When she’d run, the idea of having a lover, or a boyfriend, or anything along the lines of a male companion, hadn’t even entered her mind. She spent two years in a women’s shelter outside of Santa Raquel before moving to the city four years ago, and it hadn’t been a problem since.

But now it was.

She didn’t want to live the rest of her life alone.

Did she have a choice?

“Ethan’s, what, six?” Tad asked, startling her out of her reverie.

“Yeah,” she said. She must be tired. Working too hard. Spending too much time identifying with Marie.

The woman’s case spoke to her on a personal level more than most. Probably because of Danny.

“He’s in the first grade,” she said, forcing herself back into the moment. Tad had met Ethan twice. Brief introductions both times.

After the second time, her son had teased her, saying she should go out on a date with Tad. They’d run into Tad at the grocery store one evening and she’d stopped to chat. Ethan’s reaction had surprised her. She’d never thought of her son as thinking about her personal situation. She was Mom. That was all.

But maybe it had been her son’s grinning little push that was her problem here. Was he missing a male figure in his life? Had that prompted his teasing remarks?

And was her current fascination with Tad merely reaction to that?

Just thoughts that Ethan’s comment had put in her head?

Yeah, if life were that simple.

“Could I take the two of you out to dinner?” Tad asked, while her mind continued to fly off course.

Her stomach flip-flopped. She almost dropped her keys. Struggling to find a way to say no when what she wanted to do was ask how soon, she said nothing as he continued. “I’d like to spend some time with Ethan, since he’s so close to Danny’s age. Just to observe. It would help me get a better feel for things. In case I ever need to speak with Danny again. Dropping my drawers was a little extreme and I don’t think it would work a second time.”

She nodded, trying to school her features—feeling she managed, at best, a cross between a frown and the grin that was trying to break through.

Dinner was all he’d asked. To observe her son. No big deal.

And complicated as hell.

“I’m sorry about that, by the way,” he said when her feelings continued to flay around inside. “The dropping of the pants thing. And thank you for not mentioning it.”

“It was unconventional, not to mention unexpected, but I thought the idea was brilliant,” Miranda spoke the complete truth. Probably because she could. Her tongue needed to fly along with her brain waves, but most of them weren’t traveling in the same atmosphere.

“And... I like you in blue.”

What? Had she lost her mind? I like you in blue?

Oh my God. She was flirting with him?

Dinner was definitely out.

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Tad’s tone was so easygoing, her raging blood settled a little. A lot, actually. She felt completely put in her place.

Which meant that... “Dinner would be fine,” she said, sane again. He needed her help with Danny. And Ethan would be with her. She was clearheaded every second of every day that she was with her son. She was all he had in the world, and she was conscious of that fact first and foremost. “When?”

“Tonight? Unless you have other plans? I’m already on Danny duty and am eager to get what help I can so I don’t blow it with him.”

His “duty” entailed a few minutes a few times a day, driving by wherever the boy was, according to the schedule Marie would text him each week, with nightly changes if there were any. Marie could call or text him if she got in a bind. Miranda knew, because she’d been sitting at the table when the plan was devised. She knew what every participant in the plan was doing—including their medical office. They were all on alert. And careful to make sure that only handpicked personnel were alone with Danny any time he was in for treatment.

That brought her back to this morning. Tad in the examining room.

She was dying to know what had happened to him in the past. The details.

But she didn’t ask. Instead, she agreed to meet him at Uncle Bob’s, a hamburger diner on the beach with a sandbox for kids to play in, at six.

She didn’t have time to stand around and chat right now. Ethan would be out of school in ten minutes, and unlike Marie, she didn’t have a team of experts watching out for her son.

Because, unlike Marie, she’d escaped her past. She was safe.

As long as she kept her mouth shut.

* * *

In his rented apartment with a view of the ocean, Tad took a long, hot shower, turning the water to cold when the heat failed to relax him.

