Danny Gates

Former henchman with the Mercado gang, Danny served his time in jail and wants a brand-new life, helping troubled teens avoid a life of crime. But when a beautiful lady cop steals his heart, Danny’s in danger of breaking his parole—and breaking his heart!

Molly French

Assigned to the LSCC bomb task force, ambitious police officer Molly French knew she could crack the case in no time. But that was before she fell head over heels for a bad boy with a smile to die for and a stint in jail! Can Molly separate business and pleasure before it’s too late?

Bobby J.

Danny befriends the sullen juvenile delinquent and convinces him to go straight. But Bobby’s mysterious employers won’t let him leave “the business” and send him to the hospital. Who is Bobby working for? What secrets could he possibly reveal?

Police Chief Benjamin Stone

A month after the Lone Star Country Club bombing, the Mission Creek Police are no closer to finding the culprits. Is someone sabotaging the investigation? Will Chief Stone ever discover the bomber’s identity?

Dear Reader,

They say that March comes in like a lion, and we’ve got six fabulous books to help you start this month off with a bang. Ruth Langan’s popular series, THE LASSITER LAW, continues with Banning’s Woman. This time it’s the Banning sister, a freshman congresswoman, whose life is in danger. And to the rescue…handsome police officer Christopher Banning, who’s vowed to get Mary Bren out of a stalker’s clutches—and into his arms.

ROMANCING THE CROWN continues with Marie Ferrarella’s The Disenchanted Duke, in which a handsome private investigator—with a strangely royal bearing—engages in a spirited battle with a beautiful bounty hunter to locate the missing crown prince. And in Linda Winstead Jones’s Capturing Cleo, a wary detective investigating a murder decides to close in on the prime suspect—the dead man’s sultry and seductive ex-wife—by pursuing her romantically. Only problem is, where does the investigation end and romance begin? Beverly Bird continues our LONE STAR COUNTRY CLUB series with In the Line of Fire, in which a policewoman investigating the country club explosion must team up with an ex-mobster who makes her pulse race in more ways than one. You won’t want to miss RaeAnne Thayne’s second book in her OUTLAW HARTES miniseries, Taming Jesse James, in which reformed bad-boy-turned-sheriff Jesse James Harte puts his life—not to mention his heart—on the line for lovely schoolteacher Sarah MacKenzie. And finally, in Keeping Caroline by Vickie Taylor, a tragedy pushes a man back toward the wife he’d left behind—and the child he never knew he had.

Enjoy all of them! And don’t forget to come back next month when the excitement continues in Silhouette Intimate Moments.

Yours,

Leslie J. Wainger

Executive Senior Editor

In the Line of Fire

BEVERLY BIRD

Books by Beverly Bird

Silhouette Intimate Moments

Emeralds in the Dark #3

The Fires of Winter #23

Ride the Wind #139

A Solitary Man #172

[*]A Man Without Love #630

[*]A Man Without a Haven #641

[*]A Man Without a Wife #652

Undercover Cowboy #711

The Marrying Kind #732

Compromising Positions #777

†Loving Mariah #790

†Marrying Jake #802

†Saving Susannah #814

It Had To Be You #970

I’ll Be Seeing You #1030

Out of Nowhere #1090

In the Line of Fire #1138

Silhouette Desire

The Best Reasons #190

Fool’s Gold #209

All the Marbles #227

To Love a Stranger #411

Silhouette Romance

Ten Ways To Win Her Man #1550

BEVERLY BIRD

has lived in several places in the United States, but she is currently back where her roots began on an island in New Jersey. Her time is devoted to her family and her writing. She is the author of numerous romance novels, both contemporary and historical. Beverly loves to hear from readers. You can write to her at P.O. Box 350, Brigantine, NJ 08203.

For Don, still titling and still inspiring…

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 1

It was raining hard in Mission Creek, South Texas.

It wasn’t the general, impotent misting that he’d come to accept as a squall during his formative years here, Danny Gates thought, as he stood on the concrete sidewalk of Main Street for the first time in six years. That sort of rain would have been a kind of “welcome home, boy.” This rain was hard and punishing. It slid down the back of his neck, a cold finger trailing memories, most of them of the freedom he’d enjoyed years ago.

He started to pull up the collar of his jacket, then he remembered, too, that he no longer owned one. He’d been dragged off to jail without warning on a blistering hot July afternoon. He’d been denied the bail that would have allowed him a window of time to get his affairs in order. As a result, almost everything he’d owned back then was gone now.

Danny took a step off the curb. A glaring yellow taxi pushed toward him through heavy traffic, and he started to wave it down. He aborted the gesture just in time to shove his hand into his jeans pocket and pull out a few crinkled bills. He had six dollars and some change left of the money that the state of Texas had given him as a parting gift. Not enough for cab fare to his mother’s home out on the poor end of Gulf Road—it wouldn’t have been enough six years ago.

Danny swore aloud. His brown eyes darkened dangerously in the direction of the driver as the car approached. His expression obviously warned the cabbie not to pick that man up after all, because the yellow car sped on.

He’d have to work on that, Danny thought, rubbing a hand over his jaw as though to erase the expression.

He started to walk, turning off Main Street, leaving Lone Star County’s probation offices behind. He didn’t even dare stick his thumb out as he would have done as a kid. Hitchhiking was considered a minor crime in most places, and Danny suspected that Mission Creek was probably one of them. Any ridiculous infraction now could get his parole revoked.

He was an ex-mobster and an ex-con. He accepted responsibility for the first if not the second. He trudged on, toward whatever fate had in store for him in this second chance at life.

On Monday morning Molly French overslept.

Part of that could be blamed on the really good pinot noir she’d uncorked last night after her shift had ended—a sort of quiet celebration here on her bed with an old movie and a bag of tortilla chips. Unfortunately, her shift had ended at midnight, and that celebration had taken her into the wee hours of the morning. The rain that had started at dawn hadn’t wakened her; it had just lulled her into a deeper, dreamless sleep. Thanks to her little party-for-one, she’d forgotten to set her alarm before she’d dozed off.

“Damn it.” She pushed the comforter back and sat up in bed, scraping chocolate-brown corkscrews of hair out of her eyes. The curls tumbled back again as soon as she let them go. Because there was no help for it, she levered her legs over the side of the bed and went in search of a headband.

She found one on the floor where she’d tossed it last night when the stupid heroine in the movie had stood there screaming at the sight of a Martian. Molly distinctly remembered shouting, “Shoot him, shoot him!” and ripping the headband off to throw it at the television in disgust when the bimbo had only stood there with her laser weapon pointed at the floor. “She did not deserve what she got,” Molly muttered, shoving the headband on again. The bimbo had gotten the hero—long, tall and sexy with a fierce glare that could have slain the Martian on its own. It had probably been her large breasts that had won him over, she thought. When a woman had large breasts, it was Molly’s experience that she really didn’t have to actually do much of anything.

She turned on her heel and ended up facing the cheval mirror in one corner of her bedroom. Her curls were fastened back now, but beyond the braided leather headband, they shot straight up from her head as though protesting the confinement. Her favorite oversize sweatshirt—emblazoned with the words TEXAS A & M—stopped high on her thighs. Her legs were good, trim and strong, but her breasts were definitely not large.

“My cross to bear,” she murmured. She picked up the chip bag and the wineglass from her bedside table and carried them into the kitchen, glancing at the clock on the wall.

It was just past eleven. She liked to get to the rec center no later than two o’clock, but she was going to be late today. She’d found out last night that she’d been appointed to the task force that had been organized to investigate the bombing at the Lone Star Country Club last month. That was what she’d been celebrating.

Appointed might be a somewhat inaccurate description of what had actually gone down, Molly admitted, heading into the bathroom. She had badgered the chief of police shamelessly. She’d written him four or five memos and sneaked them into his In box. Okay, maybe the first three had actually resembled memos. Maybe the last couple had been outright pleas. Either way, Chief Stone had finally relented.

She’d had to promise him that she would work the task force on her own time, that it wouldn’t interfere with her regular patrol duties. It was the only way she’d been able to overcome his reluctance to appoint her. But Molly had never had a problem with working hard, and this time she had a plan. She’d been with the Mission Creek Police Department for nearly two years now and it was time to start moving up the ranks. She had the experience. She’d had almost ten years in with the Laredo Police Department before she’d made the jump to Mission Creek. She’d known she would lose her seniority and would have to start back at the bottom of the totem pole here, but two years of wallowing in the trenches was enough.

She wanted her detective’s shield, and she wanted it now. So she figured she’d just crack the case that the rest of the task force had been chasing their tails on for the past month. Then she’d accept the accolades with a small, polite smile. Then Chief Stone would realize what an incredible asset she was to his department, and he would rush at her with hands outstretched, that sweet little shield nestled in his palms.

“Nowhere to go now but up, baby.” Molly took her headband off again and yanked her sweatshirt over her head. She turned on the shower. She considered that she really ought to do something about this habit of talking to herself, but it just wasn’t high on her list of priorities. She stepped over the lip of the tub…and yelped.

Molly lunged for the steaming shower nozzle and turned it aside so she could readjust the water temperature. The task force was the opportunity she’d waited for, but what good would it do her if she scalded the skin off her bones before she even started?

Fifteen minutes later she was aiming the blow dryer at her curls and ruthlessly attacking them with an industrial-size hairbrush. The result was a rich, full sweep of gloriously straight hair that just skimmed her collar bone. This, she knew, would last until she left the rec center. She’d get four hours out of the do, tops…if she didn’t sweat. The bright side was that a scrunchie and her uniform cap would take the edge off the worst of the corkscrews from four o’clock until midnight, her regular patrol shift.

She hesitated at her closet. What did an off-duty cop wear to pop up in a task-force war room and share her brilliance? Jeans, she decided. Nice jeans. And a classic, V-neck white sweater. She’d look casual but ready for anything.

With that decision made, she was out the door in ten minutes. She lived in a ground-floor apartment on the north edge of town. She kept three separate locks on her door. Not that she owned a great deal worth stealing—she’d sold most of what she’d owned when she’d made the move from Laredo. But she’d been harassing Mission Creek’s more unsavory element for the better part of two years now in the line of duty. She’d slapped a few handcuffs on people who would not forget it in a hurry, and it wouldn’t take much effort to discover where she lived alone.

Molly turned her key in the last lock and stepped away from her door. Her booted feet got tangled up in the newspaper there and she nearly twisted an ankle. “Whatever the art is to walking in heels, I’ve yet to discover it.” She bent to swipe up the paper and held it over her head in an effort to divert some of the rain coming down.

“Good afternoon, Molly.”

“What?” Her gaze shot to the street where the custodian for the apartment complex was busily clearing the gutter. “Hi, Warren. It’s not afternoon yet. It’s only eleven…” She pushed up the sleeve of the navy-blue blazer she’d tossed on. Her watch read 12:05.

“Well, isn’t that just fine?” What would the task force think when she strolled in at a quarter past twelve? Not a thing, she decided, not once she wowed them all with her brilliance.

Still carrying the newspaper, she jogged along the walkway to the parking lot tucked off to one side of the complex. She was behind the wheel of her ten-year-old Camaro when she succumbed to an urge to pull the paper out of its protective plastic. She opened the reasonably dry pages against her steering wheel, then she saw the date at the top.

Year after year, memory after memory, it always happened to her the same way.

Her heart stopped for half a beat, then it raced. Something airy and light filled her limbs, then her head. And hot tears came unbidden to her eyes, though she refused to let them fall. It was February fifteenth. “Well, happy birthday.” Molly swallowed hard.

It was the day she had been born thirty years ago, the same day Mickey had died seventeen years later. Molly’s hands fumbled as she crushed the newspaper into a large, wadded ball. She tossed it into the passenger seat and shot the key into the ignition, revving the Camaro’s engine. She drove out of the lot, turning south onto Mission Creek Road.

This was not a day to dwell on the past, not this year. This February 15th she was going to find out what her future might hold.

It held three fellow officers who did not seem exceptionally overjoyed by her presence, Molly discovered ten minutes later.

By the time she stepped into the task-force war room, the rain had her hair zinging all over the place again. She blew a couple of damp locks out of her eyes and looked around. Chief Stone had converted the old lunch room for the task force’s efforts. The three Formica-topped tables had been jammed back against the far wall in a line. Some chairs were situated in front of them; others were littered about the empty room as though a band of rowdy children had suddenly abandoned a game of musical chairs.

The table farthest to the left supported a computer that was whining with a high-pitched hum that told Molly it might be about to exit this world. Beside it were photos from the bombing scene. Joe Gannon and Paulie McCauley stood there, flipping through them. The table in the middle held the crime book and a lot of pages and reports yet to be filed. She thought she could make herself useful there. It would be an excellent way to bring herself up to speed on what the task force had achieved this past month without her.

But first she went to the table on the right. It held the coffee machine, an empty box of donuts and a solitary slice of pizza abandoned in its super-size box. Molly lifted the lid to inspect the pizza. The cheese had hardened into yellowish-white nodules and the edges were curling.

Detective Frank Hasselman was standing there talking into a cell phone. His pale eyes lifted to her face at Molly’s expression. “Not to your liking, Officer?”

Molly gave a weak grin. “Not particularly.”

“Then find another restaurant.”

Her spine stiffened. Deliberately she lifted the slice from the box. “This’ll do.”

His brows climbed his forehead. “You’re not seriously going to eat that.”

“Watch me.” She bit in. Once, when she had been ten, Mickey had talked her into swallowing an earthworm. She reasoned that nothing could be worse than that.

She was wrong. Molly fought valiantly to swallow. At least the pizza didn’t curl in on itself on her tongue the way the worm had. “Yummy.”

“You’re crazy.” Hasselman put the telephone back to his mouth and turned away from her to continue talking.

“I’m tougher than I look,” she muttered. And she knew that she was going to have to be to get ahead here. After two years she was still the new kid on the block—which, in all honesty, perplexed her somewhat. It hadn’t taken her this long to break in back in Laredo when she’d been fresh out of the academy.

She poured herself a cup of coffee to wash down the truly bad pizza and went to the table in the middle. She pulled out the chair there and dragged a pile of filing toward her as she sat.

“What are you doing?” Hasselman said, disconnecting his call.

“The grunt work. Somebody has to.”

“She knows her place, got to give her that,” said McCauley.

“Ease off her,” Joe Gannon warned from the other table. At forty-three, he was pretty much the elder statesman of the task force. She’d looked into all fourteen officers and detectives who comprised the team. Gannon was two years from retirement.

Molly fought the urge to sigh in relief. He might be an ally…sort of.

Gannon placed a photo into a pile and came to the middle table to join her as McCauley and Hasselman left the room. “Do you know what you’re doing?” he asked, frowning.

“Oh ye of little faith.” She glanced up at him as she began sorting pages. “I worked a task force in Laredo. Double homicide.”

“Don’t tell that to the others.”

Molly frowned. “They’ve got a thing about me coming in from Laredo? Is that what it is?”

“It’s part of it.”

“What’s the other part?” She slid the last of the pizza surreptitiously into the trash can beneath the table and thought she saw him grin fleetingly.

“Beats me.”

“That’s not helpful.”

“Best I can do.” Gannon shrugged. “Plus they don’t trust anybody who wanted to be on this detail so bad she’d do it without pay.”

“Word spreads fast.”

“Start filing. Earn Brownie points. That’s my best advice.” He moved away from the table again.

Forty minutes later, Molly knew scarcely more than she had when she’d started. It was appalling how little information this team had gathered in the month since the bombing, and how disorganized it was. Fourteen cops, four weeks and the crime book was only about two inches thick. She rubbed her forehead, feeling a headache coming on.

The bomb had gone off behind the Men’s Grill, in its kitchen, at the Lone Star Country Club. The task force had gathered statements from everyone dining there at the time with the exception of Daniel and Meg Anderson who’d had the misfortune of being seated closest to the point of detonation. They were dead. Their little boy, Jake, was not. He’d been on his way to the bathroom that afternoon when he’d made a wrong turn near the kitchen. He’d seen a couple of men moving large green canvas bags outside into a car. Molly noticed from some handwritten notes—not even typed—that there were those on the task force who thought the bags had contained the explosive device.

No matter how she tried, she couldn’t envision a bomb being transported in numerous green canvas bags. And besides, according to little Jake, the bags had been heading out of the country club, not in. It took no thought at all to rule out the theory, so why were the notes included without a disclaimer and why had it been awarded five useless interviews with the kitchen personnel?

Molly wanted to talk to Jake Anderson. He was currently living with Adam Collins, one of the firefighters on the scene that day. He and his fiancée, Tracy Walker, a burn specialist at the hospital where Jake had been treated, had already set the wheels into motion to adopt the little boy. What shape were these bags that he’d seen? That was important, but apparently no one had bothered to ask him. Had they been smooth, compact…or bumpy and bulging with knobby angles? Jake had said that something about them made him think of Santa Claus.

Molly made a note to herself to contact Adam Collins and see how the boy was doing. It might be too stressful for him to talk to her just yet. Whoever was behind the bombing had obviously thought Jake knew too much because he’d been kidnapped along with Tracy Walker no more than a week ago. They were both safely home now, but on top of losing his parents…Molly shook her head and decided she’d wait a few weeks on Jake.

But the boy brought to mind the matter of Ed Bancroft. Molly sat back in her chair and dug the heels of her hands into her eyes. He and another guy, Kyle Malloy, were the ones who had kidnapped Tracy and Jake, but neither of those men were going to be talking about it. Malloy had been killed when he was apprehended, while Bancroft had been slapped into a holding cell here at the police station. As soon as she had heard about it, Molly had rushed over to see if Bancroft would talk to her, even thought she wasn’t part of the task force. But she’d found him swinging in his cell from an overhead fixture, courtesy of his belt.

Bancroft and Malloy were—had been—cops.

Then there was a nagging little something that had been bothering her ever since she’d gone to the scene that day of the bombing. Nine-tenths of the Mission Creek Police Department had responded to that call, most—like herself—whether they had been on duty during that shift or not. Granted, Mission Creek was a smaller, more intimate community than Laredo and they didn’t see this kind of trouble very often. But still…that was a lot of cops.

Molly didn’t like what she was thinking. She felt nauseous, but maybe that was just the pizza. She pawed through the papers and reports on the table that she had yet to file and found notes pertinent to Bancroft. The general consensus was that he and Malloy had been sucked in by Carmine Mercado and his boys into moonlighting for the Texas mob. It felt right to Molly. Green canvas bags, she thought again. Weapons, drugs, something being moved through the country club’s kitchen. And whose domain were those things in South Texas? The mob’s, of course. If Malloy and Bancroft had kidnapped Jake Anderson in order to keep him from talking about what he’d seen, they’d done it on orders from whoever was responsible for the blast. That indicated that the organized crime network had owned them.

It always upset her when a cop turned. She thought about all the officers at the scene again. Were Bancroft and Malloy the only ones? Or had some of the others had a staked interest in that explosion?

There were other theories. Heaven knew the Wainwrights and Carsons had been going at each other’s throats for the better part of a century now, but Molly couldn’t see two of Mission Creek’s elite families blowing up the spectacular and lavish club they had jointly established generations ago. There were rumors around town about the involvement of a South American terrorist group, but as far as Molly was concerned, that just smacked of pulp fiction. What would terrorists want with Mission Creek, Texas? Mission Creek already had its own bad boys in the form of Carmine Mercado and his mobsters.

Molly finally pushed her chair back and stood. She’d only gotten halfway through organizing the book, but a glance at her watch told her that it was time to move on to the rec center. She turned away from the table to find Paulie McCauley standing in the door watching her, his arms crossed over his fairly significant chest.

“Solve the case yet?” he sneered.

“No.” Molly shook her head and walked toward him, squeezing past him when he wouldn’t move aside to give her space. “But you can bet your bottom dollar that I’m going to.”

“Danny, Danny, Danny.”

He looked up from his seat on the chintz-covered sofa in his mother’s living room, the one that had smelled faintly of over-cooked cabbage twenty-five years ago and still did. If he inhaled hard, he could detect it beneath the strident lemon tang of the cleaning solution his mother tended to use with a heavy hand. It made his heart move in a way it hadn’t done for a very long time. This was home.

Some things never changed, Danny thought. Including the money in the shoe box on his lap.

“There’s nearly thirteen thousand dollars in here,” he said.

“You told me to keep it for you. Here. Have another cookie.”

“Mom…” He felt twelve again, but Danny took the cookie.

She went to the threadbare chair across the room from him and sat. Her hair was still as iron-gray and as ruthlessly scraped back from her face as it had been six years ago. Her face was just as seamed. He recognized her blue polyester slacks and the dimpled, dotted Swiss blouse she wore from the years before he had gone away. As near as he could tell, the stubborn woman hadn’t bought herself a damned thing in six years.

He loved her so sweetly and savagely it stole his breath for a moment, so he did the only thing he could do. Danny grinned at her as he shook his head in defeat.

“I told you to use what you needed and to keep the rest of the money for me,” he clarified.

“Which I did.” Mona Gates took a cookie for herself and watched the change come over her boy’s face. Thirty-two years old last month, she thought. She’d visited him in jail with a birthday cake, but they’d hacked it all to pieces before they’d let her give it to him. If she had been going to slide a file in there, she would have done it six years ago when he had first gone away, not weeks before his chance for parole. Fools.

On that day, on his thirty-second birthday, her Danny’s beautiful brown eyes—as soulful and hopeful as a puppy’s, she’d often thought—had stayed fixed on her face, never wavering. She knew he had gone through the motions of celebrating for her sake, not his own. Mona had watched him right back, knowing his gaze missed nothing in that visiting room, not a single movement of the guard standing near the door or a gesture made by the couple sitting at the table beside them. To Mona’s knowledge, Danny hadn’t smiled in six years.

His mouth had a way of crooking up at one corner—almost like he was abashed, but then there was that devil’s own gleam in his eyes. He’d had a way of winking that made anyone who saw the gesture feel as though they’d just been let in on some wonderful, exciting secret. Danny didn’t wink anymore, either.

After a moment his smile faded. “You used less than four hundred dollars, Mom. I gave you thirteen thousand three, and you’re giving back most of it.”

“That was what I needed. I get my Social Security now.”

And he could just imagine how much that added up to each month.

“I have everything I want,” she insisted.

“Liar.”

For a second her eyes twinkled, the way they had long before his father had left them with nothing, before she’d worked too many jobs trying to see them through and before Danny had accepted Ricky Mercado’s offer of a job to pull them out of a particularly bad financial hole. That had started him down a long road that had ended with him knowing every one of Carmine Mercado’s secrets…and needing so desperately to get away from them that he had spent six years in jail to do it.

“You can get a cab back now, can’t you?” Mona asked.

Danny nodded. “I’d say so.” His feet still hurt from the walk.

“Buy yourself a car,” she advised.

“I’m planning on it.” But it wouldn’t be the black Lexus he’d owned six years ago. All the same, it was time to move on, Danny thought. He stood and scraped two thousand dollars off the top of the money in the box. She probably wouldn’t spend that, either, but he was damned if he was walking out of here with it.

Although he’d been picked up by the police without warning, he’d been able to tell his mother where to find this stash. He’d kept it in a safe deposit box at the bank because anything could happen in the profession he’d chosen, and often did. His mother had been authorized for access to that box. She’d picked up the money for him and had held it all this time.

He laid the two thousand dollars on her scarred coffee table. “Buy yourself a new sofa.”

“I don’t want a new sofa.”

“Then that crocheting machine you used to want so much.”

She thought about it. “That’s only about a hundred.”

“Mom…”

She laughed and stood suddenly to hug him. “Danny, Danny, Danny. It’s so good to have you home. I love you.”

“I love you, too, Mom.”

He finally extracted himself from her arms and folded the remaining eleven thousand back into the shoe box. He looked around for her telephone. She read the direction of his gaze and pulled a cordless from the cushions of the chair she had been sitting in.

“One of those newfangled ones. I bought it with forty dollars of your money when the arthritis started hurting me too bad to get to the phone fast.”

Danny laughed. That was something, at least. “Good for you.”

He used it to call for the cab he hadn’t been able to afford two hours ago. It arrived within fifteen minutes. He was half hoping it would be the same driver who had snubbed him in the rain, but it was a young Hispanic guy with what might well have been the whitest smile Danny had ever seen. He flashed it a lot, too, as though he had only just discovered what a jolly place the world was. Danny didn’t particularly agree with that assessment so he stared at the guy in the rearview mirror until he stopped grinning and looked away.

Eleven thousand dollars left.

The cab let him out at a used-car lot on Scissom Street. He negotiated a fourteen-year-old Dodge down to two thousand dollars and didn’t like the look the salesman gave him when he paid in cash. He’d paid cash for a lot in his life, but back then he hadn’t given a damn what anybody thought. Danny wanted to warn the salesman that if the car didn’t run for at least eight blocks, he was going to come back and bury him in it. But that kind of remark would probably get him in trouble so he kept his mouth shut.

He finally took possession of the car and drove…home.

The rec center was a beleaguered tan brick building on the eastern edge of Mission Creek. He pulled up at the curb and stared at it. Rain funneled down from the corners of a flat roof that covered most of the building. The water formed a solid, wet sheet cascading from the green metal awning hanging over the front door. The place took up most of the block, and the door was dead center with two barred windows on either side of it. Stuck to the top of the left side of the building was a square addition, sided in well-aged cedar. That had a window on each of its four walls.

His apartment. And the kids loitering beneath the green awning, getting wet but not seeming to care, were his new job.

Danny had agreed with his parole officer to teach basketball to these underprivileged kids, most of whom had already had a few skirmishes of their own with the law. For this he would receive the impressive compensation of eight bucks an hour. He could also have the apartment in exchange for acting as a handyman/caretaker/night watchman. Danny got out of the Dodge and reminded himself that this was what he had decided he wanted during his long, lonely nights in that cell.

The kids eyed him. He eyed them right back.

There were three boys and a girl. The boys were all wearing identical baggy jeans that clung to their narrow hips in a way that defied gravity. Two of them wore T-shirts and the third wore a green wool sweater that had seen enough launderings that the knit had gone loose and given way to nubs.

The girl scared him a little. Her hair stuck up from her head in spikes. Her roots were jet black and the ends purple. She was a beauty, with smooth dusky skin and intense dark eyes. It couldn’t be more than fifty-five degrees today, and the sky was pouring cold rain to boot, but she stood with one hip cocked in a stretchy black sports bra and a very small green leather skirt. A silver ring had been inserted into her belly button. Danny rubbed his own midriff against a reflexive sympathy pain.

One of the boys came forward, his chin jutting, ready to protect his territory. Danny pushed his hands into his jeans pockets, a deliberately nonthreatening gesture. He hadn’t been off the streets so long that he didn’t remember how it was.

“Who’re you?” the kid asked.

“The answer to your prayers. And you would be?”

He didn’t answer but one of the other boys stepped forward. “How come you want to know?”

“So I can call you something besides ‘Hey, you.”’

Glances were exchanged. The girl sidled up to join the other two. “Well, I’m Cia.”

“Hi, Cia. Are you going to play basketball in those boots?”

She looked down at her feet. They were encased in more leather with chunky, killer heels. “Who said anything about basketball?”

He had his work cut out for him, Danny thought.

He kept his eye on the one boy who hadn’t yet come forward. He was bone thin with dark hair that had been cut ruthlessly short. One to watch, Danny thought. There was something about him, something that said he was more desperate than the others. There was a certain hollowness to his eyes.

The other kids scattered as Danny passed by them beneath the awning, but the loner held his ground. Only his eyes moved as Danny walked past him. Danny pulled open the rickety screen door to the center, then he paused to read the graffiti on the bricks to one side of it. It was significantly more creative than it had been in his own youth.

“Is that even physically possible?” He nodded in the direction of the words scrawled in red paint.

The first boy snorted. “Not for you, maybe. I can pull it off.”

Cia laughed. “In your dreams, Lester.”

So he had Cia and Lester, Danny thought. So far so good. “Meet me inside on the court in fifteen minutes.”

“What for?” Lester demanded.

“I’m going to teach you guys basketball.” If not today, then tomorrow, Danny thought, but sooner or later they’d come into his gym.

He stepped through the door into a vestibule floored with cracked blue linoleum. The walls had once been white, but they were filthy now with graffiti of their own. There was a single door to his left and double, swinging doors straight ahead. The door to the side wore a small metal sign that read office. Danny went forward. He pushed through the double doors and stepped into the gym.

A glance around told him that, surprisingly, it wasn’t in total disrepair. He could work with it, and what he couldn’t work with, he could fix. He’d never set foot in this place when he was a kid—he’d had the school gym at his disposal until Ricky had taken him under his wing and had shown him more lucrative ways to spend his time.

Thoughts of Ricky had his heart seizing a little. Best to take care of that little problem straight off the bat, he thought. Otherwise he wouldn’t live long enough to coach anybody.

Beyond a door at the back of the gym were stairs. The light bulb overhead was burned out so Danny made his way up cautiously, finally stepping into a single room, half of it given over to a sofa bed of deep, depressing green. The other half of the room was taken up by a kitchen straight out of the sixties. Danny didn’t have to open the bathroom door to know that the facilities in there would be prehistoric. He spotted an old rotary-type telephone on a coffee table in front of the sofa and he went straight for it.

He dialed in the number from memory, glancing at his watch. It was two o’clock. Ricky would be home. He was the type who did his prowling at night.

The line picked up midway through the second ring. “H’lo.”

“Some problems never go away,” Danny said calmly. “They just lie dormant for a while.”

He was gratified by a pause before Ricky Mercado spoke. “So you’re out. I heard they were going to spring you sometime this week.”

He’d loved the guy like a brother. But Danny didn’t feel like playing games. “You heard about it the instant I stepped through that jailhouse door this morning and you were waiting for this call.” He knew the way it worked. He knew too much. Therein lay the problem.

He was still as much of a threat to Carmine as he had been six years ago, Danny thought, when the mob had framed him and had him put away because he’d left their ranks. The fact that he had remained silent for six years, not singing like a bird to gain his own release, would hold minimum sway with the old man even now. Danny knew he was alive only because Ricky had probably interceded for him back then, convincing his uncle to go for the prison term instead of eliminating the problem of Danny Gates entirely.

Ricky finally laughed. The sound was rich and familiar. “Okay, we kept tabs on you. So I guess you’re not calling me for a lift somewhere.”

“No. I’m already where I need to be.”

He heard Ricky accepting this in the ensuing silence. “You’re definitely still out then.”

“I’m out.”

“What do you want to do about it?”

“We need to meet and work out a stalemate.”

This time Ricky didn’t hesitate. “How about tomorrow?”

“No. Friday. I’m going to need a little time.” This, Danny thought, would be the true test of how much of their friendship remained. They both knew what he was going to do with that time. “Can you hold Carmine and the others off until then?”

“I guess I have to.”

Danny let himself breath again. Cautiously.

“I’ll meet you at the country club at one o’clock,” Ricky said.

Danny thought about that. As long as Ricky had kept his nose reasonably clean these past six years, meeting with him wouldn’t be a violation of his parole. It wasn’t against the law for an ex-con to meet with a suspected mobster—yet. “You haven’t been charged with anything while I was gone?”

“Bro, I’m way too clever.”

Same old Ricky, Danny thought. “I thought I was, too.”

Ricky ignored that. “Friday. One o’clock. In the Yellow Rose Café.”

Danny’s eyes narrowed hard and fast, like blinds slapping down to cover a window. It worried him that Ricky hadn’t chosen the Men’s Grill for old time’s sake. “Why the change?” he asked.

“Because the grill isn’t there anymore. Somebody blew it clear to China last month.”

“No kidding?”

“Sky-high, buddy. It’s a pile of rubble.” Ricky laughed again.

Danny didn’t ask if the Mercados had been behind the explosion. It was just one more thing he didn’t need to know. “All right. The Café, then. In the meantime you’ve got my back, right?”

“You’re covered.”

For now, Danny thought. After Friday, who knew?

He disconnected and shifted his shoulders back and forth, trying to rock some of the tension out of them. Then he cocked his head to the side. From downstairs came the thump-thump-thumping sound of a basketball hitting the gym floor. He grinned to himself. The kids had already come inside.

He returned to the stairs and trotted down, then he went still, holding the door to the gym open with one hand. Whatever was going on out there more closely resembled a game of keep-away than basketball. And it didn’t resemble keep-away much at all. He suspected this all had something to do with the woman who had pulled the kids inside onto the court while he’d been upstairs.

As he watched, she more or less tackled Cia on the hard flooring and began tickling her. The two of them came up gasping for breath. Somehow Cia managed to keep her modesty in that tiny skirt. Then the woman sprang to her feet again. Laughing, she scraped her hands through her hair, pulling it back from her face. It was a wild mass of curls that had hidden her features, but when it was swept clear, Danny saw delicate cheekbones and a spattering of freckles across her nose.

She was small, compact and she had the voice of a drill sergeant. She spun to one of the boys who’d stuck his tongue out at her behind her back—a new one who hadn’t been outside. “Keep it in your mouth, Fisk, until you figure out how to use it.”

“Hey, babe, I know how. Want me to show you?”

“Grow up first. Maybe we’ll talk in ten years.” She caught the ball that Lester shot to her. And fast, without looking, she threw it in the direction of Fisk. The boy was startled, but caught it. “Good job,” she said. “See? Your hands actually work for something besides picking pockets.”

Then she threw herself into the game, or whatever it was.

Her face changed, Danny thought. Her eyes went hot. Passion, he thought. It was there on her face, a hunger both for the release of the exercise and the need to win, assuming her game even had rules. Her hair bounced, all long, dark ringlets that made a man’s hand itch for palms full of it.

A new girl had joined the kids from outside, as well, he realized. She caught the sleeve of the woman’s white sweater. In an instant the woman stopped playing and turned, looking concerned. Then she slung an arm over the girl’s shoulder and together they moved off the court in his direction, their heads close as they whispered.

“Ah, man,” Lester said. “Damn Anita’s got more problems than an ex-con.”

Somehow Danny doubted that.

The woman made a semirude gesture in the boy’s direction and it shut him right up. Passion and kindness, he thought, and no-nonsense guts. He felt one corner of his mouth try to pull into a smile. Danny rubbed his palm over it to get rid of the reflex.

When she looked up and saw him, she stopped midstride. “Who are you?”

Danny lowered his hand and stepped out of the stairwell. “Danny Gates.” Her eyes were emerald green, he noticed, and she definitely had freckles.

“Is that your rattletrap out there?” she demanded.

“My what?” She’d lost him.

“Your car. There’s a car out there in my parking space.”

“There’s no assigned parking out there.”

“I always leave my car at the door. There’s an old yellow Dodge there now, in my spot.”

“It’s lemon.”

It was her turn to frown in confusion. “I beg your pardon?”

“Lemon. That’s what the salesman called it.”

“He might have been referring to its condition, you know, not its color.”

That snagged his pride. He walked past her. “Yeah, if the car in question is lemon, then that would be mine.”

“A rose by any other name…” She shrugged and pivoted to follow him with her gaze. “Are you leaving now? Because if you are, I’ll move my car back to where it belongs since the rain’s tapered off a little. I don’t want to have to run a block in a downpour to get to it when I’m done here.”

He stopped and looked back at her. It had been a while since he’d had occasion to handle a woman, Danny thought, but he was pretty sure he could remember how the routine went. Something told him that this one was used to having her own way, to giving orders. He’d have to fix that if she intended to spend any time around here playing with his kids.

“Finders keepers,” he drawled. “I was there first. Live with it.”

“I’m staying here for a while, and you’re not!”

“Who says?”

“I…well, I volunteer here. I’m Molly French.”

“Yeah? I work here. I live here. Guess you’ll have to find someplace else for your vehicle from here on in, won’t you? That spot is mine now.”

He had the pleasure of seeing her jaw drop as he picked up the ball that had fallen at center court. “Okay, here’s how we’re going to do this,” he said to the kids. “Let me show you how you’re supposed to play basketball, not that sissy thing you were doing a minute ago.”

He heard the woman make a choked sound of outrage behind him. Danny grinned to himself, and this time he didn’t wipe the reflex away.

His new life was starting to look interesting.

Chapter 2

Who did he think he was?

Molly stared after the guy as he started snapping out directives to the kids. Her kids. For the most part, they were ogling him, just as she was.

“Sure, this’ll work,” she murmured aloud.

Already Lester had that evil gleam in his eye. She gave five-to-one odds that he’d be tripping Mr. Basketball with one of his big booted feet within the next two or three minutes. He was generally the one who protected the kids’ turf from hostile adults. Jerome just shrugged and went to sit down at the edge of the court—he was the most easy-going of the lot and didn’t get worked up about much. As for Bobby…well, Bobby J. rarely showed much reaction to anything, Molly thought. Beneath his bristle-shaved hair, his brown eyes were as watchful as his expression was neutral. He stood at the edge of the court, so painfully thin it hurt her. Bobby rarely spoke to anyone. When he showed up at the center, he was just…there. It was anybody’s guess why he bothered to come by at all.

The coach-nobody-wanted was in Fisk’s face now, talking to him urgently. Molly took in his clothes—really bad-fitting jeans and a rain-dampened blue chambray shirt that was at least one, if not two, sizes too small. Who was he? she wondered again. And where had he come from?

In another thirty seconds, Molly had had enough.

She stalked over to him, reaching for the basketball. “Give me that.”

He went up on his toes, his arm extended, the ball balanced on his hand. He was tall. It was well out of her reach. With a quick little thrust of his wrist, he sent the ball sailing, then it dropped neatly through the hoop. He was all male grace and flexing muscle. It was quite a sight, Molly admitted, swallowing carefully. Something tickled her pulse.

“Nothing but net.” He turned and grinned at her. “You were saying?”

“I—” Molly began, then her mind went blank.

He kept watching her with the kind of smile that spelled trouble…and the trouble was an invitation. Come play with me and get burned. Some women were crazy for his type, and Molly discovered in that moment that she could definitely be one of them.

Unfortunately, they didn’t go crazy for her.

Molly planted her hands on her hips. A lock of her hair fell into her eyes and she blew it back. “Okay. That was pretty.”

“Thank you.”

“And it was a total waste of effort.”

“Says who?”

“Says me. We’re dealing with a bunch of aimless teenagers here, not the Houston Rockets.”

He feigned a look of utter awe. “You know about the Rockets?”

“Knock it off,” she growled.

“Come on, come on, you’re on a roll here. I’ll help you. They’re a basketball team. They actually play by certain rules. They get paid for it. Five-on-five competition in four quarters. Man-to-man defense, twenty-four-second clock to shoot. Does all that sound familiar?”

“Basketball isn’t the issue here.” She ground the words out and realized her jaw was tight.

“Tell that to Ron Glover.”

Ron Glover was the director of the rec center. Molly frowned. What had he said earlier? I work here. “Ron hired you to play basketball? We don’t have that kind of budget!”

“You’re telling me. The pay stinks.” He sauntered away from her to go after the basketball. None of the kids had made an effort to touch it. They were all gathered under the opposite net now, watching them.

This, she thought, was incredible. “He didn’t tell me he was hiring anyone.”

“Ron reports to you?”

“No, of course not. But he…we just…we pool our efforts around here. And he never mentioned this.”

He shot another basket unperturbed. “Don’t take it so hard. It all just came together on Friday.”

Molly went after him as he moved to catch the ball again. “Why? Why would he do something like this?”

“We had a meeting of the minds.” He started dribbling the ball in circles around her.

“What kind of meeting?”

“The kind that says that if we put together a team that’s even halfway good, if we teach these kids the basics, some of them might land on their high school team. One of them might get noticed by a college scout.” He stopped and pinned her with intense dark eyes. “Granted, that would require some raw and unconventional talent, but one of them could get out of here to someplace better, someplace where they might have a chance.”

Molly opened her mouth one more time and shut it again. She couldn’t argue with that.

She wanted the same thing for her kids. It was what she had been trying to do here herself these past two years, why she volunteered her time to the center—though her methods were different. She wanted each and every one of them to get out of the poverty, the drugs, the petty crime that could lead to treacherously bigger things.

Still, she felt she had a certain stake in being contrary, if only because he looked so good with that ball in his hands…and he knew it. “What do the rest of the kids get in this grand scheme of yours?”

“They get something to do for a few hours a day instead of hanging, on the streets.”

This time when he sent the ball swishing through the net, Molly lunged for it and caught it as it bounced to the floor. She gathered it against her chest. “They’re off the streets—sometimes—even without organized basketball. I keep them off the streets. I help them.”

“And how do you do that, pretty Molly French?”

Pretty? Her heart chugged even as she refused to react. “I get them jobs and I get state assistance for their families. I listen when they talk.”

“Admirable.” He started circling her again, clearly looking for a way to knock the ball from her arms.

She felt like prey. Molly pivoted with him, trying to keep him in front of her. “Basketball’s just…you know, something we horse around with here while we…while we…talk.”

“Not anymore.” His hand snaked out so quickly she barely saw him move. He knocked the ball straight down out of her grasp. The back of his arm nudged her breast. Molly lost her breath and took a quick step back. The basketball bounced on the floor between them, and he scooped it up with one broad hand, then he spun it on his index finger.

“Show-off,” she muttered.

“Yeah.” He grinned. “Maybe we ought to leave you in charge of jobs and state assistance. When it comes to the game, you’re…ah, a bit lacking, Molly. No offense intended.”

She flushed. “I rarely get worked up about something so trivial.”

“So what does work you up?” He grinned a devil’s grin, sizing her up with his eyes.

He was flirting with her. Molly definitely felt something working inside her now. It was a low, steady thrumming. She decided to change the subject. “So what are your qualifications for this, hot shot?”

“All-state my sophomore year.”

That would have been high school, she thought. “And the college scouts just gobbled you right up, didn’t they? That explains why you’re working for Ron now.”

A hardening came to his eyes. It happened as fast as his nifty hands could move. “I quit playing when I was a junior.”

“And now you’re here to impart all you learned in two short years.” That was always her problem, Molly thought. She never knew when to keep her mouth shut. “Aren’t we blessed.”

To her surprise he laughed. It was a deep sound, a little rough around the edges. It tickled her skin. He pocketed the basketball against his side and shook his head. “Thanks. I haven’t done that in a while.”

What? Laugh? That puzzled her, then her thoughts scattered again as he took a step toward her until his face was inches from hers.

“Guess what, Molly French? I think I like you.”

Her heart somersaulted. “My jury’s still out on you.”

He laughed again and rubbed his throat as though the reflex hurt him.

“I’m leaving now,” Molly decided.

“It’s pouring.” He gestured with the ball in the general direction of the barred window.

Molly saw rain battering the dirty glass, making tunnels in the brown-gray dust there.

“I’ve decided I don’t care.”

She hurried to the door and shot into the vestibule where she ran headfirst into Fran Celtenham, another volunteer whose contribution to the center was about as indefinable as Molly’s. Fran was in her sixties. She was a widow, a retired civil servant, who worked hard to organize the kids into doing occasional community-service projects. She also ran a bingo program on Monday nights—not just for the kids but for any Mission Creek family who cared to join in. Attendance was sporadic, but she never stopped trying.

“Ron hired a new guy,” Molly blurted without even greeting the woman.

“Yes, I know. On Friday.” Fran smiled at her benignly as she started to step past.

Molly caught her arm. “No, I mean, he hired him.” She held up her hand and rubbed her fingers together to show that money was changing hands. Then, finally, Fran’s words registered. “What do you mean you knew?”

“Ron told me.”

“He didn’t tell me.”

“You weren’t here on Friday.”

That was true. Molly rarely missed a day, but she’d had to testify in court on one of her arrests. “Everyone knew but me.”

Fran patted her on the shoulder before she continued into the gym. “Don’t take it so hard, sweetie.”

Exactly what Danny Gates had said, Molly thought. She stepped outside into the drenching downpour, disgruntled. In seconds her hair was flattened to her skull. She put her head down and trudged to her car.

She was halfway home before she realized that she’d hardly thought of Mickey or her birthday at all today.

The man standing in front of the long ebony desk practically vibrated with anger. “Are you out of your mind? You approve of this?”

“I think it’s a brilliant move.”

“Letting her on the task force?”

“Think about it. She was sticking her nose where it didn’t belong, anyway. She found Ed Bancroft. Think of the trouble we’d have on our hands if she’d gotten to him before his, ah, demise…if he had talked to her.”

The man was silent, but his eyes narrowed with consideration.

“We need her where we can control her and keep an eye on what she’s up to,” the second man said. “We can’t have her running around sleuthing on her own like that.”

“She’s smart. She has big-city experience. It’s a risk. I just don’t like it.”

The second man shrugged. “It’s a risk we’ve been instructed to take. We’ll minimize it by having her work the task force on her own hours. That’s your responsibility, to wear her out with her regular patrol duties so that her participation with the task force is limited. And have someone keep an eye on her when she’s in that war room. Try to have someone get close to her to keep track of what she’s thinking, what she’s decided she knows.”

“I’m not some damned baby-sitter.”

“Yes,” the second man said. “You are.”

“One week,” Jerome said. “He’ll be all over her like white on rice. Did you see the way he was eyeing her?”

“I’ll take that bet. How much?” Fisk asked.

“Twenty bucks.”

“Twenty and my diamond stud says she decks him when he tries.” Cia touched a finger to one of the many piercings in her left ear. “Molly’s tough.”

“She’s still a chick,” Lester said. “And he’s got the moves down. My Starter jacket says she wraps herself all over him when he finally gets around to it.”

“I’ll take that.”

“Right.”

“Yeah.”

High-fives were exchanged, then the subject of the conversation headed in their direction. The kids began to disperse.

“Whoa,” Danny said. But he had to pull his mind and his eyes off the door to address them. Molly French could make one hell of an exit when she had her dander up.

It might have been six years, but he knew a rattled woman when he saw one, Danny thought. He was inordinately pleased with himself for the achievement. Damned if he didn’t still have the knack.

He waved a hand in greeting at an older woman who came through the gym doors Molly had just flashed through, then he brought his attention back to the kids. “What were you guys just betting about?”

“Who says we were betting?” Lester challenged.

In response, Danny high-fived the air and touched a finger to the earring he didn’t have. He was gratified when they exchanged wary glances. “Been there, guys. So spit it out. What’s the bet?”

“Nothing,” Anita muttered. She was a pretty black girl who paled in comparison to Cia’s looks and she seemed to know it. Danny felt something in his heart go out to her.

“Nice tattoo you’ve got there,” he told her.

Her eyes shone with gratitude. She held up her wrist. An inked chain of ivy and roses encircled it. “You like it?”

“Wouldn’t want one, but, yeah, it looks good on you.”

“Thanks.”

“Where’d you get the kind of money to pay for something like that?”

Her eyes shut down. He’d known they would.

“None of your business, man,” Lester said, protecting her.

“Yeah, well, see, that’s where we’re going to have a problem.” Danny put the basketball on the floor and sat on it, resting his arms on his knees, looking up at them now. “I’m not going anywhere, and I’m going to keep asking questions.”

“Don’t mean we got to answer you,” Anita said.

“Nope. You don’t. But trust me, I’ll wear you down after a while.”

“Who are you?” Lester was getting agitated.

“My name’s Danny. I’m the guy the rec center hired to teach you kids the game of basketball.”

“Molly plays with us,” Cia said.

“Correct. Molly plays with you. I’m going to teach you basketball. There’s a difference.”

“What if we don’t want to learn?” Fisk asked, but Danny could tell he was curious.

“Just give me a couple of weeks, then you can decide.” He’d hook them. He was confident.

“What are you, some kind of do-gooder?” Lester demanded.

Yeah, these days he was, Danny thought. But that wasn’t the way to reach them. “Actually, I just came off six years of doing time.”

Eyes widened again in five identically stunned faces. For the first time, Danny looked around the whole gym and realized that they’d lost the skinny, quiet kid with the razor-short black hair. “Where’d that other boy go?”

“Bobby J.? Man, he’s like smoke. He’s here, he’s not here, you know?” Jerome said.

Danny did know. That kid was troubled, he thought again. He made a mental note to keep an eye out for him, not only here at the center, but on the streets, as well.

“Okay, here’s the deal.” He eyed Lester’s feet. “Tomorrow you all show up in gym shoes. No boots.”

“What if we don’t have none?” Jerome asked.

“Then give me your size, and you’ll have some by this time tomorrow.” Danny had a mental image of his remaining nine thousand dollars dwindling fast.

“What about us girls?” Cia asked.

“You’ll play, too.”

“Why would I want to play basketball?”

“Boys think it’s a contact sport.” He was delighted when she tossed back her purple-and-black hair and laughed.

Danny finally stood and picked up the basketball again. “Okay, one last question. What’s with the lady? Molly French? What’s her story?” As soon as the question left him, more high-fives were exchanged. Ah, so that was what the betting was about, he realized.

“You won’t like her, dude,” Lester said, heading for the door. “Leastwise not if you’re telling the truth ’bout doing time.”

“Why’s that?” But something in his gut shifted.

Cia giggled. “Molly’s a definite do-gooder. She’s a cop.”

Every good thing Danny had felt since leaving the parole office abruptly left him.

Molly made it in and out of her apartment, with her hair dried again and her uniform on, in less than half an hour. Record time, she thought. Which just went to show what a good head of steam could do for a woman.

She was really irritated about Danny Gates.

She landed back at the police station three and a half minutes before roll call. The task force cops gave her baleful looks. A couple of them were here, though neither Gannon, McCauley or Hasselman worked the four-to-midnight with her because they all had a healthy chunk of seniority. They got the plum shift, day work, eight-to-four.

