I Got You, Babe (26 page)

“Knock it off, Sandy.”

“Look at her,” Sandy said, as if he hadn’t been doing just that. “She’s really good with Melanie, isn’t she?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Even Grandma seems to be having a good time.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’re still pissed at me, aren’t you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why don’t you just get over it and tell me that it’s been a nice afternoon? Alice got to meet the family. Everybody likes her. That’s a good thing.”

“I suppose you and Aunt Louisa are going to pick out our china pattern tomorrow.”

“No. Silver tomorrow. China on Tuesday.” She patted him on the knee. “Now I’m talking seriously, John. She’s a good one. Do everything you can to hold on to her, will you?”

An hour later the Cowboys barely squeaked to victory, and John was never so happy to see a game end in his entire life. After the usual standing and stretching and gathering of casserole dishes, his family finally headed for the door. Renee joined him there to say good-bye.

Melanie tugged on John’s jeans. He knelt down beside her. “Alice is fun.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Are you going to marry her?”

“Well, Millie, we haven’t talked about that yet.”

“I like her. But she’s not very smart.”

“Oh?”

“I beat her at Go Fish. I never beat Mama.”

John had no doubt of that. That would be like pitting Tinkerbelle against Rambo.

Melanie skipped out the door. Grandma approached

Renee, her expression guarded. “If I come to your restaurant sometime, will you watch them make my food? Make sure there’s no funny business?”

Renee smiled. “I’d be happy to.”

Grandma turned to John. “Okay, then. I guess she’s got my vote.”

She hobbled out the door. Aunt Louisa was next. “It was such a delight to meet you, Alice. Hopefully Alex and Grandpa will join us next time and you can meet the whole family. How would that be?”

Renee smiled again. “I’d like that.”

Dave came next, holding Ashley. “Please don’t judge all of us by John. He might not be worth a damn, but his family’s really something.” He gave her a quick hug. “Don’t be a stranger,” he said, then followed Aunt Louisa out the door. Even Brenda offered a perfunctory but genuine good-bye before whipping out her dark glasses and making her eyes disappear.

As Renee stood at the door and waved good-bye, John remembered Sandy’s words:
Do everything you can to hold on to her.
Now that was all he could think about. Holding on to Renee. For hours on end. Maybe all night long...

How had this happened? How, in the span of a few hours, had his perception shifted so dramatically that he saw not a woman accused of a crime, but a woman he wanted in so many ways—to talk to, to touch, to hold, to make love to....

He blinked away that thought and watched out the window as the last car disappeared around the block. After the pandemonium that had taken place all afternoon, the house was suddenly so quiet he swore he could hear his own heartbeat.

“Well, it looks like we pulled it off,” Renee said. “They never knew, did they?”

“No,” he said, still looking out the window. “They never knew.”

“I was afraid they’d ask me something and I’d screw up and say the wrong thing. I didn’t, did I?”

John closed his eyes. “No. You didn’t.”

“Did I say too much? Not enough?”

“It was fine, Renee. They liked you.”

“Then what’s the matter?”

He turned around slowly. Thanks to her, his family had never suspected she was anything but his girlfriend. And that made it even harder to do what he had to do. But he had no choice. None at all.

He glanced toward the bedroom, where the handcuffs still dangled from the headboard. That small shift of his gaze was all it took for Renee to understand. Her words came out in a hoarse whisper.

“You have to lock me back up.”

He paused. “Yes. I don’t want to, but—”

“Duty calls?”

He expelled a harsh breath. “What am I supposed to do, Renee? Tell me. What am I supposed to do?”

“Let me go, maybe?”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“John—”

“Don’t make this hard for me.”

Her hand crept to her throat, as if she were suddenly having a hard time breathing. “I guess I should have known, but I guess I thought...after everything… She looked at him plaintively. “I-I just can’t believe you’re going to do this.” They stared at each other a long, shaky moment. God, he hated this. But there was absolutely nothing else he could do. He was hovering in a terrible limbo—in good conscience he couldn’t take her in, and in good conscience he couldn’t let her go.