He was supposed to be recovering, and in the interim, doing a man he respected a favor as a private way of repenting for the wrong turn his career had taken. He was supposed to be getting his shit together, not losing it over the woman he’d been sent to find.

Pulling on a pair of black jeans one size larger than he normally wore, to accommodate the thigh that was still painful sometimes and had a tendency to swell, he took a T-shirt from the top dresser drawer. He followed that with a button-down white shirt from the closet, careful to line up the empty hanger in its proper place, and yanked open the little side drawer on the dresser for a pair of socks.

The arrangements in his apartment weren’t all as he would’ve preferred them, but the place had come furnished and that was what he cared about. His clothes back home in North Carolina were in the house he’d purchased the previous year in an upper-middle-class neighborhood.

Reaching inside one of the socks he’d retrieved, he pulled out the burner phone that had traveled across the country with him six weeks before. Fridays were call days. North Carolina was three hours ahead of California and he didn’t know how late he’d be out.

“Chief O’Connor.” North Carolina’s newly appointed state chief fire marshal always picked up on the first ring.

“Just checking in, sir. I told you she’s working as a physician’s assistant in a pediatric office and I had a chance to see her in action today. Like you, she’s not afraid to think outside the box. I think you’d be proud of her.” Maybe it made him a bit of a wuss that he always tried to find a way to comfort the older man during these conversations, to make him feel less alone.

But if it wasn’t for Chief O’Connor’s quick thinking at a scene that hadn’t even required his presence, Tad and a couple of his fellow officers could well be dead.

“And the boy?”

“Other than those two brief meetings I told you about, I haven’t seen him.” He’d meant to tell the chief about his dinner engagement. Didn’t.

Wondered why the hell not.

He didn’t like the predicament he was putting himself in.

“Yeah, best to go slowly.” The older man’s voice came firmly over the wire. “The last thing I want to do is tip her off...”

“I was going to ask you about that. With her ex gone, is there really a need for this secrecy?”

The question had been bothering him for a while, particularly since the Marie Williams case had sprung up that week. Miranda Blake, real name Dana O’Connor, had no way of knowing that she was out of danger. Surely she’d welcome the knowledge—and the chance to go home to the friends and family she’d been forced to leave behind when she’d changed her identity to escape a madman.

“I know my daughter, young man. This is my operation. My call. Dana doesn’t like change. She doesn’t like having her world upended. If she’s happy there, in that life, I want to know about it. I’ll need to figure that into how I approach her. And I’ll need to figure out how I might fit into that life so I can make the transition easier for her.”

Okay. Sure. But...

“Her ex...he might have family,” the chief went on. “Someone who’d want contact with the boy. I’ve got a guy looking into that. Good investigator. I need to be absolutely certain, before I have any contact with her, even through you, that I’m not putting her in any danger or in any way making her life more difficult than it’s already been. I’m not going to put my selfish need to have her back in my life ahead of her needs.”

Nodding, respecting the man all over again, Tad wandered into the living room, to the window looking out toward the Pacific Ocean two streets in the distance.

“I’d be more than happy to check into any in-law family that might exist.” His detective skills had earned him the right to make his own calls on the job—until he’d made a call based as much on emotion as skill, one that was so far from protocol that he’d almost gotten himself and others killed.

He’d saved the girl, though.

There was that. Always that. Every single time he relived the horror of that morning three months before.

“Forgive me for being set in my ways, but I learned a long time ago not to put all my eggs in one basket,” Chief O’Connor said. “I have someone else following that lead. Someone who has no idea that you, or your job for me, even exist. I’m paying you to use your highly touted skills to find my daughter and grandson, which you’ve done, and to be fully focused there, to keep me informed. It’s been years since I’ve had any word of my daughter and these weekly calls of ours...well, let’s just say they’re the best moments I’ve had in all those years. And I won’t risk having any searches for her coming from the town in which she lives. There can’t be anything connecting our investigation too close to her.”

