers on the darkened rug. “You saw the office. It’s a mess. Obviously, someone was searching for money, or something.”

Weldon just looked at her. And looked at her, until his pale blue eyes and tired, hound-sad face were all she could see.

She knew this game. If he didn’t talk, she’d have to. She role-played, too, to get the effect she wanted in court. This game didn’t interest her.

She used every muscle in her body to shake the chair in front of her. “Where’s Maggie Howard? You tell me where that little girl is right now.”

Officious jerk—he looked pleased with her outburst.

What did she care? She’d lost her best friend. She could only help David now by keeping her promise to take care of his child if something happened to him and Joanna. “Even you must see Maggie will be terrified in a stranger’s home.”

“A foster home,” he said, as if Maggie, at nine months, would know the difference between foster caregivers and strangers. “And, Mrs. Gabriel, I want to talk to you about that baby girl.”

His tone hinted at more trouble. He terrified her, and she leaned toward him. “She’s not hurt, too?” If someone could do…that…to David, what might have happened to Maggie?

He narrowed his eyes, looking for guilt, as Noah would have done. “She’s fine, but tell me, do you believe in coincidence?”

“What coincidence?”

Weldon smoothed a perfectly shaped eyebrow. “Your daughter died, didn’t she?”

His soft question tossed her into the past. Tessa tried to breathe and not see the persistent image of Keely’s face as she’d lain in her crib that morning. Add that to her gore-filled last memories of David, and she could barely speak. “What does my daughter have to do with Maggie?”

“You lost her and then your husband divorced you. How desperate are you to replace your family? Maybe you think a new child will bring Detective Gabriel back to you.”

Struck dumb, she stared at him. She couldn’t think of the family she and Noah and Keely had been if she wanted to deal with the life she was trying to build. “Even if you think I’d hurt David, why do you suppose my ex-husband would come back to me for someone else’s child?”

“You want the truth? I think the whole damn bunch of you are sick. I believe you were sleeping with David Howard, and his wife found out. To deal with his cheating, she relapsed into taking hard drugs and she was high when she wrecked her car. I think Mr. Howard knew he’d caused his wife’s death, and guilt made him move heaven and hell to persuade the power in this town to help him hide her drug use. And then he cut you off. But what do you want more than anything? You want to start over with what you lost—a husband and a baby. You may even love Maggie Howard, but if you couldn’t have her father, why not kill him and start over with your ex-husband and your lover’s child?”

“You’re the one who’s sick.” How had he discovered so much about Joanna? In a miasma of postpartum depression, she had only imagined an affair, but she had started using drugs again. And when Tessa discovered the truth after Joanna’s death, David had begged her to keep quiet. He’d loved Joanna deeply, and he hadn’t wanted Maggie to find out her mother had died under the influence. He’d bribed or pressured some powerful men to keep Joanna’s secrets, and Tessa tried to lead the chief away from his suspicions.

“David was my friend—and only my friend. He should be alive and raising Maggie. The last thing Noah or I would want is to love another child.”

Weldon narrowed his gaze, as sidetracked as she could have hoped for. “I don’t understand you,” he said. “Why did you agree to take custody of Maggie Howard?”

Because she’d never dreamed she’d have to.

She gathered her wits. Since she’d joined David in the law firm, she’d represented a few clients facing misdemeanor charges. And she’d lived with Noah long enough to understand how single-minded the police were on the trail of a criminal. Pushing away from the desk, she fired another defensive shot. “No one can replace my daughter. That’s all you need to know.”

She didn’t bother to tell him she was leaving. He’d probably figure it out.

He said nothing as she opened the door and then carefully closed it behind herself. In the overly bright hall, she flexed her fingers against the wall. It was the light that made her falter, not the torment of a past she’d buried deep enough to keep it from touching her anymore.

The door opened at her back. Declining to turn, she forced herself to straighten up and stride toward the reception area. A deputy stood as she drew even with his desk.

“Mrs. Gabriel?”

Let Weldon explain where she was going. She had to find Maggie.

“Mrs. Gabriel, your husband is on his way from Boston.” At the chief’s quiet announcement, she stopped.

She didn’t need Noah to rescue her from this police station or her grief for David. She should have chopped off her hand before she’d let herself dial his number.

“Please tell him I changed my mind. Send him back to Boston.” She faced the man who’d virtually held her prisoner. “Good evening, Chief Weldon.”

“Call me Richard. We’ll be seeing a lot of each other.”

His jaded amusement all but brought Noah into the room. Police cadets must spend hours in front of their mirrors practicing that look.

“Why don’t you search for the real killer instead?”

She grabbed her dark green overcoat off the rack by the door and then hurried into the snow-spotted night. The wind snatched her breath out of her mouth as she pushed her arms into her sleeves and pinched her lapels together beneath her chin. She fumbled for the cell phone in her pocket.

Stopping beneath a feeble streetlamp, she dialed Information and asked for Child Protective Service’s number. While the operator connected her, Tessa leaned into the light to read her watch. Barely after six in the evening, it was already nighttime according to the January sky.

Tessa’s heart thudded as she made her way to her car. After four years of practicing family law in Boston, she’d turned all such cases over to David when they’d pooled their resources. She’d no longer wanted to deal with children or families. However, when the representative on duty answered her call, her old instincts took over.

“I’m looking for Maggie Howard,” she said. “She was put in your care today, but I’m her legal guardian, and we both know she’ll be better off seeing a familiar face.”

“I don’t think we need to disturb her—”

“I’ll be at your office in—” Tessa gazed up at the snowflakes falling out of the black sky. “I’ll be there in about twenty minutes.”

She hung up without waiting for the woman to answer. She pushed her phone and both hands into her pockets with such force her coat went taut over her shoulders. She’d never stopped believing she should have been able to save Keely. The mere idea of loving another child made her feel guilty, as if she were forgetting her own daughter, and afraid that the worst could happen again.

NOAH’S POST-HANGOVER headache had turned into a full-fledged migraine by the time he turned onto Prodigal’s typical New England town square. City buildings and small brick-and-glass shops closed around a wide lamplit, snow-covered lawn.

From spring through fall, the school bands would practice on that grass. Citizens would stroll to the gazebo where bird feeders of every size rocked together in the snowy night. If it was anything like the village where Noah had grown up outside of Boston, a farmers’ market and the local craft merchants would set up their stalls on the lawn on nice days, hoping for business.

He parked in front of the police station, opened the door and lifted his face to the snow. The icy flakes on his face relieved some of the pressure that had only intensified with each mile he’d driven on his four-hour trek. A sound of wood hitting against wood drew his burning gaze to the bird feeders on the gazebo.

He dragged himself out of the car and concentrated on walking as if he wouldn’t rather pass out. A deputy met him at the station’s glass doors.

“Can I help you, sir?” Suspicion colored his offer.

“I’m looking for Tessa Gabriel.” As soon as he said it, he wondered if she’d stopped using his name. But the deputy backed up, and his eyes went carefully blank.

“I just came on duty, but I can tell you she left about two hours ago. Are you her attorney?”

“Does she need a lawyer?”

The younger man’s slow blink made him look more like a kid wearing a toy badge. “We let her go. That’s all I’m able to say.”

So they hadn’t cleared her yet. Noah turned away, bent on getting back to the car before the anvil player in his head worked up to a new crescendo. “She went home?” he said over his shoulder.

“I guess.”

He guessed? Yet she was still a suspect? Even the Prodigal police realized they didn’t have evidence to charge her, or they’d be watching her.

Outside, Noah opened his car door and lowered himself to the seat. By the dim interior light, he worked out the way to Tessa’s house on his map.

Ten minutes later, he pulled to the curb in front of a Cape Cod on a quiet street. Light, like two lasers beaming from the cheerful lamps attached to either side of her door made him sick. He tried to blame his weak stomach on the migraine, but deep down, he knew exactly what was wrong.

Tessa’s was the one face that brought back their baby’s death and the grief that he beat down twenty-four hours of every day.

Maybe he couldn’t have saved their little girl, but he had let Tessa down. He’d had nothing left to give her, no comfort to feed her needs.

With a groan, Noah rested his head on his fingertips. Motion in the night dragged his gaze to the left. A dark car flowed past and then edged to the curb in front of him. Almost immediately, Tessa rose from the driver’s seat.

Noah exhaled, a sound drenched in agony that startled him in the silence of his car. Ashamed of his own weakness, he rubbed the misted windshield clear and leaned forward to see Tessa better.

Wind and snow lifted her straight blond hair from the collar of her dark coat. He couldn’t see her face as she leaned into the back seat of her car. She moved as if she were wrestling with someone inside, and then she straightened, holding something in her arms. Her stance scourged him with memories that refused to fade.

His blood froze, slowing the beat of his heart. He’d seen her cradle their child exactly the same way, but he’d never realized he should imprint that image on his brain. And now she was holding someone else’s baby.

She had to be David and Joanna’s daughter.

