boxers. Dark hair on legs that were tight and firm. Even now, driving to discuss the afternoon’s event and how it played into the care plan the High Risk Team had developed to prevent Devon Williams from ever hurting Marie or their son again, she shied away from thinking about the ugly facts of life, and found herself picturing those jeans pooled around Tad’s ankles instead.
Watching him with a very definite feminine reaction.
Wrong. It was just plain wrong of her. On so many levels.
Parking in the coffeehouse lot, seeing Tad already inside sitting at a table for two with a couple of steaming cups in front of him, she pulled herself together. Having very private fantasies was bad enough; allowing them to invade the space she shared with others was prohibited.
Period.
* * *
“That went well.”
Miranda heard the sarcasm in Tad’s greeting as she sat down. She felt herself immediately tuning into him.
“It did go well,” she assured him. “I can’t tell you what was said after you left—” he knew about her legal restrictions with regard to medical confidentiality “—but it went well. Marie asked me to tell you thanks. She feels much better knowing that you’ll be adding extra drive-bys to the ones the police are already going to be doing.”
Tad’s next comment was angry. “Devon Williams should be in jail.”
“Agreed. But since he hasn’t actually physically hurt anyone—that we can prove—since Marie dropped those charges against him last year, and still insists that her current bruising comes from a fall, there’s not a lot the prosecutor can do.”
He knew that, too. Santa Raquel’s assistant prosecutor was a new member of the High Risk Team.
“At least the judge granted her restraining order,” Miranda added, wishing she was only thinking about the woman who’d just left her office. Truth was, she saw more abused children and their mothers than she’d like. She suspected that at least five of the fifty families she saw on a regular basis dealt with that insidious disease.
“And you know as well as I do that those orders are ignored more than forty percent of the time in these kinds of cases,” Tad countered.
And often victims invited the abuser back into their lives. Yeah, Miranda knew that, too. Which was part of what made the situation that much more frustrating.
Unknown to Tad, though, she wasn’t just aware that it happened, she understood how it happened. In the most personal way possible.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “How can a woman marry a man after he’s already abused her? It makes no sense to me.”
He was talking about Marie, whose boyfriend had hit her a couple of times back in high school. Once, he’d also shoved her up to a wall with his hands around her neck.
He’d also loved and adored her when no one else had, making her vulnerable to him, and he’d scared her into thinking that marrying him was the only way to keep herself safe. And happy.
The incidents had been isolated. She’d understood that he hadn’t been himself for various reasons—usually involving alcohol. But she’d believed him when he promised never to lift a hand to her again when she’d dropped charges against him the previous year.
She’d hoped.
Right up until he’d been thundering behind their son, trying to catch up to him to give him a spanking for not packing a suitcase as he’d instructed. He’d panicked Danny, who tore out of their house so fast he’d tripped and fallen on a stake she’d just put up in her garden.
“Our job is to follow the safety plan and do what we can to see that Devon doesn’t have a chance to hurt either of them again,” she reminded him. “You heard Chantel. As soon as he violates that protection order, his ass is in jail.”
Chantel Harris Fairbanks, a Santa Raquel detective on the High Risk Team, might be married to a millionaire banker and live in one of the town’s most impressive mansions, but she was all cop when it came to her job. Even to the point of keeping her previous small apartment in town so she didn’t ever lose sight of who she was and what she knew. So she wouldn’t ever forget where she came from.
Miranda envied her—being able to keep her old self alive. Nothing about Miranda’s former self lived on with her. Not even her name.
“And then the prosecutor can call for a dangerousness hearing,” she said. It wasn’t technically called that in California, but it meant that if Devon was arrested and was considered a danger, he could be held without bail.
The man had threatened to kill his wife. Twice in the past eight weeks since she’d told him she wanted a divorce. He’d actually told her how he’d dispose of her body. He’d been drinking again. And quit his job. When he’d gone to their house the week before to insist that Danny come to his apartment and stay with him for the weekend, the boy suffered his fall. And then he’d blamed his wife for that, too, taking his anger out on her face. On a list of nineteen risk factors pointing to the danger of death, Devon Williams ranked at thirteen. It only took eight for the case to be referred to the High Risk Team.
Marie was changing her routine, her working hours. Her newly married sister and brother-in-law were moving in with her for a while. She and Danny were going to stay around crowds when they went out. She wouldn’t be going to her usual church, grocery store or hairdresser. Not until Devon was under control.
It wasn’t just to keep her and Danny safe, but because she truly wanted Devon to succeed. She wanted him to come through this. To find a good life for himself. To be happy.
She loved him.
And that was the part Miranda got that many others, most others, couldn’t. How a heart could still feel love for someone who beat them.
The secrets she held close inside kept her emotions in check during that afternoon coffee with Tad Newberry though she desperately wanted to talk to him about them.
She couldn’t. She wouldn’t.
No matter how badly she hurt.
Ethan’s life depended on her keeping her secrets to herself.
And the second she’d given birth to him, his life had become more important to her than her own.
Miranda was fine right up until Tad walked her out to her car. His, an older-model black SUV, was parked down the street. He’d bought it used, he’d told her during one of their coffee sessions with a couple of others after a High Risk Team meeting. He was only in town for a year while he was on leave from his detective job back east. Michigan, she figured. That was where he’d said he’d grown up. A suburb of Detroit.
He was using his time off, he’d said, to learn more about the High Risk Team with the thought that he could help implement a version of it in his hometown.
Other than that, she knew so little about him.
And