Tad nodded, understanding. He’d succeeded in tracking her down, via the access he continued to have to law enforcement databases of various kinds. He’d learned a great deal about her.

But he still wasn’t satisfied. He didn’t even know Dana’s ex’s name. The cop in him needed to be certain, especially after witnessing from the sidelines the Devon Williams nightmare that week, that he was working with complete and accurate information.

In his entire career, he’d always double-checked facts himself. He wasn’t a “rely on others” kind of guy.

“You’re one hundred percent certain her ex is dead.” His voice could be intimidating, too, when necessary.

“Yes. I have definitive proof. I give you my word on that.”

Then there was nothing more to be said. He’d accepted the job. He respected the man. Hell, all of North Carolina respected him if such a thing was possible. Heroes didn’t come around every day, and when they did, they didn’t shine as often or as brightly as Brian O’Connor had. Again and again, over the course of a lifetime, he’d risked his life, and volunteered his time, too, to save and enrich the lives of those in his community. And his state.

If he’d grown a little eccentric over the years, Tad figured that was his right.

He owed him the news that Tad would be having dinner with his grandson in a few minutes. That he could call back later with a report the chief had been waiting for.

He owed him. And he reneged.

He’d figure that one out later.

First, he had a date to keep.

In a manner of speaking...

Chapter 3

“So...are we like...on a thing?” Ethan glanced between Miranda and Tad, his eyes rimmed by the dark-framed glasses he’d chosen because he thought they resembled the ones worn by Clark Kent, Superman’s alter ego—the Superman of earlier days that Miranda had shared with him. If her son had been grinning, teasing, she might have been able to brush the moment aside.

“No.” She reined in the rest of the blurted response that almost came out, changing it to a mildly firm denial. “I told you, Tad and I work together.”

They’d just ordered their burgers, and all three had glasses of soda with straws sitting in front of them. The minutes they’d be waiting until their food was delivered suddenly seemed interminable.

“On a committee.” Ethan nodded. “You said you work together on a committee.” He looked at Tad. “Do you like my mom?”

“Of course I like your mom. Why would I eat dinner with someone I didn’t like?”

“Exactly,” Ethan said, pushing his glasses back up his nose. “Do you know the game Zoo Attack?”

Breathing a sigh of relief, Miranda took a sip of soda and let her son have at Tad. After all, the off-duty detective had asked for the meeting to get to know Ethan better.

“No. I don’t know that game,” Tad said, elbows resting on the arms of his chair.

“It’s really cool,” Ethan said. “You get to be in the zoo, taking care of animals, and then danger comes and you have to solve puzzles to save the animals...”

As she listened to her son’s in-depth and enthusiastic description of his favorite video game, Miranda wanted to relax. To enjoy the moment.

There was much to enjoy. In spite of everything, she’d raised a boy who was confident enough, trusting and outgoing enough, to take charge of a conversation with a virtual stranger. A male stranger.

And she was sitting with a man who, in another lifetime, might have been someone she’d feel passionate about. Watching Tad as he seemed to give Ethan his full focus, engaging in conversation as though the conversation mattered to him, she felt again that peculiar bounce of joy inside, as though she was with someone special.

“I’d like that,” Tad said, and she tuned back in, realizing, too late, that Ethan had just invited him to their house over the weekend to learn how to play Zoo Attack in two-player mode, which meant that they’d be racing against each other to get puzzles solved to save animals.

Tad couldn’t come to their home. Ethan would ask, “Why not?” She could hear his voice inside her head, asking. No simple or credible-sounding reply presented itself. But the answer was unequivocal. He could not come into their home.

Home was her safe place. The only space she could be herself without fear...

“Jimmy from school is over there, Mom. Can I go play in the sandbox?”

She had to nod. To let him go. She wanted him to be independent. But she did not want, at that moment, to be left alone with a man who was getting way too far into her.

“This isn’t a thing,” she said as soon as her son was out of hearing range.