Molly’s manna was another cop’s poison. While many of the others complained about working the swing shift, she was just glad to be home each night by 12:30. She had only just worked her way up to the four-to-midnight three months ago. Prior to that, she’d been on graveyard.

Beau Maguire shot a smirk in her direction as Molly slid into the vacant seat beside him. He was on the task force and putting in a lot of overtime these days. “The extra hours getting to you already, Officer?”

Molly made a pointed show of looking at her watch. Then she raised her hand when her sergeant called her name. “Bingo. Present and accounted for. And, I’m pleased to say, not a second behind schedule.”

“You need to work on that mouth of yours,” Beau said, scowling.

“So I’ve been told.” She smiled at him. “Maybe later.”

When roll call was finished, Molly shot to her feet. She already had her cell phone out of her trousers pocket when she got to the hallway. She tapped in Ron Glover’s office number with her thumb. When he wasn’t at the center, he worked as an accountant.

“What have you done?” she asked when Ron answered on the first ring.

“Molly?” He sounded, as he always did, vaguely befuddled. His voice was always hushed and hesitant, but he had a heart of gold. Ron had taken over the operation of the rec center nine years ago, and against all odds it was still open for the kids.

“There’s a man in my gym,” Molly said.

“Ah, him.”

Ah, him? “Did one of the Wainwrights or the Carsons make some major contribution to our bank account that I don’t know about?”

“Most of them won’t even accept my phone calls.” Ron sighed. “No, we’re still limping along on the same budget. I wish I could pay you…” He trailed off without finishing. Neither Molly, Fran nor Plank Hawkins—who ran a city-funded soup kitchen out of the center’s back room on Sundays—were compensated for their time.

So how had he found it in the coffers to pay Mr. Basketball with his smooth male grace and that crooked bad-boy grin? It just didn’t make sense, Molly thought. Something was wrong here.

She entered the city garage and held her hand out for her cruiser keys as she passed the attendant there. He dropped them into her palm, and she went to her assigned unit. “Danny Gates just came to the rec center for a job, and you flipped open our limited checkbook and said sure?” Molly said into her cell phone.

“Well…yes. That was—that’s just about the way it happened.”

In a pig’s eye, Molly thought.

“He’s also going to fix the place up in exchange for the use of the apartment upstairs.”

“That’s not an apartment. It’s a cardboard box.” She knew. She had spent two nights there shortly after moving to Mission Creek until she’d gotten her apartment.

“Be that as it may…” Ron said, then he trailed off again. “The neighborhood’s not the best, Molly. It’s good to have someone like him there at night.”

Someone like him? What did that mean? This was getting stranger and stranger, Molly thought.

She drove out of the garage. When something smelled, she thought, it was usually a fish, even if you were standing in the middle of a desert at the time. But she had connections, didn’t she? She was a cop. Ron Glover was hardly her only source of information. “Okay,” she said equably. “I’m on shift, Ron. I’ve got to run.”

“Oh, of course. I’ll see you later, Molly.”

She disconnected and narrowed her eyes on the road ahead of her. Thinking. Simmering. Oh, yes, she thought, there was a fish in this desert somewhere, and she was going to follow her nose until she found it.

She went around the block and turned in the direction of the rec center. Danny Gates’s ugly yellow car was still in her parking space. She pulled to the curb half a block away and got out, locking the cruiser and pocketing her keys.

She was just going to meander inside and poke her nose into Ron’s office for a moment. She’d been volunteering here for two years; she was in and out of Ron’s office all the time. So why did she suddenly feel nervous and guilty about it?

Because, she thought, she didn’t want Danny Gates with his devil’s grin and sexy, not-quite-definable air of danger to catch her at it this time. And Fran might be around somewhere. Sometimes she came in early to set up for bingo. For some reason Molly realized that she didn’t want Fran to know what she was up to, either.

Molly slid into the vestibule and waited for a moment, listening. There were no basketballs thumping in the gym. He was probably upstairs. She stepped into Ron’s office and closed the door quietly behind her. The resulting clicking sound seemed furtive even to her own ears. She moved over to his desk and found what she was looking for right there, on top, in the center of his blotter: Danny Gates’s application.

It was typed. That was very weird.

She pulled her cell phone from her trouser pocket again, and this time she hit in the number of the Department of Motor Vehicles. She ran his Social Security number.

“He just registered a car today,” the woman at DMV said after a moment. “All the paperwork hasn’t caught up yet, but his last known address was the state penitentiary.”

Molly felt her legs fold suddenly. She turned around fast and sat in Ron’s chair. “The pen?”

“Please tell me, Officer, that you’re not standing at the side of the road with this guy pointing a gun at you.”

“Oh, no. It’s nothing like that.”

“Well, good. Anything else I can do for you?”

“Not a thing.” Molly disconnected.

She would make one more phone call, she decided. She looked at her watch. It wasn’t quite five o’clock yet. Ralph would still be at his desk.

She’d dated Ralph Bunderling once, eighteen months ago. He was a probation officer. He was the kind of man who normally went for lady cops. Not a Danny Gates kind of man. She’d known better, she chided herself. She’d known from the start, when her stomach had somersaulted and she hadn’t been able to get her air, she’d known that a man like Danny coming on to a woman like her was just…well, flat-out too good to be true.

He was the bad-boy-hero type and she was no big-breasted bimbo. She was a woman who was a whole lot smarter than to get goofy-eyed over an ex-con.

“Damn it.” Molly dropped her forehead briefly against the desk.

Ralph was more her speed. Ralph and his kind adored her. Ralph was quiet, timid—basically spineless. He craved an authority figure in his life. Maybe it was her badge, or maybe it was her stubborn strength or her nonstop mouth, as Beau Maguire had said earlier. Maybe it was even the fact that her physical attributes were all—to her way of thinking—just a tad on the side of average. Either way, the Ralph Bunderlings of the world flocked to her while the Danny Gateses…well, the ones who didn’t have records just pretty much ignored her.

She’d let Ralph down gently so he was glad to hear her voice when he picked up his line. “Molly! It’s been a long time.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’ve been very busy. Listen, I need a quick run on a Social. I’m on the city’s clock right now.” She winced a little at the inferred lie.

“Certainly. Absolutely. Anything. Just read it to me.”

Molly did. She could hear Ralph’s fingers clicking on the computer keys in the background.

“Got him,” Ralph said. “Daniel Gates. He was released today, parole for good behavior after six years. He ran a basketball program at the prison. He’s not part of my caseload. The parole department has him.”

“What did he do?”

“Armed robbery.”

Her stomach wanted to heave. She pressed a hand to it.

“Oh, now, here’s something interesting,” Ralph continued. “His parole officer got him a job at that rec center you help out at. Hey, he’s living there, too.”

“No kidding.”

“You’ll keep him on the straight-and-narrow, Molly. I have faith in you.”

“Thanks,” she said hollowly. “Anything else?”

“Well, they finally got him on the convenience store holdup but prior to that he had a rap sheet going back to the time he was eleven. Those were just loitering and vagrancy charges when he was a kid, though. You know how it is, they don’t want to go home for the night, they hang out somewhere else. And good cops like you get them.”

“Like me. Right.”

“By his late teens, he was already wrapped up with the Mercados.”

“The Mercados?” How much worse could this get? Her head spun. “Any charges there?”

“No, none. It’s just in his backup bio. A rumored association is what we call it. He was clean from his last vagrancy charge at sixteen until six years ago when he held up the store.”

“Thanks, Ralph. That’s what I needed to know.” She fumbled her thumb over her phone buttons, disconnecting, and stood unsteadily from Ron’s desk. Then the door opened.

The ill-fitting clothes he’d worn earlier—prison issue, she understood now—were gone. Danny stood there, the doorknob in one hand, those dangerous dark eyes of his steady on hers. He wore navy-blue gym shorts and a T-shirt emblazoned with—of all things!—TEXAS A & M.

These clothes fit. Nicely. He must have gone shopping, she thought inanely.

“Great legs,” she said hoarsely, trying to smile.

He ignored that. “You really put in the hours here, don’t you…Officer?”

So he knew she was a cop. He must have done some digging on her, too. It made absolutely no sense that that should please her, especially under these new circumstances.

Molly licked her lips. “That’s me. Dedicated. Ron called me and asked me to stop by to…ah…check on something.”

“Something like me?”

He noticed that she had the good grace to flush. Her gaze slid away. A cop. Damn it, it still burned at him two hours later.

The law had been his enemy for too many years. He might be starting over with a clean slate, but damned if he wanted to snuggle up to a narrow-minded, handcuff-toting police officer who wouldn’t know a guy was being set up if the proof jumped up and bit her on the nose. And he had been thinking about snuggling up to her. Life had been starting to look good for a little while there. That was the pity of it.

“Were you with Mission Creek six years ago?” he asked sharply, then he heard his own question and fought off the urge to wince. What difference did it make?

“No,” she said stiffly. “I was in Laredo back then.”

“Were you a cop there, too?”

She nodded.

“Got it in your blood, have you?”

It drove into her heart like a knife. “No. It didn’t start out that way.” Mickey had changed everything.

So she hadn’t been one of those in that interrogation room with him six years ago, Danny thought. They hadn’t heard a word of explanation he gave, just stared at him with contempt in their eyes. Then again, he’d known she hadn’t been a part of that. There was something about her…something vibrant and vital and worn stubbornly on her sleeve. He’d have remembered her, Danny knew, if she had been there.

“What are the odds that you’ll end your involvement with this place?” he asked evenly.

She brought her chin up. “Because of you?” She gave a little snorting laugh. “Slim and none.”

“That’s what I thought. But I don’t want to cross paths with you.”

“Finally we agree on something.” And he couldn’t leave the center, at least not without seriously ticking off his parole officer, she thought. Whatever else he was, he didn’t seem stupid.

“Then here’s how we’re going to do this,” he said. “From now on, you just stay on your side of the gym and I’ll stay on mine. I changed my mind. I don’t like you after all.”

She fought the hurt. “No problem.”

“Good.”

“Good,” she repeated.

“And stop running my name through the system. You won’t find anything else. There wasn’t a hell of a lot there to start with.”

“I didn’t—” But she had to break off. She couldn’t lie.

“Points for honesty, Officer.” His grin was feral. “Unfortunately, you started in the hole.” He left her and slammed the door hard behind him. Molly sank back down into Ron’s chair. For some reason she felt ashamed. Like she’d been narrow-minded and she’d misjudged him. But that was insane. How badly could you misjudge someone who had held up a convenience store? How badly could you misjudge someone who had been associated with the mob—the same mob her task force was looking into for the bombing?

Molly shot to her feet again, angry now, at herself and at him. She left Ron’s office without even glancing over her shoulder at the gym, but the steady thump of Danny’s basketball followed her.

Within twenty-four hours, Molly had decided two things. Dressing for success with the task force was a total waste of time because no one wanted her there, anyway. And Danny never seemed to leave the rec center. At least, that damn yellow car of his never moved.

She woke early on Tuesday morning, thinking to get a good start on the day. The telephone rang just as she was leaving her apartment. It was Ralph Bunderling asking for another date. She’d probably given him renewed hope with her phone call last night. Molly declined politely.

At least the rain had stopped, she thought, stepping outside. Because she wore flats today, her ankle didn’t turn when she stepped on the newspaper. She took a breath, grabbed it from the walkway and looked up. The sky was that cool winter blue that came in February even to southern Texas, and the sun was big and…

Lemony.

“He just moved right in on my turf,” she complained aloud. “And Ron not only let him, he enabled him.”

She realized that she was talking to herself again.

“Well, spinsters talk to themselves. I read that somewhere. They do it a lot. They talk to themselves, and they talk to their cats.” How old did one have to be to officially become a spinster? The term brought to mind doddering virgins in their eighties, she thought as she headed for her car. But times had changed. In current lingo it would probably define a thirty-year-old unmarried woman who had scarcely had more than three consecutive dates with the same man in her entire life.

She decided to drive past the rec center first. If Danny was gone, she’d stop and chat for a while with whatever kids were there. It didn’t matter that it was a weekday and the high school was in session at ten o’clock in the morning. Lester had already dropped out, and the attendance of the others was spotty in spite of the volunteers’ best efforts. Molly wondered how Danny expected them to play for a high school team when half of them already had one foot out that door.

“That’s his problem, not mine.” She slowed down as she approached the center. His car was still there. “Jerk. Store-robbing, gun-wielding, mobster jerk.” Why’d he have to go and rob that store, anyway? Why couldn’t he just have been a nice guy?

Because spinsters had notoriously bad luck where men were concerned, she answered herself. He’d seemed to be flirting with her and he looked good enough to eat, so something had to be wrong with him.

All she’d ever asked for was a man who could match her, stride for stride, she thought, driving on. Someone who wouldn’t back down from her and let her wear the pants all the time. Someone who could make her skin heat with a glance. Someone whose kiss didn’t leave her wondering what was on television later that night.

Someone with all that who didn’t have a record.

The full task force was in the war room when she arrived. They were having a meeting.

She hadn’t been informed. Molly felt a dull flush creep up her neck, but she forced herself to stride confidently to the first vacant chair she could find. They had all been lined up in rows for the occasion.

“Hi, Chief.” She sat and wiggled her fingers at Ben Stone. “I said I’d do this on my own time. I didn’t say you ought to start without me.”

Stone’s head moved as though his gaze had turned her way, but that was the only acknowledgment she got. He stood in one corner of the room, near the coffee table, taking up space between that and the American flag. She couldn’t see his eyes because of the cowboy hat he wore.

Spence Harrison, the district attorney, stood beside him at the end of the table. Molly’s glance flicked that way and she caught a quick smile touch the man’s mouth. His brown eyes were clear and direct on her for a moment before they cut to Chief Stone. “I wasn’t aware that Officer French had joined our ranks.”

Stone shrugged without actually responding. One of the task-force cops made a disparaging sound in his throat. Harrison lifted a brow at him, then he focused back on Molly. “Welcome aboard.”

“Thank you.”

“To sum up, I’m still liking the Mercados for this, predominantly because nothing points away from them,” he said, obviously picking up from where he’d been when she’d entered the room.

Translation, Molly thought, he likes them because we don’t have anything else.

“But I’m very concerned with our lack of progress,” Harrison continued. “If we don’t catch a break soon, I’m thinking we’re going to have to go outside our area for expert help. The lack of evidence so far indicates a professional job. It tells me that we’re dealing with someone who is used to committing crimes and covering his or her tracks afterward.”

“Like the mob,” one of the detectives suggested.

“That’s one scenario,” Harrison agreed enigmatically.

Now what did that mean? It was an interesting comment, Molly thought. It seemed to indicate that he had another scenario in mind. But whatever it was, he obviously wasn’t going to share it with the task force.

Everyone was standing to leave. Molly stood, as well, but she stayed behind as the others dispersed. She noticed that more paperwork had been added to the crime book table and that no one had done a thing about organizing it since she’d left yesterday. No wonder they weren’t getting anywhere. How could Chief Stone even monitor this investigation if nothing was in place?

She started to move a chair back to that table, then she realized that Spence Harrison hadn’t left. She gave him a crooked smile. “Joe Gannon seems to think it’s my Laredo connection, but maybe it’s because I’m a woman. What you think?”

“You mean why they cut you out?” He was replacing papers to his briefcase and didn’t look up at her.

“Actually, I sort of cut myself in.”

Again, he gave that fleeting grin. “It’s an old-boy network. I’ll make sure you’re notified of the next meeting.”

“Thanks.” Molly wondered how much she could trust him. Her gut instincts told her that neither Harrison nor Joe Gannon minded her being involved here. She decided to find out. She was a pretty good judge of people and their reactions to things she said. “You know, something’s been bothering me.”

The district attorney finally glanced up. “What’s that?”

“It’s Ed Bancroft. Why didn’t they take away his belt and shoelaces when they put him into that holding cell? Who booked him?”

“Joe Gannon.”

She noticed that Harrison didn’t have to consult anything in his briefcase for the answer. Molly nodded. She’d already known it, too, but she was going somewhere with this.

“And he relieved him of all his potentially deadly possessions at the time,” Harrison continued.

Molly took a deep breath. “Okay. So Bancroft had a friend who brought him the belt. And by association, Malloy probably had some friends, too.”

“It’s a safe guess.”

“I wonder if these friends have any more associates…within the department.”

“You’re a good cop, Molly. You’ve got to know there are also bad ones.”

There, it was out on the table, she thought. It was what she had been fishing for—support for her only theory. Malloy and Bancroft had friends in bad places—and if they did, then it was entirely possible that other cops did as well.

There had just been too many at that bombing scene, she thought again.

“For what it’s worth,” she said finally, “I like the Mercado angle for this, too. Who else could they have been hooked up with?” She refused to think of Danny when she said it.

“The Mercados are our resident bad guys,” Harrison agreed. He snapped the locks on his briefcase.

He left and Molly sat down at the crime book desk, rubbing her forehead. It was nice to know that someone as powerful as Spence Harrison didn’t think she was nuts for her theory. But she still had questions. Who had supplied Bancroft with the belt he’d looped around his neck? Had Bancroft requested it? Or had someone convinced him that he wanted it?

Molly rose from the table suddenly. She left the war room and went to the records department.

Ten minutes later she had a copy of the official visitors log from the cell area for the day Bancroft had been brought in. She ran down the list of the man’s visitors as she stood in the corridor. Some list. She was the only one on it.

No attorney? Why hadn’t Bancroft called for legal counsel? Those sharks could be counted on to show up before the key turned in the lock.

She hadn’t supplied Bancroft with the belt. Therefore, Molly thought, someone else had visited Bancroft without being signed in. Which meant that whoever had been on desk duty that day hadn’t made an issue of the belt-carrying visitor. Whoever had been on the desk had just waved the visitor in. Because it was another cop?

Her stomach shifted. She’d have to check with personnel to find out who had worked the holding cell area during that shift.

She already knew from the autopsy report that Bancroft hadn’t been dead long when she’d found him. She’d gotten him down and had started CPR herself, to no avail. Bancroft had still been warm. His mysterious visitor could have been there within half an hour of her own sign-in.

Molly started to head back to the war room, then she hesitated. Don’t do it, don’t do it, an inner voice warned her. She stepped back into the records room. “I also need the file on a six-year-old convenience store hold-up.”

“Got a number? An exact date?” the clerk asked. She was a pretty, lithe, young blonde named Gale Howard. Most of the guys loved her.

“No, just a name. Daniel Gates.”

“I should be able to find it. Hold on,” Gale said. “Sign another request for me and I’ll go look.”

And stop running my name through the system. Danny’s voice shot back into Molly’s mind like acid, seeming to singe the edges of everything it touched. “Go away,” she said aloud. “Get out of my head. You’re messing with my kids at that center. I have a right to know.”

“Were you talking to yourself?” Gale asked, returning with the file.

“Uh, no. Well, not really.” Molly took the file and stepped away from the desk.

At some point or other, the store-robbing, gun-wielding, mobster jerk would have to leave the center, she decided, returning outside to her car. He couldn’t stay there twenty-four hours a day, could he? She decided to swing by the place again.

His car was still in her space. That was when Molly got her brainstorm. She went back to the police station and found Joe Gannon in the detective’s bureau. She told him what she needed. She could do it herself, but she would probably be questioned by the brass over it.

“What’s this about?” he asked, scowling.

“I volunteer there.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that. But that’s not a no-parking zone, is it?”

“Not unless we decide to make it one.”

“On what grounds?”

Molly thought about it. “That building is a firetrap.”

“Close to it, but it must have passed code or the fire department would have shut them down a long time ago.”

Ron was going to kill her for this. Still, principle was principle. And she wouldn’t be able to park there anymore, either, would she? Plus, it really would make the building safer. “We should probably have a clear path to the front door for…you know, firefighters. Just in case.”

“What the hell are you up to?” Gannon was staring at her as though trying to find the answer in her eyes, then he scratched his temple. “Okay. Who cares? I’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

“So do I. I just want to start with the minnows.”

“You’re going to owe me for this.”

“I always pay my debts, Joe.”

“A six-pack. Any import.”

“Consider it done.”

He nodded, then he called in the tow order for the ugly lemon Dodge in front of the rec center. “I’ll have a temporary No-Parking sign there by nightfall.”

Chapter 3

It didn’t seem possible to Danny that seventeen kids in any given city in modern America could not own gym shoes. Granted, the rec center families were mostly impoverished. But Anita’s tattoo, Cia’s leather and Lester’s boots had all cost money, so the kids were finding it somewhere.

He was being played for a chump, Danny decided. And where had these other eleven kids’ names come from, anyway? There’d only been six teenagers here yesterday.

“You,” he said to Jerome, “had sneaks on yesterday.” He sat at Ron Glover’s desk facing the boy who stood on the other side of it.

“They got stole last night.”

“Stolen.”

“What, now you’re an English teacher?”

“Whatever I have to be, pal, to get you into college.”

That broke Jerome up. “Me? Yeah, right.”

“You. Right.” Danny looked down at the handwritten list. At least the kids had sent Jerome back with it. That was something. Actually, it was more than he had hoped for. “Okay, here’s the deal.”

“I don’t do deals, man.”

He caught the boy’s gaze and held it. “My guess is that you do deals every day, just not with the likes of me. Now where was I? Right. I’m going to leave here and buy gym shoes for everybody who was here yesterday. These other eleven kids—whoever they hell they are—are going to have to make an appearance and personally request their own pair—after they’ve practiced with us at least five times.” In the meantime, Danny realized, he was going to have to try his hand at a little fund-raising. They’d need uniforms, too, and various other equipment, not all of which could come out of his limited bank account.

“Man, that’s lame,” Jerome complained.

Danny stood from the desk.

“Hey, what did you do time for, anyway?” the boy asked suddenly. “You didn’t tell us.”

Danny paused on his way to the door. He’d known it was coming and had already determined to be honest with these kids. He had a halfhearted hope that some of them might learn from his experience. “Money,” he told him. “They said I stole money.”

Jerome didn’t bat an eye. “Yeah, so you got plenty, right? You can buy us all shoes.”

“If I had money to buy you all shoes, would I be driving that scrap of metal out there at the curb?”

“Ain’t no scrap of metal there now, dude.”

“Sure, there is. Right out front.”

“Uh-uh. No more.”

Then, somehow, Danny knew.

He shot around the desk, opening Ron’s office door hard enough and fast enough to make it crack against the wall like a gunshot. He heard Jerome laughing behind him as he jogged outside.

His car was gone.

Danny drove his fist against a stop sign. The metal clanged. Then he realized that he was still holding the piece of paper with the shoe sizes. Swearing, he shoved it down into his jeans pocket and headed back to the center to call—again—for a cab.

He was going to kill her.

When Molly arrived at the center at two o’clock, the space in front of the center walkway was vacant. There was a no-parking sign there. She grinned to herself and started scouting around the block for another space. She found the Dodge around the first corner, deliberately taking up two spaces, half in each of them. Her grin vanished.

Oh, baby, this was war.

She had to park two blocks away this time. Molly locked her Camaro and headed back to the rec center on foot. She found Danny in the gym.

There were fifteen to twenty kids with him today. She’d never seen so many kids here at once in the whole two years she’d volunteered. What was he doing? Paying them to play basketball with him? She stalked across the court and approached the knot of them.

Danny looked up at her. “Good afternoon, Officer.”

“Same to you.” Then she added under her breath, “Inmate.”

He heard her. “Not anymore.” He nodded at the far basket. “Your end of the court is down that way.”

“It’s wherever I want it to be.”

“No, actually, that rule changed yesterday right around five o’clock. Now I’m assigning you one.”

He’d caught her in Ron’s office at five o’clock, Molly thought. She felt her temper spike even as her stomach squirmed with guilt. “No one promoted you to director of this place.”

“Nope. No one did.”

“Then I’d say rule making is a little out of your job description.” Where were the kids going? she wondered. A quick glance around told her that they were all easing back to the other end of the gym. “Her” end. Were they choosing up sides, determining to stick with her against him? Molly started to smile at that prospect then she noticed that Jerome and Fisk, Cia, Lester and Anita were all wearing new gym shoes. Cia wore hers with rolled-up white socks beneath a stretchy, skin-tight red skirt.

Molly picked out Bobby J. standing at the edge of the gym, watching the others the way he usually did. He wasn’t wearing new shoes. They sat on the floor beside him, still in the box.

“In any society, there tends to be a hierarchy,” Danny said.

She turned back to him quickly, her eyes narrowing.

“Hierarchy? Good word. You know, I’d heard they were starting to educate you guys in prison.” The barb hit its mark. She could tell by his face, and she almost felt ashamed of herself.

He shot a basket then jogged and caught the ball back. He was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt today. A muscle shirt. And he had the muscles to go with it. Really incredible muscles, she thought. His upper arms were corded, solid, and the sight made her wonder what it would feel like to have them around her.

Molly pressed her fingers to her temples. He was an ex-con. She was losing her mind.

“Hierarchy implies a sort of a totem pole effect,” he continued, dribbling. “First comes the director. Then there are the paid employees. Oh, wait. Let me rephrase that. Paid employee. There’s only one of us here, isn’t there?”

Molly glared at him.

“Then we have the bottom dwellers. They would be the volunteers. Are you following me here, pretty Molly? I think so. Those dazzling green eyes of yours are shooting sparks.”

Real anger shot through her. “Fran and Plank give generously—” Then she broke off and made a funny little sound in her throat.

Startled, Danny stopped playing with the basketball to look at her. Was she blushing? Why? Because he’d said she had dazzling eyes? She was a cop. She couldn’t be so naive and innocent that she couldn’t take a little pure male appreciation in stride. The possibility had something tightening suddenly across his chest. The effect started to spread to other regions before he clamped down on it.

Danny turned and shot the ball through the hoop again. “I admire all of you who donate your time here. All this is just an abject lesson on the authority-chain around here. And, no, they didn’t teach me words like abject in prison. I was actually a pretty good student. Before.”

Molly waited for him to say something else about before, then she realized that he wasn’t going to. She might have asked, but then he’d probably think she was interested or something.

“Bite me,” she grated.

“Oh, honey, I wouldn’t give you the pleasure.”

He turned back in time to see her face actually flame this time. That tightening-effect started to hit his body again, then it was doused by pure surprise. Danny dropped the ball, and it hit his foot, rebounding and rolling away.

“You lost something there, jock.” She looked smug now.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“About so big, round?” She held her hands up as though to grasp the basketball.

“Not the same something I was just thinking of.” He let his gaze coast up and down her deliberately.

It happened again, he realized. She had the most transparent face of any woman he’d ever met. But at the moment, Molly French’s heart was stamped all over her face. His innuendoes were really getting to her.

He took a step closer to her. She actually surprised him by holding her ground this time. One of her heels seemed to shift, but she stayed put.

“Get out of my space,” she warned. “Back off.”

“Molly, this is my half of the gym. I can step wherever I please. Volunteer…” He poked her gently on the chest, right beneath her collarbone. This time she jumped back skittishly. Then he tapped his own chest. “Employee. And by the way, volunteer, you owe me eighty bucks.”

“For what?” she asked, startled.

“That’s what it cost me to get my car out of the tow lot.”

“Your car got towed?”

She blinked with feigned innocence. He wanted to close his mouth over hers and take that smirk right off her lips, swallow it deep, keep it for his own. That rattled him. The suddenness of the urge had him stepping back of his own accord. “Get off my court.”

“You’re going to teach basketball now?”

“You got it.”

“To whom? May I watch?”

“I—” He broke off and looked down at the other end of the gym.

Five of the kids from yesterday remained. They were all sitting beneath the basket, watching them, their new shoes gleaming white in the overhead lights. Bobby J.—and all the rest of them—had vanished.

“Damn it,” Danny swore. “Now see what you’ve done? You chased off my kids!”

Molly turned away with a quick little twitch of her hips. God help him, but he noticed. How could any woman look that good in khakis? He hated khakis. And loafers. She wore loafers that were clicking their hard little heels all over the floor he’d polished late into the night. She was a genuine handcuff-toting, law-abiding priss. With really great hips. He wondered what she’d look like in Cia’s leather.

He watched her sit down among the kids beneath the other basket. A few minutes later she and Anita peeled off from the rest of the group and went outside. Danny took a deep breath and walked toward the rest of them.

“Back to basketball.”

“It’s going to be a little bit of a walk,” Molly apologized as she and Anita turned the corner onto the next block.

“Where’s your car?”

“In Ethiopia.”

“How come?”

Suddenly her mother’s voice filled her head, something about cutting off her nose to spite her face. Molly’s mother had been full of axioms, bless her soul.

Linda Lee French’s heart hadn’t given out until she was fifty-two. Which was a miracle, Molly had always thought, given her mother’s life. She’d raised two children on her own—one of which hadn’t been able to stay on the right side of the law to save his life, literally. She cleaned houses day and night, taking in enough extra seamstress work that Molly couldn’t remember her ever not having some piece of fabric in her hands. Any men she’d attracted after Molly’s father had run out on them had always seemed more interested in having Linda Lee support them than the other way around. And she’d always done it, generously, hopefully, until each of them left her high and dry. Finally, at fifty-two, all her hope had run out.

“The fire department decided they needed direct access to the front door of the center,” Molly explained, her heart cringing a little at the lie.

Anita laughed. “You’re a cop, not a fireman.”

Molly looked at her sharply. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Danny said you did it.”

He’d told the kids that? “What else did he say?”

“He said you did it because you’re hot for him.”

Molly choked as she unlocked her car door. “That’s not true.”

“Yeah. Whatever. Happens to all of us, right?”

Molly grabbed the drugstore bag out of her passenger seat. It held a pregnancy test and a box of condoms. “But most of us take precautions.”

“I knew you were going to get around to a lecture.”

She pushed the bag into Anita’s hands. “Just listen to me for a minute. Please.”

The girl rolled her eyes but she took the bag.

“You are a special, intelligent human being. You don’t need to let some guy paw you just to prove that to him.”

“Cia—”

“Forget Cia. This is about you.” Molly took a deep breath and plunged in. They hated it when she talked to them this way. “When they’re pawing you, most guys aren’t thinking about how special you are. Most guys are just thinking about themselves. If you sacrifice yourself—your life—to that, you’re only betraying yourself.” And because she knew Anita would probably do it, anyway, she’d bought the condoms. “There’s more to this than just pregnancy, Anita. There’s HIV and all kinds of other nasties out there. So try to make sure of who you’re with. Make sure of where he’s been and try to find out if he’s that one guy who knows you’re special. I promise you, he’s out there. And even then, even when you find him, promise me you’ll use what I put in that bag.”

Anita opened the top, peeked into it and groaned.

Molly cleared her throat. “I put a pregnancy test in there, too. Can you pull that off at home without anyone knowing, or do you want to spend the night at my place?”

The gratitude in the girl’s eyes wrenched Molly’s heart. “I can do it at home. My dad’s hardly ever there.” Molly knew Anita’s mother had died years ago of a drug overdose.

“Okay, then let me know. Whatever the result, we’ll take it from there. I’ll help you, Anita, all I can.”

“Thanks.” Anita started to turn away. Then she looked back over her shoulder. “I’m really scared, Molly.”

Molly couldn’t tell her not to be. She just nodded. Then, when Anita was several strides down the street, she stopped her again. “By the way, where’d the new gym shoes come from?”

Anita turned to walk backward, looking down at her feet. “Coach,” she said, glancing up again.

Coach? He’d been here twenty-four hours, Molly thought, as something tried to choke her, and already he was Coach? “The rec center doesn’t have that kind of money!”

“He paid for them his own self. He robbed a bank, you know.”

“He did not! It was a convenience store!” What had he told these impressionable kids, anyway? Molly felt herself moving, taking a step back toward the center, ready to take another strip off his hide. Then she realized that Anita was laughing.

“I knew that,” the girl said. “I just wanted to find out if you did.”

Molly let out her breath and slumped back against her car.

She really, really hated him.

Molly dragged herself home at 12:20 in the morning, bone tired. She tossed her uniform cap on her bed, dragged the scrunchie from her hair and dug her fingers into her curls. When her hair sprang free in her hands, she blew it out of her eyes.

The small of her back hurt from where a teenage behemoth—not one of her rec center kids, thank heaven—had gouged her with his knee as she had wrestled with him on a very hard sidewalk. He’d been higher than a kite. He was in a holding cell now. It broke her heart. But even worse was the fact that suddenly she was getting all the dangerous and waste-of-time calls thrown her way—and she didn’t even have a partner on this shift yet. She had to wonder if it was her comeuppance for having squeezed her way onto the task force.

She undressed and found a T-shirt in her drawer, this one sporting the logo of the Dallas Cowboys. She hadn’t worn her Texas A & M shirt since Danny had turned up in an almost identical one. Danny again. She shook her head. Why couldn’t she get him off her mind? Because he was an enigma, she decided, going into the bathroom to brush her teeth.

Because—damn it—he wasn’t what an ex-con was supposed to be.

She’d known her share. She’d put in her time and she’d met the best and the worst the world had to offer. Danny just didn’t have that same sly glide to his eyes.

Didn’t mean a thing, she told herself, staring at her reflection in the glass. There were exceptions to every rule.

Why was he coming on to her? she wondered with her next breath. Because he definitely was.

Molly took a step back from the glass, eyeing herself critically. Okay, she was cute. Curly brown hair, big green eyes—they were good, but not dazzling—and that dusting of freckles over her nose. But there was nothing especially worth coming on to there, at least not for an ex-mobster who had probably had more than his fair share of exotic, olive-skinned women with come-hither eyes over the years.

Okay, she admitted, so that bothered her. Danny Gates was a hero-type hunk and if his past was any indication, he’d probably been around with the best womankind had to offer. It went with the territory. She couldn’t compete with that. She shouldn’t even want to. And she didn’t. Of course she didn’t. But for some reason, it made her feel so sad.

Molly went back to her bed. Beside her uniform cap, which she picked up and placed on her dresser, was the file she had gotten out of records hours ago. She went to the kitchen for a can of soda pop, then came back and curled up in bed with the file. She told herself again that she owed it to her kids to know exactly what Danny had done—and to convince Ron Glover to let him go if need be. If he posed any danger whatsoever—outside of the bad influence that Ron Glover had obviously already overlooked—she’d drag him off that gym floor bodily.

She read, and twenty minutes later she had enough of a headache to get up again and go looking for some aspirin.

Not much of the police report made sense. The store Danny had robbed had been way the heck north on Mission Creek Road, halfway to Lone Star Highway, actually beyond the city’s jurisdiction. That was the first odd thing. The sheriff had tossed the case to the Mission Creek boys but there was no record of why. Still, she could have lived with that, it was the only oddity.

What bothered her most was the fact that Danny had been picked up on the opposite end of Mission Creek Road—within the city limits—seventeen minutes after the 911 call had come in from the convenience store. Was it even possible to drive from the Mission Ridge area—which was just west of Mission Creek Road where the store had been held up—to a point south of Gulf Road inside of seventeen minutes? It was, she thought, if you had the pedal to the floor. And according to the police report Danny had been driving a spiffy, presumably horsepower-endowed Lexus at the time. But was it possible to drive that distance in seventeen minutes and add a small side trip even farther to the south and a jog to the west where his condo had been located? Because that was what he would have had to do to deposit the stolen money there. The 911 call had come in at 2:12 in the afternoon. He’d been picked up at 2:29. The stolen money was located almost simultaneously in his bottom dresser drawer by other investigative officers because, lo and behold, the convenience store owner had known Danny’s name and had bleated it out like a frightened lamb the minute the first cops had arrived on the scene. They’d dispatched another unit directly to Danny’s address, and that unit had discovered the money.

How neat. How convenient. Except…

For that to be possible, Danny would have had to leave the Mission Ridge area, drive all the way to his condo to dump the stash he’d taken, and then for some reason he would have headed north and east again before the cops had picked him up. Oh, and one other interesting thing, she thought. He would have had to make an inexplicable U-turn on Mission Creek Road in the process because by that time, when the cruiser had nabbed him, he’d been heading back home.

At least he’d said he’d been heading home. Maybe he’d lied. Cons did lie.

Why hadn’t he called for a lawyer? Maybe that just bothered her because Ed Bancroft hadn’t done it, either. An awful lot of guys these days were going down without a fight, Molly thought.

Why hadn’t anyone noted the discrepancy in the direction Danny had been traveling? Where had he really been heading home from—especially since he had presumably just left his condo after dropping the cash?

The Mercado compound was right off Mission Creek Road, she thought, between the convenience store and the location where Danny had been picked up. If Danny had been driving home from there, he would have been traveling in the correct direction.

Molly got back into bed and set the file carefully on her bedside table. Well, well, well, she thought as she turned her light off. Another smelly fish in the desert.

“I’ve figured it out. You were framed.”

Danny barely heard her. He was too transfixed by what he found when he came downstairs from his apartment and set foot in the gym on Wednesday afternoon.

First of all, there was an open library book on the floor in the middle of the court. The regular kids were standing back a way and watching Molly skeptically. Some of the newcomers had returned, as well. Four or five of them were lined up on the side of the court next to Bobby.

“What the hell are you doing?” Danny demanded.

“Playing basketball.”

“You’re not playing basketball. You’re bouncing around on your toes and occasionally looking down at that book. What’s that book?”

“You were framed. Either you’re too stupid to realize it or too stupid to care.”

“I cared.”

“You didn’t do anything about it.”

“I want to talk about basketball.”

“Well, I don’t.” She stopped bouncing and faced him, planting her hands on her hips.

Those hips, Danny thought. What he could see of them today left his mouth dry. She wore spandex leggings. There was a great deal of rolled-down sock at her ankles and…she wore new high tops. She also wore a black sports bra, and he liked it a whole lot better than Cia’s.

Every sweet curve of her was outlined in nice, tight black.

“You can’t learn basketball from a book,” he said stubbornly, trying to keep his mind off the way she looked. “That book is about basketball, isn’t it? Some sort of in-ten-easy-lessons kind of thing? Basketball for dummies?”

“It’s very informative.” Molly sniffed. “And I can learn anything from reading. For instance, I learned a great deal from reading your crime file.”

“You read my file? I told you to stop digging up dirt on me! Damn it, stop bouncing!” She was jiggling in place. Oh, yeah, she definitely jiggled.

“I just warmed up. I want to stay that way.” She thrust her chin toward him. “Warming up is important. The book says so. I want to stay loose.”

“You’re loose as a goose. And you don’t need to be. This is my basketball team.”

“Are you guys talking about his record or our game?” Cia called out from behind Molly.

“We’re talking about his record,” Molly said.

“We’re talking about her bouncing,” Danny said.

“Oh, man, I want to up my ante,” said Fisk.

Danny stalked over to the library book and snatched it up off the floor. “This is a joke.”

“Why didn’t you defend yourself when they brought you in for questioning?” she countered. “Why didn’t you call a lawyer?”

“It wouldn’t have done me a damned bit of good. Get off my court.”

“No. Not until you explain.” She grabbed the book back from his hand.

“What’s it to you?”

“Maybe I just want leverage to use against you.”

If it meant he could part ways with that spandex, then Danny thought it might be worth it. He couldn’t look at her like this. Couldn’t. She was a cop. “Come with me,” he said shortly.

“Where?”

“To Ron’s office.”

“Why?”

“Stop with the questions for once, will you? Follow me. You want to talk? Fine. We’ll do it in private.” He was damned if he was going to give the kids more of a show.

He was halfway across the court before he sensed rather than saw her fall into step behind him. He stalked angrily through the vestibule and waited by the office door. When she passed through it, he slammed it shut behind her and went to the other side of the desk to keep space between them.

“We have a serious power struggle going on here,” he said.

Molly leaned her back against the door. “I was here first.”

“You’re not going to get rid of me. I don’t care how many times you tow my car. Regardless of my parole terms, it was my decision to be here.”

Somewhere along the line, she had started to realize that, and it made Molly feel small.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said again, sitting in Ron’s chair. He laced his fingers behind his head. The muscles in his upper arms flexed. Molly felt her throat go a little tight. “They’re my kids,” she said finally.

“Well, now they’re mine, too.”

Okay, so he had bought half of them gym shoes. “Let’s just say I accept that…since I have no choice. What’s your point?”

“We had an opposite-ends-of-the-gym agreement. This did not include you bringing library books onto center court.”

She tossed the book on Ron’s desk. The cover said Learning The Basics of Basketball, pretty much as he had expected.

“Maybe I’m willing to concede that you have a point about getting these kids on school teams,” she said. “A weak point, but a point just the same.”

That surprised him. He didn’t want her to be open-minded. He especially didn’t want her to be open-minded for the sake of the kids. It made him like her too much. “Then let me handle it. I know basketball. You don’t. There are other areas where you can help.”

“Such as?”

Damn it, he thought. Double damn it. She had both her hands wrapped around the doorknob at her back. It made her breasts thrust toward him. “I’m thinking.”

“That might be a stretch for someone who allowed the police to frame him.”

“Shut it off, Molly. You know nothing about that.”

“I’m trying to.”

“To what? Shut your mouth down? Yeah, I can see where that might be difficult.”

“I’m trying to figure out why anyone would let themselves go to jail without a fight.”

“It’s none of your business!” he shouted. She had a way of seriously getting to him. He scrubbed a hand over his jaw. “All right, let’s calm down here.”

“I’m perfectly calm.”

“Yeah, well, you are unless I decide to move in on your space. You get pretty shaken up whenever I get too close.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

But he saw it happen again, that flush come to her skin. Today there was a lot more skin. There was all that pretty freckled expanse over the top of her sports bra and a stretch of midriff between the bottom of that and the top of her spandex leggings. She had a truly fantastic body.

He couldn’t think like this. She was a cop.

Danny decided that he had gone too long without a woman. That was his problem. He made a mental note to remedy that little problem this very night.

He cleared his throat. “We…uh…need money. We need uniforms. We need the other cities to agree to play against us.”

It took Molly a moment to bring her mind back to sports. Her heart was still thumping. She did not want to be affected by him this way—Mr. Mobster, Mr. Ex-Con. But, oh, there was something about him.

“What are you suggesting?” She rubbed goose bumps off her skin absently.

“That if you want to help, come in here tomorrow and get on the phone.” Get rid of the spandex, he thought. It would also keep her out of his gym, out of his sight…off his mind.

“I might be willing to do that.”

“You’d do anything to help these kids.” It came out before he’d thought it through. And he knew he was right.

“Okay.” She scraped curls off her forehead. “That takes care of your team. What about the fact that the cops framed you for armed robbery? Who really put that money in your condo?”

Now he understood why she’d given in so easily. She’d been placating him until she could turn the conversation back to where she wanted it to go. “Forget it,” he growled. “The cops didn’t do it. The mob did.”

“And you let them?”

“I’m not willing to talk about this.”

“I’ll wear you down. I have that way about me.”

“Tell me something I didn’t already know.”

She laughed. Then, for a moment, a deadly moment, they just grinned at each other. A little like…comrades.

Danny recovered first. He needed to fix that. Right now. He could shake her up, make her run, he reminded himself. Danny rose from the desk and closed the distance between them.

Molly tried to back up. With her back against the door, she had nowhere to go.

He was out of his mind. He stepped even closer, anyway. “See? You get sort of shivery when I get near, don’t you?”

“I do not.” She drew in breath. Enough breath that her breasts almost touched his chest. He was that close. Molly blew her air out again quickly. “That’s quite an ego you’ve got there.”

“Actually, you’re wrong. I lost that six years ago.”

Molly tried to mentally measure the space between his mouth and hers. Three inches, she decided, tops. “I’m really good with my knee. They taught me in the academy. Back off.”

“You won’t use your knee.” He prayed hard that she wouldn’t, anyway. If she decided to, then he was reasonably defenseless, the way he was standing over her. Cops were ruthless. Cops would do anything. “You’re waiting with bated breath to find out what I say or do next.”

“My breath doesn’t bate.”

“Want to bet?” He braced one palm against the door over her left shoulder. Knowing he was insane, he did it anyway. Then he traced a line with his fingertip from the hollow of her throat right to the top of that sports bra.

She stopped breathing. Molly couldn’t have found her breath in that moment if he’d held a gun to her head—and given who and what he was, maybe that wasn’t such a reach. Her limbs went weak. And everything inside her sank to the core of her, hot and shivery and ready. She tried to think if she had ever experienced any sensation like it before. She didn’t think so.

“That,” he said, “was definitely a bated breath.”

“It’s just your eau de gym. It caught me by the throat there for a moment.”

“I like that about you, you know.” He closed the distance between them another half an inch.

Her heart was hammering. “You like what?”

“That quick tongue of yours. Makes me wonder what else it can do.”

“Ohmigod,” she gasped. She couldn’t do this. He was an ex-con.

“Give it up, Officer. You can’t order me into line. Your kind has already done the worst to me it can do.” The reminder should have quelled him. Should have been like a bucket of cold water over his head…and all the other parts of him that were waking up and feeling randy. But the flames were too hot in his blood. Licking. Tantalizing.

“This is insane,” she whispered.

“It’s every bit of that and more. Want me to kiss you now?”

She choked and drove her fist into his stomach.

Danny backed off quickly. It hurt. Damn it, it really hurt, and he’d taken punches from men twice the size of her. He rubbed his gut and gave her her space back. “You could have just said no.”

“Would you have listened?”

“Probably not. I’m an ex-con. I’m the baddest of the bad.”

At least that took her mind off what had just passed between them…a little. “Why? Why, Danny? Why did you let them do that to you? Why did you let them frame you?”

“It was six years of my life, Molly. Or it was the rest of it. Which would you have chosen?” His voice was suddenly tired, and something in it, some obscure note of hurt and bitterness made her want to cry. Molly didn’t answer. For all she had seen and survived—through Mickey and his death and all her years in law enforcement—Molly wasn’t sure she had it in her to make a decision like the one he’d just described.

She turned around and wrapped both hands around the doorknob, wrenching it hard, escaping.

“Worked again,” Danny murmured, watching her run. But he felt little satisfaction this time.

This time he wanted her to come back.

Chapter 4

Molly was nearly at her car—two and a half blocks away this time—when she heard someone calling her name. She looked back to find Anita chasing after her. The teenager was grinning from ear to ear.

Molly went to meet her and clasped both her hands. “The test was negative, right?”

“Right.” Anita gave a whoop and tugged her hands away to dance around in a little circle, shooting her fists at the sky.

“Good,” Molly said, still feeling a little shaky, remembering Danny’s words, Want me to kiss you now? What kind of game was he playing with her? And why?

“I just wanted to let you know,” Anita said, turning away.

“Wait.” Molly bore down on her scurrying thoughts. “You’re welcome and all that. But promise me you’ll use the condoms from here on in.”

Anita waved a hand. “Yeah.”

“Promise me.”

“Okay.” Anita shook her head and started back up the street.

Molly didn’t know if she had reached the girl or not. She went back to her car and sat behind the steering wheel for a while, her hands clenching it until they hurt. Then she let out her breath and turned the key in the ignition.

Danny Gates was a whole lot more than she had bargained on.

Someday, Danny thought, he might be able to look at his parole officer without hating him for things that were no more the poor guy’s fault than the weather was. He left the office on Main Street after his weekly check-in feeling as though someone had wrapped steel bands around his chest. He stood on the sidewalk for a moment, breathing deeply, trying to loosen some of the tension.

That was when he saw Bobby J. across the street.

The kid was standing in front of the bank. He was talking to a short man in jeans and a black windbreaker. The guy’s back was to the street. Danny couldn’t see his face. But he did see the man reach forward and either take something—or put something—in Bobby’s hands.

Danny acted without thinking about it. He jogged into the street. A couple of passing cars honked at him. He was jaywalking, right in front of the probation offices.

By the time he reached the opposite side of the street, the man was halfway down the block and Bobby was turning in the other direction. “Hey,” he said.

Bobby’s shoulders twitched but he kept walking.

“I can catch you,” Danny said, “so spare me the race.”

Bobby paused. Danny picked up his step again to reach him.

“Get out of my face, man,” the kid said when he reached him.

“No money is worth that, Bobby.” He inclined his head in the general direction where the transaction had just taken place.

“Yeah, right, con. You’re one to lecture me, right?”

“Right. It’s nasty inside.”

“I know. Been in juvie.”

“Multiply that by five for the big house.”

He thought he saw a reaction on the boy’s face before he turned away again. Bobby took a few steps and looked back, poking his finger at him. “You back off,” he snarled. “Just leave me alone. You got no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t want your frigging help.”

You’ve got it, anyway, Danny thought, watching the boy walk away.

Bad cops were like coat hangers in a closet, Molly decided the next morning as she stepped into the war room. Leave them in the dark long enough and they just proliferated.

She was tired, and the small of her back hurt from either a bad night’s sleep or the tussle she’d had with the drugged-out teenage Sumo wrestler two shifts ago—she couldn’t be sure which. The kid had turned out to be from a very good family, the kind that could afford top-notch counsel for their hoodlums. Unlike Bancroft and Danny, he had called for a lawyer right off the bat and he’d been out of the holding cell within an hour.

Come to think of it, Molly realized, maybe Bancroft hadn’t called for counsel because he really had been suicidal. Maybe he had known he’d be dead as soon as his belt arrived so there was no need to call anyone.

Danny, on the other hand, had apparently taken the fall just to stay alive. He’d said the mob had framed him for some infraction, and he’d implied that they might have killed him instead. Why would the mob kill one of their own? For squealing, for turning state’s evidence against them, she thought.

For walking away.

“Stop it, stop it, stop it,” she warned herself as she pulled out a chair and sat at the crime book table. “Stop dwelling on him.”

“Internal Affairs could set you up for a psych examination for talking to yourself, you know.”

Molly turned in her chair to find Joe Gannon. “And I’m starting to think that there are those who would gladly turn me in to IAD for doing it, too. Point taken.”

