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“Don’t do that.” Kristen glared at her foster father, her anger festering. “You’re not my father anymore.”
“You never let me be,” he said bleakly.
Guilt stoked her anger. “All I ever wanted was to be left alone to get on with my life. That’s still all I want.”
“You’re not getting on with your life. You’re hiding behind your badge and your attitude, avoiding anything that scares you or challenges you. I’m not talking to you as a father now,” he added when she opened her mouth to protest. “I’m your boss, and this is a job I think you can do if you put your mind to it. Are you telling me I’m wrong?”
Nostrils flaring, Kristen looked away from Carl. “I don’t think Sam Cooper will agree to it.”
“I think he’ll agree to anything that will keep his daughter safe from another attack.” Carl’s voice dipped an octave. “Fathers are like that.”
Kristen stood up, her legs trembling with pent-up anger and a healthy dose of apprehension. “It’s a terrible idea.”
“But you’ll do it?”
“I don’t have a choice, do I?” She left his office, giving the door an extra-hard push as she shut it behind her. The slam echoed down the corridor behind her.
Foley looked up as she entered the bull pen, making a face at the sight of her scowl. “Good afternoon to you, too.”
“Carl wants me on full-time babysitting duty with Maddy Cooper,” she growled.
Foley’s eyebrows lifted. “Really? I was betting he’d tell you not to go on your movie-night date with Sam Cooper.”
She shot him a dark glare. “It’s an informal interview with a crime victim at his home.”
“Over popcorn and movies.”
“The popcorn and princess movies are for the kid.” Kristen crossed to her desk, grabbed her purse and headed for the door before he asked more questions.
“That kid’s got a thing for you,” Foley said as she passed.
“Then maybe she’ll remember something new and tell it to her new best buddy,” she retorted.
“That’s not fair, Tandy. And you’re not that cold.”
She stopped in the doorway and turned back to look at him. “I have to be that cold, don’t I? Especially if I’m going to be Maddy’s best friend 24/7.”
Foley shook his head. “I don’t think that’s what Carl had in mind. I know Sam Cooper won’t put up with it.”
She sighed, leaning against the doorjamb. “What am I supposed to do? Blow off the assignment? Do you really believe there’s not going to be another attempt to grab that kid?”
“No. I think someone brazen enough to send photos to her daddy is brazen enough to try to snatch her again,” Foley conceded. “But I’ve seen you with kids. You look like you’re allergic. I keep waiting for you to break out in hives.”
She pushed away from the door frame and swung her hair over her shoulder. “I’m not good with kids.”
Foley’s expression was full of pity. “It’s not that you’re not good with them, Tandy. You’re afraid of them.” When she didn’t answer him, he added, “Are you going to do what Madison wants?”
She left without answering, her chest tight with dread.
“LET’S GET SOMETHING straight,” Sam murmured to Kristen an hour later after Maddy had squeezed out from between them to go to the bathroom. “Clearly, you’re not the maternal type.”
Kristen’s eyes met his. The vulnerability that flashed there for a moment stunned him, but it disappeared quickly, leaving her expression unreadable. “No, I’m not.”
“Then, I think from now on, we should limit your interactions with Maddy to formal visits.”
Her gaze remained steady, but Sam saw a flicker of something in the depths of her blue eyes that might have been pain. Again, it slipped away as quickly as it had come. “I was afraid you’d say that,” she murmured. “But—”
Maddy came back into the room and bounced onto the sofa between them. “Unpause!” she said brightly to her father.
Sam hit Play and the syrupy strains of a princess love theme filled the room, ending the conversation with Kristen for the moment. But Sam felt her gaze on his face, sensed the tension buzzing around them, as whatever it was she’d started to tell him lingered, unsaid but unforgotten.
Within an hour, Maddy’s eyes began to droop, and she gave only a halfhearted protest when Sam finally stopped the DVD player and carried her off to bed. He lingered a few moments as she tossed and turned, still not used to the strange bed. She demanded a story, and he complied with a quick reading of Horton Hears a Who. She was asleep within a couple of minutes.
Sam put the book on the nightstand and tucked her in, lingering a moment to run his fingers over the satiny curve of her round cheek. Swaddled in the enormous old wedding ring quilt that had belonged to his grandmother, she looked tiny. So very fragile and breakable.
