A Good Girl

CHAPTER 7

He should tell her about Jenny. Tell her why he'd busted The Strip Joint and taken away her only hope of seeing her father recover. Obviously Mary would have known his sister. They'd been onstage together the night of the arrest.

Mary had just poured out her deepest secrets to him and Bill sat there, holding his silence. He could look at her now and see the woman he'd loved for the past two years.

The woman he'd almost lost two days before.

But things were different. Something was happening. Inside him, or between them, he didn't know. He just knew he had to get out of there.

He offered to take her to work, where her car had been parked since the storm.

She accepted.

And they talked about the sunshine and the calm during the drive, finding it odd that things could look so peaceful and normal after the nightmare storm. They talked about the vagaries of Mother Nature. And when he pulled up in front of her office, she jumped out, thanking him for the ride before he could decide whether or not to kiss her goodbye.

She didn't expect to hear from him anytime soon. He could tell.

"I'll call you," he said just before the door shut, but he wasn't sure she heard him. He wasn't sure he'd wanted her to.

Neither was he sure why he called Ramsey's cell and told the younger man to let their Captain know he wouldn't be in that day. Or why he drove to the airport and boarded a plane to Atlantic City. He didn't tell anyone, not even Ramsey Miller, what he was doing.

Mostly because he had no idea what he'd tell them. He had no idea what he was doing.

The few hours' wait to get on a plane, the flight and cab ride didn't give him any clarity. He gave the last address he had for his baby sister, not convinced she'd let him in. She'd made it clear when she'd left home ten years before that she didn't want to see any of them again. She wasn't like them, she'd said. She didn't fit into their cozy family unit.

And she was done with their interference.

What she did with her life was her own business. And she was going to do it on her own. Not with help from her parents, who wanted her to be what they thought she should be. Or her older sister, and certainly not from her interfering cop brother.

She'd been in touch with Bill's younger brother. Had him up to Atlantic City more than once. Sean let things slip now and then. But the family didn't mention Jenny much. Talk of her hurt too badly.

It especially hurt Bill. Jenny hated him most of all. She wasn't going to answer her door to him. Didn't matter that it was three-thirty in the afternoon. He'd made this trip half a dozen times. In the morning. The evening. She was never home—or hadn't wanted him to think she was. He'd leave a note and catch the next flight back to Boston. That should get him home by early evening and he could still put in a few hours at the office before heading home.

Before Mary turned in and he'd have to decide whether or not he was going to call and see how she was doing.

Leaving the cabbie out front with the meter running, he knocked on the door of Jenny's apartment. And stood there speechless when she opened it. Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, with her long blond hair hanging over her shoulders, she wore no makeup, no jewelry. She looked like a grown-up version of the little girl who used to tag along behind him and drive him nuts with her questions.

He'd never questioned her adoration.

Until he'd lost it.

"What's wrong?" Her question wasn't filled with the resentment he'd come to expect from her. But it wasn't all that friendly, either. "Did something happen to Mom or Dad?"