Daniel's Desire - By Sherryl Woods Page 0,5
he had to do, no matter how delicate the situation or how uncomfortable it made him.
“I’m on my way,” he promised, folding the fax into quarters and stuffing it into the pocket of his jacket. “I’ll check in with you later. You sure you don’t want me to bring her over, if it is Kendra? If she figures out we’re on to her, she could run again.”
“Just alert Molly, in case she doesn’t know anyone’s looking for the girl. She’ll keep her safe enough.”
“She has a thirteen-year-old working in a bar,” Daniel reminded him, an edge of sarcasm in his voice. It was just like Molly and her soft heart to take in a runaway kid and to hell with the consequences. Had she even once considered how desperate the parents might be or how many laws she might be breaking?
Joe chuckled at his comment on Molly’s lack of judgment. “Loosen up. The kid’s serving chowder, spilling more of it than she’s serving, to tell the truth of it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Something tells me it’s the best place she could be right now while we figure out what drove her to run away. The note she left didn’t tell us a damned thing. I don’t want to turn her back over to her parents and then find out there was some kind of abuse going on.”
Daniel had his own opinion about this bending of the rules, but he bit his tongue. It was Joe’s call, at least until the court got involved. Then Daniel would have quite a lot to say about a woman who put a teenage runaway to work, no questions asked, without reporting her presence to the authorities.
“The man you were talking to before, he was a cop,” Kendra told Molly, her face pale and her eyes filled with panic. “I can spot a cop a mile away.”
“It was Joe Sutton and, yes, he is a detective, but he’s a good guy,” Molly reassured her. “He drives over every few weeks for my chowder. If he’d been here to look for you, he would have said something. Besides, he’s gone now, so obviously he didn’t recognize you.”
“Maybe he forgot his handcuffs and had to go back for them,” Kendra said.
“Sweetie, he wouldn’t handcuff you. You ran away. You’re not a criminal. You have nothing to fear from Joe.”
The words were barely out of her mouth when the door opened and Daniel Devaney came striding in as if he’d arrived to conquer the world. In her opinion, Kendra had a lot more to worry about with Daniel than she ever would with Joe Sutton. Daniel was a rigid, by-the-book kind of guy when it came to situations like this. How he and his twin brother, Patrick, had come from the same gene pool was a total enigma to her.
“Go in the back,” Molly ordered the teenager, maneuvering in an attempt to keep Kendra out of Daniel’s view. “And stay alert in case you need to get out of here in a hurry.”
Kendra paled at the terse order. “What’s going on? Is that cop back?”
“No. Just do whatever you have to do to stay out of sight. Tell Retta what I said. Tell her Daniel’s here. She’ll understand and she’ll help you. I’ll explain later,” Molly promised, giving the girl’s hand a reassuring squeeze. “Trust me. Everything’s going to be okay.”
Kendra followed the direction of her gaze and spotted Daniel. “He’s a cop, too, isn’t he?” she said at once.
“No, worse, in this instance. He’s with a social services agency.”
Understanding and alarm immediately flared in Kendra’s eyes. “Then he’s here for me?”
“More than likely.” She couldn’t imagine anything else that would have brought Daniel waltzing into her bar again, not after she’d made it clear that his presence here was unwelcome. “Just stay out of sight. I can handle Daniel Devaney.”
When she was satisfied that Kendra was safely out of the bar, Molly strolled over to Daniel’s table, order pad in hand, a neutral expression firmly plastered on her face. She ignored the once-familiar jolt to her senses. She would play this cool for Kendra’s sake. If there hadn’t been so much at stake, Daniel could have starved to death before she’d have given him a second glance.
“Fancy seeing you here,” she said. “I thought you preferred classier joints these days.”
Daniel frowned at her. “I never said that.”
“You never had to. Your disdain has always been evident.” And never more so than the