by Rachel Lee
Rafe wanted to tell her to put the damn thing out, that it wasn’t good for the kid, but he decided that wouldn’t be the best way to start.
Tate finished speaking to the dispatcher, then turned to him. “Well, well, well,” he said with a friendly smile. “Our D.E.A. agent and companion. What can we do for you?”
“I was wondering if I could have a private word with you, Sheriff?”
“Come on back to my office. I’d pass on the coffee, though, if I were you. Velma makes it thick enough to spread with a knife.”
“I make real coffee, boss,” the dispatcher called after them. “It puts hair on your chest.”
“Like I don’t already have enough,” Nate said. He ushered Rafe into his office and waved him into a chair, then closed the door. Nate walked around behind his desk and sat.
“So,” Nate said, leaning back in his chair and folding his hands across his flat belly, “did you lose your weapon, or did you run across some big-time drug dealer on Main Street?”
There was antagonism there, Rafe realized. The sheriff resented his presence. Well, of course. He probably figured Rafe was here on assignment, and he didn’t like being cut out of the loop.
He sat back, patting the baby’s bottom gently, and looked at the sheriff. “I don’t usually bring my son with me when I’m on assignment, Sheriff.”
“Why not? A baby would make great cover.”
“Would you believe I’m just stopping over on vacation?”
Tate leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk. “No. This isn’t the kind of place people come for vacation. The only tourists we get come off the state highway to get groceries or directions. There’s no rodeo in town at the present, we don’t have a Wild West show, or even dinosaur bones to show off. Just a small town with a lot of hardworking people. And the last time I checked—which was this morning sometime—we don’t even have a drug problem. Unless you count alcohol. Oh, I see some marijuana from time to time, and I suppose some of our folks have even tried cocaine, but nothing that ought to interest a big-time fed like yourself.”
“I’m not here on government business, Sheriff.”
“Then maybe you ought to explain yourself a little bit bet ter. Being sheriff, I get a little paranoid about strangers who don’t add up.”
“Well, I’m staying with Gage Dalton. He’s one of your investigators, isn’t he?”
“Gage is my only full-time investigator. He says he met you a couple of times but doesn’t know you.”
So Tate had been checking him out, too. Rafe felt a smile start to stretch his mouth. “Seems we have a lot in common, Sheriff. I came here to check you out.”
Tate didn’t like the sound of that. His face hardened, and the lazy drawl disappeared from his gravelly voice. “Maybe you want to tell me why the D.E.A. would be interested in me.”
“The D.E.A. isn’t. I am.”
Nate nodded slowly. “Okay. So...are you congenitally incapable of just laying it out for me, or do I have to sit here and ask a million questions?”
Rafe realized something about himself suddenly. He was incapable of just laying it out. Too many years on the streets had made him prone to answering with monosyllables and misdirection. But realizing it didn’t mean he could change it.
“Did you ever know a Marva Jackson?” he asked.
Nate stilled. Something in his gaze grew distant and cold. “Yeah. A long time ago. She in trouble?”
Rafe shook his head. “She’s dead. She’s been dead for over twenty years.”
“Then why are you asking about her now?”
Rafe hesitated, suddenly reluctant to blurt it out, though he didn’t know why. But it wasn’t like him to hesitate, and sooner or later he was going to have to say it, anyway. “She was my mother.”
Nate might have been carved from stone. For the longest time he didn’t move or even breathe. Peanut stirred in Rafe’s arms and managed to get his fist into his mouth. Content, the baby sucked on it once or twice, then settled back into slumber.
Finally Nate spoke. “She was my mother.”
“I know.”
“Well, hell, son, why didn’t you just say so right off?”
Rafe felt unaccustomedly embarrassed. “I don’t know,” he said after a moment. “I had some notion about checking you out first, finding out what kind of person you were before I spoke to you.”