He nodded. “I know.”

“It can’t be a thing.” She was sounding like an idiot. Had to get herself together.

“You seeing someone, then?” Tad asked easily. She didn’t like how his total attention was suddenly on her. Eyeing her with some kind of understanding or something. She didn’t like how warm that made her feel.

She was hot enough already.

Tempted to lie to him, she hesitated. Santa Raquel wasn’t all that big. And her son’s conversational filters were sadly untrustworthy.

“No, I’m not seeing anyone.”

“Coming off a bad breakup?”

That might work. Except that Ethan seemed unusually focused on her dating situation. Could it be that now that he’d started school, he was noticing they were missing a part of their family? Was he needing that male figure in his life? Granted, there’d be plenty of kids without dads at his school and some without mothers. But many had other family, siblings, aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins...

She’d known this time of reckoning would come. Had worried about it to no avail—figuring she’d have to let the future take care of itself on that one.

“No, I’m not coming off a breakup.” She prayed he’d leave it there. Or that their food would arrive and Ethan, who always seemed to know when there were goods to shove in his mouth, would descend upon them once again.

When Tad glanced in the direction of the boys playing outside the sandbox with little cars Jimmy must have brought, Miranda guessed he was seeking a way out of their awkward moment, as well.

He looked so good, his dark hair, thickening shadow of whisker growth and brown eyes giving him a rakish aura in an oh-so-masculine form. She knew his legs were lean and strong. She’d seen them firsthand...and was he still wearing his blue boxers? Or had he showered since she’d seen him at work that morning?

“So you don’t date at all, or is it just me?”

So much for the idea that he was looking for an out. He’d just slammed them right smack-dab in the middle of too complicated.

“You’re only here for your leave.” She blurted what immediately came to mind, as though that explained everything.

He didn’t argue, and again she hoped she was off the hook. At least with him.

She still had to deal with herself and her deepening feelings for this man. And she would. She’d only known him six weeks. It wasn’t like it would take a lifetime to get him out of her system.

Unless... What if, for the first time in her life, she was really and truly falling for someone? As in...the real thing?

Of course, that didn’t matter in the long run. Her life wasn’t open to real. Her goal was to give Ethan a chance at a good life, a life of his own. He wouldn’t have to lie to anyone he met in his future. The life he lived now was his only known reality.

“You don’t ever talk about Ethan’s dad.”

“It’s not like we’ve had a lot of time for private conversation.”

Not entirely true. They’d fallen into the habit of having coffee after every High Risk Team meeting. At the moment, as the team became a stronger force in Santa Raquel and the surrounding communities, they were meeting weekly. And she’d volunteered to go in place of her employer, Max, every single week.

Partially because of Tad, she was ashamed to admit to herself.

“Ethan’s father is dead.” She dropped it out of the blue. There were some truths she could tell, at least in part. Clearly everyone would realize Ethan had had a father. “He died before Ethan was born.”

With no name, there’d be no chance to find a death record. To trace her to any young man who’d died during their last year of college. Or even to trace her to a particular college. Or to identify a girl who’d been friends with a boy who died. No way to discover who she really was.

“Wow. I’m so sorry.”

So was she. Jeff had been one of the greatest guys she’d ever known, and he hadn’t deserved the blows life had dealt him. “I miss him every day,” she said, allowing one more piece of her real self through. Jeff had been the only one who ever knew the whole truth about her. The only one in her past life she’d told.

“That had to be hell, to lose him and be pregnant at the same time.”

She shrugged. “You’d think so, but being pregnant, knowing that Ethan was part of him, and a new part of me, a whole new life... I’m sure that’s what saved me.” In more ways than Tad could ever imagine. If it hadn’t been for Ethan she might never have had the strength, the clarity of mind, to get away.

Jeff, who’d been a foster kid, had believed in her, trusted her to raise his child—even knowing the truth about her life.

