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Which led him back to the place he’d landed, on and off, all day. Tamara Frost. She’d accepted his invitation to lunch. He’d casually mentioned her to Mallory when he’d received his personal report on Diamond Rose’s day, but had gleaned nothing, other than t
hat she worked hard and excelled at her job.
Things he already knew.
He paused at the deli, considering premade pork barbecue and coleslaw. Both looked one step away from congealed.
In his other life he’d have treated himself—and Stella—to an expensive dinner. As it was, he settled for frozen lasagna that could do what it needed to do in the oven without his supervision.
He made it home without mishap. He’d timed it so that Diamond Rose slept through the entire outing. He put his food in the oven and, when she woke up, was ready with a diaper and a warm bottle. He had her back to sleep in record time and was considering a beer—the hardest he liked his alcohol most days—when there was a knock on his door.
He wasn’t expecting anyone and didn’t ever have drop-in visitors. His thoughts immediately flew to the police, coming to bring yet another bout of bad news about his mother. He was halfway to the door before he realized it wouldn’t be the police. At least not about his mother.
He was never going to have another of those visits. The awareness settled on him—with relief, since he was free from that dread now, and with sadness, too. His mother was gone. Any hope he’d held of her ever turning herself around was gone with her.
To his shock, a uniformed officer stood outside his door.
“Are you Flint Collins?” the woman asked.
“Yes.”
“You’ve been served, sir,” she said, handing him an envelope.
By the time he glanced from it to her, all he could see was her back.
Tense from the inside out, Flint glanced at the baby sleeping in her carrier on his kitchen table, with the idiotic idea that he didn’t want to open the envelope in front of her. Whatever it was, he was going to shield her from it.
Shield her from a life in which officers appeared at your door—for any reason at all.
Was he being sued?
Or, God forbid, was someone after Diamond Rose? Challenging his right to her?
Turning around, he tore open the envelope. No one was taking the baby from him. He had money. He’d fight...
What the hell?
He’d been issued a restraining order. By Stella. Reading it, he could hardly believe what he was seeing. Stella was afraid he was going to hurt her. That he was going to retaliate for her breaking up with him. He was not to distribute any pictures of her that might be in his possession. He was to gather up any of her belongings still in his home—she’d provided a list—and leave them outside his front door, at which point the woman who’d delivered the order would take them and would leave a box of his things in return.
The next sheet was a legal agreement whereby he agreed not to attach to any Wainwright holdings, not to mention them, or say he’d ever been associated with them, not to claim anything of theirs as his, for any reason. Stella agreed to the same, regarding him and his family. It was further understood that any child he had in his custody had no relation to, or bearing on, her.
When he got through the last sheet, he started back at the first. She’d gone to court and requested a restraining order. There was a legal document filed with his name on it. A court date would be set within the next three weeks to allow him to dispute the claims therein, and the order would either be dropped for lack of cause or put into effect for up to three years.
It was the paragraph on the second page that got to him.
Defendant. Him. He was a defendant. His whole life, even eight years before, he’d managed to keep himself clean, no charges filed against him ever. And now...he was a defendant?
Flint’s entire being slumped with fatigue. The weight on his shoulders seemed about to push him to the floor as he read the claim.
Defendant has a history of criminal influence and, upon victim asking to end relationship, wouldn’t take no for an answer to the point of victim being frightened for her and her family’s safety and well-being.
When Stella had said she was breaking up with him, he’d given her a chance to calm down, to get used to the idea of the secret he’d kept about his mother’s identity. Because Stella had known the man he’d become. Collins was a common enough name. There’d been no reason for her to remember a court case from eight years before when it had had nothing whatsoever to do with her area of law. Small-time drug dealers didn’t touch corporate lawyers.
But she’d looked up the case. And when, after a few hours, he’d stopped by her office to see her, thinking they could talk, she’d been pissed off. He’d waited outside and she’d warned him not to stalk her.
Stalk her?
That had been that. He’d left. And hadn’t tried to contact her since.
