“Enough,” Quinn said, not quite sharply but still with a snap of command. “You two can hash this out later—and if Cutter has anything to say about it you will—but right now we need to focus on who might be trying to send Amanda a message. Or worse.”

Worse. Adam’s gaze snapped to Quinn, then Amanda. He hadn’t thought that far. That perhaps that accident that apparently wasn’t an accident might have been more than a warning.

That it might have been intended to be much worse.

That it might have been meant to kill her.

It was odd, Amanda mused. All this time she had despised the very thought of Adam Kirk alive and well, had felt a spark of anger and resentment every time he popped into her mind. Practically had a mantra to chant about how unfair it was that he had walked away, how he was to blame.

So why did she feel so unsettled when she realized he felt the same way about himself?

Perhaps it was because she had always imagined him going blithely on with his life while her father, his life cut short because Adam had been careless, was in his grave. That had been the foundation of that resentment. To realize that he had been tortured by the memory of that night just as she had was...rattling somehow.

Quinn’s crazy idea that the guy in that car had been trying to kill her was...well, crazy. If Trevor Malachi wanted her dead why would he wait until now? And as Adam had said, wouldn’t he be more likely to come after the man who had actually shot him?

“It doesn’t make sense that he’d come after me,” she said.

For the first time Adam turned to look straight at her. And again she saw how stormy his gray eyes could look. When he spoke, his voice was full of both confidence and bitterness. “I’d play video of the statement you made about your father in court for anybody with a child and guarantee they’d vote for the worst penalty possible,” Adam said. “The evidence made him look like a killer. You made him look like a monster.”

She stared at him. The prosecutors had told her she didn’t have to make a statement, that it wouldn’t be needed since the case was so clear-cut, but that it couldn’t hurt. She had spent agonizing hours trying to pour her heartbreak, her grief into those words. And in the end she had veered off what she had written, and instead had simply told the jury who her father had been. Not just the cop willing to lay down his life for them, but the incredible man he’d been, the single father who had adored her, who had sacrificed time after time to see that she had the best he could give her, including himself.