He joined her at the table and looked down at the reports, forms and notes strewn all over the scratched Formica. “This is a mess.”

“I know,” Molly replied. “No one files. And because they don’t, no one can find anything.” Then it hit her. What a clever way to slow down the investigation!

She almost opened her mouth and said so but for once in her life, she bit her tongue instead. Coat hangers and closets, she thought again. Joe seemed like a good cop. But at this point, who knew? She’d been staggered to learn that Bancroft and Malloy had nabbed Tracy Walker and Jake Anderson. And Spence Harrison had seemed to agree with her that maybe others in the police department were working on the side as well.

“How’s your parking situation coming along?” Joe asked, taking a pile of papers and beginning to sort through them himself.

“Terrible. Great.” She cut her gaze up to him as he continued to stand beside her. “In this case, it’s the same thing.”

He helped her file for half an hour. Molly found nothing new of interest in the reports that passed through her hands. She wondered about the ones Gannon was tucking away. Was his help just a clever way of keeping her from seeing something on this table that the others didn’t want her to see? Was he actually lifting a few pages out of her grasp?

Yes, she thought, she suspected task-force cops now as well.

Hasselman and McCauley really didn’t like her. Neither, it would seem, did Beau Maguire. She’d never had so many enemies in one place before in her life. And all of them were on the task force. What better way to protect the bomber than to get assigned to this detail and skew the investigation a little? She’d muscled her way onto the team. Maybe one or two of the others had done the same thing. The fact remained that the filing really was a disaster.

Molly stood and moved to the computer on the other table. She tried to boot it up but it was stuck in safe mode and wouldn’t do much of anything for her.

“What are we using this for?” she asked Gannon.

He looked up. “It’s supposed to cross-reference everything we’ve got here in hard copy and give us access to other police departments, too. The theory being, once we finally get something concrete on the bomb, maybe we can find a similar device used in other cities. But Hasselman hasn’t been able to get it on-line yet. And he’s our resident computer geek.”

Another information dead end, Molly thought. Convenient…if anyone really was deliberately trying to muddle things here.

She went back to the crime book table. Gannon handed her the book after he finished putting his share of the paperwork inside, so maybe he wasn’t trying to hide anything.

“I’m going to head over to the country club,” she said. “I haven’t really had a good look at the bomb site yet.” It wasn’t true, but she wanted to catch his reaction.

Gannon dug into his pocket and came up with a key. “You’ll need this then. The Men’s Grill area is all boarded up and ply-wooded-off from the rest of the club. Only authorized personnel can get in.”

“That would be me.” Molly caught the key when he tossed it to her.

“Now it is. If I’m not at my desk when you get back for your regular shift then hold on to it and give it to me later. I don’t want it just sitting around in one of my drawers.”

Did that mean he was suspicious of some of the officers, too? “I don’t blame you. I worry a little about some of our coworkers,” she said neutrally, watching him. He shot her a speculative look but didn’t answer. Molly held up the key. “Mind if I have it copied?”

“My guess is that’s the only way you’re going to get one.”

Molly smiled slowly. “Thanks.”

She left the war room, then she hesitated and looked back over her shoulder at the door, frowning. Something else bothered her, she realized. Why was it that the war room was always pretty much empty of task force members? She’d been the fifteenth cop or detective to be appointed to the team, so where were the others? Why was the place always so lonely except during meetings she wasn’t informed of?

Maybe the others were always out running down leads. Heaven knew they were generating enough unfiled reports.

On impulse, Molly stopped at the personnel office as she passed it. The woman behind the counter there was new. Molly didn’t know her but something about the way she cracked her gum and pounded at her computer keys told her that she had handled her fair share of city records over the years.

“Whatcha need, hon?” the woman asked without looking up. She wore a red beehive hairdo that seemed in danger of toppling over.

“Shift records.” She still wanted to know who had been on the holding cell desk the day Ed Bancroft had been brought in.

The woman finally lifted her gaze from the keyboard. “Sorry. They’re not available to civilians, at least not without a subpoena and a corresponding act of God.”

Molly found herself laughing. “That’s good to know. I’m a police officer.” She could understand the woman’s caution. She wasn’t in uniform.

The clerk cracked her gum. “You’ll still need a subpoena and a load of prayer, honey.”

“Are you serious?”

“As a hospital stay,” the woman agreed. She finally got up and came to the counter. “I’m Evie Castelano.”

She held out her hand. Molly shook it. “I’m Molly French. I’m just trying to find out which of us was working the holding-cell area on a certain day about a week or so ago.”

Evie cocked her head. The bright-red beehive tilted. Molly wondered for a moment if it was going to flop right over. “Well, for that you’d need clearance from your immediate supervisor and IAD.”

Molly blew out her breath. “Wow. You run a tight ship.”

“Not me, honey. The Mission Creek brass. I never worked a place this tight, to tell you the truth. And I’ve worked in a few, just never in the grand state of Texas before now.”

Molly shot another question off the top of her head. “What about the bombing task force? Do they get access?”

Evie looked surprised. “Yeah. Actually, they do.”

Molly grinned. “Well, I’m on it.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” Evie grabbed a black spiral bound notebook from under the counter. “Molly French, you said? I’m still going to need some ID.”

“Will a driver’s license do?”

“Works for me,” Evie said cheerfully, then she frowned. “Except you’re not on the list. How do you spell your last name? Like the foreign language?”

“That’s right. I just got the appointment late on Sunday.”

“Paperwork must not have caught up yet, then. Sorry.”

Surprise, surprise. Molly set her teeth. A lot of her paperwork wasn’t catching up to where it was supposed to be, she thought, including notification of meetings. “I don’t believe this.”

Evie looked at her sympathetically. “Get me some kind of clearance from Chief Stone, and I’ll show you whatever you want to know.”

“Thanks, Evie.” Molly turned away. Damn it. It would probably take her five more memos to get Stone to even consider another request from her.

Now what? she wondered, leaving personnel and heading outside to her car. How was she supposed to crack this case if she couldn’t get access to the information she needed? She wanted more than the shift records from that day, she realized. Who had Bancroft and Malloy been friendly with? Wouldn’t bad cops tend to stick together, especially if they were working for the same mad bomber? She wanted a list of current partnerships as well.

“I’ve got a better chance of meeting the president.” A woman she passed in the corridor hesitated and looked at her oddly. “Just talking to myself,” Molly explained.

The woman smiled. “You know what they say. If you don’t get answers…”

She could use a few answers right now, Molly thought, even if they were of her own device.

She was back in her car, hunting down a parking space at the rec center, before she realized that she was a full two hours earlier than usual. But why not? Danny had more or less appointed her to raise donations for his team. She didn’t mind doing all that, but she didn’t want it to cut into her regular time with the kids. She’d worked hard over the past two years to gain their trust. If she broke her routine now, they might think that she had abandoned them. She could invest a couple of hours on the telephone in Ron’s office, then she could spend her usual time schmoozing with the kids until three-thirty or so.

She parked three blocks away and stopped at a convenience store as she passed it to buy herself some lunch. Then she trudged on, chewing a hot dog and thinking. She considered having Joe Gannon take the No Parking sign down again, but Danny lived at the center. The minute that space in front of the building was available, he’d move his car right back there. One way or the other, Molly knew she wasn’t likely to park there again in her lifetime.

Danny’s voice hit her, ringing off the gym rafters, as soon as she stepped inside the vestibule. Molly leaned against the double doors to push one open a crack. She peeked in.

Gym shorts. He was wearing gym shorts again today. Want me to kiss you now? Her heart jittered and she took a small, involuntary step forward.

“This is called three-on-three pass/cut,” he told the kids. All the regulars were there—Lester, Fisk, Jerome, Cia and Anita. Bobby J. was missing. She wondered where he was today.

“You, Lester! Catch!” Danny shot the ball to him. “Take it out of bounds. I want you to inbound to Cia and Jerome. Fisk and Anita are going to try to deny you.”

Lester planted his hands on his hips as the ball bounced right past him. He made no move to catch it. “Man, this is so stupid.” He spouted a good line of swearing.

“Not in my gym.” Danny’s voice lowered by five or six dangerous, significant notches.

“What did you say, man?” Lester came back with his best belligerent tone.

“I said no foul language in my gym. If you don’t like the rule, then leave.”

“I leave, then you don’t have five kids. Basketball needs five players.” Lester seemed proud of himself for figuring this out. Molly could tell by the way he rocked back on his heels.

“Basketball needs a minimum of ten,” Danny corrected. “Five offensive, five defensive players. This particular drill really needs six. So no matter how you look at it, I don’t have enough. I’m not going to miss one less.”

Lester’s jaw set and his eyes clouded over. He turned away and started to leave the court.

“By the way,” Danny called after him. “Leave the gym shoes at the door.”

Lester turned back to him. “You’re kidding me, right?”

“You want to try me?” Then Danny’s gaze moved and he caught sight of her in the door. “Just what I need. More trouble.”

Molly stepped into the gym. “Hey, champ, you’re the one who said he needed donations.”

“The office is that way.” He pointed over her shoulder. “The phone’s in there. And you’re early. You never get here this early.”

It pleased her more than she cared to admit that he’d noticed. “I was having such a horrible day, I thought I’d just contribute to it and make it as bad as it can be. Crossing paths with you came to mind.”

“Try calling all the Carsons and Wainwrights then, to scare up a hundred bucks a pair for basketball shoes. That ought to help your mood.”

Molly felt a corner of her mouth try to pull into a smile. She started to step back through the doorway, then Anita’s voice stopped her.

“Hey, wait, Coach said he needed six!”

Molly frowned at the teenager. Why had she never noticed before that the girl had a wicked grin? “What? And why aren’t any of you guys in school instead of here?”

“Staff development day. Coach just said we need six for this drill,” Anita repeated. “We got five. Plant it, Lester, you ain’t going nowhere ’cause you’re not going to lose those shoes. Coach is teaching us, Molly, so he’s got to give the directions. That means you need to play.”

“She doesn’t know how to play,” Danny argued quickly.

“Well, neither do we, right?” Anita asked. “That’s why you’re teaching us.”

Danny opened his mouth and closed it again. “We need money more. I can work this drill with five of you.”

In response to that, Molly shrugged her oversize purse from her shoulder. It dropped onto the floor in the doorway with a thud. He wanted to shoo her off, did he? She headed toward him.

“Get those high-heeled boots off my gym floor,” he warned.

“No problem.” She sat suddenly where she stood and unzipped them. Then she stood again and took them to the edge of the court where she dropped them. “Socks okay with you? I mean, they won’t offend your floor or anything like that, will they?”

“You offend me,” Danny grated.

“What? What was that? Sorry, I didn’t catch you.”

She was still coming straight at him, Danny thought, and there was something of the devil in her green eyes now. That worried him.

Two could play this game, Molly thought. He thought he shook her up. Well, they would just see about that.

She had never backed down from a fight in her life.

She stopped toe-to-toe with him and was immensely proud of herself when she saw something like panic in his eyes. They moved away from her, then back, then away again. “Want me to kiss you now?” she purred.

Every ounce of blood in his body did a dive. As hot as lightning, it aimed for the core of him. “Okay, so maybe that wasn’t my best-thought-out provocation.”

“Provocation,” she repeated, as though tasting the word. “Ooh, big words like that just turn me on.”

Danny lost the ball. It dropped from his hands, hit the floor and rolled off. He grabbed her by both elbows and fairly lifted her off her toes before he realized what he was doing. He’d been prepared for anything today except for her turning this around on him.

Worse yet, he liked it.

“Damn it, if you send these kids running out of here again today with your antics, I’ll make you regret it.”

“Oops. No swearing in Coach’s gym.”

He let her go. Fast. Before the urge not to became too much for him.

He should have gone out last night, Danny thought. Should have found an available woman and taken the edge off. Why hadn’t he? He couldn’t remember. He put his mind back to the business of basketball.

“Why are all of you just standing there?” he demanded of the kids. “I thought I told you to take position.” They scurried into place.

“Where do you want me to go?” Molly asked.

He smiled quickly—like a fox might, she thought. “Don’t tempt me with a question like that.”

“Okay, try this one,” she said sweetly. “What are you trying to achieve with this drill?”

“You heard me earlier. You were eavesdropping in the door.”

“Expound then.”

“Ooh. Big word. Turns me on.”

It stopped her dead in her tracks. Danny smiled fully this time. Then he came to his senses.

What the hell were they doing here? Best to call it quits right now, he thought, before it got out of hand. The word play was just too much fun. And it had a lot of potential for leading somewhere neither of them wanted to go.

“You’re on defense,” he told her. “Go stand over there. Leave me alone.”

“That means I’m one of the ones…how did you put it? Denying Cia and Jerome?”

“And me.”

“You’re not playing. You’re coaching.”

“Depends on which game you’re talking about. Do you need a coach, Molly?”

Her knees went a little unsteady. Never in her life had she had unsteady knees. And for the life of her, Molly couldn’t come up with a comeback.

“Cat got your tongue?” he asked, giving her that slow, sly grin again.

Her brain jolted back. She opened her mouth and flicked it at him. “Want to check and see?”

Then she saw his eyes change and everything inside her went still. “Molly, this is no good.”

She knew that. She let out her breath. What was she doing, playing games with him like this? Was she crazy? It was just that…no one had ever engaged her like this before. For whole moments she didn’t care who or what he was. All she knew was that he came back at her, word for word and barb for barb.

He took a step toward her. “Listen to me. We’ve got to stop this.”

“Consider it stopped.”

“Right,” he said quietly.

“Good. Go teach basketball,” she advised.

“I will.”

Except there were no kids left. Sometime during their interchange, they had all vanished out the door again.

“I guess I’ll just go call the Carsons and Wainwrights,” she said quickly and beat a hasty retreat.

“For what? What? I need ten kids for a team, damn it! If I don’t have kids, I don’t need money! You chased them off again!”

He was genuinely angry. Before she knew she was going to do it, Molly came back and put her hand on his arm. She noticed that it took him a whole three or four seconds before he pulled away as though she had scalded him.

“Danny, they’ll come back. They always do. Every day. They have nowhere else to go.”

“What about Bobby J.?” he asked suddenly.

Molly tucked her suddenly free hands under her arms. “So you noticed him.”

“It would be like overlooking a ghost rattling chains in your attic. He’s spooky.”

“He’s just starting to talk to me. I’m working on it. But so far, I don’t really know what his story is, other than the fact that he’s got three younger sisters, a mother who’s drunk a lot and they all live over in the south-side projects. Also, he’s been arrested three times and he’s only fifteen.”

“For drugs? I saw him talking to an older guy outside the bank earlier. It looked like they were exchanging something.”

Molly winced. “Two of his arrests were for possession. The last charge was dropped on a technicality. The usual police procedural goof.”

“It doesn’t sound like your talking is doing him any good, then.”

Molly bristled. “That’s what I do here. I talk, you coach. I buy condoms and pregnancy tests and—”

“For who?” he interrupted.

Molly caught her tongue quickly. “Never mind. It was in confidence. I can’t tell you.”

“Why not? We’re on the same side here.”

“Are we?” And something in her heart wanted to hurt because she knew they weren’t, not really. He might have turned on the mob and he might want to help these kids stay straight and get out, but the plain truth was that their delinquency sprees could not possibly horrify him the way they did her. Because he’d been a criminal himself.

Molly changed the subject. “What was the purpose of that drill you were trying to pull off a little while ago?” She watched him frown at her. “Three-on-three pass/cut,” she clarified. “Isn’t that what you called it? That wasn’t in my book.”

“Which you left here yesterday,” he pointed out. It was an inane comment and it took them a little too close to ground they didn’t want to cover.

“I don’t want to talk about yesterday. We’re not going to tease like that anymore.” But her mind spun back there, anyway. What if he had kissed her? What would she have done?

Danny seemed to take a deep breath. Basketball, he reminded himself. “In the long run, it’ll teach the kids to start moving and dribbling the moment the ball hits their hands.” When she looked at him blankly, he added, “You were asking me about the drill.”

“You really know this basketball stuff, don’t you?”

“I used to. But then I went for more immediate gratification.”

That quickly, she thought, that simply, a word or two could make a memory come back. She’d blown off immediate gratification in her own youth…and Mickey had died. “Good for you,” she said shortly, turning away.

“Now I know I said nothing right then to tick you off.”

“Shows how little you know me.”

He’d barely scratched the surface of her, he thought. And that was the way it was going to stay.

But as he watched her go, he wondered what it was that he’d just said that had made pain move through her eyes. There were layers there, interesting layers to pretty Molly French, all the way from that glib little tongue of hers to the darkness behind her eyes that spoke of too much pain.

He didn’t want her to have layers, didn’t want to be intrigued, so he let her go. It was best for both of them, he thought. No matter how much she intrigued him. She was still a cop.

He went to retrieve the basketball as the double doors swished shut behind her. He shot it viciously through the hoop. It was for the best, he told himself. He gathered up the basketball and headed for the door to his apartment upstairs, then he thought he heard movement in the back room. He turned that way and found Plank Hawkins moving industriously around the kitchen.

“Hey, what’s going on?” Danny asked, snagging a carrot from the butcher-block table. He was starving.

“Sure, help yourself,” the old man grumbled, then he gave him a nearly toothless grin. “Used to cook for Archy Wainwright’s boys. I ever tell you that? I’m used to folks snitching my food. Those guys got no civilization in them.”

Danny was reasonably sure he had never talked to the guy before, about the Wainwrights or anything else for that matter. He took another carrot. “How come you’re here now?”

“Got my butt fired. Went to jail. Said I was rustling steers.”

Danny’s brows climbed. Interesting. “Did you?”

The cowboy cackled. “I ain’t telling.”

“Don’t blame you.” He started to leave, then he looked back. “How long have you been out now?”

“Oh, ’bout twenty years or more. Tell you what you need to do tonight, boy. You need to go out and find yourself a woman.”

“You don’t say.”

“Know where you been. Ron told me. And I know where you ain’t been yet—in some lady’s bed.”

Danny couldn’t help himself. He laughed. He liked this guy. “How do you know that?”

“’Cause you been aiming a little too hard at our Molly. You mess with her, boy, I gotta hurt you.”

The old man was maybe five-foot-nine, 140 pounds. Danny wasn’t worried. But he was alarmed by the observation. “I’m not aiming at her.”

“You want to make damn sure it ain’t just six years’ worth of randy you’re feeling there, boy. So go take the edge off with someone else first.”

“We’ll see.” Danny looked at the butcher-block table again, but something in his chest moved in a shifting, uncomfortable way. The cowboy might have a point. He was just feeling six years’ worth of randy, nothing more. “Are we having company tonight?” he asked him to change the subject.

“Yessiree, we are. Men from the shelter down the street. Welcome to join us, if you want. Think you’d be better off with a woman, though.”

“Me, too.” Danny laughed again.

He went upstairs and dropped the basketball on his living room/kitchen floor and grabbed the phone book from the top of the refrigerator. Then he sat on the sofa and reached for the telephone to find out if any local watering holes had live entertainment tonight.

He didn’t have a private line. His phone was the center’s phone, and he remembered that there was an extension downstairs in Ron’s office. Molly’s voice came through the line, soft and convincing. And cunning, he thought. He definitely heard cunning in there underneath the sugar. She could probably talk a monk into doing a drunk tango with her, he thought.

“Come on,” she said. “Word has it that you’d give five hundred bucks for the right shade of lipstick.”

Danny cracked up. Luckily, a lilting laugh from the other party on the line covered the sound.

“I’ve been known to,” the woman on the other end of the line agreed unabashedly.

“I’m asking you for half that,” Molly said. “Your dad won’t talk to me, so I’m calling you.”

Definitely a Carson or a Wainwright, Danny decided. She was a little too plucky to be any of the Wainwrights he knew of, so he decided it might be Fiona Carson. And he continued to listen without shame.

“Do I get my name anywhere for this?” the woman asked.

“I’ll emblazon it on the roof in lights if you’ll pay the electric bill, too,” Molly offered.

Danny almost laughed aloud again, but he choked on the reflex this time.

“What was that?” the other woman asked.

“That was our coach,” Molly said. “He’s listening in upstairs. But don’t worry, I’ll see to it that not a dime of your money goes to his paycheck.”

Danny raised a brow.

“Is he cute?”

“Well…he thinks he’s God’s gift to women.”

He opened his mouth to argue, then he snapped it shut again.

“I like that type,” the woman said, sounding delighted. “For a shot at him, I’ll give you five hundred. I’ll just get the money back from Dad, anyway.”

“Thanks. Let me give you the address.”

She’d gotten five hundred dollars in one call. Danny hung up the phone gently, feeling mildly stunned.

She was good. But then, he was coming to know that.

By 11:30 that night, Danny had had his fill of women. This was what he had hungered for, craved, lusted after for six long years? He stood at the bar in the Saddlebag—Mission Creek’s answer to nightlife for those who weren’t members of the country club or who wanted to see how the other half lived. He scowled around at the crowd.

A woman who reminded him a great deal of Cia left the pool table at the back of the bar and bore down on him. She didn’t wear leather, but she had on a lot of animal skin. Her skirt inched provocatively up her long, really incredible legs with every stride she took. He’d seen bras that had more fabric to them than whatever she wore on top.

She stopped in front of him and ran a manicured finger across his chest. “Hi, there, cowboy. That scary look on your face doesn’t bother me at all.”

“It should,” he murmured.

“What?” She frowned, obviously not anticipating the response.

Whatever else could be said for Molly, Danny thought, at least she got his retorts. And she reacted. Damn, did she react.

“Buy me a drink, anyway,” the woman cooed.

“Well, here’s the thing.” Danny leaned an elbow back on the bar. “I’m not drinking.”

“I am.” She smiled. The reflex reminded him of a shark. “Help me along with a beer or two and I’ll bet you could have me in bed before you know it.” She leaned closer to him, enough for him to catch a great deal of beer already on her breath.

“But do I really want to spend that kind of money if that’s the only way I can get you there?”

Her eyes narrowed as she apparently tried to decide if she was angry or just confused.

“I like my women sober…and to be just a little bit of a challenge. It adds spice.” Danny downed the last of his soft drink. “And with all due respect, ma’am, you’re tipsy and too easy.”

She’d had enough. Her eyes glinted. “What’s wrong with you, anyway?”

“So much I’d probably bore you with the recital.” Danny turned away. What had happened to women while he had been in jail? He thought maybe they’d started crossbreeding them with piranhas. He gave a gusty sigh and headed out the door.

The no-parking sign was still in front of the rec center when he returned there just before midnight, and it ballooned his blood pressure all over again. That was a cop for you, he thought. High-handed, autocratic, arrogant. He parked down the block and moved a couple of trash cans into the street in front of and behind his Dodge. It wouldn’t do any good but it made him feel better. She’d just move them tomorrow—or the trash collectors or owners would—but with any luck they’d still be there when she arrived at the center. She’d know what he thought about this parking business.

He headed inside, pleased with himself, then he realized he was grinning for the first time all night. Because of thoughts of Molly French. “Damn her.”

He was relaxed in his lumpy sofa bed, alone after all and nearly asleep, when his eyes flew back open. Thump-THUMP-thump. Th-th-th-thump-THUMP. Someone was downstairs playing basketball in the middle of the night. Someone who couldn’t dribble.

Danny flung himself out of bed, made it to the stairs, then looked down at himself. Not cool to go stalking into the gym in boxer shorts.

He was pretty sure there was a law against that, too. He backtracked for a pair of sweats and glanced at the clock beside his sofa-turned-bed. It was 12:43. Either there was a kid down there who felt really strongly about the game or…He trotted down the steps to the lower gym door. It was her.

She looked like some kind of cross between a ballerina and Magic Johnson. He figured she wanted to be Magic Johnson but if she had suddenly spun into a pirouette, it wouldn’t have surprised him. She had that kind of grace…even if she couldn’t hit the net to save her life. He watched her try once, twice, three times, to no avail.

And what was she wearing this time?

He recognized the trousers quickly enough—cop uniform—and the sight of them chilled his blood. But then his gaze traveled upward to what appeared to be some kind of lavender bra.

Her cop shirt was tossed on the floor in one corner of the court. Most of the lights were out in the gym, but the few that remained had her dancing in and out of shadows, all those pretty girl-muscles fluid and stretching. She did a dance step here, a turn there…then there was another missed basket.

“Hey.” Danny stepped through the door.

He had the satisfaction of startling her. She gave a small, aborted scream as the basketball thudded to the floor a good six inches from the hoop.

“I’m practicing.” She pressed a hand to the freckles on her chest. “So I can help out with your drills when you have less than six kids. Don’t you ever sleep?”

“Hard to do when someone is making a racket down here.”

“I was being quiet!”

Danny walked onto the court. “You know, not even I think basketball is so important that I’d shoot hoops in the middle of the night, and I’m a pretty big fan.”

As he approached, Molly backpedaled. She reached her shirt and snatched it up off the gym floor, but then she only used it to wipe her brow. “You’re superjock. You don’t have to practice.”

“That’s right, but it’s beside the point.”

She grinned fast. Then she pursed her lips together. “Well, your ego is healthy, at any rate.”

“Do I have to tell you what else is healthy so you’ll get rattled and run out of my gym again so I can get some sleep?” Then it hit him—like a thunderbolt—that he had enjoyed himself more in the last two minutes than in the entire evening he’d spent at the Saddlebag warding off women he didn’t need to keep clear of.

He wasn’t going to entertain that insidious thought, Danny decided, not even for a moment.

“What?” she asked at his expression. “Is something wrong?”

“You woke me up. I’m cranky. Give me that ball. I’ll put it back where it belongs.”

He watched that chin of hers come up, and it irritated him. The way she did that really got to him. She was so sure of herself and of her authority. Her femininity. Then it got worse. She planted her hands on those hips again, the basketball tucked under one arm.

“Nope,” she said calmly.

Danny lunged at her suddenly. He punched the ball so that it shot out from beneath her arm. Then he jogged after it and swiped it up, dancing out of reach. “You were saying?”

“That you’re an arrogant, know-it-all, high-handed male.” She turned to glare at him.

“You got that last part right.” He grinned. “Wanna play?”

She crossed her arms coolly over her breasts, but he heard her catch her breath. “No.”

“Ah, come on. Please.”

“You’re just going to try to make me look ungainly and stupid.”

“Honey, those are the last things you are.”

She gave him a bemused, startled half smile. He had the satisfaction of watching her hand flutter up to her throat then drop again. Her gaze cut to the side, then back to him. He was rattling her again. But this time something skittered inside him in response.

That bothered him, too, so he shot the ball to her, hard and fast. He gave it the best of himself and was surprised when she caught it. She had good reflexes.

Then again, she was a cop. He was pretty sure they trained them for that.

“Okay, hotshot, you’re on,” she said from between clenched teeth.

He wasn’t sure what she thought she was doing, but he liked it. She rushed at him, dead on. At the last second she jogged to her left and caught him off guard. He shot one arm out, trying to snag her around the waist but she spun. And then damned if she didn’t shoot and finally make a basket.

“Where’d you learn that?” he demanded.

“My basketball book. Molly, two, superjock…zero.”

“You were right underneath the basket. How hard is that?”

“Hold on, I’ll show you again.”

She dove for the ball. He did, too. Their shoulders connected, and she went sprawling. Danny was instantly contrite. He’d never hurt a woman in his life. “Hey, are you all right?” He gave her a hand to help her sit up.

She used his moment of discomfiture to twist away, grab the ball with both hands and leap back to her feet. She shot another basket. “Oh, I love it, I love it!” She laughed. “Four-nothing.”

“Don’t let it go to your head.” The ball bounced once beneath the net and he snagged it. He dribbled to midcourt and went to his toes, lofting the ball. It made the net. “Four-three.”

“Where do you get three from? Are you cheating?”

“That’s a three-point throw from way back here. It’s harder to do.”

“The hell it is. Baskets are two points.”

“Not always.” He jogged for the ball again, grabbed it and made another basket from beneath the net. “Oh, look at that. The arrogant, know-it-all, high-handed male takes the lead. You’re down five-four, honey.”

“You’re making these rules up as we go along!”

“I am not. Go read your book again.” He pulled off a rim shot. “Seven-four. You’re going down.”

“Like bloody hell I am.” She rushed at him again.

Her eyes were emerald fire, he thought, catching the dim light. That froze him for a second and she hit him with both palms in the upper chest. When he dropped the ball in surprise, she grabbed it on its first rebound. “That’s a foul,” he said, catching his breath back, “but I’ll beat you, anyway.”

He defended her from behind, one arm loose around each of her shoulders, intent on smacking the basketball free the second it came back up into her hands. Then he caught her scent.

He wouldn’t have taken her for the spicy type—would have thought she’d go for something more floral and prissy given the way she blushed—but that wasn’t what lifted from her skin. It was cinnamon and something hot and unfettered. It damned near drove him to his knees.

Molly made another basket. “Seven-five. By your rules. I can win that way, too.”

She went for the basketball again. Okay, Danny thought. No more rules. He ran after her and as soon as she picked it up, he wrapped both arms around her from behind again. He caught the quick little intake of her breath as their skin connected. And realized he couldn’t stay close to her because in another second she’d feel what she did to him, right there against the back of those pressed, starched cop pants. He shot the ball out of her hands with his fist, then their feet got tangled up. They went down together this time.

What had he told Cia? Boys think basketball is a contact sport. This boy sure did, Danny thought.

She stared up at him as he lay half on top of her. The warmth of her skin against his hit him like a punch. Then she licked her lips, a quick little flick of her tongue. He felt something start to unravel inside him.

“Move,” she said hoarsely. “This isn’t in the rules.”

“Yeah, but I was thinking that it raises all sorts of interesting possibilities for new ones.”

“You wouldn’t.” Her eyes went straight to his mouth.

“Correction,” he murmured. “I shouldn’t. But damned if I’m not thinking about it.”

He watched her throat move as she swallowed deep and hard. “I don’t like you.”

“I don’t think much of you, either.” And that, he thought, was maybe the first outright lie he’d told her. “But you feel very, very good beneath me.” He had to move, Danny thought. Now.

If he didn’t, she’d probably punch him again. Instead he felt her hands move, sliding tentatively up his chest.

Danny slid off her fast.

He wondered if that was disappointment that skittered across her features, over those delicate cheekbones and the spattering of freckles on her nose. He wondered if that was hurt that made her green eyes go darker for a second or if maybe it was just a trick of the light. He sat up and took a deep breath, driving both hands into his hair. He was still about as turned on as he had been in…well, a long time. Something told him it went back even further than six years.

“You’ve really got a thing about winning, don’t you?” he muttered, just to change the subject, to drag it back to somewhere safe.

Molly sat up, as well, shoving chocolate curls out of her eyes. “Yes.”

Her honesty surprised him. “Is that what this is all about?” When something in her eyes flared, he waved a hand at the hoop. “I meant the basketball stuff, practicing in the middle of the night, not us.”

“There isn’t an us. We agreed on that,” she said quickly.

“We agreed we weren’t going to do anything about it. I keep thinking about changing my mind.”

Her breath fell short again. He heard her pulling for it. He couldn’t look at her, because if those breasts were rising and falling with the effort of it, he didn’t want to know. Danny cut his gaze to the far basket. “Don’t do that,” he said finally.

“What?”

He sucked in breath the way she had just done. “That.”

“You imagined it.”

“Not likely.” Safe subject, he thought. He had to find a safe harbor. Hadn’t he had one just a minute ago? “Why do you always have to win?”

“Because when I lose, I lose big-time. So I just don’t risk it anymore.”

Another honest answer—it had the almost metallic ring of baldness to it, he thought. It made him look at her again. They were sitting side by side now, both of their knees drawn up and the basketball was…well, he didn’t know where it had gone to. “What do you mean?”

He watched her shrug and for the first time one of her movements seemed a little brittle. “I promised myself a long time ago that I was going to go at everything full throttle from then on.”

“Why?”

“Because going at things in a nice, deliberate, polite, thought-out way just…just destroys people sometimes.”

He was confused, but Danny knew that what he was watching was a window opening on her soul. “What people? You seem pretty healthy to me.”

“I am. But my brother is dead.”

Molly felt shock punch through her when she heard her own words. No one in Mission Creek knew about Mickey. No one. But she shoved hair out of her eyes again and heard herself keep talking. “I was going to be a lawyer, you know. I had it all planned out, step by step, how I was going to drag my mom and my little brother out of poverty. My dad was gone. My mother was exhausted by the time I turned thirteen. I figured it was all up to me, so I made this nice, long-term plan. Straight As in high school, a scholarship to college, finally law school. But then something went wrong. On my seventeenth birthday, right before I graduated from high school, Mickey was shot.” She waved a tense hand. “A drug deal had gone bad. They said he was trying to steal the money, but he’d promised me he was going to get out of that scene. I think maybe he was just trying to get free. Anyway, the details don’t matter now. My point is, I should have worked faster. I didn’t help to get him out. I was too busy planning.”

“Well, how the hell could you have moved your family out of that neighborhood when you were only seventeen?” He was angry, Danny realized. Why was he angry with her? Because too much of what she said reminded him of his own youth and the bad choices he had made. He had gone for the quick route out instead of planning, had made his move at sixteen…and it had ended up nearly as disastrous.

She turned her head to look at him, and he prayed that it was anger making her eyes glint. If she cried, it would undo him. “I could have taken an after-school job instead of studying all the time.”

He fought back…this time because he sensed it would make her feel better. “Oh, yeah, that would have worked. Minimum wage wasn’t going to get your brother off the streets, Molly.” He knew. He’d tried that route first…before he’d hooked up with Ricky.

“I never even attempted it, though,” she said. There was a tightness to her tone.

“And now—what? You’re doing penance? Bashing yourself against walls all the time?”

She didn’t take offense. “Most of them fall down when I hit them.”

“They won’t, Molly, not every time.”

“Then I just hit them harder.”

“What if they still stay up?”

“Then I’ll know at least this time I tried.”

She surprised him by standing suddenly. Danny looked up at her, finally understanding. “That’s why you volunteer here, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” She reached for her shirt again and shrugged back into it.

“You’re going to save all of Mission Creek’s Mickeys.”

“I’m going to give it my best shot.” She started to button her shirt, then she gave up because her fingers seemed unsteady. “I give these kids support, funds, whatever I can. It’s more important than basketball, Danny.”

He thought about it. “If you believed that, you wouldn’t have sweet-talked Fiona Carson into donating five hundred dollars.”

She reached down to give him a hand up. “If it helps them somehow, I’m willing to give it a shot. I just have my doubts.”

He took her hand. Her fingers were warm, small, as delicate as her cheekbones and the freckles on her chest. That surprised him. He’d never thought of her as fragile.

Then she let his hand go and flipped her hair out from under her collar. “Good night.”

Before he could get his voice back, she was already strolling for the door, hips moving nicely.

“Are we friends now?” he called after her.

She turned to walk backward so she could look at him. “I don’t think so. We’re worlds apart. But maybe we could be civil enemies.”

He would accept that. For now. Danny watched her go.

The trouble was, there was a whole lot more going on here than friendship. There were undercurrents that could have rocked the Titanic.

Chapter 5

When Danny went outside the next morning, he found the trash cans planted squarely on the hood and the trunk of his car. He stared at them for a long time before he realized he was grinning. “Point to French.”

He took the trash cans off his car and headed into town. It was Friday—either the last day of his life or his coup de grace. Exactly which, remained to be seen. His smile faded. His gut went tight, and impatience started to hum in his blood.

One thing was a given. He couldn’t show up at the Lone Star Country Club to meet Ricky Mercado in gym clothes. Today’s lunch was going to necessitate dipping into what remained of his financial base. He had to play the part, had to resemble his old self—cocky and self-assured—and that would require a smooth wardrobe. He’d need a steady hand and nerves of steel.

The clothier he’d once visited with lavish regularity was—not surprisingly—still in business. The guy enjoyed the support of the Wainwrights, the Carsons, the Mercados—all of Mission Creek’s wealthiest citizens. Six years ago Danny had been one of them. Now Trevor Edmunson’s prices were going to hurt.

No help for it, Danny thought, leaving the store fifteen hundred dollars and two hours later. It put him in a foul mood until he returned to the rec center and saw a black Camaro in the parking space he’d vacated.

Anyone could have come along and tucked into his spot in the time he’d been gone, but he knew it wasn’t just anyone. It was Molly. There was something about the car that reminded him of her. It was sleek and sporty, somehow as feminine as it was powerful. Danny found himself grinning again as he went in search of another parking space. He found one two blocks away and around the corner and had to walk back to the center.

She was in the office with the door open when he passed through the vestibule. He paused to watch her. Her curls were tamed into a straight look that he didn’t like half so much, but judging from the way she kept driving her fingers into it, he couldn’t imagine the effect would last long. She was gnawing away on the eraser end of a pencil. She started to reach blindly for the phone—her eyes were still on a sheet of paper on the desk in front of her—then she sensed his presence. She looked up.

A smile that would have brightened the shabby office almost got away from her. Danny found himself wishing she’d let it go. There weren’t many people who were that glad to see him anymore.

“Parking’s a bitch these days, isn’t it?” she murmured.

Damned if he was going to laugh. “I thought we were going to be friends now.”

“Uh-uh. You said that, I didn’t.” She gave a quick little shake of her head and one lock of hair sprang into a curl. “Civil enemies is the way I believe we left it.”

“Civil enemies don’t put trash cans on each other’s cars.”

“Hey, I didn’t empty them on it, did I?”

A bark of a laugh escaped him.

He’d tried to forget a lot of what she’d told him last night about her childhood. He didn’t want her to have come from the same kind of streets he had. But then she flipped out a comment like that and he couldn’t help but remember how it had been before the poverty had gotten painfully oppressive, before it had started sucking the air right out of life, before it had become something that had to be escaped at any cost. Back in those days he had probably emptied a few trash cans of his own. Old McGlinchey’s front yard came to mind—he’d been the guy on the corner who had hated kids so much he had tried to booby-trap his sidewalk against them.

Oddly, the memory made him feel good. Then he noticed that Molly’s gaze had fixed on the wardrobe bag he held.

“Edmunson’s,” she read aloud. “How can you afford Edmunson’s?”

The suspicion in her eyes hurt more than he would have expected. “I robbed a bank.” Danny moved for the double doors into the gym. He heard her chair scrape back.

“Damn it, Danny, stop!”

“No.” He headed for the stairs to his apartment.

“It was a simple, innocent question!”

“I didn’t like it.” Something hot bubbled up in his blood. Temper. He finally stopped halfway across the gym to look back at her. “Tell me something, Officer. If you didn’t know what you know about me, would you have asked that question?”

“If I knew you worked here? Yes! Ron can’t afford to pay you enough for Edmunson’s!”

He chewed on that for a moment. It was reasonable. He nodded, breathing carefully in an effort to let the anger go. “Okay.” He started to turn away again.

She had never been able to hold her tongue, Molly thought. Its tendency to get away from her was as much a part of her as her freckles and her green eyes. She took off after him again. “So where did you get the money for that stuff? And why do you need it?”

“And this would be your business…how?” He kept walking.

“The kids around here aren’t going to be impressed by that kind of wardrobe.”

He jerked back to face her. “I need it for my funeral.”

That stalled her in her tracks. There was just enough of a glint in his eyes to tell her that he might be serious. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t you ever give up?”

“No. It comes from my same ingrained tendency to win all the time.”

“You don’t win all the time. You just endeavor to.”

She shot her brows up deliberately. “Endeavor? Another fancy word.”

“I read a lot in prison. It helped to pass the time.”

“Are we back to that again?”

It made something darken in her eyes, he realized. She really couldn’t accept the fact that he’d done time.

“That’s where the money for the clothes came from, isn’t it?” she asked suddenly. “The convenience store thing.”

The garment bag dropped from his hand. He felt something dangerous fill his head. “They recovered every penny of that money from my apartment. They framed me, remember?”

“It was mob money, then. Somehow.”

“That I just spent on these clothes? Yeah, Molly, it was.”

Her eyes widened—went almost stricken—before she schooled her expression back to passivity and turned away.

He was on her before he knew he was going to do it, jogging back to her, catching her elbow. He spun her around to face him. “Don’t do that to me. Don’t you ever do that again.”

“What?” Her expression was still carefully bland.

“Judge me with your eyes.”

She jerked her arm away. “Hey, it’s your life, your moral code.”

“It was money I put aside a long time ago.” Tiny hot fists started battering the inside of his temples. Damn it, he’d made his decisions and he wasn’t going to apologize for them, especially not to her, not to a cop. Her opinion didn’t matter.

But it did. Somehow it did.

That made him want to hurt her back. “You know, if your own code had been a little less anal, your brother might still be alive.”

It was cruel, inexcusable, and Danny regretted it the moment the words left his mouth. She took a hard step back, her head whipping to the side as though he had actually struck her. The color drained from her face until her freckles stood out. “Damn you,” she whispered.

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you?”

“I shouldn’t have judged.”

“No, you shouldn’t have. You weren’t there. You have no right.”

“Ditto.”

“What?”

“You weren’t there, Molly. You have no right.”

It knocked her legs out from under her. Literally. One minute she was standing, Molly thought, the pain and the guilt snarling inside her, clawing through every part of her. Then her knees folded and she sat. She dropped to the gym floor and pulled them up to her chest, leaning her forehead against them. “Touché,” she said finally when she trusted her voice.

He gave a rough sigh and sat beside her. “You did what you had to do, what you thought was best. So did I.”

Molly looked at him again. She wanted to know, she realized. She needed to know why he’d gotten involved with the mob and how much of his soul it had taken. Was she just searching for some way she could somehow excuse what he had done because she badly needed there to have been mitigating circumstances to his crime? She had actually started to slide her palms up his chest last night, had wanted to kiss him in that moment as much as she had ever wanted anything…and because of that, she couldn’t bear to know that he was not a good man.

“I don’t want to make excuses to you,” he said finally, harshly.

She put a hand to her chest to stop her heart from squeezing. She wanted to tell him he didn’t have to. That she liked him and it didn’t matter. But it wouldn’t have been the truth.

“Damn it,” he continued, “I want you not to need them. Why is that?”

Because something was happening between them, she thought, and it was so much more than taunts and sexual innuendo. But he was so wrong for her, for everything she was. “I…I don’t know.”

Danny rubbed a hand over his jaw. “I could have done two things back then—back when it started. I could have taken your way out—study, a careful, long-term plan—or I could have ended the poverty right there and then. I never had your patience, Molly.”

Hers hadn’t done Mickey any good, she thought.

“I was always big for my age. Strong. I played basketball for my high school team, football in the fall. I could have had a scholarship either way, but I liked basketball for it’s quickness, for that sweet, split-second edge where anything could happen.”

He paused for a long time. Molly waited, wondering if he would go on. Needing him to.

“Ricky came to me one day the summer after I turned sixteen. Ricky Mercado. He was a little older than me, had already been away to the military academy. He was back home on vacation. We knew each other from school—we overlapped for a year or two. I admired the hell out of him, looked up to him. He had all those sharp clothes. That cool car. The life. He had everything I didn’t—a full stomach, cash in his pocket. And I wanted all that.”

“He offered you a job,” Molly guessed.

“His uncle, Carmine, was doing some major shindig out at the country club. All I had to do was hang around in the background of that party, keep an eye on Carmine, make sure he stayed safe. Carmine was going to have enemies at that bash.”

“That sounds innocent enough.” Don’t tell me anymore, please don’t tell me it wasn’t.

Danny pinned her with his eyes. “Molly, I knew what Carmine was. I knew what he did. Ricky and I had few secrets from each other. I took the job regardless—because I was hungry.”

“But you didn’t hurt anybody.”

“I put a man in the hospital that day.”

She felt everything inside her cringe. “But—”

“Someone made a move on Carmine. I was closest to him at the time. I picked the guy up and threw him against one of those stone pillars on the back patio. Knocked him out cold. His skull hit and cracked. Carmine hired me as a regular bodyguard after that.”

“That’s what you did for them? For the family? That’s what you were?”

“Yeah, Molly, that’s what I was. Does that sit well enough for you?” There was a bite to his voice now.

He’d been honest. She’d do it, too. “I’m not sure.”

“He paid me a thousand-dollar bonus for saving his life that afternoon. Do you have any idea how much money that was for me back then? It might as well have been a million. I bought my mother a coat so she wouldn’t have to freeze her way through another cold winter—she didn’t even own one, was too busy trying to make sure that I did. I saved the house for her—the city was going to take it for back taxes, so I put the balance of the money down on that debt. But there was still sixteen thousand or so outstanding, so I went back to Ricky for more.” He scrubbed a hand over his mouth. “Instant gratification. I grabbed it, baby. And I looked the other way from that day on because the money was the most important thing.”

She understood now and it terrified her. “You would have been beside Carmine all that time, part of his…his inner circle. You’d…know things.”

“I know a lot of things. I know so much that now I’m pretty much a marked man since I left their ranks.”

“But they didn’t kill you for it. In the end they were willing to just have you locked up.”

“Ricky interceded. He was the only chance I had.” He watched something bloom in her eyes. She was too smart for her own good, he decided.

“You’re going to meet with him, aren’t you?” she asked. “That’s why you need the clothes. It’s not over. You need him to do it again.”

He didn’t answer, not directly. “And if I fail, then my mother can bury me in that suit.”

Her heart seized so hard, so suddenly, it was a physical pain. “Danny, no.”

“Molly, yes.” He pushed to his feet again. “Happy now?”

“No.”

He glared back at her. “You can’t have more questions. I’ve told you everything that matters.”

“When are you meeting him? Where?”

“Are you going to put on your cop uniform and come watch my back?”

Her chin came up. “Maybe.”

He picked up the garment bag again. “Molly, don’t you get it yet? I don’t want your help. I don’t trust you. You’re a cop.”

She watched him leave, hurting more than she would have thought possible.

Danny pulled into the circular drive of the Lone Star Country Club at ten minutes before one o’clock. That was planned. The impact of seeing the place again was not.

A million mental images flashed through his brain as he tucked the Dodge under the covered portico and got out to gaze at the stately oak trees lining the drive. He remembered gorgeous women gathering out here in sleek, barely-there dresses as the limousines pulled up one by one. He imagined Ricky throwing his dark head back and laughing, clapping him on the shoulder in easy camaraderie. They had enjoyed a lot of parties and extravaganzas here at the country club in those days. There had been fellowship, liquor, women.

“Your keys, sir?”

Danny jolted and glanced at the valet, pulling himself back. “I left them in the car.”

The attendant looked from him to the lemon-yellow Dodge, from the Dodge to Danny. Danny fought an urge to laugh at his expression. A man dressed as well as he currently was driving that heap. No, it didn’t reconcile. He wondered what the guy would have thought if he’d driven up with those trash cans still on his trunk and his hood.

He carried thoughts of Molly inside with him, couldn’t seem to shake the image of her. He had an image of the belligerent Lester, as well. And Cia with her dark, laughing, way-too-wise eyes. Anita with her wishful expressions. Bobby J. always there on the outskirts, watching.

All of them mattered, Danny realized with a jolt. They had become his source of fellowship now. That comforted him somewhat as he strode into the lobby.

Time had stopped here. The original four-story brick clubhouse was the centerpiece of the country club and it was as old as the feud between the Carsons and the Wainwrights who had conceived its every nook and cranny. The lobby was double-storied, vast. It led straight through to the covered patio where he had broken a man’s skull at the age of sixteen. Beyond the patio was a trellised walkway and, he knew, one of those old-fashioned gardens with pretty paths winding through them.

He really didn’t belong here anymore, Danny thought, but the guy at the concierge desk remembered him and stepped quickly around the marbled counter to greet him.

“Mr. Gates. Good to see you again.”

“Wish I could say the same.” But Danny shook the man’s hand as he wondered how much money Molly had raised for his basketball program. He thought about setting her loose in here instead of on the phones. In a sleek, barely there dress.

“Mr. Mercado arrived just a few minutes ago,” the concierge said. “I believe he headed for the café.”

“Had some trouble here lately, did you?”

The man’s face went to stone. “Yes, sir.”

“So who did it? Who blew up the Men’s Grill?”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know the answer to that, sir. No one does.”

“Someone does—whoever lit the fuse.”

The man didn’t reply. Danny left him to take a quick tour through the clubhouse.

The elegant Empire Room wasn’t yet open for business—it served only dinner—so that was safe enough. Danny stepped out onto the patio and walked around to the gardens tucked behind the restaurant. They were deserted. He retraced his steps and followed the trellised walkway to the lawn and the paths behind the Yellow Rose Café. If the family had planted anyone here who planned to take him out, this was probably where they would be waiting.

A young woman and a little girl sat on one of the benches. Had it not been for the presence of the child, Danny might have suspected her. But Carmine valued little ones. Unless he had changed radically in six years, Danny didn’t think he would involve one in this.

He walked all the way around to the stable area and came back past the tennis courts, his back itching right between his shoulder blades. Half of him fully expected a bullet to find him there. But the grounds seemed clean. He returned inside and stuck his nose into the old Men’s Grill area. It was boarded up with plywood. A large single padlock was on the makeshift door there. Danny reached for it and rattled it to make sure it was for real, that there was no one waiting for him behind that door.

“Can I help you, sir?”

The curt voice took him by surprise, and Danny had to fight the urge to react. He looked over his shoulder to find a fireplug of a guy in an ill-fitting suit tagged with a county club employee ID that said Y. Ingram. Danny’s nerves twitched, anyway. Was this it? Here? Now?

“Nope,” he answered, his voice calm.

The man’s face grew florid when he realized that Danny wasn’t going to say anything more. “Can I ask what you’re doing back here? This area is currently off-limits to guests.”

