The Lonesome Lawmen Trilogy

by Pauline Baird Jones

  “I know.” She sighed. “It’s too close to call it either way. We’ll just have to…”

  “Wait. I know.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders. “I hate waiting.”

  Alice smiled wearily. “Like I don’t know that.”

  * * * *

  Dani smoothed the edges of her black dress down to her knees, then curled her icy fingers into the palms for something like the hundredth time she’d done so since they left the courthouse. A stop in a McDonald’s parking lot so Kelly could run in and get them coffee hadn’t helped her stop doing it. Not even to drink coffee as hot as Richard’s last stand, judging by the steam rising from it.

  Kelly picked up her cup, brought it almost to her lips, flinched at the heat and set it down again. “What now?”

  Dani blinked, then frowned. “I won’t be going to Disneyland.”

  Kelly’s grin was relieved, though she still looked shocked around the eyes. “Not the way you’d choose to win your point, was it?”

  “No, it wasn’t.” She was cold, but she still felt the heat of the explosion, could still see the way the car heaved skyward, then slammed back against the pavement, it’s interior gutted, then engulfed in flames. The worst part was, she could still see Richard’s face, looking so much like the Richard she knew, just as he prepared to step out and meet the press. Could see him disappear in flame. “You didn’t see Liz, did you? She wasn’t in the car?”

  Kelly shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “I have to call…”

  Kelly looked relieved. “It’s about time you called him.”

  Dani frowned. “Call who?”

  “Your Fed. Who else?”

  “Oh. Yeah. Him.” He stayed in her head, some place where she couldn’t see him. Not now. Now she could only see Richard.

  “Who—oh no. No.” Kelly gripped the steering wheel and shook her head. “You’re not thinking of calling…”

  “I have to.”

  Kelly snorted, then sighed. “It’s your funeral. Here, you can use my cell phone. But don’t ask me to stay and listen to this, because I won’t.” She opened the door. “You want something else?”

  “Yeah, thanks, something with sugar?” When Kelly nodded and shut the door, Dani dialed. By the third ring, she was sick to her stomach. This was nuts…

  “Yes, hello.”

  It was Steven’s voice, laced with irritation. She hadn’t expected him to answer, but she should have. Surely Liz was here in Denver for the trial.

  “If this a crank call…”

  “It’s not,” Dani got out in a rush. “I was just surprised to hear your voice.”

  “You’re surprised to hear my voice?”

  “I—was worried about Liz. And the—kids.”

  He didn’t answer. Her hands tightened on the telephone until the knuckles went white. Please don’t let Liz be dead, too. I couldn’t bear it. “I’m sorry I bothered you.”

  “She’s there. Liz is in Denver,” he said brusquely.

  Dani inhaled sharply. “Oh no, not—”

  “No! She wasn’t feeling well. Was going to catch a cab later—we haven’t told the kids. Liz wanted to—” His voice broke. She could hear his heaving breaths. “Why? Who would do this to him? I don’t get it.”

  Dani sighed. She couldn’t handle his grief. She could barely handle her own. “You never did get it, Steven.”

  “I know that if you’d just…”

  “Kept my mouth shut? Let him get away with murder?”

  “He was family!”

  Dani almost didn’t notice that Steven didn’t deny Richard’s guilt. Almost.

  “You knew, didn’t you? You knew all the time.” Steven didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. “Did you kick in something on the hit man he hired to kill me, Steven? Because he’s family?”

  She had thought he couldn’t hurt her anymore. Just shows how wrong a girl could be. He started to say something, but she wasn’t in the mood to listen. “Just tell Liz I called. That I’m sorry it ended this way.”

  She broke the connection and leaned forward, resting her head on the dashboard. Why did it feel like Richard was the lucky one?

  The car door opened and Kelly slid in. “You aren’t crying, are you?”

  “No.” Dani sat back, took a shaky breath to steady her voice. “I’m not crying.”

  “Good. Real women don’t cry.” She handed Dani a baked apple pie, then opened hers and took a bite.

