“Just hold your horses,” Tiffany muttered, placing a bandage over the biggest area of Christina’s wounds. “Come on, sweetie, we’d better answer the door.” She tossed the washcloth into the sink, picked up her sniffling daughter and carried her to the front door. Expecting to have to apologize to a police officer and Stephen, she yanked on the knob and found herself face-to-face with J.D.

“You were going to get me a key,” he reminded her.

“Right.” His key had been the last thing on her mind. He shot a look at Christina and his brows drew into a single, condemning line. “I didn’t think about it. The back door was unlocked.” She shuffled her daughter from one hip to the other while Christina blinked back tears.

“What happened here?” J.D. asked.

“I falled down!” Christina said with more than a little pride. All of a sudden she was like a soldier home from battle, showing off her war wounds.

“That you did.” Tiffany pressed her lips to Christina’s curly crown. “Well, come on in—” She waved to the back of the house and then stopped short as she looked over his shoulder toward the street. “Oh, no.”

J.D. turned in time to see a police cruiser easing up to the curb. His gut clenched, an automatic reaction from too many conflicts with the law when he was a kid. In the house, Tiffany paled and J.D. realized that for a beautiful woman, she looked like hell. Her normally cool facade had slipped, her hair was falling out of a makeshift ponytail, and her clothes—faded jeans and a sleeveless blouse—wrinkled and smudged with dirt were a far cry from her usually neat and tidy, no-nonsense appearance.

“Excuse me.” Like a brushfire devouring dry grass, she was past him in an instant. Holding her daughter to her, she dashed down the two steps of the porch to the edge of the lawn, where shade trees lined the narrow street.

J.D. followed, his eyes narrowing as the rear door of the police car opened and Stephen sheepishly crawled out. All of J.D.’s worst fears congealed right then and there, and he wondered if Tiffany was at the end of her rope as far as the kids were concerned.

Christina was dirty and bleeding, like a refugee from a war zone. Stephen didn’t look much better. Most of his usual bravado had evaporated and his face was bruised, one eye nearly swollen shut. Scarcely a teenager and yet, it seemed, on the brink of big trouble with the law.

Not good. Not good at all.

But then J.D. had suspected as much.

“Mrs. Santini?” The officer who had driven the car, a short man with thick, wavy brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses, approached.

“Yes.”

“Officer Talbot, Bittersweet Police.”

“Hi.”

He glanced at J.D. “Mr. Santini?”

“Yes, but I’m not the boy’s father.”