“Well, I can see that.”

Suddenly two security officers appeared behind the squat man. One of them rested his hand lightly on his weapon. Danny felt his heart start hammering. “Hey, easy does it. I’m hardly a threat to national security.”

“I’ll be the judge of that. ID, please.” The first guy held out his hand.

ID? Danny reached for his wallet.

The bullish guy inspected his driver’s licence and handed it back. “You shouldn’t be back here, Mr. Gates. I’ll have one of my men show you to whatever area you were looking for.”

“I know where I’m going.” Danny stepped past them. No one tried to block his way but he felt their gazes on his back as he returned to the lobby. A little touchy, he thought.

The Yellow Rose Café was nestled prettily beside the patio. Ricky was waiting for him at a table in a far corner where he could keep his back to the wall and his eyes on the door. Danny would have chosen the same table himself. Old habits—like showing up early to case the joint—just died hard.

He headed straight for his friend, feeling too many eyes upon him. He recognized Judge Bridges at a center table; his rheumy blue eyes followed Danny’s every move. One of the Carson twins—either Cara or Fiona—was lunching with her father. She looked up when Danny passed and lifted an eyebrow. Something in her speculative gaze told him she was Fiona, the generous contributor of her father’s five hundred dollars.

Then Danny almost missed a step, nearly blew his cool. Two tables away from Ricky, he saw Tyler Murdoch and Spence Harrison, the district attorney who had helped to put him away with no questions asked. Harrison was too much the politician to show any expression when he recognized Danny, but then his gaze flicked to Ricky and his jaw hardened. So, Danny thought, there was still some bad blood there. Hatred was another habit that died hard.

He pulled out a chair and sat at the yellow-ginghamed table that Ricky had chosen. “So sunny. So bright. Your taste has changed, pal.”

Ricky’s dark eyes grinned. He sat back negligently in his chair, seeming relaxed, but his gaze kept slowly sweeping the room. “They stuck a temporary grill out there behind the rubble of the old one,” he said, “but it still smells like smoke over there. Kind of tough on the appetite.”

Judging by the crowd in the Café, a lot of people agreed with him. “When are they going to rebuild?”

Ricky shrugged because it didn’t matter and they both knew it. “I heard they contracted Joe Turner to redesign it before this year’s Debutante Ball, but so far the cops haven’t released the area back to the club. Why? Are you going to grab some sweet young thing and dance all night at the ball now that you’ve cleaned up your act and gone straight?”

“Could be.” Danny wouldn’t justify the question with more of an answer than that.

Ricky eyed his Armani suit. “Looks like you tucked some funds aside before they nailed you.”

“Among other things.” There, Danny thought, it was out, on the table, the real reason for their reunion.

Something in Ricky’s eyes flared, then he waved down their waitress and ordered a beer. He looked questioningly at Danny when he remained silent. “You’re not going to have one?”

“With the D.A. sitting right over there? It’s against the terms of my probation. Thanks for that. I’ll have an iced tea,” he told the woman.

Ricky ignored the barb and ordered the roast beef. Danny decided on the sole. He was planning on sticking Ricky with the check. The waitress retreated.

“There’s no beer in the afterlife, either, not that I’ve heard,” Ricky said finally.

Danny nodded, conceding the point. “True enough.”

“Carmine never thought you were going to squeal. If he had, I wouldn’t have been able to keep you alive. It was more than that, and you know it.”

It had been a matter of betrayal, Danny thought. Carmine had loved him like a son. When he’d broken rank—effectively passing judgment on the old man’s sins—Carmine had been hurt enough to fight back. And he had done it with a vengeance.

“So how heartbroken is your uncle these days?” he asked. It was time to find out what he was up against.

“Nothing’s changed,” Ricky answered.

Danny felt something in the area of his heart try to cramp. It was time for some hardball. “Okay then, here’s how we’re going to handle this.”

Ricky’s beer came. He took a long swallow. “Meeting today gave you some time to cover yourself, didn’t it?”

“It did.” And they’d both known it would, during that phone call on Monday.

“So what did you do?” Ricky asked.

“I put everything in writing the way I should have done the first time.”

Ricky nodded. “Good move.”

Danny knew then that they were still friends. They would always be brothers. They just wouldn’t see each other again after today. He met Ricky’s gaze. “There are three copies—one’s with a lawyer, one is in a safe deposit box and the third is buried in someone’s backyard. None of these three places is located in Texas. I’ve included enough details to put Carmine away.” It had taken him all week to do it.

Ricky shook his head. “Carmine’s not going anywhere at this point. His heart’s really bad these days.” Danny saw a flicker of pain in his friend’s eyes. “House arrest maybe, but no jail term. He’s too sick. That alone would keep him on this side of bars no matter what he’s done.”

“Texas isn’t known for its compassion.” But if Ricky needed to believe it, he’d let it lie.

“Regardless. He’s dying, Danny. No matter how you look at it, you’re probably only going to need that paperwork for another year, maybe less.”

Danny wished he could find it in his heart to feel sorry for the old man. But he knew the evil Carmine was capable of. “Well, until that point, those copies of my paperwork are ready to be opened should I suffer an untimely demise. If I don’t call each of those locations on a scheduled weekly basis, everything will hit the fan. And just in case your uncle decides to gamble that they won’t put him away with his heart condition, what I’ve written should pretty much dismantle the entire Texas faction of the mob as well.”

Ricky thought about it. “I’ll pass it on.”

“Does that give you enough to work with?” Danny asked bluntly. Carmine could be just hotheaded enough to have him gunned down, anyway, if Ricky couldn’t convince his uncle otherwise. The best hope Danny had was the fact that Ricky and his uncle were tight. Carmine had always been more of a father to Ricky than Johnny Mercado, his own father, had been. Johnny had spent Ricky’s entire youth trying lever him free of the mob. He’d sent him to military school in Virginia to break the ties. Carmine, on the other hand, had welcomed him back with open arms, treating him with respect, grooming him to take over as his successor someday. Danny wondered if that would finally happen now when Carmine died. In a part of his heart, he just couldn’t see it. Ricky was cunning, smart, had his own little power base…but he wasn’t cruel. There was heart inside him, and compassion.

Danny glanced briefly at Tyler Murdoch and Spence Harrison again and knew that neither of those men would share his opinion. The mob had set up both of them—as well as Luke Callaghan and Flynt Carson—to do time some fifteen years ago for the death of Ricky’s sister. Haley had died in a boating accident when they’d lured her out on Lake Maria with them during a drunken party. The men had been negligent, sure, but not murderous.

It had happened just about the time Danny had first been sucked into the family. He knew the truth, had overheard Carmine speak of it as he had heard so many other things over the years. Carmine had trusted him implicitly—Danny had saved his life so many times that after a while the old man wouldn’t even step out of his bedroom without Danny by his side. Danny knew that while Haley had certainly died that night, her body had never been found. The decomposed woman who had washed up on the shores of Lake Maria two weeks later had not been her. He’d been there when Carmine had arranged that ruse. It had been a body imported from Mexico to pass for Haley, to cement the case against Callaghan and Carson, Murdoch and Harrison.

An innocent young woman had died so that Carmine could set his nephew’s friends up for murder charges. That had brought the first twinge of hatred to Danny’s gut for the old man.

Ricky had known the truth, as well, Danny thought now. They’d talked about it. But although Flynt and Luke, Spence, Tyler and Ricky had all attended the military academy together, though they had been thicker than thieves in those days, Ricky hadn’t interceded with his family to spare his friends that trial. He, too, blamed them for what had happened to Haley. Ricky had been as angry as anyone else in the family when the four men were acquitted in spite of Carmine’s methods.

It was old history, Danny thought, bringing his gaze back from Harrison and Murdoch, and yet it was still crucial to what was going on now. “You never forgave them.” He inclined his head in the men’s direction. “Why me?”

Ricky was staring at Murdoch and Harrison, as well. He answered without taking his gaze from them. “You never took from me anything I loved.”

“Except maybe Judy Maldonado.”

Ricky threw back his head and laughed, his mood already lightened. “Yeah, well, I was through with her anyway. What were you, then? Seventeen? And she threw me over—a college man—for you.”

“She said I was better looking.”

“Yeah, well, let me see what I can do about keeping that pretty face of yours intact.” He sat back to allow the waitress to put his plate in front of him and dug into his roast beef. “Six years ago I reminded Uncle Carmine that he owed you his life several times over. It worked then. It’ll probably work now.”

“Probably isn’t good enough.” Danny forced himself to take a bite of his sole.

“I know that. So here’s how this will work from our end.” Ricky chewed, swallowed. “They’ve kept an eye on you all week.”

They would be Carmine’s henchmen. Danny was not the least bit surprised.

“They’ve withheld any action to give me time to talk to you, to find out how you want to handle this, but they’re not happy about it. They want to avenge my uncle in the worst way which of course strokes Carmine’s ego real nicely. So far they’ve amused themselves by ascertaining that you’ve been spending some time with a certain cop.”

Danny felt his stomach spasm so hard and suddenly he couldn’t swallow the bite of fish he’d just taken. “Leave Molly French out of this.”

“I can’t do that, bro. I’m sorry.”

Danny knew then that whatever Ricky was about to say, whatever ultimatum he put on the table, it would be purely of Carmine’s inspiration. Already it had the cruel, ruthless tone of the old man written all over it. “Go on.”

But Ricky wasn’t ready to issue the ultimatum. “You know, for your sake, I hope she has some strength of character. What would she think if she knew you had information she could use to bring down the Mercado empire and you won’t give it to her? Word has it she wants her gold detective’s shield so badly she practically shivers with the need. She nosed her way onto the bombing task force with the shield as her ultimate goal.” He laughed shortly. “She thinks my family is behind the bombing. You could probably tell her the truth, if you wanted me to tell it to you.”

Rage, Danny thought, was more lethal when it was cold. That was what filled his blood now—jagged chips of ice. Then his heart stalled briefly before it slammed his chest hard.

He thought of the way she’d looked at him that morning before he’d finally walked away, of that candid, perfect face of hers that simply couldn’t hide a secret. I don’t trust you, he’d said. You’re a cop. Hurt had drenched her eyes, but before that there’d been need there, to come to terms with what he had done, to be able to encapsulize it in some kind of justification so she could live with it. She wanted desperately to believe that he wasn’t the kind of man Carmine Mercado—or even Ricky—was.

And he wasn’t, he realized. Because he’d walked away.

A strange softness filled him. She’d asked him about his association for her own personal reasons, not because he could tell her something that would give her that shield. In fact, she’d never once skated near the line of asking him if the Mercados could have planted the country club bomb…and she’d had ample opportunity. She’d known what he was, where he had been, pretty much from the start.

With that stiff, moral cop-backbone of hers, that could only be out of respect for their friendship, or whatever the hell it was.

“Oh, yeah, man, she’s got you.”

Danny focused on Ricky again. The man was grinning. “What?”

“You’re falling in love with her. Carmine hit the nail right on the head. It was the only reason he agreed to use her in this.”

Danny’s heart slammed again. “Like hell I am. We’re barely civil enemies.”

“Is that why she was at the gym until two o’clock this morning?”

Of course they’d know about that, too. The mob had eyes everywhere. Danny didn’t like it but it was something he was going to have to live with for the rest of his life. Or for the rest of Carmine’s, whichever came first. “We were playing basketball.”

“Yeah? That’s not what we called it when you snapped Judy Maldonado out from under my nose.”

“Judy thought I was a hunk. Molly thinks I’m a career criminal.” It sobered him. “Which I don’t intend to be, so give me the rest of Carmine’s ultimatum.”

“Ah, that.” Ricky pushed his plate away. “I’ve been instructed to tell you that if you talk—or, as it turns out, if those envelopes get opened before you’re six feet under—you won’t be hit first.”

Danny’s blood slowed in his veins, going icy again.

“They’ll take either Molly French or Mona in your place, bro.”

His mother. Dear God, Danny thought. But he understood their angle.

“You could run back and forth between those women like a wild man—could have the entire P.D. and the Sheriff’s Department doing it, too, but sooner or later we’d get to one of them.”

“Carmine came up with this.”

“No. I did.”

Danny’s eyes narrowed dangerously. A new knife of fury found his heart. “You’re getting cold, Ricky. You’re getting just like him.”

Ricky actually grinned. “You’re missing something here.”

“Yeah? What?”

“I know you. I know it’ll never be an issue. Carmine thinks that you’d turn on anybody because you did it to him. That if you wanted to, you’d knife Mona and maybe even Molly, too. He does worry about that. But I’m pretty sure your secrets will go to the grave with you. If you were going to sing, you would have done it by now, while you were in jail. I don’t personally think that any leverage is necessary at all. So I just gave them a suggestion they could live with.”

Danny knew he was wrong. If there had been a way to bury Carmine and the others without dying, he would have taken it. If there was a way he could do it without risking Molly or his mother, he still would. But neither of those things had ever been possibilities.

Danny felt his air leave him and sadness pour in, in its place. “Hell of a way to end this.” Twenty years of friendship, he thought.

“It’s the only way. I’ll tell them you agree to their terms.”

“Do that.” Danny reached for his billfold. He decided he was going to pay for lunch after all. Once again he owed Ricky his life.

They stood and shook hands. Ricky hesitated. “Good luck,” he said finally. “I can’t say I understand what you’ve done—you had it all, bro, without having to get your hands dirty. But if this is the way you want it, then good luck. Just keep some obvious space between yourself and Officer Molly. You don’t need to be alarming anybody, making them worry about your pillow talk.”

Danny stepped back and watched his old friend saunter out of the Café. Ricky paused to take the Carson girl’s hand, and it made her light up like a Christmas candle. He really did have a way with women, Danny thought. The air of danger he wore like a cloak was irresistible.

Danny sat again slowly. You’re falling in love with her.

He gave a hoarse laugh. He wasn’t. For one thing, he didn’t have it in him. For another, it just wasn’t an option. He couldn’t let it happen, so he wouldn’t. Whatever that tantalizing little thing was that had been dancing between them all week, it was just as over now as his friendship with Ricky was.

One way or the other, Molly French was now another official Mercado casualty in his life.

What he knew about relationships he could fit on his thumb-nail, Danny thought, rubbing his jaw. From Judy Maldonado all the way down to pretty Molly with her startling green eyes, he’d never had one that had lasted more than a few weeks. Before he’d turned away from the mob, it had been safer that way. He couldn’t risk ticking Carmine off—or one of the others—and have them aim for a loved one, just as they would do now if they thought he was stepping over a line.

He knew nothing about relationships, he thought again, but he was starting to know Molly pretty well. He knew her integrity, her honesty, her spunk.

He could never again speak to her of something that was a huge part of his past. And she would never ask. So there would always be that unspoken chasm of secrecy between them. And that was something that would tear a woman like Molly apart, day after day until she could stand it no more, until she hated the sight of him because of it.

It made Danny sick.

Chapter 6

Molly wasn’t sure when her nerves changed to fear. At first they were just a humming sensation beneath her skin that started when she made a quick trip to the police station. She wanted to try to get clearance on the personnel records from Chief Stone, and she didn’t want to be at the rec center knowing Danny was at a meeting that was so very wrong and so horrifyingly necessary. So she decided to kill two birds with one stone.

Luck was running her way for once. She didn’t have to beg and plead with Stone’s secretary to get past her into his inner sanctum. She met up with the chief in the parking lot.

“Just the man I wanted to see.” Molly grinned winsomely and moved quickly to intercept him before he reached his white city-issue Explorer.

“Officer French.” She thought he might have groaned. “I’ve already given you everything I can possibly give you without the consensus of city council. What do you want now?”

Molly had to shield her eyes against the sun to look up at him. He was tall, and the silver threaded through his hair caught the light and seemed to glint. He really wasn’t an unattractive man. It was just that she had the unique ability to turn his blue eyes to flint.

She dropped her hand and resigned herself to addressing his shirt front. “Evie Castelano—in personnel—doesn’t have my name on the task-force list. I need to check something but I can’t get past her without your okay.”

“Why on earth would you need to check with personnel?”

Molly frowned. If he had cleared the other task force members, then why should he be surprised that she wanted access, as well? Her nerves starting thrumming.

“You were a late appointee,” Stone added.

Molly shrugged carefully. “I figured that was it. So now I’m just asking you to push the paperwork along a little so I can have the same access to the investigation that everyone else has.”

“Molly.” He said it wearily. “There is absolutely no chance you’re going to get your gold shield out of this. You’ve got to relax before you drive us all crazy.”

She felt a cold, hard fist grab hold of her backbone. “I fail to see why not.”

“Because there are others with more seniority ahead of you. You know how it goes. The twenty-five-year guys retire, they make space at the top, then you young pups can move on up. But there are other guys who get to move first and they all want that same shield.”

“Did they earn it?”

His eyes crinkled shut at the corners, telling Molly that she’d done it again. She’d opened her mouth and ticked him off. She backpedaled quickly. “Chief, this really isn’t about my shield—although we all know that I want it. I’m just trying to figure out who planted that bomb at the country club. I don’t see why it should matter to you if it’s me or Joe Gannon or anyone else who does it, for that matter, just as long as we apprehend the people responsible.”

“Of course it doesn’t matter to me,” he said stiffly.

“Then I need my name on Evie Castelano’s list. And on whatever other lists are out there.”

“What do you need from Personnel?” he asked again.

“I want to know who was working desk duty the day Ed Bancroft hung himself.”

“You were there that day,” he said, clearly exasperated. “You found Bancroft yourself. Who signed you in?”

“That’s just it—no one did. The book was there on the desk, I signed it and went past to the holding-cell area. As it turns out, I’m the only person who signed in all day. My name is the only one on that sheet, and I want to know why. Somebody gave him that belt.”

Stone’s expression changed as though he was just remembering something. “Beau Maguire was on duty that day. He left his post. He’s already been written up and reprimanded for it, which is why he is now on your four-to-midnight shift.” He beeped the remote to unlock his Explorer door and finally stepped around her to get into the vehicle. “I have no more time for this, Molly. I’m sorry. I really have to go.” He shut the door hard enough to make her wince.

“Beau Maguire?” Molly murmured as she watched Stone drive out of the lot. “Well, why didn’t you just tell me that in the first place?” Because, she answered herself, Beau was one of the good ol’ boys. And if he had been demoted, none of the other good ol’ boys were going to tell her that one of their own had been taken down a peg. Or maybe Stone really had forgotten the issue.

Molly went back to her car and kicked the tire in exasperation. She still wasn’t sure if she’d gotten access to Personnel or not. Stone had never really answered her request.

Her nerves were actually starting to twitch. “Twenty-four hours,” she promised herself. “If Evie doesn’t have my name by then, I’ll have to do something radical.”

With that decided, she made up her mind to stop by the drugstore and the bank before heading back to the rec center.

When she returned an hour and a half later, the yellow Dodge was still gone. Molly tucked her car quickly into Danny’s vacated space, but she couldn’t find it in herself to smile this time.

She felt nervous, as if ants were marching busily through her blood. Did he possibly think he could talk the mob out of hitting him? He held it against her that she was a cop, but because she was a cop Molly knew that what he was trying to do today was akin to hitting the moon with a BB gun.

She was scared for him, she admitted. She looked up and down the street where the yellow Dodge should have been hogging at least two parking spaces.

By two o’clock, her nerves gave up and fear took over. The ants receded and something cold and iron-like held her heart in its grip. He wasn’t coming back. They had killed him.

“Where’s Coach?” Fisk said, striding into Ron’s office with Jerome on his heels. Molly sat at the desk with the telephone book, trying to figure out which other cities had rec center basketball teams. She looked up at the boys.

“He had something to do.” When was she supposed to start looking for his gun-toting, store-robbing jerk body? How much time should she let pass before she raised an alarm and got involved? She glanced at her watch and tried to put her mind back to the kids. Then she frowned. “What are you doing here? School’s not out yet.”

“Nope. But we are,” said Jerome.

Fed up, Molly threw her pen onto her desk with enough vehemence that it bounced off. “Damn it, you guys! I’m a cop. I could—and should—take you in for truancy!”

“Uh, okay.” Fisk eyed the fallen pen. “You okay, Molly?”

“I’m great. I’m fine. Never been better.”

Jerome backed out of the door again. “Hey, we’re just going to school now, okay?”

“Good. You do that.”

“Tell Coach we were here.”

Not in this lifetime, Molly thought, as they left again. He’d probably blame her for chasing them off one more time.

If he even came back alive.

She put her elbows on the desk and buried her face in her hands. Then she heard the rickety screen door clatter open again. “Don’t push your luck!” she shouted.

“If I can outsmart organized crime, I can sure as hell hold my own with a cop.”

Danny. Molly’s head snapped up. She almost came to her feet.

He was standing in the office door, and her tongue tried to cleave to the roof of her mouth at the sight of him. The suit fitted him as if it had been tailored just for him. It was charcoal gray. He wore a white shirt and his tie—was that lemon yellow? she wondered, choking—was undone and draped negligently around his neck. He held a paper bag in one hand. He had never looked so good…or so tired.

“You’re alive,” she croaked.

He grinned fast. “Ah, Molly, you really care.”

Temper sizzled into all the bones that fear had been holding captive just moments before. “Of course I care. You’re a human being. And what you did today was really stupid.”

His eyes darkened. “So’s dying for doing the right thing, at least in my book.”

“No!” She clapped her hands to her ears. “I don’t want to talk about this again!”

“Stop acting like an adolescent Pollyanna.”

“What?” She dropped her hands. “What did you just call me?”

“An adolescent Pollyanna. The world’s a nasty place, but I just held my own against a piece of it and I’m feeling pretty damned good about it, all things considered. So stop ticking me off and trying to ruin my mood.”

Molly clenched her hands in her lap and swivelled Ron’s chair so that she faced him. “You’re definitely alive and as unpleasant as ever. What do you have in that bag?”

“You know, you’ve got a real preoccupation with the things I carry in and out of here.”

“I hate mysteries.”

He seemed to sigh. “It’s a bottle of pinot noir. Are you going to bust me, Officer?”

“Bust you? What for?”

“Possession of an alcoholic beverage.”

“That’s not—oh.” He was on parole.

It was always there, she thought. They could never get past it. Where he came from…where she came from…their backgrounds were so similar, yet they’d taken such divergent paths. And because of that, they were each something the other despised.

Molly’s throat closed a little.

“What’s wrong?” He motioned at the phone book. “Is the money drying up?”

She shrugged. “No. I’ve gotten about sixteen hundred dollars so far. I’m just angry with myself because I spent two hours worrying about a gun-toting, store-robbing jerk.”

Something suddenly closed over his heart. The only other person who would care where he had gone today was his mother…which was why he hadn’t told her. Now both these women were under the eye of the mob.

He took a step backward out of the doorway. The best thing he could do for Molly French was leave her alone, he reminded himself. And now it went beyond the fact that she was a cop. Her life was in his ex-con hands. Even Ricky had warned him about that.

“I chased more kids off a few minutes ago,” she said suddenly as he took a step away.

“What?” He stopped and looked back at her, registering her words. “That’s okay. I’m not up to coaching today.”

“Oh.” Something was wrong, she realized. What had happened in that meeting?

“Just don’t tell Ron. He’ll dock my pay and then I’ll have to file for bankruptcy.”

“Ha. I’ll cut you a portion of what he gives me.”

He gave that tight grin again and left the office.

“Wait!” Molly vaulted out of the chair and jogged into the vestibule, pushing open the double doors to the gym with both hands. “Are you sure everything worked out okay?” she called after him.

Danny paused. Had it? He’d put his insurance on the table, and Ricky’s ultimatum was there, too. The rules were plain as day, cold and concise on both sides. They understood each other. And that was about as good as it was going to get.

Danny decided there was no way to answer her question.

“I am going to take this bottle of wine upstairs and I am going to drink it,” he said slowly instead. “Wine has not touched my tongue in six years. I’m going to munch on some cheese and crackers and enjoy what I can out of life and—for the rest of the day, anyway—I’m going to forget about the future and the past. Excuse me.”

Something moved in the area of Molly’s chest. She didn’t want him to be a man who—on his first celebration after being released from prison—drank wine and ate cheese alone.

“Tortilla chips are better,” she said finally, lamely.

He grimaced. “I lived on tortilla chips when I was a kid.”

“So did I.”

“Those little bags were easy to steal out of convenience stores.”

“Easier than the cash register, at any rate.”

His face closed down. “I wouldn’t know.”

“Danny, wait. I didn’t mean—”

“Molly, you are always going to mean it.”

She covered her face with her hands. “It’s my tongue. Sometimes it just says things.”

He actually laughed, though he did it harshly. “I know. Can I go now? I’m beat. Contrary to popular opinion, holding a friend’s feet to the fire doesn’t sit well with me—no better than having my own feet held there in return.”

“Is that what happened? What did he say to you?” she asked quickly, then she added, “He’s not your friend, Danny.”

“Yes, Molly, he is. He’ll always be my friend. He just won’t be a part of my life any longer. I’m leaving now.”

But she didn’t want him to go. “Is it over?”

“Yeah, I’m out.” But you’re not.

He wasn’t prepared for the way she did it again, just sat down on the gym floor as though her legs had folded. “Thank God,” she murmured.

“Molly, this has nothing to do with you.” Which was a lie, he thought.

“I don’t want you to get hurt. Or to go back to jail.”

She made his heart shift with the simple, sincere words. He couldn’t let that happen, couldn’t let her get to him. “Yeah, then who would you irritate the hell out of?”

“Oh, plenty of people.”

He laughed again. It sneaked up on him and got out. He rubbed a hand over his jaw, then he headed toward the back of the gym.

“Where are you going now?” she called out.

“To Plank’s kitchen.” He found two paper cups and a knife and headed back to the gym.

“The way this is shaping up,” he said, “you’re not going to shut it off long enough for me to get upstairs, and I’m not willing to postpone this libation indefinitely.”

“You’re going to share the wine.” She sighed it. “I’m off tonight, too. Perfect timing.”

“You’d probably only follow me upstairs if I didn’t.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“Maybe not. There’s a bed up there.”

Her breath caught and her eyes flew to his. “You’re doing it again,” she murmured. “I thought we were going to stop that stuff.”

“We can’t seem to stay away from it, though, can we, pretty Molly? Here.” He passed her the knife. “Cut the cheese.”

He’d bought a corkscrew as well. Danny set about uncorking the wine, watching her out of the corner of his eye. That flush was still on her skin, faintly pink, soft and sweet. She laid the cheese out, and he poured them each a paper cup full of wine.

She savored her first sip. She closed her eyes and just enjoyed it. It rocked something inside him…that she was a woman who could turn herself over to pleasure like that. When she finally swallowed, she opened her eyes and grinned at him. “Thanks. So what exactly happened today? How did you talk Ricky into letting you go this time?”

He’d been thinking about his mouth on her skin, if she would close her eyes then in just that way. He was sitting on a gym floor in an Armani suit drinking wine out of a paper cup, and somehow it felt right. It took him a moment to focus on what she had said. “Huh?”

“Ricky Mercado. How did you talk him into letting you out?”

“Damn it, Molly. Can’t you ever just let anything go?”

“No, not usually.”

He took the offensive. “You’re doing this to find out about the bombing, aren’t you? To find out if the mob is behind it? You’re being a cop again. Even if I knew, I couldn’t tell you, and I don’t know.”

Hurt rained down her face, stealing first her eyes then her mouth. “That’s not true.”

He stretched his legs out in front of him. He knew it wasn’t and he always felt like hell when he tried to hurt her. “Sorry.”

“No, you’re not. You really think the worst of me.”

“I have my moments. I just wish I could hold on to them all the time.”

Something snapped in her heart—one of the last tethers she had to hold it in place.

“Don’t do that,” he said sharply, glancing at her again.

She thought of the time they’d spent here in the gym last night, of how he had accused her of breathing hard. “I did not just breathe hard.”

“No, you did the other.”

“What other?”

“This.” He sighed. “You let air out instead of taking it in.”

She threw a piece of cheese at him. He caught it neatly and popped it in his mouth, and that just irritated her more. Molly imitated his sigh. “That’s a Cinderella sound. I don’t do Cinderella.”

“No kidding. She wore dresses.”

Molly recoiled, hurt. “I wear dresses. Sometimes.”

He wiggled his brows at her. “Double dare you.” He realized he really wanted to see those legs of hers. Without the spandex.

“You want me to wear a skirt to play basketball around here?”

“Why not? Cia does.”

Molly choked on her cheese.

“Besides, you’re not supposed to be playing basketball. You’re supposed to be raising money.”

“I did that already. Now I’m working on finding someone to play the team you don’t have. Give me that.” She reached for the wine bottle.

He didn’t intend for his fingers to brush hers as he passed it to her. It just happened. And so did the next words out of his mouth. “You know, when I went away, it was only six years. I figured even then that I’d get out on my first parole hearing. So it only meant six years of my life.”

She went still with the bottle half-poised over her paper cup.

“That’s all it meant to me,” he said, staring down into his own cup because he couldn’t stand the look on her face—the hope there, the fierce, pure need to hear him say something that would make everything he’d done into something she could live with. “It was just years. Time. A portion of my life sacrificed so I could have more years later. I was cutting my losses. I guess I hoped that would be the end of it, if I didn’t talk, didn’t say a word. But I always knew better.”

“The police had no case, Danny, no strong case against you.”

“It would have gotten stronger in a hurry if I had fought it.”

Something cold seeped into her blood. Was he saying that the cops were in on framing him? That certain cops were involved with the Mercados? Who? If they were bad six years ago, were they still bad now? Were they even still on the force?

Molly opened her mouth and shut it again fast enough to nearly bite her tongue. She couldn’t ask him that. Somehow she knew, instinctively, that it would cross a line—for both of them. She pressed a hand to her chest, feeling an odd pain there.

Danny drank more wine, chewed more cheese. “It was a done deal from the time I got the phone call that day. Carmine wanted to see me. A ‘final’ meeting, he called it. Stupid of me. I thought he was just going to try one more time to talk me into staying. The whole damned lunch was casual, a lot of old-times conversation. I honestly thought he’d let me go. I’d saved his life so damned many times, I figured emotion, gratitude, whatever, would count for something.

“Then the store was held up while I was out there at the Mercado compound. I don’t know what they paid the store owner to ID me—or what they had on him to twist his arm. All I know is that I was driving home and suddenly there was a posse of red and blue lights blinking behind me. Then I knew. I knew.”

“And you let them take you in.”

“Sure I did. I knew it was Carmine’s way of telling me, Take this or die. Like I said, the store owner had already ID’d me. They found the money in my apartment at the same time they were throwing handcuffs on me on the roadside. And sure as hell Carmine wasn’t going to give me an alibi.” He watched her face and drained the last of his cup. “There’s a reason I’m telling you this. I went down for that crime never believing that it would matter to a person like you.”

Before she could open her mouth to respond, he stood up. He grabbed the last of the bottle of wine from beside her. “That’s all I’m sharing.”

“But—”

“No, Molly, that’s it. You’ve got to understand that I’m never going to talk about this again.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re on that side of the line, and I’m on this side. And damn it, that’s where we have to stay.” If I’m going to keep you alive. Carmine would die. Someday—maybe even soon—Carmine’s heart would fail him. And maybe then, as Ricky had said, everything would be different. But pretty Molly French with her staunch, law-abiding ideals would never last that long.

Danny finally turned away and headed for his apartment. For the first time he almost wished he’d taken the grave instead.

When Molly dragged herself into roll call at four o’clock, her stomach felt a little sour from the wine, she had a headache, and her temper was pumping. This was her eighth straight night without time off—more penance for worming her way onto the task force, she knew. She’d worked for Harry Roscoe on Thursday night and was supposed to have had tonight off in exchange—until someone from dispatch had called her at 3:30 to tell her that they were shorthanded and they needed her to come in after all. Now Molly looked around the room and felt her anger ratchet up another notch. Everyone who was supposed to be here was present…except for Harry Roscoe.

“Enjoy it, friend,” she muttered aloud. “It’s the last time I’ll ever work for you.”

“Did you say something, Officer French?” her sergeant asked.

“No. You must have imagined it.”

He scowled at her. Molly eased back to stand against the wall rather than sit down among Maguire and the others. If one of his kind tried to take a piece of her again tonight, she was in the right frame of mind to flatten him.

“I take it that you’re present, Officer,” the sergeant said, “and not happy about it.”

“Ten-four.”

“Well, I think your day is about to get worse. Deputy Chief Stanmeyer would like to see you before you head out tonight.”

Trouble, Molly thought. Either that or she was finally getting her personnel clearance—but why would Stanmeyer get involved in that? Her back came away from the wall. “Why?”

The officer moved on with roll call without answering her. That wasn’t good. Molly swore under her breath and left the room, stalking to Stanmeyer’s office. The man was just standing up from behind his desk when she stuck her head in the door.

“Excuse me, Martin. You wanted to see me?”

Stanmeyer looked up, startled. Then he seemed to flush a little. He reminded her a great deal of Ralph Bunderling, except Ralph was eternally single and Martin was in the process of clearing his second divorce. She’d gone out with Martin once, too, but she’d let him down even more gently than she had Ralph. She’d been fully aware of what he could do to her career if she hurt him or made him mad. So far they’d remained friends.

“Ah, Molly, I hate to be the one to do this to you. Stone threw it to me.” Stanmeyer sat again, looking miserable.

Molly felt her internal organs begin to sink slowly. “What?” she asked warily.

“You’ve been written up.”

She was the cleanest, most honest cop she knew. She was fanatical about it—especially lately, knowing there were people gunning for her. “What do they think I did?”

“You’ve been consorting with a person of ill repute.”

“I have not—” Danny.

Her stomach heaved. She pressed a hand to it. She’d never thought of that, had been too wrapped up in the personal implications of his past to worry about any impact it might have on her professionally. But she was a police officer. He was a convicted felon. And any time she spent with him was against the departmental rules and regulations.

“I’m sorry,” Stanmeyer said, and he sounded sincere. “You know the drill—it’s been turned over to Internal Affairs. They’ll contact you for an interview and you can have a hearing fourteen days after that to defend yourself against the charges. If you do so successfully, it won’t be a permanent part of your record.”

“Am I suspended until then?” She had to force the words out. Her throat was raspy and tight.

Martin looked surprised. “I don’t think so. No one said anything about that.”

“Of course not. Without me, who would they torment?” But it was coming, she knew suddenly. This was a warning. If she didn’t take it and back down from the task force, she’d be off duty completely.

But why? This went well beyond her gender or her Laredo experience. Molly felt an invisible hand tugging her gold shield right out of her fingers. “This is insane.”

“That’s what I tried to tell Chief Stone. He—Daniel Gates—only works at the same place you volunteer, right?”

“Right.” And I wanted to kiss him. But no one on earth knew that, and wanting was hardly a chargeable offense. Molly started shaking a little.

“Why don’t you stop volunteering until this blows over?” Martin suggested.

“I can’t do that.” The kids, she thought. Oh, heaven help her, she couldn’t abandon her kids.

Besides, this had nothing to do with the rec center, she realized. It had everything to do with having pushed her way onto the task force. Cutting out her time at the center wouldn’t affect things at all, except that they’d have a harder time proving she had any real association with Danny. And if they couldn’t get her for that, they’d just come after her for something else.

Obviously, she was closer on the issue of bad cops than she knew, she realized suddenly. They really wanted to clear her out of that war room.

“Who initiated this?” Which one? Hasselman? McCauley? Maguire? Who had done it?

“I don’t know,” Martin said quickly. “An anonymous tip came in to Chief Stone. He had no choice, Molly. You were there at the center after your shift last night, in the wee hours of the morning. Someone took pictures of your car.”

“Big deal. I was practicing basketball. I’ve been volunteering there for two years. My car being there isn’t grounds for anything.”

“They also have a photo of you and Mr. Gates in a, um, compromising position. On the gym floor.”

“Like hell they do!” Molly exploded. “There’s never been such a position!” Then her heart stalled. She remembered the way Danny had fallen on top of her when their feet had tangled together, when she had started to pull him closer before he’d suddenly rolled away. Molly closed her eyes briefly, feeling sick.

“You can see both photos,” Martin reminded her. “Your representative has a right to view the file. It might prod your memory.”

“Please don’t be condescending to me.”

When she opened her eyes again, he looked shocked and hurt. “Molly, I wouldn’t. We went out. I know the kind of woman you are. I don’t believe a word of this. I know you must have an explanation for whatever…whatever it is they think they captured on film.”

She was a woman who had somehow managed to sidestep a kiss good-night with him, Molly remembered. But she would have been more than willing to kiss Danny last night if he hadn’t aborted the moment. And why exactly had he done that? she wondered now. Because she was a cop. And he hated cops. Her stomach pushed up into her throat. All this over a man who didn’t even want her.

Martin was trying to hand her the pink sheet. “A copy already went to Eli, as well. He’s waiting to hear from you. He’ll help in any way he can.”

Eli Tripician, she thought. The PBA president. She stepped forward and snatched the sheet from his hand. “I’m leaving now, Martin.”

“Yes, well…yes. You should have been on patrol ten minutes ago.”

“No, I mean I’m leaving. I’m going home. I was supposed to be off tonight. I exchanged time off as a favor to Harry Roscoe. But, gosh darn it, I’m feeling a case of the flu coming on.”

“Molly, don’t do this. It can only hurt you.”

“Well, guess what, Martin? I’m getting real tired of lying down and letting them kick me.” Temper flooded her face with heat. “No matter what I do from here on in—if I toe the line or not—I’m screwed. You know it and I know it. I can call in sick tonight or I can stay on and be beaten up by another drugged-out hoodlum because they threw another horrible call to me without a partner. It won’t make a bit of difference either way.”

Martin looked miserable. She wondered if he realized, too, that this was about the task force. “Talk to Eli,” he suggested.

“Count on it. But for now, why don’t you do me a favor and call Roscoe and tell him he’s needed tonight after all?” She shoved the pink sheet down into her trousers pocket and left the office.

Damn them, damn them, damn them. She’d never been written up in the whole twelve years she’d worked in law enforcement. When she reached her car, she leaned her head against the roof and did something she rarely allowed herself to do.

Molly cried.

After taxes, Danny’s paycheck for his first week of legitimate labor in sixteen years came to $256.43. He stood in Ron Glover’s office at the rec center and stared at it for a moment, then he laughed.

“I know,” Ron said, clearly embarrassed. “I wish I could do better.”

“No, it’s fine. I have no overhead.” But he had spent more than twice that on the basketball shoes. The fifteen-hundred-dollar suit was his own problem.

His money was dwindling and it was dwindling fast. Eventually he was going to have to think of another way to survive than just teaching basketball. With a record? It wasn’t going to be easy, he thought. It was just one more thing he hadn’t considered six years ago when he’d swallowed the lesser of two evils.

Danny left Ron’s office and headed for his apartment. Paltry though it was, this $256 was going to have to be the basis for his new—legitimate—checking account. He was halfway up the steps to his apartment to find his car keys when he heard a sound overhead that froze him in his tracks.

Movement. In his apartment.

Danny went still on the sixth tread down. Adrenaline flooded his system, and it made him hot enough to itch. The sound from above had been stealthy, the kind of step that happened when someone was trying not to make floorboards squeak. Someone was up there. Waiting for him, or looking for something? Damn you, Ricky, I believed in you. I trusted you. Danny’s right hand went instinctively to his side, beneath his left arm. And, of course, there was no gun there anymore.

He would have to use his fists. And his cunning. He knew how to travel the next six steps without making a sound. He’d made it a point to know, the day he’d moved in.

He moved to the top door in silence. It was closed. He folded his hand over the knob and gently determined that no one had locked it behind them when they’d gone in. Surprise was the only edge he had. He hit the door hard and suddenly with his shoulder and was crouched on the floor of the apartment before the intruder could react. Then he could only stare.

Bobby J. Bobby J.?

Danny swore in a way he’d forgotten he knew how to do and came to his feet again. The boy stared back at him impassively.

“Just helping myself to a drink, man,” Bobby said. “What’s with you?”

Danny gave himself a second to let his blood settle. “You’ve heard of private property, Bobby? This place qualifies.”

Bobby sneered and tilted his head back to swig from the soft drink can he’d lifted from Danny’s fridge. “They own you.”

“Who owns me?”

“Molly, Ron. All the rest.”

Something was happening here, Danny realized, something huge. He could not believe this boy had found his way into his apartment…and why? Danny went to the fridge for his own soft drink to buy some time before he responded.

“Texas owns me,” he said finally, “for another three years or so, anyway. But that’s about it.” He popped the tab and drank deeply, keeping one eye on the kid with the ghostly skin and the cunning eyes.

“Why’d you do it?” Bobby asked suddenly.

“Steal the money? Break the law?” Danny wanted to be sure what they were talking about.

“No. Why’d you turn and quit?”

Danny felt his heart kick. Who had the kid heard that from? Molly? He couldn’t quite believe that she would repeat something like that. “Who said I turned?”

“I just heard it.”

“Where?”

The kid’s eyes said he wasn’t going to tell him. Danny’s heart went to his gut, and his gut went to his toes. Was the kid in with the Mercados? How else would he have heard such a thing?

There’d been little doubt in Danny’s mind from the first that this boy was into something worse than the others, and he was in deep. Danny went to the sofa and sat, deciding to play this according to his gut instincts. He wanted to find out more. “Okay, you’re right. I turned.”

“So how come?” The boy continued to stand, watching him suspiciously.

“I was protecting a man from his enemies. That was my job. Then I realized that his enemies had a good case against him.”

The kid frowned and took a step back, putting space between them.

Danny kept on. “You know a lot. Do you know I was framed because I left, that I never stole that money in the first place?”

Bobby scowled. “I didn’t hear that. Just heard you quit. But I bet the money would have been damned good, right?”

“The money was top caliber.”

“How much?”

Danny went with him. He shrugged. “A few hundred thousand a year, including bonuses.” Carmine had always been real generous whenever he’d realized that he was—against all odds—still alive.

“And you quit that for this?” Bobby waved a hand around the shabby apartment.

“I quit because people who had no business dying kept ending up dead, Bobby. I quit because no amount of money can condone being a part of that.”

The boy was quiet for a long time. “Did you kill any of those people?”

“No.”

“Did they ask you to?”

“Yes.”

“How’d you get out of doing it? You said no and they just said okay?” He made a sound of disgusted disbelief.

“Not quite. Like I said, eventually they landed me in jail for it.”

The boy leaned back against the wall. That surprised Danny. He was relaxing. “Okay, if you’re that much of a candy-ass how come you started up with them in the first place?” Bobby asked.

“Because I was raised pretty much in the same part of town you were and my mother was going to lose her house if I didn’t. I needed the money.”

Bobby J. nodded as though he understood that perfectly. “But, man, you bailed on her if you stopped getting paid that way.”

“It was what she wanted. She didn’t want me to have to do what I was doing.” And now, God help him, she was in danger of dying because of it. Guilt had claws, he realized, and they were all sharp.

“My mom doesn’t give a damn,” Bobby said suddenly, bitterly. “She just takes the bucks whether I want to give them to her or not.”

Danny opened his mouth and closed it again. This was fragile. “You’ve got to decide what to do about that, then. You’ve got to figure out if whatever you’re doing is worth it.”

He straightened from the wall. “I still don’t want your damned shoes.”

“Never dreamed it.”

“I’m not going to play some candy-ass game.”

“Bobby, that game might surprise you.”

Bobby started for the door, then he stopped to press the soda can to his forehead, his face etched with something close to agony, Danny thought. It hurt his own heart.

“It ain’t worth it. I’m not stupid. I know that,” the boy said. “But man, they’d kill me if I tried to back out now.”

“You’ve got to be smart,” Danny said carefully. “Smarter than they are.” And who the hell were “they”? he wondered again. “I wasn’t. I was a little too naive and I hoped for the best, and I ended up doing time because of it. But I learned my lesson, so let me know if you want to bounce any ideas off me. Sometimes you just need an adult to intercede for you, whether you like it or not.” He paused. “If you didn’t want help, Bobby, you wouldn’t be here.”

“I don’t need nobody.” Suddenly his moment of vulnerability was gone again. His eyes were angry and antagonistic.

“We all need somebody, and you’re lucky you’ve got me.”

But the boy was gone again, vanishing out the door like the ghost Danny had once likened him to.

Danny stayed on the sofa for a long time after Bobby’s footsteps had receded down the stairs. Then he reached for the telephone, intent on calling Molly with this update on one of their kids. He realized that he didn’t know her phone number. He knew nothing about her, not where she lived or how she lived or who she spent time with when she wasn’t here.

She was off-limits. Even if he knew where she lived, he couldn’t go there. Carmine had eyes on her—and probably on him, as well. He’d always have eyes on them.

Danny stood from the sofa, anyway, and headed downstairs to Ron’s office. The mob was clever, but he was better. They’d trained him, after all, and he was smarter than most of them. Molly was off tonight. He was pretty sure she’d mentioned that somewhere along the line.

He’d find a way to get to her safely.

Chapter 7

Molly’s personal information was in Ron’s files. Two could play the snoop game, Danny thought, and he felt not the slightest spasm of guilt as he read the volunteer info sheet that she had filled out two years ago.

She’d listed no next of kin. So what had happened to her mother?

The phone number she’d given in case of emergency was that of the police station.

Who was she close to? Who did she share her free time with? His stomach gave an odd hitch as he realized that he really wanted to know.

She lived at 11639 Wellington Drive. Danny thought about that for a moment. There was a fairly large apartment complex out that way. The complex was just on the other side of a wide stretch of federal land that also bumped up behind the Saddlebag Bar. That was convenient, Danny thought.

Her phone number was 555-1219. But he didn’t want to call her.

He slid the info sheet back into Ron’s filing cabinet and went outside to his car. Then he went to the bank and opened a checking account before they closed for the day. He earned himself a cash card for the first time in his life…unfortunately there wasn’t enough money in his account that he could do much with it. He didn’t dare deposit what was left of his stash—that would surely raise a few law enforcement eyebrows.

He went to the supermarket, just to try the card out. He stopped at the post office and rented a box there in case anyone ever wanted to send him mail. He dropped in at the library and returned Molly’s book. And he was whistling when he returned to his car for the last time.

Anyone watching him would be bored out of their minds by now, he thought. He was being such an upstanding citizen it even nauseated him a little. When he finally got to the Saddlebag, he imagined that he could hear his tail moaning with relief. This was a place where he could be expected to stay put for a while.

None of the women at the bar or at the pool tables was able to approach him this time because Danny walked straight through and let himself out the back door. He started across the federal land on foot. Night was beginning to press over south Texas. He was as sure as he could be that no one would notice him walking away in the darkness.

Her tears were long since spent. By 6:30, Molly was boiling mad again.

“They think they can keep kicking me and I’ll just take it like some kind of…of chump!” She shot a frozen dinner into the microwave and slammed the door hard. “An IAD interview isn’t just poking at someone they resent.” She grabbed a bottle of wine out of the fridge. “It’s serious. Why? What are they afraid I’ll find out from being a part of that task force?”

Bad cops, she thought again, digging in a drawer for a corkscrew. They had to be worried because she suspected that there were bad cops operating out of that war room. Nothing else made sense. Who had she voiced that theory to? Spence Harrison, she thought. And Joe Gannon. Had one of them betrayed her? Or had they simply, innocently, repeated what she’d said to the wrong ears?

“Who are they? And who followed me off shift and took pictures of me at the rec center?” She turned to the kitchen table, then she screamed.

There was a face pressed against her kitchen window. Danny. Danny?

Molly dropped the wine and the corkscrew on the table and hurried to the back door, yanking it open. Her entire apartment complex backed up onto a center courtyard. There was a heated Olympic-size pool out there that she had been promising herself she would use for two years now. She’d never found time to dip a toe into it.

Beyond that, there was nothing but barren land. Had Danny come that way? He must have. Why would he walk all the way around the whole complex just to use her back door?

She had a headache. Nothing was making sense anymore.

“Were you talking to yourself just now?” he asked. He motioned at the window he’d been peering through.

“Of course not.” She advanced on him, everything else forgotten. “Do you have any idea what trouble you’ve caused me? Do you know what you’ve done?”

Danny took a surprised step backward. Something told him this wasn’t about lifting her personal information from Ron’s office. “No. What?”

Suddenly, her eyes went thin with suspicion. “What are you holding behind your back? A gun? Are you armed? Kill me right now, why don’t you, and put me out of my misery.”

“Molly, you’re a little off the wall here—even for you.”

She started to shove a hand into her pocket for the pink slip that Stanmeyer had given her. Then she remembered she’d changed into a robe when she’d gotten home. He was noticing that, too, she realized, if his eyes were any indication.

The robe was short, black silk, and it was clingy. His gaze slid down, up, then up and down. Molly felt her skin heat. Excitement started skittering in her blood. It had been a very long time since a man had looked at her with that kind of appreciation in his eyes. She hugged herself against reacting and searched for her voice again.

“I’ve had a bad day,” she said finally.

“I guess flowers won’t help your mood.” He brought them out from behind his back.

“You brought me flowers?” Molly gaped. “You stole me flowers!”

“I did not.”

“These are from the garden behind the pool over there. I recognize them.”

“They aren’t. Well, okay, the rose is.”

“Once a thief, always a thief.” She snapped her mouth shut too late.

He scowled. “Do you want them or not? All the others are from the land back there behind the complex. Honest.”

“What were you doing back there, anyway?” she asked again, frowning in that direction.

“Long story.”

Molly decided that she wanted the flowers. No one with the kind of muscles Danny had ever gave her flowers. She took them from his hand and brought them to her nose. Heady, she thought…sweet. “Thanks. But why would you do this?”

“Can’t you just accept the damned things without picking it all apart?”

