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  He prowled forward, stiff-legged, cautious, like a wounded lion coming to tea. Pity she didn’t have any raw meat in the freezer, she thought with self-defensive humor. Spooning decaf into a paper filter, she watched him from the corner of her eye, a little curious, a little wary, and more than a little attracted. He chose a seat on the far side of the table, angling it to face the door. A cop’s gesture. With a stifled grunt, he stretched his right leg out in front of him.

  He hurt. And she suspected he hated betraying it. Ready sympathy welled inside her. “Milk or sugar?”

  “Black.”

  “Real men don’t take cream?”

  Unexpectedly, he smiled. “I used to. But all we have at the station is that powdered nondairy crap. I learned to drink it without.”

  She slid an orange mug across the table and sat opposite.

  He sipped. “Thanks.”

  “What about sugar?” she prompted.

  He didn’t smile this time, but appreciation lit his eyes, kindling an answering warmth inside her. “You think I need sweetening up?”

  “When I answered the door, I thought you might,” she said candidly.

  “Huh.” A noncommittal sound, like a lion’s chuff.

  Well, at least he wasn’t glaring any more.

  “So, now that you have your coffee, do you want to tell me why you’re on my doorstep at nine o’clock at night?”

  ***

  Matt rubbed his jaw. Truth was, he’d just as soon forget his reason for being here. It felt good to sit down. He wanted a minute to savor the coffee, to stretch in the warm kitchen, to talk to the woman. He liked more than her looks, he decided. He liked her easy hospitality and her neat, quick hands. But experience had taught him he was no good at comfortable domesticity. Habits from the interview room died hard.

  He leaned forward, taking advantage of his temporary rapport with the witness. “What do you know about the men working for you this morning?”

  Those hands tightened on her mug. Carefully, she set it down and pushed back from the table. So much for rapport, Matt thought.

  “They work for me,” she said coolly. “What else should I know?”

  “Some of them came from city lockup, you said. Do you know what they did time for?” “Whatever they did, whoever they were, doesn’t matter once they’re hired. That’s one of our rules.”

  With the number of repeat offenders running around out there, it was a stupid rule. He let it pass for now.

  “But you do know,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  She didn’t elaborate. Damn, he missed Will. His partner’s specialty had been drawing out uncooperative witnesses, just as Matt’s had been intimidating recalcitrant suspects. Even if he’d been willing to try that tactic now, and he wasn’t, Clare Harmon didn’t look easily intimidated.

  “So, what’ve you got? Possession? Larceny? Assault?”

  Her lashes swept down. Reddish lashes, bleached at the tips. He hadn’t noticed before how thick they were, how effectively they curtained her eyes.

  “Any of them follow the show?” he persisted.

  “What show?”

  Patiently, he asked again. “Any of them baseball fans?”

  She looked up at that, her brown eyes bright and challenging. “Let’s not dance around, Sergeant. Why don’t you tell me what you know, or suspect, and I’ll tell you anything I know that could help you out. Unless this is a formal investigation?”

  He admired her spunk, if not her lack of cooperation. “Not yet,” he growled.

  “So.” She held up three slim fingers and, one by one, ticked them off. “Everyone on the lot knows better than to use on the job. And I doubt they sprinkled drug paraphernalia in among your things as they moved you in. Which rules out possession. Obviously you got through the afternoon without anyone on the crew attacking you, so it’s not assault. Which leaves larceny.”

  “You talk like a lawyer,” he observed.

  “I married a lawyer,” she said.

  He looked for a ring. “Divorced?”

  “No. He died.”

  He’d broken the news often enough himself not to belittle the moment by ignoring it or mouthing platitudes. “I’m sorry.”

  She smiled sadly. “Yes. So was I.” Silence resonated between them like a clock ticking in an empty room. Twisting out of her chair, she padded over to the gray-patterned counter. “More coffee?” she offered, keeping her back to him.

