Free Home Before Midnight by Virginia Kantra Page A

her husband?”
     
    “He attends—attended—with her sometimes.”
     
    “And you?”
     
    “Interested in my morals, Lieutenant?”
     
    “Maybe I’m just making conversation,” he suggested.
     
    “Uh huh.”
     
    “We’ve always gone to First Methodist,” Dorothy said. “Same as your people.”
     
    He didn’t go there anymore. But his mother did. It was another connection he might use. Another complication he didn’t want.
     
    “What else do you need to know?” Bailey asked.
     
    “The name of the Ellis’s lawyer.”
     
    She was already backed against the kitchen cabinets with her arms across her chest. But her chin came up at that. “Does he need one?”
     
    He’d been angling for a reaction. Hell, this whole visit was a fishing expedition. She was hooked, no doubt about it. That didn’t mean he had to enjoy watching her squirm.
     
    “I want to talk to Helen’s executor,” he explained. “Who’s handling her estate?”
     
    “Oh.” Bailey’s face cleared. “Pierce and Reynolds, here in town. Does that help?”
     
    It could. Especially if he found out Helen Stokes Ellis had left a whopping pile to her husband.
     
    His cell phone vibrated. He glanced down at the caller’s number. Gabrielle .
     
    Shit .
     
    “Is something wrong?” Bailey asked.
     
    Yeah . He checked his watch. He was late, and his daughter was going to be furious. Or worse, disappointed.
     
    He was supposed to do better. He had to do better.
     
    “Nope,” he lied. “But I have to go.”
     
    Mother and daughter stared. He could trace their family resemblance in the narrow, oval shape of their faces, in their nearly identical fine-boned frames.
     
    The reminder of what he had lost, of what he had left to lose, swept over him.
     
    “Thanks for the tea,” he said, and was gone.
     
     
     
     
    “WELL.” Dorothy huffed in disappointment. “He certainly left in a hurry.”
     
    Your fault, her look said. Men never leave your sister .
     
    Bailey shrugged. “So we were lucky this time.”
     
    “You could have at least tried to stop him.”
     
    “Mom.” Bailey regarded her petite, attractive mother with exasperated affection. Burke was investigating her. But in her mother’s world, male attention was always a good thing. “The guy is six feet four and built like a line-backer. Not to mention he carries a gun. I couldn’t even slow him down.”
     
    “A woman has ways,” Dotty said.
     
    “Some women, maybe.”
     
    “You know, Bailey, honey, you’re not bad-looking. If you’d just make an effort—”
     
    “I don’t want to make an effort. I’m happy the way I am.”
     
    Happy enough .
     
    “The right man could make you happier.”
     
    “Steve Burke is not the right man.”
     
    She’d already met the right man. At least, she’d thought she had. When Paul Ellis smiled at her on his way into his editor’s office, when he sent flowers after she completed an exhaustive line edit, when he plucked her from her miserable corner at the Christmas cocktail party, Bailey had felt like Cinderella attracting the notice of the prince. Paul was more than charming. He was educated, urbane, sophisticated, successful . . .
     
    And married, she learned later.
     
    Had been married. He was widowed now.
     
    Oh, God . Guilt scorched in her cheeks and burned in her stomach. She was absolutely going to hell.
     
    “What’s the matter with him?” Dorothy demanded.
     
    Him? Bailey pulled her thoughts together. Oh, Burke . “He’s too . . .”
     
    “Too what?”
     
    Too large. Too harsh. Too aggressively masculine, with his hard, cop’s eyes and broad, muscled body.
     
    Bailey had already battered her heart and bruised her ego fishing the pool of available men in New York. It was better—safer—to nurse a crush on her married boss than to risk her heart, her health, and her sanity on another disappointment. At least with Paul, she knew the limits of their relationship up front. At least Paul