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Authors: Marilyn Pappano

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“He and my mother were never married.” His mother had wanted more from life than marriage to a man who couldn't keep a job and a trailer to call home in a dusty little town like Heartbreak. She'd been in and out of their lives for years, coming home during Del's ranching phase, leaving during his attempt at farming, moving in again while he worked in the oilfields and out again when he'd scraped together every penny he could to open the garage. Working with engines, it turned out, was where Del excelled, but even steady work and good money hadn't been enough to make Lena Harlowe settle down with a lowly grease monkey. Since she hadn't come around in twenty years or so, Reese assumed she'd found someone
who made good money and had clean fingernails, too. He'd been glad to see her go.

“The first marriage was before I was born, and I don't know anything about it except that he's hated the name Karen ever since. Then came the on-again, off-again thing with my mother. The second marriage was doomed from the start. They'd been seeing each other awhile. She wanted to get married, and he didn't. They took a little trip one Memorial Day weekend—did a lot of partying. He woke up when the weekend was over with Lou Ann in his bed and a marriage certificate on the nightstand. The next April he woke up after another rowdy weekend to find that Lou Ann had filed for divorce and run off with someone else—which explains why, to this day, Tax Day is the high holy day of Del Barnett's nonreligious life.”

“And number three?” Neely sounded vaguely amused, more like the woman who'd knocked him for a loop ten years ago by doing nothing more than walking into a courtroom, tripping over a loose board and dropping an armload of files at his feet. She hadn't been embarrassed, hadn't blamed the county or the faulty board, but had laughed instead, and that quick, he'd been a goner.

“She was a souvenir from a trip to Las Vegas. Her name was Georgie, she was only four years older than me, and she was an exotic dancer. She looked like a stripper, dressed like a stripper, stood out like a peacock in a flock of doves and generated gossip everywhere she went. She damn near wore him out before she got a calling to go help the less fortunate in South America.” He smiled at the memory of Georgie with her magenta hair, multiple piercings, dramatic makeup and eyebrow-raising clothes. “She's the one he misses the most.”

“And you miss your mother most.”

His smile slowly faded into a frown. “Not at all. I miss Georgie, too. She kept things stirred up. I never really knew Lena—my mother. About the time we'd start to get acquainted, she'd take off for a few months or a few years. By the time she wandered back, we'd have to start all over again.
Then one day, when I was fifteen or so, she took off and never came back. By then I didn't care if I ever saw her again. That was somewhere in between Lou Ann and Georgie.”

“So your dad's been alone a long time.”

“Not alone. Just single. There's a difference.” Turning his back on her, he stared out the window again, at grass in need of mowing, blackjacks and a thin blue sky.
He
was the one who'd been alone a lot. Thanks to Neely, he knew the difference intimately.

Thanks to her, he might never know anything different.

Chapter 4

T
here was another storm Tuesday evening that took out the power with the first lightning strike and left Neely and Reese in warm, muggy darkness. She was stretched out on the sofa, her skirt pulled up to expose her legs, with a magazine clutched in one hand to languidly fan herself, and he was comfortably slumped in the chair-and-a-half, with his bare feet propped on the ottoman.

Wishing for shorts and a T-shirt, a piña colada and a cooling breeze, she asked, “Does your electricity go off every time it storms?”

“Nah. Sometimes I lose the phone instead. Sometimes all it takes is one lightning strike and the power will be off for hours. On the other hand, last month a tornado passed between the house and the barn, and the lights didn't even so much as flicker.”

“And you know it came that close because…?”

“I saw it.”

“But the safe room doesn't have any windows.”

“I wasn't in the safe room. I was in the barn.”

She recalled her first sight of the barn out back, when she'd thought it was surely a hundred years old. “Is there any particular reason you took shelter in that old barn instead of your high-tech safe room?”

“I'd gone to check the horses. I thought I had time.”

“You're lucky it didn't come crashing down on your head.”

“Believe it or not, some people would have minded.”

She gazed in his direction, but with no illumination, all she could see was shadows. Swallowing a soft sigh, she turned her head to look at other, less dangerous shadows.

She didn't doubt people around there would have been sorry if anything had happened to him. After all, the position of sheriff was an elected one, so enough people liked him to put him in office and keep him there. But, hell, people liking him had never been a problem. He'd been popular with the Royals' fans, and had been easily the most respected deputy in Keegan County. Heaven knows,
she'd
never had any trouble liking him. She'd thought he was the best thing that ever happened to her.

She'd proven herself a lousy judge of character.

Resolutely pushing away the ache in her chest, she aimed for a cheery, conversational voice and asked, “What brought you back to Oklahoma? As I recall, you had no intention of ever living here again.” He'd had enough small-town living to last a lifetime, he'd insisted, and once he left Thomasville for a job with a bigger and better department, he was never living in a city with fewer than a hundred thousand people. And here he was, back home in a county with only a fraction of that population.