  Obviously, Matt thought, she wasn’t a woman who let strangers intrude on her grief. He understood that. Respected it. But he read the cost of her control in the delicate cords of her neck and the set of her slim shoulders. He felt uncomfortable sitting there drinking her coffee, interrupting her evening, battering on her feelings. One of his girlfriends—Marcia? No, it was Amy—used to tell him what an insensitive jerk he was.

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  She busied herself for a moment with pot and cups before sitting down again. “Tell me what’s missing,” she invited.

  “A baseball. A Hank Aaron autographed ball, 1974.”

  Her eyebrows lifted. “Not the stereo?”

  So, she wasn’t a fan. “1974,” Matt repeated. “The year he broke the record. The last season he played with the Braves. I was eight.”

  She exhaled slowly. “It sounds special.”

  “It is.”

  “Almost irresistible.”

  He was sure, then, she knew something. “Only to a crook,” he said.

  “Irreplaceable?” she ventured.

  To him. But he didn’t go around spouting off his feelings either. Not to strangers and not to civilians. “Yeah.”

  She sipped her coffee. Buying time, he thought. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I need names. Addresses. Your guys were in and out of that house all afternoon.”

  “So were half a dozen police officers,” she reminded him.

  Matt rubbed the back of his neck. He was tired, bone tired. Muscle tired from moving and soul tired from Will’s desertion and the frustration of his new assignment. He didn’t need some perky little redhead making ridiculous accusations against his buddies. Not when he’d already figured his probable crook and suspected the lengths she would go to to protect him. “They didn’t take anything.”

  “Neither did my team.”

  Right. She couldn’t be that naive. “Maybe one of them saw something.”

  “I can ask,” she said.

  He could push. But experience had taught him that statements obtained under duress were usually recanted. Better to give her time to think and an opportunity to come forward on her own.

  “I’d appreciate that,” he said.

  ***

  He didn’t look appreciative, Clare thought. He looked grim, like he suspected her of poisoning his coffee. But maybe she was being unfair. A man his size could hardly help but appear threatening. And he was wounded, and almost certainly tired... Unwilling sympathy moved in her. She ought to be grateful he was giving her the chance to approach this problem on her own and in her own way, to deal with the unwelcome suspicion that crossed her mind the minute he mentioned the Atlanta Braves. Richie’s team.

  “It’s most likely the offender still has the ball in his possession,” he continued dispassionately. “It’s an easy item to take, but equally easy to trace. Its value depends on its being identifiable.”

  “You’re sure you didn’t just misplace it?” she asked.

  “I packed it in an open box of personal items. I know I didn’t leave it behind, and nothing else is missing.”

  “It couldn’t have rolled...?” Clare stopped at the barely governed impatience in his face. “No, I guess not,” she answered her own question.

  He stood with a controlled strength that almost made her forget his gimpy leg. His eyes, black and potent as the coffee he’d just finished, accelerated her heart rate like a dose of caffeine. Not with fear, Clare thought. She wasn’t afraid of his size or his badge or even the threat he pres
ented to Richie. She’d learned to hold her own on a daily basis with men far more menacing than this wounded cop. Determined to succeed where the legal system her husband served had failed, she worked with gang members, parolees and delinquents. But none of them emitted the subtle threat of this representative of the law. None of them made the short hair on the back of her neck rise, or a sweet, feminine heat drag her lower limbs and paralyze her will.

  “You’ll ask around and let me know.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Yes.” She realized what she’d just said and clarified it. “I’ll ask around.”

  “Good.”

  She trailed him through the narrow hall, murmured in response to his terse good-night, closed and locked the door. Leaning her forehead against the cool glass, she listened to the uneven grate of his boots on her walk until she was sure he was gone. But her house still vibrated from his brief possession.

  Clare gave herself a little shake. The danger Matt posed to the project was far more significant and troubling than the fluttering of her pulse. His questions, even his presence, on the lot could jeopardize the fragile alliance she’d forged with her team. She depended on their allegiance to keep the project running. She owed them hers.

