The Tough Guy and the Toddler Read online

  “Here,” he said, handing it to her. “In case you want to report my surly attitude.”

  His remark seemed to startle her out of her reverie. “I don’t think—”

  One side of his mouth quirked up. “Nah, I didn’t mean that. Look, take it,” he said, wondering at his persistence. “In case you, you know, ever need anything...”

  Dom let the sentence trail off, but he kept his gaze on hers. Why was he saying this? Hell, she had a husband, didn’t she? And obviously enough money to smooth most of the rough edges in her life. Why would she ever need anything from him?

  Finally, she nodded and took the card. “Thank you. That means a lot,” she said in that husky voice of hers. A bedroom voice, he thought, then shook away the impression as totally out of line.

  “Yeah.” He got out of the car, waved at the patrol car, then turned again to Mrs. Carlisle. “Hey, good luck,” he said.

  Her mouth curved in the first hint of anything resembling a smile he’d seen from her. “Not my strong suit,” she said, then took in a fortifying breath and got out of the Rover. She came around to the driver’s side and slid into the seat without another glance at him. When she pushed a button on the dash, the wrought-iron gates swung open. He watched as she drove through the gates, watched them swing slowly shut afterward. Mrs. Carlisle never looked behind her or waved goodbye.

  As Dom lifted his own arm in a half gesture of farewell, it came to him that he’d never see her again. He frowned. The realization made him feel empty somewhere deep in the vicinity of his gut.

  Still, he kept his gaze focused on the Rover’s taillights until the tall, stately gates shut with a firm—and final—clang.

  Chapter 2

  A week had passed and Jordan was almost back to normal. Or as normal as she ever got, she thought with a smile, as she closed the front door behind her. In this past week since the child’s rescue and the subsequent discovery of her as the 911 caller, the attendant press attention had taken its toll. She was tired. Good tired, for a change. She had spent all day at the shop, which had been just what she’d needed—hard work, distraction, the concentration on other people and other lives instead of on her own. Tonight, she looked forward to a leisurely hot bath, maybe even a good night’s sleep.

  Brushing one hand through her hair, she reached with the other for the pile of mail on the small antique pine table by the front door. As she did, Cynthia appeared from around the corner, perfectly dressed as usual in a soft silk dress, heels, her white hair styled immaculately.

  “So, you’re home,” her mother-in-law said.

  Jordan smiled. “Did you have a nice day?”

  “I had a doctor’s appointment, remember?”

  “And is everything all right?”

  Cynthia didn’t answer her question. She was still attending to her own agenda. “I had to get Connie Lehman to drive me,” she said, accusation dripping from every word.

  “Why didn’t you ask Sofia?” Jordan answered, referring to the live-in housekeeper and trying to keep her voice pleasant

  Cynthia waved her hand dismissively. “She has enough to do around here.”

  What her mother-in-law did not say out loud was, You should have been here, instead of at that awful shop. You should be here with me all the time, as a dutiful daughter-in-law should be, especially one I support financially and provide with a place to live.

  Jordan ignored the familiar stab of guilt that Cynthia always managed to arouse in her and sifted through a couple of catalogs, a bill from Neiman-Marcus. “I’m sorry, Cynthia,” she said, keeping her tone level. “Maybe next time we can make the appointment for one of my days off.”

  “I don’t understand why you have to work at all.”

  “No, I know you don’t.”

  Cynthia would never understand. But Jordan had realized three months ago that if she didn’t have something else to do with her time than listen to Cynthia’s complaints, attend luncheons and shopping expeditions and charity functions, she would descend into the pit of despair that had been beckoning her since Michael’s death. Her mother-in-law’s life was not hers and never would be.

  So she’d gotten herself a job at Riches and Rags and now she had a purpose. Jordan loved well-made clothing and interesting accessories, got a kick out of matching styles with customers. This job represented a first tenuous step toward some sort of future, a looking ahead instead of looking back. Cynthia might not understand, but Jordan would not give it up.

