Unspoken (42 page)

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Authors: Lisa Jackson

Tags: #Contemporary, #General, #Romance, #Romantic Suspense Fiction, #Suspense, #Fiction, #Texas

BOOK: Unspoken
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The Judge’s shoulders slumped.
“Maria’s related to Lydia.”
“I remember Maria,” Nevada said.
“Leave it be, Shelby,” her father pleaded.
“Can’t do it.” Picking up the telephone receiver, Shelby held it under her father’s nose. “Do you want to do the honors, or shall I?”
“You’re making a mistake.”
“I don’t think so.”
Determined, she punched out the familiar numbers of Lydia’s home phone. “We’re going to deal with this now. I’m going to call Lydia this very minute and find my child. I’m not going to waste another second. As for all this mess between my mother and your father, we’ll sort it out later. They’re both dead now, so as painful as it may be, it’s over. As for Ross McCallum—believe me, I can deal with him.”
“You broke in here,” her father accused her as the telephone began to ring on the other side of town.
“You bet I did, Judge. And I’d do it again.” It was Shelby’s turn to lean across the desk. Sweat dripped onto the top of her father’s humidor from her chin. She didn’t care. Didn’t even notice as she glanced from her father to Nevada and she heard the distinctive click of a telephone being answered. “Come hell or high water, I’m going to meet my daughter.”
 
“Ramón, no! Dios, do not! Oh, Holy Father ...”
Shep sat bolt upright. Reached for his sidearm and wondered where the hell he was when he discovered he was bare-assed naked.
“Do not, no, no, no—Ramón!” Aloise was screaming and crying in the next room and he ... oh, shit, he was alone and naked as a jaybird in Vianca’s bed. He must’ve fallen asleep after screwing her from here until tomorrow. The bedroom still smelled of smoke, sweat and sex.
As the cobwebs cleared from his head, he grabbed his clothes and mentally kicked himself up one side and down the other. The digital clock on the night stand read one-forty-five, soft Spanish music was wafting from the radio and the double bed was empty except for him. What had gotten into him, staying here with Vianca? Peggy Sue would be worried sick.
How would he explain ... oh, shit. He stepped into his clothes, heard Vianca’s smooth, silky voice trying to quiet her mother and the old woman having none of it. She was upset and her dead husband’s name kept cropping up between the broken, disjointed pieces of conversation and prayers.
Stepping into his jockey shorts and slacks, Shep discovered his wrinkled shirt tossed over the edge of the bureau. What had he been thinking? His truck was parked outside, and here he was fucking his brains out while Peggy Sue couldn’t get a good night’s sleep and would be up at dawn, fighting morning sickness and dealing with the kids.
He was a fool. There were no two ways about it. Here he wanted to be the next sheriff, had the Estevan murder about tied up so that he would be a hero, and he’d been willing to throw it all away for a blow job and a quick roll in the hay.
He was just about finished buttoning his shirt when the moaning stopped and Vianca, wearing nothing but a red, shiny robe, flew into the room. She stopped short at the sight of him fumbling with his buttons. “You are leaving?”
“I have to.”
“But it’s early.”
“No, Vianca. It’s late.”
Her lips, no longer shiny, drew into a little pout and her eyes, darker with the mascara that had rubbed onto her skin, silently accused him of using her. “I want you to hold me.” She pouted and he sighed.
“Just for a second.” Opening his arms, he drew her close, sighed onto her crown and wished to holy heaven that things were different. If he was twenty years younger, if he didn’t have a passel of kids with another on the way, if he wasn’t married to a good woman who trusted him, if he’d already been elected sheriff ... He kissed her forehead. “I’ve got to go.”
“You will be back?”
He hesitated and saw tears begin to form in her eyes. “Sure I will,” he heard himself say, but she didn’t smile and those dark, suspicious eyes of hers seemed to pierce his very soul.
Carrying his boots to the front steps, he walked outside to air that was as warm and sticky as honey. Halfway down the steps he heard Vianca lock the door behind him. He had to put all thoughts of her out of his head for the moment. Vianca’s testimony that she’d seen Nevada at the store alone on the night that Ramón Estevan was killed and also in the hospital the day that Caleb Swaggert died was just what he needed to nail Smith’s hide to the cross.
He had some details to attend to, wanted to write up a report, talk to the D.A. himself and then, if things went as expected, arrest Nevada and charge him with the crime.
His scalp itched as he crossed the street, and he felt more than one twinge of guilt. This was all too easy and smacked of a setup. Why would everything fall into place so easily now, after all this time?
Unlocking his truck, he stepped inside. He didn’t much like Nevada Smith, never had. Smith was just too damned cocky and arrogant for the son of a whore and a drunk. But Shep didn’t see him as a cold-blooded murderer either.
Stranger things have happened,
he told himself as he cranked on the ignition and the Dodge’s engine roared to life. He had a job to do and he damn well planned to do it. If Nevada was innocent, he’d get his chance to prove it.
Shep didn’t much believe that a man was “innocent until proven guilty.” That right was just way too convenient and overused by the bleeding-heart liberals who weren’t out in the trenches fighting the bad guys. Let a man prove he was innocent, rather than the other way around. It was just a damned sight easier, to Shep’s way of thinking. He found his can of Copenhagen, put a pinch under his gum and pulled away from the curb. A final glance at the Estevan house made him smile. Vianca was standing at the window, staring after him, as if she couldn’t wait to see him again.
Shep felt a moment’s pride, all of his guilt over Peggy Sue and the kids temporarily forgotten. He’d ridden Vianca like a stallion. Of course she’d want more.
 