  Deliberately, Clare suppressed her inconvenient reaction to Sergeant Tall, Dark and Dangerous and focused instead on the men who’d reported for work that morning. Not for a minute would she suspect responsible Isaac or fearful Benny or hardworking George. And the rest were either too wary to steal from a cop in the presence of half a dozen other cops, or too practical to lift an object that couldn’t be fenced. She honestly believed none of them was Matt’s culprit. But if he started pulling them in for questioning, they’d be angry and resentful. Some would certainly quit Most of them had been in trouble with the law before.

  Not Richie, though. Not eleven-year-old Richie.

  Jamming her hands in her back pockets, she paced the hall. She pictured the boy standing at the end of her row, squinting at her from under the red bill of his Atlanta Braves baseball cap, and her heart twinged in anticipation of trouble like an old farmer’s rheumatism presaged a storm. She should have noticed he hadn’t dropped by to see her after he left Matt’s, with the casual cool that masked his need for attention. Guilt, painful and familiar, seeped through her. Had she failed to notice because she didn’t want to see?

  No. She cleared the orange mugs from the table and set them in the sink. She wouldn’t believe Richie deliberately set out to steal. Letitia Johnson might be old and infirm and overwhelmed by the physical demands of caring for a preteen boy, but Clare was convinced she’d instilled her God-fearing ways in her only grandchild. If Richie had taken that baseball, Clare decided, his theft was a spontaneous thing, quickly done and rapidly regretted. Or he would have stopped by to see her on his way home for dinner.

  Turning on the tap, she rinsed the mugs. She needed to see the boy, talk to him, convince him there was still time and opportunity to make good on his impulsive act. Otherwise, she feared, his failure to come forward would prejudice Matt’s reaction when the detective eventually uncovered his offense. Even if Richie escaped trouble with the law, she dreaded the subtle damage to his spirit if the child, already at risk, learned to live with guilt.

  The hands on the painted face of the kitchen clock pointed to an onion past corn, a quarter after ten, too late to call on a school night. But tomorrow, Clare promised herself, young Richie had some explaining to do.

  ***

  “Why can’t you take it back?” Richie complained. “You could tell him you found it.”

  “But that wouldn’t be true,” Clare said gently.

  He shrugged, huddling inside his light jacket. March had turned capricious and cold overnight. The cement steps, unaffected by the pale afternoon sun, bit through the seat of Clare’s jeans. She shifted uncomfortably, unwilling to let either one of them off the hook when Richie was on the point of a decision.

  He fiddled with the straps of his book bag. “Maybe you could go in your house for a minute, see, and when you came out again there’d be this box on the porch? And you’d find the ball inside.”

  He looked at her hopefully.

  Clare squashed her instant response. “Nice try.”

  “Aw, Clare.”

  Affection softened her resolution. Deliberately, she hardened her tone. “It’s your responsibility, Richie.”

  “He’s gonna be mad,” he predicted gloomily.

  “Probably,” she agreed. Almost certainly, she thought.

  “Couldn’t you at least come with me?”

  “Of course,” she said, surprised he felt the need to ask. And then she remembered he wasn’t used to the adults in his life always being there for him. “Do you know what you’re going to say?”

  He nodded. They’d been through this part before. “I’m sorry, and I won’t never do nothing like it again, and I’ll pay him back any way he says. And does he want his lawn mowed or anything like that.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Clare said. She hoped the earnest recitation had a similar effect on Matt. Getting to her feet, she held out her hand. “Ready?”

  “No,” he mumbled. But he pulled himself up and slung his book bag over one shoulder.

  They trudged silently between the parked cars and across the street. Richie tugged his hat over his eyes, burying his neck in his shoulders. He still topped Clare by an inch or more. An almost maternal pride surged through her, fierce and sweet. If she and Paul had had children...

  “I gotta stop home a minute. It’s under my bed.”

  “All right.” She gave her permission. “Hurry.”