“You don’t strike me as the flowers type so you must have done something I’m going to be mad about.”

“That shows what you know. I’ve given plenty of flowers in my time.”

“Maybe because you’ve done a lot you’ve had to apologize for.”

“Uh…Molly.” He was really getting uncomfortable standing out in the open with her. He also knew he was going to end up losing this discussion. “Humor me here. Let’s go inside.”

Something happened to her face, something he couldn’t quite define, a sudden kind of dawning. “Good idea.” She stepped back from the door quickly and led the way inside.

As he watched, frowning, she closed the blinds in her kitchen. Then she went to the living room and drew the drapes there, as well. She couldn’t possibly know that she had the mob watching her, he thought. Or could she? Would Carmine go that far? Would he let it leak to her that her very life was in Danny’s hands? No, he decided. If that were the case, she wouldn’t have taken the flowers. She would have decked him. She’d be spitting fire.

“Want some more wine?” She came back to the kitchen. “I happen to have a bottle of the same stuff you bought this afternoon.”

“Sure. Molly, what’s going on?”

“Like I said, I’m having a bad day.”

“You were having a great day three and a half hours ago. You were happy I was alive.”

“I changed my mind.” She started to uncork the wine.

“About my living or the day?”

“Both.”

He watched her reach over her head into a cabinet for glasses. The little black robe hiked up her thighs. His mouth went a little dry.

“I don’t have any cheese,” she said, pouring. “All I’ve got is a frozen dinner and an old burrito I bought on Wednesday but didn’t finish.”

“I’ll pass on that.”

She swept past him into the living room, carrying the glasses. Danny went after her, then she did it again. She got halfway across the room and dropped down to sit on the floor. She put the wine on the coffee table.

Danny looked around. Night had gathered in the room, filling it with clever shadows that should have drained the color from it. But everything was too bright for that. Her sofa was a vibrant blue floral print with splashes of indigo. Some red throw pillows were tossed casually over it. The sofa sat in front of a picture window that would have looked out onto Wellington Drive, but it was all closed up now. The coffee table was old, marred oak and there was a rocker in one corner with a cushion of the same vibrant red as the pillows that dotted the sofa. It was female, but not fussy. Like her, it was vibrant, feisty, without a word of apology for it.

His gaze caught on framed photos that captured the wall space on either side of an old grandfather clock. Danny went that way and switched on a lamp so he could see them better.

He wanted to know about her, he thought again. He wanted to know everything.

The first photo was of a much younger Molly standing arm in arm with a strikingly handsome young man. The boy had black hair and piercing dark eyes. Danny knew without asking that it was her brother. Then there was an older Molly with a tired-looking, gray-haired woman sitting in the same rocking chair that now took up a corner of Molly’s living room. There was Molly—in uniform—with the governor of Texas. What was that about? The guy seemed to be giving her some kind of commendation. Then his gaze got snagged by a picture of Molly in a sleek, barely there dress of crimson, her wild hair swept up, looking glamorous and hot.

Whoa.

Danny found that he wanted to know the identity of the guy standing beside her in that picture. “Who’s the guy?” he asked, taking a seat on the sofa.

“What guy?” She followed his gaze to the photo. “Oh. Him. Well, these days he’s the chief of the Laredo Police Department, but back then he was only an officer.” It struck her then that she had always dated other law-enforcement types. And where had that gotten her? Maybe it really was time for an ex-con.

She almost laughed aloud. She was feeling a little giddy from the events of the day. Molly reached for her wine and took a deep swallow. “That picture was taken the night his boss retired, so he knew he was going to be moving up soon. He wanted to put on a show.”

“How long did you go out with him?”

She looked at him oddly. “One night. That night.”

“Why not ever again?”

“What do you care?”

Damned if he knew. “Just curious.”

“He wanted a mother,” she said finally, “not a wife.”

Something jolted hard inside him. “You wanted to be his wife? You knew all that from one date?”

“I did not want to be his wife. Because I didn’t want to be his mother. I knew that from one date. What’s wrong with you tonight, anyway?”

“Nothing.” Danny drank from his wine. “Everything’s fine.”

“Everything’s so fine that you sneaked through Ron’s records to find out where I live, then you came here through the back like some kind of thief?” She winced at her own choice of words. “Sorry.”

“I didn’t say I sneaked through Ron’s records.”

“You didn’t have to. Where else could you have gotten the information? I’m not in the phone book.”

He shrugged and turned the conversation back to safer ground. “When I got here, you said something was my fault. So what did I do to you?”

“Nothing. You got off me too fast, remember?”

Danny felt cut adrift before he realized that she was referring to what had happened between them last night when they’d fallen together playing basketball. He never knew what she was going to say or do next, he realized. One moment he was rattling her with his own sexual innuendo, then, out of the blue, she grabbed that same innuendo and hurled it back at him. She was prissy and law abiding, then she bounced around his gym in a purple bra.

He was ready and up to playing more of the game with her—no matter that they’d both decided it wasn’t a good idea. Then she threw him another curve ball.

“The department wrote me up with IAD,” she said suddenly, “because of my association with you. It’s against regulations for a law enforcement officer to consort with a convicted felon. It’s that way in most cities I know of. I just wasn’t thinking. It never occurred to me because we never…you know, we don’t actually…consort. We’re just…friends.”

A wrecking ball in the chest couldn’t have hit him as hard. Danny stared at her. Then anger poured into his blood. “Who?” he said with deadly quiet. “Who did that to you?”

“It doesn’t matter.” She licked her lips, a quick little flick of that tongue again that made the heat in him change from anger to something else and shoot straight down to his groin. “It’s really not about you. It’s about the task force. They don’t want me on there. Someone took pictures of me with you last night in an effort to start working me off the detail.”

“How the hell could they do that?”

“Take the pictures?” She scraped her hair off her brow and looked miserable. “Well, I’ve been thinking about that for the past two hours. They were probably in the vestibule. I didn’t lock the outside door behind me when I came in. I mean, why bother?”

“Maybe because the center is in a really bad neighborhood and you were a woman down there bouncing around in a purple bra alone?”

Molly’s brows lowered into a scowl. “That was a bathing suit top.”

“Why the hell would you wear a bathing suit top under your uniform?”

“Because my sports bras were all in the washing machine.” Her spine was starting to snap straight. “And a T-shirt is too hot under my Kevlar vest.”

“That’s no reason. The stores are full of regular underwear.”

“So are my dresser drawers! But I could hardly practice basketball in my underwear! I’d planned to go there after shift!”

“Yeah, well, you might have warned me!”

“What on earth for? And why are you yelling at me?”

Danny came up off the sofa. “Because you just took a hit to your career because of me!” he shouted.

It knocked her backward into silence. He was upset because he had inadvertently done something to hurt her.

Molly closed her eyes and felt something slide through her that she couldn’t identify at first. It was new, elusive. It was like smoke—there, then vanishing on a breeze. Then it gathered again in other corners of her. It struck her that she would have done anything to ease his turmoil, because she never ever wanted him to feel guilt over something he hadn’t done again.

“Danny.” She took a deep breath, found his gaze. “You didn’t do it. They did. They just…they used my association with you to strike me a blow. If it wasn’t you, it would have been some other dubious line I inched too close to. They were following me, looking for something, anything that even vaguely resembled an infraction they could use against me.”

“So what are you going to do about it?” He still didn’t sit again.

She blinked at him in surprise. “I’m going to fight it, of course.”

He raked a hand through his hair. “I shouldn’t be here. I need to go home.”

“No.” The word came out of her too fast. Molly felt herself flushing a little. “You went to the trouble to get here, and I’ve got the better part of a bottle of wine left. Besides, it really burns my toast to let those bastards dictate my personal time.”

Danny stared at her for a moment, then felt himself grinning in spite of it all. “Yeah. It would.” He thought about it. “You could pull out of the rec center. That would fix the problem.” Before he could react, the red rocking chair cushion was sailing in his direction. It hit him in the face. “Dream on,” she muttered.

“I was just trying to fix your problem.”

“I think I’ll resign from the P.D. instead and make the center my full time occupation.”

“You’re going to have to give up this apartment then. I got my first paycheck today and I can tell you it’s not going to take you far.”

It happened again—another new sensation sliding through her, wrapping itself around her heart. This time it was respect. Molly cleared her throat carefully. “You gave up a lot when you left the Mercados. And you didn’t have to. You probably would never have done time if you hadn’t left the mob. You were a bodyguard. Small fry, really, at least to law enforcement. If you had just stayed with them, you probably would never have gone to jail, and you’d be living so much better now.” But he’d stood on principle, she thought.

“A man does what a man has to do.” Danny went into the kitchen to get the wine bottle.

“Why didn’t you get even with them, with the mob?” she asked when he came back. “Why didn’t you talk after you were in jail?”

This was inching too close to dangerous ground. Danny wondered if Carmine’s boys had wired her apartment. He hoped to hell not, or they would know that he was here in spite of all his efforts to lose them. “I knew that eventually I’d be walking the streets again,” he said finally.

She blanched. “And they’d kill you for it then.”

“If they didn’t get me before I even set foot out the prison doors.”

“Oh, Danny.” Something in her eyes hurt him.

“Molly, I made my choices. I went in knowing what I was getting in to. I got out knowing there would be no easy way out. That was what I tried to tell Bobby this afternoon.”

Her eyes sharpened. “Bobby?”

“Bobby J.” He’d been so wrapped up in seeing her—and what did that mean?—that he’d forgotten what he had come by to tell her. “He sneaked into my apartment this afternoon.”

“Bobby J. sneaked into your apartment?” She looked dumb-founded. “Why?”

“To talk to me. I think to find out why I’d done what I’d done.”

“Why you got into organized crime?”

“Mostly why I got out, and how.”

Her face cleared. She beamed. “This is big.”

“Very big.”

“I’m blown away.”

“So was I. I’m just worried about what it is that he’s into—you know, that he would come to me with questions, that he felt that kind of…I don’t know, rapport with me.”

Molly frowned. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“I did, and long before today. Molly, there’s something about him. Something desperate. It sounds like his mother takes the money he earns—doing whatever it is he’s doing—to buy liquor. Probably drugs, too. That’s my take. That kid’s going to snap.”

“He’s doing something he knows is wrong…and for all the wrong reasons,” she murmured.

“Yeah. I think if he actually thought he was helping his family, he’d never get out. He’d be a career criminal. But he knows he’s not helping them because his mother gloms onto the money.”

“You were helping your mother,” she said, “but you got out.”

“No. That was different. I always had to pay for things behind her back. She never really accepted the money.”

“I’d like her then,” Molly said suddenly, surprising him.

Something cold dove inside him to banish the heat he’d felt only moments before. He hoped to hell that she and Mona wouldn’t meet in the afterlife. What was he doing here?

He was here because there was nowhere else he wanted to be, he answered himself, and no one else who would understand Bobby J.’s overture. He was here because the lure had been too great.

“I’ll try to talk to Bobby again,” Molly said.

“It won’t do any good. Not with this kid.”

Her spine snapped straight. “Why not?”

“You’re a cop.” She snarled something under her breath but he interrupted her. “Let me work with this and see what I can accomplish. This kind of situation is why I went to work there at the center in the first place.”

She was not going to feel these weird sensations for him anymore. Molly clapped a hand to her stomach as it rolled around inside her. “I can put officers on him, try to keep a covert eye on him to find out what he’s into.”

“He’d pick them out in a heartbeat. Besides, it doesn’t sound as though you have many friends within the department at the moment.”

More important, she didn’t know which ones she could trust.

Still…“He’s just a kid.”

“He’s street smart. Think of your brother.”

Molly flinched, but she knew he hadn’t meant it to hurt her this time. “There’s got to be something I can do.”

“There is. For once in your life back away from the wall. Stop hurling yourself at it. Let me take care of this.”

Molly hesitated. “Okay.” She trusted him with this, she realized. Deep down, in her soul, she trusted Danny with Bobby J.

Maybe they were on the same side after all.

“What was that?” he asked sarcastically.

“I said okay.”

“Got a calendar anywhere? I want to mark this day.”

“Don’t push your luck.”

He held his hands up in surrender. “Not me.”

Molly snorted. “Knock it off. Innocence doesn’t suit you.”

He raised a brow. “Yeah? What does?”

“Horns, a tail and a pitchfork come to mind.”

He laughed, but this time it hurt something inside him. It was too close to the truth. “Molly, I really should go. I only came by to tell you about Bobby J.”

She hesitated. “You could have called. Ron has my phone number, too.”

“I wanted to see you.”

Everything—everything—inside her moved this time. “Why?”

“Do you really want me to answer that?”

She opened her mouth with a quick response, then she sighed. “I—no. No, I don’t think I do.” Not with her current problems with the department, she thought. It would just complicate things if there really was any kind of…consorting going on.

Danny wasn’t sure what he would have said anyway. He wasn’t sure if he knew the answer to her question, and if he did, if he wanted to face it. A cop.

Molly sprang suddenly to her feet. Moment over, he thought. Amen.

“Want to kiss me goodbye?” she quipped.

“Want me to?”

She tilted her head to the side in a dangerously provocative way. He watched those curls spill to her shoulder, and his fingers itched again. Reach for her, just reach for her. She won’t hit you this time, she won’t stop you.

“Well?” he challenged.

“Hold on. I’m thinking about it.”

“Too late. You lost your chance.”

“I could change your mind about that.” Her eyes glinted at him.

“You’re trouble,” he said softly.

“Yes. Everywhere I go.”

Danny stepped around her fast and headed for the back door.

“Coward,” she whispered after him.

“Watch yourself. Someday I’m liable to call you on that.”

Excitement slid under her skin again, hot and expectant. This was crazy. Then he was gone, the door swishing quietly shut behind him.

Molly sat slowly on the floor again and gulped her wine. It finally occurred to her she’d never actually found out why he was using the back door.

The man stroked the small pin on his lapel thoughtfully. “This is a problem.”

“The kid’s shaky,” the second man agreed. “And he’s associated with her through that rec center she’s always hanging out at.”

“If he says anything to her, it will just fan her flames. All right, yes, I see your point. Talk to the boy. If he says anything about…disassociating himself from us, he’ll have to be eliminated.”

“Why not her? She’s been snooping around personnel now. The IAD charge didn’t even slow her down. And she’s starting to talk about bad cops.”

“Relax. Officer French is enjoying her last days as well. We’re not going to give her time to repeat that theory to anyone.”

Molly knew she wasn’t supposed to be this happy. Her life was a shambles.

She really couldn’t have anything to do with Danny, she thought, at least not if she wanted to keep her career intact. If she had a sane cell in her brain, she would avoid him for all she was worth right now. And yet she couldn’t stop thinking about him…or smiling when she did. It went beyond any kind of sense that she should be on cloud nine this morning over something—someone—she couldn’t possibly have, but she bounced into the war room anyway, cheerful.

Gannon and Hasselman were there.

“Top of the morning to you all,” she greeted them, and went directly to the crime book table.

“With a name like French, something tells me you’re not Irish.” Gannon lifted a brow at her as he finished writing out a report.

“You’re one crazy female, you know that?” Hasselman muttered as he poked at the force computer that still wasn’t working right. Molly watched him for a moment to see if he was actually doing anything to it, then she pulled out a chair and picked up a fresh pile of filing.

“I love this stuff.” She sighed. “I live for it. It’s the only way I know what’s going on around here.”

“Maybe because nobody wants you here,” Hasselman retorted.

Gannon sat back and crossed his arms over his chest. “Frank, I think those are fighting words.”

“Where’s your camera, Hasselman?” Molly asked.

“What camera?”

“You know, point, focus, click? That camera.” She didn’t look directly at him as she spoke, but she kept one corner of her eye on him.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

Either he was an excellent liar, Molly thought, or he had never taken pictures of her and Danny at two o’clock in the morning. She was inclined to go with the latter.

“I’m out of here.” Hasselman stood from the computer. “You work with her,” he said to Gannon.

“Actually, I don’t find her all that unpalatable.” Gannon waited until Hasselman was gone, then he asked, “Want to lift that no-parking thing now?”

So he knew about the IAD matter. It punctured Molly’s balloon a little. She let her breath out carefully. She liked Joe—but someone had obviously let the word around that she suspected cops were working for the mob. Molly looked over to meet his steady gaze.

“If I do it at this point, it’s as good as admitting that I had a personal reason for asking you.”

“Did you?”

Molly stayed silent. Gannon finally nodded, getting her message. “Okay. But can I give you some advice? Stop being so…I don’t know, out there with the likes of Frank.”

Molly sighed. “I don’t know how to be any other way, Joe. I just wanted to find out if he knew anything about those pictures.” Then something occurred to her and she looked at him sharply. “Do you know who took them?”

Gannon held up both hands as though to ward off a blow. “No. I have no idea who started your mess. But you do tick off a lot of people around here.”

“Why do you think that is, Joe?”

He didn’t hesitate. “Because you’re smart. And you’re honest. You came from a larger P.D. in a rougher city so you probably have experience they don’t have, like I said before. And you’re a woman. Through the last century, female officers have made up maybe 1 percent of our number. This is South Texas, Molly, land of the Texas Rangers.”

“Yeah, well, there have been a few pistol-packin’ mommas in these parts, too.”

He laughed. Molly didn’t think he’d ever done that with her before. “I’m just saying, IAD asked me about that no-parking sign.”

“What did you tell them?”

“That I thought the building was a fire hazard.”

Molly closed her eyes briefly in relief. “Thank you, Joe.”

“You’re welcome. Now would you like a little more advice? Why don’t you start hitting this room after your shift is over so no one sees you here?”

“There’s never anybody here anyway.”

“They have eyes on this room, Molly. It belongs to them.”

Her heart jerked. He was telling her that he thought there were bad cops involved here—and that they were behind her IAD problem. First Spence Harrison…and now Joe Gannon.

She was definitely on the right track. Now all she had to do was prove it.

“They have to sleep sometime,” he said. “You work the four-to-midnight, so come here afterward while they’re sleeping.”

Molly stood from the table. “Okay, I guess the filing is all yours then.” She grinned at him and scooted out the door.

She was halfway down the corridor to the parking lot door when she skidded to a stop and turned back to look thoughtfully at the records office. She had returned Danny’s file days ago. She’d done it before he’d acknowledged—sort of—that the police department might have been involved in his arrest, at least to some extent.

Who had gone to Danny’s condo and found money that shouldn’t have been there? she wondered now. Who had thrown cuffs on him on the side of the road and never considered that he was heading in the wrong direction at the time? None of the officers named in that report had thrown a red flag at her the first time she’d read the file—because she’d been so wrapped up in the issue of Danny’s crime and what it meant to her attraction to him that she hadn’t been paying attention to what those names might mean to her “bad cop” theory. Molly went back to the office and stepped inside.

“Hi, Gale.”

“Well, if it’s not persona non grata,” the woman responded, looking up from her computer.

“Ouch. You heard.” Obviously the news was all over the police station, Molly thought.

Gale came to the counter. “Eli Tripician was just here picking up copies of all your arrest records.”

Molly’s heart hitched. “Is that good or bad? This is the first time anything like this has happened to me. I don’t know what to expect.”

“It’s good. He’s already putting a case together for your merit.”

Molly nodded, breathing a little better. She really had to pay the man a visit. “Well, anyway, I need that Daniel Gates file back.”

“IAD has it.”

This time her heart fell like a burned-out meteor. “They know I took Danny’s file?” That was bad.

“I’m sorry. When they first inquired if you’d been in here lately, I didn’t know what was afoot. I would have tried to cover for you—as much as I was able.”

Molly was trying to digest too much at once. Her thoughts scurried then stuck on the one thing that really bothered her. “Damn it, now I can’t even find out who picked him up and who got the money back.”

“Well, that’s actually not true. Everything we get through here is scanned into the computer system so we have that record as well as a hard copy.”

“There’s a computer copy?” Molly perked up.

“Give me ten minutes or so to print it out, then come back.”

Molly nodded. “I will.”

She moved down the hall to personnel. Evie Castelano looked up and grinned when she saw her. “Ah, our resident bad girl.”

Molly sighed. Already this was getting old. “Who’d you hear it from?”

“The first time? Paulie McCauley. Then I heard it again at the water cooler.”

“From anyone who’s on the task force?”

Evie scratched her temple. “I don’t think so, but I have trouble keeping track of who all is on that list unless they come here looking for something.”

“Have any of them done that?”

Evie shook her head. Her beehive jiggled. “Only you.”

“So am I on the approved list yet?”

“Sorry, honey. I’ve been waiting for word and I haven’t gotten it.”

“Well, don’t hold your breath.” Molly started to turn away, then she went still.

Evie’s keys—or someone’s keys—were right there on a far corner of the counter, right next to a paper cup of convenience-store coffee and a paperback novel. Would the one to this room be on there? The woman came to the counter and picked up the coffee cup to sip from it slowly.

They were her keys.

“What’re you going to do about the charges?” Evie asked.

Molly jolted and pulled her gaze from the keys. “I’m going to kick some serious butt. I’m going to do whatever it takes to clear my name.” Then she glanced at the keys again. She realized that her heart was beating a little too hard. She left the personnel office.

“Here you go,” Gale said when she returned to the records room. The woman passed a new file to her.

Molly opened it. She scanned it for what she wanted. “Beau Maguire. I’ll be damned.”

“What?”

“Beau Maguire went to Danny’s condo and confiscated the money.” It didn’t mean a thing, Molly told herself. She was too much the investigator to overlook the obvious. Maguire had been on patrol in that area during that shift. He had taken the call to check the situation out. It was a perfect cover, she thought. It offered an almost too-perfect explanation for his involvement in the whole thing.

If she could just get into the personnel shift records, she could find out if that area had been his regular patrol of if he’d been strategically moved there for the afternoon. She thought of Evie’s keys again and her heart skipped a beat. She found herself wondering if Maguire owned a camera.

He’d left his post and had let someone get to Ed Bancroft without signing in. And now it turned out that he had discovered Danny’s purportedly stolen money. “Am I supposed to believe that all this is coincidence?”

“Pardon me?” Gale asked.

Molly realized she’d been talking to herself again. She didn’t make excuses this time. She closed the file and handed it back. “Thanks, Gale.”

“You can have that.”

“Uh…all things considered, that might not be a good idea.”

“Don’t worry about it. I didn’t log it this time.”

Molly grinned, gave the woman a little salute, and left the office. She went to her car, peeled out of the parking lot and headed toward the PBA office.

Chapter 8

After an hour with Tripician, Molly wasn’t sure if she felt better or worse.

She’d dropped in unannounced but he cleared his calendar to see her. That belied the fact that he kept telling her not to worry. Obviously, she thought, he was concerned.

“You’ve got an excellent arrest record and a good conviction rate,” he said. “You’ve always kept your nose clean before. So far, the evidence against you is all gathered from one specific night, not spread out over a calendar year. That minimizes the impact of consortium a great deal.”

His clear blue eyes had a calming effect, she realized. Molly nodded and let herself breathe. “How many of these IAD things have you handled, anyway?”

“One or two.”

Her heart gave a warning kick. “That’s all?”

“Ben Stone runs a tight ship. Not many of his men—er, women—that is to say, female officers, have stepped out of line.”

Her confidence level was ebbing. “Were the charges against the others legitimate?” Or had they, too, been good cops who had managed to irritate the hell out of some bad ones?

“One guy discharged his service weapon in the middle of his own domestic violence incident,” Tripician reported. “There were too many witnesses, and his wife went for his throat. I couldn’t save him. The other gal—”

“A woman?” Molly was instantly alert. Maybe all this was a gender-bias sort of thing after all.

“Yes, that’s right. She was accused of using undue force.”

“Did she?”

“I don’t think so. And they couldn’t prove it.”

“Who is she? Where is she now?” She’d like to talk to someone else who’d been through this, Molly thought.

“She’s relocated to Tulsa. She decided a change of scenery was called for.”

Molly sat back in her chair again, frowning. Was it possible that Mission Creek’s good ol’ boys just really didn’t like female officers? Even Danny hadn’t seemed very surprised last night when she’d told him they were trying to convince her to leave the task force. He’d just nodded as though, given her sex, it should almost have been expected.

Molly started to ask another question, then that thought went through her like lightning. It lifted the hairs at her nape. Danny hadn’t been surprised. She was assuming she knew why…but did she? Was there more to it? Did he know something about this through his association with Ricky? Was this more proof that the bad cops had mob ties? She tried to remember if she had ever mentioned her theory to him, but she couldn’t be sure.

She needed to talk to him. Molly shot to her feet. “I’ve got to go.”

“Where?” Eli was startled.

“I just remembered an appointment. I’m sorry.”

“Is it more important than these charges you’re facing?”

“You’ll be the next to know.” But Molly paused at the door and looked back at him. “For what it’s worth, Eli, I’m going to bring down every one of them who are doing this to me. And I’m not going to move to Tulsa afterward, either.”

“Bring them down?” Eli blinked slowly, as though the reflex would buy him time to collect his thoughts. “I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”

Molly shook her head. If he didn’t, then she wasn’t going to enlighten him. “Just tell me one thing—what happens next?”

Tripician relaxed. He was back on safe ground. “I have an appointment with IAD on Friday to try to convince them that their charges against you are bogus. If I can’t make them see reason, they’ll attempt to grill you in a question-and-answer session.”

“The interview part,” she clarified.

Tripician nodded. “We’ll block that, of course. If they push it that far, we’ll hire an attorney and threaten to sue the city if they refuse to desist with this charade.”

“That makes me look guilty. Maybe I should just talk to them.”

“How much time on average do you spend with Mr. Gates per day?”

Molly started to respond, then she shook her head. “I see what you mean. But suing them? That ought to really endear me to the rest of the department.”

“Do you want your career intact or do you want to win a popularity contest?”

“Both. I want both.” For the second time in as many days, Molly felt tears stinging at her eyes. She dashed the back of her hand across them, annoyed with herself.

To have any chance of that, she was going to have to bring them all down, she realized. She was going to have to neutralize the enemy. She’d have to find out who the bad cops were and what they were doing besides harassing innocent cops. She’d have to prove that they’d been involved with the bombing.

A tall order.

“Thanks, Eli,” she said quietly. “I’ll call you Friday afternoon.”

“In the meantime, stay away from the rec center at night.”

Molly made a growling sound of pure frustration. The war room was off limits during the day; the rec center was off-limits at night. She was getting very tired of these fools dictating where she could go and when she could go there.

“You didn’t even bat an eye when I told you!” Molly charged ten minutes later.

Danny leaned back precariously in Ron’s office chair to put his feet on the desk. “You’re magnificent when you’re angry.”

She showed teeth. “Stop trying to rattle me and change the subject. I want to know why.”

“Why?” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with the way your skin gets…sort of translucent with all that blood rushing around under the surface. Your eyes get greener, too. Real shiny.”

Molly stomped her foot. “Stop it!”

Danny brought his feet down suddenly. “I can’t answer your question, Molly. Leave it alone.”

Her heart thumped. What was he saying? “You can’t or you won’t?”

“Both.” He knew she’d wormed her way onto the task force—and had probably made enemies in the process—because Ricky had told him. And Ricky had told him because the mob was making it their business to know everything there was to know about Molly French. There was no way to explain that. Neither was there any way to explain the sick feeling he got when he thought of what his choice six years ago was now doing to her life. He’d never thought that doing time would hurt anyone else.

“You know something,” she accused.

“I know so many somethings it would boggle your mind, and I’m not going to tell you any of them.” And here it came, he thought—the moment when she started hating him. He wasn’t prepared for the way an unseen fist clamped around his stomach and twisted it with savage regret.

Molly measured him with her eyes for a long time. Then she moved into the office. “Okay. I actually figured you were going to say that. But I had to try. This isn’t just cop stuff now, Danny. I wouldn’t ask you just to break the case. It’s gotten personal for me.”

The fist twisted harder…because he still couldn’t help her.

“I’ll just have to figure it out for myself.”

She dropped down into the chair on the other side of Ron’s desk and put her forehead to the wood, dejected. It snatched the air from his lungs. Her chocolate-brown curls spilled. He half reached out to touch one when he caught himself.

He had no right.

“You said that if you had fought the case against you six years ago, the case would have gotten stronger,” she said finally. Her voice was muffled.

“Molly, I can’t go there.”

“I know. I’m just making connections, thinking aloud.”

“It’s called talking to yourself.”

She brought her head up again to look at him. “I’ve been going about this all wrong, you know. In fact, I haven’t been going about it at all. I’ve been reading the task-force notes daily, trying to make sense of them, but I haven’t done anything.”

She got up again to pace. He still hadn’t seen her in a dress, though that robe last night had been nice. Now her legs were clasped in denim again, and that was good, too. They were tight, cupping her rear in a way that almost made him sweat. “What?” he asked hoarsely, aware that she’d said something else but he hadn’t been listening.

“The hell with the war room,” she repeated. “Joe Gannon called that one—there’s nothing there that they don’t want to be there.”

“Who’s they?”

No, she realized, she hadn’t told him before. It eased her mind somewhat. “We’ve got bad cops,” she said flatly.

Danny’s heart slammed into his chest wall. He could have told her that they certainly did. He knew of at least two who were on the Mercado payroll. Or at least they had been six years ago. Now he couldn’t be sure. That assuaged his guilt somewhat as he firmly closed his mouth. Then Ricky’s voice came back to him. What would she think if she knew you had information she could use to bring down the Mercado empire and you won’t give it to her?

Danny pushed the question away and watched her pace, running those fine-boned hands of hers—too delicate and pretty for what she did for a living—through her reams of curls.

“I need to start a list,” she said suddenly, coming back to the desk and snatching up a notepad. “And then I have to find out everything I can about each of the men on it. That’s the way to go about this. If I have to spend a week tailing each and every one of them, I will. Sooner or later one of them will lead me to where I want to go.”

“Where’s that?”

“To the bombed-out Men’s Grill.”

Danny flinched as the hollow echo of Ricky’s voice hit him again. She thinks my family is behind the bombing. You could probably tell her the truth, if you want me to tell it to you.

“You think bad cops blew up the Men’s Grill?” he asked cautiously.

“No. I think bad cops work for whoever blew up the Men’s Grill. And in a town like Mission Creek, who could that be?” She didn’t wait for his answer but supplied her own. “Your friends. Your ex-friends,” she corrected herself. “The Mercado gang.”

She began scribbling things on the notepad, dragging lines from one item to the next. “Look at this. Ed Bancroft and Kyle Malloy were involved with whoever bombed the country club. That’s a given. Otherwise, what reason would they have had to kidnap Jake Anderson?”

“Okay,” Danny said neutrally. She didn’t seem to hear his vague tone.

“Beau Maguire allowed someone to get to Bancroft the day he was hung. Was it deliberate or just negligence? If it was deliberate, then he would only have done it because the powers-that-be told him to. He’s also been riding my backside like I’m some kind of pony and he conveniently discovered that money in your apartment six years ago. If not for the other stuff, I could accept that maybe he was just on patrol that day and he caught the call. But add in the rest, and it looks like he’s working for someone. And who might be interested in both framing you and killing off a loose link where the bombing was concerned? I’ll tell you who—the mob.”

She didn’t look up when she said it, he realized. She didn’t even try to find his eyes to read the truth there. And he knew it was deliberate because she had no qualms whatsoever about asking him about his past for personal reasons. But she’d switched from the personal again. This was cop stuff. This was for her shield.

In that moment it hit him.

Her strength of character, he thought. And her stubborn, thorny determination to do what was right. All covered up by a glib tongue—one he had yet to even taste, he reminded himself a little desperately—and an almost zany self-confidence. It was all of that, wrapped up in a tight, trim package with too many curls. The truth punched into his chest with enough force to steal his air.

Ricky had been right: he was falling in love with her.

“I have nothing concrete on Hasselman or McCauley,” she continued, “except for the fact that they’re really antagonistic toward me.” She wrote their names on a bottom corner of the notepad. Then, finally, she glanced up at him. “There’s no help for it. I have to get into Maguire’s personnel files and as long as I’m at it, I might as well poke into McCauley and Hasselman as well. Bancroft and Malloy are almost a waste of time given that they’re dead, but there might be something telltale there. Anyway, I really think the answer is in Evie Castelano’s office somewhere. The security on our personal records is just too tight for comprehension. I’ve got to break past it. I need some kind of proof here.”

Danny dropped back to earth with a thud. “Molly, don’t do anything stupid.”

“Weren’t you the one who told me that stupid is dying for doing the right thing?”

“Don’t throw my words back at me. And nobody is trying to kill you.”

“They’re trying to annihilate the one thing I am. My identity. That comes damned close.”

“A cop.” It should have made him flinch, but he was still too dazed by his own feelings. “What kind of career do you think you’re going to have left if you break into the personnel office? That’s what you’re thinking of doing, right?”

Molly hesitated for only a second before she nodded.

“Ah, jeez,” Danny groaned, then he got up to pace.

Molly leaned back in her chair and nibbled on her bottom lip thoughtfully. “Joe Gannon says I should stay away from the war room during the day and Eli Tripician wants me to steer clear of this place after hours. So I guess I’ll just nose around the police station after shift.”

“The police station, hell!” Danny charged. “You’re going straight to personnel! You’re slamming yourself into walls again, Molly.”

“This one is going to fall down. I’m going to get these guys. I have to.”

“Then at least let me help.” What the hell was he saying? Visions of Ricky and Carmine and his parole officer flew through Danny’s mind, fierce little winged goblins with each man’s face. He could break into that office for her easily…and it would land his butt right back in jail.

Molly shook her head, knowing it, too. “There’s nothing you can do. Anyway, I’ve got an idea about how to accomplish this.” She thought of Evie’s keys again. If she swung by the office as soon as she reported into work, there might be a way to lift them. She stood and headed for the door.

“By the way.” She paused, looking back at him. “Before this is all over, I’ll find out why you weren’t surprised last night.” She shut the door quietly behind her.

Danny made a move to stop her, then he decided he had to let her go. He sat down again hard.

What was he supposed to do about this—about wanting her this way? He couldn’t let himself love her. It broke every rule he knew, and all the ones Ricky had given him.

He hadn’t squealed six years ago because he hadn’t wanted to die. He’d agreed to Ricky’s terms yesterday because it was the only way to protect Mona and Molly. And he’d consigned himself to hell, where constant fear for them would gradually tear the life out of him. They’d so far escaped clean with his visit to her apartment last night, but how many chances like that could he—could they—take?

And he wanted to take those chances, he thought. He wanted to go back to her blue and red living room again and again and again.

His stalemate with Ricky wasn’t the answer.

He went hollow and cold inside. Carmine’s death wouldn’t matter, he realized. There were always the others—henchmen, deputies, hitmen—who, as Ricky had said, all wanted vengeance against Danny Gates for biting their master’s hand, for taking everything Carmine had given him and walking away. Someone would always be watching him, waiting for any good excuse to make him pay. And someday they would do it. Neither Molly nor his mother would ever breathe an entirely safe breath again for the rest of their days.

Unless Danny blew the whole thing wide open, after all.

He had to cough up what he knew and he had to bring the mob to their knees, he realized. He had to dismantle them, cripple their power base here in Texas. It was the only way he could set any of them free. And Ricky had inadvertently pushed him to it with his ultimatum.

He might have stayed quiet forever if it had only been a matter of his own life.

“Hold on, Molly, just hold on. Don’t hate me yet.” Danny scrubbed a hand over his eyes. Now she had him talking to himself.

He didn’t know how to do it. He didn’t know how to strike that fatal blow without any of them being caught in the cross-fire. He didn’t want to destroy Ricky, either. Somehow there had to be a way to get them all out of the line of fire and sweep the Texas mob out of Mission Creek once and for all.

Hope seized on that idea with a ferocity that would have brought him to his knees had he been standing. Hope. Danny wondered how long it had been since he had experienced that simple emotion.

Then Molly burst back into the room. “Danny. Hurry.”

He jolted and looked up. Her voice was a hum of repressed panic. Danny came to his feet, scared by that and by the way the color had drained from her skin in the short time since she’d left him. She was alive, unhurt, not bleeding. No one had made a move on her. What had happened, then?

“It’s Bobby,” she said. “Our Bobby. Someone’s hurt him.”

Her entire adult life had been built upon, layered upon, the need to stay calm, Molly thought ten minutes later. First there had been Mickey’s blood sliding through her fingers as she’d bent over him, knowing that if she stopped applying pressure to his wound long enough to scream, she’d lose him. And somewhere between that and watching her mother lay her head down on her pillow for the last time, there had been more blood, the blood of strangers. There’d been shattered flesh and crushed bones, accident scenes and aggravated violence. Through it all, she’d stayed calm.

She couldn’t have said why she was unraveling now if her own life had depended upon it.

“Jerome lives in the same projects as Bobby,” she said, closing her fingers over the dashboard as they raced to the hospital, bracing herself as Danny took a curve too fast.

“Molly, I was right there with you in front of the rec center when Jerome told us that. I know.”

Molly brought her hands to her temples and dug her fingers in there. For some reason, she couldn’t remember the exact chronology of things. “So you know that he saw the ambulance pull up to Bobby J.’s apartment?”

“And he saw Bobby being scraped off the sidewalk and loaded onto the stretcher.” Danny could barely get the words out. He was suffering his own agony. I put him up to this. I told him to break free.

He hadn’t, really, but logic couldn’t find a toehold in his churning thoughts. What, really, had he said to the kid? He’d implied that if the money wasn’t helping his family, then maybe Bobby ought to rethink what he was doing. He’d told him to come back and bounce ideas off him, ways to extricate himself from his mess of a life before it was too late. He’d mouthed all the right platitudes, had made all the right gestures. But Danny knew without a doubt that Bobby J. had gone off half-cocked, anyway, because of something he’d said yesterday. He’d tried to get out of whatever it was he was doing. Danny’s guilt was vicious.

He’d told Molly he’d handle the situation. She’d trusted him with it. And he had failed miserably, with the worst repercussions possible.

“One of his sisters called 911,” Molly said hoarsely. “Danny, she had to watch that! She saw them beating the bloody hell out of him. A little boy!”

“Bobby gave up boyhood a long time ago.”

“Jerome said he was beaten to within an inch of his life.”

“And how much could Jerome see from a block away?” He was desperately trying to remain sane, calm.

What the hell had Bobby gotten himself into? Danny wondered again, peeling into the hospital parking lot. Would Carmine’s thugs beat a kid that badly in front of another innocent child? Adults—yeah, Danny thought. Carmine would give the order for something like this to be done in front of a loved one, usually because he felt there was a pertinent lesson to be learned. But kids?

It didn’t feel right. Something was wrong with this whole picture, Danny thought.

“It’s the mob, isn’t it?” Molly whispered. “That’s who he’s been involved with. They have cops, and they have kids.”

This time Danny was honest. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

He parked the car and they ran into the emergency ward. He spared her a glance as they shot through the doors together. What was happening to her bothered him, too. She’d never really gotten her focus back.

He nudged her aside when they reached the desk, but it took him a moment to pull his gaze off her. Then he turned to the nurse behind the Plexiglas window over the counter.

“A boy—a teenager—was brought in here by ambulance a little while ago,” he said. “We want to check on his condition, to see him if possible.”

The woman was dispassionate as only one who had spent long, long years in the emergency room could be. Danny could tell by the colorless tone of her eyes that she had long since burned out. “Name?” she asked.

“Bobby.”

“Last?”

Danny stalled. He looked helplessly at Molly. She’d been at the rec center a lot longer than he had. But Molly only shrugged and shook her head.

“I don’t know,” she said. “We just call him Bobby J.”

Okay, Danny thought. He could work with that. “His last name begins with a J,” he told the nurse.

She looked at him as though he had just tried to pull off a major heist. “You’re not kin then.”

“Does he have kin here?” Danny demanded. He was gratified when something changed in her eyes. “Stop playing games with me. You’ve got to know what kid I’m talking about. How many teenage boys have been brought in here in the last half hour, beaten to a bloody pulp?”

She sniffed, then she relented. “One. He’s unconscious. He’s in one of the exam rooms. And no, he has no family with him yet.”

“And he’s not likely to.”

“We don’t know that.”

“I’m telling you, we’re all he’s got, lady.”

“I can’t—”

Danny left her and headed for the swinging doors leading to the exam rooms. To her credit, she didn’t try to stop him.

It took Molly a second to realize what he was doing. She was dazed. She took off after him and caught up with him in the corridor behind the door.

The smells. Antiseptic, she thought, that was really nothing more than a disguise because the germs were never really banished and death was never really held at bay. Underneath the tang of that was the unmistakable odor of blood. She had come to recognize it early in her career—an almost metallic scent. They walked past an elderly man on a gurney in the hallway. There was the smell of aging, disintegrating flesh clinging to him.

She passed through this building on an average of once per week. Why had she never been so acutely aware of all this until today?

Just ahead of her, Danny stopped at the last exam room. “He’s got to be in this one. He’s not in any of the others.” She realized then that he had been poking his head into every room they passed.

They found Bobby on a gurney in that last room.

“Oh, God,” Molly prayed as she stepped inside after Danny. Bobby’s face was almost unrecognizable. One of his arms was twisted unnaturally over his waist. Molly sank to her knees beside the low gurney and reached for his hand. Just as she thought better of it—she didn’t want to hurt him—Danny pulled her to her feet again, anyway.

“Okay, we found him. Now get out of here. I’ll stay with him.”

“What?” It took her a moment to pull her gaze from Bobby to him. “What are you talking about?”

“I said, go. Do whatever you normally do at three o’clock in the afternoon. I’ll stay with him. I won’t leave.”

“I can’t—” Something bizarre was swimming through her head, dulling everything; she couldn’t think. “I have to go to work,” she realized.

“Then do it,” Danny said harshly. “I’ll call you as soon as I know something.” His voice softened. “Molly, you really don’t need to be here.”

Anger reared up inside her. “You want me to drive around in a patrol car while he’s lying here dying? I’ll just call in sick.”

“Sure, that’ll do you a whole lot of good with the IAD mess you’re in right now.” Danny took her arm and steered her back toward the door. He had to get her out of here. She was on the edge—and he knew why.

He figured she would try to hit him again as he dragged her up the hallway and this time he was prepared for it. When she twisted away from him and gathered her arm back, he caught her wrist. “I’ll carry you out of here if I have to.”

“Why are you doing this to me?” she demanded.

Because he cared about her even more than he cared about that boy back there on the gurney, Danny thought. But he didn’t dare say so. “Count of three, Molly. If you’re not heading out of here under your own power by then, I swear I’ll pick you up and do it for you.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I’ll kill you.”

“No, you won’t. I’m bigger and stronger.”

“Stop this. Let me go.” She struggled with him, trying to pull her wrist free.

“One…two…”

She took a quick, panicked step back.

“Smart woman,” he murmured. He let her go to dig into his jeans pocket for his keys. “Can you drive?”

“Can I or will I?” Her chin came up.

“Oh, you will. My only question is whether or not you’re going to wreck my luxury automobile in the process.”

His stab at humor didn’t work, he realized. Her eyes still wouldn’t quite focus. Then she turned away from him, and in a blink she was jogging back up the corridor toward Bobby’s room.

“Damn it!” He caught up with her in three strides and lifted her in his arms. “Don’t embarrass yourself,” he warned her, then he glanced at a nurse who passed them, looking concerned. “She’s fine,” he assured the woman. “Just stubborn.”

He carried her through the waiting area and out through the hospital doors before he deposited her on her feet on the tarmac. Then he took both her shoulders and he shook her a little. “Molly! Bobby isn’t your brother! You didn’t let him down.”

For a moment her face went even whiter. Fury tried to leap into her eyes, but she couldn’t hold on to it. Danny held her as she swayed.

Molly never felt herself unravel but suddenly the tears were there. They choked her, big gulping sobs. She didn’t know when she reached out for him blindly, but she knew when he was there, when those strong arms closed around her. She didn’t feel his breath on her hair or his hand as he stroked it, but she heard his voice, as gentle as a prayer.

“You’re all right now,” he said. “Shhh.”

“I didn’t…I’m not…”

“Yeah, you were. You went back there to that place inside you where you keep those memories. There was nothing you could have done, Molly, for either of them—sure as hell not for Bobby J.” He’d warned her that not all of the walls she threw herself at would fall down, he thought, but even he hadn’t guessed that she would react quite this way when it happened.

“Hold me,” she said wretchedly.

“I am.”

They were standing in front of the hospital, in full view of Mission Creek, Texas. It was insanity to do as she asked, to stay here, both because of her IAD problem and because of Carmine. Her fists came up between them and found his shirt front, wrapping themselves into it. Danny took them in both of his and loosened them, then he slung an arm around her shoulders to guide her to the parking lot. “Come on. You can do more for him on your shift than you can do here.”

They reached the Dodge. It took a moment for the meaning of his words to work its way through to her. It happened like the tremors of the earth after a quake, gentler than the first trauma but with the potential to be just as powerful. Molly let her breath roll out of her, and she leaned back against his car. “That’s the first time you’ve ever done that.”

He knew what she was talking about. Because he didn’t want to acknowledge it, he didn’t answer. He should have known, though, that she wouldn’t let it drop.

“That’s the first time you’ve ever admitted that I can do some good…being a cop.”

“Well, you’re not a bad cop,” he said uncomfortably.

“Tell that to IAD.”

She was coming back to herself, he realized. “I don’t think they want to talk to the likes of me.”

Why the hell was he holding her hands? he wondered. When had that happened, and why was he running his thumbs over her knuckles? Because, he thought, something horrible had almost happened to her heart back there, and he hadn’t been able to bear it. Yeah, he thought, he loved her.

“Are you okay now?” he asked finally.

Molly hesitated. “You were right. I feel like I let Bobby down, like I wasn’t there for him, either. I’ve been too busy with the task force.”

“No, Molly. No. I think I said something wrong to him yesterday. Or he didn’t get the message.” And the guilt clawed again.

“You couldn’t have known—”

“Neither could you,” he interrupted.

“Go back inside to him, Danny. Somebody needs to be there when he wakes up. I’m fine now.”

“Right.” But neither of them moved.

“Thank you for holding me together.”

“Yeah, I saved the day. You were about to come unglued.”

She laughed hoarsely. “You’ve really got to work on that humility problem you’ve got going on there.”

He almost grinned, but she held him captive. Her eyes were bright now and focused…on him. He was drowning in them. “Later,” he said finally, hoarsely. “After I go see about Bobby.”

“Danny?”

He tried to let her hands go. “I know. I’m leaving now.”

“That wasn’t what I was going to say.”

“What then?” he asked impatiently, anxious to get away from her and to get back to being himself, a man he could recognize.

“I want you to kiss me now.”

“What?” She hit him with it out of the blue. And he felt something inside him quake.

“If you won’t, then I will.”

Molly went up on her toes and found his mouth with hers. Finally. It was the only thought he had when the surprise wore off, and for a moment his mind simply stopped there.

His blood gathered instantaneously. He was hard, hot, ready…all with that first touch of her mouth to his. He’d known, somehow, that it would be this way. He wanted to know how she could do that to him. He’d have to figure it out later. For now he finally let himself taste her.

Those strong, muscled arms of his wrapped around her hard. And his mouth relented against hers, his tongue sweeping inside. Crazy, was all Molly could think. She was risking everything—her job, her world, her own ideals—for this moment, for this single taste of him, because for a little while he’d seen through her like no one else could. And because he’d cared enough to back her down when she would have driven herself to the edge. Then he turned her fast and suddenly until his own back was against the Dodge. He dragged her into him and she couldn’t think anymore at all.

There was only sensation…so many little sensations. The way her legs fitted between his, denim straining against denim, and beneath the fabric, her skin was alive with every brush of contact. One of his hands came up to take a fistful of her hair with a strength and intensity that almost hurt. His other arm hooked around her neck, pulling her deeper into his kiss as his mouth worked on hers.

She’d thought he’d be punishing, tough, all part of that bad-boy image that had first captivated her. But his lips slid over hers like warm silk and his tongue was gentle, seeking, then finding. He kissed her as if he had been waiting to do it all his life.

She tickled his tongue with the tip of her own, playing, and Danny could feel her mouth smile against his. Mindlessly and wordlessly she promised all the things they’d teased each other about for so long now. His fingers splayed over her ribs, sliding until he could feel the weight of her breast in his hand. He was ready to drag her down to the tarmac without a care for anything else in the world because his blood was beating hard and his mind was glazed with craving her. Then he heard a car door slam shut somewhere else in the parking lot.

They were in the hospital parking lot.

Danny realized that he was shaking a little as his mouth left hers. He let his lips cling a little. Then, feeling suddenly cold as though the sun had left the sky, he found he had to lean in and kiss her again one more time. He finally eased her from him so he could step away from the car.

He ran a hand over his mouth. His legs felt unsteady. That had never happened to him before, either.

“Well, that was worth the wait.” There was a tremor to her voice. So she wasn’t rock solid right now, either, he thought.

“You’ve…uh, really got to work on this timing problem you’ve got going on here.”

She laughed hoarsely, and Danny wasn’t sure he trusted himself to say any more. There was too much in his head, in his heart. He was a man who had been cautious all his life—and now he had just wrapped himself around her in a public parking lot as though there could be no repercussions for that in the world. And all because she’d asked him—just asked him.

She was everything wrong for him, and somehow she had tunneled her way into his life, making everything right.

He wanted to promise her that he would fix everything—the mess he’d made of his life, and hers, too, by association. But he still didn’t know how he was going to do that. He told himself she was safe no matter what they had just done because those papers he’d written out were still where they were supposed to be, and Carmine was still sitting happily by his telephone, no doubt giving the orders that would chop his other enemies off at the knees. But Danny was still scared. Because whoever had called this shot against Bobby J. had no qualms, was hair-triggered, was liable to do anything in the world.

