Give up custody. Terminate her parental rights. Would that be enough to remove them from Craig’s threat? The argument could be made that hurting Daisy and Dahlia then wouldn’t have the expected impact. The kids would already be out of her life; she wouldn’t know where they were or who they’d been placed with. She likely wouldn’t even hear about anything that happened to them.
Terminate her rights, keep her mouth shut and go to prison—that would be the absolute best thing she could do for them.
But Maggie never had been into doing the best for anyone but herself.
After a few more minutes, Ty and Nev left, and Sophy locked up behind them. With the locks on the door, the bars on the windows and the alarm system, the old house felt pretty secure.
But none of that would protect them against an explosion or a fire. And a hundred-year-old wood-frame house...how easily it would burn.
On her way back from the door, she caught his hand and pulled him over to the couch. As they settled into the cushions, she lightly said, “I’ve decided that the girls and I are running away. You wanna go with us?”
Stretching his feet out on the coffee table, he tilted his head back and stared at the family pictures on the fireplace mantel. “Where are you going?”
“Anywhere but California.”
He laughed with her. Neither Daisy nor Dahlia knew the first thing about the state, probably weren’t sure exactly what the ocean was and didn’t have a clue about surfing, but they’d talked it to death this evening. He wouldn’t mind if he didn’t hear the name again for at least a year.
“How about Montana? I hear it’s a beautiful place.”
“Yeah, but it gets cold there.”
She mimicked his position, then slanted a look at him. “You’re too delicate for the cold?”
“I like it warm.”
“Arizona?”
“Not that warm.” He took her hand, twining his fingers with hers. “How long are you running away for?”
“A week, a month, a year. However long it takes for the kids to be safe.”
After giving that a moment’s consideration, he pressed a kiss to her hand. “You’re a good mom.”
“I don’t feel like it. Standing there in that room at the jail, all I wanted was to wrap my hands around Maggie’s neck and throttle her.”
“That’s all I’ve wanted every time I’ve seen her this week.” His gaze shifted to the stuffed bear. It was easy to form a picture of a waiflike brown-eyed Sophy, dragging the toy with her everywhere she went, snuggling with it at night in her bed. Just as it was easy to summon an image of Maggie at the same age, just as waiflike, just as innocent, with just as many dreams as Sophy had had.
Two little girls, the same age, both without their mothers. One placed in the foster-care system with its abundant flaws, the other left with her family. Based on nothing more than that, it should have been Sophy who went off track and Maggie who’d succeeded, Sophy who’d wound up in the judicial system.
The fact that it hadn’t been said a lot for the abundant flaws of the Holigan family.
“She wasn’t a bad kid.” It took him a moment, and the weight of Sophy’s gaze, to realize he’d spoken out loud. With a self-conscious shrug, he went on, “She had a lot going against her.”
“I know.”
“Which is no excuse.”
“I know.” Sophy’s voice was quieter this time.
The house wasn’t really silent, but with the kids asleep, it felt that way. There were little noises in the background, the kind of things a person usually didn’t notice in his own home. A car went past, and the wind scraped a tree branch against the side of the house. Chimes tinkled somewhere, and a few plops on the roof slowly turned into the steady beat of raindrops.
“I hear Florida’s nice in winter,” Sophy mused. “A million snowbirds can’t be wrong.”
“Miami Beach.”
“I was thinking Orlando. We could get jobs at Disney World. You could be a pirate of the Caribbean, and I could be a pirate’s wench.”
He gave her a measuring look, from the demure neck of her shirt all the way down to her bare feet, propped beside his. “You could be my wench anytime.”
Her smile was sweet and sensuous and made his gut knot. “I was hoping you’d feel that way, ’cause this couch isn’t very comfortable for sleeping.”
He was sure her bed was comfortable as hell. He would probably get the best sleep ever in it. He would probably learn that all his life, he’d been sleeping—and having sex—totally wrong because he’d been doing it without her.
