He thought it probably hadn’t occurred to her what she must look like when she did that. Or that she wasn’t supposed to be beautiful.

“Well, shoot,” he said belligerently, “I think Susie’s pretty, even with her scars. I’ve told her, but I don’t think she believes me. She just tells me, ‘Oh, Dad…’”

Mary nodded, and he watched her smile grow crooked. “That’s because everybody knows all dads are supposed to think their little girls are beautiful. It’s a question little girls ask their mothers: ‘Mommy, am I pretty?’” She studied her almost empty cone as if she’d lost her appetite for it. The sadness was in her eyes, now, too.

“Did you ask yours?” He smiled at her, wanting to bring the lovely green light back into her eyes.

She bit into her cone with a soft crunch and nodded. “Sooner or later we all do.”

“And what did she say?”

Her throat moved as if it was rocks she’d swallowed instead of a bite of sugar cookie ice cream cone. After a pause, looking past him she said in a voice without expression, “She told me the devil loves a pretty face. Then she told my father. He made me kneel on the church floor-I don’t know for how long…hours, I guess. Maybe all day. I remember the floor was hard…I remember my knees hurt, and my back. I remember being cold and hungry. I remember crying.”

Roan was used to hearing shocking things, but he couldn’t remember anything he’d ever heard on the job that hit him as hard. Luckily, he’d had a lot of practice keeping his feelings to himself, so he was able to respond in the quiet, even tone he’d use with a distraught witness. “Your father was a preacher?”

She nodded.

And there it was, finally-a small thing, but after a week of subtle probing his mystery woman had just handed him a piece of her past. A piece that might even help solve the puzzle of who and what she was, if he could take the time to look at it closely.

But right then he felt no flare of triumph at the revelation, no sense of achievement or success. Right then his mind was occupied by only one thing: the image of a little girl with shimmering tear-filled green eyes and the face of an angel, on her knees in a cold empty church, shivering…crying…praying. Wondering what she’d done that was so wrong.

As the shock slowly faded, rage took its place. The same rage, he told himself, that filled him every time he had to deal with a case involving abuse of a child. He never had been able to understand that kind of cruelty-never had and never would.

Stiffening his facial muscles and avoiding the eyes that gazed past him, veiled in a misty sheen that reminded him of dewfall on a gray spring morning, he tried to think of something to say, something that might restore the gray to sunlit green. His inability to do so had begun to eat dangerously at his self-control when he saw Susie Grace wending her way toward them, wearing the remnants of her Rocky Road ice cream cone as a chocolate goatee.

A final little skip-hop brought her to a halt beside the table, already launched into her appeal. “Dad, I used up all my quarters. Can I have some more? Please? I only need-”

“What’s this?” Roan touched her sticky chin with his knuckle. “Looks to me like you need to wash your face, kiddo.”

Susie Grace stuck out her tongue in a mostly fruitless effort to comply with that suggestion.

It felt good to watch his kid being a kid and be thankful for it. Laughter shivered inside his chest as he said sternly, “Nope, ’fraid it’s gonna take more than that. Come on-I’ll take you to the restroom.”

Susie Grace gasped as if he’d suggested she strip right there on the spot. “Da-ad, it’s the girls’ bathroom. You can’t go in there!”

“How about if I take you?” Mary said.

His daughter’s reply was a radiant smile, made downright impish by that chocolate goatee.

“Is that okay with you?” Mary asked Roan in a low voice as she scooted back her chair, nudging aside the pile of shopping bags that were stacked around and underneath it.

He shrugged and said, “Sure.”

Susie Grace threw him a look of pure glee. She reached confidently for Mary’s hand, Mary looped the strap of her purse over one shoulder and the two of them began to make their way through the maze of tables toward the restrooms on the opposite side of the food court.

Roan followed them with his eyes, followed them until the image was seared on his brain: little girl with tousled red-gold hair, dressed in a spanking new spring-green outfit, hopping and skipping with barely contained exuberance as she held on to the hand of a tall, slender woman…a woman who dressed in shapeless clothes, with her hair hanging down her back in a lank brown ponytail, yet who walked with beauty and grace and confidence in her step.

