Cry Wolf

Chapter One

My cop ex-husband pulled me over on New Year's Day while I was still in my doughnut pajamas. This seemed like a bad omen for the year to come.

Luke Vitale was only supposed to be in town for a couple of days, and I couldn't even avoid him that long. Glancing in my rear-view mirror, I watched as he exited the police cruiser, looking a hell of a lot better than I remembered and eons better than I felt at the moment.

He was built like a swimmer, though I knew for a fact that he was too hard headed for easy floating. A biting Potomac City wind blew his dark hair into his face. It looked like he'd been soaking up rays down in the Louisiana, while I'd been stuck in frigid, northern Virginia. If possible, I was paler than ever, my bright orange hair washing out any color I might have had.

Nothing about my life was fair.

He walked over to my window, waiting for me to hastily roll it down. "Do you know how fast you were going?"

This seemed like a trick question to me.

"Too fast to worm my way out of a ticket?"

"About five miles past that, even."

Luke reached for the license to write down my ID number, which had undoubtedly changed in the last half of a decade, just like everything else in my life. I tried to hand it to him, but my butterfingers slipped and it fell to the car floor.

"Easy, Finley," he said, pulling out a tablet. "How about I just fill in what I remember?"

He'd always been the collected one. Of course, it was probably easy for Luke to stay cool as a cucumber. He had moral high ground. He wasn't the one who walked away from our marriage without a backwards glance.

Well, fair was fair, and I was doing my share of backwards glancing now.

"I thought you were just visiting?" I asked, pulling on my years as a glorified carnie to school my face into something I hope could be labeled "professional friendly." The PCPD cruiser had thrown me off.

He shot me an unfriendly look. "You mean Gabe told you I was just visiting."

Gabe, the oldest Vitale brother, was my man on the inside. Whenever he warned me that Luke was coming back into town to visit the numerous members of the Vitale Clan, I absconded to my amusement park and hid like a meerkat in its tunnel. This morning, however, I'd had a killer craving for blueberry pancakes. One mistake and my five-year streak of avoidance was kaput.

Luke stepped back from my window after handing me a hastily scrawled out ticket. He paused, gathering his words. After a moment, he found a string of words that I would've rather went unsaid.

"Mom wants you over for family dinner."

Diana Vitale, ruler of the Vitale family and its unruly men, was a traditional Catholic, Italian woman. She made a mean Zuppa di Vongole, she didn't believe in divorce, and she counted me as one of her children. That meant I had better show up when she called, or else.

"Are you going to be there?" I demanded, almost getting out of my car, since Luke was already turning to leave.

He raised an eyebrow. "Are you trying to uninvite me to my own family dinner?"

"Probably bad form."

He rolled his eyes, looking just like the scruffy boy I'd known a lifetime ago. "Probably."

Possible disasters I could encounter at dinner had me slumping back in my seat, wishing for a sudden onset of the plague. I loved Vitales, but the thought of spending the night with my ex-husband and his big, Italian family made me want to get back in the car and fly out of Potomac City like a bat out of hell.