They weren’t things she normally considered. She didn’t need them. And the more money she could stash away, the more secure she and Ethan would be. No matter what happened...
She hadn’t even reached her car yet when she had her phone to her ear.
“You feel like lunch?” she asked as soon as the call was answered. Before she could talk herself out of it.
“Of course. When? Where?” His deep voice made her feel like liquid gold.
“My house.”
“I’m on my way.”
* * *
“I can’t believe it was even better than last time.” Miranda let the words fall out as she lay, replete, in Tad’s arms an hour and a half later. They’d been very careful about condom use, and then, when things had started up again, she’d used her hands to please him.
Her face on his chest moved with his chuckle. She ran her fingers through the hair close to her cheek.
So this was what got people to do crazy things to be together.
But she couldn’t be like them.
Couldn’t be crazy. Not completely.
“It’s only for a little while,” she told him, loving his leg between her thighs. She’d straddled him, was holding him down—sort of. He could move anytime he wanted to. He didn’t.
“I know.” He was playing with a strand of her hair.
“No touching around Ethan,” she reiterated. “We aren’t a family and can’t give him the idea we might be. It’s not fair to him.”
“I know.” He didn’t sound any happier about that than she did. But he wasn’t arguing, either. Had she wished he would?
She’d have had to say no if he’d offered any chance at anything more permanent. She had secrets she could never share. But he didn’t realize that.
He had a job to get back to.
And a house.
He had a life to get back to, she reminded herself, back in Michigan. He wasn’t married, didn’t have family, but he had colleagues he’d known and worked with for years. He had people going to bat for him. Friends.
“So when can we do this again?” she asked.
His finger was drawing circles on her shoulder. “Tad going to Jimmy’s again anytime soon?”
“No.”
“Then give me a little time to recoup, say half an hour from now?”
She laughed, as she supposed he meant her to do.
And the subject was dropped.
* * *
Tad couldn’t get anything about that afternoon out of his mind. From the sight of her heart-covered scrubs on the floor, the bottoms, half inside out, trailing from the bedpost, to the ray of sun that had shone through the closed blinds. From the way she’d sounded when she’d come, like a fierce feminine warrior who’d found bliss, to the hint of emotion in her voice when she’d kissed him goodbye at the door twenty minutes before she had to go pick up her son.
He seemed to be smelling the lavender that pervaded her home in every room of his own place now. Even after he showered her scent from his skin.
He’d had lovers. Enjoyed his time with them. He’d never known anything like this...thing...he had going on with his client’s daughter.
What was wrong with him?
Or had he found something very, very right? He made his trips to the gym on Friday, with drive-bys to the elementary school, Marie’s house and Miranda’s, with one scenario playing over and over in his mind.
He’s with Miranda, alone, but they’re dressed. On a balcony. His. He tells her who he is. Why he was initially in town. Tells her that her abusive ex really is dead—not from some imagined car accident, but from a drug overdose. That his criminal brother is behind bars. He tells her that her father loves her so much he sent Tad to find her, just to make sure she’s safe.
She’d be shocked. It would take her a few minutes to assimilate it all. To come to terms with his duplicity. But she was so mature and wise, she’d see his heart. Her father’s. Ethan’s. And her own. She’d know that the way they’d become involved was meant to be. She’d be grateful to him.
It could happen.
When he stood on his balcony with his burner phone on Friday, calling Brian, he was determined to get things moving forward.
“Tad? You’re a minute late.”
Taken aback by the greeting, he apologized and didn’t feel he should’ve had to. Really? A minute?
“Something wrong, sir?” he asked. The chief was a fair man. Reasonable.
“Damn straight there’s something wrong! My grandson’s across the country from me, that’s what’s wrong.”
O’Connor’s tone, the way he said his words, didn’t seem quite right. He was slurring. Didn’t sound tired, but...
“So let’s bring him home.” Tad jumped on the opening. “I’m ready anytime you are.” Now. I’m ready now.
“Not time yet,” the chief said, sounding almost petulant for a second. And it occurred to Tad—the irritation, impatience, petulance...
“Have you been drinking, sir?” He’d never heard of the man having so much as a beer at a dinner function, but it wasn’t a crime. As long as he wasn’t driving. Or working.
“Yes. I apologize.” He sighed. “Today is the anniversary of my wife’s death and I came home with a six-pack of beer. I’m afraid I nearly polished the thing off. I don’t normally touch the stuff,” he said.
“It’s okay, sir,” Tad quickly assured him. He’d had his own share of six-packs over the years. Usually after a tough case.
“No. No, it’s not okay. I know better and should hold myself to higher standards.”
Shouldn’t they all?
“So...tell me about your week. Their week. How’s Jeffrey?”
He told the older man about his grandson’s first sleepover. About the friend’s father building a wooden car in his workshop.
“I’d like to have been there,” O’Connor said, not quite sounding maudlin, again, but not himself, either. “There’s so much I could be teaching him.”