  Trust Kelly to kill the angst. Dani looked at her. “It’s real men that don’t cry.”

  Kelly paused in mid-bite. “I thought they did now?”

  “That was the eighties. Now they’re just tough in a very sensitive and caring way.”

  “Oh. I guess that’s what I get for spending so much time with fictional men. And my dentist.” Kelly munched quietly for a bit. “We still doing that ‘I am woman, hear me roar’ thing?”

  “I have no idea.” Dani was quiet for a moment, then sighed. “What do you do when your ex-husband wants you dead?”

  Kelly shrugged. “Go to a movie?”

  Dani thought about that. “I wonder what’s playing?”

  SIXTEEN

  It hurt to move. It hurt to think. Matt did not want to get out of his truck, let alone tackle the stairs to the second floor apartment he shared with his brother Luke. He was no masochist. The tree-lined, sloping street was almost empty, a soothing sight in the half-light left by the recently set sun. He could just put his head back and sleep sitting up if it weren’t for the fact that it also hurt to not move.

  He slid out, moving like the old man this week had made him, then looked up at the converted Victorian house. According to his mother, it was mellow and charming. She was probably right. Tonight it just looked high and all stairs. He climbed the outside stoop, then the inside stairs. Did not enjoy any of it, not even making the landing. Still had to drag his tired and aching body down the hall and around the corner.

  Through a haze of tired, he noted someone at the end of the hall, sitting in the window well of the old-fashioned window. It meant he couldn’t groan. He still had his pride—somewhere down there under the bruises, the tired, and the pissed off. He had his door unlocked and open before his brain registered who the someone at the end of his hall was.

  Only the quarry he’d hunted all over the city.

  Not dead.

  Not blown up.

  In fact, the opposite of blown up. Neat as a pin with her hair up and wearing sober black, a long string of white pearls, and a reserved expression that made her look honest and earnest. The perfect prosecution witness. All dressed down and no jury to charm.

  So she had come to him.

  Better, he supposed, to be the last resort than no resort.

  He had a lot of things to say to her. A lot of questions to ask her. He didn’t want to say or ask anything, he realized, looking into her coolly wary, green eyes.

  He wanted to wring her neck.

  Dani stood up. She knew he wouldn’t be happy to see her here. She just didn’t know he would be quite so unhappy.

  “Where you been?”

  “You don’t want to know,” Dani said, careful to keep her distance. She watched his eyes narrow.

  “I’ve never hit a woman.”

  She couldn’t blame him for the “yet” she heard at the end of that. She could admire his control. His face was scored with exhaustion, but his body was erect, his restraint made out of pure iron. She was too tired to stop her nerve endings from becoming emotion receivers for what was behind the control. The heat wasn’t all from rage and frustration. She was cold enough to be glad for the warmth.

  His cellular telephone rang. Without letting her gaze off the hook of his, he flipped his telephone open. “Kirby.”

  “Matt,” Alice said in his ear. “We got confirmation our girl is still above ground.”

  “Really?” He watched Dani’s eyes widened, then slide away from his, as if she knew they were ta
lking about her. She seemed to know a lot. He didn’t like that in a woman. He didn’t like the way her eyes sized him up, rooting out his secrets, taking her ill gotten knowledge and tucking it way to use against him at a later date.

  A woman looks at a guy and sees an open book to write in. A guy looks at a woman and sees a puzzle in a female package. If the package was good, a guy can’t even spell his name. If not, he still didn’t have a chance of figuring her out.

  “Yeah,” Alice went on, “seems she called her ex. FBI had the phone tapped.”

  “Oh?” He listened while Alice ran the tape for him, then said, “Interesting.”

  “Yeah. Kerwin’s surfaced, back at her hotel. Claims Gwynne’s heading your way. Thought you’d want a heads up.”

  “Thanks.” Matt didn’t know why he didn’t tell her Dani had arrived his way. Instead he asked her to keep him posted and rang off. He shoved his telephone back inside his jacket and looked at Dani. The romance writer and the lawman. He could see the wheels of her mind turning in her big, green eyes. He liked green eyes. Beneath the bravado of her defiantly angled chin, she looked exhausted, brittle, ready to break.