He felt rather than heard Kristen enter the room behind him. He turned to find her standing in the doorway, her narrow-eyed gaze fixed on his daughter as if looking for something in Maddy’s soft features. Tonight she wore a pale green T-shirt and jeans, her hair loose and a little wild, very different from the buttoned-up police detective he’d spent the morning with. The T-shirt revealed even more new curves he hadn’t seen before, and the snug jeans made her legs look miles long.
His whole body tightened pleasantly in response.
Kristen stepped out into the hallway, and he rose to follow, closing the door to the bedroom behind him. She faced him as they reached the living room, her tense expression working hard to kill the light sexual buzz he’d been enjoying.
“I have something to ask you.” Her voice was tight, as if she’d had to force the words from her throat.
He grew instantly apprehensive. “What?”
“Carl—Captain Madison—believes there’s a strong likelihood that whoever broke into your home is going to go after Maddy again. I agree with him.”
“So do I,” Sam conceded, though her stark assessment made his stomach hurt.
“He wants to assign someone to Maddy full-time.”
Sam frowned. “Full-time? Like a bodyguard?”
“Yes.”
Sam stepped away from her, rubbing his jaw. His beard stubble scraped his palm with a rasping sound. “I don’t know if she’ll take to some stranger coming in to play nanny—”
“It won’t be a stranger,” Kristen said, her voice even tighter than before.
Tension stretched in the air between them as he slowly turned to look at her, understanding dawning. Her eyes locked with his, wide and scared.
“I’ll be Maddy’s bodyguard,” she said.
Chapter Four
Waiting for Sam to break his stunned silence, Kristen didn’t know whether she wanted him to agree or refuse. On a purely visceral level, anything that saved her from spending every day and night with Maddy Cooper would be a welcome response. But it was also a coward’s choice.
She wasn’t a coward, no matter what Foley or Carl thought.
“That’s the last thing I expected you to say.” Sam sat down on the sofa and passed his hand over his jaw. His palm made a raspy noise against his beard stubble, and she was surprised to feel a flutter of feminine awareness in her belly.
He was an attractive man. Not handsome exactly, not by Hollywood standards. His appeal was edgier—raw male power, evident in the broad expanse of his shoulders and the lean, almost feral features that even a veneer of civilization couldn’t temper.
She sat beside him, ignoring the tremble in her knees. “It wasn’t my idea.”
He shot her a dark look. “You don’t say.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s the wrong thing to do,” she continued, ignoring his sarcasm. “Maddy may be in further danger, and I’m the best person, under the circumstances, to protect her. She seems to like and trust me. I will do anything in my power to protect her.”
“My brother could do the same thing.”
“He’s on special assignment with the Drug Enforcement Agency. You know that.” She had checked into Aaron Cooper’s availability herself, during the short hour between Carl’s order and her arrival at the Cooper family guesthouse.
“My sister’s husband is also a deputy.”
“Riley Patterson? The one who’s currently in Arizona for his parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary?”
“You did a background check on my whole family?”
She had, in fact. A cursory one, anyway. Standard operating procedure for child abduction cases. “He and your sister won’t be back until Monday.”
Sam frowned at her, his gaze intense. She could see him weighing all the ramifications in his mind as he stared her down. Could he trust her with his daughter?
Should he?
She withstood his scrutiny for as long as she could before finally blurting, “Yes or no?”
His nostrils flared briefly. “Okay. There’s an extra bedroom you can use. But I don’t want our lives disrupted any more than they have to be. Maddy still gets to visit with my parents and go fishing with Jake and Gabe. Understood? If I say she’s safe with someone without you there you don’t interfere.”
Kristen nodded. The less time she had to spend alone with Maddy, the better. “I know you’re probably wary about bringing a gun in here with Maddy around—”
Sam’s lips curved into a grim smile. “I’m armed myself, Detective Tandy.”
The deadly serious tone of his voice made Kristen’s stomach tighten. So she’d been right to see the masculinity beneath the well-cut suits and expensive ties. Despite the Italian silk and the fancy letters at the end of his name, Sam Cooper had grown up here in the hills of Chickasaw County and hardened his native strength with a stint in the Marine Corps.