Tad didn’t doubt that. He could barely imagine how hard it must have been, missing the first six years of his only grandchild’s life.
Missing his only child.
“She told me that Jeffrey’s father—Jeff, right?”
“Yes, Jeff, that’s right.”
“She told me they were friends, not a couple. That he didn’t die immediately in the car accident. That he’d been injured and the injury led to his death months later. And it was only after he’d known he was going to die that they’d conceived Jeff.”
He felt like scum, sharing Miranda’s secrets behind her back, but this was her father. They were two men whose goal was to help her, protect her, give her back her life. He was doing what Miranda would do herself, if she could, telling her father whatever he needed to know to help her.
“Lies. All lies.” Brian O’Connor sounded sad as he said the words. “That Jeff guy got hold of Dana good. Got her to lie about all kinds of things.” His tone held definite tones of irritation now and a hint of bitterness, even as he said his daughter’s name.
Tad’s own anger rose with that one. This wasn’t her fault. None of it was her fault.
The chief clearly wasn’t used to drinking. He didn’t seem to hold his alcohol well.
“I need more, sir,” he said. He wasn’t just the chief’s employee now. He was Miranda’s lover. That came with responsibilities.
“I can’t keep doing this job for you without knowing certain things. I need proof that her ex is dead. That I’m not somehow putting her in further danger, having found her, having ties to you and to her former life.”
He’d tried his damnedest to get beyond an almost irrational need to overcome his inability to trust anyone or anything on a gut level. He’d come to terms with the fact that perhaps he’d thrown protocol to the wind on that last case be
cause he hadn’t trusted the system or his peers. He’d somehow seen himself as the only one capable of saving that little girl.
But he’d made love to Miranda. Trust in the chief aside, job aside, he had to know. Her father could fire him, but Tad wasn’t going to leave Miranda now. He was going to finish what he’d started.
“I need to know for sure, or I’m done.”
“You’re falling for her.”
“I need proof that her ex is really dead. That she’s out of danger.”
“Proof coming your way,” Chief O’Connor said, and there was a beep on the line signifying an incoming text.
He wasn’t ready to climb off his high horse yet. Which had probably led to the wrong decision in that antiques shop, too.
“I need one more thing,” he said. “A list of car accidents in and around Asheville—” the North Carolina town where Dana had gone to college “—for the eighteen months before Jeff was born.”
“Since my beer binge has trapped me at home with nothing to do, I’ll get to work on it and have it to you before day’s end.”
Tad slid back down to reality. To being just a guy on a private payroll because he’d screwed up his job.
“Thank you for understanding, sir.”
“Back at you, Detective. Not one of my best days.”
Tad hung up feeling he’d gotten to know the man he’d long admired more in five minutes than in all the years he’d been hearing about him. Sitting there all alone, mourning his wife.
And his daughter and grandson, too. Having risked his life so many times to save others, only to have everything he cared most about stripped from him. It had to be emasculating to someone like the chief to sit back and let others tend to his family. To know there was nothing immediate he could do to help them.
Kind of like Tad’s need to do more for Miranda, to end this. The chief’s need, by comparison, would be that much greater.
You couldn’t blame a guy for drinking on that one. Or for irritability and rudeness.
Chapter 19
Tad had been expecting a death certificate. Really, really needed one. The text that he opened as soon as he ended his call was not a death certificate.
It was a coroner’s report. A confirmation of the deceased’s identity and the manner and cause of death. Not a matter of public record.
More than a death certificate.
Jeffrey Muldoon Patrick. Aged 23. Death by opiate ingestion.
It didn’t get much more official than that.
Or more convincing, either. He’d had Dana’s birth certificate from the beginning, but got Ethan’s now, too. He knew that Ethan’s real name, his birth name, was Jeffrey Patrick O’Connor.
Named after his father, just as Miranda had said.
Thank God. She was in no danger. Miranda and Ethan really were safe. The giddy feeling of relief carried him to dinner at a place not far from his apartment. And to the grocery store to restock some essentials afterward.
If only he could tell her, be honest with her. This was good news. She should be the one buoyed by it.
But he couldn’t break the chief’s faith in him, break his word to a man of honor.
No matter how much he wanted Miranda to be happy.
This mission belonged to Chief O’Connor. He had a right to determine how he reintroduced himself to his daughter. He knew Dana. Tad only knew Miranda.
But if Tad could somehow get Miranda to tell him the truth about her husband—take the huge risk of exposing her past to him... No, he still couldn’t break his word to the chief. If he acted too soon, if Miranda was angry with her father, as the chief believed, and he didn’t give O’Connor a chance to mend fences, she could very well cut him off again.
He couldn’t be responsible for a hero losing his family for the second time. Or for Miranda and Ethan—Dana and Jeffrey—losing their chance to be reunited with the man who adored them both, even though he and Jeffrey, aka Ethan, had never met.