  “Monsignor Larsen is our guest for dinner tonight,” the older woman said. “He’ll be here in half an hour.”

  She’d forgotten. There went her hot bath and quiet time to herself. “I’ll be ready.”

  As Cynthia, with her customary sniff of disapproval, walked away, her high heels clicking on the marble floor, Jordan’s attention was caught by an envelope addressed to her in large block letters. There was no return address.

  Curious, she opened the envelope. A piece of paper was folded over a snapshot, Jordan glanced briefly at it as she unfolded the paper It was a blurry Polaroid of a child on a swing.

  Does this child look familiar? The letter was printed in the same block letters. Could it be your son? Is there a reward offered for information? Please say nothing to anyone else—this is between you and me. If you bring in the police, forget the whole thing. You’ll never see Michael again. You’ll be hearing from me. It was signed, A Friend.

  Jordan studied the picture more carefully, and as she did, she felt her heart speed up. The child was towheaded, about two or three, with a shy smile. Oh, God, she thought as her hand flew to her rapidly beating heart. It did. It looked like Michael.

  But that wasn’t possible. Michael was dead.

  Pain twisted throughout her body, a pain that was so familiar it felt as though she’d been carrying it all her life instead of only a year. She gripped the edges of the photograph and stared. The image was not clear, but something inside her cried out. Michael? Could it be?

  Clutching the letter and its contents to her chest, she crossed the marble entrance hall and made her way up the broad staircase to her bedroom suite. Once inside, she leaned against the closed door, gave herself a moment to calm down, then again studied the picture. How was it possible? she asked herself, all the while knowing the answer. It wasn’t.

  This was some sort of sick joke. For months after Michael’s death, she’d received all kinds of letters and phone calls from crazy people telling her his passing had been God’s judgment for her past sins. Some offered to hold seances. Charities had asked for donations in his name. Reporters had hounded her every move, recorded her every breath. Michael’s death had ceased to be her private loss—it became fodder for anyone with an agenda.

  And this letter, she told herself, was from yet one more crazy person. It was nothing. The picture meant nothing. She threw it on her dressing table on her way to her bath. Discarding the pantsuit she’d worn that day, she showered, letting the hot water soothe her tense muscles as she tried to order her thoughts into some coherent state.

  But her rebellious mind kept returning to that blurry picture, to that smile that was so like Michael’s. Of course it wasn’t her son, she told herself, it couldn’t be. Jordan’s picture had been in the papers again this past week, that was all, and had acted as a catalyst for some cruel, twisted person.

  After drying off, she sat at her dressing table, tunneling her fingers through her wet hair. Against her will, her gaze returned to the picture, setting off the ache and the memories. Michael had been a beautiful child, with her pale green eyes and his father’s white-blond hair. But that smile—it had been his alone.

  She remembered the day she’d been nursing him and he’d opened his eyes, looked up at her, let go of her nipple and smiled shyly at her. His perfect little mouth turned up slightly more on the right corner, a little hesitant, offering a gift.

  “He smiled!” she’d cried out. “Reynolds, look, he’s smiling.”

  Her husband
, who had been fussing with his cuff links, had walked over from his huge walk-in closet. “Let me see,” he’d demanded.

  But Michael had gone back to nursing. Reynolds had stared at the child for a few more minutes, then had said, “It was probably your imagination,” and had gone back to his closet.

  Her husband’s cold, dismissive remarks had been something she’d almost gotten used to in all their years of marriage. But that day, she knew it hadn’t been her imagination. Her son had smiled at her, with loving trust in his eyes.

  She squeezed her eyes shut as another stab of grief assaulted her. Never to nurse him again, to feel his small mouth tugging at her breast in order to receive the sweet liquid gift of life. She should throw the picture away, but somehow she was unable to force herself to do so. She opened her eyes and gazed at it again, wishing it were more in focus. Michael would be two and a half now, the same age as this child appeared to be. Reluctantly, she set the photo down. Why was she doing this? It was masochistic to dwell on this, she told herself, as she applied mascara to her lashes.

