The Sheriff's Surrender (10 page)

“If I hadn't taken it, and your clothes and your shoes, you wouldn't have been waiting to greet me so warmly when I got home, would you?”

She saw no reason to admit that she'd spent at least half of her long, boring day fantasizing about escaping—how she would do it, where she would go, what name she would give herself. Would she be a redhead or a mysterious brunette? A
demure Southerner or a no-nonsense Yankee? Would she hide in plain sight or choose someplace impossibly remote?

And the big question: could she possibly survive?

She didn't know, but she'd rather take her chances out there alone than here with Reese.

“I foolishly agreed to stay here a few days,” she said stiffly, hearing her voice quaver and hating it. “I
didn't
agree to become your prisoner, and I
didn't
agree to give up my right to privacy. There's not much left in my life that's all mine, and I'll be damned if I'll give up even one small part of it to you just because you get an ego boost from playing the big, arrogant, controlling cop.”

After a long silent moment, he left the room. Undecided whether to follow, Neely remained where she was, rubbing one bare foot uneasily over the other. When he returned before she could make up her mind, he was tight-lipped and scowling. With his dark, unforgiving gaze fixed on her, he offered her her wallet, then left the instant she took it.

Clasping it tightly, she closed the door, then slid to the floor. She knew without looking that the important things—the things that could help her get away—were gone, and she didn't care. She would have thought him an incompetent cop if he'd given them back, and while Reese Barnett was many things, incompetent was
not
among them.

But the rest of it… She slid her fingers behind the wedding photo of Hallie with husband number two and pulled out two smaller items. One was a snapshot of Reese, twenty-two years old, handsome, just drafted by the Royals with a quite impressive contract. The other was a card insert, and both had been delivered years ago with a dozen coral roses. On the back of the picture he'd written, “The second best day of my life.”

On the card he'd added, “May 17.
The
best day of my life.”

The day they'd met. The day he now cursed.

Laying the notes aside she unzipped the outside wallet pocket, which was too small for coins and too inconvenient for anything else, and carefully removed one of those dozen roses. It was pressed almost flat, its color and fragrance long
since faded. Her first impulse was to crumple it to dust. After all, it was dead, just like the love it was supposed to represent.

But even though her fingers curved around the bud, she didn't crush it. She couldn't. As she'd told Reese, there wasn't much left in her life. He was gone, her father was dead, her family scattered all over. Her career was done for, and no matter what happened, her quiet existence in Kansas City was finished. But she still had the rose—physical evidence that, at one time, she had made a difference in someone's life. He had loved her—maybe not well, clearly not for long, but for a while. For a while, she'd mattered. She'd been happy.

And it had been the best time of her life.

“I
want to go somewhere.”

The petulant voice made Reese blink a couple of times before he turned from the computer. It was nine-fifteen on Thursday night, and Neely hadn't spoken one word to him since calling him a big, arrogant, controlling cop Tuesday evening. She hadn't come out of her room again that night, and she'd come out only for dinner the next night.

But both Wednesday and Thursday mornings he'd found her asleep in his leather chair.

“You can't go—”

She rolled her eyes, reminding him of Guthrie and Olivia's twin girls when they needed a nap. “It's nighttime. It's dark. Your truck has tinted windows. It's in the garage so no one would see us get in or out. Just for a drive in the country. I need to smell fresh air. I need to see something besides this house.” Abruptly her gaze narrowed. “If you don't take me someplace, I'm going to walk out the door. You'll have to choose between calling the dispatcher first, which means I'll
have a head start, or going after me first, which means the dispatcher will think you're an idiot—again.”

“I have a third choice,” he said mildly. He reached in the desk drawer, then let a pair of handcuffs dangle from his fingers. “I could make sure you can't go anywhere.”

She gave the steel cuffs a flippant look. “Been there, done that.”

Then heat flooded her face and spread through his body, making his skin clammy and his hand unsteady, making his voice rough and husky as hell when he softly added, “And enjoyed it a lot.”

Looking away, she shifted uncomfortably. She cleared her throat a couple of times, but couldn't seem to find the words she wanted. What could she say? They
had
been there, done that, and they had most definitely enjoyed it. Of course, they'd been ten years younger and a hundred years more innocent. They'd been adventurous, foolish, deeply in love and incredibly in lust.

He'd never felt that way before or since. Had never wanted a woman the way he'd wanted her. Had never been so weak or felt so powerful. Had never felt so…complete.

The handcuffs swayed, glinting in the light. The steel should have felt cold, but if he closed his fingers around it, it would sizzle. And if he fastened the cuffs around her wrists,
he
would sizzle, and before he let her go, so would she.

He returned them to the drawer, then took an unsteady breath. Turning back to the computer, he signed off the Internet, then stood and gestured toward the hall. “Let's go.”

For a moment she was too surprised to react; then she popped to her feet. “I need shoes.”

