Protecting What's His (Line of Duty #1)(6)

“Why do they need to know that?”

Barker gulped. “The place card for the table.”

“Jesus.” Derek ran an impatient hand over his hair. “I’ll let you know.”

As Barker beat a quick path to the exit, Derek leaned back in his chair, allowing the heated meeting with Ginger in the hallway to play through his mind again, as it had done frequently since that morning, three days prior. Each time, he remembered something different about their encounter. Her floral scent, the smooth line of her throat, that damn sexy accent.

She claimed to be raising her seventeen-year-old sister. He couldn’t think of many women in their early twenties capable of shouldering that type of responsibility. It was a distinct possibility that she hadn’t been given a choice. The need to know more about Ginger ate at him…and he didn’t understand why. Despite his obvious attraction to her, this insatiable curiosity over a woman was damned unusual for him.

After a brief hesitation, Derek typed “Peet, Ginger” into the search bar of the national database. He’d learned her last name this morning after seeing it on the building mailbox assigned to her apartment. Based on her accent, Derek narrowed down his search to the Southeast section of the country.

He stilled in his chair when a two-week-old missing person’s report popped up out of Nashville, filed by a Valerie Peet, also listing Willa Peet, a minor, as missing.

It gave little information about the circumstances surrounding their disappearance, but color photographs had been provided by the mother, one being Ginger as a teenager. Willa’s appeared to be a recent school yearbook photograph. Neither one of the girls had police records.

He stared at Ginger’s photo. Though undeniably beautiful, she looked too thin and tired, appearing surprised that someone cared enough to take her picture. Shaking off a frisson of unease, Derek returned to the search screen and typed in “Peet, Valerie, Nashville.”

Her rap sheet took up the entire screen, including reckless endangerment of minors, crystal meth and prescription drug possession, public intoxication, prostitution, and a handful of DUIs. He could spend all day combing through the charges, but he was mostly interested in the first.

Derek clicked the first reckless endangerment file, dating back to 1999. As he read the description of Valerie’s criminal charges, he grew more incensed with each detail. A ten-year-old Ginger had been brought into a Nashville police department for attempting to shoplift food to feed four-year-old Willa. She told the officer their mother hadn’t been home since Christmas, two weeks prior.

Based on her latest charges, dated as recently as four months ago, Valerie hadn’t changed since leaving her two young children to starve all those years ago. Ginger had been seeing to Willa’s welfare for quite some time, it seemed. How they’d avoided being taken into state’s custody, Derek couldn’t fathom.

Something about the missing person’s report niggled at his detective’s brain. Why would Valerie Peet, a woman who obviously had very little use for her children, even bother making the effort to report them missing? Furthermore, after years of neglect, what would prompt Ginger to take Willa and leave Nashville only a couple of months before Willa graduated high school?

Derek had no way of finding out. Thanks to his massive hangover and annoyance over finding himself lusting after a woman on his way to a funeral, he’d made a less-than-stellar first impression. He very well couldn’t knock on her door and pry into her personal business when it shouldn’t be his concern in the first place.

The part that scared the hell out of him?

He wanted to make it his concern.





Chapter Five


Ginger used her trusty pink scissors to cut out the headline Is Your Vagina Angry? from a newly purchased women’s magazine, spread glue on the back, and pasted it over the picture of a nun looking thoughtful. She had a sick sense of humor. So sue her.

She stepped back and admired the decoupage nightstand she’d been working on all day. Get Thee to a Nunnery, she’d named this particular one. After a few finishing touches, it would be ready for a coat of lacquer.

Ginger smiled. Her hobby of decorating various pieces of furniture with interesting photographs and magazine cutouts might have started as a way to occupy her mind when living in Nashville, but somewhere along the line, she’d started doing it for fun. Since she purchased most of the furniture at donation centers, the expense was minimal, and creating something one-of-a-kind brought her a sense of accomplishment. Occasionally, she’d even sold pieces to students or visiting artists she met at Bobby’s Hideaway, although such a thing proved a rarity since the clientele didn’t have much interest in discussing furniture. Any money she’d made went into a college account for Willa. In a bank where Valerie couldn’t touch it.

She sighed into her half-empty wineglass, knowing her free time would be limited from here on out. While Willa attended her first day at the new high school, Ginger went out and found a job bartending at Sensation, a nightclub in the River North section of downtown Chicago.

Old habits die hard, she supposed. Bartending felt like a step backward after the progress she’d made leaving Nashville behind last week, but money came easy behind the bar. And if she knew how to accomplish one thing, it was getting people good and trashed. With the money she’d “borrowed,” Ginger probably didn’t need to work for quite a while, but apart from using some of the cash as their security deposit on the apartment, she didn’t plan to touch it unless absolutely necessary.