Or he’d find he couldn’t sleep at all because just having Holigans in her house put her in danger.
And what would she think when she found out about him working for Craig?
God help him.
He stood, pulled her to her feet and started toward the hallway. There he stopped, laid his hands on her shoulders and turned her toward the open door at the other end. “I’ll test the couch tonight and let you know what I think in the morning.”
She gave him a knowing look. “It’s a good thing I have a strong ego, or you’d be breaking my heart now.”
He brushed her hair back gently. “You know we’ll end up in there together, or at least you should after this afternoon.”
Her smile was smug. “Oh, honey, I’ve known it longer than that.”
“But not tonight. I need—” To think. To figure out what to tell her about the rest of his life and when and how. That he was an informant against his best friend. That said best friend happened to be a murderer, drug dealer and thief. That the threat against Maggie and the girls came from Craig. That the explosion was thanks to Craig, too.
That Sean wasn’t as respectable as she thought he was.
It wasn’t fair to have sex with her before dropping that little bombshell, not when it could change everything between them. Wasn’t fair to hurt or disappoint her.
She leaned onto her toes, brushing her mouth across his, light strokes, tender and teasing and tempting. “Think of me tonight,” she whispered, wearing that smug smile again as she turned and strolled lazily, languidly to the bedroom.
Oh, he’d think about her, all right, and if he managed to sleep, he would probably dream about her. Forever.
Turning into the kitchen, he made a cup of coffee, then sat down in a chair with a view of a tiny pocket of a backyard, and he settled in for a long night of hard thoughts.
Chapter 10
When Sophy woke, rain still pounded the roof and streaked the windows, giving a dim view outside. The leaves on the trees across the street were waterlogged, the weight pulling the branches lower than they would normally hang, and narrow streams flowed along the curbs. It would be a great day for walking to school—would have been, if it were a normal morning. She liked splashing through puddles, getting her shoes and clothes and hair soaked, but that fun would have to wait until quiet returned to their lives.
Please, let the kids be here then.
She’d kept the bedroom door open all night but hadn’t heard so much as a snore from Sean. Maybe going all statue-still-and-silent was a talent the girls would master as they grew up.
What had he thought about last night? The ramifications of his taking the girls permanently? The fallout of taking on Sophy temporarily? Did he at least allow for the chance that, like the kids, she could become permanent, too? Had he worried what the court and social services would say? Did he realize that even making the request could bring him a boatload of pain and disappointment?
It sucked to have so many questions and no answers.
After a hasty shower, she dressed in cargo shorts and a T-shirt decorated with the shop logo. A check of the clock showed the girls could sleep awhile longer, so she padded into the darkened living room, following her nose to a mug of steaming coffee.
Sean shifted his feet to make room for her on the couch. He’d been in the shower ahead of her—she’d smelled the tang of his shaving cream and the crisp, c
lean scents of his toiletries—and he was dressed only in snug-fitting jeans. His body was long and lean, not overly bulky like a weight lifter, but the kind of lean strength any woman could appreciate.
“Do you always get up this early?” She settled next to him, feet tucked beneath her, facing him.
“How early is it?”
“I don’t know, but the sun hasn’t found its way out.”
“I usually get to the garage between six and seven. About half our customers are strictly repair work. ‘My car vibrates when I go over eighty miles an hour.’ Or ‘It shimmies at stoplights.’ Or, my favorite, ‘It’s going thunka-thunka-thunk.’”
“So those are the ones you want to get in and out quickly.”
With a nod, he offered his coffee. Her fingers brushed his when she took it, and for a moment she breathed deeply of the intense, dark aroma. Finally she tested it, found it just hot enough and took a long drink. It warmed her all the way to her toes.
“And the other customers,” she said, giving the cup back. “There for the restoration. They buy the old beat-up muscle cars and pay you well to get them into shape.”
