Protective Instincts. Julie Miller
ingrained alertness that had become as much a part of her as breathing kicked up to warning levels, speeding her pulse and sharpening her senses. She squeezed the steering wheel in her fists and pressed a little harder on the gas.
She didn’t recognize the black truck, either.
Melissa splashed through the lake pooling at the end of her driveway and parked her car up beside the house. She left the bag of groceries tipped over in the passenger seat, grabbed her keys and climbed out into the rain.
“Mom?” She turned up the collar of her trench coat, blinked the beads of moisture from her eyelashes and spared a glance for the officer in his car. Drinking his coffee. Just sitting. He wasn’t on his radio or writing up a report as though the truck was illegally parked or stolen, or if there’d been a break-in. Still, surprises had never been a good thing for her. Especially this close to home. “Benjamin?”
Forcing her lungs to breathe deeply and evenly, she ran across the slick grass to the porch. She quickly unlocked the knob and dead bolt, cursed when she discovered the chain wasn’t fastened and pushed her way inside. “Mom!”
The screen door slammed shut behind her as she hurried toward the light streaming through the archway from the living room. “Ben? Mom? Why won’t you answer—”
She turned the corner and froze.
Her mother was sitting on the sofa, cradling a coffee mug between her hands and laughing with rare abandon—laughing at the man wrestling with Melissa’s precious son on the braided rug.
For one awful moment she thought that Ace… But no, Benjamin might be a dead ringer for his father with his black hair and olive skin, but her ex had never claimed him. He’d seen their child as a threat—as competition for her love. To Ace, their son was an abomination. A betrayal. Ace had never accepted any other males in her life—not even his own child.
All the more reason to hold her little boy close and keep him safe.
The man’s deep voice cracked as he teased Benjamin with a high-pitched plea for mercy. “Aagh! Big Ben got me!”
“Get me! Get me!”
“You asked for it.” Her four-year-old squealed in delight as the dark-haired man closed him in a scissor hold between his knees and rolled back and forth on the floor.
You asked for it. Melissa blocked out the painful memory the words conjured and found her voice. “Mother!”
The wrestling ceased in an instant. Her mother’s smile vanished. “Melissa.”
“Mommy!” Benjamin beamed from one flushed cheek to the other. “’Tective got me!”
Melissa gripped the door frame and retreated half a step as the man sat up and scooted Benjamin onto his lap.
Oh my God.
She wasn’t ready for a reunion like this.
“Hey.” The slightly breathless laugh that lingered in their guest’s bass voice should have reassured her with its familiarity. His lazy grin should have struck a pang of welcome recognition instead of tensing every muscle with the urge to turn and run from the remembered horrors of her old life.
Melissa Teague didn’t run anymore. But standing her ground still didn’t come easy.
She knew this man. Not exactly a stranger. Not exactly an old friend, either. His straight, coffee-brown hair was shorter than she remembered, his clothes certainly different. Tom Sawyer. No, that wasn’t right. Tom Sawyer Kincaid. He’d said something about his mom being an English teacher who’d named all her sons after characters in books. He’d said something about being a cop—something about asking her out and getting to know her better.
“What are you doing here?” was the only greeting that worked its way past the guarded tension squeezing her throat.
“Melissa—your manners!” her mother chided, setting down her coffee and rising to her feet.
As her initial panic ebbed, an embarrassing self-consciousness took its place. He was looking at her in that way. The way a man who wanted something looked at a woman.
Before she was completely aware of doing it, Melissa combed her fingers through the hair at her left temple, urging a golden wave over her cheek. But just as quickly, hating even that revelation of weakness about herself, she squared her shoulders and marched across the room to pluck her son from the officer’s arms. “Benjamin’s too small for roughhousing with you.”
“Mommy, you’re wet. I want down.”
“I didn’t hurt him. Boys like to wrestle—”
“Get me again!” Benjamin reached for their guest.
“See?”
The man’s lopsided grin was just as innocently boyish as her son’s. In another lifetime, she might have succumbed to its charm.
But this was the life she had to deal with. Despite Benjamin’s squiggles to climb down and resume the game, she wedged him firmly on her hip. “Why is there a police car parked in front of my house?”
“I let Detective Kincaid in, dear,” her mother explained. “He’s only been here a half hour or so. I checked his ID before opening the door. Don’t you remember him?”
“Of course I remember—”
“Better let me handle this.” The man she’d known as Tom Sawyer, a bartender with a sweet but misplaced sense of responsibility for the waitresses who worked with him, smoothed the scattered strands of hair off his forehead and rolled to his feet. He stood. And stood. Melissa’s pulse quickened with an instinctive self-preservation and she backed away.
His warm brown gaze darted to the subtle movement of her feet. But she didn’t apologize or make excuses.
He didn’t ask for any. “It’s good to see you again, Mel.”
She forced her gaze up past the evening beard that studded his square jaw, and acknowledged his greeting with a nod. “Tom.”
He raised his focus and skimmed her face, probably noting the newer, shoulder-length cut of her hair—probably satisfying his curiosity about how her injuries had healed as well. “You look great.”
He looked…male.
Ignoring the little tremor of awareness that blipped through her brain, Melissa concentrated on all the reasons why she’d never picked up a phone to resume their friendship, never encouraged him to turn that friendship into something more. One, he was an old-fashioned kind of guy—the sort who held open doors, sent flowers and who’d try to make everything right for her. Two, nice as he’d seemed back at the casino where they’d worked together, he’d lied about who he was. What he did for a living. Why he’d been so interested in her. And whether or not the lie was unavoidable and he really was one of the good guys, she couldn’t afford to be fooled by good intentions and false promises. She couldn’t allow herself to drop her guard and be taken in by any man—even a nice one. Especially a nice one. She needed her independence in order to survive.
And three? Oh, hell. She remembered thinking Tom Sawyer Kincaid might be the one man in her life with the brawn and bravado to stand up to her ex-husband. The man who’d come galloping to her rescue. But any chivalrous fantasy she might have toyed with scared the hell out of her, too. She’d forgotten just how imposing he could be, with those broad shoulders and thick forearms, every sinew and hollow made blatantly evident by the sticky second skin of his damp white shirt and rolled-up sleeves.
She couldn’t help but compare. There’d been so many times she wished she’d met a man like Detective Kincaid before Ace had ever walked into her sheltered life back in South Dakota. But wishing didn’t help reality. There were no more fantasies to be dreamed, no trust to be given. There was only survival.
So she sloughed off his compliment and ignored the spark of interest her