In other words, it was none of his business. Shit.
When the list of car accidents came over his burner phone later that evening, Tad perused it carefully, but wasn’t surprised to find there’d been no fatal or near-fatal crash involving anyone named Jeff, or any other man in his early twenties, in or near Asheville around the time of Ethan’s conception.
As he’d suspected, Miranda’s story had been a lie.
* * *
Living a lie had never been harder for Miranda than after she’d started sleeping with Tad. So many times she’d wanted to call him and tell him the truth about herself. She could trust him with the truth.
She knew she could.
And yet something held her back.
Sara Edwin’s advice, for one. And the fact that Tad exhibited signs of a tendency she knew all too well from her father—one of the things she’d admired about him, actually. An inability to let injustice just lie there. Tad was a detective. A damned good one based on what he’d told her. He’d been willing to risk his life without hesitation to save a little girl.
There was no way he’d sit idly by, letting her and Ethan live in constant danger of having her father find them. He’d take on the man the state of North Carolina revered. He’d want her to prosecute her father.
He’d probably believe she could win.
What she knew was that there wasn’t enough evidence. She’d never told anyone about the years of beatings. At first, because she’d felt responsible. And because she’d loved him. Because he was her only security and support. Her only family. If she didn’t have her father, who did she have? There were no grandparents in her life. No aunts and uncles. Her mom’s parents were both gone. Her father’s dad had beaten him for much of his life. She’d never met her paternal grandmother, either.
Her father had an older brother whom she’d never met.
If she’d lost her father, she’d have been a ward of the state, and the one or two times she’d told him she’d rather be that than live with him, he’d not only punished her for the words, but had brought home reports of some of the things that happened to wards of the state. Of course, now she knew that most children in foster care were lovingly and well cared for. But back then...
Didn’t matter. There was no way she’d be able to prosecute her father without evidence. No charges to file against him. Just like the courts couldn’t file anything against Devon on Marie’s behalf. Not yet, anyway.
You had to wait for the abuser to abuse in a big way in order to get away from him, and then you’d have a chance.
So many times, in situations like hers, the victim died first. She wasn’t going to let that happen. To her or her son.
Ethan was an unknowing victim.
The train of thought led her right back to where she’d started. She absolutely could not tell Tad about her past.
And so she tried not to think about the things she couldn’t change, things she could do nothing about. She had a really easy way to do that, too, and found herself sinking into a world where she worked, took care of her son and then let her thoughts be consumed by Tad—and her body governed by sexual adrenaline.
The weekend following her Thursday tryst with him, if she wasn’t working or watching out for her son, she was thinking about ways to be alone with Tad. Finding times in her schedule where there might be a possibility.
Barring anything else, they could squeeze in an hour on Tuesday morning, if they didn’t go for coffee with the group after the High Risk Team meeting. And if she skipped lunch.
On Monday, she proposed as much in a text to him. And got his immediate affirmative response. Hell, yes.
Then she walked around hot for him the rest of that day, dreaming about him that night, as she anticipated being with him.
She shaved her legs with extra care on Tuesday morning and left the conditioner in her hair a little longer than us
ual. Chose her newest scrubs—a lavender pair with rainbows and bears—and used a touch of rose-scented essential oil on her wrists.
Buzzing with need, she walked into the police station for the meeting Tuesday morning, trying to look nothing but professional as she approached the conference room. Smiled and said hello to everyone before she let her gaze home in specifically on the chair Tad always occupied.
Trying not to falter when she saw it was empty. He always got to the meetings early because he was also in domestic violence training sessions at the station and in meetings with other detectives, listening in on discussions about other domestic violence–related crimes.
He didn’t show up at all that day. Neither did Chantel Fairbanks, their High Risk Team detective.
Five minutes into the meeting, she knew why.
Tad had seen Devon Williams lurking outside a business near the elementary school that morning. He’d been wearing a janitorial jumpsuit and a hat. He’d turned to a dumpster, reaching inside as though looking for something when Tad first drove past. A dumpster-diving janitor had alerted Tad enough that he’d parked and taken a walk around the building. Devon hadn’t seen him, but Tad made a positive ID and called Chantel, who’d asked him to keep Devon in sight until they could get to him.
Miranda was back at the clinic, seeing patients, before she got word that he’d been apprehended—and then let go. It turned out that Devon had been just far enough away from school property to be within his allowed limits.
All team members had been put on high alert. Devon was biding his time. Chantel—and everyone else involved—was sure of it.
Suddenly sex was the last thing on Miranda’s mind. Leaving work as soon as she’d charted her last patient, she drove straight to Ethan’s school. Didn’t matter to her that she was half an hour early. She’d rather sit in her car and wait than have him come out a second early and her not be there.
She wanted him close.
Needed him close.
He was her life.
This was her life.
She was thankful for that reminder.
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