"The very best kind. What are you helping her with?"

"A kidnapping." The teasing light went out of his eyes. "A baby."

"Oh." Automatically she covered her own with her hands. "I'm sorry. The baby… Is the baby… Do you know?"

"He's alive. And well."

"Thank God." Even as she closed her eyes in relief, she remembered. "The baby? Is it the one who was taken from his playpen, from his own backyard, just a couple of months ago?"

"That's right."

She took his hands. "You'll find him, Sebastian. You'll find him soon."

He nodded. "I'm counting on it."

It just so happened that Mel was at that very moment in the process of typing up a bill for Underwriter's Insurance. They had her on a monthly retainer—which kept the wolf from the door—but in the previous few months she had had some additional billable expenses. She also had a fading bruise on her left shoulder where a man supposedly suffering from whiplash and slipped discs had popped her a good one when he'd discovered her taking pictures of him changing a flat tire.

A tire she had herself discreetly deflated.

Bruises aside, it had been a good week's work.

If only everything were so simple.

David. She simply couldn't get David out of her head. She knew better—had been trained better. Personal involvements meant you messed up. Thus far, she'd only proven that rule.

She'd canvassed Rose's neighborhood, questioning people who had already been interviewed by the police. And, like the police, she'd come up with three different descriptions of a car that had been parked half a block from Rose's apartment. She also had four markedly different descriptions of a "suspicious character."

The term made her smile a little. It was so detective-novel. She'd certainly learned that life was much blander than fiction. In reality, investigative work consisted of mountains of paperwork, hours of sitting in a parked car fighting boredom while you waited for something to happen, making phone call after phone call, talking to people who didn't want to talk. Or—often worse—people who talked too much and had nothing to say.

And, occasionally, there was the extra added excitement of being pushed around by a two-hundred-pound gorilla in a neck brace.

Mel wouldn't have traded it for a mountain of gold dust.

But what good was it, she wondered, what good was making a living doing what you loved, and having the talent to do a good job of it, if you couldn't help a friend? There hadn't been so many friends in her life that she could take Rose and Stan for granted. They had given her something just by being there, by sharing David with her. The connection to family that she'd always done without.

She would have walked through fire to bring David back to them.

After tossing the billing aside, she picked up a file that hadn't been off her desk in two months. It was neatly labeled David Merrick, and its contents were miserably thin.

All his vital statistics were there—his height and weight and coloring. She had his footprints and his fingerprints. She knew his blood type and was aware of the tiny dimple on the left side of his mouth.

But the reports didn't say that the dimple deepened so sweetly when he laughed. It couldn't describe the engaging sound of that laughter, or how it felt when he pressed that soft, damp mouth to yours in a kiss. It didn't say how his pretty brown eyes sparkled when you lifted him high over your head to play airplane.

She knew how empty she felt, how sad and frightened. Just as she knew that if she multiplied those emotions by a thousand it wouldn't come close to what Rose was living with every hour of every day.

Mel opened the folder and drew out the formal studio shot of David at six months. It had been taken only a week before the kidnapping. He was grinning at the camera, his pudgy chin creased in a smile as he clutched the yellow bear she had bought for him on the day he'd come home from the hospital. His hair had begun to thicken, and it was the shade of ripening strawberries.

"We're going to find you, baby. We're going to find you and bring you home real soon. I swear it."

She put the picture away again, quickly. She had to, if she was to have any hope of proceeding in a calm and professional manner. Mooning over his picture wouldn't help David, any more than hiring a psychic with a pirate's mouth and spooky eyes would.

Oh, the man irritated her. Irritated her from the top of her head down to the soles of her feet and every possible inch between. That look on his face, that not-quite-a-smirk, not-quite-a-grin set to his mouth made her want to plant her fist there.

And his voice, smooth, with just a whisper of an Irish brogue, set her teeth on edge. There was such cool superiority in it. Except when he'd spoken to Rose, she remembered. Then it had been gentle and kind and unflaggingly patient.

Just setting her up, Mel told herself, and stepped over a pile of phone books to get to the doorway, where a refrigerator held a monstrous supply of soft drinks—all loaded with caffeine. He had just been setting Rose up, offering her hope when he had no right to.

David would be found, but he would be found by logical, meticulous police work. Not by some crackpot visionary in six-hundred-dollar boots.

She was just taking an angry swig when those boots walked through her door.

She said nothing, just continued to lean in the doorway, the bottle to her lips and her eyes shooting tiny green darts. Sebastian closed the door marked Sutherland Investigations behind him and took a lazy look around.

As offices went, he'd seen worse. And he'd certainly seen better. Her desk was army-surplus gray steel, functional and tough, but far from aesthetically pleasing. Two metal file cabinets were shoved against a wall that would have benefited from a coat of paint. There were two chairs, one in a lurid purple, the other a faded print, on either side of a skinny table that held ancient magazines and was scarred with sundry cigarette burns.

On the wall behind them, as out of place as an elegant woman in a waterfront dive, was a lovely watercolor of Monterey Bay. The room smelled inexplicably like a spring meadow.

He caught a glimpse of the room behind her and saw that it was a tiny and unbelievably disordered kitchen.

He couldn't resist.

Tucking his hands in his pockets, he smiled at her. "Some digs."

She took another drink, then dangled the bottle between two fingers. "Have you got business with me, Donovan?"