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“You didn’t, did you?” Kendra prodded. “So why should I have to? Just because I’m a kid?”
“You have a point,” Molly admitted, impressed by the girl’s quick grasp of things. “But letting you stick around here and giving you a job could get me into a whole lot of trouble. You’re a minor in the eyes of the law, even if you think you’re old enough to be on your own.”
Kendra gave her another one of those too-grown-up looks. “What’s the alternative? You don’t give me a job and I keep running,” she said simply. “Do you honestly want that on your conscience? The next place I stop, the people might not be so nice.”
Well, hell, Molly thought. She definitely did not want that on her conscience. “One week, max,” she said very firmly. “And you open up to me. I’ll try to help you figure out the best thing to do.”
“If that means calling my parents, it’s not going to happen,” Kendra said stubbornly.
Molly was equally determined to see that it did, but she merely said, “We’ll see.”
Now that her immediate fate was settled, Kendra gave her a hopeful look. “I don’t suppose you have any of that apple pie left, do you? I could smell it when you brought it to those guys in the booth next to me. It smelled awesome.”
“Yes, there’s pie left.” Her cook always baked enough for at least two days, because it was a customer favorite.
“And ice cream? I’m pretty sure there was ice cream on their pie.”
Molly chuckled. “Yes, there’s ice cream. When was the last time you ate?” she asked as she cut a slice of pie and set it in front of Kendra, then added a large scoop of vanilla ice cream.
“A trucker bought me a couple of doughnuts this morning,” Kendra said as she dug into the dessert.
“Please tell me you were not hitching rides,” Molly said.
Once again, Kendra regarded her indignantly. “What? Do I look stupid? I know better than to get in a car or a truck with a stranger, especially some guy.”
“Well, thank heavens for that.”
“This was a lady trucker, and she was in this place where my bus stopped. She must have felt sorry for me or something, ’cause she offered to buy the doughnuts. I could have bought them for myself, but I figured I should hang on to all the money I could, since I wasn’t sure how long it would be before I could get a job.” She gave Molly a thoughtful look. “So, how much are you paying me?”
“We’ll work it out in the morning.”
“Meals are part of the deal, right?”
Molly bit back a grin. “Yes.”
“And I can sleep here, too?”
“Yes. Were you by any chance a negotiator in a previous life?”
Kendra shrugged. “Just looking out for myself. If I don’t, who will?”
Indeed, Molly thought. Wasn’t that a lesson she’d had to learn the hard way?
* * *
The saddest eyes Daniel Devaney had ever seen stared back at him from the latest missing-child poster to cross his desk. Kendra Grace Morrow had huge, dark, haunted eyes. Only thirteen, according to the information on the fax, she looked older and far too wise.
Believed to be somewhere in Maine, she had run away from her home in Portland two weeks earlier, no doubt leaving behind frantic parents and baffled police. Daniel’s heart broke for all of them, just as it did every single time he looked over one of these posters. At least this time there seemed to be no question that the girl had taken off on her own. She hadn’t been kidnapped. She’d left a note that hadn’t said much and packed a bag. There had been a few sightings reported to the police, and in each the girl had been spotted alone.
Still, runaways never seemed to understand the dangers that awaited them, or else the situation they were leaving behind was so desperate, so awful, that anything seemed to be an improvement. He didn’t know the facts of this particular case, but they all had one thing in common—a kid who needed help. And each time he saw one, he wondered if there had ever been posters like this for his three older brothers, the ones he hadn’t remembered until he’d accidently found the old photos in the attic, the brothers his parents had abandoned years ago.
Sometimes when he thought of what had happened, of the choice that Connor and Kathleen Devaney had made to keep Daniel and his twin, Patrick, Daniel’s heart ached. What had Ryan, Sean and Michael thought when they’d discovered that they’d been left behind? How long had they cried? How long had it been before they’d stopped watching and waiting for their mom and dad to come back for them? Had foster care been kind to them? Or had the system failed them, just as their own parents had?
He’d met them all recently, but they’d danced around the tough issues. One of these days they were going to have to face the past together and deal with the mess their parents had made of all their lives. It wasn’t as if he and Patrick had emerged unscathed, not once they’d discovered the truth.