  In the mirror was the reflection of her large sitting room with its thick carpets, the plump gray love seat and chairs. Through the doorway, she could see the separate bedroom with its pedestal bed. It was an enormous bedroom suite, as spacious as the entire first floor of the small ranch house in Wyoming in which she and her older brother had been raised.

  But the sumptuous surroundings barely registered. If everything in the Carlisle home was the best money could buy, she had long ago stopped being impressed. External riches covered up a hollow existence.

  And she was part of that existence, knew it and hated it. She didn’t want to be here, was uncomfortable living off the Carlisle family money. She was not the type to be dependent on the goodwill of others, but the terms of her late husband’s trust had left her with nothing. She was too old to model again and had despised that life, anyway.

  In the past year, she’d been trying to regain her strength, both emotional and physical. For the present, she was biding her time until she could make the break. She hoped it would be soon.

  Unable to help herself, Jordan picked up the picture and looked at it. Michael? Alive? Was it possible?

  Please say nothing to anyone else, the letter said. The anyone was underlined.

  But how could she not? She felt as if she would burst. Someone. She needed to talk to someone about it, get some perspective. How she would have liked to pick up the phone and get a reality check. Family? Her brother and she weren’t close. Her parents were dead. Friends? One of her two close friends was working in a Brazilian rain forest and was unreachable. The other lived nearby but was an inveterate gossip.

  As her mind scurried about for someone to share this with, the in-house phone buzzed. She picked it up. “Monsignor Larsen is here,” Cynthia told her.

  “I’ll be right down.”

  Cynthia? Could Jordan share this with her? No. Her mother-in-law had her good moments, but their relationship was tenuous, at best. All through Jordan and Reynolds’s marriage, Cynthia had seemed to feel that Jordan was responsible for her son’s unhappiness and let it be known, never directly, but in subtle ways. Sometimes, Jordan thought, Cynthia even held her responsible for Reynolds’s death in that fiery crash, the same one that had killed Michael.

  No, she couldn’t tell Cynthia. Then who? She drummed her fingers on the dressing table. She knew she had to talk to someone or she would implode. As her gaze wandered over the top of her dressing table, as though searching for a clue, it fell on the business card she’d tossed next to the phone. Dominic D’Annunzio. The policeman she’d met a week ago during that awful day with the kidnapped child and the hovering news helicopters.

  Why had she placed the card there? she wondered. Why hadn’t she filed it in her desk or thrown it away?

  If you bring in the police, the letter said, forget the whole thing.

  No, she told herself, not Detective D’Annunzio.

  But... What had he said there at the end? To take his card and to call him if she needed anything? She desperately needed someone to talk to about this, even if it was just to be told to forget it.

  Anything, he had said.

  Without giving herself a chance to change her mind, she picked up the phone.

  An entire morning in court, testifying on a robbery-rape case, was not Dom’s idea of a good time. He’d made the collar, had done it by the book, the case was airtight. But that didn’t stop the perp’s lawyer from trying to chew him up on the stand, making veiled accusations about police brutality, the planting of evidence, the whole nine yards. Dom had sat there and taken it with a straight face, answered the questions without losing his cool or his temper.

  But the anger sat there inside him, churning. He was a good cop, a damned good detective, and he knew it. The lawyer was showboating for the jury, trying to tap into an anti-cop bias, and that kind of thing pissed him off.

  By the time Dom returned to West Hollywood at two o’clock, his mood wasn’t real upbeat. It didn’t get any better when he was greeted by the sight of all the paperwork on his desk, files and forms and reports he’d been meaning to get to for weeks. Mumbling a curse, he picked up his messages, shuffled through them. Steve, wheeling his desk chair over from the adjacent cubicle desk area, said, “Hey, Dom, my man, you had a call yesterday from that lady.”

  “What lady?”