“I won’t try to get away, John. I promise. Please. Just for a few more hours at least...”

Her voice trailed off, and the plaintive look in her eyes made John realize just how much he wanted that, too. He wanted this situation to become normal, where she wasn’t an armed robbery suspect and he wasn’t a cop, and words like
responsibility
and
duty
and
obligation
never even had to enter his mind.

“For just a few more hours,” she whispered.

Damn it.
Why was she doing this to him? He was in a hell of a position here. Why couldn’t she see that?

“We can do this one of two ways,” he told her. “Either you can walk in there, or I can drag you in there.”

Tears sprang immediately to her eyes. “Damn you! I did what you asked me to, and this is how you treat me?”

“You’re still a fugitive. You seem to have forgotten that.”

“How could I forget? You won’t let one minute pass without reminding me!”

“I’m just doing my job!”

“No, you’re not. Your
job
would have been to take me to the police station. Instead, I’m here. And now you don’t know what to do with me. You could take me to jail, but you know what will happen if you do, and you can’t live with that!”

In a fit of frustration, John clamped his hand onto Renee’s arm. He dragged her down the hall and into his bedroom, then sat her down on the bed.

“No, you don’t, John.
No!”

She started to stand again, but he shoved her back down. She tried to yank her wrist away, but he was too quick. He snapped the dangling handcuff around it.

Renee glared at him. “Why did you bring me here in the first place? If all I’m going to do is sit here in handcuffs, I might as well be in jail!”

“Don’t push me, Renee!”

“You can’t do it, can you? You can’t take me to jail. Because you know I’m not guilty. You know I didn’t rob that store. You know I didn’t shoot that clerk. But still—” She held her cuffed wrist up defiantly, then dropped it back to the bed, the chain rattling against the headboard.
“Still
you’re acting as if I did it!”

The tension crackled between them with an intensity that practically lit the drapes on fire.

“I’m asking you one more time, John. Do you think I’m guilty? Or am I an innocent woman who was in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

“There’s no evidence—”

“Damn it! Would you forget the evidence for five seconds? I don’t want the cop version. I want
your
version.”

He turned away, desperately needing to walk out of this room, to
stay
out of this room, until he felt more in control. But then she spoke again, her voice soft, with a tenderness to it that caught him off guard.

“I realized something today,” she said. “I was wrong out there in the woods. Your problem isn’t that you don’t care. In fact, sometimes you care so much that it tears you up inside.”

He needed to get out of there. Right now.

“You know the truth, don’t you?” she said. “You
know!'

He turned to face her, which was his first mistake, and his second one was thinking he could maintain any objectivity at all where she was concerned. She eyed him with such intensity that he felt as if she were looking right inside him. He turned away again, knowing he was on the verge of stepping over a line he’d never intended to cross, and once he was on the other side of it, there would be no going back.

But she was right. He knew the truth. How could he deny it any longer?

“The cop side of me says you’re guilty,” he told her. “And that part of me wants to take you straight to jail and be done with it. But still there’s something....”

He paused, then slowly turned back and met her eyes, those clear blue eyes that had captivated him since the moment he met her.

“Even though I haven’t got a shred of evidence to base it on, for some reason I still believe you’re telling me the truth.”

Chapter 13

I
n that moment, Renee felt as if every bone in her body had melted with relief. She’d wanted John to believe in her innocence
—needed
him to believe in her innocence—but what he’d just said meant something more. It meant she wasn’t alone in this any longer.

But as welcome as his admission was to her, she could tell it had taken a toll on him.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at his hands, his shoulders hunched, his face tight and drawn, and for the first time she saw that he wasn’t supercop at all. He was just a man—a man with some very tough decisions to make.

“What’s going to happen to me now?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

A long silence ensued. Finally John rubbed his hand over his mouth, then shifted around to face her.