Though he tried to simply glance at her feet, it wasn't that easy. His look started at her shoulders and slid slowly downward, but it wasn't entirely his fault. Her outfit left little to the imagination. The sleeveless top hugged the gentle swell of her breasts and her flat middle before ending a scant inch above her waist. With its ribbons and lace and soft white fab
ric, it was innocent and virginal for a woman he knew all too well—all too gratefully—was neither.

Below a thin strip of pale skin, her skirt, the color of a well-washed chambray shirt, fell in a full sweep, hiding lush hips, lean thighs, shapely calves, before finally reaching her feet. Delicate, narrow, perfectly arched, with nails painted pale, pearly pink. He'd rubbed those feet after a long day, had warmed them through a Kansas winter, had tickled them a time or two and made her squirm.

Remembering where she'd been sitting when she'd squirmed, he grew warm and stiff—play on words intended—again.

“If we're just going for a drive, you don't need shoes,” he said dismissively, roughly.

She didn't protest, though the go-to-hell look she gave him suggested she wanted to. Instead she turned in a swirl of chambray blue and stalked toward the garage door. After a stop in the bedroom, he joined her.

“You expecting trouble?” she asked, giving the pistol he'd clipped onto his belt and the shotgun he carried a suspicious look.

“You haven't given me anything but trouble. I'm just trying to be prepared.” As soon as they were both belted inside the truck, he backed out of the garage, closed the door and reactivated the alarm, then made certain the truck doors were locked. “If Jace knew I was doing this, he'd snatch you out of here in a heartbeat.”

“I won't tell if you don't.” Then she glanced at him in the dim glow from the dash lights. “Oh, I forgot. Getting rid of me is your number one priority.”

Reese ignored the discomfort her flat statement sent down his spine. “Oh, yeah, like you haven't spent your time trying to figure out how in hell to get away from me.”

She didn't deny it but smiled coolly instead. “Maybe I'll go to Seattle or Vancouver. Or maybe Alaska. I read about this family who lives on an island off the coast of Alaska, and they get mail and supplies only two or three times a year. The
rest of the time they're totally isolated. They raise their livestock and tend their crops and fish, and the rest of the world leaves them alone. I'd like that.”

“No, you wouldn't. No restaurants? No movie theaters or shopping malls? No poor unfortunates to help?”

“No one to hurt,” she murmured before turning to stare out the side window.

He looked at her a moment, disconcerted by her answer, then shifted the focus of the conversation. “Running away to Seattle, Vancouver or especially Alaska is a dumb idea. What are you going to do? You can't practice law without a license, and as soon as you get a license, you go in a dozen databases, complete with new address. Forbes wouldn't even have to leave Kansas City to track you down.”

“I'm not going to practice law.”

“Yeah, right.” Neely giving up the law was about as likely as him giving up law enforcement. It just wasn't going to happen. “Jace will make this case, Forbes will go to prison, and you'll go back to the pursuit of liberty and justice for all. No, sorry, I forgot who I was talking to. You'll go back to the pursuit of liberty and fairness for the guilty.”

The look she gave him would have made a lesser man quake. “Can you honestly tell me you've never made a mistake? You've never arrested someone based on an eyewitness identification that you knew was shaky? You've never had to choose which suspect to believe and had this niggling doubt that you chose the wrong one? You've never turned over a case to the D.A. that was based on nothing more than weak circumstantial evidence?”

“I've never made the kind of mistakes you did.”

“Never,” she repeated doubtfully. “Every arrest was a good one? Every conviction arising from your arrests was a just one?”

“Yes,” he said stiffly. To the best of his knowledge.

“That's what the district attorney who prosecuted my father said. And you know what he said when he heard my father had been exonerated? ‘Well, gee…you win some, you lose
some.'” Her voice trembled, and the tension radiating from her made the air inside the truck damn near vibrate. “My father was lying in the prison morgue after spending seven years behind bars for a crime he didn't commit, and that
bastard—
” Breaking off, she pressed her hand to her mouth, then took a long ragged breath. “I envy you, Reese. I'm not infallible. I've made mistakes…but not anymore. I'm not playing with people's lives anymore. Right now I can't even be responsible for myself. I'm not competent to be responsible for anyone else.”

Reese drove silently for a while, through dark side streets, past brightly lit houses where normal people were living out their normal lives, and he thought about her father's circumstances. He'd never bought into the argument that it was better for a hundred guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be wrongly punished. One innocent man's freedom to rid society of a hundred violent criminals, even temporarily, was a fair trade in his book.

Unless you were that innocent man, or the family who loved him dearly. He couldn't begin to imagine the fear the little girl Neely had been must have felt at seeing her father taken away, the anger when people said things about him that weren't true, the emptiness his absence had left in their lives. When Reese was a kid, his father had
been
his life. It would have destroyed him to lose him that way or any other way. He'd worshiped his dad and would have hated anyone who'd taken him away.