Clutching a shopping bag in her free hand, Tessa hurried up the steps and propped the bag against her leg as she opened the door.

He resented her for daring to care for another little girl. How could she hold another baby in arms that would never hold their daughter again? But then he remembered what David’s child had lost, and his resentment shamed him.

He turned his car key in the ignition. He had to get out of here. He wasn’t the man to help Tessa now.

He stomped the accelerator, but he hadn’t put the car into gear. The engine roared, but he went nowhere.

CHAPTER TWO

AFTER SHE KICKED THE DOOR shut behind her, Tessa dropped the shopping bag at her feet and shrugged out of her coat. As she laid Maggie on a wide ottoman, the baby woke, scrunching her small face in displeasure.

Breathing in the scent of baby and snow, Tessa tugged the pink knit mittens off Maggie’s tiny clenched fists and then unzipped her snowsuit. At once, Maggie gripped Tessa’s index finger and clung unquestioningly.

Tessa’s heart raced with panic, her gut reaction to such humbling trust from David’s daughter. Sure she’d carried a sleeping infant from a foster home in the middle of the night, but she hadn’t quite realized she was starting a lifetime of caring for Maggie. In the year since she’d left Noah, Tessa had built herself a safe, solitary existence, a life raft she’d ridden out of the wreck of her marriage. David’s baby girl threatened her security.

She closed her eyes, tensing with shame. She’d been reluctant before, in the early months of her pregnancy with Keely. She’d always meant to have children, but she’d wanted them according to her time frame—when she was ready to be the best mother who ever undertook childrearing. She’d planned a perfect life for her family, a mom and dad wildly in love, a doting home, good schools, and at least one parent available to provide unfettered devotion.

She’d spent so many days alone while her own father had built his reputation as a plastic surgeon and her mother, the ultimate Junior Leaguer, had paved his social path and waited for Tessa to grow up and become interesting.

But she hadn’t grown interesting. She hadn’t even grown out of being too short and too round to make a less-than-embarrassing Junior Leaguer in training. And she hadn’t mastered the fine arts of womanhood her mother modeled so flawlessly—studied helplessness, perfect decorum in the face of disaster and the all-important ability to set a perfect table with an ideal dinner for an impromptu party of six or more.

Her father, who could fix anyone, and her mother, who’d never needed to be fixed, still didn’t understand that their absences and their disappointment had taught her to make sure it would be a glacial day in hell before she’d parent by their examples.

She’d intended to build her career first. She wanted no success as an attorney at anyone else’s expense, but eventually, she’d planned to have time to work from home, or to take a break from her career, to make sure her children knew how dearly she and Noah had wanted them.

Pregnancy had smashed her plan, and her early reluctance now seemed like a red flag she’d waved at fate. Quickly abandoning her idiotic ideas about time frames hadn’t saved her daughter. She hadn’t even managed to save Keely with love deeper than she could bear to remember.

She squeezed Maggie’s hand. This baby needed love, too, and Tessa had learned not to taunt fate. What if curses were real, not the product of her grief?

She gazed into Maggie’s tear-damped blue eyes, smiling through a tremble that hurt her mouth. She lifted the baby in her soft terry sleeper. Need sliced through her. She shifted Maggie to her shoulder so she could hide her face as she gritted her teeth. Her arms ached for Keely’s warmth.

She breathed deeply. In…out…in…out. Maggie needed her now.

When the baby shifted, ramming her fist into her mouth, Tessa recognized the gesture with a start. Despite trying with all the willpower she possessed to forget the past few years, she remembered how to care for a baby.

“Are you hungry?” Thank God, she’d stopped for bottles and formula and baby food.

But as she reached for the shopping bag, something moved outside, breaking the line of porch light that spilled across her pine floor. She straightened, staring through the small panes of the bay windows.

Nothing else moved.

Then she remembered she was holding a baby whose father had been viciously killed. What if someone had acted on a grudge against David? Tessa shot to the wall beside the door, slamming her hand over the switch to turn off the living-room lamps. Easing Maggie onto her other shoulder, she leaned across the door and yanked the cord that dropped blinds over the nearest section of the bay window.

Footsteps crunched the snow on her porch. Tessa gasped, and Maggie started to whimper. Smoothing her hand over the baby’s head, Tessa forced her breathing into a regular pattern.

Good guardians tried not to terrify children in their care. She’d given Weldon her honest best guess about what had happened to David. Nothing else made sense.

All the same, unexpected company scared her tonight.

Fear drew images of David, sprawled on his office floor. Trying not to sob, she turned toward the kitchen—and the closest phone. With Maggie here, she couldn’t take chances. She should have asked Weldon to send someone to watch the house until he caught the killer.

Tessa veered toward the keypad beside the kitchen door and tapped in the alarm code she barely remembered. She’d hardly ever used the thing. Nothing that had frightened her before went bump in the night.

Just then the doorbell chimed, and Maggie tugged her little fist out of her mouth. “Da?” she demanded. It had been her first word, and David had crowed proudly.

Tessa pressed a kiss to the baby’s silky hair. “I’m sorry. It’s not Daddy.” She stroked Maggie’s back as the little girl whispered another call for her father. Tessa pulled her even closer, trying to share her own body heat as comfort.

She reached for the wall phone and started to dial 911, but Maggie yanked the receiver from her hand. The baby’s playful grab gave her a moment to think. Was she overreacting?

The person on her porch might be another friend of David’s, coming to pay his respects, to check on Maggie. Why tell Weldon she had a prowler if she didn’t? He’d love an excuse to search her house.

She inched back along the living room wall to the door, angling her body to protect the baby. Supremely indifferent to Tessa’s little dance of fear, Maggie attacked her own fist with another hungry cry.

“Hold on a minute,” Tessa whispered. “I’ll feed you.” As soon as she made sure a maniacal killer hadn’t come to call. She parted two of the slats to peer through the ice-encrusted glass.

The stubbled chin at eye level triggered alarms all over her body.

Noah. She recognized the faint dimple beneath his bottom lip before she raised her gaze to his shadowed dark brown eyes. He tipped his head in an unspoken let me in, and Tessa sprang back. The blinds clattered into place, keeping time with her erratic heartbeat.

She went hot and then cold, and then warmed again with frustration.

“Open the door, Tessa. You need help.”

Her name sounded unfamiliar on the ragged edges of his raised voice. She should have called Larry Baxton one more time and begged him to burn her message.

She studied the living room’s shadows. She’d felt safe here because she didn’t have to avoid images of her broken family in these rooms. This house contained no memories of Noah or their own baby.

But now she had to think of Maggie. In a few hours, the baby had grown more important than Tessa’s worst fears. She had to learn to love Maggie and make new memories. And she couldn’t teach David’s little girl to be afraid of love or of facing a painful past.

Something heavy slammed into the door at her back. Noah’s fist, no doubt.

She must have lost her mind when she’d called him. She hadn’t been able to depend on him after Keely—after… He’d disappeared inside his job, finding more comfort with the murderers he was so good at catching than with her.

The door shuddered under his fist again. “Open up or I’ll shoot the damn lock.”

She didn’t like being pushed around. She bit her lip, curling her toes inside her shoes as she refused to walk away. Responsibility for Maggie pinioned her to the floor.

“Just let me in.” His strained patience was anything but familiar. They’d long since stopped trying to bear with each other. “Give me a chance to help you. And David’s baby.”

Tessa opened her mouth to answer. At the same time, Maggie sensed anger in the air. She teared up, puckering her lips.

Damn.

Tessa turned to a second keypad by the door. She didn’t want him in her house or anywhere near her life again, but Noah would help her keep Maggie safe. He’d turned away before, but he wouldn’t have driven all the way from Boston to turn his back on her now. She tapped out the code that disarmed the security system.

The moment she opened up, Noah pushed inside. She’d forgotten his scent. All male, it tugged at her, slipping between memories too intimate to face, too insistent to ignore. She hated the need that absorbed her in his drawn cheeks and the lines she’d never seen before, at the corners of his eyes. Emotion she couldn’t understand and certainly didn’t trust thinned his mouth.

“Tessa.” This time he whispered her name, as if their shared past drew his breath from depths she hadn’t known she’d reached inside him. His gaze washed her with the same insatiable need she felt. A yearning that had nothing to do with sex.

They were two people who’d lost everything that mattered most. Seeing him brought it all back. The joy as well as the pain. Joy scared her more. She didn’t want to remember that much happiness now that she’d lost it.

“I don’t want you here.” What she meant was she never wanted to need him again.

His grimace acknowledged what she couldn’t say. With shaking hands, he dragged his hair away from his face. Black strands stuck to his scalp, and moisture clung in drops to his fingers. He shut the door and turned the dead bolt. “Who did this to David? Are you all right?” His eyes looked like holes in his face. “Is someone trying to hurt you?”

“I’m fine.” She wasn’t. She wanted to cry—for David, for Maggie, for herself, and maybe a little for this empty-eyed shadow of Noah.

