by Laura Parker
Maybe, if they could get away from everything, her past and his, they might find again the magic that had brought them together in the first place. Once love had made them brave enough to spurn all of the odds against them.
Maybe...if...then...she might forgive him and...perhaps...learn to love him again.
Chapter 8
As she gazed through the truck windshield into the distance at the ultramodern skyline of Dallas with its keyhole archway skyscraper and sky blue glass hotel flanked by a restaurant shaped like a golf ball on a tee, Halle tried to contain her annoyance.
Joe’s invitation to join him on his business trip had been made that morning between his after-fishing shower and the time it took him to shove a few essentials in a duffel bag. Aware that he might only have been being polite, she had said yes and then run to grab her toothbrush and toiletries before he changed his mind. Joe’s house was darling but it left her feeling totally isolated and very alone. At least now she had the scenery to look at.
East Texas had been surprisingly woody with large patches of evergreen forest. Near the shoulders of the highway delicately stemmed wildflowers spread out on either side like spilled paint in brilliant shades of red, yellow and blue. Too bad there had been no conversation to go with that view.
Stoic was a polite description of Joe’s behavior the past two hours. His gaze shielded by dark shades, he had driven in absolute silence, listening to a series of discs on his CD player by Chris Isaak, Sade and Eric Clapton. The few times she had attempted conversation he had grunted or ignored her entirely. His treatment of her seemed to swing in extreme arcs between solicitude and bare tolerance. He had to be the moodiest man she’d ever known. She then wondered if that was true.
If he hadn’t just pulled off at a service station to buy gas and use the lavatory she would have thought he was on automatic pilot. Something was on his mind and so far he wasn’t willing to share whatever it was with her.
“Hi!” The appearance of a smiling Joe at her passenger window was so unexpected that Halle jumped. “Want one?” He held up a canned drink.
She shook her head. “No thanks.”
“Suit yourself.” He walked around and climbed in then popped the top on his can and took a long swallow before tucking it between his legs.
Halle glanced at the can wedged against his crotch. The sweat from the aluminum was greedily absorbed by the faded denim of his jeans. Considering the part of his anatomy that fabric covered she wondered if it didn’t feel...her thoughts got no further before she noticed that he had noticed where she was looking.
His eyes, usually so still and mysteriously dark, flashed with amusement. “Sure you don’t want some?”
She glanced away but it was much too late. His not-to-be-taken-seriously sexual tease had roused, suddenly and sharply, her desire. She would give a lot to know what had happened to his mood while he was out of the truck.
The air conditioner roared to life as he turned the key in the ignition, spewing her heated skin with its chilly blast. The analogy to taking a cold shower was a little too obvious. She shivered as her silk blouse absorbed and held the cool against her skin.
As he maneuvered the truck back onto Interstate 20 he said, “I may be able to use you today so I hope you read that dossier.”
Halle glanced down at the manila folder she had been balancing on her lap since they left Gap. “I read it.”
He had been hired to locate a runaway by the name of Lacey McCrea, son of state senator William McCrea. She doubted she could contribute a single thing to his investigation but she didn’t offer that observation to him. She had gaped at his crotch. She needed a change of topic.
“Why do you suspect Lacey McCrea came to Dallas to pursue a performing career? If he was serious, wouldn’t he head for New York, Broadway and all that?”
Joe glanced at her, his sunglasses once more shielding his expressive eyes. “How do you figure a seventeen-year-old kid from Tyler would be eager to go it alone in the Big Apple?”
“Why not? You think he’d be afraid to go east?”
“I know he’d be afraid. It scared the bejabbers out of me.”
“That’s right. You were an East Coast transplant.” He had actually made a personal reference without her pushing him. Remarkable. “How did you handle it?”
He stretched an arm out along the back of the seat, his hand resting just behind her left shoulder. “I was with my family, first of all. Second, I was still in school. That kind of forces you to meet people. I joined the wrestling team where I made a few friends. Other than the language problem, it worked out all right.”
“What language problem?”
He smiled a slow I’m-going-to-enjoy-this grin. “Anybody who thinks Americans speak the same language hasn’t traveled much. First day of high school I felt like I’d been dropped into the middle of a Martin Scorsese film. Tough guys, wise guys, tougher-looking girls dressed all in black with attitude to spare, all talking ninety-to-nothing in that Jersey accent. It was about impenetrable to me the first week.”
“What about Texans? A western thesaurus would sometimes come in handy. ‘Touchy as a pig with a sunburn’ is not the sort of simile that would immediately come to my mind.”
He chuckled. “You got that one from Lauren.”
“Oh?” Halle responded politely though she was not happy to hear the woman’s name mentioned. “Is she partial to porcine metaphors?”
“Whoa! Do I hear the sharpening of claws?”
“No, of course not,” she answered primly. But she was thinking unkind thoughts about Lauren and resenting her hold over Joe, however tenuous it might be.
She studiously avoided watching as he pulled the soda can from between his legs and drank a bit more. She already had a head full of images to keep her uncomfortably aware of his attraction for her. And it wasn’t just the memory of his searing kiss the day before.