Patrick had taken it even harder than Daniel had. He’d left home and hadn’t spoken to their parents since. Nor had he been in touch with Daniel until recently, when he’d set up that first meeting with Ryan, Sean and Michael. He’d expected Daniel to have explanations by now for what had happened all those years ago, but Daniel was still as much in the dark as everyone else.
Oh, he’d tried his best to make sense of what had happened, but beyond revealing the existence of the three older boys, his parents had said precious little to try to justify what they had done. Even though Daniel had maintained contact with his parents, that didn’t mean he’d worked through his own anger and guilt over having been one of the two chosen to be kept.
He supposed he owed his folks in one respect. Had it not been for the discovery of their betrayal, he might not have found the kind of work that he was doing now—saving kids in trouble, fighting for their rights, mending fences between them and their parents or finding them loving homes. The caseloads were heavy, the hours long, but it was important, meaningful work. And it could break a man’s heart on a daily basis.
He coped by adhering strictly to the rules, by reducing messy emotions to black-and-white regulations. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. Gazing into Kendra Morrow’s haunted eyes, he instinctively knew that this was one of those times it wouldn’t work. The girl was a heartbreaker. He hoped to heaven she was in someone else’s jurisdiction, where she’d be found safe.
He sighed when his phone rang, relieved by the intrusion into his dark thoughts about a world in which kids ran away when they were little more than babies, too young to understand the risks.
“Devaney,” he said when he’d picked up the phone.
“Daniel, it’s Joe Sutton at police headquarters. Have you seen that poster for Kendra Morrow?”
“It’s on my desk now.”
“I was just having lunch over in Widow’s Cove,” the detective told him.
The mere mention of Widow’s Cove was enough to make Daniel’s palms sweat. And there was only one place in town worth going to for lunch...Molly’s. “Oh?” he said as if his heart wasn’t thumping unsteadily.
“I think Kendra Morrow’s hanging out at Molly Creighton’s place on the waterfront,” Joe reported. “You know the one I mean? Best chowder on the coast?”
“Yeah, Jess’s. Are you sure it was Kendra?”
“If it wasn’t her, it was her double. I’d just seen the poster before I went over there.”
“Then why didn’t you pick her up?” Daniel asked, surprised by the lapse from a cop who was usually quick to nab runaways for their own protection. He and Joe had handled more than their share of these cases together, and he respected the older man’s instincts.
“Because I looked through the file earlier, and something’s not quite right. I thought you might want to have a chat with the girl while I do some checking into why she ran away in the first place. You know as well as I do that sometimes these things aren’t as cut-and-dried as they seem at first glance. If I’d thought she was at risk, I’d have brought her in, but she’s not going anywhere. Molly will see to that. I didn’t see any point in uprooting her until I have all the facts.”
This time Daniel’s sigh was even heavier. He and Molly got along like a couple of tomcats fighting for turf. Their relationship had been passionate and volatile for years, even before he’d let her down so damn badly. After what had happened the night she’d told him she was pregnant, the relationship had cooled to a degree that a glance between them could freeze meat. He regretted that, but he’d accepted it. He’d been a stubborn fool, and he didn’t deserve her forgiveness.
Out of respect for her feelings, it had been a few years now since he’d set foot in that bar she’d inherited from her grandfather. He stayed away in part because Patrick tended to hang out at Jess’s, but mostly because he couldn’t bear the look of justifiable contempt in Molly’s eyes.
“Can you take a run over there?” Joe pressed.
Daniel hesitated for just an instant, but when it came to work, he always did what he had to do, no matter how delicate the situation or how uncomfortable it made him.
“I’m on my way,” he promised, folding the fax into quarters and stuffing it into the pocket of his jacket. “I’ll check in with you later. You sure you don’t want me to bring her over, if it is Kendra? If she figures out we’re onto her, she could run again.”
“Just alert Molly, in case she doesn’t know anyone’s looking for the girl. She’ll keep her safe enough.”
“She has a thirteen-year-old working in a bar,” Daniel reminded him, an edge of sarcasm in his voice. It was just like Molly and her soft heart to take in a runaway kid and to hell with the consequences. Had she even once considered how desperate the parents might be or how many laws she might be breaking?
