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Neither of Mollie’s parents had known she was coming because Mollie had been the one to call for Audrey’s help.
Audrey talked to Ryan again on Wednesday morning. He phoned as he came off his shift to ask her about another case they’d shared—a pair of nine-year-old fraternal twins who’d initially been reported as runaways several months before. Very soon into the investigation, however, they’d realized the twins had been abducted.
Ryan thought he might have located them living in Arizona with a man who, other than the color and length of his hair, perfectly fit the description of the children’s father.
She’d grieved for Darla and Danny Buford for months until she’d finally, with the help of some counseling, let them go. There’d been an obvious break-in at Mrs. Buford’s well-to-do home. A ransom note.
Mr. Buford, the other half of the lengthy and ugly divorce that initially had brought Audrey into the picture, had been right beside his ex-wife through the entire ordeal. He’d paid half the ransom and cried with his ex-wife in his arms when the terms of the bargain were not met.
The money disappeared. The police didn’t catch the slight figure who’d picked up the bag in the middle of the busy New York City street where the kids supposedly had been taken. And the children were never returned.
The kids were dead. Plain and simple.
And shockingly, horribly, grossly unfair.
Audrey wanted Ryan to be right about the Arizona lead, but she didn’t think so.
Yet that didn’t stop her from hoping. If any other detective had told her he’d located those kids, she’d have shrugged off the news without much thought. But Ryan Mercedes’s track record for accuracy was impressive.
Because he didn’t speak until he knew what he was saying? Or because he was that gifted at his job?
He called again on Friday morning. The Buford twins were alive.
“Turns out some psycho, who’d just lost his wife and daughter in a car accident, had taken them. He never let them out of his sight.”
“What about school?” Audrey prided herself on the professional tone—glad that Ryan couldn’t see the moisture in her eyes.
“He home-schooled them. They’re pretty confused, but physically unharmed. The state has them until their parents can get there.”
Audrey had to take a deep breath to let the emotion pass. There were so many more tragic stories in her line of work than happy endings. “Mr. and Mrs. Buford are going together?”
“They remarried more than a month ago.”
Thankful that at least two traumatized children had every advantage for full recovery, Audrey listened as Ryan offered to grill a steak for her that night to celebrate a homecoming they both took personally, yet neither would attend.
“I can’t.” It was for the best, she told the part of herself that was disappointed. “I’m having dinner with a therapist who had a session with one of my clients yesterday.”
Both she and the therapist were booked for the next week, but Audrey wasn’t willing to settle for a paper report on this one. Nor could she wait a week. The family was due in court again on Monday.
Saturday night she had a fund-raiser with the Arizona Bar Association, and on Sunday she was volunteering legal services at a women’s shelter.
All things she did because she loved to do them. Wanted to do them. Because they gave her life meaning. And a reason to get up in the morning.
The activities were designed to create the life she wanted. And that was exactly what she had as she hung up the phone, fully aware that Ryan thought she’d been making excuses not to see him again. Fully aware that she might never hear from him again—outside the office.
Fully aware and completely okay.
It was very unsettling, therefore, that a time or two over the weekend she almost resented those same activities. Mostly when she was thinking of the handsome detective and wondering what he was doing with his two days off, living in real-world time.
Still, a little resentment, in exchange for the ability to live her own life, was a small price to pay.
When her phone rang again Monday morning at the time Ryan was due off shift, she picked it up with far too much vigor. And flooded with warmth when she heard his voice.
Get a grip, my girl, she admonished herself. He’s a friend.Nothing more.
“Do you have any free time this week?” he asked after a brief hello. He sounded as impatient as she felt over the past weekend’s misses. Not angry. More like…needy.
Or maybe she was projecting her own eagerness onto him?
“I have a couple of hours between court hearings tomorrow, starting around eleven, but you’re sleeping then,” she told him.
“I’ll stay up.”
“What—and get yourself killed tomorrow night?”
“I can sleep after lunch.”
“Are we having lunch?”
“I think so.”
“Okay.”
AND THEY DID. She had a quick dinner with him on Thursday, too, before her guest lecture at the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State. They talked about work. About the weather and the Cincinnati Reds and about work some more.
She asked about Delilah.
They didn’t talk about each other. And the more they didn’t, the more Audrey wanted to.
What was the matter with her?
She’d never needed a man to complete her before. To the contrary, she did better, felt stronger and more capable, when she wasn’t with a man.
So why couldn’t she stop looking at him? Whether he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, exhausted and on his way to sleep, or wearing a jacket on his way to work, the man looked like an art sculpture to her. Legs that were long and lean and nothing but delineated muscle, shoulders that blocked the clouds from her view when he stood in front of her, eyes that smiled, or admired, or sympathized without guise, and a butt that—
No. She wasn’t going to think about that. Wasn’t going to think that way. She wanted a friendship.
She didn’t want sex. Didn’t want to be that vulnerable. A man might be able to join his body parts with a woman, share pleasure with her, and get dressed and walk away, but not Audrey. Nope, she’d open her heart right along with her legs, then she’d be right back where she’d been at sixteen. Craving love. Needing validation from someone who could give it, or take it away, without notice.
No butt looked good enough to risk that.
