Her Detective's Secret Intent. Tara Taylor Quinn

but most of them weren’t traveling in the same atmosphere.

      “And... I like you in blue.”

      What? Had she lost her mind? I like you in blue?

      Oh my God. She was flirting with him?

      Dinner was definitely out.

      “I’ll keep that in mind.” Tad’s tone was so easygoing, her raging blood settled a little. A lot, actually. She felt completely put in her place.

      Which meant that... “Dinner would be fine,” she said, sane again. He needed her help with Danny. And Ethan would be with her. She was clearheaded every second of every day that she was with her son. She was all he had in the world, and she was conscious of that fact first and foremost. “When?”

      “Tonight? Unless you have other plans? I’m already on Danny duty and am eager to get what help I can so I don’t blow it with him.”

      His “duty” entailed a few minutes a few times a day, driving by wherever the boy was, according to the schedule Marie would text him each week, with nightly changes if there were any. Marie could call or text him if she got in a bind. Miranda knew, because she’d been sitting at the table when the plan was devised. She knew what every participant in the plan was doing—including their medical office. They were all on alert. And careful to make sure that only handpicked personnel were alone with Danny any time he was in for treatment.

      That brought her back to this morning. Tad in the examining room.

      She was dying to know what had happened to him in the past. The details.

      But she didn’t ask. Instead, she agreed to meet him at Uncle Bob’s, a hamburger diner on the beach with a sandbox for kids to play in, at six.

      She didn’t have time to stand around and chat right now. Ethan would be out of school in ten minutes, and unlike Marie, she didn’t have a team of experts watching out for her son.

      Because, unlike Marie, she’d escaped her past. She was safe.

      As long as she kept her mouth shut.

      * * *

      In his rented apartment with a view of the ocean, Tad took a long, hot shower, turning the water to cold when the heat failed to relax him.

      He was supposed to be recovering, and in the interim, doing a man he respected a favor as a private way of repenting for the wrong turn his career had taken. He was supposed to be getting his shit together, not losing it over the woman he’d been sent to find.

      Pulling on a pair of black jeans one size larger than he normally wore, to accommodate the thigh that was still painful sometimes and had a tendency to swell, he took a T-shirt from the top dresser drawer. He followed that with a button-down white shirt from the closet, careful to line up the empty hanger in its proper place, and yanked open the little side drawer on the dresser for a pair of socks.

      The arrangements in his apartment weren’t all as he would’ve preferred them, but the place had come furnished and that was what he cared about. His clothes back home in North Carolina were in the house he’d purchased the previous year in an upper-middle-class neighborhood.

      Reaching inside one of the socks he’d retrieved, he pulled out the burner phone that had traveled across the country with him six weeks before. Fridays were call days. North Carolina was three hours ahead of California and he didn’t know how late he’d be out.

      “Chief O’Connor.” North Carolina’s newly appointed state chief fire marshal always picked up on the first ring.

      “Just checking in, sir. I told you she’s working as a physician’s assistant in a pediatric office and I had a chance to see her in action today. Like you, she’s not afraid to think outside the box. I think you’d be proud of her.” Maybe it made him a bit of a wuss that he always tried to find a way to comfort the older man during these conversations, to make him feel less alone.

      But if it wasn’t for Chief O’Connor’s quick thinking at a scene that hadn’t even required his presence, Tad and a couple of his fellow officers could well be dead.

      “And the boy?”

      “Other than those two brief meetings I told you about, I haven’t seen him.” He’d meant to tell the chief about his dinner engagement. Didn’t.

      Wondered why the hell not.

      He didn’t like the predicament he was putting himself in.

      “Yeah, best to go slowly.” The older man’s voice came firmly over the wire. “The last thing I want to do is tip her off...”

      “I was going to ask you about that. With her ex gone, is there really a need for this secrecy?”

      The question had been bothering him for a while, particularly since the Marie Williams case had sprung up that week. Miranda Blake, real name Dana O’Connor, had no way of knowing that she was out of danger. Surely she’d welcome the knowledge—and the chance to go home to the friends and family she’d been forced to leave behind when she’d changed her identity to escape a madman.

      “I know my daughter, young man. This is my operation. My call. Dana doesn’t like change. She doesn’t like having her world upended. If she’s happy there, in that life, I want to know about it. I’ll need to figure that into how I approach her. And I’ll need to figure out how I might fit into that life so I can make the transition easier for her.”

      Okay. Sure. But...

      “Her ex...he might have family,” the chief went on. “Someone who’d want contact with the boy. I’ve got a guy looking into that. Good investigator. I need to be absolutely certain, before I have any contact with her, even through you, that I’m not putting her in any danger or in any way making her life more difficult than it’s already been. I’m not going to put my selfish need to have her back in my life ahead of her needs.”

      Nodding, respecting the man all over again, Tad wandered into the living room, to the window looking out toward the Pacific Ocean two streets in the distance.

      “I’d be more than happy to check into any in-law family that might exist.” His detective skills had earned him the right to make his own calls on the job—until he’d made a call based as much on emotion as skill, one that was so far from protocol that he’d almost gotten himself and others killed.

      He’d saved the girl, though.

      There was that. Always that. Every single time he relived the horror of that morning three months before.

      “Forgive me for being set in my ways, but I learned a long time ago not to put all my eggs in one basket,” Chief O’Connor said. “I have someone else following that lead. Someone who has no idea that you, or your job for me, even exist. I’m paying you to use your highly touted skills to find my daughter and grandson, which you’ve done, and to be fully focused there, to keep me informed. It’s been years since I’ve had any word of my daughter and these weekly calls of ours...well, let’s just say they’re the best moments I’ve had in all those years. And I won’t risk having any searches for her coming from the town in which she lives. There can’t be anything connecting our investigation too close to her.”

      Tad nodded, understanding. He’d succeeded in tracking her down, via the access he continued to have to law enforcement databases of various kinds. He’d learned a great deal about her.

      But he still wasn’t satisfied. He didn’t even know Dana’s ex’s name. The cop in him needed to be certain, especially after witnessing from the sidelines the Devon Williams nightmare that week, that he was working with complete and accurate information.

      In his entire career, he’d always double-checked facts himself. He wasn’t a “rely on others” kind of guy.

      “You’re one hundred percent certain her ex is dead.” His voice could be intimidating, too, when necessary.

      “Yes. I have definitive