Between Love and Duty

by Janice Kay Johnson

  He spread his hands. “Mi casa su casa.”

  The flash of her eyes might have been sardonic, but she said politely enough, “Thank you.”

  As Jane poured herself a cup of coffee, Duncan popped a raisin cinnamon bagel into the toaster when she said that’s all she wanted.

  “Actually,” Jane said, “I was hoping you’d give me a lift to my house. I thought I’d take my car and go shopping. I need to start replacing the basics.”

  “You might find a fair amount of your clothes can be salvaged.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  He couldn’t look right into her eyes, deep blue and clear, and lie. “I…didn’t look into every drawer or lift the piles.”

  She made a sick sound and closed her eyes as if gathering strength.“What about my shoes? Did you notice them?”

  “They were soaked with blood,” he replied, hurting for her.

  Her whole body jerked, as if he’d hit her. Duncan made a helpless sound and pulled her into his arms. She clung, but only briefly. When she stepped away, her face was pale but set.

  “Will you give me a lift?”

  His jaws ached. He gave a short nod.

  “Okay.” The bagel popped up, and she turned away to butter it as if nothing out-of-the-way for a typical Sunday morning had happened.

  Was making love Saturday night typical for her? She was on the pill. He didn’t know why the idea bothered him; he really didn’t think he held a double standard concerning sexual mores. It was only that he—oh, hell, face it—didn’t like to think of her in another man’s arms.

  “I hope you don’t regret last night,” he heard himself say stiffly.

  “I suspect you’re more likely to regret it than I am,” said Jane, giving away absolutely nothing.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You wouldn’t have been in bed with me at all if I hadn’t woken up screaming bloody murder.”

  Maybe he was mistaking wariness, or even shyness, for a rebuff. He wasn’t the only one feeling uncertain this morning, Duncan belatedly realized. Instead of greeting her with a smile and a kiss, he’d gone on the attack.

  “I wanted to get in that bed with you when I tucked you in.”

  She went very still. Then her eyes, wide and dilated, searched his. “Tucked me in?”

  “Well, not quite.” His mouth was lifting into some kind of smile. “I didn’t dare. If I had, I wouldn’t have been able to leave. I had myself convinced you didn’t need that.”

  With a soft explosion of air, Jane flung herself at him. They hugged, hard. Tipping her head, she smiled at him, though it wobbled on her lips. “Turns out,” she whispered, “that it was exactly what I needed.”

  “Jane.” Only, Jane. He kissed her. Not so much with passion, although it was in the mix. Rising to the top was tenderness, his need to protect her and, maybe most of all, this confounding need she’d provoked in him since their first meeting.

  She kissed him with, he sensed, as much feeling. The touch of their mouths was strangely soft, a lingering and soothing and sampling that, as far as he was concerned, could have gone on all day. Into the night.

  His cell phone rang. Since it lay on the counter about two feet away, they both jumped. Reluctantly, he let go of her and reached for it.

  Niall.

  “What did you learn?” Duncan demanded.

  Beside him, Jane smothered a giggle. When he rolled his eyes toward her, she murmured, “Hi. Thanks for calling.”

  Duncan grimaced. “Thanks for calling.”

  His brother laughed. “Did somebody prompt you?”

  Duncan made a purely masculine sound Niall could take as he pleased.

  “Entry was through the back door—jimmied lock. Lots of fingerprints, but I’m betting they’re all hers. I’ll need to get a comparison print from her. Ah…ditto for her bedroom. Obviously, she doesn’t even have a housekeeper.”

  Or a lover. Duncan briefly exulted in the thought, until it occurred to him that, like him, she might prefer to have her sexual encounters away from her own home. Her haven.

  “No info yet on the blood. I’ll let you know.”

  “Okay. We can pick up Jane’s car, can’t we?”

  “Yeah, sure. I took a look in the garage, but I don’t see any sign our guy was out there at all. Not for more than a look, anyway.”

  After ending the call, Duncan repeated the gist to Jane.

  “I don’t have any plans today. I could come shopping with you.”

  She blinked. “You’re a man.”

  “And?”

  “Men don’t like to shop.”

  “I don’t usually,” he admitted. “Today, I want to.”

  “You mean, you want to play bodyguard.”

  Offended, he thought, Play? Fun and games, this wasn’t. “If that’s how you prefer to look at it.”

  She looked at him. Really looked at him. “I didn’t mean to insult you.”

  “You shouldn’t have to do this by yourself.”

  Jane leaned into him, hugged him and said simply, “Thank you.”

  “We can pick your car up on the way home.”

  “Okay.” Her voice was thick. She made a funny little snuffling noise, then straightened with a shaky smile. “What say we hit the road, then?”

  At her request, he drove her to Skagit County, where an outlet mall drew shoppers from Canada and farther for designer goods. Jane decided to hit the lingerie store first. In some alarm, Duncan decided to wait outside on one of the benches put there for that purpose. Laughing, Jane disappeared inside for quite a while, reappearing eventually with a good-sized bag that Duncan stowed in the rear of his 4Runner.

