You asked for it...Here's another scene!!!

I'm having trouble posting from the road, so here's the second scene of The Perfect Daughter...Matt Lebretti's first scene...More details and prize winners to follow, when I can get a reliable connection, so keep checking back!! Maybe even a third scene later in the week (Matt and Maggie's first together ;O) . There are still more books and promo goodies to give away to one lucky visitor each day who leaves a comment...

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

"Hell no," Matt Lebretti bit out as he turned away from the church.

He wasn't ready for any of it.

It was too dark to be such a such a hot, July morning. The grey-tinged clouds overhead threatened rain as they drearily rolled by. Still, staring at the depressing sight 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 first told her about the shooting.

She'd clung to him, asking if there was anything she could do, for him or the Donovan family. She'd bravely battled the first tears he'd ever seen in her expressive eyes when he'd left for work the next morning. Then when he'd come back that night and every night since, she'd clung some more. And he'd let her, even though anxious women who couldn't handle the reality of the job were tops on his list of distractions to avoid.

He'd let her, because 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 wasn't just about Bill.

She said she was fine. She'd been saying it for nearly a year, ever since she'd moved in with him and something had changed inside the amazing woman he didn't understand anymore.

Maggie's friend Amber called her an old soul, whatever that meant. All he knew was that Maggie had been a force to reckon with when they'd first started dating. Then last summer she'd started calling his cell three and four times a day. They'd argued about it, when they'd never argued before, 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 student-teaching by day, and masters-level courses in education at NYU several nights a week. She hadn't been irritated, he'd begun to realize. She'd been scared. Then Bill had been killed, and Matt had seen tears in her eyes every time he'd left her since.

Maggie Rivers, kick-ass independent and mature beyond her twenty-five years, the unpredictable center of the last year and a half of his life, daughter of one of the toughest cops he'd ever met, was terrified by the job.

The job that was the one constant in his life that had never let him down.

The dangers inherent in being a lead detective on Manhattan's gang task force were constant and unforgiving. One mistake, one foot placed in the wrong direction, and he could be gone tomorrow. Hell, Bill had done everything right, and he was gone, regardless.

Damn it!

He had a friend to bury. A job to do. A flood of internal red tape drowning him after the shooting, when he wasn't hunting down leads on the gang that had staged the ambush that got his partner killed. Soothing his girlfriend's fears, worrying about her worrying about him, shouldn't even rate a second thought right now.

That made him an asshole. Clearly not what Maggie needed him to be. But it was the way things had to be. The way his life worked.

"I'm here if you need to talk," she'd said the night Bill had died.

And they would talk, eventually. But neither one of them had the stomach for it now.

Maybe her anxiety would burn itself out, and he'd get back 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. She'd been almost too young, but not the least bit bowled over by his bad-boy muscles or the Italian charm most women responded to. Her first irreverent comeback to one of his smoother pickup lines had piqued his interest. Before the game was over, he'd talked her into going for a beer after, and he hadn't looked at another woman since.

A sudden burst of sunlight glinted off the windows of the hearse as it turned the corner and crept to a stop at the curb. He and the other officers headed down the granite 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 could never turn his back on. Yes, his work was dangerous. Yes, every year it was tougher not to wonder if he was wasting his time. There was always more crime and violence, more too-young gang hoods joining the party, than he and his men would every be able to stop. But he did the job better than just about anyone on the force. And he'd always been willing to give up just about anything, or anyone, to keep making a difference.

So why couldn't he face the reality that, sooner rather than later, it was going to mean giving up Maggie Rivers, too.