“Those are my favorites. And the nice thing about these guys is once they get a taste of the first restored car, it’s just about a guarantee that they’ll come back with another one every couple years.”
There was a change in his expression, his voice, when he talked about his work. He liked it, and he was proud of it. She understood exactly how he felt. She would never get rich with the quilt shop, but she made beautiful pieces and had ready buyers for every one of them.
“Will you be able to make enough time for the girls?”
It took him a bit to answer, his gaze directed out the window, where only gray showed where the sun should be starting its morning job of lightening and brightening the sky. “If I had them, I wouldn’t go back to Virginia.”
She leaned her arm on the back of the sofa, resting her cheek on her fist. “How about Orlando?”
“Is the pirate’s wench going?”
Her smile was faint. She’d dressed up as a wench one Halloween but couldn’t remember who her pirate was. She would never forget this pirate. “What if the wench stays here?”
His features turned distant and troubled. “I don’t know. So many things would have to be settled before I could make a decision.” To take the sting out of his words, he set his coffee down, then made room for her in his embrace, her head resting on his shoulder, the rest of her body snug and warm against his.
Sophy had loved a dozen men in her life, good men, fun guys who made her laugh, guys she would love forever, but she’d never been in love with one of them. She’d known Sean far less time than she’d dated any of them, but deep in her heart, she knew he was different. It didn’t matter that she could count the number of days he’d been in town on one hand with a finger left over. It didn’t matter that he’d warned her from the start that he wasn’t staying here. She knew.
She wasn’t talking about love at first sight. She was a bit of a skeptic about that, though she knew several people who claimed to have experienced it. Her own parents loved to share the story of how they’d told their friends, thirty minutes after meeting, that they were going to marry each other. They had, too, less than three months later.
Sophy preferred to think that, with Sean, she’d found potential at first sight. Some little alert had gone off inside her, slyly whispering, This could be the one, and every minute she spent with him, every conversation she had with him, added weight to that little voice.
But being sure he was the one wasn’t a guarantee that he felt the same—that he would allow himself to feel the same. He’d spent his entire lifetime avoiding commitments. Now he was willing to take custody of his nieces. Was that enough of a commitment to start with? Did he doubt he would have anything left over for a woman?
She glanced at her watch and sighed softly. “Time to rouse the sleeping beauties. It’s usually a slow and painful process—for them. I rather enjoy it myself.” With a grin, she pushed to her feet and headed for the girls’ room. The soft footsteps behind her told her Sean was following.
A night-light cast pale shadows over Daisy and Dahlia, sleeping back-to-back this morning. “The first night they spent here, I put them to bed in separate beds.” She kept her voice low, her gaze on the girls with Sean a shadow in her peripheral vision. “The next morning I found them in the same bed. That night I tried the separate beds again and woke up to the same thing. I just let them be now. I figure when they’re ready, they’ll use both beds. Or when they’ve gotten so big that one of them falls out.”
“They look sweet, don’t they?”
His tone—quiet, hoarse, a bit chagrined—made her smile. “They are sweet...in a really vibrant, exuberant, hell-on-wheels sort of way.”
She flipped on the light switch, then raised her voice. “Daisy, Dahlia, time to get up, kiddos.”
True to form, the girls didn’t stir.
Sophy crossed to the bed and bent over, but not too close. “Dahlia, you’ve got to get up for school.”
With a grunt and a swing of her arm, Dahlia snuggled deeper into the covers. Beside her, Daisy mumbled something unintelligible and flopped onto her back. Her hair covered most of her face, the ends fluttering as her mouth sagged open in a steady snore.
“Come on, kids.” Sophy grasped two handfuls of the covers and tugged them away from skinny arms and slack fingers. “Time to get up, get up in the morning,” she singsonged.
“Go ’way!”
Dodging Dahlia’s flailing arm again, Sophy shook both girls’ shoulders at the same time. “Seriously, guys, get up, get dressed and let’s eat. Since we have a little extra time today—” thanks to Ty’s instruction that she drive Dahlia to school instead of walk “—I might even fix waffles for breakfast.”
