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  He wasn’t close enough to hear what she said, but he could see its effect.

  The circle of boys shifted and re-formed, Richie sliding to the periphery and Clare taking the center. Matt watched the boys’ bright glances, could imagine the dumb remarks. They showed off for her, shoving and joking, until a rake balanced against the side of the shed clattered to the ground. One of them pretended to use it as a ninja stick before replacing it carefully against the wall. Matt felt his muscles tense. If they made a move, he was going to step in. He’d deal with Clare’s offended feelings later.

  She said something, her head tilted a little to one side, her expression earnest.

  The boys laughed and shook their heads. Three of them shambled off. At the corner of the lot, their leader turned, tossing the Braves cap through the air. Richie grabbed for it, stuffed it on his head, and scooted behind the house. The rake rescuer stayed behind, lounging against the side of the shed. He was older than the others, fourteen or fifteen, with razor-shaved blond stubble and a badass attitude. Matt didn’t like the way he looked at Clare. He balanced on his good leg, itching for an excuse to cross the street.

  But when Richie reappeared to steer the wheelbarrow out of the shed, the punk hesitated and then pushed away from the wall. The boys exchanged a few words before disappearing together behind Clare’s house. She came back across the street, red-gold hair shining in the sun, looking pleased with herself.

  So she was good with kids, Matt thought, releasing his breath. Will, who had walked a beat when turf wars in Buchanan were still being fought with fists and bottles, would have approved her handling of the situation. Matt thought she was asking for trouble.

  He hooked his thumbs in his belt loops and waited for her to come to him. “So, what did you offer him?” he demanded cynically. “Money?”

  She smiled, her dancing eyes inviting him to share a joke he couldn’t see. “Pretty nearly. I offered him a job. Three-fifty an hour today, four-fifty in two weeks if things work out.”

  He reminded himself not to blow his cool. He knew she hired adult ex-cons, but he’d assumed she screened them somehow. He hadn’t imagined she co-opted active gang members right off the streets.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “It’s not a lot, is it? He could make five times that much as a runner, or even as a yo.” A yo was a drug dealer’s lookout. She looked briefly discouraged, and then brightened. “But if he weren’t at least a little interested, he wouldn’t have stuck around. I think he’ll take it. And anyway, I can’t afford to offer more.”

  The protective surge he felt astonished him. Her naivety made him want to punch out a wall. “You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what a kid like that is capable of.”

  She tipped up her fine-boned jaw, as if daring him to take a poke at it. “You’re wrong. I know precisely what a kid like that is capable of.”

  “I’m talking violence,” he said bluntly. “Not his unexplored human potential or any of that social worker shit. He probably has a rap sheet as long as your arm.”

  “Probably,” she agreed calmly.

  “You don’t want him around.”

  “Yes. I do.”

  She looked so certain. Cool, immovable. He wanted to shake her. He seized the back of his neck instead.

  “You’re begging to get hurt. Is he a Viper?” he demanded. “Is he one of Eddie Boothe’s gang?”

  Something flickered behind her whiskey brown eyes. Not fear, he thought. He would have understood fear.

  “One of Eddie Boothe’s cousins,” she said.

  She wiped her palms on the back pockets of her jeans. She filled the soft denim very nicely, Matt noted, for all she was so small. A man could span her pretty buttocks with his hands.

  The image aroused him, and that irritated the hell out of him. Not that it wasn’t reassuring to know that more than his leg was regaining regular function; but he was used to having control of his sexual appetites. He’d learned to seek his pleasure with women who didn’t mistake the physical satisfaction he could bring them for an emotional commitment. Women who wouldn’t be hurt by his failure to communicate or sulk over his disinclination to try. Women who knew the score.

  Little Clare Harmon didn’t look like she even knew the name of the game.

  If he needed proof of that, he only had to look at her foolishness in hiring the kid. Eddie Boothe’s cousin. Damn.

  “What shift is he going to work? Are you going to be alone with him? Do you carry protection?”

