No Place Like Home: The Coming Home Series, Book 1 by Jennifer Kacey Page A

completely alone.
    Not knowing exactly what was going to happen, Charlie decided to stay lying on the couch and leave it up to him.
    “You’re amazing, you know that?” He moved toward her and her heart sped up.
    She flipped her hair over her shoulder. “I could give Judy Garland a run for her money.”
    “Or even Glenda. You’d look wicked hot in that big-ass pink dress.”
    She expected him to jump her, take her down onto the floor and get right to it, but that couldn’t have been further from reality. Like a bulldozer he pushed between her and the back of the couch and then tucked her body into his in front of him.
    Smelling her hair, he sighed into it and held her close with her back to his chest.
    Knowing it was their last night together, for who knew how long, Charlie didn’t want to waste a moment of it, so she turned in the circle of his arms and snuggled up to him face to face…err…face to chest. “Your daughter is amazing, and so are you.” She looked up at him. “Would you tell me what happened? How you came to adopt her?”
    It didn’t take him long to start, as if he’d already been thinking about what he wanted to say. “I worked a huge trafficking case three years ago. Massive sting operation. Took months to put together. Most of it’s still classified because several people are still awaiting trial, but long story short, things went bad at the end. Several people died, including Addyson’s mother.”
    Wrapping her arms tighter around him, she offered what support she could for what had to be a horrible ordeal. “Her father?”
    “No known information. Not listed on her birth certificate. And it could have been anyone. The women we were trying to save were being used to breed kids. For sale.”
    Charlie sucked in a breath and swallowed bile. “That’s…”
    “Yeah. I’ll spare you the details.” He was quiet for a few minutes, lost somewhere in the past.
    “And Addyson?”
    “Her mother hid her in a closet when the assholes came through wiping people out. They got wind of the sting and started trying to eliminate evidence. We found Addyson in the closet once we’d taken down the shitheads that killed her mother.”
    “Was she okay?”
    He nodded against the top of her head. “Mostly. Cold. Hungry. Dirty. Lethargic. But otherwise unharmed.” His fingers rubbed up and down her spine as he continued. “I’m the one that found her. I opened the closet door and there she was, staring at me. This little one-year-old who’d obviously been crying. And those eyes.” He shook his head. “She was already mine from that moment on. The rest was just paperwork.”
    “Is that typical? An agent adopting a child they found during a case?”
    “Oh Lordy, no. When I told my boss I wanted to adopt her, you’d have thought I’d told him I wanted to learn how to walk on water. But her going into the system since she was legally born in the U.S. with no known relatives to take her, that wasn’t going to happen. I had a few friends pull some strings to keep her out of the system until I could figure out what the hell I needed to do.” He shrugged and Charlie rubbed her cheek on his chest. “So I took an Internet crash course on adoption and was approved to be a foster parent within a week.
    “They granted custodial guardianship a day later. My mom being retired three streets over and able to watch her for me whenever I needed her to was amazing and definitely worked in my favor.”
    “You being generally wonderful and a more than upstanding citizen probably didn’t hurt either.”
    His grin tugged at her heartstrings and he continued to touch her face and caress her. “That probably didn’t hurt my chances.”
    “I know enough about the adoption process to know that it can be costly and time consuming. Is the adoption official already?”
    “A year ago last March. It took longer than a normal adoption but mostly because of the case and legalities of how she came to be. I don’t think