She paid back his earlier scrutiny by indulging herself with a long, appraising look, smiling as he reacted to the tit for tat with a look of grudging amusement. She knew Sam Cooper had graduated from law school and passed the bar exam by the young age of twenty-four and spent the next five years working as a JAG lawyer before taking a civilian job in the District of Columbia. Sure, it hadn’t been a combat assignment, but everybody in the Marine Corps had to go through boot camp, didn’t they?
If the hard muscles and flat planes she glimpsed beneath his olive-green T-shirt and faded jeans were anything to go by, he’d kept up with the fitness regimen even after he’d left the service. She looked away.
“I keep wondering who’d do something like this.” The vulnerability in Sam’s voice caught her by surprise. “I’m not rich. I’m not a celebrity. I don’t think I could scrape up a ransom payment if I tried.”
“I think maybe revenge,” she offered quietly. The haggard look in his eyes suggested that answer had been squirming around the back of his mind since the attempted kidnapping. “Or some other personal agenda,” she added.
His eyes narrowed. “You’re still thinking about my ex.”
“The majority of child abductions are familial. You have full custody of Maddy and moved her to another state recently—”
“With Norah’s blessing,” Sam said firmly. “She’s welcome to see Maddy whenever she likes. She chooses not to.”
“Why not?”
Sam’s lips narrowed to a thin line. His gaze shifted toward the hallway, as if he was afraid Maddy might overhear. He nodded toward the cottage’s kitchen nook, leading the way. When he spoke, he kept his voice low. “She didn’t want to have Maddy in the first place. The pregnancy wasn’t planned. I talked her into the marriage.”
Kristen felt a cold tingle crawl up her spine. “She didn’t want to have children at all?”
He flashed a bleak smile. “No. But she knew how much I did. So she agreed to marry me and have the baby, give the whole wedded bliss thing a shot.” He nudged a folded dishrag across the counter with one long finger. “Didn’t work out.”
“How long did it last?”
“Nine months, until Maddy was three months old.”
Not very long to give marriage and motherhood a chance, she thought. “And she gave you full custody?”
“Since our divorce was all about getting out of playing mommy and wife, yeah. She did.”
Kristen wasn’t sure how to respond. There had been a time in her life when she couldn’t imagine how a woman could turn her back on her child. But that was a long time ago, before she’d seen firsthand what a mother was capable of doing to her children. She cleared her throat. “Some women just aren’t meant to be mothers.”
When she dared to look at him again, she was shocked to find his expression sympathetic. She’d expected disgust.
She hardened herself against the compassion in his warm blue eyes. “I looked into your ex anyway. She’s just become engaged. Did you know that?”
He looked surprised. “More background checks, Detective?”
So he didn’t know about the engagement. Interesting.
“Who’s she marrying?” he asked, almost as an afterthought. She wasn’t sure if he was indifferent or just pretending to be.
“Graham Stilson,” she answered.
One dark eyebrow notched upward. “Junior or Senior?”
“Junior. Do you know him?”
Sam turned to face her fully, resting his elbows on the narrow breakfast bar behind him. “Stilson Junior was a trial lawyer in the D.C. area before he was elected to the state senate. We crossed paths now and then. I know his father better, though. Stilson Senior is a judge.”
Clearly, he didn’t care much for Stilson Junior. Kristen wondered how much of his dislike was wrapped up in unresolved feelings for his ex, annoyed with herself for her curiosity. What had she expected, that he’d have lost all interest in a woman he’d once loved enough to marry?
Not that Sam Cooper’s feelings were of any importance, she reminded herself. It was his ex-wife who was currently on Kristen’s suspect list, not Sam.
“I asked her assistant to track her down and have her call me. Nothing yet,” she said aloud.
“Norah doesn’t get motivated to return calls unless she thinks you can do something for her,” Sam said with a shrug. “I left a message for her, too.”
“I thought you said you didn’t think she was a suspect.”
“I don’t,” he said firmly. “But she’s Maddy’s mom. She should know what’s going on.”
Would Norah Cabot even care? She hadn’t given much thought to her daughter’s life so far—why would she start now?
