Anna Adams - Maggie's Guardian

The person on her porch might be another friend of David’s, coming to pay his respects, to check on Maggie. Why tell Weldon she had a prowler if she didn’t? He’d love an excuse to search her house.

She inched back along the living room wall to the door, angling her body to protect the baby. Supremely indifferent to Tessa’s little dance of fear, Maggie attacked her own fist with another hungry cry.

“Hold on a minute,” Tessa whispered. “I’ll feed you.” As soon as she made sure a maniacal killer hadn’t come to call. She parted two of the slats to peer through the ice-encrusted glass.

The stubbled chin at eye level triggered alarms all over her body.

Noah. She recognized the faint dimple beneath his bottom lip before she raised her gaze to his shadowed dark brown eyes. He tipped his head in an unspoken let me in, and Tessa sprang back. The blinds clattered into place, keeping time with her erratic heartbeat.

She went hot and then cold, and then warmed again with frustration.

“Open the door, Tessa. You need help.”

Her name sounded unfamiliar on the ragged edges of his raised voice. She should have called Larry Baxton one more time and begged him to burn her message.

She studied the living room’s shadows. She’d felt safe here because she didn’t have to avoid images of her broken family in these rooms. This house contained no memories of Noah or their own baby.

But now she had to think of Maggie. In a few hours, the baby had grown more important than Tessa’s worst fears. She had to learn to love Maggie and make new memories. And she couldn’t teach David’s little girl to be afraid of love or of facing a painful past.

Something heavy slammed into the door at her back. Noah’s fist, no doubt.

She must have lost her mind when she’d called him. She hadn’t been able to depend on him after Keely—after… He’d disappeared inside his job, finding more comfort with the murderers he was so good at catching than with her.

The door shuddered under his fist again. “Open up or I’ll shoot the damn lock.”

She didn’t like being pushed around. She bit her lip, curling her toes inside her shoes as she refused to walk away. Responsibility for Maggie pinioned her to the floor.

“Just let me in.” His strained patience was anything but familiar. They’d long since stopped trying to bear with each other. “Give me a chance to help you. And David’s baby.”

Tessa opened her mouth to answer. At the same time, Maggie sensed anger in the air. She teared up, puckering her lips.

Damn.

Tessa turned to a second keypad by the door. She didn’t want him in her house or anywhere near her life again, but Noah would help her keep Maggie safe. He’d turned away before, but he wouldn’t have driven all the way from Boston to turn his back on her now. She tapped out the code that disarmed the security system.

The moment she opened up, Noah pushed inside. She’d forgotten his scent. All male, it tugged at her, slipping between memories too intimate to face, too insistent to ignore. She hated the need that absorbed her in his drawn cheeks and the lines she’d never seen before, at the corners of his eyes. Emotion she couldn’t understand and certainly didn’t trust thinned his mouth.

“Tessa.” This time he whispered her name, as if their shared past drew his breath from depths she hadn’t known she’d reached inside him. His gaze washed her with the same insatiable need she felt. A yearning that had nothing to do with sex.

They were two people who’d lost everything that mattered most. Seeing him brought it all back. The joy as well as the pain. Joy scared her more. She didn’t want to remember that much happiness now that she’d lost it.

“I don’t want you here.” What she meant was she never wanted to need him again.

His grimace acknowledged what she couldn’t say. With shaking hands, he dragged his hair away from his face. Black strands stuck to his scalp, and moisture clung in drops to his fingers. He shut the door and turned the dead bolt. “Who did this to David? Are you all right?” His eyes looked like holes in his face. “Is someone trying to hurt you?”

“I’m fine.” She wasn’t. She wanted to cry—for David, for Maggie, for herself, and maybe a little for this empty-eyed shadow of Noah.

Somehow she’d managed to forget the ghost who’d walked out long before she’d left him. She’d been angry with the Noah she’d loved, the husband with whom she’d planned at least one brother or sister for Keely and a future as long as forever.

Another reason to forget about counting on life being fair or normal. She’d better just tell Noah what had happened and hope he’d be able to help before he vanished again.

“David must have interrupted a burglary. Whoever—” She stopped. David’s death grew more real each time she had to talk about finding him. She wiped her mouth. She had to function for Maggie. “Whoever hurt David also tore the office apart.”

“You—” He sounded scared, except Noah didn’t get scared. “You found him?”

His question confused her. “Didn’t Weldon tell you? Why are you here?”

Noah shook his head, as if he realized he didn’t sound coherent. “Weldon told me, but I hate thinking of you seeing him like that.”

She backed up a little, distancing herself from his concern. If David was still alive, she’d be planning to tell him about this crazy conversation. David had been the one she could rely on. She clenched her teeth to keep from crying out loud.

David would never come back again, and Noah hadn’t come to comfort her. Better count her blessings he was such a good cop. Closing her eyes on her tears, she turned away, but Noah caught the arm that wasn’t clutching Maggie.

“You’re not all right.”

She stared at his hand until he let her go. “I was better until I had to ask you for help.”

“I know you called back and changed your mind, but I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know.” One step brought Noah closer. “And I know why you don’t want me around. You don’t think about…her, until you see me.”

She resented him for never saying Keely’s name. “Do you forget her?”

Maggie cried out at Tessa’s hostility, but Noah didn’t have to answer. Grief hollowed his eyes and his gray face made him look like the walking dead.

Tessa scaled down her anger. She wasn’t being fair. “I shouldn’t have called you the first time.”

She shifted the baby against her breast, and Noah stared, mesmerized by Maggie. When he looked slowly back at Tessa, he staggered. At first, she thought he was upset, maybe even drunk, if the rumors she’d heard from their Boston friends were true. But he reached behind himself, grasping for anything solid.

“You’re sick.” He’d had so many migraines after Keely died Tessa had begged him to see a doctor. He hadn’t.

With a grimace, he ignored her. “How can you take on that child?”

He’d gone to the heart of her doubts. She wasn’t certain she’d make a good substitute parent for Maggie. “What choice do I have?”

“Are you being fair to her? You can’t just give her up if it doesn’t work out. You won’t.”

He shut his mouth in lines of pain. After Keely, they’d forgotten how to love each other, but he did still know her, and she knew him well enough to recognize his anguish.

He backed unsteadily into the wall, and she forgot to be wary of him.

“I’ll make it work, Noah. She needs me.” She slid her free arm around his waist. His muscles tensed against her, from her shoulder to her thigh.

Feel nothing, she warned herself. He’s temporary here.

“Migraine,” he muttered.

“I guessed. Come sit down.”

Noah shrugged off her helping hand. “Carry the baby. I’ll manage.”