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  Husband or not, Brian never got the sense that the man had her best interests at heart. "Ben wasn't the one who got shot."

  "No, not then," she said softly.

  Damn, he'd walked right into that one with his size-twelve feet. How could he have not remembered? There'd been a bullet to the head at close range. "I'm sorry. That just came out. I didn't mean—"

  She didn't want him feeling guilty. Not when he'd always been there for her. "I know you didn't."

  She was right not to tell him about the other nightmares. The ones about Ben being shot, about his being beaten and tortured and clubbed in the face. His teeth were all destroyed in an obvious ploy to hide his identity on the off chance that his body would wash up on shore. Which it had.

  Lila could shut it down during the day, but at night, it was a different story. Asleep, she envisioned all of it on a recurring basis.

  That, too, made her hate going to sleep in the empty house.

  Brian could almost see her pulling away. He knew her well enough, even now, to pick up on the signs. Maybe it was time to revert back to why she'd sought him out. "About this not-so-heavy breather of yours—"

  Lila waved her hand, dismissing the topic. "Forget it."

  "No," he replied in the soft, no-nonsense voice that his detectives had learned could not be opposed. "I won't. It was important enough for you to break your self-imposed exile and come look me up."

  Because it was more than a little true, she took exception to his words. "There was no self-imposed exile."

  "Then why have you been avoiding me all this time?"

  Shrugging, she went for the obvious. "We work on different floors."

  "But not different countries," he pointed out. "Last time I looked, the station had elevators and a phone system. I know, I used both." When he heard she was back and then again when Ben had been murdered, he'd tried to get in touch with her. To no avail. "And every time I tried to get in contact with you, you were either dashing off somewhere or your machine would pick up. Eventually, even someone as thick-headed as me takes the hint."

  "There were no hints," she insisted, feeling guilty about having treated him that way. Feeling guiltier about lying now. "I was just busy."

  "Twenty-four, seven?"

  She was in too deep to abandon the lie now. "Twenty-five, eight," Lila countered. What good would it do either of them for him to know that she hadn't been up to facing him, not up to having to defend her husband to someone who'd once been her best friend?

  Would all that ever be completely behind her? Would she ever be able to be as open with Brian as she once had been? God, she hoped so.

  "I'm not as fast as I used to be," she told him.

  One eyebrow rose in a silent, skeptical declaration. "Ha. That'll be the day. There is no slowing you down."

  He made her laugh. He always made her laugh, she recalled. Even when things at home were unbearable, she could always count on Brian to divert her for a little while, to come through and make things seem better.

  She looked at him now and wondered if she could still count on him. Or if, ultimately, time had changed that, too.

  * * *

  Chapter 3

  « ^ »

  The next words out of his mouth told her that her faith had not been misplaced.

  "I'm going to have a tap put on your phone," Brian told her. "See if we can find out who this night caller of yours is and 'politely' suggest he get his entertainment some other way—or face prosecution."

  She didn't want it to come to that. She just wanted it to stop. More than likely, it was someone who thought she was somehow involved in the mess that had ended Ben's life. So many rumors abounded around that time. Some had her killing Ben herself and using the drug cartel scandal as cover. Others thought she was as deeply involved as they said Ben was, taking money from the drug dealers to look the other way. There were as many different rumors as days of the week. She learned not to pay attention to any of them and waited for the air to clear. And eventually it did. But some rumors died harder than others.

  She wondered if Brian had been tempted to believe any of them. But this wasn't the time to ask. So she nodded in response to his offer.

  "I'd appreciate it." And then she hesitated. "Brian, you won't..."

  "Tell anyone?" he guessed. "I'll have to tell the guy running the tap, but I'll swear him to secrecy," he quipped. "I'd offer to blindfold him if you like, but then he might not do the best job."

  Brian smiled at her understandingly. He could only guess at what she'd gone through. If she hadn't been so damn stubborn, he might have been able to help long before this. But then, he supposed, she wouldn't have been Lila. Independent as hell.