Somehow she’d managed to forget the ghost who’d walked out long before she’d left him. She’d been angry with the Noah she’d loved, the husband with whom she’d planned at least one brother or sister for Keely and a future as long as forever.

Another reason to forget about counting on life being fair or normal. She’d better just tell Noah what had happened and hope he’d be able to help before he vanished again.

“David must have interrupted a burglary. Whoever—” She stopped. David’s death grew more real each time she had to talk about finding him. She wiped her mouth. She had to function for Maggie. “Whoever hurt David also tore the office apart.”

“You—” He sounded scared, except Noah didn’t get scared. “You found him?”

His question confused her. “Didn’t Weldon tell you? Why are you here?”

Noah shook his head, as if he realized he didn’t sound coherent. “Weldon told me, but I hate thinking of you seeing him like that.”

She backed up a little, distancing herself from his concern. If David was still alive, she’d be planning to tell him about this crazy conversation. David had been the one she could rely on. She clenched her teeth to keep from crying out loud.

David would never come back again, and Noah hadn’t come to comfort her. Better count her blessings he was such a good cop. Closing her eyes on her tears, she turned away, but Noah caught the arm that wasn’t clutching Maggie.

“You’re not all right.”

She stared at his hand until he let her go. “I was better until I had to ask you for help.”

“I know you called back and changed your mind, but I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know.” One step brought Noah closer. “And I know why you don’t want me around. You don’t think about…her, until you see me.”

She resented him for never saying Keely’s name. “Do you forget her?”

Maggie cried out at Tessa’s hostility, but Noah didn’t have to answer. Grief hollowed his eyes and his gray face made him look like the walking dead.

Tessa scaled down her anger. She wasn’t being fair. “I shouldn’t have called you the first time.”

She shifted the baby against her breast, and Noah stared, mesmerized by Maggie. When he looked slowly back at Tessa, he staggered. At first, she thought he was upset, maybe even drunk, if the rumors she’d heard from their Boston friends were true. But he reached behind himself, grasping for anything solid.

“You’re sick.” He’d had so many migraines after Keely died Tessa had begged him to see a doctor. He hadn’t.

With a grimace, he ignored her. “How can you take on that child?”

He’d gone to the heart of her doubts. She wasn’t certain she’d make a good substitute parent for Maggie. “What choice do I have?”

“Are you being fair to her? You can’t just give her up if it doesn’t work out. You won’t.”

He shut his mouth in lines of pain. After Keely, they’d forgotten how to love each other, but he did still know her, and she knew him well enough to recognize his anguish.

He backed unsteadily into the wall, and she forgot to be wary of him.

“I’ll make it work, Noah. She needs me.” She slid her free arm around his waist. His muscles tensed against her, from her shoulder to her thigh.

Feel nothing, she warned herself. He’s temporary here.

“Migraine,” he muttered.

“I guessed. Come sit down.”

Noah shrugged off her helping hand. “Carry the baby. I’ll manage.”

Shadows intensified the paleness of his cheek where his beard grew more sparsely. Tessa swallowed, trying to wet her dry mouth. She’d forgotten that small patch of skin she’d kissed so many times she could feel its texture now against her lips.

“How did you get out of the police station without an attorney, Tessa?”

“I don’t need an attorney.”

“Weldon hinted you did, and you should pay attention when a cop talks like that.” He enunciated each word too carefully. “Don’t tell me you’re representing yourself.”

With sudden impatience, Maggie brought the fleshy part of Tessa’s thumb to her mouth. Sharp baby teeth grazed Tessa’s skin, making her draw a deep breath. Leaning down, she grabbed the shopping bag and then headed for the kitchen. “Let me feed her and I’ll drive you to a hotel, Noah. We can talk tomorrow.”

She switched on the kitchen light, but Noah, who’d driven at least four hours in excruciating pain, gazed at her through slitted eyes, trying to filter out the brightness. “What hotel?”

Maggie’s protest at the lack of anything filling in Tessa’s hand left little time to argue. “You can’t stay here.”

“Why? We don’t love each other anymore. I can’t hurt you.”

“You know why.” She wasn’t about to admit how long she’d worked at sleeping in a house where she couldn’t even hope he’d be coming home. “We got divorced. We didn’t part on good terms. I called you because with David…gone…I didn’t know who else to turn to.” She pushed the shopping bag onto the kitchen counter.

“I’m sorry about David.”

“Me, too.” She couldn’t keep moisture from gathering at the corners of her eyes, but she used her forearm to wipe it away. Better get Noah out of here before the shock of David’s death finally wore off.

She kept remembering how painful “never” was when you realized you wouldn’t see someone you loved again. Saying goodbye to David would feel something like letting Keely go. She couldn’t do that with Noah watching her.

He’d been unable to share her pain for the daughter they’d both loved deeply. She wouldn’t expose herself to his reserve again.

Fortunately, he had his own concerns, and he seemed oblivious to hers. “You don’t seem to understand how angry someone must have been to stab David like that,” he said. “It could have been a client. It could have been a friend. It had to be someone who knew him.” Noah’s investigative instincts were so strong he’d trained half the detectives on Boston’s homicide force. “I don’t care how you and I split up, I’m not leaving you alone tonight when someone killed David in your office this morning.”

“What use would you be?” She softened her voice. She wasn’t out to get him, just to remind him he wasn’t at top strength. But she was used to helping him when he had a migraine. Keeping a tight grip on the baby, she eased Noah toward a chair. “You can barely stand up straight.”

“I could throw you my gun.”

His wry tone threw her off balance. Maggie began emitting an “aiyiyi” sound that apparently meant she was ravenous. Tessa peered from the baby to the man. Maybe now wasn’t the time to prove she didn’t need him. She just might.

“For tonight,” she said. “Until we’re sure no one has a grudge against David that includes Maggie.”

Unexpected wistfulness colored his exhausted gaze. “She is kind of cute.”

“You could have met her at the christening.”

“No.” In response to the invitation David and Joanna had sent him, he’d simply scrawled “I hope you understand” on the RSVP card. “I couldn’t,” he said now.

Tessa wanted to think badly of his weakness, but she remembered how she’d sweated outside the church, furiously trying to force herself through those doors. Only her friendship for David and her growing concern for Joanna, whose second addiction had begun to show itself, had pulled her inside.

The last of Maggie’s temper went up in a shrill cry that whitened Noah’s already pale skin. Tessa reached into the bag and pulled out a baby monitor. Noah stared at it, and she stared at him.

They’d left Keely’s monitor on that last night, but it hadn’t helped. If she had to strap this one to her hip and turn up the sound until she heard ice forming on the windowpanes, this baby would survive.

“I’ll wait in there,” Noah said, and departed the field for the safer confines of the living room.

Tessa nodded, taking out the formula mix to refresh herself on the recipe. Maggie drank most of a bottle before her eyes drifted shut, but Tessa waited to make sure she was sound asleep. She backed through the kitchen door, clutching the baby and the monitor.

She tried not to wonder where Noah would turn up. Had he scouted out a bedroom? Hardly seemed likely.

She had to cross the living room to reach the stairs. Noah sat hunched forward on the sofa, resting his head between splayed fingers.

“Did you take anything?” she asked in a low tone.

He looked up. “The medication knocks me out. I was waiting for you to finish in there.”

“We don’t have to talk tonight.”

“You found a murder victim today, and Weldon wants me to believe he suspects you. Think of Maggie if you can’t see you’re in trouble.”

“I’m not afraid. I didn’t hurt David.”

“You’d better be afraid. You know how many people have been ruined because the police falsely suspected them, and you know someone hated David enough to kill him. Put the baby to bed and come back down here.”

When he reminded her Maggie was her priority, she had no choice. She had to give in.

She carried the baby up the stairs at the far end of the room and turned onto the gallery that led to the three bedrooms. She managed not to look down at Noah as she took Maggie into hers.

Mentally preparing herself to make their talk quick, she recounted each second of her morning. Noah had despaired more than once about witnesses who’d kept “inconsequential” case-breaking information to themselves.

She glanced at Maggie, who suckled in her sleep. “We’ll find the guy who did this to your daddy. I won’t let you forget him and your mom. I promise you.” Her voice broke under the strain of holding on to her grief, but she kept her mind on getting Maggie to bed and seeing Noah once more tonight.

She searched her room for a safe bed for a nine-month-old. The armchair wouldn’t do, and neither would her bed. She wasn’t used to sleeping with a baby, and she didn’t want to risk rolling over on Maggie. Maybe a dresser drawer?

Tessa positioned pillows on the bed and eased the baby into the center. Then she opened her dresser’s bottom drawer and emptied it. She fished a quilt out of her closet and lined the drawer before adding a blanket. Then she checked Maggie’s blessedly dry diaper.

The baby whimpered when Tessa laid her in her makeshift bed, but after one strong stretch, Maggie burrowed into the little nest.

She might manage to crawl over the side, but she’d only slither onto the floor. Just in case, Tessa surrounded the drawer with a comforter from the hall linen closet and then set up the monitor by the baby’s head. Tomorrow she’d find a crib, but for tonight, Maggie would be safe.