Joe chuckled at his comment on Molly’s lack of judgment. “Loosen up. The kid’s serving chowder, spilling more of it than she’s serving, to tell the truth of it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Something tells me it’s the best place she could be right now while we figure out what drove her to run away. The note she left didn’t tell us a damned thing. I don’t want to turn her back over to her parents and then find out there was some kind of abuse going on.”
Daniel had his own opinion about this bending of the rules, but he bit his tongue. It was Joe’s call, at least until the court got involved. Then Daniel would have quite a lot to say about a woman who put a teenage runaway to work, no questions asked, without reporting her presence to the authorities.
* * *
“The man you were talking to before, he was a cop,” Kendra told Molly, her face pale and her eyes filled with panic. “I can spot a cop a mile away.”
“It was Joe Sutton and, yes, he is a detective, but he’s a good guy,” Molly reassured her. “He drives over every few weeks for my chowder. If he’d been here to look for you, he would have said something. Besides, he’s gone now, so obviously he didn’t recognize you.”
“Maybe he forgot his handcuffs and had to go back for them,” Kendra said.
“Sweetie, he wouldn’t handcuff you. You ran away. You’re not a criminal. You have nothing to fear from Joe.”
The words were barely out of her mouth when the door opened and Daniel Devaney came striding in as if he’d arrived to conquer the world. In her opinion, Kendra had a lot more to worry about with Daniel than she ever would with Joe Sutton. Daniel was a rigid, by-the-book kind of guy when it came to situations like this. How he and his twin brother, Patrick, had come from the same gene pool was a total enigma to her.
“Go in the back,” Molly ordered the teenager, maneuvering in an attempt to keep Kendra out of Daniel’s view. “And stay alert in case you need to get out of here in a hurry.”
Kendra paled at the terse order. “What’s going on? Is that cop back?”
“No. Just do whatever you have to do to stay out of sight. Tell Retta what I said. Tell her Daniel’s here. She’ll understand and she’ll help you. I’ll explain later,” Molly promised, giving the girl’s hand a reassuring squeeze. “Trust me. Everything’s going to be okay.”
Kendra followed the direction of her gaze and spotted Daniel. “He’s a cop, too, isn’t he?” she said at once.
“No, worse, in this instance. He’s with a social services agency.”
Understanding and alarm immediately flared in Kendra’s eyes. “Then he’s here for me?”
“More than likely.” She couldn’t imagine anything else that would have brought Daniel waltzing into her bar again, not after she’d made it clear that his presence here was unwelcome. “Just stay out of sight. I can handle Daniel Devaney.”
When she was satisfied that Kendra was safely out of the bar, Molly strolled over to Daniel’s table, order pad in hand, a neutral expression firmly plastered on her face. She ignored the once-familiar jolt to her senses. She would play this cool for Kendra’s sake. If there hadn’t been so much at stake, Daniel could have starved to death before she’d have given him a second glance.
“Fancy seeing you here,” she said. “I thought you preferred classier joints these days.”
Daniel frowned at her. “I never said that.”
“You never had to. Your disdain has always been evident.” And never more so than the night he’d declined to be a father to their child. Though he’d told her about his own father’s failings, she’d always believed that at least some of his reluctance had stemmed from an aversion to her choice to run her grandfather’s bar, rather than going off to some snooty college and pursuing some equally snooty career. Unlike his twin, Daniel was a snob in his fancy shirts with the monogrammed cuffs and his Italian leather loafers that were more suited to the streets of downtown Portland than the waterfront in Widow’s Cove. He was definitely no longer a small-town boy.
He didn’t even flinch as her barb struck him. “Save the judgments. I didn’t come here to fight with you. Just bring me a cup of chowder, please.”
Molly noted the order but didn’t budge. He was acting too blasted casual and innocent. Something besides chowder had brought Daniel into the bar. Given Joe Sutton’s recent departure, there was very little question in her mind that he was here because of Kendra.
“In town to see your folks?”
“No.”
“If you’re looking for Patrick, he won’t be in till later,” she said casually, in an attempt to get him to show his hand.
“I’m not looking for Patrick.”
