THE PERFECT DAUGHTER by Anna DeStefano Harlequin Super Romance Harlequin Silhouette Romance Novel Contemporary Romance

MonaVie

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You've watched her fight for the people she cares about. Now journey back to Oakwood, Georgia as Maggie and NYPD Detective Matt Lebrettie fight for her safety, the future Maggie deserves, and the love they can't run from any longer.

Don't miss the first two books in the Daughter series!
The Unknown Daughter (ISBN 0373712340)
The Runaway Daughter (ISBN 0373713290)

The Perfect Daughter "offers an insightful look into the realities of dealing with tragedy. Her characters are well-drawn and her dialogue sparkles." -- Romantic Times

"Touches the heart...pierces the soul...a true romance!!! Treat yourself with Anna DeStefano's The Perfect Daughter this Valentine's Day." -- 5 Stars, Donna Zapf, Cataromance Reviews

"Anna DeStefano writes in a breezy way that makes her books a joy to read...heart warming...the reader will be rooting for a happy ending. ... A very good book recommended to all romance readers!" --Armchair Interviews

"Anna DeStefano's remarkable stories of the healing power of love touch the heart with hope. One of the genre's rising stars..." --Gayle Wilson. Two-time RITA Award Winning Author

"A wonderful story...that tugs at your heart and leaves you with a satisfied sigh." --NYT Bestselling Author Haywood Smith, on The Prodigal's Return (ISBN 0373713584)

"Stop hovering, Mom." Maggie Rivers barely glanced at the woman who'd joined her beside an ornate stained glass window.

She'd been independent for years. Since she was a teenager, her parents had supported her from a distance while trusting her to make her own choices. But today, Carrinne Wilmington-Rivers was displaying a talent for up-close-and-personal hand wringing.

"I'm fine," Maggie insisted, when her entire body was a throbbing migraine waiting to happen. "Please go sit with Dad."

Her father was somewhere amidst the crowd of Class-A-dressed officers who'd filled the enormous Manhattan cathedral. But her mother had abandoned their perfectly good seats to offer the kind of public support that could only mean disaster. The kind of lean on me, when you're not strong display Maggie refused to let NYPD Detective Matt Lebretti see her needing.

Matt and the other pallbearers would be carrying the flag-draped coffin into the church any minute. Then he'd join her near the front. She had a funeral service to get through for a man she barely knew. A man whose death was entirely too personal for both her and Matt. No way was she indulging in a heart-to-heart with her mother. It was already impossible not to picture everyone being there for Matt, instead of his partner.

He and Bill had been standing only a few feet away from each other when Bill went down. "I know how hard this must be for you." Her mother squeezed Maggie's shoulder. "If you needed anything--"

Through the cathedral's open doors, she could see him waiting on the steps for the hearse to arrive. Her heart caught at the rigid set of his classic Italian features. He was determined to be okay, too, no matter how responsible he felt for Bill Donavan's death.

"It's not like this is the first funeral I've ever been to." She shrugged off her mother's touch and the echoes of everything she'd fought to leave behind.

"Matt's clearly worried about you." Her mom blinked at Maggie's wordless glare to shut up, please. "Letting yourself lean on people while you deal with something like this isn't the end of the world, Honey."

That's what her dad had said a NYPD funeral would look like. His description hadn't begun to prepare her for the reality.

When she'd started NYU five years ago, he'd transferred from being the sheriff of small-town Oakwood, GA, to a captain's position in one of New York's outlying boroughs. His county-funded job mostly involved enforcing civil laws and warrants, unlike the city officers who dealt with the bulk of the day-to-day violence and street crime. Still, he and his deputies had attended every department funeral in the last five years. They all turned out--NYPD, New Jersey officers, sheriffs, port authority cops. They showed up in force to honor the ultimate sacrifice an officer could make.

Maggie glanced to where Bill's grieving widow and mother were holding each other in the front pew. Women who'd given a hero their heart, never believing this could happen. Not really. Not to them.

Carrinne walked away in silence. Her expression assured Maggie that she wasn't fooling anyone.

Okay, maybe fine wasn't the right word for standing alone in a church teaming with grieving people. But at least she'd earned a few moments of silence, free of her family wondering what had been going on since her trip down to Georgia last summer.

Her return to the tiny town of Oakwood for her great-grandfather, Oliver's, funeral had unearthed memories she'd thought were buried forever. Now, her past had a stranglehold on the life she'd worked so hard for, feeding her fear of losing Matt and the compulsion to run from everything.

"You guys ready?" Tommy Callihan asked. Word had just come over the radio. The hearse was a couple of blocks away.