Nate nodded. “I guess I can see that. Unwanted relatives can be a pain in the butt. My wife has a couple I’d as soon ditch in Death Valley.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Rafe said. “I’ve never had any.” He felt almost ashamed to admit it, as if it were his fault somehow. He looked down at his sleeping son. “Well, that’s not true any longer, I guess. I have Peanut now.”
“No wife?”
“We weren’t married. She was killed the night the baby was born.”
“I’m sorry.”
Rafe looked out the window. “I didn’t really know her.”
Nate leaned back in his chair, and it creaked a protest. “I reckon you must have been born right after Marva disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
“That’s the way it looked. I went off to the army when I turned eighteen. Came home from my first year in Vietnam and she was gone, lock, stock, and barrel. No forwarding address. I tried a couple of times to find out where she went, but no luck. Or maybe I didn’t try very hard. I didn’t exactly miss her. She was a terrible alcoholic, and abusive as all get-out. These days we take kids away from parents like her. Did she clean up when she left here?”
“For a while, I guess.”
“So where did she go? What happened?”
Rafe sighed and unconsciously held the baby tighter. “She ran off with a rodeo clown. My dad, Paul Ortiz. They wound up down in Killeen, Texas. My dad ran off a little while after I was born. She went back to drinking, and by the time I was ten they took me away from her. She died a year later”
“I’m sorry.”
Rafe lifted his head and looked across the desk at Nate. “Why? It sounds to me like your childhood wasn’t any easier. Maybe it was worse.”
“If I’d known I had a half-brother, I’d have moved heaven and hell to get you away from her. I’d have raised you myself.”
Rafe didn’t know how to react to that. He felt something inside him shift and had the feeling that he was never again going to be the same person. He didn’t know if he liked that or not. “You didn’t know,” was all he said.
“Maybe I should have looked harder.”
“I didn’t come here to make you feel guilty. I just wanted to find out about you. I’ve had the advantage all these years. She used to talk about you.”
“Did she? Well, she couldn’t have had much good to say. She always thought I was a pain in the butt.”
“Actually, she didn’t say anything bad about you at all. Just that she had a son up here. When I was in foster care, I thought about trying to get in touch with you, but I didn’t know how. Then I got older, and it seemed crazy to even think about it. Then I got...the baby here.”
“And family seems important?”
“You could say that.” He sure as hell wasn’t going to admit what his original plan had been.
Nate nodded. “Well, you’ve got family now, son. I’ve got a wife, six daughters, one son, a bunch of sons-in-law, and a few grandbabies. All the family a man could want—assuming you want to adopt us. Why don’t you come have dinner with us tonight and make up your mind about us? You won’t get to meet us all, of course. A couple of the girls are away at college, one lives out in Los Angeles with her husband, and Seth’s in the navy, stationed on the east coast. But I can rustle up a couple of the gals and their husbands, and my youngest is still at home.”
Rafe hadn’t expected to be welcomed so easily or so rapidly. He was far more accustomed to being treated with suspicion and had been subconsciously prepared for it. Nate’s ready acceptance of his story left him feeling off balance.
&
nbsp; “Um, thanks,” he said. “But it’s such short notice, and your wife—”
“Will be thrilled to meet you,” Nate interrupted. “Marge has a strong sense of family. She’ll welcome you lickety-split. But if it’s too soon for you...”
It was. He’d had more time to prepare for this than Nate, yet he was the one balking because it seemed too sudden. He just plain didn’t feel ready to be smothered in family.
“Tell you what,” Nate said, apparently reading Rafe’s hesitation correctly, “let’s just take it slow. How about you and me and Marge get together for lunch at Maude’s diner tomorrow? Then we can decide where to go from there.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“I think you and I have a lot of catching up to do, son. A lot of missed ground to cover. I’m looking forward to it.”
Rafe wasn’t sure he could say the same. Now that he’d finally gone ahead and taken the step, he felt reluctance bordering on total resistance.
What the hell was wrong with him?