  That was his role, he realized quickly: Sherpa. Occasionally she asked his opinion, which was a greater pleasure. She’d emerge from a dressing room, twirl in front of him, and he had an excuse to let his eyes linger on how a pair of low-cut jeans perfectly outlined her perfect ass, or how a soft sweater draped over her breasts and bared her delicate collarbone and long white throat. He agreed with all her choices.

  “Um…shoes next,” she finally decided, and Duncan shook his head.

  “Lunch next.”

  They had to leave the outlet mall for that. He took her to a nearby soup-and-sandwich place. Somehow, over lunch she got him talking about his brothers. Sneaky, the way she went about it, asking first about the little stuff, whether he was jealous when they were born, the closeness he’d had with Niall and the distance from Conall, six years younger.

  “Too far apart in age, I guess,” he admitted. “I think… Oh, hell I don’t know for sure, but Mom said things that made me suspect Conall was an accident. She…always seemed ambivalent about him.”

  “That’s sad,” Jane said finally. Her attention was utterly on him, to the point where, in that way she had, she’d begun to crumble her food rather than eat.

  He reached across and rescued her sandwich. She laughed ruefully and took a bite.

  A few minutes later, she said, “I was the oldest in my family, too, you know.” A shadow passed over her face. “I wished I could have taken my sisters with me when I left.”

  “It wouldn’t have gone well if you had,” he said harshly then moved his shoulders in discomfort. “No. Maybe you’d have done better than I did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  So he told her. How they’d clung to him briefly, scared he’d leave; how it had felt, as if he was being smothered in responsibility, as if their neediness adhered to his flesh like Velcro he’d yearned to rip away and instead had endured.

  “Then they started to relax. To test me, I suppose. To get angry when I reacted differently than they had expected or wanted.”

  “You weren’t Mom or Dad.”

  “No.” Talking about it made him feel a little as if he were ripping some of that Velcro from his bare skin right now, tearing up strips that bared the muscle and blood beneath. Not making him naked; no—worse. “If I was going to do it at all,
it was going to be right,” he said. “No more trouble with the law, no more booze, drugs, parties. Conall was twelve,” he added as an aside. “Twelve years old, and he liked beer. Too much.”

  “So you did do it right,” Jane said softly, eyes drenched with compassion.

  “Oh, I did it. But right?” He shook his head. “There had to be a better way. Niall speaks to me, Conall doesn’t.”

  “What…what happened?”

  This was one of his worst memories. The realization that he couldn’t watch them every minute, that persuasion wasn’t working, that, in the grip of grief and resentment and hormones, they were incapable of listening to the voice of experience—from an eighteen-year-old!—or of achieving perspective themselves. That, if he was going to keep them out of trouble and following his orders, he could only do it with fear.

  Of him.

  He’d picked his moment. He had grounded Niall, whose brand-new driver’s license was, so to speak, burning a hole in his pocket. Niall told him he could shove his rules you-know-where and walked out the door. He drove away and didn’t come home until three in the morning. He wasn’t staggering, but he’d clearly been drinking.

  “He was nearly my size. I couldn’t turn him over my knee.”

  Jane nodded. Neither of them were eating anymore. He was grateful they’d arrived at the sandwich place late enough the lunch crowd was mostly gone. Now they were the only customers left.

  “I dragged Conall out of bed. I wanted the demonstration to work on both of them. I grabbed a baseball bat, went outside and took it to Niall’s car. I’d…helped him restore it. We’d worked on it for months. Rebuilt the engine, painted it…” He had to stop for a minute. “I took the baseball bat to it. Windshield, hood, trunk. I beat the shit out of that car. Nobody would ever be driving it again.”

  He could still remember the looks on their faces as they stood like terrified children on the lawn, Conall a scrawny thirteen-year-old, Niall still skinny but coming into his adult height and bulk. Conall had started to cry, but Niall’s expression, by the time Duncan was done, had been closer to hate.

  And fear. Oh, yeah, he’d made them afraid of him. They’d stayed that way long enough. There had been battles, but nothing so hideous again. Niall had closed himself to the big brother he’d once worshipped; Conall had gotten into sports, found new friends, graduated in the top ten in his class, his defiance of Duncan constant but petty.

  “Didn’t the neighbors…?”

  “Call the police?” Duncan gave a short laugh. “Oh, yeah. I had a lot of explaining to do. But I owned the car. Thanks to my mother, I owned the property it was on.”

  “Your father didn’t…?”

  “No, the house was always in her name. She didn’t trust him. Couldn’t trust him.”

  And then had been untrustworthy in her turn. The MacLachlan legacy, he thought.