A green reflector highway sign flew by overhead, it’s arrow pointing to an exit for Highway 45 north, which he took.
She had dreamed all night long, endless convoluted dreams that began and ended with her in Joe’s arms. There had been a soothing tropical breeze, the sound of waves in the warm quiet of the middle of the night, and Joe lying beside her, naked, heavy, and sated yet waiting for her to signal that she was ready to handle another bout of his lovemaking. The mood changed. They were in an apartment in New York, the sound of taxi horns and sirens a strange urban lullaby buoyed by lethargic air currents that wrapped the summer night in its sultry stupor. Heated bodies barely touching, they’d slowly made love that dampened the sheets and slicked their bodies and turned waves to ringlets.
Halle bit her lip as the highway heading north quickly filled with traffic coming up from Houston. There was only one problem. Even in the midst of the dreams she had not doubted their make-believe quality. She’d awakened with damp skin and every nerve singing with the tension of overwrought emotions. That’s when she decided the dreams couldn’t be reflections of a past reality. They were too intense, too perfectly suited to wish fulfillment. If she and Joe had once been lovers, wouldn’t the delirious edge of her desire have been eroded by the experience? In the glare of wide-awake morning she could not say she had remembered anything, only vividly imagined possibility.
So what if she could picture Joe shirtless and pantless, his dark eyes smoked by need? What difference did it make to her that she could shut her eyes even now and imagine the tugging motion of his mouth on her nipples?
Her eyes popped open when an arm struck her dead in the middle of her chest, compressing both breasts as the truck horn blared.
The truck jerked sharply as Joe swerved to avoid a collision.
“Sorry,” he murmured. “You all right?”
“Certainly,” she answered, but the word sounded smashed by emotion. After a fractional moment he lifted his protective arm.
Halle swallowed and stared straight ahead as his arm resettled on the seat behind her head. She told h
erself it was only accidental that his fingertips curved over the top so that they brushed between her shoulder blades whenever the truck bounced over a defect in the pavement.
She sipped in a long slow breath. She had no one to blame but herself for her predicament. The dreams meant only that she had an active, fully adult libido. She could control the wistful longing inside her for something she did not know if she’d ever had: the experience of Joe Guinn’s brand of loving.
The reality was Joe had a woman friend. The reality was she was nobody, not even a full person. She couldn’t with any confidence say from moment to moment what she wanted or needed. When her memory returned it might make a lie of anything she said or did now. She mustn’t listen to the voice inside her telling her that she had as much right as anyone to fall in love. In love? Oh brother! She was seriously deluding herself.
From the first moment she saw Joe Guinn she had felt the need to be enfolded in his embrace. It had not been a sexual longing then. The need was more basic, the desire of a frightened female to be consoled by a primal male. He had seemed, no matter the irrationality of her logic, the one man capable of consoling her. Three days later he still fit the bill. But maybe that was because he was the only person in her world who knew her past and present. When she was with him she knew she genuinely existed. With strangers she felt as insubstantial as a shadow, something that only exhibited the shape of reality.
“Do you mind if I ask how close you and Lauren are?”
Joe glanced at her, his eyes concealed behind two smoky ovals of glass. She was beginning to hate sunglasses. “We aren’t close.”
“But she said—”
“Lauren likes to plan ahead, way ahead.” He tucked his pelvis forward and slid into a slightly more comfortable position behind the wheel. The soda can pinged against the underside of the steering wheel but nothing spilled. “Planners don’t usually pay a lot of attention to anything that spoils their plans.”
“I’d say you were in Lauren’s plans big time.”
He shrugged.
Halle recognized that gesture as his signature endof-that-subject punctuation. As long as he was talking she decided to try another subject. “You never said who called you Jag. Was it your wife?”
He sighed. “Why are you so curious to know about my ex-wife?”
Halle plunged in. The only thing she had going for her was honesty. “I’m divorced. You’re divorced. That gives us something of a bond.”
His profile tensed. “Maybe.”
“I’d tell you what happened to my marriage if I knew. If you tell me a little about yours maybe something will click in my head about mine.”
“I don’t think so. My past life isn’t up for grabs.”
“Okay. Then tell me something else. Why you left New York and the police force, for instance.”
“Too dirty, too crowded, too many criminals.”
“No other reason?”
He muttered a curse under his breath and whipped off his shades. The look he turned on her repelled like a physical assault. The moody loner was back. “What did Lauren tell you?”
Halle wondered how the same malleable skin, muscle and bone that made his face so attractive could solidify so quickly into menace. “Not much, really. She hoped I might know something about ‘your ordeal,’ as she phrased it. Why it made you decide to come back to Texas.”
She could see he was thinking about that. “Is that all?”
“I didn’t ask for the gory details.”
He tilted his head to one side, watching traffic by glancing forward every other second. “Why not? Weren’t you interested?”
“Not enough to invade your privacy with a stranger,” she answered honestly. “You’ve been nothing but nice to me. I didn’t want to betray that by gossiping about you behind your back.”
