“What happened when you came back? Did you try to reconnect with your team?”

Hal shook his head. “I wrenched my shoulder a couple of times over there. My throwing arm was never right again. Besides, when I came back, I found the girl I left behind had married someone else. I came home to St. Dennis, got a job with the local police force. Made it all the way to chief.” He paused for a moment. “I hear you were in law, too.”

“FBI. Jokingly referred to as the family business.”

“I heard about your dad and your uncle, your cousins, all going into the Bureau. That must have made for some interesting family dinners.”

“There was never any lack of conversation, that’s for sure.”

“You have any thoughts about going back?”

Grady shook his head. “No. I knew what I was doing when I left. I’d had enough, seen enough. I figured I could find something else to do.”

“Did you?”

Before Grady could respond, Hal’s line took off, and both men lunged for the rod. A few minutes later, Hal had reeled in a nice-size bluefish. He slipped it off the hook and into the ice chest he’d brought with him.

An hour later, they still had only the one fish in the cooler and no other nibbles. Hal didn’t really care if the fish were biting or not, but by midmorning, he figured they’d spent time enough on the Bay for one day. He had other things to do, and he suspected Grady might as well.

The closer he got to 309 Cherry Street, the slower Grady walked. On a scale of one to ten, baking cookies with the girly girl would have been at point-oh-five. But Mia had all but begged him.

“Why me?” he’d asked after he had been summoned to the house she shared with Beck with a come-quick-I-need-you phone call on the morning after Grady’s fishing outing with Hal.

“Because I have someone to help me and she doesn’t,” Mia explained. “We need about a thousand cookies for wedding favors by Saturday and we won’t have time to bake them all if we don’t double up.”

“You’re just now figuring out that you need a thousand cookies?”

Mia had nodded somewhat sheepishly.

“So what’s the big deal? I passed a bakery on the way in. I’ll bet they have cookies.”

“I want Mom’s cookies.” She moved several bags of flour and sugar around on her kitchen counter. “Where did I put those measuring spoons?”

“Mom’s cookies?”

“Mom’s lemon cookies.” Mia found the orange spoons under a bag of flour. “Remember them?”

“The little round ones with the lemon stuff on top?”

Mia nodded. “I wanted to have something special of Mom there on my wedding day. You know that if she was still alive, she’d be baking them for the wedding.”

“That’s really sweet, honey, but why don’t you send your someone to Vanessa’s place and I’ll stay here and help you?” He thought that sounded reasonable.

“Because my someone is Mara, and she’s baking at her house.”

“So why can’t Mara’s cookies count for half of Vanessa’s?”

Mia had stared at him as if he’d suddenly gone stupid, then replied, “Because they count for mine.”

Her eyes began to fill with tears, and he’d given in. What insensitive oaf would make his sister cry over cookies just three days before her wedding?

“Just go back to Charles Street, then take a left onto Cherry.” Mia seemed to recover quickly but he thought it best not to mention it at that point. “Vanessa’s house is three blocks up. Number 309. You can’t miss it. It’s a white house with a blue door. It has some pink and purple flowers in the front yard.”

“Yeah, well, no surprise there,” he grumbled as he walked along.

It wasn’t that he didn’t like Vanessa. They’d run into each other several times over the past few days, and he’d found her to be funny and charming and smart. And yes, as Mia had noted, she was very pretty. He hadn’t needed his sister to point that out. Some might even have described her as beautiful. But it wasn’t as if he hadn’t been around very pretty women before. It was just that there was something different about Vanessa. He couldn’t put his finger on just what that something was, or how to react to it, but it set off an alarm inside his head. He’d been in the FBI long enough to know danger when he saw it, regardless of the form it took.

Halfway into her block he spotted the house on the opposite side of the street. To say there were “some” flowers out front had been an understatement. There were so many tulips-in every shade of pink and purple imaginable-that it looked as if someone had spilled bags of pastel jelly beans across the yard. It must have taken her days to plant them all.

But yeah, pink and purple. It figured.

He walked along the path that wound through the sea of blooms and took the porch steps two at a time, imagining what the house must look like inside. He’d bet that the furniture would be all white with flowery pillows and the walls would be shades of pink. He pictured Vanessa in the kitchen with her pink apron, wearing pearls and high heels as she measured out flour and cracked open eggs to bake Mia’s cookies.

He rang the bell, not sure whether he was more amused or frightened by the image he’d conjured.

Vanessa unlocked the front door. “Mia just called to tell me you were on your way. Thanks for coming.”

He stepped inside and found himself engulfed by the scents of lemon and vanilla. In a flash, he was transported back to his childhood, and could almost see himself sitting on his knees on a kitchen chair, his elbows propped on the kitchen table as he sniffed the air intently while his mother grated lemon rind.

“Careful,” she’d teased him, “or there won’t be any lemony smell left for the cookies.”

“Just close the door tightly behind you so that it doesn’t blow open in this breeze we’re having this morning.” Vanessa’s voice brought him back to the present with a thud.

Her voice trailed away as she disappeared toward the back of the house.

He followed and tried to will away the memory of the way life had been back then, before their mother died and childhood had changed for all of them.

The front hall was all polished wood, the walls the color of fresh cream. Grady gave a quick glance at the rooms on either side as he followed her. The living room was a deeper shade of cream, the furniture not at all what he expected. It was all vintage-y looking, in dark jewel tones. The dining room off to the right had deep red walls and an old Oriental carpet. No pink anywhere.

No pearls, either, he realized as he came into the kitchen several steps behind Vanessa. No cutesy apron, and no high heels. The apron covering her cutoff jeans and gray T-shirt was tan and had DISCOVER ST. DENNIS! in navy-blue block letters. Her feet were bare, and though her hair was pulled back into some elastic thing, enough escaped to frame her face with curls. She wore no makeup and, in spite of her smile, appeared just barely happier to see him than he was to be there.

The counters were crowded with baking supplies and cookie sheets. An open carton of eggs, half empty, sat on the kitchen table.

“What can I do to help?” he asked.

“Do you know how to roll out cookie dough?”

“I know how to mix it.” He did his best to ignore the cut lemons that lay side by side on a cutting board. It was still his all-time favorite scent.

“I’m not ready to mix another batch yet,” she told him. “I’ll roll and you cut.”

“Cut?”

“With cookie cutters.”

“Sure.” He nodded. “I can do that. I used to be good at that.”

“Great. You’re hired.” She waved him over to the table and pressed something into his hand. He looked down at the smooth plastic object, then back up at Vanessa.

“My mom always used a round cutter,” he told her.

“Mia wants hearts.”

“Oh.” What, he wondered, had happened to kick-ass former FBI agent, criminal investigator Mia Shields in this town?