  “I see.” Jane was gazing at him with an expression he couldn’t read. Not contempt, which he’d half expected. Not fear, because he was the kind of man who had used violence as the prod to push his brothers into the future. Not…anything he could figure. “You did that in cold blood,” she said, her tone odd. “Not because you were mad that night and had to take it out on someone or something.”

  “No.” True confessions sucked. “You’re smarter than they were.” Or knew him better? That was an unsettling thought. “I planned it. I almost pushed Niall into defying me that day, that way. It was a setup.”

  Her smile was as strange as her tone. “You’re an interesting man, Captain MacLachlan. Not quite what meets the eye.”

  “Is anyone?”

  “No.” Her expression became, if possible, even more veiled. “I don’t suppose any of us are.” After a moment, her mouth quirked. “I think I’m rejuvenated enough to tackle shoe shopping. What about you?”

  A fate worse than death. No, he realized; a worse fate would be letting her go off shopping alone. Alone, needing to replace the shoes drenched in blood by someone who hated her guts.

  “Why not?” he said.

  Her knowing chuckle lightened his mood, impossible though that should have been.

  DÉJÀ VU.

  It was Tuesday morning, and the review of the custody on Tito Ortez was in front of His Honorable Judge Edward Lehman. He was once again peering over reading glasses at the six people seated around the table in his courtroom—the one difference being that this time he’d requested Tito’s presence. The judge had been reading Jane’s report, which made her nervous. It was not one-hundred-percent complete. At the same time, she’d expressed enough reservations… Well, she had no idea which direction he would leap. Or even which way she thought he ought to leap, which was unusual for her.

  She wasn’t the only nervous one. Not the caseworker; she was surreptitiously scanning a file on another case. She hadn’t had much to do with the matter of Tito Ortez this past month. A visit or two to Lupe’s home, to ensure his well-being.

  But Tito himself was hunched as small as he could make himself, and that was small. With his shoulders rounded and his head bent, the effect was turtlelike, except that Jane suspected he knew quite well he had no shell to hide within. No, as a minor he was completely vulnerable to the decisions of these adults.

  Lupe was fidgeting. Hector sat impassive, reminding Jane again of a Mayan figurine, sullenness set in stone. She could all but feel his anger, barely contained. It was enough to make the small hairs on her arms rise.

  And Duncan… Jane didn’t know. They’d arrived separately, even though they’d slept together. And made love. Mostly, made love. In theory, she could go home today. The home security system had been installed on her house yesterday. Duncan and Niall had both tested it and deemed it adequate. Jane hadn’t said anything last night about going home, though, and neither had he. She’d told herself she couldn’t face her bedroom until it had been scrubbed and everything that was damaged hauled away, but a cleaning firm that apparently specialized in crime scenes was coming that day. By tonight it should be bare. Mostly empty. Ready for her to fill the drawers with her new clothes.

  Which brought her, reluctantly, back to Duncan and the present.

  Didn’t know? Of course she knew what he was thinking. He hadn’t relented in any way toward Hector. If anything, the threats to Jane had hardened his stance. Hector was still his primary suspect, if not Niall’s.

  Maybe her skin wasn’t prickling because of Hector’s suppressed emotions. Maybe it was Duncan’s she felt instead.

  Or also.

  The judge had already asked questions of Lupe and of Jennifer Hesby, the caseworker. Now he said, “Mr. Ortez, thank you for the copies of the pay stubs. I see nothing to indicate you’ve yet rented a home for yourself and Tito?”

  Hector’s face flushed. “I had to buy the truck, and then there were repairs on it and tires. It had to be safe, for my son.”

  Judge Lehman waited patiently.

  “No,” Hector finally said, in a strangled voice. “Because I couldn’t have Tito at home, I have to take him out to eat a lot, and to movies. With the rain, I had to think of things we could do inside.”

  “Children are expensive to raise. Particularly teenagers,” the judge observed.

  “A few more weeks…”

  “You may recall, one of my stipulations was that you have a home to offer Tito before I granted you custody.”

  Hector simmered in silence.

  “I see that Ms. Brooks had to curtail your home visits at your daughter’s apartment.”

  “The apartment is so small! All we did was…”

  The judge’s sharp gaze sliced off the beginning of an impassioned defense.

  “I think we must once again continue any final decision. Mr. Ortez, when do you anticipate being able to make first and last months’ rent on a place of your own?”

  Hector flattened both hands on the table. He was sweating, his dark eyes fixed in a kind of desperation on the judge’s face. “Only a few more weeks. Perhaps a month. No
t that long… Tito could come stay with me now. Two of the men have left. I now have a bedroom he could share.”

  Tito shriveled even smaller. The judge’s gaze flicked to him and then to Duncan, seated beyond Jane.

  “Captain MacLachlan, you don’t properly have a place in these proceedings. However, through the perspective of your relationship with Tito, how do you believe the visits have gone?”

  Jane tensed. With all her being, she prayed for him to be honest, fair. To be the man of honor she wanted him to be. Like Tito, she bent her head.