Daisy shoved her hair back to reveal one narrowed eye. “Is that them bumpy pancakes?”
“Yep.”
“Can I have chocolate butter and syrup on ’em?”
“Yep.” In an aside to Sean, Sophy explained, “Daisy will do practically anything for Nutella. Daisy, wake up your sister, will you?”
Daisy sat up, stretched, braced herself against the headboard, planted both feet in the middle of her sister’s back and shoved her off the bed. The older girl hit the floor with a muffled thump and came up growling, hands outstretched. With a giggle, Daisy jumped to her feet and leaped from the bed into Sean’s arms, shrieking, “Save me, save me!”
As Sophy walked past them, she leaned close to him, murmuring, “See what fun awaits you?”
As her mom had said during her visit, he got points for not running while he had the chance.
* * *
Thursday was, on the surface, as normal a day as Sean had had in a while. Ty gave them regular updates on Dahlia; customers came and went in the store, paying little attention to him and Daisy; the rain kept falling. When the shop door opened, its clean scent rushed inside on the wind, the air fresh and cooled from its usual end-of-summer heat.
None of that normalcy went very deep, though. His muscles were knotted with the need to move, go, do something. Every time the door opened, his gaze jerked to the front. Every time the phone rang, he froze, all his focus zeroing in on Sophy’s voice, her face, looking for the relief that came across it after an instant.
Dahlia was home from school now, the bus that delivered her trailed by a police car. It was almost time to close and go upstairs, where they’d already decided to order pizza from Luigi’s. The thought, Sophy had said, was enough to make anyone feel better, no matter what their troubles. He agreed.
He was lifting Daisy to return a bolt of fabric to an upper shelf when the doorbell announced Ty’s arrival. He was accompanied by another detective, his face familiar, his name eluding Sean.
Sophy looked up from the bank deposit and smiled. “Hey, Ty, Pete.”
Pete Petrovski. Ski, they’d called him in school. Another of her exes. Wh
at a lineup: four cops, a lawyer, a businessman, who knew what else...and an ex-con informant of a mechanic. Damn.
Petrovski responded to her greeting with a somber nod. In fact, both men were somber. Sean lowered Daisy to the floor, sent her off to help Dahlia and joined Sophy at the counter as she asked, “What’s up?”
It was Ty who answered. “I told you that the judge gave Maggie’s boyfriend, Davey, permission to stay with his brother over in Martinez.”
Sophy nodded.
The town butted right up next to Augusta, so close that it was hard to tell where one ended and the other started.
“We just got a call from the state police.” Ty glanced at the girls, then fixed his gaze on Sean. “He was killed in a wreck this morning. His car broke through the railing on the Savannah River bridge at a high rate of speed. They just got it out of the water and ID’d him.”
Cold and stiff, Sean walked away, thinking of all the reasons for an accident like that. Falling asleep. A medical condition. Suicide. Alcohol or drug use. Excessive speed. Weather. Vehicle malfunction.
Accident. Murder. Either way, Craig’s life just got easier. One less problem to worry about. Now the only thing that tied Copper Lake’s routine drug bust to Craig was Maggie. Would this help her see reason? Make her realize she was playing with danger?
He didn’t hear Sophy’s approach but didn’t startle when she touched his arm. “Does Maggie know yet?”
“No. Pete and I were just coming back from court when I got the call.”
“Let me tell her,” Sean said abruptly. If this didn’t get through to her, he had an idea that might. After he’d given her a chance to—how had Nev put it?—look into her heart and do what was right for her daughters.
Ty shrugged. “Go ahead. Pete will give you a ride. I’ll stay here until you get back.”
Sophy squeezed his arm before letting go, her look reassuring. He appreciated that she didn’t shy away from contact with him in front of her exes, that—limited though their lives were—she wasn’t secretive about him.
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