Tessa took a scarf from another drawer and settled it over the lamp shade to dim the light. Cupping the monitor’s receiver in her hand, she tiptoed from the room. She paused to pull the door, but when she leaned over the gallery rail, Noah seemed to have fallen asleep.

With one arm angled over his eyes, his other hand flattened on his belly and one knee bent so his foot rested on the floor, he looked peaceful.

Sleep was the only sure cure for his migraine. Why wake him when they couldn’t solve anything tonight? She reached for her door again, but stopped, swearing under her breath as she stole another look at him. He might get cold if he slept there till morning.

She snatched another comforter and a pillow from the linen closet and negotiated the quiet stair treads. She set the pillow and the monitor on the floor beside her former husband and then made herself spread the comforter over his long body.

He shifted one lean leg, and the past exploded in her head like Fourth of July fireworks. Noah’s legs, naked and strong, wrapped around hers, his back curved protectively as he covered her.

Tessa bit her lip, trying not to whimper the way Maggie had. She’d better forget those days. And the nights. The lovely, loving nights. They were all over. Lost. Unshared grief had destroyed her marriage.

“I’m not asleep.”

She jumped back, tripping over the coffee table, but Noah caught her hands.

“Don’t break your neck. Sit down beside me.”

He still looked pale enough to pass out at any moment. Those treacherous memories tempted her to curl her body into his and pull his head onto her shoulder, but she perched on the opposite arm of the sofa. He didn’t suggest she come back.

“Tell me what you saw.” He pushed the comforter off. “From the moment you stepped inside your office.”

Horrible images flooded back. She tried to distance herself. She’d had enough practice, getting through the days after Keely’s death. “The main door was locked. I had to open it with my keys. I didn’t notice anything at first. I worked for half an hour in my own office.” She shuddered. If only she’d gone to David’s office. Had he still been alive? “Whoever—the killer must have already gone. I left my door open and anyone who tried to leave would have had to walk past.”

“You have a receptionist?”

“She comes at nine o’clock, but I got there around eight because I had to finish some research for a meeting today.” She’d never called to cancel that appointment.

“You changed your routine so you could go in early. That’s why Weldon thinks you arranged to meet David. He thinks you might have killed him and then pretended to find him.”

She began to breathe fast. She hadn’t taken Weldon seriously.

“Are you all right?” Noah leaned forward and cupped her nape. While she stared at him, startled that he’d touch her, he made her bend down. “Put your head between your knees before you faint.”

She put her head down because goose bumps radiated from the place where he’d pressed his fingers against her skin. “You think Weldon really suspects me?”

Noah didn’t speak, so she looked up as he considered his answer. He’d become a cop because he’d seen his father die making an almost routine traffic stop. His intuition had been born that day, and Tessa trusted it.

“I don’t know.” Weariness strained his tone, and he looked more haggard by the second. “He even mentioned Joanna’s accident. He said she was using drugs because of you.”

“What?” Her promises to David meant more than her own reputation. She’d vowed she wouldn’t let anyone else find out about Joanna. “Weldon got his training at the movies. Joanna had an accident.”

“Weldon thinks you wanted David for yourself.”

She sprang to her feet, flustered. No matter where they stood now, she didn’t want Noah thinking there’d been something between her and David. It was hard enough to live with the fact Joanna had thought so. “He was my friend.”

Noah drew his mouth into a brief, tense line. “I have to ask you—as much as I don’t want to—did your feelings for David change after you left me and Joanna died?”

The man had to be blind. She hadn’t left him until he’d made sure they were living separate lives in the same house. And David had welcomed her here. They’d always been close, but their losses had created a shorthand that had strengthened their friendship until Joanna became ill. “We were friends, the same as always.”

She couldn’t explain the truth about Joanna without betraying David. She looked down at her hands. A tear splashed just above her thumb, horrifying her. The last thing she needed was to cry in front of Noah.

She tried to clear her throat. “If anything, we weren’t as close after Joanna died. David was distracted with Maggie.” And they’d both felt guilty that their innocent friendship might have hurt Joanna.

“Weldon said you’d argued.”

“Who told him that?” She couldn’t explain to Noah. He’d want to get all the way to the bottom, and she couldn’t tell him the truth about Joanna. “I thought David was preoccupied, raising Maggie alone.”

“But now?”

“Now? Nothing,” she said. “He was preoccupied with Maggie. We had a couple of troublesome clients, one who sort of harassed me.”

“What?” Noah was instantly razor sharp.

“David and I handled it.” She felt and sounded defensive, but she couldn’t help it.

“The guy what—called you?”

She nodded. “Last time was about two weeks ago.”

“Did he ever come here? To your house?”

She blinked in surprise. It was odd to hear him talk about her house. Once, she’d assumed she’d always share a home with him. “Once or twice. I never encouraged him.”

“You should have told me about him the second I arrived. Did you tell Weldon?”

His brusque question sealed their new, impersonal relationship. In Noah’s eyes, she’d become a witness.

“I only told him what I saw this morning.” Her quavering voice gave her grief away, but again Noah didn’t notice.

“Someone wanted David to suffer. The rage that kind of murder takes—who knows if it’s dissipated? When you found him you must have been—”

“I was terrified,” she admitted.

“This guy you’re talking about—do you think he’d be capable of stabbing David?”

“I don’t know.” She truly didn’t. “He also thought David and I were more than friends.” She denied it again with a shake of her head. “Eric gives me the creeps, but I can’t imagine anyone doing what I saw.”

“Eric?” He reached inside his pocket for a notepad, but Tessa held out her hand, mindful of his pain.

“Don’t. I’ll write it down for you in the morning.”

He nodded a terse thanks. “Your other clients—the ones who were unhappy—did you solve their problems?”

“Yes, or we’re in the process. Hugh Carlson was rebuilding his factory after a fire, and we argued with him about following code. We’re also defending a lobsterman’s daughter against a breach of promise by her former fiancé.” She thought about his assumption that the killer’s rage might spill over to someone else in their office or onto David’s child. “Do you really think someone might try to hurt Maggie?”

“Or you.” He rubbed his temples. “When I thought about it, I was almost glad Weldon wanted to keep you. I stopped at the station.”

“I walked out,” she said. “I haven’t done a lot of criminal law, but I knew he couldn’t keep me.” She lowered her head again. “Wouldn’t I know if someone were that angry with me?”

“Did David?”

“He never said anything.” Because of the distance that had crept between them? “I keep thinking he’ll call, that I’m baby-sitting for him tonight.”

Noah dropped his police persona. “You baby-sat?”

“Occasionally. More over the past few months. As I saw less of David, I saw more of Maggie.” She shook her head. “You’ve got me suspicious of every conversation we had.”

“Could he have been afraid something was going to happen? Maybe he wanted you to be comfortable with the baby, and today was what he expected.”

“He would have told me that, Noah.”

“I’m wondering why he didn’t.” He glanced up at her room. “You seem comfortable with her.”

She’d felt way out of her depth. “She was David’s daughter before now. I could like her, but I didn’t have to give her much of myself. You know?”

“More than anyone.” His gentle tone offered the kind of comfort she’d once needed, but then he detached his feelings and became a suspicious cop again. “Where are Joanna’s parents?”

“I haven’t heard from them yet, but Weldon called them.” She glanced toward the phone. “They might have tried to reach me.” Taking a deep breath, she plunged on. “I wonder if they’re going to change their minds about leaving Maggie with me.”

“Why did they agree in the first place?”

“They’re both in their late sixties. I’m young enough to be a mother figure to Maggie, and that was what David and Joanna wanted for her. We drew up the papers just after Maggie was born, and Joanna asked them to sign a consent, but I don’t know how I’d fare in court.”

“They’re probably concerned if they’ve heard David was murdered at the office.”

Her breath caught, but she made herself think of good times with David—when they’d dangled off her roof, cleaning the gutters, the way he’d hounded her about not using the alarm system. He’d been her best friend. “Maybe I should call the Worths.”

“Yeah. David wasn’t so much killed as slaughtered.” At his blunt statement, she pulled back from him, and he grimaced. “They’ve lost him, too, Tessa.”

“You’re right. I didn’t think of that.” She stood, already looking away. “I’ll call from my bathroom. I can take the phone in there without waking the baby, and I know you need to sleep. Can I get you some water?”

“I’ll get it.” He rose, too, apparently as anxious to have her out of his way as she was to leave him on his own.

“I have a guest room upstairs.”

“I’ll take a look at it later.”

At his rueful tone, she picked up the monitor and left him. This was the way they should be together. Except for those first few moments, when they’d absorbed each other like two lost souls who’d wandered in from a desert, they’d treated each other as acquaintances.

She put their first reaction down to unfinished business, but she was happier being Noah’s acquaintance. He’d guide her through any pitfalls the Prodigal Police Department could throw in her path. He’d keep her from making a mistake that would hold their attention on her.

