Protection Detail. Julie Miller

to reverse positions to protect him.

      Thomas hadn’t protected Mary all those years ago. He should have been the one at that convenience store when the bullets had taken down every customer and cashier in the building. He should have saved her.

      People were shouting, ducking for cover, running to save loved ones, running toward the threat raining terror down on the guests in the sanctuary. His gun and badge were locked up at home. He was helpless to protect his children, to save his friends. Helpless to do anything but reach for his elderly father.

      Blood spattered his cheek a split second before his father’s cane clattered against the marble tiles. Thomas caught Seamus as he fell, cradling him in his arms as he lowered his limp body to the floor.

      “Niall!” He shouted for the closest doctor at hand. “Help me, son. Dad’s been shot.”

       Chapter One

      September

      If anyone had to suffer a stroke after a traumatic brain injury like being shot in the head, Thomas hoped he or she possessed the same stubborn cussedness Seamus Watson did. There were bound to be a lot of arguments, setbacks and hurt feelings along the road to recovery, but apparently, it was the only way to survive.

      He just wished there weren’t so many casualties along the way.

      Thomas looked from his father’s red face to Millie’s pale, gaping expression to the retreating backside of the young speech-therapy intern who was running out the door of the Saint Luke’s Hospital rehab center in tears. Although the young woman barely looked old enough to have graduated from high school, much less college, her youthful enthusiasm, pretty face and obvious competence hadn’t spared her from Seamus’s wrathful outburst at the end of a long afternoon of medical evaluations.

      While he went down on his good knee to gather up the flash cards his father had knocked to the ground, Thomas spared a glance at the fourth person in the room, the private nurse he’d hired to aid in Seamus’s recovery, Jane Boyle. How was Battle-Ax Boyle, as his three sons had secretly nicknamed her, going to handle his father’s refusal to do the speech test since she was taking point on Seamus’s health and physical rehabilitation?

      Although her rigid professionalism and terse, almost-awkward personal skills had earned her the teasing, never-to-her-face nickname, Thomas had spent enough time with Jane over the past several months to have a slightly different take on the resident battle-ax. No one could question her devotion to her duty, a fact that all of them, as a three-generation family of cops, could understand and respect. As for the I’m-not-interested-in-making-friends vibe she put off? He wished he wasn’t so intrigued by a challenge like that.

      Thomas Watson solved mysteries. He’d done it so well for so long that he taught other cops how to solve them. And Jane Boyle was the biggest mystery to cross his path in a long while.

      The nurse’s honey-brown ponytail hung in a straight line down to the high collar of the pink mock turtleneck she wore. She stood with her arms crossed in front of her, her stance emphasizing feminine curves beneath the shapeless blue scrubs. About the only time she wasn’t wearing boxy scrubs and a jacket of one pastel hue or another was in the mornings when she went for a run before breakfast. Or late at night, when she roamed the upstairs hallway between the guest room and the shower in a sweetly sensible pair of pajamas that usually consisted of a T-shirt and cotton pants that never quite met at the waist, exposing a thin strip of bare skin that he’d glimpsed more than once as she hurried into one room or the other and closed the door.

      Really? He was a grown man, crawling on the floor of a major metropolitan hospital, cleaning up after his eighty-year-old father’s tantrum and picturing the woman who worked for him in her pj’s?

      Man, he needed to stop noticing details like that. It wasn’t like he could do anything about that little hum of awareness that seemed to excite his blood every time he cataloged another observation about Jane. After six months living under his roof, sharing meals and a few family evenings together, he couldn’t seem to help himself from noting the sleek arch of her hips, the flawless skin hugging the angles of her oval face, the soft pink mouth that rarely smiled. She worked for him. He needed her to focus on his father’s recovery. He needed to focus on his father’s recovery, too.

      He might have a few gray hairs at the temples of his dark brown hair, but he wasn’t dead. Yet he needed to act as if all the male parts of his body were too old to care about the pretty in a woman in order to maintain the professional relationship between them.

      Thomas set the cards on the table and pushed to his feet, ignoring the inevitable protest in his left leg. “Dad, you can’t talk to people that way. Stephanie was doing her job. She was trying to help you.”

      Seamus’s blue eyes stared straight ahead, ignoring both Jane’s thinning mouth and his own voice of reason. He’d seen his dad bleeding and unconscious; still and pale in a hospital bed after surgery; unable to speak or use his legs and right arm; fighting to stand and pick up his feet and relearn how to hold a fork; working his lips and teeth and tongue so hard to form a coherent word that a lesser man would have given up months ago. It felt wrong to be wishing for even one moment that the old man couldn’t talk.

      “I’m not doing da tupid eckertise again.” Seamus’s slurred words were articulate enough to make his frustration and fatigue clear.

      Jane sat her hip on the edge of the table, facing Seamus. “Yesterday in our therapy session at home, you handled the tongue rolls and language exercises just fine.”

      “I’m too tlow. Tink faster dan I talk. Make mi-takes.”

      Although her words were a little less peppered than Seamus’s tirade had been, Jane’s tone seemed as reprimanding as his father had been with the intern. “Speed doesn’t matter. How many times have I told you that getting back to the man you were before the shooting isn’t going to happen overnight? You’re giving up.”

      Whoa. That was going a step too far. “He’s tired. He’s been testing for two hours.”

      Jane tilted her chin toward Thomas, her hazel eyes glittering with angry specks of gold that he shouldn’t have noticed, either. “Don’t you defend him. He was rude and he knows it.” She looked back to Seamus. “You have worked your butt off all month to improve your performance on this evaluation. Now, are you being lazy, or do you just enjoy making women cry?”

      “Jane...” Rising to her feet, she put a hand on the middle of Thomas’s chest and stiff-armed him away from intervening between her and Seamus. Not that he couldn’t have easily overpowered her claim of authority over his own family if he wanted to seize her wrist or push against her hand. But the moment of ire quickly gave way to an ill-timed rush of awareness that heated the spot where she touched him, and Thomas retreated a step from the contact.

      Nope. Definitely not dead.

      “Seamus?” Jane pressed his father for a reply with the stern tone of a mother dealing with a child. “I know you can do this.”

      After a few silent moments, Seamus nodded. “I chould ’pologize.”

      “Yes, you should.” Although it burned in his gullet to let someone else take charge of his father, to take charge of the entire room, Thomas retreated another step as Jane turned to the silver-haired woman still clutching her hands and keeping her distance on the opposite side of the table. “Millie, would you see if you can get Stephanie to come back? Tell her Seamus is feeling more cooperative now.”

      The older woman seemed relieved to have a task to perform. “Of course.”

      Once the office door at the end of the room had closed behind the Watsons’ longtime housekeeper, Jane moved behind Seamus’s chair, squaring it in front of the table. She squeezed his shoulder before moving around him to straighten the therapy items on the table. “You should apologize to Millie, too, for using language like that. And your son. And me. I thought you were this infamous Irish charmer