by plastic lunch boxes, her thighs thumped by backpacks that gave each little kid linebacker shoulders. “Ricky!” she heard a high voice yell, and she spun left to follow the sound, but lost the speaker in a sea of pigtails and porcupine-spiked hair.
She whirled back, telling herself she’d find her son, telling herself not to panic, telling herself even a person without a brain injury might be confused within the mass of chattering voices and afternoon exuberance. Breathe, Linda, breathe.
“Grrrr!” Something knee-high and wearing a gruesome, paper-plate-with-poster-paint mask came at her, eyes glittering, bitty fingers curled into claws. Linda drew instinctively away from it, and her back hit someone else’s solid frame.
Emmett’s. He held her against him with an arm across her waist. “It’s a jungle out here, isn’t it?” he said against his ear.
Even as his warm breath sent goose bumps sprinting down her neck, Linda relaxed against him. Just as it had in the grocery store, his presence calmed her and gave her renewed strength.
“I don’t see Ricky,” she said. “Could we have missed him?” The cell phone moms hadn’t missed their kids. Already they were climbing back into their cars, their kids in tow, their mouths still moving as they continued their calls.
“We didn’t miss him.” Emmett placed a hand atop each of her shoulders and turned her back to the intersection of streets. “See that Stop sign over there?”
Attached to the Stop sign was Ricky, his features almost lost beneath the plastic yellow brim of his hard hat. Her son, Ricky. Star of the traffic patrol.
At least, that was how it seemed to her. A swell of warmth rose inside her as she watched him nod to the group of children waiting on his corner. They hurried through the crosswalk under his serious gaze.
She looked up at Emmett. “He’s very good at that, don’t you think?”
“Truly a prodigy.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Are you laughing at me?”
He shook his head. “No. You just sounded so motherish.”
She considered the notion. “No, I don’t have the cell phone for it.”
“What?”
“Never mind.” She returned her gaze to Ricky, watching as he monitored the last of the crossers, then tucked his Stop sign under his arm and headed back for the school. She realized the instant he saw her.
“Hi,” she said, hoping she still had that motherish tone that Emmett had noted. Maybe if she sounded like a mother and acted the part, she’d really begin to feel like one. “Good day at school?”
“What are you doing here?” he asked, his eyes darting toward his patrol buddies and then back to her face.
“I thought maybe you’d like a ride home today, instead of taking the school bus. We could stop for…ice cream or something.” She glanced up for Emmett’s approval, but he’d drifted away from her and Ricky.
“I want to take the bus.” His glance flicked over to another boy, who was standing shoulder to shoulder with him. “Anthony and I always take the bus home together.”
She shrugged. “We could take Anthony with us. For the ice cream, too.”
Anthony’s dark-chocolate eyes widened. “I can’t go home with a stranger. My mother would kill me!”
“I’m not a stranger,” Linda started to say, but Ricky was pushing his friend toward the school.
“C’mon, Anthony, we have to put our signs and stuff away,” he said, herding the other boy off.
“Ricky, wait!”
He turned back reluctantly. “What do you want now?”
“I—” She sighed. “You really want to go home on the bus?”
“Yeah.”
She rubbed her palms against the front of her jeans. “Well, then, I guess that’s what you should do. I apologize for coming here without checking with you first. And I apologize about thinking I could take Anthony with us. I didn’t think. I didn’t realize—”
“That he’d get in trouble. A real mom would know that.” He turned and walked away from her.
A real mom would know that. A real mom.
She couldn’t fool Ricky, could she? Even if she sounded like a mom, acted like a mom, learned all the mom rules, none of those would get her anywhere if Ricky himself didn’t want the mother in his life to be her.
Emmett didn’t need the skills of observation he’d honed through his FBI experience to know that Linda’s conversation with Ricky hadn’t gone well. Not only had she walked away without the boy, she’d spent the entire ride back home in a deep silence.
He’d let her stew, because he didn’t know what else she needed.
Back at the guest house, when she asked him to show her how to use the new treadmill, he’d hoped the exercise would exorcise the demons that were plaguing her.
Instead, they seemed to be punishing her.
She’d already been on the machine for thirty minutes, her speed increasing from a walk to a fast walk to a brisk jog, as if she were trying to outrun whatever was bothering her. The shorts and T-shirt she’d changed into clung to her perspiring body and the tendrils of hair around her face were wet.
Still, she kept on moving, her long ponytail swishing behind her back, her running shoes slap-slap-slapping against the treadmill’s belt.
Under the pretext of doing his own workout, he’d kept an eye on her. But he couldn’t pretend any longer that he wasn’t worried.
“Maybe you should quit,” he called from across the room over the machine’s hum.
She acted as if she didn’t hear him, so he set down the free weights he’d been pumping and strolled over to her. He stood right in front of the piece of equipment, ducking his head a little so that their gazes met. “Maybe you should quit,” he repeated.
“Believe me…I’m thinking…about it,” she panted out.
“Quit running,” he clarified, then leaned forward to reach the keypad where he could reduce the speed of the belt. “It’s time for your cooldown.”
She frowned at him, though her feet slowed. “Don’t need…a keeper,” she got out. “Used to be…fit. Very fit.”
“You’ll be fit again.” He punched the pad a second time, reducing the speed even more. “Unless you give yourself a heart attack first. And I charge extra for CPR.”
She made a face at him, even as she sucked in a couple of long breaths. “You don’t believe me… Used to be one tough woman.”
Her pace had slowed to a walk, and he let his gaze linger on her slim legs and their long stride. Toughness wasn’t an antidote to evil and