RYAN STAYED UP on Friday after work. He had two days off, plans to see Marcus Ryan—because he couldn’t seem to stay away from the baby recently born to the biological parents he’d met the previous year—to go to a Reds game with the dad who’d raised him, and have some of his mom’s home cooking. He needed to be on the same time as the rest of the world.
He also needed to shop and clean his place before Audrey showed up at six expecting steaks on a grill he didn’t yet have. He didn’t have the food, either, or furniture for the patio, but those were minor details.
Things to take his mind off the rape victim he’d watched being loaded into an ambulance at three that morning. What in the hell a middle-aged married woman had been doing out in a deserted school parking lot by herself in the middle of the night, he didn’t know.
But he hoped to God she lived to tell him. One way or another, as the newest detective in the Special Victims Unit, he was going to find out.
His place was ready, new furniture assembled, grill put together, salad made and steaks marinated by five. Up in the master-suite loft, Ryan showered, pulled on some jeans and a black T-shirt, ran his fingers through his hair—then decided to shave again. Just for something to do.
Ten minutes later he still had forty minutes to kill. Avoiding the king-size bed, avoiding thoughts of his dinner guest in that bed, he checked his cell phone for messages.
Nothing from work. Good. Sometimes it was nice not to be needed.
Needed. He adjusted his jeans. Ryan wanted to be needed. Bad.
He needed his watch.
Walking around the massive bed to the nightstand where he’d left the timepiece his father had given him when he’d made detective—it had a tiny recording device built into it—Ryan glanced at the comforter.
It was clean. The browns and beiges were kind of masculine, but then, he was a guy. Guys tended to be masculine.
The sheets were light-colored. While he tried to see them from a woman’s perspective, a thought occurred to him. He hadn’t changed them in a while.
Never seemed to have the time.
He had twenty minutes right now.
Only because he so rarely had extra time, only because he needed to take advantage of that time to accomplish something, Ryan changed his sheets.
He’d just finished when the doorbell rang.
HE’D SEEN HER in jeans before. Several times. Just didn’t remember them fitting those long, feminine thighs quite so well. The white, short-sleeved T-shirt covered the waistband. As long as she didn’t move.
“Wine?” he asked, handing her a glass as she sat in the wicker rocker he’d purchased that afternoon.
She lifted her hand to take the glass. “Thanks.” Ryan had to turn away before she noticed his reaction to the thin strip of lightly tanned stomach she’d exposed.
He’d have raised his gaze to avoid that possibility, except that her breasts, which were round and full and completely framed by the tight shirt, were far too much temptation.
He was a solitary man. With a job to do. People to protect.
Maybe he should go next door. That way he wouldn’t see her. Wouldn’t flirt with temptation. He could cook on his neighbor’s grill and courier the steaks over….
“I talked to Scott Markovich today.”
The kid who’d beat up his stepdad. The bastard dad was going to live. Thank God. As it stood, Scott had been charged with assault, which was a lot better than murder.
And talking about work was a lot better than…anything else.
“And?”
“I think he’s protecting his mother.”
“She was out of town when the incident took place.”
Audrey’s hair fell forward across her shoulder as she shook her head.
“I don’t think so. I think she was there. I think she’d been drinking again.”
“I thought the court ordered that she’d lose custody of Scott if she went back on the juice.”
“Right.”
Realization dawned and Ryan blurted, “She knows what happened that night.”
“I think so.”
“And she won’t speak up because she was drunk.”
Audrey shrugged.
“She knows what that SOB was going to do to her son.”
“That’s my guess.”
Ryan swore, his mind racing ahead—and back at the same time. Going over the reports he’d practically memorized, looking for clues he’d missed. Trying to figure out how he was going to prove Audrey’s theory.
“Her sister wasn’t her only alibi. There was the bus driver who took her to Detroit,” he reminded her.
And maybe the guy was dating the sister. Or had lied for favors. Maybe he’d been drinking on the job and couldn’t remember who he’d transported and had lied to save his ass.
Maybe…
“There was the woman who sold her the ticket, too,” she added.
Didn’t mean she got on the bus. “No passengers remembered her.”
“It was the middle of the night,” Audrey said, not that he hadn’t already been thinking the same thing himself.
“There were only two of them and they were both asleep,” he finished for her.
The evidence was mostly circumstantial. But Scott had openly threatened to kill his stepdad the previous year. And there was no denying that the kid had used the crowbar on the man’s back. The only question was why.
“If we can get it on the record that she was there that night, we can subpoena her to testify. If her husband had been about to rape her son, any halfway-decent attorney should be able to get a self-defense dismissal out of that.”
Her eyes had the fire of battle, the glow of an imminent win, and Ryan was almost a little sad that she’d opted not to practice law. She’d make a damned good prosecutor. And Lord knew the world needed them.
But she was young. Fresh out of law school, he figured, based on the fact that she’d taken the bar exam the previous year. There was time.
“As strongly as I believe you,” he said, sitting down beside her, wishing he’d opted for the footed double swing rather than two chairs, “I can’t put theory on report.”
“I think I can get Scott to talk to you, if you’re willing.”
Sitting forward, Ryan almost spilled his drink. “Hell, yes, I’m willing.”
“It’ll have to be tomorrow. They’re moving him to a facility in Dayton until his trial. Something about bed space in the non-sexual-offense unit for fifteen-year-olds.”