  Her brows flicked together at his rapid-fire questioning. “After school, I don’t know, and no. I don’t need protection.”

  “Sure, you don’t. You’re what, five feet tall—”

  “Five-two.”

  “—and maybe a hundred pounds dripping wet, and ready to take on some punk kid from a bad background with probable priors without any thought to your own safety.”

  She had the gall to look almost amused. “I don’t need a bodyguard, Sergeant Dunn.”

  “No. You need a keeper.”

  She put her hands back on her hips. “Are you by any chance volunteering for the role?”

  The temptation to do exactly that staggered him. He didn’t want any woman for keeps. Cops were notoriously bad husbands. Even the good ones, like his dad, put their wives through hell. The job took their days and their concentration. Their colleagues got their leisure hours and their confidence. Their families, Matt remembered, got whatever was left. Sooner or later, every woman he’d ever gotten involved with got fed up with his hours, his moods, his dedication to The Job. He wasn’t even going to try with Tinkerbell.

  “Hell, no,” he growled. “Dewy-eyed do-gooders aren’t exactly my type.”

  He saw the hit register and the reddish brown lashes sweep down, shielding her hurt. Damn. And then her chin went up another notch and she pinned him with her smile.

  “No, you need a nice, bosomy blonde to comfort you through your convalescence. What do they say in the Personals? ‘Open-minded’? ‘Fun-loving’?” She shook her head in mock regret. “We’ll just have to be friends, then. What a disappointment for me.”

  It was so dangerously close to what he’d actually been thinking that he had no defense. In that moment he liked her, her spirit, her humor, about as well as any woman he’d ever met. Which made it all the more imperative that he drive her away.

  “You are so right, sugar,” he drawled. “Guess I’d better start calling all those nurses who wrote their numbers on my cast.”

  He turned and stalked off. His wounded thigh ached from his hospital session, but it wasn’t pain that made him awkward as he pulled up the steps. He was still uncomfortably aroused.

  ***

  He was a Neanderthal jerk, Clare thought, watching him walk away. A male chauvinist of the worst possible kind. A redneck throwback to a time when a woman could be impressed by nothing more than a man’s broad, hard body and wicked, dark eyes. She hoped his nurses told him to go to hell.

  Stooping for the empty one-gallon pots, she started back across the street.

  Paul had been thin. Tall and lanky, with a diffident, gentlemanly manner that cloaked a sharp intelligence and dry wit. She had loved her husband with the single-minded certainty of a twenty-year-old girl. She would have loved him forever, if he had given her a chance. If life had given them a chance. Paul’s determination to protect her from the seamy side of his job hadn’t even bothered her before the threats on his life began.

  She’d been very young, Clare thought. Young and sheltered and woefully naive.

  She didn’t have those excuses any more. Once, Paul’s efforts to shield her had made her feel cherished and secure; Matt’s heavy-handed attempt at protection only made her mad.

  Glancing up as she approached the porch, she saw that the house needed painting. The white paint had rubbed or splintered away in patches like the peeling bark of a paper birch. But the green spears of daffodils poked through the ground beneath the full
-moon maple, and yellow and blue pansies nodded from a bucket by the front steps.

  She’d come to terms with her loss, Clare thought, delicately touching their cheerful, velvet faces. Out of the barren ground of her desolation, she’d brought forth her garden. Frustrated with the legal system’s failure either to convict Paul’s killer or to avenge his death, she’d taken justice into her own hands. A life for a life, wasn’t that the ancient code? Only the lives she sought in return for her lawyer husband’s belonged to the children she struggled to reclaim from the streets. She wanted them to have the chances denied children of her own. A chance to live. A chance to grow.

  She snapped off the dead heads of the spent pansies. How dare Matt Dunn challenge her choices and her consolation?

  Dewy-eyed do-gooder.

  Clenching her fist on the draggled blooms, she tossed them on the compost pile. Not so dewy-eyed. No longer naive. Eddie Boothe had snuffed out her naivety when he’d ordered his hit man to put a bullet in her husband.