“Oh?” She sat down opposite him, sliding onto the booth’s bench until her knees brushed his. The little spark of awareness that shot through her was an unwelcome surprise, but she tried not to show it. She couldn’t control the sparks, but she could refuse to give him the satisfaction of seeing that his presence bothered her. Besides, there had been an answering spark of heat in his eyes. She could use that to her advantage, assuming she could manage to avoid choking on her own words. She had to try, though.
“Then it’s my company you’ve come for? You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting to hear that one more time.” She dropped her voice provocatively and made herself add, “What can I do for you, Daniel? Have you decided you missed me after all this time? Want to pick things up where we left off?”
He shook his head, clearly not taking her seriously. “As attractive as you make that offer sound, I’m here on business,” he retorted dryly.
Molly stiffened, fighting the sting of hurt, even though the rejection was fully expected. “What business could you possibly have that involves me?”
His gaze swept over her, lingering just long enough to make her toes curl, dammit.
“That girl you’ve got hiding in the kitchen, for starters.”
2
Daniel hadn’t expected his conversation with Molly to go smoothly. Given their past history, he was probably lucky she hadn’t hit him with a cast-iron skillet on sight. It was no more than he deserved after the way things had ended between them. Even so, he wasn’t expecting her to flat-out lie to his face and judging from her expression, that was clearly exactly what she was contemplating.
“Well?” he prodded. “Cat got your tongue?”
He had to give her credit. She didn’t even blink. In fact, she kept her eyes locked with his and managed a look of complete confusion. She never once glanced toward the kitchen.
“What girl?” she asked with all the innocence of someone whose heart was genuinely pure.
“You have a runaway working here,” he said flatly, vaguely disappointed in her for the lie. It would have been more like the Molly of old to throw the truth in his face and dare him to make something of it.
Keeping his gaze on her face, he added, “Joe Sutton spotted her here earlier, and I saw her scurrying out through the kitchen when I came in. She’s thirteen, Molly. Shall I count the number of laws you’re violating by putting her to work in here?”
She visibly bristled, bright patches of color staining her cheeks. “If I had anyone that young working here, they wouldn’t be serving alcohol. Nor am I running a sweatshop with child labor, Daniel, and you very well know it, so get off your high horse.”
He reached in his pocket, pulled out the missing-child poster and slapped it on the table, carefully smoothing out the wrinkles. “Then you haven’t seen this girl?” he demanded, his gaze locked on Molly’s eyes, which always gave away her emotions. They were stormy now, but she didn’t even blink at the challenge. In fact, she glanced at the poster without so much as a flicker of recognition.
Daniel bit back a sigh. She was good at lying. Damn good. She hadn’t been when they were together. Something always gave her away. Was she this good now because of what he’d done to her? Something inside him twisted at the possibility that he was responsible for the hard shell she wore so easily now.
Her gaze never wavered as she said flatly, “Never seen her. What’s she done?”
“She’s a runaway, Molly,” he explained patiently. “That’s plain from the poster, or didn’t you want to take a good long look at it? Were you afraid you might give yourself away if you had to read the fine print?”
“Go to hell, Daniel,” she said, sliding from the booth. “I don’t have to listen to this from you.”
He snagged her hand, felt her stiffen and tried to ignore the slam of regret that hit him. “Then let me see her.”
“You want to go poking around in my kitchen or even in my apartment upstairs, you do that,” she said loudly enough to be heard in the next county. “I won’t try to stop you, but I won’t forgive you.” Her gaze swept over him, cold as ice. “Oh, wait, that’s right. I haven’t forgiven you for a lot of things, have I? I can just add this to the list.”
Daniel wanted nothing more in that instant than to pull her into his arms and kiss her until the ice melted and she molded herself to him the way she once had. He wanted the heat and excitement and passion back, if not the complications.
“Molly, this isn’t personal,” he said quietly.
“Funny, it feels damn personal to me. You’re questioning my integrity.”
“Only because I know what a soft touch you are when it comes to kids,” he said. “You’d hide that girl if you thought it was the right thing to do, especially if you thought it would also tick me off. I’m telling you, it’s not the right choice. She has a family. Think about them for a minute. Put yourself in their shoes. Their daughter’s missing and they’re scared. They’re worried to death about all the things that could happen to an innocent kid out on the streets alone.”