It was too dark to be such a hot, July morning. Grey-tinged clouds rolled drearily by, threatening rain. Staring at them should have been depressing. Instead, it was a relief. Anything was better than focusing on the flood of dark blue surrounding him as he waited for the body of his friend to arrive. Or turning around again to find Maggie still watching from inside.

"Oh, my God! I'm so sorry," she'd said three days ago, when he'd told her about the shooting.

She'd clung to him, asking if there was anything she could do, for him or the Donovan family. When he'd left for work the next morning, she'd bravely battled the first tears he'd ever seen in her expressive, brown eyes. Then when he'd come back that night and every night since, she'd clung some more. And he'd let her.

He'd needed Maggie's warm, toned body in his arms, just as much as she'd needed him. Just for a day or two, he'd told himself. Just until he could close his eyes and not see Bill bleeding out while Matt was powerless to do anything but pray for a medical miracle that hadn't come.

But two days had come and gone, then three. And the haunted look in Maggie's eyes hadn't disappeared. A look that was about more than just one dead police officer.

She'd said she was fine. She'd been saying it for nearly a year, ever since they'd moved in together and things had started to change.

She'd been a force to reckon with when they'd first started dating. Fearless. Magnificent. Then last summer she'd started calling his cell three and four times a day. They'd argued about it, when they never argued, and she'd finally stopped. Next, his long hours and late nights had started to irritate her. This from a woman mired in a grueling schedule of teaching by day, and masters-level courses in education at NYU several nights a week. Then Bill had been killed, and Matt had caught tears in her eyes every time he'd left her since. And that's when he'd finally understood.

Maggie wasn't irritated. She was scared. Spooked by the unrelenting danger he faced as a lead detective on Manhattan's gang task force. Damn it!

He had a friend to bury. A job to do. A flood of internal red tape drowning him after the shooting.

But what was he spending every waking moment worrying about? Holding on to the woman who'd knocked him on his ass when he'd first caught sight of her--at the Central Park softball game she'd come to watch her dad pitch. At twenty-five, she'd been almost too young for him. But she hadn't seemed the least bit impressed by his bad-boy muscles, or the rough-edged charm that most women responded to. Her first irreverent comeback to one of his smoother pickup lines had lured him back for round two. Before the game was over, he'd talked her into going for a beer after, and he hadn't looked at another woman since.

Sun glinted off the windows of the hearse as it turned the corner and crept to a stop at the curb. He, Callihan and the other officers headed down the marble steps, his mind replaying the image of Bill's widow and his mother crying at the front of the cathedral, powerless to stop what was happening. Just as they'd been powerless every day Bill had left to do what he'd sworn to do for the people of this city. The same job Matt couldn't turn his back on, not even for Maggie. Not even when it felt like he was wasting his time more often than not these days.

There would always be more crime and violence, more too-young gang hoods joining the party, than he'd every be able to stop. But he did the job better than just about anyone on the force. And that had always been enough. Making whatever difference he could had kept him going, no matter the cost.

Now, the tab included his partner's life. And if Matt didn't do something soon, his relationship with Maggie might join the growing list of casualties.

Matt's hands caressed Maggie's skin. She swallowed his growl, returning the roughness she'd never wanted with anyone else. Her nails scraped. Her teeth nipped at supple muscles. Their bodies came together one last shuddering time.

Minutes later, their breathing still out of control, he rolled until she was straddling his waist, their chests touching, her brown hair curling madly around her face as she leaned in for another kiss. He palmed her bottom, his fingers long enough to trace downward until she wiggled and collapsed with a purr of contentment. His arms wrapped her in a hard-edged cocoon she never wanted to leave, so she cuddled closer and held on to both the moment and the man that she was fighting so desperately to keep.

Her heart skipped at his lazy sigh, the way it always did when something felt this right. Then he kissed her temple so tenderly, the impulse to run attacked without warning.

"You should go. You're going to be late." She struggled away. Drew the sheet around her as she sat. Wiped at her eyes and cursed under her breath.

"We have a few more minutes." He curled her back into his arms, then scowled when she shied out of reach. Rolling to his feet, muscles rippling, he yanked on his jeans. "One minute, you're dragging me back to bed, Maggie. The next you're shoving me out the door. Make up your mind."

The task force had a lead on the Latino gang members who'd ambushed Matt and Bill two weeks ago. They were tightening the net tonight. Forcing a confrontation that could turn deadly. And she'd deliberately delayed Matt getting to the station for his midnight call.

I needed to hold you, so I wouldn't think about where you're going...or what could happen...