They were in the country now, on the west side of Heartbreak, traveling along a dirt road that went everywhere in general and nowhere in particular. If a person had the time and knew the turns, he could eventually reach the highway that would take him to Stillwater, Oklahoma City, or Tulsa, and see a fair part of Canyon County while he was at it. He could go to Buffalo Lake or Buffalo Plains, could wind up at Grandpa Barnett's hunting cabin back in the middle of nowhere or find himself back in the heart of Heartbreak.

Neely shut off the air conditioner, then rolled the window
down and leaned against the door so the breeze ruffled her hair. After a moment, he rolled his own window down. The night was a bit warm, but everything smelled fresh and clean. The recent rains kept the road dust to a minimum, and the endless chorus of tree frogs filled the silence.

After a mile or two, Reese broke the quiet himself. “What was your father convicted of?”

She planted her feet on the dash board and tucked her skirt in snugly before glancing at him. “Murder. But he never could have hurt anyone. He was the sweetest, gentlest man I've ever known.”

“So how did he wind up in jail?”

“He was a bookkeeper for a small tool and die company in Wichita. He'd asked for a raise, but one of his bosses said no. They exchanged words, and he went home. A short time later he got a call from the other partner, saying that the first one wanted to speak to him in his office. Daddy went back, the man said he knew nothing about any such call, and he fired my father for harassing him. The man's body was discovered by his secretary the next morning. She told the police he'd argued with Daddy. The partner claimed Daddy had been fired before he left work the day before, and he denied ever calling him. Witnesses came out of the woodwork to say that my father and his boss had argued frequently—people my dad didn't even know—and my father's fingerprints were on the murder weapon.”

“And the real killer was the partner.”

She nodded. “Six months after my dad was convicted, the partner sold out, took the money and the dead man's wife and disappeared. Presumably he's still out there somewhere, living the good life.”

Her voice was dark and angry. He'd heard that bitterness before, when they'd argued the merits of the law, of justice versus fairness, and had mistaken it for simple passion. But it was so much more.

“Hypothetically, let's say you know beyond a doubt that this man is guilty of the crime your father died for. But he's
been arrested for a different crime—one that you know beyond a doubt he
didn't
commit. Justice would be letting him go to prison anyway. But under your definition, that's not fair. What do you do?”

“I'd do my best to help the D.A. convict him and bury him under the prison.”

“And fairness be damned.”

“To hell.” Catching the smug look on his face, Neely went on before he could point out how inconsistent she was being.

“In the first place, I would never represent the guy. I'd kill him myself before I'd lift a finger to help him. Second, my father didn't get a fair trial, so why should he? And third, a highly personal hypothesis like that isn't fair. What a person would do in a situation with someone he has strong feelings about is obviously different from what he would do in the same situation with ten million other people. Take you and me. If asked how you feel about convicted felons who try to kill the D.A.s who send them to prison, I feel fairly confident you would be against it. But when you were told that a convicted felon was trying to kill
me
in retaliation for my prosecuting him, your response was, ‘Good. I wish him luck.'”

She stretched her right arm out the window and closed her eyes as the warm, fragrant air brushed her skin in an unending caress. Wishing for the easy, soothing sensation to never end, she made her point and finished her little speech. “Under the circumstances, no one would think it odd that you'd wish I was dead, but they would know it was a special case. They would never think you believed every assistant D.A. deserved to die for sending felons to prison. As I would never believe that justice gained by illegal means
is
justice.”

With an uncomfortable silence—a guilty silence, she thought—filling the truck, Reese slowed to make a turn, then proceeded at a snail's pace. Gravel crunched under the tires and off to the left she heard the quiet, rhythmic lap of water against shore. From somewhere on the right came the low hoot of an owl, along with the steady calls of bobwhites and whippoorwills.

Neely smiled faintly. She wasn't a nature girl. She'd never gone hiking or camping, wouldn't make it fifty feet into the woods without getting lost, and didn't know how to get along without indoor plumbing. But the sounds in the otherwise still night made her understand how a woman could develop an appreciation for a sleeping bag, a starry sky, a dying camp-fire—and, of course, a special someone to make it worthwhile.

Reese brought the truck to a stop, then shut off the engine. The water was on three sides now, and the birdsongs were more distant, though she heard the flap of impressive wings overhead. They were sitting at the end of the line on a narrow peninsula stretching out into a lake. There was no beach, no boat ramp, just a few concrete picnic tables and benches scattered around in grass that, with a few cows, could pass as pasture.

Of course, so could Reese's yard.

After opening the door, she slid to the ground. The grass was prickly and the soles of her feet were tender, but she carefully made her way toward the nearest table. She was almost there when a sharp pain pierced her foot. Gasping, she shifted her weight to her other foot, where the pain was duplicated several times over. “Ow, ow, oww—”