  He was tired. He was pissed. He wasn’t a hammer.

  He nodded towards his open door. “I don’t have your soda, but I can probably rustle up a cup of Java for us.”

  Until this moment she didn’t know how much she had needed him to be kind. It wasn’t politically correct to need a man, but she wasn’t ashamed to be non-PC. She needed him. The sisters would just have to deal with it. “Thank you.”

  He flicked on the light and gestured for her to go in. She stepped past him, careful not to let their bodies touch. There was too much tension in the air. He was tired. She was tired. Touching could be dangerous to their health.

  His hall was short, but it still took concentration to put one foot in front of the other, like a drunk trying to walk a straight line. She stepped around the loop of rope reaching out to snag her dragging feet, noticed in a vague way that it was attached to some climbing gear piled to one side.

  Behind her, Matt shut the door, wood snapping against wood, the lock snicking in place. The hallway opened onto a living room with a high ceiling. She stopped in the doorway. The light from the hall made a circle that reached part way into the room, but even with the sun gone outside, there was enough light from the street lights coming in the uncovered windows for her to see the layout of Matt’s home. In the spirit of “know thy adversary,” she looked at it for what it would tell her about him.

  On her right a low bar exposed a shadowy kitchen that didn’t look big enough for Matt’s shoulders, let alone his whole body. It was clean, without even the smell of old food to indicate use. The other direction, three long windows did double duty by giving a view to the street and breaking up the white expanse of wall. Between two of the windows was a square, serviceable desk. Matt moved past her and closed the blinds, then turned on a table lamp sharing desk space with a laptop computer that looked suspiciously familiar. There was also a stack of mail, several gun clips, and a scattering of loose bullets.

  Probably not a liberal.

  Straight ahead was a doorway to bed and bath. Other than the desk chair, the only place to sit was on a massive, manly gray leather sofa or one of three stools lined up in front of the bar. In front of the sofa was a battered coffee table that looked like it doubled as a footstool. It was covered with magazines devoted to sports and law enforcement. One inside wall was covered with shelving fashioned out of planks and cement blocks. In the center was a fancy television and stereo setup. Rows of books and videos marched off in either direction. As far as she could see, the videos weren’t of a salacious nature, but if Richard had taught her anything, it was that looks could be deceptive.

  It was a testosterone-only zone, the quintessential bachelor’s pad, though cleaner than one not acquainted with the lonesome lawman’s terse smile might expect. She and her estrogen felt an urge to add flowers in vases, curtained windows, and pantyhose drying in the bathroom.

  Matt thumbed through the stack of mail on his desk, then looked up, his brows drawing together.

  “You’d better sit down before you fall down.”

  Despite his blunt delivery, he had a point. Her knees were losing structural integrity with each passing second. She tottered the short distance to his man-size couch, sank into cool depths. It felt good, even if had been made for a man-size body.

  For a few seconds she tried to resist the compulsion to shed her shoes, but even the most comfortable shoes wore out their welcome eventually and her feet were in full rebellion. She had to kick them off. To ease the cramps in her insteps, she stretched her legs out on the coffee table and rotated her sore feet with a soundless sigh of relief. Something, a quality in the silence, a current in the air, made her look up. She found Matt staring at her, his expression too controlled for comfort. What, she wondered, was going on behind those eyes?

  Dani looked good on his couch, her stocking-clad legs stretched across his table for easy viewing. She reached up and freed her hair, shaking her head and pushing her fingers into the mass to massage her scalp, the thick strands catching light as she moved.

  It was bad how good she looked. He felt the gnawing bite of lust do a slow crawl in his gut. His control was under attack by the sheer black nylons on her nearly perfect legs, not to mention the lift of her breasts against the soft fabric of a dress that wasn’t as demure as he had thought.

  She leaned forward and massaged one foot, then the other. Her long necklace fell forward, clanking against the table. She pulled it off and tossed it on the table. From where he stood, he could now see the bare, smooth nape of her neck. He rubbed the nape of his neck and wished the room wasn’t so hot.