  "It'll be off the record," he assured her. He saw a hint of skepticism in her eyes. "You don't put in as much time on the force as I have without gathering a few favors to call in."

  He liked the way relief softened her expression. "I really appreciate this, Brian," she repeated. "I know you probably think I'm overreacting."

  "Lila, when we were partners, I learned to respect your gut instincts. You never overreacted then and you're probably not overreacting now."

  She caught the one word he had glossed over. '"Probably."'

  Brian smiled. The wording was a result of on-the-job indoctrination. "Being the chief of d's has taught me to be cautious."

  Brian set down his mug, finished with his beer, but she was still nursing hers. "Well, I'm glad something finally did. For a man with four kids, you were always a little reckless," she remembered, then took another long swig of the amber brew.

  As he recalled their partnership, Lila was always the one to rush in where angels feared to go, not him. "Look who's talking."

  She had the good grace not to argue. "Maybe you have a point."

  Folding his hands before him, he watched her for a long moment. Humor faded in the face of more serious memories. "If you'd been a little less gung ho, I would have been the one who caught the bullet that night. And a lot of things might have been different." For one thing, she would have continued on the job and he would have refused to retire, the way Ben had made her do. They would have continued working together and she would have never withdrawn from him.

  Lila could almost hear what he was thinking. No point in going there, that path led nowhere. So she did her best to lighten the moment. "Yeah, you would have been dead because blood makes me squeamish. I could have never done what you did, put my hand over the hole to try to get it to stop bleeding."

  Brian knew better. Knew that when they were partnered, she had always been there for him. That she had his back no matter what.

  "Somehow, I don't think so." He paused for a moment, debating whether to take on more serious subjects. There was so much to talk about. So much to try to catch up on. Even after their partnership had terminated, even after she clearly began to avoid him—because of Ben, he'd like to believe—he'd thought about her. Thought about her a lot if he were being honest with himself. He'd wondered what she was doing, how she was getting along and if he should take it upon himself to barrage into her self-imposed solitude.

  He never did. Maybe he should have. Because God knew he'd missed her.

  Impulse, something he rarely experienced and even more rarely gave in to, had him asking, "Listen, would you like to have dinner sometime?"

  Lila's mouth curved slowly, like a flower responding to the first rays of the summer sun. "Sometime," she echoed.

  Heartened, Brian pressed on. "How about tomorrow night?"

  She blinked. "'Sometime' came fast."

  He spread his hands, taking care not to knock over the empty mug. "Hey, if this business has taught me nothing else, it's that you never know how much time you have left—" he eyed her intently "—and personally, I think that I've lost too much time with my best friend already."

  Best friend. He probably had no idea how comforting that sounded to her. Or how much she had missed him, Lila thought.

  "Me, too,"
she agreed softly. And then, because she thought that maybe she'd admitted too much, she focused on what he'd said about the capricious nature of the kind of life police officers led. "When the kids all opted to go into the force, I was both so proud and so scared. A big part of me just wanted them to be safe. To sit in cubicles where nothing more serious than a paper cut threatened them."

  "You sit in a cubicle," he reminded her, humor framing his mouth. "How do you like it?"

  Lila laughed. Checkmate—or was it touche? she wondered. In any case, he had her. "I hate it."

  He nodded, knowing that she did. He couldn't help wondering why, after Ben had died and the man's hold over her went with him, she hadn't asked to be put back in the field in some capacity.

  "Wouldn't wish an existence they'd hate on your kids, would you?"

  "No." Which was why she'd never told even her daughters, Riley and Taylor, how she felt about their choice of a vocation. "But I still get knots in my stomach at times, worrying."

  "All parents worry—if they're worth their salt." It was a given. He worried about all of his kids, even Janelle, who was an assistant to the D.A. All of them dealt with the criminal element every day. There was nothing reassuring about that. But some things were just out of his hands.