  Behind the house, Eddie’s cousin whooped and Richie hollered as the wheelbarrow clattered over flagstone. Clare lifted her head, filling her lungs with cool, hawthorne scented air, breathing in calm. They were probably pushing each other down the walk. She hoped they’d spare her border plantings. She should send Richie back to finish setting out the perennials around Matt’s stoop. Tyler could help her clear last autumn’s leaves from under the forsythia hedge.

  And Matt Dunn and his opinions could go to hell.

  Chapter 4

  “Reverend Ray?” Clare tapped on the open office door before sticking her head into the tiny, book-lined room. “Are you busy?”

  Sunlight streamed through the vertical blinds of the converted storefront, turning the drifting dust motes gold as pollen. Children’s artwork brightened the cinder block walls. The Reverend Raymond C. Carter, pastor of Grace African Methodist Episcopal Church, came around his desk with a welcoming smile and his hand extended. A barrel-chested man in his forties, he wore black-and-white clericals and an air of warm authority.

  “Clare! Glad you came by. Sit down, sit down.”

  The three available chairs jammed into that cramped space overflowed with papers, books and flyers. Chuckling, the minister took off his reading glasses and polished them on his jacket, as if that would help him find her a seat. “If you can locate a chair under all this mess.”

  Clare smiled affectionately, relaxing in the peaceful warmth of the room. “I think I can.”

  She moved some books to the top of a filing cabinet. He shifted some papers to the floor. They both sat down.

  “Richie said you wanted to see me.”

  He steepled his fingers over the closely printed pages on his desk. “Mm, I did. We’re having a reception in the hall after services on Sunday, and I wondered—”

  “—if I’d bring my Jell-O mold?” Clare’s lack of cooking skill was a long-standing joke between them.

  He smiled in acknowledgment. “Actually, I hoped you could design the flyers on that machine of yours.”

  Grace Church had an old computer which Reverend Ray professed was good enough for him to peck out his sermons and keep the church books. But he often asked for Clare’s assistance with public relations materials. She wasn’t sure if the reverend truly needed her help or if he simply wanted her to feel involved.

  “Of course,” she said promptly. “Do you have the information written down?”

  “Mostly.” He pulled a legal pad from a drawer. “I still need a phone number, though. Got an appointment coming in—you might want to meet him—at one o’clock.”

  She was too grateful for the preacher’s support to mind a little inconvenience. “It doesn’t matter. I can send Richie over later to pick it up.”

  “That’s right. Letitia said he’s doing some work for you these days?”

  “Yes. After school,” she hastened to add.

  “Boy get himself in trouble?” Reverend Ray asked bluntly.

  Clare hesitated. While she appreciated the minister’s concern, they’d both had to learn to trust her judgment where the project’s kids were involved. Richie had already returned Matt’s ball and was making good on his theft. What purpose would be served by betraying his confidence now?

  “He could have,” she temporized. “I think we took care of it.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “All right, Clare. You let me know if I can help.” He took off his glasses, rubbed his nose, and put them on again. “What about Tyler Boothe? He doing a little community service, too?”

  Clare smiled ruefully. Reverend Ray might trust her judgment, but he still kept a watchful eye on all his flock. “Tyler’s more a case of preventive intervention.”

  “Well, he’s a child who needs it. You want to watch him.”

  “I can watch him better if he’s where I can see him.”

  “All the same... Do you really want to give a job to Eddie Boothe’s cousin?”

  “I especially want to give a job to Eddie Boothe’s cousin,” she said with grim satisfaction.

  “A vendetta, Clare?” The reverend shook his head. “You know they never proved there was a connection between Eddie Boothe and your husband’s passing on.”

  “You think it was just a coincidence Paul got shot on Vipers’ territory a week before the trial?”

  Reverend Ray shifted the papers on his desk. “All the same, Boothe is serving time now.”

  “For possession, not for dealing. His sentence is up soon. Every child I give a chance is one less child for him to influence when he gets out.”