Was it Carmine? Was it the mob? He had to get back to the boy.

Molly opened his car door and slid behind the wheel. “I think I can drive now.” He caught the top of the door, and she glanced up at him, her brows lifting. “What?”

“Just for the record, we’re not done with that yet.”

Her heart did a slow somersault and never quite got its proper position back. Molly nodded, then she forced herself to swallow as she watched him walk back to the hospital. She put the key in the ignition and sat for a long time before she remembered to close the car door.

She’d lied. She couldn’t drive.

But somehow, after she left Bobby and Danny, she managed to do just that. She got herself home in the hideous lemon-yellow Dodge—there was no time to swing by the rec center and exchange Danny’s car for her own. She was probably going to be late for work as it was. Her Camaro would still be there after midnight, and there was no help for it.

There was a part of her that was fiercely glad about that—at least they might guess from this that she wasn’t going to buckle easily. It would be like a slap in their faces. Then, as she showered and dressed, nasty thoughts crammed her head, bumping up against each other almost painfully. By the time she pulled her hair into a bun, they started to line up more cohesively.

It was all linked. Somehow it was all linked, Molly thought.

Danny thought Bobby worked for someone powerful and evil. The mob. Danny thought that Bobby had taken his words to heart yesterday and had recklessly and abruptly tried to sever his connection to that same entity. And they’d damned near killed him because of it. The mob.

It had to be the mob, she decided, the same mob that had blown up the country club and who had hastened Bancroft’s death, the same mob who had framed Danny—obviously with some help from within the department. Someone was calling the shots to deter her from the task force, throwing her to the IAD wolves—that part wasn’t coming directly from within the department, she didn’t think. The order would have been given from higher up. But when they’d used Danny to do that, they’d overplayed their hand. Because if she could prove that he hadn’t robbed that convenience store, that they’d framed him, then he wasn’t an ex-con. And if he wasn’t an ex-con, then she could roll around naked with him in the middle of Main Street and all she’d be risking was an ethics violation.

All they’d done was make her want to try harder.

She jogged into roll call. “Here!” she gasped just as her sergeant called out her name.

“Flu all better, Molly?” Harry Roscoe asked.

She glared at him. “Must have been a twenty-four-hour bug.”

Beau Maguire sneered. “I hear there’s a longer one going around.”

The gaze she sent his way was lethal, too.

“Officer French, your car has been changed for this shift,” her sergeant interrupted. “You’ve got unit eleven tonight.”

Molly opened her mouth again in outrage, then she swallowed the words. That car hadn’t been out of the garage in six months since it had been involved in a major fender bender. “Did they finally fix the alignment on that?” she asked sweetly.

“I’m told that it’s fine and dandy and ready to go.”

“Too bad. A worker’s comp claim might fix all my problems right about now.” She left them to chew on that and veered out of the room.

She wasn’t all that surprised when she got to the garage and the attendant handed her the keys to her usual vehicle—unit nine. “Thought better of it, did you?” she muttered aloud, then she skidded to a stop on her way to the car.

Someone at roll call had called off the dogs on the car issue.

It was the only way that the switch back to her regular vehicle could have happened so quickly. Someone had heard her words and had reconnoitered, realizing what they were risking. She was working the task force on her own time. A worker’s comp claim would take her off shift for a while…and leave her with a lot of down time on her hands, time during which she could poke into their shenanigans all she wanted. Why risk it for what was essentially nothing more than just another taunt thrown her way?

Suddenly she knew, too, that that was why she hadn’t been suspended pending the outcome of the IAD charge. They wanted her working steadily without enough time off to even breathe.

Who was it? Who on her shift was the pipeline to the powers pulling the strings? Her sergeant? Maguire? Roscoe? It could be any one of them, she realized, or more than one. Unfortunately, Molly thought as she drove out of the garage, the full scoop on all the officers on her shift was also with Evie in personnel. She couldn’t get to that, either.

Until she found a way to lift Evie’s keys. She hadn’t had time to stop there before her shift after all.

“Damn it,” she muttered, reaching for her radio handset. Well, she was rolling in her rightful car now, Molly thought, and there was a teenage boy lying in the Mission Creek Memorial emergency ward who needed her. Before Danny’s mouth had finally touched hers, before she’d found out that he kissed a woman as though he cherished her, he’d said she could do more for Bobby on shift than she could by his hospital bed. And he was right.

Molly clicked on the radio handset and got the dispatcher. “This is Officer French, unit nine. I need you to put me through to 911 dispatch.”

“Right away, Officer.”

There was a click, a buzz, then a male voice came through the radio. “This is 911 terminal.”

“It’s Officer Molly French. I’m inquiring about a 911 call that came through to you guys at about 2:30 this afternoon. A young male Caucasian, beaten pretty badly. He was taken to Mission Creek Memorial.”

“One moment, Officer.”

There weren’t that many 911 calls in Mission Creek per hour so it wouldn’t take him long, Molly thought, and she was right.

“I have the call in question on screen, Officer,” he said after a short pause. “What did you need to know?”

“Anything and everything you can tell me.”

“A nine-year-old girl by the name of Beatty Jansen called in at 2:38 p.m. This call was not placed from the Jansen residence as the child explained that her family has no telephone service. She stated that the boy—her brother—was being hurt by ‘two bad men.’ That last is a direct quote, Officer.”

“I figured that.” Her heart started picking up its rate—more anger, she thought. More fury. Oh, how she wanted to hurt the people who had done this.

“As the girl declared that there was a great deal of blood on the sidewalk, an ambulance was dispatched along with a patrol unit,” the 911 operator continued.

“What unit caught the call?”

“Twenty-two. Officers Kevin Neely and Bryce Evans. That’s all I know, Officer French. After we dispatched, our file closes.”

“Right. Thanks. I’ll contact the officers involved directly.” Molly disconnected.

Neely. Evans. She couldn’t quite place them. Mental images came to mind, but she wasn’t at all sure how accurate they were. They’d never worked the same shift with her in the two years she’d been with Mission Creek. They would be top-of-the-line, day-shift guys.

“Where I’d be if I’d had an ounce of sense in my head and had just stayed in Laredo,” she said to herself. But she’d left after her mother had died and had no longer needed her, because Mickey’s ghost had never stopped walking the streets of that city.

And now, here in Mission Creek, she’d found Danny. Danny. Her stomach fluttered oddly, and she pulled her mind off him. She glanced at her watch.

It was nearly a quarter to five. The day shift guys should be home by now unless they’d stopped for a beer or something on the way. She dug her cell phone out of her pocket and called information. Some innate caution had her avoiding the police department’s main switchboard and routing the call through her radio.

She didn’t expect much from information. Kevin Neely’s phone number did turn out to be unlisted, but then she actually got one for Bryce Evans.

“Brave man,” she thought aloud, tapping in the number with her thumb. She didn’t know of many cops who’d let the public have access to their personal lives. Maybe Evans thought he was above retribution.

A man with a gruff, deep voice answered the line on the first ring. “Hello?”

“Could I speak with Bryce Evans, please? This is Officer Molly French with the M.C.P.D.”

“You got him.”

Molly took a breath. She wondered if Evans was one of those who considered her to be the enemy. She couldn’t help it—everyone was suspect these days. “Hi,” she said, trying to sound chipper and friendly. “I’m not sure we’ve ever met. I work the swing shift. I have some questions about a 911 call you took this afternoon and the corresponding investigation.”

“Only 911 call I took today was that delinquent who’d already been in the detention system, anyway,” Evans replied. “That’s one off the street who won’t be causing us trouble for a while, huh?”

He paused. Molly waited, not knowing what to say.

Evans kept talking. “We sent him over to the hospital—that city ambulance bill isn’t ever going to be paid, we know that, right? Damned low life kid.”

Something in her head was thumping. Hard. But Molly decided to ignore his slurs in favor of not ticking him off and getting more information. “Do you have any suspects?”

“Suspects?”

“As to who did this to him?”

“It was probably one of his hoodlum friends. Who did you say you were, anyway?”

Molly didn’t answer. “His sister said it was two men.”

“Did she? I didn’t hear that.”

“It’s on the 911 record.”

“Yeah, well, thanks for letting me know. But the case is not priority, if you get my drift.” He chuckled.

She set her teeth. “No, I’m not sure I do.”

There was a long pause. “Listen, Officer, what did you say your name was?”

“Talbot.” And where the hell that came from, Molly had no idea. It was just a knee-jerk, half-baked effort to protect herself from more trouble…as if she could. Two or three phone calls and questions would turn up that there was no Officer Talbot with the M.C.P.D. and this inquiry would be pinned on their resident troublemaker—her. Like Joe Gannon had said, there were only a couple of women with the department.

“Take care of your own shift, Officer Talbot,” Evans said, his tone darkening, “and leave me to mine.”

“Will do.” Molly disconnected. Her hands were trembling.

Okay, so Evans was one more cop who didn’t think that the worst of the city’s juvenile delinquents were worth saving. She’d met her share of them over the years, and she despised them. If any of them had thought of reaching out to Mickey before it was too late, he might be alive today.

Don’t go there. Molly caught her thoughts up fast and ruthlessly. Danny was right. Bobby wasn’t Mickey. But they were alike in so many ways. Mickey had been shot while trying to back out of something ugly, too. And she might very well be in the process of losing Bobby, as well.

“Okay,” she said aloud. So maybe she was emotionally involved here. Maybe her past was crossing with her present. Danny had grabbed her back from the abyss at the hospital and he had shoved her to safety, but she was teetering on the brink again. What Evans had said was…outrageous. But was she over-reacting?

One man would know, and one man would have no qualm whatsoever about getting in her face to tell her. Molly turned around the block and headed back to the hospital. It was time to check in with Danny and Bobby J.

Chapter 9

Her uniform made all the difference, Molly discovered ten minutes later. The same nurse was moving around behind the Plexiglas window, looking harried and miserable, but when she caught sight of a police officer, she hustled her way to the counter right away. She doesn’t recognize me from earlier, Molly thought. In all fairness, the nurse had spoken mostly to Danny when they’d been here earlier.

“Yes, Officer. How can I help you?”

Molly decided that there was no sense in enlightening her. “I’m here to see Bobby Jansen.”

“Let me check his status.” The woman began tapping a computer keyboard, flipping through screens. “He’s still here in emergency.”

“Still?” Molly was flabbergasted. “He was badly hurt! And he was brought in hours ago!”

“I’m sorry. Apparently, they’re waiting for a pediatric surgeon. He’s been paged.”

A surgeon? Molly’s heart stalled and her mouth went dry. She cleared her throat. “Is he still unconscious?”

“He’s been in and out of consciousness,” the nurse reported. “You’ll find him in the last room down that hall there.”

“Still?” Molly pushed through the swinging doors into the corridor.

Nothing had changed since she had left, she discovered, entering Bobby’s room. He lay in almost the same position as when she had left him. His arm was redder, more swollen. His face was swollen badly now, too. Before his eyes had merely been closed as though he’d been sleeping. Now they seemed pressed shut by bruised and hurting flesh.

Danny had pulled a chair up to the gurney. His arms were crossed on the edge of the makeshift bed and he rested his forehead against them. At the sound of her footsteps, he spoke without looking up. “To tell you the truth, I was really hoping you’d come back here first chance you got.”

Molly was startled. “How did you know it was me?”

“Cop boots on linoleum flooring make a very specific sound.” He finally lifted his head.

Molly decided to forego a retort this time. He sounded too beaten, too tired. She went to stand beside him.

“Plus,” he said, “there’s that perfume you wear.”

“It’s called Caribbean.”

“Hot, spicy sunsets? Yeah, that works.”

She grinned a little, bemused. “Ah…okay.”

“That was a compliment in case you didn’t realize it.”

“You’re making my knees weak.”

“Then say thank you and sit down here with Bobby. I need to go crack some heads together.”

Something about the way he said it rolled through her from her head to her toes. His tone was raw, and now she understood his exhaustion. He had been restraining himself for hours. He hadn’t knocked heads yet, and he wanted to, desperately, but he wouldn’t leave Bobby until she came back.

“Danny, no…”

“Just sit with him a minute, okay?” He finally stood and pulled the chair back for her.

“Cracking heads isn’t the answer.”

“Don’t be a cop on me now, Molly. They’ve left him here this way because he has no health insurance. And my stash of cash is damned near depleted. I don’t have enough left to help him. And that makes me mad—really mad.”

“I have money.”

He finally looked at her. His eyes were ravaged. She saw in them the teenage boy who had gone to work for Ricky Mercado’s uncle because there had been no other way out. She saw in them a man who had gone to prison for something he hadn’t done because he’d always known there would be penance to pay for his earlier choices. She saw a man stubborn and strong enough to stay away from the lure of that money now that he was an adult, even if it meant he would suffer…and who berated himself anyway because he could not help a poor kid pay his hospital bill.

She saw all that, and in that instant Molly knew she had fallen in love with him. Her knees nearly gave out with the realization.

Something must have shown on her face because Danny’s eyes sharpened on her. “Are you going to weird out on me again?”

“No, I—I’m fine.”

“Right, and I’m the King of England. Will you please sit down?” He finally caught her hand, then he pushed her unceremoniously into the chair he’d vacated.

Molly felt something hysterical try to press up into her throat. “You’re a regular Sir Galahad.” With tarnished armor and a record, she thought. Except she was going to fix the matter of his record. Still, he was everything she shouldn’t want. She loved him.

She gathered her thoughts back fiercely. “Nurse Evil-Eye out at the front desk says they have a call into a pediatric surgeon. They’re just waiting for him to call back.”

“He won’t rush it because he knows he isn’t going to get paid.” Danny fisted his hands.

“No decent man would do that. Besides, I told you. I have money. I’ve been saving to buy a house. That’s why I drive a ten-year-old car.”

He looked at her in a way that made something in her chest hurt. “You should have a house, Molly. You really should. You’re that kind of woman.”

She sat up straighter at his tone. “What does that mean?”

In that moment, Danny lost hope again.

It flooded out of him, that fierce, ecstatic feeling that had filled him earlier when he had convinced himself that if he could just bring down the mob, he could keep on kissing her, wanting her, could let himself love her. But bringing down Carmine and his guys was a simple order compared to ever being a man who deserved her. He had a record. He was always going to make $8.00 an hour. He wasn’t ever going to buy her a house.

The choices he’d made six years ago began strangling him again.

“I’m going to go find a nurse.” He turned for the door.

“I just told you why they’re waiting—”

“I want a better explanation than the one Godzilla offered.” He left the room.

Molly watched him go, frowning, then she turned back to Bobby. The hairs on her nape lifted.

She pressed a startled hand to her chest. His eyes were open. He was staring at her.

Either that or he was dead. Her blood rushed cold.

“Bobby?” She reached quickly for his pulse. It was there. Oh, thank God, it was there.

“Maaa.”

Did he think she was his mother? Or was he trying to say Molly? His mouth was so swollen. She leaned closer. “Don’t talk. You’re not alone.”

“Head hurs.”

His head hurt. That made sense. “Danny’s gone to get some help for you.”

“Tuped.”

Tuped? What did tuped mean? she wondered frantically.

“Stup,” he tried again.

Now she got it. Stupid.

But…did he think Danny was stupid for going to get help? Or that he had done something stupid to deserve this? She couldn’t ask him, couldn’t make him try to talk, and frustration burned in her blood. “Not now, Bobby. We’ll straighten it all out later. But nobody’s stupid. Not one of us. We’re all smarter than anyone gives us credit for.” She realized then that she was talking about all of them—Bobby and Mickey, Danny and herself, all the kids at the center, all of them who had come out of nothing with every strike against them and had turned into special people anyway. She reached across him to hold his uninjured hand. “We’re going to pull you out of this.”

“Lines,” he said.

Lines? Molly shook her head helplessly.

“Du…this.”

“Lines did this to you?”

“Coss.”

“Damn it,” she whispered in frustration, scrubbing her hands over her face. Then she looked at him again. “You crossed lines? Is that what you’re trying to say?” Her eyes filled with tears. “I know that whatever it is, it’s important, or you wouldn’t be trying so hard to tell me. But you’ve got to be quiet. You’ve got to rest now. We’ll talk about it later.”

“Lines. Den. Coss.” And then he closed his eyes again.

Molly reached frantically for his pulse one more time. It was still there. He’d just passed out again. She breathed, then she heard footsteps behind her.

She turned around in the chair. Danny had come back with a sprite of a woman who instantly set Molly’s teeth on edge—simply because she was the kind of woman Molly would never be—tiny but somehow voluptuous, with the kind of breasts the hero in every story always went for. She had nearly platinum hair that only another woman would know did not come out of a bottle. She had porcelain skin and perfect blue eyes. The nurse’s uniform should have negated some of her looks, but this girl would be beautiful in army fatigues, Molly thought with a sigh.

“I’m so sorry,” the nurse said. “I don’t know how this could happen.”

“I told you how it happened,” Danny said harshly. “He’s been lying here for hours because he has no insurance.”

The nurse looked honestly stricken. “I don’t know where Dr. Walters is. I usually work with him in pediatrics. I’m just filling in here in the E.R. tonight for someone else. But you can believe me—he would be here if he had gotten his page.”

“Told you so,” Molly couldn’t resist saying to Danny.

“Then get someone else,” Danny said to the nurse. “If you can’t find that doctor, get another one.”

“Dr. Walters is the best.” Her tone brooked no argument. She adjusted an IV for Bobby, moving busily around the room. “If we don’t get a call back from him soon, I’ll…I’ll do something.”

She would, too, Molly thought, feeling better. There was grit here. And the flush on the nurse’s cheeks told her she was angry.

“He says his head hurts,” Molly reported. “Can you at least do something about that while we’re waiting?”

“I already have. That’s what the IV is for.” She finished with the boy and turned to face Molly. “I’m Caitlyn Matthews. And our patient here talked about more than his head when they first brought him in. I checked up on him a couple of times before I turned him over to the nurse on shift in this room. He was more cognitive then. He was talking about lions.”

“Lions?” Lines. What the hell? Molly thought. She looked helplessly at Danny and shrugged.

“He could well have been already delirious because of the pressure building inside his skull,” Nurse Matthews said. “We did some scans on him as soon as he arrived. He’s bleeding in this area.” She motioned to an area of the boy’s head.

Molly’s heart tried to stop but she appreciated that the nurse wasn’t mincing words. “Tell me.”

“Are you family?”

“Nope. Want to make something of it?”

The nurse gave a flickering smile. “Just getting my bearings here, Officer.”

“Molly will do just fine.”

Nurse Matthews hesitated, then nodded. “Okay. Let’s just say you’re asking in the line of duty, Molly. That clears me to divulge the information to you.” She paused. “We’ll need to bore a small hole in his skull to let the blood out. It sounds worse than it is. Until that happens, the pressure just keeps building. It will gradually block out more and more of his capacity for speech and reasoning, but not for pain.”

Molly winced. “You’re tough.”

“Yes, but don’t tell anybody.”

Damned if she wasn’t ending up liking this woman. “Thanks for your honesty. If I can ever do you a favor in return, just yell.”

The woman gave a tiny, wry smile. “One can only hope I never need the police. Excuse me. I’m going to page Dr. Walters again.” She started to turn away, then to Molly’s surprise, she paused in front of Danny. “As for you, why didn’t you come find me sooner? As I said, this wasn’t my assigned room, but I’ll find out who had it and they’ll hear about this.”

Danny looked nonplussed. Caitlyn Matthews went to the door, then she stopped one last time and looked back.

“Oh, one other thing about those lions he was speaking of. I know this sounds bizarre, but I got the feeling he was talking about…well, cops. He said they have some sort of…what did he call it? A den somewhere.” She paused to rub her forehead as though she had suddenly developed a headache. “I’m sorry, but I got the impression that they’re the ones who beat him up. I was going to try to call it in when my shift was over, but to be honest, I didn’t know what to say or who to tell. Now you’re here, and you seem like his friend, so I wanted you to know. As I said, it’s entirely possible that he was just delirious, but there had been limited internal bleeding at that point. So medically speaking, I would tend to believe him.”

She finally left the room. If Molly hadn’t already been sitting, she might have fallen.

Cops beat him up. Bad cops. She had been right all along. She’d been right. She looked at Danny, her heart hammering even as nausea shoved its way up her throat.

“He said lions to me, too. And he said den. Coss was cops. Dear God, Danny, do you understand what this means?”

He leaned one shoulder hard and suddenly against the wall as though to steady himself. “He was working for cops.”

“The bad cops must be called the Lion’s Den! Bobby knows who my bad cops are. And you thought he was working for the mob! This has got to be proof that the bad cops are linked to the Mercados!”

“Maybe.” But in all his years with Ricky and the mob, he had never heard about a Lion’s Den, he thought. He didn’t know anything about this. For once—for maybe the only time—there wasn’t a single thing he could tell her to help her.

Rage was still a physical pain inside her when Molly left the hospital forty minutes later. It pounded in her head. It clawed at her throat and kept her from swallowing. It filled her stomach with acid.

Cops had beaten Bobby—probably because he’d tried to leave Carmine’s employ, as Danny had done.

Cops had helped the mob frame Danny.

Cops had bombed the Men’s Grill. She was sure of that now. It was why they wanted her off the task force. They were afraid she’d figure that out.

And, lest she forget, cops had thrown her to the mercy of the IAD wolves.

They had named themselves, she thought. They had a cute little tag for their nasty group. “You’re done,” she whispered from between clenched teeth as she drove her patrol territory. “I’ll get you now. I will.”

Twenty minutes later she picked up her radio handset and called in just to make sure everything was working right. The dispatcher was being uncharacteristically quiet tonight.

She’d been out of her car for an extended period of time at the hospital, Molly thought. She’d thought that dispatch would be frantic by the time she returned. They had probably tried to reach her and gotten no response. Normally she would have reported that she was leaving her vehicle. But she hadn’t thought she’d be in the hospital very long, and she hadn’t wanted to give anyone any more ammunition to use against her. Bobby wasn’t her case and she had no business checking up on him on city time.

Had they known she wasn’t in her car because they were actually following her?

She couldn’t believe that no one had tried to raise her during the entire hour she’d been in the hospital. One way or the other, eventually she’d have to explain where she’d been. It would mean another reprimand in her once-spotless file. But until then, there was a bright side to the whole situation, she thought, grinning slowly. If the Den guys didn’t know where she had gone, it would drive them crazy. And if they knew she’d been with Bobby, then they would be really worried.

Her radio finally buzzed. Molly grabbed it. “Four-Delta, Officer Molly French responding.”

“Four-Delta, respond to 612 Hacienda Place on report of a domestic dispute.” It was the same dispatcher who had been throwing her the trench calls all week, Molly realized. The woman had a flat East Coast accent.

Molly waited, but the dispatcher didn’t continue with the usual details. “Are there weapons involved?” she asked finally.

“Not at this time,” the flat voice responded.

“Might there be at some other time?” She had a right to know what they were sending her into.

“Unlikely, Officer. This woman is a little paranoid. She has a restraining order in place against her ex-husband and she calls in periodically because she thinks he’s lurking in her bushes.”

One of those, Molly thought. “Four-Delta received and responding from—” she peered at the next street sign she passed “—Sage and Main.”

She found the address on Hacienda Place. It was a small, pretty stucco home with pyracantha bushes bracketing the front porch. Molly parked and headed up the walkway to knock on the door.

The woman who opened it was disheveled, distraught—and drunk. “You came,” she said, weaving slightly in the door frame.

“Yes, ma’am. Do me a favor now, and stay inside. Go back in there and close the door. I just wanted to let you know I was out here. It’s me you’re going to hear pawing through your hedges for the next fifteen minutes or so. Okay?” Translation, Molly thought, don’t shoot me because I’m not your husband.

Molly left her and made a tour through the infamous bushes, poking at them here and there with her flashlight. There was no one in the vicinity, she discovered, not even a stray cat.

Where was her backup? she wondered, leaving the pyracantha to look up and down the street. Domestics were the most potentially dangerous of all calls. No unpartnered officer was ever sent to one alone. Another patrol car was always signaled to follow the initial unit to the location. What games were they playing with her now?

Molly went back to the front door and knocked again. This time there was no answer. She moved a little farther down the porch to peer through the bay window there. The woman was passed out on the sofa. Molly sighed and went inside to make sure she was all right, then she returned to her patrol car to call in.

“Four-Delta,” she said to the dispatcher. “False alarm. There’s nothing going on here, and the woman who made the call seems to have…ah, gone to sleep for the night.”

“Four-Delta, your sergeant requests that you remain at the scene, anyway.”

Molly frowned. “Remain here? What for?”

“To make the woman feel safer.”

“I just told you. She’s passed out.”

“From what?”

“Judging by the smell of her? Liquor.”

“One moment, Officer. I’ll report that back to him if you’ll hold your position.”

“I’ll hold,” Molly grated.

The woman came back on the radio a few minutes later. “Sergeant Connelly reiterates, remain at the scene until you hear otherwise.”

“Who the hell is this woman? A senator’s wife? Some major contributor to the presidential campaign?”

“Not to my knowledge, Officer.”

“Okay. What the hell.” Molly hung up the radio. If they wanted her to sit here for the rest of the night, she’d do that. It was better that wrestling with drugged-out boys who outweighed her by sixty pounds.

She was just getting comfortable when her radio buzzed again. “Four-Delta, Officer Molly French responding. Can I leave here now?”

“I’m just patching a call through, Officer,” said the East Coast voice.

“Dandy.” Maybe this would be her reprimand for leaving her car earlier, Molly thought, then she shook her head. No, they would nail her for that when she came in at the end of her shift.

“They put me right through,” came Danny’s voice. “I guess this is what it’s like to be on the right side of the law for once. Am I on your good side, Molly?”

Molly’s heart rolled over at his dry, familiar tone. She found herself grinning for the first time in hours. “Hello to you, too.” Then her heart stalled.

She knew why they had put him right through. It was on the record now. She’d gotten a radio communication from her ex-con. But she couldn’t tell him that.

He’d blame himself. “How’s Bobby?” she asked instead.

“Cutting to the chase, Officer 432?”

“How do you know my badge number?” Oh, how he lightened her night!

“You were wearing it at the hospital earlier.”

“My, you’re observant.”

“They teach it in ex-con school.”

“Don’t say that on here!”

Then Molly realized that it didn’t matter anymore. It didn’t matter at all. She knew about the Lion’s Den now, and she was prepared to fight fire with fire. Anything they did to her, she would come back at them with one better.

They were through using Danny against her. When she was done with them, he wasn’t going to be an ex-con any longer.

Danny gave a long silence to her outburst. “Right. I’ll catch up with you later on all this.”

“No. Wait. It’s okay.”

“What do you have up your sleeve now?”

Molly didn’t answer, but he figured it out, anyway.

“Ah, Molly, you can’t fix my mess. It’s another wall you don’t need to be throwing yourself against. I am what I am and what’s done is done.”

“Oh, I can fix it,” she murmured quietly. “But don’t let it go to your head. Maybe I’m not doing it for you.”

She thought whimsically that she could hear him grinning in the pause on the line. “Then who are you doing it for?”

“For me. I want to consort with impunity.” That got to him, she thought, as she heard him choke a little. “Are you still there, Mr. Gates?”

“I’m here. Define consort.”

“Later,” she promised. “With the rest of our unfinished business.” She’d never known her heart could beat this fast. Anticipation thrummed in her blood, staining her cheeks.

She wanted him. She wanted all of him this time. And she wanted him soon. She wanted to resume what they’d started this afternoon.

She loved him.

“Oh, God,” she murmured aloud.

“What?” he asked sharply. “Are you all right?”

“Sure. I’m fine. Just fantasizing.”

“Jeez, Molly! Can you be talking like this on here?”

Yes, she thought again, yes, she could. Because they weren’t going to suspend her any more than they were going to set her loose with a worker’s comp claim. They’d want to keep her on duty to pin her down. They couldn’t know it was already too late for that.

She changed the conversation anyway to somewhat safer ground. “How’s Bobby? You never answered me.”

“He’s out of surgery. But he’s no longer responding to pin-pricks and whatnot.”

“What does that mean?” Something in his voice scared her now.

“Molly…I’m sorry. He’s officially in a coma.”

Molly closed her mouth against an instinctive cry of protest. “He was in and out of consciousness all night. Why is this different? Did they relieve the blood in his skull, let it out?”

“Yeah, but there’s bruising, trauma to the brain. They’re saying that it has sort of…I don’t know, shut itself down to give itself time to heal. He could come out of it tomorrow, next month, next year.”

“Or never,” Molly supplied the blank he’d left, her voice strangled.

“That, too.”

She didn’t realize she was crying until she saw the drops on her trousers. Hot tears slid down her cheeks, landing in her lap. “Damn it, I never do this. Until lately.”

“What?” he asked, his voice hitching with concern.

“Cry.”

“You’re crying? Because he’s not going to be able to tell you anymore?”

“No. Because he’s Bobby.” She sniffed, then the gunshot rang out.

There was a distant ping and spider-web fractures erupted over the right side of her windshield. Molly screamed and dived for the seat. “Got to go.”

“What?” Danny bellowed. “What the hell was that?”

She dropped the radio handset back into its holder and cut him off. “Bastards.” She wouldn’t cry. She would live. But all she could think of was the dispatcher’s voice. Your sergeant requests that you remain at the scene.

Molly wormed her way across the seat to the passenger side door. It was the safe side of the car. She was pretty sure the shot had come from her left. She tugged up on the handle there, crawling out and crouching. This domestic had not been an honest, legitimate call. Someone had shot at her.

She waited for more gunfire. There was none. But the woman in the house had been awakened by the explosion of the bullet. She was on her front porch, screaming now.

Molly reached a hand back into her car and found the radio handset. Her hand was shaking. She willed herself to sound calm. Damned if she’d let them know they were terrifying her.

“Four-Delta, requesting that backup you never got around to sending me. I have shots fired here.”

“I’ll radio, Officer.” There was a long pause. “There’s no other officer in the vicinity, Officer. I can send one from the next quadrant, but that will be a while.”

Molly beat back a stream of curses. “Get someone from there then. Tell them to try using those nifty little lights and sirens these cars come equipped with. Tell them to hurry.” Please, someone please hurry. She took a deep breath and deliberately cleared her head. “Sergeant Connelly’s VIP lady is currently standing on her front porch howling like a banshee. She’s wide open, dispatch, in plain line of fire. Without someone to cover me I can’t get to her and move her safely back inside.” Then again, Molly thought, they all knew nobody was going to shoot at her. Unfortunately, it was the only threat she had.

“I’ll relay that information, 4-Delta.”

“You do that. I’m not moving out from behind this car without cover,” Molly said. “Repeat, I’m not moving.”

She waited, her heart thrumming. Finally, her radio beeped again. Molly depressed the button with her thumb. “Four-Delta responding—and becoming highly agitated by this situation.”

“Detective Gannon is on call tonight,” the dispatcher said. “He lives a short distance away from Hacienda and can be there quicker than the others. He says he will respond. He’ll be in his personal vehicle, 4-Delta. It’s a late-model silver Acura.” The dispatcher gave her the license plate number. “He says not to mistake him for the shooter.”

Thank God. “Received and acknowledged.” Or had Joe set her up? She had no choice now but to sit down by her front tire and wait to find out.

They hadn’t dared to suspend her, she thought again, fighting a hysterical laugh, so apparently they’d decided to get rid of her entirely.

Her gun hand was steady enough when the silver sedan came to a brake-screeching stop in the middle of the street next to her own car. The passenger window lowered. She couldn’t see Joe from her position on the ground but his voice came to her clearly. “Status, Molly?”

“By the manual, Joe. I’m alone so I waited for backup.”

“Good call.”

“Gee, thanks. I think he’s gone by now, though. Whoever shot at me. There’s been no further fire.”

“He was probably gone before his finger went cold on the trigger.” Gannon’s voice was tight, vicious.

He knew, Molly thought, feeling sick. He knew, too, that she’d been set up. Because he’d been in on it? She had to trust someone, but Danny’s was the only face that came to her mind. And Danny wasn’t here. All she had was Gannon.

“You’re senior officer here,” she said finally. “Advise, Joe. What do you want me to do?”

“Take the back of your car. I’ll take the front.” She heard his door open and close on the other side of his car. “You head for that lunatic screaming her lungs out on the porch. I’ve got your back. Get her inside and when you’re clear, I’ll head out to the rear of the property to check things out.”

She heard what he was implying. No one would shoot at him. They wanted her.

“Joe,” she said hoarsely, “I really need to trust you right now. You’re a good guy, right?”

“I’m not one of them, Molly.” His reply was even, not insulted, not surprised. Did he know that they had a whole damned organization, that they’d even gone so far as to name themselves? Just how much had Gannon figured out when he’d booked Bancroft into a holding cell only to have a dead prisoner on his hands an hour later?

If he was lying, she was either going to die on her way to the door…or here by the tire.

Molly moved around to the rear of her patrol car, her weapon drawn, then she darted for the cover of some oak trees on the rim of the property. There were no more shots. She was sure then that there wouldn’t be. Joe was right. The shooter was long gone. They wouldn’t risk staying in the vicinity any longer than was absolutely necessary. They might well even think they’d gotten her—at least until they heard her alive and well on the dispatch tape, bleating for backup.

Molly left the cover of the trees and ducked into the edge of the pyracantha. She avoided the steps and went up onto the porch from the side, then she ambushed the woman and pushed her quickly back through the door into the house. She found the light switch and turned the porch light out.

The woman was still weeping in her arms when Joe came back. Molly caught his gaze. “No footprints, right?”

“It hasn’t rained in well over a week. The ground’s too hard.”

“Convenient.”

“Isn’t it though?”

Her fury blazed. It burned in her blood, hot, lethal, staining her skin red. “Damn it, Joe! This isn’t just an IAD charge! This is my life we’re talking about here! I had shots fired and no one would come!” They had to be up to something terrible, something heinous, to be this worried, she thought, and felt her head spin.

Joe gave her a glare of warning and inclined his head in the direction of the door. Molly set the weeping woman away from her. She mollified her with comforting words. Joe told her that he would be back to take a statement from her in the morning, that none of this actually had anything to do with her or her husband. She was safe, but he’d arrange for another patrol car to sit outside her residence for the rest of the night.

They finally went outside. Molly pulled the door shut quietly behind her. Joe looked at her steadily.

“What the hell do you know, Molly? What have you done that I don’t know about?”

She hesitated. All she had, really, was a list of maybe-suspicious names and confirmation that there was a network of bad cops. She knew what they called themselves.

“I already have my gold shield,” he said. “I’m no competition for you getting yours. And if I were one of them, you’d be dead now.”

She was too shaky, too tired in the aftermath of adrenaline, to be offended. “That’s not it. I want to be sure of what I’m saying before I make accusations. But as soon as I sort through a few more things, I’ll bring you in.”

He thought about that. “Fair enough. Okay, here’s what we’re going to do now. We’ll leave the damaged cruiser and I’ll give you a lift back to the station. You’ll need to fill out a report and I’ll send a tow truck for the car. Damn it, Molly, I wish you had stuck with no-parking signs.”

“At this point…me, too.” She followed him to his Acura, her legs feeling boneless.

Forty minutes later Molly hunched over a desk in the squad room and dug the heels of her hands into her tired eyes. Joe’s words rang through her head. What the hell do you know, Molly?

Someone had shot at her. In her twelve years in law enforcement, she had never come so close to death as she had tonight. She had been talking on the radio with Danny, her left shoulder leaning against the driver’s-side door of the car. That slouch may have saved her. They’d brought her car in a little while ago; the bullet had gone through the right-side stuffing of the driver’s seat. If she had been sitting upright, it probably would have caught her in the right shoulder.

Had the shooter been close enough to the car to see that she hadn’t been sitting up straight? Even assuming he had been, it had been pretty damned close if they had just been trying to rattle her. No, she thought, no. They had definitely been trying to kill her. They had to be protecting something huge to justify murder.

Dispatch had known she was talking to Danny. They’d put the call through. What did that mean? She would drive herself crazy trying to figure it out, Molly knew.

“Damn you, damn you, damn all of you,” she said aloud, then she pushed her chair back and got to her feet. Okay, she thought, all bets were off. “You shot at me.” They’d put Bobby in a coma. They’d framed Danny.

It was time for some hardball.

She looked at the wall clock as she left the squad room. It was twenty past eleven. For all intents and purposes, her shift was over. They wouldn’t issue her another car now. She should probably stay on the premises for the next forty minutes or so, but that was fine with her. It worked to her advantage. Molly headed for the personnel office.

There was a glass window in the door there. Molly leaned against it and peered inside. Some of the computer monitors glowed overnight with screen savers. There was enough insipid light that she could tell that there were no keys, no coffee cup, no paperback novel on the counter. No surprise there. Evie had long since left for the day. Molly sighed and pushed away from the door, but she tried the knob for good measure. It was locked.

“What don’t you guys want me to find in here?” she murmured aloud.

She’d lost her chance with Evie’s keys when she’d been late today, but she had a credit card in her purse, Molly thought. Molly left personnel and started toward the women’s locker room—a misnomer if ever there was one. The space was pretty much a broom closet with two lockers stuck in there—one for her and another for the only other female officer on the M.C.P.D. They didn’t get a shower and bathroom facilities like the guys did. It was why she always dressed for her shift at home.

The locker room was inky dark. Molly hesitated in the door, her stomach roiling. She was getting paranoid—and why not? She finally stepped inside and inched along the short, tiled wall, her hand out until it connected with the light switch. She drew her weapon again and flicked it on.

Nothing. No one was there. The locker room was empty.

Molly pushed off the wall and stepped across the narrow room. Then her heel came down on something lumpy and unsteady. She swore aloud and backed up. The lockers cast a shadow on the floor between them and the wall. Molly glanced over her shoulder to make sure no one was behind her, then she dropped to her haunches to feel around the tiles.

Her fingers closed over a set of keys.

Molly straightened quickly and went back to the door to look at them in the better light there. Her heart started beating like a snare drum. She had a flash of Evie Castelano strolling nonchalantly to the counter this morning to sip deliberately from that convenience-store coffee. What are you going to do about the charges?

Evie worked in personnel and would have access to the schedules. Evie would know that Molly would be the only person coming through this room tonight. The other female officer worked days. She would already have been gone from the police station by the time Evie got off work.

These were Evie’s keys. They’d been sitting on the floor in front of her locker. Evie had left them for her.

Molly’s first instinct was giddy gratitude, then paranoia sank in on her again, teasing her pulse. Was she being set up again? Lured to that office?

Did she have a choice but to find out?

She left the locker room and went back to personnel. She stopped in front of the door and shifted the keys in her hand, looking for a likely fit. The one she chose slid easily into the lock. “Okay. Let’s see where this leads me.”

She let herself into the office and closed the door quietly behind her, locking it. She couldn’t hear if anyone else was in here because her heart was galloping. When in her life had she ever done anything this outrageous? But they were pushing her to the wall now. They’d shot at her. They’d beaten up Bobby. They’d framed Danny. The Lion’s Den. She moved to the computer that she’d always seen Evie use whenever she’d visited this room.

It wasn’t one of those that had been left alive for the night. Molly sat down, booted it up and waited. It asked for a pass code.

“Damn, damn, damn.” She felt the skin on her neck prickle. She was being set up. If Evie had left her the keys, wouldn’t she have made this easier? Wouldn’t she also have left the pass code? Molly glanced over her left shoulder, then over her right.

“Pass code,” she muttered aloud, looking back at the screen. “Okay…Molly.” She typed in her name for lack of anything else.

The screen came alive.

At first she was startled speechless. Then she laughed aloud. “Bless your bright-red beehive.” Of course Evie would fix it so that no one else could see what she’d left. The woman had been calling her attention to those keys today. But Molly hadn’t taken the bait, so Evie had gone into high gear. Molly hit enter, and the screen filled with text.

Twelve years ago I was a police officer in Dover, Delaware. I fell in love with an ex-con. They drove me out of the department. But we are married now. Don’t know what you are up to, why you need to get in here so bad, but you go, girl!

“Oh, Evie, do I ever owe you a bottle of post-nuptial champagne.” Molly grinned and started to tap into the records she needed.

Forty minutes later, a line of cold sweat trickled down the back of her uniform shirt. It was nothing conclusive, she thought, but it was just enough to start with. It tied most of her suspected cops together in a web of favors and associations.

She sat back in Evie’s chair as a new screen came up. “What in the world?” Ben Stone?

It was nothing like what she had pulled up on the others, but it was curious. His paychecks were being hit to the tune of $5,500 a month by the Lone Star County Probation Department.

“That’s a haul.” She called up the rest of his payroll records. He grossed a little over $9,500 per month. Probation was taking more than half of his income. Why?

Was Chief Stone part of the Den? He hadn’t readily complied with all her requests, Molly thought, but eventually he seemed to get around to it. He’d always been a little put off by her, but she was pushy.

She knew where he lived. How in the world did Stone afford a house like that on the $4,000 a month that the probation department was leaving him?

Molly leaned back in Evie’s chair and finally turned off the computer. Then she heard a sound that had her diving for cover behind the desk.

The office doorknob turned once, then twice.

No more tonight, please, no more. But her adrenaline burned again even as every muscle in her body cried out from stress fatigue. Molly stayed crouched beside Evie’s desk. Had she locked the door behind her? Yes, she was almost positive that she had.

But she wasn’t taking any more chances.

Molly shot to her feet, her weapon in front of her and drawn. She jogged to stand beside the door, then she reached and unlocked it. She aimed her gun in that direction as it finally opened. “Stop right there. Damn it, freeze.”

“Alive and well,” Danny drawled, stepping through the door, “and as irritable as always.”

Molly hurled herself at him. “Oh, my God. What took you so long to find me?”

Danny caught her in his arms. He smelled her hair, felt the sudden heat of her against him and he cherished it. “You were supposed to give me more clues. A gunshot and ‘got to go’ doesn’t cut it. I couldn’t figure out where you might have ended up—here, or in the morgue. I checked there first.” She was alive, he thought. And he had found her. He wasn’t going to admit how weak his own knees were at the moment—or the lifetimes he’d lost when he had heard that gunshot over the telephone.

Finally, when he had called the hospital and the morgue and turned up nothing, he’d remembered her threatening to get to these records tonight.

“Come on home with me now so I can officially enter you into my ex-con hall of fame,” he murmured.

Molly pulled back from him. “What? Why?”

“Honey, from the looks of things, I believe you just pulled off a break and enter.”

Chapter 10

The apartment over the rec center hadn’t changed a lick in the two years since Molly had last set foot in it. She stepped through the upstairs door and realized she was hugging herself. She hadn’t expected the sight of the place to be so poignant.

The sofa bed was still the same hideous green. The refrigerator still groaned constantly. The telephone was still the big, old, black rotary type. “I stayed here right after I moved to Mission Creek while I was waiting to move into my apartment,” she said, peering out the window at the wretched street below. “I was so optimistic then. I figured I had a whole new clean slate on life.”

“Why did you move here?”

Molly glanced back at him. “My mother finally died.”

He waited, remembering the picture of the older woman on her living room wall.

“No one needed me in Laredo anymore,” she added finally.

“Who needed you in Mission Creek?”

“The woman I lost while I was taking care of everyone else. Now look at the mess I’ve got on my hands.” She laughed a little thinly. “I finally found her, only to have someone try to kill her.”

It still squeezed at something inside him. Danny found that he couldn’t even think about the sound of that gunshot without a sweep of the same utter physical debilitation he’d felt when he’d heard it.

He’d thought he lost her. He’d been sure of it.

He’d thought Carmine had ordered the hit, retribution for the scene in the hospital parking lot, because he’d gotten too close to her—a cop—and the mob had decided they couldn’t risk it. He’d wanted that bullet for himself. Then she’d said, “Got to go”, and he’d known that Carmine’s boys didn’t miss when they fired.

That left Bobby’s Lion’s Den. Maybe they were involved with Carmine; maybe they weren’t. He’d never heard mention of such an organization, but he’d been away for a while. Either way, Molly’s bad cops were no longer her own personal war. He wasn’t going to stay away from her, wasn’t going to lose her to any of them—and he wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life dying inside every time a car backfired.

Somehow he was going to bring both enemies down.

Danny took two soft drinks from his refrigerator, then he kicked it once, squarely middoor, and it stopped moaning. Molly gaped at it.

“Wow,” she said finally. “How did you figure out that trick?”

“I had a temper tantrum one night at three in the morning. I wanted to hurt it. I ended up fixing it instead.”

“So how long does it stay quiet?”

“Three, maybe four hours. Just long enough for you to get into a deep sleep, then it wakes you up again.”

“The alternative is to pay rent, I suppose.”

He cocked a brow at her dry tone. “Or live with my mother. And I can’t do there what I want to do here. I believe we have unfinished business from this afternoon. Don’t we, pretty Molly?”

She took the soft drink from him, then her breath vanished and she got caught in the look in his eyes. They both knew why she was here. Her car had been parked down the street since they’d rushed to the hospital that afternoon, but he could have just dropped her off. She could have gotten out of his Dodge and behind her own wheel and gone home.

“So what are we going to do about this?” He toasted her can with his. “Are we going to take it the rest of the way? I’ve got to tell you, I’ve been thinking about it all night.”

Her heart jittered. So had she. Still, Molly tried for sanity. She needed to be sure. “There are so many reasons not to.”

“That’s funny. I’ve forgotten them all.” He put his can on the coffee table.

His eyes were so dark, she thought, so deep. And she wanted to drown in them, to forget everything else. Molly realized she was trembling a little. For the first time in her life she trembled with sheer wanting.

“There are two things I wanted to do the first time I saw you,” Danny continued in that same low, smoky tone. “You were on the court, playing some abomination you called basketball.”

Molly cleared her throat. “It was the day you stole my parking space.”

“That wasn’t what I wanted to do to you, though.”

Her heart hit her chest wall with a solid thump. “What, then?”

“I wanted to feel those curls of yours tumble through my fingers.” He stepped closer and gathered a handful of her hair.

Molly’s breath came back, but it snagged.

“And I wanted to touch you here, like this.” His other hand closed over her breast.

Molly’s knees buckled. She would have fallen, she knew, if he hadn’t pulled her into his arms at just that moment. Then he cocked his head thoughtfully to the side.

“Or maybe it was the time you showed up in the sports bra.” His mouth moved to her throat, slick and warm. “Maybe that was the first time I really thought about doing this.” His strong fingers kneaded her breast gently, his thumb gliding over her nipple.

She was melting. “I told you…that was a…bathing suit top.”

“The bathing suit top was later.” He tucked her hair away from her ear, and his mouth found the soft spot behind her lobe. “The time I’m thinking of it was definitely the sports bra. You had the library book. And you were moving in place…jiggling.”

“There’s not enough of me to jiggle.”

“Oh, Molly, you are so wrong.” His mouth moved down to close over her breast, right through her uniform shirt. Molly had the dizzy, disjointed thought that she was very glad she had taken her Kevlar vest off at the station before she’d sat down to write her report.

“I don’t want to be just friends anymore.” His mouth came to hers and sealed over it. “And civil enemies—well, let’s just say that it had its moments. But even then I was thinking about changing the status quo.” He began unbuttoning her shirt.

“Danny…”

“Don’t tell me to stop, Molly. Please.” He kept unbuttoning.

“No.”

“Good.” He pushed her shirt off her shoulders, then he picked her up and carried her to the sofa, settling himself on top of her. “Because it’s time now, Molly. It’s time.”

He knew all the reasons he wasn’t supposed to do this, Danny thought. They’d been taunting him since she’d kissed him this afternoon. But all the dominoes were falling down now. He would beat Carmine at his own game, and he would take down her Lion’s Den, too. The only obstacle that remained was what he was, and what she was, and he knew he’d find a way around that rather than live without her.

There was no bathing suit top this time, no sports bra, but something clever and filmy and white. This time when he closed his mouth over her breast, the sheer fabric clung damply to her nipple. If she had worn this to play basketball that night, he would be a dead man already, Danny thought. He would have killed Ricky Mercado the next day for warning him off her.

But he couldn’t hold on to the image of Ricky when Molly was writhing beneath him. Her hands fluttered, searching, skimming down his back then diving into his hair. She dragged his face back to hers and claimed his mouth. Her tongue reached for his and he tasted the soft drink, something deeper and more promising in the way she groaned. He reached between their bodies and unfastened the hook on her trousers.

“Molly,” he murmured.

“Will you please shut up now and just touch me?”

“I was planning on it. But I want you naked first.”

His words rippled through her, tickled along under her skin. Molly dragged on his T-shirt, pulling it over his head, and she realized she was smiling again. She realized that, in this moment, caught in this sliver of time, she was as happy as she had ever been in her life. Part of it was standing on the precipice, ready to leap off, to leave the anticipation behind and finally feel his skin against hers. Part of it was the burning need of discovery. And part of it was that she had waited for him, for this, all her life.

She tugged on his jeans, impatient now. Tonight, when she’d thought she might die, she had known simply that she couldn’t leave this life without having this, without loving him first.

He finally stood to take his jeans off and to slide her trousers down her legs. There was another patch of nearly translucent white there, he found. If something was delightful once, he thought, there was the reasonable expectation that it would be again. He closed his mouth over the flimsy material and her back arched off the sofa in response. A strangled sound left her throat, and her fingers knotted in his hair.

He tasted her again and again until her breath came in short, ragged little pants, then he dragged the cloth down her legs and out of the way.