A masculine sigh yanked her from her thoughts. She looked up in time to see Matt's frown soften.

Why couldn't he have just stayed pissed and stormed away, until she was ready to handle him again?

He was an amazing lover. A tough man with a huge heart to match every other larger-than-life part of him. But tender and understanding gestures weren't his thing. Neither was looking at her as if she might shatter to pieces.

"I'm fine." At least she would be, if she could manage just a little more space between them. But Matt held fast this time.

"Not until we talk," he insisted, as if heart-to-heart chats were something they indulged in every day. "You can't keep doing this. I can't keep doing it. I thought you understood the risks that I have to take."

"I do understand." Too well. But understanding and dealing with the danger he put himself in for his job, where two different things.

The woman he'd first met had been able to handle anything, and Matt understandably wanted that kick-ass, confident Maggie back.

"You say, 'I love you,' when I walk out the door--" He sounded almost angry now. Sad, but angry. "--like you may never get another chance."

"Since you make it impossible for me to do my job without worrying about how it's going to affect you!" His fists clenched against his thighs. "You've always known what I do. What I am."

He stood between total strangers and the harm most people never knew surrounded them. But Maggie knew. She'd survived her teenage brush with drugs and the violence of that world, during the few years she'd lived in Oakwood before college. But her best friend, Claire, hadn't. Her sheriff's deputy uncle had protected Maggie, but she'd seen with her own eyes the kind of risks officers took to do their jobs. Risks that got cops, even specially trained ones like Matt, killed. And she--

"Maggie?" Matt smoothed a hand through the messy hair that made her look even younger than she was. "It's time to talk about what's bothering you."

Everyone wanted to know what was wrong--her parents, the friends she hardly ever saw anymore, the doctor no one knew she'd visited, her professors and her boss at work. But talking, remembering... It only made things worse.

"What about you?" she demanded. "You want to talk? Let's talk about the way you're obsessed with going after that gang that took Bill out, putting yourself more and more at risk with every assignment. It's like you won't quit until you've made up for what happened, even if you have to self-destruct to do it."

"Is that what you call being on the streets or in the station twenty hours a day since the funeral?" She was working herself up to sounding bitchy, but how else was she supposed to sound, when something precious was dying right before her eyes? "You only come back here to change clothes, grab a shower and maybe fit in a quickie, if I'm available. You're not eating. You're not sleeping. Half the time, you look ready to kill someone, or get yourself killed in the process. Why don't we take a few minutes to discuss that?"

"So you'll have even more reason to worry about me and wonder what's going to happen while I'm at work!" He stalked to the tiny closet they shared and dragged on a t-shirt--completing the uniform that, along with his longer-than-regulation hair and beard stubble, helped him blend into the inner-city environment he fought so hard to control. "You haven't been able to handle hearing about my cases for months, Maggie. Now you're so messed up about Bill, you've even got your mother asking me to help."

Her concerned lover was gone when Matt returned to the bed. Calm, unflappable Detective Lebretti gazed down at her now.

"She pulled me aside at Bill's wake. She wanted me to find some way to get you to talk about what's wrong, because she sure as hell can't."

"I'm tired." Tired of herself. Tired of everyone worrying. Most of all, she was tired of denying that this broken thing she and Matt had become was entirely her fault. "I'm--"

"You're a mess, and you won't let anyone help you." The pain in his voice almost sent her back into his arms.

Disgusted, she headed for the closet, wrapping the sheet around her and wiping her eyes to be certain not a single tear fell. When Matt reached for her arm, she jerked away.

He couldn't help her. No one could--with the messed-up love she felt for him, or the mess she'd made of graduate school and the summer teaching internship she was no longer handling any better than anything else.

The only person who could help her was herself, a truth she'd hid from long enough. She came from a family of fearless survivors. It was time she started acting like it again.

"I... I'm okay." She forced her brain to function as she slipped into the first thing she found to wear. "It's okay."

It felt good, actually, to be pulling her suitcase from the shelf and filling it with whatever she'd need for that night. To be doing something besides delaying the inevitable.

"What... You're leaving?" Matt hovered behind her, his warmth and concern taunting her with dreams that were never going to happen for them. Lord, the man knew how to twist the knife. "I don't want you to leave. For God's sake, don't go tonight. Wait until--"

They were over. They'd been over for months. She'd simply been too much of a coward to accept it.

The impulse to kiss away his shock sent her back to the closet for more of her things. When you'd give anything to stick things out for one more night, just so you could hurt your guy all over again tomorrow, it was time to kick yourself to the curb.

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