“I didn't. But I took some vacation time after…”

After Judy's death, which they'd agreed to not discuss.

“I stayed with my dad over in Buffalo Plains, spent some time with the family, saw some old friends. I found out things weren't quite as suffocating as I'd remembered. When the sheriff offered me a job, I decided to take it. It wasn't as if
there was anything for me back in Thomasville, and getting out of Kansas certainly couldn't hurt my so-called career.”

A lump swelled to block Neely's throat, bringing with it a shudder of deep sorrow. There was nothing for him back in Thomasville…except her. Lying in a hospital bed the first four or five days, then struggling at home to manage alone and facing the anger and hostility of an entire community with no one on her side—and, in his eyes, that was nothing. The harassment, the vandalism, the threats against her life—nothing. The great love he'd claimed, the commitment, the forever-and-ever—nothing.

“What made you move to Kansas City?”

She barely restrained a choked laugh that could too easily dissolve into hysterical tears. “You're kidding, right? I moved because I wanted to stay alive, and the odds were against that happening in Thomasville.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, come on, Reese. Even if you weren't there, your buddies must have kept you informed. After all, they were doing it for you.”

“Doing what for me?”

Unable to sit still any longer, she surged to her feet and paced the length of the dark room as if she'd placed each piece of furniture herself and knew its location intimately. She went all the way to one hall door, then all the way to the other. When she returned, though, Reese was on his feet, blocking her way.

“Doing what for me?” His voice was softer, lower, milder, and more demanding. She knew from experience that the angrier he got, the more reasonable he sounded. When people who didn't know him thought he was as harmless as a kitten, that was when he was most dangerous. And knowing that, she hesitated only a second before stepping around him.

He caught her arm just above the elbow and pulled her back. Her skin was clammy. His palm was warm and dry, his grip strong enough to hold her, but not strong enough to hurt. “What were they doing, Neely?”

A flash of lightning showed the hard, unforgiving look on his face. She thought it probably matched her own look. “Harassing me,” she replied in clipped, challenging tones. “Punishing me. Trying to make me leave town. Failing that, trying to kill me.”

Abruptly the power came back on. Lights banished the darkness to the corners of the room and made them both blink in response. The television came on midshow, the air-conditioning unit kicked on, and the ceiling fan began turning lazily, picking up speed with each revolution. And she and Reese stood where they were, staring at each other as if one might persuade—or dissuade—the other with nothing more than the sheer force of their gazes.

He didn't believe her. She didn't expect him to, not without proof. Even with proof, he would find some way to shift the blame entirely to her. He was good at that.

But she was disappointed. Unreasonably, irrationally disappointed.

“You expect me to believe that Dave, Reggie and those guys tried to kill you because…they thought it was what I wanted?”

She gazed into his dark eyes—eyes that had once looked at her with such tenderness, that were now skeptical, cynical, distrusting—and she felt so lost, so hopeless. “Please…let me go. Just turn off the alarm and let me leave. You can tell Jace I escaped. You can blame me for everything. You've done it before.”

His fingers tightened fractionally. “And where would you go?”

“Someplace safe. I know people who will help, people who wouldn't rather see me dead.”

At that, something flickered across his face—dismay? offense? shame?—but it was gone long before she could identify it, and once it was gone, his features settled into stone-cold stubbornness. “Most people don't give a damn whether you're dead or alive. You have quite an opinion of yourself, don't you?”

Her eyes burned with tears she damn well wouldn't shed, and her throat was so tight that the words she forced through sounded raw. “No. I used to, but not anymore.” He—and life and luck—had taken care of that. “Please let me go.”

“We haven't finished discussing this alleged conspiracy plot against you in Thomasville.”

Over the years she'd felt a great many things for Reese, but his smug words and his obnoxious smirk made her hate him for the first time ever. She wanted to slap that smirk right off his handsome face, but with her luck, any physical aggression would be rewarded with handcuffs. Instead she responded in kind. She gave him a smirk that made her feel dirty, and arrogantly replied, “Maybe you haven't, but I have. Now, let go of me before I decide to make your life a living hell.” She wrenched free and made it as far as the hall before he got in his last dig.

“Too late, counselor. You did that years ago.”

 

After another restless night—courtesy of Neely—Reese got up early, showered and dressed in his uniform, then headed for the kitchen to start the coffee. He didn't make it farther than the door into the living room, though, where he found her curled tightly in the chair-and-a-half, with the chair arm for a pillow and the quilt off her bed for cover. The position looked uncomfortable as hell, but, sound asleep, she didn't seem to notice.

Why give up a perfectly adequate bed for a backache-inducing chair? Granted, she'd said she was learning to love small, safe spaces, but this was stupid. This entire house was safe.

