PROLOGUE

Two months ago

NYPD detectives Lori Soles and Sue Ellen Bass led a pack of uniformed officers through the door of my busy coffeehouse. Seeing their grave expressions, I feared something terrible had happened to Mike Quinn, and they’d come to deliver the grim news.

Despite my worries, I faced the women squarely.

“Detectives, how can I help you tonight?”

“Clare Cosi, we’re here to place you under arrest.”

With customers chattering around me, and the fire crackling loudly in the Village Blend’s hearth, I assumed I’d heard wrong.

“Arrest me?”

Sue Ellen Bass, the more volatile of the pair, glanced at the small army of uniforms behind her and reached for the handcuffs on her belt.

“Did you think you could get away with grand theft?”

I blinked. “Are you kidding?”

“This is serious,” Lori Soles said. “In New York State, stealing a police lieutenant’s heart is a Class-A felony.”

Suddenly the wall of uniforms parted, and there was Detective Mike Quinn down on one knee. Wearing a rare smile and his best blue suit, he lifted a white ring box.

Time seemed to stop, the packed coffeehouse stilling with it.

Among the captivated crowd, I noticed the shaved head and grinning face of Sergeant Franco, the young detective my daughter was seeing. He was holding up his mobile phone, recording the scene for posterity—and, I suspected, for Joy to watch from her job in DC.

“Clare, I love you,” Mike began plainly, “and I know you love me.”

Opening the white box, he revealed a perfect diamond, its ice-blue color shining as brilliantly as the good in his eyes. Around the center, a circle of smaller coffee diamonds winked warmly in the glow of the firelight.

“I have something to ask you,” he said. “And you’d better think hard about your answer. With these law officers as witnesses, it’s going to be tough to change your story.”

I nodded numbly, waiting for the words.

“Clare Cosi, will you marry me?”

My eyes blurred, emotions swirling, and my mind flashed back to the first time I saw this man, standing in my coffeehouse doorway, his expression haggard, jaw rough with stubble, trench coat stained and wrinkled. Never had I seen a soul more in need of caffeine.

But Mike hadn’t come for coffee that day. He was there to inspect a crime scene; and, by the end of that case, he’d become a regular customer and eventually a good friend. Passion blossomed naturally between us. Trust wasn’t as simple—at least for me.

My first wedding had led me into such cavernous misery that I’d been reluctant to step one foot back into that chasm. Mike had been battered by a bad marriage, too, but he was willing to try again, and I knew the reason. While the cop in him appreciated a friend and cherished a lover, what he valued more than anything was a partner.

As gun-shy as I was, I came to realize the painful cost of not moving forward, which is why, in a voice choked with happy tears, I said yes to Mike’s proposal.

Yes to a new partnership.

Yes to a new beginning.

Yes to another chance with another man, in so many ways, a better man.

I would take my time planning this wedding, a big one, with all our friends and family. This ceremony would be a true celebration, nothing like my first, when I was alone and pregnant, an anxious nineteen-year-old, half-desperate to be saved by a City Hall union to a peripatetic coffee hunter, little more than a boy himself.

Before me now, on one knee, was no boy. Mike Quinn was my rock, and I was his. How right this actual rock looked in his hand. Polished with patience, shimmering with certainty, fixed on an unending circle, it was the perfect symbol of what we shared together, and the years it took to make this moment. As he slipped it on my finger, I knew with complete conviction that I would love this man forever.

And this would be a day I’d never forget.