He came back to her. He wasn’t ready when she wrapped her legs around his waist, wanted more time to investigate all the little curves and corners of her. But the clasp of her thighs made him impatient. Needs tangled inside him…to drive himself into her, to fill her hard and fast and fully, and yet he wanted to ease away and slide his hands and his mouth over more of her skin. He wanted to feel the silken flesh that gripped the delicious muscles of her thighs, the taut stretch of her belly, the little ridges of her ribs.

He satisfied both urges. He slid his hand up and pushed her bra away at the same time he finally slid seamlessly inside her. Then he felt her close around him and he was gone.

Molly heard herself cry out once. She was vibrating, she thought, actually vibrating. There were tremors inside her, growing stronger and steadier with every heartbeat, every one of his thrusts. And for the first time in her life she gave herself over to the sensation of it.

There were no answers because she had no questions. There was no struggle because she had no doubts. She was where she had always needed to be. When they were one, when they were joined, there was no tomorrow, there were no differences. They belonged together.

She rocked up to meet him as he drove deeper inside her. Then they rode over the edge together.

By Molly’s reckoning—though she admitted her mind wasn’t working very well—it took a full fifteen minutes before she could feel her legs again. She sat up unsteadily, then she took the chance and decided to try to stand. “Where’s my drink?”

Danny had rolled to his side to let her move out from beneath him. He watched her scoop hair free from her temples as she looked around the room, took in those beautiful, firm muscles, the sweet uplift of her breasts. “You’re magnificent,” he murmured.

Molly looked at him quickly. It was on the tip of her tongue to argue with him, to tell him about all those full-breasted bimbos in the movies who always got their hero, to remind him that she wasn’t like that at all. But in the moment, she didn’t feel that way. She felt full, sated, voluptuous. She felt her mouth slide into a smile. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” He braced his head on his hand to keep watching her.

“My soft drink?”

“You dropped it. Over there.”

“I did not.”

“Oh, yeah. You did. You went to put your arms around me and—plop.”

“I dropped it?” She pivoted to find the can on the floor. “Wow. I dropped it.”

“I’m good, aren’t I?”

She glanced back at him. She tried for a retort, but that wouldn’t come to her mouth either. “You’re magnificent.”

They grinned at each other.

“Go get us more drinks and then tell me what you found out by breaking and entering tonight,” he suggested finally.

Molly almost sputtered. She didn’t know which of his words tweaked her more. She decided to take them one at a time. “What, now I’m the little woman? Molly, get me this, Molly, get me that?”

“Actually, I just want to watch your backside when you walk over there to the refrigerator.”

She couldn’t help herself. Molly laughed. He was everything she’d ever thought she wanted. He met her word for word…and touch for touch. She finally sobered and cleared her throat. “Actually, I didn’t break and enter.”

“Ah, now, honey, don’t disappoint me.”

She went for the soft drinks. “Sorry, but I really didn’t. Evie Castelano planted her keys at my locker. I would have, though, if I’d had to. Does that make you feel any better?”

Danny sat up and took the can she handed him. “Yeah.” He popped the tab and drank, then, just to prove he could be chivalrous, he took hers and popped that tab also. “So what did you find out?”

Molly sank down beside him on the sofa. “Do you have anything to write on around here? I want to put it all down on paper.”

“You’ve remembered it so far.”

“My mind turned off for a while there. It went into suspension mode or something. Now that it’s reviving, I want to make sure I don’t forget anything.”

Danny looked around the apartment. “Why don’t you go down to Ron’s office? You should find some paper and a pen there.”

“I’m not dressed.”

He wriggled his eyebrows. “Exactly.”

She laughed again. It felt so special, Molly thought, so precious. “You’ve got a good memory. I’ll just tell you, then you’ll remember everything for me.” She took a deep breath and pulled her legs into a lotus position. “Okay, from the beginning—”

“Molly,” he interrupted suddenly, hoarsely.

“What?” She glanced at him, startled.

“Not naked. Don’t do that naked. Not if you want me to remember anything at all.”

Something good and warm slid through her. She grinned and untied her legs. “This is important so keep your mind on it. But I’ll do it again later if you want. The leg thing.”

“Promise?”

Her heart skittered. “Absolutely.”

He tossed her his T-shirt. “Then for now, put this on and talk.”

Molly pulled the shirt over her head. “Okay, in order, starting with when I first knew something was wrong—when Malloy and Bancroft kidnapped Jake Anderson. I’m not sure why Bancroft went bad. I couldn’t find anything on him. But Kyle Malloy owed some serious favors to his sergeant—who, by the way, is currently my sergeant on the four-to-midnight shift. And he’s been seriously busting my chops. He was the one who told me to stay put at the domestic scene tonight—and then someone shot at me.”

“Who is he?” Danny’s blood heated. Dangerously.

“Connelly. Mark Connelly. He used to work the day shift and was brought back to swing seven months ago. This is interesting because a lot of my suspected cops have been demoted from the day shift and bounced to evenings right along with him. I think they’re all kind of sticking together. Connelly has an undisclosed reprimand in his file, and right after that he landed on the four-to-midnight. Then Malloy got in deep trouble for setting his K-9 dog on a suspect. Instead of being suspended—which he should have been—Connelly went to bat for him. There were four other instances like that in his file, so Malloy really owed Mark Connelly. The sergeant kept pulling his backside out of various slings.” She drank from her can and told him about the day she’d more or less threatened the worker’s comp suit, and how word had reached the garage before she’d even walked down there. “Connelly is part of this Lion’s Den. I’d put money on it. Of everyone in that room that day, only he would have the clout to change a car order that quickly. Everyone else would have had to go through channels, would have had to get a supervisor to okay it—and they would have needed a damned good excuse if that supervisor wasn’t involved. It just couldn’t have been accomplished in such a short period of time. I think Connelly pulled in some of the chits Malloy owed him and had him kidnap little Jake.” She paused. “Anyway, that brings us up to Beau Maguire. He discovered the money in your condo six years ago.”

Damn it, Danny thought. It couldn’t be connected. He didn’t know anything about anybody named Maguire, and Carmine had definitely been behind that frame-up.

“It wasn’t Maguire’s normal patrol area, Danny. He was reassigned that morning, just for the day. Connelly gave that order, too. Don’t you see? They put one of their own men in the area of your condo so he’d know exactly where that money was supposed to be planted and he could grab it without any complications.”

Anger boiled up in his blood and he deliberately ignored it.

“Frank Hasselman has a demerit in his file for illegal gambling on the Internet,” she continued. “He’s a computer whiz. Paulie McCauley has a sexual harassment charge pending against him by a suspect he arrested for—get this, jaywalking. Connelly intercepted both situations from going to IAD. They all owe him, Danny. Every one of them.”

“So you’re thinking…what? That this Connelly is the Lion’s Den ringleader?”

Molly nodded. “I couldn’t find anything untoward on Harry Roscoe. He’s the one I switched days off with last week and I ended up getting suckered for it. I think they wanted me working my regular shift without a night off until I dropped from exhaustion—so I wouldn’t have the time or energy to poke around the task force war room. But I’ll bet there’s something somewhere tying Roscoe to Connelly as well. As for Bryce Evans and Kevin Neely, they took Bobby’s 911 call this afternoon.” She filled him in on her conversation with Evans. “At first, I was just ticked off by the way Evans kept trashing the worth of Bobby’s life. I was getting tied up with memories of Mickey again. Then, later tonight, I realized that he was talking to me like I was one of them, like I was part of the Lion’s Den. I think he just assumed I was, that at first he thought that was why I was calling him. He kept saying things like, ‘if you get my drift.’ Which I didn’t, at the time. Then when he realized I wasn’t sympathetic, he asked who I was. I lied, but they’ll figure it out eventually. I think he was implying that the Den was behind Bobby’s beating. Then, when he realized I wasn’t a comrade, he pretty much warned me to keep my nose out of it.”

Danny swigged soda, his pulse beating.

“There’s only one other female officer with the department right now,” Molly continued. “Her name is Donita Carver. If Evans thought he was talking to Carver, then Donita might be in on this, too.”

“Stands to reason.”

“Evans owes favors to Connelly too, by the way. And given that Neely is his partner, I can’t see how he could operate without Neely’s knowledge and cooperation, so that puts Neely into the mix too.”

Danny focused on that. “Why don’t you have a partner? Why were you there at that house alone tonight?”

Molly shuddered briefly. “I told you why. They set me up. Actually, I used to have a partner when I was on grave, then I got moved up to swing shift. When that happens, you have to wait for the dust to settle a little and for other officers to get freed up. My not having a partner right now isn’t unusual, but dispatch should damned well have shot another unit to that address after me.”

“So you’re thinking that dispatch is in on this too?”

“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I’m not sure yet. More than likely, the dispatcher was just following Connelly’s directives tonight.”

Danny caught one of her curls around his finger. “What are you going to do now?”

Molly didn’t hesitate. “I’m going to be smarter than they are. I’m going to fake out the ones I can fake out, and I’m going to scare the devil out of the rest of them. I’ll officially resign from the task force in the morning. That should mollify the dumbest among them. I have to stay alive long enough to finish this.”

His heart spasmed. “I’m in favor of that.”

“Then I’m going to continue working on this Lion’s Den thing on my own time. I don’t need access to the war room for this. That’s their turf. But if anything pertinent does come through there, Joe will tell me.”

“Who the hell is Joe?” Danny was reasonably stunned to feel a tug of jealousy at his gut. He was never jealous.

Molly shrugged and drank from her can. “Joe Gannon. He lifted your parking space from you. And he came off his personal time tonight to save my backside, to cover me.”

Danny didn’t know whether to hate the guy or go to his knees in gratitude. “So you’ve got…what? Eight bad cops.” He mentally counted off the names.

“Ten, if we count Harry Roscoe and Donita Carver. But like I said, I’m not sure about them.”

“You’re going to start tailing the others, aren’t you?”

Molly met his gaze. “Yes. I have to.”

“No. I will.”

“Danny—”

“Clamp that mouth of yours shut for a minute. This matters to me.”

It was the way he said it that had her falling silent.

This wasn’t his nightmare. It was only peripherally his problem—if Beau Maguire had helped to frame him. Molly’s heart spasmed. This mattered to him because she mattered to him.

“Who are you most suspicious of?” he asked. “Who among all those you just mentioned do you think has the strongest chance of being involved with the bastards who hurt Bobby and shot at you?”

Molly didn’t hesitate. “Mark Connelly and Beau Maguire.”

“Why Maguire?”

“It’s a gut feeling. Something about the way he looks at me.”

“All right, then, which of those two is smarter?”

“Connelly.”

“Then we’ll start with Maguire. He’ll be more likely to slip up and do something stupid. Get me his address tomorrow. Can you do that?”

“I already know his address. It’s 126 East Tamara Lane. It was in his file tonight. I memorized it.”

“You’re something.” Oh, yeah, he thought, he really was in love with her.

“Thank you. I think.”

“Yeah, that was another compliment.” He looked at the clock over the stove. “I’ll pick up on Maguire in the morning. In the meantime, are you going home or are you going to taunt them with your car outside all night?”

She grinned wickedly. “I was kind of planning on taunting them.”

He covered her body with his own again and found her mouth. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

“Wait, Danny. Call the hospital and check on Bobby first.”

When he didn’t argue or hesitate, when he reached immediately for the telephone, she fell in love with him all over again.

It was amazing, she thought, how you could ache for something your whole life and not even know you’d missed it until you had it. She rolled over at 8:30 the following morning and found her cheek resting against Danny’s chest. Somewhere along the line, they’d pulled out the lumpy sofa bed. She hadn’t found it to be half as uncomfortable as it had been two years ago.

“Ummm,” she said, closing her eyes again.

“I heard that,” he said groggily. “That was a sound of contentment.”

“Dream on.”

“Sure. All my dreams were of you.”

Things inside her moved again. She smiled against his skin. “Do you have any coffee around here?”

“Molly, we only went to sleep three hours ago. You’re not getting up. I won’t let you.”

“Let me?”

“Okay, maybe that was a bad choice of words. But I will seriously dissuade you.”

“Be my guest,” she whispered, and leaned up to find his mouth again.

How had she lived without this all her life? He rolled over to cover her again, then he filled her. Molly thought no more at all, except to know that, for the first time in her life, she felt whole.

The conversation took place in short, tense tones as the man looked up at the apartment windows over the rec center. The curtains were open but he couldn’t see anything. They weren’t moving around in there. He figured he knew what they were doing.

“Her car’s still here,” he reported into his cell phone.

“She spent the night there, then. Okay, I’ll pass it on.”

“So what do you want me to do now?”

“Stay on her. Hit her at the first opportunity. Make very sure she doesn’t go back to personnel first. I don’t trust that woman who works in there.”

“Evie Castelano?”

“She’s too friendly with our resident troublemaker.”

“I would have had her there last night if Gates hadn’t shown up when he did. Thirty more seconds and she wouldn’t be a problem anymore.”

“Well, he did show up. He won’t keep doing it, though. He’s the easiest to get rid of. All we have to do is shift him back into jail. In the meantime, concentrate on Molly French. You’ve got to get to her. We can’t risk her finding a sympathetic ear before we kill her.”

“You think Bobby Jansen told her anything?”

“It doesn’t matter. They’re both dead. You still have someone inside the hospital who can finish the kid off, right?”

“Right.”

“Good. And Gates won’t get out of jail alive this time, either. If we can get the three of them, we can contain this.”

They disconnected. Because he was frustrated, the first man slashed the Camaro’s rear tires before he crossed the street to wait for her behind an abandoned, boarded-up cottage.

Molly didn’t realize her back tires were flat until she tried to drive away from the rec center an hour later. She heard the rims grind and felt the irregular, protesting thump in the steering wheel. “Oh, damn it,” she muttered, pulling over again. “Come on, you guys, grow up.”

She got out of the Camaro and glared at the tires. She could afford new ones—as long as they kept focusing on such juvenile stunts and left her life alone.

“Hey, what happened?”

Molly looked up quickly at the sound of Anita’s voice. “Hey, there. It’s nothing. Someone’s just playing games with me.”

“You think it’s Coach?” The girl grinned wickedly.

“No, we’re on much better terms these days.” Molly smiled, wondering if the reflex looked as goofy and smitten as it felt.

“No kidding. Real good terms?”

Molly scowled. “Pretty good. Why?”

“I just got a bet, is all.”

“What kind of bet?”

“That you guys end up doing the mattress tango before too long.”

“Anita!”

The girl wagged a finger at her. “Don’t forget the condoms.”

Molly’s heart jumped over a beat. So much for heeding her own advice. She’d never even thought about that last night. Then again, she’d stayed on the Pill for years now, just on general principle, in case Mr. Right decided to come sauntering along. And she knew where Danny had been these last six years and what he had been doing all that time.

Intent on redeeming herself, Molly asked the standard question. “How come you’re not in school?”

“Trouble with my dad this morning. He was too drunk to drive me. I was going to the center to use the phone and call for a cab. When I saw you, I thought maybe I could get a ride, but…” Anita trailed off and shrugged at the slashed tires. “Hey, what are you doing here so early anyway?”

“Never mind,” Molly said quickly. “Come on, let’s go to the office so you can call for a ride.”

Danny stuck his head in the office right after Anita left and just as Molly was finishing up a phone call to the garage she used. “What’s wrong?” he said harshly. “Why are you still here? Is everything all right?”

How long had it been, Molly wondered, since anyone had been aware of her every move? There had never been anyone like that before in her life, she realized. Her mother had always been too busy, too tired, and Mickey had had other concerns.

Molly told him about her car.

“You’re pretty calm about it,” he observed.

“Well, it’s just stupid. I called the garage. They’ll send someone out to fix it.”

“I would have fixed it.” His jaw set.

“Is this a macho sort of thing?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you be pounding your fists against your chest?”

“Why spend money on a garage when you’ve got me and my hulking muscles?”

Molly laughed. “I have two flats, but only one spare. The garage is bringing two new tires.” Then her eyes narrowed. He was dressed all in drab browns and khakis. “What are you up to?”

Danny looked down at himself. “I’m going to spend the day blending into the background.”

“And this clothing is…a proven approach?”

“It is.”

She knew better than to ask for details or where he had learned the technique. “Okay. You look like hell, though.”

“You weren’t saying that an hour ago.” He came into the office to lean his hands on the desktop and kiss her. No, Molly thought, she had never been happy before. She had never felt like this before in her life.

“Come back upstairs,” he said against her mouth.

“Later. After you tell me what Beau Maguire does with his daytime hours.”

“You’re a tough woman.” Danny straightened and moved away from the desk, then he stopped at the door. “Hey, Officer.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Are we back to that cop business again?”

“I’m just a little worked up about the things that happen to you lately while you’re in uniform. In case we don’t catch up between now and then…don’t die on me tonight.”

Molly softened. “I’m not going in to work tonight. I have sixteen sick days stockpiled. I’m not giving anyone else a chance to take a shot at me.”

Danny hadn’t realized he wasn’t breathing until the air came back to his lungs. “Good. I approve.”

“And I just live for your approval,” she said dryly.

“If that doesn’t motivate you, I’ll bribe you.”

She loved him, she thought. She loved him so much. “That has some possibilities. With what?”

“I’ll come up with something good while I’m watching Maguire. If you’re not going in to work, when do you think you’ll be back here?”

“Probably around two o’clock, my usual time.”

“Then I’ll be back by then, too.”

“Danny, you don’t have to baby-sit me. You don’t need to be my bodyguard.” She paused. “As soon as my car is up and running, I’m going over to the police station and I’ll pick up my vest while I’m there. I’m appropriately spooked.”

His face cleared. His heart steadied a bit. “I approve of that, too. I’ll catch up with you later.”

Molly watched him go and gave a sigh that sounded entirely too much like Cinderella for her comfort. Then she picked up the phone again. If she was stuck here until the garage arrived with new tires, she figured she might as well make use of the time. She called Ralph Bunderling.

“Molly! Molly!” He practically gasped at her greeting. “I’ve been so worried about you!”

Had he heard about the IAD thing, she wondered, or what had happened last night? Either way, her response was the same. “I’m fine, Ralph. Really.”

“I don’t believe a word they’re saying. I just want you to know that. You would never…never…”

Ah, she thought, it was the IAD business. Molly couldn’t help herself. The devil took her tongue again—and she was in such a good mood. “Roll around on a gym floor with an ex-con? Of course I would.”

There was a long silence. She thought she heard him gulp. “You would?”

“Oh, sure. With the right provocation. I have unplumbed depths, Ralph. Listen, I need your help with something.”

“Anything.” He breathed it.

“Why is the Probation Department lifting $5,500 a month from Ben Stone’s paychecks?”

“How do you know about that?” He sounded startled. “No one knows about that—I mean, no one outside of this department.”

“I have my resources. So what’s the story?”

“Oh, well, it’s nothing, really. It’s just alimony and child support.”

“Probation handles that sort of thing? What rock have I been living under?”

“We have a whole child-support unit here, Molly. They go after deadbeat dads and attach wages. Chief Stone got walloped by Judge Sanderling a few years ago. It’s a little extreme, how much he’s paying.” Ralph’s voice dropped a notch. “But, you know, he arrested Sanderling’s daughter for prostitution quite some time ago. The charges didn’t stick, but word has it that the judge has never forgotten.”

“Ah,” Molly said. Now she got it. His Honor had a personal vendetta going, and Stone was paying through the teeth for it. But it had nothing to do with the Lion’s Den, she thought. “Thank you for your help, Ralph. I appreciate it.”

“Of course. Do you think we could see each other again, maybe this weekend?”

“Thanks so much for the thought, but I’m…” She’d started to give her usual line about being too busy, then she grinned around at the empty office. “Actually, I’m seeing someone now.”

“Ah, well,” Ralph said, disappointed. “If it doesn’t work out, please call me.”

“I hope with all my heart that it works out.” Molly hung up the phone, then she sat a little longer at the desk, still smiling. It wasn’t until the screen door banged that she realized what an idiot she was—and Danny, too, for that matter. Neither of them had thought to lock the outside door when he’d left.

Molly came to her feet fast, spinning toward the safe in Ron’s office where she’d put her service revolver for safekeeping the night before. She hadn’t quite reached it when a male voice sounded behind her.

“Ms. French? Your car’s ready now.”

Shaking a little, Molly let out her breath and turned. She recognized the guy from the garage. Her car was old enough that she had it in there with some frequency. “Thanks,” she said a little shakily. Determined not to be stupid again, she went back to the safe. “Could you do just one more thing for me? Wait two seconds and walk with me to my car?”

Danny stopped by the hospital before he put himself on the trail of Beau Maguire. Bobby had graduated to an upstairs room. He found Caitlyn Matthews with him.

“Hi,” he said. “Picking up on someone else’s shift again?”

“No,” she said quietly. “This time he’s officially mine.”

Danny found that he was relieved. “How’s he doing?”

“The pain makes me hopeful.”

Danny was startled. “Pardon me?”

“I think he’s still aware of pain. His coma isn’t so deep that he’s not cognizant of it. That’s a good thing, Mr.…”

“Gates.”

“I’m sorry. Yesterday was a very long day. It was a blur. Did your lady friend manage to do anything with the information I gave her?”

His lady friend. Danny thought about that a minute and he realized that he didn’t like the term. “Actually, she’s my…” He trailed off, stymied.

Caitlyn blinked at him. “Your what?”

Lover? Friend? Civil Enemy? Danny mentally ran through the list again. “She’s everything.”

Caitlyn laughed. “I like that. But did she have any success with my information?”

“Not yet. But she will. We will.”

“Good.” She changed the subject. “Do you know any of this boy’s family?”

“Uh…no. Not really. But I can find out. Why?”

“No one but you and your…your everything person…have been by to see him.”

Danny felt frustration pump into his blood again. “I’m not surprised. What’s your point?”

“Well, there’s a theory that familiar voices might help him out of this. That he can hear them and recognize them despite the coma. It’s just a theory, mind you, but we’ve had some success with it in the past.”

“You want me to bring his family by to talk to him?”

“Could you?”

Danny nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thank you, Mr. Gates. You’re a good man.”

He thought about that, too. “I could have been.”

Then he left the hospital to go find Beau Maguire.

Chapter 11

“You’re doing what?”

The expression on Chief Stone’s face was almost worth taking a bullet for, Molly thought an hour later. She’d spent most of those sixty minutes in his anteroom, waiting for him to see her. “I’m resigning from the task force,” she repeated.

“You badgered me to death to get on there.”

“And now I’m badgering you to take me off.”

He leaned back in his chair. “Molly, this is not rational behavior. Can I ask what prompted this change of heart?”

She shrugged. “Contrary to popular belief, I’m not a troublemaker.”

His expression turned skeptical, she thought.

“Chief, those guys don’t want me there. I’m just making everyone miserable and by virtue of that, I’m sure I’m disrupting the process.”

“Well, it’s your call.”

“Thank you.” She stood, then she couldn’t hold her tongue any longer. “Plus, I’m kind of attached to my life, if you get my meaning.”

His expression turned sincerely aghast. “You can’t possibly think that your trouble last night has anything to do with the task force. In all likelihood, that was Mrs. Anilworthy’s husband. In fact, Larry Higgins has him in for questioning right now.”

Larry Higgins. The name rang a bell, Molly thought. She was pretty sure he worked days. Why would his name mean anything to her?

Because, she remembered suddenly, he had been Beau Maguire’s partner six years ago. He’d been riding with him when Beau had found the money in Danny’s condominium. And now he was interviewing her supposed shooter.

It was just too convenient. “Oh, dandy,” she muttered aloud. “I’d love to be a mouse in that corner.”

“I beg your pardon?” Chief Stone asked, frowning.

“I thought Joe Gannon was supposed to be handling my incident last night,” she said without responding.

“It’s his day off, Molly. There was no sense in bringing him for overtime on something another detective can easily handle.”

He made it sound like someone had made a face at her rather than shoot a bullet at her, Molly thought. And yesterday had been Joe’s day off. Something was up here. But then, nothing surprised her anymore. “You may be right. Maybe Mr. Anilworthy just took a sudden dislike to black-and-white cars. My point is, ever since I became part of that task force, my life has been a living hell. I’m tired of it. I’m quitting.”

“I can’t talk you out of this?”

Molly blinked, startled. “Why would you want to? You fought my assignment tooth-and-nail in the first place.”

Stone sighed. “Molly, I have many, many other things to do with my time besides answer your memos. When I got around to it, you were assigned.”

She thought about that and nodded. She left his office, wondering how long it would be before she got word that IAD was backing off on the charge against her.

Five minutes after Molly left Chief Stone’s office, cell phones began humming.

“I’m trying,” complained the man who had tailed Molly from the rec center to the police station. “As soon as she got out of her car this morning, some teenager showed up and they went back to the center together. After she left, Gates was with her. Then the guy came to fix her car. She was never alone.”

“Why did he have to fix the car?”

The man decided to gloss over that one. “Guess it wouldn’t start. I haven’t had a single opportunity, man. You don’t want me gunning her down as she drives Main Street.”

“My friend, you couldn’t even gun her down when she was parked.”

The man used his sleeve to wipe sweat off his brow. “I’ll get her this time.”

“See that you do. She should be leaving the premises shortly. Get her alone and hold her this time. She’s had all night now to snoop around since you missed her—there’s no telling who she may have talked to in the meantime. You’ll be informed of where to take her and someone will meet you there. We’ll find out what she knows, then we’ll put an end to her.”

“But if she backed off the task force—”

“She’s not backing off, you idiot. She’s playing with us. Our orders are to snuff out this nightmare. That means eliminating all three of them—her and Gates and the kid—and anyone else we find out she’s spoken to.”

Beau Maguire was harder to pick up than Danny had anticipated. The modest, blue-shuttered house at 126 East Tamara Lane was deserted when he got there. No wife, no kiddies, no cop, he thought. Danny wasn’t even able to ID what kind of car the guy drove. There was no vehicle in the driveway.

He fell back to plan B, stopping at a florist in town. The daisy arrangement he bought was cheap and bedraggled but he was damned if he was going to spend his few remaining dollars on the man who had found the convenience store money in his apartment.

Armed with the floral arrangement, Danny finally tucked his car around the corner from the police station and, holding the flowers prominently in front of him, he went inside to the personnel office where he’d found Molly the night before. The woman there was slightly overweight, and the color of her hair defied any palette Danny had ever heard of, but she had a grin as big as Texas.

“Why, you shouldn’t have,” she said, lifting her brows at the flowers when he entered.

Danny grinned right back at her, turning on the charm. “Wish I could, though, if they weren’t for someone else.”

The woman sighed gustily. “That’s the story of my life. Who’s the lucky girl?” Then she eyed the flowers. “On second thought, maybe she’s not so lucky. A little wilted, aren’t they?”

Danny held up the daisies and inspected them. “They’ve seen better days. Maybe that’s the point. The woman who came in and ordered them seemed a little distraught.”

“Distraught?” Curious, Evie came to the counter and leaned against it. “Come on, spill. Tell me all.”

“You’re breaking my heart, ma’am. You’re forcing me to disappoint you again. There’s not much to tell.”

“That’s okay,” she said magnanimously. “Just give me the details.”

“A blonde on a crying jag came into the shop a little while ago—I work over at the Floral Connection. Wanted these delivered to her boyfriend. Beau Maguire. She said he’d understand what they meant and she didn’t want to include a card.”

Evie’s eyes went round. “A blonde? No kidding? Beau’s running around on Janine with a blonde? Now, see, you’re not disappointing me at all.”

Danny arched his brows. “Maybe he’s running around on the blonde with Janine. Ever think of that?”

Evie hooted. “You’re delicious, sweetie. I could just gobble you right up.”

“If only I had met you a month ago.” He sighed.

“There’s someone else now, huh?” She winked conspiratorially. “I’ll let you in on a secret. I’ve got someone, too. I just like to flirt. Anyway, I guess you need to get those poor things to Beau now, right? Well, you got lucky, handsome. He’s not usually here during the day but I just saw him pass by outside the door there. Try looking for him in the task-force war room. It’s in the old lunch room right down the hall here. Keep going straight, you can’t miss it. Last door on your right.”

“Thanks, but which of the men I find there would be Beau Maguire?”

“He’s about five foot ten, black hair—kind of slicked back and greasy, you know? Blue eyes. He’s got a navy-blue jogging suit on today.”

“Good enough. Thanks, beautiful.”

“Ah, you made my day.”

Danny left her and checked out the war room. It was empty. Then he got lucky. He was headed back in the direction of the main doors when he saw a guy matching the man’s description coming out of the men’s room.

Danny picked up his stride. “Beau Maguire?”

The cop looked back at him, scowling. “Yeah. Who are you?”

“Delivery. The Floral Connection.” Danny handed him the daisies.

“There’s no card.”

“The lady said you’d know what they meant.”

“Janine sent me flowers?” He grinned, then he scowled. “Man, they’re beat up.”

“Maybe that’s the point.” Danny shrugged. “That was one very distraught blonde, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

“Blonde?” Maguire scowled at him. “Janine’s not blond.”

Danny took a step back toward the main doors, holding his hands up as though to ward off a blow. “Hey, don’t shoot the messenger.” He pushed backward through the outside doors and escaped. He had a knack for this, he decided. Maybe he could pick up a few extra bucks working for the flower shop.

He figured Maguire might spend some time puzzling over the daisies and he was right. Danny had time to jog across the street and slip into the diner there before Maguire exited the police station. Now he could identify the guy. Now he was ready to blend into the background.

When Maguire finally followed Danny outside, the man was empty-handed. Danny let himself chuckle at that, then he made note of the car the man got into, jotting the license plate on a napkin. It was a pale-blue Dodge, several years younger than his own.

Mission Creek wasn’t that big. If he lost him now, Danny thought he could probably find him again. He was ready to head for his own car, anyway, but the cop only got comfortable behind the steering wheel and started talking on a cell phone. Even when he disconnected, he sat and sat and sat.

It was going to be a long day, Danny thought. “Come on, Maguire, do something stupid.”

A waitress came to his table. “I’m sorry, sir, did you want something?”

Danny answered absently without taking his eyes off Maguire. “No. She’s just got me talking to myself now.”

Molly put in for her sick time, then she paid a quick visit to Eli Tripician to bring him up to speed. Finally she headed home. She wanted a shower and clean clothes more than she had ever wanted anything in her life. Well, maybe not anything, she thought, her thoughts gliding to Danny again. For a moment, she simply stood in her entryway and let herself remember the feel of him, the taste of him, the texture of his hands on her skin.

He wanted her. He really wanted her. It almost seemed to be too good to be true.

She turned all the locks on the front door, then she went to the back and made sure that was secure, too. She moved around to all the windows, double-checking them, then she drew the blinds and the drapes. Getting shot at tended to make a person a wee bit more diligent about such things, she discovered.

She kept her gun in her hand as she headed for the bedroom. Was this overkill? she wondered, laying it on the bed as she undressed. That bullet last night had been real. Given that, and what these guys had done to Bobby, she figured she couldn’t be too careful.

Molly moved into the bathroom. She spent a few seconds stretching some precious, new kinks out of her muscles, then she turned on the shower and stepped inside. She groaned with pleasure as the hot water pelted down on her. Long before she was ready to, she turned the water off again. As much as she might have liked to stay in there all day, she wanted to get back to the rec center more.

She pulled back the shower curtain, smiling to herself, then she screamed. Danny sat on the vanity, leaning back against the mirrors, his arms crossed over his chest.

“Some security system you’ve got here.”

Molly felt anger pound at her temples. After last night, she hadn’t thought she could ever be mad at him again, but, apparently, there was no telling what depths he could sink to. “You just took five years off my life!”

“You look great, by the way.”

She stepped out of the tub and snatched a towel off the back of the bathroom door. “You are never, ever going to see me naked again.”

He had the audacity to grin. “Honey, I can talk you out of your knickers anytime without half trying. And that’s just about the way I got in here ten minutes ago, too—without half trying.”

“You broke into my apartment!” She wrapped the towel around herself hard and fast.

“Yeah. To see if it could be done. And it can. You cops are so sanctimonious about your security. One bullet and—boom—that dead bolt is gone. Crooks don’t observe niceties, Molly.”

She gaped at him. “You shot my dead bolt?”

“No, I jimmied it—something else that’s reasonably easy for a professional to do. I’m just trying to make a point.”

She thought about it. “Well, your point ticks me off. You scared the hell out of me.”

He slid off the vanity. “Beau Maguire is sitting down the street keeping an eye on your front door. I wanted to get in here first. I figured you wouldn’t care how I did it.”

“I—” she began, then she broke off. “What?”

“You heard me.”

Her knees went weak. “Danny, this is bad.” She paused. “I knew he was one of them.”

He caught her when she seemed to sway a little. “He followed you to that little office you went to at the edge of town, too.”

“Eli Tripician’s place,” she murmured. “The PBA president. I was checking in on the IAD thing.” She couldn’t think when his strong hands were stroking her arms like that. Then he let her go.

“By the way,” he said, “you’ll probably want this back, too.” He took her gun from the back waistband of his brown jeans. “Smart move, Officer, leaving it on the bed.”

Molly let out a shaky breath as she took her service revolver from him. She couldn’t even argue with him about this one. “I don’t suppose Maguire did anything incriminating besides tail me? I didn’t even pick up on him behind me!”

“You weren’t looking for anyone. And no, he didn’t do anything else. You want to take that towel off now?”

She pulled it tighter. “Not with Maguire out there.”

“Who cares? The one sensible thing you did do was pull the drapes.” He wiggled his brows at her. “Let’s fool around.”

Molly kept her mouth hard and unyielding when he kissed her—even though it killed her. He groaned and stepped back. “I guess not. I guess you’re still mad at me.”

A grin tugged at her mouth. “It’s mostly over the part about being able to talk me out of my knickers without half trying.”

He kissed her sweetly this time, tracing the curve of her bottom lip with his tongue. “I’ll prove it later if you want.”

She was melting. “I want.”

“Good. You’re staying with me tonight in case you haven’t figured that out yet. There’s only one way in and out of my place.”

She shuddered a little, coming back to earth. “I still can’t believe you got in here.”

“There’s not a lock in the world that can’t be broken. A really sexy police officer told me that once. Then she went bad, breaking into a personnel office.”

“I did not. Evie—”

“Don’t split hairs.”

Molly let herself sag against his chest. “These guys are really fired up about me, Danny. Hasn’t anyone ever suspected them before? Am I that unique?”

“Oh, you’re definitely unique.”

“You know what I mean.”

“My guess is that they’ve been skating along without incident for quite a while now, especially if they had anything to do with framing me. That goes back six years. Maybe someone outside the department suspected them, but I’ll bet none of their colleagues did until you started nosing around and speaking your mind.” He paused, thinking it through. “Then Bobby turned, tried to get out. They had to be afraid he would tell you why, confide in you, given your connection to the rec center.”

“They meant to kill him.” It was hard for her to get the words out. Her heart seemed to be throbbing in her throat.

He wrapped his arms more tightly around her. “I don’t know, honey. Maybe they were just warning him to keep his mouth shut and it got out of hand. He probably fought back hard.”

“Now I’m a loose end that has to be tied up. I guess they figure if they can get rid of me before I talk to anybody else, they’ve restored the status quo. But that’s not entirely true. I know for a fact that Spence Harrison is at least a little suspicious of them, and Joe Gannon definitely is.” Then her blood went ice-cold and sluggish in her veins. “They probably guess that I’ve been talking to you. You’re in danger, too.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not going to let them get to either of us.” Danny finally set her away from him. She felt the reluctance in his touch. No one had wanted to hold her—just hold her—for a very long time, not in any recent memory she possessed.

“Put some clothes on before I forget my promise to the nurse at the hospital that I’d bring some of the rec center kids back to talk to Bobby,” Danny said.

“You were at the hospital? How is he?”

“About the same, but the nurse seems to think our voices might get through to him. I want to see if I can track down his sisters, but I’m not holding out much hope there. Maybe Lester and Cia and some of the others will be at the center by the time we get back there.”

Molly nodded once, jerkily, still feeling overwhelmed. “I’ll get dressed.”

“Molly? Keep your gun with you today even though you’re not on duty. I might need it.”

That broke something inside her. Half of her reasoning for poking into the issue of bad cops in the first place had been to prove he’d been framed, to clear his name. She’d done a damned poor job of it. He still had a record. And if he had to use her gun, that would be the end of his parole.

“I may have lousy locks,” she muttered, heading into the bedroom, “but I’m great with a gun. Leave the shooting to me.”

It was dark when they left the hospital and even Lester’s usual arrogance was gone by the time they dropped him off at the apartment he shared with an adult brother. He was white-faced when he got out of the Dodge.

“Oh, man,” he said again. “They really got him, didn’t they?”

“Yeah,” Danny said as he, too, had been saying all night. If nothing else, he thought, maybe this would be a lesson to the other kids. Maybe it would shake them up and shake them loose from the petty crimes that kept them in tattoos and Starter jackets.

“Hey,” he said suddenly. “Do you know what Bobby was into?”

Lester’s face closed down. “Nope,” he said automatically.

“Lester, we do,” Molly said quietly. “We already know. He told us.”

The boy’s eyes glinted suspiciously. “How come he’s asking, then?” He jerked his had at Danny as he sat behind the wheel.

“I want to make sure none of the rest of you are in it with him,” Danny replied.

Lester hesitated, then he made a sound of disgust. “No way, man. Bobby always went his own way. I was telling you the truth. I don’t know who he was in with.”

Molly breathed again. “Good.”

“How about the others?” Danny asked.

“I don’t think so.”

They watched Lester go inside. Then Danny tried to lighten his own mood, but he was bone weary and frustrated. Talking to Bobby hadn’t produced any results, though they’d rounded up all five of the regular rec center kids and Beatty Jansen, one of Bobby’s sisters, as well.

“Do I get to prove that I can talk you out of your knickers now?”

Molly managed a smile. “You can sure try.”

He gave a hoarse, quick laugh and found that it was easier than he would have thought. “You’re good for me, pretty Molly.”

She wondered.

If she hadn’t poked into the issue of bad cops, he’d be safe right now, she thought again. As it was, she had the unshakable feeling that his probation was hanging by a thread. If the Lion’s Den didn’t actually try to hurt him—kill him—over what she might have told him, then she knew it would be a relatively easy matter for one of the Lion’s Den cops to have his probation revoked.

“I’m so sorry,” she moaned aloud, covering her face with her hands.

Danny started to pull away from the curb, then he stopped the car again. “You’re thinking that you brought all this down on my head, aren’t you? Don’t you get it yet? I’ve been in a hell of a lot worse positions—I’ve gotten you in a worse position—and nothing comes down on my head except what I’ve invited there myself.”

“Me?” Molly scowled. “What do you mean?”

Danny realized what he had just said.

He closed his eyes briefly. He was tired, way too tired. It had been an incredibly long few days, crammed full of highs and lows. He was usually well above slips of the tongue. “Never mind. Let’s go home.” He made a U-turn and headed back the way they had come.

“No, I want to know,” Molly persisted. “How do you have me in a worse position?”

“Molly, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I do.”

“Well, you can’t always have what you want. Do you need to stop at your place for anything before we head to my apartment? Toothbrush? Girl stuff?”

“I’m not going back to your apartment until you tell me what you just meant by that.”

Danny took his eyes off the road to glance her way, exasperated. Then something happened to his heart.

There was a look in her eyes. It flashed at him fast as they passed a streetlight and her face was illuminated for a second. It was angry and stricken. Somehow, she knew. And even if she didn’t—yet—how long would she have to stew on it, pick at it, pick at him before she came up with the whole picture? So much had happened between them, so much good, and now his unspoken past was making something burn in his own throat. He hadn’t foreseen that, had only thought what the secrets would end up doing to her.

“Damn it,” he snarled.

“Now what are you doing?” Molly demanded.

“I’m stopping the car again.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m going to look at you when I say this.”

Something blind was driving him, he realized, something crazy and desperate, something close to agony. Maybe he’d known from the minute he had watched Ricky walk out of that Country Club that it would come to this. But he’d deluded himself, had played stupid games, he thought viciously, with his own mind.

He’d told himself that he could bring down the mob—somehow—and he would have a future with her. She’d never have to know why such a thing was necessary.

He’d told himself that those papers he’d written and Ricky’s friendship were his insurance in the meantime. He just needed time to figure out a way to save them.

He’d forgotten the most obvious thing—Ricky’s taunt. He’d ignored it, pushed it aside into dark, rarely visited corners of his mind, because he couldn’t handle it, couldn’t face it. No matter what he did about the mob, this woman was not going to forgive him for leaving her life in Mercado hands—even for a little while.

“What?” she whispered, and there was something almost like terror in her voice. Yeah, she would figure it out, he thought. His only prayer was in not making her do that. His only hope was in telling her himself. She was a woman who valued honesty. Maybe his own would count for something.

“If I talk about anything I know from those years with Ricky and Carmine, they’ll kill you.”

She recoiled as though he had hit her. He knew that, in a respect, he had.

“Kill me? Someone else wants to kill me now?”

“Ah, jeez.” He scrubbed his hands over his face. “You or Mona. My mother.”

“The mob is going to kill us?” Her voice was wire thin.

“No, they are not going to kill you as long as I let them go their merry way and keep my mouth shut. As long as I keep Carmine’s crimes to myself.”

“That’s the deal you made with Ricky Mercado, why he let you go this time?”

“It’s half of it.”

“What’s the other half?”

“I wrote all that stuff down, anyway. Everything I know. I did it before he hit me with that ultimatum.” He waved a hand and was amazed to see that it shook. “The packets are out there. They’re hidden. If anything happens to either one of you—or to me—they’ll be made public. Trust me, the Mercados do not want that to happen.”

“You’re arm wrestling with him.” He could barely understand her, her voice was so pitched.

“What do you mean?”

“Each one of you is pressing against the other with everything he’s got. Who’s stronger, Danny? Who the hell is it?” Her voice went up still another notch. “Who’s going to win this?”

“It’s not going to matter.”

“Excuse me, but it matters to me very much!”

“It’s a moot point. I’m going to break the code.”

“What code?”

“Of honor.”

“You call this honor?” Her voice went to a shriek.

“Yeah, damn it, in certain circles it is!”

“I don’t live in those circles!”

“I don’t want you to! I’m trying to keep you out of it!” Now he was shouting, too. Danny lowered his voice deliberately, painfully. “You’re not getting what I’m saying here. I’m going to go to the FBI and tell them what they want to know. Or I’m going to find a way to leak one of those packages of papers I wrote. But I need time. I need time to figure it out. Because if I don’t do it the right way, someone is going to die for it. I’m making you a promise, Molly. I’ll fix this.”

“Damn you.” She made a lunging move for her door handle.

“Get back here.” He was half out of his seat, sliding out from behind the wheel, pinning her into hers, before he knew he was going to do it. “Don’t be a flighty, overemotional female. It’s not your style.”

She punched him in the gut. He felt his air woof out of him. “How’s that for flighty and overemotional?”

He gritted his teeth and stayed on her. “I’m not letting you get out of this car, and the Mercados have nothing to do with it. I don’t know where Beau Maguire is at the moment, and I don’t know who else might be out there. Molly, don’t do something stupid.”

She went suddenly limp beneath him. “I just want to get out of this car, Danny,” she said, quiet again, too quiet. “I need to get away from you.”

Her words were like a knife to his gut. He eased back from her warily. “Swear you won’t jump out of the car?”

“No, Danny. When I die, it’s going to be on your head.”

“All right,” he said, shaken. “I’ll take you home.”

They drove the rest of the way in silence. When he pulled up in front of her apartment, he tried again. “I don’t know where Beau Maguire is,” he repeated.

“I’ll take care of it.” Her jaw was clenched, and her words came out sounding flattened.

“Molly—”

“I’m a cop. I can protect myself. I don’t need you.” She leaned her weight against the door, and when it opened, she scrambled out of the car. “I don’t need you,” she said again, and it was almost like a plea.

“What are you going to do?” He couldn’t let her go like this, without knowing.

“I’m going to drink the rest of that bottle of wine we started, then I’m going to try to figure out how much I hate you.”

The door slammed shut hard, sounding like a gunshot. Danny reared back, feeling as though a bullet had hit him.

Pain, disappointment, anger—all of it seemed to siphon the life, the spine, the bones out of her.

Molly stood in the middle of her kitchen forty minutes later, clutching the half-finished bottle of wine to her chest. Then she brought it to her mouth and upended it. She choked a little and dragged the back of her hand over her lips shakily. “I’m not an overemotional female. This is just more than I can take.”

For the first time in all her years of talking to herself, a snide little voice inside her head asked her, Why?

“Why? Why?” She had no ready answer for that, Molly realized. Her thoughts were too tangled.

She went to the living room and peered out through the blinds there. Joe Gannon’s car was still parked in front of her apartment. She’d called him as soon as she’d come inside. “See, I’m not flighty. I have sense. I’m not crazy.”

Joe had promised her he’d stay outside until midnight, then he would contact someone else he could trust.

“Trust,” she whispered aloud. Her stomach spasmed. That, she thought, was the whole issue these days, wasn’t it? Who could she trust? She was trusting Joe. She had trusted Danny. One of them had already proven her wrong.

She sank down onto the living room floor, cradling the wine bottle, then she drank from it again. She finally put her head down on her updrawn knees.

For whole minutes after she’d left him, she’d tried to tell herself that she was bitter because she’d known all along that what she had discovered with Danny was too good to be true. She’d tried to tell herself that she was outraged because he had so blithely offered up her life in negotiations with Ricky Mercado. But it was more than all that. It was deeper.

It was that she had trusted him, and she had never really trusted anyone before in her life.

No wonder he had come to her back door that night, she thought almost giddily. He’d been sneaking here behind the mob’s back, but when she had asked him about it, even then he hadn’t found the honesty to tell her.

Remember the snake story your mom used to tell? asked that wretched inner voice.

“Oh, shut up,” she snarled.

You do remember. That’s why you don’t want to hear it.

Molly brought her head up and swigged more wine. “Go away.”

What had that story been, anyway? Molly got up again to pace the living room. Something about a little girl crossing the desert. It had been one of her mother’s bitter-ending stories—Linda Lee French had been full of them. “I remember now,” she murmured. The little girl had been walking across the desert and the night had grown so cold. Then she’d come upon a snake. The snake had asked her for a lift, if she would just tuck him inside her cloak so he could be warm and go along with her to his destination.

But you’re a snake, she’d said. You’ll bite me.

No, the snake had said. I won’t. I promise.

So the little girl had taken pity on him. She’d picked him up and tucked him inside her nice warm cloak. And then he had bitten her. She’d cried out that he’d broken his promise. But the snake had felt no guilt.

Why are you so surprised, little girl? You knew what I was when you picked me up.

“I knew,” Molly whispered wretchedly. “I have no one to blame but myself.” She’d known what Danny was from the start. She had just desperately wanted him to be more.

Molly sat on the floor again and finally let herself cry.

She was nearly asleep when the telephone rang, jarring her. Molly came bolt upright on the sofa where she’d been indulging her tears with a box of tissues. She parted the blinds quickly to peer out and make sure someone was still there. She didn’t recognize the car, and that made something twist briefly in her gut until she realized that it must be after midnight. Joe had left and one of his buddies had taken his place.

She went in search of the telephone. The portable was shrilling from somewhere in her bedroom so she went to the kitchen instead and grabbed the one on the wall there, figuring it was Danny.

“Leave me alone.” Her mouth was dry as dust. Her temples pounded. She actually felt physically ill. It had been a long time since her heart had been broken, at least two years since her mother had died. She’d forgotten how devastating it could be.

But Danny’s voice didn’t answer her. It was a woman. “Officer French?”

Molly’s spine went straight. “Speaking.”

“This is Nurse Myers at Mission Creek Memorial. I’m sorry to bother you but I have your name listed here as someone to contact if Bobby Jansen regained consciousness.”

Molly’s brain cleared as if lightning had struck it. Yes, she thought, she had left her name and number for that eventuality. “He’s awake?”

“Yes, he is. There’s a note here on his chart that we should contact either you or a Danny Gates. There’s no answer at the number he gave.”

Molly’s heart squeezed hard enough to almost double her over. She wondered if he was out carousing with Ricky Mercado.

That was stupid, she thought in the next moment. Why would he do that? She was being catty, illogical…overemotional. There’d never been any doubt that he was breaking his ties with the mob. The clincher had been that he had used her to do it—without telling her. She wondered if his mother knew the stake she had in Danny’s freedom.

“I’ll be there shortly,” she said into the telephone. She disconnected. Then, because she was a cop—and she damned well could take care of herself without Danny Gates, she thought again—she hit *69 on the telephone.

A tinny voice read back to her the number of her last incoming call. Molly pressed another button to have the number recalled.

“Mission Creek Memorial Hospital,” the same voice responded. “Pediatrics floor.”

Good enough, Molly thought. She forced herself to relax again. She wasn’t used to being so paranoid. It was wearing—a constant, tight grip on her muscles. She hung up the phone without speaking.

She felt wretched but she didn’t want to take time for a shower. Who knew how long Bobby would stay awake? She’d heard that coma victims could come to, only to go back under again a short time later. She had so much to ask him. There was so much she needed to know about this Lion’s Den.

She settled for brushing her teeth and pulling her curls back into a ponytail. She took an under-the-shoulder holster from her closet and grabbed her gun from the coffee table, fixing it into place. Then she threw a bulky jacket over it. She tied on sneakers and jogged out the door, pausing just long enough to knock on the window of the car at her curb.

The man inside lowered the glass fast. “Is everything all right? What’s wrong?”

“I’ve got to run over to the hospital to check on someone there. Can you follow me?”

“Sure, no problem.”

“Just make sure I get safely inside, then you can go.” She figured there was safety in numbers. Hospitals never slept. There would be people all around.