Upstairs Tessa carried the phone into the bathroom and eased the door shut. She called Information for Eleanor and Joe Worth’s phone number. Eleanor answered on the first ring.

“I’m so glad you called,” she said as soon as Tessa greeted her. “Where’s Maggie? That idiot police chief said he’d had Child Services pick her up from day care, but they wouldn’t tell us—”

“I have her.” Tessa waited for Eleanor’s reaction.

“Thank God.” Her gratitude sounded heartfelt. “Why don’t you bring her to us? She needs familiar faces around her, and we’d love to have you both.”

“Thank you,” Tessa said, a touch uneasy. Maggie knew her face. “But I have to arrange for the funeral and take care of the office.” And Weldon might not let her travel forty-five minutes beyond his jurisdiction until after he had cleared her.

“Oh.” Eleanor’s voice faltered into silence.

Her disappointment pricked Tessa’s conscience. “You could come here.” The second she offered she wished she’d kept her mouth shut. Now was not the time to confuse Maggie about who would be taking care of her. Eleanor and Joe might not be able to keep themselves from interfering if they had any second thoughts about the guardianship.

“We should come. Maggie’s too young to go to her father’s funeral. We’ll look after her.”

Eleanor’s excitement felt inappropriate at a time when Tessa couldn’t get David’s broken body out of her head, but the other woman and her husband were all the family Maggie had left. Tessa didn’t want to alienate them. Maggie would need her grandparents, and naturally, they wanted to see her.

A squeak in the floor made her glance toward her bedroom door. Noah must have decided to use her extra room.

Used to old habits, she stood, on the verge of asking what he thought about having the Worths stay, but she came to her senses.

“Let me tell you how to get here from David’s house. It’s on your way.” Again she held back sorrow to take care of business.

“We have a few things to do first, but we’ll drive over late tomorrow morning.”

CHAPTER THREE

HOURS LATER, Tessa lay staring into the darkness. A bony limb scraped at her ice-etched window. Wind seemed to lift the eaves with each sudden gust. The house settled, making familiar snaps and clicks. The only thing she couldn’t hear was the sound of Maggie breathing.

And at last, she couldn’t stand not knowing. She turned on the lamp and knelt beside the baby in her makeshift bed. On her side, with one small hand across her face, Maggie looked ridiculously older than she was. Her terry sleeper lifted and sank with lovely regularity over her chest.

Tessa eased a relieved sigh between her lips. She slid to the floor and cushioned her own elbow beneath her head.

Before long, she began to shiver. The pine floor transferred the cold, despite being insulated by another layer of house downstairs. She crawled back and yanked down a pillow and her own comforter. Then she burrowed into a warm nest beside Maggie on the floor.

Tomorrow night, maybe she’d be able to sleep in her bed. If she found a crib and pulled it near enough.

She closed her eyes. Maggie’s rhythmic breaths became her own. She felt each in-and-out exchange of oxygen that fed Maggie’s blood and hers. Until finally, by some miracle, she stopped thinking at all and fell asleep.

NOAH OPENED ONE EYE to the morning sun. The anvil player in his head had slowed the tempo enough to make life bearable. He turned over, but the familiar scent of the sheets beneath his face startled him. He lifted his head.

Until this second, he hadn’t noticed his own sheets no longer smelled like this, fresh and something floral that made him remember lying with Tessa. He pressed his face into the bed and breathed in.

In the scented darkness, he could almost pretend the past eighteen months hadn’t happened. Any second now he’d hear his baby cooing the odd, off-key songs that had tugged at his heart as Tessa sang back to her.

Punching a hole in his fantasy, a sharp screech erupted from the next room. Noah pulled a pillow over his head, but it couldn’t muffle Tessa’s confused response.

He’d never known her to face the morning with pure joy. Maybe if he’d had twenty years with her, he would have gotten sick of her bad humor in the a.m. He’d only lived with her five years, just long enough to find her morning temper endearing. She’d hidden it from their baby, and even now, she spoke lovingly to Maggie.

He shoved the pillow away. Tessa had less reason than ever to welcome a new day. Memories of finding David’s body would probably hit her harder this morning.

She’d never seen such violence. Tessa’s family tended to be detached. She’d grown up on her own for the most part, in a nice safe, upper-middle-class environment. But her parents had protected her from anything resembling David’s death.

A sudden spurt of anger surprised Noah, twisting out of the depths of his apathy. Loss of life pissed him off, but David’s death mattered even more. After his and Tessa’s divorce, he’d backed away from his friendship with David in case the other man felt he had to choose between them.

Since then, they’d shared exactly two beers on two separate occasions when David had come to Boston for business. They’d never talked about Tessa, and they’d never discussed David’s personal life. Noah figured David had chosen which friend he wanted to keep.

But he’d be damned if he’d let anyone get away with killing David Howard, and he’d be damned again if he’d let anyone think Tessa could hurt their friend.

He got out of bed, and a whole anvil chorus tuned up for a more complex piece. Pressing his fists to his temples, he staggered to the chair where he’d left his clothes.

He dressed and then opened the door just in time to stumble into Tessa, carrying small brown-haired Maggie. His ex-wife’s glance flickered over him. Despite the percussion in his head and his need to maintain a professional distance, interest rode his nerve endings along the path Tessa’s gaze had taken.

He stepped back into his borrowed room, realizing a retreat probably exposed his response to her innocent gaze. Fortunately, she had her eye on Maggie.

“I forgot how often they want to be fed.” She broke off, looking stricken.

He knew. She didn’t want to forget their baby, even the small, everyday functions of caring for her. He lifted his hand to comfort her, but second thoughts held him back.

He’d come to make sure no one charged her with murder, not to resurrect a relationship they’d failed at. Nevertheless, he cleared his throat and tried to sound like the kind of man she’d once needed him to be. “It’s all right to talk about our daughter. Maybe we’d both be happier now if we’d talked about her.”

Over Maggie’s head, Tessa’s green eyes lit with—reproach? Anger? He couldn’t tell which.

“I feel guilty when I think of being happy, and you can’t even say her name.”

Obviously she still blamed him. He took a stern grip on his temper when he really wanted to hurt Tessa back. Maybe he’d chosen a touchy word, but something was sure as hell wrong with both of them after eighteen months of grieving. How was he supposed to say their child’s name when thinking of her tore him apart? If he said her name out loud, that morning would unfold all over again.

And now, since Tessa seemed to be saying his pain wasn’t as bad as hers, he eyed her, unable to put the truth in words.

“What?” She stepped up, small and furious, spoiling for a fight.

Being angry got them nowhere. He concentrated on his own failure. She’d suffered, and he’d let her. He hadn’t meant to, but he hadn’t known how to bridge the gulf between them. “It’s too late to say this, but I wish I’d been a better husband to you.”

All emotion drained from her face, and she walked away. “It is too late to talk about our marriage.” The baby’s head bobbed over her shoulder as they reached the stairs. Even Maggie seemed to accuse him.

He stared at Tessa’s hair sprouting from an untidy ponytail, at the wrinkles in the short, tight T-shirt that hugged curves he’d loved and she’d loathed. The left leg of her sweats climbed halfway up her calf, and she should have looked a mess.

With her stiff neck and her disinterest, she just looked as if she didn’t want him here.

“I have to drive back to Boston and pick up some clothes. I came without packing.” His only thought had been to straighten Weldon out about Tessa. He forced himself to march down the gallery behind her. He matched her indifference. “First I’ll check around here, see what I can get out of Weldon. Maybe one of the traffic cops noticed someone hanging around David’s house. Will you need help with the arrangements?” For David’s funeral. He didn’t have to specify. Tessa would know what he meant, and she was the only one left to set it up. David’s parents had passed away years ago.

Still, she didn’t look back. “I’ll take care of everything. He wanted a memorial service.”

At the bottom of the stairs, he caught up, taking her elbow to make sure he had her attention. “While I’m gone, I want you to be careful, Tessa.”

She shrugged lightly to release herself. “I won’t take chances.”

She was thinking of David’s daughter, not of her own safety. “I’m not just talking about the baby. You might be in danger, too.”

“I get it.” She made an obvious effort to keep her tone civil. “I won’t go out after dark, and I’ll set the alarm. The second I see anything suspicious, I’ll dial 911.”

“Keep your cell phone in your purse or your pocket, wherever you can get to it in a hurry. We should ask Weldon for protection until we’re sure whether David interrupted a robbery.”

The baby muttered, a slight edge to her voice that even Noah already recognized.

Tessa turned toward the kitchen. “I don’t want the police tossing my house.”

He almost laughed. “The police search. Criminals toss.” He followed them, and when Tessa turned, he nodded at the baby before he went on. “Remember you have her before you turn down protection.”

Again she relented. “If I had to let them in because of Maggie, I would, but couldn’t Weldon leave someone outside?”

Truth was, neither he nor Tessa had charmed Weldon so far. “We’ll be lucky if I can browbeat him into having someone drive by.”

