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There was more to his story. Audrey didn’t succeed at her job without being able to read between the lines, to read people, to hear what they weren’t saying as much or more than what they were. And she didn’t succeed without knowing when not to push.
Ryan Mercedes was a private man. An intriguing man. A man who had the looks of Adonis and the heart of Cupid.
A man who was occupying her thoughts so often he was making her uncomfortable.
“How about you?” he asked. “Why do you do the work you do?”
For maybe the first time ever, she considered telling someone the whole truth. Considered.
“In 2003, in Ohio alone, there were 47,444 substantiated cases of child abuse and or neglect. More than seven thousand of them required the services of a guardian ad litem.” Hide behind the facts. It had always been her way. People couldn’t argue with facts. And win.
“I understand the need for child advocates,” Ryan said. “Remember, I see the results of child abuse and know full well that there are far too many children in this city who need someone on their side, someone looking out only for them and their best interests. But that’s not what I asked. I asked, why you?”
His perception surprised her. Or maybe not. Maybe her heart already knew that this man was good for her. That he was personal. In a life that was anything but.
She opened her mouth to tell him about the volunteer guardian ad litem program. The hours of training it took for one qualified ad litem to emerge. The need for legal advocates sitting alongside children in court to help clear up the confusion that stole childhoods.
And about the few of them, the paid lawyer ad litems who, in addition to looking out for the child’s best interests and supporting the child, also offered legal advocacy.
She opened her mouth and said, “I…had a…rough childhood.” And in spite of the heat in her cheeks, the discomfort attacking her from the inside out, she couldn’t seem to stop. “Other than my parents’ divorce, things looked fine on the surface. Middle-class, well-dressed mom with a college education and respectable job. No one could see the things that went on underneath the surface, behind the closed doors of our home. And trying to get anyone to listen, when things looked so picture perfect, proved impossible.”
His frown deepened. “She hit you?” He sounded as though he’d like to hit her mother back, and Audrey almost smiled. Too many years had passed, the wounds had healed, and still it felt good to have someone come to her rescue.
She was falling for this man.
“No,” she said. “She suffers from depression, though she refused counseling and has never been treated. Sometimes she’s fine, but when the darkness descends, watch out. She’ll turn on me without warning. Her way of loving is to control. If you do something to displease her, she’ll take away her love. And anything else she’s providing that she knows you want.”
“Such as?”
“When I turned sixteen, she gave me a car. I needed it to get to the university where I was attending class as part of a special high-school-student program. From that point on, she used that car to control me. From the classes I took, the people I chose as friends, the jobs I applied for, the clothes I wore, the church I attended, even the boys I dated. If I didn’t do as she suggested, she’d take away my car. Or my college-tuition money. Or the roof over my head. She’d tell me what to think, how to act, who to love. She used to write these horrible letters, telling me how stupid I was, how I never came to the table, as she called it, or that I came late. Anytime anything went wrong, it was because I’d screwed up again.”
“Where was your dad through all of this?”
“I’m not sure. They divorced before I was a year old. Mom told him he wasn’t my real father, but there’s never been anyone else in her life that I’m aware of.”
“You didn’t get tested, to find out if the man was your father?”
Audrey kept thinking that she’d stop the conversation. Right after the next sentence.
But something about Detective Ryan Mercedes compelled her to talk to him. She’d never met anyone like him. Such a mixture of idealism and rigid determination. He was a man you could count on to protect the tribe. But one with a heart, as well.
“He wasn’t interested in proving anything,” she said.
“Did you ever see him?”
“Nope. I don’t even know what he looks like. I wrote to him once, when I was in high school, but the letter came back with a big ‘return to sender’ on the front. My mother said it was his handwriting.”
“And she never told you who your father really was?”
It did sound rather fantastic, now that she heard her story aloud. Audrey was so used to that part of her circumstances, it seemed normal to her. And in her line of work, representing children whose rights were in jeopardy, she regularly saw familial situations that were much more dysfunctional than hers had ever been.
