A Good Girl

CHAPTER 4

Mary might or might not be a good girl, but she was a lucky one. At least that was how she saw it as she stood in her shower Thursday morning getting ready for work. Her boss had told her to take the rest of the week off. The cases piled up on her desk told her differently.

Those families needed her, and there was no reason she couldn't tend to them. She'd been buffeted by a storm, but she'd come through it with only bruises, a concussion and one night in the hospital for observation.

A night Bill Mendholson had spent with her. He'd been the one to wake her every couple of hours that first night. To see that she had everything she wanted or needed. And he'd spent Wednesday night in her bed at home.

"Breakfast is ready," Bill's voice called out to her just as she stepped out of the shower and Mary warned herself not to get too attached to the idea of Bill Mendholson by her side through life's daily trials.

They dated. That was all. He'd never once hinted at anything more.

He had his place. She had hers.

His attention since the storm was simply a matter of decency. Her family was in Florida and Bill was one of her closest friends—her only friend who lived alone and didn't have family to go home to every night.

Pulling on her thick white terry robe, she belted it at the waist, yanked the shower cap off, letting her long dark hair tumble down her shoulders, and made her way out to the breakfast nook. She'd purchased the little two bedroom Cape Cod home a couple of years earlier for far too much money because it had a view of the Atlantic Ocean. In the distance, mind you, but still the ocean…

He'd found her place mats, set the table as she'd set it for him so many times in the past. Her favorite coffee mug—the one with the heart that had been given to her by a client on the girl's eighteenth birthday, celebrating the fact that she'd made it through the system and into adulthood—sat by her plate. He'd fixed omelets. Again, her favorite, although his version resembled scrambled eggs. There was toast, too.

She hadn't had much of an appetite since the storm.

"Ramsey called," Bill said as he held out her chair and then sat perpendicular to her, in the seat she always gave him when he was over. "He's been keeping track of Damon and Kayla as promised. The decision is made to try to keep them together. Assuming you can find a place for them. They're in a temporary foster home until you get back to work."

"I'm going in today."

He frowned, his glasses touching his eyebrows as he did so. Which endeared him to her that much more. God, she loved this man.

Just as he was.

A man who walked his own walk. Who worked extremely long hours and lived alone.

"The doctor told you to take the rest of the week off."

"He also said there is nothing wrong with me. I won't go out on calls until Monday, but it's going to hurt me more sitting here thinking about all the cases on my desk than it will to be at my desk dealing with them."

He was still frowning and Mary covered his hand with hers. "I'm fine, Bill. And I give you my word, I won't leave the office, and I'll come home the second I start to feel tired or get a headache." A residual headache or two was to be expected after being conked on the head by a sheet of drywall.