by Adams, Anna
“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 doo
r. 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.