  However, the direction of the conversation was not and he got it back on track. "So, what's your answer?"

  Lila raised her eyes to his quizzically. Something quivered in his gut. "My answer?"

  She did innocent well, Brian thought, amused. "I wasn't distracted by the sidebar, Lila. Dinner? Tomorrow?"

  Lila moved the mug aside. She'd had enough beer. Taking in a breath, she let it out slowly, as if by doing so it somehow signaled the beginning of a new journey. One that promised to be far more pleasant than the one she'd just been on.

  "Dinner. Tomorrow," she echoed, confirming the engagement.

  Something like the burst of sunshine went off in his chest. He didn't try to explore the reasons behind it. "Great. I'll pick you up at your place. Seven o'clock all right?"

  Now that she was living alone, dinner no longer had a set time. It was dictated by the contents of her refrigerator and her desire to nibble.

  "Seven o'clock is fine," she assured him. Warmth spread through her as she felt him looking at her. She wasn't quite sure how to handle this, so she pushed it aside for the time being. Glancing at her watch, she realized that a lot more time had gone by than she'd thought. "I'd better get going." She flashed him a grateful smile. "I've kept you long enough."

  He began to protest that it hadn't been nearly long enough, then thought better of it. She was still skittish, even though that was difficult to reconcile with the Lila he knew. So instead, he rose from the booth, signaling that he was ready to go, too.

  As Lila slid out, he leaned over to quietly tell her, "The tap will be put in place tomorrow morning. I'll send Manny Lopez over." The senior computer tech was both exceptionally competent and quiet. "What time do you leave for work?"

  The precinct was only ten minutes away, but she liked getting in early. "Seven-thirty."

  "Manny will be there at seven." It was before his shift, but he knew he could prevail on the man to come in early. "It shouldn't take long."

  "Are you sure he won't mind putting in the extra time?"

  Manny, a widower, had a daughter who had been caught shoplifting last year. Brian had made the charges go away, keeping them off the police blotter in exchange for Rachel "volunteering" for community service and counseling.

  Nodding, she preceded Brian as they made their way to the door.

  "Come back soon," Shawn called after them.

  Brian glanced over his shoulder toward the bartender. "Count on it."

  "I'm talking to the cute blonde, not you, Cava-naugh," Shawn responded.

  Lila laughed and raised her hand above her head to wave goodbye.

  "You have an admirer," Brian told her as they walked out.

  "Shawn was always a good guy." She turned around at the entrance. The night air was chilly. The temperature had dropped drastically since they'd gone inside. Lila turned up her collar, wrapping her arms around herself. "So are you, Brian."

  Then why had she avoided him? But he knew better than to ask the question this early in their reconnection. If he did, she might find a reason to cancel tomorrow night. And he was really looking forward to tomorrow night.

  "Hang on to that thought," he told her as they walked back to the precinct parking lot.

  * * * * *

  He was whistling when he got home twenty minutes later. Even walking into the dark house didn't bother him the way it usually did.

  Ordinarily, the darkness and silence assaulted him the second he pushed open the front door. But not tonight. Tonight, this was the house where a lot of living had gone on, where four babies had grown up to be upstanding adults.

  And where, tonight, he felt like a kid again.

  Though Brian had never looked toward each birthday with increasing dread, he could feel his usual zest for life waning these last few months.

  Maybe it was because everyone in his family had now paired off. That didn't just include his own kids but Andrew's and Mike's, as well. Eleven members in all, every one of them married and in the family way—or getting there. Even Andrew, who had been on his own for so many years, was now reunited with the wife only he had actually believed was still alive.

  Rose Cavanaugh had disappeared one morning after an argument with her husband. All the evidence had pointed to her death, not the least of which was the fact that her car was discovered in the river. Her body wasn't found, but it could have easily been swept out to sea, and that was what everyone believed.

  Everyone but Andrew.