Angela was in the kitchen making tuna salad for lunch when Rafe returned with the baby. She heard him come in the front door, heard the baby fussing and the sound of his feet as he climbed the stairs. She hesitated a moment, then decided it would only be polite to ask him if he wanted a tuna sandwich, too.
She didn’t really want to face him, but that was ridiculous. She had faced people in much worse situations than this. All they had done was lock horns in a minor fashion, something that should have faded from her mind already.
Except that it hadn’t. She felt raw, somehow, and exposed. Vulnerable. And she didn’t like the feeling.
The worst of it was that she was attracted to him, and it embarrassed her to think he might know it. All those carefully erected walls she had been building against men for years seemed to be tissue thin. No matter how many times she told herself she couldn’t have it, and therefore shouldn’t want it, she did still want someone to love her.
How weak. How juvenile. She had believed herself stronger than that.
Which just went to show how little she really knew about herself. Somewhere inside this thirty-five-year-old woman was the girl who had believed in love, romance and happily-ever-after. Life had taught her that there was no happily-ever-after, and she had believed that she’d learned her lesson. Ha!
Of course, she didn’t know Rafe Ortiz at all, so what she was feeling was nothing but sexual attraction, which was understandable. It had been a very long time since she’d been with a man, not since her disastrous engagement ten years ago, in fact. Her body was simply reminding her that she was still alive.
Which was something of a miracle, when she considered how poorly she’d been taking care of herself lately. She ought to be rejoicing that she could still feel a healthy attraction to a man.
Instead, she wanted to hide from it. Oh, well. Quitting her job was all the hiding she was going to allow herself to do this month.
With a sigh, she put the knife she was using to slice celery on the cutting board, rinsed her hands and headed up the stairs. Rafe’s door was closed, but she could hear him talking to the baby, so she went ahead and knocked.
He answered a few seconds later, the child tucked into the crook of his arm. “Yes?” he said.
“I just wondered if you’d like a tuna sandwich. I’m making one for myself, and I’ve got plenty of tuna.”
“Uh...sure. Thanks. I’ll be down in a minute.”
She looked from him to the fussing baby. “Is everything okay?”
“Oh...yeah. The peanut’s just acting up a little. A bit of diaper rash.”
Angela nodded and backed away. She didn’t know a darn thing about diaper rash. “I’ll be in the kitchen.”
Diaper rash. Rafe closed the door behind her and grabbed the baby book from the bed where he’d dropped it. His fault. How was he supposed to have guessed that the kid had dumped in his diaper while they were sitting there in the sheriffs office? Hell, he’d been sleeping. He’d just been changed not twenty minutes before they got there. Even the peanut usually took longer than that to fill a diaper.
And this stuff was foul. Hardly any wonder that the kid’s bottom looked as though it had been burned. Rafe had nearly passed out from the odor when he’d unfastened the diaper.
He didn’t have the ointments that the book recommended. Expose the kid to the air? Yeah, that would be fun to clean up after.
He earned Peanut into the bathroom, filled the sink with lukewarm tap water, and gave him an impromptu bath to make sure all the irritating stuff was washed away. Then he patted the kid dry with a nice clean towel.
What now?
Maybe they should go to the doctor?
He stood for a minute, thinking, with the baby wrapped in the towel, then decided to take him downstairs in nothing but the towel. That was about as close to air-drying as he was going to come in somebody else’s home. And the darn disposable diapers had that plastic wrapper on them that wouldn’t let air in.
Maybe he ought to see about some cloth diapers for emergencies?
He was surprised to realize he was feeling more at sea than at any time since his first few days with the child
He looked down at his son. “Always something new, isn’t it? How does anybody ever get to be an old hand at this?”
Peanut had no opinion on the subject. At least his fussing had stopped.
“Some help you are.”
Well, the book seemed to treat occasional diaper rash as inevitable. After lunch, he would dress the kid and go to the pharmacy to get one of those recommended ointments.