“Which does us no good unless the cop and the bad guy happen to show up at the same time. Let’s drop it.” As the hungry little girl arched her back and mouthed a furious complaint, Tessa soothed her with the same sounds that had calmed their own baby.

She took a bottle from the fridge while Noah watched and marveled. Every step she took was sure.

“Joanna’s parents are coming over.” Tessa put the bottle in the microwave and set the timer. “They’re staying here, so if you need to take care of business in Boston…”

“How far away are they?”

“Only about forty-five minutes, but they want to see Maggie, and she needs all the love she can get. I don’t mind if they stay.”

“I’m glad someone will be here with you.” He’d remind Weldon that no matter how annoying he found Tessa, she remained his best witness. That should insure some extra police interest, and three adults ought to be able to work dead bolts and the telephone.

As for him, he needed clean clothes, and Baxton would force him to fill out paperwork for a leave of absence. They needed to talk about a case the two of them had been working in their free time, an abusive husband who seemed to be on the verge of hurting his wife and children.

However, that old saw about murderers showing up at their victims’ funerals was sometimes true, and Noah intended to get back to Prodigal in time to attend David’s service.

Tessa took baby cereal and a small jar of fruit from a shopping bag on the counter.

“Do you have everything you need for her?” He should offer to hold the baby, but he couldn’t move the impulse from his mind to his mouth. He didn’t want to hold her, to risk being reminded of the child who’d been, along with her mother, his greatest joy.

“I don’t have anything,” Tessa said, unaware of his cowardice. “Do you think Weldon will let me go to David’s house to get her clothes and her crib?”

A crib? He hadn’t even thought about one. “Where did she sleep last night?”

“In a drawer.” The last word came out around the baby’s fingers as Maggie tried to plunge her hand into Tessa’s mouth. Laughing, Tessa ducked out of the grinning little girl’s reach. Their smiles made the floor drop from beneath Noah’s feet.

He grabbed the table’s edge, wanting, needing, craving one more impossible second with their baby. One morning spent just this way, preparing her breakfast, enjoying the destruction she’d wreaked in their kitchen with her curiosity.

“How’s your head, Noah?” Tessa planted the baby-food jar between her arm and her body and twisted off its lid. “You don’t look as if you’ve recovered yet.”

“I’m fine.” Dizzy with unexpected sorrow, he looked anywhere except at her and pretended his most vital interest was the growth of beard on his chin. “Do you mind if I take a shower before I visit Weldon?”

She stared at him over the baby’s head as if she heard something in his voice. She might not want to care for him anymore, but concern cut a frown across her forehead. He had to be more careful. He faced her until she turned back to her task.

“The guest bath is next door to your room.” She spooned some of the fruit into a bowl. “Toward the stairs. You can take a disposable razor from the cabinet beneath my sink.”

Right. He was dying to rummage through her personal belongings. Annoyed daily at the sight of his own bare bathroom counter, the last thing he wanted to see was the face cream and toothpaste and perfume he still expected to shift out of his way.

“Why don’t you take out a razor after you finish with her and leave it by the guest bathroom door?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” His pathetic need to maintain their separate lives made her laugh. “Just get a razor. Everything else you’ll need is either in the bathroom or in the linen closet. That’s the door between our rooms on the gallery.”

Her apathy taunted him. His life should have grown easier after she’d left. He no longer owed her the emotional outlay loving required. Facing the back of her head, knowing she considered him a failure at emotional outlay, he wanted badly to prove he could still make her feel anything at all.

But what if he couldn’t? He’d learned enough about his weakness from Tessa. Why risk any more self-knowledge?

He pushed away from the table and exited the kitchen, slowing only as he all but burst through her bedroom door. The clutter pushed him back a step.

Her room was a muddle of her clothes, Maggie’s makeshift bed and stacks of books. To hell with perfume. He swallowed a groan as the books took him back eighteen months in less than a second. He knew Tessa’s stacking method as well as she did. Just looking at the piles, he knew to the book which ones she’d already read.

A bone-deep ache drove him into the small bathroom where Tessa’s sweet, sexy scent pervaded everything, the curtains, the shower, the cabinet whose door he yanked open.

Sweat poured off his face as he fished out a razor and then dug a bar of soap from a cellophaned pack of six. Why the hell did a woman on her own buy soap by the six-pack?

He straightened, meaning to grab what he needed and beat it. Instead, he stopped to inventory the rest of Tessa’s things. Nothing that belonged to a man. He wasn’t terribly surprised, except at the relief that flooded him.

This was ridiculous. She’d left him. He hadn’t asked her to go. He wasn’t the kind of needy jerk capable of mooning around Tessa’s room.

He slammed the cabinet door, pretty sure he’d lost his mind. Fortunately, the past eighteen months had taught him he didn’t need certified mental health to catch a killer.

TESSA HAD BARELY SUNG, cajoled and bribed Maggie to take a nap in her brand-new crib when the telephone rang. She grabbed the receiver and then buried it in her sweater, trying to keep the ringer from waking Maggie as she grabbed the baby monitor and bolted from her room.

Please let it be Weldon. She’d dialed his office after breakfast to ask if she could pick up some of Maggie’s belongings.

When he hadn’t returned her call by the time Maggie ate her second meal and began to scrub at her eyes with weariness, Tessa had gone out to buy a new crib. By some miracle she’d managed to set it up in her room while Maggie slept on a pile of quilts on the living-room floor.

At the bottom of the stairs, Tessa pulled the phone out of her sweater and whispered a hello, but instead of Weldon, her mother’s voice breathed her name.

“Are you all right? My neighbor just called to tell me about David. Why didn’t you call?”

“I’m fine, Mom.” How did the neighbor know the number of the bed-and-breakfast they were staying at in England? Amanda and Chad Lawlor, her parents, hadn’t left the number with her.

“Mrs. Hawkins said you found his body.”

“I’m fine,” she said again. Most of her conversations with her mother went this way. She tried to say whatever might be least likely to spawn a melodramatic reaction. Her mother drove forward.

“You have bad luck, Tessa. First you marry a guy who works with dead people. Now your best friend’s husband dies and you find him.”

Why argue that Noah tried to keep people alive, and David hadn’t gotten killed on purpose? Despite the fact the entire family had known David since he and Tessa were in kindergarten, her mom still couldn’t remember she’d met Joanna through David, not the other way around. Ladies didn’t have male best friends, unless they were hoping to date them.

“I blame it on Noah,” Amanda said.

“Mom, you like Noah, remember?”

“I’d like him better if he’d taken that lieutenant’s position. It was a much more respectable job, and I’ll bet you’d still be together if he’d stopped chasing unkempt, unfit criminals and devoted himself to you.”

“Mom, he’s here.” And who would be a kempt, fit criminal? “He came to help me because the police think I know something about David’s death.”

“What?” At her mother’s shocked bleat, Tessa scrambled to backtrack. A suspected murderess might find herself designated persona non grata in the Lawlor family.

“I don’t know anything, of course, but I was his partner, and because of Maggie, I’ll have indirect access to his assets.”

“Why ever would you not? You agreed to take care of little Megan. Why is Noah there again?”

“Maggie, Mom. David’s daughter is Maggie. And Noah came because he didn’t like the way the police treated me. I don’t want you calling here and saying something ugly to him.”

“As you said, I like the man. He’s gorgeous, after all. I just think he might have done better by you.”

“What happened between Noah and me, we did to each other.” Tessa changed the subject. “How’s Dad?”

“At a seminar at some hospital. That reminds me, dear, I have to get his tux cleaned. We have tickets for Madame Butterfly on Friday. Do you think this David thing will get you and Noah back together?”

“Mother, my friend was killed.”

“What happened anyway? Someone shot him? A robbery, honey?”

Her mother, a blasé citizen of Boston, obviously imagined a nice, clean death, a bullet that served its purpose with little or no trace. “No, Mom. He was stabbed.”

“Do you need us to come back to the States for the funeral?”

“No.” Noah was enough to face for now. “But thank you.”

“We want to be there for you.”

“Thanks, but too many people might confuse Maggie. Every time someone opens the door, she asks for David.”

“She’s another good reason for you and Noah to try again. You’re too fragile to take care of her by yourself.”

Fragile? She was anything but. “Thanks for the advice.”

“Call me after the funeral. Your father will want to know you’re fine, too.”

“All right, Mom.”

“I love you.”

“Me, too, you.”

She clicked the phone’s off button and dropped her arm. As she turned, Noah seemed to rise out of the floor. She hadn’t heard him come in, but he crossed the room in three steps.

“Was that Weldon?”

“My mom.”

“Oh. Amanda.” He lifted one shoulder, and for a moment they read each other’s thoughts. He turned away.

“She means well.” She’d always tried to pretend her family was “normal.”

“You know exactly what she means. You know who they are, Tessa, and what they are. Why do you waste time protecting them?”

“They’re not your problem any longer.”

“Did you talk to your dad? Are they coming here?” He managed to make it sound like the last straw.