  He never gave up hope, and over the years, every spare moment he had found him poring over one dead end after another, until he finally found her. But even that hadn't been a total success. Rose had been working at a diner upstate and was a victim of amnesia. She had no recollection of the husband and children she'd left behind.

  Undaunted, Andrew displayed ultimate patience and somehow got her to come around, to remember.

  So there they all were, paired up and happy while he pretended it didn't matter to him that he was always stag at the endless family functions.

  Well, tomorrow night he wasn't going to go stag. Tomorrow he was going out with Lila.

  "Don't go getting ahead of yourself," he murmured to himself. Methodically, he removed his jacket and then his holster with the service revolver. The former he slung across the back of a chair, but he placed the latter on the third shelf of his bookcase, the way he had been doing for the past twenty-some-odd years. "It's just dinner, just catching up on old times."

  And maybe, finally, making a few new ones, he added silently.

  "You talking to yourself now?"

  Reaching for his gun, Brian swung around toward the sound of the voice, the weapon aimed and ready to fire. Andrew was standing in the doorway, looking more amused than angry or distressed.

  "Easy, Quick Draw." Andrew raised one hand in mock surrender.

  Putting the safety back on, Brian returned the gun to its holster. "How did you get in here?"

  "The front door was open." Andrew nodded in the general direction of the door. "You forgot to lock it." He crossed over toward Brian. "Not like you to be ab-sentminded." He considered his assessment for a second. '"Course, not like you to be talking to yourself, either. Hope you don't do that down at the precinct. Wouldn't want people to start talking, saying that my little brother is going crazy. Might not reflect well on the rest of the family. Or the police force for that matter, having a chief of d's who talks to himself."

  He couldn't care less what people at the station gossiped about. People always found something to talk about. All he cared about was what his family thought of him—and what he thought of himself. "Why don't you let me worry about what people say about me?"

  To his surprise, Andrew shook his head. "Can't. I'm th
e patriarch of the family, remember? That's what patriarchs do, they worry about the family's reputation."

  Brian didn't have any experience with so-called patriarchs, but he knew Andrew and what was important to his older brother. It wasn't necessarily reputation, but seeing to it that everyone was fed. Well fed. "And cook."

  "If they're exceptional," Andrew deadpanned. "And speaking of food," he continued, "that leads me to what I'm doing here."

  Brian crossed his arms before him, his affection for his brother more than slightly apparent. "I figured you'd get around to it, sooner or later."

  "I've come to take you to dinner."

  He'd wondered when Andrew would finally swoop down on him. It was very important to his older brother to have family members turn up at his table on at least a semi-regular basis and he'd been absent of late.

  Still, he couldn't resist giving Andrew a hard time. "I don't remember you asking."

  Andrew looked at him as if he'd taken leave of his senses. "It's a standing invitation. That means I don't have to ask."

  Brian parried to Andrew's thrust. "That also means if I don't show up, no one's nose is supposed to be bent out of joint."

  "Yours might be if you give me a hard time," Andrew informed him. "Rose told me not to come home without you."

  Brian knew better. Although he and his sister-in-law got along very well, it was Andrew who insisted on meal attendance, Andrew who found any kind of an excuse to throw an immense family party. Andrew who insisted that the family that ate together, stayed together.

  "Or what," Brian asked, amused, "she'll give you a time-out?"

  Andrew ignored the question, getting down instead to the reason he'd come to fetch his brother. "You haven't been around for a couple of weeks."

  He knew families who only saw one another over the holidays, if then. But to Andrew, that was unthinkable, and now that he reflected on it, Brian had to admit that he was grateful that he was a part of this family rather than the other kind.

  But he did enjoy giving Andrew a hard time. "Maybe I'm on a diet."

  Andrew never missed a beat. "I've got carrots sticks. You can gnaw on a few while the rest of us eat." Looking around the house, Andrew frowned. "You spend too much time alone."