Then…that image seemed to shimmer and sizzle and melt like butter on a griddle, and another came to take its place: Same little girl, four years younger…same joyful exuberance as she clings to the hand of a tall, slender woman with fiery red curls tumbling untamed down her back…as she smiles down at the child… and walks with beauty, grace and confidence in her step.

And for some reason he thought again about the old Blackfoot horse trainer and the Spirit Messenger. He didn’t believe in such things-he didn’t. But something shivered across his skin and filled the inside of his head and every part of him, and he wondered whether it was a warning…or a promise.

He waited until he was certain Mary and his daughter weren’t going to look back, then buried his face in his hands.

God help me…God, or Spirit Messenger…Bear, Wolf, Buffalo or Raven…whoever you are: Help me. I think I’m in danger…of falling in love with a murder suspect.

It was late afternoon when the SUV pulled to a stop in front of Mary’s house, but at that time of year the sun was still high in the sky. Susie Grace had fallen asleep in the back seat on the drive back from Bozeman, stuffed full of ice cream and lulled by the sunshine and the quiet and the lazy beat of the music from the car radio Roan had tuned-with apologies to Mary-to a classic country station.

Mary didn’t mind that Roan seemed disinclined toward conversation, or worry about what might be weighing so heavily on his mind as he drove with his elbow resting on the windowsill and his hand covering the lower part of his face, eyes narrowed behind his sunglasses in that way they had of seeming to be focused on something far beyond the road ahead. She didn’t worry about anything, actually, not even her own bleak future, and the silence didn’t seem awkward or burdensome to her.

Perhaps, like Susie Grace, she’d fallen under the spell of a lazy spring Sunday afternoon, and it was only lethargy that made her content to listen to the music-which she’d grown accustomed to if not fond of during the past ten years-and gaze through the car window at the cattle and horses grazing in spring-green pastures, and new foals frisking awkwardly alongside their mothers. And to allow herself, for the first time in many, many years-and only for a little while-to dream…

This. Yes, this life…this man, who makes me feel excited and happy…young and alive…and yet somehow…safe. This child, who makes me feel needed, and makes me laugh. Yes…this.

Like a child glimpsing a forbidden garden beyond a locked gate, she could allow her mind to drink in the fragrance of the flowers, bask in the loveliness…just for a little while.

She couldn’t hold back a sigh when Roan pulled the SUV to a stop and turned off the motor. The smile that hovered on her lips as she turned to him felt fragile and precariously balanced, like a butterfly in a breeze.

“Thank you,” she said softly, mindful of the sleeping child. “It was nice of you to let me do this.”

She couldn’t read his eyes behind the dark lenses, but his smile seemed wry. “I should be thanking you. Susie Grace had a great time. I know that was about the easiest time clothes shopping with her I’ve had in a while.”

“She’s a great little girl. And it was nice to forget…for a time.”

“Yeah.” He looked away for a moment, and she could see a muscle rippling in his jaw.

She stared at it, knowing she mustn’t, while her own jaws grew tight and her throat began to ache, and all her forbidden thoughts and dreams thrummed inside her head like imprisoned bees. That thrumming grew ever more insistent, until it seemed to hang in the air between them…until she couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Yeah, well-” Roan said, at almost the same moment Mary was saying, with a bright little laugh, “Well, I guess I’d better-”

He cleared his throat and slapped the gear lever into Park. “I know some of those bags back there are yours.” He reached for the door handle.

“Don’t get out,” Mary said quickly, nodding toward the back seat. “I’ll get it-there’s just the one.”

Her chest twinged with the guilty knowledge that somewhere in the jumble of shopping bags full of little girls’ clothes in the back of the SUV was a department-store bag with a lovely pale-green silk sweater in it. A woman’s sweater, slinky and sexy and feminine. It was the first becoming thing she’d allowed herself to buy in years-almost certainly a mistake, especially now. But it had been impossible to resist both the sweater and Susie Grace. Mary had just been telling her that redheads look good in green when Susie Grace had spotted this particular sweater. She’d insisted Mary should buy it. “You’d look good in green, too,” she’d declared, “’cause you’ve got green eyes.”

A mistake.

Heart pounding, vision shimmering, she reached for the door handle and yanked it open. And froze, half in and half out of the car as a sleepy voice came from the back seat.

“Mary? What’s goin’ on? Are we home already?”