“They’re in England. He’s at a seminar.”

“Good. Their comfort is the last thing you need.” At her affronted glare, he shoved his hands into his pockets. “My mother always asks me if you’re ever going to speak to her again.”

She’d avoided Lucy Gabriel since the divorce. Not that she was mad at Lucy. She just hadn’t wanted to poach on Noah’s property. Lucy, whose independence was her greatest possession, next to her son, would be annoyed that Tessa could consider anyone property, but that happened during a divorce.

“She blames me,” Noah said. “She thinks I told you to stay away from her.”

Tessa planted the baby monitor on one hip and the phone on the other, forgetting she had them in her hands. “I never said so. I just didn’t want to come between you. She was your mother first.”

“But you still belong to her, too. She doesn’t like to lose anyone she loves.”

His unaccustomed frankness made her feel contrite. And that bugged her. “Why don’t you handle her? Tell her not to worry about me.”

“Handle my mom?” His eyes crinkled, making the irises seem darker than she remembered.

“I don’t know how to be friends with her now.” She wasn’t about to admit Lucy reminded her too much of Noah.

His gaze intensified. Palpable unease and one of Maggie’s breaths filled the silence. He tossed his coat at the couch. “Don’t tell me to ‘handle’ her. You care more for her than that.”

“I do.” Hot shame raced across her skin. “But she tries to talk about you. I know I hurt you both, but I had to go. I couldn’t stay in that house when we were both so alone.”

He spoke through tight lips. “Why did we have to be alone? We lived together.”

“We didn’t.” Her solitary grief swept her with familiar emptiness. “You wanted nothing from me, but I needed someone to make me want to live again.”

He tilted his head, eyeing her with an incredulous question. “How can I make you want to live?”

“I don’t know.” She cleared her throat. “And I don’t need that now, but I couldn’t get through to you. We left each other, and then I finally moved out.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?”

“I told you over and over, but you refused to hear.”

He nodded suddenly, and the light picked out silver strands in his black hair. “I didn’t want you to go. I think—I thought—you should have given me another chance.”

As if she owed him? They looked back at the end of their marriage just the way they’d lived it—miles apart in perception.

She glanced toward her future, asleep behind her bedroom door. “Maggie’s the last chance I have in me. You and I stopped owing each other anything the day our divorce became final. I just have to do right by her now.” She twisted the kinks out of her shoulders. “About your mom, what do you say to her?”

“That you’ll call when you’re able to talk to her again.”

Which made it sound as if there was something wrong with her. She started to get mad again.

He saw. “Just call her.” His tone, almost defeated, reminded her he rarely recovered from a migraine in only twenty-four hours. “Mom keeps insisting she didn’t need to deal with a divorce.”

She’d spent a lot of time trying not to miss Lucy. Noah’s mom had made her believe in unconditional mother’s love. With bright copper hair, bloodred faux nails and a legion of suitors, Lucy had been the worst example Amanda could imagine for the daughter she’d considered a failure as a woman. Amanda had admired the quantity of Lucy’s suitors, but she’d lectured long and hard that a woman should more subtly display her attributes.

To Tessa, Lucy had always been…Lucy. What you saw was what you got. She’d only turned her back on her borrowed mother because she’d loved her so much. She’d sworn she wouldn’t come between Noah and his mom.

“I’ll call,” she said with dread. Lucy probably still considered the divorce a temporary measure because Noah had told her he didn’t want it. His signing the papers hadn’t convinced her he’d lied, and Lucy would never stop trying to piece her family back together.

“I don’t mean just for today. Call Mom because you’re a daughter to her, as much as I’m her son.”

Tessa walked around him. “Don’t take yourself too seriously in this ex-husband-to-the-rescue role. I need you because you understand the way Weldon thinks, but I’ve learned how to run my own life again.”

“Maybe I’m more worried about my mother than about you.” He said it so quickly she knew he meant it, that he hadn’t planned the one answer that would make her wonder if she’d made a mistake.

Surely he knew her well enough to see she still loved his mom. “I’ll call her,” she said again. Continuing toward the kitchen, she tried to step back onto last night’s impersonal footing. “Did you talk to Weldon? What are you doing back here anyway?”

“I wanted to check in before I left town.” He followed her lead. “Weldon has nothing on you. He just doesn’t have any other suspects. I talked to the patrol officers who work David’s neighborhood.” He paused as she took out bottles and the formula mix. “What are you doing?”

“Making formula for later. She’ll be hungry again any second. How much longer do you suppose she’ll drink this stuff?” She made a mental note to schedule an appointment with Maggie’s pediatrician.

“I don’t know. Can I help?”

She nearly slammed the formula onto the counter. A cozy suggestion, but unthinkable. “No, thanks.” She tried to sound as if his help didn’t matter in the least. “What did the patrolmen say?”

“No one’s been hanging around David’s house, or here, either.”

“Good.” She hadn’t wanted to believe she and Maggie might be in trouble.

“Weldon wants you to search your office records again to make sure nothing’s missing.”

“I’ll have to ask Emily, our receptionist, to help.” She glanced at him. Bracing his hands on one of her kitchen chairs, he looked big and completely at home. As soon as they switched to business, he shucked off the discomfort that felt like her second skin. “Emily does a lot of the filing.”

“I’d like to talk to her, too. She might know more about David’s office than you.”

He was right. “Does Weldon want to see me again?”

“He didn’t say so, but he knows I’m on your side, and I’m afraid I all but called him a small-town idiot.”

“That should help.” He didn’t answer and the silence stretched. She began to spoon formula into tonight’s bottles. “Noah?”

“Yeah?”

His voice warned her he was coming around the table to look her in the eye. “Why are you so sure I’m innocent?” Following his earlier approach, she asked it quickly. A healthy divorced woman didn’t care what her ex-husband thought of her.

“Are you kidding? I know you.”

“Not now. You knew me before.” As in before she’d lost him and Keely.

“Nothing we’ve been through turns a loving woman into a murderer.”

She nearly dropped the bottle again. If he thought her loving, why had he said no to the divorce but then signed the papers?

“Why are you helping me?” She turned to watch his expression as he answered her.

He looked away. “I let you down. And maybe I should have been able to save our daughter.”

Terrifying compassion swayed her toward him. “Don’t say that.”

“You don’t believe it’s true?”

“Not at all.” She couldn’t force her voice above a whisper. She’d felt the same guilt all this time.

“Then why did you leave?”

“Because you didn’t love me anymore, and I had to learn not to love you.” She brushed away her tears. “Why are you helping me now?”

“Because I owe you.”

Rage flashed up and down her nerve endings. He owed her? She set Maggie’s bottle on the counter and reached for him. He lifted one thick eyebrow, and his shoulder flexed beneath her palm. He felt real and warm and alive, and she wanted to shake him.

“You feel sorry for me, because you couldn’t love me after Keely—after she—” She couldn’t say it. Eighteen months later, and she still found it hard to say the words.

“I have to make up for the way I let you down so I can get on with my life.” His raspy tone, the warmth of his breath on her face, reminded her she’d been his wife. She’d been much closer to him than this.

“So if you help me now, you’ll make up for everything that happened before? I’m your penance?”

“If I’m doing what you need, why do you care about my motives? You only called me out of habit.”

“I hope you’re right.” She struck back, unable to stop herself. “I don’t want to need you again.”

He tilted his head away, as if her anger ricocheted off his face. She hadn’t known she could still hurt him. She hadn’t realized how badly she still wanted to make him pay because she’d hated living without him and Keely.

Most of all, most painful of all, she didn’t want to be a debt he owed.

The doorbell rang, and she spun away from Noah, accidentally elbowing the bottle off the counter. Powdered formula sprayed her floor, and she strode through it.

She pressed her hands to her chest, trying to slow her pounding heart. Behind her, sounds from the kitchen told her Noah was cleaning up. If she were as self-sufficient as she’d tried to be, she would have thrown him out of her house. He didn’t belong here.

The bell rang again, and Tessa hurried to open the door. A tall woman, who seemed much older than when Tessa had last seen her, spilled over the threshold.

“Where’s Maggie?” she demanded.

On her heels, her husband carried a single large suitcase. He hadn’t changed as much as his wife. Tessa hadn’t seen them since they’d last driven down to visit David and the baby.

“She’s asleep.” Tessa closed the door and turned to her guests. Her heart danced a vicious tango as Noah joined them from the kitchen.

“You remember my husband—” She passed her hand across her mouth and then tried again. “My ex-husband, I mean.”

CHAPTER FOUR

ELEANOR AND JOE LINGERED in the doorway, both staring over Tessa’s shoulder at Noah as if he shouldn’t be there. The older woman’s animosity startled Tessa, but then her mouth trembled, deepening the lines in her shocked face. Tessa felt for her. She’d been through too much, starting with Joanna’s accident.

“Mr. and Mrs. Worth.” Noah came so close his body heat surrounded Tessa. “Good to see you again.” He curved his hands around her waist and eased her aside to make room for the other couple. “Come in, out of the cold.”