“Then how are you going to get home again?” he asked.

Molly thought about it. “Give me your number, if you don’t mind. Depending on what time it is, I’ll either call you or I’ll call Joe again.” If Bobby fell unconscious again, she knew she’d stay there the rest of the night waiting for him to wake up one more time.

The man took a scrap of paper from his glove compartment and scrawled his name and his phone number, handing it to her. Molly looked at it, then back to him. “Josh Gannon?”

“I’m Joe’s brother.”

She let out a shaky breath. “He’s really going out of his way for me on this.”

“He’s got a thing about cops misusing their badges.”

“He told you what’s going on?”

“Enough that I wanted to help.”

“Thanks. I owe you, too.”

“A case of beer will do me.” He grinned. Joe had pretty much asked for the same thing, she remembered, when he’d fixed the center’s parking situation for her. “Just figure out what’s going on here so I can go back to sleeping at night,” he continued.

“I’m trying.” Molly sighed. “My car’s around that corner there in the parking lot. Want to give me a lift to it?”

“Get in.”

She went around to the passenger side. He pulled up beside the Camaro and she thanked him again—probably too much, she realized. She felt punchy.

She kept her eyes on the rearview mirror as she drove to the hospital. Traffic was spare. His headlights never wavered—and there was no other car back there. Molly parked in the hospital lot and, once again, Josh gave her a lift back to the front door.

She went through the glass doors and waved back at him, then she hurried to the elevator and rode it to the pediatrics floor. The nurse on the desk there looked startled to see her and that made something wary hitch in her stomach all over again.

“I’m Molly French,” she said, approaching the counter. “You just called me about Bobby Jansen.”

“No, I didn’t.” The woman frowned before her expression cleared. “Then again, I just got back from break. Janine probably called you. She’s down in the cafeteria now. What’s going on?”

“She said he woke up.”

“He did? That’s terrific. Let me page her and get her back up here. I didn’t even think to look at his chart.”

“I’ll be in his room.”

Molly set off down the corridor. Something bothered her about this. Her stomach felt tight. But that was ridiculous. She’d traced the phone call back here. The other nurse had simply gone on break and hadn’t thought to mention Bobby’s progress. Everything was copacetic. All the same, she paused at Bobby’s closed door and glanced back at the nurse’s desk. The woman was on the phone, not looking in her direction. Good, Molly thought. She didn’t want to scare her to death. She just wanted to make sure her own death wasn’t imminent.

She reached inside her jacket and slid her gun free before she leaned on Bobby’s door and pushed it open. But the gun didn’t make a bit of difference.

The arm that hooked around her throat came from behind the door as soon as she stepped through it. Molly drew in a breath to scream, then a hand clamped over her mouth.

“Bitch. You think you’re so clever. You got everybody breathing down my neck wondering why I couldn’t get to you. But I guess I’m smarter.”

She recognized the voice. Beau Maguire.

Molly fought with the strength of terror. She brought her elbow back fast, as hard as she could, into his gut. She jammed her heel down on his foot. She was rewarded by a grunt. She could do this. She was in shape. Her life depended on it.

She didn’t count on the shadowy form coming out of the far corner of Bobby’s room. The woman rushed at them.

“Here, here, use this!” she cried. “You’ve got to get her out of here, Beau, or you’re going to get me in a world of trouble!”

Then something wet was flattened over her face, her mouth, her nose. It had a strong, cloying smell to it. Molly held her breath, struggling not to take it in. Her mind started blackening at the edges anyway.

The last thing she remembered was someone twisting her wrist painfully, taking her gun from her hand.

Chapter 12

Danny rebounded the basketball off the backboard hard enough to make the thrumming sound of metal vibrate through the gym. That one, he thought, was for Ricky.

He’d save the most vicious shot for himself.

He worked at it a few more minutes, pushing himself too hard, going on after his muscles started burning. He was afraid that if he stopped he would do something totally emasculating and staggeringly horrifying…like go to her apartment and beg her not to close the door on them.

“Leave her alone,” he said aloud, dribbling, pivoting, shooting again. “There’s no reaching a woman when she gets like this.”

“What did you do to her?”

The voice, rough and as calloused as a pair of work-worn hands, stopped Danny’s heart. The ball went sailing and missed the basket by a good three feet as he turned in the direction the voice had come from.

The bleachers. Someone had spoken from the bleachers.

As Danny watched disbelievingly, a head popped up from between the rows of seats. Even in the dim light, he could see the grizzled beard that covered most of the man’s face. It was Plank Hawkins.

Danny got a grip on himself. “I guess there’s a good reason why you’re lying on that hard wood in the middle of the night.”

“Got nowhere else to sleep.” He sat up, dragging a blanket with him. “Most nights its real peaceful in here, too.”

Danny walked over to the bleachers. It had never occurred to him that the cook might be homeless, that he used what funds he had to feed everyone else. Now he understood why he’d found the kitchen window open so many mornings when he came downstairs.

He sat beside the old cowboy. “How long have you been doing this?”

“A few weeks. Used to use your place, then Ron gave it to you. Now I just come here when it gets too cold.”

Danny swore. How much guilt was he supposed to handle in one night?

“Get that look off your face,” Plank growled. “You belong here as much as the rest of us, and we all share what we got. Anyone breaks into this place at night, I sure can’t hurt ’em, can I?”

Danny found a grin. “I’ll bet you could.”

“You hammer and bounce balls and watch over the place. I cook,” Plank said stubbornly.

“Yeah.” Castaways, Danny thought. They were all castaways in their own fashion. Except Molly.

She shone brightly above the rest of them, he thought, pure and strong, muttering to herself all the while. He felt his breath punch out of him with the image of her that came to his mind. What had he done to her?

He knew what he’d done to himself. He’d lost her. But that he had caused her pain in the process was more than would settle under his skin. He put his face in his hands. “Ah, man.”

“I didn’t take ’em, you know,” Plank said suddenly.

“What?” Danny looked up, bemused. “What are you talking about?”

“Them cattle. You asked me once if I’d took ’em.”

“Oh. Yeah, I did.” What difference did it make now?

“Something else ran me off that ranch, boy, and landed me here, sleeping in a gym.”

For the life of him, Danny couldn’t care. He didn’t feel like talking. He put his hands to his knees and pushed to his feet again. “Listen, cowboy—”

“It was a woman.”

“Yeah, well, they’ll destroy you every time.”

“You love ’em hard enough and you’re stupid, sure they will.”

“Thanks for the advice.” He loved her, Danny thought, and he sure as hell was stupid. His only choice, he realized—his only chance—had been to come back from that meeting with Ricky and tell her right then and there that her life was in his hands. It had been a matter of every next breath she’d ever take. He’d owed her that. Sure, she would have been spitting mad. She probably would have gone after Ricky and Carmine herself. But she wouldn’t have hated him for what had happened, not if he’d told her then. If he had just come back to the rec center that day and coughed it up, she would have seen the whole sordid mess for what it had started out to be: a nasty warning, issued by some scum thugs, that had inadvertently involved her because they’d played basketball late one night.

She didn’t hate him because Ricky had threatened her, Danny thought. She hated him because he had gone along with that threat for weeks, allowing it, never sharing it with her. Not even, he thought, when she had asked why he was knocking on her back door.

If he had told her then, what would she have done? Danny’s mouth twisted into a grimace, because he knew without a doubt. She would have reminded him—long before he realized it himself—that bowing down to the mob was no way out at all.

Danny pulled his mind back. Plank was jabbering on about something.

“Me and the foreman went after the same gal, see. Pretty little thing name of Tia. She worked in the main house. Mexican, with some big black eyes could stare right through a man, right to his heart, bring him to his knees. Foreman told me I didn’t leave her alone, he’d get her deported. He woulda done it, too. Nasty son of a gun, he was. Figured he’d rather do without her himself than see me have her.”

“Yeah?” Danny stared at the far wall of the gym. How the hell was he supposed to fix what he had done to Molly?

“So I figure to myself, that’s the end of me and pretty little Tia. I buckled, I did. Gave in to it. Didn’t want nothing like that to happen to her. Then, the son of a gun, he goes and sends her back to Mexico, anyway, and sets me up for taking those steers just cause I had the guts to set my sights on something he thought was his.”

Danny finally looked at the old man. Something he had just said jiggled at loose threads in his mind. “What’s your point, Plank?”

“I’m just telling you, you want a woman, you ought to fight for her. Back down like some kind of female, you probably don’t deserve her, anyway. What’s Molly gonna do if you go over there? Shoot you with that gun of hers?”

“She might.” A raw laugh scraped from Danny’s throat, surprising him. He hadn’t thought he was capable of it.

“What did you do to her? You never said, boy.”

He found that the answer was easy. “I underestimated her. I forgot for a while that she can handle anything, as long as she knows what it is she’s supposed to be handling. I shut her out.” And that, he thought, was the worst of it. That was what she would hold against him for the rest of her life if he couldn’t reach her.

Then it hit him.

“I’ve got to go,” Danny said suddenly. Of all the words he’d said to her tonight, the fact that he was sorry, that he regretted his course of action had never fit into them anywhere, he realized. It wasn’t much, but it was all he had left to reach her with. And maybe, if he went to his knees, she would understand.

He started for the double gym doors, then something stopped him again. He looked back at the grizzled old cowboy sitting on the bleachers. “Hey, were you sleeping there the night she and I…” He trailed off and waved a finger in the general direction of the far basket.

“Wasn’t sleeping. I was trying to. Big difference.”

Well, hell, Danny thought.

“I heard what she said about her brother. She was trying to save you, too, Mr. Not-Quite-a-Con. She’s got that way in her. And somethin’ tells me you didn’t let her.”

Danny thought about it. “Yeah. Yeah, she was.” He found his keys in his pocket. “Plank, go on upstairs. Use my room. I won’t be back tonight—I hope.”

“No kidding?”

“About which? The hoping?” Danny pushed through the gym doors.

Molly smelled smoke.

It was the first thing that came to her. Old, acrid, bitter, it hurt the inside of her nostrils and made her headache worse. She tried to roll over, then she grunted in shocked pain when something kicked her in the shoulder hard.

“Get her up,” a male voice said. “Bring her around. We’ve got to talk to her.”

“Man, I’m telling you. We’ve got to kill her now.”

“Those aren’t our orders.”

“She gets loose from us, it’ll take us days to catch up with her again. You saw what I went through trying to grab her.”

“Look at her. She’s not going anywhere. We’ve got to find out everyone she’s talked to first.”

“She’s been hanging with the con. But we’ll get him and Bobby. Janine will get Bobby. I promised he’s not coming out of that coma as long as she’s a nurse there.”

The con. Molly’s mind swam a little closer to the surface. Nurse? Then she remembered.

It felt like everything in her mind gathered suddenly into a shining, hot ball. Her headache was excruciating. But she remembered now. Beau Maguire had come at her from behind in Bobby’s room. And there had been a woman waiting in the shadows in the corner. She’d done something to drug her. Here, here, use this, she’d said.

And it had been the same voice that had called her earlier to tell her that Bobby had come out of the coma. Who had she said she was then? Nurse Myers. And Beau had just called her Janine.

She’d been set up, Molly thought. Again.

Someone grabbed her beneath the armpits and started dragging her. This, she thought, was enough of this. She tried to struggle. “Let me go before I hurt you,” she rasped.

Her voice was raw, a little slurred, but at least it startled whoever had been dragging her. He dropped her again, hard and fast, with a grunt of surprise. Molly moaned with fresh pain as her head cracked into the floor. She rolled onto her stomach, then the boot came back again—it had been a boot that had kicked her before, she realized. It aimed for her throat but she twisted at the last moment and it hit her in the jaw instead. Fresh pain exploded.

“You’re in no position to even be thinking about hurting us,” the first voice said equably. She didn’t know it, didn’t recognize it. Molly forced herself to open her eyes. The man stood beside Maguire, watching her. He was tall, almost skeletally thin, with a sandy-blond mustache and hair. And he had a gun aimed at her, a regulation M.C.P.D. service revolver.

Where was she? Molly dragged in air again, tasted the smoke. Her vision cleared a little more and she looked around. They were in the bombed-out Men’s Grill kitchen at the country club.

Fresh memory seared into her head, of driving here in her car. Beau had said they couldn’t risk doing anything to her at the hospital or having her car found there, either. He had to take her to someone else at a safe place.

“I’ll be damned,” Molly moaned. “I was right. This is your turf. You blew the place up.”

“Shut up!” Maguire snarled.

“Try it yourself.” The tall, thin man clouted him with the back of his hand. “We’re supposed to let her talk.”

So, Molly thought, we know who is in charge here. “I have the floor?”

The man gave her a stark grin. “Sure. It’s all yours.”

“Thank you so much. But, come to think of it, I have nothing more to say.”

“I told you she has a mouth on her.” Maguire was still rubbing his jaw.

“Who are you?” Molly asked the mustached guy. She dragged herself up to sit against the wall behind her. Oh, everything hurt.

The man sank down onto his haunches to meet her eye to eye. “Well, now, I guess I might as well tell you, seeing as how you won’t be leaving here alive. We can be on a first-name basis while you spill whatever else it is you’ve figured out.”

Molly’s heart seemed to seize at his response. She was in trouble. She was in very deep trouble. They were going to kill her.

Danny.

Her mind veered to him, desperately, pleading with fate. She’d only just found him. She didn’t want to lose him. She was going to kill him for not telling her the truth about Ricky and Carmine, but they’d get past that. They had to get past it. He was her own personal handsome hero.

She was going to get out of this. Somehow. And damned if these idiots were going to kill him or send him back to jail. She had plans for him. And one of them was to make him pay for that little oversight of his every day for the next forty years. In the nicest possible way, of course.

It cleared her head a little more, gave her the strength to fight back. “Let me guess,” she said finally. She let her gaze flick to Maguire, then back to the sandy-haired guy. “Your favorite pastime is finding money in innocent guys’ condominiums, right?”

The blond man grinned again. The look chilled her blood this time. “Smart lady.”

“Too smart for her own damned good,” Maguire said. “I’m telling you, she went right for the crime book in the war room and started chatting up Gannon.”

“Shut up, Beau. Don’t make me keep telling you.” The mustached man nodded at Molly. “Pleased to meet you, Officer French. I’m Larry Higgins. Detective Larry Higgins. Which means I rank you, and you will answer my questions when I tell you to.”

“And then I can die for it? I don’t think so.”

This time he backhanded her. Molly couldn’t help herself; she cried out as her head cracked back against the wall. Then she brought her gaze around to him again and narrowed her eyes. “Go to hell, Larry. That’s what I think of your seniority.”

Something flared in his pale eyes—something almost like respect. “You’ve got some grit. You know, you should have joined us instead of fighting us.”

“No one invited me to the party.”

“We were going to watch you for a while after you got on the task force. Then you started cozying up to the wrong people and asking questions you shouldn’t have asked.”

“My cross to bear.”

She saw his hand move to hit her again. This time she was ready for it. Molly lashed out with her foot, knocking him off balance as he squatted in front of her. He went down and rolled, and by the time he did, she was on her feet.

She was unsteady, Molly thought, breathing hard, but at least she was on her feet. And Higgins was coming at her again.

She didn’t have the strength to fight him. And even under the best of circumstances, she couldn’t fight both of them. She had to outwit them. Somehow. Oh, God help her, she needed a plan!

“Don’t do it!” she gasped, recoiling when Higgins brought his gun hand up again. From the way he was holding the weapon, she knew he was going to hit her with it. “Break my jaw and I’ll never tell you a thing.”

Higgins caught himself up short from the blow. But then he grabbed her arm and spun her around. He drove her face first into the wall. Molly made a gargling sound of pain. He twisted her arm up behind her and held her that way, then she felt his gun at her temple.

Where was her own gun? Did Maguire still have it?

“Enough idle chitchat,” Higgins said. “Talk to me about what matters.”

“Politics? Religion?”

The revolver clicked as he cocked it. The sound was huge in her head.

If she talked, she would die here. As soon as they knew what they needed to know, Higgins would pull the trigger. She didn’t want to die.

He wouldn’t kill her until he knew what she had learned about them and who she had told, Molly thought. For the first time since Mickey had died, she knew she was going to have to back away from a wall. She couldn’t follow her instincts and hurl herself at it. She had to keep her mouth shut.

You’re right, Danny, you’re right. They don’t all fall down. And even if this one did, it would take me with it.

Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong. Danny knew it in his gut when she didn’t answer his knock on her door.

Molly was many interesting, complex things, but she wasn’t petty. She might want to leave him standing out here like a fool for spite, but eventually she’d have to throw the door open and come at him with both barrels. The woman wasn’t known for her restraint.

He knocked for a fourth time. Still nothing.

Danny swore and went back to his car, springing the trunk. He retrieved his neat little crowbar for the second time that day. He started to use it on the deadbolt again, then ice drove into his veins. It wasn’t locked. She hadn’t locked the deadbolt on her door.

He tried the second lock and that turned easily as well. Then he went for the plain, pedestrian doorknob and he found that that lock held.

She’d only used one lock? Fear was starting to make him feel nauseous.

Danny broke past the restraint of the doorknob about as easily as he’d tried to convince her he could get her out of her knickers. The memory closed his throat as he stepped inside her apartment.

The wine she’d told him she was going to drink was sitting on the coffee table—just the bottle without a corresponding glass. He picked it up, hefting it. She couldn’t have had more than a few mouthfuls of it. It was still nearly a quarter full. He scowled at the table. There were a bunch of wadded-up tissues there and a tissue box sat on the sofa cushions.

She’d been crying. He’d made her cry.

“Molly!”

Silence.

“Molly, answer me!”

He knew she wasn’t there. He jogged through the apartment anyway and when he returned to the kitchen he went to the place on the wall where he’d noticed that she hung her keys. They were gone.

She’d left under her own steam then. It should have comforted him. But would she have done that without locking all her locks?

Danny left the apartment and ran to his car. “Who, damn it, who?” The Mercados? Or the Lion’s Den? He banged his fist repeatedly against the steering wheel as he drove, growling wordlessly in frustrated terror. One of them had her.

There’d been no sign of a struggle in her apartment. So they’d lured her out…somehow, somewhere. And she had been in a hurry, or she would have used all those damned useless locks on her door. Don’t you die on me, Molly. Don’t you dare die before I apologize.

Danny pressed his foot down on the gas, and the old yellow car hurtled as it picked up speed. Okay, he thought, this would have to be a process of elimination. It would eat up crucial time, so he’d have to rule someone out quickly. He went to find Ricky.

Five minutes later he hit the brakes. They screamed as he skidded to a stop in front of the condominium complex where the convenience store money had been handily discovered six years ago. Oh, yeah, he thought, all his bets with the Mercados were off.

He ran up to the third floor, then he rammed his fist against Ricky’s door like a wild man, again and again. When it was suddenly flung open, he almost nailed Ricky in the jaw.

His old friend jumped back. “What the hell, Danny? What are you doing?”

“Where is she?” he snarled.

“Who?” Then Ricky’s sleep-clouded eyes cleared. “Your cop? Oh, man. We don’t have her, bro. I swear it. What’s going on?”

Danny needed to believe him so badly it nearly buckled his knees. But the alternative was very nearly worse. “Call Carmine. Make sure.”

“I don’t have to. I was with him until a few hours ago. He’s in the hospital—another heart attack. Danny, with all due respect, you’re the farthest thing from the man’s mind right now.”

His brain was grinding, Danny realized. It kept trying to move but it felt like it was missing gears. He was terrified. “What about one of the others? One of Carmine’s favorite goons? Someone has her.”

Ricky grabbed both his shoulders, his strong hands squeezing hard. “It’s not us.”

Danny met his eyes. And he believed him.

He turned away from the door. “It’s the cops then.”

“Cops? She is a cop.” Ricky shouted after him. “What are you talking about?”

“There are bad ones.”

Ricky raked a hand through his hair. “Well, we’ve always known that.”

“No, I mean, they have some kind of network.” Too late, Danny thought to stop and look back at his friend’s eyes. If there was awareness there, if Ricky knew about the Lion’s Den, then he’d missed the truth in the second it had glimmered there. And he didn’t have time to press the issue. “I’ve got to go.”

“Whoa,” Ricky said. “Just hold on a second. I’ll make some phone calls and see what I can find out. I know the cops that are in our pockets. There are only a couple these days, but I can find out if any of them know anything.”

Yeah, Danny thought, they were still brothers—for what it would be worth when this nightmare was over. “Okay, thanks. One way or the other, I’ll come back here.”

“Yeah, well, try not to do it in a body bag. I’ve got enough enemies and worries without adding a cop network to the list.”

Danny left him and ran down to his car.

She wasn’t with Carmine. Where then? Where the hell had they led her? Where would they want her to go? He drove aimlessly now, riffling through the possibilities in his mind, his hands sweating on the wheel. Those names she’d given him last night, he thought—Connelly and Maguire, Evans, Neely. Did they have her in one of their homes? If they did, she’d be dead long before he could discover all their addresses and check out every one of them.

An unseen fist clamped over his heart.

“Where else, damn it? Where?” Then it came to him.

The country club. She’d said it herself the other day. Sooner or later one of her suspected bad cops would lead her just where she wanted to go—to the burned-out Men’s Grill. It wasn’t much, but it was all he had. He couldn’t think of anything else.

Danny made a sweeping, tire-whining U-turn in the middle of the street and headed back toward the Lone Star Country Club.

“Call in,” Higgins said, his voice low and tense with frustration. “There’s a cell phone in my pocket. Use it and find out what we’re supposed to do about this. She’s not going to say a word. Find out if we’re supposed to kill her, anyway, or if they want us to take her someplace else. We can’t stay here much longer. It’s damned near four-thirty in the morning.”

Molly’s heart slugged her ribs. The pressure of the gun against her head was becoming excruciating. The arm Higgins kept twisted behind her back was on fire.

She tried to listen while Maguire was talking on the cell phone, but she couldn’t hear him clearly. His voice was an undertone and he’d gone to the other side of the kitchen. When he came back to them and spoke again, his voice close behind her, Molly jumped a little.

“He says to start hurting her. We’re supposed to take her to the old gun range and keep working on her. She’ll wear down eventually. Then we’ll get rid of her there.”

“That’s wide open, right outside!”

“He doesn’t want to take the chance of doing it here now because soon more people are going to be showing up for work.”

Higgins grunted in response.

No, Molly thought helplessly, they couldn’t kill her here now. At this point, the sound of gunfire in the country club would be the end of them. An hour ago they could have gotten away with it. Now, with breakfast just hours away, staff would be pouring into the kitchen areas. If they discharged a gun here now, someone was bound to come running. Higgins and Maguire might not get away cleanly. And somebody would find her body.

She’d kept her mouth shut for once and it had kept her alive. She felt woozy with relief until she realized that they were going to try to drag her out of here now. And if they did that, she was as good as dead. She couldn’t let them take her from here. She had to keep them occupied while the clock ticked on.

Molly started shaking hard enough that her teeth snicked together. “I know you call yourselves the Lion’s Den,” she said quickly.

There was a long silence. She imagined them exchanging glances, though with the gun to her temple, she couldn’t move her head to see them.

“Hey, now, that’s the spirit of cooperation,” Higgins finally said. “Keep going.”

All her prayers, all her chances, were sliding through her fingers like sand. All she could do now was trickle information to them a little bit at a time. If enough employees arrived for work, they might not be able to drag her unobtrusively out of here.

“You give me a monster headache and now you want me to remember? Shut up for a minute and let me think.”

“She’s about this tall.” Danny held up his hand. “She has lots of curly brown hair.”

“I keep telling you,” the security guard said impatiently. “No one’s come through this way for at least a couple of hours.”

Danny wasn’t sure that mattered. He’d dropped her off at home well before midnight, so she could have arrived here as early as one o’clock. “Think harder. Go back to when you first came on shift.”

The guy fingered a pin on his lapel nervously. Danny couldn’t quite see what it was with his finger stroking over it. The guy was definitely uptight. Then his hand dropped and hovered near his weapon.

What the hell? For a moment, Danny’s mind went blank. Why did the guard need his gun just because someone—okay, granted, an uninvited guest—was questioning him? Touchy, he thought, then, suddenly, another image swam into his brain.

The day he had come here to meet Ricky. The goons who had confronted him back at the bombed-out grill area had been playing touchy-feely with their weapons, too. Something was going on here—and Molly’s car was outside in the lot. Unless she had sneaked in for some reason, unless someone had carried her in through some other entrance, this guy who was getting off on his gun should have seen her.

“You security boys are pretty attached to those things, aren’t you?” he asked, nodding at the guard’s holster.

“What?” But something happened to the guy’s gaze. It slid to his weapon almost furtively.

“Are you under orders to take out anybody not wearing a tux?”

At the word orders, the guy developed a tic below his left eye.

Yeah, Danny thought, something was definitely going on here. Goodbye, parole.

Even if Molly wasn’t in danger, even if he ended up coming out of this looking like a fool—could he take the chance? He wasn’t leaving here without combing every square inch of the country club property. And this guy sure wasn’t going to let him pass nicely. “Nighty-night, tough guy.”

Danny took one more quick glance around the lobby. They were alone. He brought the side of his hand around and chopped the guy hard in the windpipe. The guard went down like a sack of potatoes, gurgling.

“Amateur,” Danny muttered. He reached down and freed the man’s revolver from its holster. Then he rolled him over, studying the back of his head for a moment. “Gee, I hope I remember how to do this. If not, tough luck. You should have told me where she was when you had the opportunity. I’m not going to let you follow me or call for more of your goon friends.”

He brought the butt of the revolver down on the back of the man’s head. The guard went limp and flat on the floor. Danny felt for his pulse. It was still strong and regular. All those years of figuring out ways not to kill a man had finally paid off.

He grabbed the guard under the armpits and dragged him around to the back of the abandoned reception desk. There was nothing to tie him up with. He’d have to leave him. Unless Danny had lost his touch, he’d be out cold for a while, anyway. Danny straightened and looked around the lobby again. It was still deserted.

He headed for the old Men’s Grill area. Halfway there, he heard her scream.

Higgins grabbed Molly’s ponytail and yanked back on her head. Tears stung at her eyes. She would not whimper.

“Honest, that’s it,” she said hoarsely. “That’s all I know.”

“That there’s a Lion’s Den,” Higgins clarified.

“Right.”

“And how did you find that out?”

She was going to take at least one of them down with her, Molly thought. “Bryce Evans slipped and told me.”

“Like hell he did. He said he figured out who you were when you called him. You’re lying.”

“Do you want to take that chance? I’d give him a good talking-to if I were you.”

Higgins jerked her arm up higher. Molly screamed at the pain.

She heard the pop. She felt it, everything coming loose in her shoulder, pain screaming down her arm. He’d dislocated it. Darkness swam in front of her eyes. She fought to hold on to consciousness with everything she had left.

“Tell me who else you think is involved.”

“You and Evans.”

He jerked her around, shoving her back against the wall now. “Keep going.”

“Oh, yeah. Your sidekick over there.” She inclined her head toward Maguire. “You know, I think he needs one of those little monkey vests and a tambourine.”

He brought back his fist to hit her again. Then Maguire shouted.

Higgins jerked around before he completed the blow. He looked at Maguire. Maguire brought his gun hand up and aimed at the door. He had her gun. Molly slumped against the wall and followed Maguire’s gaze.

Then she saw Danny. “They’re both armed!” she screamed.

Two of them. Danny assessed the situation in the heartbeat it took him to crash past the plywood door. There was Maguire and another guy—one he didn’t know. He leaped for the first guy because he was closer, hitting him from behind as the man tried to keep pivoting in the direction of the door.

They slid together on the floor, coming up hard against the wall. The guy’s gun was knocked clear of his hand. It slid across the floor, spinning. Danny crashed his fist down into the man’s face. Again. Again. Again. The bastard had been planning on killing her.

Molly watched the gun spiral past her. Then she saw Maguire move again out of the corner of her eye. He was taking aim again at Danny and Higgins. “Not as long as I’m breathing.”

She would never know where she found the strength. Her shoulder screamed. She heaved her weight forward and threw herself against Maguire’s legs. He staggered and fell, bellowing. Molly rolled with him and managed to wrench her gun from his hand.

Her left arm was useless, and she was left-handed. It didn’t matter. She didn’t have to aim. She pointed the gun at the ceiling with her right hand and prayed like hell that no one was standing a floor above. She found the trigger just as Maguire started coming after her again. She pulled it once, twice, three times, then four, stopping only two bullets away from emptying the chamber.

She’d leave one for Maguire, one for Higgins, if it came to that. But it wouldn’t. She heard shouting from other areas of the Country Club almost immediately.

She kept the gun trained on Maguire. “Don’t move. Don’t even think about it,” she said hoarsely. “I want to hurt you, so don’t put me to the test. We don’t want to find out how crazy I really am.”

Maguire went still, wild-eyed.

She couldn’t look at Danny, didn’t dare take her gaze off Maguire. But she heard the dull sound of his fist as it kept connecting with flesh. “Danny! Don’t do it! Don’t kill him! Don’t do it to yourself. We’re okay now. Someone’s coming.”

A blond woman with too much hair was the first to race into the room. She started screaming. A second after that, two burly men in chef’s whites followed her.

Good enough, Molly thought. Then the pain clawed its way into her brain and she passed out.

The next time she came around, Molly was on a sofa in the lobby. There were faces pressed around her, people staring at her. One of them was the blond woman who had first rushed into the kitchen. She was trying to hold a wet cloth to Molly’s forehead. Molly batted her hand away. “It’s not my head, it’s my arm.”

“What? Oh, dear, be quiet now. Don’t try to talk. I’ll just keep you nice and soothed here.”

This, Molly thought, was the kind of woman who gave blondes a bad name. She wore an expensive crimson suit and a name tag that said B. Branigan, General Manager.

“Ms. Branigan.”

“Yes, darling.”

“I don’t need soothing. My arm is dislocated. I need a towel. A big, dry one. Can you do that for me?”

“Yes! Yes, of course. Horace!” she shrilled to a man Molly couldn’t see. “Bring me a towel!”

While the woman was turned away from her, Molly managed to sit up and take stock of the scene. Everyone had spilled out of the Men’s Grill. Most of the crowd was gathered around Beau Maguire. Higgins, almost bloodied beyond recognition, was lying on another one of the sofas. They’d have to throw that one out, Molly thought inanely. She doubted if there was another security guard in any other part of the building because they were all here. And they were all gathered around Maguire.

Something about that made her blood chill.

When the unknown Horace didn’t respond, B. Branigan hustled off on horrifyingly high heels to get the towel herself. Molly pushed unsteadily to her feet and went toward Maguire.

“She was planting evidence,” she heard him say as she approached. “I saw her. She’d do anything to get her detective’s shield. We tried to stop her. Then that crazed ex-con boyfriend of hers—hey!” He broke off when he saw Molly.

“He’s lying,” she hissed.

“Call this in. Will somebody call this in on 911?” Maguire demanded.

Molly knew someone already had. There were too many sympathetic people girding Maguire.

“I saw her planting bomb fragments,” he said to one of them.

“And for that you had to shoot her?” B. Branigan demanded, scurrying up with a towel. The others looked at her bemusedly.

“Who are you?” someone asked.

“I’m Bonnie Branigan.” She drew herself up. “I’m in charge here.”

“She shot the gun!” Maguire argued. “Her prints are all over the damned thing!”

Of course they were, Molly thought, feeling a wave of nausea sweep over her. It had been her own gun.

Maguire’s fingerprints would be on there, too. It was proof of…something. She had to cling to that.

“Well, then, did you have to do that to her arm?” Bonnie Branigan cried, finally noticing its awkward, drooping angle.

“She was contaminating the crime scene! I had to stop her.”

“Oh, dear heavens,” Bonnie gasped. “This is—what do they call it?—excessive force. Isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Molly murmured, taking the towel from her. “It definitely qualifies.”

She had to get out of here. She had to find Danny.

She gripped Ms. Branigan’s arm, pulling her away from Maguire. “Where’s the other guy?” she asked in an undertone.

“The man who was struggling with that one?” The woman looked in the direction of the unconscious Higgins. “Why, he’s…” Her voice trailed off. “I don’t know.”

There was another shout from the area of the reception desk. Molly looked that way quickly enough to make her head spin again. One of the cooks was dragging an unconscious security guard out from behind it.

“He’s alive, he’s alive!” the man called. “He’s got a pulse.”

Then it hit her. Molly understood.

Danny had broken his parole in the worst way possible. Assault and battery. He’d made a choice again. And this time he’d done it for her.

He was going back to jail after all.

A fist seemed to wrap itself around her windpipe. Molly left everyone and ran back to the grill kitchen. She found Higgins’s cell phone on the floor there. She used her good hand to dig Josh Gannon’s phone number out of her pocket. Shaking, she punched it in with her thumb.

Someone had called 911, she thought again. Whether the arriving officers turned out to be good cops or Lion’s Den guys, it wouldn’t matter. Danny had damned near killed a man—two men if the guard behind the desk was any indication. And someone would make him pay for it.

“No, no, no,” she whispered aloud, waiting as the phone on the other end of the line rang.

Both factions of cops would arrive, Molly decided. They’d turn out in record numbers again, just as they had on the day of the bombing. This place was their hub. If the Lions had a Den, then it was here in this building. There would be chaos when everyone arrived, and the Den guys would see to it that she was hauled off ignominiously for planting evidence. They’d settle for destroying her now, tonight. Maybe they would still try to kill her later.

She had to get out of here.

Josh Gannon finally answered the phone groggily.

“It’s Molly French,” she said quickly, looking over her shoulder to see if anyone had followed her. She was still alone. She slid out of the kitchen again and started for the back of the clubhouse, in the opposite direction from the confusion. “I’m in trouble, Josh. I need your brother. Tell him to come to the country club. Tell him it hit the fan. Tell him that Larry Higgins and Beau Maguire brought me here to kill me. Do you have those names?”

Josh made a coming-awake sound. “Yeah. Yeah, I have them.”

“Higgins is half-dead and Maguire is trying to say he caught me contaminating the crime scene. I need Joe to take over here, to protect our interests on this end. I can’t stay here.”

“Where are you going?” Josh asked. “Where can he find you?”

“Tell him I’m going to find the district attorney.” It was the only chance she had, Molly thought. She disconnected again and tucked the phone into the waistband of her jeans. Maguire had called somebody on it. The call would be traceable.

She would go find Spence Harrison, Molly thought. Later. After she found Danny.

When Molly stepped outside onto the patio behind the clubhouse, she heard sirens wailing all over the city. From the sound of it, Al Capone was coming down tonight. Either that, or one troublesome good cop who just wouldn’t go away, she thought, feeling a little giddy. Yes, they were going to want her badge. This was going to be an IAD skirmish that would make Tripician’s head spin…assuming Spence Harrison couldn’t help her.

She was about to find out just whose side the D.A. was on.

Her face pulled tight with pain as she paused in the darkness just long enough to fashion the towel into a sling for her arm. Then she headed for the parking lot, keeping to the gardens, praying she could get there before too many patrol cars descended. With any amount of luck, Maguire had left her keys in it.

Her luck seemed to be running all right so far. She was alive. But where was Danny?

Molly found her old Camaro. It was unlocked, but her keys weren’t there. She grinned suddenly, a little ferally, in the night. If Maguire still had them on him, if he had dropped them into his pocket after he’d brought her here to the country club, that was going to leave him with a bit of explaining to do.

Molly hot-wired her car. There was something to be said for having grown up with a hoodlum brother.

She left the parking lot just as the first units arrived. Where would he go? Not to the rec center, she thought. It was the first place the police would look for him. Her apartment? No, that would be the second place they’d look. His mother’s house? Molly had no clue where the woman lived. She could find out through department channels, but she didn’t want to risk surfacing until Joe Gannon managed to sort things out at the country club and she found Spence Harrison.

The mob, she thought suddenly. The Mercados. “Ricky,” she whispered aloud. What had Danny said that day he’d met with him? That they’d always be friends; they just wouldn’t see each other after that last meeting. Well, Molly thought, this situation pretty much changed everything. If Danny needed to avoid the law now, who better to hide him than his best friend, the mobster?

She knew where Ricky Mercado lived. Everyone in law enforcement knew where Ricky Mercado lived. They just couldn’t lay a hand on him because he never obviously did anything wrong. She turned south, heading for the posh condominiums at the hem of town.

“Please, Danny, please, don’t have turned yourself in yet.” Her heart tried to stall. It was possible that he had. He was that kind of man.

He’d left the mob on principle, and he’d done jail time rather than talk about what he knew. He’d saved her life at unconscionable cost to himself. More than any man she had ever met, Danny had goodness and honor inside him.

What would he do now? she thought frantically, driving. Would he do the just and noble thing and head straight for the police station because he had broken his parole? Or would he lie low for a while, to give the dust time to settle and to think things through?

Molly stopped in front of the condominiums and let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. Then she painfully levered herself out of the car and headed for Ricky’s door.

“Third one on the top,” she said to herself. “I think.” Otherwise, she was going to wake someone else up very early.

She took a second to look up at the sky. Dawn was spreading…and she had lived to see it. She prayed that Danny would be looking at it tomorrow—and not through a barred window.

She went up to the third floor and banged her fist on the door that she thought belonged to Ricky Mercado, then she rang the bell for good measure. He opened it too quickly to have been sleeping.

“Here’s your chance,” she said flippantly. “Either kill me now or tell me where to find Danny. But I’ve got to warn you, I’ve put up one tough fight already tonight and I’m not in the mood to be nice about this.”

Ricky looked at her for a long time, then he called back into the condo over his shoulder. “Would she be cute and sarcastic with a lot of dark hair?”

“That’s the one,” Danny’s voice came back.

Molly cried out in relief. She shoved past Ricky, nearly knocking him off his feet, and ran into the living room behind him. Danny was sitting on the sofa.

He came to his feet to meet her and she found her way into his arms. “You didn’t do it,” she gasped. “You didn’t do anything stupid.” She couldn’t stop touching him, his face, his hands, his arms.

“Not in the last hour, anyway.”

“I was afraid you would turn yourself in.”

“Why, Officer, does that mean you’re willing to aid and abet a criminal?” Then he found he could no longer talk. His throat was a knot of pain. She was alive.

She was warm beneath his hands, humming with emotion—energy, fury, panic, he couldn’t tell which. Danny buried his face against her hair and just held her.

“I wanted to see you first,” he said finally.

“And you knew I’d look here on the dark side?”

“Hey,” Ricky said from behind her, affronted.

“Never mind. I’m here.” Molly kissed Danny. Then she kissed him again. “You’re not going back to jail. Not without a fight. We’re going to the D.A.”

“Oh, now he’s a pal of mine.”

“He is now. He’s all we’ve got.” She finally eased back from him. “I don’t have much time here, Danny. I’ve got to get to Spence Harrison.”

“Just a second. I need a second.”

“What?” she asked anxiously.

“About the other thing—when you left me tonight. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you right away. I’d do it all over again, I’d make the same deal, knowing what I knew then. But I should have told you when I did it.”

Her eyes filled. Molly bit her lip. “Danny, it’s okay. Not now…”

“Wait, I’m not done yet. When I made that deal, I didn’t know I was in love with you.”

“Well, I did,” Ricky said from behind them. “I told you. Didn’t I tell you?”

Molly’s throat closed. Her gaze whipped between the two of them. Her tears spilled. “You love me?”

“And now that I know it, I would take any risk, fight any battle, rather than lose you.”

“You already did,” she whispered, choking.

“Tell him you love him, too,” Ricky suggested, “so I can get some sleep here.”

“I love you.” Molly slid back into his arms. “Oh, I do.”

Danny felt his heart move in his chest. He wanted to stand there forever, just holding her. But he kissed her and set her away from him, looking at the man he still loved like a brother. “You’re going to need to duck now, pal. Get out of the line of fire. I can probably give you a couple of days.”

Ricky just closed his eyes as he understood. “Damn it, Danny. You’re going to do it, aren’t you? You’re going to talk.”

“I have to. Just get out of the way first, would you? Before I do it? I don’t want to take you down. That’s the best I can give you.”

“Don’t tell me this. Don’t put me in this position.”

“I don’t want to see you in jail. You’re too pretty.”

Ricky crossed his arms over his chest. “Go on.”

“That money Carmine siphoned off from what was sent up north to the New York boys—you had no part of that, not then. But do you now?”

“No. I still keep my hands clear of the whole drug scene. That was the money from the heavy stuff we bring up from Mexico.”

“Right.”

Molly didn’t want to hear this. Her stomach was hurting. And she knew how important it was for her to stay…just because Danny hadn’t asked her to leave.

Trust, she thought again. And she knew if she came out of this with her career, she’d never do a thing with this information.

She wouldn’t have to, she understood now. Danny would.

“I thought about giving that information to New York,” he said.

That brought anger to Ricky’s eyes. “My uncle would be dead before nightfall. They’d kill him.”

“And the rest of Carmine’s guys would be running around town with sawed-off shotguns looking for me—for revenge. They might even hit you—for your association with me. No, that’s not how I’m going to play it. But I will turn it over to the D.A. to give it to the FBI.”

“You know where we bring the stuff in. They’ll have agents all over the border there.”

“Not if they’re smart. They’ll pick up the trail there and follow it straight to Carmine’s bedroom door. That should successfully dismantle things in Texas.”

“They’ll kill you, bro. The FBI won’t put everyone in jail, and someone will come after you. One of you.” He glanced at Molly.

“My mother is already gone. I went to her place before I came here and sent her away. She’s got bus fare and she’s already on the road. And I won’t talk unless the FBI agrees to protect her once she gets where she’s going.” He looked at Molly. She nodded her agreement.

“What about you guys?” Ricky asked.

Danny looked at her again. Molly found his gaze one more time and held on.

“For better or worse, we’ll be together.”

They found Spence Harrison hustling down his driveway toward his car. He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw them. “Molly French. We’ve got people all over the city looking for you right now.”

“Good guys or bad guys?”

Harrison winced. “Both. Come on inside.”

In that second Molly breathed again. He wasn’t going to try to take her in. He could be trusted.

Harrison rented the second floor of a rambling, two-story Colonial on Brent Drive. They followed him upstairs. Molly sank down at his kitchen table while he put on coffee. She tried to stifle a groan of pain but it worked past her lips.

“Damn it,” Danny growled, “you need to be at the hospital.”

“They’ll find me if I go there.” She looked at Spence. “Have you got any aspirin?”

He got a bottle from the cabinet. “What the hell did they do to you?”

“They tried to kill me. Larry Higgins and Beau Maguire tried to kill me. They settled for taking my arm out of its socket instead.”

Harrison’s face went white. “Joe Gannon called me from the country club. That’s more or less what he said. I wasn’t sure I could trust him. He booked Bancroft that day.”

Molly washed the aspirin down with coffee. “Yeah, he did. But he’s a good guy.”

The coffee was sweet, delicious, and she shuddered a little as it hit her stomach. Then she started at the beginning, with Bobby’s last words at the hospital before he’d gone into a coma. “Higgins never denied that they were called the Lion’s Den,” she finished. “He just kept hammering at me, trying to get me to tell him who I thought was part of it.”

“Give me the names.” Harrison took a notepad out of his briefcase.

“Higgins and Maguire, obviously. Maguire tailed me all day yesterday, watching my apartment, then he caught me at the hospital. And you know someone shot at me last night, right? Joe Gannon was supposed to investigate the incident, but they pulled him off it.”

Harrison nodded. “Higgins is in the hospital right now,” he responded. “He’s not going anywhere. As for Maguire, he tucked tail at the country club and ran right after Joe Gannon got there. He’s gone underground but we’ll find him. He’s not that bright.”

Molly nodded. “And Kyle Malloy and Ed Bancroft were probably involved.”

“We knew that.”

“I put together a list through personnel records of others that seem shady.” At his look, she added quickly, “Don’t ask me how. I had help and I won’t divulge it.”

“All right. Who else then?”

“Frank Hasselman, Paulie McCauley. Sergeant Connelly seems definitely connected. And I’m pretty sure Kevin Neely and Bryce Evans are involved. You might want to check out Donita Carver and Harry Roscoe really closely.”

Danny spoke up. “Uh, for what it’s worth, there’s an unconscious guy behind the reception desk at the country club that tweaked my antennae.”

Harrison almost grinned. “Yeah. They found him. He’s a cop, too.”

“And Janine something-or-other,” Molly added. “Um…Myers, I think she said. She’s a nurse at the hospital. She helped them grab me when I went there to see Bobby.” Suddenly, something else hit her hard. “Spence, they said they were going to get all three of us. If she’s still there at the hospital, Bobby could be in danger right now.”

He put down his pen and went to the telephone. “I’ll have her picked up for questioning right away.”

Danny got an odd expression on his face. “Janine? Did you say Janine? I guess I really ticked her off.”

“What are you talking about?” Molly scowled.

He told her about the daisies.

Molly had thought she’d never smile again, but a grin took her lips. Then she let her gaze slide back to Harrison as he hung up the telephone. “One last thing. Higgins and Maguire found the money in Danny’s apartment six years ago when he was convicted of robbing the convenience store. I think the Lion’s Den is working for the mob. I think there’s our connection to the bombing. It was Connelly who shifted them to that patrol that day. Danny was set up by the mob for trying to leave them. He never robbed that store.” She found Harrison’s gaze and pinned it with her own.

“Molly, hold on—” Danny began.

“You’re giving me a lot to deal with here,” Harrison said.

“I am.” Molly watched his eyes and found what she wanted to see in them. She finally nodded.

She trusted him, too. She had learned a lot about trust these last weeks.

“So that’s that, then.” Molly let out a shaky breath. She had to ask it. “What happens to me, Spence? I know they’re trying to say I was there tampering with the scene. Beau was already giving them that party line when I slid out.”

“And Ben Stone has put out the word to find you and bring you to the station ASAP.”

“He’ll take my badge.”

“No, he won’t. But you both need to get out of town for a few days. You—” he nodded at Molly “—are hereby on an official leave of absence from the M.C.P.D. And you—” he glanced at Danny “—stay clear of Mission Creek until I can make sure they don’t revoke your parole for saving the life of an officer.”

Molly felt a squeaky sound escape her throat. She gulped it back and pressed a hand to her mouth. She wouldn’t cry.

“Here’s my inside line at the office and my home number,” Harrison added, writing both down. “When you get wherever you’re going, call me and let me know where you are. I’ll tell you when the coast is clear to come home.”

“Thanks,” Molly whispered. She stood.

“Don’t go too far.” Harrison snapped his briefcase shut again. “The one thing we don’t have right now is anything to link the Lion’s Den to the bombing—other than the fact that Higgins and Maguire took you to the country club tonight, and that won’t hold up in court for as long as it takes a good attorney to stand up and object. I might need your help on hammering that part out later.”

“Uh…I resigned from the task force.”

“Not anymore, you didn’t. I don’t know how many officers I can trust right now. Those I’m sure of—like you—I want in place, where I can use you. We also can’t be sure who these Den guys are working with. I like the mob, given that Higgins, Maguire and Connelly were instrumental in finding that money in your condo, Mr. Gates, but we’re going to need more.” He paused. “I need to get into the office now. This is going to blow sky-high with the press at any moment.”

They went back outside again. For a long time Molly and Danny stood on the sidewalk, watching Harrison’s car retreat down the street. Then she found his hand and linked it with hers.

“The man has a point,” she said finally. “I’ve got the really strong feeling that we should do what Spence said and get out of Dodge. Like…now.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Anywhere but Texas.”

He grinned wearily. “How about Las Vegas then?”

“What’s in Las Vegas?” she asked, startled. “Besides a lot of scantily dressed women?”

“Guys who will marry us pretty cheap.”

Her heart vaulted. “Is that a proposal?”

He pulled her into his arms. “Yeah.”

“Well, I’ve heard better.”

“I’m an ex-con. You get what you get.”

“Not for much longer, you’re not.”

“Maybe I should do this right, then.”

“I agree. I’ve waited thirty years for this. Get down on one knee.”

His brows lifted. “In the middle of the sidewalk?”

“I’m still making you do penance for the bit about talking me out of my knickers.”

“That’s all?”

“I’ve forgiven you for the other. That was one very touching apology back at Ricky’s place.”

They grinned at each other.

“Come to think of it, I never got to prove my theory about your knickers.” He looked into her green eyes and got lost in them. “Oh, what the hell.”

When he dropped to one knee, Molly’s mouth fell open. Then she threw back her head and laughed. She laughed until the tears that she’d been battling for hours spilled freely. Then she sank down on her knees to face him. “Will you marry me?” she asked.

“Hey, that’s my line.”

Molly sobered. “Danny, you don’t ever have to tell me anything about that part of your life if you don’t want to. And what you do tell me, I won’t ever repeat.”

“I know, Molly. It’s one of the first things I loved about you.”

She threw herself into his arms.

“This is the part where you get to tell me how you fell in love with me,” he reminded her. She reared back to kiss him. “I will. On our way to Las Vegas. It’s going to take a while.”

Special thanks and acknowledgment are given to Beverly Bird for her contribution to the LONE STAR COUNTRY CLUB series.

ISBN: 978-1-4268-7198-6

IN THE LINE OF FIRE

Copyright © 2002 by Harlequin Books S.A.

All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the editorial office, Silhouette Books, 300 East 42nd Street, New York, NY 10017 U.S.A.

All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

® and TM are trademarks of Harlequin Books S.A., used under license. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.

Visit Silhouette at www.eHarlequin.com

*Wounded Warriors

*Wounded Warriors

*Wounded Warriors

†The Wedding Ring

†The Wedding Ring

†The Wedding Ring