Return of the Lawman. Lisa Childs

Mr. Warner?”

      The older man nodded and took Dylan’s arm. “They’ve sedated her. Thank you, Deputy, for finding her, for being there.” Then William Warner reached out a hand toward his daughter, but Lindsey shook her head. “Lindsey?”

      “No, Dad. I want some answers for once. I want the real reason she’s like that!” Lindsey straightened from the wall, bristling with anger. “I want to know why she called Chet Oliver a baby thief! You know, but you’ve never told me!”

      Dylan had never seen Lindsey so distraught. But she wasn’t the girl he’d once known. She was a woman now. Then he realized he’d never known the girl, either. “Lindsey, your father—”

      “No.” Mr. Warner sighed and shoved his trembling hands into his pockets. “She’s right. You know about the miscarriages, Lindsey.”

      She nodded. “After me, she couldn’t carry another baby to full term. She really wanted another baby, a boy….”

      Bitterness dripped from Lindsey’s words. Apparently she thought she’d never been enough to make her mother happy. While Dylan hated being involved in other people’s emotional scenes, he found he couldn’t detach himself from this one. When he held out a hand for her, she grasped it tightly in both of hers.

      William Warner shook his head. “No, honey. She wanted a boy to replace the one she gave up a few years before we met at college. This place—” He waved his arms around the wide corridor.

      “—used to be a home for unwed mothers,” Lindsey finished. “That’s what she meant when she said she’d been here long ago. She’d—”

      “Been sent here by her parents when she became pregnant during her senior year of high school in Chicago. They wanted her to have the baby and give him up for adoption. She was to go off to college that fall. So she came to this place, but she didn’t want to give up her baby.”

      Despite his misgivings, Dylan found himself drawn into the story, into a young girl’s loss. “But she did.”

      Warner nodded. “Yes. Lindsey, I met your mother at college. When she heard I was from this town, well…”

      Lindsey didn’t say anything, but her fingers clutched Dylan’s hand so tightly, he’d have indentations of her short, no-nonsense nails in his skin.

      “She told me everything,” Will Warner explained.

      “What was ‘everything,’ Mr. Warner?” Dylan asked. “I mean, how did Chet Oliver figure into this?”

      “He was the lawyer who handled the adoptions.”

      “A baby broker. Is that legal?” Lindsey’s dark eyes widened.

      “It was if your mother signed away her parental rights of her own free will,” Dylan clarified. “It would be considered a private adoption. A lot of people prefer them.”

      “And if it wasn’t of her own free will?” Lindsey’s dark eyes swam with her mother’s pain and loss. “Then you have a motive for Chet Oliver’s murder. That’s why you’re here, huh, Dylan?” She dropped his hand and whirled away.

      “Lindsey!” But she didn’t stop. She stomped down the corridor, and the guard at the outside door didn’t attempt to stop her.

      “Is that true, Dylan?” Mr. Warner grabbed Dylan’s arm again. “Is my wife a suspect?”

      Dylan shrugged. “I don’t know, sir. She left here early yesterday afternoon. She wasn’t found until late this morning. Chet was murdered last night. No one can account for her whereabouts. I don’t know.”

      LINDSEY DIDN’T GLANCE UP when Dylan approached her. She continued to balance one hip on the front bumper of the patrol car. With the toe of her hiking boot she pushed a couple of leaves across the asphalt. “What’s that saying about going home again?” she asked.

      “You can’t do it.” His tone was flat, unemotional. People said that about him. His mother died when he was still a boy, and with her had died Dylan Matthews’s capacity for emotion. But Lindsey never believed what people said when it came to Dylan Matthews.

      She shook her head. “Naw. It feels like it always did. Marge gossiping about me down at the diner. Mom having her episodes. Dad keeping his secrets. Naw. If this was ever really my home, then I came back to it. Why would I do something so stupid?”

      His shadow fell across the asphalt at her feet. She glanced up, but he’d put on his sun glasses again. What did it matter? She’d never had a chance of reading his mind. But she was a reporter to her soul. She had to ask her questions. “Why would you?”

      He expelled a breath through his nostrils. “Why would I come back? I had to do something about the house.”

      She raised a brow. “You can do better than that.”

      “There was nothing for me in Detroit.”

      “After ten years? No little woman to keep the home fires burning?”

      He snorted now. “Yeah, right. What about you, Lindsey? Nobody for you?”

      “The rumor is I came home with a broken heart, remember?” She forced the levity. “Really?”

      She almost believed he wanted to know. She shrugged. “You know the gossip in this town, only about half of it’s ever true. I may be bruised, but I’m not broken.”

      Half his mouth lifted into a sexy smile. “Lindsey. Why are you home?”

      “Nothing for me in Chicago. And maybe home is where the heart is, or the heart ache.” She sighed and dropped her gaze to the long shadow Dylan Matthews cast. He’d been there, a shadow across her heart, for the last ten years.

      “I figured you had probably hot-wired my car and taken off. You were steamed in there, just a few minutes ago,” he reminded her.

      If she was smart, she would have. But she’d never been smart where Dylan was concerned. He would more than bruise her; he’d break her.

      She nodded. “Yeah, I should have. But then you’d have to arrest me, and with my record…”

      “You have a record now?”

      She laughed over his shock. “Well, parking tickets. Didn’t you expect that, after all those tickets you gave me?”

      “I let you get away with warnings quite a few times.”

      “Yeah, I should have listened.” To straighten away from the bumper, she held out a hand to him. He closed his long fingers over hers and pulled her up. He was too close, too tempting.

      “Now I’m going to make you listen,” she vowed.

      “Hmm?” He pulled her closer.

      Lindsey’s foolish heart raced away from her. “Yeah, you’re going to listen to me. My mother is not a suspect. That’s ridiculous.”

      He dropped her hand and stepped around to the passenger’s door, which he held open for her. “Murder is pretty ridiculous when you think about it, not an act of a rational person.”

      She agreed. She’d seen too many sense less deaths. “But not my mother’s act. Someone else did this, and I’m going to prove it to you.” She stepped close again, her face to his throat.

      “Great.” His breath stirred her bangs.

      “Great?”

      He gently pushed her into the seat. “Murder isn’t my field. I was in the Narcotics division.”

      “Narcotics?” She’d known some Narcotics officers, tough, cynical people who lived life on the edge. She’d attended a couple of their funerals. She shuddered.

      He closed the door and walked around to the driver’s side. “There’re just a couple things about this, Lindsey.”

      “Yeah?”