Angela had set two places at the kitchen table and directed him to the one with two sandwiches on the plate. “He seems happier now,” she remarked as she looked at the baby.
“A bath helped.”
“It probably would,” she agreed.
“You know much about babies?”
She shook her head. “Not a damn thing.”
“Me, either. This is OJT—On the Job Training.”
A little laugh escaped her. “It probably is for most people.”
“Yeah.” She was avoiding meeting his eyes, he noticed, and that bothered him a bit. What the hell was the matter with him? Why was he letting all these little things bother him? He’d spent years cultivating himself as a man without feelings, now here he was suddenly drowning in them. Damn, he had to get his head turned around straight.
But his head didn’t seem to want to cooperate. Instead he found himself noticing just how slender and delicate Angela’s hands were as she lifted her sandwich, just how ladylike all her gestures and movements were. She was very different from the women with whom he usually associated, he realized. Very different.
So the warning Klaxon in his head didn’t surprise him at all. He knew potential trouble when he saw it But sometimes he ignored the warning.
Like now. He took a bite of his sandwich and allowed himself the luxury of watching her. She wouldn’t look directly at him, so she would never notice. Which gave him time to notice the way her hair teased the nape of her neck. He found himself suddenly wishing he could reach out and touch her there, just the way that strand of hair was touching her. Gently. Lightly.
Damn! He looked down at the sleeping baby in his arms and told himself not to be a damn fool. One kid was more than enough, and thoughts like that had gotten him into enough trouble for a lifetime.
“Great tuna,” he remarked. “Thanks.”
She gave him a fleeting smile, her eyes not quite meeting his. “Don’t thank me, thank the tuna.”
“Kinda hard, given his condition.”
That elicited another laugh from her, and for just an instant their eyes met.
He felt an electric tingle all the way to his toes. No. No, no, no. With a sense of desperation, he fixed his attention on his plate.
“I’ve got to go to the pharmacy,” he said, trying to find a safe avenue of conversation. “Do you know where the closest one is?”
“On t
he corner of Main and Fourth.”
“I can find it, then.”
“I’m thinking about taking a drive up into the mountains this afternoon,” she remarked. “It’s such a beautiful day.”
He grimaced. “After spending the last five days in the car, I don’t know that I’m ready for another drive. I think I’ll come home after the pharmacy and read a book.”
She nodded. “The hard part about vacationing here is figuring out what to do. I like to hike, but...” But she didn’t want to be out there alone on the side of the mountain if her blood sugar decided to give her hell.
“That’s kind of out of the question for me,” Rafe said. “The peanut and all.”
“Why do you call him that?”
He looked straight at her, forgetting his resolution to keep his gaze trained elsewhere. “Why not?”
She looked embarrassed. “Sorry. I just wondered if there was a reason.”
“Oh.” Now he felt like a fool, taking a simple question too much to heart. He had to find a way to shift gears between being on the streets and being in the normal world.
Although, he found himself thinking, this wasn’t exactly the normal world. At least, not like any normal world he’d ever experienced before. He had the feeling that he’d somehow stepped out of time into some enchanted place. Everything seemed too peaceful—except his own thoughts, of course.
And he really couldn’t afford to allow himself to relax, because Manny might come looking for him, and he wouldn’t put it past the guy to actually steal the baby. Molinas had been known to do worse, and this time they would probably feel justified.
A sigh escaped him almost before he realized it.
“Something wrong?” Angela asked.
“That’s the third time you’ve asked me that question.”
She pulled back a little and looked away. “Sorry. You’re sitting over there looking like gloom and doom and sighing heavily.... Trust me, I won’t ask again.”
He wondered if he could kick his own butt, because he certainly needed to.
“Look,” he said, his appetite gone and his mood turning thoroughly sour, “I’m sorry. I’m jumpy. I admit it. Too much time on the street. Thanks for lunch, leave the dishes, I’ll do them when I get back.”