Tessa glared over her shoulder, annoyed that Noah had touched her possessively to mark himself as the host in her home.

Eleanor managed a tight smile. “We didn’t expect to see you, Mr. Gabriel.” Faint welcome warmed her voice. “I mean, Detective Gabriel—I’m sorry—I just don’t know how to treat policemen since my daughter’s death last year. After Chief Weldon took office here, he came out to our house. He tried to make us believe she was under the influence of drugs that night she died.”

Tessa started. Did the Worths know? David had told her about Joanna’s depression soon after Maggie’s birth, when he’d begun to back away from their friendship. She’d only discovered Joanna’s drug use when she’d caught David flushing his wife’s stash after the accident. He’d sworn Tessa to secrecy, to protect his family. He would never have told Eleanor.

Noah took the older woman’s hand, unexpected compassion in his gaze. Surprised again, Tessa watched him comfort Joanna’s mother.

“Police are naturally suspicious. You have to make allowances,” he said. “I’m sorry about David. He was a good friend to my—to Tessa. She counted on him.”

Tessa felt her eyes widen. An expert at reading character, he’d failed at tending frayed relationships. Had he changed or was he merely offering the Worths appropriate responses?

She rubbed her temples, trying to avoid old resentments before they bubbled to the surface. After Keely’s death, Noah had maintained his phenomenal success rate at work. Murder had claimed the largest share of his attention, as if he couldn’t be both a good cop and a good family man. He’d steered clear of the pain and regret that had swallowed her as their marriage withered, but his empathy for Eleanor now obviously touched the older woman.

Tears welled in her eyes, and pink color stained her thin face. “We’ll miss David,” Eleanor said. “I don’t know what Maggie will think, after her mother and now this.”

With heartbreaking tenderness, Joe Worth stroked his wife’s back. “We’ll make sure Maggie remembers her mother and father, and she’ll still have us and Tessa.”

Noah looked suddenly uncomfortable. Tessa knew what he was thinking. He was only a temporary part of the picture.

“Noah’s on his way back to Boston.” She’d grabbed for her hard-fought sense of detachment. Easier to do with Noah out of the way.

He obliged by moving toward the door, and Eleanor and Joe sank against the wall to give him room. But Joe grabbed his sleeve.

“You’re satisfied the police here can handle the case?”

Noah opened his mouth, but he waited too long to be convincing. “Chief Weldon and his men are qualified.”

His bland tone reminded Tessa of what he’d called the first rule. The initial twenty-four hours after a homicide were key. Almost thirty had passed.

As if his uncertainty went over her head, Eleanor changed the subject. “When do you think Maggie will wake up? I won’t feel the world is a safe place again until I can hold her in my arms.”

Tessa stiffened. Surely David deserved a moment’s remembrance. But Eleanor had lost two members of her family. Naturally she needed to see Maggie. “She just went down for her nap—”

“I’m not leaving for good.” Noah interrupted, making them all look at him.

He pinned Tessa, his gaze dark and intense. “I’ll pick up my stuff at home and talk to Baxton about a leave of absence. Maybe you should give me a key so you don’t have to wait up for me tonight.”

Hand over a key to her home? “I’ll wait up.” Pigs would fly before she’d invite him to come and go at will.

Clenching his jaw, he flicked a quick look at the Worths and then grabbed his jacket off the sofa. His broad shoulders stretched the leather as he wrapped himself in control. Skimming her face with a glance that came nowhere near her eyes, he held out his hand to Joe Worth.

“Nice to see you after so long. Mrs. Worth, again, my condolences.”

Joe shook Noah’s hand, nodding while his wife mumbled thanks. They wore the stunned smiles of the living who’ve lost a loved one. Noah opened the door, but Tessa caught it to ease it shut so they wouldn’t wake Maggie.

“Wait.” Noah grabbed the heavy door again, his greater strength shoving the cold wood against her palm. “I know you can’t get into your office to access the files, but I want you to write down everything you remember about any client who’s complained at any time in the past year.”

“I can’t, Noah. I’m their attorney.”

“Don’t start that. I’m not official, and we’ll find a way to protect privilege if we have to, but I have to know what went wrong here. I’m especially interested in the guy who wanted you to be his own private attorney.”

“I’ll just bet you are.” The words slipped out, echoing the last contentious days of their marriage.

Noah curved his mouth and the seductive fullness of his lower lip rattled her even more than his pleasure in provoking her. He spun on his heel and sauntered down the steps, in charge again, damn him. She hadn’t learned his kind of control, and she was still mad as hell at him.

She watched him walk away until she realized divorcing him hadn’t cured her addiction to the loose, sexy swing of his stride. Without another thought she slammed the door. And then cursed herself, waiting for Maggie’s shrill cry.

Which came right on schedule.

“Let me get her,” Joe said.

Tessa wavered, already used to having sole responsibility for the baby. But she had to assure Joe and Eleanor they were still important to Maggie. She might be afraid of loving enough to get hurt again, but she’d make herself trust a little for Maggie’s sake.

“She’s in my room.” She pointed up at the gallery. “That door. I’ll get a bottle in case she’s hungry.”

“I’ll come with you, Joe.” Eleanor followed her husband to the stairs. “But, Tessa?”

With her hand on the kitchen door, she looked back.

“Are you sure you don’t want us to go to a hotel?” Eleanor asked.

“You’re welcome here.” Maggie knew them, loved them and needed them. “Noah’s already taken the room closest to mine. You can have the one nearest the stairs, but I’ve been using it for storage. I’ll clear it out for you later.”

As simple as that, she began to transform her haven for one into a family dwelling. Her safe days of owing nothing to anyone were over, but she’d held Maggie without screaming in agony because she couldn’t hold Keely. Maybe she was turning a corner. Maybe she’d learn to treasure her memories instead of avoiding them.

Some of her memories anyway. The ones that featured Noah still spelled danger. He might be the one man who could find the real killer quickly, but afterward, he’d retire to his self-sufficient life. A hint of unease snaked down her spine, making her shiver.

She didn’t want to need Noah again.

“BAXTON, I HAVE TO TAKE the time.” Noah shifted in the cracked leather chair across from his angry commander. The other man glared at him from beneath bushy brows that looked more gray than Noah remembered. When had Baxton started to look his age?

More to the point, when was the last time he’d noticed anything except his own work? For eighteen months he’d made himself numb while he’d functioned on the job. He used that same detachment to focus now.

“You know Tessa’s innocent. I can’t let those village clowns nail her for something she’d never do.”

“You’re divorced. You haven’t forgotten that in some drunken stupor?”

Noah passed on responding to Baxton’s sneer. Taking a punch at his superior could end this negotiation badly, and if his boss had really thought he was coming to work drunk, he’d have been off the job months ago. “I haven’t forgotten the divorce.” He never forgot, but maybe if he did something right for Tessa, he’d learn to let her go.

“How well do you know her after all this time? When did you last see her?”

Noah wasn’t about to admit he’d sat pathetically outside her parents’ house on Thanksgiving, knowing the hour she’d walk up their steps to the door.

“We haven’t seen each other since she left me—until last night.”

Baxton rocked slowly back and forth in his chair as a clock ticked behind him. “How much time off do you want?”

“I’m not sure.”

The commander seemed to think it over, as if he had a choice.

Noah reared out of his chair. “Look, Baxton, I’m not asking—I’m going to Maine to help my ex-wife. Fire me if you have to.”

“Damn you, man, you know I can’t fire you. I’d be explaining until my successor was planning his retirement party. Go, but you’d better make this fast. Let’s go over your caseload.”

“We’d better start with Della Eddings.”

Della’s was a case they’d worked on together outside of office hours. Abused by her husband, she’d arrived in the squad room in the early hours of a rainy morning, begging them to save her and her two children. Frank Eddings remained just outside the reach of the stalker laws, but Baxton and Noah, both sick of cleaning up after killings, had gone out of their way to protect her.

“My wife will thank me for spending double my usual time with Della,” Baxton said.

“We’re keeping her alive.”

“I won’t forget to check in with her.”

Noah nodded. “I’ll let Della know she should try you first if anything happens.”

They covered the rest of Noah’s cases, and he got up to leave. Baxton swung around in his chair as if a great idea had suddenly struck him. “If you manage to train one of those hicks well enough, send him back here instead of coming yourself. He’d have to be less trouble.”

“Thanks.” Noah gripped the doorknob, just a little ashamed of the pain in the ass he must have been in the past year and a half.

Baxton dropped his loose fist on the desk. “Don’t forget to fill out your paperwork. I don’t want to come up there after you to get it right.”

“You’re a warm guy, Baxton.”

“Damn straight.” Picking up a pencil, he prepared to move on to his next point of business. “You know you got no jurisdiction up there?”

“I don’t need jurisdiction. I can dial 911 as well as anyone else.” Noah pulled the door shut and met the accusatory stares of the detectives working their cases from the office. A single thought on so many minds was easy to read.

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