Her Detective's Secret Intent

He told the older man about his grandson’s first sleepover. About the friend’s father building a wooden car in his workshop.

“I’d like to have been there,” O’Connor said, not quite sounding maudlin, again, but not himself, either. “There’s so much I could be teaching him.”

Tad didn’t doubt that. He could barely imagine how hard it must have been, missing the first six years of his only grandchild’s life.

Missing his only child.

“She told me that Jeffrey’s father—Jeff, right?”

“Yes, Jeff, that’s right.”

“She told me they were friends, not a couple. That he didn’t die immediately in the car accident. That he’d been injured and the injury led to his death months later. And it was only after he’d known he was going to die that they’d conceived Jeff.”

He felt like scum, sharing Miranda’s secrets behind her back, but this was her father. They were two men whose goal was to help her, protect her, give her back her life. He was doing what Miranda would do herself, if she could, telling her father whatever he needed to know to help her.

“Lies. All lies.” Brian O’Connor sounded sad as he said the words. “That Jeff guy got hold of Dana good. Got her to lie about all kinds of things.” His tone held definite tones of irritation now and a hint of bitterness, even as he said his daughter’s name.

Tad’s own anger rose with that one. This wasn’t her fault. None of it was her fault.

The chief clearly wasn’t used to drinking. He didn’t seem to hold his alcohol well.

“I need more, sir,” he said. He wasn’t just the chief’s employee now. He was Miranda’s lover. That came with responsibilities.

“I can’t keep doing this job for you without knowing certain things. I need proof that her ex is dead. That I’m not somehow putting her in further danger, having found her, having ties to you and to her former life.”

He’d tried his damnedest to get beyond an almost irrational need to overcome his inability to trust anyone or anything on a gut level. He’d come to terms with the fact that perhaps he’d thrown protocol to the wind on that last case be

cause he hadn’t trusted the system or his peers. He’d somehow seen himself as the only one capable of saving that little girl.

But he’d made love to Miranda. Trust in the chief aside, job aside, he had to know. Her father could fire him, but Tad wasn’t going to leave Miranda now. He was going to finish what he’d started.

“I need to know for sure, or I’m done.”

“You’re falling for her.”

“I need proof that her ex is really dead. That she’s out of danger.”

“Proof coming your way,” Chief O’Connor said, and there was a beep on the line signifying an incoming text.

He wasn’t ready to climb off his high horse yet. Which had probably led to the wrong decision in that antiques shop, too.

“I need one more thing,” he said. “A list of car accidents in and around Asheville—” the North Carolina town where Dana had gone to college “—for the eighteen months before Jeff was born.”

“Since my beer binge has trapped me at home with nothing to do, I’ll get to work on it and have it to you before day’s end.”

Tad slid back down to reality. To being just a guy on a private payroll because he’d screwed up his job.

“Thank you for understanding, sir.”

“Back at you, Detective. Not one of my best days.”

Tad hung up feeling he’d gotten to know the man he’d long admired more in five minutes than in all the years he’d been hearing about him. Sitting there all alone, mourning his wife.

And his daughter and grandson, too. Having risked his life so many times to save others, only to have everything he cared most about stripped from him. It had to be emasculating to someone like the chief to sit back and let others tend to his family. To know there was nothing immediate he could do to help them.

Kind of like Tad’s need to do more for Miranda, to end this. The chief’s need, by comparison, would be that much greater.

You couldn’t blame a guy for drinking on that one. Or for irritability and rudeness.