Maggie's Guardian

Tessa’s was the one face that brought back their baby’s death and the grief that he beat down twenty-four hours of every day.

Maybe he couldn’t have saved their little girl, but he had let Tessa down. He’d had nothing left to give her, no comfort to feed her needs.

With a groan, Noah rested his head on his fingertips. Motion in the night dragged his gaze to the left. A dark car flowed past and then edged to the curb in front of him. Almost immediately, Tessa rose from the driver’s seat.

Noah exhaled, a sound drenched in agony that startled him in the silence of his car. Ashamed of his own weakness, he rubbed the misted windshield clear and leaned forward to see Tessa better.

Wind and snow lifted her straight blond hair from the collar of her dark coat. He couldn’t see her face as she leaned into the back seat of her car. She moved as if she were wrestling with someone inside, and then she straightened, holding something in her arms. Her stance scourged him with memories that refused to fade.

His blood froze, slowing the beat of his heart. He’d seen her cradle their child exactly the same way, but he’d never realized he should imprint that image on his brain. And now she was holding someone else’s baby.

She had to be David and Joanna’s daughter.

Clutching a shopping bag in her free hand, Tessa hurried up the steps and propped the bag against her leg as she opened the door.

He resented her for daring to care for another little girl. How could she hold another baby in arms that would never hold their daughter again? But then he remembered what David’s child had lost, and his resentment shamed him.

He turned his car key in the ignition. He had to get out of here. He wasn’t the man to help Tessa now.

He stomped the accelerator, but he hadn’t put the car into gear. The engine roared, but he went nowhere.

CHAPTER TWO

AFTER SHE KICKED THE DOOR shut behind her, Tessa dropped the shopping bag at her feet and shrugged out of her coat. As she laid Maggie on a wide ottoman, the baby woke, scrunching her small face in displeasure.

Breathing in the scent of baby and snow, Tessa tugged the pink knit mittens off Maggie’s tiny clenched fists and then unzipped her snowsuit. At once, Maggie gripped Tessa’s index finger and clung unquestioningly.

Tessa’s heart raced with panic, her gut reaction to such humbling trust from David’s daughter. Sure she’d carried a sleeping infant from a foster home in the middle of the night, but she hadn’t quite realized she was starting a lifetime of caring for Maggie. In the year since she’d left Noah, Tessa had built herself a safe, solitary existence, a life raft she’d ridden out of the wreck of her marriage. David’s baby girl threatened her security.

She closed her eyes, tensing with shame. She’d been reluctant before, in the early months of her pregnancy with Keely. She’d always meant to have children, but she’d wanted them according to her time frame—when she was ready to be the best mother who ever undertook childrearing. She’d planned a perfect life for her family, a mom and dad wildly in love, a doting home, good schools, and at least one parent available to provide unfettered devotion.

She’d spent so many days alone while her own father had built his reputation as a plastic surgeon and her mother, the ultimate Junior Leaguer, had paved his social path and waited for Tessa to grow up and become interesting.

But she hadn’t grown interesting. She hadn’t even grown out of being too short and too round to make a less-than-embarrassing Junior Leaguer in training. And she hadn’t mastered the fine arts of womanhood her mother modeled so flawlessly—studied helplessness, perfect decorum in the face of disaster and the all-important ability to set a perfect table with an ideal dinner for an impromptu party of six or more.

Her father, who could fix anyone, and her mother, who’d never needed to be fixed, still didn’t understand that their absences and their disappointment had taught her to make sure it would be a glacial day in hell before she’d parent by their examples.

She’d intended to build her career first. She wanted no success as an attorney at anyone else’s expense, but eventually, she’d planned to have time to work from home, or to take a break from her career, to make sure her children knew how dearly she and Noah had wanted them.

Pregnancy had smashed her plan, and her early reluctance now seemed like a red flag she’d waved at fate. Quickly abandoning her idiotic ideas about time frames hadn’t saved her daughter. She hadn’t even managed to save Keely with love deeper than she could bear to remember.

She squeezed Maggie’s hand. This baby needed love, too, and Tessa had learned not to taunt fate. What if curses were real, not the product of her grief?

