Maggie's Guardian

“I get it.” She made an obvious effort to keep her tone civil. “I won’t go out after dark, and I’ll set the alarm. The second I see anything suspicious, I’ll dial 911.”

“Keep your cell phone in your purse or your pocket, wherever you can get to it in a hurry. We should ask Weldon for protection until we’re sure whether David interrupted a robbery.”

The baby muttered, a slight edge to her voice that even Noah already recognized.

Tessa turned toward the kitchen. “I don’t want the police tossing my house.”

He almost laughed. “The police search. Criminals toss.” He followed them, and when Tessa turned, he nodded at the baby before he went on. “Remember you have her before you turn down protection.”

Again she relented. “If I had to let them in because of Maggie, I would, but couldn’t Weldon leave someone outside?”

Truth was, neither he nor Tessa had charmed Weldon so far. “We’ll be lucky if I can browbeat him into having someone drive by.”

“Which does us no good unless the cop and the bad guy happen to show up at the same time. Let’s drop it.” As the hungry little girl arched her back and mouthed a furious complaint, Tessa soothed her with the same sounds that had calmed their own baby.

She took a bottle from the fridge while Noah watched and marveled. Every step she took was sure.

“Joanna’s parents are coming over.” Tessa put the bottle in the microwave and set the timer. “They’re staying here, so if you need to take care of business in Boston…”

“How far away are they?”

“Only about forty-five minutes, but they want to see Maggie, and she needs all the love she can get. I don’t mind if they stay.”

“I’m glad someone will be here with you.” He’d remind Weldon that no matter how annoying he found Tessa, she remained his best witness. That should insure some extra police interest, and three adults ought to be able to work dead bolts and the telephone.

As for him, he needed clean clothes, and Baxton would force him to fill out paperwork for a leave of absence. They needed to talk about a case the two of them had been working in their free time, an abusive husband who seemed to be on the verge of hurting his wife and children.

However, that old saw about murderers showing up at their victims’ funerals was sometimes true, and Noah intended to get back to Prodigal in time to attend David’s service.

Tessa took baby cereal and a small jar of fruit from a shopping bag on the counter.

“Do you have everything you need for her?” He should offer to hold the baby, but he couldn’t move the impulse from his mind to his mouth. He didn’t want to hold her, to risk being reminded of the child who’d been, along with her mother, his greatest joy.

“I don’t have anything,” Tessa said, unaware of his cowardice. “Do you think Weldon will let me go to David’s house to get her clothes and her crib?”

A crib? He hadn’t even thought about one. “Where did she sleep last night?”

“In a drawer.” The last word came out around the baby’s fingers as Maggie tried to plunge her hand into Tessa’s mouth. Laughing, Tessa ducked out of the grinning little girl’s reach. Their smiles made the floor drop from beneath Noah’s feet.

He grabbed the table’s edge, wanting, needing, craving one more impossible second with their baby. One morning spent just this way, preparing her breakfast, enjoying the destruction she’d wreaked in their kitchen with her curiosity.

“How’s your head, Noah?” Tessa planted the baby-food jar between her arm and her body and twisted off its lid. “You don’t look as if you’ve recovered yet.”

“I’m fine.” Dizzy with unexpected sorrow, he looked anywhere except at her and pretended his most vital interest was the growth of beard on his chin. “Do you mind if I take a shower before I visit Weldon?”

She stared at him over the baby’s head as if she heard something in his voice. She might not want to care for him anymore, but concern cut a frown across her forehead. He had to be more careful. He faced her until she turned back to her task.

“The guest bath is next door to your room.” She spooned some of the fruit into a bowl. “Toward the stairs. You can take a disposable razor from the cabinet beneath my sink.”

Right. He was dying to rummage through her personal belongings. Annoyed daily at the sight of his own bare bathroom counter, the last thing he wanted to see was the face cream and toothpaste and perfume he still expected to shift out of his way.

“Why don’t you take out a razor after you finish with her and leave it by the guest bathroom door?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” His pathetic need to maintain their separate lives made her laugh. “Just get a razor. Everything else you’ll need is either in the bathroom or in the linen closet. That’s the door between our rooms on the gallery.”

Her apathy taunted him. His life should have grown easier after she’d left. He no longer owed her the emotional outlay loving required. Facing the back of her head, knowing she considered him a failure at emotional outlay, he wanted badly to prove he could still make her feel anything at all.

But what if he couldn’t? He’d learned enough about his weakness from Tessa. Why risk any more self-knowledge?

He pushed away from the table and exited the kitchen, slowing only as he all but burst through her bedroom door. The clutter pushed him back a step.

Her room was a muddle of her clothes, Maggie’s makeshift bed and stacks of books. To hell with perfume. He swallowed a groan as the books took him back eighteen months in less than a second. He knew Tessa’s stacking method as well as she did. Just looking at the piles, he knew to the book which ones she’d already read.

A bone-deep ache drove him into the small bathroom where Tessa’s sweet, sexy scent pervaded everything, the curtains, the shower, the cabinet whose door he yanked open.

Sweat poured off his face as he fished out a razor and then dug a bar of soap from a cellophaned pack of six. Why the hell did a woman on her own buy soap by the six-pack?

He straightened, meaning to grab what he needed and beat it. Instead, he stopped to inventory the rest of Tessa’s things. Nothing that belonged to a man. He wasn’t terribly surprised, except at the relief that flooded him.

This was ridiculous. She’d left him. He hadn’t asked her to go. He wasn’t the kind of needy jerk capable of mooning around Tessa’s room.

He slammed the cabinet door, pretty sure he’d lost his mind. Fortunately, the past eighteen months had taught him he didn’t need certified mental health to catch a killer.

TESSA HAD BARELY SUNG, cajoled and bribed Maggie to take a nap in her brand-new crib when the telephone rang. She grabbed the receiver and then buried it in her sweater, trying to keep the ringer from waking Maggie as she grabbed the baby monitor and bolted from her room.

Please let it be Weldon. She’d dialed his office after breakfast to ask if she could pick up some of Maggie’s belongings.

When he hadn’t returned her call by the time Maggie ate her second meal and began to scrub at her eyes with weariness, Tessa had gone out to buy a new crib. By some miracle she’d managed to set it up in her room while Maggie slept on a pile of quilts on the living-room floor.

At the bottom of the stairs, Tessa pulled the phone out of her sweater and whispered a hello, but instead of Weldon, her mother’s voice breathed her name.

“Are you all right? My neighbor just called to tell me about David. Why didn’t you call?”

“I’m fine, Mom.” How did the neighbor know the number of the bed-and-breakfast they were staying at in England? Amanda and Chad Lawlor, her parents, hadn’t left the number with her.

“Mrs. Hawkins said you found his body.”

“I’m fine,” she said again. Most of her conversations with her mother went this way. She tried to say whatever might be least likely to spawn a melodramatic reaction. Her mother drove forward.

“You have bad luck, Tessa. First you marry a guy who works with dead people. Now your best friend’s husband dies and you find him.”

Why argue that Noah tried to keep people alive, and David hadn’t gotten killed on purpose? Despite the fact the entire family had known David since he and Tessa were in kindergarten, her mom still couldn’t remember she’d met Joanna through David, not the other way around. Ladies didn’t have male best friends, unless they were hoping to date them.

“I blame it on Noah,” Amanda said.

“Mom, you like Noah, remember?”

“I’d like him better if he’d taken that lieutenant’s position. It was a much more respectable job, and I’ll bet you’d still be together if he’d stopped chasing unkempt, unfit criminals and devoted himself to you.”