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Couldn’t speak of the past she’d left, ever. Doing so could expose her to someone talking to someone else who happened to be talking to someone who’d once known a woman named Dana and was looking for her...
“Just please...if your mind starts to play tricks with you, if you start getting paranoid that something’s wrong with you or Danny, if he sneezes and you worry that he could be getting pneumonia, don’t get scared. Don’t let fear take over your senses. Call me instead.”
“I don’t...”
“Think of me as your weapon in that particular battle,” Miranda said, finding strength out of nowhere. “Fear seems all-powerful, but the truth is, it buckles and evaporates when you stand up to it. Calling me is the way you look that particular fear right in the eye.”
Marie needed an arsenal. She’d collect it one weapon at a time, to face down one fear at a time.
Just as Miranda had.
And she’d need to carry it with her for the rest of her life, too. Because although fear slithered away, it always waited, out of sight, to strike again.
Chapter 6
The Santa Raquel High Risk Team was meeting every Tuesday in a conference room at the police station—for those who could make it or had news to share. Eventually the meetings would taper back down to once a month, but while the team was building, they were keeping in close contact.
In jeans and a striped shirt, with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, Tad sat and listened. He wasn’t an official member of the team, although he had his moment to report that during his dozen drive-bys of Danny Williams, he’d noticed nothing untoward. Everyone, including Danny’s mother, Marie, was following established protocol.
Sara Havens Edwin, a licensed professional clinical counselor, head counselor at The Lemonade Stand, looked relieved, and Tad nodded in her direction. In a private conversation, Sara had informed him that one of the biggest concerns in a situation like the Williamses’, one of the greatest threats to life was Marie herself. She not only loved her husband, but she’d been manipulated by him since high school. She was driven from within to keep him happy.
Miranda had her turn, too, telling everyone about Marie’s visit to her office the morning before, leaving out specific medical information that wasn’t pertinent to the case, but letting them know that while Marie had been concerned about her son’s wound, the boy’s healing was completely on track. There’d been no sign of any other injury. Sara took notes on that, too.
A few minutes of administrative discussion took place then. A new email loop was being set up; contact information was dispersed. Funding was mentioned, finances appropriated. He listened, but found himself paying more attention t
o the little park benches with primary-colored rainbows over them that dotted the scrub top Miranda was wearing.
They dipped and fell with the shape of her breasts and he knew he shouldn’t be noticing that. Tried not to. And looked again.
Her breasts weren’t the only ones in the room. And he wasn’t the type of guy who generally went around noticing them in any case. A shapely, curved butt was his more usual distraction. But those rainbow-covered breasts across from him... They were so captivating. Like the woman.
Miranda’s ability to nurture flowed from her with every breath. And he kept wondering how it would feel to lay his head on her breasts.
Wrong. Wrong, Newberry. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
They’d be soft, with hard nipples. Womanly softness with a core of strength.
And they’d smell like flowers.
Because she did. Something in her soap, probably. Or whatever lotion she used.
When he started envisioning himself rubbing lotion onto her back, into her shoulders and the sensitive parts of her neck, he sat forward. Brought his thoughts to a screeching halt—to catch her watching him stare at her breasts.
Their charged gazes held for a second.
How could something so not good feel so great?
* * *
Tad wasn’t feeling too great half an hour later as he sat with Miranda over coffee in a shop they’d visited several times before. Others had been there with them, the last of them just leaving.
“Let’s move to a smaller table,” he suggested when she didn’t get up with the others. He was pleased she’d stayed, but the look on her face didn’t bode well. Something was bothering her.
And since she’d been fine until the others left, he was pretty certain that something had to do with him.
Or rather, his wandering eyes. He’d screwed up. Badly. Bringing sexual awareness into the workplace. He of all people. Back home, at the station, he’d developed a reputation for being the one guy who hadn’t fallen under the spell of a young female cop who’d apparently joined the force to find herself a husband in uniform, not to serve and protect.
He’d also refused friendly advances from a forensic specialist he’d actually liked a lot because he knew better than to bring sex into work.