But theoretically no place should be safer than a designated safe house, and yet it was sheer luck that she hadn't been carried out of the Kansas City safe house in a body bag.

He watched her for a moment, then another, before finally giving himself a mental shake. He retreated into the hallway, then cut through the kitchen to the guest room, where he gathered her belongings. After removing the extra set of keys to
his truck from the desk drawer and disconnecting the power cord from the computer, he carried it all, along with the phone from his nightstand, into the closet where he also kept his guns, then closed and locked the door. The lock was a two-inch dead bolt, and the only key was on his key ring. There was no way she was getting inside.

That done, he went back to the living room. He didn't like the idea of leaving her alone—didn't trust her to not do something stupid—but he had no choice. He'd missed two days of work already, and today he not only had a meeting with the county commissioners, but also a court appearance. Neither one could be put off.

The only question was whether he should wake her and tell her, or let her find out he was gone on her own. Wake her and put the fear of God in her, or trust her to realize that, like him, she had no choice. Wake her, with her face scrubbed clean of makeup and her hair falling every which way and looking delicate and vulnerable and making him feel so damn vulnerable, or save himself.

Taking a deep breath, he pivoted away from her. In the kitchen, he scrawled a quick note, telling her where he was going and when he would return, warning her that one of his men would be nearby at all times, hinting that she would be sorry if she didn't behave—though he had little doubt she couldn't be any sorrier than she already was. Sorry she'd ever met him. Sorry she'd taken his advice and gone to work for the prosecutor. Sorry she'd come here instead of taking her chances with the bad guys in the city.

He anchored the note on the table underneath her starry glasses, then left. Everything was locked up tight. The alarm was armed. She couldn't get out and no one else could get in without his knowing it. She couldn't have any contact with the outside world. She was more secure than she'd be in his jail.

He hoped.

It was a short drive to downtown Heartbreak, where he parked in front of Shay Rafferty's café. He'd had a relation
ship with Shay for a while last year, and occasionally he'd tried to imagine the two of them married, having a family, planning a future. The images had always refused to form, though—because he'd known from the start she would never love him, he'd told himself.

Not
because there was only one woman he'd ever wanted to spend the rest of his life with.

Virtually every seat in the café was taken, and Reese figured he knew every single soul by name and history. There were some he liked, such as Ethan and Grace James, sharing breakfast with their little girl, Annie Grace, before they headed out to open up the hardware store. There were some he didn't like—Inez Taylor, her snotty sister-in-law and snottier daughter came immediately to mind as they turned three identical scowls his way—and some he'd arrested, none of whom ever bore him any ill will.

There were worse things than knowing everyone, he thought as he settled into the back booth reserved for Shay's family and friends. Not knowing anyone at all—that would be lonely. Believing that people wanted you dead…

Scowling, he muttered a curse, then looked up as a coffee cup appeared in front of him. Shay filled the cup, then slid in across from him. “Howdy, Sheriff.”

He removed the tan Stetson that was part of the uniform and laid it on the seat beside him. “Ma'am.”

“So…you've come out of seclusion, and except for a few signs of fatigue, you look none the worse for wear. Who was the lucky lady?”

“Lady?”

Tossing her head as if she still had the incredibly long mass of blond hair that had made men weak, Shay batted her eyelashes and said in her breathiest, most seductive voice, “Oh, by all means, darlin', go on. I don't mind stayin' here in this great big ole house all by my little ole self one bit.”

He continued to scowl at her, but his heart wasn't in it. “You like to exaggerate, don't you?” Neely didn't go in for breathy or blatantly seductive. She didn't need to.

“Maybe a bit. It's so much fun to watch you get all stern. Who is she?”

“Nobody.”

“Oh, come on, Reese, I
heard
her voice. It wasn't
nobody.
Give it up, Sheriff, or I'll cook your breakfast myself.” She grinned wickedly and affected a totally different accent. “I haf vays of makeeng you talk.”

“Idle threats. I know you're not allowed in the kitchen, even if you do own the place. How's Easy?”

“Easy's beautiful. Is she from around here?”

“And your mom and dad?”

“They're fine. I'm fine. Everybody's fine. And you're no fun.” Her blue eyes widened and she leaned closer. “Is she married?”

He gave her an annoyed look. “I'm not interested in married women. That's a good way to get yourself shot.” To say nothing of losing any self-respect a man might have.

“Not even one married woman in particular?”

“Not even one.”

Shay sat back and studied him a moment, then slid to her feet. “Give me your order so I can get it in, then make the coffee rounds.”

He ordered, then stirred sugar and cream into his coffee and wondered about the way she'd looked at him—as if something he'd said surprised her. But he hadn't said anything of substance, except for the remark about married—

BOOK: The Sheriff's Surrender
4.71Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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