“I’ve always assumed that the man listed on my birth certificate, the man she was married to, was my father. My mother has a way of changing the truth to suit her in the moment. She uses words to lash out and hurt when she’s hurting, but I don’t think she’d have been unfaithful to her marriage vows.”
“He must have known that.”
“Probably. But she uses people’s vulnerabilities against them until she breaks them down to the point where they’ll agree with her just to get some peace. I’m guessing she hit him where it counts one too many times.”
Audrey sat forward. She’d said too much. Far too much.
“Nice guy, to leave his kid all alone with that woman.”
“He paid child support, every single month, until I turned eighteen.”
“Like money was going to make you happy? Protect you?”
Life was black and white to Ryan. There was right and wrong. Good and bad. You chose the right. Righted the wrongs. Served good and obliterated the bad.
A characteristic that had drawn her to him from the beginning. The world needed more of his kind of passion.
She just didn’t want to need it. Not on a personal level.
“Maybe he thought, since I was a girl, her daughter, that there’d be some kind of motherly instinct that would come out in her, protect me from the emotional abuse he must have suffered.”
“Or maybe he sucked as a father.”
Ryan’s words made her smile.
“YOU NEVER DID answer my question.” Ryan wished he’d brought the wine bottle in with him. Wished he could pour another glass for both of them. Keep her on his couch with him.
At least for a time.
Long enough to get to know her well enough to get her out of his system. To dispel the strange and uncomfortable hold she had on him.
Ryan was used to being his own man. He’d been hearing the beat of his own drummer for most of his life. And walked to it alone.
He liked it that way.
He had things to do with his life—lives to save and evils to conquer—and he couldn’t do that if he gave his heart away.
Or at least that was the story he’d been telling himself. If there was another reason, some deep-seated something that prevented him from living the normal life of wife and kids and family, he didn’t want to know about it.
“What question?” Her big brown eyes were mysterious, pulling him into their shadowed depths, as she flung a lock of her long blond hair over her shoulder. She sat on the edge of the couch, as though poised for flight. He wished she’d relax again.
“Why you do what you do.”
“Oh, I thought I had. That’s easy. I spent my childhood feeling powerless,” she said as though that explained it all.
And in a sense, it did. She’d been stripped of something vital as a child. And every day, when she went to work, when her work preserved the dignity and sense of self of even one child, when she protected the innocence of childhood, she took back the personal power she’d lost.
Ryan understood that. Righting wrongs was what made his past, his history, his genealogy conscionable, too.
CHAPTER TWO
AUDREY DIDN’T WAIT around for his call. And only checked her cell phone so many times Sunday evening because she gave the number to all her clients, and if a child needed her, tomorrow could be too late.
It wasn’t Ryan’s fault she’d bared her soul like an idiot the night before. He had no way of knowing she’d shared with him more than she’d ever told anyone.
She’d come across like some pathetic victim, instead of the strong and healthy woman she’d become.
With the hundred-year-old hardwood floors of her Victorian-style cottage shining, she put away the cleaning supplies she’d hauled out and went upstairs to the treadmill. And half an hour later, panting and sweaty, headed across the hall to her home office—the only other room upstairs—and read over her files for the next day.
When everyone else in the world was relaxing, watching television, reading, napping, Audrey worked.
The kids whose lives seemed reduced to files of unfortunate facts, whose parents, for a variety of reasons, were unable to parent effectively, called out to her. They were always calling out to her.
Kaylee Grady. Date of birth, 9/29/04. That made her four years old. Audrey looked through the documents of the new case she had an initial meeting on the following morning.
Kelsey Grady. Date of birth, 9/29/04.
Twins.
Lifting the cover page, she studied the picture underneath. They were identical. Blond. With chubby cheeks—and far too serious eyes. Their parents had been killed in a car accident during a blizzard the previous February. There’d been no will. And the family was fighting over custody. They wanted to split up the girls to satisfy members from both sides.
“Over my dead body.” Audrey’s voice, usually a comfort, sounded loud in the gabled room. Loud and lonely.