  “Well, don’t let this child put you or your project at risk.”

  She lifted her eyebrows. “You sound like our new neighbor.”

  “Sergeant Dunn?”

  “You’ve run into him—or had a run-in with him—too? Honestly, I don’t know why a man like that was ever chosen for a program like this.”

  The reverend looked at her over the tops of his glasses. “A man like what? I liked him.”

  “I did, too.” Too much. But she wasn’t going to confess that. “I just don’t think he understands what’s involved in becoming a part of this community. It’s not enough to just move into the neighborhood.”

  “There was a time when the same thing was said about you.”

  He had her there. And the remembered sting of her initial ignorance goaded her reply. “Well, yes. But I tried. I cared. Matt Dunn doesn’t seem the slightest bit interested in the most basic forms of community outreach.”

  “Clare...”

  “I’m serious. He didn’t want introductions, he wasn’t willing to work with Richie, and he was downright rude about Tyler.”

  “It’s not like you to condemn somebody without knowing all the facts. Don’t you think you might have misjudged the man?”

  Outside in the hall, a door opened and closed. It could be the youngest Carter daughter, running in from preschool, or the minister’s wife, summoning him to lunch. In spite of the distraction, Clare couldn’t disregard the reverend’s gentle accusation.

  Because quite possibly he was right.

  Something about the tall, strong cop got to her. His dark, knowing eyes invited confidences. His broad shoulders begged to be leaned on. His proximity was reviving old dreams, painful dreams that included a loving partnership and a family. Impossible dreams. Especially with a cop.

  Maybe her own vulnerability had made her severe, even unfair. How could she see the good in everyone else and be blind to it in Matt?

  “Well, all right, maybe. I mean, he’s been injured, obviously. And I can understand he’s directing most of his energy right now to regaining his health. He came right out and told me he’s eager to return to his regular duty.”

  The minister cleared his throat, signaling an interruption. Intent on justifying her harsh words, she rolled right over him.

  “But just because I can sympathize with his frustration doesn’t mean I think he should have been assigned to community policing. This ne
ighborhood shouldn’t be shortchanged because the police department doesn’t know what else to do with one of their hamstrung detectives.”

  Reverend Ray, looking acutely uncomfortable, rubbed the bridge of his nose. The back of Clare’s neck prickled. Before she could turn around in her chair, a deep voice drawled behind her.

  “Nice of you to make allowances for my infirmities, sugar.”

  Oh, lordy. Her hands flexed nervously on her thighs before she flattened them and turned around.

  Matt leaned in the doorway, muscled arms crossed in front of his powerful chest In spite of the relaxed pose, he was furious. She could tell. His black eyes practically glowed, and his jaw was tight with temper. Once again an odd, quick thrill ran through her at the sight of him. Not fear, she recognized. Pheromones. And maybe something else?

  “Sergeant Dunn!”

  “Matt,” he corrected. “If you’re going to talk about me behind my back, we might as well be on a first-name basis.”

  Ruefully, she smiled. “I guess I really put my foot in it this time, didn’t I?”

  He lifted a dark brow. “In what?”

  Cute, cowboy, she thought. “In my mouth.”

  He looked down at her, his glance lingering longest on her lips. He didn’t say anything. She bet there were bad guys who found his strong, silent routine intimidating. She imagined there were women who found it exciting.

  She drew a short breath. “Anyway, I’m sorry you overheard that.”

  He shrugged. “I’ve heard worse, believe me.”

  He strolled forward, making the already crowded room contract around him. Smiling easily at the minister, he extended his hand. His palm nearly engulfed the other man’s. “Reverend.”

  The desk chair scraped the floor as Reverend Ray stood. “I appreciate your coming by, Sergeant.”

  “He’s not...?”

  “Sergeant Dunn is my one o’clock appointment,” the minister confirmed gently.

  She’d survived embarrassment before, Clare reminded herself firmly. When she was new to the project and made mistakes on the lot. She knew better than to compound her humiliation by blithering.