When the Bough Breaks (Rose Gardner Investigations #6) - Denise Grover Swank Page 0,1

you’re glowing.”

If I was glowing, it was only because I was perspiring. I was hot all the time.

He wrapped an arm around my back and gave me a sweet smile. “Let’s get you dressed and take you home so you can rest.”

“I don’t want to go home,” I said in a grumpy tone. “I hate bein’ alone out there. Yesterday I dropped a wooden spoon, and try as I might I couldn’t reach it. I had to have Muffy pick it up and jump up on the sofa so I could get it from her.”

“Just imagine how handy she’ll be with fetchin’ diapers,” he said as he helped me slide off the bed. “How about you get dressed and we’ll do something together?”

“I’m supposed to see Ashley and Mikey tonight, remember?”

Mike had agreed that I could take them out to dinner, which was nothing short of a miracle. After my sister, Violet, had died last October, my former brother-in-law had kept me from seeing my niece and nephew. But then I’d run into them at Walmart the week before. Ashley, my six-year-old niece, had cycled through shock, excitement, then anger to see that I was so pregnant, given she hadn’t known I was expecting. I’d tried my best not to shame Mike in front of them, and when Ashley said he’d been telling them for months that I was too busy to see them, I just shot him a dirty look and suggested I get them for a few hours this week.

“I’m totally free,” I’d said with a bright smile. “Any day.”

With no graceful way out, he’d settled on tonight. When I’d offered to pick them up from daycare, his body had stiffened. “I’d have to add your name to the list of approved people,” he said in a short tone. “So just pick them up from my house.”

I used to be on the list of approved people, so I had to wonder why he’d gone to such lengths to push me away. What was he really up to? Then again, I’d been wondering that very thing for months.

I was fairly certain he had some criminal ties that circled back to James “Skeeter” Malcolm, the crime lord of Fenton County, Arkansas, though I had yet to figure out any details. I was even more sure Violet had known. Other than a few personal items, she hadn’t left anything to the kids, instead leaving her one-third share of the nursery to my best friend, Neely Kate, and everything else, including our childhood home, to me. Her attorney had said she’d given him an envelope for me to open after her death, some sort of directive that would help me understand the terms of her will—including her wish to grant me custody of her children (something she couldn’t do without just cause)—but his office had been broken into after the funeral. The only thing missing was that envelope.

I’d given the theft a lot of thought over the last few months as I tried to figure out how to handle the Mike situation, and I’d come to the realization that it had been intended as a message.

I’m powerful. Don’t mess with me.

And the only person in the county powerful enough to stand up to the Lady in Black, my alter ego in the criminal world, was my ex-lover and the biological father of my baby.

The aforementioned James Malcolm.

But it was hard to get information out of someone who refused to see you. James had made it clear he wanted nothing to do with the baby, so back in February, I’d sent him a letter asking him to meet with me to sign the forms that would relinquish his paternal rights. I’d also hoped to ask him about Mike’s illegal activities. He’d very grudgingly agreed to a meeting at our mutual attorney’s office, but ultimately, he’d been a no-show. Or rather, he had shown, and then slipped out before Carter sent me back to meet him. He’d left behind the paternity relinquishment papers with a sticky note that said, I’m not signing.

So not only was I none the wiser about Mike’s criminal involvement, but now I was waiting for Skeeter Malcolm to try using my baby as a pawn.

Because the criminals in the county couldn’t find out James was my baby’s biological father—they needed to continue thinking he or she was Joe’s in all ways, rather than just by choice, and James knew it.

When Joe had first suggested that we raise the baby together,