  Her gaze found his. The room got so quiet he could hear the clock in the kitchen ticking. A car honked outside and she jumped, then pulled her legs off his table. Her feet didn’t quite reach the floor.

  “Sorry,” she murmured.

  A dangerous feeling wound into his want.

  Tenderness.

  He would rather face a truck full of Uzi-toting wise guys than a woman that made him feel tender. Tender was the disguise weakness wore. He would not do weak again. No way.

  “Not a problem. Do the same thing myself.” He wasn’t ready for her smile. It flowed across the tired landscape of her face, lighting it with something almost as dangerous as tenderness. He picked up the beads. “Nice touch.”

  “Mardi Gras,” she said, a hint of strain in her voice that told him he wasn’t the only suffering from August heat. “Can’t wear them in New Orleans because everyone would know.”

  “Everyone would know what?”

  “That these are the good beads. The kind you show your—” She stopped, color rushing into her face. The flush was almost as good on her face as the smile.

  “Show what?”

  Dani looked at him. His face was still carved out of rock, his mouth a straight line above his give-no-quarter chin. If she had stopped there—but she didn’t. She had to look at his eyes. They gave him away, spilled his deep, dark secret.

  The lonesome lawman had a sense of humor.

  She knew what happened when you tossed a rock in a pool. The ripples started tight and small, but got wider the further they got from the center. Ripples that could be trouble. Knowing trouble was waiting didn’t always blunt temptation, didn’t stop her wanting to make ripples on the hard surface of Matt’s face.

  She wriggled her butt deeper in his couch, lifted her legs back on the table and crossed them at the ankles. His face didn’t change but his throat rippled when he swallowed hard. Tough audience, but not tough enough. She crossed her arms behind her head and arched her back in a mock stretch. He ran a finger around the neck of his white shirt and blinked once.

  “Skin,” she said, then gave a mock sigh. “You have to show skin. Lots of it. The more skin, the better the beads they throw you.”

  “I see.”

 
; His face didn’t change. The temperature in the room did. From his direction, she felt enough heat to make a furnace jealous. The siren call of passion tried to stir up her sluggish body, tried to blind her to the fact she didn’t know him, despite feeling like she knew him better than she’d known Steven.

  She was too tired to sort it all out, but not too tired to worry. Pressure, plus heat had to go somewhere. It was the only scientific law she remembered, probably because she blew up a beaker in high school chemistry learning it. Singed her eyebrows, too.

  Her one foray with love had singed her mind, dang near broke her heart. Dangerous things, heat and pressure, action and reaction, love and hate.

  She ran a fingertip along her eyebrow. It had grown back. Her heart thumped out a caution. It healed, but it wasn’t as brave as eyebrows. It had more to lose in desire’s arena.

  Dani took a shaky breath, gathered her thoughts together and said lightly, “That’s what Kelly says. These are her beads.”

  “Oh.” He hadn’t moved or altered his stance, just stood there with his hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans watching her with his dark neutral gaze.

  He gave no quarter, but unlike Steven, he didn’t compromise or give up. Unlike her, he didn’t bend. She had recognized the quality outside Boomer’s office, seen it in action when he went after Spook at the mall. Because he wouldn’t turn or be turned aside, he would be very careful about what, or who, he chose to commit himself to.

  The male surroundings made it pretty clear where matters of the heart stood in the queue of his life. If she mistook his kindness for something more, she was going to lose more than eyebrows.

  It was as if he had followed her thoughts and agreed with them when he said in a carefully cool voice, “I’ll see if I can scare up that coffee, unless you’d like something stronger? There might be some Scotch.”

  “I don’t drink.” Watching Steven’s slow spiral into alcoholism had pretty much killed any desire to imbibe.

  He stopped beside the couch, said without looking at her, “I’m sorry. I should have thought…”

  “Don’t.” She looked up at him. “I’m not some hot house plant who can’t deal with reality. I’m…”