She gazed into Maggie’s tear-damped blue eyes, smiling through a tremble that hurt her mouth. She lifted the baby in her soft terry sleeper. Need sliced through her. She shifted Maggie to her shoulder so she could hide her face as she gritted her teeth. Her arms ached for Keely’s warmth.

She breathed deeply. In…out…in…out. Maggie needed her now.

When the baby shifted, ramming her fist into her mouth, Tessa recognized the gesture with a start. Despite trying with all the willpower she possessed to forget the past few years, she remembered how to care for a baby.

“Are you hungry?” Thank God, she’d stopped for bottles and formula and baby food.

But as she reached for the shopping bag, something moved outside, breaking the line of porch light that spilled across her pine floor. She straightened, staring through the small panes of the bay windows.

Nothing else moved.

Then she remembered she was holding a baby whose father had been viciously killed. What if someone had acted on a grudge against David? Tessa shot to the wall beside the door, slamming her hand over the switch to turn off the living-room lamps. Easing Maggie onto her other shoulder, she leaned across the door and yanked the cord that dropped blinds over the nearest section of the bay window.

Footsteps crunched the snow on her porch. Tessa gasped, and Maggie started to whimper. Smoothing her hand over the baby’s head, Tessa forced her breathing into a regular pattern.

Good guardians tried not to terrify children in their care. She’d given Weldon her honest best guess about what had happened to David. Nothing else made sense.

All the same, unexpected company scared her tonight.

Fear drew images of David, sprawled on his office floor. Trying not to sob, she turned toward the kitchen—and the closest phone. With Maggie here, she couldn’t take chances. She should have asked Weldon to send someone to watch the house until he caught the killer.

Tessa veered toward the keypad beside the kitchen door and tapped in the alarm code she barely remembered. She’d hardly ever used the thing. Nothing that had frightened her before went bump in the night.

Just then the doorbell chimed, and Maggie tugged her little fist out of her mouth. “Da?” she demanded. It had been her first word, and David had crowed proudly.

Tessa pressed a kiss to the baby’s silky hair. “I’m sorry. It’s not Daddy.” She stroked Maggie’s back as the little girl whispered another call for her father. Tessa pulled her even closer, trying to share her own body heat as comfort.

She reached for the wall phone and started to dial 911, but Maggie yanked the receiver from her hand. The baby’s playful grab gave her a moment to think. Was she overreacting?

The person on her porch might be another friend of David’s, coming to pay his respects, to check on Maggie. Why tell Weldon she had a prowler if she didn’t? He’d love an excuse to search her house.

She inched back along the living room wall to the door, angling her body to protect the baby. Supremely indifferent to Tessa’s little dance of fear, Maggie attacked her own fist with another hungry cry.

“Hold on a minute,” Tessa whispered. “I’ll feed you.” As soon as she made sure a maniacal killer hadn’t come to call. She parted two of the slats to peer through the ice-encrusted glass.

The stubbled chin at eye level triggered alarms all over her body.

Noah. She recognized the faint dimple beneath his bottom lip before she raised her gaze to his shadowed dark brown eyes. He tipped his head in an unspoken let me in, and Tessa sprang back. The blinds clattered into place, keeping time with her erratic heartbeat.

She went hot and then cold, and then warmed again with frustration.

“Open the door, Tessa. You need help.”

Her name sounded unfamiliar on the ragged edges of his raised voice. She should have called Larry Baxton one more time and begged him to burn her message.

She studied the living room’s shadows. She’d felt safe here because she didn’t have to avoid images of her broken family in these rooms. This house contained no memories of Noah or their own baby.

But now she had to think of Maggie. In a few hours, the baby had grown more important than Tessa’s worst fears. She had to learn to love Maggie and make new memories. And she couldn’t teach David’s little girl to be afraid of love or of facing a painful past.

Something heavy slammed into the door at her back. Noah’s fist, no doubt.

She must have lost her mind when she’d called him. She hadn’t been able to depend on him after Keely—after… He’d disappeared inside his job, finding more comfort with the murderers he was so good at catching than with her.

The door shuddered under his fist again. “Open up or I’ll shoot the damn lock.”