  Clare waited on the broken sidewalk, shivering partly with cold and partly with what she was astonished to recognize as apprehension. Why should she be nervous? She’d lost count of the times she’d argued on behalf of members of her team to their parole officers or case workers. In the past three years, her assumed calm had evolved into real confidence, and her thin skin had developed armor.

  Of course, Richie was special. And Matt’s reaction to Richie mattered enormously in terms of getting the boy to accept responsibility for his actions without branding him a bad kid. But in spite of Matt’s obvious anger the night before, she had no reason to suppose he wouldn’t be sensible about this. They were two adults coming together in the best interests of a child.

  She wiped damp palms down the front of her jeans. Two adults. That was it. Matt Dunn made her all too aware that he was an adult man, made her feel like an adult woman.

  She didn’t like the feeling. Mercifully numb for three years, her body was tingling painfully back to life, like a sleeping limb prickling with returning circulation. It was painful. It was absurd. She’d had enough heartbreak to last her a lifetime. And there was no way a man that blatantly sexy would ever look twice at a single-minded skinny bones like her, which also made it...safe. Maybe she’d reached the point where she could handle a little fantasy?

  “What’s so funny?” Richie asked grumpily beside her.

  Smiling, she shook her head. “Nothing important.” She didn’t see the baseball, but his book bag still swung from one shoulder. “All set?”

  “I guess.”

  They climbed three concrete steps to the detective’s front door. She pushed the bell. “You’ll do fine.”

  Richie shuffled his feet as they waited. She touched his shoulder reassuringly and depressed the bell again, listening. Was it broken?

  She reached for the knocker just as the door jerked inward, leaving her hand hovering inches from Matt’s massive chest. Shirtless chest. Sweaty chest A dusting of dark hair, damp between deep pectoral muscles, emphasized the power of his broad torso and the glint of gold against his skin. The heat of his body practically singed her knuckles. She recoiled, her blood warming her cheeks.

  With an effort, she focused on his face. He looked grim.

  “We’re interrupting,” she guessed.

  ***

  Matt yanked t
he towel from around his neck, humiliated at being caught shirtless and sweating from a series of reps a baby could have performed without effort. Stiffly, he stepped back, rubbing at his chest.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I was almost done, anyway. Come on in.”

  She danced in as if she made house calls on half-naked men all the time, easy, unself-conscious, slim hips swinging in the boys’ jeans she favored. The curve of her breasts under her soft knit shirt hit him with the punch of arousal. Her red-gold hair lit the dingy hallway. He was tempted to crowd her against the wall and cover her slight body with his own hard, hurting one, to take her bare lips with his mouth. He resisted the urge. Even if his leg didn’t spasm and dump them both on the floor, it would be like putting the moves on Peter Pan’s little fairy friend.

  Besides, she had a kid with her. He recognized him from the day before. Ricky? Richie, that was it. He slouched in behind her, careful not to touch the door or walls, never quite meeting Matt’s eyes.

  Matt’s cop’s instincts switched on like headlights on a car, cutting through the cloud of pain and the rising fog of sexual awareness. He gestured toward the living room.

  “Sit down.” He needed to. Carefully, he lowered his weight to the boxy couch, stretching his right leg in front of him.

  Tinkerbell perched on the square-sided chair. The kid chose to stand. Casually, she tugged the back of his jacket until his rump rested on the arm of her chair. Her gaze ranged from the cartons stacked in a corner to the utilitarian brown furniture contributed by the department.

  “Very nice.”

  He recognized the teasing. He was just too wrung out to respond. His right leg throbbed as if somebody had smacked it with a crowbar. “Nice enough.”

  Her smile flashed in apology. “No, really. It’s a good house. Solid. You could do a lot with it.”

  “I don’t have to. I’ll be out of here in three months.” The response sounded bald, brusque, even to him. “Some other guy’ll get to fix it up.”

  Her clear eyes judged him, found him wanting. Too damn bad. She had no idea how hard he’d kicked against this assignment in the first place. He didn’t need the neighborhood fairy godmother to tell him he was out of place here.