Katrina rubbed her eyes. Criminey, she was tired. Her back hurt, her neck hurt and she didn’t know when she’d be able to get some more sleep. Not that the sagging mattress in this flea bag of a motel could give her a moment’s rest. And forget the fact that the bed, equipped with “magic fingers,” was supposed to, for a quarter, give her a massage. She couldn’t wait to move out of this place.
She thought of the Judge’s mansion,
her father’s
house, with its manicured lawns, tile floors, shimmering pool and expensive furniture and art work. What a joke. While her half-sister had grown up privileged, Katrina had been raised in a two-bedroom bungalow in a tiny town near the Oklahoma border. They’d had enough money to scrape by on, but nothing, nothing like the palatial lifestyle of Shelby Cole.
Katrina had done her research. Shelby had been pampered. Her damned horse—an Appaloosa thing named Delilah-that Shelby had ridden while growing up had cost more than Katrina’s mother’s Chevrolet station wagon. And her little car—a Porsche. Shit.
Katrina stood and cracked her back. She peered through the blinds of her room at the Well, Come Inn sign and frowned as the first rays of gray light were visible in the eastern sky. Life hadn’t been fair, but it was about to turn around. Big time.
The story for
Lone Star
was just the tip of the iceberg. She intended to write a book, an exposé on Judge Cole that everyone who was anyone in Texas would drool over. There were enough skeletons in the old man’s closet to ensure that the pages would be juicy.
She turned away from the blinds.
She alone had an interview with Caleb Swaggert, and now she was getting insight from Ross McCallum, who swore he’d been set up—by the Judge, no less.
“Tsk, tsk, Daddy,” she muttered, rotating her neck and wondering if she could just close her eyes for twenty minutes, then go back to work.
She’d survived on a couple of hours of sleep last night and large quantities of caffeine. She’d learned more and more as the days had passed and the townspeople of Bad Luck, hicks most of them, had grown more accustomed to her. As a means to her end, she’d even re-adopted that horrid drawl she’d worked so hard to get rid of in college. But it fit here. Fit as well as one of the Judge’s trademark black Stetsons on his aging head.
“Bastard,” she muttered and wondered when Ross McCallum would call again. The man was a snake with sharp fangs and a coiled body, ready to strike. Yet she needed him. He was the key to the Estevan mystery. She was sure of it. If Ross didn’t call soon, she’d have to tuck her little gun in her purse and go looking for him.
Her blood turned to ice. The truth of the matter was that Katrina didn’t like dealing with McCallum. He was just plain evil. But she’d swallow back her fear and do whatever it took.
She turned back to her laptop placed on the motel’s cheesy table. She was just beginning to stretch her notes into story form, the tale of an egomaniac of a Texas judge who would soon rue the day he’d ever cut off his illegitimate daughter. And Shelby-maybe it wasn’t her fault that she was the pampered princess. But face it, the girl was a fool. How could anyone in this day and age get knocked up and believe that her baby had died? Idiot. Shelby was a woman who had the world by the tail and didn’t know it. As far as Katrina could see, Shelby had carved out her own life up in the Northwest. God, why? When everything she could ever want,
everything
was here. Not only would she eventually inherit unlimited wealth, but she also had a loving father.
Katrina swallowed hard and blinked fast. She wouldn’t cry, damn it. She picked up her glass, drained the remaining sip of Mountain Dew from it and crunched on a couple of melting ice cubes. Jerome Cole was a jerk. A man who hadn’t cared one iota for his second-born. A man who hid his granddaughter from the kid’s mother. A man who deserved everything he got.
Katrina only hoped she was the person who could give it to him.
 