“I talked to the woman who owns the convenience store that was robbed. Your eyewitness is a flake. She can barely see her hand in front of her face. Even a crappy defense attorney will discredit her in a heartbeat.”

Renee sat up suddenly. “That’s wonderful!”

“Don’t get your hopes up. It doesn’t prove you didn’t do it. It only proves she can’t positively identify you. It’s pretty meaningless in light of the physical evidence.”

“But it’s something, right?”

“It’s...something. And you were right about the ladies in 317. They’re hookers. But they’ve got a pretty lucrative operation going, and I think we have to discount them as suspects. Another negative is that the original detective on the case has since retired. The guy who’s taking it over is worthless. We’re not going to be able to count on any help from official sources. They’ve got their suspect, and they won’t be looking for another one.”

“You actually checked all this out?”

“Yes.”

Renee couldn’t believe it. That was where he must have been this morning. While she’d been handcuffed to this bed, he’d been out investigating the crime.

“Do you think it’s possible that we could find out who really committed the robbery?” she asked him.

John shook his head. “No. I don’t.”

“But that’s the only way—”

“No. It’s not. We don’t necessarily have to find the person who did it. All we have to do is find enough evidence to put reasonable doubt in a jury’s mind that
you
did it. If we can do that, you’ll be acquitted.”

“And if I’m not acquitted—”

“You’ll go to prison.”

Prison.
Just the word made Renee’s stomach chum with anxiety. “John. Please listen to me. Please. I can’t go there. If there’s even a possibility—”

“Our best hope is to come up with a piece or two of compelling circumstantial evidence. You say you didn’t see Steve at the right time that night to establish an alibi, but it’s close time-wise, so it might make a jury think twice. Your eyewitness can easily be discredited. A defense attorney can use those things to instill reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury members.”

The thought of being thrown on the mercy of the criminal justice system was just about the most frightening thing Renee could possibly imagine. But somehow it didn’t seem quite so ominous with John beside her, now that she knew that he’d been checking things out, going out on a limb for her when he could have done the easy thing and taken her straight to jail.

Sandy had been right about him. So very right.

“But I’ve got to tell you, Renee. This could still end badly, no matter what I do.”

He didn’t define
badly.
He didn’t have to. If he didn’t find enough evidence to support her innocence, she could still go to jail. And because she was still locked up, even though he believed she was innocent, she knew there would come a day when he’d be forced to take her in and let the court decide what to do with her. Luckily, today didn’t appear to be that day.

Then she had a terrible thought. He’d just told her he believed in her innocence, even though he had nothing to support that belief. But what if he discovered evidence that pointed to her guilt? How would he feel about her then?

When they were walking through the woods, he’d asked her if she had a record. She’d told him no.

What if he found out about her juvenile record? Would he understand that she wasn’t that person anymore? That the adult woman she was now didn’t so much as toss a gum wrapper down on the sidewalk? That the memory of the terribly misguided girl she’d been was so painful she didn’t even like to think about it?

No.
She couldn’t risk telling him. The records were sealed, and they wouldn’t be brought into evidence at a trial. He’d never know.

Then again, it wasn’t the trial she had to worry about.

Leandro had known about her juvenile record because some cop couldn’t keep his mouth shut. How likely was it that John wouldn’t find out about it, too? If he ever discovered she’d lied to him—about anything—he’d never trust a word she said again.

“John?”

He turned.

“There’s something I have to tell you.”

Her hands actually started to tremble. She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to gain a little bit of control. “You asked me out in the woods if I had a record. I told you I didn’t, but...”

His eyes flickered with surprise, then immediately narrowed with suspicion.

“It was a long time ago,” she said quickly. “Juvenile. Five arrests, six—I don’t even remember. But I’ve been clean since then. I swear to God I have.”

His expression changed again, this time displaying the one thing she’d never wanted to see on his face again: doubt. And it just about killed her.