She waited long enough for the truth of her statement to sink in with him then said, “But if you’d like to tell me about it, I’m about the most unbiased audience you’re ever likely to get. As far as my memory’s concerned, we’re total strangers.”
He looked her over carefully. She knew he was judging how much of his truth she could take. “The short version is I got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time holding the wrong thing.”
Halle nodded and folded her arms. “That’s certainly enlightening.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Why don’t you want to tell me?” she retorted. “Are you afraid or ashamed of the truth?”
That got his attention. Color edged up from his collar into the bottom half of his face. “No, I can face the truth. I faced it and the consequences.”
“But you feel you never got a fair hearing.”
He looked ready to argue the point but then he turned his head back to survey the traffic. “Why do you say that?”
“You resent the gossip so much. You must think it doesn’t tell the truth.”
He smirked. “Always said you had a good head on your shoulders.”
“Would you have told me the truth if I’d been around at the time?”
His head whipped toward her. A long searing glance made her aware that she was daring to cross the invisible barrier Joe Guinn had erected to keep the world out and his feelings in. When he looked away again she felt as if she had scaled an electrified fence. She wasn’t yet certain if she had escaped unscathed.
“I would have told you,” he said finally, “if you would have listened.”
“I’m listening now.”
He didn’t say anything but he withdrew his arm from behind her head. So that was that, she thought. At least he hadn’t rebuffed her in his usual gruff fashion.
She reached up and flipped the visor down to shield her eyes from the midday glare. Dallas must be the brightest city in the country she decided as she squinted against the sharp light. Or perhaps it was just that so much of the uninterrupted sky was on display.
“I tried to help a fellow officer out of a jam.”
Halle glanced at him, disconcerted for an instant. Then she realized he was going to tell her what had happened to him. “He must have been a good friend,” she ventured.
“The best. We were at the police academy together. We walked our first beat together. For two years we lived in each other’s pockets. Later we worked undercover together. When you eat, sleep and live that close, you form some serious bonds.”
Halle nodded. “Kind of like a marriage.”
He nodded even more slowly. “Exactly. You may pass on to other things but you never forget the old feelings. No matter what comes along.”
Halle wondered if he was now talking about his ex-wife. Was he still in love with her? She’d bet the ten thousand in her purse that he was. What a waste.
“About a year after we changed partners Ed’s father was diagnosed with cancer. His dad had been laid off a few months earlier and so had no insurance. The bills started piling up but Ed was determined his father would have every treatment possible.”
Joe raked a hand through his hair. “Ed went into debt and then he started borrowing. By the time his father died he was up against it with two different loan sharks.” He glanced at her. “One thing the movies always get right is how they operate. Ed couldn’t possibly pay them back. When he was asked to deal with certain evidence at police headquarters he did it.”
“He tampered with evidence?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes he removed it altogether. I won’t lie to you. Things occasionally get misplaced. The sheer volume of evidentiary articles collected on a weekly basis by a New York City precinct would stun you. The departments are way understaffed, bound by budgetary constraints that makes perfect record keeping impossible. Ed was careful. He thought no one had caught on. The cases he was fixing seemed so dissimilar.”
“But they weren’t?”
“They had one name in common. Lazaro Demotta.”
“The crime king?”
He nodded. “You know about him?”
“He was on
ce written up as the crime boss so far removed from the source that no charge would ever be linked to him.”
“What else do you remember?”
Halle realized with a start that she had actually remembered. She lifted a hand to her mouth. “I—I don’t... He was finally indicted. The trial was held recently. He was found guilty. Right?”
“Anything more?” His voice had dropped to a deep whisper.
Halle frowned, staring at the star-bright point of light reflected back at her from the bumper of the car ahead. “No, nothing.”
Joe shrugged. “Ed came to me in a panic a few days before the mess hit the fan. He’d had enough. He could see he had gotten into a deal that wasn’t going to end. He said he wanted to turn state’s evidence against Demotta. Only he needed a little help to set up his alibi. He hadn’t destroyed the evidence he had stolen. He had kept it as insurance. He wanted help in planting it.”
“You agreed to help him?”
“He’d watched my back more times than I want to remember. It wasn’t as if he were taking bribes or skimming funds. He’d tried to save his father’s life.
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not defending what he did. He broke the law. He knew the consequences. If I’d been doing my job, I’d have turned him in myself.”
“Yet you didn’t.”
“No.” It was terse a painful admission. “I wasn’t tough enough.”
“What happened?”
He turned an annoying glance on her. “What do you think? The night I went with him to plant the stolen evidence we weren’t alone. Someone, maybe another cop in the department who was under Demotta’s thumb, had tipped off internal affairs. Ed didn’t know it but he’d been tailed for weeks. He must have let it be known he wasn’t happy doing Demotta’s work indef initely.”
“You were caught?”
“We were caught. Arrested and cuffed and taken in.”
Halle was silent, thinking about the depth of humiliation that must have caused him. “Did you offer a defense?”
“I was offered an out, if that’s what you mean. Rat on Ed and I’d walk away a hero, called a plant who helped set Ed up.”
