Free Under the Wire by Cindy Gerard

so enjoyed telling her, he was sixteen. Not a baby.
     
    Well, he was her baby, damn it, and that was never going to change. Opening up a lower desk drawer, she pulled out his photograph and set it on the credenza where she could see it.
     
    Such a beautiful boy. Who would soon be a man. A man who looked exactly like his father.
     
    When she felt a tear threaten, she growled, angry with herself, "Okay. Pity party's officially over."
     
    She settled in to get some work done. In the back of her mind, however, a niggling question—one that had nothing to do with Sri Lanka—played over and over again: How long was it going to take her to work up the courage to follow through with the real reason she'd moved to Boston?
     
    As soon as she got her legs under her and her backbone shored up, she'd face the music ... and possibly the most difficult confrontation of her life.
     
     
    Two weeks later
     
    "Ms. Campora?"
     
    Lily looked up from her desk to see the charge nurse poke her head in Lily's open office door.
     
    "Hey, Gracie. And it's 'Lily,' okay?"
     
    Lily's first two weeks on the job had passed in a blur of activity. Which was good. When she dragged herself home each night, she was too exhausted to worry about Adam. But she still missed him. That wasn't going to change even though he'd called twice, he was fine, and he was having the time of his life.
     
    "You got a minute?"
     
    "Sure. What's up?"
     
    "We're having a little trouble deciphering your new trauma board procedures. Can you come down and decode for us?"
     
    "Absolutely." Lily checked her watch—couldn't believe it was almost noon. She reached for her coffee mug, telling herself that since it was still officially morning, she was entitled to another jolt of caffeine to get her through it. "Give me fifteen and I'll be there."
     
    One of the hallmarks of her administrative practices was the open-door policy. That and striking a balance between management priorities and staff needs. First and foremost, she was a nurse. She didn't want to ever forget that. And she wanted her staff to know she never forgot it.
     
    She finished up what she was doing, then hit the floor and headed for Trauma. She'd just rounded the corner into the unit and had the main desk in her sights when she looked up—and felt her heart stop.
     
    A man stood in profile at the far end of the hall; he was speaking with the EMTs who were debriefing an attending on what appeared to be a recent admit. The man was well built, dark, and Latino. And the way he stood ... the breadth of his shoulders ... the blue-black of his hair. He looked so much like Manny.
     
    Manny.
     
    Her heart still hurt when she thought of him. Of returning to his sister's Managua apartment all those years ago and finding him gone. Of the days she'd spent searching for him, agonizing over his fate.
     
    Of the moment Poveda had told her that Manny had died in a firefight in some Nicaragua hellhole.
     
    For seventeen years, she'd still seen him in every handsome Latino man she ever encountered. She would spot a man across a room, across a street, on a bus, or even on a plane and her heart would stutter exactly the way it was stuttering now.
     
    God. She'd lost track of the number of heart-stopping times she'd studied a dark male profile with her breath caught in her chest... and then he'd turn and she'd be looking at a stranger.
     
    Because Manny Ortega was dead.
     
    For seventeen years.
     
    Only now she knew otherwise.
     
    It still came as a shock—but Manny was alive.
     
    The thrill and amazement and confusion that knowledge always brought coursed through her now, adding to the irregular beat of her heart.
     
    Manny was alive.
     
    He was also the real reason she'd moved to Boston.
     
    He was here. A detective on the Boston PD. He'd been here for almost five years now. And Lily had been determined to find him. To find out what had happened. How he'd survived. Why he hadn't contacted her.
     
    A guarded