Tad’s brows had been drawing closer together as she talked, giving Miranda the impression that she was coming on too heavy. She was suddenly aware that she wasn’t in their own little cocoon, with her son playing safely in the distance. Instead, she—and Tad—were in a noisy diner with Friday-night happiness going on all around them.

She tried to think of a way to change the subject.

But she didn’t manage before he asked, “How long did you know him? Ethan’s father?”

“Four years.”

“You were obviously close...”

Obviously. She’d had his son. Though not close in the way Tad would assume. “We were best friends.” And that was all they’d been. Friends. Not a “thing.” Best friends. With Ethan, she’d given her best friend his dying wish—a child who would always be part of him, carrying on a life that had been cut far too short.

“How long were you married?”

Her mind went blank. What did she say? Would the truth give her away somehow? She tried to think of everything she’d been told. By the lawyers who helped her legally change her identity. By Lila and Sara at The Lemonade Stand, the unique women’s shelter in town that had founded the High Risk Team. Everything she’d heard during her time with the team about the ways information could travel to the wrong people.

Marriage meant records.

The haze of panic receded. “We weren’t married.” She told him the truth. No one could find what didn’t exist. She was safe.

And no one knew that Jeff was Ethan’s father. She hadn’t named him on the original North Carolina birth certificate, and their new identities certainly didn’t name him. To begin with, she’d kept the secret to protect Jeff from her father’s wrath; Jeff had so little time to live and she couldn’t bear the thought of bringing more tension into his life. And when he’d died before Ethan was born...she’d just kept the secret.

Tad sat back, adjusted his knife on the table. Took a sip from his straw. What was he thinking?

Surely, in today’s world, he didn’t respect her less for having a baby outside of marriage?

She wanted to tell him that they knew Jeff was dying. That they’d decided not to marry so there couldn’t be any legal chance she’d be held responsible for any of his medical bills.

It seemed to be taking an inordinately long time for their dinner to arrive. But then, it was Friday night and the place was packed. Ethan had glanced their way a few times, but was still happily engaged with Jimmy. The two were in the sandbox now, trying to plow roads for their cars around the other children playing there.

All in all, less than ten minutes had passed. It just seemed like forever.

“I haven’t dated anyone since Ethan was born.” She had to tell Tad something that would get them out of this awkward mess. “A conscious choice I’ve made.” For reasons she’d never tell him, no matter how badly she wished she could.

Tad wasn’t asking her out, but she was guaranteeing that he wouldn’t, although her heart was clamoring for a chance to see what life with him would be like.

Even if just for the months he was there.

Because it was only for however many months he’d be there. There’d be no risk of having to live a whole life of lying to him... It would be a question of living in the moment for the few months he was around.

Which her heart was telling her would be better than nothing.

It would be great, actually, to have such a memory to take with her into the future. To hold close. A good secret to combat all the bad ones...

“In honor of his father?”

“No. But...” She searched for an explanation that would shut him down. And yet she didn’t allow anything remotely credible to surface. Would it be so wrong to get to know him better? He wouldn’t be staying, had an entire life, an important job, to return to.

“I haven’t had the time,” she finally said, wondering if leaving a door open to him was emotional suicide. Or maybe it was the only personal bliss she’d know in her life. “I’m a single mother, and not all men want to take that on. Added to that, until last year I was in school full-time and working, too.” While becoming a PA had only taken two years of additional schooling, she’d been unable to take her college degree with her and had to earn that all over again, too. Thankfully she’d been able to test out of more than two years of that, having to pay just for the class equivalent, not actually retake the classes.

“So now that you’re fully accredited and have more time...”

Oh, God. Was he going to ask her out? Flooded with heat, she felt she was possessed by something stronger than herself—this desire to get closer and closer to him.

She shrugged when he didn’t complete his sentence.

He nodded, as though her lack of a definitive “no” was interesting.

She smiled.

He nodded again.

And dinner was served.

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