Ross slammed his empty glass on the bar. The crowd at the White Horse had definitely thinned, just a few old drunks still hanging around, but the gossip that had fueled most of the conversation still rattled around in his head—conversation concerning the reporter-woman, the Judge and Shelby Cole. Conjecture had it that Katrina was the Judge’s illegitimate kid and she was back here with her own axe to grind.
Funny, she hadn’t mentioned it to him when they’d had their little chat the other night. Maybe it was time to pay her a visit. But first, he had his own agenda—a little game he played.
Quickly, he motioned to Lucy and she managed a thin smile. Hell, she’d always liked him. Tonight, Lucy looked shot. Her lipstick had faded, her eye makeup was long gone. She swabbed the bar’s surface as Ross handed her a twenty for the four beers he’d consumed. She made change quickly and he left her a decent-enough tip, but pocketed the coins.
“Say ‘hi’ to your sister when you see her,” Lucy said, and Ross mumbled that he would. It was a lie. They both knew it. He didn’t much like Mary Beth and she felt the same about him. They’d only banded together because, as kids, they’d only had each other. Workin’ on that old scrap of land for a grandfather who spouted off verses of the Bible as easily as he beat them with his belt, they’d cowered together. Until Ross had noticed Mary Beth was growing titties. Until he’d kissed her and put his hand down her pants at the age of twelve. Mary Beth had screamed bloody murder, Grandpa had beat him within an inch of his life and then taken him down to the irrigation ditch where he’d nearly drowned Ross while the family dog looked on.
He’d pushed Ross’s head under the water until Ross’s lungs had burned and he’d come up gulping and gasping only to be held down again. “Get thee out, Satan,” Grandpa had yelled. “Get away from my grandson!” Swallowing warm, stagnant water, spitting and coughing, Ross’s head had been dragged upward so that he could see the sky for a few seconds before he was plunged into the ditch again. Over and over again, until Ross had passed out and woken up on his bed, feverish, his grandmother, dark-eyed and sullen, tending to him without saying a word.
“You leave your sister alone or I’ll strip you down and take you to a place where the scorpions nest,” his grandfather had warned later while slathering butter on a slice of homemade bread, then drizzling it with honey. With rimless glasses, a bald head, and several missing teeth, Gerald McCallum was an imposing man whose wife, children and grandchildren never raised their voices to him. His word was law. “I ain’t kiddin’.”
Ross had believed him.
He’d never laid a hand on Mary Beth again.
From that point on he’d been more careful, and his sexual fantasies about his sister had been transferred to other girls. He’d gotten laid at fifteen, but found no thrill in it; the girl, seventeen and horny, hadn’t been a challenge and Ross liked a challenge. The harder a woman said no, the more he pushed. Using his football player’s body and promises he never intended to keep, he usually got what he wanted.
Until Shelby.
She was the only woman he’d had to force into his way of thinking. And, he’d guessed later, she’d liked it that way. Otherwise she would’ve told her pa and there would have been hell to pay. Ross suspected Shelby liked it rough.

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