  “You know, the looker, the nine one one caller from last week.” He handed him a yellow message sheet, then wheeled his chair to his neat, orderly desk. Jordan Carlisle, the message sheet read, followed by a number.

  At the sight of her name, Dom’s irritation vanished like smoke and was replaced by a gush of something warm in his gut. Smiling, he leaned back in his chair and stared at her name. Jordan Carlisle. A classy name for a classy dame.

  If one week ago, Dom had no idea who she was, now he knew all about her. So did most of L.A. For those few days after the car chase, Jordan Carlisle, Beverly Hills socialite and former model had been identified as the 911 caller who had led the police to the little girl’s rescue. Her picture and her life story had been splashed all over TV screens, although the lady herself, through the family lawyer, had declined interviews. Then some new scandal erupted, and Jordan Carlisle’s name disappeared.

  Dom, meanwhile, curious about the woman whose life and his had intersected briefly, had done a little background research of his own. He read about her discovery at age fifteen by a camera crew in a small town in Wyoming, about the ensuing three years as a teen model, her fairy-tale marriage twelve years ago to Reynolds Carlisle, a young man with old money. And all about the parties and charity functions, the birth of a son.

  Then, last year, both the child and the husband had died in a car accident.

  It had struck Dom as odd that, when they’d talked, Mrs. Carlisle had spoken about the kid’s death but hadn’t mentioned that in the same crash she’d also lost her husband. He wondered if that was significant—the leaving out of that little fact—or if it had been a momentary lapse.

  Whatever the answer, he now knew that she was a widow, not a married lady, which altered the equation a little. Not that he cared one way or another, he assured himself, or that it was any of his business. They were worlds apart and fantasizing about her wasn’t worth his time.

  Even so, each day for the past several days, he’d taken out the file he’d assembled on her and studied the pictures of her. And, each day, he’d had a hard time connecting the glossy, self-confident celebrity in the photos with the unhappy woman he’d met. She’d stayed in his head most of the week. The eyes, mostly, had haunted him. Large and sad, filled with a pain he knew all about, even though he’d shut out most of the memories associated with that pain.

  Sitting at his jumbled desk, he picked up her file again, held it in his hand without opening it. So, she’d called him, had she? Call her back, she’d requested, so yeah, he would do that. No problem. Dropping the manila folder on his desk, he reach
ed for the phone.

  But, for some reason, his hand stopped in midair. It was weird—it was like some sort of premonition. If he called her back, he’d be setting something in motion, something out of his control. Dom liked to be in control.

  Premonition? Where the hell did that come from?

  “Bull,” he muttered to himself. All he was doing was returning a call. He picked up the phone and punched in the numbers.

  “Carlisle residence.” The voice on the other end of the line had a slight Eastern European accent. The maid, he assumed.

  “Mrs. Carlisle, please.”

  “Mrs. Cynthia or Mrs. Jordan?”

  “Mrs. Jordan.”

  “Whom shall I say is calling?”

  “Detective D’Annunzio.”

  “One moment, please.”

  He shuffled through some paperwork while he was on hold, listened to the background noise in the squad room—phones and beepers ringing, conversation, laughter. About a third of the sixteen detectives in the unit were in at the moment, each in a work cubicle or hanging out at the coffee machine. He liked it here; it felt like home.

  “Detective?” Her voice startled him, and he sat up straight in his chair.

  “Mrs. Carlisle?”

  “Yes.” She emitted a relieved rush of air. “Oh, thank you for calling me back,” she went on in that same husky, low-pitched bedroom voice that had blown him away a week ago. The shock wave of pleasure that ran through him took him by surprise, but he cut it off ruthlessly.

  “Sure. What can I do for you?”

  Again, she seemed to hesitate before she spoke. “Well, you’ll probably think me crazy—” She left it hanging, waiting for him to jump in.

  But he didn’t. Sixteen years on the force had schooled Dom to let silence do the work.

  “I wonder if—” She sighed. “Listen, you said to call if I needed anything.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The thing is, I need to talk to someone who—”