Her Detective's Secret Intent. Tara Taylor Quinn

enough to expose his upper thigh or, more accurately, the jagged, puffy and discolored seven-inch scar slashing across the front and around the side of his leg, he said, “It doesn’t look as gross now as it did. And yours won’t look nearly as bad because it was a straight line, and that makes a big difference.”

      Standing there with his pants around his ankles, Tad might have felt embarrassed. Or inappropriate. All he felt was that he had to reach this little guy on his own level. Dealing with what was foremost on the boy’s mind.

      And it appeared to be working. Danny, having sat upright, was staring at the scar. Boys must still be somewhat the way he remembered himself being—fascinated by gross things.

      “I fell, too,” he said, leaving out the part about the explosion that had sent him flying. Just like he didn’t mention that he knew Danny had been running from his enraged father when he’d tripped and impaled his leg on a plant stake in the backyard.

      “It hurt like heck to move my leg for a while,” he added, because he knew Danny had months of rehab ahead of him as the muscle that had been cut in his upper thigh healed. “I go to the gym at least twice a day, three days a week, to make it stronger, and now I can walk without any limp at all.” Unless he was overtired. Then a tilted gait came back to remind him of what he’d done.

      He moved his leg enough to flex the muscle, which made the scar jump. “See, it works just fine now.”

      Glancing briefly at the two women on either side of the exam table, he asked if they’d mind turning around so he could get himself put back together. He did so in record time, except for tucking in the blue cotton polo shirt. Going strictly on instincts, as he watched the boy watching him, he lifted his shirt a few inches, showing Danny his back. “I got burned, too,” he told the boy. “So, you see, I’m just here as a guy who got hurt, wanting to help another guy who got hurt.”

      Danny didn’t speak. But he didn’t turn away, either. He watched Tad. And maybe that was enough.

      “What happened?” Danny’s mother asked. Tad looked up and saw the compassion on her face. He chose to think of it as that, as opposed to pity, which he could not abide. He’d made a stupid choice.

      But it had brought the best result possible—saving a little girl’s life. Something that might have been done with less damage—to himself and others—if he’d followed protocol by waiting for the hostage negotiators and SWAT to arrive.

      Or little Lola could have been hurt far worse than the minimal bruising she’d suffered from Tad’s falling too heavily on her when he dived to protect her body from the blast.

      “A guy was angry with me,” he said, vetting his words carefully with Danny in mind. “He had something that didn’t belong to him and when I went to get it back, he...hurt me.”

      Lola’s’s father had rigged a homemade bomb to go off if anyone pushed open the antiques store’s back office door, behind which he held the child hostage. Unaware that the girl was there, Tad had gone to the business, not yet open for the day, to question him about some things he’d been selling in his shop. Stolen things.

      “Did they get the bad guy?” Danny’s voice was surprisingly strong as he looked Tad in the eye.

      “Yes, they did,” he said. The man had been prepared to kill himself and his daughter, too, apparently, rather than face arrest. The child wasn’t supposed to have been there. Her mother, who’d had shared custody of her and no idea that her soon to be ex-husband was in any kind of trouble, had dropped her off with him because she’d been called into work.

      He’d dragged her into the back office, telling Tad and his partner to get out or he’d hurt her...

      “So, anyway, if you want to come to the gym with me sometime, have your mom call me,” Tad said. Marie Williams already had his cell number. “You might see me hanging out, too,” he added. “You can talk to me or not, your choice. I just wanted you to know who I am and that I’ll be around.”

      Danny said nothing more. Tad took the boy’s choice at face value and left the room.

      * * *

      Miranda didn’t hurry through the rest of her appointment with Danny and Marie Williams, but as soon as they were out of the exam room, she finished the last of her administrative responsibilities for the day. Then she was out the back door of the clinic where she worked for pediatric specialist Dr. Max Bennet, and heading to her car.

      The white Chevy Equinox blended in with a million other similar-sized and -shaped white mini SUVs, which was why it fit her perfectly. She had an hour before she had to pick Ethan up, and Tad Newberry was waiting for her at a coffee shop halfway between her office and the school.

      The balmy sixty-five-degree weather was perfect for her white cardigan and cartoon-spattered scrubs.

      Heart pounding in an entirely new way, she drove five miles over the speed limit, switching lanes when necessary to weave past slower cars. All the while, she thought about those minutes in the exam room with the off-duty, out-of-state detective who’d shown up at a High Risk Team meeting six weeks before.

      He’d dropped his pants. The move had been calculated, out of the ordinary, a somewhat shocking attempt to get Danny’s attention—and build trust, too. She understood that. Admired the hell out of it, actually. He’d known that Danny felt particularly vulnerable, so he’d made himself seem—and perhaps feel—just as vulnerable.

      All of that aside...she’d peeked. She shouldn’t have. It had been completely unprofessional. Completely, 100 percent out of character. And she’d done it. Seen...a lot.

      Blue boxers. Dark hair on legs that were tight and firm. Even now, driving to discuss the afternoon’s event and how it played into the care plan the High Risk Team had developed to prevent Devon Williams from ever hurting Marie or their son again, she shied away from thinking about the ugly facts of life, and found herself picturing those jeans pooled around Tad’s ankles instead.

      Watching him with a very definite feminine reaction.

      Wrong. It was just plain wrong of her. On so many levels.

      Parking in the coffeehouse lot, seeing Tad already inside sitting at a table for two with a couple of steaming cups in front of him, she pulled herself together. Having very private fantasies was bad enough; allowing them to invade the space she shared with others was prohibited.

      Period.

      * * *

      “That went well.”

      Miranda heard the sarcasm in Tad’s greeting as she sat down. She felt herself immediately tuning into him.

      “It did go well,” she assured him. “I can’t tell you what was said after you left—” he knew about her legal restrictions with regard to medical confidentiality “—but it went well. Marie asked me to tell you thanks. She feels much better knowing that you’ll be adding extra drive-bys to the ones the police are already going to be doing.”

      Tad’s next comment was angry. “Devon Williams should be in jail.”

      “Agreed. But since he hasn’t actually physically hurt anyone—that we can prove—since Marie dropped those charges against him last year, and still insists that her current bruising comes from a fall, there’s not a lot the prosecutor can do.”

      He knew that, too. Santa Raquel’s assistant prosecutor was a new member of the High Risk Team.

      “At least the judge granted her restraining order,” Miranda added, wishing she was only thinking about the woman who’d just left her office. Truth was, she saw more abused children and their mothers than she’d like. She suspected that at least five of the fifty families she saw on a regular basis dealt with that insidious disease.

      “And you know as well as I do that those orders are ignored more than forty percent of the time in these kinds of cases,” Tad countered.

      And often victims invited the abuser back into their