One

      “Lee! Don’t pull—”

      Too late. Deirdre Patten’s oldest son used every ounce of his wiry five-year-old strength to tug a box of sugared cereal from the very bottom of an enormous stack of the breakfast foods in the grocery store. With an experienced eye born of many brushes with disaster, she instantly calculated that she was too far away to grab her son. Her heart lurched as the entire stack tilted and began to slide slowly forward. Visions of the grievous injury a huge stack of boxes could do to a little boy flashed across her mind as she dashed forward, and in the same instant, the entire array of cereal boxes crashed to the floor right in front of her.

      “Lee! Honey, where are you?” Frantically she kicked aside boxes, then dropped to her knees looking for a little arm or leg beneath the avalanche. “Lee? Lee!”

      “Hi, Mommy!”

      Her heart began to beat again when she heard the chirpy little voice. She paused in the middle of her frantic shoveling and looked around. On the other side of the aisle, Lee was waving to her. He stood beside a stranger, a man with dark chestnut hair, a man who had Lee’s wrist in a firm grasp.

      “Baby, are you all right?” She leaped over the boxes and knelt beside her son, running her hands over him. Nothing looked broken. “How many times have I told you—”

      “The man saved me, Mom.” Lee was pointing up, and she realized the man who had released her son’s wrist must have pulled him out of the way of the boxes.

      She sat back on her heels with a weary smile. “Thank you so much. This one and his little brother keep me...on my...toes.” Her voice drained away to nothing as she recognized the man looking down at her.

      “Hello...Mrs. Patten, I believe?”

      The voice was the same, deep and slightly rough, with a lazy drawl to the words that made a woman’s toes curl. She’d noticed that the night of the office Christmas party in Baltimore, Maryland, three years ago even though she’d been so upset with her husband she could barely see straight.

      Slowly she got to her feet, keeping her hands on her son’s shoulders in front of her. “Hello.”

      He extended a large, tanned hand. “Ronan Sullivan. We’ve met before.”

      She flushed, a nod her only acknowledgment as she reached out to shake his hand. “Deirdre is my first name, but my friends call me Dee. This is Lee and my other son, in the cart, is Tommy.” She barely touched his fingers before drawing back quickly. His hand was warm and firm, and the brief moment when her hand was in his produced an unsettling instant of awareness