And she glanced at the cell phone she’d carried up with her. Nothing. No missed calls. No messages.
She didn’t blame him for not calling.
The cuckoo clock in the family room downstairs of her 1920s, whitewashed home chirped eight times. Not meaning to, Audrey counted every one, and then knew what time it was. A piece of information she’d purposely been denying herself.
It was just that, last night, she and Ryan had crossed into new territory. Hadn’t they?
That of friends, trusted friends. Or something. It wasn’t as though they were kids, playing the dating game. They were mature adults. Getting to know each other. Sharing a moment in time.
A phone call would have been nice. That was all.
HE WAS STILL working the eleven-to-seven shift. Not because he had to—no, Ryan Mercedes had all the right contacts in all the right places, whether he wanted them or not. He was on the night shift for one reason only.
A selfish reason.
Working nights allowed him to keep his distance from everyone in his life. Having to sleep when family gatherings happened, when an old school mate suggested going out for beers, anytime he was issued an invitation that got a little bit too close, he could always bow out with the excuse that he was working.
The night shift let him operate in a different world. A world where everyone slept—except those few who were working as well, or those who took advantage of others’ sleep to commit crimes against them.
The downside was, when he came off shift Monday morning, he was completely exhausted and wired at the same time. He’d been awake all day Sunday having dinner with his birth parents—he hadn’t seen two-month-old Marcus Ryan in over a week, and his biological cousin, Jordon, a fatherless young man Ryan had met the previous summer who seemed to gravitate to him, had been visiting from Cleveland. Then he’d visited his adoptive parents to watch the Reds game on television with his dad.
He hadn’t been to bed since Saturday night. And that session hadn’t contained his most restful sleep with the continuous interruptions of vivid dreams of a certain lady in the bed with him.
He’d never had a woman in his bed at the condo. Never had a woman in his bed, period.
So why was one suddenly appearing there, uninvited?
He wanted to think she was unwanted, but his body wouldn’t let him go quite that far.
He settled for…uninvited.
And still, nearly thirty-six hours after she’d left his apartment, he was thinking about her.
He was on shift again that night, Ryan reminded himself as he drove slowly through the streets of Westerville, cell phone in hand. Two kids were waiting for the school bus on the corner of Cleveland Avenue and Homeacres Drive. Usually there were three. The shorter girl was missing.
Ryan made a mental note to take the same route home tomorrow. And the next day. If the girl was still missing by the end of the week, he’d stop and ask about her.
In the meantime, he had to sleep. And sleep well. He couldn’t do his job on adrenaline alone. His instincts wouldn’t be as sharp. Lives could be at risk.
He had to get some rest.
“Hello?”
Her number was on speed dial only because a couple of her clients were under his investigation.
“Audrey? Is this a bad time? Did I wake you?”
Seven-thirty in the morning was early to some people.
“Of course not. I’ve been up a couple of hours.”
Well, then… “Are you at work? With someone? Should I call another time?”
“No, Ryan.” She chuckled. “This time is fine. I don’t have to be in court until ten-thirty this morning, and my breakfast meeting canceled.”
Canceled. She was free for breakfast. Unexpectedly. The thought of asking her to meet him somewhere for a quick bite sent alarm signals up his spine. Where was the harm in two friends having breakfast?
They both had to eat.
“So what’s up?” she asked, bringing to his attention the length of time he’d let lapse while he blubbered over the idea of asking her out to eat.
Shifting in his seat, adjusting the pistol digging into his thigh beneath the brown tweed sports jacket he wore, Ryan thought about the case he’d been working on for most of the night.
Focused on the life he’d chosen to live.
The juvenile who’d beaten his stepfather to a pulp, claiming that it was self-defense. He’d claimed some other pretty horrendous things, too.
Reviewing four hours of witness testimony, tapes, doctors’ reports and police records had netted Ryan no more than they already had.
“The prosecutor’s going to charge Markovich.”
“No way.” He heard the drop in her voice and felt as if he’d failed not only the fifteen-year-old boy whom he’d believed, but Audrey, too.
